Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  Nothing their governess had told them prepared the Smith children for their arrival at Wentworth. ‘The thing that struck us most forcibly when we got there was how filthy everything was – with coal dust – mines all around us. Everything black. Then, when we went up to the house, it was the grandeur, the riches, the sheer scale of the place. The first morning I was told, “Daddy has to go up to ‘The House’ to take prayers and you can go with him if you like.” So I went. We walked through the lovely gardens to the chapel entrance. All the servants came in to Prayer and “the family” sat in a gallery with its own entrance. I was fascinated. Then my father said, “I must take you to see Whistle Jacket.” So we went up some stairs and along carpeted passages to find what sounded so exciting, a jacket that whistled! It was so disappointing to discover that it was only a huge painting of a horse! But the grandeur was beyond anything I had imagined. From that moment, I longed to be invited up to Wentworth House.’

  Joyce did not have to wait long for the invitation. ‘One morning, Lady Fitzwilliam called on my mother at the Vicarage and said, “We are going to get a dancing teacher for the children and make a little dancing class. Would your Joyce like to join it?” Well, of course I thought this was absolutely wonderful!’

  Every Friday afternoon, during the winter of 1919, Joyce and her brother were taken up to Wentworth by their governess. ‘It was a child’s dream. You arrived at the front door, an insignificant-looking entrance under the great steps beneath the portico. It was opened by the butler and you went through into this pillared hall, filled with pillars, rather like going to church. There must have been twenty or thirty of them and all round the walls there were elk’s and buffalo’s heads. At the end of the hall there was this lovely staircase, running up two sides. I always used to make my governess go up one side and I’d go up the other. The carpet was white and you were practically ankle-deep in it. It had been specially woven to fit the sweep of the stairs. We were shown up to a bedroom with a purple carpet and yellow silk walls where the footmen took our hats and coats. This bedroom had its own bathroom and loo. We thought it very impressive. Very few people had that then.’

  Peter and Helena Fitzwilliam, aged nine and eleven, were the same age as Joyce and Armand. The dancing class for the four children was held in the Ante-Room to the south of the Marble Salon. It was forty feet by twenty-two feet, with a huge fireplace guarded by two griffins carved from stone. The ceiling was a copy of the Inigo Jones ceiling at Forde Abbey. Alongside the famous pair of Reynolds’s canvases, The Adoration of the Shepherds, portraits of the Fitzwilliam family lined the walls. The servants had prepared the room in advance: Joyce remembers the marble and mosaic console tables, the yellow silk-covered sofas, the black and gold Louis Quinze chairs, stacked neatly against the walls to make space for the children to dance.

  It was here that Joyce first met Peter Fitzwilliam. ‘I longed to meet him. After all, he was the only son and heir. My brother and I were in awe of the idea of him. Everything for miles around was going to be his.’ At the first dancing class, in a routine that would be followed precisely in the coming weeks, after taking off their hats and coats, Joyce and her brother were shown into the Ante-Room by the butler, where they were instructed to sit on the Louis Quinze chairs while they waited for the Fitzwilliam children to be brought down from the nursery wing. At exactly two minutes past two, a footman came in to announce their arrival. ‘Seconds later,’ remembers Joyce, ‘Peter and his older sister, Helena, appeared in sailor suits, accompanied by Nanny and their governess. Lady Fitzwilliam had brought a woman over from Sheffield to teach us. She was quite young and she had to curtsey when they came into the room. She called the children Lord Milton and Lady Helena. I thought this very peculiar. They were only children, they were nine and eleven! Peter struck me as a very fat unhappy little boy. He was a sort of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Overfed, terribly nannied all the time in case he caught a cold or got his feet wet. Later my mother told me that Nanny had complained to Lady Fitzwilliam when she heard that Armand and I had been invited to the dancing classes. She was horrified at the idea because these children from the Vicarage were certain to have colds and germs and pass them on!’

  The Fitzwilliams’ nanny and governess remained in the Ante-Room for the duration of the dancing class while the children were taught the hornpipe and the Lancers, and to waltz and polka. ‘If Peter was doing anything he shouldn’t, which he often was, his governess would gabble at him in French, rapid French. I think they all spoke French when they were alone. Lady Fitzwilliam did too. I suppose it was so that the servants wouldn’t know what they were saying. When the class finished, we had tea in the nursery. Everything was so special. It was brought up and served by the footmen on Rockingham china. There were always footmen and butlers in all directions. Before sitting down to tea, the first time I went, Nanny asked me if I would like to wash my hands, and what sort of soap I liked. I said, “Oh, Pears soap.” I just said it for fun because I liked looking through it, you see, it was transparent. She immediately produced it out of a drawer. I was frightfully impressed. If I’d said some other type of soap, I suppose she would have produced that too. Peter was awfully sweet, very polite and playing host, and he showed me to the loo, and I remember he said, “There you are, Joyce,” and flung open the door. Poor boy was immediately ticked off by Nanny – she didn’t think it was proper of him to open a loo door for a lady.’

  At the dancing classes and on the days when Peter played at the Vicarage, Joyce and her brother got to know him well. ‘Armand and I liked him very much, but he was soft. He wasn’t allowed to be anything but soft. All round the Vicarage gardens, beyond the shrubbery, there were these tall trees, and Armand used to go along the tops of them, swinging from one to another, like a monkey. Peter would watch him from below with Nanny. He wasn’t allowed to climb trees. In the summer holidays we always camped in the shrubbery, made our own camp and slept out at night. Peter was never allowed to join us. I remember saying to my father, “Can’t we get Peter here without Nanny to play with us?” But his mother wouldn’t let him. He did not have a proper childhood. He was a very kind gentle sort of person, but so sheltered. He was wanting to spread his wings one felt, even when he was a little boy.’

  For the couple who had everything, Billy and Maud Fitzwilliam had waited thirteen years for the thing they wanted most of all: a son and heir.

  A succession of daughters had followed their grand Society wedding at St Paul’s Cathedral in the summer of 1896: Elfrida was born in 1898, Joan in 1900, Donatia in 1904 and Helena in 1908. ‘They thought they couldn’t have a son. It made them feel rather miserable, I think,’ recalled their granddaughter, Lady Barbara Ricardo. ‘In those days, an heir was everything. It clouded the early years of their marriage. It made them terribly unhappy.’ In 1908, Billy’s frustration and disappointment at the birth of yet another daughter, Helena, became evident moments after she was born. When the monthly nurse took the baby in to show its father, he turned his back and said, ‘Don’t you point that thing at me.’ Years later, when Helena was eleven years old, she told Joyce this story, solemnly adding, ‘If you call a baby Marie Gabrielle the next one is a boy. That’s why my middle names are Marie Gabrielle, because they wanted a boy so badly.’ Billy and Maud’s longing for a son touched all their daughters. Joyce was deeply embarrassed when Elfrida, Peter’s oldest sister, told her, ‘If you ever want to be sure of getting an heir in your family, when you’re having sex you must stand upside down, that’s what you must do, stand on your head.’ Joyce was fourteen at the time: ‘I was very embarrassed, not because I was shocked but because I didn’t understand. I had to ask her what sex was.’

  Peter was born on New Year’s Eve in 1910. ‘His birth meant everything to my grandparents. It was the most important thing in their lives,’ recalled Lady Barbara. ‘They simply doted on him. After so many years of trying to have a son, when one finally came, they were absolutely thrilled.’ To celebrate the arrival of their son a
nd heir, Billy and Maud gave Peter the traditional family christening, one that Billy himself, because of the mysterious circumstances surrounding his birth, had been denied. In February 1911 Peter was christened in the private chapel at Wentworth swathed in a medieval piece of silk that William the Conqueror had awarded to one of his ancestors for valour at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

  The public celebrations that followed the christening were comparable to a coronation. As if to trump his predecessors, Billy invited 60,000 people to attend a party in the Park at Wentworth. In the event, after word spread through the neighbourhood, more than 100,000 showed up, the majority miners and their families from the pit villages around Wentworth. Billy spared no expense: there were marquees and beer tents, funfairs and brass bands. Oxen were roasted on spits, 4,000 gallons of tea and beer were drunk, and four tons of bread and cakes and tens of thousands of sandwiches and meat pies consumed. Painted in gaudy lettering around the curves of the helter-skelters and merry-go-rounds, even the fairground attractions proclaimed they were ‘suppliers to the nobility and the elite’. The day ended with a spectacular fireworks display specially orchestrated by a team from the fireworks manufacturers, Brocks. Set to music, it consisted of a series of pyrotechnical portraits. One showed a British dreadnought bombarding a ship from a ‘continental power’; in another, the Niagara Falls rolled ‘its waters down in limpid fire’. The climax of the display was a double portrait of the Earl and Countess Fitzwilliam, drawn in Catherine wheels and Roman candles.

  ‘Anything Peter wanted he had to have,’ said Lady Barbara. ‘My grandmother was so thrilled when she had him that he was frightfully spoilt as a consequence. Of course my grandfather was thrilled too, but he didn’t approve of the way she spoilt him the whole time. It used to make him quite cross.’

  Peter was a shy, sensitive boy. Fat, physically gauche, withdrawn and lacking in confidence, he was his father’s opposite. Machismo was the strongest trait in Billy’s character. A trained and distinguished soldier, he had been decorated in both the Boer War and the Great War. Speed and sport, particularly hunting and horse-racing, were his great passions. In the 1920s, life at Went-worth revolved around horses. During the hunting season, Billy hunted six days a week. ‘He rode out with the Wentworth Pack on Mondays and Fridays, on Tuesdays with the Badsworth, a pack that hunted the ground west of Doncaster, and Thursdays with the Grove,’ his cousin, Charles Doyne, recalled. ‘On Fridays, when the day’s hunting was over, his chauffeur would drive him to Holyhead to catch the overnight boat to Ireland. Another chauffeur met him at Dublin docks and drove him down to his estate at Coollattin. He’d get there just in time for the Meet and off he’d go with his Irish pack.’ Billy’s love of hunting was equalled only by his love of horse-racing. The household accounts show that, in the years after the First World War, the Stud at Wentworth, with its stallions, hunters and brood mares, cost more to keep up than the house. ‘We were all mad about horses,’ Billy’s eldest daughter, Elfreda, Countess of Wharncliffe, recalled. ‘Mother was a great horsewoman. Terrific. I think she made us all the horse people we were. We girls all hunted from the age of two. I did five days a week on a horse, two horses a day, and one day a week on Hobson’s choice. We were all hard riders – fitter than fiddles and hard as nails.’

  Peter was the exception. When he was two years old he was taken to the opening meet of the Fitzwilliam Hounds, held on the lawn in front of Wentworth House. Twenty-five years later he wrote, ‘A rather fat spoiled little boy was dressed up in a red coat, white breeches, hunting boots, spurs and a huntsman’s cap, and placed on top of a very quiet and very old pony, which was held by a groom, threatened with instant execution if anything should happen. The small boy was supported on both sides by a nurse and a nurserymaid, and he proceeded to cry continuously for at least half an hour, which was the entire time he was on the pony’s back. The Hounds then moved off to draw and the small boy was taken upstairs and comforted by his nurse.’

  Horses became an early source of friction between father and son. ‘In the nursery there were horses everywhere. There was a rocking horse and there were little model horses all over the place,’ Joyce remembers. ‘Everyone in the family was very horse-minded, except Peter. He was frightened of horses. He hated riding – especially hunting – and refused to go. In this respect he was a great disappointment to his father. You felt terribly sorry for him really, he was so inept as a little boy. He was mad keen on Cricket – it was the one thing he was rather good at as a boy – and I remember a sad thing happened. His great ambition was to play for Yorkshire and the team used to come to Wentworth. They had a cricket pitch on the lawn in front of the house. One summer – Peter was about eleven, I suppose, maybe not as much – as a treat he was allowed to open the batting for the Yorkshire team. There was great excitement. We were all sitting in a row of chairs at the edge of the lawn and Peter went out to bat. First ball, pretty well, he was bowled out for a duck. He came back half-way to where we were sitting and stopped. And I know he was crying. I felt so sorry for him. He didn’t want anyone to see him. He was so disappointed. He really was a sweet boy. Very modest. He wasn’t at all “I am the great I am”. I think he got sick to death of having to try and be the great I am.’

  Almost from the moment he was born, Peter was expected to be the ‘great I am’. As soon as he could walk, he accompanied his father to public functions: to civic ceremonies in the district and to the host of social engagements that revolved around the Fitzwilliams’ business interests. From the age of four, on Christmas Eve, it was Peter who handed out the family’s presents to the long line of village children that queued up in the Marble Salon. Compelled by his parents to assume centre stage, he was constantly on parade, the obligation to play a part no less relentless in the formal atmosphere of life at home.

  Joyce Smith remembered Peter’s tenth birthday party on New Year’s Eve in 1920. ‘There was a huge house party. All sorts of grand people were there. I hadn’t the least idea who any of them were. As a special treat, the children were allowed to join the grown-ups for dinner. Peter appeared in an Eton suit. He had a white waistcoat and tails, the same kind of get-up as men’s tails, with beautiful studs down his front. Though we were only children, we were escorted into dinner! We all met in the small ballroom to the side of the Marble Salon, and then you walked in pairs in procession with your person across the hall. There were these lovely long tables, banked with flowers and set with gold cutlery, and all these men waiting. The footmen stood behind the chairs, one for every two chairs. They had yellow striped waistcoats. Yellow was the Fitzwilliams’ colour. All the cars were yellow, everything was yellow.’

  After dinner, there was dancing in the Marble Salon and games. ‘Then, at that sort of party, conversation was very rare,’ recalled Lady Marjorie Stirling, a close friend of Billy’s and a guest at Wentworth during the 1920s and 1930s. ‘We relied on games and practical jokes during house parties. At most country seats time was devoted to very energetic, endless games – energetic physically, like Murder or Sardines. All over the house; it must have been awful for the host and the hostess, but it was quite fun, sometimes great fun … Some houses absolutely revelled in practical jokes: apple-pie beds and creatures in baths. One or two families were known for it. Sometimes you couldn’t take it any more; you thought twice before going again.’

  Practical jokes were frowned on at Wentworth. In the 1920s, Sir Richard Sykes was sent home and banned from the house after running over a pheasant in the Park and putting the mangled bird in a girl’s bed. But at ‘energetic games’ the Fitzwilliams – with the exception of Peter – excelled. Wentworth was the perfect place to play them. As a young boy, Charles Doyne remembered watching one of the house favourites. ‘There was quite a party and they collected all the jerry pots. They had a curling competition, sliding the chamberpots across the polished marble floor in the Marble Salon. Some were prize Rockingham – quite a few were shattered to pieces.’ Another popular game, as Joyce des
cribed, was ‘The “Fox” Hunt’. ‘One of the young men of the house party was chosen to be a fox and there was a hunt. He was given ten minutes start to go anywhere in the house. Then the rest of the house party hunted him. In full cry! When they caught him, they stripped him. There was a kill! They took all his clothes off. Scragged him, and brushed his hair up the wrong way. He came back into the dining room looking like nothing on earth.’ There were other games too. Bert May, whose father, Jack, had become the butler at Went-worth, and whose wife, Margaret, worked as a housemaid there, remembered her complaining one day about the mess she had cleared up. ‘They’d had a paper chase. The toilet rolls were unravelled all around the house. To this room, to that room, to the next room, and all the way back again. She started work at seven in the morning and it took her till lunch time to clean it all up.’

  Vicar Godfrey Smith and his wife Katharine found their eight years at Wentworth difficult. There was a darker side to life at Wentworth House. Behind the façade, family life was not all that it seemed. ‘It was terribly difficult for my parents,’ Joyce remembered. ‘They both knew they were under the wing of these people whose private lives they believed to be most immoral.’

  From an early stage in their marriage, Billy and Maud had led separate lives. In 1913, Billy had been cited as the third party in a high-profile society divorce case. A few days before the case was due to be heard his reputation – and his marriage – had been saved when, unusually, the parties opted to withdraw the proceedings. Billy’s detractors claimed that to avoid a scandal he had paid the couple a large amount of money not to divorce.