Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  At precisely one minute to five o’clock, a bugle sounded, and an expectant hush fell over the crowd. A plumed officer on a grey charger galloped across the lawn, reining his horse to a crunching stop on the drive. Seconds later a fleet of grand cars, moving at walking pace, came into view, As they drew to a halt at the entrance to the Pillared Hall, the royal standard unfurled from the flagstaff above, catching in the breeze.

  It was not a social visit. The King and Queen had come to Wentworth on business. The day before they arrived, Billy Fitzwilliam had issued a statement to the Press:

  I am instructed by His Majesty that he wishes ‘informality’ to be the watchword. It is in no sense a state visit. The King and Queen have expressed a desire to see working men and working women in working conditions. We have impressed upon the owners of works and establishments to be honoured by the royal visit that a great deal of whitewash is not what is required.

  In the course of their four-day stay, George V and Queen Mary planned to visit collieries, factories, engineering works and steel foundries. The highlight of the tour – a personal coup for Billy and a first for a British monarch – was to be George V’s descent underground at Elsecar Main, Billy’s own pit.

  The Royal Tour of the North, as it became officially known, was radical in concept. It was also unprecedented. No British monarch had previously toured the industrial heartlands. Yet, historic though it was, the minutiae of the tour have not been preserved for the historical record. As in most matters relating to Wentworth, the details are blurred. The correspondence between the King’s officials and Billy Fitzwilliam in the months prior to the royal visit has been destroyed – both at Wentworth and in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle.

  The destruction of the Fitzwilliam side of the correspondence is not in itself odd; a reasonable assumption would be that the papers were among those burnt in the great bonfire of 1972. At Windsor, the Registrar of the Royal Archives explained why the King’s correspondence has not been preserved: ‘Many of the files from the Private Secretary’s Office in the reign of George V were destroyed many years ago. They ran out of space. There was nowhere to store the papers.’ Yet the suggestion is, from other historical sources, that George V’s visit to Wentworth was instigated by worried courtiers. Mysteriously, as the Registrar at Windsor confirmed, important correspondence between the King and the Prime Minister in the months leading up to his visit to Wentworth – and directly relevant to it – was also deliberately destroyed: not for reasons of space, but due to the sensitivity of the letters. The aim of the Royal Tour of the North, as George V himself stated, was ‘to see working men and working women in working conditions’. Why then were the stewards of the Crown so determined to hide the traces of the events that led to a four-day public appointment that on the face of it demonstrated an admirable engagement with the lives of the working classes?

  It is necessary to look elsewhere. A Cabinet memo suggests that the tour was hastily arranged. George V, so it reveals, had never intended to go to Wentworth. He had originally planned to spend the summer conducting a series of state visits to his European cousins. At the Cabinet meeting at Downing Street on 6 March, the King’s proposed tour of the ‘royal houses of Europe’ was one of the main subjects of discussion. ‘After careful consideration of the matter in all its aspects,’ the Prime Minister wrote to the King, ‘it was the general opinion of the Cabinet that Your Majesty should be advised to postpone the visits until next year.’ Chief in the Cabinet’s reasoning was ‘the unsettled social and industrial aspect at home’. It was a masterful flourish of understatement; the subtext was that the political situation was too precarious to permit the King to leave the country.

  In the first months of George V’s reign, Britain had been convulsed by strikes. In the summer of 1911, soon after his coronation, a pamphlet was circulated by radical trade unionists to soldiers serving in His Majesty’s armed forces at garrisons in the north of England.

  Men! Comrades! Brothers! You are in the army. So are we. You, in the army of Destruction. We, in the Industrial army of Construction.

  We work at mine, mill, forge, factory or dock, producing and transporting all the goods, clothing stuffs, etc, which makes it possible for people to live.

  You are Working men’s Sons.

  When we go on Strike to better Our lot, which is the lot also of Your Fathers, Mothers, Brothers, and Sisters, YOU are called upon by your Officers to MURDER US. Don’t do it.

  On 17 August 1911, the newly crowned King, staying with the Duke of Devonshire at Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire, was compelled to send a telegram from the grouse moors to Winston Churchill, the Home Secretary. Was he satisfied, he inquired, that order in the country could be preserved? Two hundred miles south, the Aldershot Garrison had been mobilized to the capital. Along St James’s Street and Pall Mall, gunmakers had sold out of revolvers in twenty-four hours. ‘The difficulty,’ Churchill replied, ‘is not to maintain order but to maintain order without loss of life.’

  The country was in the grip of a national railway strike – a strike that, as the King described, caused him the ‘greatest possible anxiety’. It had been preceded by a national dock strike and a national transport workers’ strike. Collectively, they indicated a new mood among the working classes, one that would become increasingly belligerent as the year progressed. The King’s distress – and his alarm – is evident in a letter his Private Secretary wrote to Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister, on 6 September, shortly after the King returned from Bolton Abbey.

  The King is very much disturbed by the present unrest among the working classes and by the possibility, if not probability, of further strikes breaking out at any moment. He is afraid that if there were a renewal of recent occurrences, the disturbances might lead to political elements being introduced into the conflict which might perhaps affect, not the existence, but the position of the Crown – independent of other evils. He desires me therefore to urge most strongly on the Government the importance (& it is also their duty) of their taking advantage of the lull, and of Parliament not meeting until the end of October, to devise a scheme, which although not entirely preventing strikes (perhaps that is not possible) would to a large extent prevent a threatened strike from coming to a head, and might be the means of preventing ‘sympathetic’ strikes from taking place.

  The Liberal Party had repealed the punitive Taff Vale Judgement of 1902. The Prime Minister was not prepared, as he perceived, to legislate against the grain of democracy. Five months later the storm the King had anticipated was unleashed.

  On 1 March 1912, the country was faced with a situation that had never been experienced, never even dreamt of. One million miners went out on strike, the number downing tools unequalled in any industry in Britain or Europe. The closest parallel was the General Strike of 1905 in Russia. The miners were striking for a minimum wage – the ‘fives and twos’ – 5 shillings for a man per shift and 2 shillings for a boy. It was the gravest of all the challenges from organized labour: in the Prime Minister’s words, British trade was as dependent on coal as ‘we all of us’ depend on agriculture ‘for our daily bread’.

  Within days of the start of the strike, industry began to stagger, then it stopped.

  It is at this point that the letters between the King and his Prime Minister also stop.

  In the Archives at Windsor Castle and at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where Herbert Asquith’s papers are deposited, the letters between the two men in the month of March 1912 are missing. In point of fact, there are very few letters for the entire first year of the King’s reign.

  George V’s correspondence with Herbert Asquith has been systematically pruned. The King’s letter to the Prime Minister, written on 6 September 1911, by his Private Secretary, is to be found in Herbert Asquith’s papers. It is the only letter from the period. Stark in its revelation of the King’s anxieties, it appears to have slipped through the net: after the correspondence between George V and the Prime Minister was destroyed
at Windsor Castle, there was obviously a clear instruction to ensure that the originals among Asquith’s papers were also destroyed.

  The gravity of the crisis engendered by the miners’ strike is apparent in the Cabinet’s decision on 6 March – a week after it began – to advise the King to postpone his European tour. That George V and the Prime Minister regarded the strike as a threat to the very existence of the Crown, as opposed merely to its position, is suggested by the missing correspondence. Further clues lie among the fragments of historical record that remain. They are to be found in the private papers – and in the behaviour – of the Prime Minister and his wife.

  Three weeks after the Cabinet meeting on 7 March, an extra-ordinary scene took place in the House of Commons. On 27 March, Margot Asquith recorded the following entry in her diary: ‘Last night an emergency coal bill – the Minimum Wage Bill – was carried at 3 o’clock this morning by 213 votes to 48. I should say this is perhaps the most dangerous and unhappy moment of our or indeed anyone’s political experience.’

  Faced with the paralysis of industry and deadlock between the coal owners and the miners, Asquith was forced to rush a Minimum Wage Bill through Parliament in an attempt to resolve the strike. At 10.30 on the evening of 26 March, he opened the speeches at the Bill’s third reading. It was by no means certain that the Bill would resolve the strike, or that Parliament would pass it. The historian George Dangerfield, based on the testimony of those who witnessed the Prime Minister’s speech, described what followed:

  He was on his feet, speaking not so much to the apprehensive faces around him, as to the miners themselves. He begged them to stay the havoc with which the country was confronted: he recited once again the efforts which had been made, how hopes had risen and hopes had been shattered. ‘We laboured hard,’ he said. He turned to the packed Labour benches. If their case for the five shillings and the two shillings was strong, would they not trust the district boards to provide these rates? Must the country be subjected to further hardship? ‘I speak under the stress of very strong feeling,’ he went on; and hesitating between words – he, who was always so impassive, so lucid – begged Parliament to pass the Bill. ‘We have exhausted all our powers of persuasion and argument and negotiation,’ he concluded, in low thick halting tones. ‘But we claim we have done our best in the public interest – with perfect fairness and impartiality.’ He stood there, struggling for words; and they would not come. The House watched him, fascinated and appalled: something was taking place before its eyes which not one of its members had ever expected to see.

  The Prime Minister was weeping.

  Asquith’s were tears of exhaustion and humiliation. For the first time since the English Civil War, the sanctity of Parliament had been breached: the miners, a non-elected body, had forced the Prime Minister to legislate. Further humiliation threatened. The Bill had failed to stipulate the amount of the minimum wage – the ‘fives and twos’ the miners demanded: it was possible that it would not persuade them to call off the strike.

  Here was power indeed. At the height of her Imperial wealth and glory, and for the first time in her history, the miners had combined to bring Britain to her knees. Syndicalism, a continental movement the revolutionary socialist ideas of which had struck a chord in some industrial areas, was blamed. Lord Cecil, the son of the former Conservative Prime Minister, believed the strike posed a ‘profound danger to civilization’. It was ‘part of a great conspiracy’, an attempt, he said, to gain ‘dictatorial powers over the industries of this country by a small band of revolutionaries’.

  At Downing Street, Herbert Asquith’s anxiety was echoed by his wife. In an entry in her diary, Margot confided, ‘I was terribly harassed by the living danger and for H’s anxiety over the strike.’ Out of desperation, in mid-March at the height of the strike, when her husband was deadlocked in heated negotiations with the miners’ trades union leaders – and behind his back – she endeavoured to arrange a secret meeting with Robert Smillie, the Vice-President of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain and a key figure in the negotiations. The day after meeting Smillie at a lunch party, hosted by the industrialist Sir George Askwith, Margot sent him a letter:

  I was pleased to meet you yesterday. You will keep your promise of being at the Westminster Palace Hotel at 3.30 tomorrow, where I shall meet you. The big question I long to ask a man of your ability, sympathy, and possibly very painful experience is: What do you want? Do you want everyone to be equal in their material prosperity? Do you think quality of brain could be made equal if we had equal prosperity? Do you think in trying or even succeeding in making Human Nature equal in their bankbooks, they would also be equal in the sight of God and Man? Equal in motive, in unselfishness, in grandeur of character?

  Margot concluded her letter with a plea: ‘I don’t like to see my husband suffer in his longing to be fair, just and kind to both sides in this tragic quarrel,’ she wrote. ‘Keep your blood warm. Don’t let it get cold. Use your great power for an honourable settlement. Destruction is a sad exchange for construction. Help my husband. He is a self-made man like yourself …’

  Smillie reneged on his promise to meet her. Undeterred, she wrote again, imploring him:

  I don’t see why anyone should know we have met. I am afraid I vexed you in my letter, which was written quite freely. (Perhaps you did not get my letter?) Do the masters and the miners live at your hotel? Do let us meet again. I don’t want to talk about the strike at all. It is only for the pleasure of discussing abstract ideas with a man whose temperament and views interest me. I am very sorry you have thrown me over. I’ve never been afraid of any individual, or any situation, or rumour, or gossip in my life; but can assure you that I would meet you at 3 Queen Anne’s Gate, Sir Edward Grey’s house, at 3.30. Even he need not know. I would just ask him if he would allow me to have private talk with a friend for 15 minutes. He would say ‘Yes’ and never even ask, nor would I tell anyone. If you won’t do this, do answer my letter.

  Smillie does not appear to have answered either of Margot Asquith’s letters, yet the answers to the questions she sought were simple, expressed by John Cairns, a miner from Northumberland. ‘Our men have been under the thumbs of the masters from at least 1870 until now and our men are more refined than they were forty years ago,’ he said, ‘they desire better homes, better food, better clothing, better conditions.’

  The core issue of the miners’ strike was wages, as it had been in the railwaymen’s, dockers’ and transport workers’ strikes that had preceded it. In the winter of 1912, the British working man was poorer than he had been in 1900. Between 1896 and 1910, food prices had risen by 25 per cent, causing the real level of wages to drop. In presenting the case for a minimum wage, George Barker, a trades union leader from South Wales, illustrated his argument using the example of the average miner whose nominal wage was 27 shillings* for a six-day week living in a household of six. ‘He does not work full-time,’ Barker said,

  there is the slack time, trade and general holidays to be taken into account, which will reduce the average from six days to five-and-a-half-per-week, and reduces his average wages from 27 shillings to 24 shillings 9 pence per week. Let us look now at the family budget, which will work out at something like this for a family of six persons. Rent 6 shillings per week, coal 1 shilling and 6 pence, fuel 1 shilling, clothing and footwear per week 5 shillings, club doctor and Federation per week 1 shilling, making a total of 14 shillings and 6 pence. This leaves 10sh and 3 pence per week for food to feed six persons for a week. Allowing a bare three meals per day, eighteen meals per week – 126 meals – with 123 pence to pay for them, or less than 1 pence per meal per head. Have we overstated the case? No; if anything it is understated. There are thousands in this movement that are existing for less than 1 pence per meal per head.

  In the event, the miners did not, as the Prime Minister had feared, continue their strike. Reluctantly, divided over the fact that the Minimum Wage Bill had failed to stipulate the ‘fives
and twos’, they returned to work at the beginning of April. The crisis had passed, but it left a profound feeling of unease. The miners had returned not just with a sense of grievance, but with a sense of power. They were not alone. The transport workers, the dockers and the railwaymen had come out before them: it was felt that it was simply a question of time before they joined forces to mount the final assault of a General Strike.

  George V’s visit to Wentworth was triggered by the unprecedented industrial militancy that overshadowed the first twelve months of his reign; that it was a deliberately conceived public relations exercise designed to strengthen the position of his throne is suggested by an entry in the Archbishop of York’s diary. It was he who first thought of the idea while staying with the King and Queen at Balmoral. Intrigued, George V asked the Archbishop to submit a memo. He recorded its substance in his diary: ‘I urged the importance of his [the King’s] coming into contact with the masses of his people, that it was not enough that they should assemble in the streets on ceremonial occasions to see him, but that he might, so to say, go to see them – move about with as little ceremony as possible through their own towns, villages and workshops.’

  Cosmo Gordon Lang, the Archbishop of York, was a member of the Edwardian ‘liberal’ establishment; he subscribed to its belief that society would have to be modified if its essential features were to be preserved. As a close personal friend and adviser to George V, it was this belief that motivated him to suggest that the King should alter his modus operandi too. As prelate in one of the great industrial dioceses, Gordon Lang was sensitive to the suffering of the working class. Presciently, on the eve of George V’s coronation, he addressed an audience in the Queen’s Hall. ‘The nineteenth century,’ he told them,