Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  A single event marred the day. En route from St Patrick’s to the reception at St Anne’s, the wedding cavalcade was held up by a funeral cortège. Peter and Obby’s car was forced to stop while the hearse passed directly in front of it. It was a bad omen: in Ireland, according to superstition, it meant the marriage was doomed.

  Some days later, at Coollattin, the Fitzwilliams’ Irish estate, the portent appeared to come true. ‘I was sitting in the drawing-room at Coollattin with my mother and my sister,’ Lady Barbara remembered, ‘when suddenly, in walked Obby. We were all astonished to see her. Peter had left her in the middle of their honeymoon. He had gone off somewhere else.’

  Barbara was thirteen at the time. Her mother, Elfrida – Peter’s sister – told her to leave the room. ‘I remember Obby was terribly upset. We were all frightfully shocked. What could she possibly be doing there, what could have happened? I was too young then to be allowed to know. I left the room, as my mother asked. It was obviously a matter for the grown-ups.’ Years later, when Barbara was older, her mother told her what had happened. ‘Obby was a Bishop’s daughter! Poor thing probably hadn’t been told anything much about sex. There was Peter. He had had all those girlfriends – some of them very experienced. It was probably not very interesting for him! He got bored and left. Poor Obby, I think she had a very grim time with him.’

  PART VI

  29

  The silhouette of Wentworth House was clearly visible. The moon was full, the sky cloudless, the night bitterly cold. That evening, 12 December 1940, a hard frost had fallen at dusk, encasing the roof in ice. The statues crowning the central block on the East Front glistened steel-white. Beneath them, thinly etched across the breadth of the portico, the Fitzwilliams’ motto, ‘Mea Gloria Fides’ – My Glorious Faith – shimmered, blue-gold. The eighteenth-century shutters in the state apartments were closed; in the hundreds of windows along the two wings, and in the upper reaches of the house, the newly made blackout curtains were drawn. The ice continued its creeping advance as the temperature dropped: glinting in the moonlight above the blackness below, it confounded the labours of the army of seamstresses that had dressed the house for war.

  Ten miles south, flying at 10,000 feet, Nazi bomber crews attached to the elite Kampfgeschwader 100 – the ‘Pathfinder Squadron’ – were making their final approach. Their flight path had been set by a radio beam, transmitted from a secret location in Europe. A continuous audio tone sounded in the cockpits to keep the pilots on course. Flying in formation, following the silver ribbon of the River Sheaf, the foothills of the Pennines stretched below. They were within seconds of their target. Marking off their position on neatly folded night navigation maps coloured deep magenta and green, the pilots waited for the continuous tone to alter. German Bomber Command had positioned a second beam to guide the Pathfinder Squadron in; at the point where the two beams intersected, an alert would sound in the cockpits: the final signal to the pilots to release their bombs.

  The Kampfgeschwader’s target was Sheffield. In the first year of the war, the ‘Steel City’, dogged by recession in the 1930s, had geared up to full capacity. By December 1940, it was of critical importance to the defence of Britain. The Vickers works on the edge of the city operated the only drop-hammer capable of forging crankshafts for Spitfires; Hadfields Steelworks was the only factory in the country producing eighteen-inch armour-piercing shells. The authorities had been expecting an air raid throughout the summer: barrage balloons floated above the city and on the crescent of hills that ringed it the anti-aircraft batteries were permanently manned.

  On the night of 12 December 1940, the Kampfgeschwader dropped their bombs shortly after 7 p.m. First to fall were the parachute flares, magnesium bombs that ignited in the air, casting a fierce iridescent glow, as if a thousand arc lights were being trained on the city below. Then came the incendiary bombs – phosphorous exploding ones – deliberately designed to ignite fires as markers for the wave upon wave of Heinkel bombers following behind. Arcing to the east of the city, the squadron headed back for Occupied France. As the pilots executed a turning circle, four miles north-east of Sheffield, they discharged the last of their bombs over Wentworth.

  ‘I was on the bus coming back from Rotherham,’ Charles Booth, the former steward’s room boy at the house, remembered. ‘When the air raid started, they stopped the bus at Greasbrough and told us to get off. I had to walk the rest of the way home through Wentworth Park. It was about a mile and a half across to the village. I suppose I must have been a lad of about eighteen or nineteen. Terrified, I was. There wasn’t a soul about, eight o’clock on a winter’s night and it was bright as daylight. There were magnesium bombs littered all over the place, burning very bright, bright as a summer’s day. They made a swishing noise coming down – sssssssssssssh, ssssssssssssssh. They were coming in showers, hundreds of them. I could see the knars on the old oaks as clear as my hand. You could hear the bombs crunching in the distance and the drone of the aeroplanes. Up on the hills the searchlights were going and the gun batteries blazing. There was a red sunset glow in the sky over Sheffield. I thought of all those poor people there.

  You knew they were getting a pasting. One of the pubs, a place called Marples, received a direct hit. There were hundreds in there. They’re still there. All they did was pour lime down the crater to cover the corpses. We wondered if it was us in the village next.’

  The bombs were felt throughout the South Yorkshire coalfield. As far as ten miles away, at Conisbrough, the ground shook. ‘Our kitchen door was a solid two-inches-thick wooden door,’ Alicia Dufton recalled in her memoirs. ‘It rattled loud and ominously during the blitzes, as did the contents of the pantry and the ornaments on top of the piano.’

  At Wentworth, five miles closer to Sheffield, the pristine interior seemed to quiver with imminent destruction. Thousands of crystal beads in the chandeliers in the state rooms trembled and the loose Georgian frames rattled in every window of the house; the fine porcelain, displayed in glass-fronted cabinets, and the hundreds of bibelots that adorned the occasional tables, struck their own notes. ‘Everything was moving. It was like a giant space ship about to take off,’ Bert May, the butler’s son, recalled. ‘The noise was deafening. Everything were going off. All the china and crystal were singing, and then there were these bangs and crashes as bits and pieces came down from the walls. Pictures, bits of plaster, you name it. My father told me one of the bison’s heads came down in the Pillared Hall.’

  The Heinkel bombers that followed in the wake of the Path-finder Squadron bombed Sheffield for nine hours. Two days later the bombers returned. In the course of the two raids, 785 people were killed and 589 seriously injured; in the centre of the city, thousands of buildings were destroyed. The factories and steel-works had been saved at the cost of high civilian casualties: years later it would emerge that the RAF, using powerful transmitters, had ‘bent’ the Germans’ directional radio beam, diverting the Pathfinder Squadron’s marker away from the strategic targets and on to Sheffield’s residential and business centre instead.

  Wentworth had a narrow escape. Three bombs barely missed the house, landing within yards of the state apartments in the walled garden behind the West Front. ‘A stick of bombs came down by the greenhouses. None of them went off,’ Charles Booth remembered. ‘The next morning, they called in an army bomb disposal team to diffuse them. They had to blow one of the bombs up. It blew out every pane of glass in the greenhouses. Great white pavilions they were – like the ones at Kew Gardens. On a winter’s day it was like the Amazon jungle in there – full of bananas and tropical fruits. That were the end of them after that.’

  The phoney war was over: before long, the vaulted state rooms and the stone-floored corridors at Wentworth would echo to the tread of marching boots.

  ‘The war turned my grandparents’ world upside down,’ Lady Barbara Ricardo recalled. ‘It was when everything began to unravel.’

  In the months following the declaration of w
ar, thousands of country houses across Britain were requisitioned by the Government, or donated by their owners for wartime use. Burke’s Peerage estimated that some 10,000 were commandeered: used for a variety of purposes, they were converted into schools, military head-quarters, hospitals, repositories for national treasures, homes for evacuees and secret intelligence establishments.

  Wentworth was one of the first of England’s stately homes to be requisitioned. Early in 1940, it became the temporary head-quarters of the 10th Battalion, the Duke of Wellington’s regiment. To the Fitzwilliams’ relief, the first year of occupation had been tolerable, even enjoyable. ‘It was rather like having guests to stay,’ Billy’s daughter, Elfrida, Countess of Wharncliffe, recalled. The house had not been overrun: the 10th Battalion was a new battalion manned by a skeleton HQ Company Staff and only a handful of the Duke of Wellington’s senior officers were billeted in the wings. The other ranks, ‘the licentious soldiery’ as one of the regiment’s officers referred to them, were accommodated in the stable block where the stalls that once housed the Earls’ hunters were turned into makeshift dorms. ‘We were very comfortable. We had use of his Lordship’s billiard table,’ remembered Patrick Hewling, the Regimental Medical Officer, who was billeted in a wing along the East Front. ‘Lord Fitzwilliam visited our mess, usually on a Sunday morning before lunch and had a drink with us. He liked a little “military gossip”. He very often brought a bottle of his excellent port as a present to our mess for consumption after Sunday dinner … It was a very happy billet. The Fitzwilliams were very good to us, and I don’t think they were much incommoded by the military presence.’

  The house party came to an end in 1941. In December, the Fitzwilliams were notified that the Intelligence Corps would be moving to Wentworth for the duration of the war. The entire East Front, where the state rooms were located, was to be taken over: Maud and Billy would have to move into a suite of rooms in the ‘Back Front’ – the baroque West Front that overlooked the gardens at the back of the house.

  Preparing the East Front for the troops’ arrival was a mammoth task. It took an army of domestic staff, helped by extra recruits from the village, several weeks to pack up its contents. The Whistlejacket Room, the Van Dyck Room, the State Dining Room and the rest of the galleries and ante-rooms in the State apartments were stripped of their treasures. Chandeliers were bagged; furniture and pictures sheeted or moved; plate, porcelain and other objets d’art packed into crates.

  Working around the clock, under the direction of Captain Taylor and Colonel Landon, the comptroller and land agent at Wentworth, the servants formed human chains, criss-crossing the length of the corridors, passing the lighter objects from hand to hand. The bulk of the contents of the State Rooms was stored in the private chapel and in the great subterranean network of cellars and passages; the remainder was moved to Billy and Maud’s new apartment in the West Front.

  Mouldings, panelling, furnishings and rugs all had to be protected from the wear and tear of the new tenants. In the ante-rooms and drawing rooms, posses of Estate workmen sawed Essex board in situ, crafting it into protective casing carefully calculated to fit snugly against the decorative panelling and around the precious carved stone fireplaces. In the galleries, the servants struggled to roll the handwoven carpets into portable bundles which then had to be heaved downstairs to be stored in the vast space under the Grand Staircase. Damask curtains and tapestries, too ancient to take down without the risk of tearing them, were swathed in canvas covers by the housemaids; in the Marble Salon, a temporary wooden floor was constructed to sheath the priceless marble-inlaid floor.

  For those who witnessed it, it was an unnerving sight. Centuries of history were being dismantled and wrapped. Along the corridors, paintings, loosely covered in baize, were stacked in bundles against the walls. Beside them, beneath the niches where they had stood, suits of armour and statuary were laid out, shrouded in cloth, like corpses, on the floor. Everywhere, housemaids hovered over packing crates, carefully wrapping porcelain and silver in felt and old newspaper. ‘I wrapped so many beautiful things,’ remembered Ethel Jones, a former laundry maid at Wentworth, who was drafted in to help with the packing. ‘Ooh, there must have been about twenty-five teapots! Not just any old teapots they weren’t. There were porcelain ones in all colours and gold ones with beautiful hand-painted pictures on them. There were one with a painted view of Wentworth House. I expect it came from Rockingham kilns over by Pottery Lane. Family had a lot from there. You had to keep pinching yourself. You couldn’t believe you were packing it all up. We all thought world were coming to an end. War were going badly. Germans were bombing us. Family were moving to back front, soldiers taking over. You wondered what things would be like when time came to open up them crates again. One thing I’ll never forget was a glass goblet. It had the words “Milton For Ever” inscribed on it. Her Ladyship happened by just as I was wrapping it. She told me not to pack it. “Give it to Jack May,” she said. He were her butler. She wanted it in her room where she could see it. We all knew she were worried sick about Lord Milton.’

  ‘The thing that frightened Grannie Mumbo the most was that Peter would be killed,’ Lady Barbara Ricardo, Maud’s granddaughter, recalled. ‘She didn’t think he was going to come through the war. It overshadowed everything else. She worried dreadfully. Like every mother did.’

  Peter, a reserve officer in the Grenadier Guards, was called up immediately war was declared. He was thirty on New Year’s Eve 1940. His first six months of the war were spent training with his regiment at the Guards Depot at Windsor Castle. By the spring of 1941, he was fighting in a Commando unit in the Middle East. ‘He had a reputation for being exceptionally brave. All his soldiers adored him,’ Lady Barbara remembered. ‘It was extraordinary really because as a little boy he was so feeble. Then he turned into this incredibly brave young man. I suppose it was Eton really. It enabled him to escape from the family, to develop his own character. At home he was always being molly-coddled by his parents or his sisters, or being pushed into doing this, that, or the other. The trouble was, he was the only son and heir.’

  In the seven years since their marriage, Peter and Obby had produced one child – a daughter, Juliet, born in 1935. ‘There were a lot of talk about it in the villages,’ Geoffrey Steer, the son of an Elsecar miner, recalled. ‘“Won’t be long now before he’ll be having an heir,” they’d say. When he left to fight, there were a lot of speculation. “Who’s going to take over if Young Lordie’s killed?” People said it were Lady Milton’s fault there weren’t no heir. Called her a silly billy, they did. Every time she got to be expecting, what u’d happen? She’d be going riding, wouldn’t she, on’t ’orse. Oh, it used to play ’em up. She had lots of miscarriages.’

  The village gossips were correct in spreading rumours of miscarriages, but they were unkind to blame Obby for failing to produce an heir. Poor Obby had a most dreadful time. As Lady Barbara recalled, there were complications at Juliet’s birth. ‘Why they didn’t give her a caesarian, heaven knows. Perhaps they didn’t in those days. You see, it damaged her insides. She couldn’t have any more children after Juliet, that’s what my mother said.’

  Early in 1943, Peter was recruited by SOE, the Special Operations Executive in charge of top-secret wartime operations. He was one of five officers handpicked to lead a highly dangerous mission in the North Sea. Code-named ‘Operation Bridford’, its objective was to secure desperately needed supplies of a small but essential aircraft part: tiny ball-bearings obtainable only in Sweden.

  Three years earlier, the supply line had been cut when the Germans occupied Norway, gaining control of the Skagerrak, the narrow sea channel leading to Sweden’s ports. Unless the German blockade could be broken, Britain’s aircraft-assembly lines were at risk. A memo circulated by the Ministry of Aircraft Production at the end of 1942 spelt out in simple terms what a delivery of 100 tons of the ball-bearings would achieve: ‘100 tons would be sufficient to cover 75 per cent of the airfra
me work on 1,200 Lancasters and 60 per cent of the airframe work on 1,600 Mosquitos.’ Realistically, the Ministry of Aircraft Production calculated, 500 tons of the ball-bearings were needed.

  Operation Bridford, devised by Sir George Binney, one of the founders of SOE, was a last-ditch attempt to break the German blockade. Dubbed the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ for his audacity, Binney proposed deploying five high-speed motor gunboats (MGBs), disguised as merchant shipping, to slip undetected – and under the noses of the Germans – through the Skagerrak to a remote inlet along the rocky Swedish coast where secret agents would be waiting to load the ships with a precious cargo of ball-bearings. Speed was of the essence; after a quick turnaround, the heavily laden ‘grey ladies’, as the boats became known, would steal out of the inlet to run the gauntlet of enemy shipping on the return journey back to their base at Immingham, a small fishing port on the Humber. ‘We have our traditions in Nonsuch, our aspirations in Hopewell, and our light-heartedness in Gay Viking and Gay Corsair,’ Binney wrote as the boats, each powered by three diesel engines, were being fitted up for their mission. ‘I have been groping to find a suitable name which would crystallize the steadfastness of our purpose. I think Master Standfast will do that.’

  Peter, operating under the cover name ‘Peter Lawrence’ to save him from being singled out in case of capture, was assigned as Chief Officer to the Hopewell. ‘None of the family knew what Peter was doing. We weren’t supposed to know, it was secret,’ Barbara recalled. ‘We knew he was doing something hush-hush.