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Authors: Catherine Bailey
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be alive, and to be back again by the quiet, peaceful-looking old windmill, with the prospect of six days’ rest, very good to be out of the wood, altogether too much stuff flying about up there.’
John had felt none of their euphoria. Nor did he refer to his battalion in his diary. ‘Usual day – went to tea with Pulteney’ * was all he wrote.
‘
Usual day.
’ It was a phrase that John had used repeatedly. Four of the days between 29 June and 5 July he had described as such. It did not make sense. Then I turned to the next page of his diary.
The date – 6 July – was written at the top. The rest of the page was blank. I looked at the one that followed, and the one after that. They were blank too. So was every other page, right through to the end of the diary.
It was frustrating. I knew that in the months to follow, there were dramatic events to come. After seventeen weeks in reserve, the North Midlands had spent most of that summer in the front line. In the autumn of 1915, at the Battle of Loos , it would experience its worst day of the entire war. On 13 October, in five ghastly hours, it lost a quarter of its strength: 3,763 men were killed or wounded – 180 officers and 3,583 other ranks. John’s diary had appeared to promise so much: a contemporaneous record, day by day. But he had abandoned it at exactly the moment the North Midlands had entered the thick of fighting.
I got up from my desk to fetch the catalogue to the Muniment Rooms. The blank pages in the diary were hugely disappointing. But at least the trail was not cold. On the shelves around me, there were John’s letters home. There would be news of him in other family letters. I could follow his story through the correspondence in the blue files.
I made a note of the case and shelf numbers for every file relating to the year 1915. Two were of immediate interest: John’s letters to his mother, Violet, Duchess of Rutland, and to his uncle, Charlie Lindsay.
John’s letters to the Duchess were kept in Room 2. I looked at these first. Thumbing through the months to find the ones he had written in the summer and autumn of 1915, my heart sank. I had almost reached the bottom of the pile and it was only June. In July, the stream of letters stopped: John’s last letter to his mother was dated the 6th.
The
6
th of July.
The coincidence cast a shadow. It was the date John’s diary had stopped.
Straightaway, I walked back along the passage to Room 1. John’s letters to his uncle were kept there. The correspondence between them spanned twenty-five years; I pulled at the file for 1915. Even before I looked at it, I had an inkling of what I was about to find. Quickly, I flicked through the pages. John’s last letter to Charlie was also dated 6 July.
Twenty-eight-year-old John, Marquis of Granby, had vanished. I felt a rising sense of panic. This was far from being the pristine archive I had imagined. I went across to my desk and looked at my list. I had identified a further twenty files that related to the year 1915. They contained the Duke and Duchess’s correspondence, and that of their three daughters – John’s immediate family. Surely their letters would yield clues to his whereabouts and the reason – or reasons – behind his apparent disappearance.
By the time I got to the fourth file, a clear pattern was emerging. It was not only John who had vanished. So, it appeared, had the entire Manners family. After 6 July, their letters
to
John – and theirs to each other – were also missing.
The tour guides’ words kept floating into my mind.
No one goes in there
. But I was beginning to think someone
had
been in here. The apparent excision was meticulous. It extended with absolute precision from 7 July to 5 December 1915.
The discovery of such a significant void was a major setback. Without the letters, I had no means of chronicling the family’s story – and the story of their great estate – at this important stage in the war.
But
John had felt none of their euphoria. Nor did he refer to his battalion in his diary. ‘Usual day – went to tea with Pulteney’ * was all he wrote.
‘
Usual day.
’ It was a phrase that John had used repeatedly. Four of the days between 29 June and 5 July he had described as such. It did not make sense. Then I turned to the next page of his diary.
The date – 6 July – was written at the top. The rest of the page was blank. I looked at the one that followed, and the one after that. They were blank too. So was every other page, right through to the end of the diary.
It was frustrating. I knew that in the months to follow, there were dramatic events to come. After seventeen weeks in reserve, the North Midlands had spent most of that summer in the front line. In the autumn of 1915, at the Battle of Loos , it would experience its worst day of the entire war. On 13 October, in five ghastly hours, it lost a quarter of its strength: 3,763 men were killed or wounded – 180 officers and 3,583 other ranks. John’s diary had appeared to promise so much: a contemporaneous record, day by day. But he had abandoned it at exactly the moment the North Midlands had entered the thick of fighting.
I got up from my desk to fetch the catalogue to the Muniment Rooms. The blank pages in the diary were hugely disappointing. But at least the trail was not cold. On the shelves around me, there were John’s letters home. There would be news of him in other family letters. I could follow his story through the correspondence in the blue files.
I made a note of the case and shelf numbers for every file relating to the year 1915. Two were of immediate interest: John’s letters to his mother, Violet, Duchess of Rutland, and to his uncle, Charlie Lindsay.
John’s letters to the Duchess were kept in Room 2. I looked at these first. Thumbing through the months to find the ones he had written in the summer and autumn of 1915, my heart sank. I had almost reached the bottom of the pile and it was only June. In July, the stream of letters stopped: John’s last letter to his mother was dated the 6th.
The
6
th of July.
The coincidence cast a shadow. It was the date John’s diary had stopped.
Straightaway, I walked back along the passage to Room 1. John’s letters to his uncle were kept there. The correspondence between them spanned twenty-five years; I pulled at the file for 1915. Even before I looked at it, I had an inkling of what I was about to find. Quickly, I flicked through the pages. John’s last letter to Charlie was also dated 6 July.
Twenty-eight-year-old John, Marquis of Granby, had vanished. I felt a rising sense of panic. This was far from being the pristine archive I had imagined. I went across to my desk and looked at my list. I had identified a further twenty files that related to the year 1915. They contained the Duke and Duchess’s correspondence, and that of their three daughters – John’s immediate family. Surely their letters would yield clues to his whereabouts and the reason – or reasons – behind his apparent disappearance.
By the time I got to the fourth file, a clear pattern was emerging. It was not only John who had vanished. So, it appeared, had the entire Manners family. After 6 July, their letters
to
John – and theirs to each other – were also missing.
The tour guides’ words kept floating into my mind.
No one goes in there
. But I was beginning to think someone
had
been in here. The apparent excision was meticulous. It extended with absolute precision from 7 July to 5 December 1915.
The discovery of such a significant void was a major setback. Without the letters, I had no means of chronicling the family’s story – and the story of their great estate – at this important stage in the war.
But
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