Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey (25 page)

A certificate from the recuperating soldiers, thanking the 5th Countess for her efforts.

A remarkable drawing, found in the Castle archives in the Wartime Visitors book, made by a recuperating soldier in praise of the 5th Countess’s efforts as the hospital was being moved to a site in London.

A portrait of Lady Evelyn Herbert (1901-1979) during the Great War.

The romance between Charles Clout and Mary Weekes was an untypical bright spot in a gloomy year. Charles was never sent back to the front line – his injury was too severe – and he spent the rest of the war helping to train battalions of new recruits. But the sickening rhythm of injury, recovery and return to the war was repeated over and over again for hundreds of thousands of others. Some men had to find the strength to return two, three, even four times, in the full knowledge that whilst they had been lucky so far, their luck could not hold for ever.

At the same time that Charles Clout was being shipped out of the Somme with a bullet lodged in his shattered jaw, Almina was frantically pulling strings to secure a pass for
the father of a young man she had treated back in February, to go over to France. Monty Squire had been at ‘48’, as the Bryanston Square hospital was known, for a month and had made a full recovery as a result of the excellent nursing he had received there. Almina had as usual made it her business to contact and befriend Monty’s family, and his parents wrote a grateful letter to her after their son’s release. As soon as he was well, he was sent back to France, and to the Battle of the Somme. Some time in August, Mr and Mrs Squire received the news they had been dreading. Monty was hit, he was being held in a base hospital in France and treated there. It was an admission that he was going to die.

They wrote again to Almina, this time begging her to do anything in her power to help them secure permission from the military authorities to travel to be at their child’s bedside. Once again, Almina’s connections, and her willingness to use them, got results. A pass was secured to speed Mr Squire out to the field hospital where his son lay dying. Monty was unconscious for his last four days, during which time his father sat by his bedside talking and reading to him. Monty’s mother Alice wrote to Almina afterwards to say that she had been comforted by the fact that Monty was not alone when he died. ‘I have to be strong for my husband, as well as my son,’ she wrote.

Winifred Burghclere’s nephew Richard Maitland, whose brother had already been killed, was also serving at the Somme. He was badly wounded in the leg and sent back to Southampton and from there to Bryanston Square. He spent five months there and survived the war though, even after his final operation in 1917, he walked with a limp because of a stiff knee.

No family was immune to death, and the Carnarvons, although they were becoming almost numb from the endless loss of friends, were still devastated to hear in November that their cousin, Bron Herbert, was missing in action. Aubrey Herbert was especially close to Bron, who had joined the Royal Flying Corps. He had lost a leg in the Boer War and then followed family tradition by becoming a politician and serving in Asquith’s government as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, the same post as his uncle, the 4th Earl of Carnarvon, had held. He was confirmed dead in December. Aubrey wrote to his cousin, Bron’s sister, ‘Oh my dear, I can’t write, I am too selfishly sorry. I did love him so.’ In his letter to his wife Mary, Aubrey said, ‘Bron is more than I can bear, for him this time as well as myself.’

Mary was worried that the news would push Aubrey over the edge and make him do something stupid. His nerves had been frayed by the horrors he had seen in the Gallipoli campaign and the futility he saw everywhere. Aubrey could no longer bear to read
The Times
for news of the death of friends, and began to express the view that the ‘military solution’ had failed and could not go on. That was not a popular position, in spite of everything, and Aubrey was increasingly seen as a crackpot and a potential danger to himself.

Aubrey was still a serving MP, though, and took the job extremely seriously. He was well placed to substantiate his opinion that the new government was not to be trusted. In December Mr Asquith, who was increasingly blamed for the drift in strategy and the lack of decisive progress, had been ousted. David Lloyd George, who had been made
Secretary of State for War after Lord Kitchener’s death, took over as Liberal Prime Minister of the Conservative-dominated coalition government.

It was not a good moment to take on the top job. The public was restive, the generals were patently confused and the war was a disaster. On top of that, the Easter Uprising in Dublin had reawakened the question of Home Rule for Ireland, which had been the recurring nightmare for every British Prime Minister for more than fifty years. Overshadowing everything was an almost unimaginable number. When the Battle of the Somme finally petered out in November 1916, 415,000 soldiers from the British and Dominions Army had been killed or wounded or were missing in action. The total number of casualties across all the nations that participated was 1.5 million. Eventually, of course, Lloyd George would be associated with victory, regarded as one of the greatest politicians of the twentieth century, but for now, he had inherited a very poisoned chalice.

Lord Carnarvon had been ill again in the autumn of 1916 and Almina begged him to come up to London and stay at the house in Berkeley Square so she could keep an eye on him. He was fretful about the new government, particularly their agricultural policies for land requisition, and wrote to Winifred that he was worried about his son, Porchy, who was suddenly looking far too young to be serving in the Army. On Boxing Day 1916, Lord and Lady Carnarvon had to wave Porchy off when he sailed with his regiment, for war. Their big consolation was that he was heading not to France or the Balkans but, for now at least, to the backwaters of India.

Lord Porchester was just eighteen when he landed at Bombay and was a boisterous, self-important teenager who had been enjoying his first love affairs in between training to join the cavalry. Porchy’s attitude was the embodiment of the young man’s inability to grasp that he may die, that something bad might happen to him. He always recalled the awful sinking sensation of scanning the casualty lists for the names of his schoolfriends, but as a boy he was quite capable of resisting the melancholy and hopelessness that his uncle Aubrey could not.

Nothing Porchy found when he arrived at Gillespie Barracks to join the 7th Hussars disabused him of his good-natured expectation that his life would continue to work out very well indeed. As he wrote in his memoirs, ‘the changing pattern of warfare on the Western Front hadn’t filtered through to India. The Indian Army still trained and drilled to a pattern that hadn’t altered in 200 years: sword-play exercise, mounted combat with lances, revolver practice and polo, to practise horsemanship.’

The niceties were meticulously observed out in Meerut. The Anglo-Indian military’s way of life was totally impervious to the austerity that was biting back home. There were four changes of kit a day and dress uniform was worn for dinner, which was always served on the best silver plate by a retinue of staff that put Highclere’s to shame.

Porchy enjoyed himself, but he was also frustrated, as was the whole regiment, that despite the awful news from France and the Eastern Front, there was no sign of them being called up and given any work to do.

Porchy would have to endure the luxurious calm until the late autumn, but everywhere else, all was chaos. The
naval battle was being stepped up by Germany, since it had been decided that domination of the seas was the way to break the public support for the war in Britain. From February 1917 there was a ‘sink on sight’ policy and civilian boats were increasingly targeted. US boats were also being sunk in the Atlantic, and Germany was gambling that British morale would collapse before the United States’ neutrality was tested too far. German High Command misjudged it and the US declared war on the Central Powers on 6 April 1917. That would eventually prove decisive, but initially the Americans’ involvement couldn’t alter the fact that Germany was winning the war.

Both the French and the Russian armies were mutinying. The Russians’ ability to fight on the Eastern Front, which had been ebbing away since 1915, was on the brink of collapse. In March 1917 the Russian people’s loathing of the war and contempt for their government’s leadership spilled over into violent demonstrations. The Tsar abdicated; the Russian Army had only one eye on the job of trying to win the war. The provisional government launched a highly unpopular big push against the Central Powers in July and that was enough to prepare the ground for the October Revolution in which Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power.

At Bryanston Square the hospital was busier than ever. In January and February there were still men staying who had come from the Somme, men who needed too much nursing to be sent out to convalescent homes, some of whom had been there for five months. New patients were arriving from France every day. They begged Almina to be allowed to come back to her hospital the next time they
were wounded. No one had any hope that the war would be over soon, and no one wanted to go back to the Front. A condition of stasis gripped people; it began to feel as if war was a permanent state. Almina instructed her nurses to spend as much time as possible sitting with the men, talking, listening and playing cards. She lived by the principle of taking one day at a time and staying busy. There was very little alternative.

In February there was a boost to the spirits of the residents of ‘48’ when King George and Queen Mary paid a visit. Almina had met the royal couple of course, had been to their coronation dressed in her finest silks and jewels. Now she greeted them on the doorstep wearing her nurse’s uniform with a large starched cap and floor-length apron. Only her trademark waved hair and enormous smile were the same. She could never resist the opportunity to be charming, and she welcomed her guests effusively. They spoke to every single patient, nurse and doctor, walking from ward to ward and commending the excellent equipment and standard of care. Almina was naturally overjoyed by this recognition and delighted when, following the King’s glowing report, she welcomed his uncle, Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, the following week.

The King and Queen were accompanied by Admiral Louis Battenberg and Sir Thomas Myles, a high-ranking member of the Royal Army Medical Corps. Admiral Battenberg was a German Prince and a cousin of George V. He had been serving in the Royal Navy for forty years when war broke out, and had been First Sea Lord since 1912. He had begun to draw up the Navy’s plans for war, but a huge wave of anti-German feeling had forced his
retirement. Just as Alfred de Rothschild’s family had found itself on two different sides of the conflict, so the British Royal family had to contend with the perception that some members might have split loyalties. The issue came to a head in the summer of 1917 when anti-German sentiment was so insistent that King George issued a proclamation changing the name of the Royal family from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor.