Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  Kick then made a second call, to her friend Janie Compton. ‘The meeting was absolutely vital to her,’ Janie recalled. ‘She telephoned to ask me if I would go with them. So much depended on it. She wanted moral support from me. I knew Joe quite well from the time when he was Ambassador – when Kick and I first became friends. I think she thought Joe wouldn’t like Peter, wouldn’t see the point of him at all. Joe was so ANTI what he called “you bloody aristocrats”.’

  Janie, recently married to Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook’s son, was unable to go. Resigned to the fact that they would be going alone, Peter and Kick spent a couple of days together at Wentworth before leaving for France. Jean Oliver, who worked in the post office in the village, was up at the house one afternoon during their brief visit. ‘I’d gone up to the house to see my friend. She was the chef’s daughter. We were sitting outside the kitchen door chatting, and Peter and Lady Hartington walked past. They looked so happy and carefree. Peter wanted to show her the family mausoleum. We watched them set off across the Park and I remember she was wearing an immaculate pair of beautiful white shoes. There was all that coal dust and muck around from the open-cast mining! They’d be ruined, I thought!’

  Peter and Kick left Wentworth on Wednesday 12 May – the evening before they were due to fly to France. On the drive south to London, they called in on Tom Fitzwilliam at Milton Hall, a few miles outside Peterborough. Mindful that his cousin might be sensitive about welcoming Kick, as he opened the door Peter said to him:

  ‘Look, I’ve got Kick outside. May I bring her in?’

  ‘For God’s sake do,’ Tom said. Over dinner, Peter told Tom what they were about to do. ‘We’re going off to try to persuade old Kennedy to agree to our getting married.’ With a laugh, he added, ‘If he objects, I’ll go to see the Pope and offer to build him a church.’

  36

  They were late. The ten-seater private jet Peter had hired to fly the two of them to the South of France was due to take off from Croydon Airport at 10.30, and Kick was still packing. Waiting for her at the house in Smith Square, Peter teased her about her voluminous luggage: they were only going away for a long weekend but her two large suitcases contained enough clothes for several weeks. Besides the surfeit of outfits, she had also packed her Devonshire jewels and an assortment of expensive lingerie – a blue silk negligee, lace-embroidered camisoles and a selection of black lace jarretelles. For the four-day trip, they were taking 187 pounds of baggage – most of it Kick’s.

  They left the house in a hurry. Ilona Solymossy was there to wave them off.

  ‘Wish me luck,’ Kick yelled as their car pulled away.

  ‘Should I cross my fingers?’ the housekeeper replied.

  ‘Yes, both hands!’

  ‘I will even cross my feet!’ Ilona shouted, laughing.

  By the time they got to Croydon Airport they were half an hour behind schedule. The De Havilland Dove was waiting for them on the tarmac. Peter had hired the plane from Skyways of London, an exclusive Mayfair-based charter firm. It had cost him £81.* He had chosen the same model as the one owned by his great friend Prince Aly Khan. Skyways had also provided a pilot. Aged thirty-four, Captain Peter Townshend was highly experienced: in the course of his career, he had clocked up almost 3,000 hours in the air, 550 of them as Chief Pilot in an RAF Bomber Squadron during the war.

  The route to the Riviera was one Townshend had already flown eleven times that year. The flight plan was routine: Paris by noon, with a short stopover for refuelling, and then on down to Cannes, with an anticipated arrival time of around 3.30 p.m.

  It was 12.45 – forty-five minutes later than Townshend had anticipated – when the Dove, after its delayed departure from Croydon, landed at Le Bourget, the stylish art deco airport favoured by the international jet set, nine miles to the north of Paris. Peter and Kick got off to stretch their legs while the plane refuelled. As they headed into the terminal, Peter, on a whim, decided to telephone his Parisian friends: would they like to join them for an impromptu lunch in the centre of Paris? Telling Townshend they would be gone for just forty minutes, Peter and Kick caught a taxi to the Champs-Elysées – a twenty-minute drive away.

  At 1.30 they had not returned. Townshend, waiting on the apron at Le Bourget, was becoming increasingly anxious. That morning, he had checked the meteorological reports: bad weather was forecast over the Rhône Valley, directly en route to Cannes. Climbing down from the Dove, he crossed the tarmac to the control tower to get an update on the weather.

  He was given a chart that had been made up at nine that morning: a violent thunderstorm, with abnormally heavy rainfall, was expected over the Rhône Valley at around five o’clock. The flight south would take three hours: if they were to avoid the storm, they would have to leave immediately. To compound his anxiety, the meteorologist told him that the latest update from weather stations in the south suggested that conditions over the Rhône Valley, and to the south-east of the Massif Central, were worsening.

  ‘The pilot,’ the meteorologist reported later, ‘did not take notes. He went off, came back and seemed visibly worried about the delay caused by his passengers who had not yet returned. “I’m going to be late,” he told us, speaking in French, “and it is very boring.”’

  At two o’clock – the Dove’s revised departure time – there was still no sign of Peter and Kick. Townshend, in communication with air traffic control at Le Bourget, altered the take-off slot to 14.20 – almost two hours later than his original flight plan. At 14.20 he altered it again to 15.00; and again, at 15.00, to 15.30. Minutes after he had moved it forward for the fourth time, the couple, accompanied by their lunch guests who had come to the airport to see them off, finally returned. Townshend was furious. Forty minutes had turned into two and a half hours. The delay, he informed them coolly, meant they would be flying over the Rhône Valley at precisely the time a violent thunderstorm was predicted. All commercial flights had been cancelled: although there were no rules governing private aircraft flying in bad weather conditions, the meteorological office at Le Bourget had advised him not to fly. In his view, it was too much of a risk: he intended to cancel the flight.

  Annoyed, Peter began to argue with him. What was a little rain, he said. He was not afraid of turbulence: he had crossed the North Sea in storm-force winds in a small motor torpedo boat. Nothing, surely, could be worse than that. Besides, if they did not fly that afternoon, they would have to call off the trip. It was Thursday: they had to be back in Paris by Saturday morning for the meeting with Joe Kennedy at the Ritz. There was no point postponing the flight until the following morning for the sake of spending less than twenty-four hours in Cannes. Changing tack, Peter then exerted all his charm.

  ‘Why did Peter have to be so ruddy stupid!’ his niece, Barbara Ricardo, remembered bitterly more than fifty years after his death. ‘It was so stupid. So utterly stupid to go and fly when they’d been told there was a storm and that it wasn’t safe. If only he’d been more sensible. You see, he was so spoilt by my grandmother. As a child he always got whatever he wanted. He wanted to go, therefore he must. The pilot was an absolute idiot. Peter must have offered a huge amount of money to get the man to fly. That’s my opinion. The pilot should have been more firm and said, if you want to go and get killed, go and kill yourself. But I’m not going to get killed.’

  Townshend – whether bribed or persuaded by Peter’s charm – gave in: at twenty minutes past three, firing the plane’s engines, he taxied to Runway 5 for take-off.

  From a report compiled by the Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses – the French air accident investigation unit – based on the Dove’s onboard radio and navigation logs retrieved from the wreckage of the plane, it is possible to piece together the details of the flight.

  After take-off, climbing to 1,500 feet over Fontainebleau, the Dove headed south-east for Auxerre. At 16.17, flying at 150 knots at a cruising altitude of 9,500 feet, Arthur Freeman, the co-pilot and radio operator, noted ‘Loire ahead’
in the navigation log. For the next forty minutes, aside from a small deviation north to avoid turbulence generated by heavy cloud, Townshend stuck to his flight plan. At 16.50, Arthur Freeman asked Lyon air traffic control for a weather forecast for Cannes, where the plane was due to land at 18.30. Ten minutes later, Freeman entered ‘Rhône ahead’ in the navigation log. At 17.02, as the aircraft approached the Rhône Valley, Lyon radioed the forecast back.

  Crucially, as the air accident investigators noted, Freeman had not inquired about the weather conditions immediately ahead.

  It was Lyon’s last radio contact with the Dove. It is also the moment when Freeman’s navigation log stops. Flying at 10,000 feet, the plane had entered the fringes of the storm in the region of Vienne, a little north of the Ardèche mountains. ‘In all likelihood electrical discharge in the atmosphere generated by the thunderstorm rendered radio transmission impossible,’ the accident investigators reported. ‘Also,’ they concluded grimly, ‘the attempt to control the aircraft in the turbulence prevented the crew from undertaking any other activity.’

  For the next twenty-eight minutes, violent updrafts bounced the Dove thousands of feet through the air. According to the inhabitants of the Vienne, who were lashed by torrential rain, hail and forked lightning, the storm was of quite exceptional strength.

  At 17.03, one minute after its last contact with the Dove, Lyon’s air traffic control also lost contact with a DC 3 flying on the same flight path through the region. A thirty-two-seater, the DC 3 was a bigger plane: later, the co-pilot reported that visibility was zero and the turbulence so intense that both he and the Captain had had to wrestle with the controls to keep the plane level. Fortunately for the crew of the DC 3, they had hit the cumulus nimbus at an altitude of 2,500 feet and were able to descend out of the cloud to make an emergency landing at Valence airport, not far from where the Dove crashed.

  No such option existed for Townshend. He had flown into the storm at an altitude of 10,000 feet – the point where the turbulence is generally at its greatest – and the conditions were even more extreme than those encountered by the crew of the DC 3. Extraordinarily, as the accident investigators noted – incredulous at his insouciance – Townshend had made no attempt to find an entry above or beneath the cloud base, the standard procedure when confronted by threatening cumulus nimbus.

  ‘Even modern 747s would not fly wittingly into a thunderstorm at an altitude of ten thousand feet,’ a commercial pilot explained. ‘Thunderstorms are known to be one of the most formidable hazards in flight. That’s why today’s planes are equipped with systems to warn of their approach. You either climb above the storm zone or you descend below it. You don’t fly through it.’

  What Townshend did not know as he grappled with the leaden controls to keep the Dove on course was that the gale-force south-east winds were dragging the plane into the eye of the storm above the Ardèche mountains. Given its ferocity, it is probable that atmospheric static knocked out the electrically powered artificial horizon gyro – a device that measured the plane’s position in relation to the horizon. Flying blind in thick cloud, the dials of the instruments on the Dove’s dashboard – notoriously difficult to read at the best of times – spinning uselessly in front of him, Townshend became disoriented. He had no way of knowing where he was, or whether he was flying up or down. He may also have suffered hypostasis – a blackout caused by a lack of oxygen. At 10,000 feet, he was already at the upper limit of flying without breathing apparatus. The updrafts in a storm of the intensity of the one over the Rhône Valley that afternoon were capable of sucking a plane thousands of feet upwards, above the oxygen threshold.

  Whether as the result of damage caused by the extreme turbulence or a lapse of consciousness, at around 17.30 Townshend lost control of the Dove.

  For the last minute or so of the flight, everyone on board must have known the plane was about to crash. Both Townshend and Freeman stuffed handkerchiefs into their mouths – a standard military procedure to avoid biting through the tongue in a crash landing. Hurtling towards the earth in a steep dive, the massive vibration and the whine from the over-revving engines indicating the plane was out of control, the Dove shot out of the cloud base 1,000 feet above the mountains. Confronted by a ridge directly ahead, in a last desperate attempt to pull out of the dive, Townshend yanked the controls sharply towards him. It was too much for the Dove: the massive g-force broke the plane in mid-air, the right wing cracking first, causing one engine to tear loose, then the other. The fuselage followed its own trajectory: landing vertically, it was embedded in rock on the ridge when Paul Petit and his father discovered it.

  All four passengers, the autopsy concluded, had been killed on impact.

  It was a two-and-a-half-hour climb up the mountain from St Bauzile, the nearest village, to the site of the crash. Some hours after Paul Petit and his father had found the plane, the Mayor of St Bauzile, accompanied by the Petits, several gendarmes and a local journalist, struggled up the stony path leading to the summit of Le Coran to examine the wreckage. Later, Peter and Kick’s bodies, carried on makeshift stretchers, were laid on the back of Petit’s ox cart and hauled down the mountain to the Mairie at St Bauzile.

  To begin with, there was some confusion over the identity of the passengers. The police had found a passport in the woman’s handbag: an American passport bearing the name ‘Lady Hartington’. Joe Kennedy was staying at the Georges V hotel in Paris when he was woken in the early hours of the morning by a call from a reporter asking him to confirm reports that Kick – rather than Billy’s brother’s wife, Debo Cavendish, also called Lady Hartington – was dead. As Joe left the hotel later that morning to travel by train to the Ardèche, he told reporters he hoped there had been a mistake over his daughter’s identity. But he knew it was Kick. Among Joe’s personal papers there is a note written on Georges V headed paper. ‘Written by me,’ it says, ‘½ hour after notified of Kick’s death’:

  No one who ever knew her didn’t feel that life was much better that minute. And probably we know so little about the next world that we must think that they wanted just such a wonderful girl for themselves. We must not feel sorry for her but for ourselves.

  At Wentworth, within hours of the crash, the Estate swung into action. Harry Sporborg, Peter’s business partner, took charge, sending Peter’s racing trainer to France to identify his body. Before plans could be made for the funeral five days later, a number of sensitive matters had to be dealt with first. Rowena Sykes, a nineteen-year-old maid at the house, was at home in Jump, a pit village a few miles from Wentworth, when she received a message the morning after Peter was killed. ‘It was Whitsuntide and I’d got the weekend off. Next door to where I lived there was a hair-dresser. She had a telephone. It was the only one in the village, nobody had telephones in them days. A neighbour came round and said there was a call for me. It was Mrs Lloyd, the housekeeper. “Would I go back to the house straight away,” she said. All the maids were called back. There were seven of us. £1 12 shillings and sixpence a month we got. We had to go up to Lord Fitzwilliam’s bedroom and strip it. Move the pillows, open the windows, change the sheets, everything. He’d been in there with the Kennedy girl a few days before. They wanted her scent got rid of because Lady Fitzwilliam [Obby] was on her way up from London to Wentworth for the funeral. Then we had to go and clear out the Chapel. There was all this furniture, and pictures and what have you in there. It had all gone in when the soldiers took over the house. It had never come out, it was still there. They wanted to put Peter’s coffin in the Chapel – to lay it in state before they buried him in the Church.’

  It was left to Joe Kennedy to deal with the formalities of Kick’s death. On the evening of Friday 14 May, after identifying her body, he phoned home to Hyannis Port where the rest of the family had gathered. Unsurprisingly, he said nothing about her disfiguring wounds. He told the family how ‘beautiful’ she looked. She had been found on her back ‘asleep’ with her shoes gone. Wasn’t that just li
ke Kick, who always went barefoot?

  Joe alone was confronted by the gruesome – and uncomfortable – details of Kick’s death. Soon after identifying her body, the police handed over her personal effects. As well as a family photo album and a string of rosary beads, they included a vaginal douche. The daughter of America’s most prominent Catholic family, and the widow of a man once mooted as a husband for England’s future Queen, had died on her way to an illicit weekend with a married man.

  Hours after the plane crashed, the Devonshires, the Fitzwilliams and the Kennedys closed ranks. They used both Ilona Solymossy – Kick’s housekeeper – and Peter Fitzwilliam’s secretary as conduits to channel an acceptable version of the story to the Press. ‘Chance Invite Sends Kennedy Girl to Her Death’, read the headline in the New York Daily News, a newspaper owned by Joseph Patterson, an associate of Joe Kennedy’s. The paper was the first to ‘break’ the story of the ‘circumstances’ leading to the couple’s death. Quoting Peter’s secretary, Kick was described as an ‘old friend of both Lady and Lord Fitzwilliam’s’. ‘Lady Hartington’, the paper reported, had ‘casually encountered Lord Fitzwilliam’ at the Ritz Hotel in London. On discovering that she was unable to secure a train or plane ticket to visit her father in the South of France, the paper continued, Lord Fitzwilliam offered her a seat on the plane he had chartered to visit ‘racehorse breeders’ on the French Riviera. ‘Lady Hartington,’ so the paper alleged, ‘had been delighted with the offer of a lift.’ The inconsistency of the facts – that Joe Kennedy had been in Paris, rather than the South of France – did not trouble the New York Daily News. Nor did the fact that the French Riviera was not known for its racehorse breeding.

  In Britain, a virtual news blackout was imposed. Of the four tabloids with the highest circulations, only one, the left-wing Daily Mirror, printed the story. On the Friday, the morning after the accident, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Daily Herald had all carried reports in their Stop Press columns that a British light aircraft had crashed, the identities of the passengers as yet unknown. Yet in the days that followed, there was no further news – no reports even that Kick and Peter had been killed. High up in the organization of each of the newspapers, someone had clearly decreed that the story be pulled.