Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  Albert Wildman, along with forty other miners, headed off for No. 1 district – a remote area of the pit, a twenty-five-minute walk from the bottom of the shaft.

  Eight miles away, at Wentworth, the King and Queen and the house party of thirty-four guests were half-way through dinner, seated at the three round tables in the State Dining Room. In the soft light cast by the candelabra the gold tableware and the crystal glass glittered. Military medals, pinned on the men’s lapels, caught the light as they moved; diamonds, rubies and emeralds from the ladies’ tiaras and jewels glinted in reply, as if flashing some secret aristocratic code.

  More than twenty footmen in full-dress livery stood behind the guests waiting to serve the ninth of thirteen courses. Even by the standards of the late Edwardians it had been a sumptuous meal, prepared by French chefs drafted up to Wentworth from London specially for the occasion. It had begun with Caviar Frais, Consommé Froid Madrilène, Saumon Truite et Mayonnaise, Filet de Boeuf Poêle, Poularde aux Perles de Périgord and Timbale d’Homard Royale, with Neige au Cliquot and Cailles aux Raisins to follow. The ninth course, the main dessert, was the culinary highlight. A strawberry dish, with a base of crème anglaise and jelly, the pudding was served in baskets spun from sugar. It had taken the resident confectioner three days to weave the baskets. Perfectly proportioned, they had circular handles and a tiny lid that lifted to reveal the strawberries nestling inside. To complete the conceit, the confectioner had coloured the sugar paste to give it a grain, like dark oak. The remaining courses – a savoury, cheese, fruit and petits fours – were still to come.

  Billy Fitzwilliam sat with the Queen on his right. Playing host to a reigning monarch was a first for the family. Queen Victoria’s visit to Wentworth in 1855 had been cancelled owing to the ill-health of the 5th Earl Fitzwilliam. Before that, in 1789, George IV, as Prince of Wales, had been the most senior royal to visit the house. In the library at Wentworth, Billy kept a treasured leather-bound scrapbook, passed down through the generations, containing the newspaper cuttings from the Prince of Wales’s stay. The 4th Earl Fitzwilliam had been his host:

  His Lordship in honour of his royal visitor gave the most splendid and magnificent entertainment that was ever witnessed in this part of England. Anxiously expecting to behold the illustrious visitor, not less than 40,000 people were assembled before the front of the house early in the afternoon. About four o’clock he returned from a morning visit to Lord Strafford and their highest hopes were fully gratified. He alighted from his horse amidst the huzzas of thousands, and, with the endearing affability which is his popular characteristic, he exhibited himself in the portico of the Saloon …

  After dinner – the Prince, Lord and Lady Fitzwilliam, His Grace of Norfolk, Sir Thomas Dundas and family and other gentlemen of distinction appeared again in the portico, and by means of a speaking trumpet held intercourse with the delighted multitude. A call of silence being made, the King’s health was drunk by the Prince, and followed by loud and repeated acclamations … The spectators were all this while gratified by the Prince’s presence, who for some time held up Lord Milton (a beautiful cherub, three years old) the only child of Earl Fitzwilliam, to see and be seen by the surrounding thousands.

  More than a century had passed, yet in scale King George V’s and Queen Mary’s arrival had all but matched the Prince’s visit in 1789. As dinner drew to a close, looking at the scene around him, Billy Fitzwilliam could congratulate himself; the royal visit was an affirmation of his family, testimony to its enduring wealth and strength.

  The Prince and his entourage had danced till dawn; in 1912, it was not that late when the party began to break up. An early start was planned for the next morning: the first stop on the King’s itinerary was a meeting with the fourteen-year-old boy to whom, seven weeks earlier, he had sent a pair of artificial limbs. It was to be followed by a tour of the surface workings at Silverwood colliery.

  By midnight, the house was wrapped in silence and darkness.

  Half a mile below ground, in the tunnels of No. 1 district at Cadeby Main colliery, Albert Wildman and William Humphries were laying a road. Aside from their clogs, they wore only a strip of cloth around their groins; the tunnel they worked in was just six feet high, the temperature in the pit approaching 95 degrees. As they sweated in the half-light, the props – the timber joints that held up the roof along the tunnel – creaked and cracked, shifting to the awesome weight above. ‘Hundreds of millions of tons of stone and clay and shale and dirt,’ one miner wrote, ‘and higher still upon the table of it all, moves the busy world of men.’ Albert should have been up at the coalface with his usual workmate, Joseph Boycott, but, because of the number of absentees, the pit deputy was a man short in No. 1 district. Wildman had been paired up with William Humphries instead.

  The two men felt uneasy as they worked; the pit was so empty. Where normally there would be a hundred miners, there were no men working either side of them for 400 yards.

  ‘We were getting along swimmingly with the work,’ Wildman remembered. ‘There was only another few hours left before the end of the shift. All of a sudden the air reversed, and it grew even hotter. The air was filled with dust, it all picked up from the tunnel floor. I can’t tell you what it was like but it was fearfully weird. We didn’t hear a sound, but the air, which had been blowing in one direction, suddenly began blowing in exactly the opposite. The sensation it gave me was just as though a big clock had been ticking and suddenly stopped.’

  The two men carried on working, but Humphries, a more experienced miner, was frightened. He went off to ask the opinion of a couple of men working further up the tunnel. He told them what he had felt but, as he later reported, ‘could not make anything of them’. Returning to Albert, they continued their work. After a bit, the flame in their lamps guttered to a thin blue plume – the sign of foul air. ‘Work I could not,’ said Humphries, ‘I thought there was something really amiss in the pit, but where it was I did not know.’ Increasingly anxious, he decided to walk to the top of the district to check the ventilation system that circulated air around the pit. On his way back to Albert, to his relief, he saw the light of a miner’s lamp heading towards him along the tunnel. It was John Farmer:

  When I got to Humphries, Humphries asked me if I’d heard anything or seen anything. I said, certainly not. I said I’ve just come off the east to the pit bottom and I’d neither seen nor heard anything, so he described to me what had occurred. As soon as he mentioned the wind reversing and the dust, I said, ‘My God! There’s been an explosion down the South Plane.’ I said it would be wise for us to go down the plane forthwith. Well, we wanted to see: we hadn’t any snap [food and water], we generally feel dry when we’ve had a run around like that. He wanted to see Wildman as regards coupling this road up. I said, ‘Nip down and tell him and I’ll wait of [sic] you and we’ll go down the plane. Of course, when he came back I asked him if he was ready and he didn’t answer as regards going down and he did utter these words, he says, ‘If what you think is right there will be someone up before now if there had been anything the matter.’ I says, ‘Good God, have you never known a district cut off and another district at work and that district know nothing about it.’ He said, ‘I have,’ and I said, ‘Perhaps there is no individual down there can get up.’

  The truth was that Humphries was too scared to go and investigate. More than half an hour had passed since he and Wildman had first noticed something was wrong. Farmer went alone.

  When I got 200 or 300 yards I began to see pieces of lids and various coverings and timbers blown about, lying in awkward positions across the rails. And then I proceeded further down. When I got further down, I began to feel being all alone, I began to feel a little strange in the head. I shouted two or three times and it was silent as the grave. I thought it would be wise for me to go back and get assistance.

  Farmer dispatched Albert Wildman to run the half-mile back to the shaft to get help. It was 4.30 a.m., an hour after the explosion. />
  Above ground, dawn was breaking over Denaby, the village where many of the Cadeby miners lived. Bunting from the previous day’s festivities fluttered in a light breeze; in the alleyways between the back-to-backs, Union Jacks lay strewn over the cobblestones. As the sun rose from behind Scabba Wood, the village was woken by the most sickening of sounds: a sound every householder dreaded. Someone in one of the houses began to bang a poker against a fire grate, the signal that there had been a serious accident at the pit. Within seconds, the sound was replicated a thousandfold, as others took up their pokers to drum out the grim beat.

  At Wentworth, the domestic army had risen early to prepare breakfast.

  The kitchen men and the coal porters were the first to wake. Their job was to stoke the fires in the kitchen so that breakfast could be cooked and to rouse the lower servants – the housemaids, scullery maids and kitchenmaids. ‘It was the handymen – the kitchen men – who woke us up,’ recalled May Bailey, a scullery maid. ‘We slept on the lower ground floor. When they carted the coal to the kitchen they used to knock on our windows. The handymen were always in the kitchen. They lifted all the big pans. There were these huge pans, set pots they called them. Like cauldrons, they were. We couldn’t lift them, the men did that. They had all these big cookers like barbecues. The fires were underneath the grate, with the stoves on either side, like an Aga. The fires kept the ovens going, and the men used to keep them going. The head kitchenmaid would say, “We want some more fuel on the fire, rake it, I want it hot.”’ Breakfast was cooked over the fire: chops, bloaters, chickens, woodcocks and cutlets were roasted in rows on spits. ‘They’d have twenty woodcocks in a row,’ remembered May Bailey, ‘all hanging down over the fire. The bacon was grilled in another part of the kitchen and there was one chef who had to make all the egg dishes.’

  By seven, the housemaids and footmen were also up. Tea trays were prepared to be taken upstairs and presented to the ladies’ maids and valets outside the guests’ bedroom doors. Footmen toasted and ironed the newspapers, crisping them for the breakfast table. In the scullery, the maids washed the loose change the men in the house party had emptied from their pockets and left out the night before. Later, their valets would return the sparkling coins. Breakfast was to be served at eight. The King was due to leave Wentworth at ten o’clock.

  Six hours after the explosion, underground at Cadeby Main, a rescue party had at last reached ‘14 level’ in the South District, the place where it had occurred.

  The devastation was described by Albert Wildman:

  We went slowly forward through the darkness. Suddenly one of the men shouted. We had come upon the scene of the disaster. At this point the pit was just one awful crumple. Lumps of roof and piles of ‘muck’ were in all directions, and fragments of shattered tubs were scattered all about. Suddenly we saw something white sticking out of the dust. It was the body of a man. He lay with his head on his arm as though he had tried to shield his eyes. We pulled him up out of the dust in which he was nearly buried and rolled him over. But he was quite dead. A little further on there were more bodies. Some were terribly shattered and scorched, while others looked as though they had passed peacefully away in their sleep. One boy – a lad of fourteen – we found lying with his arms around the neck of a pit-pony. Every hair was singed from the pony’s body …

  At 8.45, the pit manager confirmed that every man, boy and horse on ‘14 level’ was dead. As Albert Wildman later told a reporter, ‘My mate, Joseph Boycott, went down the workings and he’s dead now. But for the King’s visit, I should be dead also.’

  Unaware of the manager’s verdict, at the pithead a crowd of 200 women waited for news of their loved ones. The night shift had ended at 6 a.m. Seventy-six men had come out of the mine. All they knew was that thirty-five miners were missing. As the first bodies were brought up, the police formed a cordon around the shaft to hold the women back from the pit mouth. A local reporter was with them:

  Some three hundred yards from the road is situated the shaft and plainly visible to the horror-stricken spectators was a continuous procession of ambulance men bearing corpses from the pit to the pay room, where the long tables were rapidly filled up with the bodies of victims wrapped in white sheets … at first the women were fiercely angry with the officials for keeping them away from the squat building of red brick into which the stretchers are carried. ‘Why can’t you let us see whether our men are dead or not?’ one woman shouted, seizing a policeman’s arm. ‘If I was in your place I wouldn’t block the way two minutes.’ Another woman put an arm around her and led her gently away. ‘It’s no good taking on so,’ she said. ‘We’ll know soon enough, God help us.’

  Stretcher-bearers were bringing a new body out of the cage every two minutes. The suspense was awful.

  On a stone by the road that leads to the colliery an old man has kept watch for many hours. Sometimes he mutters to himself and plucks at his beard, and every now and then he springs to his feet, and, confronting some little group of miners that are about to pass him, beseeches them to give him some news of his sons. He is incoherent with agitation – almost crazy. ‘They’re down there, both of ’em,’ he keeps repeating. ‘Don’t say that they’ve put ’em in the dead house.’

  By mid-morning, the body count had reached twenty-two. Then, suddenly, shortly after eleven o’clock, the procession of corpses came to a halt. The great wheels silhouetted against the sky above the pithead – the mechanism that wound the cage up and down the shaft – stopped turning. Shouts were heard coming from the vicinity of the lamp room next to the cage. Rumour of a second explosion ran through the waiting crowd.

  It was true. Underground there was carnage. Forty-four men who had courageously volunteered to go down the pit to bring up the bodies from the first blast had been killed. Sergeant Winch was one of the few members of the rescue party to survive:

  We had been working down the pit for a couple of hours recovering the bodies of those killed in the first explosion – loading them into a train to carry them to pit-bottom. I think we had recovered about twenty-four bodies. It struck me that our electric torches had been in use for rather a long time, and that it would be well to recharge them. That thought saved my life. Two other men came with me. We had not gone more than a hundred yards when there was a roar. I found myself groping on the ground in thick darkness and swirling dust. How many yards I had been thrown by the explosion I can’t say. Dust. I have seen some terrible dust storms in India, but they were a trifle to the dust that swept over us. It was like a great black torrent. I groped my way about and suddenly I saw a tiny twinkle of light. It was from my electric lamp which was lying on the ground half-buried. There were hoarse shout s from behind us, and I got my lamp and we groped our way back to see if we could save anyone. We came across one or two who had been even nearer to the explosion than ourselves. They were badly cut about and we assisted them along the road. But there was no sign of the main body of rescuers. A huge fall had taken place close to where they were standing, shutting them in completely. It stopped up the way just like a cork pushed into a bottle. I believe that fall saved our lives, for while it crushed many of the rescue party, I believe that it dammed the flow of the after-damp which otherwise would have reached us and choked us before we got a hundred yards.

  Frederick Smith and his team, volunteers from a neighbouring colliery, were also lucky to escape: ‘For the most part,’ he said, ‘we were strangers to the pit, and half a dozen other men and myself took a turning which we thought would lead us to the victims of the first explosion. As a matter of fact, we lost our way, and that saved our lives. We went down a turning, and suddenly found we were cut off from the remainder of the rescue party. We were just about to turn round to get back to the main body, if possible, when the place was filled with a red glare. There was a dull rumbling noise and smoke and dust filled the air. Then came the gas. It made us turn sick and faint, but we held up, and in a few minutes the air had grown comparatively clear, and seizin
g our lamps, we retraced our steps along the road to discover what had become of our friends. We had not gone far before we came upon them. Bodies absolutely littered the ground. We had a pulmotor apparatus with us, and we did our best to revive one or two of them. Some of them were still alive and gasped feebly. One man suddenly exclaimed, “Lord help me, I am done,” and collapsed. When we bent over him he was quite dead.’

  Sergeant Winch and the two miners who had gone with him to get the chargers for the lamps, and Fred Smith and his men were among the few left alive on the shaft side of the fall. One hundred tons of rock had crashed from the roof in the explosion, entombing the rescue party: without proper digging equipment, it was impossible to reach the dead and dying on the other side. For the second time that day, as Albert Wildman had done some hours earlier, the men ran the mile to the pit bottom to raise the alarm.