Most damaging of all was the disintegration of the European export markets. In a bitter twist of historical irony, the Versailles Treaty, designed to punish Germany, dealt Britain a devastating blow. In striking at the coal industry, with its millions of dependants, it struck at the country’s heart. Under the terms of the Treaty, Britain and her allies had stipulated that a proportion of Germany’s reparations should be paid in deliveries of free coal. France, Belgium and Italy, previously large importers of British coal, were the main beneficiaries. By the mid-1920s, British exports to Italy alone had fallen by 3.5 million tons from their pre-war level: over the same period, German coal exports to Italy had jumped from under 1 million metric tons to 4.4 million, the majority of which was reparations coal.
Quite how damaging the Versailles Treaty was to the British coal industry became evident in 1923 when French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr after Germany defaulted on its coal deliveries. That year, with production halted in the German coalfields, Britain’s exports leapt briefly to an inter-war high of 98 million tons. The boom was short-lived; by 1925, the Dawes Plan, an American-led rescue operation to stabilize the Deutschmark, had kick-started the German economy, driving coal production in the Ruhr from strength to strength. As European markets were flooded with cheap German coal – on top of the free reparations coal – in Britain, the terms of Versailles tipped the mining industry into a slump, knocking mines and the miners out of work.
For industrialists and economists alike, in the grim economic conditions of the mid-1920s, the price of coal became the Holy Grail. If the cost of production could be reduced by cutting miners’ wages, so could the cost per ton of British coal: pre-war export markets, so the argument ran, would recover and unemployment would fall. The assessment, as it turned out, was flawed: in the bleak decade between 1925 and 1935, wage reductions served to depress the home markets further, causing more unemployment than they cured.
The truth was that neither politicians nor industrialists were prepared to grapple with the reality that the coal industry, on which Britain’s imperial wealth and power had been founded, was haemorrhaging, in slow, mortal decline.
The dual issues of Coal and Class had become inextricably entwined.
25
A breeze blew through the marquees at Wentworth. It came from the south, smelling of industry: of tar, sulphur and the metallic tang of steel. A mile away, at Parkgate, the steelworkers and factory hands had returned to work. Dense clouds of smoke belched from the foundries into the late spring air, the roar of industry competing with the clear chimes from the church clocks in the villages nearby.
It was a Saturday morning, the fourth week of the coal strike, and 1,200 children, the sons and daughters of the New Stubbin colliers, stood outside the marquees waiting to be fed. A remnant from the Great War, the Fitzwilliams’ agent had bought the former hospital tents as a job lot. A decade earlier they had stood in a line of others along the cliffs above Calais – Casualty Clearing Stations for British soldiers wounded at the Front. Now, under Billy’s instructions, they had been put up along the southern edge of Wentworth Park, close to Greasbrough and Rawmarsh, where many of the miners from New Stubbin lived. For as long as the coal strike lasted, Billy had undertaken to provide his miners’ children with one midday meal a week. Five miles away, at Elsecar colliery, a further 1,300 children were being fed.
The officials at New Stubbin pit had marshalled the children into a queue. Boys and girls up to the age of thirteen, they clutched the mugs and basins they had brought from home. As they waited in line, each child was given an orange. It was strange fruit to most of them; few, if any, had tasted one before. A few years earlier, a teacher at Rawmarsh Junior School had asked a group of ten-year-olds to write about their parents. The results of the classroom exercise reveal that, even before the coal strike began, family life in the Fitzwilliams’ pit villages revolved around the struggle to survive. Food and work dominated their barely literate accounts. The descriptions were short, in some cases little more than a sentence, but they were the first thoughts that came into the children’s minds:
‘I hawe gotta father and some fathers has dide [died] and the ladys get some roses and daffodils and croces and tulip and put on the graffes.’
‘My father gos to work. Wehen he comes home his has black has sut. he coms home at afternoon. When he comes home he has is dinner. he goes to wrk at nighte. When he comes home he bringht some moony back. My father goes to work to get some mony to get some food whit it.’
‘My father gos to wak [work] for mony to keep ues we bay food for to aet our Nell she waks at keethli [Keighley]. We had not inuf to keep us all So. She went a waye so we cud live aply [happily].
‘I have got a mother at home and she warks hared and when she woshes some time is mase her pooly and then she mite die and my father will go in the cab and then myt bey some flower eles my anty will bey some.’
Inside the main marquee, the air was clammy and fetid. It smelt of overcooked porridge and the sweat from the bodies of scores of women. Four weeks into the strike, soap was an unaffordable luxury. Clouds of steam rose from the gruel pans that simmered on industrial-size gas burners; a long trestle table stretched down the length of the tent where an army of miners’ wives, working at an efficient pace, was buttering bread.
Feeding 1,200 children was a military operation. Besides fruit, the children were to be given ‘water gruel’, teacakes and sandwiches. It was Maud Fitzwilliam who had taken charge of the proceedings. Working beside the miners’ wives in the long assembly-line, she stood out from the others. Most of the women wore white pinnies over their drab dresses; the fine fabric and the pale spring colours of the Countess’s dress marked her out at a glance. ‘The Fitzwilliams were liked. Nobody ever called them nought. You never heard people call ’em bad names. They were really nice people, kind people, they looked after you,’ remembered May Bailey, who lived in Greasbrough, and whose father and brothers worked at New Stubbin pit. May’s memories were echoed by others. ‘If anyone went without it was their own fault,’ Gracie Woodcock from Wentworth recalled. ‘There was always a rabbit or a pigeon, they only had to open their mouths. My husband used to go down every week to the Big House with a cart and he used to come back with great hunks of sheep and calves to give to the poor.’
During the grim months of the coal strike that lay ahead, the Fitzwilliams’ generosity would be tested to the limit. On that first Saturday morning in the marquees, Maud turned to the woman next to her to reassure her: ‘I’ll slay the last bullock in Wentworth before the children should want,’ she told her. ‘We called her Lady Bountiful,’ Bert May, the Fitzwilliams’ butler’s son, recalled.
It was said without a trace of irony.
From the moment she arrived at Wentworth, Maud Fitzwilliam had devoted much of her time and energy to charitable activities. In Billy’s grandfather’s time, formal procedures had governed the way the family looked after the needy in their pit villages. ‘When the Vicar took Morning Prayers, as he did every weekday at 9.30 a.m. in the House Chapel for residents, visitors and staff, the old Earl expected him to bring what he called “The Soup List”,’ remembered Marguerite Verini, the former Principal of Hughes Hall, Cambridge, whose father was Vicar at Wentworth from 1898 to 1912. The ‘Soup List’, as Verini described, was the daily tally of the sick and the poor. After Morning Prayers the Earl would instruct his staff to arrange for provisions to be sent round to the families. In 1902, when Billy succeeded the 6th Earl, Maud Fitzwilliam had dispensed with this tradition: she took charge of the arrangements personally, identifying those families in need of assistance and delivering the provisions herself.
She became a familiar figure in the district. Most afternoons, she toured the pit villages, driven by her chauffeur in a yellow Rolls-Royce. Pregnant mothers and the mothers of newborn babies were automatically included in her daily round. ‘All the mothers would get milk and her special gruel and a dozen or two eggs,’ remembered May Bail
ey. The servants at the house packed the Rolls-Royce with all sorts of provisions for the poor – food, clothes and, on some occasions, even live chickens. Unannounced, the Countess would stop off at the miners’ cottages, often staying to have a chat and a cup of tea. ‘Lady Maud was always in the villages, popping in and out, dropping something round,’ Rita King, a miner’s daughter from Greasbrough, recalled. ‘I remember my grandfather grew chrysanthemums. He won first prize most years at the flower show up at the house. One morning Lady Maud came down the path. “Are you there, Maleham?” – that were his name – she says. “I’ve brought you this.” It were a lovely little silver cup. She said, “You may as well have it. You’ve won the bloody thing often enough.”’
Favoured tenants and employees were treated to the same food as invalids at Wentworth House. Beef tea and calves’ foot blancmange – or its variant, calves’ foot custard – were thought to be especially restorative. The calves’ foot ‘blammonge’ was made following a special house recipe:
Put a set of Calves feet, well cleaned and washed into 4 quarts of water and reduce it by boiling to one quart, strain it and let it cool. When cold scrape off all the fat, cut it out of the bowl avoiding the settings at the bottom, and put to it a quart of new milk with sugar to taste and boil it for a few minutes. It may be flavoured with cinnamon or lemon peel before boiling; if flavoured with rose water or peach water after boiling. When boiled 10 minutes, strain it through a fine sieve and stir it till it cools. When only blood warm, put it into moulds, first dipped in cold water.
The Wentworth House gruel, a thin water-based porridge, was another favourite of Maud’s. During the coal strike, it was made in the kitchens at Wentworth, from where it was transported on flat drays to the marquees to be reheated. In 1926, May Bailey was working as a scullery maid up at the house. ‘They had these huge set pots in the kitchen – like great cauldrons they were, and it were my job to scrub them. I didn’t like scrubbing them set pots. They were used for making Countess Maud’s gruel. The oatmeal used to stick to the bottom and it were a hell of a job getting it off. I were a lackey for better end – you know the cook, housemaids and chambermaids. I were at bottom! Them pots were on the go round the clock. That gruel went out at all hours.’
The Fitzwilliams’ generosity towards their miners was not motivated by socialist principles; in Billy’s case, it stemmed from a loathing of trades unionism and a near-feudal sense of his obligation to his men. In 1911, in the midst of an industrial dispute at Elsecar, he had issued a statement: ‘Acting upon what has been a tradition in the family, Lord Fitzwilliam has declined to negotiate the dispute with representatives of the Yorkshire Miners’ Association. He states that it is a matter between himself and his men, and that if the men are left alone, there will be a prompt settlement.’ In 1926, although Billy’s sense of realpolitik prevented him from airing his views in public, privately his position was as vehemently anti-union as it had been in 1911, and during the troubles of 1919. It was not just a question of politics; the issue had an emotional resonance to him. He believed that trades unionism threatened to poison his relationship with his men. By helping the miners during the long months of the coal strike, he was fulfilling the obligation he believed he owed to every man who worked for him. His grandfather had expressed it simply: ‘the protection,’ he had said, ‘which is due from me to him.’
In addition to feeding the miners’ children, Billy helped his men in other ways. Jobs were found for them on other parts of the Estate. Up on the family’s grouse moors in the Pennines, an entire forest was planted by the miners from New Stubbin and Elsecar pits during the summer of 1926. Billy also allowed his colliers to mine coal from the old surface workings on his land. A source of free coal made a big difference to the miners: at home they were dependent on coal for heating, hot water and cooking. In neighbouring pit villages, the miners were forced to pick through the slag heaps to find what coal they could. ‘Most people ran out of coal, which they needed for cooking on the fire – that was if anybody had anything to cook,’ remembered Luke Evans, a miner from Aldwarke Main, a colliery close to Wentworth.
I used to go to Hickleton tips about five miles away on an old bicycle that had not got any tyres on the wheels. I would fill two bags with coal and push one bag through the frame and one on the top bar of the bicycle. This was a full day’s work from early morning until late at night. Sometimes I would sell one bag of coal for one shilling. The number of people at Hickleton tips grew into hundreds; people came long distances with their horses and flat drays to collect coal. Men worked in teams and as darkness approached some would stay all night to guard their precious find.
In some districts, whole families resorted to picking through the sewage tips in search of any lumps of coal that had been thrown into the midden trenches.
As the strike dragged on, conditions became desperate in the Yorkshire coalfields and in other mining regions across the country. The government estimated that 1.7 million families were affected by the coal strike. ‘It was clog and boot time if you like, not much to wear, no money at all,’ Ernest Kaye, a miner from Birdwell, near Barnsley, remembered. ‘We went to school as normal, some were worse than me, wearing just one shoe, with big holes in their jumpers.’ ‘I can remember the 1926 strike,’ Jack Parkin, a miner from Carlton, a colliery village near Wentworth, recalled. ‘One word sums up the village at the time: bloody destitute.’
The miners at New Stubbin and Elsecar collieries were better off than most. In the last week of August, Billy Fitzwilliam made an extraordinary announcement: instead of giving their children one meal a week, all 2,500 of them were to be fed every day.
In London, negotiations between the Government, the miners’ leaders and the coal owners were deadlocked. The strike had two more months to run.
‘The owners are fighting Socialism,’ wrote Lord Londonderry, one of the wealthiest coal owners in the north of England, in a letter to Winston Churchill, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the fifth month of the strike. ‘The Federation [the miners’ union] is nothing but a Communist Central Office. We want a victory over the strongest Communistic force in the country. You will have to fight Socialism in the very near future,’ he warned the Chancellor, ‘and the Miners’ Federation is one of the powerful army corps in the field against us.’
The tragedy of the coal strike lay not simply in the hardship suffered by the miners but the fact that the Government allowed it to be hijacked by the warriors of class war.
During the eight months it lasted, it was the coal owners who were the most belligerent. In the years between the Great War and the Second World War, the Conservative and Liberal share of the electoral vote did not fall below 60 per cent; the Communist Party’s share averaged 0.3 per cent. At the time Lord Londonderry was writing, in September 1926, while a number of the miners’ union leaders were Communists, there was no evidence to support the theory that the men they represented were bent on overthrowing parliamentary democracy and forcing a revolutionary Communist Government into power. On the contrary, their docile conduct during the coal dispute, like that of the 3 million-plus men who had come out in sympathetic protest with them in the General Strike, ought to have shown that, far from posing a challenge to the constitution, the majority of miners were fighting solely for the principle of a living wage.
From the outset, the coal owners – the men who owned and operated Britain’s collieries – were determined not to give ground. ‘It would be possible to say without exaggeration of the miners’ leaders that they were the stupidest men in England if we had not frequent occasion to meet the owners,’ Lord Birkenhead, Secretary of State for India, and a member of the Coal Committee appointed by the Prime Minister to resolve the dispute, remarked to his friend Lord Irwin in May 1926.
During the negotiations to end the strike, the coal owners were represented by their association, the Mining Association of Great Britain (MAGB). In contrast to the aristocratic, often flamboyant, super-rich mineral royalty
owners – the men who owned the land from which the coal was mined – the coal owners were a shadowy, provincial body of men. Their strongholds were the dour granite buildings, stained by dirt and damp, the civic megaliths to the industrial revolution that crowded the centre of the ‘new’ towns in the Black Country, the Yorkshire coalfields and at the heads of the Welsh valleys. Coal, iron and steel represented the whole of their lives; as Dr Outram concluded in his study of the forty-four men who in 1926 made up the Central Committee of the MAGB, ‘their status in society, and in their communities depended entirely on coal; if it failed their moderate wealth and power was at stake. They had nothing else.’
Of the forty-four members on the MAGB’s central committee, nearly half were JPs; twelve had served at one time as county or urban district councillors; seven were Deputy Lieutenants of their county. With the exception of one, their public activities were confined to their county and their industry, a record that fell far short of many of the wealthy northern manufacturers. Despite an average fortune of £112,000 each,* few, if any, of the committee members had followed the contemporary practice of dedicating parks or buildings to their localities. While the majority had inherited their mines and their wealth, they shunned – or were shunned by – ‘society’; as Outram discovered, they stood apart from the political social elite. Few had been to the ‘right’ schools – Eton, Marlborough or Harrow; their families had chosen to send them to grammar schools or to minor public schools like Fettes and Clifton instead. A university education was the exception and only a handful had a record of military service. Their births, deaths and marriages were not reported in The Times; most had married the daughters of men from similarly provincial backgrounds to themselves. Only four maintained a London residence. In the terminology of the day, the coal owners were ‘players’ rather than ‘gentlemen’ – men of practical skills gained through experience or technical training, with few outside interests and whose chief concern was business. Deeply conservative in their outlook and in their politics, they regarded the strike as a challenge to their very existence. As the months wore on, they became determined to destroy the miners’ union, the MFGB.
Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty Page 28
