A musical interlude – April 1916

Teresa Hulton (1890-1972)

Although the war had brought dramatic changes for Teresa, many aspects of her life went on as they had before the war. In particular, her interest in music persisted. In April 1916 Teresa was invited to a dinner party given by Edith, Countess Rucellai and she was asked to play the piano to entertain everyone as she had often done before the war.

Teresa (left) and her sister Gioconda (right) in their home in Venice, early 1900s.

Teresa was a skilled musician and had been trained as a professional concert pianist. At the age of fifteen she became the pupil of the admired Swiss pianist Fraulein Wilhelmina Adler in Munich, Germany. She had to practise for three hours a day and had two piano lessons daily. In 1907 she returned to Venice where she became the pupil of Baron Giorgio Franchetti.

Teresa in Munich, 1905.

The Rucellai family, who invited Teresa to play in April 1916, had been friends of the Hultons since before the war. Letters in the archives show that they often sent donations to the war hospitals where Teresa worked.

Nurses, staff and patients at the Infermeria Britannica (British Hospital) in Florence, Italy, 1916.

As well as donations of items like sheets and bandages, war hospitals needed food supplies for the wounded soldiers. British Red Cross V.A.D. members worked as cooks in British Military Hospitals in places like Genoa, Bordighera, Cremona, Arquata Scrivia and Taranto. On average they prepared and served 40,000 meals per month. Dishes for the recovering soldiers included jellies, broth, custard and chicken soufflé.

Teresa (centre) with Contessa Carafa (left) and Mrs Nott (right), Joanniz, in the Udine province of northern Italy, May 1917.

Food was prepared for the canteen where Teresa worked at Cervignano by an Italian man, Ernesto. Photographs of him survive in Teresa’s wartime photograph album.

Photos of Ernesto in the Zona di Guerra 1916-1918 album.

Click here to see a short British Pathé film of a railway station canteen.

Click here to see a film about lunchtime in a hospital in Southport, Lancashire.

Teresa’s uncle, Gino Villari, the half-brother of her mother, begun a new army post in Salonika, Greece. Her father wrote to her giving her Gino’s new address, although he added that he was ‘uncertain as to whether [Gino] will be comfortable in his new post.’

Luigi (Gino) Villari on horseback, Salonika, January 1918.

Teresa’s sister, Gioconda, was not enjoying her new job as a secretary in the Admiralty Intelligence Division in London. Gioconda complained that she had not been paid for her work and received few days off.

Gioconda, Florence, February 1916.

The Hulton family were also beset by the worry that the Austrian-Hungarian army would destroy Venice before the end of the war. Teresa’s father, William Hulton, wrote in a letter that he thought it might be a good idea to deposit valuables elsewhere.

William Stokes Hulton, Venice, 1907.

 

Lord Berwick (1877-1947)

In 1916 Lord Berwick was working as an Honorary Secretary to the British Embassy in Paris, but he had kept military books that he bought before and at the beginning of the war when he was in the Shropshire Yeomanry.

Advertisements for military publications and waterproofs in Company Drill Illustrated, 1914.

One particularly interesting book is Company Drill Illustrated (1914) which includes illustrations of commands and signals that Lord Berwick would have used in the Yeomanry.

Commands and signals in Company Drill Illustrated, 1914.

The book is currently kept in the Inner Library at Attingham Park. Inside it is a paper with a list of questions that a commander should ask himself before attack. This was possibly left as a bookmark by Lord Berwick.

This book also includes many advertisements. These range from advertisements for pyjamas, a series of military books, coal-tar shaving soap and waterproof clothing to an advertisement for Turkish Baths in London guaranteed to ease illnesses associated with serving in the war.

Advertisement for pyjamas in Company Drill Illustrated, 1914.

 

Attingham

The Van Bergens, who were Lord Berwick’s tenants at Attingham during the war, were especially concerned for the welfare of wounded soldiers. As well as suggesting that Attingham was used as a war hospital the Van Bergens took a great interest in the Royal Salop Infirmary in Shrewsbury.

The Van Bergen family, c.1917.

Mrs Van Bergen was on the Ladies’ Auxiliary Committee whilst Mr Van Bergen was involved with the committee weekly board, the finance committee and the committee for appointing medical staff. The Van Bergens also donated ten guineas to the Royal Salop Infirmary. The Infirmary is now the Parade shopping centre. For more information and for images, please click this link.

Lord Berwick’s Land Agent, Louis Dease, was asked by the Government to use wood from the Attingham estate to help to supply railway sleepers to be sent to France for railway lines.

The egg collection set up to provide eggs for use in Shropshire war hospitals was going well with 67,110 eggs collected in 1916.

World War One egg collection poster. © IWM (Art.IWM PST 10833)

For 2016 the Walled Garden team at Attingham put on a display about food production during the war. They grew WW1 varieties of vegetables and there were even some hens to see!

 

 

Outposts of Mercy – March 1916

Teresa Hulton (1890-1972)

Teresa was as busy as ever with supply work for hospitals in Italy. She worked at this task with Bridget Talbot, who wrote asking if Teresa could quickly find some supplies for Hospital 022 as the big new wards of around a hundred beds had ‘got no pillows, very few sheets and no bed covers.’

Interior of an Italian Hospital Train, filled with wounded soldiers, somewhere on the Italian Front, 1915. © IWM (Q 53780)

The need for rapid expansion indicates the strain that the fighting was putting on war hospitals. Mrs Watkins’s team were run off their feet but it was worthwhile, as Teresa’s friend Julia assured her how grateful the wounded soldiers were for all the work that the nurses were doing for them.

The heroism of Mrs Watkins’s team is captured by E.V. Lucas in Outposts of Mercy, a pamphlet about the efforts of the Red Cross in Italy written during the First World War. E.V. Lucas visited Mrs Watkins’s team at Cervignano, where he met Teresa.

Outposts of Mercy by E.V. Lucas. Image courtesy of Kiplin Hall.

Lucas wrote of the danger that the team faced since Cervignano was ‘a constant target for Austrian aeroplanes.’ The nurses lived in ‘a tiny wooden cottage beside the rail, just big enough for the fires which boil the coffee and milk for the poor fellows in the trains, and anything but big enough for the ladies to dwell in comfort.‘ Photographs show that at this time, compared to later in the war, the uniform and equipment used by Teresa and her companions was basic.

Teresa Hulton (left) with Mrs Nott (centre) and Contessa Carafa (right) in a hut at Cervignano, northern Italy, May 1917.

E.V. Lucas gave a vivid picture of the women going about their work:

‘What the soldiers in an English hospital train stopping at a village station in Essex, say, would think of three Italian ladies, unassisted, carrying hot coffee and bread from bunk to bunk along two or three hundred yards of compartments, I cannot imagine; but the grateful Italians have come to look upon the converse phenomenon without surprise.’

Newspaper clipping from the Tribuna Illustrata showing Mabel Campbell and Teresa Hulton helping the wounded soldiers on the train at San Giovanni di Manzano, northern Italy, taken between October and December 1915.

The ministrations of Mrs Watkins’s team were especially useful as ‘the authorities have had to make the meal time-table inflexible, so that a wounded man, brought in just too late for, say, breakfast, would have no chance of food until lunch, even though he had long been fasting.’

Wounded soldier carried on a stretcher, Italy, taken between 1915 and 1918.

To see a short British Pathé film of a railway station canteen during WWI, please click here.

The toll that the war had taken on armies of all countries by March 1916 was vast. Many people must have feared that they would be the next to hear the news of a loved one’s death. On the 6^th of March Teresa’s friend, Lady Helen D’Abernon, wrote that her nephew had been killed. Already he had been wounded twice since he joined the army and since August 1914, 28 out of the 30 officers in his battalion had died.

Lady Helen Vincent, who became Viscountess D’Abernon from 1914.

For others, the war brought new opportunities. Teresa’s sister, Gioconda, secured a post as a secretary in the Intelligence Division for the Admiralty in London. On the 27^th of March she began her work and was to hold the post for several months, although, as with nursing, she was to find it not to her taste.

Teresa and Gioconda in a gondola in 1908

Lord Berwick (1877-1947)

Lord Berwick was working in Paris at the British Embassy in early 1916 but he remained in contact with his Shropshire Yeomanry friends. From the 14^th of March 1916 to April 1917 the 1/1^st Shropshire Yeomanry was based in Egypt. The order to sail to Egypt was mentioned in a letter to Lord Berwick from H. Heywood-Lonsdale, an acquaintance in the Yeomanry. He wrote to Lord Berwick from ‘Gorleston a most infernal hole where we have had the roof burnt down over our heads.’

Shropshire Yeomanry badge on Lord Berwick’s uniform in the Attingham collection.

Heyward-Lonsdale also described possible future movements:

‘I rather think we shall go to Salonika very soon’ and he hoped that the regiment shall spend ‘next winter in Vienna.’

And commented on the war in France:

‘…your appreciation of the Verdun affair is interesting, we have heard 3 of the forts have fallen, hope French are preparing a surprise for the Bosch.’

[For a list of slang terms used at the Front, please click here and scroll to ‘Allies and enemies’.]

Lord Berwick’s friend, Heyward-Lonsdale also went on to explain entertainments for the Yeomanry:

‘A paper has been started, run by the Doctor and Guy Rogers THE SHROPSHIRE WAR PAPER on the lines of THE SPORTING TIMES. Poker parties carry on.’

 He thanked Lord Berwick for his letter and informed him that Berwick had a mess bill of £4.7s.11d outstanding.

Lord Berwick at a desk taken between 1900 and 1919.

Attingham

Demand for British war hospitals increased and in March 1916 the War Office took over Cross Houses workhouse, near Attingham, as a hospital. The 321 inmates were accommodated in other workhouses or hospitals. The workhouse was named the Berrington War Hospital due to its proximity to Berrington train station.

Berrington War Hospital, formerly the workhouse at Cross Houses, Shropshire.

The Attingham and Berrington war hospitals worked closely together. Berrington was the central hospital, acting as a clearing hospital for wounded soldiers. Attingham was one of several auxiliary hospitals that received patients from Berrington. There were over 3,000 auxiliary hospitals in Britain.

Wounded soldiers were sent by train to Berrington station. The hospital bell was rung and to alert people at the hospital that there was a train load of wounded soldiers to be collected.

Wounded soldiers, a nurse and a dog outside Attingham Hall, c.1917.

Hilda Evans, born in 1902, vividly recalled the first convoy of 127 soldiers arriving at Berrington station. In an oral history recording she explained that initially, there were ‘no nurses here at all, and they had to collect the people round. My mother was one – to help until they got the nurses here. And when they used that awful mustard gas, in the First World War, the poor lads were brought here with great holes burnt in their backs. It was dreadful to see them, dreadful; shocking.’

The aftermath of a mustard gas attack on the Western Front in August 1918 as witnessed by the artist, John Singer Sargent. © IWM (Art.IWM ART 1460)

To see a 1915 photograph of patients in a gas ward receiving a salt bath treatment for their mustard gas burns, please click here.

Hilda Evans also described how the wounded men came ‘straight from the trenches here, because we had to cut their clothes off and they’d be full of lice and all sorts of things. It was dreadful. And they used to make a big bonfire and burn all their old uniforms, because they couldn’t do any good with them.’

Troops of the 2nd Australian Division in a support line trench checking their shirts for lice, northern France, May 1916. © IWM (Q 582)