WELCOME BACK TO Murder on the Mind, with your host, Freddie Miller, and today we have a small story about Red Rigg House itself. In 1915, the house became a convalescent home for soldiers injured in the Great War, although it was not, it should be said, a particularly successful one.
At the beginning of that terrible conflict, the powers that be confidently predicted that England was well prepared for the casualties of such a war. Very quickly, it became clear that would not be the case, with slaughter across the theatre of war happening on a scale they’d never previously experienced. A number of great country houses were requisitioned, and despite its somewhat remote location, Red Rigg House was one of those called into action, with both the great halls cleared out to make way for beds and surgical equipment. Agatha Lyndon-Smith, then the matriarch of the house, took it upon herself to organise the comings and goings of that place – the doctors, the nurses, the supplies, the logistics. She drafted her two daughters as nurses. As a family, they became celebrated in the area for their dedication to helping these injured men make full recoveries.
And yet, despite all of their hard work and enthusiasm, it was not a successful venture. Those were dark years for the house. Because of the difficulty of transporting the soldiers so far north, most of those who arrived at Red Rigg House were not the most gravely injured; the men that arrived at the house suffered from shell shock, shrapnel injuries, or the odd clean amputation. But despite all that, the death rate was high.
On her morning rounds, conducted as the first rinse of dawn light was showing through the windows, Agatha would often come upon men who had died in the night – their hearts stopped in their chests, their eyes open and dry. Similarly, soldiers with wounds caught infections easily, despite Agatha’s strict disinfectant routines, and many died of fevers, raving into the night that they could see shadows moving on the walls, that they could smell smoke. At first, those who were able to move around were given full access to the grounds, until they started to turn up missing. Sometimes they would be found wandering the woods at the foot of Red Rigg Fell. Sometimes they were not found at all. And those that were brought back seemed broken in new ways: their anxieties and fears had evolved into full-on delusions, a terror of the night or the outside world.
It became a kind of dark joke to those in the know. ‘Watch out,’ they would say to each other, ‘if your injuries are too light, you might get sent to Red Rigg. Better to have an arm or a leg blown off.’
The house closed as a convalescent hospital in 1917.