Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle

by The Countess of Carnarvon

  14

  Death in the Trenches

  Mr Bates’s war was over, but Aubrey Herbert, despite his severe disillusionment in the aftermath of the Gallipoli campaign, was gearing up to return to the Middle East. In March 1916 he was sailing for Mesopotamia in the company of the Commander-in-Chief of Egypt, the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean and the Prince of Wales. It was the first time Aubrey had met the eldest son of George V and Queen Mary, who was briefly Edward VIII before his desire to marry Wallis Simpson sparked the abdication crisis. Aubrey, clearly somewhat underwhelmed, commented that at least ‘he was more imaginative than I expected. He said that he hated being at home, it worried him thinking of the others in the trenches.’

  British military involvement in Mesopotamia had started out as an operation to safeguard the oil fields in what is now Iraq; crucial given that the naval campaign in particular was heavily oil-dependent. But it was spiralling into a humiliating disaster, and Aubrey’s language skills and local knowledge again made him indispensable.

  The 6th Indian division had been dispatched to the region from the Army’s bases in Bombay, under the command of General Townshend, but they were woefully poorly supplied in terms of both food and transport. As the military problems escalated, such cost-cutting measures proved catastrophic. Aubrey had a very bad feeling about the whole thing, but was hoping to be proved wrong. When he arrived he wrote back to his great friend Sir Mark Sykes, who was still based at the War Office. ‘Well, the position here is absolutely bloody.’

  General Townshend had retreated to Kut al-Amara, which he was trying to defend against the vastly superior Turkish forces. Attempts to relieve him and break the siege had failed. His troops were starving; some aerial drops of rations had been made but, even so, by April, the men were down to four ounces of food a day and riddled with disease. There was no choice but to surrender.

  Aubrey wrote to Colonel Beach, the head of Military Intelligence in the region, offering to accompany General Townshend to the negotiations – he knew some of the leading Turks very well. While he was waiting for a response, he visited Turkish prisoners of war in the British Army camps and noted that their morale was high. They believed that after Gallipoli, Salonika and now Kut, they were going to win. Aubrey’s response was typical of the bullish determination that persisted in the British forces and public, despite the shock of failures. He informed the confident Turks that it was his country’s ‘national habit to be defeated at the beginning of every war and to win in the end.’

  A year to the day after Aubrey’s arrival at Gallipoli, he was reunited with his friend T. E. Lawrence, and sent to go and talk terms with the Turkish High Command. The two men’s hopes were limited to being able to secure a truce to allow the wounded soldiers to be shipped out, but the British government seemed to have a longer-term goal in mind. The men were authorised to offer £2 million and the promise of not launching further attacks on the Ottoman Empire. This offer was rejected and, although there was a truce to allow for an exchange of prisoners, on 29 April 1916 General Townshend surrendered. Thirteen thousand British and Indian soldiers were taken prisoner.

  The whole incident was a tremendous humiliation for the British Army. It must have been hard even for Aubrey to remain positive about the national chances as he surveyed the River Tigris, full of bloated corpses. They washed up on the riverbanks and bumped up against the small boats that plied their way up and down. There had been a cholera outbreak that raged through the already weakened troops. Of the 13,000 prisoners of war, more than half died of starvation or at the hands of their captors.

  Aubrey wasn’t the only Highclere man out in the region. Major Rutherford, the Earl’s agent, had a son serving as a Lieutenant in the ¼th Hampshire Regiment. He eventually made it back to Almina’s hospital and survived the war. Lord Carnarvon wrote to Aubrey asking him to find out what had happened to ‘[his] boys from the stud farm and the estate.’ He ‘hoped to send money or some small comforts.’ The news trickled back agonisingly slowly. Albert Young, Charlie Adnams and George Digweed had all been gardeners and joined up together, also serving in the ¼th Hampshire Regiment on the ill-fated attempt to take Baghdad. Perhaps when the flies and the stifling air and the stench of the cholera-infested corpses became too much, they dreamt of the peaceful walled gardens and talked about the Dutch azaleas that would be flowering on the Castle’s east lawns. They were all buried in Mesopotamia. Adnams and Digweed were taken prisoner at Kut and died in captivity. Thomas Young was killed in action at the crossing of the Shumran Bend on 21 January 1916 as was Frederick Fifield. His body was never found. His young brother was still at home at Highclere, working in the buildings department. Only Tom Whincup, who worked under his half-brother Charlie Whincup at the stud, and Charles Steer who had also worked there, survived the campaign and were lucky enough to avoid being taken prisoner.

  Aubrey made it back to Britain in early July and went to Highclere. He wanted to see his brother. All his life, even after he had established himself as a man to call upon to negotiate for soldiers’ lives, Aubrey felt the need to touch base with his brother. Lord Carnarvon was of course delighted that Aubrey was safe and in a position to tell him exactly what had gone on. He was also infinitely frustrated that he could only play a part on the sidelines. Through his friendship with Moore-Brabazon he had become closely involved with the development of cameras and interpretation of aerial photography carried out by the Royal Flying Corps, but he wished ardently that his health permitted him to do more.

  It was the second time in a year that Aubrey returned from the Middle East feeling helpless and despairing. He wanted the comfort of being home.

  Just weeks later, seven more men left the Highclere estate. Henry Berry from the saw mill, Charles Brindley, a plumber, Charles Choules, a woodsman, Willie Kewell who worked at the farm, Ernest Barton also a woodsman, Gilbert Attwood and William Bendle, both from the buildings department were all spurred on by the news Aubrey brought of their colleagues’ deaths. They headed for France. They were heading for the Somme.

  Summer 1916 was dominated by the nation’s dismay and grief over the death of Lord Kitchener. K might have lost his aura of the unimpeachable hero, but in death he was restored to mythic status. The naval battle had been escalating brutally as the effects of the British blockade on Germany’s trade routes and food supplies began to bite. The war at sea claimed its most high-profile casualty when the HMS Hampshire was sunk by a mine on 5 June. Six hundred and forty-three men, including Lord Kitchener, lost their lives.

  The Carnarvons were even more devastated than most as he had been a family friend. Porchy, who had two more months to go at Sandhurst, was utterly laid low: K had been his great inspiration for a career in the Army. He was due to go to Ireland for four months’ training at the end of the summer, but was mopy and uncharacteristically reflective for weeks. If K’s loss was a hammer blow to British morale, already shredded by stalemate and surrender, nobody could have predicted how much worse things were about to get.

  The Battle of the Somme was planned by General Haig as a decisive breakthrough in the stalemate in France. Instead it has passed into British and Canadian consciousness as the epitome of catastrophic and futile loss of life. On its opening day, 1 July 1916, the British Army suffered 60,000 casualties – still the highest number ever sustained in a single day of combat. The 1st Newfoundland Regiment was totally annihilated as a fighting unit, with 500 of 801 men killed. Over the course of the battle’s four and a half months, that story was repeated over and over again. Whole battalions of men, who had joined up together and came from tight-knit communities, were wiped out, creating lost generations back home. Highclere, like thousands of other places all over the Empire, was about to suffer a test of its ability for self-sacrifice the like of which it had never known before.

  The impact on every hospital in the country was enormous. Four hundred doctors were killed and injured in July, increasing the pressure on the already horrifically ov
erstretched medical corps. Patients were sent back to Britain in a barely controlled flood. The Somme was characterised by the use of very heavy artillery. It was also marked the debut of a new weapon – the tank. As well as their physical injuries, the men were suffering from devastating shell shock. The human frame couldn’t withstand the impact of this new, fully mechanised slaughter on a grand scale and the number of cases of mental breakdown began to increase exponentially.

  Lady Almina had to step up to the task. The staff at Bryanston Square had been working steadily, with the same attention to every little detail as ever. The work was tough, but the routines were in place now and there was a palpable sense that the results were enough to justify all the labour involved. Everyone was tired and demoralised by the war, but at the same time keenly invested in and positive about the hospital. Into this stability crashed the vast numbers of officers arriving with complex injuries and severe trauma from the battlefields of the Somme.

  One such man was Charles Clout, twenty-one years old, a Cambridge-educated linguist from a modest middle-class home in south London, who had been recruited by the War Office in August 1914, on the strength of his military cadet training at Cambridge University. Clout joined the Territorial Army and was gazetted to the rank of 2nd Lieutenant in the 20th Battalion the London Regiment. He was a serious-minded man who, even in later life, disapproved of the use of first names except between close friends of the same sex. This seriousness made him an excellent officer, and he took pride in training his men up before they shipped out to France on 9 March 1915. Clout was terribly disappointed when on disembarking he was moved to another battalion that was in need of a good officer to lick it into shape.

  By August 1916, Clout had seen almost a year and a half of action on the Western Front. He had been in reserve for the first battle of Neuve Chapelle and fought for months at the Battle of Loos. He had seen a man shot in the head by a German sniper as he ran towards him down a trench. The bomber’s brain was ‘excised as if on an operating table’ and fell in two neat hemispheres on the ground behind him and lay there ‘steaming in the sunlight’. When Clout’s men refused to touch the man’s brains, Clout took a spade and shovelled the remains out of the trench.

  In August 1916, after two weeks’ leave in which he visited his parents in Blackheath, he found himself back out on the front line at the Battle of the Somme. His first job was to accompany a more inexperienced officer as he ventured out of the trench to collect all the property of the dead men who lay scattered in the mud, so that it could be sent back to England. Clout was sitting reading a map, trying to locate the final resting place of the battalion they had been sent to search for, when a sniper shot him in the face. The bullet entered directly between his eyes, passed through his palate and shattered the right-hand side of his jaw. Part of the bone severed an artery in his throat. Instinctively he clutched his neck and, finding the place where blood was gushing, he tried to stem it as he staggered back in the direction of the headquarters’ dugout, shouting at his junior officer to stay low since the sniper was certainly still looking out for them.

  He was almost unconscious when they got back and was immediately sent to the base hospital at Le Touquet on the coast. The hospital was funded by the Duchess of Westminster and – in another of the surreal contrasts of the Great War – had been set up in the casino of the elegant holiday resort. Clout had been unlucky to be hit on his first day in the new post (although luck like that was not terribly unusual on the Somme), but he must have been both fortunate and tough to survive his wound even as far as Le Touquet. The science of blood transfusion was in its infancy in 1916, and such procedures were very rarely attempted, so the only hope when treating a patient losing a lot of blood was to keep them immobile and administer drugs like morphine to slow the heart rate.

  Clout was operated on to remove part of the bullet lodged in his jaw and, two weeks later, once he was stable, he was transferred to a hospital ship for return to Britain. From Dover he went by train to Victoria Station; there, as he lay on the platform with hundreds of other wounded men, he was labelled for the Countess of Carnarvon’s hospital at 48 Bryanston Square. Clout tried to insist that he would rather go to the General Hospital in south London. He must have been thinking of visits from his family, and of getting as close to home as possible. He was dispatched to Bryanston Square in any case, and arrived late at night on 2 October 1916.

  Clout always recalled the pleasure of being allowed to sleep late at Almina’s hospital. At Le Touquet the matron made her ward rounds at the crack of dawn. In the slightly more tranquil surroundings of Bryanston Square, the men slept until breakfast, and then they saw the medical staff. Clout was there until 13 November and made a reasonable recovery, although he had to return in January for a series of operations to continue removing fragments of bone and shrapnel. He later had reconstructive surgery to enable him to eat solids, but his speech was impaired for years. He took to wearing a bandage on his throat because he was embarrassed by his speech and concerned that people wouldn’t appreciate that it was the result of a war wound.

  About two weeks after his arrival, when he was able to sit up in bed and the swelling and pain in his face had improved enough for him to take an interest in the world again, Charles noticed that Almina had a very charming assistant who accompanied her on her rounds, taking notes on a clipboard as Almina directed. Mary Weekes, who was rather tall and neatly dressed with a kindly and efficient manner, was by then 26 years old. She had been with Almina first as a secretary then as a hospital administrator for five years, and the two had become completely dependent on each other. Charles wrote in his memoirs that Almina regarded her more as a daughter than an employee, which is certainly borne out by Almina’s generosity to her.

  Charles caught Mary’s eye. There was small talk and she made sure she visited him every day; an attraction formed and within weeks it had progressed to a definite courtship. Charles and Mary frequently went for a turn in the gardens behind the railings of Bryanston Square. Almina thought that going out for a walk or going to the theatre was very therapeutic. Perhaps she had been quietly encouraging Mary. Charles asked Mary to marry him in early 1917.

  Despite his insistence on formality, Charles definitely had a roguish streak, and he certainly looked good in a uniform. He recorded in his memoir that when he returned to King’s College Cambridge after his Army training to inform the authorities that he was heading to France, he also called on a lady student from Newnham whom he’d met at a university society for reading plays in foreign languages. The Tabard Society was one of the few opportunities the undergraduates had to meet the opposite sex, and although the girls were chaperoned, sparks had clearly flown as the young people recited lines together. As they sat over tea in her rooms, ‘her flattering comments on my appearance in uniform put me out of countenance, especially as a number of other girls were summoned to meet me. It seemed I was something of a trophy to be displayed to her friends.’

  On another occasion, before Charles was wounded and hospitalised back to London, he found very attractive billets. Since he spoke French, he was often asked to help out when another officer was having problems with his accommodation. Officers were billeted with local people, but it was not obligatory for households of women to take in a guest. A young lady living with her mother had refused to allow a British officer to lodge with them but the communication problems meant there was a lot of misunderstanding. Clout went to investigate with his fellow officer and the matter was resolved and alternative accommodation found. ‘I offered to escort the lady back to her home. On the way, with a side-long glance at me, she said, “If it had been you who wanted our room I would not have refused.” ’ Charles was not about to pass up this opportunity. ‘As she was a very attractive person, I immediately took up the offer and had my orderly move my kit into her home. My friend would never believe that I had not “pulled a fast one” on him. That night the lady came into my bedroom, and for the rest of the period that we
were in action in this section of the line I was always able to visit her during any rest period, which probably helped keep me sane.’

  Mary and Charles were married in July 1918, when Charles ‘believed that the war might drag on for years yet’. They had decided to wait until his recovery was complete and all the work on his jaw was finished. Lord and Lady Carnarvon were their guests of honour and, in fact, their witnesses. Almina arranged for them to be married at the fashionable church St George’s, Hanover Square. She then set them up in a house in Paddington, buying all their furniture. They went on to have three children, and until Mary briefly became ill after the birth of her third child, she continued to work for Almina.

  All her life, Almina had wildly cavalier attitudes to money. She could be a bully about it, but she was also generous to a fault, often indiscriminately so. It was a habit that got her into a great deal of trouble in later life, but on this occasion her generosity was born out of sincere affection and in recognition of Mary’s years of hard work. She also lent the couple the Lake House on the estate at Highclere for their honeymoon, and, as a souvenir, she gave Mary a specially made fan, painted with a view of the building. It is a beautiful house, an elegant, low villa right on the water’s edge, and a peaceful idyll for two people who had been working surrounded by death and destruction for years. Almina, who was good at detail, made sure that food and staff were laid on so that the couple would not have to lift a finger.