The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (50 page)

This was on 22 September 1915. Six weeks later, at his next board in November, he was passed fit for active service. But he didn’t return to the Western Front. On 4 December, he’d failed the emergency medical board that the army council convened at the War Office.

On this occasion Hood
had
supplied the medical certificate. It was document that I’d found in John’s War Office file:

December 2 1915

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 been constantly affected with gastro-intestinal disturbances.

Lord Granby was invalided home from the Front by Colonel Beevor on July 9th 1915 as suffering from gastric 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.

John knew that Hood was lying. The fact that he’d allowed him to supply the board with a fabricated medical certificate was proof that he had colluded in the lie.
Between 5 December 1915 and
16 October 1918, John failed a further thirteen medical boards. He
had
used Hood’s medical certificates to escape the war. It explains why the gap in the correspondence at Belvoir begins as soon as he is invalided home from the Front. It is then that Hood – in his letter to the Director General of the Army Medical Service – first lies about the cause, and the seriousness, of his illness.

But the question of course is why had John finally colluded in the lie?

From the beginning of the war he had resisted his mother’s threats and blandishments. He hadn’t been feigning illness when he was invalided home in July; throughout that summer he had wanted to return to the Front. Something had happened to him towards the end of 1915 that had made him change his mind.

Later in his life, his shame had come back to haunt him. He had spent a good part of it – and his final hours – removing the evidence that would incriminate him.

I knew what John had wanted to hide. But I still didn’t know why this man, whose moral integrity and whose sense of duty to his country struck me as hitherto unimpeachable, had opted to use a fabricated medical condition to escape the war.
While he had been abetted
by some of the highest-ranking men in the British Army, he had effectively deserted – a crime for which 306 men were executed by firing squad in the years between 1914 and 1918.

Whatever the answer to this question, it was the source of his shame. It was what had caused him to spend the last hours of his life in the Muniment Rooms.

I focused on the period between 4 November 1915 – the date John was passed fit at his third medical board – and the emergency medical board convened at the War Office on 4 December 1915.

Between these two dates, just three letters remained in the Muniment Rooms at Belvoir. I found them in an obscure file labelled ‘General Correspondence’. They were all from soldiers in the North Midlands. What they had to say was revealing: I was able to pinpoint the moment when John decided that he wasn’t going back to the Front.

The first two indicated that he was expected back in the third week of November.

‘My dear Granby,’ Lieutenant-Colonel Septimus Legge, the North Midlands DAQM
*
wrote on 22 November: ‘We were all very sorry that you did not turn up with the GOC last week. However, it’s as well not to come out here unless you are quite fit. You can always do your “bit” at home. I can quite understand how sick you are about it. Thanks very much for your present of waders, they will come in quite useful.’

The second letter was from John’s batman, Robert Maclean:

My Lord,

In answer to your letter of 18th inst … I had everything ready for you coming back with the General, and now I’ve packed up everything – your French boots and water bottle that was under the seat of the Rolls. I have also packed your knee boots.

I see Rigsby has got Pegsy
^†
clipped, and I told him the instructions
you wanted him to carry out. If I should receive any instructions about your kit, I will carry them out immediately. I have the honour, my Lord, to be your obedient and faithful servant.

The third was a colourful letter from Rothesay Stuart Wortley:

20 November 1915

My dear John

I am most awfully sorry you failed to pass the vet (horse expression) but still, the winter out here is pretty bloody and it is just as well to be in England where one can find a fire, a doe and a glass of wine.

I don’t know exactly how long I am going to stay here, but anyhow I hope to come over on leave before the end of the month. I will let you know when it will be, somewhere about Nov 25th I expect. We must certainly arrange an evening of the sort you describe. It would give me extreme pleasure, yes, I think so! I want to get a day or two fox hunting and also loose off my bundook
*
at a fat pheasant. We might arrange a party at Highcliffe if you can think of any suitable does.

I dined with Eddie
^†
last Saturday and got a teeny bit tight. Capital fun, as I live with some rather sad sods here, especially the GSO3 – who sits at the next table, has a snub nose, hair that stands on end, a raucous voice, no sense of humour, and a manner subservient to those above him and officiously offensive to those below him. He makes me damned angry and I see a row brewing for the near future! He is one of those “I-am-not-quite-sure-Sir, but-I’ll-go-look-it-up-and-make-certain-we-must-get-these-things-right” kind of a bugger for whom I have no use!

We seem to be losing the war, worse than usual just now, don’t we? But I am still awfully brave. I went up to the ditches with Uncle Wilson and nearly got drowned so I haven’t been again.

Eddie went to Paris and rogered so much that he broke a blood vessel in his head. Heated argument as to who should pay for the washing.

Eddie maintained the pillows would have to be washed in a month or so anyway. Opposition claimed that the stains would never come out – result – Eddie billed.

Love to all nice girls.

For all the talk of does and burst blood vessels, the significance of Rothesay’s letter was that John had lied to his best friend. He’d told Rothesay he’d failed the medical board on 4 November, when, of course, his War Office file shows that he was passed fit for active service.

Rothesay had written in answer to John on 20 November and Legge on the 22nd. Maclean was replying to a letter that John had sent on the 18th. The postal service to France was famously efficient. The suggestion, therefore, is that by 17 November at the latest, John had already decided not to return to the Front. This could only mean that whatever had triggered his decision had occurred at some point in the previous two weeks.

It was a letter from Violet – another of her gold-dusted letters – that cracked the mystery open.

It was undated and I assumed that it related to one of John’s earlier medical boards. But, in fact, Violet was writing about the emergency board on 4 December.

I was able to date the letter by a reference to Egypt. On 2 December, the North Midland Division was ordered to Cairo. Following the failure of the Gallipoli offensive, the evacuation of the Dardanelles was in progress. Fearing that the Turks would attack Egypt if the evacuation failed, Kitchener was withdrawing troops from the Western Front to defend his positions in the east.

Initially, Violet’s letter confused the picture. It seemed John had had yet another change of heart:

Private

D
arling C – I fear we are beaten – John means to go out to Egypt!
If
his General can find room for him!

He has asked Diana to prevent my trying any further at the WO.
And today I have obeyed as it seems to be his
determination
! He longs to go back with his General. His General will wire to him to come – but not till after Xmas will he go.

I don’t know how he will get round the ‘3 months leave’. He may have been settling that today – I never dare ask him a thing as you know.

You can imagine the bad state I am in.

For a moment, Violet’s letter made me think that John’s emergency board was Violet’s high-water mark, her grand victory. It made me question whether John had in fact colluded in the lie that he was seriously ill. Once again, he seemed bent on overturning the findings of the board.

But then it dawned on me that whatever had caused John to abandon going back to the Front in mid-November had also caused him to abandon going out to Egypt ‘after Xmas’. It looked as if he had had a crisis of conscience after the emergency board. Yet, ultimately, his desire to remain in England held sway.

The correspondence at Belvoir resumed on 5 December. Potentially, Violet’s letter was an important clue in unmasking John’s last secret. The traces of whatever it was that had kept him in England ought to be there.

On the drive up through the woods to the castle, the rhododendrons were out – huge clusters, bordering the drive, a haze of purple, crimson and pink. It was spring – almost a year since my last visit. As I followed the winding road up to the battlements, it was ironic to think I was returning to look at John’s official version of events. Odder still was the thought that, possibly, the key to the mystery had been there in the Muniment Rooms all along.

I had looked at the notes that I had made when I first discovered the gap in the records. While the correspondence resumed on 5 December, until the end of January 1916, it focused on one subject – John’s engagement to Kathleen Tennant. He had removed the rest of the letters for that month – presumably because they contained information relating to his sudden decision to fall in with his mother’s plans. I’d had a cursory look through the correspondence. The letters between John and Kathleen were touching: John had even kept a journal of their courtship. But I hadn’t thought them to be of any great significance: after all, this was nothing to do with the war.

I parked by the entrance to the Grand Portico, and entered the castle through the small priest’s door. As I crossed the Guard Room, past the stands of muskets, the suits of armour and the tattered remnants of regimental flags, captured in battle, the bellicosity of it all jarred with what I’d discovered.

Inside the Muniment Rooms, it was gloomy and cold; the sun was shining on this side of the castle, but the thick stone walls held the winter chill. I gathered together the relevant files and sat down at the table next to the sofa where John had died.

I began with the file labelled ‘Letters from Kathleen, 9th Duchess 1915/1916’. It didn’t take me long to realize that I had found the
missing piece in the puzzle – a piece which, without the medical reports in John’s War Office file and Violet’s gold-dusted letters, would have been impossible to slot into place.

On the face of it, the file offered a touching record of one of the happiest moments in John’s life. But what it actually contained was the resolution to the last and most mysterious of the gaps that he had created in his family’s records.

At the end of 1915, John had fallen in love. Kathleen – or Kakoo as he called her – was the reason why he had not returned to the Western Front. It was his love for her that had caused him to abandon his duty to King and country.

Aged nineteen in December 1915, Kakoo was beautiful. Tall, with a slim figure, and a pale ivory complexion, her elfin face was framed by long dark hair, which she wore, piled high, in a chignon.
She had ‘golden-brown eyes’
, her friend Cynthia Asquith recalled – ‘eyes that seemed to claim happiness, to see all things in their brightest aspect’.

Ten years younger than John, Kakoo was the daughter of Frank Tennant, the second son of the first Lord Glenconner, whose grandfather invented bleaching powder. Lord Glenconner had made a large fortune from railways, banking and his father’s chemical plants. Though Kakoo lacked a title, her family was rich and well connected. Her aunt, Margot, was married to Herbert Asquith.

On Saturday 11 December, a few days after John told Violet that he would join the North Midlands in Egypt, and that on no account was she to meddle via her contacts at the War Office, he wrote: ‘I am very much looking forward to Wednesday – and there is no doubt that I love Kakoo very much.’

This was in the journal he kept of their courtship. Four days later, on the Wednesday he had referred to, he went to tea with Kakoo at the house she shared with her brothers at 57 Seymour Street, near Marble Arch:

I found all her brothers
[Mark, Francis and John]
in the room and they never left. So I asked her if, when I next came, the room would be full of
people or not – because I said I would not come unless she would be alone. So she sent me this dear little note – which meant to me she would be alone:

“Dear John – come to tea tomorrow will you? I will be in about 5.”

John’s journal resumed the day after:

16th December

I went to tea of course yesterday with my K., and I pulled my self enough to the scratch as to ask my darling if she would come to Belvoir on Saturday next – and she said she would love to, but would have to ask her mother.

Just before I left her sitting room I kissed her hand – which nearly sent me mad with delight – as she did not mind. I thought perhaps I might get a rebuff.

They were the words of a man whose heart had been broken. Before he met Kakoo, John had lost in love. It is only in the context of his previous relationship that the sacrifice he was about to make for her becomes understandable.

‘I don’t think I’ll ever
fall in love again,’ John wrote to his sister Marjorie on 28 May 1914.

The week before, he had broken off his engagement to Rosemary Leveson-Gower, the striking-looking and captivating daughter of the Duke of Sutherland.
Twice, in the eighteen months
since he had proposed, she had called it off. Their affair was finally over. John had not wanted to end it, but her mother, Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland, had given him an ultimatum: