The Safe House World War I at Home

In the closing years of the First World War, this magnificent

country house in the heart of Cheshire was transformed

into a military hospital.

It became a sanctuary from the trenches for almost 300 soldiers.

They'd been shot, blown up, gassed or shell`shocked but here

at Dunham Massey they found a refuge from the terror of warfare.

Imagine you've been injured on the front line ` shot at

by a rapidly firing machine gun, or torn apart by burning shrapnel.

The army medics have done all they can, then you've endured

the trip back to Blighty.

Perhaps you spent days on a thin army mattress, with your body

aching and your nerves screaming.

Then you arrive here ` in these glorious, stately surroundings `

to be met by aristocratic women who want to look after you.

For the young men returning from the Western Front injured, Dunham Massey

became known as The Safe House.

Within a few weeks of the First World War,

the enormous and unexpected tide of casualties soon overwhelmed

the existing medical facilities ` both at the front and at home.

Many civilian hospitals and public buildings were turned

over to military use.

Stately homes across the country were converted

into convalescent hospitals.

At Dunham, they turned the Salon into

a ward and over the next two years treated a total of 282 soldiers.

They were just "Tommies" ` rank and file working class lads whose

injuries weren't life threatening, but did require medical care.

There were no officers here, so most of the soldiers were entering

a world they'd never seen before, and would probably never see again.

They found themselves being cared for by a trinity

of resourceful women.

There was a determined nurse who nearly drove herself to exhaustion.

A teenager who'd only just left a top`class boarding school

in Berkshire.

And a Victorian Countess who'd married

into a family which could trace its lineage back to the Tudor throne.

Penelope, Lady Stamford had been a widow for seven years by the time

she opened her doors to the troops.

In 1904, at the age of 39, Penelope posed with her children

for portraits by John Ernest Breun (correct).

Roger was the heir to the title, while his sister Jane would find her

teenage years dominated by the war.

She was just 15 when the first shots were fired.

Jane trained as a nurse and helped convert the house into a hospital.

70 years later, towards the end of her life,

Lady Jane recalled how people reacted to the declaration of war.

It was the spirit of the time.

Everybody was thrilled.

It's almost unbelievable to think of it now.

We'd won the Boer War and we were going to mince up

the Germans before Christmas.

The whole country was thrilled about it and cheered and cheered

in front of Buckingham Palace.

The excitement and the glamour was simply tremendous

For 19 year old Arthur Topham, a trainee cabinet maker, war leaves

him with a big decision to make.

Should he enlist for overseas duty?

He wants to learn his trade ` but he also likes the Military.

Four years ago, when the world seemed a safer place,

he'd lied about his age and joined the Territorial Force.

Now his friends call him a "Saturday Soldier"

because he only serves part`time.

Arthur knows the Army will soon be asking if he'll volunteer to serve

overseas ` probably at somewhere called Flanders.

As Arthur ponders his future, three`quarters

of a million men are recruited.

As they set off on their great adventure ` believing

they'd be home by Christmas ` the truth was slow to emerge.

They were ill`equipped for modern battle and completely unprepared for

a war that would grind to a halt in the fields of France and Belgium.

For houses like Dunham in 1914, the War was still a long way away,

and life continued with the same ease and opulence that

For houses like Dunham in 1914, the War was still a long way away,

and life continued with the same ease and opulence that

its occupants were used to.

No`one appreciated yet, that hostilities would also signal

the swansong of the British upper classes.

The golden age was drawing to a close, and the Tommies would be at

Dunham to witness the last Hurrah.

In 1914 a house like Dunham Massey would have had

a fairly extensive household staff.

And they still had quite formal roles like footman,

people who were there to look good, rather than to necessarily to do

a lot of the heavy labour.

The butler and the housekeeper were really the key people of the staff.

They had their own spaces.

They might have had the butler's pantry or

the housekeeper's sitting room.

And they had absolute authority in those spaces.

They could summon servants, they could dismiss servants.

You know, their word was law.

So it was a place where discipline was pretty,

pretty firm and a very close eye was kept on the younger servants.

Arthur Topham's decided not to volunteer for service overseas.

Instead, he's hoping to see home defence service only.

Many of his contemporaries who went to France have already been killed

in the Battles of Mons and Ypres.

It's clear that within months even this reluctant soldier's unit will

soon be embarking for France.

He leaves his work wondering if he'll ever return.

3,500 miles away a huge snow storm is sweeping Canada.

In the city of London, Ontario a young man just two years

older than Arthur is also wondering what life has in store for him.

Carl Brodie is a bank clerk who lives with

his mother and two sisters.

By January 1916 his mind is set.

Brodie joins up, agreeing to serve overseas with

the Canadian Expeditionary Force.

With a flourish of his signature, the blue`eyed, fair haired Brodie

is a new recruit.

By March he's leaving for Liverpool on the first leg

of his journey to the battlefield.

He sails aboard the steam ship Missanabie

with fellow members of the 43rd Canadian Field Artillery.

By the time he reaches France on the 14 July 1916 he's in the middle of

one of history's bloodiest battles.

The Somme.

The Somme wasn't a single battle ` but a series that lasted

until November 1916.

On the first day, 20 thousand British troops were killed,

and 30,000 were injured.

It was the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army.

The details would have reached Dunham by newspaper `

and it's likely that Lady Stamford would have read them here in her

parlour and that romantic vision of war that she'd had two years earlier

would have quickly disappeared.

It may have been the news of the carnage that stirred her

into action.

Lady Stamford was the President of the Altrincham division

of the British Red Cross, and was charged with developing

local convalescent hospitals.

In a letter to her son in 1916 she suggests using Dunham `

but in a particular way.

She writes to Lord Stamford and suggests that it should become

a hospital for officers because it wouldn't really do for Tommies.

We don't know what happened to change ` or whether anything did

happen to change her mind ` or whether the Red Cross decided that

it didn't need an Officers' hospital but it needed somewhere for Tommies

who were coming from the front ` or whether Lord Stamford who was

a bit liberal in his tendencies that actually he would prefer Dunham

to be a hospital for Tommies.

But we know that by 1917 when the doors opened it was Tommies

and non`commissioned Officers ` so privates

and non`commissioned Officers that were coming here to Dunham.

On the 23 April 1917, Lady Stamford penned

a short note to her son Roger.

In it she told him the news they'd all been waiting for:

"This evening a telephone message came through ` "Expect 16 patients

tomorrow at 11.30" This great house had at last become a hospital.

Medical staff and domestic servants were anxious but ready, as the first

convoy of injured arrived.

The first patient to be admitted was Private Thomas Hibbits of the

Royal Irish Rifles.

His regiment had seen action at the Somme.

He was sent to Dunham to recover from Trenchfoot `

a painful condition stemming from weeks standing

in the quagmire that was the front.

the soldiers presented with.

Shrapnel wounds, bullet wounds, shellshock, men recovering

from gassing as well.

Lady Stamford oversaw the running of the hospital and appointed Sister

Catherine Bennett, as the Matron.

Most of the nurses came from the Voluntary Aid Detachment `

an organisation of middle and upper class civilian women.

One of them was Lady Stamford's daughter, Jane who became a VAD

as soon as she left school.

I think the staff would have been very excited about the prospect of

incoming wounded, also to do their duty but quite exciting to have them

Arthur Topham and Carl Brodie are now fighting in the Battle of Arras.

The two soldiers ` who've never met ` are within 16 miles of each other

at the village of Bullecourt.

These pictures are taken on 3rd May 1917 near the village.

On the same day, Topham is struck in the face, arms and legs by shrapnel.

Soon afterwards, Gunner Brodie is also seriously wounded in the arm.

Their traumatic journey to Dunham is under way.

When a soldier was wounded on the battlefield

in northern France or Flanders his first task would be to dress his own

wound with a first field dressing.

He would then be picked up by stretcher bearers ` there could be

a long wait before that happened.

A doctor would treat him, he'd have morphine

and anti`tetanus serum before being put in a motor ambulance.

At the Casualty Clearing Station he would have emergency surgery

and then he'd be put in a hospital train and taken to a Base Hospital

on the coast of northern France.

And then he'd be put on a hospital ship, and then put

into another hospital train and brought to a place like this.

The Stamford Hospital.

So the transport of troops to the front, the transport of ammunition

and supplies to the trenches was given a higher priority than the

return of wounded down`the`line.

Three weeks after being seriously wounded, Topham arrives at Dunham.

Brodie is admitted a few days later.

Their details meticulously recorded by staff.

The two patients soon strike up a friendship.

Despite being foreigners to one another, they have much in common,

not least their survival at Arras.

You see people in the same photographs together so they became

close friends we can only presume?

Um, I think they do.

If you spend two months in the same place sharing the same room

with someone you'd either want...

to throttle them, or you'd become good friends with

them, I should think.

And I'm sure many friendships were formed within these four walls.

MUSIC: Duettino ` Sull'aria from The Marriage Of Figaro.

It's so peaceful,

you can't hear anyone at all.

And just to be away from the noise, the hell, the shrieking noise

of the Western Front and just be here to have your own time, and

actually it's time devoted to you ` it's not for the Battalion, it's not

for your Division, it's for you...

It's for you to get better.

It must have been almost quite unusual for a lot of them,

they'd probably never really had time just for themselves.

And so it would have been just wonderful.

Within a month nearly 50 soldiers had been admitted.

Some of the household staff helped treat

the patients ` working alongside the voluntary aid detachment nurses.

One housemaid did fall in love and escape to a new life

as the wife of one of the soldiers.

Sergeant Percy Chaplin was looked after by Mabel Doody `

they married two years after the war and moved to Essex

where Percy became a fishmonger.

The reason we know so much about the Dunham hospital is the family

here rarely threw anything away.

Their archive goes back to long before the start of the

First World War, and even includes old electricity bills.

Sorting the useless from the fascinating became a labour of love.

We've been working on the project for about two years

in total from start to finish.

Katie Taylor from the National Trust is responsible for the historical

collection at Dunham Massey.

The recreation of the hospital has been done

by a team of 500 volunteers.

It involved researching our soldiers,

researching what the household was doing, researching what Lady

Stamford and Lady Jane were doing, as well as looking at how we could

replicate some of the original items so that people could use them.

So all the bed side lockers you can see

around the room are based on this original one, were all made by our

volunteers, the woodwork was done by our volunteers and the locker covers

were made by volunteers as well.

The bedspreads were all made by volunteers to replicate

as close as possible the originals.

We're really lucky at Dunham that the family left us a huge archive

as well as a massive amount of information regarding the

collections that remain in the house which really helped us to create

something that we feel is really true to what would have

happened here back in 1917.

To find out more, I've come to Deansgate in the centre

of Manchester to one of the most beautiful libraries in the world.

You've spent years working with all these papers.

I mean how many people keep that amount of information `

and that was a good thing from your point of view, wasn't it?

Absolutely.

They were born hoarders, I think.

Born archivists almost so they threw nothing away.

Erm....they

had the space, partly it was a case that they didn't need to throw

things away, but also I think it was all part of this business of having

an awareness of their historical importance so they wanted to

preserve their place in history for future generations. The archive

arrived here in the late 1970s and very little happened to it

until I was appointed in 1989.

So I was confronted with boxes and boxes and shelves

of uncatalogued, fairly chaotic, papers and it was quite a daunting

task to try and put some order to this archive and then catalogue it.

And can people come and look at this or not?

Absolutely.

The archive is here to be used like all our collections and the

Stamford papers are very well used.

One of our most frequently accessed archives.

It's a standard autograph book which has been used as a souvenir

album by many of the patients at the Stamford Military Hospital.

And it contains photographs of them sitting in the grounds...

Gosh, it's rather lovely that, isn't it?

And so many of the photographs show soldiers who

really they look like teenagers.

Look it says here, "May Good Fortune Always Be With

Nurse Grey", and she's depicted as an angel there, isn't she?

That's right, yes and every care was taken of them.

They were in this beautiful secluded place.

It must have been a paradise compared to the horrors they had

experienced in the trenches.

It's a really lovely piece of archive actually, isn't it?

It is.

And what of Topham and Brodie, the two soldiers

which fate had brought together?

By September 1917 both men have recovered and are discharged

from Dunham.

Brodie heads to a training camp in Hampshire to rebuild

his strength and prepare again for the Western Front.

Arthur Topham returns to France ` one of his three brothers was

killed in action a few weeks ago, and another was shot in the arm.

Now, he's back where he started ` Cambrai just a few miles from Arras.

He's been promoted to Lance Sergeant.

On the 11th of October ` exactly a month before Armistice,

he was involved in vicious hand`to`hand combat, as the Allies

advanced two miles ` an enormous distance for the First World War.

There have been numerous battles at Cambrai but now in the closing

days of the war, the Allies are on the point of liberating it.

The fighting is almost done.

And soldiers are beginning to think the unthinkable ` about going home.

Arthur Topham was a cabinet maker who'd wanted to stay

at home but instead went to fight for his country.

He'd been restored to health by women who'd given up

their time and their home.

But by the end of that day he was dead ` his body falling in

a foreign field far from home ` one of the last casualties of the war.

It was his 23rd birthday.

But the story doesn't end there, and it's thanks to the family at Dunham

who never threw anything away.

Deep in the vaults of the John Rylands Library a series

of letters was recently discovered that tells us what happened to

Gunner Carl Brodie, the smiling Canadian who'd spent

months in hospital with Topham.

In 1917 he's gone back to his unit, He's about to be sent off to France.

It's quite a poignant letter because he's comparing the

tranquillity of Dunham Massey with the horrors he's going to face.

in France.

His mother has also written from Canada and she emphasises

the distance, the physical distance between her and her son.

This camp is a fairly good one with lots of amusements `

not to much work and good food.

so we do that fare too badly.

Please tell Nurse Grey that I'm not starving yet.

Kindly remember me to Sister Bennett and the other nurses.

His mother has

also written from Canada.

She emphasises the physical distance between her and her son.

And she's thanking Lady Stamford.

My heart was at rest while he was there away from he danger zone.

He has told me so much about your beautiful home and surroundings...

I remain sincerely yours, Margaret Montgomery Brodie. So he's

been treated by Lady Stamford and all the nurses there

and then we know he's going back to France which is worrying, but....

That's right, yes, but there is a happy ending.

He's survived the war and he's now in Rhyl in North Wales waiting

to be repatriated back to Canada.

I'm sure very Canadian soldier will go back to Canada with a feeling

of great respect for the way in which the English people have

thrown their homes open to us and for the kindness we have received.

So it had a happy ending.

It's a lovely story and we only just managed to find that one.

So you sort of think they go off to France

and that could have been the end but that's lovely to see, isn't it?

Yeah.

And there may be many, many stories like that in the archive.

For the soldiers, servants, nurses and the house things would

never be the same again.

No longer a family home with little children

running in the corridors, or wounded soldiers filling the main rooms

the house lost much of its purpose.

The furniture and objects which had formed the wards were put

in store here in the Great Gallery, and just like a memory, left.

When the National Trust took over the house 60 years later, they found

it all just as it had been in 1919.

The world for these people had changed and that the kind of era

of grand country house weekends ` for this family in particular `

was kind of coming to an end.

And that their way of life was for ever going to be impacted

on what had happened here.

Sister Bennett moved on and worked in the Balkans

for the Serbia Relief Fund.

Lady Jane visited Paris after Armistice, and in later years

married a vicar in Suffolk.

Lady Stamford died in 1959 at the age of 93.

After the Great War she continued to living at Dunham with her son Roger

who became the 10th Earl of Stamford.

And they're buried alongside each at St Mark's Church.

She left behind her a legacy of grateful soldiers who never

forgot their time in her house.

You can hear more fascinating stories from the war with

World War I at home at:

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