Stevie‘s review of The Secret Rooms: A True Story of a Haunted Castle, a Plotting Duchess, and a Family Secret by Catherine Bailey
Biography and Memoir published by Penguin Books 31 Dec 13
This book is both a biography and a memoir, although it was originally planned as something else entirely. The story of the author’s research, fraught with unexpected difficulties, is interwoven with the story of the late Ninth Duke of Rutland, the man she decided to focus her work on after originally planning to write the story of his estate workers during the First World War. And a fascinating story it turned out to be, even if some sections of the Duke’s story are still a little obscured by the scarcity of documents relating to three distinct periods of his life. Then again, without the author’s diligent work, we’d probably know nothing at all about what happened in those gaps and would have been deprived of a compelling account of one aristocratic family’s struggle to continue their name into the next generation.
Catherine Bailey originally visits Belvoir Castle to research the effects of the First World War on the men who left their villages at the outbreak of the conflict – most having never travelled more than a few miles away before – as well as on the people they left behind. She’d been told that John, the Ninth Duke of Rutland, who died in 1941, had extensively catalogued his family’s records. The archives in the five Muniment Rooms – the dark, private rooms below the castle, to very which very few people had been allowed access before Bailey – offer the perfect source material. What she finds, however, leads her to write a very different book, and this book, The Secret Rooms, is the intertwined story of Bailey’s research and the Ninth Duke’s life and death.
Searching through the records in the Muniment Rooms, Bailey finds the Ninth Duke’s diary and correspondence for 1914 – when so many estate workers joined up, encouraged by the Eighth Duke’s rhetoric, along with John himself, then heir to the dukedom – and 1915 when so many of those men were killed on the front line. However, the pages and documents relating directly to the period Bailey wanted to write about are missing, and the last few diary entries before those missing pages are so bland as to be apparently written by a different man to the John who wrote detailed and vivid accounts of his earlier months at war.
Bailey digs deeper, hoping to find the missing letters misfiled somewhere, or at least other letters that explain the omission. Instead, she finds two other sections of missing correspondence – one from when John was a young boy and his elder brother died unexpectedly – and one from the time when John, as a young man, received his first Foreign Office posting to Italy. Suspecting that the Ninth Duke’s work in the days immediately before his death was responsible for the missing documents and that the circumstances surrounding his death indicate that he may have missed destroying everything – since he kept working in the Muniment rooms right up until he dropped dead, forbidding even the most highly respected doctor in the country to enter and see him at work – Bailey keeps looking, both amongst the letters in the castle and in collections elsewhere. All the letters at the castle must be, after all, only one half of any set of correspondence and many of those people written to will have left their descendants with similar collections of documents. Slowly but surely she unearths what she believes to be the true story.
For all three periods covered by the missing records, what the family told almost everyone around them, and what was really happening – what they told to only one or two close relatives or trusted friends – differed vastly. Behind most of the lies Bailey finds the work of John’s mother, the Duchess Violet, a woman utterly devastated by the death of her first son – John’s brother – but also determined to continue the family name and reputation beyond John’s lifetime. John seems to have been deeply shamed by what his mother did – so much so that he tried to destroy all evidence of it – and Bailey has theories as to why, having resisted her for so long, he eventually fell in with her schemes.
I’m not totally convinced by all of Bailey’s theories. I think other explanations could fit the facts available – both for John’s eventual capitulation and some other, more minor family, mysteries that she finds in the documents and when talking to current family members and surviving members of the Ninth Duke’s staff – but the book is gripping nonetheless. I have another of Bailey’s books waiting to be read, her earlier Black Diamonds about the Earl Fitzwilliam, whose family has vague connections to mine through their Sheffield Simplex cars, and I really must find time to read it in the next month or so.
Grade: B
Summary:
For fans of Downton Abbey: the enthralling true story of family secrets and aristocratic intrigue in the days before WWI
After the Ninth Duke of Rutland, one of the wealthiest men in Britain, died alone in a cramped room in the servants’ quarters of Belvoir Castle on April 21, 1940, his son and heir ordered the room, which contained the Rutland family archives, sealed. Sixty years later, Catherine Bailey became the first historian given access. What she discovered was a mystery: The Duke had painstakingly erased three periods of his life from all family records—but why? As Bailey uncovers the answers, she also provides an intimate portrait of the very top of British society in the turbulent days leading up to World War I.
Read an excerpt.
