Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  At the working place nearest the mansion (100 yards) the hard rock is forty-eight feet thick, at another place nearby fifty-three feet thick. At a point close to the area to be worked there is seventy-seven feet of rock. The proposed method of working is to bore down into the rock and blast it with a heavy charge. The rock is disrupted by a series of heavy earthquake shocks. It cannot sanely be held that any building will escape damage when its foundations are submitted to such shocks.

  The team levelled further criticism at Shinwell’s boast that an ‘effective restoration programme’ would be launched to restore the land after the mining operations had finished. ‘“Effective restoration” forsooth,’ William Batley, a member of the team, wrote angrily to the Secretary of the Georgian Group, a society dedicated to the preservation of historic buildings. ‘What a cockeyed yarn. These Ministers of State must think we are a lot of simpletons – spinning us the tale. It is just bunkum, sheer bunk.’ The verdict of the Sheffield experts was damning: the proposed operations at the garden site did not in their view ‘justify the spoliation and destruction’.

  Technically, Peter was powerless to stop Shinwell. The Defence Act brooked no opposition. He was philosophical about the nationalization of the mines and the end of his family’s association with coal, recognizing the necessity of the legislation, but the needless destruction of Wentworth House was a different matter. It was a question of principle: he was not prepared to give up the Fitzwilliams’ centuries-old tenure at the house without a fight.

  To the Government’s amazement, the Yorkshire miners and the Labour-controlled local authorities were on Peter’s side.

  ‘It is sacrilege. Against all common sense,’ Joe Hall, President of the Yorkshire branch of the National Union of Mineworkers, told the Press in April 1946. ‘The miners in this area will go to almost any length rather than see Wentworth House destroyed. To many mining communities it is sacred ground. I have known the spot since boyhood and some of my happiest hours have been spent there. The Park at Wentworth is an oasis in an industrial desert. It has taken at least a century to produce these lovely grounds and gardens. Yorkshire people cannot stand by and see it all devastated in a few weeks.’

  It was a landscape the Fitzwilliams had shared with their miners and the local communities. The woodlands and fields, the three ornamental lakes that cascaded down to the pit villages of Rawmarsh and Greasbrough, belonged in the collective memory. ‘You could go anywhere in the Park, you weren’t restricted at all,’ May Bailey remembered. ‘We used to go every Sunday and also in’t summer when’t nights were nice. All the villages used to go. We used to shout, “Are you goin’t Park? Oh ay, we’ll see you then. We’re going round Lily Pond first.” In winter, we’d skate on them ponds. There were three of them, lakes they were. We’d have a pit lamp, there were no torches in them days. When I was older, I went courting by them. You could go anywhere. You could walk right up’t Wentworth House. You couldn’t go in mind, but you could stand right in front of ’t. You were never stopped.’

  For generations of miners, the Park at Wentworth was elemental in the life cycle of the pit villages. It was the venue for agricultural shows, flower competitions and the June garden fête, annual rituals attended by thousands of miners and their families. It was the place where the Fitzwilliams’ family landmarks – the weddings, christenings and comings of age – had been magnificently and collectively celebrated, and where a constant round of sports had been played out: games of cricket, football matches, pit pony races and tugs o’ war, all fiercely contested between the competing local villages and collieries. The Park had been the stage for events that had connected Wentworth and its community to the wider world: King George V’s visit in 1912 and the commemoration parades for local men killed in action in the Great War. And it had been a much-needed point of focus during the hard months of the 1926 coal strike when the Fitzwilliams had fed the miners’ children in the marquees. Outraged at the ‘frontal attack’, the ‘acts of vandalism’ and ‘ravaging’, in the winter of 1946 hundreds wrote letters of protest to the Minister of Fuel and Power.

  Shinwell was unmoved. Speciously dismissing their letters as ‘half a dozen postcards, all in the same handwriting’, he accused Peter of ‘intrigue’, refusing to believe that the volume of local protest was based on genuine feeling. Adamant that the Earl had used the last remnants of his feudal powers to whip up a false storm, in an internal memo to his Cabinet colleagues Shinwell wrote, ‘claims made as to the enjoyment of the estate by the people are exaggerated. I have no intention of sacrificing the national interest to a nobleman’s palace and pleasure grounds, the sanctity of which is no longer respected to the same extent as heretofore.’

  He was wrong. Incensed at the Minister’s high-handedness – particularly his refusal to meet a deputation of miners to discuss the issue – Joe Hall, President of the Yorkshire branch of the National Union of Mineworkers, resorted to the Press. ‘Whatever might be our view of the Gentry of this country, they certainly do not sacrifice natural beauty to easy profits,’ he told them on 6 April. ‘The Labour Government supposedly stands for the preservation of rural beauty. It is amazing to me that they persist in this scheme at Wentworth. Only a complete disregard of the beauties of the English countryside could prompt sheer vandalism of this description. I have almost got to the point of asking for a forty-eight-hour stoppage of work in this coalfield to put an end to this terrible sacrilege.’

  Two days later Hall sent a letter to Clement Attlee, the Prime Minister:

  My purpose in writing to you is to vigorously protest against a scheme which is about to be operated at Wentworth, near Rotherham … As one who has been an auditor for the National Labour Party for twenty years, and who fought for you to get the Trades Union Movement affiliated to the Party I make this personal appeal to you to do all in your power to prevent what can only be described as vandalism.

  Wentworth is the beauty spot of the Rotherham and Barnsley districts, the garden and spacious grounds having been enjoyed by our mining folk for very many years …

  I sincerely hope you will, as my political leader in our first Labour Government in power, leave no stone unturned to save this pleasure resort.

  A worried Private Secretary passed Hall’s letter to the Prime Minister, attaching an anxious memo:

  Prime Minister, I should not have troubled you with the private protest against the proposal to extend open-cast coal mining to the gardens at Wentworth House, but you should see the letter which has now come in from Mr Hall, the President of the National Union of Mineworkers (Yorkshire area) … I have seen reports in the Press that the miners may strike for 48 hours if the present proposals are adhered to and though Mr Hall says nothing of this kind, and the Press reports may be incorrect, I should have thought the Minister [Shinwell] might find it necessary to reconsider the position if the miners persist in their opposition to the scheme.

  ‘Yes’, Attlee wrote at the bottom of the memo.

  Conservation groups, the media and the local authorities in the neighbourhood of Wentworth joined the miners in the chorus of protest. ‘Nobody can possibly guarantee that this blasting will do no damage when it is carried out so close to the house,’ Lord Rosse, representing the National Trust, wrote to Captain Noel-Baker, a Conservative MP, urging him to put pressure on the Government in the House of Commons. ‘The best one can say is that it is a gamble which may come off, but to gamble with a building of real historic and national importance such as Wentworth is nothing short of criminal. There is still time to have this stopped or at least to have the programme modified so as to lessen the danger.’ Other public bodies took up the crusade: ‘It is a thoroughly unnecessary piece of vandalism,’ the Secretary of the Council for the Protection of Rural England wrote to an official at the Royal Institute of British Architects. ‘For the sake of a few hundred thousand tons of bad coal this priceless estate will be mined and lost irretrievably. It is a scandal if the PM and the Cabinet do not overrule Mr Shinwell.�
�� The Economist was equally critical: the coal, it claimed, would be ‘quickly produced and as quickly consumed, leaving the land ruined and useless for perhaps half a century and the coal problem just where it was before’.

  Until the Government had wind of the South Yorkshire miners’ threat to strike, the volume of protest had fallen on deaf ears. Seizing his chance, Peter, who was in daily contact with Joe Hall, telephoned Downing Street to request a meeting with the Prime Minister. He wanted to show Attlee the plans that he, together with his miners at Elsecar colliery, had come up with for an alternative means of mining the coal. Drift mining – sinking shallow, walk-in tunnels beneath the land around Wentworth House – was the method they proposed. In this way, they argued, the site would yield a greater tonnage of coal, of a better quality, and at less cost. Crucially, the coal could be won without destroying a ‘single tree or shrub’, or running the risk of destroying the ‘mansion’ itself. Hall had endorsed the proposal: ‘I am confident,’ he assured the Prime Minister, ‘that within six months a greater quantity of cleaner coal could be won more economically without the least disturbance of the ground.’

  ‘I suppose I must see him,’ Attlee scrawled across the note his Private Secretary had sent him to advise him of Peter’s request. Even two years earlier, Peter’s wealth, his social position, and his connections in Churchill’s Coalition Government had enabled him to prevent the Park and gardens at Wentworth from being mined. Now, in the changed post-war world, he was barely able to secure an audience with the PM.

  The minutes of the Cabinet meeting held on the morning of 15 April 1946 – the day Peter and Attlee were due to meet – show that before Peter even had the opportunity to present his drift-mining plan, the Prime Minister had rejected it out of hand. Marked ‘Secret’ – a standard procedure for minutes relating to Cabinet meetings – they summarize the discussion:

  THE PRIME MINISTER said that some local agitation had developed against the Government’s decision to extend the working of opencast coal in Wentworth Park; and the owner, Earl Fitzwilliam, was calling on him later in the day to discuss the matter. He was likely to ask whether this coal could not be secured by underground mining [drift mining]. Would this be possible?

  Shinwell, as requested by Attlee, had ‘reconsidered the position’. But he had not changed his view. The Fitzwilliam Estate was to be the source ‘First of all, of coal. Secondly, of more coal.’ The Cabinet, according to the minutes of the meeting, was swayed by the Minister’s arguments:

  THE MINISTER OF FUEL AND POWER said that underground working would not be appropriate on this site. It would take two years to get the coal which could be obtained in eight months by open-cast working, and underground miners would be needed: these were not available locally, and one of the main objects of open-cast working was to supplement the output of the underground labour force. The local agitation against this project had been worked up by a comparatively small number of people and did not, in his view, correctly reflect public opinion in the district … It would be a sign of weakness on the Government’s part to abandon or modify the scheme now that the contracts had been let and work was about to begin.

  Shinwell’s victory served notice on the raison d’être of Wentworth – the way of life that had been lived there for centuries. A grand house party could hardly be held on an industrial site, nor the hunt meet on a lawn that, as one local observed, would ‘resemble the fields of Passchendaele’. Among the miners, it left a bitter taste. Like Peter, they believed the desecration of Wentworth was an act of class hatred. ‘Shinwell’s reaction was, let him have it,’ Charles Booth recalled. ‘I was a trainee engineer at Elsecar at the time. I was one of the men who’d worked on the scheme to sink the drift mine. The Government wouldn’t hear of it. They had to desecrate the gardens. So desecrate them they did.’ The miners at the Fitzwilliams’ New Stubbin pit, as Ralph Boreham recalled, were of a similar view. ‘There were some at that time – the functionaries in the Labour Party, Communist types – as were saying, “Why should he [Earl Fitzwilliam] have all that and we’ve got nothing?” Idiots they were, powerful idiots. It were awful, I didn’t like it. I’ve never felt that way about nobody. Most of the men round here felt the same as me. That Estate were a beautiful place. We loved to see it as it were. We didn’t want to see it wrecked. Nationalization of the pits, that were different, mind. Time had come for that. It were right. But not the destruction of Wentworth House. There was some destruction. It all crumbled after that. It were spite, we reckoned. Simple as that.’

  Maud Fitzwilliam was at Wentworth when the bulldozers turned up. ‘The brutes of contractors rushed in, two days before they were to start,’ she wrote to Lucia, Viscountess Galway,

  mowing down shrubs, trees and specimen Rhododendrons of every kind, to say nothing of miles of every sort and kind of daffodils – things we had collected for years and the overburden is to be put 50 feet high in the gardens up to the gallery window. It is absolute vandalism, as the coal could have been got far better from below … they just would not listen – 10 feet of the spire of the church has already gone, and I should think the house is bound to crack. It is utterly heartbreaking.

  At the eleventh hour, Peter decided he would rather give the house away than see it destroyed. Days after his meeting with the Prime Minister, he approached the National Trust to offer Wentworth to the nation. Some weeks later, James Lees-Milne and Lord Rosse, the National Trust’s representatives, travelled up from London to inspect the house and grounds. James Lees-Milne was both stunned and shocked by what he saw:

  ‘It is certainly the most enormous private house I have ever beheld,’ he noted in his diary.

  I could not find my way about the interior and never once knew in what direction I was looking from a window. Strange to think that up until 1939 one man lived in the whole of it. All the contents are put away or stacked in heaps in a few rooms, the pictures taken out of their frames. The dirt is appalling. Everything is pitch black and the boles of the trees like thunder. To my surprise, the Park is not being worked for surface coal systematically, but in square patches here and there. One of these patches is the walled garden. Right up to the very wall of the Vanbrugh front every tree and shrub has been uprooted … Where the surface has been worked is waste chaos and, as Michael [Lord Rosse] said, far worse than anything he saw of French battlefields after D-Day. I was surprised too by the very high quality of the pre-Adam rooms and ceilings of Went-worth; by the amount of seventeenth-century work surviving; by the beautiful old wallpapers; and by the vast scale of the layout of the Park, with ornamental temples sometimes one-and-a-half miles or more away.

  The National Trust was nervous of taking on a building which, potentially, faced imminent destruction: at Peter’s suggestion, it proposed to accept covenants over the Park and gardens to ring-fence the house from further mining operations. If these were in place, the negotiations for its transfer to the nation could proceed. But the last-minute rescue plan was quashed by the Government after the Ministry of Town and Country Planning intervened. Responding to a letter from one of the Trust’s officials seeking clarification as to whether, if the covenants were accepted, the open-cast mining would stop, a civil servant, on behalf of his Minister, warned the National Trust off. ‘It would be a great mistake for the Trust in this, or indeed, in any other case of threatened property where the owner still maintains a substantial interest, to accept covenants in the middle of a controversy as a means of protecting in effect, the owner, against what purports to be a public interest.’ Refusing to credit Peter’s decision to offer Wentworth to the nation at face value, the civil servant dismissed it as his ‘latest intrigue’, accusing him of ‘merely trying to preserve his own sovereignty and privacy against the public at large’. Cautioning the National Trust against accepting the covenants, he concluded, ‘A Covenant to preserve a thing of beauty that no one but the owner and his friends can see is not much public benefit.’ Once again, the Government, against the body of evide
nce, had persisted in Shinwell’s view that ‘claims made as to the enjoyment of the estate by the people’ were ‘exaggerated’.

  Not wishing to ‘embarrass’ the Government by protesting against its decision, having failed to secure a guarantee that no further open-cast mining would be carried out, the National Trust’s Historic Buildings Committee voted to put the negotiations over the future of Wentworth House on hold.

  The Whitehall vendetta continued; shortly after the National Trust rejected Peter’s offer, the Government served a second requisition order: this time, on the house itself. The Ministry of Health, so Peter was informed, proposed to take over the ‘greater part of Wentworth House for the housing of homeless industrial families’. The Park and formal gardens had been desecrated: the ‘seventeenth-century work’, ‘the beautiful old wallpapers’, the ‘high-quality’ mouldings and ceilings that James Lees-Milne had so admired, were unlikely to withstand such an assault from within.

  It was Billy Fitzwilliam’s redoubtable sister, Lady Mabel Smith, who saved Wentworth House from the ‘industrial families’. Yet had Billy still been alive, he would rather have surrendered his home to the homeless than allow his sister to interfere in its fate.

  ‘Mabel was taboo at Wentworth when we were growing up. Absolutely taboo,’ Joyce Smith recalled of her aunt. ‘She was a rabid socialist. She didn’t get on with her brother at all. They hardly ever saw each other. She was horrified by Uncle Billy’s lifestyle at Wentworth. “He had so much and everyone else had so little” – that was her line. She was a bit of a crank about it, really. She had all these ideas about the equality of man. Uncle Billy would have run a mile rather than talk to her.’