The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (29 page)

What I discovered was startling. In flat contradiction to the evidence in the visitors’ book, the Lists clearly showed John as being on active service with the 4th Leicesters until April 1916. Further, they revealed that, when he left Belvoir that month, it was not to rejoin his battalion on the Western Front. On 4 April he had been appointed ADC to Field Marshal Sir John French.

The previous December
, Herbert Asquith had sacked Sir John for his incompetent handling of the Battle of Loos. The much-vaunted offensive had ended in failure; far from forcing a German retreat, not a single yard of ground had been gained. British losses amounted to 50,000, and yet to save the field marshal’s face – and the morale of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers formerly under his command – the prime minister made him a viscount and appointed him Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces.

From April 1916, John was based at French’s headquarters in Horse Guards. There, in luxurious surroundings, he served out the remainder of the war.

The information contained in the Army Lists was bafflingly at odds with the scant evidence held at Belvoir. More troubling though, was the revelation that John’s departure from the Western Front in
the summer of 1915 marked his retirement from active service for good. I had seen his name on the war memorial in the chapel at Belvoir. So why, if he hadn’t been with the 4th Leicesters after July 1915, were the words ‘Capt. 4th Leicesters’ inscribed beneath his name?

The plaque stood on the wall, facing the altar. An oblong-shaped tablet of pale-grey stone, it commemorated the members of the household who had served in the war.

Violet had commissioned the memorial in 1919; she was responsible for its design, and for the tribute inscribed beneath the names:

THIS MONUMENT TO THEIR COURAGE IS SET UP BY THOSE WHO LOVE THEM AND ARE PROUD OF THEM.

There at the centre of the plaque was John, his name flanked by those of the family’s servants. Frank Palmer, killed at the Somme at the age of twenty-two, had been the 4th footman at the castle; George Allcroft, the 19-year-old son of the Duke’s Master of Hounds, had worked in the kennels. Nixon, Doubleday and Tweed were
gardeners; and Lamb, Coy and Patience were grooms. John Price, who had received the Croix de Guerre, was the Duchess’s chauffeur; David Gibson, awarded the Military Cross, one of the highest awards for gallantry, was the Duke’s valet.

Among these courageous men, John’s name did not appear to merit inclusion. He had served as a soldier for just four months of the war. During that time, his battalion was held in reserve. At the very moment it was drafted into the front line, he left for England. The castle’s servants had fought for the duration of the war. Two had won medals for their bravery. John had not fought at all.

Capt. 4th Leicesters
; the reference to his battalion was extraordinary. The impression left to posterity was that John had been with them. The 4th Leicesters had spent close to four years on the Western Front.
They had fought at Ypres and Loos
in 1915; at the Battle of the Somme in July 1916; at Hill 70, Thiepval and the attack on Lievin in 1917; and at the battles of Cambrai, Selle and Sambre during the Final Advance in Picardy in 1918.

I found the injustice of the inscription – and the apparent deception – disquieting. Opposite the war memorial, at the far end of the chapel, stood Haddon’s tomb; there beside it was the notice that stated he had died of tuberculosis. This hallowed room appeared to have become a repository for myths the family was anxious to perpetuate.

But then how had Violet been able to get away with including John’s name on the plaque? In 1919, everyone – from the castle’s servants to the villagers on the Duke’s estate – would have known that he had not been with the 4th Leicesters; they would also have known that he had not fought in the war.

It pointed to just one conclusion: John’s reason for leaving his battalion must have been entirely honourable. The letter General Stuart Wortley sent him after the catastrophic action at the Hohenzollern Redoubt reinforced this theory. There was no suggestion that John had evaded active service, or that he had left the general’s staff under a cloud.

So why, if John’s reason for leaving his battalion was honourable, had he gone to such lengths to conceal it? His departure from the Front coincided
precisely
with the start of the excisions he had made
in the family records. Not a single document remained to explain why he had left, or what he was doing in England.

Given his determination to kick over the traces of this chapter in his life, I had assumed that in seeking to bury his secret in perpetuity, he must have believed that excising this period from the family records would do the job – that there were no other records elsewhere which would reveal his secret.

But his military career was a matter of public record.

Over the course of the First World War, the War Office kept a file on every soldier in the British Army; they contained the details of promotions and postings, and the periods of service in various theatres of war. The files were now held in the National Archives at Kew. If I could find John’s file, it ought to explain why he left the 4th Leicesters in the summer of 1915.

Then I remembered that at the outbreak of the Second World War a significant proportion of the nation’s records had been evacuated to Belvoir. Some three hundred tons of documents had been sent up to the castle in the months before John died.

Had the service records of soldiers who had served in the First World War been among them?

The government’s decision to use the castle as an emergency repository had been taken at the last minute, largely thanks to John’s persistence. He had not been responsible for the records; yet he had insisted that the catalogue to the many thousands of documents be held for ‘safe-keeping’ in the Muniment Rooms.

Had John pressed the government into using the castle as a wartime repository because he had wanted to find –
and remove
– his own War Office file?

The priority now was to return to the National Archives at Kew.

‘WO 374. Piece Number 28523. The Marquis of Granby, Capt. J. H. M. Covering Dates 1914–1919’.

The file was buff-coloured; the pages inside loose leaf and frayed at the edges. It was impossible to determine whether John had looked for it and failed to find it; it wasn’t clear whether it had actually been among the records transferred to Belvoir in 1940. The main thing was that it was here.

I began to go carefully through it. It held around thirty documents; printed reports that had been dated and rubber-stamped; numbered army forms that had been signed and counter-signed. Scrawled in ink across the pages were the hieroglyphics of anonymous civil servants. Four million British men had served in the First World War: the acronyms and strings of numbers were a bureaucracy’s means of imposing order on the horror and chaos.

It was the third document in the file that caught my attention.
Form A. G. 4A.
The date – 9 July 1915 – leapt off the page: this was just three days after John’s war diary stopped. The print was faded; the tiny creases in the tissue-thin paper, a wartime economy, obscured some of the details. I smoothed out the form and studied it closely. It was a notice of embarkation:

Cause of return, sick.

A form, filled in by an orderly in the Transport Corps on the quayside at Boulogne, had given away John’s secret. But then why would he have wanted to keep this information secret? He had been invalided home from the Front: it was a legitimate reason for leaving his battalion: he could hardly be blamed for the fact that he had fallen ill.

Shell shock – or a nervous collapse of some kind perhaps; it must have been an illness of which he had been ashamed, one to which some kind of stigma was attached.

I turned to the next form in the file. It was marked ‘Confidential: Proceedings of a Medical Board’.

John had attended the board at Caxton Hall, opposite Westminster Abbey, on 23 July. Quickly, I scanned the form to find out what had been the matter with him. At the bottom of the page, in the space that had been left blank for handwritten notes, the examining surgeon had filled in the details:

The above-named officer [Lt. J. H. M. Marquis of Granby] was sent back from France on 9 July suffering from diarrhoea, the effect of old malarial poison contracted some time ago in Rome; of a very obstinate character, with abdominal pain and symptoms of dyspepsia. It is surmised that the abdominal discomfort may indicate a condition of chronic appendicitis. He is, at present, quite unfit for duty. Recommended for two months’ leave. To apply for a Board before its expiration should he feel fit to return to France.

The account of his illness contradicted the evidence in the game books and the visitors’ book at Belvoir. Chronic appendicitis was a life-threatening condition; usually, it was necessary to remove the appendix before it burst. John, as far as I could tell, had not had his removed. On 25 July – two days after the medical board – he had returned to Belvoir. More puzzling still was the fact that the examining surgeon, a lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps, had declared him ‘quite unfit for duty’. John had spent the entirety of his two months’ leave shooting, fishing and entertaining his friends at Belvoir. There was nothing to suggest there was anything wrong with him. So why, if he
was
fit, hadn’t he applied to return to the
Front before the expiration of his leave, as the army surgeon had recommended?

I read the next report – the proceedings of a second medical board, which John attended on 22 September. This was three weeks before the battle at the Hohenzollern Redoubt.

It wasn’t surprising to see that the ‘chronic appendicitis’ that the doctors initially suspected had failed to develop. What was surprising though, was that John was given a further two months’ leave. According to Lieutenant-Colonel Brown, the examining surgeon, the intemperate conditions in the trenches would ‘aggravate’ his illness: ‘He is distinctly better,’ he reported, ‘but his general condition is unsatisfactory and is susceptible to the slightest climate change as regarding his gastro-intestinal system.’

The diagnosis explained how John had managed to escape the fighting at the Hohenzollern Redoubt on 13 October, but it did not explain how, if he was ‘susceptible to the slightest climate change’, he had managed to spend a number of days that month shooting partridges on his father’s moor in Derbyshire.

The meteorological records were held at the National Archives. A quick check revealed that October 1915 had been memorable for its appalling weather. In the Peak District, where the Duke of Rutland’s Longshaw estate was situated, the mean temperature – accompanied by strong winds and torrential rain – remained well below average. Surely, if John had been fit enough to stand for hours on a wet, windswept moor, he had been fit enough to stand in a trench?

On 4 November, three weeks before his leave expired, John presented himself at Caxton Hall for a third board. This time, the examining surgeon judged him fit for active service. So why hadn’t he returned to the Western Front
?
He had passed the medical board; he was under orders to rejoin his regiment immediately; yet, according to the visitors’ book, he remained at Belvoir.

I skimmed through the rest of the documents in the file. They were all medical reports. Within weeks of his third medical board, John had suffered a relapse. He had not recovered from his gastro-intestinal problems. Between 4 December 1915 and 16 October 1918, he appeared before a further fourteen medical boards. He failed every one of them.

The insignia of His Majesty’s Government was stamped across these documents; on seventeen separate occasions a panel of eminent army doctors had ruled John unfit for active service. On the face of it, despite the discrepancy between their findings, and what I had found in the scant records available at Belvoir, there was no reason to doubt the veracity of these reports. But if this official version of events was true, why did John want to conceal the fact that illness had kept him out of the war? He was suffering from a stomach condition. He had no apparent reason to be ashamed of his illness, yet he had removed all mention of it from the letters in the Muniment Rooms.