Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  If Billy Fitzwilliam was the father of Edgar Bower, the advice May had given her son was correct. Historically, the Fitzwilliams had looked after their illegitimate children in the villages around Wentworth, though always on their own terms. Over the centuries, a convention had emerged: male Estate employees were persuaded to admit paternity and to marry the mother of the child. The pay-off was a good job, a decent house and an understanding that the Estate would look after the family for the rest of their lives.

  So why was this convention not followed in Edgar Bower’s case? The answer, possibly, is to be found in May’s religious beliefs. The Bowers were Quakers who believed that God married people, not the magistrate or the priest: according to their faith, the social aspect of a marriage – the umbrella of respectability – was of little significance. May was a devout Quaker and it is conceivable that her religious faith caused her to reject the offer of an Estate-arranged marriage.

  Had the offer been made, and refused, it was May’s failure to conform that partially sealed Edgar’s fate. Because she flouted the conventions of the village, the community was no longer bound to accept her child. When Edgar returned to Wentworth from the Royal School for the Deaf in 1932, May Bower had been dead for four years. No one wanted to look after him; his severe handicap, his reputation as a difficult, troublesome child, and the rumour and taboo surrounding the identity of his father, determined that the village closed ranks and rejected him. Had Katharine Smith still been living at the Vicarage she might have taken him under her wing as she had done when he was a child – or at least seen that he was found a home. But the Smith family had long since gone; they had left the village in 1926.

  The one person who might have looked after Edgar was unable to. Four years before she died, May had married an outsider to the village, a man from London called Charles Garwood. They had two children, Albert and Gladys, born in 1925 and 1927. After May died, Garwood had struggled to raise the two younger children on his own; in the late 1920s, he had been forced to send Albert, Edgar’s half-brother, to an orphanage in Rotherham.

  Fifty-three years after Edgar left the village, it was Lily Fletcher who uncovered the secret it had tried to conceal. ‘I believed Edgar,’ she said. ‘After he told me he was the Earl’s son, I got hold of a copy of his birth certificate. That’s when I found out that his name was Edgar William Wentworth Bower. I then went back to check his hospital file. It was very odd. There was no mention of his middle names. He was admitted to the asylum under the name of Edgar Bower. The hospitals always recorded the full name of a patient. They were always very strong on that. I can only think that the village doctor who certified Edgar must have deliberately left those names off his admittance form.’

  An error of omission on the part of Dr Mills, the Estate doctor? The action of a loyal retainer anxious to protect the Fitzwilliams’ reputation? Or, conceivably, did the doctor omit Edgar’s middle names, sacrosanct in the village at the time, because he knew he had no right to bear them? Following the great bonfire at Wentworth in 1972, the Estate archives that could have revealed the answer have not been preserved; the old villagers, who might have known, are now mostly dead. But among those still alive – still anxious to protect the Fitzwilliams’ reputation – there is one point on which they are adamant: the family played no part in the doctor’s decision to certify Edgar insane.

  The truth, it appears, is more prosaic. In 1933, when Edgar returned to the village after leaving school, Charles Garwood, his stepfather, was working as gardener and chauffeur to Dr Mills. ‘The doctor sent Edgar away because Mr Garwood was his gardener. He didn’t want to lose him,’ Gracie Woodcock explained. ‘Too much of Garwood’s time would have been taken up with looking after Edgar. It was easier to send him away.’

  All his life, as Edgar repeatedly told Lily, he had wanted to go home. ‘It was the love of Wentworth and his mother that sustained him all those years,’ she recalled. ‘He must have been an extraordinary person to have coped with what he had been through. When I first got him, he used to stand in the corner of the room banging his heels against the wall. I couldn’t understand why he did this, then I found out they had these metal shoes at the hospital. They were a form of punishment. The shoes were chained to the wall; patients were made to go and stand in them when they misbehaved. Edgar was always being punished. It was all there in his hospital file. Every time he was in trouble, he was never able to put his point of view. There was no one to represent him. All they did was increase his medication: he was drugged up to the eyeballs. How on earth that man kept the picture of his mother and the village in his mind for all those years, goodness knows. But it was the thing that carried him through.’

  Lily’s patience and persistence changed the course of Edgar’s life. In the autumn of 1988, under the Care in the Community initiative – a Government proposal to close Britain’s Victorian asylums – Stanley Royd Psychiatric Hospital, previously the West Riding Paupers Lunatic Asylum, was due to be closed. Lily resolved to try to get Edgar a place at the Residential Care Home in Wentworth. Ironically, the Home was at the Vicarage, the place where May Bower had worked as a housemaid for the Smith family, opposite the cottage where Edgar had grown up.

  In the spring of 1988, Lily took Edgar back to the village: his first visit in fifty-five years.

  ‘When we pulled up outside the Home, an awful thing happened,’ she remembered. ‘He ran straight across the road to the cottage and tried to open the door. There were people in the front parlour, I had to pull him away. He was terribly upset, he was shaking all over. I took him over to a low wall and sat him down. Then he asked me for a pen and paper.’

  Seeing his old home for the first time triggered Edgar’s memories of his mother’s death. Situated on an oak-lined avenue at the edge of the village, the cottage stood along the road leading up to Wentworth Church. Edgar had last been there in September 1928 when he had walked behind May Bower’s coffin as it was carried up the avenue to the graveyard to be buried. Sitting on the wall with Lily, his memories came flooding back. ‘Everybody was feeling sorry for the two young children, nobody cared for me, they thought I didn’t understand,’ he later wrote. ‘I was twelve years old and I had lost the love of my life.’

  ‘We went up the churchyard afterwards,’ Lily remembered, ‘and we looked for his mother’s grave. I’d given Edgar some flowers to put on it but we couldn’t find it. Then we went into the church and we saw one of the churchwardens and he said he’d look into it and let us know. We went back outside and had a wander round and we found an old grave, it must have been about 1870 or so, and it had the name Bower on it, so we put the flowers on there instead. An eerie thing happened. I discovered afterwards it was as if we had left a signal to the village. It got them going, didn’t it – there was whispering behind doors. That grave hadn’t been tended for years. People saw the fresh flowers, they knew no one local had put them there, and they started making inquiries at the church. Who’d put them there, who’d come back?’

  ‘Bower’: the name was on the grave. ‘They knew,’ said Lily. ‘The older ones – the ones who’d played with Edgar as a child – guessed. When I asked them later what had happened in the months before he was sent to the Asylum, they just shrugged their shoulders and shook their heads. “We didn’t know anything,” they said, “he just disappeared.” I asked them if they knew Edgar was the Earl’s son. Some said one of the stocksmen on the Estate was his father. Others said he had been made to take the blame. I didn’t push it, I didn’t want to jeopardize Edgar’s chances of coming home.’

  In the autumn of 1988, Edgar moved into the old Vicarage. ‘I moved back home on October 16th 1988, nearly sixty years to the day when you died. I do so wish you could be here, Mother,’ he wrote, ‘but we will meet again. I have asked to be buried with you, and I did “come home”, just like you said I would.’

  Soon after Edgar moved to the old Vicarage, Lily Fletcher contacted the Wentworth Estate, the agency responsible for overse
eing the Fitzwilliam family’s descendants’ interests in the area, to ask their permission to allow May Bower’s grave to be opened on his death, in order that he could be buried alongside her. Edgar had no financial assets. In the terminology of the pre-war era, he was a ‘pauper’: the costs of burying him in the churchyard at Wentworth were over and above the standard funeral arrangements covered by the Department of Health and Social Security. After consulting the Fitzwilliams’ descendants, the agent for the Went-worth Estate agreed to pay the full costs of the funeral in the form of a grant from Wentworth Charities, a long-standing family trust. ‘Such matters to be covered by the Trustees’ grant,’ the agent informed Edgar in a letter, ‘would include a service in Wentworth Church, provision of a burial within Wentworth churchyard utilizing the grave presently occupied by your mother and the provision of a gravestone. I do hope this sympathetic view held by the Trustees,’ he continued, ‘will reassure you that efforts will be made to ensure that you will be laid to rest with your mother following a service in Wentworth Church.’

  Edgar Bower died in February 1996, aged seventy-nine. Godfrey Broadhead, who had worked for the Estate for almost fifty years, was charged with making the arrangements for his funeral. Some months after Edgar’s death, he left a message for the agent at the Wentworth Estate office: ‘Mr Broadhead is arranging for the headstone which will be put in place in July,’ the secretary noted in a memo to the agent. ‘He wondered if the inscription should be: “In Memory of Edgar Bower” or “In Memory of Edgar William Wentworth Bower”. Broadhead thought perhaps the first option may be the best.’

  Godfrey Broadhead was in his eighties. He had grown up at Wentworth: he knew – and was close to – the older residents in the village who had worked for the Estate in the early decades of the twentieth century, the men and women who would have known whether the rumour that Billy Fitzwilliam was Edgar’s father was true. Broadhead told his daughter what he knew of Edgar Bower’s story. But at the dawn of the twenty-first century, among the descendants of the village families who worked for the Fitzwilliams for generations, the old loyalties, the old taboos linger. ‘It’s a matter for the Wentworth Estate,’ Godfrey Broadhead’s daughter said after his death. ‘I couldn’t possibly say. My father told me things in confidence which he would not have wanted people to know.’ Asked whether her father had ever denied the rumour, she said again, ‘I cannot say.’

  The headstone above Edgar’s grave in the New Churchyard at Wentworth bears two names – ‘Edgar Bower’. Not the four names with which he was baptized. The only gravestones inscribed with the names ‘William Wentworth’ are in the Fitzwilliam family plot. Even in death it appears that things did not go right for Edgar. The confusion, rumour and counter-rumours continue. ‘He ain’t buried with his mother,’ one woman in her nineties said. ‘They put him in the wrong grave. I know for absolute certain that he was buried in the wrong one.’

  PART V

  22

  On the evening of Saturday 1 May 1926, at 19.40 hours according to the Admiralty logs, the Neuralia, a Royal Navy transport ship, steamed out of Devonport en route for Liverpool docks. On board were two detachments of troops: the 1st Somerset Light Infantry and the 1st South Wales Borderers. One hour earlier, at 18.45 hours, the Nevasa had sailed from Portsmouth carrying the 1st Duke of Wellington’s regiment, its destination the port of Leith in Scotland. The two troop ships were the first to be mobilized. Britain was girding for war – not against an external aggressor, but against herself.

  ‘Everything I care for is being smashed to pieces at this moment,’ the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, told the House of Commons in an Emergency Debate. ‘Despotic power … has been put in the hands of a small executive in London. This irresponsible power is a gross travesty of any democratic principle … threatening the basis of ordered government, and going nearer to proclaiming civil war than we have been for centuries past.’

  The country stood on a knife edge. Hours before the Neuralia and the Nevasa sailed from the naval bases on the South Coast, the ‘despotic power’, the General Council of the Trades Union Congress, had issued an order to its own troops; if the Government failed to meet its demands, at precisely one minute to midnight on Monday 3 May, 9 million workers, it instructed, were to down tools and come out on a General Strike.

  The threat of coordinated industrial action on such an unprecedented scale had triggered the mobilization of Britain’s armed forces. Successive governments had been haunted by a fear of revolution since the end of the First World War; in the years up to 1926, the Home Office Directorate of Intelligence, in conjunction with Special Branch, had been required to issue weekly reports on ‘revolutionary organizations in the UK’. Official anxiety had focused on the trades union movement – an extra-governmental body, capable of acquiring extensive political power not through the ballot, but through force majeure. Coordinated strike action was the eventuality post-war governments had dreaded the most, a spectre first raised in 1919 when the newly formed ‘Triple Alliance’ – the unions representing Britain’s miners, railwaymen and transport workers – had pulled back from the brink of launching a General Strike. Seven years later, in the spring of 1926, the fear had become a reality: the Government regarded the TUC’s ultimatum as the precursor to political revolution.

  ‘Enemies to the Parliamentary Constitution system,’ Winston Churchill, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, told the nation, ‘threatened the subversion of the State.’ The position, he warned, was now extremely uncertain:

  It is a conflict which, if it is fought out to a conclusion, can only end in the overthrow of Parliamentary Government or in its decisive victory. There is no middle course open. Either the Parliamentary institutions of the country will emerge triumphant, and the nation, which has not flinched in the past through many ordeals, the nation, which indeed has always shown itself stronger and nobler and more generous in its hours of trouble, will once again maintain itself and be mistress in its own house, or else, on the other hand, the existing constitution will be fatally injured.

  The crisis had been provoked by Britain’s million miners. On 30 April, the day before the War Office mobilized the armed forces, every colliery in the country had closed. It was the coal owners who had shut them down. ‘The owners are the provokers of this quarrel. They are the men who served notice upon their workmen. It is not a strike; it is a lock-out,’ the Labour MP George Barker exclaimed angrily in the House of Commons. ‘How is it,’ he asked, ‘that the owners have not been censured for locking out a million men? We have a million men in this country who are prepared to go to work tomorrow if they can only get a reasonable living wage.’

  The coal owners were not offering a living wage. Until the miners agreed to accept wage cuts, the mines would remain closed. Six weeks earlier, the Samuel Report, the third Government inquiry into the state of the coal industry in seven years, had concluded that, due to the depressed economic conditions, wage ‘revisions’ were necessary. It was the verdict the coal owners had been waiting for: seizing the opportunity, they proposed to reduce the miners’ average weekly wage to little more than 30 shillings* – less than it cost to keep a man in the workhouse. They also proposed to increase the length of the working day. The coal owners’ terms, so the miners and their representatives believed, were nothing short of belligerent. ‘I do believe in the class war,’ said George Lansbury, the future leader of the Labour Party,

  I believe the class war is responsible for the starvation of my kith and kin, people who are the bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, down in the coalfields of Britain. The only thing that is being asked today by the Government and the capitalists is that the workers should sacrifice. I hope to God that the workers will be able to stand out and with their women defeat the most nefarious campaign that has ever been waged against them.

  The TUC hoped the threat of a General Strike would force Baldwin to guarantee the miners a ‘living wage’. But there was no question of the Government caving in to t
he ultimatum: a fundamental principle was at stake. In 1919, Lloyd George had expressed it succinctly: ‘If a force arises in the State which is stronger than the State itself, then it must be ready to take on the function of the State itself, or withdraw and accept the authority of the State.’

  Behind the scenes in Whitehall, the Cabinet, in liaison with the Chiefs of the Defence Staff and the Chiefs of Police, prepared for civil war. All military leave was cancelled; soldiers suspected of Communist leanings were placed under observation, and troops dispatched to guard ‘vulnerable points’, a pre-determined list of strategic sites that included explosives factories, oil depots and power stations across the length and breadth of Britain. Five battalions of troops were mobilized to potential sites of conflict in the coalfields, and to the dockyards in the main shipping ports, to ensure the flow of essential supplies. Priority destinations included Glasgow, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Bury, Bradford, Cardiff and Hull. ‘It should be impressed upon all Commanding Officers,’ the War Office cabled the Home Commands, ‘that early and accurate information as to the possible trend of events and as to the temper of the populace in any particular area is of paramount importance. To this end selected officers should be employed by officers in command of bodies acting in aid of civil power to move about in plain clothes and keep in close touch with the civil authorities and with the populace generally.’ Anticipating the likelihood that insurgents would target telegraph poles across the country, the War Office was leaving nothing to chance. Commanders in the field were notified of the Emergency Wireless Scheme, a secret network of wireless stations to be used ‘in the event of a serious breakdown of the normal means of inter-communication’. They lay off Britain’s coastline, on Royal Navy ships positioned to operate as makeshift communication centres of the last resort: if the telegraph wires were brought down, key signals staff were to be ferried out to the ships to relay enciphered messages back to Whitehall.