General

In 1868 a stranger arrived in the ruins of Dilston Castle in Northumberland. The unknown Countess of Derwentwater, clad in an Austrian military cloak, had arrived to enforce her right to the Radcliffe family’s Derwentwater Estate. She claimed to be the granddaughter of John Radcliffe, son of James Radcliffe, the 3rd Earl of Derwentwater, an English Jacobite executed for treason in 1716. The Countess told authorities that John had not died at the age of nineteen in London, as was thought, but had in fact fled to Germany, where he had married and had two sons. Amelia Matilda Mary Tudor Radcliffe, the self-styled Countess of Derwentwater, presented herself as the only surviving heir to the estate.

Amelia assumed the title Countess of Derwentwater soon after coming to public attention. She continued to use it despite having no right to the title as it was not inheritable by a female line of decent. Her occupancy in the ruins of Dilston Castle fuelled her public campaign to reassert her personal claim to the estate. After the resident cows had been removed from the castle’s ground floor, the Countess had tarpaulins stretched across the ceiling to cover the crumbling roof and hung Radcliffe family portraits on the walls to legitimise her presence. At this time the castle and the estate was owned by Greenwich Hospital, having been given to the hospital by the Government after the death of John, Amelia’s supposed grandfather, the last heir to the estate.

On hearing of Amelia’s residence in the only ruins of the castle left standing, Mr Grey, the Receiver of Rents from Greenwich Hospital, arrived to interview his unusual trespasser. After days of requesting she quit Dilston and sending over cooked breakfasts in an attempt to maintain cordiality between them, Mr Grey was left with little choice but to have the Countess forcibly removed from the ruins of the castle. She did not make her ejection an easy one. Amelia declared that she would rather face death than leave Dilston and barricaded herself inside the castle. When Mr Grey’s men started to remove her belongings and the make-shift tarpaulin roof, the Countess began thrusting her sword at them. She was quickly disarmed and carried from the room in the chair she refused to move from.

Rather than accept this defeat, or the carriage that was offered to taxi her wherever she wished to go (presumably so long as it was away from Dilston), she instead chose to camp in a roadside ditch close to the ruins. Her temporary tent became a popular attraction for all classes of local society, drawing the likes of the vicar of Newcastle and Northumberland gentry, to villagers from the local pits. It was reported that the road adjoining tent was sometimes impassable due to the crowd. After a week in her tent, a wooden hut was erected for her, which concerned the local magistrates as is obstructed the road. They fined the Countess ten shillings and ordered her removal. She was as inclined to move from her ditch as she was to leave the castle. The hut was soon dismantled around her and she eventually left with her belongings. Amelia was well-treated by local residents around Dilston, even selling them personal items when she became short of money. Charles Herbert Lawrence Alder was sold a portrait of Mary Queens of Scots in prison, a Waterford cut glass toilet jar with stopper and pieces of cut Rock Crystal.

Soon after her removal from the ditch a new phrase in the Countess’s agitation began. The farm tenants on the Derwentwater estate, who paid their rents to the hospital, were encouraged to stop paying their rent to Mr Grey, and start paying the Countess, as the rightful owner of the estate. When rents were not paid to Amelia, one of her supporters rounded up the livestock from the farms and sold them at auction, with all profits going to the Countess. Another farm auction for Amelia’s benefit, in which she intended to sell farm equipment and property, descended into a riot when two-thousand of her sympathisers arrived at the sale. Despite the swell of public support that bolstered her cause when she first came to public attention, sympathies waned when it was found that Amelia refused to give a penny to support those who had been reprimanded or fined for their part in the auction. Innocent supporters were beginning to suffer for her cause.

Her public campaign had a financial impact too and in 1871 Newcastle County Court declared the Countess bankrupt and her possessions, which she claimed were Radcliffe family heirlooms, were put up for auction at Mr Sutton’s Sale Rooms in Newcastle. The sale attracted very little attention, partially due to Amelia’s dwindling popularity and the dilapidated and dubious condition of her belongings. Several bankruptcy examinations followed in which Amelia either refused to attend or refused to answer any questions. In 1872 she was imprisoned in Newcastle for contempt of court and in less than a year was released. In a wonderful act of consistency, the Countess of Derwentwater refused to leave her cell and had to be carried out of prison.

Amelia, the self-styled Countess of Derwentwater, died in February 1880 of bronchitis, aged 49, still claiming to be the rightful heir of the Dewentwater estate and rallying against the authorities. She died in poverty and was buried in an unmarked grave in Blackhill Cemetery, near Consett. In 2012 the Northumbrian Jacobite Society erected a small plaque on her grave to recognise the final resting place of the eccentric and determined Countess. The real identity of Amelia, Countess of Derwentwater has never been uncovered. Ralph Arnold, a biographer of the Radcliffe family, has suggested that Amelia was a school teacher from Yorkshire who was able to forge documents to support her claim in Latin and French and produce an imaged Radcliffe pedigree. Others have suggested that she may have been a governess in Germany to noble family. Some have said that she was simply an emboldened West Country servant girl with knowledge of the Radcliffe family. Whoever she may have been, the Countess of Derwentwater remains a fascinating mystery that continues to intrigue today.

As part of our celebration of the NHS, this extract  is taken from an oral history transcription after an interview with former Stannington Sanatorium student nurse Marjorie Wilson [T/882].

Marjorie began working at Stannington in 1949. She loved the work and enjoyed studying anatomy and physiology. When she was on day shift, she was awakened by someone knocking on the door at 6 am. They all had their own bedrooms at the nurses’ home, with washbasins, but the bathrooms were in a row at the end of the corridor. They had to be on the ward at 7am so the night staff could hand over and leave. The first task of the day was to wash the children, the night staff having already put their washing things out. Some children got bed baths, others just had their hands and face washed. Breakfast was brought over from the kitchens and they helped to feed those who could not feed themselves.

The nurses were not allowed on the ward while the teachers were there, but later served lunch. She could not remember if they administered treatments to the children before or after the teachers’ (who did not live in but came to Stannington every day from outside) visit. Some children had ulcers which had to be cleaned and bandaged. For the first few months she was at Stannington, streptomycin had not been introduced. Treatment was mainly bed rest and fresh air and they had to pull the beds out onto the veranda. They also had to make and tidy the beds, and do the ‘potty rounds’, taking any ambulant patients to the toilet. It was easy to take care of those who were on a frame, but they had to be kept very clean because they were lying in their beds for so long. One little boy called Garth was very possessive about everything, including his bodily excretions, which he hid in his sponge bag! The youngest patients were in a mixed ward. Another patient, Malcolm, had to have a dressing fed into the ulcers on his ankles. All the children’s pressure points were treated daily with dry soap, methylated spirits and powder, and none ever developed bed sores. Unfortunately there was not an awful lot of real nursing; mostly they were just looking after the patients, who had primary infections.  Most of the patients had parents who were tubercular and were from the poorer areas of Tyneside, with poor housing conditions. Marjorie’s class was taken to see the areas the children came from. She recalled six symptoms of tuberculosis: cough; spit; hemoptysis (spitting blood); loss of weight; loss of appetite; and night sweats. None of the Stannington patients had hemoptysis, a sign of secondary TB infection, which is highly infectious and required a huge hygiene regime. Negative infection was not infectious but the patients could be very poorly. They had both types at Stannington. TB was discovered by X-ray for those with bone infections; they were on the frames for a long time, which made Marjorie wonder whether streptomycin was used, because those with lung TB or sores recovered so quickly. Marjorie remembered a girl with Down’s syndrome called Maureen, who was on a frame. She was very affectionate and strong, so she grabbed hold of the nurses for a cuddle. Hers was the only death that Marjorie experienced at Stannington.

In general the children were very well-behaved. The older ones could read or do jigsaws, while parents brought in small toys for the younger ones that they could play with in bed. One six year old girl with red curly hair had to lie on her tummy. She was such a lovely child with a lovely name – Lorraine.  Marjorie ended up calling her daughter after her. In the early evening they would clear away the teatime meal and tidy the beds and children, getting them bedded down for when the night shift arrived. Night duty was three months at a time, with three days off after each fortnight. The first thing they did when coming on night shift was to get the children’s washing things ready for the morning. The main thing was to simply be there, as the children were asleep. They wrote letters and the report for the log book, with the night sister coming round a couple of times to make sure everything was alright. Sister Bevin was always on nights.

The medical superintendent was Dr Stobbs, who was in charge of the whole place. His family lived with him there – wife and two daughters. Marjorie remembered lovely dinners at the nurses’ home, which had a beautiful sitting-room with a baby grand piano and loads of comfy sofas. Dances were held there and if they brought partners, they had to introduce them to the Matron and the home sister who stood at one end of the room. It was all very formal. Dr Stobbs often made Marjorie sing after dinner. She recalled one of the Newcastle pantomimes coming to entertain the children with a condensed version of their show. She also remembered an open day with a brass band in which her father was playing. All the children were brought out, in bed on the verandas if necessary.  She could not remember being at the sanatorium at Christmas, although she recalled getting very drunk once on Sister Bevin’s home-made rhubard wine. She fell into the bath and got her cloak soaking wet. They were all very ill the following day and Sister Bevin was very angry. They made their own entertainment as they did not have much money.

Marjorie described her relationship with the children as ‘bossy’. It was necessary to impose a kind of discipline on them because there were so many – forty on one ward. Day shift comprised the ward sister, staff nurse and two student nurses, plus an orderly (many were German girls, as were kitchen workers and cleaners) per ward. A lot was left to the student nurses because the ward sister and staff nurse were often incarcerated in the office. The orderlies kept the floor clean, while the students looked after the sluices and damp dusted around the ward.  On visiting day at Stannington, the nurses stayed out of the way, although parents sometimes came and asked them how their child was getting on. The parents would sit round the bed of a bed-bound child, or go for a walk in the grounds if their child was mobile. The children cried after their parents left but got over their homesickness once they were back into the routing of the ward. Children are so adaptable; it was probably harder for the parents to cope with the separation. It would be a whole month before they could visit again. It was lovely when the children were well enough to go home; most left on the bus because few people had cars in those days. Marjorie did not remember Stannington being involved with any aftercare.