Friday 27 January 2017

Secretum discubitus

The Secret Rooms by Catherine Bailey

Catherine Bailey read history at Oxford University and is a successful, award-winning television producer and director, making a range of critically acclaimed documentary films inspired by her interest in twentieth century history. She lives in West London.  She has written a compelling account of a dysfunctional family in the upper echelons of nobility.  The account reads like mystery and her research for the book, which flows like a novel, must have required superior detective skills.

...........At 6 am on 21st 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.  But what lay behind this extraordinary set of circumstances?

For the first time, in The Secret Rooms, Catherine Bailey unravels a complex and compelling tale of love, honour and betrayal, played out in the grand salons of Britain's stately homes at the turn of the twentieth century, and on the battlefields of the Western Front. At its core is a secret so dark that it consumed the life of the man who fought to his death to keep it hidden. This extraordinary mystery from the author of Black Diamonds, is perfect for lovers of Downton Abbey, Brideshead Revisited and The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.

.............. as I read the final pages I could only marvel at what I had read and what it tells the reader about the lengths to which members of a family will go to protect 'the firm', to connive, to deceive, to bring the privileges which birth has conferred on an individual to bear for personal advancement and preference.  Violet, the female protagonist in the story, is a scheming woman of the worst kind.  What she represents is the lengths to which mothers will go to protect their own. 


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