Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  The lecturer said that the Russian workmen had never suffered as much as they were doing at the present moment. The workmen were confined to their factories by force, the right of meeting was prohibited, all Socialist papers were suppressed, and any Socialist who did not agree with the terroristic policy of the Bolsheviks was at once imprisoned or killed …

  The Professor went on to say that the Bolsheviks had abolished God, and had forbidden children to say their prayers, therefore it was not surprising to find that archbishops had been massacred and mutilated, bishops had been buried alive, and priests and monks had been massacred wholesale …

  Reading from captured German documents, the lecturer then startled his audience by declaring that Bolshevism was not Russian at all, but was a German-made instrument … The majority of the Bolshevik leaders, he said, were German Jews.

  Billy did not confine his crusade against Communism to South Yorkshire. At the start of 1919, he revived a secret society that had lain dormant during the Great War. With the unedifying name of the Mineral Owners’ Association of Great Britain (MOAGB), its members were some of the richest and most powerful men in Britain. So secretive was the organization that later that year a Government inquiry failed to elicit their names.

  The association was established on a pact: should it ever be disbanded, its records would be burnt precisely twelve months after. The society closed in 1947; a year later the documents were duly destroyed.

  Nevertheless, a few papers have survived. They reveal that in the years between the two World Wars over fifty peers joined the MOAGB. ‘Mowbray and Stourton, Buccleuch, Carnarvon, Leeds, Northumberland, Scarbrough …’, the list reads on, a throwback to the Middle Ages, a roll-call of the country’s wealthiest aristocrats. Between them, they owned great swathes of Britain; they also, as mineral royalty owners, owned a sizeable proportion of the country’s largest and most lucrative export: coal.

  The principal aim of the MOAGB was to stop the Government nationalizing the collieries. Based on intelligence supplied by its network of informers in the coalmines and exploiting its members’ close links to the Press barons and to the Cabinet, in March 1919 the Association launched a public relations campaign to convince the nation that the country’s pits should remain in private hands. But within weeks of the launch, it went disastrously wrong: by the summer of 1919, the men Billy had chosen to defend were among the most vilified in Britain.

  Six months later, looking out from the Whistlejacket Room across the thousands of men surrounding his house, Billy knew that relations between the coal owners and the miners had never been worse.

  The bad blood stemmed from a Royal Commission that had mesmerized Britain. Its outcome had enraged the MFGB: the miners, in the words of a member of the union’s Executive Committee, had been ‘duped, deceived and betrayed’. It had also shaken Billy Fitzwilliam and the members of the MOAGB to the core. Eight peers of the realm, representatives of Billy’s association, had been coerced to appear as supplicants to plead their cause.

  The stage for their humiliation was the King’s Robing Room at the House of Lords.

  18

  The Duke of Northumberland, twenty-first in the Dukes’ table of precedence, the owner of five stately homes, a quarter of a million acres and a townhouse in London’s Kensington, stood in the witness box, facing twelve Commissioners, seated at tables arranged in a horseshoe around him.

  Under subpoena and against every fibre of his aristocratic being, the Duke had been compelled to answer a question that few, if any, had ever dared ask him. Precisely how much income did his coal royalties bring in per annum? At his answer – £69,194* – the assembled audience gasped.

  Behind the Duke, members of the public and Press crowded every inch of the room. Hundreds had been turned away. The setting was magnificent: the carved ceiling owed its inspiration to Cardinal Wolsey’s closet at Hampton Court; frescoes depicting the Arthurian legend, among them ‘Generosity’, ‘Courtesy’, ‘Mercy’ and ‘Courage’, were painted on the walls. The Winterhalter portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, almost nine feet in height, flanked the Cloth of Estate. But for the handwoven royal blue carpet, a pin could have been heard to drop.

  Leaning forward, looking the Duke directly in the eye, Commissioner Sir Leo Money, representing the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, began his interrogation.

  ‘Don’t you think it is a bad thing for one man to own as much as you do?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I think it is an excellent thing,’ replied the Duke.

  The assembled public and Press roared with laughter. It was excellent entertainment. Class war had come to court.

  Commissioner Herbert Smith, President of the Yorkshire Miners’ Association, continued the cross-examination. ‘If this Commission recommend nationalization,’ he asked, ‘you would use your influence in the House of Lords to defeat it?’

  ‘Certainly. What has this Commission got to do with me?’ the Duke replied.

  ‘The House of Lords has always opposed reform in the country,’ retorted Smith.

  ‘That is a matter of opinion. I do not agree.’

  ‘Will you give me any reform that they have voted for that has brought about better conditions for the people?’ challenged Smith.

  ‘I think there have been many,’ said the Duke.

  ‘Why do you oppose nationalization?’

  ‘Because it is only a blind – perhaps it is correct to say a stage to something more revolutionary.’

  It had been the Earl of Durham’s turn to be interrogated before the Duke of Northumberland. He was the owner of Lambton Castle and one other stately home; the coal royalties from his 12,411 acres brought in an annual income averaging £40,000 a year.*

  Lord Durham was cross-examined by Commissioner Robert Smillie, the President of the MFGB. The true extent of the union leader’s revolutionary intentions swiftly became clear.

  ‘I suppose it may be taken that the land, which includes the minerals and metals, is essential to the life of the people? Do you agree?’ he asked him.

  ‘If you like, I accept that. They cannot live in the air,’ Durham replied.

  Pressing the Earl, Smillie said, ‘You do agree that land is essential to the life of the people, but you will not accept the proposal that if the land is in the hands of a limited number of people, practically they hold the lives of the people at their disposal?’

  ‘The lives of the people who live on my land are as happy as those on any other land, and it makes no difference whether I own it or not,’ the Earl replied sharply.

  Flicking through a sheaf of notes on the desk in front of him, Smillie continued, ‘I will quote a constitutional lawyer, Blackstone, who says, “It is a received and undeniable principle of law that all lands in England are held immediately of the King.” Do you deny Blackstone’s authority? If he is correct, you cannot hold the land you claim to own?’

  ‘That is your opinion. My family has owned land for a great many years and no one has disputed it.’

  ‘We dispute it now!’ retorted Smillie. There was loud laughter from the spectators.

  Rising to his audience, he went on, ‘I will quote another. There is a very old Book which says, “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof.” I am not exactly sure of the author but it appears in the Bible, upon which you have promised to tell the truth and the whole truth this morning. Would you deny that authority? The reference is Psalm Twenty-four, verse one.’

  ‘I prefer another authority,’ replied Durham. ‘“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” Matthew, chapter twenty-two, verse twenty-one.’

  ‘That is exactly what I want to be done at the present time,’ said Smillie, ‘because if “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof”, it cannot be the property of individuals!’

  ‘Is this an ecclesiastical examination?’ asked the Earl.

  It was not. Lord Durham and the Duke of Northumberland wer
e appearing, under subpoena, before a Royal Commission set up by the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, to conduct a forensic inquiry into the state of Britain’s coal industry. Its remit was to examine every aspect of it: wages, the length of the working day, the miners’ housing and social conditions, but most crucially its future. Should the industry be nationalized or not?

  The Prime Minister had been forced to set up the Commission in order to avert a national coal strike. The panel of twelve Commissioners, presided over by the Chairman William Sankey, was made up of representatives from all sides of the industry: capital (the coal owners) and labour (the miners’ trades union representatives) were in equal balance. For the first time the miners, through their union leaders, had the opportunity to challenge the coal owners on a very public stage. Private ownership of coal was in the dock: capitalism, with particular emphasis on the English aristocracy, was on open trial.

  Of the 116 witnesses called to appear before the Commission, among them coal owners, Government officials, trades union leaders and the miners themselves, it was the mineral royalty owners, the men whom Billy Fitzwilliam had formed his Association to defend, who drew the most fire.

  Following the evidence of the Earl of Durham and the Duke of Northumberland, six other peers were compelled to testify against their will: the Marquesses of Bute and Londonderry, the Duke of Hamilton, and Lords Dynevor, Dunraven and Tredegar. Between them, during the Great War, they had earned over £2 million pounds (£61 million at today’s values) in royalty payments.

  Mineral royalties were the dividends paid per ton of coal by the colliery operators to the owner of the land under which the coal was mined. To the shock and incredulity of the British public, the Commission revealed that, whereas the miners were paid less than a shilling per ton of coal, the mineral royalty owners received more than a shilling for every ton they mined.

  The country was gripped by the inquiry: in exposing the issue of mineral royalties, one of the most inflammatory in the industry, the Royal Commission ceased to be purely about coal; in effect, it became an investigation into the injustices of the British class system.

  The mineral royalty owners, as Billy Fitzwilliam’s Association reflected, were invariably upper-class. In the years between the Reformation and the turn of the twentieth century, the pattern of land ownership in Britain had barely changed. In the late 1870s, 7,000 individuals, the majority of them aristocrats or members of the landed gentry, owned almost four-fifths of the British Isles. Twenty-nine peers owned a staggering 4,600,000 acres. In 1919, this group, together with the King and the Church Commissioners, were the biggest owners of coal. Less than 5 per cent of the mineral royalty owners mined their land themselves, preferring to lease it to the colliery companies. As a consequence, their huge revenues were earned from doing nothing – bar having had the good fortune to inherit their land.

  The inquisition of the Dukes, Marquesses, Barons and Earls had no historical precedent. Never before had individual members of the British aristocracy been so publicly humiliated, so rudely challenged.

  The miners’ representatives played to the public gallery. Using every trick of class rhetoric, weaving speciously constructed arguments incorporating details which at times were irrelevant to the Commission’s line of inquiry, they humiliated the mineral royalty owners. The effect was devastating: by the pointed use of ridicule, the peers became the laughing stock of the proceedings, the spectators thrilling at the pricking of their power and mystique.

  A farcical note was struck from the beginning. Robert Smillie had asked the Chairman of the Commission to request that ‘certain Dukes and Earls’ send the titles and charters ‘justifying their possession of certain land in the country’ to London for the Commissioners to examine. The Chairman waived the request when it became clear that several railway vans, if not a special train, would be required to transport the documents.

  The issue came up during Smillie’s cross-examination of the Earl of Durham. The transcribers in the Robing Room were careful to annotate the moments when the public laughed.

  ‘I want to examine you as fairly as I can without bitterness of feeling of any kind.’

  ‘About a railway van?’ (Laughter)

  ‘Do you agree that it would require a large van to carry your title deeds?’

  ‘It is an exaggeration.’

  ‘Would it require a railway van to produce them?’

  ‘A portion of a railway van, no doubt …’

  ‘Now that you have had the title deeds examined, does that indicate that you have any doubt at all? Any doubt about the validity of them?’

  ‘Yes. No. And I hope I never shall have.’

  ‘Was it only recently this examination was made?’

  ‘About a fortnight or three weeks ago, when you practically made a demand that my title deeds should be produced in this room. You caused a great deal of inconvenience in suggesting that these title deeds should be sent up. Otherwise they would have remained in the depository. I don’t read them every Sunday.’ (Laughter)

  ‘They have not been sent up?’

  ‘No. But if the Chairman says I am to bring them I will.’

  ‘And the Chairman may say that. (Laughter) You say you did not read them yourself ?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You depend upon your agent keeping you read up in matters of this kind?’

  ‘Yes. For many years past.’

  ‘A good many people would be delighted to read their title deeds from day to day if they could manage to secure any.’ (Laughter)

  ‘You don’t suggest I should give them my title deeds?’ (Laughter)

  ‘I have a feeling that you have no title deeds which justify your ownership of land or minerals, and that being the case I would suggest you ought to give it back to the State, who is the proper owner of it, if I am correct.’

  Commissioner Smillie proceeded to draw the Earl’s attention – and the public’s – to the deplorable state of the miners’ houses in his own district.

  ‘Are you aware,’ he said, ‘that in Durham and Northumberland there have been serious complaints about the conditions of houses? I put it to you that in very few of the houses you would like to live.’

  ‘I would prefer to live where I am living,’ replied the Earl.

  Beneath the flourishes of comedy and class rhetoric, the undertones were grave. For the private owners of the coal industry, the inquiry, with its royal imprimatur of objectivity and impartiality, was more damaging than anything that had gone before. In its forensic exposure of an industry riddled with abuses, the chief asset of which the aristocracy owned, it undermined the supremacy of the ruling class.

  The country was both appalled and startled by its findings. ‘There are houses in some mining districts,’ the Commissioners reported, ‘which are a reproach to our civilization. No judicial language is sufficiently strong or sufficiently severe to apply to their condemnation.’ There were more casualties in Britain’s mines in 1918, it was revealed, than there were in the Gallipoli campaign, and for the children of miners, the infant mortality rate was higher than in any other section of the population: 160 per thousand, as compared with 96.9 among agricultural labourers and 76.4 for the upper and middle classes.

  Particularly disturbing was the testimony of the Financial Adviser to the Coal Controller, who gave evidence of widescale profiteering by the coal owners during the war. The total profits and royalties of the coal-mining industry in the years 1914–1918 amounted to £160,000,000 – £25 million more than the total pre-war capital of the industry. Many of the coal owners, it emerged, had succeeded in concealing further profits by the capitalization of reserves or other readjustments of capital.

  What caused the public revulsion was that the swollen profits had been wrung out of low wages for the miners and high prices paid by the consumer. Further, the Commission concluded, wastefulness and inefficiency engendered through the private ownership of the mines had seriously hampered the national war effort. />
  In the course of the hearing, it became clear that the nationalization of the mines offered the only really adequate method through which to raise the miners’ standard of living and to safeguard the interests of the consumer. In an interim report, submitted to the Government at the end of March 1919, the Chairman of the Commission, Mr Justice Sankey, concluded, ‘Even upon the evidence already given, the present system of ownership and working in the coal industry stands condemned, and some other system must be substituted for it, either nationalization or a method of unification by national purchase and/or by joint control.’

  Billy Fitzwilliam was lucky to escape the Inquisitors. Following the King and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, only the Duke of Portland and the Marquess of Bute owned more coal than he did. During the Great War, Billy’s mineral royalties, combined with the profits from his two collieries, had yielded an income well in excess of £100,000 a year.* Yet he had not been called before the Commission.

  The miners’ leaders, Robert Smillie and Herbert Smith, were careful in their choice of the Peers they subpoenaed to attend. For political reasons, they chose mineral royalty owners who were historically unpopular among the miners in their districts and whose family’s track record in industrial relations and social welfare was poor.

  The Fitzwilliams’ record was exemplary. Unusually, they were both mineral royalty owners and coal owners – the term used to denote the men who owned and operated Britain’s collieries. The standard of safety in the Fitzwilliams’ mines and the housing and social conditions in their pit villages were unequalled anywhere else in the country. Arnold Freeman, a writer, visited Elsecar in July 1919, shortly after the Royal Commission submitted its final report. So shocked was he by what he had seen of the miners’ living conditions in Scotland and South Wales that he wrote in overblown terms of what he saw at Elsecar: