The Final Curtsey (7 page)
Authors: Margaret Rhodes
In 1938 and 1939, despite the sabre-rattling coming from Berlin, my routine continued. In the last August of peace I was dispatched to Birkhall as usual to keep Princess Elizabeth and Princess
Margaret company. The King and Queen must have been desperately worried, but they never imparted the deepening sense of crisis to us. I didn’t know it, but on 22 August Europe shuddered at
the announcement of the Soviet-German non-aggression pact and then groaned in anguished apprehension for few doubted that this could but betoken war. The King and Queen at once returned to
London.
The tide of war seemed inexorable and at dawn on 1 September, the Wehrmacht crossed the Polish frontier. The timing of the ultimatum sent to the German Chancellor, demanding he withdraw his
troops or accept a declaration of war by Britain and France, had passed and so we were at war from eleven o’clock on the morning of Sunday 3 September. We three girls were in Crathie Kirk for
the morning service at this time. The Minister, a small, spare man called Dr Lamb preached a highly emotional sermon and told his flock that the uneasy peace which had prevailed since the end of
the First World War was now over. It seemed unreal, yet in a strange way it was exciting and it was impossible not to dream of adventure and derring-do. We were so utterly ignorant about the actual
horrors of war.
Our routine continued. Every evening at six the King and Queen would telephone and speak to their daughters. We had a French governess, Georgina Guerin, who when the war got fully under way,
would return to France and become a leading light in the Resistance. There was also one of the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting, Lettice Bowlby, to keep an eye on us. Our two carers were not best of
friends and behind her back Georgina called Lettice
‘la sale Bowlbee’.
I was just fourteen, Princess Elizabeth thirteen and Princess Margaret was only nine. We were at war but
nothing much was happening. There was no sign of Panzer divisions or enemy parachutists. We did lessons of a sort; rode our ponies, went on picnics, all the usual things. Then the week before
Christmas the Queen telephoned to say it was safe for the Princesses to go to Sandringham in Norfolk, even though it was close to one of the coast lines where a German invasion was considered most
likely. I returned to Carberry for our family Christmas. I tried on my gas mask, just to be on the safe side, and awaited what was to come.
CHAPTER THREE
The war made its impact on our daily lives at Carberry as it did for all families. My two brothers put on khaki and set off to join their regiments, John to the Black Watch and
Andrew to the Cameron Highlanders. Occasionally there were air raids: to begin with we trailed down to the front hall, which as the most ancient part of the house had the thickest walls, and sat
there shivering until the all-clear whined. But soon we gave even that up and remained comfortably tucked up in bed, listening to the thumping of the guns defending the Forth Bridge. Sometimes I
was unable to resist the temptation to get dressed and wander solitary in the grounds watching the search lights weaving strange and beautiful patterns in the blackness of the night. Every so often
a silver speck would be trapped, as if transfixed on the point of a spear and the guns would then thunder their defiance.
Once I was out seeking to shoot a rabbit or pigeon for the pot with my .22 rifle, when I heard an aeroplane coming; it was flying very low. I could easily see the Swastika on its wings, so I
immediately fired my whole magazine of eight bullets at it, in the vain hope that I might just hit the petrol tank. Alas, it flew away unscathed, but I felt better for having made a tiny personal
contribution to the war effort.
In those days I almost had Carberry to myself. My father was busy in Edinburgh and my mother had joined the Women’s Voluntary Service, now the WRVS. My eldest sister, Elizabeth, was a VAD
in an Edinburgh hospital and very aware of the presence of God in her life. She came under the spell of an order of Anglican nuns of which she later became a lay member. My next sister, Jean, had
enjoyed a rather wild coming-out season and was a born flirt. Even at the age of eighty she had lost none of her charm and attraction. When she was first grown up my parents allowed her to have a
weekend party at our house Maryland only on the condition that she was strictly chaperoned throughout. A lady duly arrived from a wonderful organisation called Universal Aunts. Jean found her
presence something of a hindrance to her idea of having fun. She solved it by telling the poor woman that all her young male guests, every man of them from the Household Cavalry, had been recalled
to barracks and that therefore the weekend was cancelled.
The men drove off for half a mile, only to re-emerge when they safely knew that the chaperone’s taxi was out of sight. Jean married one of her clandestine guests and at the beginning of
the war was living in Northamptonshire with her two small children. Her husband, John Wills, had been posted to the Middle East and was not to return until the war ended. Jean’s in-laws,
Captain Benjy and Hilda Wills, had an estate called Applecross on the north-west coast of Scotland. It was a fisherman’s dream and the salmon often seemed to be lying in layers in the deeper
pools. Jean used to invite me there and one day we took the family’s small yacht out to an island which had a row of deserted cottages. We anchored there to picnic and to our astonishment saw
smoke rising from one of the cottage chimneys. Then a young kilted man approached, claiming to be a university student who needed complete solitude so as to write his thesis. He seemed perfectly
genuine and we swallowed his story, even giving him what was left over from our provisions to help him replenish his scanty supplies. Sometime later we discovered that he and an accomplice were
Nazi sympathisers reporting on Allied shipping movements. We had unwittingly aided and abetted a couple of enemy spies.
After my brothers had joined their regiments, my father, who was seventy in 1939, had been appointed Chairman of a board which adjudicated on the appeals of conscientious objectors. It was a
difficult and unpleasant task, compounded on one distressing occasion by the appearance before him of William Douglas-Home, the son of the 13th Earl of Home, his oldest friend and best man at his
wedding. Whatever the verdict, William subsequently became an officer in the Royal Armoured Corps and in 1944 refused on moral grounds to take part in an attack on Le Havre because the thousands of
refugees packed into the town had not been evacuated. Over 5,000 of them were killed in the operation, but William was sentenced to a year’s hard labour, serving eight months for refusing to
obey an order. Courage takes different forms. He later became a successful writer and dramatist. His oldest brother, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, was Conservative Prime Minister between 1963 and
1964.
I remember my brother John coming home on embarkation leave, looking wonderful in uniform. He was in the Black Watch of which his aunt Queen Elizabeth was Colonel-in-Chief. John was particularly
close to her, and when, in the early months of the war, she visited the regiment’s Perth depot she had a poignant encounter with him. She had never seen him in uniform before and wrote to
Queen Mary: ‘It gave me such a shock to see John in his Black Watch uniform, for he suddenly looked exactly like my brother Fergus who was killed at Loos [in the First World War] and in the
same regiment. It was uncanny in a way and desperately sad to feel that all that ghastly waste is starting again at the bidding of a lunatic.’
Prisoners of war: my brother John is in the back row, second from the left
Five years later, a strange, gaunt figure returned from Germany. We all met him in London and had a celebratory dinner at Buckingham Palace. John had been taken prisoner at St Valery, along
with most of the 51st Highland Division at the time of Dunkirk. The 1st Battalion was cut off and forced to surrender near Abbeville after fierce fighting. Only nine men and one officer escaped.
By 12 June all fighting had ceased. The officer prisoners were separated from their men, which caused my brother great concern. John, in a contingent of 2,500 prisoners, marched 220 miles in
fourteen days from northern France to a railhead in Holland, subsisting on a bowl of soup a day, dandelions, marigolds and acorn coffee. They slept in their clothes, sometimes huddled together in
open fields under driving rain. It was very cold at night and they stripped greatcoats from the bodies of dead soldiers by the roadside. The French people in the villages they passed smuggled
them scraps of food and fruit, having heard by bush telegraph that
les Anglais
were passing through. In Holland boy scouts bought them cakes and honey. Their destination was Munich and
Oflag VIIC. Thereafter John spent five and a half years in captivity. In the later stages of the war he was incarcerated in Colditz Castle, with a group of prisoners known as the
‘Prominente’, regarded by Hitler as being of special value because of their relationship to prominent Allied figures. The group included Giles Romilly, the nephew of Winston
Churchill; Michael Alexander, a relative of Field Marshal Alexander; Viscount Lascelles, the King’s nephew; George Haig, the son of Earl Haig, the British First World War commander, and
Charles Hopetoun, the eldest son of the Marquess of Linlithgow, the then Viceroy of India.
I have preserved John’s letters, always written in pencil on German-provided POW forms, from various Oflags. I have also kept his own typewritten detailed account of his final days as a
prisoner. A mural John painted is still on the walls of Colditz Castle. The Nazis, faced with defeat, grabbed at any bargaining ace they could pull from their sleeves. My brother and his fellow
‘Prominente’ were one such bargaining ace, and he and the other members of the group were shuttled across Germany, from Colditz to Austria, in a bid by the German High Command to avoid
their liberation by the rapidly advancing Allies.
John’s account is set out in full below. My brother described the atmosphere as ‘gangster-like’ and above anything, he dreaded falling into the hands of the more extreme
factions of the SS. If that had happened, the ‘Prominente’ may not have survived. John’s state of mind was not improved when he discovered that Himmler, the head of the SS, was
taking a personal interest in the operation. John’s account sets out the trials and tribulations and eventual liberation through the intervention of the Swiss ministers, reaching the American
lines and freedom:
LAST DAYS OF CAPTIVITY
CHRONICLE OF SPECIAL PRISONERS FROM
OFLAG IVC
BY
THE MASTER OF ELPHINSTONE
For some months in Oflag IVC the Germans had been keeping under special surveillance the small group of officers and one civilian concerning whose further moves this
account is written. Under roughly the same conditions was also a group of 13 Polish officers headed by General Bor and consisting of high staff officers captured after the battle of Warsaw.
The German camp authorities refused to give explanation of this state of affairs other than by saying that the orders came from ‘the highest sources’.
On the night of 12–13 April, at 11.30 pm, we were roused from our beds in the room in which we were locked up every night and told that we and the Polish officers were to be ready to
leave in two hours. Armed guards in the passages and courtyards made any reasonable scheme for getting away to a ‘hide’ impossible, and in due course, at 1.30 am, we were marched
out into the waiting buses. The American troops were at this time only some 20 miles away, and reached the camp area 24 hours later. In the morning, we arrived at the fortress of Konigstein
on the Elbe, where we were lodged in the German quarters of the camp and allowed no contact with the other prisoners of war in the fortress.
Two members of the party were ill and, after some difficulty, it was agreed by the German Kommandant, after telephoning to Berlin, that these two officers, with one British orderly, should
remain there until well. Since we could hear from the fortress the guns on the Front, we all thought it likely that, within a very short time this camp, too, would be liberated — an
event which unfortunately took very much longer to materialise than we expected.
Next morning, the rest of the party were motored down through Czechoslovakia, seeing frantic efforts being made on all roads to make road-blocks, antitank ditches and weapon-pits. We spent
the night at Klattau, and at dawn moved on into Bavaria, and finally stopped outside an internee camp at Laufen, 12 miles north of Salzburg. Our great anxiety was the possibility of being taken
out of Wehrmacht (army) hands and as this now seemed probable, a fierce battle of words took place. As senior of the British/American party, I refused to leave the bus or to enter the camp and
told the German colonel conducting us that I held him personally responsible for seeing that we were taken to an officers’ camp run under army regulations. After some delay, it was agreed
that temporarily we could go to the camp of Dutch officer-prisoners ten miles away.
After several days spent with the Dutch officers, who received us with the greatest possible kindness, and gave us every help, we were informed that we were to be removed back to Laufen.
We decided that more extreme measures than protests must be taken, and, accordingly, with the help of two Dutch officers in particular, a hurried scheme was arranged whereby one member of
the party and one Dutch officer should escape by a rope (more than two being unlikely to get out unobserved owing to various difficulties) and the rest of us should be bricked up in a cleverly
constructed ‘hide’ in the wall of the room, previously prepared by the Dutch officers. The Polish officers were unable to join us, and were removed the next day to the internee camp
at Laufen. All went well the first night; two civilian members of our party and one Dutch officer succeeded in making a ‘get-away’ while we remained in the ‘hide’ hoping
that the Germans would presume us all to have escaped when they found the rope left hanging down the outer wall.