The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (6 page)

Of the men who left
the Belvoir estate for the war, 249 did not come home.

At the edge of each of the Duke of Rutland’s villages stands an oak or an ash. They mark the point where the volunteers had turned to wave to their families, who stood in the middle of the village streets watching them go.

Up at the castle, Henry John Brinsley Manners, the 8th Duke of Rutland, had played a large part in their going. Without his intervention, many of those who rushed to the colours in the summer of 1914 would not have done so. On the eve of the war, the Duke’s hold over the men and women living on the estate had barely altered since his family had first settled at Belvoir. Then, and over the centuries that followed, the power conferred by their thousands of acres had enabled them to raise huge armies, for a succession of monarchs. While the feudal obligation of military service in return for land had long since been abolished, the Duke’s power was undiminished: thousands lived in his cottages and were dependent on him for a living.

A few weeks after war was declared
, a memorandum, signed by the Duke, appeared on the noticeboards at the gates to the churches in his villages. It was an appeal for volunteers: ‘All who serve the Colours will have their situations kept open for them,’ the headline read. The Duke had offered his tenants and employees further inducements: the families of men who volunteered would be entitled to live
rent-free in their cottages; the men’s wages – less their army pay – would continue to be paid to their dependants. The local newspaper had applauded the Duke’s generosity: ‘In common with all other great landowners of the country, the Duke of Rutland has come forward in a most patriotic manner. As an inducement to his employees who are able to serve with the Colours, he has made very generous guarantees, which no doubt will be accepted by a large proportion of the servants and workmen on the Belvoir Estate.’

For the majority of those who accepted the Duke’s ‘generous guarantees’, it was the first time they had ventured more than a few miles beyond the villages where they were born. Aged between eighteen and forty, they belonged to a generation that knew little, if anything, of the realities of modern warfare. There had been no war between the Great Powers since 1871. ‘
No man in the prime of life
knew what war was like,’ wrote A. J. P. Taylor: ‘all imagined that it would be an affair of great marches and great battles, quickly decided.’

I wanted to follow the journeys of the Belvoir volunteers: to look at what became of them and how, when the war ended, their experiences rebounded on the way of life on the Duke of Rutland’s estate. Yet it was not only the stories of these men that drew me to Belvoir Castle: it was the remarkable story of a ducal family.

In an age when the word ‘nobility’
conveyed a meaning that was entirely secure, a mystique and an aura attached to the dukes, unlike that which attached to any other members of the aristocracy. The title was the highest honour that the Crown could bestow. In the 577 years since its first creation, in all, fewer than 500 individuals had had the right to call themselves Duke (or
suo jure
Duchess).

In 1914, there were thirty
dukes.
Within living memory
, they had enjoyed privileges that seem scarcely credible. Until the reforms of the nineteenth century, they were above the law: no one could arrest them; they could run up debts to infinity without punishment. In politics, they had control of Parliament, many of the seats in the House of Commons being within their gift. Such was their grandeur that, in the course of their public appearances, it was customary for trumpeters to announce their presence. ‘Flattered, adulated and
deferred to,’ as Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote, ‘they were the leading celebrities of their day.’

Of the ducal families, the Manners family was among the richest, most glamorous, most intriguing of all.

Through marriage and friendship, their tentacles stretched from the kings and queens of Europe to Prince Yusopov in Russia – the future assassin of Rasputin. In Britain, they were close to Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, and to other leading figures of their day.
So opulent was their lifestyle at Belvoir
that it prompted Julian Grenfell – himself the son of an Earl – to remark to a friend’ ‘Isn’t it an absurd thing, really, that there should still be places like Belvoir? It’s just like a pantomime scene.’

When war came, the family threw themselves behind it. At Belvoir, while the Duchess supervised the transformation of the castle into a hospital for Belgian refugees, the Duke was touring his estate, appealing for battalions of men. In London, Diana, their 22-year-old daughter, thought to be the most beautiful debutante of her generation, was working as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse, and at Luton, John, their 28-year-old son, who would later become the 9th Duke of Rutland, was training with his battalion, the 4th Leicestershires, as it prepared to embark for the Western Front.

Four years later, the scale of violence and destruction had altered reality, bringing an end to the life and values of Victorian England. ‘
It was not just that millions died
,’ Lady Mary Elcho, a relative of the Duke of Rutland’s, remarked: ‘it changed the world,
our world
, for ever, shaking all things to their foundations, wasting the treasures of the past, and casting its sinister influence far into the future.’

The breadth of the correspondence in the Muniment Rooms at Belvoir Castle offered a unique opportunity to chronicle their world as they stood on the cusp. Among historians and librarians, the reputation of the collection was unrivalled. The family, I was told, had guarded it jealously. Few, I understood, had been given permission to research in the Muniment Rooms. A mystique attached to the collection: ‘It is the holy grail,’ one historian had whispered to me.

I stood in front of Case 15 in Room 2, looking at the sea of blue box files. The case was nine feet tall; there were sixty files crammed along the five shelves. It held the family’s correspondence for the first decades of the twentieth century; it was just one of nineteen cases I needed to go through.

I reached for the first file on the top shelf. It was labelled ‘Personal Letters from Violet, Duchess of Rutland, 1914’.

Violet was to be an important character in the book. Aged fifty-seven in 1914, she was the granddaughter of the 24th Earl of Crawford. She was brought up at Sutton Courtenay, an impressive medieval hall near Oxford, and her father, Colonel Charles Lindsay, had been a favourite of Queen Victoria and an intimate friend of Louis Napoleon. Her life had been lived at the centre of events. Following her marriage in 1882, she had become one of the most influential and well-connected women of her generation. In the years leading up to the war, invitations to her parties were coveted. Besides politicians and other wealthy aristocrats, Rudyard Kipling, Feodor Chaliapin, Sergei Diaghilev and Sir Edward Elgar were among the guests she had invited to her townhouse a few hundred yards from the Ritz. A mother of four children, she was also the central figure in the Manners family.

I lifted the lid of the box. It was exciting to open it. Here was a time capsule. I was about to be transported into the Duchess’s world in 1914. Inside, the letters were held in place by a metal clip. The spring on the clip was stiff; as I raised it, particles of rust scattered over the documents beneath. The letters had not been sorted: they appeared to have been bundled straight into the file from the case or drawer where Violet had kept them. The imprint of the clip, I noticed, was stencilled in rust on the top letter: clearly, no one had looked at them for many years.

Leafing through the pile, I pulled out the ones for August through to December. Mostly, they were letters that Violet had written to John, her son, who was with his regiment. Her handwriting was chaotic, her style breathless. The pages were punctuated with exclamation marks and words that had been heavily underscored. They captured the excitement and confusion of the first heady days of the war. ‘John darling, No news of sea battles but news of 7 regiments of Germans having crossed Meuse, caught by Belgian Cavalry – practically annihilated,’ she wrote from Stanton Woodhouse, the family’s estate in Derbyshire, the week after war was declared: ‘We stay here as long as you remain at Belper. I want to be buying comforts for you – what about
waterproof boots and coats
, for it rains here every day? Wire to me if you are going to be
under cover
– in
tents
or
barracks
, or factories and for pity’s sake tell me if anything to
buy
. I may go to London 1 day soon – think of anything you want. Bless you my dear darling, Yr mother.’

John, Marquis of Granby, was Violet’s only surviving son and the heir to the dukedom. On 4 August he had been fishing on the banks of the Wye when the river keeper came running to tell him that war had been declared. Immediately, he left for Leicester to join his regiment at its headquarters in Magazine Square.

Aged twenty-eight, John was a lieutenant in the 4th Leicesters, one of two of the regiment’s territorial battalions. His family’s association with the Tigers – as the Leicestershires were known – stretched back to the eighteenth century. John’s namesake – John Manners, Marquis of Granby – celebrated for his courage in the Seven Years War, had commanded the Leicester Blues at the Highland Revolt; a long line of dukes, including John’s father, the 8th Duke, had been honorary colonels of the regiment. The Leicestershires’ depots were dotted across the Belvoir estate; historically, the regiment had recruited locally.

On 12 August, the 4th Leicesters marched the forty-four miles from their headquarters to a training camp at Belper. There, they were to await news of their next destination.

News, as Violet’s letters revealed, was at a premium in those first weeks of the war. As soon as the British Expeditionary Force sailed for France, the War Office imposed a news blackout, with the result that the newspapers carried practically no news at all. Wild rumours
circulated: ‘There is still this “Russian Army through England” going on as a “fact”. “I saw someone who
saw
them” was Mrs Abrahams story from Crewe!’ Violet reported to her son on 1 September. The Russians, apparently, had landed in Scotland; they were on their way to rescue the beleaguered British Expeditionary Force and had commandeered trains to transport them rapidly south. That afternoon, Violet had instructed her chauffeur to drive her to the local railway station so that she could investigate the rumours herself: ‘I went to see the Station Master at Almbergate, but
no
– tho’ he had been warned of troops passing it was countermanded! Such a day! How happy we could have been here if it hadn’t been for that tiresome old catspaw Austrian emperor!’

In the absence of any real news, Violet filled her letters with news from home. In the last weeks of August, there had been a flood of volunteers from among the servants at Belvoir Castle; they had all wanted to join John’s battalion: ‘All the footmen with us – Arthur, William, Charles – and Lamb, the groom, Chambers, the telegraph rider, and the motor cleaner, are going for soldiers. In the 4th Leicesters!! The two last have gone – to Grantham and on!’ Attached to her letter was one from her brother, Charlie. ‘Lil dear,’ he wrote, ‘I have a feeling that if John goes abroad, the more Belvoir people near him the better (if he is hit or if he is ill) to help him as they are all devoted to him.’

The two letters conjured an image from another age: of the young Marquis riding into battle flanked by loyal retainers. Yet in those first weeks of the war, people imagined that it would be won or lost by the cavalry. In France, the armies were still on the move: the horror of trench warfare was yet to come. War fever gripped the country. Violet, like everyone else, was caught up by the romance and glamour of it. On 4 September, in her capacity as patron of the Royal Leicester Hospital, she visited the first wounded soldiers to return from the Front. They were casualties from Mons, where the British Army had been forced to retreat after finding itself outflanked:

Darling J

I was in Leicester Hospital yesterday. A wonderful experience!! Such gentlemen with speech like ours. Such longing to get back. I could
not tear myself away. No excited exaggerations – all quite calm. Terribly pleased with their own feats and often saying, ‘I don’t think there were many left in my regiment.’ I go back again today.

A great many small injuries, like ‘a horse trod on my foot.’ This was the only guardsman there and ‘I’m quite all right now’ (
so
beautiful), a 4th Hussar. A red-haired
airman
with a broken collarbone. Shrapnel in fingers and wrists and lots of cases of rheumatism and abscesses on feet. Some saying, ‘England will
neve
r know what it was like!’

Lots of incidents told very graphically in groups of cribbage or card players – and then lots of men talking alone to me from their beds. One boy had his father killed and 2 brothers wounded. He doesn’t want his mother told nor his sister. He’s hoping they’ll not know till the end of the war. He is a fresh, very young boy. Their chief misery seemed that when they
thought
they had just got the better of the enemy they were told to retreat (they almost hesitated at this!).

A few horrors were told in a whisper. One officer, German, forcing his men to advance into barb entanglements, cut their heads off with his sabre when they refused. The Plymouth boy’s
*
death with 7 others was caused at night – he was guarding something and the Germans came dressed as French friends and killed them all.

I was lost in Violet’s letters when Mr Granger appeared.

‘I thought you might like to see this,’ he said. ‘It’s the 9th Duke’s war diary.’

He handed me the diary. It was bound in soft cream leather; the cover was grubby and worn. I read the first entry. It was dated 26 February 1915 – the day John left England for the Western Front:

Left Victoria by 5.55 train for Folkestone. The boat sailed soon after 8 pm. Good crossing and no sight of submarines, though the Captain was quite nervous. Hunlock, the King’s Messenger, was on board. Reached Boulogne 9.20. Slept the night at Hôtel Meurice.