Henry kissed his mother goodbye and went looking for his friends. A group of them made their way to the palace. Princess Elizabeth and her sister Princess Margaret begged for permission to leave the balcony and go with their cousins, Henry Porchester and others to mingle with the crowds. It was an exceptional day; smiling, the King gave his assent. Virtually incognito thanks to their uniforms, the girls melted into the mass of people and ran with their friends through the streets, laughing, crying, singing, doing the hokey-cokey. It was all a joyful madness. The Mall was packed with revellers and it took them ages to battle their way back down to join with the multitudes standing outside the palace and scream, ‘We want the King! We want the Queen!’, who duly obliged. Down below, their children hugged each other, sharing their elation alongside thousands of others.
Tomorrow there would be time to plan for the future; tonight, all anyone could think of was that the long years of stoicism and anxiety were over. Churchill’s rallying cry at the end of his announcement of victory echoed in everyone’s ears, ‘Long live the cause of freedom!’ Freedom would be toasted and cherished long into the night, from London to Highclere and all over the world.
(Picture Acknowledgment epl.1)
Epilogue
When the formal celebrations of Victory in Europe Day were held, Lieutenant Lord Porchester of the Blues and Royals was second in command of the sovereigns’ escort in the procession to St Paul’s Cathedral and to the Houses of Parliament. Porchey and Catherine were deeply proud.
Robert Taylor had an arduous journey back from Germany. There were millions of people displaced across Europe, members of the armed forces heading home, or refugees looking for somewhere they might rebuild their lives. When he eventually made it to Highclere he told Joan little about his experiences, but he hugged her more fiercely than ever. He returned to Lord Carnarvon’s service, as his butler, and he and Joan lived in a cottage at Highclere for the rest of their long lives. It was Robert who famously came to Henry, once he had become the 7th Earl, with a biscuit tin full of Ancient Egyptian artefacts he had just found in a cupboard and said, ‘Excuse me, my lord. I think there are some Egyptian treasures hidden in the castle.’ Robert died in 1990 and a cedar of Lebanon is planted in his memory to the north front of the castle.
The war was over for Highclere’s evacuee children and the teachers and nurses who had looked after them. Their belongings were packed back into small parcels and the children were bussed to the station where kindly railway staff thrust small white bags of sugar-coated almonds into their hands. They were almost as happy for them as the excited children were themselves. From Paddington they were taken by another bus to the Prince of Wales pub in Kilburn where their anxious parents and relatives were waiting for them. There were cheers and applause as the children clambered down the steep stairs from the coach and then mothers enfolded their daughters in a hug, fathers swung their sons round and round and lifted them onto their shoulders. In the midst of all this, one little boy, Terry, noticed that another small boy had not been claimed. Terry watched him quietly climb back onto the coach, clutching his brown leather satchel, and go to sit at the front next to the driver, ignoring everyone. Kind words from other mothers drifted past him. He stared ahead. As Terry’s mother tugged on his hand to urge him home, Terry looked round. The little boy was still alone. What could have happened? Had his mother been killed by a doodlebug; was his father still in Belgium or Germany? In later years Terry told himself that someone must have gone to him, taken him home with them, but he never knew and always wondered.
By the end of 1946, most of the American GIs and Canadian troops that had been stationed in Britain had gone home. Some of them were accompanied by their British brides. Even in the war’s final days, everyone ran the risk of not making it back. On 5 May 1945 a B17 (nicknamed the ‘flying fortress’) from US Air Force 326th Squadron took off from Podington Air Base on a short training flight. The crew had completed their thirty-five missions and were looking forward to going back to the States. The pilot, First Lieutenant Reginald Hammond, got lost in low cloud and dense rain. He dropped down to see where he was, circled over Highclere Castle and set off towards the south, unknowingly approaching Siddown Hill. Too late he tried to pull the B-17 up but, despite his heroic efforts, he caught the trees. The wing tips sheared off before the plane crashed, belly down, and careered down the other side of the hill, catching fire as it went. The gamekeepers heard the rumble as it came over, as did the Stacey children in their cottage; the fog had increased the terrible sound of the flames. The local doctor, Dr Kendall, was not far away, and he and everyone in the area rushed up to help. One poor airman’s body was found in the trees. The keepers went in among the smouldering wreckage and pulled out two badly burned airmen, but only one of them was still alive. Leonard Nitti, the radio operator, was the crew’s sole survivor. The crash site is still discernible because of its lack of trees. There are remains of other planes buried across the estate. My husband and I plan to create a memorial to the men of the Second World War who died at Highclere, before their time, in the service of their country.
In July 1945, Porchey stepped down from his position with the Army Claims Commission, having been warmly complimented on his years of service. He retired with the honorary rank of Lieutenant Colonel. In the autumn he hosted several shooting weekends. Needless to say the first guests to be asked were Porchey’s stalwart friends: the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, Sidney Beer, Prince Aly Khan and his wife Princess Joan, Cardie Montague and his new wife, and Peter and Poppy Thursby. Porchey and Sunny Marlborough resumed their highly acerbic games of bridge and returned to yelling cheerful insults at one another across their respective dining tables.
If some things at Highclere were the same, many more were not. The Second World War changed the social and economic framework in Britain; it marked the end of the era in which the country house was a symbol of power and privilege, and a cornerstone of the natural social order. While Highclere continued to be the home of the 6th Earl of Carnarvon, for the first few years after the war he found it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. It was the money from the flotation of Pyrotenax—the company Bro had urged him to invest in—that fundamentally redeemed his position in 1954. Porchey, and all the Carnarvons, were extremely lucky: it might have been very different. By 1955 a great house was being demolished every five days.
Porchey loved his home, the land and the people who worked there. His greatest wish was that Highclere would survive for future generations, and in this he was gratified. He lived in the castle until just before he died in 1987 and he lived all his years to the full. Witty and charming to the last, he remained an accomplished golfer and was a fine and competitive game shot. In 1955 his son Henry married a beautiful American girl, just as he had done. Her name was Jeanie Wallop and she and Henry lived across the park in Milford Lake House, so Porchey saw a great deal of his grandchildren. They grew up with an irrepressible if rather eccentric grandfather who loved to spoil them with generous gifts and meals of deliciously unhealthy food. Porchey adored the fine, old-fashioned dishes full of butter and cream that his great cook Ivy Rogers served for him in the 1970s and 1980s. He had a touch of the showman about him and was thrilled to appear on Michael Parkinson’s prime-time TV chat show in 1976 and again in 1981, demonstrating his old-world charm and peppering the conversation with amusing stories from his life.
Brograve Beauchamp lost his seat as an MP in the 1945 General Election, which returned an unexpected landslide victory for the Labour Party. Winston Churchill immediately tendered his resignation as Prime Minister and Clement Attlee was appointed, with a mandate to build a ‘cradle to grave’ welfare state and a tax-funded National Health Service. The British electorate adored Churchill but distrusted what they remembered of his party’s pre-war policies. Mrs Churchill commented that the Labour victory might be a ‘blessing in disguise’, to which her husband replied that it seemed ‘quite effectively disguised’. Brograve’s healt
h had been shattered by the war but he lived until 1976 and continued to spend many enjoyable weekends with his wife, Eve, at Highclere playing bridge and golf. Their daughter, Patricia, delighted them by marrying Major Michael Leatham in 1949.
Henry succeeded his father in 1987 to become the 7th Earl of Carnarvon. He adored Highclere and the Hampshire countryside and, having completed an agricultural course at Cirencester College in 1947, he had started his farming career on the estate. Highclere continued to build its reputation for quality crops and livestock, winning a number of farm championships at the local county show. The farm continues to thrive under the 8th Earl, who has extended his father’s legacy and expanded the business to grow and process oats for performance horses.
Like his father and grandfather before him, Henry had a passion for breeding thoroughbreds and loved the excitement of owning horses in training. He made a shrewd purchase when he bought his mare Jojo just after the war and bred a long line of winners such as Hiding Place, Smuggler and Little Wolf, who won the Gold Cup at Royal Ascot. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of bloodlines and, through his membership of the Jockey Club, became a key figure in the modernisation of the racing industry. The 7th Earl shared this passion for the turf with his lifelong friend Her Majesty the Queen, whom he met as a child when she was Princess Elizabeth, and who is also a great authority on breeding racehorses. He became her Racing Manager in 1969, a post he held up to his death in 2001.
His life was underpinned by a deep sense of duty and public service. He was a member of Hampshire County Council for twenty-four years and served as Chairman from 1973 to 1977. After his father’s death he took his place in the House of Lords, sitting on the cross benches (as an independent) and fighting the cause of rural interests.
Penelope van der Woude died in 1990, outlived by her husband and two sons. Her brother, who was by then the 7th Earl, and his wife, Jeanie, planted a grove of trees in her memory by the southwest lawns of the castle.
Tilly, Countess of Carnarvon, reinvented herself as an artist and achieved a certain measure of critical success. Having first tried her hand at watercolours, she began to paint seriously when she was encouraged by other artists. Her primary mentors were the ever loyal Cecil Beaton and John Spencer-Churchill, Winston’s nephew. She produced a series of self-portraits in oil and portraits of subjects including Anita Loos, Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. As her work became more complex, it attracted considerable positive attention. She was sufficiently well regarded in her time to have paintings purchased by the Tate Gallery.
As might be expected, her marriage to the 6th Earl ended in divorce, with the first financial settlement achieved in 1946. She remained on cordial terms with Porchey (despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that it took until 1964 to complete the divorce) and even returned to stay at Highclere in 1950 and 1956. Tilly spent her remaining years commuting between London and New York, where she died of cancer in 1975. Porchey was among only a handful of mourners at her modest Catholic funeral, an event that, thirty years earlier, might well have filled Westminster Cathedral to overflowing. He never married again.
Almina closed her last nursing home, The Glebe, in 1943, and went to live in Somerset. She retained a particular dislike for budgets and taxes all her life. Porchey provided an allowance, which always proved insufficient. On one occasion, when she had a tax bill that she couldn’t pay, he sent her the money. Almina promptly spent it on a marvellous party, and when Porchey remonstrated with her, she assured him that her party had been much more fun than paying the tax bill would have been, and for a great many more people. Over the years Almina worked her way through a vast fortune. She sold off most of the remaining Rothschild assets and much of her jewellery. In the end she was declared bankrupt. The judge commented that the reason for her sad situation was the role she had adopted as fairy godmother to so many others. Her grandson, Henry Porchester, bought her a house in Bristol where she lived the rest of her long life.
When she died the Newbury Weekly News printed an obituary signed ‘C’ (for her son, Carnarvon), recording that Almina’s ‘greatest joy in life was everything that contributed to the nursing of the sick … Courage and kindness were her greatest virtues and I think that is the context in which she would wish to be remembered by her many devoted friends and patients.’ She received letters throughout her life from the friends and family of those she nursed. Almina had in many cases literally fought for their lives with all her love, care and experience. She died in 1969, so her great-grandchildren knew her well and still remember her fondly.
Ten years after the death of Geoffrey, Catherine married Don Momand and spent the last part of her life living peacefully in Switzerland. She would return to visit her son and his wife Jeanie at Milford Lake House, Highclere, and her daughter and Gerrit in Kent; she was a much-loved grandmother.
One of Catherine’s inadvertent but crucial legacies to Highclere was the pledge for security given to her by Porchey when they divorced. During the lean years just after the war, Porchey survived by selling off parcels of land, but he was prevented from whittling Highclere’s assets away to nothing by the terms of the agreement. The pay-out from the sale of Pyrotenax arrived just in the nick of time, but it was Catherine’s divorce settlement that ensured there was still something to save, and that eventually ensured that her son Henry and her grandson Geordie could continue to farm much of the agricultural land at Highclere.
When she died, at the age of 79, Catherine was buried next to her adored brother Reggie and their mother, Gar, in the Cemetery Chapel in the park at Highclere. Porchey was moved to tears at her funeral. The whole family mourned the loss of a woman who had impressed her many friends and admirers with her infectious sense of fun, her dignity even at moments of great personal pain and her unfailing kindness.
Catherine’s portrait, painted in 1929 when she was at her loveliest, still hangs in her sitting room next to Almina’s likeness. It is one of my favourite of all the paintings in the castle.
Through a combination of determination, dedication and sheer love, Highclere Castle still stands today. My husband and I remain bound to the castle and its landscape, our lives and hearts belong to the place. An architectural witness to so much history, it is nevertheless both a home and a business. The focus of all our endeavours is to preserve the past for the generations to come.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my husband, Geordie, ever patient as I struggle with deadlines and schedules. Helen Coyle is a great and calm editor, and her father Chris Coyle provided objective first feedback. And I have had subsequent help from Geordie and David Rymill to edit and check facts. David was and is unfailingly patient, helping me yet again as I mislay another date or pile of papers. He is a wonderful archivist. Robin Mann has been a great help researching and collating information and has now changed from academic research to join our team of gardeners.
Mr Ronan Donohoe—Portsmouth Athenaeum, USA has been incredibly helpful and I am so grateful for his time and research to help bring to light the Wendell and Fendall families. I am sure there are more stories and relationships to explore.
Patricia Leatham (Beauchamp) and June Prescott (Wendell) have been very kind to tell me about their family, the people they loved and knew. I have tried to tread the path of objectivity. Mrs Edith Eastment came and told me about her life as a nursing assistant during the Second World War. I was fortunate that Garry O’Connor had researched the HCR’s part in the Italian campaign (O’Connor, Garry, The 1st Household Cavalry 1943-44: in the Shadow of Monte Amaro, The History Press: London, 2013), and John Walker, Chairman of the 92nd Bomber Group Memorial Association, has helped understand the last flight of a B17 and I hope it will lead to further research and a memorial.
Highclere is so full of stories and extraordinary visitors that it has been very difficult to narrow it down and choose whom to follow. The real cast is far larger than that of ‘Downton Abbey’, the fictional alter ego of Highclere.
I’d
like to thank all the staff at Highclere for their support, in terms of coffees, tea, delicious suppers and John Gundill for his Mini Mars Bars in addition to consistent interruptions. Candice Bauval has tried to keep my diary clearer, thank you, and to beloved Nora Sutcliffe who has undertaken research expeditions with me. I am grateful to my sisters for their solicitous support, especially to Sarah for clarifying the beginning and the end. Steve Bohill Smith contributed knowledge and detail as I enthusiastically pursued my search for plane crashes and bomb sites around the woods and hills of the Highclere Estate. That should be a book and commemoration all of its own.
I am grateful that my publishers here in the UK and abroad have given me the opportunity to write another book about this inspiring castle and the people who have lived here.
The TV series ‘Downton Abbey’ has given us a profile that has helped us share this amazing home with millions of viewers, and, like the rest of the cast and crew, we consider ourselves both fortunate and grateful.
Picture Acknowledgements
Most of the photographs: © Highclere Castle Archive
Additional sources:
© Corbis: i1.2, i2.11 & 6.1/photos Bettmann. © Getty Images: i3.1/photo Popperfoto, i4.4/photo David Montgomery, 9.1/photo Fox Photos, 10.1/photo Topical Press Agency, 13.1/photo Central Press, 15.1/photo Walter Stoneman/Hulton Archive, 17.1/photo Roger Viollet, epl.1/photo Reg Speller. © Mary Evans: i1.1, i2.6, i2.10/photos Illustrated London News, i2.4/photo Yevonde Portrait Archive/ILN, i2.8/photo Everett Collection. © Newbury News Ltd: i4.1. © Rex Features: i4.2/photo Associated Newspapers, i4.3/photo Pierre Manevy/Associated Newspapers. © TopFoto.co.uk: i1.3, i2.1, i2.2, i2.3, i2.7, i2.8, i2.9.
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