The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (13 page)

I returned to the question of what John had wanted to ‘finish’.

The servants at Belvoir had offered one further piece of information. In September 1939, the Public Records had been evacuated to Belvoir Castle for safe-keeping. Under the Act of Parliament that governed the stewardship of the records, it had been necessary for King George VI to make John their official custodian.

So was it urgent war work that had kept him in the Muniment Rooms? Had a patriotic sense of duty compelled him to keep the King’s doctor waiting?

I tapped in my reader number and selected ‘Search the Catalogue’. It was a bleak afternoon in late November and I was at the National Archives in Kew.

According to the servants, sixty tons of records had been delivered to the castle in the winter of 1940. Further deliveries had been imminent when John died. I wanted to look at the official correspondence relating to this material.

When I entered ‘Evacuated Records’ in the search box, three references came up. One looked promising: ‘Public Record Office: Repositories for Evacuated Records, War of 1939–1945’. Following the link, all seven of the wartime repositories were listed. I selected ‘Belvoir Castle’ and ordered up the documents.

It was entirely plausible that John was working on the records when he died. April 1940 had been an anxious month in the progress of the war; France was on the verge of surrendering to Germany. With the threat of a Nazi invasion escalating, the pressure had been on to evacuate the last of the records from London; it could have been work relating to the transfer of this material that he had wanted to finish.

The documents arrived in a large cardboard box. It was the letters between John and the Keeper of Records – the Head of the Public Record Office – that I was interested in. Sifting through the box, I found twelve. As I began to go through them, it quickly became evident that, while John had been a conscientious custodian, his appointment as Assistant Keeper of the Records had been titular. The arrangements for evacuating the records had been handled by London; once they had reached the castle, John had had nothing to do with them. There was no reason why he would have been working on them when he died.

But the other documents in the box were intriguing. The decision to use the castle as a wartime repository, I discovered, had been controversial.

On 24 April 1939, Cyril Flower, the Keeper of Records, received a phone call, which he reported in a memo to a senior official at the Office of Works: ‘I’ve just had a call from the Duke of Rutland, who suggested that Belvoir Castle might be a good place for the Public Records in an Emergency. I explained to him that at the outbreak of War we should be fully occupied in evacuating to the two buildings already allotted to us.’

At the time Flower was writing, the plan was to evacuate the records to Shepton Mallet Prison in Somerset, and to St Luke’s Hospital in Market Harborough. While the Keeper’s memo does not reveal why John believed the castle ‘might be a good place’, it is clear his offer was politely refused. ‘I did not feel I could accept His Grace’s offer,’ Flower informed the official at the Office of Works. ‘I told him that your office kept a register of buildings available for similar purposes during an Emergency. His Grace agreed that I should write to you and that you would let him know whether you could accept his offer to have the castle put on the list.’

The previous year, realizing that armed conflict with Hitler’s Germany was inevitable, the Committee of Imperial Defence had instructed the Office of Works to compile a register of buildings that could be utilized when war came. Britain’s historic houses played a key part in the plans for mobilization. They offered large-scale accommodation that could be adapted to a variety of purposes – hospitals and convalescent homes, intelligence and military headquarters, billets and training premises for the armed forces, even prisoner-of-war camps.

The register, detailing which buildings would be requisitioned and for what purpose, was top secret. That it remained secret was imperative. Not only was the committee anxious to prevent disclosure of its plans to the enemy, it was also keen to avoid the volume of protest that would erupt were the register to come to light. If there was a war, Britain’s historic homes were to be compulsorily requisitioned:
their owners would have no say over the purpose for which they were being taken over, or any right to reject the government’s decision.

When John telephoned the Keeper of Records, neither he nor Flower knew that the Ministry of War had already staked a claim to the castle. Its size and its commanding position meant that it was ideally suited as a military headquarters. On the government’s secret register, it had been earmarked as a billet for troops.

And yet at the eleventh hour, just seven weeks before war was declared, the decision to use the castle as a military headquarters was reversed.

Out of the blue, on 12 July, Flower received a short communication from Edward Normann, the Assistant Secretary of Defence at the Office of Works: ‘Arrangements have now been made for Belvoir Castle not to be used for billeting purposes, so you can proceed to make arrangements for evacuating there.’

No explanation was given for the last-minute switch. But, clearly, the decision infuriated senior officials at the Public Record Office. Far from believing the castle to be a ‘good place in an Emergency’, as John had suggested, they regarded it as hopelessly ill suited to their needs. In every respect, it failed the criteria they had so carefully laid down.

The search for an emergency repository for the records had involved months of investigation. The Keeper of Records, in a memo written after the war, explained the factors that had governed the search: ‘There were two main dangers to which records might obviously be exposed in time of war: aerial bombardment and invasion. There was obviously very little we could do as a direct precaution against the dangers arising from invasion. Aerial bombardment was, from the first, the danger which those responsible for the custody of the records were bound to take mainly into account.’ With this in mind, the Keeper had explored the possibility of storing the records on the Piccadilly Line beneath Aldwych station. But as his investigation concluded, ‘It was found that the tube as a whole was too damp for the storage of documents for any length of time.’ He had also considered using a special train, which, should it become exposed to attack – either from the air, or by invading enemy troops – could be
moved at short notice from its siding. Finally – early in 1939 – he had selected the two emergency repositories: the prison at Shepton Mallet and the hospital in Market Harborough. Located as they were in sleepy market towns, both were thought to be discreet, secure locations.

Unlike Belvoir.

‘I wish I could consider it a safe place,’ Michael Dawes, the Deputy Keeper of Records, lamented to his colleagues after seeing the castle for the first time: ‘It is a landmark for miles around and I can quite imagine the Germans bombing it for the sake of effect, or attempting to seize it for a time and overawe the neighbourhood.’

To the senior officials at the Public Record Office, the government’s abrupt decision to evacuate the nation’s most important historical documents to a building that was dangerously vulnerable to enemy attack appeared cavalier. No clearer indictment of the mistrust with which the Keeper of Records regarded the castle can be found than his decision – on the day war was declared – to send the most valuable document in his collection elsewhere.

On the evening of 3 September, a small, unmarked van left Chancery Lane. Travelling under armed guard, it headed west out of London. Its precious cargo, wrapped unobtrusively in brown paper, lay beside the driver on the front passenger seat. The parcel contained the Domesday Book. It was on its way to Shepton Mallet Prison, where it was to be hidden in a secret hiding place in the women’s wing for the duration of the war.

So why, given that Belvoir Castle was infinitely better suited to military requirements, had the government suddenly changed its mind?

From the outset, it was John who had pressed Whitehall to use the castle as a repository for the records. In doing so, he had joined a queue of anxious dukes. In the weeks leading up to the war, rather than see their historic homes wrecked by troops, the Dukes of Marlborough, Bedford, Portland, Devonshire, Beaufort – and others – had been quick to offer their houses to the government for non-military use. For the most part, the offers had been accepted: Blenheim, Woburn and Welbeck had been taken over by the security services; Chatsworth had become a girls’ boarding school; and Badminton a country retreat for the elderly Queen Mary – the widow of George V.

John knew the Prime Minister personally; he also knew the members of his Cabinet. It looked as if he had pulled strings to stop the Ministry of War from taking over his castle. But was it because he had simply wanted to prevent it being used as a billet for troops?

Or had he had a specific interest in the records?

What I found curious was that, from the moment the first convoy arrived at Belvoir, John had insisted that two classified documents – a summary of the records stored at the castle, and a plan of the stacks, showing exactly where they were located – should be kept in the Muniment Rooms.

I found this detail in a report, filed by Mr Gilkes, the caretaker appointed by London to look after the records. He had travelled up to Belvoir with the first convoy. ‘Everything is in order here,’ he informed the Keeper a few days later: ‘Every bundle is sorted and stacked. The slips are sorted in a leather box and I have a plan of the stacks, so bundles can be found at a moment’s notice. These are kept with a Summary of the Records in the Duke’s rooms.’

By Act of Parliament, the records had to be accessible to government departments and court officials at all times. It was Gilkes’s job to locate and retrieve them. Tens of thousands of bundles were stacked along the passages, and in the ballroom at the castle: without the summary and a plan of the stacks it would have been impossible to find any particular bundle.

But why had John insisted that these two important documents be kept in his rooms? Though he had been appointed temporary custodian of the records, they were not his business. Was it because he had wanted to be able to locate specific records himself?

Gilkes’s report hinted that John might have had some ulterior motive in pressing the government to use the castle as an emergency repository. But there was no further correspondence to suggest what his motive might have been.

I drove away disheartened. Once again, I had drawn a blank. It had been raining all day; gloomily, inching my way through the traffic, I mulled over the precarious state of my research. A depressing pattern was emerging. Every avenue of enquiry seemed to lead to a dead
end. Either that, or it compounded the mystery behind this man. The search for the missing letters had revealed that John had created not one but three gaps in his biography; his encrypted letters had proved impossible to decipher – unless a cryptologist could make something of them. I had spent weeks chasing the mystery behind the circumstances of his death inside the Muniment Rooms, yet all that I’d managed to establish was that there had been something he had wanted to finish before he died. I had talked to the family; I had talked to the servants: I had run out of leads to follow.

And yet I couldn’t escape the feeling that I had overlooked a crucial element, one that was important in a way that I didn’t yet understand.

One detail, which the servants had supplied, was particularly baffling. A few days before he died, John had made an unusual request. Flouting a centuries-old tradition, he asked that his body should remain in the Muniment Rooms until the day of his funeral. At Belvoir, the burial of a duke had always been a very public event. His predecessors had been laid out in the Guard Room, where hundreds of the family’s tenants and employees had filed past their coffins.

Even in death it seemed John was wedded to these rooms. His singular last wish was yet another mystery, as seemingly insoluble as whatever it was that he had regarded important enough to risk his life in order to finish. Why had he needed to be in the Muniment Rooms to finish whatever it was that he was doing?

Why these rooms and not elsewhere?

It was then that it dawned on me that I was faced with a puzzle that no one else had tried to solve. The Muniment Rooms had been sealed immediately after John died. They had been frozen in time. They were
exactly
as he had left them. I thought of the large, black Bakelite telephone on his desk and the vintage Anglepoise lamps with their round-pin plugs and braided gold flexes. In one of the drawers of the desk I had found packets of the brand of cigarettes that John had liked to smoke; in another, I had even come across a half-filled ashtray. Were the traces of whatever it was that he had wanted to finish still there?

I was anxious to make an early start. The next morning, I left London at seven. It was soon after nine when I drew up at the gates below the castle. The morning was cold and overcast. There had been a hard frost overnight and a thin mist hovered over the fields in the valley. As I drove up the narrow track through the woods, the mist thickened. At the top of it, coming over the brow, I could barely make out the castle. Its lower floors were obscured: only the Gothic turrets were visible, ghostly shapes, rising out of the fog.

I parked my car on the terrace by the battlements. The oak door to the portico loomed ahead. It was thirty feet high, and the Duke’s crest, emblazoned in gold and peacock blue, glinted above it, a tiny splash of colour in the murk. I tried the small priest’s door inset in the corner of it. It was locked. The other entrance was on the opposite side of the castle. In the thick fog, it was impossible to see more than a few yards. Hugging the pale stone walls, I walked the two hundred yards or so around the battlements.

A small door led into the estate office. Stopping briefly, I collected the key to the Muniment Rooms. Then I cut across the ground floor of the castle through the passages in the old servants’ quarters – past the entrance to the spiral staircase that ran up to the Central Tower, then left, into the long passage by the servants’ hall. I saw no one.