by Hilda Newman
I couldn’t have known how, in a few short years, that promise would be betrayed and all the happiness and warmth that I felt that night would be snatched away from me.
Chapter Nine
The Abdication
On the evening of Monday, 20 January 1936, all of us in service at Croome Court were sitting quietly in the hall where the under servants took their meals. We were clustered around a big, old-fashioned wireless set, staring at its lacquered woodwork and glowing valves. We were waiting for an announcement from London.
From 9.30pm onwards the ordinary broadcasting programmes were stopped and all the stations of the BBC, including those conducting the shortwave service transmitted to Britain’s far-flung Empire, were linked together but kept utterly silent, save for the transmission of an official bulletin at 15-minute intervals. The subject of that bulletin was the rapidly deteriorating medical condition of His Majesty, King George V. At 10pm, as we sat there in hushed respect, a short service of recollection and prayer for the King was broadcast, after which the silent watch between bulletins was resumed.
Finally, at a little after midnight, the tired, upper-class voice of a BBC announcer crackled across the airwaves: ‘This is London. The following bulletin was issued at nine-twenty-five. The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close.’
It is hard for me to put into words how deeply sad we ordinary people felt that night. In those long-ago days the King was as central to our lives as anything you can imagine. Our loyalty to him was something we imbibed with our mothers’ milk and was as taken for granted as the mugs of strong brown tea that sustained the nation.
Yet it is also true to say that we knew almost nothing of him and little of his family. Indeed, I don’t think I ever heard the phrase ‘the Royal Family’ in all of my time in service – that was a much later creation and one which arrived hand in hand with the demystifying of our monarchy through the medium of television. In that first month of 1936 I doubt you could have found anyone of our class who would know the names of any but the closest of the King’s family; but by the same token, I’m sure you would have to search long and hard to find any man, woman or child who would hear a word said against him. If he was a distant father figure, well, then he was still the nation’s father: that’s how we felt back then.
Although the idea of television had been invented by then (news of a proposal 12 months earlier to begin work on a broadcasting network had been given a cautious welcome by the Worcester Evening Post and had been much discussed below stairs at Croome), the wireless was our main source of contact with the outside world. In fact, for all of us there on that sad night, there was a strange sense of community with the rest of Britain and her still-mighty Empire. The BBC Home Service (as it was then called) was like a gigantic public-address system, with literally millions of listeners in all parts of the world all tuning in at the same time, hanging on every last word about the deteriorating health – and ultimate quiet passing – of their Sovereign.
‘We will stand for a minute of silence,’ instructed Mr Latter. And we all got to our feet, our heads bowed and deep in our own thoughts, as 60 seconds of silent respect were observed.
I suppose there must have been the same tableau played out in homes up and down the land – from terraced cottages like the one where my parents stood, heads bowed, to the greatest of houses occupied by the gentry and their staff. But in many of those – as in ours – the passing of the King had a significance that did not apply to the ordinary people of Britain. There would be a coronation, and our masters and mistresses must play their parts in its pomp and pageantry.
First, there was to be a funeral and the question of the succession. On Tuesday, 28 January the streets of London were lined with people as, under grey and rain-filled skies, at 9.45am the King’s coffin was placed upon a gun carriage to be escorted by an honour guard of his soldiers to its final resting place. In those pre-television days none of us could watch the procession – at least, not as it happened. But the cameras of Pathé Newsreel were present and within days a special ten-minute film was playing in cinemas the length and breadth of Britain. The grainy film and cloudy skies were made even more sombre by the near complete silence. The Queen was captured, clad from head to toe in black widow’s weeds, climbing into the State carriage. The narrator’s voice on the film solemnly announced that the world was watching.
It has been the Empire taking leave of its beloved father … and the world takes leave of the man who was the symbol of all the might, majesty and power of the British Commonwealth of Nations.
The procession, led by the King’s son, included five kings of European countries: one of the last times – had we but known it – that there would be so many monarchs gathered together in one place. This, I felt, was more than the passing of our dear King: it was the end of an era – and who could know what the next one would bring. There had already been one unpromising sign: during the procession, part of the Imperial State Crown had fallen from on top of the coffin and landed in the gutter as the cortège turned into New Palace Yard. The new King, Edward VIII, saw it fall and, so we were told, wondered whether it was a bad omen for his coming reign.
It’s one of the funny things about the aristocracy that they don’t seem to be in any hurry to get things done. And so Edward’s coronation was set to take place more than a full year after he technically ascended to the throne, in May 1937. From my point of view, though, this would be a good thing: Mr Latter had already told all of the Croome servants that the Earl and the Countess would be among the first names on the guest list – and that meant an enormous amount of extra work for the whole household.
In the meantime, though, 1936 had only just started and the year stretched out before us. Milady still went fox hunting (while His Lordship seemed to cry off as many times as possible); their children were growing and becoming quite a handful; and as February turned to March, one morning the Countess had new instructions for me.
‘We are to go away from Croome, Mulley. We are to spend a week or so at Amroth. Please see to it that all I will need is packed carefully and made ready.’
‘Of course, Milady. Will His Lordship be coming – and the children too?’ I could have guessed the answer but I asked the question nonetheless.
‘No, Mulley. His Lordship will be staying here at Croome. As for the children, Lady Joan and Lady Maria will be away at school but the younger two will be coming with us.’
‘How shall we travel there, Milady? Isn’t Amroth a long way from here?’
‘Roland will drive us in the Standard,’ she said – and my heart skipped a little beat. ‘Steady, girl,’ I told myself. ‘Just you steady down now.’
Amroth – or to use its full title, Amroth Castle – was, indeed, a fair old haul. It was the family seat of Her Ladyship’s mother and father, Lord and Lady Kylsant, more than 160 miles away near Carmarthen on the South Wales coast. It was the first time that my mistress had returned home – at least in the time I’d been with her – since her father had been released from his 12-month jail sentence for fraud. I have to say that I was very glad my Mum and Dad didn’t know about the visit: I could just imagine Dad’s reaction – ‘My girl in the house of a jailbird!’ – and hear the sound of his foot being put down very firmly indeed.
As it was, I knew next to nothing about Lord and Lady Kylsant, nor about the kind of household and servant staff they kept after his fall into disgrace. But my mistress was about to fill in at least one gap in my knowledge and, with it, dash any hopes I might have had of the possibility of seeing the dapper chauffeur about the castle.
‘Robert will be staying in an hotel in Carmarthen, Mulley. Lady Kylsant is very strict about propriety and it wouldn’t do for a male servant to be seen staying in the same house as one of our female staff.’
‘Well,’ I thought, ‘it’s perfectly all right for you to go and stay in the house of a man who has brought dishonour on your family name – and to drag me there with you – but
when it comes to us servants, we must be seen to curtsey and bow in the face of what’s proper. Father or no father, I know what that smells like.’ But I kept this thought to myself. No good would come of upsetting the apple cart – even if I’d ever thought of speaking back to Milady. ‘Anyway,’ I told myself, ‘you just jolly well stop those silly girlish thoughts of romance. They’re a short cut to a very swift downfall and an aristocratic boot propelling you out the door.’ Still, the double standards – for that’s what they were – rankled with me and I wasn’t looking forward to the visit, not one bit.
I’d like to be able to tell you that I was proved wrong; that our stay in Amroth Castle was as pleasant an experience as it could be for a lady’s maid. But I can’t. The journey was very long – not only did cars travel a lot more slowly in those days but the roads themselves were nothing like as solid and reliable as they are today – and no one had even heard the word motorway. It took hours and hours to get there and, once we arrived, I found Lord and Lady Kylsant’s staff to be stand-offish and not at all friendly. ‘Well, maybe there’s a reason for that,’ I told myself. After all, it’s the gentry that set the tone and the standards, and that didn’t exactly look promising when you thought about the recent past. All in all, I was glad to get back to Croome – and that’s something I hadn’t thought I’d hear myself thinking.
Back in the relative comfort of the servants’ quarters – and of my enormous bedroom, which, I’m slightly ashamed to say, I had begun to take for granted – I made two distinct resolutions. The first was to find out a little bit more about His Lordship and why he so rarely accompanied my mistress. The second was to allow myself the chance to consider a romance. Although Roland Newman had been forced to sleep in the dubious comfort of a Carmarthen hotel, I’d seen enough of him to realise that I was beginning to have feelings for him.
As I write this, I’m smiling at those words – ‘beginning to have feelings’: what a terribly old-fashioned and quaint way of putting it! These days I’m sure girls of my age – and remember, I was only just 20 – would say something like ‘I had begun to fancy him’ or ‘he was a bit of all right’. But none of those words would have ever entered my head. No, the 1930s were very much more genteel about matters of the heart, even for servants such as us.
In the end, the first resolution proved more difficult than the second. Mr Latter was a tartar when it came to gossiping about the family. If he ever caught the lower servants doing it, he’d give them a right royal dressing-down.
‘The Earl and the Countess put their trust in us and we are grateful to them for doing so. We must never – ever – spread tittle-tattle or rumours about our family. They are our betters and our masters and, whatever may (or may not) happen in their lives, it is simply not our place to have an opinion about it, much less to discuss these worthless thoughts with anyone else.’
Well, that told all of us! And for all that we knew that Mr Latter was a good and kind man – in a way he was like a father figure to the younger staff like me – I don’t think any of us doubted that a first offence of gossiping would be bad, but a second would mean the sack.
So it proved very difficult to discover anything very much about the 10th Earl of Coventry. Other than Mr Latter, he very rarely saw any of the staff and it wasn’t just hunting that he avoided with his own class. I came to notice that, often as not, when Milady told me to prepare her evening wear and her best jewels for a dinner out at some other aristocrat’s house, His Lordship would be unwell and unable to go. On many of those occasions the Countess would be accompanied – because it wasn’t seemly for a titled Lady to arrive on her own for a dinner – by His Lordship’s brother, John.
Now, I don’t want you to get carried away. I know what this might look like to modern eyes but, as I keep trying to remind you, this was the 1930s and, as far as I knew, there was nothing more to this arrangement than the Earl’s brother acting as a chaperone. I was – and I remain – convinced that my mistress truly loved the Earl and, in any event, there had been quite enough scandal in the family without any of that sort of business.
My other resolution proved a little easier. It started with a message from Roland’s mother: would I like to come to lunch on my day off at their little cottage in Severn Stoke? Would I? I should think so! It was arranged that after I’d been to church the following Sunday I would spruce myself up – I wanted to make an impression, not just on Roland but on his parents. The invitation was couched in terms of simply being kind – a young girl, miles away from her family and stuck out in the vastness of Croome was bound to be a bit lonely and perhaps a bit at a loose end. But I knew that beneath that innocent cover there might well be the first hints of romance. I didn’t think that Roland had ever asked anyone else from the Court home to meet his parents – and in those days that sort of invitation was the very chaste first step on the way to asking a girl out.
But there was one little problem to be solved: how would I get to Severn Stoke? The village was a few miles away from Croome and it would take several hours to walk there after church. Now, you might think that this wouldn’t be an issue: after all, Roland was a chauffeur and in charge of the Coventry’s cars. Surely he would be able to pick me up in the blue hound van, if nothing else. But this was where His Lordship’s generous treatment of his servants stopped: Roland was forbidden to use any of the vehicles except on official family business.
The solution, when it turned up that Sunday morning, was noisy and almost as smelly as the hound van. I looked out of my bedroom window to see a motorbike put-putting towards the Court and a figure almost swamped by an enormous leather coat sat on top of it. This was to be my transport to Severn Stoke and I don’t mind admitting that my heart sank a little. Not only because I’d never sat on a motorbike before but because it was almost guaranteed to ruin my efforts at looking my best to meet his parents. I sighed inwardly and resigned myself to landing there looking like I’d been out on one of my mistress’s fox-hunting jaunts. Which is just how it turned out to be.
Luckily, Roland’s parents were sensible, down-to-earth sort of people with no airs or graces, and the Sunday lunch passed off easily and happily. In fact, when it was time to go back, I felt a pang of sadness at having to leave their cosy little cottage, which reminded me of my parents’ house in Stamford, to return to the cold grandness of Croome Court. I had then the sense once again of going back to prison – a magnificent and (even for us servants) luxurious one to be sure, but a prison nonetheless. I remembered one of the songs that Dad had learned in his childhood and would occasionally sing when the Mulley family got together round the piano.
She’s just a bird in a gilded cage
A beautiful sight to see
You may think she’s happy and free from care
She’s not, though she seems to be …
‘Well, amen to that,’ I said to myself that Sunday, as I clung to Roland’s leather coat and his little motorcycle chugged and tugged me back to the Court. But I climbed the stairs to my bedroom with a warm feeling inside nonetheless: Roland’s parents had insisted I go to lunch again the following week.
Just as my love life, with all its sweet scents of secrecy (don’t forget, the merest hint of a romance could have got both Roland and I the boot, no questions asked), was looking a little brighter, the dangers of another illicit and unsanctioned love affair were about to be starkly revealed. When they did, the whole of Britain – and, above all, the aristocracy – was to be thrown into chaos and consternation.
King Edward – for that’s what he was styled, even though there had as yet been no coronation – was a bachelor but for the previous few years he had often been accompanied at private social events by Wallis Simpson, the American wife of rich British shipping executive Ernest Simpson. He was Wallis’s second husband; her first marriage had ended in divorce in 1927 and, in and of itself, it was quite shocking for Edward to be seen in the company of a divorced woman – doubly so when she was still the wife of anoth
er man. But Edward seemed able and willing to ignore all the social conventions that governed the lives of his subjects and, throughout 1936, Wallis Simpson attended more official functions as the King’s guest. These were announced in the Court Circular in The Times every morning and it was noticeable that, although her name appeared regularly, the name of her husband was conspicuously absent. Tongues began to wag in aristocratic circles and, inevitably, some of the gossip leaked down to their servants. I don’t think we at Croome ever learned of the growing scandal from the Earl or the Countess but servants from other great houses sometimes stayed at the Court when their masters and mistresses came to weekend parties – and, by the same token, we often stayed at other grand mansions belonging to the gentry.
In the summer of 1936 the King should have gone to spend the traditional royal retreat at Balmoral. But in a sudden and shocking breach of protocol, he refused and chose instead to holiday with Mrs Simpson in the eastern Mediterranean on board the steam yacht Nahlin. The government – and especially the Prime Minister of the day, Stanley Baldwin – was appalled and tried to reason with Edward but he remained stubborn and resolute.
Now, if the King’s subjects had known all of this, I don’t doubt we would have been as dismayed as Mr Baldwin. For a start, there was a very great distrust of anything foreign – and especially of anything to do with what ordinary people still called ‘the Continong’. For our nation’s father to be cavorting on a yacht there was bad enough but to do so with a divorcee who was still married: well, it would have seemed like the rules by which we had to live just didn’t apply to the gentry.