Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty Read online

  Catherine Bailey

  BLACK DIAMONDS

  The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Fitzwilliam Family Tree

  Preface

  Introduction

  PART I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  PART II

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  PART III

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  PART IV

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  PART V

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  PART VI

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Epilogue

  Illustrations

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  In memory of my grandmother Eve, with love

  List of Illustrations

  1 Billy, 7th Earl Fitzwilliam, 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, c. 1860

  8 Billy, later 7th Earl Fitzwilliam, 1878

  9 William, Lord Milton, in Canada, 1863

  10 Laura, Lady Milton, c. 1870

  11 Pointe de Meuron, 1869

  12 The house where Billy, 7th Earl Fitzwilliam, was born

  13 A group of male indoor servants at Wentworth, 1912

  14 The outdoor servants at Wentworth, c. 1906

  15 The housekeeper and some of the housemaids at Wentworth, c. 1890

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

  17 Maud, Lady Milton, later Countess Fitzwilliam, at the Devonshire House Ball, July 1897

  18 Miners from the Fitzwilliams’ collieries, c. 1910

  19 Main Street, Wentworth village, 1905

  20 Loversall Street, Denaby, 1903

  21 The Denaby Bag Muck Strike, January 1903: police evict miners and their families from their homes

  22 Faceworkers hewing coal

  23 A deputy below ground, 1912

  24 Digging for coal during the 1912 strike

  25 A young miner

  26 Pit lads and pony

  27 Queen Mary at Silverwood colliery, July 1912

  28 King George V and Billy, 7th Earl Fitzwilliam, at Elsecar colliery, July 1912

  29 Crowds wait for news of fatalities on the morning of the Cadeby colliery disaster, July 1912

  30 A miners’ rescue team, 1908

  31 A miner’s wife outside a pawnbroker’s shop

  32 The house party staying at Wentworth for the royal visit in July 1912

  33 The Wentworth Battery in training, August 1914

  34 Fireworks at Wentworth, February 1911

  35 A polo match at Wentworth House between the pony drivers at the 7th Earl’s pits, 1926

  36 Peter, Lord Milton, and a member of the household staff at Wentworth, 1913

  37 Peter, Lord Milton, and Maud, Countess Fitzwilliam, at a garden party, 1914

  38 Peter, Lord Milton, on his first hunter, 1913

  39 Maud, Countess Fitzwilliam, Elfrida, Countess of Wharncliffe, and Lady Barbara Ricardo, 1938

  40 Maud, Countess Fitzwilliam, and Peter, Lord Milton, 1932

  41 Peter, Lord Milton, and ‘Obby’, Lady Milton, at their wedding in Dublin Cathedral, April 1933

  42 Billy, 7th Earl Fitzwilliam, on the Riviera, 1938

  43 Peter, 8th Earl Fitzwilliam, 1944

  44 The Kennedy family at Buckingham Palace, c. 1938

  45 Kathleen ‘Kick’ Kennedy and Jack Kennedy

  46 Kathleen and Billy, Marquess of Hartington, at Chelsea Register Office, May 1944

  47 Vesting Day, 1 January 1947

  48 The wreckage of the plane in which Peter Fitzwilliam and Kathleen, Marchioness of Hartington, were killed, May 1948

  49 Students of the Lady Mabel College of Physical Education in the Marble Salon at Wentworth, c. 1950

  50 Eric, 9th Earl Fitzwilliam

  51 Tom, later 10th Earl Fitzwilliam

  52 Mourners at the funeral of the 9th Earl Fitzwilliam, April 1952

  53 Open-cast mining at Wentworth, 1948

  The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce photographs: Roy Young for 1–2, 5–6, 13–16, 18–19, 27–8, 32–3, 52–3; Michael Bond, Way Out West: The Story of an Errant Ancestor for 7–10; Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society for 11–12; V & A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum for 17; Brian Elliott for 20–22, 24, 29, 31, 47; British Coal/Eastwood Collection for 23, 26; Yorkshire Mining Museum for 25; Hulton Archive/Getty Images for 30; Martyn Johnson for 34, 38; Griffith Philipps for 35–7, 39, 41–3, 51; Peter Diggle for 40; Dorothy Wilding/J.F. Kennedy Library for 44; J.F. Kennedy Library for 45; Portman Press Bureau/J.F. Kennedy Library for 46; BEA/France for 48; Elma Casson for 49; Geoffrey Howse for 50

  Preface

  A crowd of thousands shifted nervously on the great lawn in front of Wentworth House, waiting for the coffin to be brought out. It was the winter of 1902: ‘February,’ as one observer remarked, ‘in her worst mood.’ Two hundred servants, dressed in black, stood stiffly along the length of the façade facing the crush of mourners. Shrouds of fog enveloped the statues and pediments crowning the house; an acrid smell clung to the mist, catching in the nostrils, effluent from the pits, foundries and blast furnaces in the valley below. The fog drained everything of colour. Now and then it lifted to reveal a portion of the house: on a clear day the crowd could have counted a thousand windows, but that morning most of it was obscured.

  The hearse, a glass coach, swathed in sable and crêpe, was ready outside the Pillared Hall. It was drawn by four black horses: plumes of black ostrich feathers adorned their bridles and black-tasselled cloths were draped across their backs. Mutes, the customary Victorian funeral attendants, stood by them; macabre figures, veils of black crêpe trailed from their tall silk hats. Bells tolled in the distance. In the nearby villages the shops were closed and the curtains in the houses drawn fast.

  At the stroke of midday, three hours after the crowd had first begun to gather, the coffin, mounted on a silver bier, was carried out of the house. It was followed by a procession of housemaids and footmen bearing hundreds of wreaths of flowers. A brilliant splash of colour in the bleak scene, they drew a murmur from the crowd.

  The oak coffin contained the body of William, the 6th Earl Fitzwilliam, one of the richest men in Britain. He had left a legacy of £2.8 million pounds – more than £3 billion at today’s values. In the century to come, only one Englishman, Sir John Ellerman, the shipping magnate, would leave a larger fortune. The dead Earl was among the very wealthiest of Britain’s twen
tieth-century aristocrats.

  His money had come from land and a spectacular stroke of luck. In the late eighteenth century, the Fitzwilliams’ Yorkshire estates – over 20,000 acres in total – were found to straddle the Barnsley seam, the main artery of the South Yorkshire coalfield. Wentworth House, situated nine miles north-east of Sheffield, lay at its heart.

  The Earl was born in 1815, the year of Waterloo. Over the course of his lifetime his wealth had increased a thousandfold. Rapid technological advances, spurred by the huge demand for coal, had made it possible to sink mines deeper and deeper along the lucrative Barnsley seam. The Earl’s collieries, as one contemporary noted, were ‘within rifle shot of his ancestral seat’: by the close of the century, mines and pit villages crowded the hills and valleys around the house.

  In the early 1900s, Arthur Eaglestone, a miner from Rotherham, writing under the pseudonym of Roger Dataller, described a dawn journey through the Earl’s country:

  The train bored its way through the grim litter of steel manufactories, the serried heaping of coal and ironstone stocks, the multiplicity of railway metals, the drifting steam of locomotives … As we gobble up one hamlet after another, cottages and farmhouses loom up mere outlines, islands in the mist; but as the light becomes clearer certain chimneys and headstocks appear upon the horizon, a reminder of the vast subterranean activity with which we are connected. As one headstock falls in the distance, another rises to meet us – the inescapable, the endless chain of winding. We shall not escape the headstocks. We may vary the route as we please, but the gaunt pulley-wheels, and the by-product plant, a column of smoke by day, a pillar of fire by night, will still be in attendance.

  The Earl’s death at the age of eighty-six – after he caught a sudden chill – had stunned the district. His life had been spent overseeing his vast estates and enjoying his wealth. For a man of few other achievements, the local newspaper’s coverage of his demise was extraordinary:

  A feeling of awe crept over the people of this neighbourhood when it was whispered vaguely from behind the veil that he had entered the Valley of the Shadow, and was sleeping by the side of the shore of that silent sea which lies between the world and ‘that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns’. But great and mighty is all-conquering Death, it is beyond even his sublime strength to convert the waters of the tideless sea. He was a noble lord, and moreover, a man who had the respect of all who knew him and the affection of those who knew him best. He now sleeps the sleep that knows no waking. Death the Conqueror has laid his icy hands upon him.

  In 1902, tens of thousands of people across the South Yorkshire coalfield were wholly dependent on the Earl for a living. On the morning of his funeral, they were drawn to Wentworth House.

  ‘The workmen on the various estates were in strong force,’ the Sheffield Daily Telegraph reported,

  A remarkable feature of the proceedings was the great muster of miners. Genuine sorrow cannot be bought with gold or wrung from the hearts of an unwilling community. It must spring from love or admiration. Wentworth is by no means easy of access and curiosity nor a perfunctory sense of duty could never have brought together thousands of mourners under such dispiriting conditions. Through the slush and the searching rain the mourners came to the funeral. Old men who had worked for the Earl for 50 years risked serious illness for love of their noble master and trudged sorrowfully from station or neighbouring village to swell the mournful gathering.

  The size and grandeur of Wentworth House were but faintly suggested through the haze of mist and fog. It was built for the Earl’s ancestor Thomas Wentworth, later Marquess of Rockingham, in the 1720s. Designed by Henry Flitcroft, it had taken more than fifteen years to complete and its façade was the longest in Europe. The house had a room for every day of the year and five miles of passageways. One guest, a Baron von Liebig, resorted to crumbling wafers along the route from his bedroom to the dining room so that he could find his way back after dinner. Thereafter, guests were presented with a crested silver casket containing different-coloured confetti.

  The house lay in parkland encompassed by a nine-mile-long stone wall. Humphrey Repton, the famous eighteenth-century landscape designer, had sculpted the Park; twelve follies – towers, columns and a mausoleum built in the classical style – marked its highest points. Millions of tons of coal lay under the land but so rich was the Earl, he had no need to mine it. Yet even he could not inure Wentworth from the grime that trespassed inside the boundaries of the Park. Coal dust carried from the nearby collieries settled in the sheaves of corn grown in the fields. The streams running through them were orange: ‘ochre water’, as the locals called it, polluted by the mines that honeycombed the district.

  Shortly after one o’clock, a bugler sounded the Last Post. It was the signal for the 5,000-strong cortège to begin the mile-long walk to the village church. As if on cue, the fog lifted as the mourners moved off. A thousand miners from the Earl’s pits led the procession, flanked by an escort of fifty soldiers from the Yorkshire Dragoons.

  The family’s downfall was unthinkable. William, Earl Fitzwilliam, had left a great fortune. Four sons – each named William after him – survived him. The coal industry was booming: the family’s wealth and power seemed as solid and unshakeable as the foundations of their vast house.

  Yet the Fitzwilliams and the thousands who worked for them were about to become the central figures in an approaching catastrophe.

  What was unthinkable on that day in February 1902 happened.

  Introduction

  In 1902, Wentworth was the largest privately owned house in Britain. It still is today.

  Its size is truly extraordinary, almost impossible to visualize. Imagine Buckingham Palace: the glorious, sweeping East Front at Wentworth is almost twice as long. Marcus Binney, the architectural historian, sees it as ‘unquestionably the finest Georgian house in England’. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner wrote glowingly of its ‘interiors of quite exceptional interest’. But unlike the much cherished Chatsworth or Blenheim, few have heard its name and fewer still have actually seen it. It is England’s forgotten palace.

  Today, the house looms blank and shuttered. The home of a reclusive figure, it is closed to the public. ‘I’ve never seen him,’ remarked a former postmistress in the nearby village. ‘And no one I know ever has.’

  The baroque West Front of the house is hidden behind a screen of tall cedars, but the 600-foot-long Palladian East Front can be glimpsed from the Trans-Pennine Way, the public footpath that runs through Wentworth Park. The first impression is a familiar one: the pediments, pillars and domed pavilions the hallmarks – be they on a breathtaking scale – of a grand stately home. But look a little longer and something jars. Longer still and the image is unnerving – even chilling. It is like looking at a picture one knows intimately from which something is missing, though it is impossible to say what.

  The clues can be found in the fields that sweep away from the house. Time is not written on the land as it is on the adjacent façade; there are no hedgerows, ditches or centuries-old oaks. The fields are bare and desolate, as if denuded by some unseen hand. The traces of the past have been kicked over.

  An obsession with secrecy corrupts the twentieth-century history of the house. The Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments – the family and estate papers of the Earls Fitzwilliam and their ancestors, the Marquesses of Rockingham and the Earls of Strafford – form one of the most important historical archives in Britain today. Rich in correspondence, there are thousands of letters and papers dating back to medieval times. But in 1900 the transparency of centuries comes to a halt: few family papers exist in this impressive historical collection after this date.

  Their absence is no accident. In July 1972 the 10th and last Earl Fitzwilliam ordered his employees to destroy the bulk of Wentworth’s twentieth-century records. Sixteen tons of documents were hauled by tractor from where they were stored in the Georgian Stable Block to Trawles Wood, a beech copse in the valley below
Wentworth that was used in the eighteenth century as a dumping ground for the household’s refuse and rubbish. There, the documents were burnt in a bonfire that blazed, night and day, for three weeks. Other smaller fires had preceded it: in a deliberate attempt to hide from history, the private papers of the 7th, 8th and 9th Earls – the tenants of Wentworth in the first half of the twentieth century – were destroyed after their deaths. The cull even extended to the personal papers of their employees. Peter Diggle, the son of Colonel Heathcote Diggle, a Fitzwilliam family trustee and the manager of their estates, watched his father burn documents that chronicled three decades of working as an adviser to the 7th Earl: ‘The Fitzwilliams had a secret life and if you have a secret life then there are things that must be destroyed.’

  The twentieth-century Fitzwilliams were obsessive in guarding their secrets, both in the systematic destruction of the family papers and in vows of silence. ‘My grandmother made me promise that I would not tell anybody about these private things that went on at Wentworth,’ Ann, Lady Bowlby, the granddaughter of Maud, Countess Fitzwilliam, who lived at Wentworth from 1902 until 1948, recalled. ‘She didn’t want it all broadcast. It was to do with the Communistic trait of the world then.’ ‘That generation of the family were very proud, very private and very destructive. It was in their blood,’ Ian Bond, another of the Fitzwilliam descendants, remembered. ‘They wanted to destroy things as they themselves had been destroyed. They lived through the downfall of the family. They had experienced a huge sea change. They saw so many sadnesses. They did not want to remember. The world had passed them by.’

  The world has also passed Wentworth House by. Although it is the largest and one of the most beautiful of England’s stately homes, the story of what happened there during the twentieth century is a deep mystery because of the loss of the Fitzwilliam family’s archives. Fragments remain: a few scattered but precious collections of family papers have survived. These – and the memories of those who lived and worked at the house and in the pit villages around it – were the beginnings of this book.