Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  Joe had Kick’s body transported up to Paris where it lay at the Catholic church of St Philippe du Roule, watched over by a nun from the Order of the Sisters of Hope. For four days, Kick’s final resting place remained undecided. Responding to inquiries from the Press, Joe, dazed, answered, ‘I have no plans. No plans.’

  It was finally agreed that Kick would be buried at Chatsworth, the Devonshires’ home in Derbyshire. The Kennedys left the arrangements for the funeral to the Duchess of Devonshire. They did not even choose her epitaph. ‘Joy she gave, Joy she has found’ were the words the Duchess chose to be carved on the headstone above her grave.

  Yet, for all Joe Kennedy’s faults, Kick had been right to place her faith in him. Four months later, writing to the Duchess of Devonshire, on whom he had lent heavily in the days after Kick’s death, Joe was still paralysed by grief. ‘Dearest Moucher,’ he wrote:

  It probably isn’t news to you to know that I thought about you a great deal since I came back to America. I think that the only thing that helped me retain my sanity was your understanding manner in the whole sad affair. I would like to be able to tell you that I am very much better, but I just can’t.

  I can’t seem to get out of my mind that there is no possibility of seeing Kick next winter and that there are no more weeks and months to be made gay by her presence. I realize that people say, ‘You have many other children, you can’t be too depressed by Kick’s death,’ and I think that, to all intents and purposes, no one knows that I am depressed. In fact, I have never acknowledged it even to Rose who, by the way, is ten thousand per cent better than I am. Her terrifically strong faith has been a great help to her, along with her very strong will and determination not to give way …

  I know I tried to tell you, while I was in London, how grateful I am to Edward and you for your whole attitude in those dark days. I don’t know whether I made myself very clear or not, but it will do no harm to repeat again that I will never forget it and I will always be deeply grateful to you and your family …

  Joe was the only member of the Kennedy family present at Kick’s funeral. Neither her mother, Rose, nor her brothers and sisters were there. For Rose, as Lem Billings, a close friend of the family’s recalled, ‘that airplane crash was God pointing his finger at Kick and saying NO!’ Days before the funeral, Rose had arranged for a memorial Mass card to be sent out. The prayer printed on it was a plea for plenary indulgence, applicable to souls in purgatory. One of Kick’s friends tore it up in a rage. Those who had loved and now mourned Kick could not forgive Rose. ‘Somerset Maugham [the celebrated British novelist] came to stay with us out in Tanganyika some years after Peter died,’ Barbara, Peter’s niece, remembered. ‘And he told us that Kick’s mother had put a curse on her daughter. She’d put a curse on her own daughter, that’s what her friends believed.’

  Rose lied about Kick’s death until the day she died. In her autobiography, Time to Remember, she wrote that Kick and a ‘few friends’ were returning from a holiday on the Riviera en route to meeting Joe in Paris when the plane crashed. There were no public foundations set up in Kick’s name or privately published commemorative books, as there were after Joe, Jack and Bobby died. Kick’s brothers and sisters knew not to talk about her in their mother’s presence: even her brothers imposed their own vows of silence. Independently, Jack and Bobby visited Ilona Solymossy in the months after her death. On leaving the housekeeper, their parting words were the same: ‘We will not mention her again.’ In 1951, when Bobby Kennedy’s eldest daughter was born, he wanted to name her Kathleen Hartington Kennedy: the family had one stipulation – that she never be referred to as ‘Kick’.

  On 20 May 1948 Joe Kennedy stood in the sheltered graveyard behind Edensor Church at Chatsworth and watched Kick’s coffin being lowered into the earth. He had lost his eldest and favourite son, Joe: now his favourite daughter was being laid to rest in the grounds of a famously anti-Catholic family in a foreign country from which, a decade earlier, he had been asked to leave. ‘I can still see the stricken face of old Joe Kennedy,’ Alistair Forbes recalled nearly thirty years later, ‘as he stood alone, unloved and despised, behind the coffin of his eldest daughter amid the hundreds of British friends who had adored her and now mourned her.’

  At Wentworth, Peter’s funeral had taken place the previous day.

  37

  The gypsies came before dawn, scattering flowers along the road leading to the church where Peter was to be buried. In his father’s day, an avenue of splendid lime trees, carefully pollarded by the Estate labourers, had lined Church Drive, but now, on one side, just three of the trees were left. The others had been uprooted by the excavators that had wrecked the fields beyond. The denuded landscape, the mounds and craters of naked limestone, stretched away to the south as far as the eye could see. The flowers stood out against the brilliant white of the road. The original grass track had long since been covered by thousands of pieces of limestone debris from the fields nearby.

  At three o’clock, the hour given by the Estate officials as the likely time when Peter’s coffin, mounted on a bier pulled by eight of the Fitzwilliams’ employees, would leave Wentworth House, there was no sign of the gypsies. They had scattered the flowers and gone – a Romany custom to honour the souls of those who had been kind to them.

  The funeral was private: the first private funeral in the history of the Earls Fitzwilliam. The orchestrated public mourning performed at Peter’s great-grandfather’s funeral in 1902, and at those of previous Earls before him, belonged to the past. Overnight, after vesting day – 1 January 1947 – the day Britain’s collieries were transferred to public ownership, the numbers employed by the family had fallen from thousands to hundreds. A skeleton staff of just eleven servants remained on duty at the house: with the acreage subsumed by the open-cast mining operations, even the Estate departments were being slowly run down.

  Yet still, on the morning of 20 May 1948, thousands came from the villages around Wentworth. ‘He were a grand lad,’ May Bailey, the former scullery maid at the house, recalled. ‘He were popular.

  Everyone liked him, they wanted to see him off.’ But tragedy, as some admitted, and the macabre symbol of the Fitzwilliams’ and Wentworth’s catastrophic unravelling, also drew the crowds. ‘Ay,’ said one man from the village, ‘they said they’d brought him home, but I doubt there was much left of him in that coffin. They told his mother he had died asleep, that his body had been thrown out of the plane and was barely touched. I heard different: they said he was in pieces, and not many pieces at that.’

  Along Church Drive, the crowd started forming at two o’clock. At the top of the road, by the green door that led into the gardens of Wentworth House, they came to pile wreaths of flowers on to the waiting farm carts. An hour later, heads were bared when the green door opened for the coffin, draped in a Union Jack, drawn by the Fitzwilliams’ eight employees.

  Maud, Obby and her thirteen-year-old daughter, Juliet, led the procession that followed the bier as it was hauled the mile from the house. Maud was bowed by grief; a crêpe funeral veil shrouded her face. ‘I don’t think she ever got over it,’ Lady Barbara Ricardo, her granddaughter, remembered. ‘She absolutely doted on Peter. He was more important to her than anything else. The extraordinary thing was later in life, when she was much older – I suppose she must have been in her seventies – my mother went up to see her one Christmas and my grandmother showed her a photograph of Peter. She said to Mummy, “Elfie darling, do tell me, who is the man in the photograph? I often look at it and I can’t work out who this handsome young man is. Who is he?” Mummy said, “Darling, it’s your son.” She said, “Darling, I don’t have a son.” My mother said, “Mummy, you did have a son. He’s gone now.” Somehow or other, the kindness of the good Lord – or who, I don’t know – enabled her to forget. Misery and fate and everything else had caused her to lose that part of her memory.’

  The farm carts, loaded with the wreaths of flowers, joined the procession, s
eparating the three women from the other mourners. A decrepit figure in his mid-sixties, wearing an unusually tall black silk top hat – a sartorial relic from the Victorian age – walked at the head of the long line that followed behind the carts. His mourning suit was ill-fitting: the trousers were too short, inelegantly hitched around his waist, and the tail coat too long. The very sight of him, his position in the bleak procession, told a sorry story: Eric, Peter’s successor – the new and 9th Earl Fitzwilliam – was the last of the 6th Earl’s male descendants left.

  Peter’s great-grandfather had been Earl for almost half a century. In the mid-1800s, he had produced eight sons; by any reckoning, it was a firm guarantee of his family’s title. But just two of his sons had produced sons themselves: William, Lord Milton, the father of Billy, the 7th Earl, and William Charles Fitzwilliam, Eric’s father. Genes, rather than untimely deaths in colonial wars or the twentieth century’s two World Wars, were to blame. Four of the 6th Earl’s sons had died childless before they reached fifty: aside from Billy and Eric, the others had produced eight daughters. With Peter’s death, the Fitzwilliam title was in danger of becoming extinct.

  Eric drew cold stares from the villagers as he shuffled past. ‘No one wanted him. No one liked him. He weren’t someone you could respect. “Him,” they’d say, nodding at ’t big house. Then they’d tip their hand. “Him as ’ud like a drink.”’

  Eric’s minder, Harold Brown, paid for by a Fitzwilliam family trust, hovered behind the new Earl. A solitary and eccentric bachelor, for much of his life Eric had been a hopeless alcoholic. In his youth, his wild excesses of drinking and extravagance had led his father to declare him bankrupt. Now approaching his seventies, he was mysteriously proud of his family nickname, ‘Bottle by Bottle’ – a name he sometimes used when introducing himself to strangers.

  All hope that Wentworth House and the Estate could pull through this dark period in its history had gone. ‘When Peter got killed, that were it then,’ Geoff Steer, a miner’s son who was at the funeral, recalled. ‘Wentworth House died with him.’

  The village church was packed; there was standing room only at the back. The congregation was half-way through the 23rd Psalm when hundreds of miners, still wearing their working clothes, their faces blackened by coal dust and grime, came hurrying up the path. The day shift at New Stubbin and Elsecar, the Fitzwilliams’ former pits, had just ended. Under the new management, they had not been allowed to leave the shift any earlier. Crowding into the back of the church, the men spilled out among the gravestones outside.

  These were the sons and grandsons of the miners who had led the 6th Earl’s funeral cortège in 1902. In four decades, the Fitzwilliam family and Wentworth House had been all but destroyed.

  It was the turn of the miners and their families next.

  The titanic battle between capital and labour that rumbled through Britain’s coalfields in the twentieth century, sweeping up Wentworth, was not over. By the mid 1990s, fifty years after the nationalization of the coal industry, of the seventy pits in the South Yorkshire coalfield that in 1900 had employed 115,000 miners, only four remained, employing a workforce of under 2,500 men. By the close of the century, Wentworth, and the pit villages for miles around, had been devastated by blight: criss-crossed by more motorways per square mile than in any other part of the country, they were roads to nowhere, funded by the Government and Europe in a futile attempt to generate employment in a region afflicted by the highest numbers of unemployed in Britain.

  For all the saints, who from their labours rest,

  Who Thee by faith before the world confessed,

  Thy name O Jesus be forever blessed

  Alleluia, Alleluia …

  Vaughan Williams’s hymn was the last to be sung at Peter’s funeral. Midway through the singing, the voices of the congregation, and those of the hundreds of miners standing among the gravestones outside, were drowned by the roar of the engines from two approaching Lancaster Bombers, flying at a few hundred feet.

  Swooping low over the church with the missing spire, the pilots performed an aerial salute, dipping the planes’ wings in tribute to a brave man.

  Epilogue

  Six months after Peter was killed, Wentworth House was taken over by the Lady Mabel College of Physical Education.

  The grand Marble Salon, where in 1912 the celebrated prima ballerina Anna Pavlova had danced for the King, became the college gymnasium, filled with climbing ropes, vaulting horses and balancing beams. The other once magnificent state rooms suffered a similar fate. The Whistlejacket Room, with Stubbs’s famous portrait of the racehorse still in situ, was converted into a dance studio; the gilded Ante-Room, where Peter and the vicarage children had learnt to waltz, was designated a Junior Common Room for the first intake of forty students.

  The trainee sports mistresses slept and dressed in dormitories in Bedlam, the wing along the East Front where the bedrooms for the Fitzwilliams’ bachelor guests had traditionally been. ‘We were absolutely in awe of the place. It was so vast, it was overpowering,’ a former student recalled. An air of disorder and decay, as another remembered, pervaded the grandeur. ‘We had to kill the rats with our hockey sticks. At night it sounded like thunder above. You could hear them running through. It was so loud it would wake you up.’ In the daytime, the sheep that grazed on the front lawn would wander into the house. ‘They would get into Bedlam and drink the water out of the toilets in the bathrooms that had been installed at the end of the wing. We used to have to shoo them down the corridor with a broom. Whenever we went out to play lacrosse, the games mistress would shout “Charge”, to disperse them, but they still kept coming into the house.’

  ‘Bottle by Bottle’, the dissolute 9th Earl Fitzwilliam, posed a further hazard. ‘He used to roam the house with his Jack Russell terriers. One was called Peril. You could hear him coming: “Peril! Peril! Come on, Peril!” Sometimes he’d stagger into our classes, or turn up in the middle of our dinner. He’d be absolutely cut. Somehow, the Principal managed to usher him out; it wasn’t the sort of thing she wanted her girls to see.’

  Eric was living at the back of the house in the apartment that Billy and Maud had occupied during the war. The suite of forty rooms resembled an Aladdin’s Cave, crammed with paintings, fine pieces of furniture, porcelain and silver – the precious family heirlooms that had once filled the other 325 rooms in the house. A few months after Peter’s death, there had been a massive clearout. Five hundred items, a mere fraction of the contents of the house, had been auctioned in one of the first of the great country house sales. The unwanted furniture had raised £55,000, almost £1 million at today’s values. With the arrival of the Lady Mabel College, space was the issue, not money. The family was still immensely rich. Their estate boasted tens of thousands of acres of land in Yorkshire and Ireland and a number of houses in Mayfair; the compensation due for the nationalization of their coal interests had been fixed at several millions.

  Wentworth House had not been structurally damaged by the open-cast mining operations, despite the Sheffield geologists’ predictions. But aesthetically, it was ruined. Anyone walking along the majestic fifty-yard Picture Gallery in Eric’s apartment, past the Titians, Van Dycks and paintings by Guido and Raphael, would see the slag heaps that had desecrated the gardens outside, framed in the window at its far end.

  Eric spent most of his day in a sitting room overlooking the industrial site. ‘He would do nothing but drink all day,’ Godfrey Broadhead, a forester on the Estate, recalled. ‘Sometimes the Earl would ask me to go out into the Park to see what I could find. I’d come back with feathers and birds’ eggs, and bits and pieces that I’d picked up from the ground. He liked that.’ A staff of seven servants had been kept on to look after him: as one housemaid recalled, they dreaded going into the room. ‘I never saw him sober. He used to drink whisky and smoke Pasha cigarettes around the clock. You can imagine going into his room. It was horrible.’

  The 9th Earl’s alcoholism was steadily
killing him. As Eric’s health disintegrated, two brothers, Tom and Toby, were contesting which of them should succeed him. The time bomb their mother, Evie, had set under the noble house of Fitzwilliam in 1914 was about to explode.

  The final act in the Fitzwilliam drama was played out at the Royal Courts of Justice in central London in the winter of 1951. The case between the two brothers was heard before a judge in the Chancery Division. It was left to him to resolve a mystery that for more than half a century the family had kept secret, hoping it would never come to light. Was Toby, the elder son of George and Evie Fitzwilliam, legitimate, or had they married after he was born? It was a question none of the family’s surviving members could conclusively answer, least of all Toby himself.

  The Fitzwilliams were in danger of being undone by their obsession with secrecy and their inclination to destroy their own records. Evie and George were dead and there was no marriage certificate: mere scraps of evidence had survived from the late nineteenth century when the marriage was supposed to have taken place.

  Peter’s sudden death, and the absence of male heirs in the main branch of the family, had forced the case. Eric, the 9th Earl, was the last of the 6th Earl’s male descendants; there being no living male descendants of the 7th and 8th Earls Fitzwilliam, it was necessary to go back to George, the third son of the 5th Earl, to find an heir. The 5th Earl had died in 1857; Tom and Toby were his great-grandsons, the last of the male heirs left.