Aldenham Park was the ancestral home of Lord and Lady Acton. The house and grounds were used as a school during the war.
If humanity means anything it is impossible to shut our eyes. It is equally impossible to refuse to take action.
G. K. A. Bell, Bishop of Chichester 1
In January 1939, Mr and Mrs James de Rothschild received a letter from Aylesbury Borough Council containing advice from the minster of health, Walter Elliot, about the transfer of population in time of war entitled ‘What the Householder is Asked to Do’. The minister wrote that it was necessary to prepare in good time and that ‘Children must come first. That, I am sure, will be agreed by all, and I feel sure too that we can rely on willing help from all.’2 The note concluded: ‘In every case as much notice as possible will be given to householders.’3 When the moment arrived the Rothschilds had four days’ warning.
Dorothy de Rothschild’s first thought had been to offer their home, Waddesdon Manor, to the Ministry of Health as a possible convalescent home or hospital. This had been the fate of many houses in Britain during the First World War as hundreds of thousands of beds were needed for sick, injured and recovering servicemen. It was assumed that the same would be required in the new war, but the nature of the fighting did not follow the same pattern and, as the government foresaw, houses for evacuees and government departments, as well as the armed forces, would be the most pressing need. Nevertheless, some houses would be needed for civilian hospitals and an official from the Ministry of Health came to Waddesdon to make a preliminary inspection. He gave the manor a damning report which rather surprised the Rothschilds. Dorothy wrote later: ‘His verdict was disappointing: “the most unsuitable house for a hospital which could be imagined”. We came to understand that boiserie [sculpted French-style panelling] even if covered up, would be a first-class harbourer of germs, and so we had to give up that idea.’4
Waddesdon Manor is one of the most striking and unusual of Britain’s stately homes. It was built by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild as a country retreat in which to surprise and entertain his friends. He wanted a house built in the grand style of the Renaissance châteaux of the Loire Valley and he could afford to realise his dream. The baron stemmed from the Austrian branch of the Rothschild dynasty that had started in Frankfurt’s Jewish ghetto in the sixteenth century. In the eighteenth century, the five sons of Mayer Amschel settled in Frankfurt, Vienna, Naples, Paris and London, the financial capitals of Europe at the time. Ferdinand was of the line that had settled in Vienna but he moved to London in 1859 when his mother, who was the daughter of the founder of N. M. Rothschild & Sons, passed away. In 1865 he married his cousin, Evelina, who died two years later giving birth to a stillborn son. He grieved for her for the best part of a decade and built the Evelina Hospital for Sick Children in London’s Southwark as a memorial to her. It is now part of the Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust and is the second-largest provider of children’s services in London. Ferdinand never remarried but instead spent the rest of his life living next door to his younger sister, Alice, who was also unmarried. She is purported to have said: ‘No man will wed me for my looks, and I will make certain no man will wed me for my money!’5
Ferdinand’s passion, apart from hunting, was collecting art and furniture. He had a house in Piccadilly but he wanted somewhere in the country to house his growing collection. When his father died in 1874 he came into a substantial inheritance. Farming land at Waddesdon belonging to the Marlborough estate came up for auction in 1873 but was not sold. Ferdinand bought it and the site where the manor now stands, commanding stunning views of Buckinghamshire and the Vale of Aylesbury, for £200,000. He commissioned the French architect, Gabriel-Hippolyte Destailleur, to design and build his vision, while Elie Lainé formalised the gardens. Ferdinand had been greatly impressed by the ancient châteaux of Valois during his stay in Touraine, and wrote: ‘I determined to build my house in the same style, and considered it safer to get the design made by a French architect who was familiar with the work.’6 The foundation stone was laid in 1877 and the bachelor’s wing completed three years later. To turn a bare wilderness on the crest of a hill into a house and park was a remarkable achievement, but to do it in just three years with little mechanised aid, requiring hundreds of men labouring with wheelbarrows, ponies and traps and shovels seems from our modern point of view almost inconceivable. To the inhabitants of Waddesdon village it must have looked like a fairy-tale castle rising out of the air. The eclectic style incorporated towers based on the Château de Maintenon and the twin staircase towers on the north side which were inspired by the staircase tower at the Château de Chambord.
By 1880, the main part of the manor was finished and Ferdinand held house parties for twenty guests. After a few years, he realised that his architect had been right when he said that ‘one always builds too small’. Ferdinand wrote later: ‘he prophesied truly. After I had lived in the house for a while I was compelled to add first one wing and then another.’7 The large morning room on the ground floor and two bedroom suites above it were completed in 1891. The manor was constructed to the most modern standards and included structural steel, which impressed engineers working on repairs a century later. The interior was luxurious with all the comforts of up-to-date plumbing, central heating and electricity, which were usually missing in country houses belonging to people in his social circle. For the next seven years, Ferdinand de Rothschild entertained the high aristocracy of Britain at his famous ‘Saturday to Monday’ social gatherings. It became the site of some of the great political house parties of the era as Rothschild was both a Liberal MP and a leading member of the Prince of Wales’ set and visits from royalty were not uncommon. Queen Victoria paid a private visit on 14 May 1890, which required endless preparation and planning. Fortunately it played out well and she was so impressed by the set-up and above all the catering that she sent her chef, head gardener and furniture keeper to learn from the Waddesdon methods. Victoria was said to have been so fascinated by the electricity, with which she was unfamiliar, that she spent ten minutes turning the newly electrified eighteenth-century chandelier on and off.
Ferdinand de Rothschild died in 1898 before reaching his sixtieth birthday and the house passed to his sister Alice who saw it as her duty to act as the protector of his creation. She is best remembered for her strict housekeeping rules that ensured the preservation of the collection. Visitors to the house in the mid-twentieth century would often comment to Dorothy de Rothschild on the exquisite, undamaged porcelain. This, she would reply, was down to Alice who believed ‘when touching china, always use two hands and maintain complete silence.’8 She ensured the longevity of the silk wallpapers by insisting on low light levels, especially when the sun was high, and had cotton covers designed for the silk upholstery. Alice was also a passionate gardener but during the First World War she gave over the formal gardens to vegetables to feed people in need. After the war she restored the layout of the beds, some of which can still be seen in the summer planting today.
When Alice died in 1922, the house, estate and all its contents passed to her great-nephew, James de Rothschild, but not the family papers. Ferdinand ordered that all his personal papers be destroyed upon his death. Alice did the same. The more intimate history of Waddesdon, therefore, comes from the next incumbents, James and Dorothy, the last members of the family to live in the house. Fortunately for posterity, Dorothy did not dispose of James’s letters and writing, nor, after a change of heart, did she request her own fascinating diaries, menu books and letters be destroyed. Thus the history of this great house in the twentieth century is impressively preserved in one of the best-kept archives which contains, among other documents, over 20,000 letters written to James and Dorothy over the years.
James had been brought up in Paris, the grandson of the French branch of the Rothschild family, and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1913, when he was already in his mid-thirties, he met and married Dorothy Pinto, seventeen years his junior, and the couple enjoyed what Dorothy described as a ‘whirlwind existence’ between London and Paris, getting married just six weeks after their engagement was announced. Within eighteen months their lives, like those of the rest of the world, were disrupted by the First World War. After the war, during the latter half of which he had fought for the British Army, James went to Paris to be part of the Zionist delegation at the Paris Peace Conference. In 1920 he came back to Britain and applied for British naturalisation. This enabled his aunt, whom they had visited regularly since their marriage, to leave him her estate, something neither of them was expecting. ‘Waddesdon is not an inheritance, it is a career,’ Lord d’Abernon told Dorothy and James when hearing of their good fortune. Catherine Taylor, Waddesdon’s archivist explained: ‘Alice and Ferdinand used Waddesdon for entertaining, whereas Dorothy and James used it as a permanent home. The estate was no longer run as it had been in its Victorian heyday when it employed around 200 men.’9 For the next seventeen years, the Rothschilds lived at Waddesdon, becoming an integral part of the village as well as using the great house to entertain political and personal friends, royalty and family. By the Second World War Dorothy was used to running the house like a well-oiled machine.
While discussions continued about Waddesdon’s potential use in wartime the Rothschilds became increasingly aware of the desperate plight of the Jews in Germany. James gave a speech in Glasgow in March 1939 appealing to his audience to consider especially the children. He described how 600,000 men, women and children were being sacrificed to the cause of the monstrous Nazi experiment. ‘What is the influence of this situation upon the character and outlook of the Jewish child in Germany today? To be kept in a state of constant fear, I do not necessarily mean fear of physical violence, but mental and moral fear, must eventually produce a cowardly disposition. Fear is the most soul-destroying element in the world . . .’10 He knew that thousands of families were desperate to get their children out of Germany, even in the knowledge that it might mean they would never see them again. It was a passionate speech by a man not given to expressing his emotions in public and it reflected a deep anger and frustration at the horrific mental impact of the Nazi regime on the Jewish people.
The Rothschilds received a letter in early 1939 from the daughter of a Jewish school teacher in Frankfurt. Her father had been arrested after Kristallnacht in November 1938 and she was anxious to find out whether his students could be removed from Germany to safety. The letter, which arrived at Waddesdon, was addressed simply: ‘Lord Rothschild, London’. James de Rothschild asked a friend, Julian Layton (born Loewenstein), to go to Frankfurt to arrange the safe exit of the school from Germany and to bring the boys to the Waddesdon estate. The Loewenstein and Rothschild families had known each other in Frankfurt in the nineteenth century and the friendship had continued when both families moved to London.
The Flersheim-Sichel Institute in Frankfurt was run by Hugo and Lilly Steinhardt as a residential school for boys. The rise of the Nazis had meant that Jewish children could not be educated in the mainstream German school system because of their race, so desperate parents sent them to Frankfurt for their school years. Over a period of several weeks, Layton dealt with the German government and with the parents of the boys, not all of whom were prepared to give permission for their sons to leave the country.
Twenty-one boys between the ages of six and thirteen arrived at Waddesdon from Frankfurt on 16 March 1939 and were accommodated in a house on the estate called The Cedars. They were lucky to escape. A second group of children from the school was stopped from leaving for South America. No one knows about the fate of that later group, but one of the boys who came to Britain said after the war that he could not believe it would have been a good outcome for those who remained in Germany.
The Cedars, formerly a nursing home, had been built by Miss Alice, and had room for the boys and their guardians, the Steinhardts. Hugo Steinhardt had spent several months in Buchenwald following his arrest. Thanks to James’s agreement to sponsor the children in Britain indefinitely and to Layton’s intervention, he was released and allowed to travel to Britain, though he died in October 1942 after a long illness exacerbated by the treatment he had received in the concentration camp. The Steinhardts’ two daughters, aged fifteen and eleven, came with them and eventually helped their mother to run the home. They were joined a month later by Miss Bertha Butzbach, who took over the kitchens and by eight other boys who managed to escape from Germany in June. As it was critical for the children to integrate as quickly as possible, they were forbidden to speak German in the house and were sent to local schools in Waddesdon and Aylesbury. The Cedars was too small to accommodate all the boys so five of them were billeted with village families. This was a thrilling thing for the boys, who missed their homes and parents. Now they had the chance to live with a family and to be immersed in the English way of life. They were invited to take it in turns to ‘live out’ for six-week periods. As a result they learned English quickly and assimilated into the community successfully, most forming lifelong friendships. They became universally known as the Cedar Boys. Dorothy wrote of her pride that Waddesdon received these bright young children with such kindness:
It says much for the understanding of the village, and for the tact of the newcomers, that this little orphanage was welcomed with open arms. The children were all educated either in the village school or in the grammar school in Aylesbury . . . They were not only quick to learn but also proved their worth on the playing field: football came naturally to them and one boy even represented Aylesbury in a boxing contest . . . During the war they were unfailingly helpful: the Waddesdon village Salvage Collection record reached dizzy heights thanks to the regularity of their assistance and their persuasiveness.11
Henry Black, the oldest Cedar Boy, said: ‘It was my responsibility to line the boys up and see that they arrived smartly at school. But soon word came back saying “Let boys be boys. We prefer a little unruliness to unnatural regimentation. Just keep the boys safe on the road.” That is the good sense and kindness we remember about Waddesdon.’12
The Cedar Boys seldom came to the manor during the war but James and Dorothy were regular visitors to the Cedars and both took a personal interest in their education, arranging scholarships for those boys who showed academic promise. During the school holidays the boys took summer jobs on the estate to keep them occupied, though a small number were able to visit relatives in other parts of Britain.
In the summer of 1940, when everyone in Britain was on tenterhooks awaiting the probable invasion by the Nazis, some of the boys from the Cedars were arrested and interned as enemy aliens on the Isle of Man. At this time two boys left for the United States and one for Israel. Fortunately all those who were interned were released by September but it must have been a very unwelcome interlude for them and the Steinhardts. At the end of the war the older boys began to leave Waddesdon to start their careers. Guenter Gruenebaum went to Manchester to work in a garage and wrote to Dorothy and James to thank them for their kindness over the years he spent at the Cedars. ‘Also I would like to thank you for bringing me over to England; if you would not have had pity on me, the same fate might have been my lot as was the fate of practically all my dear ones.’13 His mother had died in a concentration camp and his father was missing.
James de Rothschild followed the fate of Europe’s Jews with increasing concern throughout the war. He was the Liberal MP for the Isle of Ely from 1929 until he lost his seat in the 1945 election and was a member of the coalition government as undersecretary to the Ministry of Supply in 1944. In December 1942, a statement was read out in the House of Commons about the ‘extermination camps’. That night, Conservative MP Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon wrote in his diary how ‘Jimmy de Rothschild rose, and with immense dignity, and his voice vibrating with emotion, spoke for five minutes in moving tones on the plight of these peoples.’
There were tears in his eyes, and I feared that he might break down; the House caught his spirit and was deeply moved. Somebody suggested that we stand in silence to pay our respects to these suffering peoples, and the House as a whole rose and stood for a few frozen seconds. It was a fine moment and my back tingled.14
Two and a half years before this speech, but after the arrival of the Jewish boys from Frankfurt to the Cedars, the government evacuation plans began to take shape. A visit to Waddesdon village in June 1939 led civil servants to conclude that the village could take 175 evacuees, although when canvassed earlier in the year the inhabitants, numbering approximately 1,300, had offered to take 475 children, while the manor could accommodate over a hundred from a single or multiple organisations. In mid-August Dorothy met an emissary from the London County Council, who, with her housekeeper, Mrs Green, measured up the manor. Ten days later, on 25 August, she returned from London to find the house ‘in an advanced stage of packing up’15. She and James moved into the bachelor wing on 29 August and her diary brims with details of meetings on behalf of the evacuees not to the manor but to the village, for which she evidently felt some responsibility. In the end and after many consultations, the Ministry of Health concluded that the only suitable function for Waddesdon Manor was as a safe harbour for nursery-aged children from London who would otherwise be at risk from air attack. It was for this reason that four separate schools and an orphanage from Croydon ended up in the magnificent surroundings of Waddesdon Manor during the Second World War.
The evacuation of unaccompanied schoolchildren to billets in the countryside has so dominated the wartime story of the mass movement of people that it is easy to forget the picture was more varied. Children’s homes, orphanages, nurseries and schools for the disabled all had to be considered in the evacuation scheme and their needs catered for. It was far more difficult to evacuate entire institutions than it was to find willing householders to offer a child or two a room in their homes, though some owners of large properties did take larger groups, as John Colville noticed when he went to spend the weekend at Stansted Park outside Portsmouth. He wrote in his diary: ‘They were just en famille, Lord and Lady Bessborough and Moyra [Ponsonby], Eric [Duncannon] having joined his regiment. There were also sixty or more orphans, who played cricket happily on the lawn in front of the house but were carefully excluded from the main part of the house itself, which remains as cheerful and comfortable as ever.’16 Those evacuees remained for only a matter of weeks before returning to their home in Portsmouth. Others needed to be evacuated from London for the long term.
By the 1930s, counties and county boroughs were responsible for homes and for fostering schemes, with London County Council overseeing dozens of different services for orphans and vulnerable children who were at that time described as ‘waifs and strays’. Once war was imminent the need for large houses to accommodate the children from these homes became critical and the council spread its net wide in order to find suitable properties. Richard Titmuss, in his survey Social Policy during the Second World War, estimated that a residential home for forty young children would need over 4,000 articles of equipment including beds, bottles and baths, as well as cooking equipment, outdoor clothing and a very large number of clean clothes. ‘Until central buying departments and regional stores were properly functioning, equipment had to be scraped together in bits and pieces.’17
The Ministry of Health finally informed the Rothschilds on 2 September that children and staff from an orphanage and nursery schools from Croydon would be evacuated en masse to Waddesdon and they would be arriving that week. Dorothy wrote: ‘We had been given four days’ notice to prepare for them . . . this went much more smoothly than could have been hoped. With the exception of three rooms on the ground floor, all the others were stripped and emptied, as were all the bedrooms on the first floor. We ourselves were evacuated to the Bachelor’s wing. There we and our household occupied the first and second floors and we shared the kitchen with the children.’18
At eleven o’clock on Sunday 3 September, Audrey Baker was listening to the radio with her family in Croydon. They heard Chamberlain’s announcement that England was at war with Germany. It was something they had been prepared for and it was not unexpected. Her father immediately picked up his packed suitcase and set off for Whitehall, where he worked. Shortly after lunch the Bank of England called and asked her sister to report to Finsbury Circus the following morning with a packed suitcase. As a secretary at the bank she was to be evacuated away from the capital. Later that evening there was a knock at the door. A school friend of Audrey’s was there with her mother, the chairman of the Croydon Education Committee. ‘Could I help with the evacuation of the Nursery School and be at the centre of the town, 9am tomorrow, with packed suitcases?’19 Audrey agreed on the spot and spent the evening frantically packing for an unknown destination and for an unspecified length of time. All that she knew was that she would be acting as a helping hand to the nursery-school teachers and that she should be prepared to do anything asked of her. She had no previous experience of working with children but she was willing and eager to learn as she went along.
When she arrived in Croydon the following morning she found double-decker buses waiting. The lower decks were packed with the nursery-school furniture and the upper deck crowded with anxious and excited children, teachers and helpers. In addition to the nursery school there were children who came from the Mayday Road care home that had hitherto been housed in three pairs of cottages. There the orphaned children had lived with ‘house mothers’ in small groups and there was a lively atmosphere of rivalry between the six units or ‘houses’ in the three cottages. Although the administrators in charge of the home knew of the plans to evacuate the children, to the house mothers it appears to have come almost completely as a surprise and to the children of both homes it was a great adventure in a bus.
Only the drivers knew where they were heading: Waddesdon Manor. Within two hours they turned into the drive on the outskirts of the village, through a great set of black and gold gates between pillars of stone topped with glass lanterns, and up the drive towards the manor on the hill. Audrey said later: ‘The scale of the whole place was overwhelming. Versailles came to mind immediately. We were received by the chief steward who conducted us into the state apartments stripped of all furniture. I recall the great gilt picture frames and the paintings removed. Just the highly polished floor remained, upon which the four-year-olds slid and skidded.’20
The children came from the Croydon Toddlers’ Home and Fox Hill Home, from Croydon Nursery, the May Day Nursery and Croydon Queen’s Road Nursery. In all, there were 104 children ranging from one month to five years in age and twenty-nine helpers, including Audrey Baker. James and Dorothy were childless and James was already in his early sixties, so the prospect of their home being overrun by a hundred children under five and their attendant nurses, teachers and matrons must have been quite alarming. However, they appeared to take this invasion in their stride which was, one imagines, led by Dorothy. While James was somewhat austere, Dorothy was warm, generous and infinitely approachable. She was as deeply loved and admired in the village as she was by her wide circle of friends drawn from all over the world. ‘She maintained the Rothschild tradition in Waddesdon of unfussy support and interest in all that was good in village life.’21
James had inherited Ferdinand de Rothschild’s outstanding collection of fine art, furniture and tapestries and added works from his parents’ estate in Paris. All this had to be moved to safety in the shortest possible time. The great Reynolds, Gainsborough and Romney portraits were stored in the cellar in specially fitted wooden cases made by the house carpenter, Mr Chapman. ‘Fortunately, after a fortnight, he thought he would open one or two of the cases just to see that the pictures inside were all right. To his horror, in case after case, he found a blue haze creeping over the surface of each canvas or panel. Expert consultants told us that the only hope was to remove all the pictures from their damp confinement in the cellar and expose them to fresh air.’22 The Grey Drawing Room was not in use by the children so Mr Chapman made racks for the pictures and they were stored there, in safe and dry conditions, for the rest of the war, except for four paintings that were sent to the National Gallery of Ottawa who offered to house them for the duration. They were returned postwar in excellent condition. Only three paintings by the eighteenth-century French artist, Watteau, suffered lasting damage as a result of being stored in the cellars at Waddesdon for those brief weeks. Dorothy wrote: ‘We comforted ourselves with the thought that the danger of Hitler’s bombs falling on Waddesdon was less than the known peril of Waddesdon damp.’23
Although the rooms had been stripped of priceless works of art, the decorative plasterwork, wood panelling and silk-lined walls remained. Ornate fireplaces and immense gilt mirrors became the opulent backdrop to the day nursery. The carpets had been rolled up and removed and the handsome marble and wooden floors revealed. While the children simply accepted the new surroundings, the staff from Croydon had never seen such grandeur. Grace Bartlett, who had been a social worker sent to Waddesdon wrote in 1989: ‘Although when I was first at Waddesdon the treasures were necessarily hidden securely for the duration of the Second World War, the sense of rare and beautiful things seemed to pervade the house and grounds and I wondered if one day I might enjoy a peacetime visit.’24 She did return almost fifty years later and was delighted to find the house as exquisite and elegant as she had remembered, but now filled with the real treasures that had been but a ghostly presence during the war.
Some of the children who had been under five during the war shared their recollections with Waddesdon staff in more recent times and a few had vivid memories. Alan Frampton was sent to Waddesdon aged three. His mother had died and his older brother went to live with relatives. He clearly remembered the rocking horse and children’s slide that was set up in the corridor once a week, when a member of the local fire brigade came to play with the children. He also recalled the wooden floors which were very noisy when the children were racing around on them playing games.
When Audrey Baker was shown to her bedroom in the attic at the end of the first tiring day at Waddesdon she found it rather a comedown after the first-floor bedrooms with their commanding views of the countryside that had been allocated as dormitories for the children. She found a small, bare room with an iron bedstead and a straw palliasse, which became her bed for the next few weeks. ‘I did not know at the time that you had to run at it with army boots on and jump up and down to make it usable! Rolling off was inevitable. However, the days were so busy and tiring I crashed out.’25 She was in awe at the way the Rothschilds and the staff looked after the house and the new inhabitants, attending to every detail. She described how two huge kennels were wheeled onto the front terrace each evening and the watchman would bring two large hounds who would sleep in the kennels and keep watch over the front entrance. ‘We were well guarded,’26 she wrote.
On their arrival, the evacuees met the Waddesdon ‘family’ who would be part of their lives for the next few years. According to Dorothy, the housekeeper, Mrs Green was ‘red-haired, formidable and an unmistakable member of the old school, but with a heart of gold.’ The linen maid, Mabel, was kind and generous. Dorothy described her as angelic. She was Mrs Green’s closest friend and ally at Waddesdon. Dorothy wrote: ‘Whenever Mrs Green and I, in our household perplexities, had a divergence of opinion and she wished to be assured that her own view would prevail, her final and nearly always winning argument was to restate her opinion and add “And Mabel thinks so too”.’27 Another member of the household who the children soon grew to know and like was Mr Tissot, the chef, who, Dorothy wrote, ‘cooked every one of the meals eaten by the children’. Other records say that Mr Tissot only cooked at Christmas and that otherwise the food was disgusting. The truth is probably somewhere in between. Certainly he cooked for the children, teachers and the Rothschilds at the beginning of the war but he always travelled with Dorothy when she left Waddesdon. For the remainder of the time the children’s food was prepared by the cook, Mrs Kate Skinner, with the assistance of the nursery staff. Dorothy wrote: ‘The first few days were naturally somewhat chaotic, as the children came from three separate establishments in Croydon. Their staffs were unknown to each other and unaccustomed to co-operation, being used to their own routines. It took a little time to persuade them to combine their hours for food.’28
The children from the nursery schools and children’s homes were kept separate from one another. One group ate in the breakfast room, the other in the dining room. The Red and Grey Drawing Rooms were used as playrooms with day cots, so that the children only went up to the first floor at night. There were eight cots to a bedroom and Dorothy later recalled how tiny the furniture at first appeared to her. The tables, chairs and cots were children-sized and looked very small in the drawing rooms and bedrooms, normally full of large, lavishly decorated furniture.
The staff of the children’s home wore uniforms whereas the nursery staff did not. This differentiated the women immediately and there was a great deal of friction between two of the nursery-school teachers and the matron of the home, who was a brusque middle-aged woman from Yorkshire. Three days into the ‘invasion’ Dorothy de Rothschild wrote to Miss Mabel Hill, matron of the Homes for the County Borough of Croydon Children’s Home, complaining that there was a woeful shortage of staff to cope with such a huge number of children. Miss Hill immediately arranged for a further six helpers to arrive over the next two days. She came up to Waddesdon herself on 10 September to meet local tradesmen in the village and make arrangements for supplying rations for the children at the manor. This was to be paid for by the Croydon Committee.
The first week the staff struggled to cope with the varying needs of their charges and the wholly unfamiliar surroundings. The peace of Waddesdon had been shattered and Christine Bride, who was one of the two nursery-school teachers in charge of the May Day School, wrote to Dorothy in August 1941: ‘I think the trouble [. . .] has been caused by the fact that nobody wanted the plan to succeed. The May Day School committee did not help much ever – in fact they hindered always and were rather unkind. They were pretty hopeless before the days of evacuation and anyhow never had the children at heart so were bound to fail.’29
The main issue was that the staff had set out on the first Monday of the war full of enthusiasm and energy but with woefully little experience to cope with the impact of being completely uprooted from their previous lives in every possible sense. Miss Bride wrote: ‘I could never have believed that life could change so drastically – the awful homesickness of the first weeks – those ghastly nights when we were to sit limply on the side of our beds having been up a million times and not having the energy to get up again.’30
Audrey Baker was one of those inexperienced girls. She wrote in 2011:
The first morning after our arrival there was an air raid warning (which must have been alerted privately as the whole estate was too remote to hear any sirens). We were directed down to the cellars (I noted they had already been well shored up). Little children just accept what happens and calmly sat on the benches. Two tall figures also appeared and calmly walked along – Mr and Mrs de Rothschild – he in trousers and pyjama jacket, she fully dressed. Then somehow the chef produced porridge.31
Two days later, Dorothy made an inspection of the children’s area of the manor with a representative from the London County Council and Helen Crosfield of Croydon nurseries, with whom she was to correspond regularly for the entire length of the children’s stay at Waddesdon. Mabel Hill of the LCC described the set-up for the infants and children at Waddesdon: ‘The mansion has proved to be ideal for the purpose to which it has been given. At the present time, six separate units are being run including two units for sick children. It is hoped that at some later date to re-organise and have the children in small groups of twelve to fifteen children. In this way the child becomes more of an individual and receives some recompense for the love of their parents that is lost to them for the time being.’32
Helen Crosfield seemed more concerned that the whole place worked well, including for the staff who she knew were finding it a wrench to be out of London and away from home. Her own daughter was one of the nursery staff working alongside Christine Bride. She wrote: ‘It is marvellous for the children to be in such lovely surroundings and I am sure they will gain in lots of ways.’33 Dorothy was convinced that the children would thrive once they got over their homesickness and although she never interfered with the arrangements put in place for the children, she became a confidante for the young nursery teachers who found themselves out of their depth in unfamiliar surroundings. On 7 October, she wrote in her diary that she had had an interview with Matron and one can only assume that this was an unusual but necessary intervention.
The main cause of the friction was that the matron from the children’s home had a different attitude towards discipline and routine than the nursery nurses who were younger, more relaxed and from a different social background. By and large the nursery staff had more in common with their hosts than they did with Matron and Christine Bride confided in Dorothy several times when she was at Waddesdon after she had come in for a tongue-lashing from Matron. The experience stayed with her for months afterwards:
It was my fault but possibly, it was only inexperience and youthfulness. Life had been so sheltered and happy at home and I just couldn’t understand the conflicts that arose so suddenly. Matron made me so angry though – I used to weep from sheer anger! I still meet her in dreams and can hear yet her grating Yorkshire accent beating me down because I could never find words to keep pace with her. I can always see her advancing across the Red Drawing Room towards Miss Butterworth while we were all at breakfast – claws out and tongue loosed – and me springing to defend Butterworth with a whole volley of abuse I had had saved up for days – and all this only 12 hours after we had declared one of our weekly truces! It’s terribly laughable now but then it was so deadly serious. Haven’t you ever got up against anyone like that? You did understand, didn’t you?34
Helen Crosfield tried to intervene in the row between the nursery teachers and Matron. She came to the conclusion that it was territorial warfare. ‘We do want to cooperate as far as we can without losing our own nursery school identity and freedom of action for our own children.’35 She said she would be sending another volunteer helper and apologised to Dorothy, saying: ‘It must be worrying for you to have disharmony in the household and it seems a poor return for your open-hearted hospitality.’36
In addition to the staff, there was a matron and a night nurse who was responsible for the 6am feed. The other daytime staff started work at 7am helping the children to wash, dress and make their beds before breakfast at 8:30am. Every morning the children went out for their morning walk from 10am until 12:15 accompanied by members of staff. Lunch was served at 12:30 and all the children had an hour’s rest at 1:30pm. A further one-and-three-quarter-hour walk was pencilled in for the afternoons followed by tea, play time and bath and bed. ‘It is most essential that each child should have at least twelve hours’ sleep in addition to their midday nap.’37 It was undoubtedly the intention to tire the children out by making them spend over four hours out of doors but it was also lovely for the nursery staff who did not have to worry about traffic or roads as they had done in the past. There are photographs of the children wearing wellington boots and rain jackets so even on days when the weather was wet they went out if possible. A nursery nurse who came later to Waddesdon described the children’s boots lined up in the conservatory like a miniature army.
At first, the teachers, matrons and children were able to make use of the 165-acre grounds and gardens surrounding the house. The children were taken to the aviary to see the birds and to feed the deer who were in a large pen not far from the house, but later an army petrol depot opened in the grounds and the children were confined to within 100 yards of the manor for their own safety. The flower beds in the front garden were dug up and planted with grass, while other parts of the garden were used to grow vegetables. The four-and-a-half acres of glass houses, that once used to be used to nurture tender exotic plants, were given over to food production as well. Dorothy sent the Churchills a basket of Comice pears grown in the orchard and Clementine wrote to her in delight that they were Winston’s favourite and a taste they had not enjoyed since the war began.
Dorothy made a point of visiting the dormitories on Friday evenings. She would wish each child goodnight and give them a sweet, which naturally they loved her for. Sweets were rationed during the war and were a glorious treat. Many adults today who were children during those years still remember the excitement of their sweet ration. The only other time the children got sweets was when they walked down to the shop at the end of the main driveway and spent their penny pocket money.
A few mothers of the nursery-school children were able to get to Waddesdon to visit their infants though these visits were infrequent enough to be mentioned individually. Mrs Fillingham from West Croydon wrote to Christine Bride after her visit to Waddesdon of her gratitude towards Dorothy for giving her two little children sanctuary at the manor. She had met Dorothy but, ‘. . . I never know who she was till I got back to Standon a cabman told me who she was. If I had know [sic] then I would have felt out of place, but I think she is the nicest and kindness [sic] Lady in England. Miss Bride I have lived over 50 years and that is the first time I have had a good turn done for me and that made me want to thank her and yourself . . .’38
By the end of the year, Dorothy had received a steady stream of letters from grateful parents thanking her for looking after their sons and daughters. Some were short and polite, others long and meandering. One young mother of four children lived in Crystal Palace and was distraught that she had forgotten to send her little boy a card for his fourth birthday. She had been ill and working long hours, she explained. In a two-page letter, written without a single full stop, she gave Dorothy a potted version of her life story with a ne’er-do-well husband ‘who isn’t worth such lovely children’, having left her with three girls and one little boy, Henry. She explained that he was meant to be evacuated with his sisters but they had been separated, while her three-year-old daughter was still at home. ‘I am out in the morning from 7am til nine at night so it is no very much life for her.’39 She wrote: ‘I suppose I should be very grateful and appreciate whats [sic] being done for them but I am more than that, it is a good job we have some kind folks about like the homes to take care of our little ones and see they are well and healthy.’40 Yet her greatest fear was that the children would become strangers to one another if they were apart for too long. This fear was well founded. Children evacuated for extended periods to different families or homes during the war had often such completely unrelated experiences that they could not get along together when they were reunited at the end of the hostilities. Mr Hook from California observed that his wife, Glenys, who was born in July 1940 and who spent her early years at Waddesdon, had not only had a wonderful start in life living in style and surrounded by opulent décor but also had a different speech pattern from that of her siblings. He had always found this strange until he visited Waddesdon and realised the background against which she had spent her early childhood. Glenys showed him the dining room where she had been sitting when the breakfast doors were flung open to reveal a huge Christmas tree and a real-life Father Christmas and the fountains on the parterre where she had played with other children from what she called ‘The Waddesdon One Hundred’.
Audrey Baker had unbounded admiration for the nursery-school teachers who not only looked after the children all day but were responsible for them at night as well. Unlike the orphans from the children’s homes who had never known family life, many of the nursery-school children were homesick and the nights for the first few weeks were very disturbed. It was a strange juxtaposition for Audrey, who had come from a sheltered, middle-class home in Croydon: ‘This was my introduction to one of the grandest country mansions in England; it was also my first experience of nits and impetigo.’41
She was surprised and distressed when the children started crying when they heard the noise of the gardeners mowing the lawns one morning soon after they arrived. Many ran to the windows to look out. ‘It probably reminded them of Dad or Granddad. It was such a traumatic time for such young children – it must have deeply affected their lives. No one knows how much.’42 Soon the children got used to the noises around the house and the gardeners allowed them to run alongside the lawnmower. In later life, some of the older children recalled with real pleasure the freedom of the outdoors at Waddesdon. Their daily walks took them into the woods, down to the farm, across the fields to stand on the five-barred gates and stare at the world beyond their boundaries. On occasion they even went down to the airfield at Westcott behind the manor and one little girl remembered being shown how to get into an aeroplane while carrying her gasmask.
Every child who spoke of their memories of Waddesdon recalled the magic of Christmas there. It was all carefully stage-managed by Dorothy. The children and the staff were to be guests of her and James for the day. She supervised her own staff decorating a magnificent Christmas tree in a secretly guarded room. Matron’s assistant, Caroline Crelling, was the foster mother of the home. She told the story for the first Waddesdon Christmas of the war, describing the day with the kind of Victorian formality that would have grated on Christine Bride and the other nursery-school teachers:
At 7:30am on that day, Father Christmas and Matron visited the children and distributed to them gifts which had been supplied for that occasion. After breakfast, the morning being favourable, the children were taken for the usual walk in the grounds. But about 11 o’clock a very pleasing yet quite informal little ceremony took place. As Mrs de Rothschild was walking towards the Dining Room, three children, who had been kept behind to do so, presented her with a lovely spray of pink carnations; and a spray of chrysanths was also handed to Mrs Green, the housekeeper, who accompanied Mrs de Rothschild. The occasion was sweet in its simplicity and informality, whilst Mrs de Rothschild was charming. The flowers had been generously provided by the Staff connected with the children.43
The children were given minced chicken and vegetables for lunch followed by Christmas pudding and custard. After their rest they were all brought down to the Long Gallery in their party-best to have a tea party. Miss Crelling continued in her report:
Some of the tinies looked bewildered at the gaily decorated tables and room; the older children who understood the occasion, look radiant and happy, and so were the staff . . . After tea Mr and Mrs de Rothschild and party arrived whilst receiving cheers. The doors of the secret room were opened and the Xmas tree was in full view. Father Xmas was standing by it, and with helpers, quickly disposed of the presents which were hanging on it. Nor were the staff forgotten. Each of us received a handkerchief which was daintily tucked into a seasonal envelope.44
Dorothy had arranged a treat for the staff as well. Once the children were tucked up in bed, they were invited to a festive dinner in the dining room, waited upon by the Rothschilds’ staff. It made a huge impression on them all and, Miss Shelling commented in awe that the chef and the valet carved the turkey for them. The Rothschilds supplied sherry, wine and port for the dinner and this was followed by a dance in the servants’ hall. The staff were so touched that they planned to hold a party for the Rothschilds in return, but it was cancelled because James had a serious car accident shortly after Christmas and spent some time in a nursing home near Oxford.
In 1942 there was a changing of the guard. Now that the threat of the Blitz had receded, at least for the moment, the schools and orphans’ home at Waddesdon returned to Croydon where the council had found suitable buildings for them. Waddesdon, however, was still needed as the requirements of the War Office and other departments for accommodation changed. The Rothschilds took in the Columbia Market Nursery which had come not from London but from Alwalton Hall near Peterborough where they had been since the outbreak of the war.
Beatrice Whitehouse was a newly qualified nursery-school teacher and this was her first job. She was in charge of twenty children and their downstairs base was the Red Drawing Room. By the time Beatrice and her children arrived at Waddesdon all the early teething problems had been resolved and her recollection of Waddesdon was as bucolic and relaxed. She described the children shelling peas into bowls on top of the portico and blowing bubbles on the gravel outside the conservatory.
Beatrice had a boyfriend called Jack who she married in 1943. All their courting was done in the silk-walled Blue Dining Room, she told the archivist at Waddesdon, Catherine Taylor, in July 2012. It was the only private space they could find. The children got very excited when he came to visit and would queue up ‘to hold Uncle Jack’s hand’. She realised that they had very little male company. ‘It was one of the things that convinced me to marry him – the fact that he was so good with children.’45
Barbara Schweiger, a nursery-school teacher from Columbia Market Nursery, was a refugee from Germany, who arrived in Britain just before the war broke out. She remained at Waddesdon until 1945 and put together a photograph album of the children’s activities. The album charts the delights of the life led by the children in the latter half of the war. There are photographs of their walks around the estate and down to the dairy farm run by Mr Caderer and washing one of the dogs in a mass of bubbles. By 1943 the children had their own vegetable patch and were encouraged to grow lettuces, cabbages and leeks. In 1944 the Princess Royal came to visit Dorothy and the children were asked to line up along the drive with flags and wave a welcome to Her Royal Highness.
Dorothy continued to receive visitors and to entertain throughout the war, though on a much smaller scale than in the pre-war years. She kept a visitors’ book and a menu diary, so that it is possible to see what she asked M. Tissot to prepare for Princess Mary or Lady Reading, the director of the Women’s Voluntary Services (WVS) who stayed at Waddesdon on no fewer than thirty-four occasions over six years. At the beginning of the war there were few shortages and there is frequent mention of lobster, always in French: homard froid printanier or croquettes de homard, but this would be replaced over the course of the war by rabbit curry, boiled tongue and Woolton pie, a pastry dish with vegetables created by the master chef of the Savoy and named for the minister of food, Lord Woolton. It was generally held to be tasteless as it was wholly lacking in meat and the shortage of onions did not help the bland flavour. Dorothy served Lady Reading Woolton pie at lunch on 12 December 1942, followed by risotto and sardines for supper. Princess Mary fared somewhat better, getting poulet à l’espagnole and framboises à la suedoise, presumably possible because of the fresh raspberries grown in the fruit cages at Waddesdon.
In 1944, Stella Reading rang Dorothy in a state of great anxiety. The WVS stores were housed at the headquarters in Tothill Street, which was in a doodlebug target area close to Downing Street, Buckingham Palace and Westminster. Could Dorothy find a ‘cranny’ for the miscellany that had accrued in London? She immediately suggested the stables, which since the departure of the racehorses were available and in fact had become what she described as a general dumping ground. James had at first kept the horses in Britain but in September 1940 there was a tragedy at his stables at Lambourn. ‘Three mares were in a paddock by themselves, and three bombs were dropped, all of which fell in the paddock, one of them about twenty yards from where the mares were, so that death in each case was absolutely instantaneous.’46 It was the payload of a German bomber that had been damaged over Southampton and dropped its bombs to gain altitude. The plane was later believed to have been brought down near Eastbourne. One of the mares, Char Lady, was in foal and the estate manager found the perfectly formed foal, about the size of a rabbit, lying some fifteen feet from the mare. It was a dreadful blow to James and he decided to send the rest of his precious string of horses to Ireland for the remaining years of the war.
A WVS volunteer who was in charge of all the stores, Maria Brassey, was delegated to drive a very noisy three-ton lorry ‘brimming with its load’ up and down between London and Waddesdon several times a week ‘until even the Waddesdon accommodation could take no more’.47 Maria Brassey became an invaluable friend and constant companion to Dorothy from that time onwards, ready with her wit, sense of humour and indefatigable patience.
Earlier in the war, the main drives and the parkland had been requisitioned by the War Office and Italian prisoners of war helped to construct an open-air fuel storage dump for the army. Violet Griffiths, an ATS driver who worked with the RASC at Waddesdon, described ‘huge quantities of petrol and oil in cans and drums ferried from Quainton station into the dump by a stream of lorries, and there were stacked ready for rapid use.’48 Dorothy wrote of how envious they all felt of this petrol stored on their land but absolutely unavailable for their personal use. Like everyone else, she and James were entitled to civilian petrol rationing only, although she could claim extra petrol in relation to her WVS work. Violet remembered cycling around the estate on her bicycle, catching a lift up the hills by holding on to the tail of a lorry. She also recalled being taking once a week to Westcott, just a few miles from Waddesdon, to RAF dances.
Beyond the house to the north and below a large stand of trees lay a large flat area of land which was commandeered by the Royal Air Force. Westcott airfield was completed in September 1942 and was commissioned as No. 11 Operational Training Unit (OTU), along with Oakley, its satellite airfield. Over the next three years, No. 11 OTU trained almost all the New Zealand aircrews that flew with Bomber Command. The course lasted ten weeks and after that the crews moved on from Wellington Bombers at Westcott to be trained in four-engine Stirlings or Lancasters. Locally it was said that the airfield was used operationally for bombing raids but that was not so, however crews from Westcott took part in ‘Nickel’ operations when leaflets were dropped onto enemy-occupied cities. The airfield was occasionally used for emergency landings when aircraft were diverted from their home fields. Sometimes they landed while still ‘bombed up’ and that could lead to fatal accidents. Ivor Gurney and Norman Carr in their book Waddesdon Through the Ages, wrote: ‘Crashes of aircraft from nearby training and operational air fields were occurring with dreadful frequency. One crashed into the trees on Lodge Hill, and as a result obstruction lights were installed on and around the Manor for use when appropriate.’49
An immediate problem was Westcott Hill Wood, south of Lodge Hill, which restricted the pilots’ view of the airfield on the approach from the south or south-east and was particularly dangerous for low flying. It was a twenty-acre wood with some 18,000 fir trees and 2,000 mixed hardwoods. The RAF requested the wood be demolished, which caused a great deal of excitement for the children and a big headache for Dorothy’s cousin, the Waddesdon land agent, Philip Woolf. The children were particularly fascinated by the two-handed saw used by the wood cutters to slice through the enormous trunks. These were dragged away by the estate tractor and sold as timber, but the thinner branches were given to the villagers in Waddesdon. Philip Woolf negotiated compensation in 1944 of £100 for the felling and removal of the trees at Westcott Hill Wood two years earlier. This in no way compensated the estate for the cost of the ornamental wood, nor did it cover the postwar replanting.
The Waddesdon estate cost around £54,000 a year to run, including all expenditure on wages and services. The income from sales of farm and garden produce and billeting came to some £51,000 per year, so the estate made a loss year on year during the war. The accounts show the cost of the evacuees to Waddesdon was £1,481 per year and included eleven gallons of milk per day and 21,000 gallons of water per week for cooking and bathing. The county council was responsible for the costs of running the homes at Waddesdon but the Rothschilds gave the nurseries a great deal of help in kind, from M. Tissot’s kitchen to the use of the laundry.
The nursery schools remained at Waddesdon for the rest of the war and the house was the centre of additional activity. James de Rothschild ran his parliamentary office from there and continued to support Zionist causes, donating 6,000,000 Israeli pounds towards the construction of the Knesset building in Jerusalem, worth about £240 million in 2016. Dorothy was involved with the WVS and continued to take a great interest in the Cedar Boys, some of whom needed her help and support for further education or medical issues.
The memory of Waddesdon in the Second World War for those who lived and worked there is one of a wonderful safe haven at a time of great uncertainty and dislocation. The beauty of the house and its grounds, the kindness of the Rothschilds and their staff and above all Dorothy, whose warm efficiency had solved so many problems in the early days, remained a remarkable legacy. The women and girls who ran the nursery at Waddesdon in the second half of the war were genuinely sad to be leaving and Dorothy, too, was sorry to see them go. ‘There are two images of the children’s stay with us which will always remain in my mind,’ she wrote. ‘The first, seeing them being carried down the winding staircase to their prepared beds in the basement during an air-raid warning . . . and then the Christmases the children spent at Waddesdon. The house never looked so attractive as when they all assembled in the East Gallery, and the door of the Breakfast Room was suddenly flung open revealing a huge lit-up Christmas Tree with a live Father Christmas to greet them and hand out gifts.’50
Dorothy continued to be closely involved with Waddesdon until her death at the age of ninety-three in 1988. She spoke of the war years at Waddesdon in a guided tour in the late 1950s with great affection: ‘I can hear their songs now – I must say these are very happy recollections. These were the first – and last – children to live in the house.’
Aldenham Park was the ancestral home of Lord and Lady Acton. The house and grounds were used as a school during the war.