How wartime Muncaster was a safe haven for world famous art

Cumbria played an important role in the Second World War as a place of sanctuary for people – and paintings. New research by historian Dr Rob David reveals the extent of the mission to protect masterpieces at Muncaster

During the first week of September 1939, young Jack Holman was summoned to join the Muncaster Castle truck and park up in the sidings at Ravenglass to collect a delivery from a train coming from London.

Hidden from sight in packing cases, the goods arrived in three railway containers attached to the end of a passenger train, guarded by railway police and three men from London. Jack and others loaded them onto the estate’s Sampson wagon but were not told what was inside; Jack assumed they contained possessions from his master Sir John Frecheville Ramsden’s foreign estates. He had no idea that inside the packing cases lay some of the world’s greatest works of art from the Tate Gallery collection including Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and masterpieces by JMW Turner, Constable, Renoir, Manet and Rossetti.

Vincent Van Gogh, Sunflowers (1888) (Image: National Gallery, London)

This was wartime and the nation’s cultural assets would be under threat from bombing raids. Three hundred miles away from London, this most northern outpost was considered a safe and secure place to temporarily store the treasures, and so the great art evacuation got underway.

At the time the mission was top secret. Perhaps because of its clandestine nature, information on what went on back in 1939 and the following five years that the art stayed at Muncaster remained limited, known only to a few local people and passed down through the generations.

That was until historian Dr Rob David began to investigate. He recently gave a talk in the drawing room at the castle – one of the rooms set aside to store the artwork – about what he found. “Sir John Ramsden may very well have walked into this room in late August 1939 with a letter in his hand from David Fincham, chief curator at the Tate Gallery, telling him the pictures were on their way,” Rob told the audience.

The drawing room at Muncaster Castle where it is thought many of the paintings were stored (Image: Muncaster Castle)

He was galvanised to discover more about the story when he read Caroline Shenton’s book National Treasures: Saving the Nation’s Art in World War Two. She references Muncaster in just one paragraph; it was enough to spark Cumbrian Rob’s interest.

“I read that paragraph and thought there must be more of a story. She missed a treat and allowed me to have all the fun finding and uncovering it all.”

It took some detective work because of the secrecy surrounding the original evacuation; there were no newspaper accounts of it at the time and nothing in the Muncaster records and little in the county archives. In order to uncover the story, Rob had to go to London where “there were huge quantities, folders and folders” in the Tate archives about the ‘Picture Men’, the employees who followed the paintings and looked after them. “The story of getting the pictures here is sitting in the papers of the Office of Works in the National Archives at Kew,” he reports.

The origins of wartime art evacuation went back to 1933 and the first meeting of the Museums and Galleries Air Raid Precautions Committee that took place in London with an agenda entitled Precautions for the Safe Custody of National Art Treasures.

Sir John Everett Millais, Bt 1829-1896, Christ in the House of His Parents (The Carpenter’s Shop), one of the paintings evacuated to Muncaster (Image: Tate)

Following the First World War, consideration had been given as to what would happen to the nation’s treasures in the event of another conflict. “People realised Britain wasn’t the island they thought it was,” says Rob, “and it was timely because Hitler had become chancellor in 1933.

“The first idea was a crazy one: that all the collections would be transferred temporarily to Hampton Court Palace. The directors who attended the meeting were concerned that this put all the nation’s treasures in one place, and what if the palace caught fire?

“The second plan was to identify houses in the country that were considered safe and were well away from London.”

The Office of Works was charged with putting together a list and 50 possible locations were presented at the next meeting in 1934.

The Tate identified Corsham Court and Hartham Hall, in Wiltshire, as safe options. The Office of Works said it would supply packaging materials and the directors agreed to draw up lists of objects to be moved and to organise the packing but, with no imminent threat of war, the plan was not revisited for several years.

However, by late 1938 the Nazis had occupied part of Czechoslovakia and in March 1939 wholesale burning of modern art took place in Berlin.

“During 1938 the galleries checked if their evacuation locations were safe and the Tate’s definitely weren’t,” says Rob. “Hartham Park and Corsham Court were considered to be inherently unsafe as they were too close to the Central Ammunition Depot and other military installations.”

The gallery’s director, Sir John Rothenstein, who took charge in 1938 and remained in post until 1964, chose three alternative locations: Hellens, in Hertfordshire; Muncaster Castle; and Eastington Hall, in Worcestershire. Muncaster was the furthest north of the locations selected by any of the London gallery and museum directors.

“The reason why it was identified as a possibility seems to have been down to the friendship between Sir John Ramsden and Lady Carlisle at Naworth Castle; there is correspondence from her suggesting he be approached,” explains Rob.

Dr Rothenstein felt it was a sound choice on the grounds not just of location but also because the owner of the castle was not much in residence, a point that seems to have been a preoccupation with the directors, who preferred owners to be absent to allow their staff unfettered access to the works of art. The only problem Dr Rothenstein reported about Muncaster was the “erratic ballcocks of the estate’s water supply”, a reference to one of the reservoirs that would be used in the case of fire.

Sir John Ramsden, meanwhile, saw a particular benefit in accepting the paintings, writing, “Their presence here might help to preserve us from, or reduce the number of, the threatened hordes of small children” – a reference to the possibility of city evacuees coming to Muncaster.

A keen gardener – he was behind the rhododendrons and azalea gardens that attract many visitors to Muncaster today – Sir John seems to have been happier to accept rare plant evacuees from Kew Gardens at the same time.

The revised list of repositories remained secret. London’s museums and galleries closed shortly before war was declared and within a few days many hundreds of paintings had been removed from their frames at the Tate Gallery with King George VI visiting to watch the packing process.

At the castle, three rooms were set aside – the great hall and the dining room, along with the drawing room with its magnificent, curved, plasterwork ceiling. Ground floor rooms had to be chosen due to the weight of the pictures, which are thought to have numbered between 600 and 800.

Rob says: “The first thing they had to think about in preparing the rooms was what to do with all the furniture. Maybe they piled it up in the billiard room next door. Next they would have checked if the shutters were all in working order to keep out the light and to stop the temperature fluctuating too much.

“The castle didn’t have ground source heat pumps in those days. They would have had difficulty keeping the rooms warm in winter to the optimum temperature of 60F or 15C. The drawing room proved to be the best of the three rooms. The dining room fire smoked badly and the hall was a very big space with a stone floor.”

With the rooms emptied and the shutters closed, the pictures arrived. It is unclear if they were laid horizontally or stacked vertically but there is a clue in a poem by Norman Nicholson, who lived just a few miles away at Millom. He may have heard about the paintings at the castle via local gossip and may even have seen them, although there is no evidence to confirm that, just his 1954 poem, Ravenglass Railway Station from the volume The Pot Geranium:

Here, too, in the winter of war

The children came…

And here the gold, and graphite

of the Tate,

Crated and stacked like lemons.

The greatest threat to old houses was fire and this risk still had to be resolved. Sir John was already ahead of the game. He already had firefighting equipment installed and Robin Ironside, the assistant keeper from the Tate, wrote from his lodgings at the Carleton Green Hotel, Holmrook, to Millom Fire Brigade explaining what was being stored at the castle and asking for their assistance in case of fire. His letter was headed “secret and confidential”.

Captain Pelleymounter, the brigade leader, was asked to provide immediate assistance if it was required; Seascale and Whitehaven brigades were also to be summoned in an emergency.

Robin Ironside, who worked for the Tate from 1937-1946, was in charge of the operation after David Fincham, 1930-1941. He was not based at the castle but visited frequently.

“Fincham didn’t find it easy operating in a place as remote as this and he had an uneasy relationship with Rothenstein,” reports Rob. “Robin Ironside got on much better with everyone and seemed to enjoy being at Muncaster.”

In total, up to ten Tate staff, all men, worked at the castle and were kept busy making constant checks on the paintings’ condition, undertaking restoration and conservation work and doing fire watching duties on the roof. Some of the men lived on the premises while others stayed in rented accommodation in nearby villages.

One of the men, William Jeffcote, reported that they “became Jacks of all trades”, cooking their own meals, cutting each other’s hair and washing and mending their clothes – the fact that he had sewn 17 patches on a shirt suggests that replacements were not forthcoming and they had to make do.

The team included Helmut Ruhemann, one of Europe’s leading picture conservators, who passed through and was responsible for conserving Van Gogh’s Sunflowers which he took to his cottage in the Trossachs where he “enjoyed having it on his wall”. His wartime conservation tools were rudimentary at best and included a cheese grater, a laundry iron and a dental instrument.

The dining room (Image: Muncaster Castle)

Another ‘Picture Man’, John Lee, is described as “a gifted craftsman”. His tasks involved repairing damaged pictures and frames, “but whose general abilities in sorting out problems” made him “something of a Tate legend”. It is recorded that he “tidied up” Sir John Everett Millais’ Christ in the Carpenter’s Workshop (1849-1850), observing of his handiwork, “it looks quite good when viewed from five to six feet away”.

“While pieces didn’t seem to have been damaged en route to Muncaster it was the case that several needed restoration,” says Rob. Works by Turner, Burne-Jones, Seurat and Hogarth apparently all came in for cleaning; some works needed loose canvases securing, others their edges binding.

As the pictures were being looked after, they were not the only piece of art history to come to Cumbria. The Royal College of Art famously evacuated students to Ambleside where they were billeted in every available boarding house, barn and outbuilding.

“At some point the director must have realised the paintings were here because there is a letter from him to the Tate asking if he could bring students. The reply was no! And by the way, this is supposed to be top secret! Word must have got around to some extent,” says Rob.

Cumbria’s safe space reputation also saw the British Museum of Natural History send its insect collection to Wray Castle, on Windermere, where it could be looked after by the scientists of the Freshwater Biological Association, then a tenant of the castle.

Time ticked on as the war continued, but in the summer of 1941 even Muncaster’s apparent distance from the conflict was undermined when Barrow was targeted by the Luftwaffe. The shipyard and steelworks were assumed to be the principal targets of the so-called Barrow Blitz, but the town centre and residential neighbourhoods were hit too; the railway station, churches and hotels were destroyed.

The bombing, which started in September 1940 and continued until January 1942, took the lives of 83 civilians, injured 330 and damaged or destroyed more than 10,000 homes, about 25 per cent of the town’s housing stock.

Nevertheless, Muncaster was still considered the safest of the Tate repositories and the art remained there for the duration of the war. Bombing raids elsewhere prompted the removal of the work stored at Hellens and Eastington Hall, although it is recorded that the Tate officials had also had enough of at least one interfering owner. Those collections were moved to Sudeley Castle, in Gloucestershire, Abbotswood and The Old Quarries, in the Cotswolds.

Muncaster in 1925 (Image: Muncaster Castle)

There was a lot of coming and going of art works during the war and in 1944 the production of an inventory was one of the tasks given to the men at the castle. It has proved to be gold dust for Rob. “It ran to pages and is a roll call of the greatest names in 18th, 19th and 20th century art,” he says.

Rob’s highlights from the lists include Constable’s View of the House in which the Artist is Born; Turner’s Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps; Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Proserpine from 1874; portraits by John Singer Sargent; and Cumbrian interest too, in George Romney’s portrait of Willian Pitt the Younger, painted around 1783.

Later works included Eric Ravilious’ 1939 The Vale of the White Horse and a painting by the Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka CBE, significant since it was a gift to the British nation for its support from the president of the Czechoslovakian government in exile.

A further personal choice are two paintings by Charles E Cundall’s Bank Holiday, Brighton 1933 and Building in Berkeley Square because Rob is distantly related to the artist.

He adds: “It is unbelievable what was here in these rooms – and it was added to. The inventory also reveals other collections that came to Muncaster on the back of the Tate works.”

They included the art collections of The Grocers’ Company Hall, The Foundling Hospital and the India Office, in Whitehall.

A rare image of Sir Hugh Walpole at Brackenburn, surrounded by some of his art collection. Sir Hugh during the war and bequeathed some of his collection to the Tate, which were sent to Muncaster for safe-keeping [Image: Simon Dunant, hughwalpole.com]

In addition, the Tate was the beneficiary of bequests made by people who died during the war and these gifts were also brought to Muncaster for safe keeping. They included some of the collection given by the novelist, Sir Hugh Walpole CBE, who divided his time between London and Keswick during the war.

He had discovered the Lake District during family holidays to Gosforth from 1898-1902, when his father was principal of a college in Durham. Walpole would have to wait two decades before pursuing his dream of finding a home in Cumbria, Brackenburn, on the shore of Derwentwater.

On securing the house, he wrote of his arrival: “The cottage was quite empty. Neither swept nor garnished. The grass was long on the lawn and there was a baby’s perambulator with a bird’s nest in it outside the front door. But it was a glorious April evening and the daffodils flamed in the grass and the stream was running like mad. Rolled up in my great-coat, I slept that night on the floor of the sitting-room. Very sore in the morning. I fed the squirrels at the back door. I was radiantly happy.”

Walpole later described it as his “little piece of heaven on Catbells”. He died there on June 1, 1941, and is buried in St John’s Churchyard, Keswick.

Whilst the Tate artwork was in safe storage it could not, of course, be seen by the public. “Temporary exhibitions were held during the war to raise morale, and some of the pictures from Muncaster, including the new acquisitions, were sent to these exhibitions,” explains Rob.

Despite some of the work going on further travels, the Muncaster mission remained top secret until after the war when there was a rush of interest and a flurry of newspaper stories. “For the vast majority of the public, they would have been the first hint of what had gone on.”

A press report from 1945

Among them, the News Chronicle reported that the men had “the longest and loneliest vigils of the war” in their posting to the far, remote north.

Others might think they were the lucky ones, away from the threat of bombing, in the fresh air by the sea amid 77 acres of wild, woodland gardens with breathtaking views of the Lake District Fells with the chance to learn new skills. Spare time was spent painting, making toys and whitewashing. One Christmas, they received a pudding, cake and two bottles of port from Lady Ramsden, and their wives and children were invited to the party.

However, Jack Holman did observe that all was not well, noting the men could not settle or mix in. “It was a totally different life for them,” he said.

With the war officially over in September 1945, the pictures were packed up with the last departing on December 17. The Picture Men followed the next day having cleaned and tidied up to the approval of the housekeeper.

The great hall (Image: Muncaster Castle)

With the Tate having been bombed in 1940, the art evacuation must have been considered worth it. “Pretty well every room and space above ground was damaged,” says Rob, “but the basement was reasonably intact.

“The general thinking is the paintings did go back to the Tate in 1945 and although there was nowhere to display them, they could be stored in the basement. By mid-1946 some of the galleries were reinstated and by 1948 most of it had been rebuilt.”

It marked the end of Muncaster’s role as a wartime sanctuary. It is not known if any money changed hands in the arrangement. “We have to assume Sir John charged some sort of rent for the space, but I found no record of any financial transaction, but the Tate did pay for 30 tonnes of coal for the fires each winter.”

(L-R) Peter Frost-Pennington, Rob David, Iona Frost-Pennington

Peter Frost-Pennington, who owns and runs Muncaster with his wife Iona, who is Sir John Ramsden’s great-granddaughter, and their son Ewan, says the family and estate team, including assistant curator and volunteer coordinator Melanie Grange, were aware of the wartime story.

“But until Rob approached us and began his research we had no idea of the scale of the collection held here during World War Two,” he adds. “It still seems amazing to us that a collection containing the works of such revered artists shared the same space as the family portraits and collections that have been housed here for hundreds of years. These walls contain so many stories, if only they could talk.

“We are continually striving to gain a fuller understanding of Muncaster’s history and of the collections held here, and research such as this greatly enhances our knowledge. We really hope it will generate greater interest in this subject, and that readers will be inspired to visit Muncaster and learn more about its fascinating past.”

He adds: “It must be said that we now encourage small children to come – but the ballcocks are still a bit erratic.”

• With thanks to Dr Rob David

• muncaster.co.uk