Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  Most of the pit boys gave their wages to their mothers to ease the family budget. Swiftly, Peter gained a reputation among them – at his father’s expense – as a latter-day Robin Hood. Every Sunday afternoon, as Walt described, he would take the New Stubbin junior football team to Bassindale’s, the sweetshop at Wentworth, where Billy had an account. ‘We could have whatever we wanted. To a certain degree, like. The shopkeeper would be in a right fluster. He used to say, “I can’t serve you all at once, I’ll take you one at a time.” Course, everyone used to choose chocolate. They didn’t get it much. Our mothers only gave us a ha’penny a week for spice [sweets].’

  May Bailey, the scullery maid at Wentworth, also remembers Peter. ‘He’d mix around. He’d go in’t Rockingham Arms and he’d have a drink, have a chat, and he’d go to pits. If anything happened at pits he’d go, if someone was fast down pit, he’d go.’

  Cycling around the pit villages on his own, Peter’s accessibility and his genuine friendships with the miners were in pointed contrast to his father’s patrician style. In the early 1930s, on the Sunday afternoons when Billy was at Wentworth, a feudal ritual was enacted. Riding in a pony and trap, with a servant or one of the senior household officials in tow, he toured his villages. ‘Everyone used to come out in front of their houses. It would run like a ripple down the street,’ Walker Scales recalled. ‘You’d hear the cheering and shouts of “Quick, Old Lordie’s coming” and you’d all run out to the porches. The men nipped their caps and everyone waved and cheered. There was an old joke that ran about. Anyone who wasn’t seen to wave would be finished at the pit on Monday. Course they weren’t.’ A triumphal progress was Billy’s chosen style: ‘He never went anywhere on his own. He was always accompanied by someone from his retinue. Even when he went out riding, he’d have a groom with him to open and shut gates, or to knock on someone’s door,’ recalled Peter Diggle, whose uncle ran the Fitzwilliam estates.

  ‘God lived in t’ big house, didn’t he? And when God came tot’ village, you kowtowed,’ said one old miner. Peter’s friendships in the villages soon caused tongues to wag. As Walt remembers, the older generation were unsettled by what they regarded as his over-familiarity: it eroded the mystique and confused the old feudal rules. ‘There were a lot of talk among some,’ said Walt, ‘they’d say Old Lordie were far out in front. Peter were too rough and ready.’

  Billy was equally disapproving of his son’s friendships with the miners’ children. Realizing that it was more than just a passing phase, he put Peter on a tight rein. He reduced his allowance and ordered a block to be put on his account at the village shop. At home, increasingly, Peter’s conduct became the subject of family rows. ‘There was a boy up at the farm by the flour mill called Albert Sylvester,’ remembered Bert May. ‘We called him Cocky. Cocky Sylvester. He was a bit of a daredevil. I don’t know what age Peter would have been when he met him, fifteen or sixteen, something like that. Well, they stuck like glue. They went everywhere together. One day, they were up at Wentworth House on the drive by the entrance to the Pillared Hall. There were two flights of stone steps there, the curving ones. Ay, there must be more than twenty steps. And young Lordie said to Cocky, “I bet you daren’t ride down those steps on my bike.” “I dare,” he says. “Go on then. You can take it home with you if you do.” And Cocky did. There was hell to pay. His father was furious. It were a brand-new bike that he’d been given for his birthday.’

  The row over the bicycle was the first of many involving Cocky Sylvester.

  The Sylvester family had come to Wentworth from the Potteries in the late 1870s when Cocky’s grandfather had been hired as a stonemason to work on the building of the New Church, commissioned by the 6th Earl Fitzwilliam as a memorial to his father. Cocky, the son of a miner, had left school at fourteen. When he and Peter became friends he was working as a loader at Newton Chambers, the ironworks outside Sheffield. ‘His Lordship regarded him as a bad influence,’ Bert May remembered. ‘Lord Milton was coming back to the house at night blind drunk. His Lordship thought it were Cocky who’d introduced him to drinking. After that, he forbade him to see him.’ Ignoring his father’s ban, in the evenings, Peter would sneak out of Wentworth and go round to Cocky’s house in the village. ‘My grandmother lived behind the shop on Main Street. My mother told me she used to get besides herself with worry over Lord Milton’s friendship with my father,’ David Sylvester recalled. ‘He would be in and out of her house as if it were his own. He used to walk in through the back door. One of her jobs in the village was to lay out the bodies. They didn’t use undertakers in those days. My uncle was a joiner and he made the coffins. When someone in the village passed away, he and his men would go and collect them and take them round to my grandmother’s. She used to wash and prepare the bodies for burial. She’d put two old pennies on their eyes to close them before rigor mortis set in. Often as not there’d be a corpse on the kitchen table. She hated the idea of Lord Milton seeing these bodies – which he did because he’d just walk straight in through the back door. It worried her sick the way he’d turn up. My mother said she couldn’t come to terms with the fact that it were him coming in. He were like royalty to her. It frightened her. She was a timid sort of woman. She knew that he was coming to her house without his father knowing. She thought it would get the family into trouble.’

  Sitting round the kitchen table in the cramped cottage, Peter and Cocky planned their drinking expeditions. ‘Lord Milton must have been kept on a tight financial stick by his father,’ David Sylvester recalled. ‘When he came round to my grandmother’s she saw things that were hidden from the Earl. Whether he discovered, I don’t know. Peter would bring things – clothes and objects that he’d taken from the house. He and my father would take them to a pawn shop over Rotherham way. It paid for their drinking. Ay, pinching and pawning Lord Milton was.’

  Over cups of tea and sandwiches, reluctantly supplied by a nervous Mrs Sylvester, Peter and Cocky would also plot the seduction of the local girls. Deliberately escaping the narrow confines of Wentworth, their elected hunting grounds were the rougher pit villages of Greasbrough, Rawmarsh and Netherhaugh.

  ’Ooh, Lord Milton were lovely,’ May Bailey remembered. ‘He were so handsome, lovely manners. All the girls wanted to go courting with him.’

  Every Friday and Saturday night, rain or shine, a courting ritual, known locally as the ‘bunny run’, took place in the fields and lanes that linked the villages around Wentworth. ‘I started down the mine when I was fourteen and I saved up till I was sixteen to buy my first made-to-measure suit,’ Jim McGuinness, a miner from Elsecar, recalled. ‘It were biscuity brown with a stripe and 26-inch bottoms and it cost me 39 shillings and sixpence. I couldn’t keep it off. I used to wear it on the bunny run. You never took a girl out for a meal, or anything like that. There weren’t restaurants or bars in them days. Not round here. All the lads and lasses used to meet in the lanes outside the village. We had a circuit. We’d walk to Hoyland and then up New Street across the fields round the top. You used to keep patrolling until you saw someone you liked. The good bunnies would run! There were that many of us – about a hundred or so. You had to be careful though. Some of the older ones in the village complained. They thought the kids were getting up to too much mischief. So the Police introduced on-the-spot fines. Me and the girl I was courting, we got stopped and it cost me 19 shillings – 9 shillings and sixpence each. I had to pay for her you see. I were only holding her hand! You couldn’t kiss in public in them days, you could only hold hands. We’d walk round the fields and then you’d walk a girl home. It were lovely.’

  There was one girl, Madge Green, the daughter of a horseman at New Stubbin pit, whom all the boys liked. ‘She was a notable girl! The girl of the village!’ said Walker Scales. ‘She had lovely bubbly blonde hair. A bit of a girl, she was, a bit friendly to the lads!’

  Madge lived at Netherhaugh in a small miner’s cottage close to Cortworth Lodge, the gatehouse by the entrance to the trac
k leading up to the Fitzwilliams’ mausoleum, a splendid eighteenth-century building that stood on the crown of a hill in the Park. To make ends meet, Madge and her mother ran a shop in their front room, selling odds and ends: packets of biscuits, cigarettes, boxes of matches. ‘All the boys in the village knew Madge,’ May remembered. ‘She were full of life. I wouldn’t have been surprised at any boy taking Madge on, because she would have gone with them. Her father died when she was young. She had such a lonely life with her mother, once she got out, she sort of let herself go a bit. This cottage where they lived, a little bit further down you came to Cortworth Lane. Well, the lads used to play football there. She’d happen go down and have a kick of the ball with them. They all knew her. “Come on, Madge,” they’d shout. “Where are you going, Madge? Come on over here.” She were liked, she were great fun.’

  To May’s surprise, when Peter was seventeen, he started taking Madge out. ‘There was another girl in Greasbrough, her mother kept the “Beer Off”. You know, the place where the women went to get a jug of beer to take home. Doris Hare was her name. I always thought she’d be the one he’d pick because she was smarter than Madge. She had a bit more money, her mother had a proper business.’

  May was living at home with her parents in Greasbrough at the time. She had left her job as scullery maid at Wentworth House for better-paid work as housekeeper to a local estate agent. Twice a week, she went to night school to learn millinery, hoping to achieve her dream of leaving service and getting a job at a hat shop in Rotherham. Madge Green was in her evening class. ‘Lord Milton used to fetch her. He had a little green car with a hood and he used to be blowing the hooter outside night school. And he’d call out, “Madge” and they’d fly away. We were all jealous. If I’d had the chance I should have gone off in the car with him. Why not? Let’s face it, he were a Fitzwilliam. We all looked up to the Fitzwilliams, didn’t we? I mean, they were the be all and end all, weren’t they?’

  It was not long before Madge became pregnant. ‘One day, suddenly, Madge and her mother disappeared. The little house and shop were shut up. They’d flit. It were all done so quickly. They were there one minute, the next minute they’d gone.’ Their disappearance, as May remembered, was the talk of the village. ‘They’d been sent down, hadn’t they? It would be to keep people quiet. But everybody knew! We all knew she were expecting, that’s why they’d left. There were nasty talk. People in the village said, ‘She’s done what she shouldn’t have done and it’s come home to her and it’ll have learnt her a lesson.’ ‘She’s asked for it,’ they said. Well, she hadn’t asked for it. What would she be, fifteen or sixteen? That would have been her age.’

  May’s upbringing was typical of other girls in the villages around Wentworth in the 1920s. ‘I didn’t know about sex when I was fifteen. It were never discussed, not even with the girls at school. When I started to be unwell, when I had me curses, I didn’t know what it was. My mother had never told us. Never told us what to expect. I said to my Mother I’d got this blood. “Well, you’ll be like that every month,” she said. And I says, “Why?” And of course I wanted to know this and that and everything else. All she said was, “While ever you’ve got your curses you’re alreet.” She took some old shirting belonging to the boys, and cut me a square. “Now then,” she said, “I’ll give you plenty of old material every month. You’ll have to soak ’em and wash ’em. And that’s it.” When I were older, she’d say to us, “If you bring any trouble home, it’ll be the workhouse for you.” You were threatened with that. After I started courting, it was, “You can’t come in late. You’ve got to be in for such a time. Who have you been with? I’ve told you not to go with them.” You had it drilled into you. You were frightened to bring any trouble home.’

  Pregnancy before marriage, particularly in the close-knit and conservative ‘family pits’ like the Fitzwilliams’, was rare. ‘I only knew one other girl, apart from Madge, that fell,’ May recalled. ‘She lived down Scrooby Street. I remember her being pregnant. She were only young and she said she didn’t know. She told her Mother that she didn’t know they were doing anything wrong. The doctor said to her, “Well, where did it happen?” She said, “Well, up against Grayson’s Gate.” It were a farm gate at the top of the village. Later on – it weren’t very nice – it became a code word round the village. People talked about having a bit of “Grayson’s Gate”. The boy that was going with her, he said he would marry her. And they did. They got married. Poor old Madge. She were never going to marry Lordie. I felt sorry for her because there were only her and her mother, things were hard enough in them times. Nobody thought less of Lordie because he’d got a girl into trouble. Oh no, no, NO! They didn’t blame him for it. They all liked him. They said he were a naughty boy. But a grand lad. He didn’t only have Madge though, there were quite a few. People said she weren’t the only one he got into trouble. There’ll be a few more. I know that.’

  In the space of three years, Peter had three sons by girls from his father’s pit villages. Billy’s Heads of Department – the men who ran the Estate and who were privy to the family’s most secret business – were entrusted with the delicate task of providing for them. In Madge’s case, money was sent via an intermediary: ‘The Vicar at Greasbrough, old Brotbeard, let it slip out somewhere along the line that Earl Fitzwilliam paid him money every month,’ May remembered. ‘He used to send it on to Madge and her baby. They were living down South somewhere.’ While the children were financially taken care of, the human cost was high; two of the girls were forced into loveless marriages by their families – compelled to marry husbands who had been procured for them by the Estate.

  It is doubtful whether Peter ever had any contact with his sons. To this day, one of them, a man now in his mid seventies, does not know that he is the son of the 8th Earl Fitzwilliam, as Peter became. Such was the shame in his family, he was never told. His mother’s first cousin, an elderly lady in her late eighties still living in Greasbrough, remembered their shame. ‘When — got into trouble it were the talk of the place. It were there for the whole world to see. It upset my aunt and uncle because they were very much Lord Fitzwilliam’s tenants. My uncle was a miner and they lived in one of their cottages. They were really ashamed. We were the hoi polloi, weren’t we, compared to the Fitzwilliams. It was the class system, wasn’t it? Me grandfather worked for His Lordship as foreman saddler in Elsecar pit. He used to earn coppers going down to the ponds in the Park to help Their Ladyships put their skates on. I remember him telling me a story about one of His Lordship’s hunters. It went into the pond and got stuck, frozen in. They covered over its carcass with a tarpaulin. They couldn’t move it, while the ice was there, so they covered it and it was like a settee. The ladies of the house sat on the dead horse to put their skates on. Me grandfather were a miner, his son were a miner and His Lordship were their boss. It was all “Yes, Mi’ Lord, no, Mi’ Lord.” When Her Ladyship came round they used to curtsey and all that. My aunt and uncle were ashamed their daughter was such a loose-living girl and ashamed because she had swum out of her sea.’

  In the course of his late teens Peter had crossed every class barrier: upon his coming of age, at his father’s insistence, those barriers were to be rigidly maintained.

  27

  ‘Dear Jim,’ Billy addressed his agent, Colonel Landon, in a letter written on 8 May 1931:

  Peter’s 21st birthday is on the 31st Dec next and the occasion should, we feel, be appropriately celebrated amongst the tenantry and workpeople connected with our family and the estates in England and Ireland.

  Lady Fitzwilliam and I want the help and advice in this matter of our friends, and we shall be very grateful for your views and assistance. Will you think things over and jot down what you suggest might be most suitable in the way of entertainment to mark the event …

  We will then meet and talk over the recommendations with a view to a programme being prepared for fuller consideration by Her Ladyship and myself …

 
I am, as always, Yours very sincerely, Fitzwilliam.

  Peter’s twenty-first birthday party was set to become the next round in the clash between father and son. ‘It were his father who were pushing for it,’ Walt Hammond, Peter’s friend from the Rawmarsh football team, recalled. ‘Lord Milton were a pubs man. Low-key like. He didn’t want a fancy party. It weren’t his style.’

  Billy wanted to celebrate the birthday on a grand Edwardian scale. Traditionally, the coming of age of a Fitzwilliam heir had been a landmark in the life of the community as much as it had been in the life of the eldest son: he intended the party to serve as a reminder to Peter of his duties and obligations as the future Earl.

  On this occasion, Peter had no choice but to demur. He was to be given no say in the planning of the party: instead, the precise form of the entertainments was to be decided by Committee.

  10 June was a muggy summer’s day in London: the skies were overcast and a persistent light drizzle fell.

  The members of the Milton Committee, the men appointed by Billy to organize Peter’s birthday celebrations, caught the early morning train from Yorkshire. They were the heads of department from the Fitzwilliam estates, among them the managers from the two collieries and the chemical works and the land agents and comptrollers from Wentworth and from the family’s subsidiary estates in the North and East Ridings. In their mid-fifties and upwards, they were mostly ex-military: men with impeccable war records, they carried the rank of Captain or above.

  Their newspaper of choice on the journey down was The Times. Aside from the raising of the German Fleet, scuttled at Scapa Flow in 1919, the news that morning was unremarkable. The previous evening, the Third Court of the Season had been held at Buckingham Palace: a page and a half of the broadsheet was devoted to detailed descriptions of the outfits worn by each of the 200 debutantes and their chaperones as they had been presented to the King and Queen. The Court Circular, taking up three column inches, carried the usual announcements: ‘The Hon. Mrs Sidebottom has arrived at Claridges from the country’; ‘Lord Sydenham apologizes for his failure to answer correspondence owing to ill health’; ‘The Misses Dunns, accompanied by Lady Paget, have taken a house at South Place for the Season’. Following the presentations at court, there was a momentary lull in the social calendar: Ascot was over, the Lawn Tennis Championships at Wimbledon were yet to begin. On a rainy afternoon, the picture houses at least offered some entertainment. Dance, Fools, Dance was playing all over London: the hit of the summer, Joan Crawford, according to the reviewers, ‘looking more beautiful than ever in her most exciting talkie to date’.