Those years at Howick brought me out of my shell and did me the world of good.
Joan Hannant1
Late on the afternoon of 27 February 1941, Margaret Cook arrived at Howick Hall in Northumberland in her Austin 7. She had driven through the worst snowstorm she had experienced in her life and was relieved to stop in front of the handsome eighteenth-century Hall and get into the warm. The snow fall at the end of February was described by the Meteorological Office in its monthly summary as ‘abnormal, particularly in north-east England and south-east Scotland and in some places it was probably the heaviest fall of the century.’2 Twenty-nine and a half inches or seventy-five centimetres of snow fell in Newcastle in two days. Miss Cook was lucky to get to Howick at all. She was to stay there for the next four and a half years, during which time she never witnessed such extreme weather again but she gained a lifetime’s experience in her job as the secretary-bookkeeper at Howick Hall Hospital.
On her arrival she met Lady Mabel Grey, who was to be the commandant of the military hospital set up for the second time in her home. Already in her mid-fifties at the outbreak of the Second World War, Lady Grey had been awarded the CBE in 1919 for her work at the Red Cross Hospital at Howick during the Great War and in between the wars had continued her work with the organisation.
During the First World War there was an acute need for hospital accommodation in Britain. Country houses from northern Scotland to Cornwall were taken over to provide beds for anything from specialist units to general convalescent homes. In all, almost 2.7 million sick and wounded arrived in Britain, brought back from the continent and other theatres of war further afield, for treatment. Before the war there were 7,000 equipped beds in military hospitals. By the Armistice in November 1918 there were 364,133.
Previous experience had shown that mixing civilian and military patients was not a wise move. This had to do with the maintenance of records and the aftercare of the sick and wounded as well as the maintenance of military discipline, rather than with the nature of their treatment. A very large proportion of the beds made available during the First World War was provided and equipped by voluntary aid organisations and private individuals. All offers had to be submitted to the Red Cross for approval and they reported to the Army Council if they thought the accommodation would be of use. Some 1,600 large and small hospitals were accepted, ranging from one with six beds to the largest with more than two hundred. ‘Voluntary hospitals were designated auxiliary hospitals and were entitled to a per capita grant for each military patient admitted to them for facilities for treatment. Those with a trained personnel and suitable equipment were designated Class A auxiliary hospitals and those suitable only for convalescents were Class B.’3
The Ministry of Health estimated that a similar need for hospital and convalescent beds would arise in this next war and they hoped that the Red Cross would once again run auxiliary hospitals that would ‘fulfil the two-fold purpose of freeing beds in casualty hospitals for those who really needed them and of providing emergency medical service patients with suitable accommodation for convalescence.’4 Lessons, both good and bad, had been learned from the experience of hospital care twenty years earlier when great advances had been made in the treatment of the sick and injured. These were taken forward into the current crisis and, as social researcher Richard Titmuss pointed out, ‘the frame and pattern of the hospital services at the end of the war were due as much – if not more – to the kind of war that was expected as to the kind of war that happened.’5 He went on:
This is an important historical fact. The estimates of the Air Staff, the translation of these into figures of casualties and hospital beds, and the prevailing mood of fear and alarm about the character of a future war had largely determined, by the end of 1938, the way in which the medical services of the country were to be organised eventually. The outline of Britain’s first attempt to create a national hospital service was clearly pictured before the war began.6
Joined-up thinking was not something that had been widely experienced prior to the war, yet in so many spheres, out of necessity in a time of national emergency, even rival institutions agreed to work together for the common good. However, the idea of treating civilian and military patients together was still not accepted. It appeared that a major issue for the War Office was that they believed service patients would not be sent back to duty as quickly if they were treated in hospitals not under military control. So the situation remained largely as it had been during the First World War, that military patients were treated and convalesced in separate establishments. The War Office estimated they would require 20,000 beds, a substantial drop on the previous war, but in the end demand was lower. In August 1944, the Red Cross reported that there were over 14,000 beds available in 230 country houses, and the occupancy was 72 per cent.
Howick Hall had been the first stately home in north-east England to enrol as a First World War hospital. It opened on 23 October 1914 with thirty-one beds for convalescent servicemen, and ran for eighteen months. In line with the usual procedure it was funded by the Red Cross but run by the owners on a voluntary basis. Lady Sybil Grey, daughter of the fourth Earl Grey, had been the first VAD [Voluntary Aid Detachment] to be accepted by the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle at the outbreak of the war. She threw herself energetically into the work of the Howick Hall Convalescent Home of which she became commandant. She was helped by her sister-in-law, Lady Mabel Grey, who went on to become a prominent member of the Red Cross. Lady Sybil, meanwhile, was part of a British party that set up a Red Cross hospital in Petrograd, on the initiative of Lady Muriel Paget, in response to the news of terrible Russian casualties in 1916. She remained in Russia until the revolution and her father’s illness made it impossible for her to stay any longer. She was awarded an OBE for her work.
A large number of the patients at Howick in 1914 were Belgian and their letters of thanks in French to Lady Sybil contain poems, drawings and photographs. Their stay had transformed their opinion of British hospitality, one soldier wrote to her. Another letter starts ‘My most noble lady, I have so much pleasure in writing you this short letter to thank you for your wonderful, maternal care of me while I was at Howick.’7 The British soldiers’ letters were equally warm in their thanks but also full of self-deprecating humour. One contained a photograph of a football team called the Howick Cripples. Another man wrote to say that after he had returned to France he found himself sleeping on a stone floor in January with just one blanket to keep him warm. ‘I could not help thinking of Howick Hall and my surroundings and companions . . . I shall always have pleasant memories of the happy time and the many kind ways in which I was treated at Howick and once again I thank your Ladyship from the bottom of my heart.’8 The correspondence was not only one way. Lady Sybil responded to many of the letters and sometimes initiated the exchange. It would appear the hospital had been a great success.
In 1926 a catastrophic fire had destroyed the interior of the main house and all the contents of the top two floors. The fire was discovered by Lord Grey who was woken up by the noise of the second-floor ceiling falling in onto the floor below. He roused the household and rang the alarm bell outside the hall. Men and women from all over the estate and Howick village rushed to help out, as did the police and the local fire brigade, who were informed by a telephone message sent by Mr Hale of Howick Grange. Howick Hall did not have a telephone until after the Second World War but the press got hold of Lord Grey’s daughter, Molly, who was staying with her aunt Sybil in London. They asked her if she knew that Howick Hall had burned to the ground and Lord Grey with it. She was just nineteen years old and it gave her a terrible shock. Lady Sybil immediately phoned through to Mr Hale to find that Lord Grey was alive and in charge of the fire-fighting.
Unfortunately it was a foggy night and the local fire engine took three hours to cover the twenty miles from Ashington and the hall’s own fire engine proved to be of no use. Volunteers had to carry pails of water from the burn at the side of the house until the fire brigade arrived.
People who were not fighting the fire helped the Greys rescue as many of the treasures as they could from the house before the flames took such a hold that it was no longer safe to enter the building. Lady Grey, who the press delighted in reporting was ‘clad in a dressing gown’ directed volunteers to the most important corners of the hall. She and Bob Nicholl, the gamekeeper, rescued books and other treasures while Billy Meakin, the estate’s carpenter, saved all the family portraits from the blaze by cutting the canvases out of their frames and bringing them out to safety. Soon there was a huge pile of furniture, books, paintings and other treasures on the front lawn. Billy watched the men hauling buckets of water to cool down the walls in order to save the ballroom and the west wing. When the fire died down and the damage was assessed, the drawing room, breakfast room, dining room, library, central hall and eight bedrooms were completely destroyed. The main reason the damage was so extensive was lack of a nearby water source to fight the blaze. The ornamental pond that now stands in front of the hall is a fire pond, constructed to provide water close at hand in the event of another fire.
Howick Hall was rebuilt by Sir Herbert Baker who introduced a portico above the front hall in order to make the house smaller. ‘Disciples of Georgian architecture are not amused’9 said the present owner Lord Howick. However, Baker’s redesign gave the family opportunities to introduce modern conveniences such as bathrooms with hot water and electricity. There was even a basic central heating system installed in the house, though the family still relied on fires in the library and the other large downstairs rooms to keep warm.
The Grey family has an eminent and varied history. The first Earl Grey was the general who introduced marching in step on manoeuvres as an efficient method of moving an army around quickly. This had not been done since Roman times. His son, Charles, the second Earl Grey, lent his name to the famous tea. It was blended for him by a Chinese civil servant using bergamot to offset the taste of lime in the water at Howick. Lady Grey served it when she was entertaining guests in London and it immediately caught on as a fashionable and sophisticated drink. ‘It proved so popular that she was asked if it could be sold to others, which is how Twining came to market it and it is now sold worldwide. Sadly the Greys, being unbusinesslike, failed to register the trade mark and as a result they have never received a penny in royalties.’10 The second Earl Grey became prime minister in 1830 and was most famous for introducing the Great Reform Bill of 1832. He was vigorously opposed by his predecessor, the Duke of Wellington, but he prevailed, thus taking Parliament on its first step towards modern parliamentary democracy. He was also active in the march to abolish slavery. Grey married Mary Elizabeth Ponsonby in 1794 and between 1797 and 1819 eleven sons and four daughters were born and survived. He also had an illegitimate daughter, Eliza Courtney, who was born to Georgiana Cavendish, the Duchess of Devonshire, before the earl’s marriage to Mary. His oldest son, Henry, who became the third Earl Grey, remembered with great affection his father reading out loud to the family almost every evening. He lived at Howick Hall for forty-four years, dying in 1845 at the age of eighty-one. Unlike his father, Henry Grey had no children so the estate passed to his nephew, Albert, fourth Earl Grey, in 1894. Albert was married to Alice Holford whose father, Robert Stayner Holford, created the great arboretum at Westonbirt in Gloucestershire. Their son, Charles Grey, married Lady Mabel Palmer and together they laid out the gardens at Howick, transforming them from a formal Victorian design into the sweeping, informal gardens that are still to be seen today.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Countess Mabel Grey was president of the British Red Cross Society in Northumberland and she immediately suggested Howick should again be a convalescent home. She had enjoyed her experience of working with the soldiers during the First World War and knew that the newly refurbished hall was even better suited than it had been twenty years earlier.
Although Howick had been accepted by the Red Cross, it was not called into use for the first eighteen months of the war as the requirement for beds for service personnel had been far lower than the original estimates. Lady Grey was informed at the beginning of 1941 that they could expect their first patients in early March. She was eager to get cracking and Margaret Cook’s arrival on that snowy day helped to encourage a sense of purpose. As the hospital stores arrived they were piled up in the hall waiting to be distributed. The Red Cross not only sent medical supplies but also beds, tables, chairs, recreation equipment, games, books and deck chairs. Lady Grey oversaw the transformation of the hall personally.
Slim and of average height, Lady Grey had brown wavy hair parted in the middle and a kind face but her appearance hid a tireless and steely determination. Her grandson, Lord Howick, remembers her as a Victorian lady. ‘She was very religious and there were rules that had to be obeyed. She always went to church and there was no shooting on a Sunday, except for rabbits on the croquet lawn.’11 To the outside world, and to the hospital staff during the 1940s, she was efficient and well connected and Margaret Cook, working in the office, was constantly glad that Lady Grey was on her side. As she put it, ‘She knew what we needed [at Howick] and she could persuade the Red Cross Committee to let us have it.’12 Lady Grey could also be very warm and sympathetic. Joan Hannant was just eighteen when she volunteered to become an auxiliary nurse. She was desperately upset to be sent to Howick as she had never been away from home before. As an only child she was not used to mixing with other people but, she said, ‘it turned out to be one of the happiest times of my life.’13 When her mother was ill, Lady Grey sent her home for the weekend with a bunch of daffodils and a box of fresh eggs. Joan never forgot that kindness.
Lady Grey not only had a hospital to run but also an expanding household. Her younger daughter, Elizabeth, was married to Lieutenant Colonel Ronald ‘Ronnie’ Dawnay, an officer in the Coldstream Guards. The couple had four children born between 1933 and 1938. He served between 1939 and 1942, being mentioned in dispatches, but was taken prisoner at Tobruk. Lady Elizabeth died on 25 February 1941 of a brain tumour, two days before Miss Cook arrived at Howick. She was just thirty-two years old and had been living in Canada since the outbreak of the war. The children were effectively orphaned as their father was abroad so they came to live at Howick in 1942. Lord and Lady Grey lived in two rooms in the main house and the children stayed in the west wing, which is now the family home. Despite the great sadness of losing her mother, Anne Dawnay has very happy memories of the war years at Howick. She, her sister and her two younger brothers were looked after by a governess and a nanny called Scottie. When she was old enough, Anne went to the local school in Howick village on the bus, but the focus of her life was at the hall where she had her dogs and ponies.
Margaret Cook, Lady Grey, the nurses, quartermaster, matron and general service members of the Red Cross worked round the clock to get the hall ready to take the first patients. The general service members were to work in the kitchen and as cleaners for the hospital. There was roughly one Red Cross or St John auxiliary nurse to every ten beds, which meant some half dozen nurses at any one time. Overseeing the day-to-day running of the hospital was Matron. There were two at Howick over the course of the war, Matron Reid and Matron Railton, and they were feared and respected in equal measure. The doctor was a civilian who came in as and when he was needed but most of the men needed nursing rather than medical intervention.
While the hospital staff was focused on preparing the hall for the patients, Lord Grey was anxious to protect the hall and its treasures from damage. He called on the ever-reliable estate joiner, Billy Meakin, who had helped to rescue the family portraits during the great fire fifteen years earlier. Billy had lived at Howick Hall since 1918 when his father, Charlie, took the job of coachman to the fifth earl. It was a time of change: the family was switching from horses to motorcars so Charlie became the family’s chauffeur, but he spent part of his day taking the Grey daughters out riding and looking after the remaining horses in the stables. Billy, who was fifteen, was initially engaged as a pantry boy but he seems to have ‘twisted the stems off so many wine glasses, they couldn’t afford to have him in the pantry so he became apprenticed to the estate joiner, Mr Richardson.’14
Although Billy Meakin’s title was ‘house joiner’, he acquired the skills necessary to keep a house and estate the size of Howick in order. He taught himself to restore antique furniture, to regild and French-polish furniture, but also wheelwrighting and glazing. He learned how to construct barns, make garden furniture and repair doors and windows. In the mid-1930s he was badly injured in an explosion. It damaged his hand and he nearly lost his eyesight. Lord Grey organised for his eye surgeon to take over Billy’s care and his sight was saved. However, the injuries rendered him unfit for war service. By the outbreak of the Second World War he was installed in the old dairy where his son, Arthur, remembers ‘the little books of very thin gold leaf, the sweet smell of new planed wood, the stable smell of animal glue heating gently in the glue pot . . . the type of glue that took seventy-two hours to dry.’15 The workshop was located in the west courtyard which had huge gates that were supposed to keep the male staff isolated from the female servants who slept in that corner of the house. As soon as Lord Grey heard that the hall would be accepted as a convalescent home he asked Billy to help with altering the interiors to make them suitable for the purpose. All this had to be undertaken quickly and with limited materials as the Office of Works did not offer to help out, as it had done for other properties. Billy took great pride in saving Lord Grey money and would do anything to avoid having to bring in outside contractors. As well as being an outstanding and inventive joiner, he was also an able metalworker. During the war he won a contract with the War Office to manufacture episcopes (a kind of slide projector). Lord Grey could not afford to give him a pay rise so he gave him half a day off a week to allow Billy to make them.
The hospital occupied the new part of the house which was centrally heated and had plenty of bathrooms and hot water upstairs. Two extra bathrooms and a sluice room were put in for the patients on the ground floor, the whole of which was used except the central hall which was piled high with stored furniture and closed off from the staff with partitions and wooden doors, all made by Billy Meakin. A sign on the front door sent visitors to the left if they wished to enter the hospital and right to reach Lord Grey. Margaret Cook described the changes:
The dining room and library became wards each holding about fifteen beds. The drawing room became the recreation room, complete with grand piano and table tennis table and a door leading out on to the terrace. Lord Grey’s study became the nurses’ sitting room where we also had all our meals (the nurses, sister, QM and myself). The butler’s pantry became the surgery, the wall cupboards with sliding glass doors being perfect for instruments, and the heated steel cupboards for keeping food hot being excellent for airing bed linen, shirts etc. The Servants Hall became the men’s dining room and a small room where the butler used to sleep was used as a massage room and contained a massage couch and lamps for ultra-violet and radiant heat. In the library the books were left in their shelves which covered the walls, and the whole shelves were covered with a beaver boarding, so nobody ever knew they were there. The men also spent a lot of time playing billiards in the billiard room.16
The fire escape at Howick was a rope slung from a top-floor window and escaping meant abseiling from sixty odd feet above the ground. The Australians, who were the most enthusiastic at sport, enjoyed fire practice but others were not so keen. It is difficult to imagine how sick men could have been efficiently evacuated using this adventurous method of escape.
The administration office was in Lady Grey’s sitting room where there were three desks, one for Lady Grey, one for Margaret Cook and one for Miss Hale, the quartermaster. Hers was a voluntary post and she usually had three VAD nurses living with her as lodgers at the Grange. It was her family that had had the only telephone at Howick when the fire broke out in the 1920s. Margaret was amused that Miss Hale ‘spent a lot of time downstairs giving out stores etc and as little as possible at her desk coping with Food Office returns and ration books.’17 Anne Dawnay remembers Miss Hale as a woman who was full of advice on what ‘was done’ and ‘what was not done’, especially when it came to manners and speech. But she was an enthusiastic horsewoman and that was something she and Anne had in common. Anne, the most passionate of the four children about horses, had been taught to ride by her mother and now Miss Hale took over as Anne’s riding instructor.
The top floor of the hall had smaller rooms which functioned as additional wards to the dining room and library wards downstairs. The hospital kept the pre-war names of these rooms: Cherry, Spotted, Hayfield, Day Nursery and Night Nursery. ‘You can imagine what the men’s faces were like when they arrived and were told they were sleeping in the night nursery!’18 When the weather was fine beds would be set up outside so those who were unable to walk could enjoy fresh air and the gardens. Those who could walk were encouraged to make use of the grounds and the photograph album at Howick is full of pictures of men sitting in deck chairs, playing cards around a garden table or lying in the long grass, reading or sleeping. Fitter men took advantage of the croquet lawn and some even tried fishing in the river.
Howick Hall Hospital opened officially two weeks after Margaret Cook’s arrival. She wrote afterwards:
We opened on March 12 1941 with one patient, five VADs, a Matron, the QM, myself (the secretary book keeper), four RC general service members in the kitchen and four Red Cross general service members to do the house work. You can imagine how the one patient enjoyed himself! Next day there were two more, then five more and then they began to come and we were really going.19
By the summer of 1941 they had over forty patients and the routine at the hospital had settled down and was running smoothly under the direction of Matron Reid. The men were allowed in the main gardens but other areas, such as the kitchen gardens, were out of bounds, presumably so they would not help themselves to the fruit. The children each had their own vegetable patch which they tended enthusiastically under the eagle eye of Mr Woodman, the head gardener, who, presumably under instruction from Lady Grey, had put the beehives next to the strawberry beds to stop them from helping themselves to the strawberries. Margaret Cook remembered fruit trees growing along all four walls of the kitchen garden. These were unusual walls as they were hollow so they could be heated to grow espaliered fruit that would not otherwise have survived the harsh climate. Half the kitchen garden had been dug up for potatoes and the rest produced fruit and vegetables for the kitchens to bulk out the rations supplied by the Red Cross.
As president of the Women’s Land Army as well as the Red Cross in Northumberland, Lady Grey was entitled to additional petrol rations, so she would take her grandchildren with her and drop them off somewhere for a picnic while she visited hospitals or hostels and then collect them on the way home. There was usually little opportunity for getting around in wartime so the children loved those outings and looked forward to Lady Grey’s official work visits. She remained in her Red Cross role throughout the war, supporting the county director, Miss Maude Williamson. In her December 1941 county director’s report, Miss Williamson wrote that three auxiliary hospitals had opened in the county and ‘are running very successfully. Ford Castle forty-five beds, Callaly Castle 100 beds, Howick Hall fifty beds.’20 The hospitals were staffed entirely by Red Cross officers and members and at Howick the number of beds rose to sixty over the course of 1941. Two further houses were taken over in the county, Pallinsburn with forty beds for women’s services and Wallington with fifty.
Howick Hall Hospital took soldiers, sailors and airmen from the ranks. It is said that they were preferred to officers as they were generally better behaved. Howick had convalescent patients from all over the world, not just members of the British armed forces. Margaret Cook wrote:
Besides British patients we had a few Canadians, Australian, one American, a few Dutch, French, Polish etc., a few merchant seamen, including one Lithuanian marine, and practically every regiment in the British Army! Quite a lot of sailors, and a few RAF though they were usually nursed in their own sick quarters until they were fit for duty. The sailors were frightfully useful and good at polishing floors. And they were always washing their collars and pressing their trousers.21
Lady Grey’s guest book of Howick Hall is an exceptionally valuable resource. Every man who went through the convalescent home as a patient was asked to sign the book in his own hand, giving his name and home address including country, so it is possible to see when the Australians arrived or the Norwegians left and what overlap there was. In September and October 1942, for example, they had men from Greece, France, the Netherlands, Republic of Ireland and Norway. The weather was wet and windy with a dozen severe thunderstorms that kept the men indoors. The billiards’ room came into its own when the weather was foul and the men were encouraged to take up a range of activities with material supplied by the Red Cross.
One of the jobs assigned to Lady Grey was the missing lists. These were supplied by the Red Cross to official searchers, of which she was one. Nothing, short of a death notice, was more cruel than to receive an MIA (missing in action). She took this responsibility very seriously and did everything she could to establish for the families the actual fate of MIAs. In the summer of 1940 there was a good chance that a man had been taken prisoner on the continent, but sometimes it was a question of identifying where he had died. A few of the patients at Howick were able to give her news about men on the missing list. Some were able to give her detailed information which she could pass on to the Red Cross and it was Margaret Cook’s job to keep the lists up to date crossing out names of those accounted for from a list of amendments. The news was not always good. She wrote in her memoir: ‘One day I came across the name of an old patient of ours who had been killed – a young and brilliant actor who had been with the Birmingham repertory company and had entertained us a lot the previous Christmas.’22
The convalescent hospitals were designed to relieve pressure on the general hospitals by taking patients as soon as they were fit enough to travel by ambulance. There were, therefore, few bedridden patients at Howick except at pinch times, such as after D-Day, when all the major hospitals in Britain were overwhelmed with emergencies. There was little actual nursing to be done at Howick so that girls who wanted more experience tended to go to Plymouth or Haslar where they joined major military hospitals and dealt with more serious cases. At Howick the men were recovering from anything from fractured limbs to operations for appendicitis and hernias. They had cases of jaundice, tonsillitis, bronchitis and gastritis. Auxiliary nurse Joan Hannant described doing general jobs on the wards: ‘giving bed baths, doing dressings and giving pills. Sometimes we’d take the patients for a bit of exercise, even down the Long Walk to the sea for a paddle.’23
There was only one operation ever held at Howick, which was to remove a piece of cartilage from the knee of one of the household. Margaret Cook related it in her memoir with evident relish:
There was great excitement! Matron was longing to have an operation! The massage room was scrubbed up and the doctor came to operate bringing his partner to give the anaesthetic and everybody watched – including all the VADs and Lady Grey! The house member, Florence Bickerton, did not seem to mind and thoroughly enjoyed a week or two in the guest room recuperating!24
Howick lies on the coast of Northumberland some forty miles north of Newcastle. The village is ancient but the seashore is older still. In 1992 the earliest footprint ever to be discovered in Britain was found on the Howick seashore. The prehistoric amphibian dates back 350 million years and caused a great stir in the world of archaeology. Not long after that there was an even more remarkable find: the remains of the oldest house in Britain were uncovered a few hundred yards away. ‘It was thought until the find that the population of Western Europe had been nomadic in 8,000 BC. But here in Howick it became plain that families had built houses and settled down in an organised community.’25 The ancient coastline and the sea air was a tonic to the recovering patients. The extensive gardens and the woods leading down the Long Walk along Howick Burn between an avenue of beech trees were full of wildlife, while the sea beyond had its own rugged beauty, even on stormy days. Margaret Cook wrote: ‘The patients really had a lovely time while they were convalescing. Howick is a beautiful spot with lovely grounds famous for its daffodils and enormous trees. It was only 1/4 hours’ walk to the sea. The coast is rock rather like the coast of Cornwall and there was a nice beach.’26
The men who were fit enough to walk the six miles to Alnwick were allowed to do so as often as they liked, and those who could not were taken into the market town on Tuesdays on a specially organised bus where they went to the cinema. For men who had been fighting abroad life at Howick must have seemed blissful. ‘They could bathe, play tennis, croquet (which was very popular), clock golf, walk in the woods, play billiards, table tennis, have dances, whist drives, ENSA shows and films, read books and have a really good holiday.’27
On the surface the regime of the hospital was relaxed. In addition to the various pursuits available to them, the men who could would help out by making their own beds or offering to chop wood. Some took joinery lessons from Billy Meakin and others took advantage of the peace and quiet to paint, stitch and write. Embroidery was a popular pastime and Margaret Cook was amused by the craze for embroidering their regimental badges on pieces of linen which they then had framed. ‘Some of them were beautifully done, even by those who had never used a needle before. They also made a lot of string bags and belts, and some made leather handbags for their wives and rugs for their homes. We were able to get materials quite easily for all this through the Red Cross.’28 One soldier embroidered a piece of canvas the size of a pillowcase with a beautiful picture of Howick Hall and gardens. Many of the men wrote to Lady Grey when they left the hospital telling her how much they had benefitted from their stay. ‘They really did seem to enjoy themselves and the whole place had a very happy atmosphere and very little discipline.’29
Behind the scenes, however, the hospital was run on strict lines. Lorna Granlund joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service at the outbreak of war and got a job at Howick looking after the patients. She said: ‘I had two weeks training at the RVI [Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle] and then I was set to work looking after the wards, cleaning, keeping the patients cheerful and making them cups of tea.’30 Matron Railton, who took over from Miss Reid in 1942, was a stickler for the rules and everyone was wary of her. Anne Dawnay remembered her as a formidable character. ‘She was the Überboss, she was god and ruled everything but she was very kind.’31 Some VADs stayed for long stretches but most did short stints so that the turnover of nursing staff was high and often gave Matron something to complain about. She could be brusque with the young nurses and some found her strictness too much to take.
The girls had to wear blue overall dresses with an apron over the top and a ‘nun-like head covering’. Lorna cycled two and a half miles from the village of Embleton to Howick in her blue knee-length dress, but her headdress and apron had to stay at the hall. Matron did not approve of Lorna’s dress. It was far too short in her opinion. ‘She said to me: “you might let the man in the next bed see your knickers!” I replied very cheekily “I don’t keep my knickers down there.” ’32 Matron was not amused by the remark and gave Lorna the lowliest jobs she could find. One of these was to sweep the floors. ‘Lady Grey used to sweep as well,’ Lorna said, ‘but not with a brush! She would sweep into the hall and go through the green baize door through which we were not allowed to go.’33 The hierarchy of the hall was further underlined by the seating at mealtimes. ‘The cook was Mrs Robertson and the table was laid in such a way that where you sat reflected your grade.’34 Lorna did not stay long at Howick as she found the work of an auxiliary nurse dull. She joined up in 1941 and the following year was at Portsmouth with the Wrens.
The Joint War Organisation (JWO), which had responsibility for paying for the convalescent hospital beds, had two separate rates depending on occupancy and one of Margaret Cook’s jobs was to keep a tally of the number of occupied and unoccupied beds. There were endless rules that had to be complied with to satisfy the army as well as the Red Cross and JWO and Margaret had to make sure that all these were followed. Some were easier than others. The men were not allowed to stay at Howick for more than three weeks, after which they were returned to their regiments or, if still unfit, they were either invalided out or sent to another holding camp. They were not allowed to wear anything but their hospital blues so that they were instantly recognisable in Howick or Alnwick and could not go ‘walkabout’ without permission. ‘All their khaki was handed in when they arrived and put in the pack store (above the stables) in numbered pigeon holes. I had to deal with this at first and give them receipts for everything they handed in, but later the army provided a full-time NCO which was much better. Later still they also provided a PT instructor, but PT was never really popular with the majority of the men.’35
The men were entitled to bus and railway warrants, thirty-five free cigarettes a week from the Red Cross and ten shillings a week from their army pay so they could buy cinema tickets or pay for any other little expenses. On Mondays and Thursdays Margaret ran a canteen in an attic room that sold NAAFI cigarettes, matches and chocolate. She worked flat out from morning to night filling out endless forms for the Ministry of Health and the army. ‘The army’s love of forms is something we had to get used to but it sometimes seemed overwhelming,’ she said. Margaret was also asked to organise pantomimes for the men at Christmas time. Snow White was very popular, she recalled, as were Aladdin and Cinderella.
Anne Dawnay remembered the lively atmosphere at Howick. The soldiers’ presence made a real difference to the house:
I think there were about thirty or forty of them and most of the main house was taken over. For their dining room they took over the servants’ hall, which is now part of the tea room with the fireplace (my grandmother was allowed £1 per soldier per week for food). On the whole, our convalescents were recovering well. So it was good fun for us children to join in with some of their activities. We saw films on the home cinema – I recall Mrs Miniver – and we’d be allowed to sit in when ENSA concert parties visited. They brought some quite big names to Howick.36
Anne had ponies and dogs at Howick; her favourite was Chang, a Pekinese that she was given as a puppy for her tenth birthday. He was a great character and the men used to enjoy playing with him and teasing Anne. Chang used to lie on the bottom shelf of a trolley and growl at passers-by. Once he went missing for two days and was found by a local farmer who brought him safely back to the hall, but the event that sticks most firmly in Anne’s mind was Chang’s abduction by one of the soldiers. A group of men were leaving Howick and after they had gone Matron looked round and could not see the little dog. She marched down to the bus stop at the end of the drive and found him hidden in the greatcoat of a departing soldier. Chang was returned to Anne and after that she kept a more careful eye on him when parties of soldiers were leaving. The presence of the children at Howick was a tonic for the men and they enjoyed seeing them around. They were a reminder, one of them said, of their own families at home and of why the war needed to be fought and won.
Life at Howick was not all about the war and the hospital patients. Family life continued with visits from various relatives as well as friends. Lady Sybil Middleton, Lord Grey’s sister, who had been so active in the First World War, lived at Lowood in the Scottish Borders. She was widowed in December 1941 and visited Howick several times over the course of the war years, making annual donations to the hospital even though she was involved in Red Cross work in her own area. Her hand-written diaries record her views on the war in brief but honest detail. She wrote on 10 June 1940: ‘Italy declares war – Dirty Dogs!’ Later in the year she described going with her brother to see four huge craters made by bombs that had landed near Howick. They made such an impression on them that later in the afternoon she wrote: ‘We took Mother and we took a number of photographs of the craters which were over thirty feet across and fifteen feet deep.’37 Sometimes she would accompany her sister-in-law on her official business around the county. In January 1944 they visited Cornhill, Pallinsburn and Ford hospitals and then played a round of croquet.
Christmas at Howick was a joyful occasion and the staff made every effort to give the patients a happy time. There was a huge decorated tree in the hall, a gift from Lord Grey, and Margaret Cook was in charge of preparations from pantomimes to presents: ‘Every Christmas the men each received a Christmas stocking – a long white knitted operation stocking – filled with all sorts of odds and ends from Woolworths, as well as sweets, cigarettes, matches, writing paper, shaving cream etc.’
They had visitors at Howick, some official from the Red Cross and the army, others informal, but the men were not permitted visits from family members as they were not on leave. One stood out in everybody’s memory and that was the visit of Princess Mary, the Princess Royal, in July 1941. As commandant-in-chief of the Red Cross and a former trained nurse, she came to inspect the hospital. She was accompanied by her lady-in-waiting and Helen, Duchess of Northumberland, who lived at Alnwick Castle. The Princess Royal came again two years later with her entourage. On that occasion the men, including a pair of Australian soldiers, organised a guard of honour. Twenty patients were fit enough to stand for a photograph with the Princess, the Duchess of Northumberland, Lady Grey, ten nurses, Matron and Margaret.
For the next two years the convalescent hospital functioned almost to full capacity with upwards of fifty patients at any one time. In January 1943 Lady Sybil and her son Harry arrived at Howick to find ‘Mabel, Charlie, the 4 Dawnay children, 63 men in hospital.’38
The numbers increased after D-Day and then gradually began to slow down over the early months of 1945. In August there were nine patients, all British. Over the course of the war, a total of 14,135 patients were treated in Northumberland’s five hospitals, with a far greater number passing through Howick Hall than had done during the First World War. Lady Grey wrote in the foreword to her 1944–45 official Red Cross branch report for Northumberland: ‘Our five hospitals were then in full operation, and now that they have all closed down we can look back and see what a really satisfactory piece of work they accomplished. During the whole war they were busy – but for the six to nine months after D-Day they were crammed and the staffs rose most gallantly to the occasion.’39
The last patients left Howick in September 1945 and the family, including the grandchildren, moved in and took over the Hall once again. The rooms downstairs were reinstated, the boards removed from the library bookcases and Billy Meakin was busier than ever, restoring damaged furniture and moving paintings back into position. He managed to ‘procure some field telephones in handsome leather cases plus some huge drums of cable. He worked out the circuitry and ran cables around the hall, stables, gardens etc. So by winding a handle and depressing certain switches, the estate was in telephonic communication for the first time.’40 Billy’s son, Arthur, remembers that not everyone was happy about the introduction of modern communications to Howick. Some of the estate workers didn’t like feeling they could be got at on the other end of a telephone line, Arthur Meakin explained. The telephone system did good service and was still in use at Howick until the 1960s.
Margaret Cook helped to oversee the packing up of the Red Cross material and clearing up Howick Hall. At the end of October she gathered her bags and papers, and left the Hall for the last time in her Austin 7. It was a wet and windy day but mild, in contrast to the day she arrived in the snowstorm four and a half years earlier. She wrote her four-page memoir of her time at Howick in 1946, concluding: ‘I feel I was very fortunate to have had such a happy and yet useful job to do during the war years.’41
