The Ward Years, 1939 to 1945
How the pool hall became a convalescent ward, and why the tiles survived untouched.
When the requisition notice arrived in the autumn of 1939, the house had two days to decide what a bathhouse becomes. The Navy wanted beds; the hall offered thirty-eight metres of dressed stone, a boiler the size of a barn, and water that arrived at 41 °C without being asked. The compromise was 36 cots along the pool's shallow end, on platforms the carpenters built in a weekend and the stewards kept warm through five winters.
The ward years changed the house in ways the house still keeps. The Resting Hall blanket custom comes from a matron who insisted on it for men who could not yet regulate their own heat. The barley soap in the yard dates to a 1941 supply problem and outlived the problem. And the tiles survived untouched because the surveyors sent from Kesselford liked the Mosaic Room too much to draw on it; the requisition maps show the steam hall marked simply "do not alter".
When the regulars returned in 1946, the plunge had lost none of its opinion. The house log for the first dawn back reads, in full: "Six swimmers. Water 6 °C. All present. House intact."
Demonstration: this article and its history are invented.