Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey (18 page)

They placed adverts and called on all the nursing agencies in London and, between them, Almina and Dr Johnnie recruited thirty nurses. There must have been quite a run on nursing staff, what with all the grand ladies rushing to perform their patriotic duty by opening hospitals, but Almina had plenty of money to pay for the best people. She had a decided preference for Irish nursing staff and the Highclere nurses also tended to be good-looking; Almina seems to have decided that pretty nurses would be good for morale. As it turned out, she wasn’t wrong about that.

Since she was also somewhat prone to self-importance, Almina had a vision of herself in the role of all-powerful matron. She certainly relished using the same organisational and leadership skills she had been honing for years in the running of Highclere and in her political work. For the first time since her campaigning days, she felt herself flexing some mental muscle. She was in her element.

It is deliciously typical of Almina that the thing she did next was commission a high-fashion uniform for her nurses. Their dresses were made of fine wool in a cheerful crushed-strawberry-pink, with starched white aprons and caps. This detail set the tone: Highclere would be a cutting-edge
hospital, but also a sensual retreat from the horror of combat. Almina proved herself to be an instinctive master of what we might call, nowadays, holistic medicine. She understood that to treat the injured soldiers as individuals in need of space, time and comfort, as well as medical attention, was the key to success.

Once the staff were engaged it was time to tackle the equipping of Highclere. Almina relied heavily upon Mary Weekes to help her. Mary had already proved herself as a very useful secretary, but now she took on the role of deputy hospital administrator and found herself liaising with visiting doctors, Army Medical Boards and patients’ relatives.

The first task was to organise for blinds to be constructed for all the Castle’s south-facing windows. Arundel, a bedroom on the first floor in the northwest corner of the house was to be used as an operating theatre. It was right opposite the back stairs, so hot water and other supplies could be rushed up and down as required. There was no question of installing hospital beds in any of the larger rooms to make communal wards. The patients, up to twenty at a time, were to have individual rooms or, at times of great pressure, to share with one other person. All the guest bedrooms on the first floor were readied for use, as well as some of those on the floor above. The men would be made to feel as if they were house guests, sleeping in comfortable beds with soft down pillows and beautiful linen and cotton sheets.

The Castle had its own laundry on the northern edge of the estate. When a new laundress was required in 1915, a servants’ employment agency was engaged to find a suitable candidate to ensure an efficient supply of clean linen to the hospital; Harriett Russell was recruited with her
husband Harry, and the estate paid for their removal expenses from Folkestone.

Highclere was of course well used to receiving guests, but still, the maids had to double up in their bedrooms, since they were to make way for all the arriving nurses; and everyone, from the kitchen staff to the housemaids and the footmen to the gardeners, had to brace themselves for an enormous increase in their workload. Almina’s vision of her refuge for the men stipulated that the patients would be served their meals either in their rooms, if they were not well enough to leave them, or at a large table at the end of the North Library, behind the gilded columns. In either case, they would be waited on by footmen. In effect it was like moving a house party of fifty people into the Castle, on a permanent basis.

Streatfield and Mrs Macnair, who had replaced Mrs Bridgland as housekeeper by 1911 were instrumental in making it all happen. Mrs Macnair received her orders from Lady Carnarvon in the sitting room as usual, but now they concerned the nurses’ accommodation and the best foods to give men recovering from fractures or dysentery. Almina had adopted the nurse’s uniform she wore throughout the war when working, but her new occupation in no way countenanced any change in the interactions between her and the staff. Almina might have had a job to do, but she was still Her Ladyship.

Almina reported an upbeat spirit of willingness in her household staff as they helped her to make Highclere ready for its first new guests. They must have been run off their feet, but of course they were also involved in an important element of the nation’s war work. For everybody, keeping busy was a welcome distraction from wondering when the
call-up might come, for themselves or their husband or son. And then again there were some members of the household who considered that, given the usual strict regime of Mr Streatfield, it was a pleasure to have some new blood around the place, a different set of tasks and plenty of new faces.

So it was all change at Highclere. Almina decided that the Library would be used as the men’s day room. None of the furniture was moved out but additional chairs were added, so that there was ample space for the men to sit and play cards or to read the books. The room runs the width of the house and is elegant but supremely comfortable. The leather-bound books and veneered wooden shelves, the oriental rugs and the lamps on low tables next to overstuffed sofas make it feel like a place to sit by the fire and be soothed. The French windows open straight out on to the sweep of the drive and look out over the gardens, so on a sunny day the room is flooded with light, and within moments you can crunch over the gravel and feel springy lawn beneath your feet.

Everything had been designed to make Highclere’s luxurious country-house lifestyle available to the injured soldiers; Almina had re-imagined the Castle as a therapeutic space, one where the atmosphere in the Library or the excellent cooking from the Castle’s kitchen was as important as the services of the radiologist she planned to bring down from London. The first patients arrived in mid-September, members of the Seaforth Highlanders and the Royal Artillery, who had fractures, gunshot wounds and no doubt a large dose of what would soon be called shell shock, and what we now describe as post-traumatic stress disorder. No wonder they reported that when they first laid eyes on Highclere, it felt as if they had arrived in Paradise.

As soon as the call for men went out, Highclere answered. Most of the male staff worked on the estate, as gardeners and foresters, gamekeepers and grooms. Naturally they had to ask permission from their employer to go. Lord Carnarvon let it be known that any man who wished to volunteer would be guaranteed his job when he returned. Lord Carnarvon also offered to pay the men’s wives half their wages to ensure the families had some income. Arthur Hayter, who had started as a groom and risen to be the head man in the stables, volunteered and was told he was too old, but six other men had gone by the beginning of September.

History chronicles the bravery of the men joining up
– as it should, given that by December 1914 over one million men had enlisted in Kitchener’s New Army, and recruitment was maintained at 100,000 a month until August 1915. But the flip side of the coin is the movement in the other direction: 24,000 men a week coming back wounded.

The clearing hospitals in France and Belgium were extremely rudimentary and barely able to cope with the huge numbers of casualties. They were desperately short-staffed. The Royal Army Medical Corps had 1,509 officers and 16,331 other ranks in 1914, and all its procedures were based on experience gained in the Boer War. Conditions in France and Belgium were very different. Bacteria lurked in the soil that was being dug out for trenches; it caused gangrene, which was the biggest killer of soldiers who made it back to a clearing hospital, and tetanus. Typhoid was rife throughout the Western Front and isolation units were often not a top priority, so more men died from infection. Doctors resented the fact that they were expected to turn their hand to anything rather than being encouraged to specialise.

Once the wounded had been evacuated from the field and transported from their unit base, via a dressing station, to the clearing hospital, triage could be carried out. But it was haphazard at best. Surgeons would walk the rows of stretchers lined up under a makeshift cover and have to assess who to give basic treatment to there in the field, who to send home for operations that could only be performed in a fully equipped hospital, and who to allow to die. The lucky few whose injuries merited an attempt to treat them but were too serious to be seen by a doctor in France, got put on an ambulance that bumped its way to the nearest working train station for return to England by boat. The
journey from battlefield to a hospital at home could take up to three weeks. Plenty of men died en route.

Southampton was one of the principal points of return for the injured soldiers, and from there they were dispatched all over the country. Some of them came to Highclere. Later on, when the hospital’s fame had spread, strings had to be pulled to gain admission, but at the start of the war, you simply had to be in the right place at the right time. This was an era before public healthcare, when all hospitals were funded by wealthy individuals or charitable organisations. Women like Almina and the other Society ladies who stepped in to help with the huge numbers of war wounded were not just on some vainglorious mission; they were fulfilling a need that wouldn’t have been met without their actions.

In September 1914 there were just a dozen patients at Highclere. Lady Carnarvon greeted everyone at the front door. She showed the men to their room and, having seen that they were settling in, her next course of action was to send a telegram to their families to let them know that their son or husband was safe. Almina loved these moments of being able to give people the news they were desperately waiting for. Given the length of the telegram she sent Winifred about Aubrey’s whereabouts, you imagine that she didn’t skimp on her words, wanting to tell the family every possible detail that might reassure them.

The patients knew they had arrived somewhere special from the moment they opened their eyes to realise they were no longer in a dugout in Belgium, but surveying an English park. They spent their first few days at Highclere in their rooms with books, home-brewed beer from the
Castle’s brewery and exquisite meals. One patient, Basil Jones, wrote later to Almina, ‘You get on as well as they do in fairy tales, however grievous your hurt may be.’ He was the first of many soldiers to comment appreciatively on the charming nurses, singling out one Sister Bowdler, whom he thought ‘just wonderful’. The patients couldn’t thank Almina enough for giving them her home and, as one man, John Pollen, put it, ‘personally attending to the many things that make a house a real home.’

Lady Carnarvon assigned a nurse to each patient to bathe their feet, dress their wounds and offer comfort. She wanted to be very much a hands-on nurse herself, though, and enjoyed her rounds enormously, making sure she knew exactly what was going on with every man in her care. She also brought the Earl round to see her charges. Patients whose ‘nerves … were utterly wrong’, even this early in the war, wrote to her later of their enjoyment of the Earl’s calls. Almina always encouraged their own families to come to see them. Saturday was visiting day. It was all part and parcel of the deliberate attempt to resist the anonymity of big hospitals and to look after the men in every way possible.

Almina’s approach might have been exemplary, but it was also expensive; in fact it was turning out to be a constant drain on the Rothschild coffers. Not that Alfred really minded. Quite apart from the family commitment to philanthropy, not to mention Alfred’s keen patriotism, he was also a hospital administrator, being Treasurer of Queen Charlotte’s Hospital for 31 years by the time he died. When, after a few weeks of Highclere being up and running, Almina took a day off work to travel again to New Court to ask her father for more money, Alfred’s protests were
nothing but routine. ‘Darling, it was only last month I gave you
£
25,000, what on earth have you done with it? I know it’s all in a good cause, but please do be careful.’ Almina reassured Alfred, pocketed another
£
10,000 and returned to the Castle to put her plans into action. Given the way the war was going, she needed everything she could get.

On 22 October Lord and Lady Carnarvon lent their support at a stirring mass meeting in Newbury to encourage men to join the Army. There was a ‘mood of gravity’ in the country and, although the pace of recruitment was brisk, more and more troops were needed. The Carnarvons were joined on the platform by Lord Charles Beresford, Admiral and MP, who was a great naval hero and never appeared in public without his bulldog. Lord Carnarvon, as High Steward of Newbury, opened the meeting and expressed the belief that, although the war had been forced upon Great Britain, it would all be over soon, provided the nation stood firm. Then Lord Beresford exhorted the crowd to do their bit, and echoed the sentiment that any boys joining up now could do their duty and be home in time for Christmas. Beresford stayed at Highclere that night; as yet, not quite all the beds were occupied by patients.