Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  When I was a boy a bitter struggle rose between Capital and Labour and my Father was thrown out of work through no fault of his own and I learnt to know what scarcity of food meant. During the strike, my mother was taken dangerously ill and I accompanied my father on foot to Leeds, a distance of about nine miles, to fetch medicine. Returning to the village, when we entered it, we were accosted by a neighbour who told us my mother had died. I’ll never forget my father at that moment – a strong man bowed down by grief. Shortly after, two of my brothers also died. A kind friend came to our relief, and I now feel duty bound to do likewise.

  Besides housing as many of the homeless as he could squeeze into his school and chapel, Wilson distributed food parcels and blankets and clothing to the families living in the fields outside Denaby. ‘There were two classes of tent,’ he recorded in his journal, ‘the marquee and the bell-tents. In the former a large stove was fixed up for heating and cooking purposes: the latter being too small for a stove, it was fixed outside with pieces of wood nailed together to prevent the wind blowing out the fire. Beds were placed on wooden floors a few inches from the ground in the marquee, while in the bell-tents straw was spread over the wooden floor, and the mattresses placed on top.’

  The tents had been erected at the bottom of a slope. Someone had hoisted a Union Jack on a pole, prominently displayed, at the entrance to the field. Water from the sleet, snow and rain that fell in the days after the evictions poured down the hill and saturated the grass, transforming it into a carpet of mud. Two children were born in the tents that January, both christened Jesse, a mark of gratitude to the Reverend. Two also died – one from blood poisoning after grazing his knee.

  Sightseers in their thousands came by train to Denaby to look at the marquees. ‘Many seemed to think it was a kind of peepshow minus the usual fee for admission,’ wrote the Reverend Jesse angrily. In caring for the families, he saw at close hand the reality of their lives:

  I was returning from an appointment in Conisbrough and determined to see how the people were faring. The air was dry, the wind intensely bitter and the ground crisp. I was muffled up to the mouth and yet shivered with cold; I failed to keep warm even when walking briskly. I reached the field and entered. I went into the marquee first and saw a sight which saddened and sickened me. A few feet from the stove were a man and a boy lying on a mattress with a thin covering over them. The boy was lying with his face to the man’s back and with his arms over the man, pulling himself as closely to the man as possible to create warmth, and yet he shivered with cold. His teeth rattled in his mouth. I went to the bell-tents, and in one were five lovely children fast asleep, forgetful of the hard lot they were passing through. They lay on a mattress with a thin sheet thrown over them, while a few inches above their little heads was the tent canvas, blowing in and out at the pleasure of the wind.

  10

  It was first light, the Monday after the evictions at Denaby.

  Along the road to the colliery, a sharp east wind shook the overhead gas mantles in and out of incandescence. Out of the gloom, shadowy figures converged. The stark mathematical outline of the colliery rose ahead of them, the spokes on the still pulley wheels grimly distinct.

  That morning – 12 January 1903 – 3,000 miners had made an early start to attend a union meeting in a field adjoining the pit. Walking from their temporary lodgings in the neighbouring towns and villages, some had covered distances of seven or eight miles.

  Two hundred yards behind the colliery, a few solitary policemen banged the last nails into the boarded-up windows in the houses. It had taken three days to turn 750 families out on to the streets, now deserted. ‘Thank God it’s over,’ one policeman said, ‘such pitiful work has never before been my lot.’

  Fred Croft, the Chairman of the Denaby and Cadeby Main Strike Committee, addressed the men from a dray that had been wheeled into the field and now served as a makeshift platform. ‘If we are beaten we are ruined,’ he told them. ‘If the struggle lasts another two years I hope you’ll stand like braves to the foe. We have shown the world what we mean to do. We intend to fight on. We have put up with things thousands would not have stood. It is time the men of this country arose and said what should be done. If we do not take this step, conditions will become worse and worse. It is the men with the money who make the weak suffer.’

  Croft’s words – and the loud applause – carried over the empty streets behind.

  ‘Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’ The colliery company, in what it believed to be a ‘wicked and causeless strike’, was equally determined not to give ground. It had taken the roof from over the miners’ heads. To crush them into submission, its next step, in effect, was to threaten them with death.

  Starvation was the company’s chosen weapon of execution; the law courts, the executioner.

  On 14 January, four days after the last families had been evicted, a judge in London ordered the miners’ strike pay to be stopped.

  From the outset, the company had claimed the payments were illegal. When the men walked out of the pits, they had been in breach of the Yorkshire Miners’ Association’s rules. It was a spontaneous action: no ballot was taken, nor did the men serve notice on the company. The union’s rules stipulated that before strike action could be endorsed, any stoppage had to have a two-thirds majority by ballot, and that the men had to serve notice on their employers. Unless these rules were observed, the strike was unofficial and no strike pay could be disbursed. On 17 July, three weeks after the miners at the Denaby and Cadeby pits had gone on strike, to circumvent its rules for the purpose of issuing strike pay, the Yorkshire Miners’ Association ordered the men to return to the collieries to serve notice on the company.

  Days later, William Howden, a miner at Cadeby and one of the few opposed to the strike, took out an injunction against the union to prevent it distributing strike pay, claiming the stoppage was both illegal and unofficial. Howden was a company stooge. Lord Beveridge later remarked: ‘The colliery company, wishing to make the strike impossible, were almost openly financing the nominal plaintiff and were really at the bottom of the action. Why they don’t get sued for maintenance of another’s suit I can’t say.’

  The company paid Howden’s legal expenses and gave him a subsistence allowance while he pursued his case. It dragged through the courts for months. When it finally came to appeal in January 1903, the judge was clearly biased against the striking miners. At one point during the hearing, as Beveridge noted, he made his prejudice quite obvious, openly stating that he wanted the strike pay stopped in order to bring the strike to an end. He directed the jury to uphold the injunction on the grounds that the men had illegally broken their contracts on 29 June, and that they could hardly return to work on 17 July for the purpose of handing in their notices to terminate contracts that had been terminated three weeks earlier.

  Strike pay was all the miners had to survive on. The weekly allowance of 9 shillings per man,* 1 shilling for every child under the age of thirteen, and 4 shillings and sixpence to lads – boys between the ages of fourteen and eighteen who worked at the pit – meant that, while many of the families in Denaby went hungry, they were not starving. But without strike pay, they would.

  ‘It was a terrifying time for our people,’ recalled Robert Shepherd, who was nine in January 1903, when the payments were stopped.

  In the absence of the Welfare State, short of uprooting and seeking work elsewhere, whether the miners starved or not depended largely on the kindness of others. In Edwardian England, the poor and the needy were looked after by their communities. Charity was part of the weave of society, the threads running through it from the bottom to the very top.

  As Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, Duchess of Marlborough, recalled, the poor ate the scraps of food from ‘Society’s’ plates:

  It was the custom at Blenheim to place a basket of tins on the side table in the dining room and here the butler left the remains of our luncheon. It was my duty to cram this foo
d into the tins, which we then carried down to the poorest in the various villages where Marlborough owned property. With a complete lack of fastidiousness, it had been the habit to mix meat and vegetables and sweets in horrible jumble in the same tin. In spite of being considered impertinent for not conforming to precedent, I sorted the various viands into different tins, to the surprise and delight of the recipients.

  At Wentworth, once a week, the slaughterman from the Home Farm drove round the Fitzwilliams’ villages in a cart, piled high with the carcasses of animals the house had not managed to consume. They were cut up into joints of meat and distributed among the poor. At Christmas, every tenant on the estate was given a ham and a side of beef.

  The culture of giving was also dominant among the working classes. In mining communities, when the pits were working, people helped those who had fallen on hard times. The miners were clannish: their common bond was their knowledge of one another. Often, they lived in the same village from birth to death, and many never travelled far from it. At Denaby, there were no gardens to separate the houses, or hedges or high walls; the partition walls were so thin in the terraced cottages that you could join in the conversation next door. Coal and food were shared; from an early age children were brought up to run errands for the elderly in the village, or for families who had been brought down by injury or illness.

  Communities were tightly bound; you looked after your own. It was both a strength and a weakness. The problem for the Denaby miners during the hard strike months in the winter of 1903 was that if they belonged to anyone, it was to the coal owners who were bent on crushing them into submission. The village was surrounded by land owned by Britain’s wealthiest aristocratic families – the Duke of Norfolk, Earl Fitzwilliam, the Earl of Scarbrough, Viscount Halifax – but their charity was feudal, based on centuries-old ties of sentiment and mutual self-interest. There was no binding at Denaby, the miners were outsiders; in times of conflict and strife they were left to fend for themselves.

  Initially, their plight had moved the country. Throughout the week of the evictions, it was front-page news. Donations of food and money poured in from all over Britain. A Grimsby merchant sent two tons of fish and a Sheffield businessman promised twenty stone of flour each week until the strike was over. Some offered homes to the miners, or to take their children in for a month or two. One woman, writing from Chesterfield, said, ‘I have myself a little boy aged ten so they won’t be lonely.’ Collections were held at football matches at Sheffield, Manchester and Nottingham, and miners at pits as far afield as South Wales donated money from their wages.

  After the evictions, Denaby dropped out of the headlines; the village was forgotten and the donations from around the country slowed to a trickle. The soup kitchens and bread queues run by the churches and the chapels, and by armies of local women volunteers, were not able to feed the proverbial five thousand. Groups of miners toured the district, begging what they could. The Reverend Jesse Wilson spoke to a woman in the tents waiting for her husband to return:

  The poor mother was seated outside in front of the tent stove, half blinded with the smoke, which seemed to hesitate as to which way it would go; then suddenly would take a whirl as if determined to fly all ways at the same time. She was anxiously waiting the return of her husband who had been away nearly all the day in the hope of picking up a few pennies for the hungry ones at home. I could see that a dread of failure arising from his long absence was in her face. Had he succeeded he would have been back long since, for she said, ‘He cannot stand the youngsters starving.’

  In the weeks following the evictions, the magistrates’ courts at Doncaster, Rotherham and Barnsley were clogged with poaching cases. Traditionally, poaching had been a means of supplementing the family diet. After strike pay was stopped, it became a necessity.

  The pit villages in the South Yorkshire coalfield were set amidst rich sporting estates. Away from the western edge of the Don Valley, coal, iron and steel, while scarring the land above, had not claimed it. In the summer, the hedgerows along the small country lanes connecting one village to another were crowded with cow parsley and wild flowers, and in spring, with hawthorn blossom. Fields of crops encircled the collieries. ‘The corn stands rank on rank,’ wrote Arthur Eaglestone, ‘a million ears, silent and bristling, or flowing like the tide when the wind sweeps along its liquid surface. The twin steel chimneys of the pit rise up beyond, and the dead straight cinder track is hidden in the depths.’ In a strange ritual, enacted whenever the pits were working, hundreds of coal-black men ran directly from the pithead into these fields at the end of their shifts, to recover stores of matches and tobacco they had buried at the base of the stalks of corn, or hidden in cracks in the stone walls that enclosed them.

  The miners were countrymen, skilled in the art of poaching. They looked upon it as their right to take something from someone who had much more than they had. It was just another fight with the coal owner: ‘He robs us all day, we’ll rob him all night.’ A good poacher could call the hares on the back of his hand, with a peculiar sort of sound, walking round and round in decreasing circles, while the hare watched hypnotized.

  Men, and young boys, walked miles through moonless nights across the great estates of South Yorkshire, and the lucrative poaching grounds in the Dukeries, an area to the south of Rotherham where the Dukes of Portland, Leeds, Norfolk, and Earl Manvers, some of the wealthiest coal owners in England, had their stately homes.

  Fred Smith, a miner from Kiveton Park colliery, born in 1891, looking back on his childhood, wrote, ‘I could go on for years about food. It seems to have been one long struggle for food. Thousands of experiences crowd into my mind, and the idea of food runs through them like a thread.’ Among the most memorable was the night Fred went poaching with his father on the Duke of Portland’s land at Welbeck Abbey:

  Six miles or more we travelled, mostly across fields, only using the road to cross. Outside a small wood near Whitwell Common, we stood and listened for a long time, an hour I should think, and the romance of the night sounds sent cold shivers down my spine. The far-off bark of a farm dog, the crow of a pheasant in the wood, the staccato yelp of a fox and the stir of life in the undergrowth. The laws of nature were being enacted in the night and their long arm stretched into the heart of a nine-year-old little poacher. I was part of that nature and was going into the night to kill, to kill so that I might eat.

  Crossing the Worksop Road into Welbeck Park, they came to a wood where there were ‘hundreds of pheasants as tame as fowls’. Half a mile away, Fred could see Welbeck Abbey, the Duke of Portland’s home, ‘its windows alive with lights and its turrets gleaming’. Three fires blazed on the other side of the wood. ‘On the air came the faint scent of cigar. The old man sniffed and said he thought that the yogs [gamekeepers] were on the watch and had given themselves away by smoking.’

  Fred’s father knew the estate well. He also knew what lay beneath it. As a boy, he had worked as a carter for the 5th Duke of Portland, wheeling stone from the local quarry, used to construct a vast network of underground rooms that extended for twelve miles under the Welbeck estate. There was a ballroom that could accommodate 2,000 people and a riding school with a gallop a quarter of a mile long, lit by 8,000 jets of gas. One tunnel led to a suite of rooms covering four acres, and another to stables, cow-houses and dairies, where more than sixty people were employed.

  The Duke of Portland was one of the richest coal owners in England. In the 1860s, when construction first began, a miner working at one of his collieries earned around £50 a year. The Duke’s annual income was in the region of £108,000. Whimsy, not wages, drove him to burrow underground; an eccentric and a recluse, he could not bear to be seen.

  The Duke spent his life wandering his estate at Welbeck. Tenants, labourers and servants were forbidden to speak to him, or even to acknowledge his presence. If they chanced upon the Duke, their instructions were to pass him by ‘as they would a tree’. The man who dared touch his hat wou
ld be instantly dismissed. The temptation to stare must have been strong. Winter or summer, the Duke dressed in the same peculiar fashion. His trousers were tied inches above the ankle with a piece of string; he wore a heavy sable coat that touched the ground, and an old-fashioned wig. On top of the long wig, he wore a hat two feet high. Rain or sunshine, he carried an umbrella to hide beneath if anyone passed. He never mingled in society and was never seen at court. When he drove out on his estate, it was alone, in a black carriage, drawn by black horses, with the blinds down.

  The same carriage transported him to London. Directly underneath Welbeck Abbey there was a circular courtyard, where eight underground roads and passageways converged. It was the hub of the tunnel network. Two hundred yards in radius, built from red brick, it had a vaulted roof and a platform made from stone. Lit by gas lamps, it was where the Duke would wait for his carriage to collect him, the noise of the horses’ hooves and the clatter of wheels against the brick echoing along the tunnels, announcing its imminent arrival minutes before it thundered into the courtyard, sweeping in a majestic half-circle up to the platform where the Duke stood. From here, the carriage proceeded down the longest tunnel, almost one and a quarter miles, to Worksop station, where it was loaded, with the Duke inside it, on to a specially built railway wagon. Four black horses, harnessed in the Duke’s livery, waited at Euston station, enabling him to continue his journey, uninterrupted, and unseen, to his house in Cavendish Square.

  ‘My father knew every inch of these tunnels,’ wrote Fred Smith. Above ground, dotted across their poaching grounds, were scores of circular glass windows. They had been installed, at intervals of twenty feet, to light and ventilate the tunnels. Thirty years after Fred’s father had worked on their construction, the skylights offered him and his son a line of escape in the event of discovery.