We arrived next day at School House, to find the doors wide open, and the house being inspected by bowler-hatted officials of the Ministry of Works, who were already giving instructions for work to be carried out. As yet war had not been declared, though Poland had been invaded, and no requisition order had been served.
H. C. A. Gaunt, headmaster of Malvern College, 1 September 1939
On 26 December 1938 an envelope marked ‘Secret & Confidential’ plopped onto the desk of the Reverend Canon Howard Charles Adie ‘Tom’ Gaunt, headmaster of Malvern College. In those days letters were delivered 365 days a year but with two rather than three deliveries on Christmas Day and Easter Sunday. It was scooped up and brought to him on a tray with the rest of his post. He explained in his memoir Two Exiles:
Following the admirable example of my predecessor, Mr F.S. Preston, I was accustomed in those palmy days of peace to have my correspondence delivered to me together with a cup of tea in my bedroom: a quick glance at the letters followed by a few moments of reflection during the morning toilet often saved valuable time a little later in the day. On Boxing Day the 26th December, 1938, among a number of envelopes containing Christmas cards one letter stood out among the rest. It was pale bluish grey, was marked on the outside ‘Secret & Confidential’, and bore the crest of His Majesty’s Office of Works on the back of the envelope. Speculating rapidly on what single honour I was about to be asked to accept, I slit open the envelope. Inside was a second sealed envelope, this time marked ‘SECRET To be opened only by HCA Gaunt Esq, MA, Headmaster of Malvern College’. I complied.1
The communication was not notification of a New Year’s honour, but a letter from Sir Patrick Duff, a permanent secretary at the Office of Works, informing Gaunt that the government had ‘under consideration the question of earmarking a number of large buildings outside London for national purposes in the event of war, and I am afraid it is my ungrateful duty to let you know that Malvern College is one of those so earmarked.’2
When government departments were contemplating moves out of London, one of the most popular places in the country was the beautiful spa town of Great Malvern. It is in an area of outstanding beauty, nestled below the Malvern Hills, and for the past two centuries at least has been a popular tourist destination thanks to its particularly fine natural water with its health benefits. The Ministry of Information took over the luxurious Abbey Hotel to house part of its staff while the Board of Trade decided upon the Girls’ College as its initial wartime billet. Such was the obsession with secrecy within the civil service in the early months of the war that all correspondence had to be sent via London, to prevent any section of one department knowing the location of any other. This could mean that two offices of the same ministry might be housed in adjacent buildings but could not correspond directly with one another. ‘When “Lord Haw-Haw” [William Joyce, Nazi propaganda broadcaster] helpfully announced a full list of addresses of evacuated government departments, there was a collective sigh of relief from the civil servants concerned, as the previous restrictions were listed,’3 wrote Norman Longmate in How We Lived Then.
Absolute secrecy was exactly what the government asked headmasters and headmistresses of public schools to maintain when they broached the subject of requisitioning. Unsurprisingly, large public schools in safe areas with their extensive accommodation were targeted by the Office of Works from early on. Moving government departments out of London meant there was an appetite for buildings designed to accommodate large numbers of people, furniture and equipment. Few buildings were as well set up for this purpose as a school, especially one in a town such as Malvern that had tourists all year round, which meant there was also plenty of other local accommodation available. Some schools, like Marlborough College in Wiltshire, were simply asked to ‘double up’. They shared their premises and facilities with the City of London School, while Shrewsbury accommodated boys from Cheltenham College for two terms. Others were not so fortunate. Malvern College had a particularly difficult time in both 1939 and 1942.
The college, sited in the hills above the town, occupied a large sloping site of some 250 acres. Canon Gaunt received his Boxing Day letter because the Admiralty had earmarked the school as a headquarters in the event of an emergency evacuation from London. The town was in a designated safe area as it was thought that the Malvern Hills – which run some nine miles north to south and are around 600 million years old – would act as a deterrent to low-level bombing. There was ample accommodation for civil servants and military personnel in the town’s hotels and boarding houses. It also had the advantage of being close to other relocated ministries – though it does seem a little ironic that the Admiralty should be housed almost as far away from the sea as it is possible to be in Britain.
By the standards of British public schools, Malvern College was relatively young. It had been founded by local businessmen in 1865 after the expansion of the railways and the prominence of Malvern as a spa town. The population of the town rose from 819 in 1801 to 2,768 forty years later and by the middle of the century Malvern town was receiving over 3,000 visitors a year. The originator of the idea for the College was Walter Burrow, the manager of the Malvern Branch of Messrs Lea & Perrins of Worcester. It was in Burrow’s dispensary that the formula for the famous sauce was developed. Two dozen boys and six masters in two houses soon expanded to six school houses and nearly 300 boys. Within twenty-five years, the school had over 500 boys occupying the magnificent main building which dominates the school’s campus, Big School. Canon Gaunt became Malvern’s seventh headmaster in 1937 at the age of thirty-five, taking over from the previous headmaster who had been in post for a quarter of a century. Gaunt had many plans for the school but moving out was not one of them.
The morning he received the letter, Gaunt sought permission from Sir Patrick Duff to speak to the chairman and vice-chairman of the College Council and to his second master of the staff, Major Elliott. This was granted but the need for secrecy was impressed upon him at every possible opportunity. It ‘was a most serious hindrance, but it was of the highest importance to the Government, first that it should not be known that plans were being made at all, since war might not break out, and secondly that the nature of the plans should not be known, if it did.’4 This placed him, as it did other headmasters and mistresses who received the same news, in the unenviable position of having to continue to run the school as if everything were normal while at the same time engineering visits to possible sites for the future. Secrecy was just as important from the school’s point of view as revelations of this nature would make prospective parents unlikely to choose Malvern for their boys. Although a public school might seem of lesser importance than government offices in a time of war, everyone in the Department of Education and heads of schools realised the vital importance of education for the future of the country. It was not possible for a generation of children to be cut adrift: the country needed investment in the future.
Sixth formers from public schools in 1939–40 would be the junior officers, the scientists, the doctors and nurses of the next few years, not to speak of the lawyers, architects, journalists, bankers and farmers. To deprive them and the country of high-quality teaching would be disastrous, the department insisted.
At first Gaunt decided they should focus their search to the west, in Wales. Major Elliott was a keen fisherman, so it was perfectly natural for him to pack his fishing tackle into the back of his car and head off on a Friday. Some masters thought Gaunt was being a little indulgent, but nobody seriously questioned why his second-in-command was given so many opportunities to pursue his hobby in term time.
The search proved to be far more difficult than anyone had anticipated. Schools have very particular requirements which cannot easily be fulfilled by simply moving everyone and everything into a large home, hotel or camp. In addition to dormitory and kitchen requirements, there was a need for classrooms, laboratories, sports facilities and accommodation for the staff. Elliott found that hotel owners were expecting an influx of wealthy clients who would pay higher than normal rates to stay in safety away from the bombing so it would be unlikely the school could get a whole building to themselves.
By April 1939 they had still failed to find anywhere, so Gaunt and the vice-chairman of the school’s governors, Mr Richardson, went to London to see Sir Patrick Duff and express their concerns about the lack of facilities and the lack of support from the Office of Works. Gaunt threatened to mention it to his MP, which ruffled the feathers of the otherwise very pleasant civil servant. They were preparing to leave the meeting, beaten and thoroughly down, when Sir Patrick mentioned somewhat casually that he had that very morning received a letter from the Duke of Marlborough offering Blenheim Palace but assumed ‘it would not be large enough for what you want.’5 Gaunt and Richardson exchanged glances and decided on the spot that it was worth making a diversion via Woodstock on the way back to Malvern. Sir Patrick telephoned the duke and an hour and a half later Gaunt heard that he was welcome to visit him the following day. ‘The day was brilliantly fine, and Blenheim Palace looked magnificent with its great façade of golden stone and the green spreading lawn on the south side.’6
The Duke and Duchess of Marlborough must have been relieved to think they would be potentially housing a school, which would mean they could have some influence over how the palace was to be used rather than having to hand over Blenheim to a ministry. They were gracious and hospitable as they showed Gaunt round the great palace and its enormous grounds. The size was impressive but would it be big enough to keep 400 boys washed, fed, slept and educated? Time was of the essence. It was clear that someone else would snap up the opportunity to take on such large premises as Blenheim and Gaunt had little choice but to make the decision. ‘I was vividly aware of the grave deficiences in the buildings as they stood, and the appalling problems of dislocation and organisation which would have to be faced: but I felt that the moment for decision had arrived.’7 He told the duke that he would be very grateful for the security of Blenheim as a temporary home for his school if war were to break out. He wrote later that the Marlboroughs were refreshingly welcoming after the provincial greed of the hoteliers they had been dealing with in Wales. A fair rent would have to be agreed but ‘there is all the difference between a high profit and a fair return.’8
Over the next few months, Gaunt wrote to the duke on a number of matters so that he and Major Elliott were able to start making general plans as soon as the summer holidays began to move the college to the palace at Blenheim in the event of war. It was planning only, however, as Gaunt explained:
Of course, we could not commit the College to heavy expenditure which might prove to be wholly unnecessary; and the Government, though it might have powers to requisition buildings for its own needs, had no power to requisition for the needs of others, and never has had. In fact the Government at this time had no powers of requisition at all, for although the necessary Act of Parliament was already framed, it was not actually passed into Law until September.9
The Duke of Marlborough’s daughter, Lady Sarah Spencer-Churchill, turned eighteen in June and the duke threw a magnificent ball, ‘perhaps the last great European ball’ one commentator mused. A thousand people were invited and catered for by the palace kitchen and dining-room staff. That gave Gaunt the reassurance that he was not trying to attempt the impossible by believing the kitchens could cope with large numbers of hungry mouths to feed. The duke offered to leave the extensive equipment he had installed in the kitchens for the event and that really helped to boost the catering capabilities of the palace.
Gaunt wrote later that had the war broken out in the summer he would have happily housed the school under canvas at Blenheim while arrangements were made to prepare the palace for accommodation but this would not have been ideal in the winter. ‘I do not mean that boys – certainly the senior boys – could not have existed quite happily under canvas even in winter: certainly many of them had to do so in the Services not very much later.’10 War was declared on Sunday 3 September but by Tuesday the school had heard nothing, although people in Malvern whispered openly about the college being requisitioned. ‘This was exasperating to the point of despair!’11 Gaunt wrote. Those public schools who would have their buildings requisitioned were due to find out on 7 September but Gaunt did not hear formally until 2:45pm the following day. From that moment the planning began in earnest. Major Elliott was given the ‘stupendous task of fashioning and installing the necessary equipment in the Palace and outside, and of making the place ready for the school to reassemble at the beginning of the new term which was to start on September 28th.’12 This was clearly impossible to complete in three weeks so term was delayed until 12 October.
The day after the order was received, Gaunt wrote to the parents of boys who would be attending Malvern for the academic year:
I regret to have to tell you that His Majesty’s Government have informed me that the houses and buildings of Malvern College will be required almost immediately for war purposes. Fortunately the government gave me warning of this probability sometime ago, and we have been able to make our plans in good time. I may add hitherto I have been bound by the government to the strictest security. The college will reassemble at Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, the seat of His Grace the Duke of Marlborough. The palace is large enough to house the entire School and many of the staff, and the facilities contained in the magnificent buildings and grounds will make it possible for all normal school activities to be continued. The Estate contains its own farm and vegetable gardens, which will supply the school. The State rooms are being converted into dormitories and classrooms, and the school will feed together in the Great Hall. At the same time the house units will be kept, and all boys will be under the care and supervision of their present Housemasters. Woodstock itself is in the heart of the country in a reception area (i.e. for evacuees) while the palace itself contains admirable shelter against air raids.13
The letter was intended to reassure parents and it worked. Only six families decided to withdraw their boys from the college. All the others felt the move to Blenheim was sensible and that the plans Gaunt had put in place were satisfactory. He asked parents only to write to him from thenceforth on matters of great urgency as a ‘heavy task’ confronted him and the Malvern staff in getting furniture, musical instruments – including twenty pianos – and books to Blenheim in time for the delayed start of term. A heavy task was no understatement. The great palace had plenty of space and was ideally suited to accommodate the numbers but it did not have the infrastructure to cope with the day-to-day running of the school. All this had to be thought through, planned, initiated and completed in the space of five weeks.
The then Duke of Marlborough was John Spencer-Churchill, the tenth duke. He was married to Alexandra Mary Cadogan and by 1939 they had three daughters and one son, John ‘Sunny’ Spencer-Churchill, who would go on to inherit the title from his father in 1974. The duke decided to remain at Blenheim with his wife and daughters, moving into the east wing and offering the rest of the palace to the college.
Blenheim Palace has been the seat of the Duke of Marlborough since the early eighteenth century. It was ‘an epic gift of the nation to John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, whose victories over France and the subsequent Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 firmly established Britain as the pre-eminent great power, a leading position held until 1942.’14 The architect of Blenheim was Sir John Vanbrugh. His great palace, designed in 1705, had gone through many stages of building and refurbishment as the vicissitudes of life under the various dukes waxed and waned. But by 1939 it was in excellent condition thanks to two marriages to wealthy American heiresses. As the work began to turn the Great Hall into the school dining room and the Long Library and state rooms into dormitories, historian Christopher Hussey, writing in Country Life in 1940, mused that its conversion to accommodate such a large number of boys ‘certainly had not been visualised by Blenheim’s architect. Yet Vanbrugh’s ghost must have chuckled with delight in having his belief at last confirmed that Blenheim is not an inch too big.’15
The men undertaking the removal of school equipment from Malvern to Blenheim were organised by the Office of Works and lorries began arriving on 14 September with their cargoes. On the one hand this was good, as Gaunt did not have to worry about negotiating the transport, but on the other hand he and Elliott had no control over how the furniture and school treasures were handled or when they would be delivered to the palace. ‘We had to be ready at all hours of the day to direct the contents as they arrived at the Palace steps to their proper destination, and the final blow came when on the second day the men announced that they had received orders to dump the vanloads on the steps and return to Malvern with the utmost speed.’16 This meant that the contents of fifty-five vanloads had to be carried by the staff to their final locations. As the state rooms were not yet ready to take the school’s furniture, everything had to be stored temporarily on the terrace, apart from items such as books which were piled up in the Great Hall. Fortunately that September Blenheim basked in warm, dry weather and the possessions stacked on the terrace came to no harm.
The duke watched over the conversion of the palace into a school with anxiety. It proved too difficult to move some of the art treasures in time, so he decided that the magnificent tapestries and the paintings should remain on the walls but must be protected. He told Gaunt that he was concerned that boys might be tempted to use the portraits of his ancestors as dartboards. The staff laid down very strict rules of behaviour and these were assiduously monitored, which succeeded in instilling respect in the boys for the glories of the palace. Gaunt wrote later, ‘The Long Library alone contained, I suppose, over a thousand panes of eighteenth century bevelled glass. Two of these panes were broken during our stay, and both accidentally.’17
Screens of Essex board were fixed with battens around the walls, but not a nail could be driven into the walls or floors of the palace. Essex board is light, being made of layers of strips of paper, but strong enough to withstand wear and tear, with the added advantage that it does not bow in humid conditions. It can be cut with a saw or knife and does not produce rough edges, so it was the ideal material for the task. Hundreds of sheets of Essex board were required and the Office of Works helped to supply the palace with enough to cover the art works sufficiently to a height of eight feet. The damask curtains were sheathed in canvas covers that made them look like huge, hanging ghosts and felt padding was fixed to the mahogany doors to preserve the carved mouldings. It is difficult to make sense of the amount of material required to protect Blenheim Palace: 1,400 square yards of linoleum was needed to cover the floors and a further 1,000 square yards of matting. Taken together this would be enough material to cover half a football pitch. It took a lot of effort to get it into shape for the invasion of four hundred teenage boys.
One of these was James Roy, a seventeen-year-old Malvern College pupil who would go on to join the Royal Artillery, seeing active service in northern Europe, Egypt and Palestine. He attained the rank of captain by the age of twenty-two. For now he was about to enter his final year of school and wrote to his mother from Blenheim that he was sleeping in a dormitory with twenty other boys which was in fact a picture gallery. ‘No ink is allowed so I am writing outside.’ He described his journey to Woodstock by train and his delight at the beautiful grounds, ending: ‘the address is No. 8 Malvern College, at Blenheim Palace.’18
The following week he wrote again, giving her a more detailed picture of life at the palace:
All the state rooms on the ground floor are dormitories and the rooms upstairs are classrooms, which are ‘house’ rooms when not in use. There are not enough desks for the whole house. There is nowhere to put any clothes except in the trunks under the beds. The beds are 1’6” apart at the sides and nothing at the ends. A changing room has been made in a courtyard and the wash downs are in the cellars. A place for coats has also been constructed. We have to make our own beds and clean our own shoes [at Malvern, maids did the former and a boot boy (mature) did the latter]. We have to wash in shifts both morning and night. Sixty lavatories have been made in a large wooden shed.19
The kitchens, even with the extra ovens provided for the great feast in June, could not cope with the requirement to feed the school three meals a day. Additional cookers and steam ovens had to be acquired as well as extra sinks, shelves, plate racks and other kitchen equipment. This was not easy as the whole of Oxfordshire was in a state of upheaval thanks to the influx of over 37,000 evacuees, all with competing requirements. A further problem was that the ranges were run on petrol gas which soon became unobtainable as petrol was the first commodity to be rationed in the war. There was nothing for it but to lay a new gas main from Woodstock to the palace. ‘A gang of masters heroically set to work with picks and spades to dig a trench, half a mile long, in the Blenheim limestone, and were not sorry when a pneumatic drill arrived to take over.’20 The four-inch gas main took just three days to install. While the cooking facilities were being expanded and improved, new boilers were put in to heat the water in the temporary shower rooms set up in one of the internal courtyards. Another courtyard housed a changing room built out of wood and lined with the all-purpose Essex board, fitted out with seats, shelves and clothes racks sufficient to cater for the sports clothes of the entire school. Further huts, sixteen in total, were constructed to act as school rooms, reading rooms and recreation rooms for the boys, fitted with gas radiators and lamps. At Malvern, the boys had been used to eating their meals in their houses as there was no school refectory. At Blenheim this changed with all boys and masters eating together for the first time in the college’s history.
A further requirement at Blenheim was the need to black out the entire palace. Nobody knew exactly how many windows Blenheim had but as there are 187 rooms in the main part of the palace it can reasonably be assumed there would be hundreds. In 1886, the eighth Duke of Marlborough was asked how many rooms he had and he replied: ‘I am not sure but I know I paid a bill this spring for painting a thousand windows.’21 He may have been exaggerating for effect but the task of covering every window where light might leak out was colossal. The state rooms all had heavy eighteenth-century shutters which were adequate to conceal the light from within, but the Great Hall and library needed to be blacked out as well as smaller windows in a multitude of rooms. Blackout material was supplied by the Office of Works and had to be stitched and sewn by an army of matrons and needlewomen from Woodstock in order to render Blenheim ‘properly opaque’ by the beginning of term.
While the palace was being overlaid with this armature of protection, the grounds were quickly converted into kitchen gardens and sports pitches. One boy wrote to his father in delight to tell him that ‘we play football on cultured lawns’. Cultured they may have been, but Blenheim is built on solid rock and it took hours of work with crow bars and pick axes to plant the goal posts in front of the palace. The boys did PE in the main courtyard and often took their lessons out of doors when the weather was fine.
The press was interested in the new occupants of the palace and a photographer from The Times arrived on a blustery day to take pictures. The following day Gaunt and his staff were horrified to see two photographs of boys ‘enduring intolerable conditions’. One picture showed a group of twenty boys sitting at desks in the open in a howling gale. The truth was that these boys, who had been on break and were aware of the photographers around the palace, saw the empty desks and thought it would be fun to sit at them and pretend this was where they were being taught. It caused mayhem for Gaunt who received a slew of letters, ‘though not as many as I had feared’ from anxious parents.
Gaunt was the first to admit that there were drawbacks at Blenheim: ‘After all you cannot uproot people from a happy life and a home as beautiful as Malvern, and wrench them from cherished traditions and secure foundations, without considerable distress, discomfort and dislocation.’22 Blenheim Palace was new to them all, pupils and staff alike. The familiar nooks and crannies of Malvern’s school houses were replaced with endless corridors, labyrinthine basements and the Great Hall in which the whole school dined together. There were moments of despair, Gaunt wrote, when things went wrong and decisions that might have worked well in Malvern felt wrong in the vastness of Blenheim’s palatial rooms. Forced out of the familiarity of its own school buildings, the boys and staff struggled in the first few weeks to maintain its sense of community. The older boys were determined to maintain the dozens of college traditions in order to cling to their school’s character. In a new environment these seemed anomalous to the new boys who, homesick and cold, stared in disbelief as they were punished for minor infringements such as which hand they could have in which pocket when walking past a prefect.
However, the boys were, on the whole, very positive about their experiences in the early months of the war. Letters home described their pleasure in the magnificent surroundings. The school catalogued their stay in an album of beautiful black and white photographs which show the boys wandering around the gardens, reading on the lawns and sitting on their beds in the dormitories beneath the tapestries and paintings. Christopher Hussey summed up the conversion of Blenheim Palace in his Country Life article in 1940:
Blenheim’s history is built on battles . . . It was therefore in the Blenheim tradition that the latest episode in its history should have war as its background and determining cause, and surely the way in which this lightning campaign was conducted, undertaken by volunteer forces and fought against time, will ensure for it its own particular little place in Blenheim’s annals.23
By the end of October 1939 life had settled down into something approaching normal school routine. Every possible outbuilding had been refashioned to service the school. The laundry was converted into physics and biology laboratories, although the boys went into Oxford by bus to use the university labs for chemistry lessons. The riding school became an assembly hall for concerts and entertainments as well as doubling as a gymnasium. The Church of St Mary Magdalene in Woodstock, a short walk from the palace of which it was a benefice, became the school chapel for the duration. It must have been a tight squeeze to fit the whole school into the church because the current seating capacity is about 250. Gaunt wrote that the Reverend Pickles was very generous and accommodating of the school which often held its own private services. ‘But, we usually attended Morning Service on Sundays with the rest of the village, and contributed something in the way of singing. On one occasion the whole school sang as an anthem the “Hallelujah Chorus” – unaccompanied, as the organ failed at the critical moment.’24
James Roy appreciated the fine works of art at Blenheim Palace. He told his mother ‘I sleep next to a £25,000 picture and there is also a £20,000 picture in the room.’25 The picture James slept next to was a Marlborough family portrait painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1777–8 for the fourth duke, and it still hangs in the palace today. It shows the famous Blenheim spaniels and the duke and duchess with their six children. The other painting in James Roy’s bedroom was covered up by a sheet but he believed it to be by Gainsborough.
The editor of the December edition of the school magazine, The Malvernian, collected a series of first impressions from boys. One spoke of ‘the first glimpse of the beech-girt lake, grey-blue in the early sunlight, its waveless surface gently veined by the fussy paddling of myriad coots’, while another had enjoyed ‘those quiet half-hours construing Sophocles astride a leaden sphinx amid the sunlit plashings and green formality of the lower terrace.’ But the war was never far from the boys’ and their teachers’ minds. The editor wrote of ‘using those powers of imagination credited nowadays to the military, to pretend, for OTC [Officer Training Corps] purposes, that the lake is the Upper Rhine and the palace a pill-box.’26
Each house – there were eight at Malvern at the time – had a hut which was used for relaxation and socialising after lessons were over. These were soon kitted out by the boys to be comfortable and personal, something that was impossible in their tightly packed dormitories. James Roy asked his mother to send his wireless and gave her strict instructions about how to pack it so that it would not be damaged in transit. It arrived the following week and gave good service to the hut, though it broke down all too frequently. The only shortage at this stage was bath huts. Each boy could have a bath once a fortnight and even morning ablutions had to be done in relays as there were so few sinks. The Office of Works was obliged to do something about the lack of washing facilities and by January 1940 there was a second hut with twenty baths, which was deemed adequate for 400 boys.
Living in the east wing of the house, the Marlborough family watched the school get organised over the autumn. The duke took an interest in the running of the school, and would invite the head of school and other senior boys occasionally to have supper with his family on Sunday evenings, as he liked his daughters, aged eighteen, sixteen and ten, to meet young men. These evening meals were a duty for some boys and a delight for others but always an amusement for the duke who enjoyed the company of the young men and would quiz them on what they had managed to discover about the palace during their stay. He was generous and enjoyed their enthusiasm. On one occasion he told them they could use the fine model railway in the orangery if they could get it going again. Predictably this was a popular challenge and the boys had fixed it in no time.
The winter of 1939–40 was bitterly cold with temperatures several degrees below the seasonal average and lows of -15°C not uncommon, making it the coldest British winter for fifty years and the coldest January in Oxfordshire for a century. The Great Lake at Blenheim froze with ice a foot thick and the boys were allowed to skate on it. ‘The townsfolk skate on the ice, the Woodstock side of the Grand Bridge, we skate on the other,’27 James Roy told his mother. The following week the ice was still a foot thick and it had snowed copiously, producing drifts of three to four metres in places, causing severe transport disruption. Despite the freezing temperatures, the sun shone and the boys made the most of the bright, white days. ‘We had a terrific inter-house snowball match on skates, which was an extremely good pastime,’28 James Roy wrote.
The cold weather took its toll, as it had done at Aldenham, and in the unheated school huts the boys went down with colds and flu with alarming speed. By the end of January, 146 boys were ill, so the Long Library had to be converted into a sick bay, mirroring the use the palace had been put to in the First World War when it was used as a military hospital for sick and injured servicemen. The boys who had been sleeping in the Long Library were moved to huts in the courtyard with disastrous results. Snow lay three inches deep all over the grounds and the cold air seeped up through the temporary structure and into their beds. The following week there were 170 in the sick bay. Four members of staff and several boys succumbed to pneumonia. Luckily the school physician, Dr Elkington, had access to the then new wonder-drug, M&B 693, a precursor of penicillin, which saved the lives of several boys and the school was able to emerge from the scare without loss of life, something that would have been unlikely even a few years earlier.
James Roy was sent to sleep in the duke’s riding school, which was warm, light and had plenty of room so he managed to escape the flu. The biggest complaints the boys had besides the flu were chilblains. The sharp pain of blisters on toes, fingers, noses and ears is described in many letters home. The cure, they knew, was to avoid further exposure to the cold but that was almost impossible in the unheated classrooms and changing huts at Blenheim. ‘Boys came into morning school wrapped in coats and rugs, to find that icicles had formed under the corrugated iron roofs during the night. As the temperature slowly rose, they melted and dripped onto the forms below.’29
Over all this period, the war had been merely a background rumble to the life of the school with the reminder of it only during Officer Training Corps practice or in chapel. The period from September 1939 to the spring of 1940, known as the Phoney War, had lulled many people into a false sense of security. In March, Gaunt wrote to the parents announcing the welcome news that the Admiralty had had time to build and equip vast underground shelters in London as well as a mass of hutments in Malvern, which would mean that the college could occupy its own school buildings from September.
During April the Germans invaded Denmark and Norway. The unnatural calm had been broken and the power of the Nazi aggression against the countries of western Europe was witnessed by British and Polish forces in Norway. On 10 May the Germans launched the Blitzkrieg against France, Belgium and neutral Holland. The British Expeditionary Force, which had been guarding the Maginot line, was rudely awoken by the monstrous German war machine that lurched towards them, creating panic among the civilian population. At home in Woodstock life too changed gear. Headmaster Tom Gaunt wrote to the parents of all boys over the age of seventeen announcing that they would be expected to undertake Local Defence Volunteer duties. He needed parental permission as the boys were underage. James Roy wrote to his mother asking her to return the form, duly signed, adding ‘there will be a row if you do not agree.’30
One of the masters took on the task of giving the boys some extra tuition in the art of defensive warfare: ‘under Mr Nokes’ tutelage, we made Molotov cocktails in a quarry area in the north-east end of the lake. The wine bottles were filled with 1/3rd tar or bitumen, 1/3rd paraffin and 1/3rd petrol. Cotton waste was wired around the base of the bottle and ignited before it was thrown. As a reward for our efforts we were allowed to test the odd cocktail to destruction against the quarry face.’31
Stephen Brown, who was then in his first term at Malvern with his twin brother Peter, remembered an occasion at Blenheim that still makes him laugh. ‘There were wild rumours circulating all over Britain that German soldiers were parachuting into Holland disguised as nuns. We had a scare one evening at Blenheim and the OTC was called into action and sent out on patrol to locate the parachutists. It turned out to be a hoax but it showed how jittery everyone had become since the Germans had set their eyes on the west.’32
Gaunt was only too aware of the war in the background. He wrote:
Day after day the sun streamed down upon the golden landscape of Oxfordshire, wild flowers and birds abounded in the Park, the gardens and shady nooks of the Palace grounds provided refreshing retreats, and the sound of cricket floated from the Great Lawn . . . Elsewhere, however, more significant events were taking shape . . . Night by night, almost hour by hour, we listened to the grim catalogue of events in the Great Hall, in House huts, in dormitories and in the open air. The voice of Mr Churchill sounded only too clearly the peril with which we were now faced.33
The summer of 1940 was as glorious as the winter had been freezing cold. The Met Office’s summary was as warm as the weather: ‘June 1940 will long be remembered for abundant sunshine and unusual warmth; it was also markedly dry.’34 In Oxford, the mean maximum temperature was the highest for the month since 1881 with over 100 hours of sunshine in the first week. The school boys made the most of the weather, bathing in the ornamental pools and swimming in the lake. Years later, James Roy described an expedition that he and two others undertook:
Another episode concerns the Grand Bridge designed by Vanbrugh to cross a precipitous valley through which trickled the Glyme stream and its tributaries and built between 1705 and 1722, supposedly there were 33 rooms in it. However in 1764 Lancelot Brown (Capability) built a dam to flood the valley and all the ground floor rooms were flooded with the result that the visible height of the bridge is now a great deal less than Vanbrugh intended. We were convinced that there was an underground passage from the cellars to the palace due north to the bridge, partly I think because there were some manhole covers on the line of the suspected tunnel. Very early one morning, I think three of us, attempted to swim out to the nearest buttress of the bridge containing two floors of rooms, starting from the south-east bank of the lake. Whether we were beaten by the temperature of the water or by the distance being greater than we thought, the attempt was a failure.’35
Life at Blenheim continued to be enjoyed by most of the boys over the last few weeks of the summer term, though all were aware of the contrast between the grim events on the continent and one of the most beautiful summers of the century. ‘Cricket on the Great Lawn and swimming in the lake all took place under the same blue sky out of which, in France, the Stukas were swooping on columns of refugees. Even more incongruous it must have been at this moment of crisis in the nation’s affairs, the school could return to its home in Malvern.’36
In early June a complete Canadian Armoured Division arrived and set up camp. The Canadians had declared war on Germany a week after Britain and they offered military support as they had done in the First World War, when 425,000 men had served. By late December 1939, the 1st Canadian Division had begun to arrive in Britain and almost 330,000 Canadians passed through Aldershot camp where they were sent for training. ‘In twenty-four hours the Park was festooned with camouflage nets over guns, anti-aircraft batteries, armoured cars, lorries and tanks; while vast spaces were covered with the tents, kitchens, stores and military equipment of six thousand men.’37 The older boys were in their element and excited by the presence of real soldiers. Tom Gaunt wrote: ‘For ten days this occupation lasted, during which time we entertained some five hundred men to a great open-air concert on the Palace steps, and a number of boys learned to play baseball. Then one evening the division began packing up, and by early morning the men were gone, leaving behind them hardly a trace of their invasion!’38 Stephen Brown disagreed. He thought the Canadians had left plenty of evidence of their presence. ‘They took Woodstock apart. The Bear [Woodstock’s most famous inn] saw the worst of it.’39
At the end of the summer term the school began to pack up and the boys were sent to a camp in Worcestershire to support the war effort by helping with the harvest. It would be known as the Malvern College Harvest Camp at Oxstalls Farm at Evesham where the boys picked fruit for local farmers and were paid for their work. Once again, Gaunt wrote to the parents, this time to explain that the work was arranged under the supervision of the Evesham War Executive Agricultural Committee ‘and is an important form of National Service’.40 James Roy left Blenheim Palace for Evesham in early July. It was his last term of school and he would go on to study natural sciences at Sydney Sussex College, Cambridge for a year before joining the Royal Artillery.
The removal of Malvern College from Blenheim was managed with the same energy and organisation as it had been for the arrival in September the previous year. Lines of trucks drove into the great courtyard to collect beds, pianos, desks and chairs, books and sports equipment and take it back to Malvern ready to reopen the school at the beginning of September.
Blenheim was not to remain unoccupied for long. The Battle of Britain and the Blitz concentrated the mind of the government and many departments were moved out of the capital on a temporary, or sometimes permanent, basis. The Security Service MI5, which had expanded greatly at the outbreak of war, had failed to find office space in London to house its staff, so it had moved its headquarters to Wormwood Scrubs where it occupied part of the Victorian prison. The prison was hit by a bomb in September 1940 and most of the staff of MI5 transferred to Blenheim Palace, although some senior officers and counter espionage officers remained in London at the former MGM building in St James Street ‘whose identity was camouflaged by a large “To Let” sign outside.’41
When MI5 moved to Blenheim they took with them almost 1,000 people. They worked in the state rooms, which had been altered for the boys and were now further altered as they were subdivided by wooden panels with filing cabinets and trestle tables to provide office space. A ‘sea’ of wooden huts was erected in the courtyards to provide further accommodation. Helen Quinn worked for MI5 in London and she recalled the move to Blenheim, which was ordered by Churchill after valuable documents had been lost during a bombing raid. ‘We had three huts and were beside the courtyard which contained four squares of sacred soil brought back from the site of the battle of Blenheim. The Duke of Marlborough was insistent that nobody should walk on the soil, but he was not a match for the removal men who when they found that they were carrying cupboards full of ashes, walked straight across the sacred soil.’42 Helen lived in digs in Oxford and caught the bus out to Woodstock every day. ‘Though supposedly highly confidential, the nature of the palace’s new occupants was not a very well kept secret. The conductors on the bus from Oxford to Woodstock used to call out in ringing tones when they reached Blenheim’s gates, “Anyone for MI5?” ’43 After MI5 returned to London in 1944 the British Council moved in and used the palace as a base in which to plan their promotion of British culture in the postwar world.
When the boys and masters returned to Malvern they found it a completely different place from the sleepy little town they had left in September 1939: ‘A contingent of the Belgian army had its HQ at the Abbey Hotel; the records branch of the Polish Navy and a small number of Greeks were in town, and on occasions we had visitors from Yugoslavia, Norway and Holland at the some of the dances and parties which were held.’44
The college, smaller in size than it had been pre-war with just over 350 boys, settled back into its old buildings and familiar routine. School life continued with boys contributing to the war effort in various ways, including salvage collection, potato harvesting and training with the OTC, which they all took seriously.
In November 1940, Gaunt was approached by the office of the Free French in London to see if he could accommodate sixty to seventy boys of some two hundred who had cycled to the coast of France when the Germans invaded and had managed to escape to Britain. Two boys had crossed the Channel in an open rowing boat and were photographed taking tea with Winston Churchill in the garden of 10 Downing Street before being sent to join the rest of their fellow escapees. They were to be trained by the Free French army for commission, but the colonel in charge of the boys’ training was keen for them to be attached to a public school. In January 1941 sixty-three moved into No. 5 House and soon became a familiar sight in their red ‘walkingout’ cloaks. They joined in a number of school activities and used the classrooms, gymnasium and swimming pool.
For eighteen months life at Malvern College ran smoothly, but on 25 April 1942 everything changed again and this time there was no warning. A group of government inspectors arrived at the college, spent two hurried hours looking around the premises, and left without an explanation for their visit. Gaunt was sufficiently worried to go straight to London and present himself at the Office of Works: ‘I began by apologising for troubling them over what might be a silly scare, and until that very moment I was half expecting to be walking out of the building ten minutes later. . . [but] within two minutes it became obvious that the situation was extremely critical.’45
The reason for the crisis was genuinely a matter of national security. Radar had been in development since the 1930s and Britain’s research establishment was situated near Swanage on the Dorset coast. Both the Germans and the British had functioning systems by the outbreak of war and the use of radar during the Battle of Britain had proved the vital role this technology had to play in defence. A daring Combined Operations raid, Operation Biting, on the German radar station at Bruneval near Le Havre on the French coast in February 1942 had captured the vital components of a Wurzburg radar system and its German operator. These were taken to the Telecommunications Research Establishment in Dorset, known by its acronym TRE, the main organisation responsible for Britain’s research and development into radar and radio navigation. Over the next few weeks, while TRE researchers were examining the German equipment, the British became increasingly worried that the Germans would retaliate in kind. Then came intelligence about plans for a heavy attack on TRE by aircraft and the landing of a large number of parachute troops during the next moon period. When Churchill realised how vulnerable the radar establishment on the coast would be he ordered that it be moved inland with all possible speed and certainly before the next full moon, which would fall on 11 May. Finding somewhere suitable for such a huge and important establishment, while maintaining absolute secrecy, was tricky and especially so at this stage in the war when most of the large houses and buildings that could be requisitioned were already in use. In addition, TRE needed certain specific geographical features for their work, including fairly high hills, a wide range of vision – twenty-five miles would be ideal – proximity to an aerodrome and, of course, a secluded place of comparative safety.
Records in the National Archives reveal the agonising debate that went on behind the scenes in the hurried attempts to find a suitable location. The War Cabinet held three secret meetings in the third week of April, presided over by the prime minister himself. Also involved in the debate were Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs Clement Attlee, Minister of Production Oliver Lyttelton, Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, Sir John Anderson, Ernest Bevin, Air Vice-Marshal N. H. Bottomley, the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff and nine other RAF officials. On the 20 and 21 April 1942, this committee came to the conclusion that either Malvern College or Malborough College in Wiltshire should be requisitioned. Over the course of the next few days there was a great deal of buck passing. The Ministry of Supply claimed that this was the government’s responsibility, not theirs, while president for the Board of Education R. A. ‘Rab’ Butler weighed in with a hefty argument about the probable disruption to the pupils’ education. He wrote a three-page memorandum to the War Cabinet which is stamped in red ink: ‘TO BE KEPT UNDER LOCK AND KEY’. He argued that while the warning given to boarding schools in 1938–9 enabled the headmasters or mistresses to find alternative suitable accommodation, this current situation was unsatisfactory as any school with over 150 pupils would be unlikely to find a building large enough to accommodate them en masse. He cited the recent example of Wycombe Abbey School for girls that had been forced to close when it was taken over earlier that year. Some thirty percent of pupils at Malvern College were in the ‘higher’ stages, that is to say studying for entry into university. His impassioned argument claimed that if boarding schools such as Malvern College or Marlborough were forced to close there would be a generation of young people who had an inadequate or defective education and ‘the general morale of the nation will suffer by throwing out of school at short notice large numbers of pupils without providing reasonable opportunities for carrying on their education.’ This, in turn, would lead to a drop in the number of qualified and trained boys and girls ‘for commissioned rank and for technical posts [which] is vital for the war effort’46. It is a reminder that officers were still drawn, in the main, from the public schools and that the class system continued to dominate society. It also reminds us that war consumes mainly younger people at the peak of their fitness and potential. He went on:
The results are serious enough for any pupil, but they may be disastrous in the case of those with abilities of a high order. The need for competent boys and girls to enter the services with advanced qualifications, especially in science, has never been greater. The effect of closing a school at the present time is that boys and girls have their studies interrupted, sometimes at a vital stage in their career, and have to continue their advanced work often with overcrowded and totally inadequate facilities. The handicaps on advanced work are particularly crippling where premises not designed for education purposes have been taken into use.47
He pointed out that the other, perhaps less obvious, reason that school evacuations should be avoided was the issue of national security. It was inevitable, Butler wrote, that the wholesale evacuation of a school at this stage in the war would lead the public to assume, quite rightly, that the premises were required by the government for some secret military establishment. ‘By giving the strongest presumption that an important government establishment was involved, the object of the removal might, in part, be defeated.’48 These minutes provide a fascinating and detailed insight into the different and legitimate concerns the government had to weigh up when considering a course of action such as the movement of a major department from one place to another, with all the fallout that would result.
The need to house TRE safely away from the coast and in the proximity of similar establishments, such as the Air Defence and Research Development Establishment, made sense. There was already a strong presence in Malvern as the Ministry of Aircraft Production Research Establishment had acquired land in the town which they used for a Signals Training Establishment, housed in one-storey prefabricated buildings. In the end that appears to have been the overwhelming reason for the move even though bringing TRE to the town would require substantial premises to house hundreds and eventually over a thousand researchers and other staff.
Gaunt was told that the irresistible reason for this choice had to do with the most basic of human needs: sewage disposal. Marlborough’s drainage system was barely adequate for the existing residents so that the idea of increasing the population by 2,000 would put it under extreme stress. Furthermore, evacuating Marlborough would mean evacuating two schools totalling 1,100 boys as the City of London School had been sharing the premises of the Wiltshire public school since the beginning of the war. Malvern, by contrast, had only one third of that number.
So Gaunt and his council, staff and boys were once again to be made homeless but this time with one week’s warning and coming at the worst possible time for the senior boys, as they prepared for summer exams. Stephen and Peter Brown, now about to enter their final term at school, were told by telegram that the start of the term would be delayed and they would find out where they would be going in due course. For two boys about to sit their Higher Certificates this was an unwelcome disruption.
The Office of Works suggested relocating to Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire but it had no proper water supply, then they proposed a half-built Canadian camp near Hereford. It was a heartbreaking time for Tom Gaunt and at times he feared the break-up of his school which he believed would be final and fatal. His only hope, he wrote later, was to join up with another school. ‘But I also knew that most schools were far too full even to contemplate taking us.’49 At one stage he even considered splitting up the school by house and asking headmasters of other public schools around the country to accommodate one or more houses, but that would have proved to be a logistical nightmare. Then by a stroke of good luck he learned that Harrow School had suffered an alarming drop in numbers, owing to its proximity to London during the Blitz. The number of pupils had gone down from 500 to 330 in eighteen months and the ensuing financial crisis had already made it necessary for the school’s governors to close four of the houses. So when Gaunt picked up the phone and called A. P. Boissier, the acting headmaster of Harrow, he was pushing at an open door. Gaunt explained his plight and ended with the question: ‘ “Can you do anything for us?” Boissier had listened to my recital in silence, and his reply was brief, “I think so; come and have lunch.” ’50 That afternoon, Thursday 1 May 1942, Gaunt sat in Boissier’s study and they hatched a plan to accommodate both schools. Of the five houses offered, only one was empty and the rest would have to be vacated by the beginning of the ‘new’ Malvern term on 28 May. ‘The Coldstream Guards were in Westacre; the Ministry of Health had a hospital in Newlands; a London insurance company had rented Deyncourt as temporary offices during the Blitz period.’51 To its credit, the Department of Education, led by Butler, got things moving and three houses were empty by the middle of the month.
The need to get Malvern cleared for TRE quickly was intense and the chaos that ensued over the weeks before the school could open in Harrow was infinitely worse than the move to Blenheim. The Ministry of Aircraft Productions (MAP) which was in charge of the move to Malvern did not initially take into account the difficulties of simultaneously emptying a school and beginning construction work to convert the buildings to meet the needs of a completely different type of organisation. Gaunt felt he was in an almost impossible position: ‘Requisitioning Malvern College was . . . like asking the king to clear out of Buckingham Palace; in fact that would probably have caused less rumpus.’52
The removal to Harrow would be by rail, not road, but the railways could not cope with thirty-eight containers of goods all in one transport. Major Elliott, who had learned a lot during the earlier move to and from Blenheim, took charge of the project while other masters worked as labourers, emptying the houses as quickly as possible and loading up fifteen vans and thirty-eight railway containers. The bursar and Elliott had to work out a complete inventory for every item in every packing case. As this was happening, building contractors swarmed over the Malvern campus, installing hundreds of miles of new wiring, reinforcing floors, building a canteen to feed the staff and constructing huts on every piece of flat ground in the school grounds – with the exception of the ‘Senior Turf’, the school’s cricket pitch, which remained sacrosanct even in a time of national crisis.
For twenty-four hours an indescribable bedlam reigned as vans from Swanage arrived and tried to unload in the college precincts at the same time as the containers heading to Harrow were being filled for departure. Then a rumour started that soldiers had begun to break up the college in an undisciplined rout. In actuality, a small number of soldiers who had been sent to help had got bored and discovered a few straw hats belonging to the boys which had been left behind. ‘Intrigued by these novel objects, they had paraded through the grounds wearing them on their heads or dribbling them at their feet, a procedure that no doubt caused merriment to them, but aroused misgivings in the minds of others which swelled into horrific certainties a few hours later!’53
Meanwhile, the situation at Harrow was barely less chaotic. The housemasters had arrived from Malvern to settle into their new houses but only one was ready. The Coldstream Guards had begun to move out of one property, Westacre, but the Ministry of Health, who had promised to vacate a house called Newlands that was being used as a hospital, dithered before finally capitulating. The masters and their families were all temporarily lodged in the King’s Head hotel where they ate all their meals, discussed the issues facing the school and waited for the buildings finally to become available. Gaunt wrote: ‘The willingness of the hotel staff and the cheerfulness of our own people triumphed over the difficulties, and there were many moments of jest and gaiety as well as of perplexity and despair.’54
The bursar at Harrow offered Gaunt and his secretary, Miss Nicholls, a room in his office. It had previously had just one occupant but now it had two and a steady string of people coming in to ask questions: ‘The entire day, from 9.00am until 6.30pm and often later, was one of constant interruption, and the queue of attendant questioners sometimes reached down the stairs and into the street. Indeed, much of my own consultation was done in the street, for the weather was mercifully fine and there was more room outside!’55
Finally, four weeks after the planned start of term, the boys arrived in their new surroundings. Gaunt and Boissier had discussed and agreed it was essential that each school maintained its own independent character and that cooperation, though encouraged, should not mean traditions were lost.
There would be no sharing of lessons or games but at the beginning, when both schools were depleted in numbers, there were joint chapel services, ‘with the Malvern form of service being adopted for Matins and the Harrow form for evensong.’56 This practice stopped when the growing numbers of boys in both schools meant that the chapel could not accommodate them all. The schools shared the sanatorium, the tea shop and the library, and the choral societies were combined under the leadership of the Harrow music master, but otherwise they were kept apart.
The school prefects had written a list of Malvernian customs which totalled 116 and down to the last detail. They specified when boys were allowed to walk with one hand in their pocket (except when they met a prefect) and when they could walk with both hands in their pockets and wear a white handkerchief in their top pocket. ‘The very fact that these traditions were recorded and preserved made it considerably easier for the school as a community to adapt itself quickly and wholeheartedly to new ways. Time-honoured observances are treasured for their reminders of the duties, privileges, and responsibilities of a living social unit.’57 The preservation of the school’s traditions meant that it could maintain its own special character which differentiated it from Harrow at a time when public school rivalry was even more keenly felt than it remains today.
Some Malvern customs were lost forever, others merely given up for the time being. One that bit the dust was the tradition of swimming in the nude. Some thought this was because Harrow protested but in fact it was because ‘women who worked in the NAAFI near the Ducker [Harrow’s open-air swimming pool] objected to coming across naked sunbathers.’58 Another custom that was lost was in the form of greeting masters which was less formal than the Harrow greeting which they had to adopt, namely doffing their caps.
For Canon Gaunt, the move to Harrow had been a logistical and emotional nightmare, but when he spoke to the boys on the first morning they were all gathered in chapel he sought to present it from a neutral standpoint:
Let us consider this catastrophe in its right perspective, against the broader background of the war. Compare our sufferings with the perils and privations which our brothers are facing on land, on sea, and in the air. Consider the lives of those who fought at Singapore or who withdrew fighting week by week along the roads of Burma. Picture for a moment what our allies have to face in France and Poland and Greece. In the large picture of the war our sufferings and difficulties seem a small part.59
The school’s proximity to London was a mixed blessing. It had the advantage that boys and masters could enjoy the cultural possibilities as well as making it easier to invite distinguished speakers. On the other hand, the boys experienced war first-hand when Harrow was hit by incendiary bombs which ‘were put out by the fire-watching teams before they could do any serious damage except to the tea-shop.’60 The press reported on the incident referring to the school as ‘a famous one in London’. The Daily Telegraph regaled its readers with the image of incendiaries showering down on the school with ‘a fire bomb falling through the roof of one of the school houses, bouncing off the bed of one of the sons of a master. The boy was dragged clear by a master.’61 The reporter wrote that the boys put out the fires so quickly and efficiently ‘that the school was able to carry on normally yesterday except for 90 minutes delay at breakfast – because the bombs had got among the rations.’62 One family had decided against sending their son to Harrow because of the risk of bombing and had chosen Malvern instead. It was ironic that the lad ended up in Harrow after all.
Twins Stephen and Peter Brown were two of only a handful of boys who experienced both Blenheim and Harrow. Stephen said that he had little to do with the Harrovians except when they went down to the Ducker to swim. He recalled his time there as being very happy, if brief, and he was impressed by how quickly the school routine was up and running, despite the difficulties outlined above. ‘I was gearing up to take my Higher Certificate and hoped to go to Cambridge so I suppose I did not see as much of the Harrow boys as others would have done.’63 By the time the school returned to Malvern in 1946 only four boys had ever had experience of the life of Malvern College at Malvern not Harrow.
Malcolm Locock, who had arrived at Malvern College the term it was back in Worcestershire, spent four years at Harrow. He told his grandson: ‘Once we had settled in it wasn’t too bad, though initially a bit strange. Our house was quite some distance from school and we had to walk which meant getting up earlier each day.’64 All the boys at Harrow and Malvern joined the Officer Training Corps, which was taken very seriously. Malcolm wrote: ‘We were almost junior soldiers. We trained with guns and ammunition and still did night field exercises.’65 On one moonless night the boys were crawling along the ground looking for the ‘enemy’ when one of the masters kicked what he thought was a boy, telling him to move forward smartly. ‘As it happened it was a local cow which didn’t appreciate being moved on and said so.’66
The schools received distinguished visitors over the course of the war including Churchill, who apologised to the Malvern boys for being responsible for the second evacuation. Addressing both schools, he said: ‘You have visitors here now in the shape of a sister school – Malvern. I must say I think this is a very fine affair – to meet the needs of war, to join forces, to share alike, like two regiments that serve side by side in some famous brigade and never forget it for a hundred years after. I was very sorry that I myself had to be responsible for giving some instructions in regard to one of our establishments which made it necessary to take over Malvern at comparatively short notice.’67
He was booed by the Malvern boys not because of the school’s forced removal to Harrow but because of the price differential policy at the Tuck Shop, which meant the Malvernians paid more for goods than the Harrovians. ‘Rab’ Butler came to Malvern’s first prizegiving in July 1942, which meant a great deal to Gaunt and the masters who appreciated how much he had done to make their emergency move to Harrow happen by clearing bureaucracy from their path. A further visit from Herbert Morrison, then in his role as home secretary, in February 1944, acknowledged the sacrifice the school had made to the war effort.
Gaunt put the success of four years at Harrow down in large part to the boys and in particular to the senior prefects who formed an immediate and intelligent understanding with the Harrow monitors. They were always aware of the host-guest nature of the relationship and the seniors set an excellent example which filtered down to the most junior boys. ‘There was a certain rivalry between the two schools but not as much as I had expected. On each side the different customs and manners of the other were viewed with interest and a healthy sense of superiority: for Malvern, at any rate, it was a stimulus to feel that the judgment of another great school was being formed day by day, as well as that of the residents and tradesmen on the Hill . . . I never had any real anxiety about the school as a whole.’68
In the summer of 1945 a handful of Malvern boys who had been working on the harvest at a farm in Worcestershire were invited to visit their old school grounds. They accepted with delight. Most had never been there. They went into the sixth-form room which was being used by the superintendent A. P. Rowe as his study. Then they went into the chapel: ‘and were convinced that our memories of its beauty were not exaggerated. We were not allowed into any of the houses but from the outside at least they looked the same as ever.’69 When they got to the ‘Senior Turf’, the school’s first XI cricket pitch a few of the present cricket XI decided to ignore the notices forbidding anyone to step on the hallowed turf and walked onto it. They were unceremoniously turfed off it by a policeman. Despite that, they were all deeply grateful to A. P. Rowe who had made it possible for them to return ‘home’ for an hour.
The original contract with Harrow stated that Malvern must vacate the houses it occupied within twelve months of the end of hostilities against Germany. The Ministry of Education had promised Gaunt that he could return to Malvern in September 1945, which would have fulfilled this obligation, but unfortunately TRE seemed unwilling to leave its Malvern College site. It took a question in the House of Commons and exertion on the part of Ellen Wilkinson, the new minister of education, to get a partial derequisition of the site to allow Malvern to go back to Worcestershire in September 1946. So they returned. The dormitories were no longer partitioned, the grounds were littered with Nissen huts, TRE remained a presence on site but still it was a relief. Gaunt wrote: ‘We shall be back at last – back to our own home and familiar surroundings – back to the open hills – back, pray God, for good!’70
TRE enjoyed remarkable success at Malvern during the war. When Gaunt visited his old school he was able to sense that the spirit of Malvern ‘had not been wholly expelled by aliens’ and this was down to the man in charge, eminent physicist A. P. Rowe, who superintended the entire operation. Rowe had, from the outset, engaged the local council in the secret project, who had listened to his explanation about the value of radar with ‘rapt attention’, promising their utmost cooperation and the maintenance of secrecy as the situation demanded. The only thing the townspeople knew for sure was that ‘something unusual’ was going on and the local community was generous in its cooperation.
The school grounds were surrounded with barbed wire fencing and existing buildings had exciting new names to describe the activities going on inside. The school house had the ‘Centimeter Waveband Techniques’ department, or ‘radar counter measures’. The main school hall with its university boards and lists of alumni was taken over by Mr Dummer’s Synthetic Aircrew Trainers and gained the nickname ‘the Hall of Magic’. To give some sense of scale, the refectory completed on the school site could feed 1,500 people in one sitting, and the TRE Engineering Unit machine shop was said to be the largest electronics factory in Europe. TRE at Malvern was of such importance that the king and queen visited in 1944 and were shown around the Engineering Unit and other facilities.
TRE’s work at Malvern enabled Britain to keep ahead of the Germans in technology: the radar equipment developed there allowed Bomber Command to damage beyond repair Germany’s industrial output and to allow ‘the British and American bombers to blast the German defences on the French Atlantic and Channel coasts to pave the way for the Allied invasion.’71 Among the instruments of war developed in the TRE laboratories of Malvern were some high-profile offensive devices such as ‘Oboe’, which made possible high precision bombing; ‘H2S’, which provided the bombers with accurate radar pictures of towns beneath them, leading in 1943 to the bombing of Berlin and other German cities. Another development was ‘Window’, invented by a brilliant scientist called Joan Curran. It comprised strips of metalised paper that were dropped from aircraft to disrupt the signals from enemy radar and so protect the bombers. This is still used today and is known as ‘chaff’. The development of radar at Malvern which was used by the RAF from June 1943 onwards with great effect helped to spell the end of the U-boat threat, compelling Hitler to announce: ‘the temporary setback to our U-boats is due to one single technical invention of our enemies.’72 The Germans eventually came up with a device to fool radar but, as Rowe wrote, ‘when ‘Schnörkel’ [a device to make submarines more difficult to locate] appeared our armies were advancing fast across Europe and the end was in sight.’ TRE’s main purpose, he always maintained, was to buy time. He said: ‘In theory, nearly all radar devices could in time have been defeated by the enemy, provided that sufficient effort was put into countering them. The defeat of the U-boats serves to illustrate what we meant. The Germans were too late.’73 In September 1944 the first German V1 flying bomb hit London and TRE scientists constructed a model at Malvern to measure the radar signature so that ‘the anti-aircraft Radar AA No7 MK1, codenamed “Rugger Scrum”, could be linked to Bofors guns to shoot them down.’74 At this stage in the war, TRE ran courses in radar and electronics for both service and civilian personnel but immediately postwar the work focused on an altogether larger project: the Atom Smasher. A world first, it was built at Malvern in 1946 and was the predecessor to the Large Hadron Collider.
While such work was going on close by, the school resettled in its old buildings and began to grow and thrive as Gaunt had envisioned when he took over a decade earlier, and what to him must have seemed a lifetime ago. For a man whose temper must have been sorely tested for weeks and months on end it is extraordinary that he was able to be so generous. He was an optimist and summed up the impact of the second move of the war in typically positive fashion: ‘If we remember with pain the agony and frustration of the early days of May 1942 and the long exile, we none the less appreciate our intimate connection with the men of TRE and its great achievements, and shall be proud to echo the words of a high official [A. P. Rowe], spoken to me in 1944, that the war against the U-boats and the war in the air had both been won on the playing fields of Malvern.’75
