Wrest Park’s call to action came three weeks later. On 5 September Lord Knutsford, chairman of the London Hospital, telephoned Bron at his Commons office and asked if Wrest might be used as a convalescent home for his wounded soldiers. Two days later, sixty-six men were moved from their beds in Whitechapel and sent to Bedfordshire. These were the very first of Britain’s war wounded to leave hospital, and the newspapers were quick to put a positive, patriotic spin on the story: ‘A party of sixty-six British soldiers, delighted that they were taking another stage in the journey back to the Front, left London Hospital yesterday afternoon for a convalescent home’, reported the Daily News.
They will be cared for at Wrest, the fine mansion near Luton which Lord Lucas has placed at the disposal of the War Office. In all probability they will be the first batch to face the enemy a second time. As they clambered into the motor-cars lent by members of the Royal Automobile Club they were confidently asserting that in a week at most they would be starting back for France.
The villagers of Silsoe waited all afternoon to see these ‘Heroes of Mons’. As the motor cars finally drove past the thatched and terraced cottages, they stared hard at this first physical proof of battle. For them, this was where the war really began. Here were British men with bandaged heads, men with crutches–just one month after their flag-waving departure. It had been hard to take in, this past month of banner newspaper headlines, that Britain was really at war; that ‘destruction, and agony on a scale monstrous beyond precedent was going on in the same world as that which slumbered outside the black ivy and silver shining window-sill’, wrote H. G. Wells in Mr Britling.4
After the initial panic buying of food, ‘the vast inertia of everyday life in England asserted itself’. ‘Business as Usual’ became the slogan of the moment, along with ‘Leave things to Kitchener’. But here it now was: the proof. The crowds at the estate gates–mostly women and children–waved their Union Jacks and ‘cheered lustily’, coaxing a smile from the ‘dust-stained, khaki-clad visitors’. Their tunics, noted the greedy-eyed reporter from the Bedfordshire Times, were ‘more or less stained, and bore evident marks of conflict’.5
The motor cars purred through Wrest’s black and gold gateway, flanked by French-style lodges, along a tree-lined avenue towards the mellow eighteenth-century-style chateau. It was early September and the estate was green, fruit-heavy, hushed. A Red Cross flag floated lazily from the roof. As the soldiers stiffly unfolded themselves from back seats, organised their slings and crutches and limped towards the front entrance, they might well have thought themselves to be arriving at Louis XIV’s Versailles.
Perhaps, for these first brave arrivals, the steps were lined with uniformed maids, headed by housekeeper Hannah Mackenzie. More likely, though, the girls were supplanted or obscured by twenty nurses in snowy aprons, collars and cuffs, headed by Miss Martin and Nurse Herbert. And so from the initial, excited anticipation and massed endeavour of all those women at Wrest, the faintest of battle lines began to be drawn. There were the nurses…and there were the domestic servants.
The month of September 1914 was to be remembered as ‘among the happiest weeks’ of Dr Beauchamp’s life. It was, in retrospect, a soft beginning for Wrest; a sort of prelude before the ghastly business of war surgery began in earnest. There was a delightful novelty to having working-class Tommies in one’s home. The day after the men’s arrival, Bron posted a rubber stamp and ink pad for the hospital chequebook, along with some Virginia cigarettes and twelve fishing rods and tackle (a ‘source of untold happiness and innumerable wiles’, according to Nan). The men, Bron wrote to his cousin Ettie, were said to be ‘extremely happy and very jolly’. In the midst of this determinedly upbeat letter he added that his cousin Aubrey Herbert was reported ‘wounded and missing’.
There was competition among every woman in the house for ‘the boys” approval. These were women who had no children. They were women whose sweethearts were away at war: women far from their families, whose brothers and brothers-in-law were at the Front. They had been working in female domains for longer than they cared to remember. Nurse Piper, Nurse Simpson, Nurse Warner, Nurse Mandler, Nurse Camm, Nurse Riley, Nurse Burdon, Sister Rogers and Sister Martin: all had their own stories. The maids too, those unnamed young girls photographed in kitchen and dining room; all carried private anxieties.
Hannah Mackenzie was one of twelve children, of which there were three brothers. To begin with, first- and second-born William and James, at 40 and 39, were too old to be called up. But 26-year-old Alick, her favourite brother, was sent off to the Front with the Cameron Highlanders 2nd Battalion after a military career in India. Her older sister Jessie had two sons, both of which were to leave for France: 19-year-old Samuel and William, who signed up in Glasgow aged just 16–one of the many thousands of Kitchener’s ‘boy soldiers’ who lied about their age. Her younger sister Nellie, newly married to Lance Corporal Hugh Munro of the Cameron Highlanders, had recently bid goodbye to her husband, like thousands of other women. So Hannah had enough to occupy her mind and was, in the words of her mistress, ‘thankful to be engrossed in work’.
The influx of these boisterous soldiers gave Wrest’s women an unexpected blast of light relief. You could not go for a walk around the grounds (and there might, these days, be any number of hollow excuses to do so) without coming across a dozen men in khaki or blue sitting along the canals that encircled the gardens. Here, on grassy banks under weeping willows, these young men tried to forget what they had seen in France. A pet swan drifted curiously from fishing rod to fishing rod–and Nan was everywhere with her Kodak box camera (slogan, ‘You press the button, we do the rest’), recording Wrest’s ‘brilliant career as a Convalescent Home’. Dozens of small black-and-white photographs pasted into the scrapbooks show soldiers posing beneath classical Roman statuary; soldiers sitting thigh to thigh with brilliant-white-clad nurses on the steps; soldiers holding up their fishing catches, eels included.
‘The astonishing assortment of fish were then carried off to the kitchen’, wrote Nan, ‘as old Mrs Geyton could always be prevailed upon to fry them for the men’s supper.’ Mrs Geyton, she adds, was a ‘great character’ who (as in most upper-class descriptions of their cooks) ‘flung saucepans about when angry, and was inordinately extravagant’. She was also profoundly maternal, doing anything ‘to make the boys happy’.
There was fishing, and there was dressing up. No country house was complete without its fancy-dress box; the rage for dressing up among the aristocracy reached a kind of frenzied peak in the pre-war years. Wrest Park’s Victorian costume box was unearthed by the ‘little cockney’, Private Summers–and from that time on evening concerts were ‘in steady demand, especially as extra beer was served’, wrote Nan, herself a veteran of fancy dress and witty skits. ‘We nurses sat on the stairs, the convalescents in the hall singing, reciting and dancing.’ And the maids? I imagine them peeping through half-open doors, or craning down from the balcony up high.
During the American Ambassador’s time the great Italian tenor Caruso had sung for guests in the grand Staircase Hall. Now, ‘Paddy, dressed in a tabard of the de Grey coat of arms, danced Irish jigs in a corner, and Private Whalley in a very décolleté dress with bulging front, pursued Dr Beauchamp to ask him in ringing whispers “about the baby”.’
Hannah loved all this tomfoolery and high jinks. She is remembered by her great-nephew as a lover of practical jokes; a fan of the whoopee cushion, the little packet of itching powder, the stink bomb. When housekeeper to the Vanderbilts in 1920s New York, she would fill the fountains with spent champagne corks just for the wicked pleasure of seeing the butler jump with fright when he turned on the jets of water in the morning and the corks bounced down the marble staircase, bang bang bang! (this became one of Hannah’s favourite anecdotes). But where, in the new hospital hierarchy, would she have sat? Nan writes of the nurses’ inhibitions, ‘torn between extreme conventionality and a desire to follow the ways of Mount Olympus (the front seats where Bron, guests and I were sitting), uncertain whether to look embarrassed or to applaud’.
Throughout Britain, working-class soldiers were at that moment infiltrating wealthy homes, chipping away at deeply ingrained social structures. How it must have perturbed the girls’ Victorian parents. ‘Whatever you do’, cautioned one upper-middle-class mother to VAD hopeful Sybil Warren, ‘you are not going to nurse. You can go [to the war] as a pantry maid, but not as a nurse.’ She did not want her daughter dealing with the ‘lower classes–Tommies’.6 These boys had shaken up sedate, provincial England. On Sunday, 16 August 1914 the population of Bedford doubled when 17,000 Highland Territorials arrived in town, after an exhausting journey on no fewer than sixty-seven troop trains. The young men were billeted with Bedford’s unsuspecting citizens (payment 3s for officers, 9d for soldiers, per day). The ‘bare-kneed clansmen’ with their pipes and drums shook Bedford ‘out of the doldrums’, according to the local paper. The town’s young women were so smitten by these ‘strapping, brawny visitors’ that there were many marriages (and babies conceived) before the troops’ departure nine months later. A columnist for the Bedfordshire Times–a ‘bitter kiltless civilian’–writes disapprovingly of certain ‘things happening in the dusk’ along the riverbanks of the Ouse.7
For all that Wrest was a closed world, Hannah Mackenzie was able to read about the Highlanders in the paper. Their arrival in Bedford was a huge event–so huge that King George V visited the town that October to view the Territorials parading en masse with pipes and drums. There would be a full-blown Highland Games held the following Easter on the sports fields of Bedford Grammar School, Bron’s alma mater. It’s hard to appreciate today, but these were foreigners, to those southerners in a pre-television age, with strange accents and even stranger dress: sporrans, kilts, spats, hose tops, glengarry bonnets. There was a continuing obsession with bagpipes in the local press: a total of twelve pipe bands had arrived in town along with the troops.
Hannah was a Highlander, yet she had spent many years working in England, seldom making the long journey back home. I can picture her, seized with a longing to hear the pipes and the drums again, making her excuses for far-flung shopping expeditions by motor omnibus to Bedford (a twenty-mile round trip). The occasional scenes of ‘disgraceful conduct’ outside the pubs would have transported Hannah to the mean streets of Inverness and her youth. The rugged accents of those Seaforths and Argyll and Sutherland laddies made her realise just how far she had travelled in her thirty-two years. And yet, at the sound of the bagpipes, an instant lump might have formed in her throat. She was so far from home.
The thin-faced marching men in diamond-patterned hose tops and navy glengarry bonnets brought to mind her favourite brother, young Alick, whose battalion was sent to the Western Front that December. He must have heard good things about Bedford from his countrymen, for he moved there after the war, got married and set up a business selling pianos. Many Highlanders returned to see the women who had looked after them like foster-mothers before their tearful departure by train for the Front. Bedford was the furthest most of them had ever travelled in their young lives.