Soap opera ‘Downton Abbey’ recalls real-life Egginton Hall

Macfie

Today’s column is inspired by the British television series Downton Abbey, currently appearing on TVs everywhere (or at least in my house).
Seething with upstairs/downstairs intrigue and other horrors like the Great War, the melodrama is centred on the country house of an aristocratic English family.
It opens in 1912 with the sinking, in April 1912, of the Titanic, and unfolds over many years.
During the war, the family opened the doors of their mansion to serve as a convalescent hospital for battle casualties. In real life, a number of such English estates were loaned to the military to use as convalescent hospitals for the war wounded, among them Egginton Hall, in Derbyshire. My father’s brother Arthur Macfie was a patient there for two months, from mid-April to mid-June, 1917, an interval that afforded plenty of time for writing home.
The instant I learned that fictional Downton Abbey served in the same capacity as Egginton Hall, I began composing this column in my head.
Early in 1916, like hundreds of other young men of the district, Private Arthur Gill Macfie enlisted in Parry Sound’s newly mobilized 162nd Battalion.
On April Fool’s Day 1917 Arthur found himself in a frontline trench peering upward at the forbidding German redoubt in northern France known as Vimy Ridge.
Four nights later (and four days before the start of the battle that remains Canada’s outstanding feat of arms), while crouching in a listening post in No Man’s Land, he was wounded and evacuated to England. Here are excerpts from a letter he mailed to his mother soon after reaching Egginton Hall:

…It was just glorious to get into a nice bed again…. We get well fed here too, they keep up the old English style of four meals a day — that’s one thing I like about the English, four meals a day.
That’s all these autocrats had to think about before, but a lot of these people are doing good work now, not only giving their mansions for hospitals but carrying it on with private funds. Lady Dugdale keeps about a hundred patients. She has three wards built to the house; she is just a young woman and works hard herself. Her whole soul seems to be in her work as matron….

Later, Arthur wrote to his sister Gladys:

…I have been here near two weeks now; three weeks today since I got hit and it will soon be healed up now…. The up patients have quite a lot of work to do…another convoy in this morning and as I am the only up patient in our ward just now there was quite a lot I could do with one hand.
I take the afternoons off, so I am sitting on the bank of a little river that runs through the park-like lawn.
When I sit here looking into the water I think of the good times we used to have with the old canoe…. There is a little dam below here, and when I hear the waterfall I think of [river] driving days gone by. But I wasn’t satisfied then, I wanted to get into the “big drive” in France, but I’ve had my curiosity fairly well satisfied since….

It remains to be seen what’s in store for Downton Abbey and its inmates, but fate did not treat either Egginton Hall or Arthur Macfie kindly.
Just a few months after the war ended, Arthur was killed in an explosion while blowing out tree stumps on the family farm at Dunchurch.
Egginton Hall was again commandeered by the military in the Second World War, not as a hospital this time, and came out of it much the worse for wear.
Then flooding, I suppose caused by Arthur’s “little river” overflowing its banks, hastened the road to ruin.
In 1955, the 170-year-old edifice was demolished, consigning it to the ghostly ranks of England’s many lost country houses.
Arthur Macfie wrote home 13 times during his stay at Egginton Hall.
In 1990, I published those letters plus 160 more that he and my dad and a younger brother sent home to Dunchurch from the war, in a book titled Letters Home.
Years after it went out of print, I still get requests for it, so I recently set wheels in motion to have more copies printed.
I’m told that the books should be in my hands (and displayed in my usual retail outlets) by early in May.
I ordered the reprinting of Letters Home before Downton Abbey appeared on my radar screen.
Coincidence alone enables me to re-launch the book on the back of the front-running soap opera of the moment.

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