Leeds Castle during World War II by Leeds Castle

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Leeds Castle during World War II

Leeds Castle during World War II Background The history of Leeds Castle stretches back almost 1000 years. It has been owned by kings, queens and private families. In 1912 the Castle was famously described by the historian Lord Conway as “the loveliest castle in the world” and is often referred to as “The Ladie’s Castle”, because it was previously owned by six medieval queens. The last queen to hold the Castle was Catherine of Valois, the widow of Henry V, in the 15th century, it seems appropriate that the last private owner was also a Lady. The Hon. Mrs Olive Wilson Filmer purchased the Castle together with 3000 acres of land in 1926 for £180,000 with her then husband. She spent a further £100,000 on the restoration. These sums equate to £12 million in today’s money. She later married a Scottish baronet, Sir Adrian Baillie. During this time, in the early 1930s, Lady Baillie spent most of the week at her home in London, driving down to Leeds Castle at the weekend to entertain guests. Many well respected and well known people from the worlds of politics, royalty and show business were entertained by Sir Adrian and Lady Baillie.

Lady Baillie

At the outbreak of war in September 1939, life at Leeds Castle went on much as it had during the previous decade, although new laws had to be adhered to such as blacking out the windows and dimming the lights on the family cars. In 1940 the actor David Niven was a weekend guest, and in his autobiography, The Moon’s a Balloon, he wrote: “The last weekend before I went to Tidworth [to join the army] I was invited to the home of Sir Adrian and Lady Baillie, Leeds Castle, where I was to see some of the big wheels of government at play.” Niven continued: “As a group they depressed me. I had the feeling that they had no right to eat and drink and dress for dinner, make small talk and gossip like ordinary people. I was quite unreasonably shocked that they were not locked in their offices for the weekend, working tirelessly to find ways to finish the war before it got properly started.” In the spring of 1940, the German blitzkrieg swept through The Netherlands, Belgium and Northern France, forcing the Dunkirk evacuations. Suddenly the war became very close. The Castle staff was reduced from a pre-war 46 to nine, as men and women were called up for military service and Leeds Castle found itself with new roles. Blitzkrieg means "lightening war". Blitzkrieg was first used by the Germans in World War Two and was a tactic based on speed and surprise, which needed a military force to be based around light tank units, supported by aircraft and infantry (foot soldiers). The tactic was developed in Germany by an army officer called Hans Guderiane. He had written a military pamphlet called "Achtung Panzer" which found its way into the hands of Hitler. As a tactic it was used to devastating effect in the first years of World War Two and resulted in the British and French armies being pushed back in just a few weeks to the beaches of Dunkirk.

VAD Nurses at Leeds Castle. Lady Baillie - Seated in 2nd row, 2nd from the right

Leeds Castle as a Hospital During the war the British Red Cross Society and the St John Joint War Organisation took over suitable country properties, under private agreement with their owners, to provide beds for the treatment of wounded servicemen and women. Leeds Castle was one of these properties. Lady Baillie had served with the Red Cross as a VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurse in 1918 and when Leeds Castle became a hospital in 1940 she once again donned a uniform, albeit a purely honorary one this time. When the first VADs arrived in June 1940, the Leeds Castle Hospital had no patients and so the young nurses made themselves at home. Lady Baillie, assuming that there were patients in the beds, brought some weekend guests to visit them. Finding only the nurses, she re-housed them in the stable yard, where they occupied the archway rooms, formerly used by the unmarried men on the Castle staff, which today is the Education Centre. The Baillie family moved into the back half of the Castle (the Gloriette), where they remained for most of the war. Susan, Lady Baillie’s youngest daughter also became a VAD nurse and worked in the hospital wards. In July 1940 the Castle was occupied by 10 Company, Royal Army Medical Corps and throughout the Battle of Britain, in August and September 1940, the hospital treated casualties from the war in the air, both friend and foe. An operating theatre was set up in what is now the Green Bedroom and one of the first casualties to be treated there was a German pilot who had parachuted out of his plane and had to have a leg amputated. J. Melville-Smith, a VAD nurse remembers: “After Dunkirk we were sent to Hellingly Hospital and then with a short spell at Leeds Castle on to Chartham, a new (unfinished) wing of the mental hospital which was now a Military Hospital.” Mrs Barbara Harper also remembers nursing at Leeds Castle following both Hellingly Hospital and Shorncliffe: “All our patients at this time were pilots, both English and German. The wounds we treated were mainly broken limbs and burns to the hands and faces. The burns we treated with Gentian Violets.” Mrs Barbara Harper - VAD Nurse at Leeds Castle

Leeds Castle during World War II Mrs Harper also remembered posing for a photograph with Lady Baillie: “As VAD nurses, our skirts had to be the regulation 12 inches from the ground. When we saw the photo, we realised that hers was much shorter!” Once the Battle of Britain was won and the threat of invasion had receded, the hospital was emptied of patients and re-opened as a hospital for officers. Frank Yates remembers suffering with the flu during his stay at Leeds Castle: “I was almost unaware what was happening when two more orderlies arrived, strapped me to a stretcher and carried me downstairs to a waiting ambulance. When I next awoke I was in a hospital ward, fully panelled in oak with stone mullioned windows. There were about 15 officers occupying the beds and a moat outside the windows. I was in Leeds Castle, a beautiful medieval castle, near Maidstone. Most of the patients were, like me, suffering from some virulent form of flu, the M.O. [Medical Officer] informing us that there had been two deaths in the division, due to the bug. When someone has a couple of days off and says that they have had flu, believe me they haven’t!” VADs (members of the Voluntary Aid Detachment) were found in just about every wartime setting imaginable. Formed in 1910, the VAD was created to provide nurses to meet anticipated wartime shortages. About 126,000 VADs served during the whole of the First World War of whom 129 were killed. They worked on the Home Front and overseas, and as well as general nursing, they ran dressing stations and emergency hospitals, as well as clerking, ambulance driving and cooking. In the Second World War the VADs enlisted totalled 15,000 and were drawn from the Red Cross, Order of St John and St Andrew’s Ambulance Association. They were civilians and so not counted as part of the auxiliary forces.

Sir Archibald McIndoe (1900-1960) was born on the 4th of May 1900 in New Zealand. In 1938 McIndoe was appointed consultant in plastic surgery to the Royal Air Force. On the outbreak of the war in 1939, he selected the Queen Victoria Hospital at East Grinstead, which had been rebuilt shortly before the war. It possessed ample land for expansion and was a suitable site for the establishment of a centre for plastic and jaw surgery. It was there that he treated the very deep burns and serious facial disfigurements sustained by aircraft pilots and crew. In 1941 the patients at the hospital formed The Guinea Pig Club. The club was made up of members who were recovering WW2 pilots and bomber crew from the Dr McIndoe allied airforce that had been burnt and were receiving treatment from Sir Archibald McIndoe. The name reflected the pioneering nature of Sir Archibald’s work, where many of the procedures and treatments were completely new to plastic surgery. By the end of the war there were 649 members of the Guinea Pig Club, all indebted to Sir Archibald. The work carried out by McIndoe in rehabilitating badly burned aircrew was quite outstanding, not only physically but also psychologically. Richard Hillary, a terribly burned fighter pilot who later was killed in action, gives a graphic account in "The Last Enemy" of what he and others like him owe to the skill and inspiration of McIndoe. McIndoe fought to improve the pay and conditions of “his boys”. He even lent them money to set them up in civilian life.

The Guinea Pigs In 1943, when the Castle was no longer required as a hospital,some of the “guinea pigs” of Sir Archibald McIndoe’s pioneering plastic surgery at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead were invited to Leeds Castle to convalesce. One of these was Paul Hart, who returned to the Castle several times during 1943 and 1944 for stays of two or three weeks at a time as a guest of Lady Baillie. Mr Hart remembered Lady Baillie as a very beautiful and charming lady. He recalled that: “She was not there during the week, but we had the run of the house and at weekends she came with other guests, including some of the leading war-time ﬁgures.” In 1999 Paul Hart returned to Leeds Castle and was interviewed for a t Channel 4 elevision series Great Estates.

Guinea Pigs

Paul Hart visiting Leeds Castle with his wife in 1999

Leeds Castle during World War II Geoffrey Lloyd and War Time Inventions Geoffrey Lloyd was a long-time friend of Lady Baillie. He was elected as Member of Parliament for Birmingham Ladywood in 1931 and held the seat until 1945. During his time in office he held various roles including; Parliamentary Private Secretary to Stanley Baldwin from 1931–1935. the UnderSecretary of State for the Home Department, the Secretary for Mines, the Secretary for Petroleum, the Chairman of the Oil Control Board, the Minister in charge of Petroleum Warfare Department , the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Fuel and Power and finally the Minister of Information in 1945. Mr Lloyd also was appointed a Privy Counsellor in 1943.

Geoﬀrey Lloyd

During his time as Minister in Charge of Petroleum from 1940 – 1945 he was responsible for operations called PLUTO and FIDO. He served as Governor of British Broadcasting Corporation, 1946-1949, but returned to Parliament in 1950 until 1974. During this time he was Minister of Fuel and Power, and later, Minister of Education. A close friend of Lady Baillie and a frequent visitor to Leeds Castle, Geoffrey Lloyd was created a life peer on 6 May 1974 as Baron Geoffrey-Lloyd of Broomfield, Kent. He helped Lady Baillie to set up the trust to which she bequeathed the Castle and he subsequently became the first chairman of the Leeds Castle Foundation following her death in 1974.

PLUTO Operation PLUTO stood for Pipe Line Under The Ocean designed to supply petrol from storage tanks in southern England to the advancing Allied armies in France in the months following D-Day. In the early part of 1942 Geoﬀrey Lloyd MP met with 1st Earl Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations (CCO), and others, to consider the fuel supply issue. They picked up on an idea of Mr Hartley, the Chief Engineer of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. to use existing submarine cable technology, minus the core, as the basic building block of a petrol pipeline. Siemens Brothers & Co Ltd., of Woolwich, London, who were experienced in the design and manufacture of such cables, eagerly took up the challenge. It was a complex task and there were many failures arising from twists, kinks, bursts and collapse due to external water pressure and other powerful forces.

Pipe Line

One company with a huge involvement in the manufacture of the pipeline was W. T. Henley of Gravesend, Kent. An idea of the vastness of the project is conveyed by the fact that Henley's alone used 8,000 tonnes of lead and 5,600 tonnes of steel wire and strip, as well as large quantities of other materials. The cable was usually manufactured in continuous lengths of 40 miles weighing 2000 tons. In total about 500 miles of pipeline were laid over the 30 mile stretch in an average laying time of

about ﬁve hours. In January 1945 the system delivered a disappointing 300 tons but by March this had increased to 3000 tons and later still to 4000 tons. This amounted to over 1,000,000 gallons per day giving a total of 172,000,000 gallons delivered in total up to the end of hostilities. Today visitors to Shanklin Chine on the Isle of White can see a section of the PLUTO pipeline as it travels over ground towards the sea.

FIDO Operation FIDO stood for Fog Intensive Dispersal Of. During WWII Britain was poorly armed to repel an invasion and there were no anti tank guns between London and the coast. A system was devised that would enable beaches, and even the sea, to be set on ﬁre, which invading troops would have to penetrate before they could land.

Tank using ﬂame throwing device

After the threat of invasion was past, the department went from the defensive to the offensive and developed the Churchill Crocodile flame-throwing tank. Some of these top secret experiments were carried out on the Leeds Castle golf course, where the only accidents were likely to be scorched grass. Another ongoing problem for air crew and aircraft was the fog and poor visibility when returning from operations. Work had been going on, even before the war, to try and alleviate the problem, but the large consumption of fuel involved in fog dispersal prevented full-scale trials. On 26th September 1942 the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, sent Geoffrey Lloyd a letter authorising the necessary experiments. It said: “It is of great importance to find means to dissipate fog at aerodromes so that aircraft can land safely. Let full experiments to this end be put in hand by the Petroleum Warfare Department with all expedition. They should be given every support. W.S.C.” At this time the fog dispersal project had no convenient name, and was referred to as ‘a fog dispersal investigation operation’. It did not trip lightly off the tongue, until it was spotted that if you just swapped the two middle words, the initial letters of FIDO would make a useful companion to PLUTO (Pipe Line Under The Ocean). Documents referring to FIDO exist from 22 October 1942. In 1945 it was readjusted in RAF jargon to ‘Fog, Intensive Dispersal Of’. FIDO was based around a network of pipes filled with petrol, which were laid along the edges of the runway. The system worked by igniting the petrol so that the heat generated dispersed the fog. It allowed aircraft to land in fog and snow but used enormous amounts of petrol. The system contained 500,000 gallons of petrol when full. When lit in a combined wind, low stratus cloud and drizzle situation FIDO was capable of clearing the runway up to 300 ft, with the wind carrying the clearance zone out into the approach.FIDO was also put to use against snowfalls in an attempt to keep operating surfaces clear. As long as the petrol burners were lit early on, it was possible to melt the snowfall before it hit the runway and thus keep the airfield open.

Leeds Castle during World War II The Home Guard The name of Home Guard came into use after the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, used the phrase in a speech, and proper military uniforms began to be issued. The men of the Castle staff who remained at home joined the Local Defence Volunteers; later to be called the Home Guard. In May 1940, Col. W. Baker formed a local defence force, to which 200 rifles were allocated and some of these were stored at Leeds Castle. Leeds had its own section of the Hollingbourne platoon, with a command post in Leeds village. They were called to a number of incidents, including one when a German airman parachuted on to the Castle golf course. A day long search followed, until one Home Guard on duty at Broomfield Road saw the fugitive and held him at gunpoint until the platoon commander turned up and took charge of the prisoner.

Summary The Castle itself survived the war without damage, but a bomb that dropped in the grounds killed one of Lady Bailie’s pet llamas. According to official Kent County Council figures released after the war, 946 high explosive bombs, 19 oil bombs, two land mines, and 1,720 incendiary bombs were dropped on the Hollingbourne rural district, which included the Castle and grounds. In addition, 21 enemy aircrafts crashed into the district. Ten people were killed by war action in the district and another 58 were injured. 11 properties were totally destroyed, while 1,706 were damaged. During the war, a tented camp was set up in the castle park. After a while the tents were replaced by Nissen huts, but they were only occupied for a short time and when the war was over, they were cleared away with the help of German and Italian prisoners of war waiting to be repatriated. Throughout the war, the Castle remained a haven for government ministers and other guests. In 1940 the actor David Niven spent a weekend at Leeds Castle, along with Geoffrey Lloyd, David Margesson who was the Government Chief Whip and Harcourt (‘Crinks’) Johnstone, the Liberal Whip. It was this visit that David Niven recounted in his autobiography, The Moon’s a Balloon. Another biographical account came from Sir Henry. Sir Henry “Chips” Channon, who was an MP for over 20 years wrote in his diaries that he spent a weekend at Leeds Castle in April 1943. “It was a lyrical day – the heat, the gauze-like mist rising from the fruit blossoms, the spinach-green fields – all were intoxicating, as was the grey castle rising from the moat as I approached it. Black swans followed by cygnets were swimming around. I sat in the sunshine, drank champagne and ate plovers’ eggs.” Lady Baillie herself lived much of the time in London, where she carried out voluntary work for a Services club, travelling down to Leeds at the weekends whenever possible. Her husband Sir Adrian, served the country with little impact on recorded history, although staff at the Castle understood that his work “had something to do with the Free French Forces.” There was a general acceptance of not talking about one’s work during the years of war because “Careless Talk Costs Lives.” During the last 40 years our gardeners have often come across reminders of the war years such as bullet casings.

Copies of original documents in the Leeds Castle archives relating to Geoﬀrey Lloyd’s wartime work:

Minutes from Geoﬀrey Lloyd to Winston Churchill reporting on the successful use of FIDO by bombers both for landing and taking oﬀ during a particularly foggy spell of weather.

Leeds Castle during World War II

Minute from GeoďŹ&#x20AC;rey Lloyd to the Prime Minister Winston Churchill informing him of the completion of the under sea petroleum pipeline between the Isle of Wight and France.

Extract from minutes of meeting of War Cabinet during which Geoï¬&#x20AC;rey Lloyd is credited for the success of the PLUTO project.