by Pamela Horn
Exhortations were also issued in journals like Country Life and The Bystander. On 15 August 1914, a correspondent to Country Life appealed to all hunting men and polo players to ‘join either the Army or the Territorial Forces. We ought to behave as far as possible as if there were conscription … I am in favour of every sportsman doing his duty and more.’ A fortnight later it returned to the theme, declaring there was ‘no excuse for idleness, and it would be criminal on the part of the population to permit it. Every able-bodied man of the required age should join the ranks of the regular or the Territorial regiments.’28 The Bystander considered that the outbreak of hostilities would have a salutary moral effect on the male population, too;
Whatever the issue of this war – victory, defeat, or stale-mate – it is going to make a new man of the Englishman. After years of fat prosperity and lazy frivolity, it brings him up against the brute realities. It calls him to a service of his country, which is also the service of himself: to prepare to die that Britain may live.29
Within the ranks of the military there were officers like Julian Grenfell who also welcomed the new situation. He was the eldest son of Lord and Lady Desborough and was stationed in South Africa when hostilities broke out. He was soon to return to Britain and by the autumn of 1914 had been sent to Flanders. In a letter to his mother, written two days after the expiry of the British ultimatum to Germany, he declared that it ‘must be wonderful in England now … it reinforces one’s failing belief in the Old Flag, and the Mother Country and the … Thin Red Line and the Imperial Idea’.30 He arrived at Taplow Court on 25 September for two days’ leave, before departing on 4 October with his regiment for Flanders. There within a very few months he was to win the DSO for his courageous actions against the enemy.
Julian’s enthusiasm to become involved in the hostilities was shared by other military men, such as the Hon. Lionel Tennyson, who was an officer in the Rifle Brigade based at Colchester in the summer of 1914. He was able to spend occasional weekends away at a London hotel, until in the middle of the night on 3 August he received a message that he must return to duty at once. He leapt out of bed; ‘I remember dressing and packing with the night porter’s help in fevered haste, so anxious was I not to run any chance of missing the war, and a very few moments later saw me speeding through sleeping London on my sixty-mile taxi drive back to Colchester.’31
Oswald Mosley, the son of a Staffordshire landowning family, was also keen to join up quickly so as not to miss any of the action. ‘Our one great fear,’ Mosley wrote of his generation, ‘was that the war would be over before we got there.’ Events were to show his concern was needless as the war dragged on for almost four and a half years.32 Mosley himself was eventually invalided out with a badly injured leg before he was twenty, after service in the air and in the trenches.
At the leading public schools, too, youngsters who had reached the end of their school career opted to join up rather than go to university, as they would normally have done, while young men from Oxford and Cambridge also flocked to the cause. Of 13,403 members of Oxford University and 13,126 from Cambridge who served in the war, 19.2 per cent and 18 per cent respectively were to be killed.33 Among the schoolboys who joined up from Eton was the Hon. Yvo Charteris, who, according to his sister, Lady Cynthia Asquith, was in a fever of impatience to get into the Army after achieving his goal of a few days in the sixth form. After a period of training, he departed for France in September 1915. On 5 October 1915 he had his nineteenth birthday and a few days later, having spent just three weeks at the front, he was killed instantly while leading his men in an effort to capture a German trench position at Loos. When his sister received the news she was in despair, ‘Oh how it hurts and how little one ever faced the possibility for an instant! … How can one believe it, that it should be the object to kill Yvo? That such a joy-dispenser should have been put out of the world on purpose. For the first time I felt the full mad horror of the war.’34 The following year she was to lose her eldest brother, Lord Elcho, heir to the Earl of Wemyss. Many other friends were killed, and as early as 11 November 1915 she wrote plaintively in her diary,
Oh why was I born for this time? Before one is thirty to know more dead than living people? Stanway, Clouds, Gosford – all the settings of one’s life – given up to ghosts. Really, one hardly knows who is alive and who is dead.35
Yet, paradoxically, she continued to lead an active social life, even when her husband was away on military duties, and also to engage in harmless flirtations. She became particularly addicted to the game of poker and regularly lost money that she could ill afford. Her friend, Mary Herbert, even warned her about her unhealthy enthusiasm for the game.
However, following the outbreak of hostilities many country-house wives and daughters, like their menfolk, became infected with war fever and were involved in Army recruitment drives. Lady Tullibardine, for example, arranged a series of concerts in Scotland to support her husband’s recruiting campaign in Perthshire. Another supporter of the cause was the Hon. Mrs Gell. She recalled holding a recruitment meeting in a tent at her Derbyshire home, and ‘when the speeches were over, one after the other of the boys we had known from childhood shyly stepped forward and offered themselves, and … after they were enrolled, it was hard to congratulate them with a steady voice’.36
A number of women, like the Countess of Carnarvon, offered their homes as hospitals for the wounded and the convalescent. At Highclere Castle, Lady Carnarvon made accommodation available for twenty wounded officers in a well-equipped hospital, with trained nurses and domestic servants to wait upon the patients. According to her biographer, she treated the men as guests, in much the same way as she would have treated her friends at Saturday to Monday house parties before the war.37 Later, as the demand for places increased, Lady Carnarvon transferred her hospital to a large house in London, where she was able to take up to forty patients in comfortable accommodation, and with modern equipment that included her pride and joy – an X-ray machine.
So great was the patriotic seal of estate owners that as soon as 21 August, the Hexham Weekly News claimed that the authorities had been ‘literally inundated’ with offers of houses for use by the wounded. At Woburn Abbey, the riding school and indoor tennis court were converted into a 100-bed hospital, and although there were trained nurses employed, such tasks as those of orderly and stretcher bearer were carried out by domestic servants, gardeners, chauffeurs and grooms on the estate who were unfit for military service. The duchess herself, who had become a trained nurse, took an active part in the running of the hospital, often spending sixteen hours a day on duty. During the time it was open ‘she never left the hospital for a single night and in the final three years she was responsible not only for all the operating theatre sister’s work but the whole of the official correspondence, book-keeping and returns associated with its running’.38
Some of the wealthiest or most determined ladies established hospitals in France, or, in the case of the younger women, themselves volunteered as VADs, or Voluntary Aid Detachment Nurses. Lady Desborough’s elder daughter, Monica, sharing her brother’s enthusiasm to take part in the war effort, on 19 August 1914 volunteered to become a nurse and went with her mother to the London Hospital in Whitechapel, where her friend Angie Manners had been trained. Monica underwent a three-month course before being despatched to a private hospital set up by Lady Norman, the wife of an MP, at Wimereux in what was described as ‘the semi-squalid Hotel Bellevue’.39 It was one of several such initiatives by members of the social elite in the early days of the war, and their efforts earned the criticism of the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and of Lord Crawford. Asquith called the Wimereux and Boulogne hospitals ‘overstaffed annexes of London Society’.40 Lord Crawford was still more scathing, noting in his diary a conversation he had had concerning ‘the grand ladies who are running hospitals in France’:
On the whole, Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland, seems to have given most trouble. She got into debt and
seemed to expect the Red Cross to extricate her. Her chief crime is body-snatching. All these ladies are known as ‘body-snatchers’, for they seize an invalid whenever they can catch him, and carry him off willy-nilly to their private hospital … [The] Duchess of Westminster is herself most tiresome, but has an excellent staff. Lady Sarah Wilson [sixth daughter of the 7th Duke of Marlborough] has been giving a good deal of trouble. Lady Diana Manners is trying to get permission to have a hospital of her own; let us hope the Red Cross which can now control the permissions granted to these adventuresses, will be sufficient proof against the influence of society, to veto any more expeditions of this character.41
Ironically, however, as early as 8 August 1914, Lady Crawford herself had begun adapting the laundry at Haigh, their country house, as a hospital, and her husband noted it would ‘make an excellent one’. By December it was accommodating wounded Belgian officers, who were able to join in the family’s Christmas celebrations at Haigh.42 In 1915 Crawford himself joined the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) as a private, at the age of forty-three, and by the following June was in charge of the operating theatre in a makeshift casualty clearing station in Flanders, near the front. There he spent the next twelve months. However, he became extremely critical of the ‘lady nurses, employed at the front more because it pleased sentiment at home than for any practical reason,’ and who treated the RAMC orderlies with scant consideration; ‘Each woman seems authorised to give as many orders as she pleases to any man she selects.’43
Those comments were harsh but, to some extent, these female initiatives were also being criticised by Lord Rothschild, chairman of the council of the Red Cross Society, when he noted in August 1914 that the speed with which private houses were being converted into hospitals and convalescent homes was leading to confusion and duplication. The aim should be to weld ‘all miscellaneous efforts into one general and far-reaching system’.44
It was doubtless on these grounds that the offer of the Duchess of Rutland and Lady Diana Manners to open a hospital in France was rejected. Nothing daunted, the duchess determined to turn her Arlington Street home in London into a hospital for wounded officers, and this time the venture went ahead. Meanwhile Lady Diana herself had undergone a period of training as a nurse at Guy’s Hospital. There she had been subject to a strict disciplinary regime for a few months, but it had enabled her to escape the vigilant eye of the duchess for a time. As a VAD, Diana could not claim professional status, but she was pleased to find ‘that she was soon treated as a not particularly expert but still capable member of the nursing staff. She recorded proudly that she was allowed to give injections, intravenous and saline, to prepare for operations and cut abscesses.’45 She also used her expertise at giving injections to a less desirable end, administering morphia to herself and some of her friends, when the pressures and sorrows of the war became intolerable. Her friend, Katharine Asquith, was ‘a staunch champion of this drug’, too, and in December 1915, Diana informed her friend, Raymond Asquith, who was Katharine’s husband, that the only pleasure
she had found in the last month had arisen when she and Katharine had lain ‘in ecstatic stillness through too short a night, drugged in very deed by my hand with morphia … It was a grand night, and strange to feel so utterly self-sufficient – more like a Chinaman, or God before he made the world.46
The habit never became regular enough for her to become addicted, but three weeks after her letter to Raymond, she and Katharine had another session and as a result she had to spend the next day in bed ‘with an alarmingly violent hangover’. ‘I hope she won’t become a morphineuse’, commented her future husband, Duff Cooper. ‘It would spoil her looks’. One of his own sisters had already become addicted to morphia as a result of losing her lover in the war. Alcohol proved equally attractive, with champagne, vodka and absinthe the drinks of choice. Champagne was apparently the most popular in Lady Diana’s circle, but it was so much associated in her mind with the ‘hysteria of war’ that in later life she ‘viewed it with distaste’.47
While she was at Guy’s Hospital her social life was limited to her evenings off, when between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. she was allowed to be away from the premises. As she commented in her autobiography, at eight o’clock
I would fly out of the ward, across the court into my room, noting as ran the taxi waiting outside the great iron gates … The nearest restaurant was called De Keyser’s. A quarter of an hour to get there, a quarter of an hour to get back – two crowded hours of glorious life … The big party evenings were thrown at the Cheshire Cheese. This was a bit farther away, but the atmosphere was alluring … I would have to leave the candlelight and merriment and like Cinderella tear back to my brooms.48
As she later wrote, on looking back ‘on these nightmare years of tragic hysteria, it is frightening to live them again in memory … The young were dancing a tarantella frenziedly to combat any pause that could let death conquer their morale.’49
Diana left Guy’s Hospital after six months when her mother made plans to open her own hospital. The Arlington Street premises were duly converted to receive wounded officers, with the duchess’s own bedroom equipped as an operating theatre. Three trained nurses were recruited, and Diana worked there, together with her sister, Letty, the wife and later the widow of Lord Elcho, and another friend. In these new surroundings, discipline was far more lax. Friends arrived with cream cakes and sherry for their elevenses, and there were plenty of bolt-holes should they be in an escaping mood. Even when Diana used her nursing skills to help at an operation, she might rush off afterwards to dine at a friend’s house or to attend a ball. On one occasion she had to leave a dinner at the Cheshire Cheese to help in an operation, and then rejoined the party three hours later when it had moved on to a private house.50 Should work be slack at Arlington Street she and Katharine Asquith might go down to the East End to provide an evening meal in a canteen for workers from the munitions factories. Or she might take part in charity concerts and similar entertainments.
During the war the strict rules of chaperonage were allowed to slip, but the Duchess of Rutland was anxious that her daughter’s reputation should not be compromised. So she never shut her bedroom door when she was staying at Arlington Street, and insisted that Lady Diana looked in before she went to her bedroom; no matter how late it was. This meant Diana must always ‘sober up before returning’, and she would claim that a female friend had escorted her home when in fact she had been driving round and round Regent’s Park in a taxi with a man. She also visited Duff Cooper, who was a noted womaniser, in his rooms clandestinely. Yet although she had several passionate affairs and was in love with the married Raymond Asquith until his death in 1916, she successfully protected her virginity.
That was not true of all her female friends, and especially of Nancy Cunard. According to Iris Tree, she and Nancy would entertain young officers on leave in their London studio, or at the country house in Kent that Iris’s mother had rented. As early as 1915, when Nancy had learnt of the deaths of some of her friends, she responded to the horrors of the war by turning to casual sex in order to comfort young soldiers who were soon to face possible death or injury at the front. Although, for her, such encounters appear to have been followed by a strong sense of remorse, despair and loneliness. There were also wild drink parties in the Café Royal Brasserie ‘with tipsy poets and “chaps” on leave, [and] poker playing’. All the time, though, there was ‘the dread, more and more justified, that every young man one liked’ was going to be killed at the front. ‘Many of the soldiers left Nancy’s bed for the bottomless mud of Flanders Field’, writes Lois Gordon. Alongside this, there was her work in canteens and her involvement in charity concerts and other shows.51 Despite the bombs which pounded London during the war years, there were many people, like Nancy, who continued to patronise the theatres and restaurants that remained open. At the Savoy, among other venues, the thé dansant was started and was soon taken up by a wide range of other hotels, restaurants and c
lubs. The management of the Savoy remained anxious to bring ‘some cheer to guests anxious to forget the horrors and carnage’:
Saxophones sobbed defiance and even silly ragtime lyrics breathed a poignant significance for the officers who danced, drank and flirted on the too-short nights before their trains left Victoria. In the men’s cloakroom nailbrushes were tactfully fixed over the wash basins so that ‘soldiers who have lost an arm or hand can scrub the other hand quite easily’ … In the huge, half-empty kitchen with a skeleton staff of clumsy boys and tired old men, the maître-chef … tried somehow to camouflage his rissoles.52
Night-clubs, too, became established during these years, and it was into this world of wartime gaiety mixed with anxiety and sorrow that Nancy Cunard stepped, while the military losses continued to mount. It was during these years, too, that she met and married Sydney Fairbairn, a young officer who had been injured at Gallipoli, and who while recovering from his wounds in England met his future wife in 1916. Her friends were astonished at her sudden decision to marry, and her mother opposed the match, since although Sydney came from a socially respectable family, culturally and intellectually he had little in common with his vibrant future wife. It is not easy to decide why she married him. Some have suggested that it was to get away from her mother and to give herself more personal freedom away from maternal surveillance. In any event, Nancy and Sydney were married on 15 November 1916, at the Grenadier Guards’ Chapel, with the bride wearing a long gold dress, a turban-shaped toque of orange blossom, and a veil that was as long as the dress and enveloped her shoulders.53