Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  Mabel, who was seventy-seven in 1947, had lived near Went-worth all her life. She was married to Joyce’s uncle, Colonel Mackenzie Smith, and her home was at Barnes Hall in Ecclesfield, a suburb of Sheffield. ‘It was frightfully austere,’ Joy Powlett-Smith, Joyce’s sister-in-law, remembered of a visit to the house in 1946. ‘It was a big place – about fourteen bedrooms, I’d say. Very exposed, up on the edge of the moors. It was horribly draughty. Mabel was very keen on “fresh air”. There were no coal fires, only portable gas fires. No carpets, just mats on the wooden floors, which were stained black. There was no electricity, only candlelight or gaslight. There was very little furniture: a few chairs, but hard, uncomfortable ones. The curtains, I remember, barely covered the length of the shutters. They were woven from untreated wool.’

  Mabel was two years older than Billy. Part of their childhood had been spent at Hoober Hall, a house on the Fitzwilliam Estate a half a mile or so from Wentworth. It was here, when she was in her early teens, that Mabel’s social conscience was awakened. ‘I was very close to her,’ Joyce recalled. ‘She once told me what made her become a socialist. Every year, when she was a child, her mother gave a party for the village children from the schools near Hoober Hall. All the village children came. Well, of course they did, the Fitzwilliams owned and ran all the schools in those days. The children were invited for sports and Aunt Mabel and her brother and her sisters ran in these races. There was one village girl who was the same age as Mabel – she was twelve or thirteen – and they were great friends. One or other of them always won the race. One year this girl didn’t turn up and Mabel said, “Where’s Janie?” “Oh,” they said, “she’s left school now and gone into service. She won’t be coming any more.” Mabel was horrified to think that there she was being taught at home by her governess, and this, her little contemporary, had had to go into service. From that moment on, she told me, she made up her mind that she was going to get education for them all.’

  A well-known and much-loved figure in the district, Mabel had been true to her promise. She had devoted her life to improving education in the pit villages in the West Riding, first as a local councillor, and then as a leading member of the board of the Workers’ Education Authority.

  Early in 1947, after receiving the Ministry of Health’s requisition order, Peter asked his aunt for help. Despite – or possibly because of – his father’s antipathy they had always got on well. ‘The funny thing was,’ Joyce remembered, ‘Peter adored Mabel. She used to have these Christmas parties at Barnes Hall for all the cousins. I suppose Uncle Billy let him go because otherwise he would have felt left out, though I expect he thought he’d been contaminated when he came back!’

  Mabel suggested turning Wentworth House into a school. In 1947, using her connections in the West Riding Education Authority, she persuaded the County Council to take it on a fifty-year, full-repairing lease. The Fitzwilliams were to be allowed to retain their private apartments in the West Front. Thanks to Lady Mabel, the house was to be converted into a training college for female PE teachers.

  West Riding County Council signed the lease in September 1947. During the negotiations, the councillors made one stipulation: that Wentworth House should be renamed after Lady Mabel. It was to be called the Lady Mabel College of Physical Education. ‘It was a wonderful irony that the only Fitzwilliam to survive in the name of the place was Mabel,’ Joyce chuckled, ‘the person who had been so taboo in my Uncle Billy’s time. I was terribly pleased. I felt she’d come into her own. She’d been the only member of the family to have been of real public value.’

  It was a huge relief to Peter. A specialist women-only teacher training college was a more palatable option than having the house overrun by scores of homeless families, and the County Council had guaranteed to pay its running costs and to repair any structural damage. Far from brooding over the loss of Wentworth and the coal inheritance he had grown up to expect, during the course of 1947, Peter threw himself into a variety of new business schemes.

  He expanded his Stud Farm at Malton, the Fitzwilliams’ estate near York, and was hoping to secure the Coca-Cola franchise for the North of England. He was also negotiating with the Ministry of Food and Agriculture to import groundnuts from Africa. He hoped to convince the Ministry that, with the strict rationing in force, groundnuts, high in calories and protein, offered a nutritious supplement to the meagre post-war diet.

  As James Lees-Milne, the National Trust official, was leaving Wentworth House, he was introduced to Obby Fitzwilliam, Peter’s wife. ‘Lady Fitzwilliam in a pair of slacks, rather dumpy and awkward, came downstairs for a word just before we left,’ he noted in his diary. ‘I fancy she is not very sensitive to the tragedy of it all.’

  It was not that Obby was insensitive to the tragedy of Wentworth; a greater personal tragedy was unfolding. The war had imposed separate lives on Peter and Obby, placing a further strain on their heirless marriage. While Peter was serving with SOE, Obby had worked in a factory near Slough making parts for fighter aeroplanes. By the close of 1947, their marriage had fallen apart. ‘I think my mother was philosophical about my father’s temporary amours, realizing that (presumably until Kick Kennedy) they were not important,’ Juliet, their daughter recalled. ‘No other man really mattered to her, that I do know.’

  Among the skeleton staff that remained at Wentworth, the rumours spread. ‘There were a lot of talk up at the house. They all talked. They said he was going to have a divorce.’

  34

  A thunderstorm, the worst for as long as anyone could remember, was raging over the Ardèche, a mountainous region some fifty miles north of Avignon in southern France. It was late afternoon on 13 May 1948. Paul Petit, a farmer, would normally have been out on the slopes with his animals, but the violence of the storm was so great that he was resigned to staying at home. His farmhouse, a crumbling medieval building constructed from red stone, was situated a few hundred yards below the peak of Le Coran. He lived alone: in the rugged, desolate country, aside from his brother and his father, there were no other neighbours for miles around.

  Gale-force winds, and hailstones the size of a two-pound coin, had battered the house for some hours. At about 5.30 p.m., Paul thought he heard the high-pitched scream of racing engines. Rushing outside, he watched in horror as a light aircraft shot out of the cloud base and disintegrated in mid-air, the pieces of the plane spiralling into a ravine on the mountainside opposite.

  In the driving rain, running as fast as he could, Paul set off along the slippery stone trail that snaked its way to his father’s house to fetch help.

  It took the two men three-quarters of an hour to find the wreckage. They struggled through the undergrowth, up the steep, heavily wooded slope where Paul had seen the plane crash, with torrents of water, running down from the mountain above, making the climb harder. They came across the starboard engine first: located near the bottom of the slope, it was twisted beyond recognition. Eighty yards further up, they found the petrol tank; 100 yards above it, the fuselage of the plane, resting on a narrow ridge. The starboard wing was missing, the cockpit flattened from top to bottom: the passenger compartment had been torn open by the rocks when it hit the ground.

  It was immediately clear to Paul and his father when they prised open the door to the fuselage that the four people inside the plane were dead. The pilot and co-pilot were crumpled against the instrument controls in the cockpit, their earphones still on. The two passengers were in the rear of the plane. Peter Fitzwilliam lay beneath his upturned seat. He was badly disfigured. On his left side, the lower half of his body was completely crushed.

  Kick’s was the only body Paul and his father were able to drag clear of the wreckage. The right side of her face was torn by a long gash: her jaw, pelvis and both her legs had been pulverized in the crash.

  ‘Chance Invite Sends Kennedy Girl to Her Death’.

  Within hours, news of the accident was flashed around the world. But exactly why Peter and Kick were in the
plane together – and the reason for their journey – was covered up: the Devonshires, the Kennedys and the Fitzwilliams closed ranks to conceal the circumstances that had led to their deaths.

  Peter and Kick had been together for almost two years when they were killed. Yet unlike her relationship with Billy Hartington, the ebbs and flows of the affair are not charted in the voluminous collections of Kennedy letters. The public archives divulge no poignant testaments to their love: in fact there is no official record of the affair ever having taken place at all. The burning of the Fitzwilliams’ correspondence in the bonfires at Wentworth soon after their deaths ensured that none of their letters have been preserved. Not a single member of the Kennedy family ever spoke of the affair – or even acknowledged it. The Devonshires and the Fitzwilliams waited almost forty years before they broke their silence.

  After the accident happened – as with the subsequent Kennedy tragedies that were to follow Kick’s death – numerous conspiracy theories were spawned. These were circulated in private and seldom publicly aired. Some said the couple were on their way to Rome to obtain special dispensation from the Pope to marry. Evelyn Waugh believed they were killed eloping; Lady Astor circulated the ridiculous rumour that the accident was engineered by Vatican agents to prevent another sacrilegious union.

  There is nothing mysterious about why the plane crashed. The French air accident investigator’s report is conclusive, leaving no room for conspiracy or conjecture. Nor is there any mystery surrounding its destination: the privately chartered plane was en route to Cannes airport in the South of France. But the real mystery is why Peter and Kick were flying at all when one of the worst storms in years was forecast for the Rhône Valley. In 1948, only a handful of people knew the answer. Close friends and confidants of the couple blamed their families.

  In part, the absence of letters on the Kennedy side is explained by the fact that Kick kept her affair with Peter secret from all but one member of her family until the very last. It was Jack Kennedy in whom she confided. The autumn before her death, staying at Lismore, the Devonshires’ estate in Ireland, during a quiet chat together on the banks of the Blackwater River, she whispered to her brother, ‘I’ve found my Rhett Butler at last.’

  The affair seemed madness from the start.

  35

  It began with a dance. Peter and Kick met for the first time on the night of 12 June 1946 at a ball at the Dorchester Hotel, London’s most glamorous venue in the heart of Mayfair.

  The Season, the first since 1939, was in full swing. Despite the tribulations of rationing and the piles of rubble that still littered the streets, grim reminders of wartime suffering, the capital was celebrating. The theatres in the West End had reopened; Latin American dancing – the rumba and the mambo – was all the rage. In the salons and ballrooms of Mayfair and Belgravia, evening gowns, tiaras and white tie and tails were beginning to return, in place of the usual drab sea of uniforms.

  The ball at the Dorchester was a fundraising event for the widows and dependants of Commando soldiers killed and seriously injured in the war. It was a glittering occasion, and the leading lights of London society turned out in force; even the future Queen Elizabeth was there.

  Kick was chairing the Ball Committee and had helped to organize the dance. That night, she wore a pink taffeta ballgown and a pair of aquamarine and diamond clips. Eighteen months after Billy’s death, the greyness of bereavement had lifted. The previous year had been an introspective one: immersing herself in her voluntary work for the American Red Cross, she had also spent a number of months in retreat at a nunnery in Kendal in Cumbria.

  The start of the 1946 Season marked her reappearance on the social scene. To her delight, she found herself as popular as she had been before the war. Aged twenty-six, she had lost none of her allure: at a party a few weeks before the Dorchester ball, an eighteen-year-old debutante was overheard to remark, ‘It’s absolutely maddening, Kick’s taking all my dance partners.’

  ‘What do you expect?’ her friend replied. ‘You’re just a deb. She’s an attractive American widow.’

  Peter – a highly decorated war hero – was one of the star guests at the ball. Before joining SOE in 1942, he had fought with the Commandos in the Middle East. It was inevitable that he would be introduced to Kick, the Chairwoman of the Committee.

  Inviting her to dance, he spun her round the ballroom. ‘It was overnight and it was the real thing,’ Charlotte Harris, a close friend of Kick’s, remembered many years later. ‘One got the impression that she’d discovered something she didn’t really plan to experience in life.’

  John White, her old friend from Washington, was overwhelmed by the force of her passion. ‘As she talked of Fitzwilliam, the man sounded like the hero of Out of Africa, a professional Englishman, a devastatingly charming rogue,’ he later recalled. ‘Rarely in life do you see someone so bubbling over with love, everything that love should be, every bit of it. Poor old Billy Hartington. But again he probably would have been blown away if she had felt that way about him. Very few people could stand that much love, the sheer blast of emotion.’

  From the outset, Peter and Kick’s affair ran a tumultuous course, scandalizing and dividing London society. In their exclusive close-knit world, few secrets remained secret for very long. Though the couple were discreet, confining their meetings to late-night trysts at Kick’s house in Westminster or at the homes of close friends, word soon got out. People were shocked, not simply because a titled Catholic war widow was having an affair with a Protestant married man, but because Peter was regarded as the antithesis of her late husband – kind, gentle, moral Billy.

  Among Kick’s friends, Peter’s reputation had gone before him. An habitué of Whites Club in St James’s, he was known to belong to a hard-drinking, hard-gambling clique of wealthy philanderers. In austerity-shrouded Britain, their excesses were especially frowned upon. Games of baccarat for stakes of £10,000 were not unusual. Peter’s personal betting and racing losses were rumoured to amount to more than £20,000: the equivalent today of some £500,000.

  Kick’s world was very different. In the months leading up to the ball at the Dorchester, she had acquired a new set of friends. A true Anglophile, she had chosen to base herself in London, rather than in America, and had bought a small Georgian townhouse in Smith Square, a stone’s throw from the Houses of Parliament. Here, in the spring of 1946, she hosted a series of small and intimate literary and political salons for some of the leading figures of the day: Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, George Bernard Shaw and Evelyn Waugh were regular guests.

  Waugh was horrified when Kick confided her new love. He had known Peter in the Army when they were stationed together at a Commando training camp near Glasgow. As Waugh recorded in his diary, one girl, following a row at a party in the Officers’ Mess, called Peter and his friends – who included Randolph Churchill, the Prime Minister’s son, and Lord Stavordale, the heir to the Earl of Ilchester – ‘dandies’ and ‘scum’. Noting the girl’s remarks, Waugh was almost as censorious: ‘The smart set,’ he wrote, ‘drink a very great deal, play cards for high figures, dine nightly in Glasgow, and telephone to their trainers endlessly.’ Later, he confessed to finding ‘the indolence and ignorance of the officers … remarkable’. But, as a Catholic convert, it was the religious implications of Kick’s liaison with Peter that so upset Waugh. ‘If you want to commit adultery or fornication & can’t resist, do it, but realize what you are doing, and don’t give the final insult of apostasy,’ he admonished her.

  Kick’s Protestant friends were equally opposed to the affair. Janie Compton, her great friend in London before the war, found it particularly upsetting. To begin with, she did not understand it at all: ‘Peter and Kick were absolutely different personality types with absolutely different friends. She was totally different to him. She had intellectual friends. His world wasn’t a bit like that. He belonged to a set where you gambled terrifically and drank a lot. He was terribly naughty – frightfully �
� with loads of girlfriends. And that was just not Kick. Not a bit Kick. As time went by, I got the impression that he must have been a very good lover. It was the only way to explain it. It’s awful, but it can have such a major impact.’

  Peter’s friends at Whites were similarly perplexed. What could he possibly see in her, they speculated, clustered in a haze of cigar smoke in the club’s comfortable leather armchairs. Though she was reputedly charming, Kick’s devout Catholicism and unremarkable looks hardly matched up to their vision of the perfect mistress.

  Besides the gambling set at Whites, Peter’s social circle included the forerunners of the ‘jet set’: an exclusive clique of predominantly English and European super-rich. In the winter, they went fox-hunting and horse-racing, flying to race courses and hunting fields in France, Ireland and England; in the summer, they villa-hopped, charting private planes to visit each other at a series of invariably beautiful homes dotted around the Mediterranean.

  Theirs was a dazzling crowd, the money they lavished on entertainment a lure to Hollywood film stars, fashion models and raffish figures from the beau monde such as Edith Piaf and Truman Capote.

  Peter’s closest friend – and a leading light in the set – was Prince Aly Khan. Six months younger than Peter, he was the son of the Aga Khan, the billionaire leader of an estimated 15 million Ismaili Muslims in Asia and Africa. Stories of the Aga Khan’s wealth were legion; on his fiftieth birthday, his followers gave him his weight in gold – 220 pounds – and on his seventieth, when he had grown even fatter, in platinum. Double-decker buses in London sported advertisements for a brand of chocolate that bore the slogan ‘Rich and Dark like the Aga Khan’. In Manhattan, the colour of Prince Aly’s skin was an object of similar fascination: Diana Vreeland, writing in the mid-1940s, noted that it was ‘exactly the colour of a gardenia. A gardenia isn’t quite white. It’s got a little cream in it.’