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

  News of the first explosion had reached the King at breakfast. Immediately, his Private Secretary wired a telegram to the colliery:

  The King and Queen are shocked to hear of the terrible accident at your colliery, and perhaps the fact that Their Majesties were near to the scene in the midst of so much rejoicing, when they visited Conisbrough yesterday, brings home to them still more the sorrow and sadness which now prevail amongst you. I am desired to express Their Majesties’ sympathy with the families of those who have perished, and with the sufferers in this grievous calamity.

  There was no question of cancelling the morning’s programme: after breakfast, it was decided that the royal show must go on. The King had left Wentworth at ten o’clock. In the space of three hours he saw nine pit villages – all in the vicinity of Cadeby. Throughout the morning, the royal party was kept informed of developments. Though overshadowed by the tragedy unfolding close by, the first morning of the tour was judged to be a great success. On the scheduled stops – at Clifton Park outside Rotherham and at Silverwood colliery – crowds of upwards of 50,000 turned out to greet the King and Queen. Similar numbers lined the roads along which they progressed. Everywhere they went, the brass bands from the collieries played the national anthem, the crowds spontaneously joining in. At Silverwood colliery, the royal party stopped for an hour to inspect the surface workings. They watched two windings of coal coming up from the pit, and saw it weighed and ‘checked’ before it passed on to the tippers. The colliery had arranged an eccentric form of transport for the Queen. ‘For a greater part of the distance,’ the local newspaper reported,

  a railway platelayer’s trolley was provided for Her Majesty, who, seated in a revolving chair, and with Lady Eva Dugdale and Lady Aberconway standing on either side, appeared to enjoy greatly the novel mode of locomotion. Excepting that a piece of cocoa-nut matting served as a carpet, the trolley was in proper working ‘condition’ and it was propelled along the lines by half-a-dozen men.

  The highlight of the morning, as the Yorkshire Post floridly reported, was an unscheduled stop at a cottage in Woodlands, the model village that had been built for the workforce at Brodsworth Main colliery.

  It was William Brown’s, bearing the prosaic number 33, and the aristocratic address of The Park. Yet it was only a miner’s cottage, with a trim little garden in front of roses and more common-place flowers carefully cultivated by the tenant. In the little garden there stood the collier’s wife, Mrs Brown, and Mrs Aston, the next door neighbour, both with babies in arms, wistfully watching the Royal procession and the great people who made it up. Suddenly the Royal car stopped outside the garden gate and out stepped the King and Queen smiling. Both advanced towards the cottage door. The poor women, embarrassed, seemingly almost frightened, turned on their heels and rushed to the threshold of the house. Greatly amused their Majesties followed, piloted by Mr Greensmith, the local colliery manager, and in a second the party had disappeared into the house. News of the visit, which was obviously unexpected, quickly spread, and in less than a minute the cottage of the Browns was in a state of violent siege. In the middle of the crushing and squeezing could be seen the Archbishop of York, laughingly enjoying his own novel position as much as he appeared to do the unusualness of a Royal visit to a humble cottage, while members of noble houses who had accompanied the party looked on with great good humour. The crowd surged over the rose trees and flower beds of the trim garden in their anxiety to get a closer view of the Royal visitors, and Mr Brown’s little plot was soon a wreck. For five full minutes the colliers and their wives clamoured round the house, cheering madly, and when the King and Queen emerged the crowd would hardly let them pass to their motor car, so demonstrative were these Woodlands villagers. The Royal pair were obviously touched and obviously pleased. The King’s face was wreathed in smiles, and his Consort showed equal pleasure in her experiences, as she made her way back along the garden footpath to the car. A minute later the Royal party left for lunch at Hickleton Hall.

  The lunch for the twenty members of the King’s suite at Hickleton Hall, Lord Halifax’s house, had been well planned. On 29 June, Lord Stamfordham, the King’s Private Secretary, had written to Lord Halifax:

  I fear I must ask you to consider the luncheon which you kindly give to Their Majesties on the 9th as a hurried meal to satisfy in the shortest time the cravings of more or less empty stomachs!! The tendency is to undertake too much in these ‘tours’ and it is most difficult to keep up to time and consequently the luncheon is a hurry … Their Majesties will be glad to meet anyone you wish to invite but if we are pressed for time it would be difficult for Their Majesties to talk to them but of course you would present them. No tall hats and black coats. We shall all be in ordinary county clothes!

  Lord Halifax evidently satisfied the ‘cravings of more or less empty stomachs’: the printed menu for the lunch for his forty guests was as follows:

  Chaud

  Consommé à l’Impéeriale

  Filet de Soles Frites

  Côtelettes d’Agneau à la Macédoine

  Poulardes en Casserole

  Léggumes

  Pouding à la farola

  Fraises à la Cowlper

  Gelées Variées

  Macédoine aux Fruits

  Pâtissiers

  Froid

  Salade d’Homards

  Poulets à la Langue de Boeuf

  Jambon de York Sauce Cumberland

  Galantines aux Truffes

  Pressé de Boeuf en Aspic

  Lunch, intended as a pleasant interlude in a gruelling schedule, became a crisis meeting. When the royal party arrived at Hickleton Hall, some three miles from Cadeby colliery, the latest news of the disaster awaited them. The death toll had leapt from an estimated thirty-five after the first explosion, to over eighty following the second. It was the worst colliery disaster in South Yorkshire since 1893 when 139 miners had been killed at Combs Pit in Thornhill. The tragedy at Cadeby dominated the conversation over lunch. In his diary, the Archbishop of York reveals that a number of the King’s officials were uncertain whether, in view of what had happened, it would be wise for the King to keep to his plan to descend Billy Fitzwilliam’s mine at Elsecar later that afternoon. The previous week, a miner had been killed at the pit by a fall of stone; that incident – and the dangers evident in the explosions at Cadeby – prompted the officials to urge the King to reconsider his schedule. But, as the Archbishop records, George V was adamant that the descent at Elsecar should go ahead as planned. ‘Whatever happens,’ he told them, ‘I have got to show I want to do all I can at this time to see for myself, as far as I can, the risks to which my miners are exposed.’

  By mid-afternoon, at Cadeby, 80,000 people were gathered on the hillside overlooking the pit. As word of the tragedy had spread, they had come from the nearby villages. A local reporter described the scene:

  … the ill-fated colliery stood out from the hillside of Cadeby black and stern and sinister and foreboding. The flags that had floated from the headgears the previous day to welcome a King and his Consort were gone and no touch of colour relieved the gaunt tombstone. All that long black terrible day the bodies took their solemn journey down that awful gantry. Men who went to their work hearty and strong at night came back stiff and cold at noon; men who gallantly rushed to the rescue were gently shunted, twisted and lifeless on the slabs at night-fall. The crowd that had flocked into the place in the heat of the afternoon grew and swelled … Motor cars and ambulance wagons streamed in continual procession up the hill to the hospital. Now the burden was a rescuer who had been ‘gassed’ lying back in the arms of a half-naked miner, with a nurse plying a paper fan with tremendous energy for the revival of the lungs; now it was a man desperately wounded, who writhed under the brown covering of the stretcher, and uttered moans or screams. An old, wrinkled woman with red-rimmed staring eyes shambled up and down the grass-bordered pathway, praying at the top of her voice. An ambulance wagon galloped up the hill, and
as it pulled up the man inside began to shriek. The old woman thought she recognized the voice of her son. ‘Oh God help him,’ she cried and she ran forward. The man moaned again, his arms had been unstrapped and he beat the air with them. The old woman peered into his face. It was the face of a stranger. ‘Thank God,’ she said and tottered back against the wall. ‘The Lord he knows everything. The Lord he knows everything.’ One woman who had volunteered to help with the ambulance work came face to face with the dead body of her own husband. Another woman whose husband was killed in the disaster had no less than fourteen children, the youngest an infant in arms.

  There were still tens of thousands of people on the hillside and along the roads leading into the village when the King’s Daimler, driven at walking pace and with no accompanying motorcade, approached the colliery. The car edged its way through the crowds lining the road, the men and women standing in stunned silence in rows four deep. As the King and Queen drove past, the men removed their hats and bowed their heads, the women dropping to the ground in deep curtseys. The King’s visit to Denaby had not been scheduled. In his diary for that day, George V wrote:

  At 6.45 May and I with Fitzwilliam and Legge motored off to Conisbrough about 10 miles to the Offices of the Cadeby colliery, as there was a terrible accident this morning, two explosions in which I fear 78 men lost their lives, including Mr Pickering (Govt. Inspector), splendid man. We went to inquire and to express our sympathy with those that have lost their dear ones. There was a large crowd of miners outside the Offices and they appreciated our coming to inquire.

  At the entrance to the pit, the royal party was met by a group of officials and twenty miners who had been recovering bodies all afternoon. They wore their working clothes, their faces still black with coal dust. The local paper marvelled at the fact that the King and Queen shook their ‘grimy hands’. In the pit office they were shown plans of the mine and told of the force of the explosions. They had been caused by ‘gobfires’ – the spontaneous combustion of the layers of dust and muck that lay between the seams of coal. Both explosions had occurred after gobfires had ignited pockets of methane gas that had built up in that section of the pit. Billy Fitzwilliam, who, in his early twenties, had worked underground at his own pits before qualifying as a mining engineer and for whom safety was paramount, had anticipated the explosions. Though he owned a stretch of land under which the coal at Cadeby was mined, he had been unable to convince the colliery manager to install better safety measures: ‘They hadn’t got enough ventilation,’ his daughter Elfrida recalled. ‘My father had warned them: “You must have more ventilation, you haven’t got enough. You’ve got too much dust. Too much coal dust. That is the biggest danger of the lot.” He always said, “Watch Cadeby. There will be a terrible blow-up one day.” And he was right.’

  Both the King and the Queen were visibly shocked by what the miners and pit officials told them. When the Queen emerged from the pit office she was in tears. Later that evening, Lady Mary Fitzwilliam, one of the guests at Wentworth, wrote in her diary, ‘Today the deep shadow was cast over us all of the awful mine explosions at Cadeby mine near Conisbrough: so many killed. After their heavy day’s work was over the King and Queen started again for Cadeby to see the poor people and to show their deep sympathy. It has really saddened us all – one could see how the Queen had cried.’ The miners and their families were touched by the King and Queen’s visit. The local paper described the scene as the royal car drove away from Denaby.

  Their obvious sympathy with the sufferers had a remarkable effect upon the spectators, many of whom, as the Royal party left the village, involuntarily burst into cheers which, although somewhat misplaced, denoted their warm appreciation of the kindliness which had prompted the King and Queen to visit the stricken village. Their visit touched the hearts of the villagers and women sobbed aloud as they drove away.

  Lord Halifax at nearby Hickleton Hall was more cynical. Mindful of the impact of the disaster in terms of the King and Queen’s public relations, he wrote in a letter to a friend,

  Their visit to the pit after the explosion has done a quite untold good. They, the miners and all the people, were much impressed by the King going down the pit in the afternoon after the accident in the morning. And I am told the women were so moved when the King and Queen came to the scene of the accident in the evening and spoke themselves to the miners that they were ready to go down on their knees and kiss the Queen’s feet.

  For two days – night and day – the women of Denaby kept vigil at the pit. They refused to leave until the bodies had left the Pay Station, the makeshift morgue. Fifty still remained, waiting to be identified – and waiting for coffins. The undertakers in the district had run out: their stock had been filled by the first batch of dead. On the Wednesday, the day after the explosions, the Coroner visited the Pay Station:

  A horrible sight met my gaze. There outstretched on the tables were the bodies of the victims, each tenderly covered with a white cloth. The first I saw was the body of a fine muscular man. His face was bronzed, and he seemed to be asleep. The next was a body, the face of which was almost beyond recognition. The poor fellow must have met an awful death. There were several others in a similar state, whilst one man, I shall never forget him, had no legs at all. His clogs were lying underneath the table. And so I proceeded viewing the mangled frames of men – men who had died doing their duty.

  The disaster had created sixty-one widows, and left 132 children fatherless. There were no death benefits at Cadeby Main colliery: the management made no provision for a miner’s family in the event of his accidental death underground. The widows’ housing was tied to the colliery: the loss of their husbands meant the loss of the roof over their heads. For the majority, the future now depended on private donations and parish relief. In the coming months, people gave generously, not only from the district, but from all over the country. But still the bereaved families were left to subsist on a pittance – 5 shillings for each widow, and 1 shilling for every child under fourteen.*

  The night before Denaby buried her dead, Billy Fitzwilliam held a party in the Park at Wentworth. It had been planned as a celebration to mark the end of the King and Queen’s visit. With the morning’s burials pending, it became a wake.

  It was a beautiful summer’s night. The sweet smell from the mounds of grass that had been cut, ready for haymaking, drifted across the Park from the surrounding fields. Twenty-five thousand people were gathered in front of the house, stretching as far as the eye could see. They had come from all over the district. On the high balcony, beneath the portico, the King and Queen sat facing the crowd in the middle of the row of house guests. To their right, on a raised crescent-shaped platform, the Sheffield Symphony Orchestra, hired by Billy specially for the occasion, and 300 choristers, dressed in white, waited for the light to fall. When the sun had almost set, the choir began to sing. Their voices were drowned by the crowd joining in:

  When Britain first, at heaven’s command,

  Arose from out the azure main,

  This was the charter of the land,

  And guardian angels sang this strain:

  Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves.

  Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.

  ‘It Comes from the Misty Ages’, the chorus from Elgar’s Banner of St George, followed.

  Dusk had fallen. The recital ended with Handel’s Messiah. As the choir sang the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus, 600 miners, bearing flaming torches and walking four abreast, appeared beneath the North and South Towers that marked each end of the house. The miners worked at Billy Fitzwilliam’s pits. Parading in, with great precision, swinging round in front of the King and Queen, they executed two figures of the Lancers, including the grand chain. The crowd pressed forward into the light cast by their torches. When the music stopped, George V stood up, gesturing to them to come closer. ‘My friends,’ he shouted, ‘the Queen and I are very glad to meet so many miners from this district here tonight, and I wi
sh to tell you how delighted we have been with the beautiful torchlight procession and the excellent singing of the choir. It has been a great pleasure to us to visit your homes and see you at your daily work. We are deeply touched by the enthusiastic reception given to us wherever we have been during the past four days – a reception which we shall never forget and which has made us feel that we are amongst true friends.’ The crowd cheered. ‘One shadow,’ the King continued, ‘and a very dark one has, alas, been cast over the joy and brightness of our visit to the West Riding by the terrible disaster at Cadeby, in which so many brave men lost their lives; I am sure that you know that the Queen and I feel deeply for those who mourn for their dear ones. Again we thank you most sincerely for your hearty welcome, and we wish you goodnight and good luck.’

  For the moment the neighbourhood was united in grief. The anger and retribution would come two months later when the Government launched an official investigation into the disaster.

  The explosions at Cadeby Main could have been avoided. The inquiry found that the union officials were right to accuse the pit management of having sacrificed the lives of the victims on the ‘altar of output’. South District, where the explosions had occurred, was – so the investigation revealed – particularly prone to gobfires. A fire had broken out two nights before the disaster. The Inspector of Mines concluded that the pit manager, Mr Chambers, should have withdrawn the miners from that district until the gobfire had been made safe. His failure to do so, after it was first reported, meant that the miners working the night shift on 8 July had been placed in ‘grave and unnecessary danger’.

  There was no question of the pit manager being prosecuted. Health and safety legislation in the days before the Great War was minimal: broadly, safety issues were left to the discretion of the manager of the individual pit. At the inquiry into the disaster, with the final death toll standing at ninety-three, Mr Chambers gave a series of monosyllabic replies in answer to the investigator’s questions. He showed no remorse: