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1940 onwards: A castle rooms locked for years, with secrets to reveal…
The Secret Rooms
What you need to know before your trail
At 6 am on 21 April 1940 John the 9th Duke of Rutland, and one of Britain’s wealthiest men, ended his days, virtually alone, lying on a makeshift bed in a dank cramped suite of rooms in the servants’ quarters of his own home, Belvoir Castle, in Leicestershire.
For weeks, as his health deteriorated, his family, his servants – even the King’s doctor – pleaded with him to come out, but he refused.
After his death, his son and heir, Charles, the 10th Duke of Rutland, ordered that the rooms be locked up and they remained untouched for sixty years.
What lay behind this extraordinary set of circumstances?
Travel Guide
Catherine Bailey explains in the book that she visited Belvoir castle in order to research a book about villages affected by WW1. She discovered the archives and when she realised that the ninth duke, John Manners’s letters and journal ended rather abruptly in June 1914, she became intrigued. She found other unexplained gaps in the correspondence she found and so she began to dig deeper.
The novel starts with doctors being summonsed to the castle in order to attend a dying Duke. Doctors taken a certain way into the castle,told to wait, until doors are opened and the room prepared. Servants loitering at doors and passages who hear whispers in the hallways…
It was in these rooms that no one in the castle knew what went on. The Duke had barricaded himself in and the rooms locked for 60 years. As the secrets come out, a picture of the world before 1914 is created – a world that John saw growing up in his world of aristocratic privilege with crisis and change just around the corner.
But it’s the castle, with its dark corridors, shifting shadows and delicate memories that are the most intriguing at all.
Booktrail Boarding Pass Information: The Secret Rooms
Author/Guide: Catherine Bailey Destination: Belvoir Castle Departure Time: 1914, 2000s
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