The country house at war

Introduction

0:00Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai slash Spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai slash Spotify.

0:30It might be assumed that the owners of Britain's country houses weren't hugely affected by the Second World War, and that they continue to live in luxury in their vast estates. However, as Judith S. Lewis explains to Lauren Good in this episode of the History Extra podcast, that wasn't the case. From upper-class women being conscripted to stories of great loss, they explore the roles that country houses and their occupants really played in the war effort. And just before we start today's conversation, you might be interested in joining us for a live episode of the History Extra podcast.

1:04We're going to be recording next Thursday, the 22nd of October, to mark the upcoming home release of Pressure, the gripping untold story of the efforts to chart the weather on D-Day. We've teamed up with Studio Canal for a special event at the Royal Society of Arts in London, featuring David Haig, the writer of Pressure, in conversation with Catherine Ross, Archive Manager at the Met Office. Tickets are free and are available on a first-come, first-served basis. For full details and to book your place now, check out the episode description.

1:37But for now, it's over to Lauren and Judith with today's episode. Hi, Judith. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Your book, The Country House at War, a story of loss, reinvention and the birth of New Britain, explores how country houses in Britain were repurposed during the Second World War.

Country houses before the war

1:57Let's first set the scene, if we can. At the cusp of the war, what role did country houses have in society? They're mostly big houses for rich people. So that doesn't necessarily mean they have much of a role. Obviously, the aristocracy wasn't as politically important as it had been for centuries. And they know it. Some are. One of the houses I talk about in the book is Hatchfield House, still a center of conservative politics. You may have noticed, though, that I try to have a very broad definition of country houses

2:32so that I include places that are not stately homes, but some of them are the sort of houses that middle class people who had done well were able to buy and enjoy. It's an important distinction to make because we do assume that country houses were just these huge estates. But as you point out, that's not quite the history here. It's not the history. And one of the reasons I tried to get such a variety of houses was to see if people behaved any differently during the war,

3:03if the kind of people that made a fortune in business or just professionals, if they functioned any differently than the kind of people that we think of as actually living in the stately homes. And I found that they didn't. But for the most part, they're all very mobilized and very eager to prosecute the war and very happy to do what they can.

Requisitioning estates for military use

3:23Is this mobilization that I'd love to come to now? What sort of roles did country houses play once the Second World War had broken out? These structures were just used for such a wide variety of purposes. They could have been requisitioned to millet soldiers. Sometimes the grounds are turned into parade grounds or airstrips. They would house the land girls. I was particularly interested, I think, so would readers be in the ones that were used for intelligence activities.

3:56And I was stunned by just the variety that there are. Most of the houses that I'm looking at, not all, but most of them are in a sort of belt northwest of London, but going up to Bletchley. And there's a lot of usage of houses for intelligence activities. Later on, there'll be POWs. Many of the functions of the houses change as the war continues. Once they've requisitioned a house, you don't get it back. And if they no longer use it to house a particular regiment, they might use it to house a different regiment or to bring in the land girls or to bring in POWs.

4:34I think that probably the most famous usage and maybe the most important was that Wilton House out in Wilshire was used for the headquarters of the Southern Command. It's where General Eisenhower and all of his assistants planned Operation Overlord, the D-Day invasion. And General Eisenhower and his staff would have lived at the house. And that's one of the reasons why these houses were so useful is because they're isolated, but they're huge, you know. And then there were families who were concerned about the prospects of what would happen if their house was requisitioned.

5:10And they were able to offer the houses either to the government or to a private group to avoid requisition. The government is really interested in empty space. So you don't want to have a lot of empty space in your house. It's interesting that you mentioned that workaround of giving your house for private use to try and avoid requisition. Could we say whether owners were generally willing or did they have little choice in whether their houses were taken over?

5:41Well, that's a very interesting question. If you hadn't already signed a contract, you were likely to have your house requisitioned, which is not to say that they're hostile to the war effort. They're all very interested in prosecuting the war. And I was stunned by how gracious these owners often are when the house becomes occupied. If they're allowed to stay, they often socialize with the occupiers, at least if it's military, at least with the officer's staff.

6:12There's one example that I have in the book that I think is rather funny. It's not one of these great stately homes. It was a house in Buckinghamshire called The Furs, which I think you would put in the Tudor stockbroker category. In other words, it's not Tudor at all. It's 19th century house, late 19th century house. And they had actually put it up for sale. It's a major who owns it. But it does have considerable property and outbuildings. And so they put it up for sale. Major Abraham's, his name was, he worked for the Red Cross during the war.

6:45So a party came to the house and the butler let them in. And they thought these were a group of people coming to buy the house, but they weren't. They were the requisitioners. And they took a look at the house, decided it was exactly what they needed. And they actually had a member from the Ministry of Works with them who had the power to do the requisition. And he just pulled out the requisition slip and said, well, this house is ours. And you would think they would be very, very angry, but they weren't. And they were invited to dinner by Mrs. Abraham's.

7:16And they socialized until the Abraham's family left. So that often happened. As I said, when the family was allowed to stay, there was some socializing. But it could be pretty awkward. I mean, imagine there's the Earl of Verilum from Goranbury. He has a commandant that's running his house. And although the Grimston family tries to be gracious, it is a damn nuisance, you know. And there are times when there are conflicts over things like shared water, shared utilities,

7:51who's paying for them, shared roads. And I have the government requisition registers for some of these houses, including Goranbury. And it's very clear that the government is violating its own contract. There's so many different tensions here. A real story from your book that really touched me was that of Lady Braybrook, who shortly after the death of her husband, she experienced the death of her sons as well. And then her house is taken over, which is so much loss in one go.

8:24Do you think the privilege of wealthy families has caused us to perhaps overlook the sacrifices they did make for the war effort? Oh, absolutely. And I mean, I can understand it because the majority of people, the vast majority don't live like that and just assume that these people are privileged in every way. I mean, we assume that with celebrities today that, you know, they don't suffer somehow like we suffer and they don't have insecurities like we have. But that actually isn't true.

8:55I mean, if you've lost your husbands and your two sons and then your house, you're going to suffer. So I think these people did make a contribution that has been overlooked. And that was one of the reasons that as I got started, I realized that there was a story here. There was a story to be told, the story of Lady Braybrook. And that was the one that inspired me because it was just so shocking. And, you know, if you lose your son in war, however proud you might be of him, you've lost

9:26your son. I, you know, I just think that would be an unimaginable loss. And obviously, people all over the United Kingdom suffered that loss. But so did these people who live in their own country houses. There's a real idea here of change.

Upper-class women and intelligence

9:41And I think we we see that in period drama coverage of this idea that the world can't go back to what it was before the war. I'd love to talk about this in the instance of women, because you say in the book that as late as 1913, upper class women were still being discouraged from even reading a textbook. But we see women in these houses taking up roles. What sort of roles did they take up? And do you think the war changed how upper class women saw themselves and what they were

10:12capable of? Oh, absolutely. And hopefully it changed the views of men around them as they found out what they could do. I was talking to someone the other day about this, and he was stunned that upper class women were constricted. I'm sure you and your listeners know that from 1941 on December of 1941, women were conscripted. That would include young women primarily, of course, the age keeps getting older. But the only way to avoid conscription was to be a young woman with small children or

10:42to be too old for conscription. But everybody else was conscripted. And so my friend was surprised that even upper class women were drafted. But because of what you were just describing, how even as late as 1939, upper class women are discouraged from doing anything other than think about getting married and preparing for capturing this wealthy suitor. So for a lot of the young women that I read about, getting conscripted and going into one

11:13of the military forces was very exciting. It really broke up the boredom of their lives, I suppose. They went into the Wrens, the women of the Royal Navy. They became Fannies, the first aid nursing yeomanry. The ATF, like Queen Elizabeth went into, where she learned to drive and repair Jeeps. One of the things that I was very interested in was that a lot of these young women then got drawn into the intelligence services.

11:45And it's hard to know how many, because of the Secrets Act, they couldn't, you know, if you were working at Bletchley Park, for instance, you couldn't tell anybody. So the majority of people actually at Bletchley were women. So there are women doing a lot of really important things. And it's pretty clear to me that they're looking at these upper class women because what are you looking for when you're looking for intelligence personnel? You're looking for people, depending upon the kind of intelligence activity, you might

12:16be looking for women or men who are good at mathematical puzzles. But if you have linguistic abilities and you can translate from the German or speak German, that would also be something that you would be looking for. And by the 1930s, young women who were in these upper classes and who got to take the grand tour, the grand tour, or what they called getting finished, they would go to a boarding school in Switzerland, say, or France to improve their linguistic abilities.

12:48But they often went to Germany, what they considered the high culture of Germany, the Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, those were places like that. So a lot of young women got to work in intelligence. But their cover story was always that they were secretaries, that they had been secretaries. So even when the war ended, if you wanted a job and somehow that would have been related to your intelligence work, you couldn't actually even claim it because you weren't allowed to say that that's what you had done. It's fascinating to me that a lot of upper class women spent time in Germany during their

13:22finishing. I didn't know that. And that's why perhaps they had those language abilities. That's a fascinating link. Absolutely. And the ones that I came across did not like at all what they were seeing of the Nazis. They were horrified. So they went there for the language abilities. But then once the war started, they really, you know, they really didn't want the Nazis taking over England. Let's put it that way. You know, they all felt they were facing real horror and had to do what they needed to do to make sure the Nazis didn't win.

13:55Everyone's got a hard question about AI, your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai slash Spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai slash Spotify.

Domestic servants and emigres

14:15I'd love to discuss how these changes affected servants. What effect did the war have on them? I do want to mention, I don't know if you were thinking of this one, a special class of servants, which is the emigres from Germany and Austria. During the 1930s, it was very hard to staff these large old houses with sufficient numbers of people to take care of them. And they're gradually kind of getting closed up.

14:47Some of the houses, like Audley End, don't yet have electricity or central heat. And that tells you why these enormous houses needed so many people to run them. So during the 1930s, when Jewish women in particular are fleeing the Nazis from Germany and Austria, and there are actually some people fleeing Italy as well, the British government allows women to immigrate to England if they're willing to do housework.

15:18And the assumption is that all women can do housework, and I guess they can't do much of anything else. So a lot of these houses in the late 1930s in particular are staffing their houses with Jewish women who are inexperienced, but who are willing to do service work because women in the British working classes more and more were disdaining service work. You know, they could get better jobs. So the employer class was importing a lot of fleeing Jewish women from the continent. But then once the war started, these emigre servants are now considered enemy aliens, which is horrible.

15:55And so I came up with an example of a woman at Gornberry House, Elise Lesser her name was, who had been imported, brought in, emigrated in 1936, and became a housemaid, and then moved up to being the housekeeper at the time the war started. And then she has to go through a tribunal, the Aliens Tribunal, to sort of prove that she's not a danger to England. And Lord Verilym goes to testify on her behalf. And this must have been happening all over the country, but I just had the documentation

16:29because I was reading the letters from this house, from Gornberry. So Lord Verilym testified on her behalf that she was not a danger. She was not sympathetic to the Hitler regime, duh, as she was a fleeing Jew. And yet she disappears completely from the records. The day the tribunals ended was the last day she shows up in the Gornberry accounts. And Lord Verilym kept very careful accounts, so you know each month who are the domestic employees

17:01that he's employing, what he pays them, all that kind of thing. It's monthly accounts. And she just disappears. And you don't know what happened to her. I just know that she no longer continues at Gornberry. So what could happen, and why isn't there a record? Well, it is possible that she gets to work in the intelligence services. Helen Frye has written about this, that sometimes these alien tribunals are ways that the British government can discover people of character and who would be loyal to the British government,

17:33but who have native German talents that can be used in such places as listening or, you know, some kind of spying. This history that we don't talk about, really, in my experience, also shows just how vital people who weren't British-born were to the war effort. Yeah, the special operations executive really fascinates me because they were training people to do, well, special operations, you know, all this cloak and dagger stuff in the continent

18:04with the aim of overthrowing the Nazi occupiers. And so if they could find natives, native Poles, native Frenchmen and women, they liked training them. They were trained at places like Audley End and some of the other country houses. And they might be sent back to Poland or to France, wherever. And they were more useful because they spoke the native language and they understood the culture and the idioms. And they would be sent in to perform assassinations or to blow up railway lines or whatever.

18:39You know, I think the special operations executive made a major difference in the war, as it's so many of these other activities that are taking places in people's homes. What had been people's homes. We get a real sense of change throughout your book and throughout this history.

Postwar fates of the estates

18:55What happened to these houses once the war was over? If you had a male heir, normally he was very interested in doing whatever it took to save the house. The compensation that the government paid was not really adequate to fixing all the damage that had been done, the requisitions. The government might pay for major war damage, bomb damage, but what they called fair wear and tear, the government didn't pay for. And there's a lot of that wear and tear going on for years as different groups move in and

19:29move out. So if there's an older male, a male heir, he would normally do what it took. But if the house was not an inherited house, if it was a commodity, if it had been bought, if they could sell it, they'd be happy to sell it. In a case like Audley-Ann, you have, besides Lord Braybrook, who died in 1941, his two sons die in the war. So the death taxes are enormous, the inheritance taxes. And, you know, instead of three generations being spread out over time, you have a couple

20:01of deaths within a couple of years. So there are a lot of houses that, in the case of Audley-Ann, they don't have a direct heir. The house goes to a cousin and he has to pay all the inheritance taxes. And the house is in really bad shape and it hadn't really, you know, hadn't been modernized in the first place. So he's able to sell it to the government. It's the first time the British government actually buys a house. It's now part of English Heritage, but then it was the Ministry of Works that bought it. In some cases, the house, if it's not that damaged and if it's architecturally distinguished,

20:35the National Trust might take it. But not every house is that architecturally distinguished, you know. I mean, most people, even if it's a big house, it's just, you know, it's not a work of art. And so what happens to those places? So sometimes they're sold to businesses, corporations. But if the house is in bad enough condition, you know, not that many people want to buy them. Some of them are demolished. Initially, it looked like a lot of these houses would be demolished. Really, out of the ones I wrote about, Pantanger is the only one that was demolished.

21:09Their sons were killed in World War II. And then, well, they had a third and ninth killed in a motorcycle accident in 1923. So they didn't have a male heir. If women inherit the houses, usually by the time they inherit, they've, you know, got a house of their own. They're married and they have a house of their own. There's some women who didn't marry who inherited and they just weren't interested. One of the houses that I found most interesting is a place called Great Linton Manor, which is one of these smaller manor houses. And it's inherited by a woman called Stella Athwat.

21:41And Great Linton is the sort of first village that becomes the part of what is now Milton Keynes. And it is transformed. It's now part of the park. And Great Linton Manor is the art center for this park in Milton Keynes. And Stella sells it to the Milton Keynes Corporation. And, you know, you have some sense that she's sat on the rural district councils, that there's some kind of civic pride there. But the fate of each house is very individual. So there are some houses, especially if the owners were more wealthy or more determined to keep it,

22:15they themselves figure out how to turn it into a tourist. I was going to say tourist trap, but they're not tourist traps. They're lovely places for tourists to visit. And as we all know by now, these houses are sort of icons of heritage. But in 1939, the houses themselves were not icons of heritage. They might, as West Wickham did and Folly Court did for a while, they might hold the heritage that had been sent out from London for their protection. But the houses themselves were not protected.

22:46And then after the war, when everybody saw how much damage there had been to these houses, there was enough demand from the public for the government to start trying to work on what we can do to save these houses. And some of the house owners were very entrepreneurial. George Howard of Castle Howard and Francis Dashwood of West Wickham were among the more entrepreneurial. And they're used nowadays, of course, as film sets. And they make a lot of money that way. Judith, there are so many individual stories here. But if you had to choose one country house story that captures how the Second World War transformed Britain,

23:24what would it be and why? It would be Audley End, which you mentioned at the beginning. And then the story of Lady Braybrook is so moving. And that was the one that inspired me to write the book, really. When you visit the house, at least in the times I've been there, they don't really tell the story of the family. I think they will. I understand that there's going to be an exhibit next year about the two young men that were killed in World War II. But I think to make them really the kind of attractive tourist sites that they are now,

23:55the houses were sort of deracinated from their aristocratic background. So you would, you know, maybe forget how rich these people, you know, the kind of role that the aristocrats had in British history. So I was very moved to discover that there was a story there of the family, which is really a very interesting story of what happens when your house is taken over by, in this case, a special operations executive.

24:21That was Judith S. Lewis speaking to Lauren Good. Judith's latest book is The Country House at War, a story of loss, reinvention and the birth of a new Britain. Everyone's got a hard question about AI, your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way,

24:54because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai.spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai.spotify.