The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (30 page)

I had come full circle. The reports in this file resolved two mysteries: I knew why John had left the Western Front in the summer of 1915; I knew why he hadn’t returned to fight. But I was no closer to understanding why he had wanted to obscure the months after he was invalided home. Something of vital importance to him had occurred between 7 July and 5 December 1915 – so important that he had spent a good part of his life – and his final hours – expunging it from the record.

The excisions were tantalizingly precise. The gap in the correspondence at Belvoir began with his illness. But why did the letters resume on 5 December? What was the significance of this date?

Then it suddenly struck me. The defining moment in John’s military career was the board of 4 December: at all subsequent boards he had been deemed unfit for active service.

I went back through the file and took out the report of the board’s findings: ‘Proceedings of a Medical Board assembled at the War Office on 4 December 1915. By Order of the Army Council’.

Straightaway, I noticed that the details were different. John’s previous boards had taken place at Caxton Hall by order of the GOC, London District. This one, convened by the Army Council, had taken place at the War Office.
The Army Council was
the highest military authority in Britain; chaired by Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, its sixteen members included the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the Adjutant-General, the Quartermaster General, the Master General of the Ordnance and a number of permanent
secretaries. Of what possible interest could John’s health have been to them?

One further detail suggested that the board had been far from routine. The fourth of December was a Saturday; medical boards were usually held on weekdays.

I ran my eye down the page to find the examining surgeon’s explanatory note. It was short and unilluminating:

The Board, having assembled pursuant to order, proceed to examine Capt. J. H. M. Marquis of Granby and find that he has not yet recovered from the gastro-intestinal symptoms for which he was invalided home in July.
Vide
attached certificate.

John’s GP, Dr Donald Hood, had supplied the medical certificate. It was addressed to the Director General, Army Medical Services:

43 Green Street,

Park Lane

2 December 1915

Sir,

I have this day seen and examined the Marquis of Granby, who has been well known to me since his birth.

He is naturally of a delicate susceptible constitution and some seven years ago suffered from a rather severe attack of dysentery contracted in Rome, since which he has constantly been affected with gastro-intestinal disturbances.

Lord Granby was invalided home from the Front by Colonel Beevor on July 8th 1915 as suffering from gastro-irritation. Since that date he has had several similar attacks, so much so that I have questioned whether he may not have chronic appendicitis trouble. His heart action is far from satisfactory and he is in my opinion unfit for active military service.

Donald W. Hood CVO, MD, FRCP

Examining Physician, Foreign Office

Consultant Physician, West London Hospital

Physician, Roland Gardens Hospital for Officers

The second paragraph contained what seemed to be a barefaced lie.

Emphatically, Dr Hood had stated that John’s symptoms stemmed from ‘a rather severe attack of dysentery contracted in Rome’. John had been to Rome just once before the war. This was in 1909, when he was Honorary Attaché at the embassy. I had seen every one of his letters home; they were in the blue files in the Muniment Rooms at Belvoir. Not one of them had contained any mention of illness, least of all ‘a severe attack of dysentery’.

‘Since which,’ Hood had continued, ‘he has constantly been affected with gastro-intestinal disturbances.’

But how could he possibly have been ‘constantly affected’ when he hadn’t had dysentery in the first instance?

It looked as if I had found the answer to the mystery behind the gap in the records in the summer of 1909. John had returned from Rome on 10 June. On his return, he had been ill with a stomach complaint. The gap in the correspondence began on 6 June but I’d found a stray letter from the Duke to John. Until now, I hadn’t thought it of any consequence. ‘Dear boy,’ he wrote on 14 June. ‘Glad to hear you’ve recovered swiftly.’ This was the only evidence of illness I’d discovered in the period: it didn’t point to a ‘severe attack of dysentery’. So was John’s ‘illness’ an echo of Haddon’s ‘illness’? Had he destroyed the family’s correspondence for the weeks following his return from Rome to conceal the fact that he hadn’t after all been seriously ill?

I re-read Hood’s medical certificate. Evidently, he was trying to keep John out of the war indefinitely. He wanted to convince the panel of RAMC surgeons that John was suffering from a condition that was ongoing and likely to recur. Hood knew the army doctors would not question his diagnosis. Why would they? He was examining physician to the Foreign Office and one of the most respected doctors of his day.

His name cropped up frequently in the letters at Belvoir. Aged sixty-eight in the summer of 1915, he was a close friend to Violet and Henry and had been their GP for more than thirty years. He had delivered all five of their children, and was regularly invited to shoot and fish at Belvoir.

That he was capable of falsifying John’s medical certificate did not surprise me.

In the autumn of 1894, it was Hood to whom Violet and Henry had turned after Haddon’s accident. At their request, he arrived at Hatley the morning after it had happened; he spent the next six days there, battling to save the boy’s life.

The note that Hood had sent to Violet on 30 September 1894, two days after Haddon had died, was at Belvoir:

43, Green Street

Park Lane. W.

My dear Lady Granby

After being with you so much it seems strange and trying not to know how you are today. I cannot tell you how my heart bleeds for you in this awful trial. It has been a bad time for me, but for you and Lord Granby, too terrible for words.

You have shown such true courage that I trust you will keep well and able to bear up against the overwhelming truth.

If you feel at any time that a little talk would do you good, or give you any comfort, send me a note.

My Best From

Donald W. Hood

There had been no inquest after Haddon died; the authorities had not been informed of the accident. Legally, the obligation to report a ‘sudden, violent or unnatural’ death fell equally on the attending physician and the deceased’s relatives. In failing to report Haddon’s accident, Hood had been as much to blame as Henry and Violet.

In the years after Haddon’s death, Hood went on to become one of the leading doctors in the country. His obituary, published in the
British Medical Journal
in the spring of 1924, paid tribute to his distinguished career:

We announce with much regret the death on March 15th of Dr Donald W. C. Hood. He was born in June 1847 at Market Lavington, Wilts, the eldest son of the late Sir Charles Hood, a Lord Chancellor’s visitor
in lunacy.
*
From Harrow he went to Caius College, Cambridge, and afterwards to Guy’s Hospital, and graduated M.B. in 1871, proceeding M.D. in 1879, and was elected F.R.C.P. in 1892. After a few years in general practice in the country, he was appointed consulting physician to the West London Hospital and until a few weeks before his death he remained in close touch with that institution. Dr Donald Hood’s other appointments included those of examining physician to the Foreign Office, a manager of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, governor and member of the committee of management of Bethlem and Bridewell Royal Hospitals and examiner in medicine to the University of Cambridge. He received the C.V.O. in 1901 for services rendered in connection with the fund for the relief of wounded and sick officers during the Boer war.

Twice, despite his impeccable curriculum vitae, it appeared that Dr Hood had perverted the course of official proceedings; he failed to notify the authorities that Haddon had died as a result of an accident; he fabricated the illness that had led a succession of army medical boards to deem John unfit for active service.

These were serious charges.

Having failed to save one son, had he wanted to save the other? Or was he simply carrying out the family’s instructions?

His papers have not survived to answer these questions.

The medical certificate, written in the doctor’s cramped, barely legible hand, was a damning piece of evidence. Until now, I had thought John an innocent victim in the traumatic events that he had erased from the records at Belvoir; it had seemed that he had wanted to obliterate things and relationships that were painful to him. But it was impossible to escape the conclusion that, in removing this chapter, he had sought to remove evidence that would incriminate him. He had used an invented medical condition to escape the front line. Effectively, he was guilty of desertion, a capital crime, for which the penalty was execution by firing squad.

It was not just his reputation that it had been necessary to protect. His father had raised thousands of men for the war. Day after day, the Duke had toured his estates, addressing school halls crammed with villagers who had turned out to hear him speak. In appealing for volunteers, the Duke had championed the chivalric ideals of honour, valour and sacrifice.

‘If we had attempted to keep out of this war, we should have violated every honourable principle,’ he told his audience at Redmile, a few weeks after war was declared:

We should have been guilty of one of the most
cowardly actions that a country and a Government has ever been guilty of. We should have forever stained the name of Great Britain with an infamy which could not be borne.

This war is not going to end in 48 hours or 48 days. It is a big thing. Half a million men are needed. It is to be a big knock-out, and the opponents that must be knocked out are the Germans. Yes, it’s going to be a knock-out of a genuine kind. None of that slipping down to avoid punishment. We have to knock them out and cripple them. They have to get a dressing-down from which they will not recover for the next fifty years. There are to be no half-measures. It must go on until we have them on their knees. And go on and on until we have their noses on the ground.

We want every available man to come forward to enlist and sacrifice themselves for the good of the Empire and of their country. I hear from Leicester that two more battalions of the Leicestershire Regiment – the 6th and 7th battalions – are to be formed. That is an additional two thousand men required. The more of you who go, the quicker the war will be over. Come Forward. This is what I want. And what England wants. And I am confident that what England wants, you will not forget to give her.

Invariably, in those early weeks of the war, the Duke quoted John as an exemplar of the courage and patriotism he was demanding of his tenants and employees:

The North Midland Division are now all around London and my son is on the Staff there. I’ve heard that they will shortly be going to the Front. If so, they will be one of the first Territorial Divisions to go to France. As for me, the Government will not take me. I am 62. But at any rate, my boy is on the path and he will do whatever he can when he gets there. I am proud of him.

In the summer of 1915 he must have known that John’s ‘illness’ was a sham. Yet for the next six months – until conscription was introduced, in January 1916 – while concealing his son’s desertion, he continued to urge the men from his estates to step forward and sacrifice themselves for ‘the good of the Empire’.

Much of the mystery surrounding this episode in John’s life had vanished; his War Office file had explained a great deal. I now understood why his name was inscribed on the memorial in the chapel at Belvoir. It was there to reinforce a lie. Violet included it because the family’s employees had been led to believe that, while illness had kept him from fighting, John had served dutifully for the duration of the war.

I could also see why there was a discrepancy between John’s actual whereabouts and his whereabouts as recorded in the contemporary Army Lists. Though published quarterly, the lists did not indicate periods of leave resulting from illness or injury: until an officer was killed in action, or transferred to another unit, he was listed as serving with his regiment. It explains why, between July 1915 and March 1916, when John was in England, he was listed as being on active service with the Leicestershires.

But a number of things still puzzled me.

I had found nothing to account for the marked change of tone in his war diary. This had occurred in mid-June, three weeks before he left the Western Front. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he appears to have withdrawn from the events going on around him.
Why?
Was it because he was already planning his escape?

And how had he managed to get himself invalided home from the Front in the first place? In supplying him with a fraudulent medical certificate, Dr Hood had given him a passport out of the war. But this
was
after
John had returned to London. So who was behind his escape from France? Or had he somehow convinced his superiors he was ill?

And there was one very obvious question that nagged at me. Five months after John arrived back in England, the Army Council convened his fourth medical board at the War Office.

This was on 4 December, the day before the records resume at Belvoir.

I had checked the proceedings of other medical boards held that month. I couldn’t find one that had taken place on a Saturday, or one that had been convened by the Army Council at the War Office. They had all taken place at Caxton Hall by order of the GOC, London District.

So why had the Army Council, the highest military authority in Britain, intervened to call what appeared to be some sort of an emergency board?