I took the risk of bringing a baby into the world while a war was on . . . as I wanted to have something if my husband did not come back.
Quoted in How We Lived Then by Norman Longmate
There can have been fewer more unusual juxtapositions during the Second World War than a Cockney mother giving birth in Lord Melbourne’s bedroom suite in a grand house in Hertfordshire. The leap from a small council flat in Mile End to one of the most sumptuous country houses in Britain might seem improbable but it happened over 8,000 times. The first baby was born there on the day war broke out and his mother, Lily Lowe, wrote after the birth:
I was taken (with one or two others) to Brocket Hall in a small car by someone who of course didn’t know the way and we hoped our babies would not be arriving before due date! Having arrived and gone into the grounds, we had a lady come out of a small house at the right side, bob to us and then open the gate which was right across. We continued for a while and eventually came to Brocket Hall itself where they found deckchairs for us to sit on. (What a sight, with our bellies sticking out in front).1
Lily had been dropped off by her husband Leslie at the City of London Maternity Hospital in the East End to have her pre-planned Caesarean section. Her first baby had been stillborn two years earlier and the doctors didn’t want to risk a repeat of the tragedy. Leslie was already thirty-five, so too old to be conscripted, but he was not able to be near his wife as he was acting as an escort for trainloads of families to the south-west. Communication being limited, he did not know when he would be able to find out what had happened to his wife and was surprised when he returned to London to find she was not at the hospital where he had left her.
No sooner had Lily arrived at the hospital than she was told she and other expectant mothers were to be sent to ‘someone’s large home’. The large home was Brocket Hall, a magnificent Regency house near Welwyn. The hall was still in a state of transformation when this first contingent of mothers arrived. The original beds, furniture, paintings and precious works of art had been removed from the bedrooms to safe storage. These were in the process of being replaced by metal-framed hospital beds and the preparations for the delivery suite were not yet quite complete. Norah Hern, a midwife from the City of London Hospital, was in the advance party ready to set up the hall: ‘Nurses, midwifes, mums to be (with at least five days to go), plus lots of medical equipment were loaded onto eight charabanc type buses and half went to Brocket Hall. On arrival, all the rooms were empty shells. There was a delivery of beds in one room that needed carrying upstairs and putting together. This took most of the day.’2
Everywhere was bustling. Storerooms downstairs in the cellars had to be cleared to accommodate hospital equipment, rather than game and beer. The kitchens, scullery, drying room and servants’ hall became hives of activity as the maternity home got into its stride. The babies’ bathroom was downstairs in a white-tiled room near the wine cellar. None of the mothers ever ventured below stairs. They had dormitories on the first and second floors and they were encouraged to go into the beautiful gardens whenever the weather was fine and they were allowed out of bed. For the nurses and midwives, the accommodation at Brocket Hall was inadequate in the first four weeks. None of the nursing staff had beds of their own and slept two to a mattress on the top floor in the servants’ area.
Lily Lowe was fascinated by the luxury that surrounded her and above all by the size of the rooms. She told her son years later that just before he was born, ‘We nosey ones went about the house – no one to stop us and found the bathrooms (huge rooms) – talk about how the other half lives!’3
Her son was born by Caesarean section on 3 September 1939 and Lily wrote to her mother:
I don’t know whether you will have heard from Leslie as I have not seen or heard from him since he saw me in London on Friday. I hope he is all right – only it is so difficult to get any news. They brought me here and operated on Sunday – a bonny boy of 8 lbs 13 ozs – I knew it would be heavier than the other. They haven’t let me have the baby to feed yet so I hardly know I have it yet – except for what I’ve been through, by Jove. I’ve had loads of injections and can still only just see enough to write this or would have done so before. The words keep swimming.4
The next letter was written on 12 September when her baby son was nine days old. Lily had received two visits from Leslie by then and she told her mother how shocked she was by his appearance on the first occasion. ‘He nearly cried when he told me of the hundreds of mothers and babies he had to herd into the trains for Somerset and go with them there.’5 She went on to tell her mother that he had refused to get rid of the cat even though Lily had thought it best for the animal to be put down given the uncertainty of the war. It is a sad fact that over 600,000 family pets were destroyed in September 1939, most of them healthy, as frantic owners could not face an indeterminate future for their animals among the upheaval of evacuation and the uncertainty of what would happen if the Luftwaffe dropped the feared tonnage of bombs on London. In the event, it turned out to be a premature act and many families regretted their haste, while vets all over the country were saddened by having to destroy healthy animals.
Lily’s main concern was her bonny baby. She told her mother: ‘We are calling the new baby Alan Brocket Lowe, the “Brocket” after this Hall in which we have found such a blessed haven in this time of stress. Lady Brocket came in yesterday and I was introduced to her – she was very pleased and interested to hear that it was a son. We had quite a little conflab on the history of the house.’6
Brocket Hall’s history is colourful, even by the standards of the aristocratic goings-on of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Two Victorian prime ministers, one of Byron’s many lovers and the Prince Regent’s mistress were all at one time occupants of this magnificent house but at the outbreak of the war the hall was in the hands of the second Lord Brocket who had a link to the extreme right.
Lord Brocket inherited the title and the hall from his father, Sir Charles Nall-Cain, who had bought the house in 1923. His fortune came from a brewing dynasty in Liverpool established by his own father in the late nineteenth century, which later became Allied Breweries. Sir Charles inherited vast wealth and was determined to establish himself as part of the English aristocracy. Inevitably there was resentment and snobbery against ‘new money’ but he put his fortune to good use by establishing retrospectively that there was blue blood in his family history, tracing the Cains’ ancestry back to a king of Ulster. The Cain family crest includes three salmon ‘which denotes the fishing rights of three Irish rivers (the Bann, the Boyle and the Roe) and the “bloody hand” of Ulster. The Nall-Cains attached the crest to gate posts at the side of the house and placed it above the front door.’7 His ancestral credentials established, Sir Charles set out to prove himself in high society.
He used his wealth to woo royalty. In 1925 the Duke of York was invited to Brocket Hall and Sir Charles regularly took shooting parties to Scotland. He also spent a large amount of money on philanthropic activities, some of which benefitted the local community in Hertfordshire. This made it easier for people to accept him, and in 1933 his wish came true and he was at last accepted into the aristocracy when he was created a peer. He chose the title of Lord Brocket. He died less than two years later and his son, Arthur Ronald, took over the title and his father’s estates in Hertfordshire and Hampshire as well as properties in north-west Scotland.
The second Lord Brocket was thirty-one when he inherited the title. He was a committed member of the Anglo–German Fellowship, an organisation that existed between 1935 and 1939 to build a closer understanding between the United Kingdom and Germany. It was largely non-political and it folded at the outbreak of the war. However, there were some who used the fellowship as a cover for covert activities. ‘Both the Cambridge spies Philby and Burgess, on instruction from Moscow, joined the group to cover the tracks of their Communist connections, while Hitler sent Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, to Britain to lead the Fellowship, while he conducted negotiations with Edward VIII to try to engineer an Anglo-German pact. Philby was, for a while, editor of the organisation’s newsletter.’8
The fellowship was widely perceived as being closely allied to Nazism, as members of the fellowship had close friends among the senior Nazi party members. This is borne out by the fact that National Socialist members of the earlier Anglo–German Club ‘resigned en masse in protest at Jewish club members’.9 Lord Brocket, who held extreme right-wing views, was close personal friends with Joachim von Ribbentrop, then German ambassador to Britain, who was a regular visitor to Brocket Hall. In fact, he was so closely associated with Lord Brocket that one of the bedrooms was christened the Ribbentrop Bedroom. In April 1939, Brocket travelled with Major General John Fuller, a well-known supporter of Hitler, to Germany to celebrate the Führer’s fiftieth birthday. Neville Chamberlain claimed that the foreign secretary, the Earl of Halifax, used Lord Brocket as a conduit to convey the views of the British government to leading Nazis. At his two great houses, Brocket Hall and Bramshill Park in Hampshire, Lord Brocket hosted several meetings for the supporters of Nazi Germany.
When Brocket Hall was requisitioned it was immediately handed over to the Red Cross for use as a maternity home. For the next ten years the hall became the home of the London Maternity Hospital from the East End. Though it was set up by the Red Cross, it was fully staffed with doctors, midwives, nurses and orderlies from the hospital to run as a nursing home for evacuated mothers who were prepared to leave London for the birth of their babies. It was a sound decision. The East End hospital was hit by German bombs in September 1940 and again in April and May 1941, sustaining considerable damage.
Brocket Hall, just twenty-five miles from London, but deep in the Hertfordshire countryside, was believed to be an ideal location: close enough for transport for the expectant mothers to be arranged and for husbands to visit by public transport, yet far enough from the capital to be out of the bombing range of the Luftwaffe, or so the local authorities calculated.
Many of the children who were born at Brocket Hall are exceptionally proud to have an association with a stately home. Today the ‘Brocket Babies’ are scattered all over the world but some meet annually to celebrate their birth heritage. Mothers, now in their nineties, have been back to the hall to rekindle memories of a life-changing event and their link with British aristocracy. It is this human story, set against the backdrop of Brocket Hall’s opulence, that is intriguing.
A week before Alan Brocket Lowe was safely delivered in the birthing suite at Brocket Hall in September 1939, London hospitals were instructed to cease admitting patients except in the most urgent cases. Those already in hospital who could be sent home were. Outpatients departments and special clinics closed down. The government needed 140,000 beds cleared for air-raid casualties in the event that the Luftwaffe launched their much-feared Kolossal raid on London. This created a significant problem for all hospital services, including maternity.
Of all the services, maternity was the most predictable in terms of numbers so it made sense to move these services pre-emptively out of London and other big cities. The government planned to move pregnant women into billets in the countryside where they could await their confinement in safety. Dorothy Beasley was moved from Walthamstow to Hitchin in Hertfordshire and later to Brocket Hall. She said of her arrival in Hitchin: ‘The Red Cross unloaded us from the coach and instructed us to walk in twos, which we did although we had to pass all these workmen who wolf whistled at us all the way. It was most embarrassing for all of us as we had big bumps.’10 A few days later she went into labour and the Red Cross picked her up and drove her to Brocket Hall for the delivery. She was just twenty years old and giving birth to her first baby many miles from her family home. ‘I cried all the way as I was frightened with no Mum or Dad at hand and my husband had been shifted with his Unit to another district and we were losing contact. At night it was quite frightening for a young girl in those days having her first child on her own. As I laid in my bed I could see all these white statues up the corridors and it was quite creepy.’11
There has been a dwelling on the site of Brocket Hall since the thirteenth century, but the house one sees today was built by the architect James Paine in 1760. It is believed to be the only complete house Paine built. He was essentially a Palladian and his hallmarks were villas with a central building, usually with a fine staircase, and two symmetrical wings. Sir Matthew Lamb had acquired Brocket Hall in 1746 and asked Paine to design a new house that would ‘use all the technology and style of the age to bestow glory on the newly emergent Lamb dynasty.’12 Money was no object. When Sir Matthew died in 1768 his estate was worth the equivalent of about 13 billion pounds in today’s money.
The result was a handsome brick mansion with gabled roofs standing above a lake, fashioned out of the river Lea, which was widened when the gardens were laid out in the style of Capability Brown. The interiors are more striking than the exterior. Architecturally the rooms are restrained and elegant but sumptuously decorated. There are mirrors designed by Thomas Chippendale and Robert Adam’s hand can be seen in the marble chimney pieces. The ceilings were decorated by the Florentine artist Giovanni Battista Cipriani, who created motifs for the various downstairs rooms including hunting and banqueting reliefs, classical medallions and a series of geometrical patterns in pinks, blues and turquoises.
The grand central staircase rises out of the hall, below a great glass cupola and splits to lead to eight first-floor bedrooms. All the rooms have their own individual design and are named after some of the most famous individuals who slept in them. Lord Melbourne’s bedroom, dressing room and bathroom became the birthing suite where the majority of the Brocket babies were born. It was named for Sir Peniston Lamb, who became the first Lord Melbourne after his wife, Lady Elizabeth Lamb, who was charming, ambitious, single-minded and determined to further the position of her husband and her family in society, procured for him the role of master of the bedchamber for the future George IV. Her charms so captured the prince that he made her his lover, despite the difference in their ages – she was eleven years his senior. The affair lasted for four years – although they remained on friendly terms for the rest of her life – and Elizabeth’s son George, born in 1784, was widely held to be the son of the Prince of Wales, not Lord Melbourne. In fact only the first of Lady Melbourne’s children was believed to be the legitimate son of her husband. It was said that she was so disillusioned by her husband’s limited intellect, and his constant and blatant infidelity that she chose fathers for her other children who showed greater promise and talent.
Two years after their affair began, the Prince Regent specified a particularly colourful décor for his bedroom suite at Brocket Hall: hand-painted Chinese wallpaper, which was highly fashionable at the time. Peacocks and other birds with colourful plumage perch delicately on boughs of cherry blossom, roses and tulip trees. A red-legged wren pecks at a stylised rock formation while parrots, swallows and butterflies flit and wheel around the exotic three-tiered red and gold lacquered pagoda bed-head, complete with golden bells. Lady Melbourne requested a special ‘diplomatic door’ to be cut through the wall from her bedroom into the stairwell so that she did not have to bypass Lord Melbourne’s suite during night-time visits to the prince.
This beautiful room, so full of history, passion and intrigue, was used during the war as the recovery room. Mothers who had been given anaesthetics or painkillers would come round in their hospital beds to glimpse the wallpaper and see the great red pagoda against the wall where the prince’s bed had once stood. Some women told the present Lord Brocket that they thought they had died and gone to heaven as they found themselves surrounded by what appeared to be paradise.
A third bedroom is today named after Queen Victoria. When she came to the throne in 1837, the second Viscount Melbourne, William Lamb, was sixty-one years old and prime minister. During the first three years of Queen Victoria’s reign, he became her confidant, political instructor and most trusted advisor. His biographers claim that he was happier then than at any other time in his life.
As her subject (and a sixty-year-old one, at that), flirtation with Victoria was not in question. But he could expose all of his foibles—his loose talk, his cynicism, his odd mannerisms, indeed his occasional outbursts of naked emotion—without fear of reproof or ridicule from a devoted young woman, while simultaneously doing his duty as man and statesman by tutoring her in society and politics. For her part, she could depend on him totally without impropriety, and yet by virtue of her status and her own strong will never quite appear dependent or lose the power to command. Melbourne liked both her dependence and her authority: she was Caroline [his wife] within safe bounds.13
He acted as her private secretary with his own bedroom at Windsor, spending more time with the new queen than he did on his prime ministerial work. In her journals for May 1838, she mentions his name on every page, writing about requesting his advice on her choice of young women to hold her train at her coronation, what pictures she should hang in the sitting room and wanting to know what was happening at Brocket Hall. Such was Melbourne’s devotion to Victoria that he sent her flowers every week from the Brocket gardens and greenhouses. Queen Victoria stayed at Brocket on more than one occasion, preferring a modest bedroom at the back of the house rather than one of the more opulent suites at the front. The bedroom in which she slept is today called the Queen Victoria Room, but it was this room that was known in the 1930s and during the war as the von Ribbentrop Bedroom, after the German ambassador. Mothers gave birth to babies in the Ribbentrop Bedroom as well as Lord Melbourne’s suite and more than one Brocket baby has told me that their start in life was marked by the association with an unpleasant historical figure.
The routine at Brocket soon settled down as the hall was properly equipped with baby baths, early designs of washing machines in the basement and indoor and outdoor beds for mothers and cots for the babies to take in fresh air. The hospital had a strict regime, as did all nursing homes and maternity units throughout the country, but it was also clean and hygienic. Childbirth in hospital was intended to be structured, clinical, regimented and as far from the chaos and risk of home births as it could be. Childbirth had been something to fear in the last century, but now, with more medical intervention, women had less to be worried about. At the beginning of the war, nurses, mothers and auxiliaries wore masks at all times when handling the babies in order to keep them germ-free for as long as possible. Nurses, midwives and Matron wore white uniforms and headdresses or caps, black stockings and sensible shoes.
Once the baby was born – gas and air was permitted at Brocket Hall but not available for women giving birth at home – the mothers would be taken into the recovery room where they would repose in the plush surroundings enjoyed by the Prince Regent 130 years earlier. When ready to move to a ward, the mothers were pushed on their trolleys into one of the various rooms where they were kept in bed for a week. Bedbaths and bedpans were part of the routine for the first few days. The babies were taken away from the mothers at birth. There were weighed, swaddled and settled in the nursery where they were immediately subjected to a fixed routine of feeding, sleeping, changing, bathing and contact with their mothers for a few hours a day.
Over the course of the next months and years, Brocket Hall developed into a highly efficient maternity home. In 1942, the Ministry of Information sent a photographer to record details of life there for inclusion in an official album. There is a strange contrast between the luxurious décor in the wards and the austere hospital beds; mothers are neatly tucked in and knitting white woollen garments for their babies, who are absent, either in the nursery or being bathed by student midwives. The bathroom in the basement caught the photographer’s eye. One picture shows a nervous young student nurse, masked up and anxiously holding a screaming baby above an enamel-coated tin bathtub set up on a trolley with all the equipment to hand – towels, nappies, soap and talcum powder. It is hardly a reassuring image for a modern parent but the caption emphasises that the nurse ‘is wearing a surgical mask to prevent the spread of germs’.14
Miss E. F. Stock, formerly a sister at City Road Maternity Hospital, who had swapped handling babies for tending the plants in the kitchen garden, is shown on her knees by a flowerbed. Miss Stock’s job was to keep the hall supplied with vegetables so that they could be as self-sufficient as possible and supplement the diet available on wartime hospital rations. The photograph shows her next to her wheelbarrow, on the rim of which are perched her Jack Russell and dachshund looking as if they owned the hall. In the background, a nurse is tending a new mother who is lying outside on a day bed ‘taking the air’ while her baby is sleeping peacefully in a pram under a tree. It is a bucolic and heartwarming scene until you look closer and see the windows above the door show signs of blast damage from a bomb that landed nearby during the Blitz. Despite being twenty-five miles outside London, it seems Brocket Hall was not entirely safe from enemy attack.
Janice Hawker was born at Brocket Hall on 29 January 1943 and was delighted in later years to find letters from her mother to her father during her stay, giving some insight into the daily routine of the hospital. Just after Janice was born, her mother wrote to her father: ‘It is 6 o’clock in the morning. It was gone 11 o’clock last night before the lights were put out, and we were up again at 4.30. We have washed and fed the babies and have had breakfast already. Tomorrow Mrs Ives and I go down to the nursery and dining room and I shall be able to have a look round this place.’15
The next letter must have been sent after she and Mrs Ives had been allowed to move from the first-floor ward to the more relaxed ground-floor bedrooms set up in the morning room, library or billiard room, in preparation for leaving hospital:
This ward is a lot more jolly than the other, I think. It seems more free and easy down here and not so strict. The girls are able to walk from ward to ward and have a ‘jaw’ with each other . . . This morning we have had the windows right up and have been able to see across the park. It’s a really lovely view to look out on. They say that the trees are alive with squirrels. The ward is full now, we had two more boys in, so that makes us three girls and three boys.16
Doreen Glover explained how she was treated after having given birth at Brocket Hall:
I spent about two weeks in a room with a couple of other mums. It was quite a busy time for the nurses and tiring for the mums. We were confined to bed for eight days in those times before we were allowed to put a foot out of bed. We had blanket baths daily, bed pans when wanted, and were sponged down with Dettol water. We read, knitted, and slept daily between feeding babies. I was very lucky as my bed was close to a window where I could look out on the cold frosty mornings across the vast grounds and see birds and rabbits.17
At the end of her stay, Doreen was invited to go and see the other rooms in the Hall. She was particularly struck by the Prince Regent’s room and the grand entrance with Paine’s magnificent decorative staircase rising from the hall and dividing at the first-floor landing. She told her son, Brian, she had walked up it helped by two ambulance men as she was already in labour and ‘for the first couple of days I thought I had dreamed of my grand entrance, but the nurse assured me I wasn’t dreaming.’18 When she left she saw for herself that is was as splendid as she had recalled in her semi-delirious state two weeks earlier.
Barbara Perry’s mother told her she sat on a lavatory seat in one of the first-floor bathrooms and looked up to see coronets mounted on the canopies above to acknowledge the royalty who had occupied the bedroom suites in the past. It tickled her to think she had enjoyed the same luxury as the aristocracy. Her baby was born on 23 August 1941, a chilly damp day with little to remember it by but for the next two weeks the sun shone, the temperature rose to the mid-twenties and Barbara’s mother enjoyed a happy fortnight in comfortable surroundings before being collected and taken back to London to resume life again at home. For many of these women the few days in bed after the birth of their babies was a brief period of calm and tranquillity during the war. They were taken care of and had none of the worries of coping with rations and other children.
Marjorie Brisland spent Christmas in confinement at Brocket Hall and remembered the nurses putting on a show for the mothers while the only doctor at the hall dressed up as Father Christmas. The nurses made presents for the babies and she was given a toy duck with a felt beak. June Godby was born in the hall and returned with her father to collect her newborn sister, Stella, who was also born at Brocket in January 1947. June remembers her mother telling her she saw the stars through the window on her way to the delivery room and decided to name the baby Stella if it was a girl. June’s memory is of sitting on a bench seat at the bottom of the grand staircase which struck her as very decorative, even at the age of five.
There was a dark side to maternity care in the 1930s and 1940s. June was born at 9am on 15 February 1942, the day of the fall of Singapore and the greatest British military defeat in history. June’s mother was listening to the wireless and heard the news just after she had given birth. She told June how much she loved being at Brocket but was disturbed by the fact that ‘unmarried mothers had to wait on the married mothers and clean and scrub the floors. She thought this was very wrong.’19
Women who were carrying illegitimate babies were considered a disgrace by society and usually by their families as well. Their babies were removed from them at or soon after birth and put up for adoption unless there was some very powerful force at hand to stop this. The situation at Brocket Hall was no different and yet it seems ironic given the colourful history of the house, when illegitimacy was accepted as part and parcel of life for the upper classes at least, that young women were treated so punitively during the war. A mother who gave birth to an illegitimate baby at Brocket during the war, but who wished to remain anonymous, told her story in 2009. I shall call her Elsie for the purpose of making her story seem as human as possible, for at the time she was not accorded that dignity.
‘The year was 1944 and I was leaving my home of twenty years, the last time I would be calling it ‘my home’. On my journey I was joined by my ‘partner in crime’, the father of my unborn, illegitimate child. The small case I carried contained most of what I was to wear for nearly two years.’20
The next paragraph of her tale is entitled: Welcome to the Brownies. ‘At Brocket Hall I joined a group of girls called Brownies because we all had to wear a very unattractive brown dress. We were all carrying illegitimate babies and for different reasons were separated from our families to become the ‘downstairs’ maids, kitchen staff, laundry maids and other jobs required to run the City of London Hospital, now relocated to Brocket Hall.’21
The Brownies were used as skivvies: they worked as cleaners, maids, bottle and nappy washers or helpers in the kitchens from the time they arrived at Brocket until they went into the second stage of labour. Sometimes this was just weeks, but for Elsie, who had found herself leaving home for good at an early stage in her pregnancy, it was months. When she arrived at Brocket Hall she was told her duties would not start until the next day so she was directed to the attic by ‘a rather stern-faced Sister Albertella’, where she was to share a room with eight other Brownies.
The seven small attic rooms are off a corridor on two sides of the round glass atrium that lights the ground-floor staircase. The corridor is joined to the basement via a servants’ staircase. This meant the young women could go up and down the back stairs without being seen by the mothers who were lying in the state rooms, sheltered from the stigma that accompanied illegitimacy.
The morning after her arrival, Elsie was shown to the extensive basement where she was told she would become a laundry maid. Over the course of the next five months she washed hundreds of nappies, towels and baby clothes. She said she had never worked so hard in her life. Matron was a stickler and she would return stained nappies with a stern rebuke for the wash-girls who had not scrubbed them clean. When the weather was poor Elsie had to carry tubs of clean, wrung-out nappies into the drying room: ‘The heat was tremendous. Some nurses said it was like the black hole of Calcutta which didn’t mean much to me – all I knew was that it was hot!’22 The nappies were rough and caused the babies to develop sore, red bottoms. Elsie remembers feeling so sorry for the little tots with aggressive nappy rash.
The routine was the same, day in day out, regardless of how advanced their pregnancies were. ‘We rose at 6am and began work, stopping for breakfast at 7am. We had another break at 11am where our big treat was a slice of bread and home-made dripping.’ They had lunch after the patients had been fed, and tea which comprised one slice of bread, one portion of butter and one cup of tea. ‘Kath, the cook, ran the kitchen like a sergeant major, no-one ever crossed her or questioned what she did or said.’23 Elsie knew full well that she heartily disapproved of the Brownies. The girls, for most of them were just that, were not allowed to go to bed until all of them had finished their work, ‘which often meant that at the end of the day we would all be standing in the kitchen peeling spuds.’24 There was half a day off a week and a pay of ten shillings, but for all that Elsie enjoyed the camaraderie and the fact she was with like-minded women.
So the days, weeks and months passed. I remember some of the girls well. Florrie, who was the upstairs maid, had been ‘promoted’ after her baby was born to collecting dirty dishes and bringing them down in the lift to wash them in the kitchen. Wearing her blue uniform and without the tell-tale bump, which as a Brownie she had to hide from the ‘innocent’ mothers to be upstairs and with whom she was now allowed to mix.
At last it was time for Elsie to give birth to the baby she knew would be taken away from her for adoption just a few days after the birth.
Sister Albertella saw I was in the first stages of labour and advised me to go to the labour ward, first changing my dress so as to look as though I had just arrived! ‘Too soon’ they said. ‘Go back, you are not due for three weeks, you cannot be in labour’. So back I went downstairs to continue the routine, with sympathetic sounds from fellow Brownies. The pain continued until we were all in bed then the ward sister came in with a phial of liquid and said ‘Drink, it will give you a good night’s sleep’. It did, but only for me to wake up the next morning definitely in labour. My daughter was born that morning, three weeks premature. Well, any mother will tell you how they feel absolutely ecstatic, no one could possibly be as clever as you. What a feeling! She was without doubt the best-looking baby in the nursery. Rosemary, who was second in charge to Matron and had seen hundreds of babies whilst working for City of London Hospital in London and at Brocket agreed she was absolutely beautiful. Her father came to see her very soon but when he went to leave was told never to come again by the matron.25
Elsie’s partner was banned by Matron because both of them were married to other people and that was utterly unacceptable at the time. Matron regarded it as a crime. Having a man of ‘that sort’ at the nursing home, even though he felt he had a perfect right to visit his baby daughter, was thought to bring a whiff of scandal into the pure and innocent wards of the legitimate birth mothers. Elsie, as an ‘irregular’ mother, was only allowed to visit her baby to feed her and she was discouraged from forming any kind of bond with the little girl. The babies were in the nursery, which had previously been the butler’s pantry, with a line of bells just inside the door with the names of the rooms they referred to painted above them. It was agony for her not to be able to see the baby more often. Sister Albertella, who had taken a shine to Elsie, promised she would pick up the baby and cuddle her whenever she had a spare moment. She told Elsie that the little girl like to hold onto her nose which made Elsie laugh.
After just a few days Elsie was told that her baby would be taken away and she could go back to her work below stairs. It must have been bitter and heartbreaking. She did not tell the story of how she felt when her beautiful daughter was taken from her but she did write of the experience of seeing other babies being given up:
Most of the girls knew it would be impossible to keep their babies and all they had to look forward to was leaving Brocket heart-broken. Sometimes we got to hear when one of the Brownie babies was going to be collected for adoption. We all congregated at the window which overlooked the back entrance to watch the baby being carried out by the nurse and handed to the adopting parents. How can you hope to ease the pain after the mother had witnessed that? She had loved the baby so much for just a few days and may never have the chance to have another. It was sheer torture for her and we all went to bed very sad and subdued on those nights.
The time came for Elsie to leave Brocket Hall, but she had nowhere to go. One of the ward maids was leaving so she asked whether she could take her place until things became more stable in her life. ‘I was interviewed by Matron who started by giving me a thoroughly good telling off.’ 26 She was given a job sewing patches onto old Brownie uniforms and made sure she did an excellent job. Her sewing companion was a prim and proper spinster with whom she had little in common but at least for now she had been given a uniform of a different colour, which meant ‘I was now allowed to be viewed by the “public” i.e. the married parents.’27
After doing two weeks of sewing she was deemed fit enough for more heavy work and was sent back to the kitchens to collect the dirty dishes. For the next few months she lived in the twilight world between the orderly maternity hospital upstairs, full of light and flowers, crisp white sheets and the domineering matron, and the downstairs world of the brown jobs where the kitchen, laundry and drying rooms were hot and very busy. Yet she looked back on that time, especially before the baby was born, and found that despite the disgrace and disapproval, she had been happy. She wrote:
I loved . . . the people, the work, the bonding with similar situated folks. It wasn’t a holiday camp but it was war-time and everyone was used to hard times – we were very fortunate, looked after by professionals. Our babies had the very best care, safe from bombs and no queuing for rations.
After Elsie finally left Brocket she married her daughter’s father and went on to have three more children. What happened to her baby girl born during the war is not known. The first legitimate child she had was a son who was also born at Brocket Hall, in 1948. This time she was well above stairs in every sense. What a contrast that must have been for her but she made no comment about it in her memoir. Elsie was lucky that she had a supportive husband-to-be who she knew would be there for her even though the circumstances were far from ideal. Others were not so fortunate.
Norah Hern, a midwife at Brocket Hall in the 1940s, described to a friend the situation for other girls and women bearing illegitimate children:
There were two tiers of unmarried mothers, those with money and those without. Those without were asked to work at Brocket and associated lodgings to earn their stay. The babies either kept or adopted. Those with money, either well to do folk (or girls made pregnant by well to do folk) went to Lemsford House before giving birth and for rest after birth. They went to Brocket Hall to give birth as the facilities were there for any complications. If the babies were in good health and were to be kept they would return to Lemsford with their mother but if they were up for adoption they would stay at Brocket Hall and be looked after by nurses, they would be kept away from the other babies as most were secret babies.28
Lemsford House was built in the mid-nineteenth century as a vicarage but it was thought too large by the incumbent in the early twentieth century so he moved to Church End, further down Brocket Road. The Brocket estate rented Lemsford House out to wealthy tenants until the Second World War when it became part of the package run by the maternity hospital.
One nurse described how ‘most didn’t want to keep their babies as it would make them unsuitable for marriage so they never got to see their child, they weren’t even told if it was a boy or girl or if it was healthy, etc. This was private and very expensive, around £500. If you think you could buy a house for that sort of money [in those days].’29 Lemsford House was run by the church and the unwanted babies were sent to the Church of England Children’s Home in Muswell Hill for adoption. Records in the parish register show that 133 babies were baptised between October 1940 and February 1948. The mothers gave their address as Lemsford House and the father’s name was not recorded on the birth certificates. This is evidence only of the babies who were baptised, so it is probable that more than that number were born to mothers at Lemsford House.
There are stories of illegitimate babies who found out, some quickly, some much later in life, that they had been born at Brocket Hall. Julie Bloomfield was adopted by a couple called Maryon and William Gray when she was three, though she had no idea that she was not their birth child until she applied for a passport at the age of eighteen. She had had a very happy childhood and wrote: ‘This didn’t distress me at all because I had always loved them both very much and would never have considered trying to find out who my natural mother was as I considered it would have been too traumatic for her and my adopted parents. Of course, I always wondered what my mother was like and why I had been adopted.’30 She decided against trying to trace her birth mother as she felt it might be too upsetting. All she knew about her was her name: Iolanthe Whitburn, and that she had been named at birth Valerie Rosalind Whitburn.
It was not until 2004 that an Australian who was tracing his family tree got in contact with Julie to say he thought they might be related. She then obtained a copy of her birth certificate showing that she had been born at Brocket Hall Maternity Hospital on 28 July 1941 and that her mother had been a hotel receptionist in Wiltshire. There was no mention of a father. Eventually, after a lot more digging, she discovered that her mother had died but she had a half-sister. Julie plucked up the courage to get in touch with her and learned that there was another half-sister. The three of them got together and Julie was overwhelmed to see a photograph of herself in her mother’s old blue wallet, aged about three. It was the end of a puzzling journey for Julie’s two half-sisters, who had never known who the little girl in the photograph might be.
Mo Neate was also born to an unmarried mother. She arrived on 15 April 1944, born to Constance ‘Connie’ Kennedy who originally came from Aspatria in Cumberland. Connie was initially meant to give birth at the London Hospital but was moved to Brocket Hall after the hospital had been damaged by a bomb. Shortly after the birth, Connie returned to Aspatria and Christine, as she was then known, was sent to the Church of England’s Home in Muswell Hill for adoption. She remained at the home for three months until she was taken in by Mabel and Cecil Crouch who came from East Dulwich. They renamed the baby as they did not like names that could be shortened: ‘They called me Maureen – and I have been called Mo for many years!’31
After her adoptive parents died, Mo set out to trace her birth mother and eventually discovered that Connie had married a year after Mo’s birth and went on to have two more children. ‘When I first heard that I was born in Brocket Hall I thought perhaps (erroneously) I had connections with the landed gentry and maybe the proverbial bike sheds!’32 She discovered her mother was living in Burnley and made efforts through an intermediary at the National Organisation for Counselling Adoptees and Parents (NORCAP) to visit Connie. Tragically, three days before the meeting was due to take place, Connie died. However, there was a crumb of comfort: ‘NORCAP had written to Connie asking if she could help one of their clients with information about a child who had been born in the spring of 1944 in Hertfordshire – Connie knew immediately it was me and was apparently overjoyed.’33 This sad story ended at her mother’s funeral, where Mo met her nine uncles and aunts for the first time. Her sister had died at six months and her brother died in 2001 but she remained in touch with her sister-in-law.
Such was the stigma of a pregnancy out of wedlock that it sometimes even affected married couples. Les Cook, who now lives in Spain, was born at Brocket Hall on 21 April 1945. His mother, Evelyn, had had a difficult pregnancy and she was sent to Brocket Hall in March. Her husband was in the RAF in Ceylon and Les believes that his conception was the result of a ‘final fling’ on his father’s last home visit. When his father returned to Britain he became convinced the baby could not possibly be his. As Les was born ten months after the last opportunity the parents would have had for intimacy he forced through the divorce. It was a family tragedy that was seldom discussed. Les lived in Enfield with his mother, his aunt and his grandparents, and he never had contact with his father again. Years later he discovered that his father had remarried weeks after the divorce had gone through and had moved back to the family home where he lived for sixteen years, just three miles away from the legitimate son he refused to accept as his own. Les’s father and his new wife had a son in 1955 and a daughter in 1963. Les wrote: ‘My father died in 1990 but I was able to visit his grave and finally say hello and goodbye. I have a wonderful wife and family but so wish that I had asked questions earlier and been able to share a much broader based family.’34
Inevitably there were personal tragedies for mothers whose babies died at birth or within a few days. The register in St John’s Church records sixty-two babies who died during the war soon after birth, all of them bar one from Brocket Hall, and some of those were buried in the churchyard. There is, however, no reference to babies who were stillborn. In the 1940s these babies would be passed to the undertaker with half a crown. They were then put in a coffin with another body and buried with no record as to their whereabouts in the graveyard. Andy Chapman, a local historian at the Lemsford Local History Group, has been researching this subject for some time, trying to help to bring closure to women whose stillborn babies were classed as clinical waste, and to get recognition of this sad footnote to the history of Brocket Hall as a maternity home. He was inspired by a woman called Pauline, who contacted him and explained that her mother’s baby boy had been stillborn and was taken away from her at birth without explanation. She never knew what had happened to her son. She described her mother’s grief and sadness as part of her own DNA. Another woman, called June, who had a similar experience, was a little more fortunate in that her husband was able to visit and see his dead child before it was taken away. In April 2016 there was a church service in St John’s to commemorate these children and there will be a memorial to them in due course.
We know that a total of 8,388 babies were born over the ten years of Brocket Hall’s existence as a maternity hospital, including several pairs of twins, although the birth records from the war years no longer exist and are said to have been destroyed by fire when they were returned to London. Among the famous Brocket Babies are the distinguished novelist Jim Crace, who was born in the von Ribbentrop Bedroom; Colin Berry, the BBC Radio 2 presenter and the film director Mike Leigh.
In 1946, the City of London Maternity Hospital took over financial responsibility for Brocket Hall from Hertfordshire County Council, who had administered it on behalf of the Red Cross during the war years. Their own buildings in London had been damaged during the Blitz and the City of London had to make up its mind whether to replace the existing buildings or start again from scratch. The decision to rebuild the maternity hospital in London was taken at the end of the war but it took three years to complete the new hospital in a different site away from the noisy City Road. Meantime Brocket Hall continued to function as a maternity home until 1949. Lord Brocket, like many other home owners, had to wait until long after the end of hostilities to reclaim his property.
