Country Houses Requisitioned in Wartime

To requisition a house was to take possession of it for war use under emergency legislation. The Defence of the Realm Act, passed on 8 August 1914, four days after Britain entered the First World War, gave the government power to take buildings and land needed for the war effort; the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act 1939 did the same job a generation later, with the Compensation (Defence) Act 1939 setting out what an owner could claim back. In practice most country houses were used for one of four things: hospitals, evacuated schools, relocated offices, or secret work that needed somewhere large, remote and unremarkable. A good many owners offered before they were asked.

Beds, and the shortage of them

The First World War arrived with a medical problem nobody had planned for. Casualties came home in numbers the existing hospitals could not absorb, and the country's largest private buildings were the obvious answer: they had space, plumbing, kitchens already sized for scores of people, and staff who knew how to run them.

Wrest Park in Bedfordshire went first. It opened as a hospital on 7 September 1914, barely a month into the war, and English Heritage now describes it as probably the first country house to take in wounded soldiers. It ran for two years. In September 1916 a fire started and spread quickly, the troops had to be evacuated, and the hospital never reopened, which sets the pattern for a lot of what follows: the war did the damage, but rarely the enemy.

Others followed within weeks. At Highclere Castle, Almina, Countess of Carnarvon, opened a hospital for the war wounded at the outbreak of the war, helped organise it and nursed in it herself. At Cliveden, Waldorf Astor handed land to the Canadian Red Cross for the Duchess of Connaught Hospital, dismantled once the fighting stopped, then did it again in September 1939, leasing the ground for a shilling a year for the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital. The war cemetery in Cliveden's grounds, with graves from both conflicts, is what remains of it.

Dunham Massey in Cheshire is the one you can now walk through. Penelope Grey, Countess of Stamford, made the house available to the Red Cross, and the Stamford Military Hospital ran there from April 1917 to January 1919, treating men with injuries ranging from gas poisoning to bullet wounds to the head. In 2014 the National Trust rebuilt the main ward, the operating theatre and the nurses' station inside the house for the war's centenary, with actors playing the real staff and patients. It is an unusually literal piece of interpretation, and it works.

Schools in the state rooms

The Second World War brought a different tenant. Evacuation needed large buildings well away from the cities, and a country house that could sleep a family, forty guests and sixty servants could sleep a school.

Chatsworth took 250 girls from Penrhos College in north Wales, who arrived in September 1939 and stayed until March 1946. The school had eighteen days to move everything it owned across the country. All three main state rooms became dormitories, the Painted Hall was used for assemblies and singing, the chapel for daily prayers, and typing practice happened in the South Sketch Gallery. The contents had been packed away, so the girls had the run of an emptied palace: they grew vegetables for the war effort and skated on the Canal Pond in winter.

Blenheim Palace got 400 boys from Malvern College in September 1939. The state rooms and the Long Library were turned into dormitories, ink was banned for fear of what it might do to the tapestries, and some lessons were taught in the laundry. MI5 later used the palace as a temporary headquarters. At Waddesdon Manor, James and Dorothy de Rothschild took in children under five evacuated from Croydon, the only time children have lived in the house, and gave asylum to a group of Jewish boys from Frankfurt.

Castle Howard shows how badly it could go. More than a hundred pupils from Queen Margaret's School in Scarborough had been evacuated there when, in the early hours of 9 November 1940, fire broke out in a chimney on the south front. It took the Malton and York brigades eight hours to control, destroyed around twenty rooms, and brought Vanbrugh's dome down into the Great Hall, taking Pellegrini's painted ceiling with it. The girls were led out and then helped carry pictures to safety. The dome was not rebuilt until the early 1960s, and the east wing is still a shell.

The quiet work

The most interesting requisitions were the ones nobody was told about. A large house in its own park, screened by trees and far from anything worth bombing, is close to an ideal secret facility.

Hughenden is the best example on this list. Benjamin Disraeli's country house was taken over in the 1940s as an Air Ministry base under the codename Hillside, where staff worked from aerial photography of Germany to produce target maps for RAF Bomber Command, including for the Dambusters raid. Everyone involved was bound by the Official Secrets Act, and the story only surfaced publicly decades later. The National Trust has since recreated the map room.

Audley End in Essex was requisitioned within weeks of Lord Braybrooke's death in March 1941 and, from 1942, became Special Training School 43, where the Special Operations Executive trained Polish agents known as the Cichociemni, the Silent Unseen. A memorial to 108 of them who died stands on the main drive, unveiled in 1983 and listed in its own right in 2018.

Greenway on the River Dart, Agatha Christie's holiday house, was requisitioned by the Admiralty and used from 1943 to billet American servicemen gathering on the south coast for D-Day. Most rooms became bedrooms and the library became a recreation room, where a US Coast Guard officer, Lieutenant Marshall Lee, a commercial illustrator in civilian life, painted a frieze around the walls recording everywhere his flotilla had been, Bermuda and Morocco included, and finishing with Greenway itself. The Christies kept it. And Wilton House in Wiltshire was requisitioned as the headquarters of Southern Command, responsible for the coast from Portsmouth west to Land's End, with Nissen huts in the grounds and hundreds of miles of telephone cable laid around the estate. Much of the planning for the invasion was done there, though the final decision to go was taken elsewhere, at Southwick House in Hampshire.

Not everything that moved in wore a uniform

The oddest occupations were commercial. Upton House in Warwickshire belonged to Walter Samuel, 2nd Viscount Bearsted, whose family owned the merchant bank M. Samuel and Co. When London evacuation began in 1939, Bearsted moved the bank itself to Warwickshire along with his household. The great rooms he had remodelled in the 1920s specifically to display his paintings became offices; the Long Gallery became a typing pool and canteen; and the art collection was crated up and sent to a slate mine in Wales for safekeeping. The National Trust has told the story as an exhibition called Banking for Victory, and it is a useful corrective to the idea that requisition always meant soldiers.

What it cost

Compensation existed, but it was calculated on damage rather than on what restoring a house to its former state actually took, and it did not cover the underlying problem: six years of hard use by hundreds of people, in buildings that had already been expensive to run in peacetime, followed by death duties and a labour market in which nobody wanted to be a housemaid any more. A great many owners came back in 1945 to a building they could no longer afford. The two decades after the war saw country houses demolished at a rate that has no parallel in British history, and requisition is part of that story even where it was not the whole of it.

The houses on this list are the survivors, and several are better off for what happened to them. Dunham Massey and Hughenden have made their wartime chapters into the reason people visit. Greenway kept a frieze painted by a serviceman who was not supposed to leave a trace. Castle Howard's shell of an east wing is a more honest monument than any plaque. The next time a guidebook mentions in passing that a house was used as a hospital or a school, it is worth asking who was actually sleeping in the room you are standing in, and what they were doing there.

Quick answers

Where to see it

Ten houses on the list with a documented wartime occupation, from the first country house hospital of 1914 to the secret map room that stayed secret for sixty years:

Hughenden

Disraeli's old house, and in the 1940s a secret Air Ministry base codenamed Hillside, where staff worked from aerial photography to produce target maps for RAF Bomber Command. The work stayed classified for decades.

Wrest Park

Opened as a hospital on 7 September 1914, and described by English Heritage as probably the first country house to take in wounded soldiers. A fire in September 1916 forced an evacuation and it never reopened.

Dunham Massey

The Stamford Military Hospital, run from April 1917 to January 1919 after Penelope Grey, Countess of Stamford, made the house available to the Red Cross. The National Trust rebuilt the ward for visitors in 2014.

Highclere Castle

A hospital for the war wounded from the start of the First World War, organised by Almina, Countess of Carnarvon, who also nursed there herself. In the Second World War it housed evacuee children.

Cliveden

Waldorf Astor gave land to the Canadian Red Cross in both wars: the Duchess of Connaught Hospital in the first, dismantled afterwards, and the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital in the second. The war cemetery in the grounds remains.

Audley End House and Gardens

Requisitioned within weeks of Lord Braybrooke's death in 1941, and from 1942 Special Training School 43, where the Special Operations Executive trained Polish agents, the Cichociemni. A memorial to 108 of them stands on the drive.

Greenway

Agatha Christie's holiday house, requisitioned by the Admiralty and used from 1943 to billet American servicemen preparing for D-Day. A US Coast Guard officer painted a frieze round the library, and it is still there.

Chatsworth House

Home to 250 girls from Penrhos College in north Wales from September 1939 to March 1946. The state rooms became dormitories, the Painted Hall held assemblies, and the girls skated on the Canal Pond in winter.

Castle Howard

Occupied by more than 100 evacuated pupils from Queen Margaret's School, Scarborough, when fire tore through the house on 9 November 1940. The girls helped carry paintings out; the dome was not rebuilt until the 1960s.

Upton House

Not soldiers but bankers. Lord Bearsted moved his family merchant bank, M. Samuel and Co., out of London to Upton in 1939. The Long Gallery became a typing pool and canteen, and the art collection went to a Welsh slate mine.

See every guide on the list →The other second life of the country house →Or visit Hughenden's own page →