Crucially, the MFGB wanted the Government to guarantee the miners a minimum wage. In the mid-1920s, wages were still determined at a district level. The rates at every colliery – and for the different jobs underground – varied across the country. The drastic halving of the miners’ average earnings between 1920 and 1926 had resulted not so much from cuts in wages as from the reduction in the length of their working week. If the coal owners could not sell their coal, they simply switched the pits to ‘short-time’. It was a felicitous equation; at a moment’s notice, they could cut their overheads by cutting the number of shifts. The consequences for the miner were brutal: if the coal owner stopped the pit, he did not get paid.
An agreed national minimum was the surest way of conferring ‘a living wage’, a cushion against the iniquities of ‘short-time’. But during the months of bitter negotiations to resolve the strike, the coal owners would not concede it. Evan Williams, the President of the MAGB, refusing to give credence to the miners’ distress, accused the MFGB of demanding a national minimum wage for the sole purpose of achieving its political objectives, ‘the nationalization or socialization [of the mines] by means of the power which national agreements give them to threaten to hold up the whole country and make an industrial question a political issue’.
The coal owners’ use of the rhetoric of class war obscured the real issue: the poverty and hardship the miners were being forced to endure. Their success is evident in the letter Miss Brodigan wrote to the Prime Minister following her visit to Blaina and Nantyglo in South Wales. There, as she reported to Baldwin, the County Medical Officer had described the miners’ living conditions as ‘worse than the black hole of Calcutta’. Yet in the covering letter attached to her report she felt compelled to stress that her findings had not been coloured by the politics of the Left – quite the reverse. ‘I spent last Monday and Tuesday at the Rectory there, where the rector is a strong unionist and his wife an ardent member of the British Fascisti,’ she wrote. ‘I think therefore that had there been anything serious to say against the local labour councillors I should have heard of it. As a matter of fact the rector and his wife described the miners as honest, decent men.’ Miss Brodigan also felt bound to declare her own Tory colours and to emphasize that she had found no evidence of class hatred among the miners themselves. ‘They struck me as a particularly moderate body of men, without any bitterness against anyone,’ she assured the Prime Minister, ‘just thoroughly depressed and worried about their future and fatalistically certain that however the coal dispute ends it will leave them with even more unemployment than before.’
In the autumn of 1926, with the coal owners and the miners’ leaders proving equally stubborn, Winston Churchill, the one man in Baldwin’s Cabinet who had the vision to see beyond the rhetoric of class war, took charge of the Government’s efforts to resolve the dispute.
Churchill’s reply to Lord Londonderry had been stern. ‘You say that the Owners are fighting Socialism,’ he wrote. ‘It is not the business of Coal Owners as Coal Owners to fight Socialism. If they declare it their duty, how can they blame the Miners’ Federation for pursuing political ends? The business of the Coal Owners is to manage their industry successfully, to insist upon sound economic conditions as regards hours and wages, and to fight Socialism as citizens and not as owners of a particular class of property.’
Throughout the autumn, Churchill fought to convince Baldwin that the Government should force a compromise on the coal owners. Appalled by their intransigence and shocked by the poverty in the mining districts, he argued that they should be pushed into meeting the miners half-way. Adamant that the Conservative Party should not be seen to align itself with the interests of one class, he vented his frustration in a letter to the Prime Minister. ‘It would seem quite impossible for us to avow impotency when confronted with recalcitrant owners,’ he wrote. ‘We have legislated against the miners, broken the General Strike, imported foreign coal, and kept the ring these long five months. We can hardly take the purely class view that owners, however unreasonable, are sacrosanct and inviolable.’ The solution Churchill proposed was to keep the mechanism of district wage settlements in place but to set – through legislation – a national minimum for the districts below which no coal owner could go.
Churchill’s was a lone voice in the Cabinet. Even Lord Birkenhead, who had been so withering in his condemnation of the coal owners, rallied to their defence. In a telegram to Churchill, sent in mid-September, he said, ‘I am not happy with your attitude. Why should we impose upon owners national settlement if they are strong enough to obtain district settlements? Why should we enable men’s leaders who have done their best to ruin England to escape without the brand of failure?’
‘Moscow Gold’, perhaps the most inflammatory issue of the coal strike, had played into the coal owners’ hands. In the course of the dispute Russian trades unions contributed £1,200,000* to the miners’ welfare funds – almost three times as much as the amount contributed by British trades unions. ‘The Moscow influence and the Moscow money have been powerful enough to drown the voice of reason and good feeling,’ Churchill later wrote to his political ally, Sir James Hawkey. The Bolshevik donations revived the fear of revolution that the General Strike should have quashed. The coal owners remained ‘sacrosanct and inviolable’; after seven months the Coal Committee concluded that it would be better to leave the miners and the owners to fight it out between themselves: the majority view was that to legislate against the coal owners would be to yield to force majeure.
In November 1926, the miners, driven by poverty and hunger, returned to work. The coal owners won their victory: they returned to less pay and longer hours. The strike had cost the Treasury £30 million; Britain’s coal exports for the year 1926 were a paltry 26 million tons.
It could have been so different. When the Prime Minister opened the Emergency Debate at the start of the General Strike, he had begun his speech with a reprimand to the managers of the coal industry: ‘The whole machinery requires in my view a radical overhauling. I think that when we are in a position to deal with these matters in a calmer atmosphere, that must be one of the first subjects to which we devote ourselves.’ His criticism was echoed by the Leaders of the Opposition. ‘If wages are depressed, it is not the fault of those who are working in the mines,’ said Lloyd George, ‘it is something which is inherently wrong in the whole of the industry. That is accepted by the Government today. It was accepted by the previous Government, and it has been accepted by three inquiries.’
The industry had not, as Churchill had urged the coal owners, been ‘successfully managed’. It was inefficient and antiquated; the lack of investment, the taking of quick profits, the labyrinthine wage and price structures, the appalling labour relations and the poor safety conditions at many pits had all contributed to its decline.
The coal owners’ persistent summoning of the demons of revolution in the years after the First World War masked their refusal to put their own house in order, just as it masked the acute distress in the mining districts during the months of the coal strike.
As Lloyd George pointed out in the Emergency Debate, three Government inquiries had been commissioned into the state of the coal industry: the Sankey Inquiry, by his Government in 1919, and the Macmillan and Samuel inquiries commissioned under Labour and Conservative Governments in 1924 and 1925. Each had concluded that the restructuring and reorganization of the coal industry was a national imperative. Each had called on the Government of the day to direct the brains of the nation to draft legislation to place the coal industry on a secure footing. Each had pointed a finger at the coal owners, judging that they were largely to blame. And all had failed to deliver. Extraordinarily, given that coal was Britain’s biggest industry on which her balance of payments depended, successive Governments – Liberal, Labour and Tory – had balked at forcing the coal owners to reform. The misguided and obsessive preoccupation with the war between the classes meant that, for all political parties
during the 1920s and early 1930s, the defence of the coal owners’ interests became synonymous with the defence of the realm.
In 1924, Arthur Eaglestone, the miner at Billy Fitzwilliam’s New Stubbin pit, wrote an article for the Adelphi magazine. It was a bitter polemic, written at the time of the French occupation of the Ruhr when the British coal industry was experiencing a brief boom. He railed against what he perceived to be the class-prejudiced characterization of the miners in the tabloid press:
‘Well?’, it was entitled.
There are one and a quarter millions of us. What are you going to do about it? We are human as yourselves. ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, do we not revenge?’ Who are you, reader of these lines? And what your information? Are we still the worshippers of whippets? – hoary wife beaters? – the drinking den loungers? – the rapacious condottiere of the Picture Press? Do you remember our President’s cloth cap, and hold it against us? Or that, earning fabulously, we squandered our wealth in riotous living, in grand pianos and chinchilla furs? Thus the daily, thus the Sunday Press!!! …
But there is a daily round which still remains curiously unreported. Split thumbs are not romantic things. Chronic rupture offers small delight even to the reading public. A bursted eye is a little boring – (you will readily understand that I am excluding the recipient?) A crushed foot? Any damn fool can crush his foot! And when the collier, emerging into God’s own sunshine, finds that his eyes are streaming tears, and that his eye lids are uncontrollably fluttering – well, it’s only nystagmus! And doesn’t he get ‘compo’ dammit?
Well then …
‘What are you going to do about it?’ The answer to Eaglestone’s question was, absolutely nothing. No steps were taken in the ten years after the General Strike to restructure the coal industry or to improve working conditions.
It was a catastrophic failure of government, one that would have tragic consequences for the miners. In the decade after the General Strike, conditions in the coalfields steadily worsened as lower wages and longer hours combined with unemployment to create widespread hardship. By 1931, 432,000 miners – 41.6 per cent of the workforce – were unemployed. The owners had the whiphand and kept it; the global slump that followed the 1929 Wall Street Crash, in combination with the wage cuts they had imposed, depressed trade in the coal regions, creating a pool of unemployed labour that ensured wages remained low. The miners’ defeat in the 1926 coal strike determined that it was they who paid the price of Britain’s economic ills. ‘Through forces utterly beyond their individual control,’ wrote the novelist John Galsworthy of their predicament in the early 1930s, ‘a heart-breaking process is going on among a million in one of the best classes of our people … idle, hopeless and increasingly destitute.’
In the end, the owners’ victory destroyed them. ‘We never forgot 1926. The wicked 30s came after,’ a miner from Sheffield recalled. ‘Them as went through them, they’ll never forget them days. They were hard times. We were on the poverty line.’
It would be more than a decade before power passed into the hands of the miners’ representatives. When it did, Wentworth House would become a target for their revenge.
26
It was four years later, mid-April 1930. The senior members of the Fitzwilliam family were gathered in the private chapel at Went-worth, a square, simply decorated room, fitted out in oak. Its centrepiece was a large bronze eighteenth-century chandelier; oil paintings of the Twelve Apostles hung above the oak quarter-panelling on the plain white walls. Sunlight streamed through the spun glass in the Venetian window behind the altar, the light refracting in luminous circles on to the faces of the servants seated in the pews.
Morning Prayers at Wentworth were always well attended. The pews for the household staff were unusually arranged: inlaid into the oak panelling, they ran in a single row around the walls of the chapel, framing the chequered marble floor. This exceptional layout had been purposefully designed: it offered the servants, seated sideways to the altar, a clear view of the family seated above them in the raised gallery that faced the transept. ‘Morning Prayers were a chance to get a good look at them,’ May Bailey, the scullery maid, recalled. ‘When we were working in the house, we didn’t see much of the family. We were below stairs. They were up in the heights. If they passed you anywhere, you always stood. You never moved. You just stood with your eyes cast down at the floor. At Prayers, we tried not to stare but we used to like looking at them. It were nice to see them. They seemed such a happy family. We’d think of our lives compared to theirs and of course naturally we used to think, Oh, I wish it were me.’
Besides the junior staff, the senior members of the household were also present; Alex Third, the dour head gardener who had won a DSO in the Great War; Mrs Lloyd, the housekeeper, who was known among her charges – the housemaids and undermaids – to be vicious with her tongue, and Jack May, the butler. As ever, he was immaculately turned out. ‘By golly, he always looked a treat,’ his son Bert recalled. ‘When he polished his shoes, he used to polish the instep. Me mother always used to say, “When your Dad’s cleaned me shoes, it’ll last me a month.” I tell you something else about Father. When he put his boots on, he used to put his foot up on a chair to lace them and the laces had to be flat – not just twisted and tied any old way – they had to be flat on the top.’
Spring had come early to Wentworth that year; in the gardens that stretched beyond the courtyard outside the chapel, the magnolias and rhododendrons were in full bloom. It had not lifted Billy Fitzwilliam’s mood. The country was in the grip of the worst economic crisis in living memory: he had been forced to put both his pits on short-time.
Of far greater concern to him, though, was the behaviour of his son.
Peter was seated with his father. He had left Eton at seventeen. Some six months away from his twenty-first birthday, he was now an officer in the Scots Greys. The fat, unattractive little boy had grown into a lean and handsome young man, well over six feet tall. His eyes were hazel-coloured; his hair, worn slicked back from a pencil-straight side parting, a deep chestnut brown. The diffident, troubled expression that had haunted his face as a child was still evident in the heavy set of his brow. It conferred a smouldering appeal: he might easily have been mistaken for one of the matinee idols whose faces adorned the billboards outside the new picture palaces in the nearby towns.
Seated alongside each other, there was little resemblance between father and son – except in profile, in the gentle, aristocratic curve of the nose. Billy was almost fifty. In recent years he had gained weight. Flecks of grey tinged his side whiskers and his luxuriant Edwardian moustache; his hair had receded beyond the crown of his head and the chiselled features of his youth had become puffed and jowled. Physically, Peter had grown into the son that his father could at last be proud of; to Billy’s delight, he had even developed a late but passionate interest in horses and hunting. Yet in every other respect, the boy was a source of grave anxiety to Billy. The tension between them, a feature of his childhood, had continued. In recent years their relationship had been a stormy one, as Peter had persisted in defying him at every turn.
It was indeed a tense moment when, half-way through the Vicar’s address, Peter stood up and left. His feet clattering on the oak floor, he strode up the steps to the door leading to Chapel Corridor – the family’s private entrance from the house. Below, along the servants’ pews, all eyes were raised as it slammed shut behind him.
It was not the first time Peter had walked out. Charles Booth, the steward’s boy at Wentworth House, regularly attended Sunday Matins at the village church. ‘I was a choir boy. We sat in the stalls opposite the Fitzwilliams’ pew,’ he remembered. ‘Peter used to sit there and glower at us. Many a Sunday I’ve seen him get up and walk out half-way through. Browned off he was. Up he jumped and out he went. He didn’t stand on ceremony the way his father did.’
From his earl
y teens, Peter had rebelled against his parents’ values and the lifestyle at Wentworth House. Shunning boys of his own social class, most days, during his school holidays from Eton, he would set off across the Park on his bicycle to the pit villages of Greasbrough and Rawmarsh, or to the farm labourers’ cottages north of Wentworth along Burying Lane.
The villages hugged the boundaries of the Park wall. An almost seamless extension of it, the ranks of two-up, two-down cottages were built in the same coal-blackened yellow stone. Here, Peter sought refuge from the formality of life at home. ‘He was a grand fellow, nothing stuck up about him, he was a real grand bloke,’ Walker Scales, the butcher at Greasbrough, recalled. ‘He were just the opposite to old Lordie, he were rough and ready. He were one of us.’
Walker first met Peter by the ponds at the bottom of the Park. ‘There were five of us lads from the village – we were about fourteen or fifteen years old, I suppose – and we spotted him on his own. We were going to have a bit of fun. We were going to throw him in the dam. We went up to him, and he were straightforward with us, a good mixer, friendly like. And he said, “Come on, let’s all go swimming.” It were a blisteringly hot day and it were against the Estate’s rules to swim there. There were reeds under the water and the big house didn’t want the young uns drowning. So in we went. Then we used to see him all the time. Played football together, knocked about the lanes. Went drinking with him. He were a down-to-earth young man.’
Peter also made friends among the young miners at his father’s pits – boys in their mid-teens who were working as pony drivers underground. ‘He were a friend of mine,’ remembers Walt Hammond, a ninety-year-old miner who spent his working life at New Stubbin colliery. ‘Everybody thought well of young Lordie. He were all right. Course we liked him! He were spending money on us!’
Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty Page 29
