Tourism Apps
Our team, in collaboration with the Bader International Study Centre (Queen’s University) at Herstmonceux Castle, is building a curated virtual tour experience of Herstmonceux Castle and its environs. This tour, which relies on a combination of platforms – including Google Tours and Interpretours – provides a multimedia reconstruction of Herstmonceux Castle during World War Two. The tour, currently under development, can be enjoyed both virtually and in real-time and relies on various points of interest to recreate the transformed space.
Below is the history that informs the content of the tour.
What did the Herstmonceux castle look like during WWII?
During WWII, Herstmonceux castle was inhabited by the Hearts of Oak friendly society. Long before its occupancy of Herstmonceux castle in the Second World War, the Hearts of Oak were a well-established British insurance company. Established on June 20, 1842 by twelve members of a provident society, the Hearts of Oak were named for the wooden ships that protected Britain from invasion for many years.
Employees of the Hearts of Oak in the early 1940s celebrating.
At the beginning of the Second World War, January 1939, the Hearts of Oak created an evacuation plan to Herstmonceux that would be implemented in the event Britain declared war. Later that year when war was declared, with over one million members and a normal weekly disbursement of over £30,000, The Hearts of Oak put their evacuation plan into action. Most of the staff’s leadership arrived at the castle on September 4 and by September 5 the initial stages of the evacuation had been completed. An immediate priority was to blackout the castle to hide it from air raids. The size of the castle and strict government regulations rendered this task complex and ongoing.
Arial view of wooden buildings created to support growing accommodations required by the Hearts of Oak.
By the early twentieth century, the society had grown so prominent that King Edward VII opened the Society’s new Euston Road office. By 1938, The Hearts of Oak counted over one million members. The Hearts of Oak had clearly, and quickly, become an important institution within British society, providing insurance benefits to its members, and this did not go unnoticed.
Due to the enormous demands of housing, feeding, and entertaining, the estimated 700-800 required staff members, a rather large residence was necessary and Herstmonceux castle provided all the space the Hearts of Oak required.
The bomb pictured here is recorded in the Community Reminiscence Project on World War Two: Memories of the People of Herstmonceux to have landed on March 7, 1944. This is the only Doodlebug attack recorded to have landed on castle grounds, but several more landed in the surrounding area.
Herstmonceux castle was not designed to house this many people so modifications were necessary to accommodate the hundreds of maintenance workers that arrived with the Society. One of the first problems that needed addressing was sewage. Storage tanks for sewage were put into the castle’s turrets and a sewage disposal plant appropriate for the Society’s needs was constructed. Another issue was catering as feeding nearly a thousand people presented many problems. The Hearts of Oak converted the ground floor dining room into an additional kitchen to prepare the enormous amount of food necessary to properly feed its staff. Society leaders also installed extra appliances such as ranges, dishwashers, hot plates, and potato peelers. At peak capacity, the catering service could produce as many as 1,370 meals per day.
With a shortage of accommodations and insufficient infrastructure, arrangements were made to construct four large wooden buildings on the lawns facing the castle. Built on brick piers, these buildings were equipped with electric light, central heating, hot water, lavatories, clocks, and telephone services. Two of the large buildings were divided into cubicles to provide sleeping accommodation for men, and staff used the other two for office work.
The Society also made available facilities to play darts, play table tennis, arranged lectures and instruction on cultural topics through the Sussex Rural Community Council. Subsequently, additional buildings were built throughout the war to accommodate the large group of staff and their work.
Today, all the temporary buildings constructed by the Hearts of Oak have long been removed. Some of the only visible traces from the war are the gentle sloping grassy hills under which still remain the ruins of the air raid shelters. Their significance is also still visible. Across the road, in the field directly in front of the Castle’s main bridge, the crater left by a deployed V-1 bomb reminds us today of how important the Hearts of Oak protective measures proved to be.
People
Steven Bednarski, Project Director and Primary Investigator
David Brown, Co-Investigator
Anthony Montagano, Brock University
Erin Kurian, Communications Coordinator
Jacqueline Gergal, University of Waterloo
Zach Kachuck, University of Waterloo
With help from the DRAGEN Lab.