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

by The Countess of Carnarvon

  Lord Carnarvon had only met the defendant in the ‘Billing Trial’ once by chance for ten minutes, but Aubrey, who didn’t have a judgemental bone in his body, had been inviting him to Pixton rather indiscriminately. The case revolved around a delusional American eccentric and a libellous poem entitled ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’. Conducted by Mr Justice Darling, the trial degenerated into farce, albeit one the newspapers adored. By the time the case came to court that summer, Aubrey was abroad again, heading up the British Adriatic Mission and co-ordinating special intelligence in Rome. It was left to his older brother to handle the fallout as the newspapers raked over the stories of anyone even remotely connected to the defendant. Carnarvon had to instruct Sir Edward Marshall Hall, QC, Aubrey refused to come back, and Carnarvon tried to ignore the whole matter.

  Kenneth Harbord proved to be extremely congenial company and was invited to Highclere several times. The Earl of course shared Harbord’s passion for flying. He invited another house guest, a longstanding friend of his, to participate in their conversations about planes and aerial reconnaissance. John Moore-Brabazon was the first Englishman to fly, albeit in a French machine, and in August 1914 he had joined the Royal Flying Corps. Lord Carnarvon’s knowledge of photographic technique was highly regarded, and he had discussed reconnaissance with Moore-Brabazon throughout the war. By the time the Allies launched their Hundred Days Offensive, which effectively ended the conflict, the Royal Flying Corps had been combined with the Royal Naval Air Service to form the Royal Air Force and was playing a crucial role in intelligence.

  The Germans believed that the great losses suffered by the Allies in 1917 would preclude the British and French from undertaking any major offensive in 1918. The Germans knew that they had to strike before American troops arrived in force and the general consensus was that there would not be enough American troops in France until early 1919. Allied activity in 1918, therefore, would have to be restricted to meeting the planned German advance. The Americans did not want to amalgamate their troops into French and British battalions, preferring to wait until an independent American Army could be shipped to French soil, which exasperated the Allies. Events rapidly overtook the disputes as salients were pushed forward or held, and the estimate of early 1919 for the arrival of the American force turned out, crucially, to be wrong.

  August 1918 really was, at last, the endgame. By then, 200,000 American troops were arriving every month, and the British Army was reinforced by the return of large numbers of troops from the Middle East and Italy. The British Navy’s blockade of Germany had destroyed the German public’s spirit and the Central Powers’ resolve folded in a series of heavy defeats. In the end, after four decimating years of death, victory came in just three months of sharp, decisive battles that cost the Germans two million men killed, captured or injured. Once the Allied forces had broken the Hindenburg Line of defence, the German Army was in retreat. By October the Allies were claiming victory and the exhausted General Ludendorff, who had been certain that his men were on the brink of capturing Paris just four short months before, had a nervous collapse. Across what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire, countries were declaring independence; now it was the turn of the politicians to begin the long and painful process of working out the terms on which to end a conflict that had engulfed millions of people.

  Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated on 9 November and the guns stopped at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918. The war had stuttered to a close, with rearguard actions being fought right up to the very last moment. The Germans sat down to negotiate US President Woodrow Wilson’s proposal for peace, with General Foch. The Armistice was signed in a carriage of his private train, stopped in the countryside north of Paris. The news was passed as fast as possible to the armies, and hundreds of thousands of men from dozens of different countries finally dared to hope it was really all over.

  The end hadn’t come soon enough for everyone in the last little band of Highclere men to go to fight. Fred Bowsher who probably worked in the gardens had joined up with several Sheerman and Maber boys in the gloomy days of 1917. Both the Mabers made it back to Highclere but one of the Sheerman boys, Harry, was drowned when the HMS Leinster was sunk by a German submarine in the Irish Sea a month and a day before the Armistice. Fred Bowsher was killed on 21 June, aged twenty-one. His friend Arthur Fifield, whose brother had been killed in Mesopotamia back in 1916, was buried in France in the summer of 1918. The last Fifield boy made it to Armistice Day and went home to his mother.

  17

  From War to Peace

  Of course, after the initial disbelief, there was euphoria everywhere, from the battlefields of Flanders to the servants’ hall at Highclere. David Lloyd George issued an official communiqué at 10.20 a.m. on 11 November, announcing the ceasefire, and by the end of the day, Newbury was decked with flags and the local newspaper reported fireworks and ‘liveliness’ in the streets. Aubrey walked through the crowds in London, which had ‘gone wild with delight’, according to the Daily Mirror, and noted their jubilation. It wasn’t until a few days and weeks later that sheer fatigue overtook people, civilians and soldiers alike. Across the Middle East, North Africa and all of Europe, millions of men were crisscrossing countries, trying to get home. Florence, the former housemaid from Highclere, whose husband Tommy’s body was never found, had to face a future without the man she loved, like so many other women across the world. Nerves had been stretched almost to breaking point over four years, and now, as the Peace Conference of Versailles got under way, it was time to ask the question: what had it all been for?

  On Sunday 17 November 1918, a service of thanksgiving was held at the Newbury Corn Exchange. Lord Carnarvon spoke in his capacity as High Steward and told the crowd of local dignitaries that, although it was very proper to rejoice, the people there that day could never repay the debt they owed to those who had fought. Almina and Eve were both at his side, but Porchy of course was not. He had sent word that his regiment was to stay in Mesopotamia for at least a couple of months before beginning the long trip back. At the end of the gathering, a patriotic note was struck by the singing of the new verse of the national anthem: ‘God save our valiant men’.

  Almina lost no time in returning to Bryanston Square after the service. The hospital would have to be dismantled, like all the rest of the apparatus of war, but for now it was still home to some twenty or so men, as well as the band of nurses.

  Just as Almina got back to London, she went down with the Spanish flu, as did some of her patients. News of this great disaster had been emerging since the summer and now the numbers affected were terrifying an already traumatised population. Broken Europe was swept by an influenza pandemic so deadly that it claimed many more lives than the recently finished war. At least 50 million died all over the world, from the Arctic to the Pacific Islands. The war had not caused the flu, but the fact that men with weakened immune systems had been closely herded together for four years probably helped to incubate it. The sickest flu patients were hospitalised and shipped home with the wounded, spreading the disease across the Continent and then the world. It was an unusual strain in that it afflicted healthy young adults rather than the more usual victims, and it was terrible to nurse, as the sufferer drowned in his own mucus.

  Dr Sneyd, the doctor at Bryanston Square, was one of those affected; Almina sent him to Highclere to recover. She had only contracted a mild strain herself, so she stayed on at the hospital and, as soon as she was better, continued to nurse her patients. There was cruel luck for one young man whom she couldn’t save: having survived three and a half years at the Front, he died of the flu just weeks after Armistice Day.

  At the end of the year, Almina was also preoccupied with resolving the matter of her inheritance. Alfred de Rothschild had left her virtually everything. He gave generously in death as he had done in life. There were sizeable bequests for friends and family and £50,000 for charity, £25,000 of which went to Lord Kitchener’s Memorial Fund fo
r the relief of suffering amongst members of the Armed Forces. The National Gallery received a spectacular painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Alfred’s beloved Hal ton House went to his nephew Lionel, since he was ‘the only Rothschild not to have a great house’, but Seamore Place was left in its entirety and with all its contents to Almina. It was an impeccable and enormous house in Mayfair and it was crowded with beautiful things and priceless paintings, some of which Alfred asked that Almina consider as heirlooms and not dispose of. In addition, Almina received a tax-free legacy of £50,000 and Lord Carnarvon, Porchy and Lady Evelyn all received bequests of £25,000. This was wealth on a staggering scale, given that a gardener at Highclere was paid £24 a year in 1918, and the top salary, for the chef, was £150.

  From now on the Carnarvon family home in London was Seamore Place; Berkeley Square was sold. Almina, who all her life loved few things more than doing up a house, set about a programme of renovations. The property, for all its museum-quality furnishings, apparently left something to be desired with regards to the drains. In December she was asking her solicitors, Frere and Co, to write to Alfred de Rothschild’s solicitors to ask for a substantial contribution to her funds. She explained that she had been obliged to carry out major repairs to Seamore Place and had also incurred very heavy liabilities with regard to her hospital. She therefore intended to sell two of the paintings left to her, tax-free as long as she retained them, and required the executor of Alfred’s will to bear the cost of the duties payable.

  If there was one sin of which Almina could certainly be guilty, it was a tendency to fecklessness with money. She was unfailingly generous when giving it away and delighted in the spending of it; she was also entirely casual about the getting of it. The fact that Alfred’s death meant his money was now by definition finite does not seem to have occurred to Almina. She simply asked for more, as she had done all her life.

  The executor of Alfred’s will was the distinguished barrister Sir Edward Marshall Hall, who took a stand and refused to bow to Almina’s somewhat imperious demand. Almina did sell her paintings, despite Alfred’s stipulation that she shouldn’t, and she did have to pay the tax on them herself. It was a small adjustment to the new reality of life without her beloved benefactor.

  Adjusting to the new reality was the nation’s work for January 1919. Elsie, the Dowager Countess of Carnarvon, was sixty-three years old in 1919 but, with typically unflagging energy, determined to do her bit to alleviate the aftershocks in combatants’ lives. She became vice-chairman of the Vocal Therapy Society, which was instrumental in developing modern speech therapy. The aim was to restore normal speech to thousands of ex-soldiers who were struggling to cope with disabilities. Many of them had severe shell shock, as well as amnesia and panic attacks; they stammered or simply couldn’t speak. Elsie raised funds and awareness, but her big idea was the use of music and singing to help patients breathe more effectively, relax and have fun. She founded King’s Services Choirs, which were hugely successful at improving patients’ speech so that they could reclaim their social lives and look for work. Some men discovered a passion for singing and had individual lessons; some took up Spanish classes. One man with a stammer recovered so well that Elsie was able to find a place for him as a gardener on an estate not far from Highclere. At a concert in Lancashire, a mill hand was asked about being wounded. He replied, ‘I lost t’leg and t’voice but t’voice is back again, so t’leg doesn’t matter!’

  Almina was winding up the hospital, but before it was formally closed on 15 February 1919, she, her team of medics and nurses and the last few residents received another visit from Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught. He had been so impressed and moved by what he’d seen on his previous tour that he came to personally thank the staff for the work they had done.

  The hospital’s closure was reason to be thankful, of course, but it was poignant as well, to leave the place that had bonded so many people so closely. As Kenneth Witham Wignall, one of the last inmates put it, ‘It was simply pathetic leaving 48. I am quite sure that if it had not been for all the magnificent care and skill … I should certainly be without my one remaining leg.’ Letters continued to pour in from patients and their relatives. Lizzie Hooper wrote in an uneven hand to thank Lady Carnarvon for all she had done for her two boys. ‘I am utterly in your debt for all the care and skill they received.’

  Almina wrote to thank all the surgeons with whom she had worked over the previous four and a half years. She sent many of them gifts, silver tea caddies with their names and dates of service engraved, mementoes of their time at Highclere and Bryanston Square. Hector Mackenzie wrote by return to thank her for all her support and for the enormous amount of energy she had spent instilling the sense in her colleagues that they were doing everything they possibly could. ‘I have seen you as an angel, rejoicing when your efforts have been crowned with success, hoping against hope and fighting for some desperate case and now sorrowing when all your efforts have been in vain.’

  A great many people worked, as Almina did, throughout the First World War, to provide a desperately needed medical service. She knew only too well that she could not have done it without her doctors and nurses. It was of course pleasant to be recognised for these efforts, and doubtless Almina appreciated it, but the endless small acts of kindness: the funerals attended personally, the exquisite attention to detail that made every patient feel like a house guest, the willingness to get down and dress a man’s gangrenous stump herself were carried out for their own sake and without expectation of anything in return.

  Almina’s generosity and energy combined, in her hospital work, to produce a significant achievement, one that was noticed by the highest authorities. Sir Robert Jones, the Inspector of Military Hospitals, wrote to her on 28 January to express his personal thanks.

  I have always looked upon you as one of the discoveries of the war. You have devoted yourself with such extraordinary vitality to helping our wounded soldiers and I am sure the nation should be very grateful to you for it all. I shall always have the pleasantest memories of Highclere, the wonderful times the officers had there, and particularly of the self-sacrificing way in which you ministered to their mental and physical well-being.

  Having devoted herself to the health of others for years, Almina was in desperate need of a rest. In February, once the last patient had been sent off to a trusted convalescent home, and the last nurse had found another position, the family left for Egypt for the first time since 1915. Lord Carnarvon was beside himself with excitement and desperate to join Howard Carter to resume their work. London was bitterly cold that winter, with snow and icy winds, which gave him an added incentive to leave.

  They crossed to Boulogne, and from there they caught a train to Paris. France was in the grip of a giant clean-up operation. At Versailles, the political fallout was being picked over in painstaking detail by delegations from every combatant nation. Across northern France and Belgium, the task of burying the dead in war cemeteries was under way.

  The Carnarvons made a stop in Paris to visit Aubrey, who had rushed there when he heard news that his great friend, Colonel Sir Mark Sykes, who was part of the British delegation to the peace negotiations, was dying of flu. Sir Mark, who had called on Almina back in the opening days of the war to give her the information that Aubrey had been shot, died on 16 February, aged thirty-nine. He was the creator of the Arab Bureau, which existed to ‘harmonise British political activity in the Near East’. Aubrey and T. E. Lawrence both served in the bureau and all three men spent weekends at Highclere and Pixton discussing the future of politics in the Middle East over port and cigars. Sir Mark had been diligently pushing the causes of both Arab nationalism and Zionism up the Versailles agenda when he was struck down. Aubrey was horrified that his friends were still dying, even after the cessation of hostilities. When he too succumbed to the flu, he and his wife Mary decided to go to Italy for the winter so that Aubrey could convalesce.

  They spent three months at the house
that Aubrey’s father, the 4th Earl, had acquired in 1882 and dubbed ‘Alta Chiara’, Highclere in Italian. It perched on the cliffs overlooking the harbour of Portofino and commanded spectacular views over the Mediterranean. It must have been the most romantic and peaceful place to calm the spirit and regain strength.

  The Carnarvons pushed on to Marseilles and from there sailed via Bizerte in Tunisia to Alexandria. The war had been over for barely four months and travel was still very much affected, with potentially deadly consequences. The Carnarvons’ ship had been used to transport sick and wounded men and had not been disinfected properly before it was returned to civilian use. Under pressure from people’s desire to see things return to normal, corners were inevitably cut. In this case, conditions were so unsanitary that several passengers died of infections they picked up on board. Almina had only just recovered from flu and the Earl was never in good health, but they made it ashore without problems. For the first time in four years, Lord Carnarvon was again in the dry air and, as they disembarked in Alexandria, he and Almina were surrounded by a familiar cacophony of sounds and confusion. Things were different here too, though. The end of the war had fomented a new vision of nationalism and independence amongst the Egyptian people.

  They travelled to Cairo before catching the train down to Luxor, where they were met by Howard Carter. Carter and Carnarvon were desperate to resume their work in the Valley of the Kings. It had been five long, frustrating years since they secured the concession for excavating in the valley just before the outbreak of the war. They were in two minds about whether it was, as they were repeatedly told, exhausted, but they weren’t going to give up on the long-cherished dream of digging there without at least one excavation.