Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  They are all decent workmen’s cottages, many of them ivy-covered, most of them neat, clean, attractive … Lords are the natural targets for the slings and poisoned arrows of every demagogue, every agitator on the make, every Bob on the bounce – and I have thought of them as rather expensive luxuries for a democratic country to indulge in. I looked at them from afar off, through glasses coloured by prejudice perhaps. Now that I have studied the work of a real live earl at first hand, I have to admit he justifies his existence … Elsecar is a small flower-embosomed town … almost the first thing that strikes the eye is the number of its gardens or allotments. I have never seen a town in all my life with such a number in proportion to its size – probably more than one for every householder, for some of the miners have two or three. And gardens are fine antidotes to Bolshevism.

  It would take more than gardens, as Billy realized, to save his coal. In January 1920, the consequences of the previous summer’s Royal Commission had come to a dramatic head: a General Strike threatened, triggered by the Government’s failure to depose the coal owners. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, had betrayed the miners.

  At the outset, he had promised so much. ‘If they throw themselves into this inquiry and present their case,’ he had told the House of Commons in March 1919,

  they will achieve great things for their industry … they will get a Miners’ Charter, which will be the beginning of greater and better things for them. And they will have the satisfaction when they have got these things of knowing that they obtained them without inflicting any hurt upon hundreds of thousands of other men and women engaged in honest toil like themselves.

  They did not get those things. Lloyd George got exactly what he wanted. The miners got nothing.

  The Commission’s interim report, submitted three weeks into the inquiry, had been necessary to head off a national coal strike. On the day it was published, the Government announced that it accepted its findings – the nationalization of the collieries – ‘in spirit and in letter’. The strike was called off: the MFGB interpreted the Government’s announcement as a signal that it would introduce legislation to end the reign of the coal owners and bring the mines under state control.

  As it turned out, the union was misguided. The Commission’s strength – a panel of Commissioners drawn from all sides of the industry – became its weakness. When it came to submit its final report in June 1919, the panel failed to agree. Lloyd George, motivated by his dislike of the trades union movement and in defence of private property, used the rift between the Commissioners as an excuse to reject the idea of nationalization.

  ‘Was it a huge game of bluff ?’ Vernon Hartshorn, a Labour MP and a member of the Executive Committee of the MFGB, demanded angrily. ‘We did not ask for a Commission. We accepted it. We gave evidence before it. Why was the Commission set up?’ he asked. ‘Was it never intended that if the reports favoured nationalization we were to get it? Why was the question sent at all to the Commission? That is the kind of questions the miners of the country will ask, and they will say: “We have been deceived, betrayed, duped.”’

  In the months following Lloyd George’s decision, the Cabinet and the coal owners waited nervously for the backlash as the Executive Committee of the MFGB conferred with trades union leaders in other industries to find a means of forcing the Prime Minister’s hand.

  Revenge, when it came, was sweet. Or so the MFGB’s leaders thought. In December 1919, the Trades Union Council agreed to support its bid to call a General Strike to coerce the Government into nationalizing the mines. In a year dogged by fears of a Bolshevik-inspired revolution, Britain now faced its first true test of working-class revolutionary intent. If the coalminers and the union members in the country’s other key industries supported the decision of their leaders, the workers, rather than Parliament, would dictate the governance of Britain.

  To proceed with its bid, the MFGB needed the consent of its 800,000 members. Delegates in the coalfields were asked to ballot the miners on the question as to whether, at the next Special Trades Union Congress, scheduled for the second week in March, the union should propose a ‘General Strike in the event of the Government continuing to refuse to nationalize the mines’.

  This request, dispatched to every colliery in the country, was sent out on 9 January 1920: two weeks before the day that 10,000 miners surrounded Wentworth House.

  Throughout the last days of January, as the discussions took place in the districts, it emerged that the miners, far from being united by radical politics and the collective sense of betrayal that Vernon Hartshorn had claimed, were divided. The anticipated echo of political radicalism did not resound.

  At Wentworth, Billy Fitzwilliam monitored the discussions through the network of trusted informers he had set up at his pits – favoured men whom he relied upon to keep him abreast of what was happening on the ground. The Yorkshire miners, he was told, would vote against the call for a General Strike.

  It was the reason why, on the morning of Sunday 25 January, after hours spent deliberating in the Whistlejacket Room with Field Marshal Haig, he ruled out the option of calling in troops to defend the house.

  Running with his instincts, he decided to take a risk.

  19

  Shortly after a quarter to two, Jack May, the groom of chambers at Wentworth, slipped quietly out of the Whistlejacket Room. Three footmen waited in the corridor outside, standing statuesquely along its length. Softly, speaking to each man in turn, May whispered their orders.

  Some minutes later, a dray, pulled by a carthorse, made its way slowly along the gravel drive in front of the house. Upwards of twenty ‘outdoor’ servants, the men responsible for maintaining the Park and grounds at Wentworth, crammed the base of the wagon, sitting shoulder to shoulder, facing outwards.

  A murmur ran through the crowd. Under the watchful gaze of thousands, the dray came to a halt beneath the portico outside the entrance to the Pillared Hall. Jumping down from the cart, the men unloaded stacks of fence posts, the sort used to mark out the paddock at the races. They were not white but striped, like a Venetian barber’s pole, in black, yellow and green, the Fitzwilliam racing colours. Some of the men carried coils of thick tasselled rope, woven from black and green silk.

  Walking twenty paces out on to the lawn, they marked out a square. Perfectly proportioned, it encompassed an area large enough to hold 400 men. They worked quickly, slotting the posts into metal bases and hooking the coils of silk rope on to the brass rings mounted at their sides. When they had finished, each man took up position at one of the posts. Tiny figures on an expanse of green, the servants were dwarfed by the scale of everything around them: the 10,000-strong crowd, the façade of the house, the great portico towering above. The Fitzwilliam family motto was carved in gold on its entablature: ‘Mea Gloria Fides’ – My Glorious Faith. Higher still, on the stone-carved parapet, was a marble statue of Minerva, the Goddess of Wisdom and War, her head inclined towards the lawn below.

  A lone bugler sounded the ‘General Salute’. At the windows on the piano nobile, the gloved hands of footmen flashed white against the darkness behind as they reached in unison to release the bolts on the doors leading to the terrace from the Marble Salon.

  From the direction of the Stable Block came the sound of marching feet. Rounding the corner of the façade under the North Tower, Billy Fitzwilliam came into view, a single figure at the head of a column of 400 men. At the same moment, Field Marshal Earl Haig stepped out on to the balconied terrace beneath the portico.

  A deafening roar rose from the crowd.

  As Billy led his troops into the square marked out by his groundsmen, the miners held station along the perimeter of the lawn.

  The moment of danger had passed.

  The risk Billy had run was to proceed with the afternoon’s arrangements as planned.

  Weeks before, as a mark of his esteem towards the local veterans from the Great War, he had invited the Field Marshal to honour a troop of ex-serv
icemen with a General Inspection.

  On the makeshift parade ground, ringed off from the crowds by the silk tasselled rope, the 400 men dressed in their best mufti, wearing flat caps and trilby hats, stood smartly to attention. Every one of them worked for Billy. There were miners from his collieries at Elsecar and Low Stubbin, factory workers from the chemical works and the Simplex car factory in Sheffield, tenants and labourers from the Estate farms. Like thousands among those watching, they bore the scars of war. But they had at least come home. One hundred and eighty-three of the Fitzwilliam employees had been killed in action. Some of the veterans wore their sleeves turned up, proudly displaying the gold watches Billy had given them for winning the Military Medal. He had also donated £17,000* to the dependants of the dead and seriously wounded.

  Earl Haig moved to the head of the column to address the men. At a nod from Billy, the head groundsman raised his arm, a signal to the servants to unhook the ropes.

  It was also a signal to the watching crowd. Surging forward, thousands of miners came streaming on to the lawn, swelling up to the square, some of them sprinting at full stretch, hoping to catch the Field Marshal’s words. Haig’s speech was a plea for unity in the face of class war and industrial strife. Thanking the men for their support in ‘the most trying ordeal the country has ever had to face’, he swiftly moved that the ‘spirit of comradeship present in all arms, branches and classes of the service’ be applied to the current crisis. ‘Band together as firmly now as you did in the darkest hours of the war,’ he urged. ‘Together you stand for the safety of your country. Together you are better situated to obtain all you are reasonably entitled to.’ Closing his speech with a caution, the Field Marshal warned, ‘Each one of us must bear in mind that most excellent motto: “United we stand, divided we fall”.’ Gesturing towards Billy, who stood facing him at the head of the column of veterans, Haig praised his host: ‘He has striven his utmost to further the cause of freedom and justice and to secure the victory of Right.’

  Ten thousand voices boomed ‘Hip, hip, hooray!’ They were followed by a single cry: ‘To the King!’ The 400 veterans stiffened their backs, sharply raising their right hands to their caps, the rapid motion rippling from the square through to the farthest reaches of the crowd, as thousands of men joined in the salute.

  The fears of that morning had been groundless. The miners had crossed the fields to Wentworth, not in the spirit of rebellion, but in search of meaning and guidance.

  That winter, a collective depression hung heavily over the pit villages in the district. Falling wages, the high cost of living, the futility of the Royal Commission had thwarted wartime hopes that things would change for the better, that the poverty, disease and danger the miners encountered at work and in their daily lives would be alleviated. Instead, they faced a string of broken promises. Where was the ‘Nation in a molten state’ that the Prime Minister had spoken of in 1918, the Nation that would never ‘return to the old ways, the old stupidities’?

  What hurt most was the feeling that the carnage and sacrifice of the Great War had been in vain. Grief, and the sense of hope that had been crushed, seeped through the neighbourhood finding its expression in the unveiling of war memorials. At ceremony after ceremony, in village after village, Laurence Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’ was chosen as the most appropriate reading:

  They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

  At the going down of the sun and in the morning

  We will remember them.

  For the miners who worked for Billy Fitzwilliam, among the thousands gathered at Wentworth that Sunday, it was a pilgrimage to their patriarch. ‘Billy Fitzbilly’ or ‘Lordie’, as they called him, was more than a provider, he was their protector. He was all they had. In the absence of a Welfare State, they were dependent on him in almost every aspect of their lives: at work, in the conditions and regularity of employment underground at his pits; at home, in the standard of housing in his tied cottages, and of education at his schools. Even their social lives depended on the Earl, reflected in the myriad of sports and cultural activities available in his pit villages. In bad times, only he could cushion them from the vagaries of their trade.

  Billy had been right to trust his instincts. In ruling out the option of calling in troops, he had correctly judged that the miners did not pose a danger to either him or his house. It was a brave step, one that in the circumstances few coal owners would have taken. But he belonged to the small minority among the coal aristocracy who believed – and rightly – that the Bolshevist threat did not come from the miners as a whole.

  His intelligence had been correct. When the coalfields voted on the question of whether to call a General Strike to force the Government to nationalize the pits, almost half the country’s miners, including those from South Yorkshire, voted against the MFGB’s proposal. The radicalism of the union’s Executive was at odds with its membership, a confusing contradiction that would impact with tragic consequences in the decades to come.

  Billy Fitzwilliam’s personal crusade against Bolshevism was motivated by his desire to protect not only his own interests but, as he believed, those of his miners too. He saw himself as the custodian of a way of life. As radical as he was reactionary, he regarded it as his duty to wield his wealth and power with a conscience: to provide the best possible living and working conditions for the men he employed. A benevolent paternalist to the core, the protection of his interests and the protection of his men were in equal balance. The one followed from the other, or so he believed. If he could protect his miners, he could protect himself.

  But could he protect them? What neither he nor his miners could know was that 1919 was the year of no return: the world beyond Wentworth was closing in.

  20

  Two small boys, oblivious to the gathering political storm, balanced on a silk-covered footstool in a room on the top floor of the South Tower. They had moved the stool from its usual position by the fire and placed it beneath the bison’s head that hung above the door. Slowly, concentrating rigidly, the younger boy stretched his leg, aiming his toe at a low wooden nursery chair positioned a few feet beyond. Dressed in a heavily starched linen sailor’s suit, he was overweight. The suit hung awkwardly, accentuating his tubbiness. His soft brown hair, unflatteringly long, curled in wisps at its collar. Taking a deep breath, he leapt from the stool to the chair and vaulted on to the banister rail at the top of the stairwell. Reaching over with a cry of victory and peals of laughter, he grabbed the chair and slid down the rails, perching on the banister curl at the bottom of the stairs.

  Peter Fitzwilliam, Billy’s only son, and his cousin, Armand Smith, were playing a game. ‘It was our favourite game,’ Armand recalled, ‘we had to get from one end of the house to the other without touching the floor. I suppose we were about eight or nine. We played it for hours. You could stand on any of the furniture – there were low chests and seats in the window recesses along the corridors which helped – but if you fell off, you had to start all over again. We allowed ourselves a prop, a small chair, which was very useful, though it made it more difficult sometimes because you had to pull it with you all the way.’

  The games with Armand Smith during the winter of 1920 were among the rare moments in Peter Fitzwilliam’s childhood when he was able to be a child. In the family photograph albums that survive – the personal albums of Maud Fitzwilliam, his mother – as a young boy, he never smiles. Most of the photographs are of him on his own. In the few pictures there are of Peter with his parents and his sisters, he looks stiff and uncomfortable. They are staged images of a young heir, not portraits of a child. At the age of two, he is shown cutting the clod at the sinking of his father’s colliery; at three, shaking hands with an old Fitzwilliam servant at a garden fête. Most poignant of all perhaps is a photograph of Peter when he was four. Dressed in a specially tailored uniform, wearing a heavy greatcoat and puttees – the full battled
ress of a British soldier in winter – he solemnly salutes a march past of troops at Wentworth on their way to fight in the Great War.

  Peter was destined to become the 8th Earl Fitzwilliam, in the words of his friend, Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, the ‘Fabulous Lord Fitzwilliam’. Yet the man is as elusive as the boy. It was after his death that the bonfires at Wentworth began. Like his father and grandfather before him, Peter’s life has been erased, its minutiae, his correspondence and records burnt by his successors.

  Memories are all that remain of him. Between the years 1918 and 1926, when their father was Vicar at Wentworth, Armand Smith and his sister, Joyce, glimpsed into the world of his childhood. ‘We saw it through a gauze. We were only children,’ said Armand Smith almost eighty years later, ‘but still, we were left with the impression there was something odd about the household. It was not a clean-running fish.’

  21

  It was in the autumn of 1918 that Joyce and Armand Smith moved into the Vicarage at Wentworth. ‘My grandfather lived at Barnes Hall, Grenoside, a few miles from Wentworth House,’ Joyce Smith recalled. ‘He had nine sons and hunted with the Fitzwilliam Hounds and was the starter for the point-to-point races. He was getting old and wanted my father near him. The Fitzwilliams were cousins of ours and Lord Fitzwilliam wanted to help out. So he offered my father the living at Wentworth – to our disgust!’

  Joyce and her five brothers and sisters came from Cartmel, a sleepy rural village in Cumbria, where their father, Godfrey Smith, was the Vicar. ‘We were very happy at Cartmel. We didn’t want to go to Wentworth. We were the poor cousins! We’d never come into contact with the sorts of things that Wentworth did, the grand social life – big house parties, cricket matches in the summer and dances, that sort of thing. In the weeks before we left we were warned by our governess, “You can’t do this there, you won’t be able to do that there, you’ll have to be on your Ps and Qs all the time.” We were dreading it. Our governess, you see, she’d come into contact with stately homes before, she knew what sort of thing to expect.’