Season 5 History: Requisitioned Estates in WWII Britain
World War II’s impact on the British home front was dramatic and wide-ranging, and one example of a change ushered in by the war effort was the requisitioning of country houses and stately homes, as seen in Season 5 of All Creatures Great and Small. The production’s historical advisor, Dr. Mark Roodhouse of the History Department at the University of York, shared insights with MASTERPIECE about the program that sent community stalwart Mrs. Pumphrey and her legendary dog, Tricki, from Pumphrey Manor to the estate’s cottage.
While All Creatures Great and Small’s Pumphrey Manor is requisitioned by the army as a convalescent hospital, country homes were used for a variety of purposes. Roodhouse explained, “Some country houses became host to evacuees in large numbers. Others were requisitioned by the government for civil servants—there was a policy of disbursing government departments out of London so that they couldn’t all be bombed, so you sometimes got outposts in country houses.”
Some houses were requisitioned by the government for military purposes, to be used as a center of training camps. Others might be used for the secret services, but, Roodhouse noted, those tended to be more in the south than our fictional Pumphrey Hall in the Yorkshire Dales.
Roodhouse cited a house closer to the world of All Creatures Great and Small with a particularly crucial wartime purpose. “Newby Hall, a house not too far away from Thirsk, was where the royal family was to be evacuated to if there was an invasion—they would be brought up out of London to the north and put in Newby Hall. So that gives you a sense of how safe the area was thought to be where Alf Wight [the real James Herriot] was.”
According to Roodhouse, it wasn’t all bad for the owners displaced from their ancestral seats, because they were recompensed. He explained, “If the house was partially requisitioned, they might still live in part of the house. And who’s paying the heating bills for the other bit? They’re not; someone else is. With the rationing of fuel, it became really expensive and difficult to heat those big houses, so if you can take out all your precious stuff, put it in another area, and then let the military or someone else use the other part of the house and keep it warm, it actually might be in the interest of the house. There were all kinds of incentives.”
