Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey (23 page)

By August 1916, Clout had seen almost a year and a half of action on the Western Front. He had been in reserve for the first battle of Neuve Chapelle and fought for months at the Battle of Loos. He had seen a man shot in the head by a German sniper as he ran towards him down a trench. The bomber’s brain was ‘excised as if on an operating table’ and fell in two neat hemispheres on the ground behind him and lay there ‘steaming in the sunlight’. When Clout’s men refused to touch the man’s brains, Clout took a spade and shovelled the remains out of the trench.

In August 1916, after two weeks’ leave in which he visited his parents in Blackheath, he found himself back out on the front line at the Battle of the Somme. His first job was to accompany a more inexperienced officer as he ventured out of the trench to collect all the property of the dead men
who lay scattered in the mud, so that it could be sent back to England. Clout was sitting reading a map, trying to locate the final resting place of the battalion they had been sent to search for, when a sniper shot him in the face. The bullet entered directly between his eyes, passed through his palate and shattered the right-hand side of his jaw. Part of the bone severed an artery in his throat. Instinctively he clutched his neck and, finding the place where blood was gushing, he tried to stem it as he staggered back in the direction of the headquarters’ dugout, shouting at his junior officer to stay low since the sniper was certainly still looking out for them.

He was almost unconscious when they got back and was immediately sent to the base hospital at Le Touquet on the coast. The hospital was funded by the Duchess of Westminster and – in another of the surreal contrasts of the Great War – had been set up in the casino of the elegant holiday resort. Clout had been unlucky to be hit on his first day in the new post (although luck like that was not terribly unusual on the Somme), but he must have been both fortunate and tough to survive his wound even as far as Le Touquet. The science of blood transfusion was in its infancy in 1916, and such procedures were very rarely attempted, so the only hope when treating a patient losing a lot of blood was to keep them immobile and administer drugs like morphine to slow the heart rate.

Clout was operated on to remove part of the bullet lodged in his jaw and, two weeks later, once he was stable, he was transferred to a hospital ship for return to Britain. From Dover he went by train to Victoria Station; there, as he lay on the platform with hundreds of other wounded men, he was labelled for the Countess of Carnarvon’s hospital at 48
Bryanston Square. Clout tried to insist that he would rather go to the General Hospital in south London. He must have been thinking of visits from his family, and of getting as close to home as possible. He was dispatched to Bryanston Square in any case, and arrived late at night on 2 October 1916.

Clout always recalled the pleasure of being allowed to sleep late at Almina’s hospital. At Le Touquet the matron made her ward rounds at the crack of dawn. In the slightly more tranquil surroundings of Bryanston Square, the men slept until breakfast, and then they saw the medical staff. Clout was there until 13 November and made a reasonable recovery, although he had to return in January for a series of operations to continue removing fragments of bone and shrapnel. He later had reconstructive surgery to enable him to eat solids, but his speech was impaired for years. He took to wearing a bandage on his throat because he was embarrassed by his speech and concerned that people wouldn’t appreciate that it was the result of a war wound.

About two weeks after his arrival, when he was able to sit up in bed and the swelling and pain in his face had improved enough for him to take an interest in the world again, Charles noticed that Almina had a very charming assistant who accompanied her on her rounds, taking notes on a clipboard as Almina directed. Mary Weekes, who was rather tall and neatly dressed with a kindly and efficient manner, was by then 26 years old. She had been with Almina first as a secretary then as a hospital administrator for five years, and the two had become completely dependent on each other. Charles wrote in his memoirs that Almina regarded her more as a daughter than an employee, which is certainly borne out by Almina’s generosity to her.

Charles caught Mary’s eye. There was small talk and she made sure she visited him every day; an attraction formed and within weeks it had progressed to a definite courtship. Charles and Mary frequently went for a turn in the gardens behind the railings of Bryanston Square. Almina thought that going out for a walk or going to the theatre was very therapeutic. Perhaps she had been quietly encouraging Mary. Charles asked Mary to marry him in early 1917.

Despite his insistence on formality, Charles definitely had a roguish streak, and he certainly looked good in a uniform. He recorded in his memoir that when he returned to King’s College Cambridge after his Army training to inform the authorities that he was heading to France, he also called on a lady student from Newnham whom he’d met at a university society for reading plays in foreign languages. The Tabard Society was one of the few opportunities the undergraduates had to meet the opposite sex, and although the girls were chaperoned, sparks had clearly flown as the young people recited lines together. As they sat over tea in her rooms, ‘her flattering comments on my appearance in uniform put me out of countenance, especially as a number of other girls were summoned to meet me. It seemed I was something of a trophy to be displayed to her friends.’

On another occasion, before Charles was wounded and hospitalised back to London, he found very attractive billets. Since he spoke French, he was often asked to help out when another officer was having problems with his accommodation. Officers were billeted with local people, but it was not obligatory for households of women to take in a guest. A young lady living with her mother had refused to allow a British officer to lodge with them but the communication
problems meant there was a lot of misunderstanding. Clout went to investigate with his fellow officer and the matter was resolved and alternative accommodation found. ‘I offered to escort the lady back to her home. On the way, with a side-long glance at me, she said, “If it had been you who wanted our room I would not have refused.” ’ Charles was not about to pass up this opportunity. ‘As she was a very attractive person, I immediately took up the offer and had my orderly move my kit into her home. My friend would never believe that I had not “pulled a fast one” on him. That night the lady came into my bedroom, and for the rest of the period that we were in action in this section of the line I was always able to visit her during any rest period, which probably helped keep me sane.’

Mary and Charles were married in July 1918, when Charles ‘believed that the war might drag on for years yet’. They had decided to wait until his recovery was complete and all the work on his jaw was finished. Lord and Lady Carnarvon were their guests of honour and, in fact, their witnesses. Almina arranged for them to be married at the fashionable church St George’s, Hanover Square. She then set them up in a house in Paddington, buying all their furniture. They went on to have three children, and until Mary became briefly ill after the birth of her third child, she continued to work for Almina.

All her life, Almina had wildly cavalier attitudes to money. She could be a bully about it, but she was also generous to a fault, often indiscriminately so. It was a habit that got her into a great deal of trouble in later life, but on this occasion her generosity was born out of sincere affection and in recognition of Mary’s years of hard work. She also lent the
couple the Lake House on the estate at Highclere for their honeymoon, and, as a souvenir, she gave Mary a specially made fan, painted with a view of the building. It is a beautiful house, an elegant, low villa right on the water’s edge, and a peaceful idyll for two people who had been working surrounded by death and destruction for years. Almina, who was good at detail, made sure that food and staff were laid on so that the couple would not have to lift a finger.

Charles wrote a letter to Almina on the evening of his wedding day, just after the couple arrived at the Lake House, thanking her for her gifts to him and for everything she had done for them. ‘My dear Fairy Godmother I should like to call you, for that is how I shall always think of you … thank you for the links and studs, which are charming, and the gift of plate, which is so fine I think I will never wish to dine away from home …’ The man who wondered about the propriety of using first names expressed himself fulsomely to Almina, who had nursed him back to health, introduced him to his wife and set him up in life. ‘I will try to live up to the trust you have placed in me. With very best wishes and love from, yours sincerely, Charles Clout.’

The following day Mary wrote to her ‘Dearest Little Lady’ to tell Almina of her perfect happiness at the Lake House and to add her own thanks. ‘How can I even try to thank you for all you have done for me. I long to tell you what I feel about your wonderful love and affection but alas no words of mine could adequately express what I really feel … I hope I will always be a credit to the kindest lady I know, who has indeed been a mother to me for the last seven years and I know will go on being so … With love from us both, yours affectionately, Mary.’

Letter from Charles Clout to Lady Almina, 1918.
See
this page
for full transcript of the letter.

Letter from Mary Weekes to Lady Almina.
See
this page
for full transcript of the letter.

These voices from a supposedly buttoned-down age overflow with sincere emotion. There’s no doubt that Almina could be frivolous and domineering, but she also transformed people’s lives with her energetic desire to make others happy. For that, many of them loved her back with devotion.

One of Lady Carnarvon’s nurses at the Castle. Her nurses were always exceptionally well turned out and Lady Carnarvon paid for all their uniforms personally.