Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  ‘Well, we simply went into the church and they had the ceremony. I did not think anything about it, I mean I simply did as I was asked.’

  ‘You knew what the ceremony was?’

  ‘Did not dawn on me that it was a marriage service, I do not know why.’

  ‘And do you mean to say when you got inside they did not tell you what they had got you there for?’

  ‘No, I understood before that I was supposed to witness their signatures and I simply waited. You see, there was not a soul in the church except this pew opener.’

  ‘Did you not put a few pertinent questions to Evie afterwards?’

  ‘No, it was not mentioned and we never talked about it.’

  Toby’s lawyers reasoned that George and Evie had every reason to keep their wedding secret. In the 1880s it was regarded as a disgraceful and shocking thing for a young man of good family to marry an actress. In the Guards regiments, the rules were plain. If an officer married an actress, he had to resign his commission.

  But why then a second wedding in London? George, in numerous statements to his solicitor, had claimed that he and Evie had married at Hanover Square because they were told the Scottish marriage was invalid. ‘Your Lordship ought to accept George’s own account,’ Toby’s barrister, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, urged the judge, ‘that they were married in Scotland and somebody threw doubts on it … Your Lordship knows how wiseacres always haunt London clubs full of information of that kind, and in some way they accepted that and thought they should get married again.’

  Unluckily for George, news of the Hanover Square wedding leaked out, forcing him to resign his commission in the Blues. The pew opener at St George’s, a Dickensian figure by the name of Sargeant and the only other witness to the marriage besides Kate Rickards and the Vicar, was the servant of an old Fitzwilliam retainer. Via Sargeant, word reached the senior branch of the family. It was the 6th Earl’s view of the alleged wedding in Scotland and his reaction to Toby’s birth that finally enabled the judge to decide the case.

  William, Earl Fitzwilliam, who was George’s uncle, and who had been appointed guardian to George and his two sisters after the death of their father, was firmly convinced that Toby was illegitimate. It was not until two and a half years after Toby was born that George’s guardian heard of the baby’s existence. Writing to George in the winter of 1891, the Earl expressed his grave displeasure:

  I have just heard that you propose taking a little boy to Milton. I know nothing about the poor little fellow, but I should not be doing right if I did not point out to you the disastrous effects of taking him there. The evil effects of such an example would be very great, and would mar your future influence for good in the neighbourhood, and later on the consequences would fall very heavily on both you and your sisters. If you take that little boy to Milton, you permanently close the door to your sisters, whether they were actually there at the moment or not. Your sisters suffer now, and must continue to suffer, much on your account; do not add to it more than you can help.

  The 6th Earl’s letters to his nephew were among the very few contemporaneous pieces of evidence. ‘It is perfectly clear, indeed it is not in dispute,’ Mr Justice Pilcher told the court in his Judgment, given on the twentieth day of the hearing, ‘that the opinion which the Sixth Earl formed when he first heard of Toby’s existence, namely that he was illegitimate, never altered until the date of his death in 1902.’

  Mr Justice Pilcher ruled against Toby. Tom’s side had convinced him that the Scottish wedding had never taken place. George and Evie had lied: their claims to have been married in Scotland, both in their conversations with friends and with members of the family and in the various sworn declarations and statements made to their lawyers, were a ‘put-up job’, a ‘stage performance’, ‘a bluff’ by ‘theatrical people’ who were ‘theatrically-minded’. In the damning words of Tom’s barrister, ‘They knew full well that there had never been any ceremony in Scotland and that these remarks were made to keep up appearances knowing that they were always and had been untrue.’

  Evie Fitzwilliam, the judge concluded, could not possibly have destroyed the papers proving Toby’s legitimacy: none had ever existed for her to destroy.

  Toby never commented on the outcome of the case. But there was at least some consolation. Throughout his life, his predicament had struck a chord with his cousin Billy, the 7th Earl Fitzwilliam. It is possible the question mark over Toby’s legitimacy reminded Billy of his own troubles in the 1890s when the family had accused him of being an impostor. In the early 1930s, he made an unusual provision in his will: should the younger brother, Tom Fitzwilliam, ever succeed to the Earldom, he stipulated that Toby should receive an annual allowance of £8,000 from his estate. It was an act of remarkable generosity on Billy’s part. An income of £8,000 a year was more than enough to live on comfortably: in the early 1950s, it was equivalent to almost £170,000 today.

  The dry, precise language of Mr Justice Pilcher’s sixty-page Judgment failed to conceal the family’s torrid unravelling. In just five decades, the dynasty had been destroyed by love.

  In 1956, four years after he had become the 10th Earl Fitzwilliam, Tom finally married Joyce Fitzalan-Howard, the older woman he had loved for almost half his life and by whom, ironically, in the mid-1930s, he had had an illegitimate daughter. The marriage embroiled the family in yet another scandal. In order to marry Tom, Joyce divorced Viscount Fitzalan of Derwent, her husband of thirty-three years’ standing and the heir to the Duke of Norfolk, the head of England’s premier Catholic family. Tom and Joyce’s marriage signalled the end of the Fitzwilliam line: in 1956, Joyce, aged fifty-eight, was too old to produce an heir.

  Tom lived until 1979. Although he retained the suite of forty rooms at Wentworth House, he chose to live at Milton Hall, visiting Wentworth for just three weeks in every year for the grouse-shooting season and the St Leger at Doncaster. A few months before he died, his final act as the 10th and last Earl Fitzwilliam – one commensurate with his predecessors’ philanthropy – was to transfer the village of Wentworth into a charitable trust. The future rents from the hundreds of properties were to be ploughed back to improve its amenities and to maintain the standard of housing.

  The local authority gave up their lease on Wentworth House in the mid-1980s. After the Lady Mabel College of Physical Education closed in 1979, Sheffield City Polytechnic took over the historic property. But the annual maintenance costs, running into hundreds of thousands of pounds, were prohibitive: the heating bill alone was £1,000 a week.

  For the second time in its twentieth-century history, Wentworth House was unmistakably a white elephant. The extraordinary size of it, and its location in what was now one of the most depressed regions in Britain, prevented it from being put to institutional use. It had been built for show, for one purpose only: to be one powerful man’s stately home. After the years of occupation by the local authority, Tom Fitzwilliam’s trustees balked at the expense of putting it right. In 1988, Lady Elizabeth Anne Hastings, Tom’s daughter and beneficiary, put the house up for sale. It had been in the family’s possession for more than 250 years. Before that, their ancestors had first built a house on the site in the thirteenth century.

  In a twist of historical coincidence, 1988 was also the year that many of the pits in the South Yorkshire coalfield closed down, the culmination of a bitter and bloody clash between the country’s miners and Margaret Thatcher’s Government. The dispute which precipitated the year-long miners’ strike of 1984/5 had begun at Cortonwood colliery, a pit situated on land formerly owned by the Fitzwilliams a few hundred yards from Lion’s Lodge, the most northerly of the eight gatehouses that led into Wentworth Park.

  In 1989, the house and some thirty acres surrounding it was bought by Wensley Haydon-Baillie. His tenure was short. A flamboyant businessman, the son of a surgeon, he already owned a large country house in the New Forest, and a mansion next to Kensington Palace in London’s ‘Millionaires’ Row’. After making
his fortune in banking and engineering, Haydon-Baillie invested in a company called Porton International, founded in the mid-1980s to market drugs developed at the Government’s classified biochemical research station at Porton Down. At one point, the company, launched on the promise that it would soon be introducing a cure for the disease herpes, was valued at around £400 million. It failed to live up to City expectations. While it supplied anti-germ-warfare vaccines to US troops in the first Gulf War, the cure for herpes never materialized. By the summer of 1998, Haydon-Baillie admitted to having debts of £16 million. Shortly after, Wentworth House was repossessed by his bankers.

  After standing empty for a year, its lawns neglected and the roof in danger of collapse, it was bought by an anonymous bidder for the knockdown price of £1.5 million – cheaper per square yard than a council house in the nearby town of Rotherham.

  The mystery that shrouds the twentieth-century history of Wentworth House continues. It is currently owned by Clifford Newbold, a former Londoner in his early seventies, and a reclusive figure about whom little is known. He remains aloof from the village, determined to guard his privacy and to shield Wentworth House from the inquisitive eyes of visitors drawn to its grounds. ‘Its closure to the public is a crying shame,’ Simon Jenkins wrote in his book England’s Thousand Best Houses. His view is echoed in the village, where memories of the Fitzwilliams die hard. ‘It should be our Chatsworth, our Blenheim,’ one man in his eighties remarked.

  Today, as a consequence of the 10th Earl Fitzwilliam’s legacy, Wentworth village looks much as it would have looked in the family’s heyday. It is one of the most timelessly beautiful communities in South Yorkshire. Untarnished by development, the yellow stone cottages, with their green-painted guttering and doors, and white window frames, still bear the Fitzwilliam colours. Yet fittingly for a family whose reticence has veiled their recent history, the true magnificence of the last Earl’s legacy can only be seen after dark.

  Along the top road north of the village, a narrow country lane leads to Hoober Stand, a pyramid-shaped folly erected by the Fitzwilliams’ ancestor, the 1st Marquess of Rockingham, to commemorate the English victory over the Scots at the Battle of Culloden. At night, the view over the surrounding country stretches for miles. To the south, the hills above Sheffield are coloured by a livid orange glare; to the south-west, Rotherham and Rawmarsh blaze, a sodium-lit sprawl; the M1 marches along its western edge. But like totality in a solar eclipse, in the midst of this, one of England’s greatest urban conurbations, there is a vast expanse of black. Startling in its size and density, it conceals woodland, fields and parkland. It is the land once encompassed by the nine-mile perimeter wall that encircled Wentworth House.

  1. Billy, 7th Earl Fitzwilliam, on a training exercise with the Wentworth Battery, Royal Horse Artillery, 1911

  2. Troops guarding Wentworth House during the coal riots of 1893

  3. The Marble Salon at Wentworth House, 1924

  4. The Whistlejacket Room at Wentworth House, 1924

  5 and 6. William, 6th Earl Fitzwilliam, and his wife, Harriet, Countess Fitzwilliam, c. 1865

  7. William, Lord Milton, photographed in the Pillared Hall at Wentworth House, c. 1860

  8. Billy, later 7th Earl Fitzwilliam, as a boy in 1878

  9. Lord Milton (second from right, with headband) and his expedition party after crossing the Rockies in September 1863. William Cheadle, his physician, is seated to his right

  10. Laura, Lord Milton’s wife, after the birth of their eldest daughter, c. 1870

  11. A lithograph, dated 1869, taken from an original watercolour depicting the rugged landscape around Pointe de Meuron. The house where Billy was born is visible in the distance

  12. The house in Pointe de Meuron where Billy, 7th Earl Fitzwilliam, was born

  13. A group of male indoor staff at Wentworth House, 1912

  14. The outdoor servants at Wentworth House, c. 1906

  15. The housekeeper and a group of housemaids at Wentworth House, c. 1890

  16. A ploughing team on the Wentworth Estate, c. 1900

  17. Maud, Lady Milton, later Countess Fitzwilliam, dressed as Madame Le Brun at the Devonshire House Costume Ball in July 1897

  18. Miners from the Fitzwilliams’ collieries outside the gates to Wentworth Park, c. 1910

  19. Main Street, Wentworth village, 1905

  20. Loversall Street, Denaby, 1903. The blockhouse containing the privy middens can be seen on the right-hand side of the street

  21. Police evict miners and their families from tied housing during the Bag Muck Strike at Denaby in January 1903

  22. Faceworkers hewing coal

  23. A deputy below ground, 1912

  24. A group of miners and a young child take a break while digging for coal during the 1912 strike. During industrial disputes the miners lost their coal allowance. Often, whole families would turn out to ‘pick’ the coal, an essential fuel for heating and cooking

  25. A young miner. In the first decades of the twentieth century boys began work underground at the age of thirteen

  26. Pit lads and pony

  27. Queen Mary, accompanied by her Ladies-in-Waiting, views Silverwood colliery from a trolley, July 1912

  28. George V and Billy, 7th Earl Fitzwilliam, enter the cage to descend underground at Elsecar colliery, July 1912

  29. The morning of 9 July 1912. An ambulance wagon passes through the crowds gathered on the road leading to Cadeby colliery, following the disaster at the pit

  30. A miners’ rescue team, similar to those deployed after the explosions at Cadeby. They are wearing Draegar smoke helmets. Hamstead colliery, 1908

  31. The Cadeby colliery disaster created sixty-one widows and left 132 fatherless children. For many of the women, forced to survive on compensation payments of little more than 5 shillings per week, visits to the pawnshop became routine

  32. The house party staying at Wentworth during the King and Queen’s visit in July 1912

  33. The Wentworth Battery, RHA, in training in Wentworth Park in the summer of 1914

  34. Pyrotechnic portraits of Billy and Maud, Earl and Countess Fitzwilliam, at the party to celebrate the christening of their son Peter, February 1911

  35. The pony drivers from Billy’s collieries at Elsecar and New Stubbin playing polo on the lawn in front of Wentworth House during the General Strike, 1926

  36. Peter, Lord Milton, aged four, is introduced to a member of the household staff at Wentworth

  37. Peter, and his mother, Maud, at a garden party held in the grounds of Wentworth House to raise funds for the families of local soldiers fighting in the First World War

  38. Peter, aged two, on his first hunter

  39. Debutante Lady Barbara Ricardo (née Montagu-Stuart-Wortley), with her grandmother, Maud, Countess Fitzwilliam (right), and her mother, Elfrida, Countess of Wharncliffe (left), following her presentation at Court, 1938

  40. Maud, Countess Fitzwilliam, and Peter, taken shortly after his twenty-first birthday

  41. Peter and Olive ‘Obby’ Fitzwilliam at their wedding in Dublin Cathedral, April 1933

  42. Billy relaxes on the Riviera, 1938

  43. Peter in 1944

  44. The Kennedy family at Buckingham Palace, c. 1938

  45. Kathleen ‘Kick’ Kennedy with her brother Jack

  46. Kick and Billy, Marquess of Hartington, flanked by the Duchess of Devonshire and Joe Kennedy Jnr, at their wedding at Chelsea Register Office, May 1944

  47. Vesting Day, 1 January 1947, the day the National Coal Board took control of Britain’s 1,647 mines

  48. The wreckage of the plane in which Peter and Kick were killed in May 1948

  49. Students of the Lady Mabel College of Physical Education are coached in badminton in the Marble Salon at Wentworth. The priceless stone-inlaid floor has been covered by protective flooring

  50. Eric, 9th Earl Fitzwilliam

  51. Tom, later 10th Earl Fitzwilliam

  52. Mourners at the 9t
h Earl Fitzwilliam’s funeral in April 1952. Leading the procession (right to left) are Tom Fitzwilliam, his brother Toby, Lady Juliet Fitzwilliam (Peter’s daughter), and her mother, ‘Obby’, Countess Fitzwilliam. Lady Mabel Smith follows behind

  53. The desecration of the landscape around Wentworth House after the open-cast mining

  Notes

  PREFACE

  p. xvii ‘He had left …’: ‘Richest by century’, Sunday Times, 26 March 2000. £3.3 billion, the contemporary value of £2.8 million, was calculated on the basis of Britain’s GDP in 1902.

  ‘In the century to come …’: ibid.

  p. xviii ‘the train bored …’: Roger Dataller (pseud.), Oxford into Coalfield, J. M. Dent & Sons, 1934, p. 11.

  p. xix ‘A feeling of awe …’: Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 26 February 1902.

  ‘The workmen on the various estates …’: ibid.

  INTRODUCTION

  p. xxi ‘I’ve never seen him …’: author’s interview with Joan Steele, spring 2004.