Brocket Hall was requisitioned in 1939 as a nursing home for expectant mothers from the East End of London.
On 30 April 1940, Mrs Frances Cameron-Head received the unwelcome news that her home in north-west Scotland was needed for use by the military. She was in London at the time but hotfooted her way north as fast as wartime travel would allow. ‘When I arrived at Lochailort station there were only two officers who said the castle was half emptied and that they had no accommodation for me and I could not go to it. They have taken my three garages and planted tents everywhere, even in the middle of the farmyard without any permission from me or anyone representing me.’1
When she wrote those anguished words to her friend, Donald Cameron of Lochiel, she could not have known that she would never again set foot in her ancestral home, Inverailort Castle in the west Highlands. Her property had been requisitioned under the Defence (General) Regulations 1939 made under the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act 1939, passed in Parliament on 24 August, the day after the Nazi–Soviet Pact was announced. It gave the government sweeping powers to make regulations as appear ‘to be necessary or expedient for securing the public safety, the defence of the realm, the maintenance of public order and the efficient prosecution of any war in which His Majesty may be engaged, and for maintaining supplies and services essential to the life of the community.’2
The details of the act were of no interest to the eighty-one-year-old widow. All she knew was that she urgently needed somewhere to stay and that her home was no longer available. It must have been a very bitter situation for her. She was not alone. Many thousands of people, from dukes in castles to families in four-bedroom houses in the countryside, in coastal towns or Highland glens were ousted from their dwellings – some temporarily, others for the duration. A few, like Mrs Cameron-Head, never lived in their homes again. That the vast majority of people gave up their properties without formal complaint shows just how powerful the government’s powers were but also that people realised they had to pull together in a time of national emergency.
I first became interested in the subject of what happened to houses that were requisitioned, to the people who were evicted and to their wartime guests when I was on a visit to Harrogate with my nineteen-year-old son, Richard. I had always believed that my paternal great-grandfather, Harry Summers, had spent his twilight years living in the Majestic Hotel, dying there in January 1945. So I decided to visit and see if there were any traces of the long-term guest arrangements. The hotel lives up to its grand name, dominating the town from its site halfway up the hill and looking as much like a French château as an English hotel. It was opened in 1900 and boasted a lounge that ran the full length of the ground floor and a magnificent winter garden. It earned the nickname the ‘Yorkshire Crystal Palace’. I can remember thinking it was very grand for my Victorian great-grandfather.
At the outbreak of the Second World War the hotel was requisitioned by the government and the intention was to move the Air Ministry into the building. All long-term residents, many of them retired army officers, were required to vacate the Majestic and find lodgings elsewhere. However, this turned out to be a temporary measure as the expected national emergency did not happen and no bombs fell on London that autumn. The hotel received permission to reopen and by Christmas some of the long-term residents had returned. It later became an RAF Personnel Reception Centre for 850 sergeant pilots.
As it happened, Harry Summers had not lived in the Majestic Hotel but in the Prince of Wales, at the junction of York Place and Parliament Street opposite The Stray – such is the inaccuracy of family memories. The building is no longer a hotel but a block of luxury flats called Prince of Wales Mansions. It does not appear to have been taken over during requisitioning and my grandfather died at the hotel in January 1945 aged 80.
Nevertheless, my visit to the Majestic Hotel kindled questions in my mind about the extent of house requisitioning during the war. How were they selected? Did the owners have any choice but to hand them over? Where did they go? Who were the uninvited guests who came in such numbers? And what happened to the houses after the war? As I began to research the answers, I saw a complex and fascinating picture developing – far more colourful and fast-changing than I had imagined. It is a story that involves some startling, interesting, funny and dangerous characters and that, for people who know me and my work, is really what piqued my interest.
This book is not a charting of thousands of houses that were requisitioned during the war, although there will be some statistics that will give the broad-brush picture, but rather a series of individual, secret histories of houses that saw ‘action’ between 1939 and 1945 that ran counter to anything that had been experienced in their long and often colourful pasts. And because walls cannot talk, the heart of this book beats with the stories of people who occupied the houses during the war and the owners who shared their properties with these guests, and who were to live through years of dislocation, uncertainty and, for some, great loss.
Over the course of the Second World War, over 3.5 million evacuees fled to the countryside at one time or another in search of safety from the threat of German bombing. There were three significant waves of evacuation: one in September 1939, a second in June 1940 as a result of the fall of France and fear of a German invasion and a third in 1944 as those in London and the south-east fled the V-bombs. By 1945, over 2 million servicemen and women had arrived from abroad to help the Allies win the war. They came from all over Europe, from the Commonwealth and from the United States of America, who sent over 1.5 million GIs. The Post Office recorded 38 million changes of address over the course of the war, and that for a population of 38.5 million people. The impact of air attack on the capital and other cities meant that only 12 per cent of married couples could expect to be living in a home of their own by the end of the war. To put it mildly, this represented a monumental upheaval and reshaping of the status quo and makes for untidy history.
For the government, much bureaucratic cartwheeling and quick changes of direction were needed in order to keep abreast of the war on every front. From petrol, food and clothes rationing to health care, education and hospital provision; from munitions, equipment and uniforms to the secret services and the cloak-and-dagger operations necessary to prosecute a modern war – the government gradually assumed such minute control over the lives of its citizens that it could take over a person’s house at less than two hours’ notice. And then there was the army, the navy and the air force, all of whom needed to practise, train and practise more. A new kind of normality had to be established at a time of uncertainty and upheaval when no one really knew the rules, not even the government. And in planning for this uncertain future, the government realised that the civilian population would need to be taken into consideration in a way it had not in previous wars.
Much of the story of the war on the home front concerns the sheer chaos of numbers of lives coming together and contains multitudes of perspectives. We have a natural desire to tidy up historical incidents in order to make sense of them. But the fact is that two people standing feet apart and witnessing the exact same event could easily form divergent impressions. Two children separated by evacuation; a husband and wife working as scientists in two different laboratories; an elderly widow and her daughters – one working as a volunteer for the Red Cross, the other in the ATS might all have had completely different experiences. The examples are manifold. And because the Second World War was Total War it affected every single person – man, woman or child – in some way or another over a period of five and a half years. For children born shortly before, or during the war, it was all they had ever known. On the whole, it is the job of the historian to make sense out of the disorder – and yet sometimes it is interesting to look at history from the other end of the kaleidoscope and examine the messy.
Pared down to the barest minimum, the government had two roles: to protect the country and to protect its citizens. The two are almost mutually exclusive: ‘Because war means the organisation of killing and wounding it must also mean the organisation of services to heal and repair’.3 In his survey Problems of Social Policy, Richard Titmuss neatly summed up the paradox of war: in order to protect the country, every possible means of keeping ahead of the enemy militarily, tactically and with intelligence has to be explored and pushed forward with energy and focus. At the same time, the civilian population might be subject to brutal attack from that same enemy and needs, where possible, to be put out of harm’s way. This dilemma is at the centre of this book.
On 15 April 1937, the Committee of Imperial Defence – a body set up in 1924 to assess the potential risk to civilians of aerial bombardment in the event of another major war – decided to conduct a survey of buildings in all parts of the country to see what use they might be put to in the event of the war that was almost certain to come. The survey would also help avoid overlapping demands and conflicts between different government departments on the one hand and local authorities on the other who would have requisitioning powers for civil defence purposes under the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) Act. Such was the bureaucracy and the civil servants’ love of secrecy that the existence of this register was not made public until 1972.
The Office of Works took the decision that it was better not to tell owners that their houses had been earmarked, although some owners of very large properties were aware of the likelihood of their houses being requisitioned because of the experience of the First World War when many large country properties were used as hospitals. A number decided to offer their homes rather than wait for requisitioning, as it often meant they could influence to some extent who would occupy them. Owners of properties that were forcefully requisitioned had no say in how they were used. All that civil servants were allowed to say when asked was that compensation would be paid ‘on a basis which will be determined hereafter by Parliament’, hoping that invoking such high authority would reassure homeowners.
When war finally came, the owner was generally given no explanation as to why his or her house had been chosen and some did not know for what purpose it had been requisitioned until the order to move came. The owner had almost no power to resist the forced takeover of his or her property. ‘They found themselves with very little time to pack up valuable collections of works of art, or to carry out protection work to fragile decorations and architectural features.’4
Ralph Dutton, later Lord Sherborne, had to leave his house, Hinton Ampner in Hampshire, at short notice. He had just finished refurbishing it and was understandably unhappy that everything had to be stored away. He received a telegram on 29 August 1939 informing him that the Portsmouth Day School for Girls would be arriving in forty-eight hours:
It was a moment of intense bitterness: just as many months of work and effort had reached their culmination, all was snatched from me. Nowadays one is more accustomed to the buffets of fortune, but in 1939 I found it difficult to comprehend that I was being turned out of my own house. However, the situation had to be accepted, and picking up my suitcase, I left.5
Later he realised how fortunate he had been to have a girls’ school at the house and not the army. In a list of preferred occupants, a girls’ school would come close to the top and the army at the bottom.
Conscription was introduced in the spring of 1939, with units required to double their numbers so the need to accommodate large numbers of troops for training was ever-expanding. Certain areas of the country were favoured by different arms of the military: the British Expeditionary Force was largely stationed in Wiltshire, Somerset and Dorset before going out to France, while anti-tank training concentrated in the south-west where they would be out of the way of the Luftwaffe. Northern Scotland would become a training ground for the Commandos and Special Operations Executive, after their formation in 1940. By 1941 there were 2 million troops living in Britain; by 1944 that number had risen to 3 million. They all needed to be accommodated and, although many men lived under canvas or in camps, houses were needed as officers’ messes, headquarters for key figures, such as General Patton who lived at Peover Hall in the build-up to D-Day, and for training establishments.
The Dunkirk evacuation caused the first pinch point in the war, when there was a sudden need for large amounts of accommodation. Over 350,000 Allied troops were evacuated over the course of eight days; houses had to be found as quickly as possible. Some people were very cooperative but others, like a lady owner of a property in Sussex, were determined not to give up their homes. In this case the only way to deal with her was to take the house forcibly, locking the lady in the kitchen.
Some people tried to resist requisitioning, but by and large their pleas or protests were ignored. Lord and Lady Desborough received a letter in 1942 announcing that part of the park at their home Panshanger in Hertfordshire, would be taken over to construct a hospital for American wounded. Having tried approaches to various ministers, Lady Desborough tackled the prime minister himself: ‘Dearest Winston, would you be such an angel as to glance at the enclosed letter. We have simply longed, all through, to consult you on the subject, but could not bear to add one featherweight to your burdens.’6 The main reason she gave was that the hospital would be just 130 yards from the edge of an aerodrome, clearly a target for the Luftwaffe, and just 800 yards away from a secret RAF installation. She ended the letter: ‘I wrote this letter last night, and now the glorious news from the Middle East has arrived and we send you our dearest congratulations – for no people can rejoice more truly, or be more aware of what you have done for this country.’7 She signed the letter ‘Yours affectionately, Ettie’. The prime minister responded with a telegram to Lady Desborough saying, ‘Have received your letter and am looking into it. Winston’8. In this case it did the trick, but in most cases appeals to the government or to Churchill failed.
Very occasionally a case reached the press but there seems to have been little public sympathy with people who owned large houses complaining of unfair treatment. In the main, people in Britain accepted that the war would require great sacrifice and that everyone would have to shoulder a portion of the burden if the war was to be won.
An unexpected result of my research was to discover how much property was required by foreign governments-in-exile in Britain. The houses were mostly around London and in the south-east for obvious reasons of proximity to the capital and the British government. These eventually numbered eight: Czechoslovakia was the first to arrive in 1938, though it was not officially recognised until 1941. Poland followed after the fall of France, where they had been based at Angers. Next came Norway, including members of their royal family, then Belgium and Luxembourg. The Netherlands were represented by the Dutch government, Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch Resistance, who would meet and plan missions in Soho. Lynne Olson, the author of Last Hope Island wrote:
Of the seven occupied countries that found refuge in London in the spring and summer of 1940, six presented their British hosts with invaluable dowries of men, money, ships, natural resources and intelligence information. The lone representative of the seventh nation, France, brought only himself.9
By the end of the year some 100,000 foreign exiles had taken up residence in London. By autumn 1941, the Greek government and the royal family arrived, the latter moving into Claridges, which became the wartime home of many other European royals. It is hardly surprising that the charity worker and diarist Vere Hodgson, wrote of London in 1943: ‘Piccadilly is such a thrilling place these days. All the uniforms of all the nations jostle you on the pavement…’10
One of the great delights of writing social history is researching and getting to know men and women whose lives had a major impact on the people they worked alongside. In the normal course of my life I would never meet such people, and if I had, I would almost certainly never get to know them well – just a fleeting handshake or a conversation with an elderly person reliving the past. Many of them had already died long ago. Yet in the course of researching this book I have had the privilege and joy of becoming familiar with the lives, through books and archives, of some of the most extraordinary men and women whose stories breathe life into the secret histories of these houses.
There is a broad cross-section of characters, including a sprinkling of literati, such as the author of Ring of Bright Water, Gavin Maxwell, who you will encounter in northern Scotland, not far from the island that became the fictional Camusfeàrna. He was described by a friend as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, quoting Lady Caroline Lamb about Byron, and indeed during the war he would often be found sitting under a tree reading poetry. He was a man used to living on the edge of society, with aristocratic connections and personal flaws, but in 1941 he found himself surrounded by similar misfits destined to become special agents to be dropped into occupied Europe. He was in his element. To me he was both frightening and fascinating, but his understanding of the natural world was alluring and the stories of how he inspired his students compelling.
Then there is the Roman Catholic scholar, Monsignor Ronald Knox, who translated both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible from Latin over the six years of the war while chaplain to girls and their nuns evacuated from a convent school. He is known by few today outside the Catholic community, but he was a remarkable scholar, a great wit and an infinitely fascinating human being. If I had ever met him I should no doubt have been tongue-tied, and he too, for he was very shy, especially in the company of women. However, through his writing and biographies, as well as stories from the girls I met and the Acton family, whose house they all shared, I hope I have been able to bring him to life for you.
Two prominent Jewish families offered up their homes to help the war effort. Their generosity and determination to stand up for everything they believed in is impressive and moving. It is good to be able to celebrate the impact of Jewish families who, only too aware of and touched by the atrocities against the Jews on the continent, were able to change lives and fortunes in a positive way. And both families left their magnificent country houses and art collections with large endowments to the nation, giving us Waddesdon Manor and Upton House.
The country house of a colourful peer, whose friendship with Joachim von Ribbentrop was so close that he named a bedroom in his house after the German foreign minister, became a nursing home where almost 9,000 babies were born. This appealed to me as a clarion call for the future in a present that seemed anything but optimistic.
Several houses were occupied by multiple bodies, as the need for properties ebbed and waned, while others were fortunate to have a single group for the whole war. Two were burned down – both accidentally but through carelessness. It is a fact that the uninvited guests suggested in the book’s title did have, in many cases, a lasting impact on the future of a number of Britain’s country houses. Over the course of a little less than six years the fate of some houses changed more dramatically than in the hundreds of years of their previous existence.
In all cases I have tried to explore how the houses were used, or abused, and what happened within their walls, and what that tells us about the way the war was conducted on home soil. In selecting the twelve properties I have chosen as studies for each chapter, I was mindful to try and pick houses that were less well known than, for example, Bletchley Park and would give as vibrant a picture as possible of behind-the-scenes wartime Britain. I preferred to focus on houses whose histories had been documented at the time or very soon after the war.
I was fortunate to meet people who had first-hand experience of requisitioning and their memories bring colour to the stories of the houses they lived in. One of the most productive and thrilling introductions came by accident. I had taken a morning off from editing the final draft of this book to visit a remarkable school for badly damaged children in Standlake. There was a war connection – the Mulberry Bush School was founded in 1948 by Barbara Dockar-Drysdale, who started it by scooping up hard-to-place evacuee children who had been deserted by their parents. The conversation turned briefly to what I was writing and one of the hosts, Jane Smiley, said tentatively, ‘I don’t suppose you have heard of a house in Shropshire that was taken over to house nuns and girls from London . . . ?’ I burst out with an exclamation of delight: ‘Yes, of course I have. It’s in the book!’ Aldenham Park was owned by her family, the Actons, and she was able to introduce me to her older sister, Pelline, who lived there during the war and who could give me a first-hand account of life among the convent school. It was a glorious moment and gave rise to a fascinating interview.
Our Uninvited Guests is a book of two halves and moods. Two sides of the same coin: from bouncing babies at Brocket Hall to assassins at Arisaig. In the first six chapters, we see how the population was kept safe from the enemy by housing people away from the dangerous cities and coastal towns. The stories are of individuals and groups coming together and working out how best to adjust to their new homes. We see a mixture of optimism and humour combined with a good dose of making-do and mending. From newborn babies to crusty scholars, the impact of war for these evacuees was felt more in the adjustment to a new way of life than in the frightening news coming out of Europe.
The second half of the book has an altogether darker feel to it. In protecting the country, the military, paramilitary and intelligence organisations had to plan for violence. Behind the closed doors of houses tucked away in the countryside secret and at times explosive goings-on occurred cheek by jowl with everyday life and no questions asked. Special Operations Executive, nicknamed Stately ’Omes of England, used scores of properties to train foreign agents to become resistance fighters, radio operators, saboteurs and silent killers before sending them back into Nazi-occupied Europe to harass, interrupt, sabotage and even murder the enemy. This is not a military history, although I have done my best to make sure the military detail is correct. My real interest is in the stories of the individuals who were involved in the training and carried out the missions.
Our Uninvited Guests starts with birth because war does not halt everyday life, it just changes it.
Brocket Hall was requisitioned in 1939 as a nursing home for expectant mothers from the East End of London.