by Tessa Boase
But it was, of course, ill-fated.
By the new year of 1915, Nan was on the warpath. There was ‘general strafing’ if the maids were caught serving breakfast late; there were military-style timetables pinned up for the benefit of probationers–‘The men are to form in line at 7.25 and march to breakfast in charge of the NCOs’, ‘Wards inspected by nurses 8.45 a.m.’, and so on. At the same time that the British Navy was bombarding the Gallipoli peninsula, Nan decided it was time to tackle Miss Martin the Matron. ‘It was obvious that a change would have to be made’, she wrote, yet she quaked at the prospect of having to make it. ‘Informing Matron was the first and worst step to take, but no sooner had I commenced to inform her when she stopped me: “I know what you are going to say, Miss Herbert, and I agree that it is best.” No words can express the admiration and gratitude I felt.’ Nan was to ‘step into the post experimentally, and retain it subject to approval of the medical staff’. So she was to be on trial as matron in her own house, officially running the hospital she had unofficially been running before. Even she was daunted at the responsibility. ‘My dream that night of a huge wave, breaking high over my head, expressed my feelings.’
Was this what Hannah Mackenzie had wanted all along, with her campaign against Miss Martin, or did it come as a surprise? Would Nan now be more involved with the medical side of things, and less obsessed with the housekeeping? Initially, this was so. Nan turned her attention to the ‘mischievous’ and ‘superfluous’ nurses, dismissing troublemakers and putting three formidable women–Sister Ife, Sister Rogers and Sister Warner–in charge of Wards A, B and C.
Three more senior women for Hannah to negotiate–but also five more men to wrap around her little finger, now that Dr Beauchamp had returned to his practice in London. The suave, black-haired chief medical officer Dr William Kirkwood and his four surgeons Mr English, Mr Ewart, Mr Hett and Mr Cargill arrived. The hospital became yet more proficient in its patching up and turning around of wounded soldiers, clearing them off to convalescent homes and admitting fresh cases more frequently than ever before. It began to gain a reputation within the War Office for impressive efficiency.
It is often said that housekeepers ran these big houses ‘like a sergeant major’, orchestrating their smooth management with ‘military precision’. The housekeeper’s office was like a war office, from which she plotted and manoeuvred with pen, ink and trusted personnel late into the night. Bit by bit, Hannah had found these satisfactions taken off her hands. First, the household treasures had been removed –the antique furniture, the books, pictures and window drapes–thus denying her the housekeeper’s essential craft in their upkeep. Next came Nan and Sister Martin, interfering with her staff. Then Mr Argles was doing her accounts, even if this was a boon.
And now a most unwelcome new face–a man–had been introduced into her territory. With the arrival of Sergeant Major Kingsley, life began to get even more circumscribed for Wrest Park’s housekeeper. He was brought into the house in May (at Bron’s suggestion) to deal with the mounting office work and with convalescing soldiers, prone to misbehave. An old non-commissioned officer, he was an imposing man, tough-featured, mustachioed and brusquely military in manner. It was a source of personal satisfaction that, out of the 1,600 men who passed through the hospital under his watch, there were only eleven cases of ‘breaking bounds’.
Sergeant Major Kingsley is photographed writing with intense concentration at a leather-topped desk in the old butler’s pantry. There was now no possible excuse for collaboration between Hannah Mackenzie and Cecil Argles. The household they had run between them, however imperfectly, was under scrutiny.
XI
Dangerous And Disorderly
The spring and summer of 1915 brought death upon death to Nan and Bron Herbert’s circle. First, and most distressingly, Barrie’s adopted son George Llewelyn Davies died at the Front on 15 March, killed by a bullet through the head while listening to instructions from his colonel. He was 21 years old. Barrie received a letter from George two days after his death. As he wrote bleakly to a friend, ‘This is now the common lot.’15 A week after George’s death Rosy Rapture opened in the West End, but the playwright wasn’t present for the first night. Instead Barrie took George’s brothers Michael, 14, and Nico, 11, to stay at Wrest Park–it was the best place he could think of in the circumstances. Wrest’s domestic servants were stricken by the news. George–exquisitely mannered, handsome, athletic–had been doted on during his visits. Barrie’s whole demeanour changed almost overnight. There was a ‘deep hoarded sadness in his blue eyes’, remembers his personal secretary Cynthia Asquith; ‘an impenetrable shell of sadness and preoccupation’.16 I can see Hannah’s mouth tremble as she clasps his hand. ‘Oh Mr Barrie. It is a terrible thing.’
More and more headline news was affecting those at Wrest Park Hospital. On 18 May Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, fiercely criticised for failures such as the munitions shortage and the abortive attack on the Dardanelles, asked his Liberal Cabinet to resign and a coalition government was formed. ‘As far as I am concerned’, wrote Bron to Nan, ‘it is a happy release.’ Despite his age (39) and his wooden leg, Bron pulled the necessary strings to join the Royal Flying Corps and train as a flight commander.
On 26 May their cousin Ettie lost her 27-year-old son Julian Grenfell, who died at Boulogne Hospital with a splinter of wood in his brain. Two months later his younger brother Billy, 25, was killed at the Battle of Hooge. ‘I feel as if all the scaffolding of life was crashing about me daily’, wrote Maurice Baring to Nan.17
In any war the human response to horror, anxiety and grief is often to act in extremis. Norms of behaviour get forgotten. Opportunities are clutched at wildly. Confessions are made; risks are taken. Falling in love, however inappropriately, might have seemed to Hannah Mackenzie and Cecil Argles the only way of forgetting the nerve-jangling uncertainties of the time.
Photographs taken by Nan in the grounds of Wrest Park during the summer of 1915 depict a slightly crazy fairground atmosphere. While Zeppelins began their raids on London, uniformed soldiers were photographed astride ‘Major Wingfield’s camel’–a pale, proud beast with one hump and fuzzy pelt; or sitting six abreast on small donkeys and Shetland ponies (all hunters having been requisitioned for the war). Others are dressed as women (a very beautiful, slim ‘nurse’ coyly holds the hand of laughing young Nurse Cockburn), or posing in medieval tights and tabards. As the weather grew warmer, hospital beds were dragged out to line the wide terrace outside Ward A. Here, handsome soldiers lounged under improvised shades like subalterns in some colonial outpost. It was a summer of camel rides and amputations; of poisoned lungs and bowling parties. Nothing was remotely normal any more–although the Bedfordshire Times tried hard to keep a rousing, patriotic tone as it reported each and every event at Wrest Hospital, Silsoe.
‘On Saturday a cricket match took place in the splendid grounds of the hospital between teams representing the Mother Country and Colonials. It was a splendid game, played in the sporting spirit that soldiers love, and was greatly enjoyed. The Mother Country won by 74 runs.’ The Greenfield troop of Boy Scouts ‘were allowed to distribute the cigarettes among the soldiers’.
Away from the cricket and croquet matches, the oompah tunes of the Ampthill Camp brass band and the gimlet eye of Sergeant Major Kingsley, Wrest was a paradise for lovers. It was here that Nan’s cousin Ettie learnt to flirt so adroitly at house parties in the 1880s and 1890s. ‘You never came to an end of the lovely surprises in those huge pleasure-grounds’, she wrote; ‘the little hidden pavilions, secret Lovers’ Walks, Chinese hedges, the long canal encircling all.’18 Arthur Balfour, writing to a female friend in 1891, depicts Wrest as the perfect setting for clandestine assignations: ‘Shady alleys, delicious yew thickets, ponds, summer houses and gardens make it perfect for all conversational purposes. Every taste, and every “systeme” is suited.’19
How far did Cecil Argles dare pursue his passion for Hannah Mackenzie? Or
was it, rather, the other way round–was Hannah the corrupting influence on this married man? She was, according to her great-nephew, a woman who ‘did things to excess’. She drank, she smoked, she pushed a joke to its extremes. She lived life boldly. Hannah was now 33 years old, but she did not fit the contemporary image of spinster. She was a dab hand at making scones and Scotch pancakes, but she was not one to knit or read mind-improving books in her spare time. ‘An old maid is only an old maid when she makes up her mind that she is one and gets upon her shelf unaided’, ran an article in Woman’s Life, 1920, in response to the acute shortage of marriageable men after the war. ‘Girls get married so late in life sometimes that no one can really be called an “old maid”. Cupid’s bow and arrow are waiting for everyone.’20
The stereotypical spinster housekeeper was required to keep an eye on her girls: to safeguard their virtue vigilantly. Yet that summer of 1915, Hannah Mackenzie’s focus was not on her housemaids, and her mistress spent most of her time in the operating theatre. With no one to peel those young maids away from girl-starved Tommies and push them back to their duties, the domestic harmony of Wrest Park Hospital began to unravel.
I would love, at this point, to produce a snapshot of a forbidden moment under the weeping willows. Dusk is falling: Argles turns, trembling, to Hannah, pulls her slim waist towards him, speaks of his passion. And there is Nan, slowly stalking them with her Kodak, her matron’s apron stained at the hem with cut grass–Nan the hunter, who later writes of ‘a most marvellous rabbit stalk’ in her diary.
But I can’t. We do not know what led to Hannah’s downfall–whether there was a specific unforgivable incident. It’s possible, of course, that our housekeeper did not reciprocate the land agent’s feelings; that she was embarrassed by his attentions; that his spaniel eyes were the talk of the basement corridors and it was undermining her authority. It appears that the violence of Argles’s crush had, in the end, made Hannah’s position untenable, just one year into the job. Nan’s daughter paraphrases this part of her mother’s diary in the scrapbooks. She (or Nan) is tight-lipped, and the language she uses is extreme. But what exactly did she mean? ‘In 1915 the domestic situation had become dangerous and disorderly and it was obvious that Hannah Mackenzie would have to be replaced.’
It is unclear whether Hannah herself is the cause, or whether she is unable to handle the insurrection. Probably it was a combination of the two. On 1 July the housekeeper was forced to place two advertisements in The Times to replace the scullery maid and third parlourmaid, teenage girls who had fallen foul of the regime. Did the word ‘dangerous’ hint at sexual impropriety?
It was the disorder that Nan, in the final analysis, could not bear. She was fanatically systematic and she would not have her ‘A1’ hospital compromised from the basement up. Yet she was not a natural manager of people, and as with the sacking of Miss Martin she could not bring herself to have an honest chat with Hannah. First Nan waited until Hannah’s ally J. M. Barrie left for Scotland on holiday (where he found it ‘as bare of population owing to this war as if this were the month before Creation’).21 Then, seeing that there were very few wounded soldiers coming in, she decided to close the hospital for a month for general repairs. This gave her the plausible excuse she needed to talk to Hannah Mackenzie.
If this were a J. M. Barrie play, our second act ends abruptly with the denouement between Nan and her housekeeper. ‘August 30 1915: Settled Hannah’s “holiday” and installed King in catering department. All day job.’
XII
Up In Smoke
Hannah was replaced, elbowed out, by a man. Nan had been plotting it all along. Mr King was her excuse, her trump card. This was a hospital now, not a country house, and it had to be run along War Office lines. Nan needed to be surrounded by professionals who understood such things, and an old-fashioned housekeeper was no longer appropriate. Hannah was duly paid off, her staff fed the unlikely excuse of an extended holiday. Argles returned from his own short summer holiday to find King–a portly, white-haired ex-head steward from the Orient Line–at Hannah’s desk in the housekeeper’s sitting room. His effects were on the mantelpiece. A masculine smell of Macassar oil and tailoring filled the room.
This was a fait accompli of Nan’s. Housekeeping, and Mrs Geyton’s kitchen, now fell under something called ‘the Commissariat Department’, and it was to be run, with bureaucratic efficiency, by a man. Nan, who was at heart one of the boys, had surrounded herself with men. She dined with five surgeons and a Sergeant Major. She gave orders to an ex-ship’s steward. But land agent Cecil Argles, who had become increasingly contrary and opinionated, was not a welcome part of the new regime. I suspect he never forgave her, as their relationship soured from that moment on.
King ran Hannah’s domain for one year, then died of a heart attack. He is eulogised in Nan’s diary for running ‘one of the happiest and most successful departments in the hospital’, his death causing ‘the deepest regret at Wrest, as all realised how wonderfully and capably he had assisted the Hospital. So successfully had King systematised the catering’, she continues, ‘that it was by now almost a matter of routine.’ She decided to hand the job over to her secretary, Mrs Barrett–‘a really capable responsible woman’–who found the hours ‘long and exacting’ but the work ‘less difficult than anticipated’. From this we might deduce that Hannah made the place unhappy and ran it sloppily and badly; that she was incapable, irresponsible and, intellectually, wasn’t up to the job.
The swift, final act of ‘Wrest in Beds’ begins one year later. Our housekeeper long departed, Nan is on the prowl early one evening. She thinks she smells smoke but cannot find its source. Finally she sees, with a kind of calm detachment, ‘a most exquisite pattern of blue smoke frills outlining the slates. So it had come!’ On 14 September 1916 a chimney fire broke out in the eastern end of the roof of Wrest Park. There were 150 patients resident at the time. As Nan sounded the alarm, domestic staff appeared ‘with puzzled, resentful faces at what they evidently thought was “one of Miss ’Erbert’s antics ’aving drill like this”’. She put them to work dragging out the precious contents of the cellars through the great window of the stewards’ hall.
While the nurses evacuated the patients, Nan and forty men ran up to clear the attic floor of all valuables, even as smoke clouded the eastern end. Everywhere, water from the hoses of Hitchin Fire Brigade (drawn by three horses abreast) and London Fire Brigade (motorised, with a ‘great show of headlights’) was ‘dripping down the inside walls and streaming down the stairway into the Hall, several inches deep, gushing along the passages and spluttering down the stairs into the basement’.
Nan paints in her diary an intensely vivid scene–no doubt because she knew that this was the end, and she wanted to remember every detail: the men grouped haphazardly outside in their red-blanketed beds like ‘a garden of scarlet geraniums’ in the dusk; the ‘shouts of delight and excitement’ when the firemen managed to pump water from the fountain basin. The only mention of Captain Argles and Wrest’s own fire brigade are his ‘bitter remonstrations’ when she nabs some of his men to help her move furniture. By 10 p.m., with half the roof collapsed and two-thirds of the upper storey burnt, the fire was brought under control. The house was salvageable, but this was the demise of Wrest Park Hospital.
The next day, head housemaid Maggie and her squad ‘toiled at cleaning’ those parts of the house which were reasonably dry. There was no keen-eyed housekeeper to direct them. The Staircase Hall, scene of all those evenings of entertainment, was twelve inches deep in water. The fire was reported in detail in the national press, and letters began to trickle in from soldiers all over the country who had stayed at Wrest Park Hospital. Hannah, too, would have read the reports and been shaken: all that teamwork, all those memories, good and bad–gone up in smoke.
‘My dear, what a bloody time you must have had’, Bron wrote to Nan from the Royal Flying Corps in Cirencester. ‘It’s rather disappointing that it’s not more
burnt. We could have collared the insurance money and sold the land as farmland. Perhaps we could do that still. Is it worth repairing it?’
Two weeks later, Nan saw her brother off for the Front at Charing Cross station. ‘I went back to the cab to get something which had been left, and when I came back saw Bron standing by the barrier, looking utterly radiant and as if bathed in glowing light. I felt stabbed through the heart by the premonition that I should never see him again.’ She was right. Within a month Bron was reported missing, having flown his two-seater biplane over German lines. J. M. Barrie wrote the obituary for Lord Lucas–‘Bron the Gallant’–in The Times: ‘No ill will, I am sure, to whoever brought him down, but rather a wave of the hand from one airman to another. There is still that sort of chivalry on both sides in the sky.’22
Nan’s diary stops abruptly at her beloved brother’s death. Subsequent letters show that relations between Cecil Argles and his new mistress–now The Right Honourable Baroness Lucas of Crudwell and Dingwall–deteriorated rapidly. The sale of Wrest Park–decided on by Bron straight after the fire–was fixed for the summer of 1917. ‘Argles was to start looking at once for another post’, Nan had noted back then. Letters to her lawyer Mr Surtees refer to the ‘private spite’ of Argles against Land, the gamekeeper, as well as ‘the trouble between A and myself’.23
In September 1917 Wrest Park was bought by John George Murray, a brewing and mining magnate from the North-East: a war profiteer. Unpopular with the villagers, and knowing nothing about the running of a great estate, he kept Argles on as his land agent. Nan successfully fought for their old gamekeeper Land to keep his cottage, fearing some kind of retribution since ‘Argles is remaining in the neighbourhood (and apparently in authority)’, as she wrote to Surtees. She was controlling–and conscientious–to the last.