by Hilda Newman
I was sure there was and equally sure that my mum and dad hadn’t scrimped and saved to find the £25 for my apprenticeship only to see their daughter wait hand and foot on the dining tables of a bunch of la-di-da officers. Even my five years in service to Her Ladyship had managed to make some use of what I had been trained for. My new role seemed both a great waste of my abilities and an odd way to keep the home fires burning during the country’s darkest hours. Still, the army did things its own way and I could have no more budged it from its decision than I could have taken up a gun and had a pop at Hitler myself. I consoled myself that, while I wasn’t convinced the army knew best, at least I would be able to make sure the boys who were to go and do the fighting started out with a full stomach and clean tables to eat from.
In that, they were better off – as so they should have been – than the rest of the population. On 8 January 1940 rationing came into force and the people of Britain (me included) began to learn the meaning of tightening your belt. When war broke out, the country was importing an enormous proportion of its food – 20 million tons per year, including more than half of the meat, three quarters of our cheese and sugar, nearly 80% of all fruit and about 70% of cereals and fats. Not surprisingly, Hitler ordered his warships and U-Boats to attack the merchant ships which kept us alive – and barely a day passed without news that a vessel had been sunk.
The first items to be ‘on the ration’ were bacon, butter and sugar. The government issued every single person in the country a little green ration book, with coupons to tear out and hand over with payment for your allowance. This was followed quickly by meat, tea, jam, biscuits, breakfast cereals, cheese, eggs, lard, milk and canned and dried fruit. Almost all of these controlled items were rationed by weight – an ounce of this or three ounces of that – but meat was rationed by price. We all had to get used to counting our coupons as well as our pennies and eking out the decreasing quantities of the rations became, as the war years ground on, a constant struggle.
The thing everyone hated most was ‘the national loaf’. Bread wasn’t actually rationed during the war (although it would be after the fighting had ended) but the government ordered bakers to produce a new type of ‘national loaf’, made of wholemeal flour, which replaced the ordinary white variety we had all been used to. It tasted mushy, looked grey and was widely blamed for causing what might politely be called ‘digestion problems’: since most of the country didn’t have indoor plumbing, you can imagine why this was an issue!
Things got worse when the government issued a new order that bread must not be sold to a customer until the day after it was baked: the idea was to help the country cut down on the amount of bread we ate. Some bright spark in one of the ministries in Whitehall worked out that it was difficult to slice freshly baked bread thinly so our portions were a little too big, and that the tastiness of a loaf fresh from the oven was likely to encourage people to eat too much of it.
Like bread, fish was not on the ration but the price increased considerably as the war progressed and supplies dropped to 30% of pre-war levels. Long queues outside fishmongers became a common sight, and at the good old English fish-and-chip shop. In fact, everywhere you looked there were queues. Housewives – and that was a term you could use in those days without fear of seeming sexist – often spent much of their day lining up in one queue or another in the hope of finding enough to feed their families.
In fairness, it wasn’t just the ordinary people like the Mulleys in Stamford and the Newmans in Severn Stoke who were having to live on a much reduced diet. Because rationing was controlled by coupons rather than money, being rich didn’t guarantee you a full stomach.
Even for those with enough cash to go to eat out found that the government had seen them coming. In May 1942 an order was passed that meals served in hotels and restaurants must not cost over five shillings per customer and must not be of more than three courses, only one of which could contain meat or fish or poultry.
As the war progressed, other basic commodities joined the ever-growing list of things on the ration. Clothing was rationed on a points system. When it was introduced, on 1 June 1941, no clothing coupons had been issued and, at first, any unused margarine coupons in ration books were valid for clothing. Soon, though, our little ration books had special sections for clothes. Initially, the allowance was enough for one new outfit per year – and that included shoes, hat and gloves – but, as the war progressed, the points were reduced until buying a single item like a coat used almost a year’s clothing coupons.
At least in this bit of the war on the home front my training came to the fore. I was able to run up material into something useful and to make new clothes from old ones. And in June 1940 I was to have a very good reason to do so.
But first our attention must turn to the second reel of our film, and to the northern coast of Europe. The Battle of France began in earnest on 10 May 1940. The German Army Blitzkreig had swept through Holland and advanced westward through Belgium. Four days later it burst through the Ardennes forests and advanced rapidly northward to the English Channel. A combination of British, French and Belgian units tried to stop the German spearhead but by 20 May Hitler’s troops had reached the coast, splitting each of the three Allied armies off from one another. With their backs, literally, to the sea, the Battle of Dunkirk began: it was a disaster.
The story of how a flotilla of small ships rescued more than 330,000 allied troops has gone down in history as one of the defining moments of Britain during the war. At the time, the full extent of the crisis was kept from us by the official censor, who stopped newspapers publishing details of the unfolding disaster. But the papers – and the wireless – did tell us that the King had called for an unprecedented national week of prayer, and his call was echoed by the Archbishop of Canterbury when he led a special service ‘for our soldiers in dire peril in France’.
All of us knew someone – or knew of someone who knew someone – trapped on those beaches at Dunkirk. And we prayed, intensely and gladly, for their safe return. And when, by some miracle – or so it seemed – the gallant little ships succeeded in rescuing our boys from the beaches and getting them under a hail of gunfire and bombs from above to the safety of the navy carriers, we rejoiced and thanked God for his deliverance.
But there was one soldier – one among many, I know, but one whom I had known, whose hand I had shaken and whose bread I had eaten – who did not return. William George, 10th Earl of Coventry died at Dunkirk.
When I heard the news, I confess that I wept and I looked in and amongst my possessions for a little photograph, no more than two inches by two inches in size, which I had taken the summer before. It was a photograph that had got me into a little hot water with Mr Latter but which I treasured as much as anything else I had brought with me from my old life at Croome. It was a picture of His Lordship and my mistress, holding hands with Lady Maria and young Bill, taken at the back of the Court. Milady was wearing a bright, patterned summer dress, her long dark hair tucked up and pinned at the back; the children were smiling shyly and carrying wooden tennis rackets. The Earl himself was staring directly into the camera lens, his trousers hitched high above the waist with braces (as was the fashion in those days) and a smile just visible underneath his wide, sandy moustache.
I remembered Mr Latter’s shock and outrage when I asked His Lordship if I might snap their picture. ‘Miss Mulley, a servant must never take a photograph of the family – never!’ And I recall His Lordship’s gentle response that it would be fine this one time for an exception to be made. Now he was gone: a body amongst many bodies, lying somewhere on the bloodied beaches of Dunkirk.
I wondered how my mistress was taking the news. At one time I might have been of some comfort to her in her grief and loss – for, as I have said, I am convinced that she truly loved him. But she was in barracks many miles away and I was stuck waiting on tables at Norton.
As the month of June moved on, however, I had happier thoughts to take t
he place of grief. For on Saturday, the 15th, I returned to Stamford and to the church of St Michael to be married to Roland Newman. Somehow – goodness knows from where – I had found enough material to make up a white wedding dress with a full-length veil. On my head I wore a tiara – not as priceless as the one I had drawn from the bank for Milady to wear at the coronation but a source of some pride for me nonetheless. In my hands I carried a huge posy of flowers and, beside me, Roland – my Roll – sported a smart carnation in the buttonhole of his three-piece suit.
We didn’t, of course, have a honeymoon and our first home was a little terraced cottage in Hatfield, one of the villages near Croome Court: close enough to Norton Barracks for me, and to Worcester itself, where Roland had found work driving a lorry for a local company.
The house itself was a far cry from what we had been used to at the Court. There was no hot running water, no electricity and the days of the luxury of having my morning bath prepared for me by a housemaid were long gone. In those days, for us, posh sanitation meant a non-slippery path to the toilet at the bottom of the back yard! But it was our own home (though rented, never bought) and, if we began our married life amid the privations of war, we were happy just to be with each other.
What of Croome itself in those wartime years? Had we but known it – and it would be a secret kept until long after Hitler had been beaten and peace declared – our old home had been turned into one of the most important places in the whole war.
Shortly after the Coventry family moved out, the RAF moved in and began constructing an aerodrome on the estate. In all, it would take two full years to transform the Croome parkland into RAF Defford and, although it was never an operational flying base, what happened there would be the key to winning the war. In May 1942 scientists and officers moved in – all in conditions of utmost secrecy – and began to establish something called the Telecommunications Flying Unit, or TFU for short. So hurried and so secret was the move to Defford that many of the personnel had, at first, to be accommodated in tents. Before long an entire new set of buildings had been erected to house at least 2,500 personnel, as well as hangers to accommodate 100 aircraft. What was all of this in aid of? One word (although not one we heard, nor would have understood if we had): radar.
Civilian scientists, flying from Defford with aircrews from the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy, tested the radar systems that were to revolutionise the operational capability of Allied aircraft. From the first early successes with Airborne Interception (AI) systems to Air to Surface Vessel (ASV) radar, which enabled the German U-boat menace to be effectively countered by the end of 1943, the work of the TFU was critical to Britain winning the Battle of the Atlantic and, later, to our bombers being able to target German cities accurately. All in all, without RAF Defford – or Croome Court, as we still thought of it – we might never have won the war, or at least would have paid an even greater price for doing so.
Not, as I say, that Roland and I – or anyone else – knew a thing about it. So secret was the work being carried out at our old home that not a word of it leaked out. Looking back, I find it strange to think of the Croome estate – the place where I met and courted and fell in love with my husband – being so vital in bringing the war to an end.
By the time that end came and I was able to hang up my khaki ATS uniform for the last time, we had been joined in our little cottage by the first of two sons. We christened him Roland Allan, in honour of his father, but the first name never stuck and from his earliest days he was Allan.
It would be nice to say that life changed immediately for the better that day in May 1945 when all of Britain celebrated victory in Europe. But there were still terrible scars left by the war. My brother Jim was one of those who never came home, killed in a tank on the borders of Holland in 1944. A little cross in a military cemetery with his service number – 7635107 – and his rank (Sergeant) is all that marks the contribution he made and the place where he gave his life for King and country. And the privations of wartime life continued long after peace broke out, with rationing reduced but then stepped up as the chill economic winds of the new post-war world blew through the broken and blasted landscape of Britain.
You might wonder, as I did, whether I might have returned to Croome: it certainly crossed my mind in the months after the war’s end whether I might receive a summons from Her Ladyship. And, in a manner of speaking, I did.
I had not heard from her at all during the nearly six years we both were in uniform but at some point in 1947 word was sent asking me if I could go up to Croome and visit the Countess. Perhaps you might think that she was about to request that I resume my duties as her maid? Or, failing that, at least to enquire as to my welfare. But no: I was sent for to see if I would undertake a little sewing – a few buttons here, a few repairs there, nothing more than that. Of course, I agreed and in time the little trickle of seamstress work from Her Ladyship was supplemented by the occasional request from Lady Joan. This, too, I was pleased to help with.
As with the Countess, I had not seen Lady Joan since leaving Croome back in 1939. I would like to be able to say that I noticed a change in her – perhaps the war might have made her a little less wilful than before: after all, she had joined up and served with her mother in the ATS. But if I did, I cannot say I recall it. And so, perhaps, I was not surprised that day in May 1948 when the newspaper front pages carried reports of her suicide. After the Daily Express broke the story, the Daily Mirror took it up.
THE TRAGIC LOVE OF LADY JOAN COVENTRY
Lady Joan Blanche Coventry, 23, sister of the fourteen-year-old Earl of Coventry, fell in love with a married man. She tried to forget. Deciding on a business career, she went to Newbury (Berks) for a secretarial course at a commercial college. At the college – and at the Newbury hotel where she was found suffering from a fatal overdose of aspirin – she called herself Miss Joan Coventry.
The man with whom she was in love is not being called as a witness at today’s inquest, according to the police last night. Colonel O.D. Smith, a relative of Lady Joan’s mother, the Countess of Coventry, told the Daily Mirror: ‘We all knew that Lady Joan was trying to get over a love affair. There was never a question of an engagement because the man she was in love with was already married. Three weeks ago, with the full knowledge of her mother, Lady Joan went to Newbury alone. She decided to take a commercial course at Newbury to become a secretary. She thought that would help her forget the tragedy of her love. Apparently she just could not forget.’
The Countess stayed last night at the hotel where her daughter was found dying. She will attend the inquest. One of the hotel staff said of Lady Joan: ‘She always appeared to have some great worry. All she would do was to eat, read in the lounge and go to bed. She was always on her own and appeared most lonely. The only telephone calls she would receive were from her mother.’
It was, I thought, a terribly sad and lonely end to a young woman who – by the luck of breeding and aristocratic connections – might have had the world at her feet. I thought, too, of the old curse of the Deerhursts and the number of lives this had blighted for the Coventry family. And I also reflected that, in some way, the death of Lady Joan in a shabby little hotel, far away from the grandeur of her ancestral seat, marked the passing of an age. In just six years the once mighty had now fallen and become as mortal and as vulnerable as the rest of us. The war had, indeed, changed everything. Forever.
Chapter Fourteen
Envoi – ‘I Can Rest Easy’
Last night I dreamed of Croome Court.
In the years since I left service I have rarely visited the house or the estate – though it is open to the public these days and guests are welcomed into its surviving rooms and parkland. But I had been there with my son Allan and his wife – now pensioners themselves – to help my fading memory conjure up the recollections of a long-ago age.
We have come a long way since I began this tale. And you, reader, what have you taken from my story? Has it b
een what you expected from someone who began her working life, as no more than a slip of a girl, in one of the greatest houses in the land and in the service of one of the oldest aristocratic families in England?
It has not, I think, been the sort of story that would have fitted easily into the neat television dramas of life below stairs. I have tried to give you not just a sense of what it was like to be a lady’s maid with the constant demands of tending to the needs of a Countess. I hope you have had some sense of what it meant to be one of the gentry in those long-ago days – and what it meant also to be called to be in their service. I also hope I have painted some colours into the fading picture of what life was – and what it meant – nearly 80 years ago.
For England was very different then. We were a nation – or, more accurately, two nations – of people who knew and understood their place in the scheme of things. And if that place was harsh and – as it undoubtedly was – unfair, the counterbalance to this social injustice was a sense of some stability: however restrictive the hierarchy and order of things, it was at least ordered and, with that, came a feeling of security even in the worst of economic times, when hunger was never far from our door.
We were a nation of churchgoers – as I have remained all of my life – and a people who had values and standards, which (whether wrong or right) we stuck to. Phrases from my childhood still come back to me. FHB is a particular one – it stood for Families Hold Back – and meant that, when guests came to eat at our table, it was they who filled their plates first (however meagre the rations) while we waited our turn.