Beyond Brideshead
ADRIAN TINNISWOOD finds much to enjoy in this tour of the British country houses commandeered for the war effort
Our Uninvited Guests by Julie Summers Simon & Schuster, 464 pages, £20
Brideshead Revisited still colours our ideas of the country house at war – lorries arriving in darkness, Nissen huts in the park. “Not a bad camp,” the second-incommand reports to Charles Ryder. “Big private house with two or three lakes.”
Julie Summers’ new book takes us beyond Brideshead to find out what really happened when the Second World War saw Britain’s country houses invaded by schools, secret training establishments and, in one case, a maternity hospital.
Summers takes as case studies 12 country houses, ranging from stately homes like Brocket Hall – whose owner had hosted so many leading Nazis before the war that one of the bedrooms was christened the Ribbentrop Bedroom – to remote Scottish manors like Arisaig, one of the secret bases of the Special Operations Executive (see our feature on page 20 for more on this). Some, like Waddesdon and Blenheim, housed public schools or evacuees. Others, engaged with the darker side of war, were where agents learnt how to kill and how to die.
There are some fascinating insights. For instance, how much were owners paid for giving up their homes? The Countess of Essex received £20 a week for handing over the Old Manor House at Wingrave, Buckinghamshire to the staff of exiled Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš. The Bertrams of Bignor Manor in Sussex, a stopping off point for French Resistance agents, were paid £5 a week.
Of course there was damage, ranging from the careless to the catastrophic. Schoolboys carved their names on ancient panelling. At Melford Hall in Suffolk, officers and local girls broke into the north wing, where the family stored their most precious furniture and paintings. The next day the entire wing was in flames.
Summers does adopt a rather jingoistic approach to war. There is much talk of preparing to face Gestapo torture chambers, and men not much more than boys parachuting to their deaths when the moon was high. “We did not think of ourselves as killers in cold blood,” she reports one SOE operative as saying. “We saw ourselves as soldiers.” As, no doubt, did the Germans.
Against this is the fact that Summers is a wonderful storyteller. This book is immensely readable. And it makes us realise that Charles Ryder’s experience of the country house at war is only a small part of the story. That, in Ryder’s words, “the builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend”. Adrian Tinniswood is the author of The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House Between the Wars (2016)