Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  Seven weeks after the wedding Rose finally contacted her daughter. Her letter was in part duplicitous; privately, in conversations with Archbishop Spellman, she was still contriving to have the marriage annulled. ‘Here it is the fourth of July again, and another summer is almost half over,’ she wrote to Kick.

  We are all looking forward now to having Joe home and we only wish you and Billy were going to be along too …

  … I really didn’t expect that you would be married until after the invasion or at least until I knew more definitely of your plans. However, that is all over now, Dear Kathleen, and as long as you love Billy so dearly, you may be sure that we will receive him with open arms …

  Joe Junior never did come home. On 12 August, the reality of war was brought home to the Kennedy family when Joe was killed after his plane, a Liberator bomber, exploded on a secret mission over the North Sea. Kick was devastated. Joe was her favourite brother, her ‘pillar of strength’, the one member of the family to have supported her through the months of anguish over Billy. ‘When he felt that I had made up my mind he stood by me,’ she later wrote. ‘In every way he was the perfect brother doing, according to his own lights, the best for his sister with the hope that in the end it would be the best for the family.’ The evening she heard of Joe’s death, she spoke to his great friend Mark Soden. ‘I’m so sorry I broke down tonight,’ she wrote after the phone call. ‘I still can’t believe it. It’s hard to write. I don’t feel sorry for Joe – just for you and everyone that knew him ’cause no matter how he yelled, argued, etc, he was the best guy in the world.’

  On 16 August, Kick flew home to America to grieve with her family.

  32

  ‘I’ve got a telegram here,’ Joe Kennedy said to Eunice, his twenty-two-year-old daughter.

  ‘Is it about Billy?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, he’s been killed.’

  Billy Hartington was killed in action on 10 September 1944. It was three months after he had left his new wife to rejoin his regiment in France. They had spent just five weeks together.

  The telegram reporting Billy’s death was delivered to Joe Kennedy’s suite at the Waldorf Hotel in Manhattan. Kick, still in deep mourning for her brother Joe, who had died barely four weeks earlier, was eight blocks away, shopping at Bonwit & Teller, the department store, where she had arranged to meet her younger sister, Eunice, for lunch. Under Joe’s instructions, Eunice went in search of her, finding her on the second floor.

  ‘Before we go I think we ought to go back and talk to Daddy,’ she said.

  ‘Something’s happened?’ said Kick, searching her sister’s face for an answer.

  ‘Why don’t you go talk to Daddy?’

  Eunice did not tell Kick what had happened on the walk back to the Waldorf. When they got there, Joe was waiting for them at the door to his suite. Ushering Kick in, he closed the door. After he had told her Billy was dead, she remained alone in the room. She did not emerge until later that evening when the family gathered for dinner, her eyes red and swollen from crying. The meal was tense. Neither Billy’s death nor his name was mentioned.

  The following morning, Patsy White, Kick’s closest friend, flew up to New York from Washington, to be with her. After she had met Joe Kennedy at the Waldorf, a driver took her over to the Plaza where Rose and Kick were staying with the rest of the family. The room she was shown into was in a state of upheaval. Rose, Kick and the other Kennedy girls were sitting there with clothes strewn all around them. Kick was deathly pale: ‘A great cloud of misery was hanging over everything,’ Patsy recalled. When she finally got to be alone with her friend, Patsy asked her what she had been doing since she had heard the news. ‘Mostly going to Mass,’ Kick murmured, barely looking at her. ‘Mother keeps saying, “God doesn’t send us a cross heavier than we can bear.” Again and again she keeps saying it.’

  That evening, Joe Kennedy took them all out to a French restaurant on Park Avenue. During dinner he suggested getting tickets for a show on Broadway and seemed surprised when no one jumped at his offer. As the meal went on, Patsy was unnerved by the way Kick was expected to behave as if nothing had happened. But then she remembered that Kick had once told her that Kennedys were brought up not to cry. For the next two days the charade continued. The two friends were hardly given a chance to be alone. In the whirl of frenetic activity laid on by the other Kennedys, Patsy remembers Kick’s silent grief. She often caught her staring uncomprehendingly at a photo of Billy in uniform that she always kept at her side. There was to be no future, no children. Later, talking about Billy, Kick told her, ‘The amazing thing was that Billy loved me so much. I felt needed, I felt I could make him happy.’

  A few days later, Kick was comforted by a letter she received from Billy’s mother, the Duchess of Devonshire, its warmth a startling contrast to the chilliness she had experienced from her own mother. ‘My Darling Kick,’ the Duchess wrote,

  I want you never, never to forget what complete happiness you gave him. All your life you must think that you brought complete happiness to one person. He wrote that to me when he went to the front. I want you to know this for I know what conscientious struggle you went through before you married Billy, but I know that it will be a source of infinite consolation to you now that you decided as you did. All your life I shall love you – not only for yourself but that you gave such perfect happiness to my son whom I loved above anything in the world. May you be given strength to carry you through these truly terrible months. My heart breaks when I think of how much you have gone through in your young life.

  Slowly, the details of Billy’s death emerged.

  In the weeks before he died, his battalion had been engaged in heavy fighting in Northern France. They were exhilarating times: the Germans were in retreat. In early September, the battalion crossed the Somme River, pushing east towards Brussels. Billy’s unit was one of the first to liberate the city: as the German retreat was driven on, victory seemed within grasp. Thousands of locals from the towns and villages turned out to cheer the Allies on, festooning the soldiers’ tanks and armoured vehicles with garlands of flowers. Writing to Kick shortly before his death, Billy admitted to feeling ‘so unworthy of it all living as I have in reasonable safety and comfort during these years … I have a permanent lump in my throat and I long for you to be here as it is an experience which few can have and which I would love to share with you.’

  But on 8 September, at Beverlo, fifty miles east of Brussels, the battalion encountered a setback: the Germans, heavily entrenched, were no longer in retreat. In the battle to capture the village, Billy lost a quarter of his men. A fellow officer and pre-war friend of the Devonshires was fighting alongside him:

  During the attack on Beverlo I saw him walk across to one of his sections as calmly as if he had been in the garden at Compton Place. That same morning he had been standing on the back of one of our tanks directing the fire on to the German tanks and was largely responsible for their destruction. All the time, under fire. Many of our guardsmen asked who was the officer from the 5th Battalion, for it was impossible not to be inspired by his presence.

  Billy cut a distinctive – and dangerously visible – figure on the battlefield. As an officer he was not required to wear regulation uniform. In place of khaki he wore a white riding mac and brightly coloured trousers. He rarely wore a helmet.

  The morning after the attack on Beverlo, Billy’s company set out to capture the nearby town of Heppen. It was held by elite troops from the German SS divisions. With his batman at his side, Billy walked ahead of the company, carrying a pair of wirecutters. ‘Come on, you fellows, buck up,’ he said as he led his men forward.

  Later that afternoon, a farmer and his son returned to their farm on the swampy ground at the edge of the town, the scene of some of the fiercest fighting. ‘The English losses were very heavy: six tanks were left behind on the battlefield,’ Frans Magelschots recalled. ‘We finally found eleven English and thirty German corpses. The whole battlef
ield looked horrible.’ In the farmhouse itself, they came across more than a dozen bodies. Five lay outside the front door. ‘Two bodies were lying next to one another, a German and English soldier having strangled each other to death. Some had bayonets in their bodies, some even spades. It had been a hand-to-hand battle, eye to eye.’ By the back door of the house, Frans and his father found two more bodies: one was unlike any of the others. Wearing a white mackintosh and bright trousers, it was unblemished except for one small bullet hole through the heart.

  Billy was buried in Belgium alongside the men from his company who also died that day. On 20 September, ten days after his death, Kick flew back to England for the memorial service at Chatsworth. Lord Halifax, the British Ambassador to the United States, arranged for her to fly back on a military transport plane. Her fellow passengers were Sir Charles Portal, the Chief of the British Air Staff, and Field Marshal Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, who were returning from America following urgent discussions with the US administration on the progress of the war.

  The flight was top secret, expected to leave at some point in the middle of the night. Waiting for the all-clear to cross the Atlantic, Kick wrote the following entry in her diary:

  So ends the story of Billy and Kick !!!

  Yesterday the final word came. I can’t believe that the one thing that I felt might happen should have happened – Billy is dead – killed in action in France Sept 10th. Life is so cruel – I am on my way to England, Writing is impossible.

  A few days later, struggling to come to terms with his death, Kick confided her misery to her family. ‘I just feel terribly, terribly sad,’ she wrote.

  I know that Daddy said I had a lot of problems that might never have been worked out and that perhaps later in life I might have been very unhappy. That’s all quite true, but it doesn’t fill the gap that I now feel in my life. Before it had its purpose, I knew what it would be. Now I feel like a small cork that is tossing around. I know that there are hundreds like me, and lots more unfortunate, but it doesn’t heal the wound. The nice Bishop, who was so helpful before I was married, wrote the following: ‘Having borne you both so much in mind I am very anxious that you should begin again swiftly and easily the use of the Sacraments and the full practice of your faith. I have always been convinced that the reason why you took the line you did about the marriage was because you wanted your husband to be happy in what might prove the last portion of a short life.’ Isn’t that nice? I am going to see him this Tuesday and he is going to say a Mass for Billy and Joe at which I shall receive Communion. I hope that makes Mother as happy as it makes me.

  It was Kick’s first Holy Communion since her marriage. According to the teachings of St Paul, her mortal sin was absolved with Billy’s death. Providing she confessed her sin, she was entitled to participate in the Sacraments.

  Rose Kennedy was overjoyed at her acceptance back into the Catholic faith. Writing to Kick at Chatsworth, she told her,

  I have been thinking about you day and night ever since you left and praying for you and loving you more and more … I have been to Mass for Billy frequently, in fact, I am on my way now (7.15 a.m.). After I heard you talk about him and I began to hear about his likes and dislikes, his ideas and ideals, I realized what a wonderful man he was and what happiness would have been yours had God willed that you spend your life with him. A first love – a young love – is so wonderful, my dear Kathleen, but, my dearest daughter, I feel we must dry our tears as best we can and bow our heads to God’s wisdom and goodness. We must place our hand in His and trust Him.

  But in the depths of her soul, Kick could not place her ‘hand in His and trust Him’. Although, in her rudderless state, she craved her parents’ – and the Church’s – approval, her faith had been profoundly shaken. During the weeks she stayed at Chatsworth, she was unable to sleep in a room alone. Kick asked Billy’s sister, Elizabeth Cavendish, to share her bedroom. ‘I never met anyone so desperately unhappy,’ Elizabeth remembered. ‘Her mother had tried to convince her that she had committed a sin in this marriage, so in addition to losing her husband, she worried about having lost her soul.’ It was her faith she doubted: while the Catholic Church had welcomed her back, Kick found it difficult to come to terms with the irony that her sin could only be absolved through the death of her husband. ‘Well, I guess God has taken care of the matter in His own way, hasn’t He?’ she remarked bitterly to a friend.

  Unable to share her spiritual doubts with her family and suffering the grief of bereavement, Kick sank into a deep depression.

  Six weeks before he died, Billy had written her a letter from France:

  I have been spending a lovely hour on the ground and thinking in a nice vague sleepy way about you & what a lot I’ve got to look forward to if I come through this all right. I feel I may talk about it for the moment as I’m not in danger so I’ll just say that if anything should happen to me I shall be wanting you to try and isolate our life together, to face its finish, and to start a new one as soon as you feel you can. I hope that you will marry again, quite soon – someone good & nice.

  In the autumn of 1944 Kick could not imagine that anyone would ever replace him. ‘If Eunice, Pat & Jean marry nice guys for fifty years they’ll be lucky if they have five weeks like I did,’ she told her parents. ‘Tell Jack not to get married for a long time. I’ll keep house for him.’

  But, as Peter Fitzwilliam spun Kick around the dance floor a little over eighteen months later, at a ball at the Dorchester Hotel, it was love at first sight.

  33

  He could only watch from a distance. He did not want to see the impending devastation close up. On a cold, blustery day in April 1946, two months before Peter Fitzwilliam and Kick Kennedy first met, a column of lorries and heavy plant machinery trundled across the Park at Wentworth, their massive tyres and thick caterpillar tracks scoring long gashes in the wet grass. Peter stood at an upper window in the house. Beneath him, on the lawn in front of the entrance to the Pillared Hall, stretched a line of Nissen huts. Built by the army to accommodate the Intelligence Corps troops, they now housed squatters – homeless refugees from the bombing raids that had devastated Sheffield.

  Peter had come through the war, but Wentworth House and its surrounding Estate had not. In the Marble Salon, wooden boards still covered the precious marble-inlaid floor, and in the padlocked chapel and behind barred doors in the cellar rooms below the house the hundreds of crates containing the Fitzwilliams’ collection of porcelain and silver and other priceless bibelots, carefully packed by their servants, were still stored. Stacked against them, swathed in dust sheets and green felt, was the family’s collection of Old Masters and innumerable bundles of lesser paintings that had been removed from their frames. Peter doubted whether the pictures or the contents of the crates would ever assume their former positions in the state rooms in the house.

  ‘Operation Moonshine’ was the code-name given to the last of the SOE Motor Gunboat runs. Peter had completed seven missions to win his Distinguished Service Order. In the critical months of preparation for the invasion of Europe, Britain’s special ball-bearing needs had been largely met by the little ships: 347 tons of essential aircraft parts were smuggled out of Sweden along the Skaggerak sea channel, bristling with German patrol boats. Miraculously, just two of the ‘grey ladies’ had been lost and only one crew member killed. ‘Moonshine’ had ended in the summer of 1945. Since leaving the Motor Gunboats, Peter had been fighting the newly elected Labour Government to save Wentworth House from destruction.

  He had lost the first round. Along the roads that ran around the perimeter of the Park, detachments of German POWs had removed gates and fence posts to allow the convoy of lorries and machinery in. It had already left a hideous trail. In the immediate vicinity of Wentworth, thousands of acres of the Fitzwilliams’ farm- and woodland had been torn up and tree-lined avenues, buildings and roads obliterated. The church in the village, built by Peter’s great-grandfather,
had lost the top of its spire, blasted to oblivion by the ongoing mining operations. A raw expanse of white rock was all that was left of the surrounding countryside. Stripped bare to the limestone, craters, tens of feet deep, and mountainous ridges of rubble were the only features in the lunar landscape.

  Now, the army of contractors, sent by Manny Shinwell, the Minister of Fuel and Power, threatened to destroy Wentworth House. Ninety-eight acres of woodland in the Park were to be quarried for coal. Next on the contractors’ list were the beautiful formal gardens. The coal, the Minister had decreed, was to be mined right up to the back door of the house.

  ‘It is all just too utterly heart breaking,’ Maud Fitzwilliam confided to her friend Lucia, Viscountess Galway.

  I adore every stick and stone of the beloved place … the destruction that is going on with that awful open-cast coal is appalling – it really is cruel.

  … Poor Peter is heartbroken over it, and they now threaten to come right through and destroy the terrace and the gardens right up to the house, which will be left like a desert island in the midst of mess and utterly treeless for the next hundred years … am going there next week to pack up some things I left there – as nothing will be safe; though Peter says it is so devastating to see he couldn’t bear my seeing it, but I feel I must.

  Six months earlier, in September 1945, the Labour Government, under the wartime Emergency Powers still in force, had stamped a requisition order on the Park and the formal gardens behind the house. The land straddled the point where the Barnsley Seam, famous for its top-quality ‘Yorkshire Hards’, came to within yards of the surface. It was fuel the country desperately needed. War had created a shortage of manpower in the coal industry, jeopardizing supplies. In the winter of 1946, 40,000 Bevin Boys – young men conscripted during the war to the coalfields – were employed in Britain’s 1,600 collieries, but still they could not produce enough. To feed the demand for coal, the Park and gardens at Wentworth – together with the 2,000 acres of the Fitzwilliams’ estate already being mined – were scheduled to become the biggest open-cast mining site in Britain. The coal was worked from the surface, with mechanical excavators used to dig down to the seam, seventy feet below the ground. This way, the Government reasoned, it could be mined quickly and cheaply without the need to employ large numbers of men.