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

  was concerned with the creation of wealth: the twentieth century will be concerned with its distribution. There is none of us, whatever may be his political views, who does not feel that this is a problem which needs adjusting. We cannot but be appalled by the contrast of increasing prosperity and great wealth and of great poverty, of increasing luxury and of great squalor … When I think of that great multitude of our working folk among whom I have laboured, whom I have learnt to revere, I cannot but see the picture of the monotony of toil which they are called upon to bear, of the uncertainty of employment which haunts them day by day, of the overcrowded houses in which we ask and expect them to rear British homes, of the mean streets from which every sign not only of the beauty of God’s earth but of the comforts and conveniences that are common to ours are shut out … Our best self in the contemplation of this inequality says that these things ought not to be.

  In the weeks immediately following the coal strike, George V’s courtiers and advisers worked on the concept that Lang had outlined in his memo. The intention was to show the King’s subjects that he sympathized with the plight of the working man, with particular emphasis on the miner. Wentworth was the obvious base for the duration of the royal tour. The Fitzwilliam family had a track record, stretching back over a century, that showed their concern for the welfare of their employees; the house, situated close to Sheffield and in the heart of the South Yorkshire coalfield, was located in a major industrial area – and it was maintained in a style that was appropriate for the King and Queen. No other coal-owning family could match these criteria.

  The tour was orchestrated with the precision of a military campaign. Five-minute stops were scheduled for maximum effect: at one, at Clifton Park outside Rotherham, the King was to meet a fourteen-year-old boy who had had both his legs amputated after a bout of scarlet fever. A pair of artificial limbs, to enable the boy to walk again, was sent ahead seven weeks in advance of the visit with a personal note from the King attached.

  Billy Fitzwilliam’s brief as host of the royal tour was to show the King ‘three million of his working people’. On the afternoon of 8 July, the royal train pulled in at Doncaster station. On the fifteen-mile journey to Wentworth, along streets festooned with bunting and the cross of St George, tens of thousands from the pit villages en route turned out to greet the royal party. At Conisbrough Castle, where the King and Queen stopped for tea with the Earl and Countess of Yarborough, 7,000 miners lined the castle’s keep. Cosmo Gordon Lang was travelling in the King’s car. As the open Daimler approached Wentworth, it was held up outside Rotherham by a crowd of thousands more. In his diary, the Archbishop records overhearing the following conversation:

  ‘Na then, which is t’King?’

  ‘It’s little chap i’ the front wi’ a billycock hat.’

  ‘Nay, he ain’t seech a fine man as Teddy [King Edward VII].’

  ‘Well, anyway, he’s gotten him a fine oopstanding wife.’

  At first, as Lang noted, the King and Queen ‘seemed to be somewhat disconcerted by such free remarks’, but as he described, the warmth of the welcome was overwhelming. On their arrival at Wentworth, 40,000 spectators were gathered in the Park. To the cheers of the huge crowd, the King and Queen descended from the royal car. Crossing the drive, they mounted the steps leading to the balcony beneath the portico from where they were to watch the assembled soldiers parade. As they did so, a lady-in-waiting bent down discreetly to remove a piece of pit shale from the pink drive that had caught in the Queen’s long skirt.

  13

  Some hours later at Wentworth, a servant rang the gong for dinner in the Pillared Hall. A single metal disc, the size of a manhole cover, it was mounted on a wooden frame. He rang it once, using a long drumstick with a large felt-cushioned tip. The noise was ear-splitting, ricocheting off the stone pillars to the Marble Salon above. A sixty-foot cube, the room was a perfect echo chamber: the marble walls and floors transmitted the sound to the farthest reaches of the house.

  Below stairs, the servants had finished their dinner. The custom at Wentworth was for the staff to eat early. ‘An army fights on its stomach as they say,’ recalled Elfrida, Countess of Wharncliffe, Billy’s daughter. ‘They were much happier, they liked it much better than in some other houses where they had to wait until the dining-room dinner was over and they didn’t get their supper until 11 o’clock which I thought was disgraceful.’ Dinner in the Steward’s Room had been as formal an affair as the one that was about to take place upstairs. ‘There were six separate dining halls for the servants, depending on your place in the hierarchy,’ recalled Peter Diggle, the son of Colonel Heathcote Diggle, the manager of Billy Fitzwilliam’s estates. ‘The Steward’s Room was the top dining room, reserved for the Upper Ten. It was terribly smart. They sat on Chippendale chairs.’ The Upper Ten were the most senior servants in the hierarchy. They included the groom of the chambers, the housekeeper, the house steward, the butler, the under-butler, the head housemaid, the Fitzwilliams’ valets and ladies’ maids and those of their visiting guests. They dined in style: a footman served them at a table laid with fine china and glass; the men wore smoking jackets or evening dress, the women, long silk gowns. Precedence was strictly observed.

  The Marchioness of Bath, in her memoir Before the Sunset Fades, a nostalgic record of country-house life before the Great War, explained the intricacies of the rules of precedence below stairs:

  A visiting servant ranked on the same scale as his master or mistress, and his place at the table was arranged accordingly. If, for example, a Duke came to stay, his valet would have the honour of arming-in the housekeeper and would be seated at her right; in the same way, the maid of a visiting royalty would go in to dinner on the arm of the hierarchical head, the house steward.

  The servants of a commoner, however eminent, processed into – and left – the room last. It was a frequent cause of resignation, as Lady Augusta Fane described in her memoirs. ‘One lady’s maid,’ she noted, ‘told her untitled employer that she wanted to leave her service because “it hurts my feelings always to have to walk last from the Hall. I want to take a situation with a titled lady or at least an Honourable.”’ But as the memoirs of other aristocrats record, the servants’ social vanity was equally matched by their employers’. ‘I always remember the Duchess of Buccleuch and the Duchess of Northumberland sidling through the door together in their determination not to give precedence to the other,’ recalled the Duke of Bedford. Consuelo Balsan, the American heiress married to the Duke of Marlborough and regarded as an arriviste by her aristocratic contemporaries, wrote of her own humiliation when, in deference to her elders, she failed to observe the strict codes of precedence. As a Duchess, the rules dictated that she should proceed first: ‘After waiting at the door of the dining room for older women to pass through,’ Consuelo wrote, ‘I one day received a furious push from an irate Marchioness who loudly claimed that it was just as vulgar to hang back as to leave before one’s turn.’

  At Wentworth, on the night of 8 July, after the gong had sounded, the house party gathered in the Ante Room to the south of the Marble Salon.

  In the presence of royalty, social etiquette reached its apotheosis. The King and Queen did not enter the room until the other house guests had assembled; only they could originate conversation; no one was allowed to sit down if the King and Queen were standing up. The party formed up to process across the Marble Salon to the State Dining Room. Billy Fitzwilliam led off with the Queen. They were followed by the King and Maud Fitzwilliam. The other guests processed in pairs behind them according to their position in the tables of precedence.

  Besides the King and Queen, the house party numbered thirty-four. It was made up of courtiers, Yorkshire grandees and friends and relations of the Fitzwilliams. The guest list for the royal visit included:

  Lord Stamfordham – Private Secretary to the King

  The Hon. Henry Legge – Equerry to the King

  Clive Wigram – Assistant Private S
ecretary to the King

  Sir Charles and Lady Fitzwilliam – Equerry to the King and his wife

  The Archbishop of York, Cosmo Gordon Lang

  Lady Eva Dugdale – the Queen’s lady-in-waiting

  The Marquess and Marchioness of Zetland – Billy’s parents-in-law

  Major and Lady Theresa Fletcher – Billy’s sister and her husband

  The Hon. Henry and Lady Mary Fitzwilliam – Billy’s uncle and his wife

  Sir Francis and Lady Bridgeman, Mr Frank Brooke and Miss Magdelene Talbot – Billy’s cousins

  The Earl of Scarbrough

  The Earl and Countess of Harewood

  The Earl and Countess of Rosse

  Viscount and Viscountess Helmsley

  The Hon. Edward Wood – the heir to Viscount Halifax

  Mr George Lane-Fox, MP for Barkston-Ash, and his wife, Lady Agnes, daughter of Viscount Halifax

  Walter Long, MP for the Strand division of Middlesex, and his wife, Lady Dorothy, daughter of the Earl of Cork

  Miss Dawnay, the daughter of Viscount Downe

  Henry Lygon, the nephew of the Earl of Beauchamp

  Lord Charles Beresford, MP for Portsmouth and his wife, Lady Mina

  Theresa, Marchioness of Londonderry

  The list of guests reflects the small, exclusive world of the grand Edwardian house party where the degrees of separation could be calculated in fractions. The guests were tied by land, politics and marriage. If they did not know one another personally, they certainly knew of one another. But it is the vein of scandal that links them that is the most intriguing. The house party at Wentworth typifies the double standards of Edwardian life. The formality, the strict adherence to social codes, was a mask: behind it lay a tangled cluster of forbidden love – illegitimate children, illicit affairs and homosexuality.

  Theresa, Lady Londonderry’s, love affairs, for instance, linked her to two of the other guests. One of them was her sister’s son: her nephew, Lord Helmsley. For several years, during the 1880s, she had had an affair with his father, who had been the best man at her own wedding. Her second son, Reginald, was thought to have been the product of this liaison. She was also rumoured to have had a brief affair with Edward VII, George V’s father, who, when he was Prince of Wales, apparently seduced her at a shooting party. ‘She was in love with Love,’ wrote Theresa’s confidante, Elizabeth, Countess of Fingall; ‘she was deeply interested in the love affairs of her friends and very disappointed if they did not take advantage of the opportunities she put in their way. She used to say to herself: “I am a Pirate. All is fair in Love and War”.’ Lady Theresa’s colourful emotional life was the rule rather than the exception in the fin-de-siècle years that extended to the beginning of the Great War. Aristocratic marriages were more or less arranged: it was understandable – and understood – that the socio-economic motives that lay behind them would lead the parties to search for love elsewhere.

  But of all the guests staying at Wentworth, Lord Charles and Lady Mina Beresford were perhaps the most notorious. They had come within a whisker of breaking the most rigid of the social conventions. ‘What a man or woman might feel or do in private was their own affair, but our rule was No Scandal!’ wrote the Countess of Warwick. ‘Whenever there was a threat of impending trouble, pressure would be brought to bear, sometimes from the highest quarters, and almost always successfully. We realized that publicity would cause chattering tongues, and as we had no intention of changing our mode of living, we saw to it that five out of every six scandals never reached the outside world.’

  Frances Warwick, married to the Earl of Warwick and one of the great beauties of her time, was Banquo at the table of the Wentworth house party. Twenty years earlier, along with Charles and Mina Beresford, she had been at the centre of a scandal in which Edward VII – at the time Prince of Wales – had also become embroiled. Charles Beresford and the Prince had been great friends until, in 1890, they had a spectacular and – within their circles – very public falling-out over the Prince’s affair with Frances Warwick, Charles Beresford’s mistress. Society was gripped by the quarrel: ‘Wild rumours passed,’ wrote Sir Shane Leslie, ‘that they had met in the boudoir of a lady that they both admired and that Charlie had knocked his rival down. The truth was that he had pushed the Prince, who dropped into a sofa murmuring, “Really, Lord Charles, you forget yourself.”’ Beresford was angry with the Prince, not because he had taken up with his mistress, but because his wife, Mina, had been doubly humiliated. After discovering her husband’s affair she had shown the Prince a letter that Frances Warwick had written to Beresford in an attempt to win him back. The letter was passionate and sexually explicit, described by the Prince as ‘the most shocking letter [he] had ever read’. Yet such were its charms that, rather than banishing Lady Frances from court, as Mina Beresford had hoped, the Prince promptly claimed her as his mistress. It was Mina who was banished from court instead!

  Eighteen months of the Prince’s boycott, coupled with the favours he bestowed upon Lady Frances, proved too much for the Beresfords. In June 1891, Charles wrote to the Prince threatening to make the scandal public and to expose the contents of Lady Frances’s ‘shocking letter’. ‘Matters have now reached a state,’ Beresford warned the Prince,

  that compels me to reflect whether I am to go on shielding a former friend … and see my wife deliberately insulted in vengeance for my turpitude. The days of duelling are past but there is a more just way of getting right done … The first opportunity that occurs I shall give my opinion publicly of Your Royal Highness, and state that you have behaved … like a blackguard and a coward, and that I am prepared to prove my words.

  Pressure was – to use Lady Warwick’s words – ‘brought to bear from the highest quarters’. The Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, fearful of a genuinely public scandal – one that would escape the confines of Society and prove damaging to the Crown – was forced to intervene: ‘Ill-considered publicity,’ he admonished Lord Charles in a letter, ‘would be of no possible service to Lady Charles … it would do you most serious harm … I strongly advise you to … do nothing.’ The Prime Minister persuaded the Prince of Wales to issue an apology to the Beresfords on condition that Lady Frances’s letter was destroyed. Five years later, the young George’s distaste at the whole affair is apparent in a letter he sent to his wife: ‘My levee went off very well … there were a great many naval officers. Lord Charles Beresford was presented. I did not shake hands with him. It was rather unpleasant for me, but luckily he did not come very close.’

  ‘All is fair in Love and War,’ as Lady Theresa quoted. By the summer of 1912, the froideur between the King and the Beresfords had abated. Prior to his visit, George V had been sent a list of the people Billy Fitzwilliam planned to invite: the Beresfords were clearly acceptable.

  The list of those who stayed at Wentworth during the royal visit is comprehensive, drawn from the handwritten one that Billy gave to his groom of chambers. We know which bedrooms the guests slept in; we know what they ate during their four-day stay. The descendants of the servants, through memories passed down by their parents and grandparents, have painted the scene. Yet that is almost all that is known about what happened inside the house, away from the public stage, during the the royal visit. Not only have the Archives at Windsor Castle and at Wentworth been destroyed, but so, it seems, have the private papers belonging to Billy Fitzwilliam’s guests.

  With the exception of those of the Archbishop of York and one other member of the house party, no records appear to survive to offer a personal account of the royal visit. There are no diaries, no letters, no mementos. There are, of course, many reasons why this should be the case. Some are particular: in 1919, a fire gutted Duncombe Park, the home of the Helmsleys, destroying most of the family’s papers; Captain Frank Brooke was murdered by the IRA in 1920 and his house in Ireland burnt to the ground; at least six of the guests died childless – there were no heirs for them to pass their papers on to – and in the cas
e of some members of the house party, the turbulent events of the twentieth century diminished their families: in the downsizing from house to house, the bulk of the past was thrown away.

  But there are families descended from the guests at Wentworth who emerged from the twentieth century comparatively unscathed – in the sense that their historic homes remain in their possession, or have been handed over to the nation relatively intact. The Zetlands, Scarbroughs, Rosses, Harewoods and Londonderrys are among those who fall into this category. Yet none of their historic collections contain references to the Royal Tour of the North.

  The coincidence of the void is extraordinary. One reason alone might explain it, evident in a letter written by a descendant of Sir Henry Legge, equerry to George V, who accompanied the King on his visit to Wentworth in 1912. ‘Unfortunately,’ he explained, ‘we have virtually no letters, diaries or other written archive of Sir Harry, who would have regarded it as totally unethical to “tell tales” of his work over 3 reigns.’

  The coincidence is otherwise inexplicable.

  In light of the events that unravelled in the course of the King’s stay at Wentworth, it is remarkable that so little appears to have been preserved.

  14

  Albert Wildman stood in a queue of men waiting to go down the pit. The cage came suddenly, swinging up from nowhere, juddering to a halt with a clash of metal. Blackened faces hurried past – miners coming off the afternoon shift eager to get home. It was the start of the night shift at Cadeby Main colliery, a mile from Denaby. The time was ten o’clock on 8 July 1912.

  The queue shuffled forward into the cage: ‘Fourteen … fifteen … sixteen!’ shouted the banksman, thrusting his arm across a man’s chest. Sixteen men made a load or a ‘draw’. Wildman could see the dusk settling outside: the flywheel silhouetted against the darkening sky, a mist rising from the ribbon of road stretching towards the village. He was feeling out of sorts. Some 500 miners normally worked this night shift, but that evening only a hundred or so had shown up. The absentees had gone to the party at Conisbrough, a few miles from Denaby, to welcome the King and Queen. Albert would have liked to have gone too, but he had young children to feed: like most of the men working that night, he could not afford to miss a shift. A bell rang sharply. In an instant, road and mist were clipped away. As the cage gathered speed in its descent to the pit bottom half a mile below jets of air whistled through the floor, billowing coats and trousers and rustling hair. The men’s lamps illuminated the slimy walls slipping past, streaking upwards, the sky above becoming a pinhead, then a speck. The floor began to bounce; the cage was slowing down: far above, the steel rope had tightened on the drum. The doors rattled open to a whitewashed cavernous chamber where scores of deputies, trammers, faceworkers and pony boys crowded, waiting to start the shift.