Aviva companies in WW2 — evacuated offices
The second in a series of blogs written to mark the anniversary of VE day by sharing the stories of Aviva companies on the home front.
As befits organisations used to dealing with risk, the companies which make up Aviva were quick to try to mitigate the potential dangers facing their staff and business operations with the threat of war.
The Provident Mutual Assurance Association was one of those which decided to move its head office staff and business out of London to reduce the risk from potential air raids. The company purchased Alresford Place near Winchester in June 1939 and quickly adapted it to use as an office with sleeping accommodation for staff and a separate document store.
The company moved shortly before the outbreak of war and the last lorry load of books and papers arrived the night before war was declared.
One member of staff, Vera Eldridge, later described her experiences of living and working there:
‘I was in a room with six others on the first floor, with only an iron bedstead and a wooden locker I could call my own. Further on was a washroom with two lavatories and three baths, no washbasins.
Some other members of staff had to walk through our bedroom to get to the washroom. Baths were painted with an orange line five inches from the bottom to indicate the depth of water allowed. A rota system was introduced for resident staff to take baths in office hours, taking 20 minutes each away from their desks.’
North British and Mercantile and its subsidiary, Railway Passengers Assurance, were even quicker off the mark and purchased Newland Park near Chalfont St Giles Buckinghamshire in April 1939. In the house and its grounds they set up office space, dining rooms, kitchens, and living accommodation to house over 500 staff.
The property was ready for occupation in August 1939 and its extensive facilities included air raid shelters, a fire station, elevated and underground water tanks, allotments, a kitchen garden, greenhouses, a bowling green, a putting green, tennis courts, a carpenters shop, a rifle range, cycle sheds, and an office bus. Staff evacuated there even formed their own concert party, the Newland Players, whose first performance took place in February 1940. You can see more images from Newland Park on my Historypin tour.
Entertainment for the London staff of Yorkshire Insurance, who were evacuated to Littlehampton at the start of the war and later moved to Naseby Hall in Northamptonshire, was slightly more basic. According to the later recollections of L G Tyler: ‘A very senior member of staff purchased a football so that we could let off steam. I often wonder what his feelings were when one of us punted the ball through a priceless oil painting in the great hall.’
Sadly, we don’t have any photographs of the great hall, either before or after the football incident, but we do have these photographs of the exterior of Naseby Hall and the extensive grounds.
According to an article in British General’s Christmas 1939 newsletter, no expense or lack of thought had been spared in preparations made for their staff who were evacuated to Batts Hill House, a 22-roomed mansion near Redhill. ‘Our fire and motor departments have found a comfortable home in the ballroom and the remainder have settled down in various living and bedrooms. Even the stables have been utilised for the thousands of files and papers and policy papers transferred from Cheapside.’ In addition, a shelter had been built in the grounds with fitted seats, an air purification system, and back up electricity. The company also rented two large houses in Caterham for staff to say in during the week so they only needed to travel home at weekends.
The article also provided details of how the staff received anti-gas training and were drilled in various ARP disciplines. A group of approximately 50 members of staff had been trained and split into fire, first aid, gas detection, and stretcher bearer parties. You can see some of them in the photograph below.
Norwich Union’s London offices were evacuated to Horsenden Manor just outside Princes Risborough, which was the country home of the West End branch manager A G L Sladen. Harold Francis of City branch later recalled the move: ‘We loaded all our stuff on a couple of lorries and set off. It was a job to find Princes Risborough. Or anywhere else, for that matter. All the signposts had been taken down!’
Having safely arrived, the staff settled down to work. Apparently the typists’ room had a lovely view of the moat and the lawns where the resident labrador, Rajah, and peacocks were often evident. The photograph below shows the motor department set up in the man hall, complete with stag’s head.
Wooden huts in the grounds housed other departments while files were stored in the stables.
After a while the company bought two cottages in the village to house the junior male staff. Most of the senior male staff moved their families with them and found rented accommodation nearby, while female staff were housed in the manor itself. Roy Harwood later recalled that any male found in the manor after 6pm was likely to be instantly dismissed.
The company’s head office in Norwich might have seemed a safe location but it soon became evident that it was well within the scope of enemy planes and that some head office activities should be moved elsewhere for safety. The company purchased the Spa Hotel in Buxton, Derbyshire and moved about 120 of the head office staff there in 1940.
The hotel was, in many ways, ideal for an evacuated insurance office as it was already set up with plenty of bedrooms and facilities such as a lounge and dining room which other exiled companies had found necessary to build for their staff.
The estate also included a small laundry so their washing could be done, a large games room, and a hard tennis court. There was even a ‘men’s room’ which was out of bounds to the ladies and was set up for the older male members of staff so they could sit by the fire, smoke their pipes, and play snooker in the evening.
Although some members of staff apparently found it hard to adjust to communal living, for 17-year-old Ray Shearing it was ‘like having our own playground’. Ray travelled up, with a few of the other junior clerks, in the removal lorry and was one of the first to arrive at the hotel. He later described how the previous owners had obviously left in a hurry with beds unmade and milk left to curdle in the jugs. He and his friends thoroughly explored the hotel while they worked to prepare it for the other staff. During this time they found ‘secret passages’ they would later use to play tricks on their colleagues.
Sleeping arrangements appear to have been less strict at Buxton than they were at Horsenden, and Ray found himself sharing a room with two other boys next door to one occupied by three of the girls on the staff. He recalled the three boys getting into trouble after innocently passing the evening eating birthday cake in the girls’ room and being caught returning to their own room at 2 in the morning. He looked back on his evacuation at Buxton as a marvellous adventure and by the time he left to join the air force he was engaged to one of the girls from the room next door.
Staff at Friends’ Provident did not get to experience the hotel life. They were initially evacuated to Red House, Harpenden and then moved to huts which were built for them at Moreton End Lane.
Staff member Mr Nightingale, writing in the staff magazine, later recalled how every available vehicle was commandeered to transport staff, files, and furniture: ‘How well I remember tying up of files in bundles and handling of those by a chain of staff down the stairs, supplementing the loads in the lifts. Even the girls worked like Trojans, especially upon reaching Harpenden where I can now vividly picture them sitting on the floor of the garage of the Red House sorting out files which had come adrift’.
Memories of other staff who moved to Harpenden refer to the lunch rota in operation under which two members of staff each day had to provide a snack lunch for 6d per head. The selected chefs were given the morning off to shop and prepare, and a very varied menu and much friendly competition resulted.
Friends Provident chose Harpenden for its evacuation because the company secretary, Bernard Brigham, lived there and was able to arrange things like lodgings for staff with local residents and to provide the land on which to build the huts. In retrospect it was perhaps not the quietest of locations and work was often disturbed by enemy raids on the nearby Luton aircraft factories. One member of staff remembered having to go to the shelters more than six times in one day.
North British and Mercantile similarly found the choice of Bexhill-on-Sea for its evacuated Croydon branch to have been a mistake when it was discovered to be particularly liable to tip and run raids.
With the benefit of hindsight, the worst decision for locating an evacuated office was made by Sun Life. The Society took the unusual step of splitting the staff from its head office and London branches into two sections and establishing two separate evacuated headquarters. The Northern Divisional Centre was based at Delrow House near Watford.
The Southern Divisional Centre was at East Hall in Orpington. It was at East Hall that 8 members of staff lost their lives when a land mine was dropped by an enemy plane on the night of 18 September 1940. You can read more about the activities of our staff during the war, life in Delrow House, and the tragedy of East Hall in my blogs tomorrow.
