House guests from HELL!
They used Old Masters as dartboards, staircases for firewood and emptied the wine cellars. A new history of country houses requisitioned during WWII reveals the military were . . .
We ShaLL fight them from our country houses’ may lack the heroic ring of Winston Churchill, but it was arguably how we won the war.
Bletchley Park was the place where our best brains were deployed to undermine the Germans. Yet Bletchley, in Buckinghamshire, was just one of countless country homes across Britain that were used to combat the Nazi threat.
as conflict loomed, country houses were requisitioned in their thousands and turned into hospitals, schools, maternity units and command headquarters.
By 1941, more than two million troops were stationed here and accommodated across Britain. No wonder the secretive Special Operations executive was nicknamed ‘Stately ’Omes of england’.
Julie Summers’s survey of 12 rural retreats shows how bricks and mortar were pulled into service to join the war effort. the Rothschilds had to vacate Waddesdon Manor with four days’ notice and hurriedly stashed their Gainsboroughs in the cellar.
Lord Sherborne had just finished refurbishing hinton ampner in hampshire when he received a telegram informing him that the Portsmouth Day School for Girls would be arriving in 48 hours.
It was pot luck who you ended up with. a girls’ school was the most coveted occupant, while the army ranked bottom. there were stories of van Dycks being used as dartboards and staircases chopped up for firewood.
Theowners of Melford hall in Suffolk returned to it after the war and discovered the wine cellar had been raided. the soldiers had drunk all the wine and refilled the bottles with water, replacing the corks to look as if nothing had happened.
It was not only the owners who suffered distress. at Coleshill house in Wiltshire the owner’s dogs were so traumatised by the explosions let off by trainee saboteurs that the pooches had to be given aspirin and brandy on a regular basis.
More than 600,000 family pets were put down in September 1939 — many of them healthy — because their owners could not face an uncertain future for them. Brocket hall in hertfordshire, once owned by Victorian Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, became home to the London Maternity hospital (famous ‘Brocket Babies’ include director Mike Leigh).
a shocking apartheid prevailed whereby unmarried pregnant women had to wait on married pregnant women and clean and scrub the floors in brown dresses.
One of the delivery rooms was known as the Ribbentrop Bedroom, after the German ambassador to London who was a close personal friend of Nazi sympathiser Lord Brocket.
as the author wryly remarks: ‘there can have been few more unusual juxtapositions during the Second World War than a Cockney mother giving birth in Lord Melbourne’s bedroom suite in a grand house in hertfordshire.’
another unusual juxtaposition was to see Blenheim Palace, in Oxfordshire — the birthplace of Winston Churchill — play host to a school, in this case the displaced pupils of Malvern College in Worcestershire. But their stay was brief.
In 1940, Blenheim was taken over by MI5. although supposedly top- secret, the identity of the palace’s new occupants soon became common knowledge, with the conductors on local buses calling out ‘anyone for MI5?’ when they reached Blenheim’s gates.
Summers ignores Bletchley Park in favour of less well-known establishments. homes of every shape and size played their part. the assassination of Reinhard heydrich in Prague was masterminded from the Czech intelligence hQ at
Addington House in the Vale of Aylesbury. The French Resistance was flown to and from the continent via Bignor Manor in West Sussex. SuMMeRS
examines in detail the rich cast of characters that populated these houses. Perhaps none are as alluring as the instructors at Arisaig House, HQ of the secret Special Operations executive in Scotland.
eric ‘Bill’ Sykes had the appearance and voice of a bishop, ‘ but was endowed with enormous hands with which he taught students how to throttle people’. He devised the FS knife — ‘the Spitfire of the knife world’ — which enabled silent assassination by a thrust to the carotid artery in the neck.
Another instructor was Gavin Maxwell, who went on to write Ring Of Bright Water. Described by a local doctor as ‘a creative psychopath’, he taught extreme survival techniques, including how to relieve yourself in the open: ‘ No toilet paper please. Dangle from the branch of a tree and use a smooth pebble dipped in water like the Arabs do.’
The most magnificent misfit in this story is edvard Benes. When accosted while walking his dog in the Vale of Aylesbury, he would reply: ‘I am the president of Czechoslovakia.’ The diminutive Czech presidentinexile disliked having anyone over 6ft in his retinue and had the croquet hoops on his lawn widened at the base to make it easier to play.
If only Summers’s book was so easygoing. In the absence of an overarching thesis, her narrative becomes tiresomely repetitive.
Successive chapters serve up yet another potted history followed by a convoluted family genealogy before we get to any action.
As with most diligent tour guides, you become increasingly enervated by the overload of superfluous information. How I yearned for more glimpses out of the window of Mr Benes playing croquet.