How WWII spelt the end of our great country houses
In 1938, as war loomed with Nazi Germany, the British government quietly drew up a list of large country houses, away from factories and town centres, which could be requisitioned when war broke out.
The owners, mostly aristocrats and the very rich, would soon find that they had lost control of their stately homes.
The Duke of Beaufort, for instance, only discovered what was going on when he learned that the RAF planned to build a runway in front of Badminton, his magnificent 17th-century house in Gloucestershire.
Some grand houses, like Chatsworth in Derbyshire and Castle Howard in Yorkshire, accommodated schools for the duration of the war. Other places took in children evacuated from the inner cities, many of whom were less than thrilled by rural life.
Educational: Castle Howard in Yorkshire was used as a school during the war
At Panshanger in Hertfordshire, Lady Desborough reported that her young charges were ‘horror-struck by the dullness of the country’.
Woburn Abbey, seat of the Duke of Bedford, housed dozens of people from the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) who were working at the top-secret Bletchley Park.
The splendid Palladian house at West Wycombe Park in Buckinghamshire was used to store the treasures from the Wallace Collection, deemed too vulnerable to stay in London.
Audley End, a beautiful Jacobean house in Essex, was the training base for Polish resistance fighters who were then parachuted back into Poland.
The D-Day landings were planned at Wilton House in Wiltshire, home of the Earl of Pembroke. The Firs, a stockbroker’s house in Buckinghamshire with unusually large grounds, was so successful as a centre for developing and testing explosives, which were later sold to the Americans, that it ended up making a tidy profit for the British government.
The Country House at War is available now
The Special Operations Executive, the clandestine intelligence and sabotage agency, dubbed ‘the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’, requisitioned so many country houses for its training that SOE was said to stand for ‘Stately ’Omes of England’.
The Country House At War is an entertaining and surprisingly poignant book. Many country houses were handed back to their owners in dire condition, and government compensation was minimal.
With so many (male) heirs to big estates having been killed in action, they were inherited by distant relatives with little connection to the property, who then sold up.
Some stately homes were demolished; luckier ones were passed on to the National Trust or taken over by local government. Requisition, so vital to the war effort, spelt the end of the golden era of the British country house.