‘They’ve all gone,’ Nan wrote in her diary on 10 August, 1914. All the young officers had quietly vanished to France with their regiments. ‘One is talking with a man one day; by the next he has disappeared.’ Not Bron, now 38, who was held down by his job in the Cabinet. ‘It’s ghastly for Bron,’ wrote Nan, ‘but he is working 15 hours a day, which helps him.’ Really, though, it was ghastly for her. ‘No news, but many apprehensions and [at the back] of all the sickening gnawing sense of being left behind.’
Nan was not one to be left behind. She was a restless, independent, fearless young woman in search of a big project. In her twenties she had rejected the Church of England and embraced Theosophy, the alternative religion of the day with headquarters in California. She then served as a ‘directress’ of a Theosophic school in Cuba, before following the anthropologist, and Balkan expert, Edith Durham to Montenegro, acting as ‘bottle washer’ to the Red Cross unit during the Balkan Crisis. At 34, she was still addicted to travel and adventure. The sudden imperative to turn Wrest Park into a hospital was both a gift to a hungry woman like Nan, but also an inhibition. It meant she could no longer keep moving at whim.
Her great friend Angy Manners was busy organising her own nursing party, shortly setting off for Belgium to tend to the wounded. All Nan could do was ‘give’ Angy a couple of her nurses recruited for Wrest Park. ‘I feel disgruntled with everything,’ she wrote, ‘but perhaps by waiting one will get the real job.’
If Wrest Park Hospital did not feel like the ‘real job’ to Nan, might this have affected the way she went about recruiting staff? She had little experience of hiring or managing servants. While her cousin Ettie, Lady Desborough, kept fifteen domestic servants (including two footmen) at their London house alone, Nan and Bron had made do with a cook and parlourmaid in Pimlico. Equipping and staffing a great house like Wrest for a speculative future had an air of fantasy about it. Nobody knew how long this war was going to last, or if the country house hospitals were going to be needed at all.
How did the Honourable Nan Herbet find her housekeeper? By the 1911 census Hannah Mackenzie can be found working, aged 29, as housekeeper of a newly built Lutyens mansion in the village of Overstrand on the north Norfolk coast. Overstrand was known as ‘the village of millionaires’ for its concentration of large new houses and moneyed types who descended during the summer months. The house was designed at the turn of the century for the 2nd Baron Hillingdon, a retired banker and Conservative politician who wanted to make a great statement. Overstrand Hall is impressive, with that Lutyens-esque air of having always been there–all Jacobean timbers, flint and stone facings, brick and tile inner courtyards. It was a house where the social season mattered. Queen Alexandra was a visitor to the Hillingdon family, and there were frequent house parties that attracted actors, authors and poets.
Hannah was 32 years old when she arrived at Wrest, either from Overstrand Hall (which was to transform itself into a ‘luxurious’ nursing home for officers), or from closer to hand; she had family connections in Bedford. It was in some respects a strange job for an upper servant to jump at, since it came with no future guaranteed; but perhaps it appeared as a way of doing something in August 1914.
In those first few months of war there was feverish activity among those who were left behind. Women everywhere tried to ‘do their bit’. All the women on the Isle of Wight were busy making soldiers’ pyjamas. The women of Bedford were stitching hundreds of ‘special slippers’. Nan’s cousin Ettie set up a work party at Taplow Court in Buckinghamshire: by 11 December, 995 garments had been sent to hospitals and soldiers abroad.3 Nurses were everywhere in short supply. Thousands of women joined the VADs (Voluntary Aid Detachment), received basic medical training and went to the war zone as unpaid nurses, cooks, clerks, housemaids, laundresses and drivers. Or there were the less glamorous FANYs (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry): women who drove ambulances, scrubbed and disinfected wards, ran soup kitchens and hot baths for dirty soldiers.
The war demanded manpower. A leader in The Times called on those employing ‘men in unproductive domestic occupations, both in and out of doors’ to encourage them to join up–footmen, valets, butlers, boot boys, grooms, gamekeepers. By the spring of 1915 women began to be recruited for the munitions factories; they were not paid the same as the men, but they earned substantially more than they did as maids. In all, between 1914 and 1918 almost four hundred thousand male and female servants left domestic work for positions in the armed forces or to do war-related work.
Loyal old retainers, who couldn’t imagine another world or social order, stayed on at most estates. But at Wrest Park there were no loyal retainers, save for head gardener William Mackinlay. He and his team of a dozen old-timers stayed put throughout the war, clipping the verges and pruning the roses of the handsome formal gardens; leading the carefully booted horse and its mower over the acres of lawn, earning 18s, 19s and 20s a week (around £39 to £43 in today’s money). There was also irascible old John Land in the gamekeeper’s cottage; and in the Lodge, land agent Cecil Argles, 42, who had worked for Bron these past nine years.
There was, however, no resident female staff. Nan Herbert had to start from scratch, recruiting not only housemaids and kitchen staff but nurses too. The most obvious first appointment was the housekeeper, who could then be relied upon to recruit the young girls herself. Within days Hannah was procured, swiftly installed and was placing advertisements in The Times: ‘Wanted, Scullerymaid. 6 in kitchen: wages £20. Apply to Mrs Mackenzie, Wrest Park Hospital, Ampthill’, reads one. Another in the same column seeks a ‘Third Parlourmaid, to wait on doctors’ and nurses’ dining room: wages £20’. Their wages are equivalent to around £860 today, per annum.
There is a wartime photograph of Nan, snatched off guard in crumpled nurse’s apron, cigarette in hand, face split by a gap-toothed grin. She does not look like the chatelaine of a country house. Nan saw Hannah as a kindred spirit: someone her age, not over-serious or pompous. Hannah had, so they say, a refreshing (and sometimes devastating) directness of manner. To Nan–uncomfortable with unctuousness and subservience–this felt like an advantage. Certainly Hannah felt the same about her new mistress, who seemed, at this stage, bracingly liberal. No obsequious bowing and scraping required; no head butler to cramp her style. This was going to be a house run entirely by women.
In her diary Nan refers to her housekeeper simply as ‘Hannah’, rather than the conventional courtesy title of ‘Mrs Mackenzie’, and is a keen, not unaffectionate, observer of her foibles. (In contrast, Hetty the cook is always ‘Mrs Geyton’.) Hannah was Nan’s right hand, her lieutenant, in that first frantic month of setting up.