Black Diamonds (27 page)

Pressing the Earl, Smillie said, ‘You do agree that land is essential to the life of the people, but you will not accept the proposal that if the land is in the hands of a limited number of people, practically they hold the lives of the people at their disposal?’

‘The lives of the people who live on my land are as happy as those on any other land, and it makes no difference whether I own it or not,’ the Earl replied sharply.

Flicking through a sheaf of notes on the desk in front of him, Smillie continued, ‘I will quote a constitutional lawyer, Blackstone, who says, “It is a received and undeniable principle of law that all lands in England are held immediately of the King.” Do you deny Blackstone’s authority? If he is correct, you cannot hold the land you claim to own?’

‘That is your opinion. My family has owned land for a great many years and no one has disputed it.’

‘We dispute it now!’ retorted Smillie. There was loud laughter from the spectators.

Rising to his audience, he went on, ‘I will quote another. There is a very old Book which says, “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof.” I am not exactly sure of the author but it appears in the Bible, upon which you have promised to tell the truth and the whole truth this morning. Would you deny that authority? The reference is Psalm Twenty-four, verse one.’

‘I prefer another authority,’ replied Durham. ‘“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” Matthew, chapter twenty-two, verse twenty-one.’

‘That is exactly what I want to be done at the present time,’ said Smillie, ‘because if “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof”, it cannot be the property of individuals!’

‘Is this an ecclesiastical examination?’ asked the Earl.

It was not. Lord Durham and the Duke of Northumberland were appearing, under subpoena, before a Royal Commission set up by the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, to conduct a forensic inquiry into the state of Britain’s coal industry. Its remit was to examine every aspect of it: wages, the length of the working day, the miners’ housing and social conditions, but most crucially its future. Should the industry be nationalized or not?

The Prime Minister had been forced to set up the Commission in order to avert a national coal strike. The panel of twelve Commissioners, presided over by the Chairman William Sankey, was made up of representatives from all sides of the industry: capital (the coal owners) and labour (the miners’ trades union representatives) were in equal balance. For the first time the miners, through their union leaders, had the opportunity to challenge the coal owners on a very public stage. Private ownership of coal was in the dock: capitalism, with particular emphasis on the English aristocracy, was on open trial.

Of the 116 witnesses called to appear before the Commission, among them coal owners, Government officials, trades union leaders and the miners themselves, it was the mineral royalty owners, the men whom Billy Fitzwilliam had formed his Association to defend, who drew the most fire.

Following the evidence of the Earl of Durham and the Duke of Northumberland, six other peers were compelled to testify against their will: the Marquesses of Bute and Londonderry, the Duke of Hamilton, and Lords Dynevor, Dunraven and Tredegar. Between them, during the Great War, they had earned over £2 million pounds (£61 million at today’s values) in royalty payments.

Mineral royalties were the dividends paid per ton of coal by the colliery operators to the owner of the land under which the coal was mined. To the shock and incredulity of the British public, the Commission revealed that, whereas the miners were paid less than a shilling per ton of coal, the mineral royalty owners received more than a shilling for every ton they mined.

The country was gripped by the inquiry: in exposing the issue of mineral royalties, one of the most inflammatory in the industry, the Royal Commission ceased to be purely about coal; in effect, it became an investigation into the injustices of the British class system.

The mineral royalty owners, as Billy Fitzwilliam’s Association reflected, were invariably upper-class. In the years between the Reformation and the turn of the twentieth century, the pattern of land ownership in Britain had barely changed. In the late 1870s,
7,000
individuals, the majority of them aristocrats or members of the landed gentry, owned almost four-fifths of the British Isles. Twenty-nine peers owned a staggering 4,600,000 acres. In 1919, this group, together with the King and the Church Commissioners, were the biggest owners of coal. Less than 5 per cent of the mineral royalty owners mined their land themselves, preferring to lease it to the colliery companies. As a consequence, their huge revenues were earned from doing nothing – bar having had the good fortune to inherit their land.

The inquisition of the Dukes, Marquesses, Barons and Earls had no historical precedent. Never before had individual members of the British aristocracy been so publicly humiliated, so rudely challenged.

The miners’ representatives played to the public gallery. Using every trick of class rhetoric, weaving speciously constructed arguments incorporating details which at times were irrelevant to the Commission’s line of inquiry, they humiliated the mineral royalty owners. The effect was devastating: by the pointed use of ridicule, the peers became the laughing stock of the proceedings, the spectators thrilling at the pricking of their power and mystique.

A farcical note was struck from the beginning. Robert Smillie had asked the Chairman of the Commission to request that ‘certain Dukes and Earls’ send the titles and charters ‘justifying their possession of certain land in the country’ to London for the Commissioners to examine. The Chairman waived the request when it became clear that several railway vans, if not a special train, would be required to transport the documents.

The issue came up during Smillie’s cross-examination of the Earl of Durham. The transcribers in the Robing Room were careful to annotate the moments when the public laughed.

‘I want to examine you as fairly as I can without bitterness of feeling of any kind.’

‘About a railway van?’ (Laughter)

‘Do you agree that it would require a large van to carry your title deeds?’

‘It is an exaggeration.’

‘Would it require a railway van to produce them?’

‘A portion of a railway van, no doubt …’

‘Now that you have had the title deeds examined, does that indicate that you have any doubt at all? Any doubt about the validity of them?’

‘Yes. No. And I hope I never shall have.’

‘Was it only recently this examination was made?’

‘About a fortnight or three weeks ago, when you practically made a demand that my title deeds should be produced in this room. You caused a great deal of inconvenience in suggesting that these title deeds should be sent up. Otherwise they would have remained in the depository. I don’t read them every Sunday.’ (Laughter)

‘They have not been sent up?’

‘No. But if the Chairman says I am to bring them I will.’

‘And the Chairman may say that. (Laughter) You say you did not read them yourself ?’

‘No.’

‘You depend upon your agent keeping you read up in matters of this kind?’

‘Yes. For many years past.’

‘A good many people would be delighted to read their title deeds from day to day if they could manage to secure any.’ (Laughter)

‘You don’t suggest I should give them my title deeds?’ (Laughter)

‘I have a feeling that you have no title deeds which justify your ownership of land or minerals, and that being the case I would suggest you ought to give it back to the State, who is the proper owner of it, if I am correct.’

Commissioner Smillie proceeded to draw the Earl’s attention – and the public’s – to the deplorable state of the miners’ houses in his own district.

‘Are you aware,’ he said, ‘that in Durham and Northumberland there have been serious complaints about the conditions of houses? I put it to you that in very few of the houses you would like to live.’

‘I would prefer to live where I am living,’ replied the Earl.

Beneath the flourishes of comedy and class rhetoric, the undertones were grave. For the private owners of the coal industry, the inquiry, with its royal imprimatur of objectivity and impartiality, was more damaging than anything that had gone before. In its forensic exposure of an industry riddled with abuses, the chief asset of which the aristocracy owned, it undermined the supremacy of the ruling class.

The country was both appalled and startled by its findings. ‘
There are houses
in some mining districts,’ the Commissioners reported, ‘which are a reproach to our civilization. No judicial language is sufficiently strong or sufficiently severe to apply to their condemnation.’ There were more casualties in Britain’s mines in 1918, it was revealed, than there were in the Gallipoli campaign, and for the children of miners, the infant mortality rate was higher than in any other section of the population: 160 per thousand, as compared with 96.9 among agricultural labourers and 76.4 for the upper and middle classes.

Particularly disturbing was the testimony of the Financial Adviser to the Coal Controller, who gave evidence of widescale profiteering by the coal owners during the war. The total profits and royalties of the coal-mining industry in the years 1914–1918 amounted to £160,000,000 – £25 million more than the total pre-war capital of the industry. Many of the coal owners, it emerged, had succeeded in concealing further profits by the capitalization of reserves or other readjustments of capital.

What caused the public revulsion was that the swollen profits had been wrung out of low wages for the miners and high prices paid by the consumer. Further, the Commission concluded, wastefulness and inefficiency engendered through the private ownership of the mines had seriously hampered the national war effort.

In the course of the hearing, it became clear that the nationalization of the mines offered the only really adequate method through which to raise the miners’ standard of living and to safeguard the interests of the consumer. In an interim report, submitted to the Government at the end of March 1919, the Chairman of the Commission, Mr Justice Sankey, concluded, ‘Even upon the evidence already given, the present system of ownership and working in the coal industry stands condemned, and some other system must be substituted for it, either nationalization or a method of unification by national purchase and/or by joint control.’

Billy Fitzwilliam was lucky to escape the Inquisitors. Following the King and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, only the Duke of Portland and the Marquess of Bute owned more coal than he did.
During the Great War
, Billy’s mineral royalties, combined with the profits from his two collieries, had yielded an income well in excess of £100,000 a year.
^*
Yet he had not been called before the Commission.

The miners’ leaders, Robert Smillie and Herbert Smith, were careful in their choice of the Peers they subpoenaed to attend. For political reasons, they chose mineral royalty owners who were historically unpopular among the miners in their districts and whose family’s track record in industrial relations and social welfare was poor.

The Fitzwilliams’ record was exemplary. Unusually, they were both mineral royalty owners and coal owners – the term used to denote the men who owned and operated Britain’s collieries. The standard of safety in the Fitzwilliams’ mines and the housing and social conditions in their pit villages were unequalled anywhere else in the country. Arnold Freeman, a writer, visited Elsecar in July 1919, shortly after the Royal Commission submitted its final report. So shocked was he by what he had seen of the miners’ living conditions in Scotland and South Wales that he wrote in overblown terms of what he saw at Elsecar:

They are all decent workmen’s cottages, many of them ivy-covered, most of them neat, clean, attractive … Lords are the natural targets for the slings and poisoned arrows of every demagogue, every agitator on the make, every Bob on the bounce – and I have thought of them as rather expensive luxuries for a democratic country to indulge in. I looked at them from afar off, through glasses coloured by prejudice perhaps. Now that I have studied the work of a real live earl at first hand, I have to admit he justifies his existence … Elsecar is a small flower-embosomed town … almost the first thing that strikes the eye is the number of its gardens or allotments. I have never seen a town in all my life with such a number in proportion to its size – probably more than one for every householder, for some of the miners have two or three. And gardens are fine antidotes to Bolshevism.

It would take more than gardens, as Billy realized, to save his coal. In January 1920, the consequences of the previous summer’s Royal Commission had come to a dramatic head: a General Strike threatened, triggered by the Government’s failure to depose the coal owners. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, had betrayed the miners.

At the outset, he had promised so much. ‘
If they throw themselves
into this inquiry and present their case,’ he had told the House of Commons in March 1919,

they will achieve great things for their industry … they will get a Miners’ Charter, which will be the beginning of greater and better things for them. And they will have the satisfaction when they have got these things of knowing that they obtained them without inflicting any hurt upon hundreds of thousands of other men and women engaged in honest toil like themselves.

They did not get those things. Lloyd George got exactly what he wanted. The miners got nothing.

The Commission’s interim report, submitted three weeks into the inquiry, had been necessary to head off a national coal strike. On the day it was published, the Government announced that it accepted its findings – the nationalization of the collieries – ‘in spirit and in letter’. The strike was called off: the MFGB interpreted the Government’s announcement as a signal that it would introduce legislation to end the reign of the coal owners and bring the mines under state control.