Black Diamonds (30 page)

Horses became an early source of friction between father and son. ‘In the nursery there were horses everywhere. There was a rocking horse and there were little model horses all over the place,’ Joyce remembers. ‘Everyone in the family was very horse-minded, except Peter. He was frightened of horses. He hated riding – especially hunting – and refused to go. In this respect he was a great disappointment to his father. You felt terribly sorry for him really, he was so inept as a little boy. He was mad keen on Cricket – it was the one thing he was rather good at as a boy – and I remember a sad thing happened. His great ambition was to play for Yorkshire and the team used to come to Wentworth. They had a cricket pitch on the lawn in front of the house. One summer – Peter was about eleven, I suppose, maybe not as much – as a treat he was allowed to open the batting for the Yorkshire team. There was great excitement. We were all sitting in a row of chairs at the edge of the lawn and Peter went out to bat. First ball, pretty well, he was bowled out for a duck. He came back half-way to where we were sitting and stopped. And I know he was crying. I felt so sorry for him. He didn’t want anyone to see him. He was so disappointed. He really was a sweet boy. Very modest. He wasn’t at all “I am the great I am”. I think he got sick to death of having to try and be the great I am.’

Almost from the moment he was born, Peter was expected to be the ‘great I am’. As soon as he could walk, he accompanied his father to public functions: to civic ceremonies in the district and to the host of social engagements that revolved around the Fitzwilliams’ business interests. From the age of four, on Christmas Eve, it was Peter who handed out the family’s presents to the long line of village children that queued up in the Marble Salon. Compelled by his parents to assume centre stage, he was constantly on parade, the obligation to play a part no less relentless in the formal atmosphere of life at home.

Joyce Smith remembered Peter’s tenth birthday party on New Year’s Eve in 1920. ‘
There was
a huge house party. All sorts of grand people were there. I hadn’t the least idea who any of them were. As a special treat, the children were allowed to join the grown-ups for dinner. Peter appeared in an Eton suit. He had a white waistcoat and tails, the same kind of get-up as men’s tails, with beautiful studs down his front. Though we were only children, we were escorted into dinner! We all met in the small ballroom to the side of the Marble Salon, and then you walked in pairs in procession with your person across the hall. There were these lovely long tables, banked with flowers and set with gold cutlery, and all these men waiting. The footmen stood behind the chairs, one for every two chairs. They had yellow striped waistcoats. Yellow was the Fitzwilliams’ colour. All the cars were yellow, everything was yellow.’

After dinner, there was dancing in the Marble Salon and games. ‘Then, at that sort of party, conversation was very rare,’ recalled Lady Marjorie Stirling, a close friend of Billy’s and a guest at Wentworth during the 1920s and 1930s. ‘We relied on games and practical jokes during house parties. At most country seats time was devoted to very energetic, endless games – energetic physically, like Murder or Sardines. All over the house; it must have been awful for the host and the hostess, but it was quite fun, sometimes great fun … Some houses absolutely revelled in practical jokes: apple-pie beds and creatures in baths. One or two families were known for it. Sometimes you couldn’t take it any more; you thought twice before going again.’

Practical jokes were frowned on at Wentworth. In the 1920s, Sir Richard Sykes was sent home and banned from the house after running over a pheasant in the Park and putting the mangled bird in a girl’s bed. But at ‘energetic games’ the Fitzwilliams – with the exception of Peter – excelled. Wentworth was the perfect place to play them. As a young boy, Charles Doyne remembered watching one of the house favourites. ‘
There was quite a party
and they collected all the jerry pots. They had a curling competition, sliding the chamberpots across the polished marble floor in the Marble Salon. Some were prize Rockingham – quite a few were shattered to pieces.’ Another popular game, as Joyce described, was ‘The “Fox” Hunt’. ‘One of the young men of the house party was chosen to be a fox and there was a hunt. He was given ten minutes start to go anywhere in the house. Then the rest of the house party hunted him. In full cry! When they caught him, they stripped him. There was a kill! They took all his clothes off. Scragged him, and brushed his hair up the wrong way. He came back into the dining room looking like nothing on earth.’ There were other games too. Bert May, whose father, Jack, had become the butler at Went-worth, and whose wife, Margaret, worked as a housemaid there, remembered her complaining one day about the mess she had cleared up. ‘They’d had a paper chase. The toilet rolls were unravelled all around the house. To this room, to that room, to the next room, and all the way back again. She started work at seven in the morning and it took her till lunch time to clean it all up.’

Vicar Godfrey Smith and his wife Katharine found their eight years at Wentworth difficult. There was a darker side to life at Wentworth House. Behind the façade, family life was not all that it seemed. ‘
It was terribly difficult
for my parents,’ Joyce remembered. ‘They both knew they were under the wing of these people whose private lives they believed to be most immoral.’

From an early stage in their marriage, Billy and Maud had led separate lives. In 1913, Billy had been cited as the third party in a high-profile society divorce case. A few days before the case was due to be heard his reputation – and his marriage – had been saved when, unusually, the parties opted to withdraw the proceedings. Billy’s detractors claimed that to avoid a scandal he had paid the couple a large amount of money not to divorce.

Throughout his marriage, among his family, his staff and in the villages around Wentworth, Billy’s philandering was well known. ‘He was very keen on hunting – of all kinds,’ his cousin Charles Doyne remarked dryly, a memory Lady Barbara Ricardo, his granddaughter, shared: ‘He had many girlfriends. He was especially fond of actresses and chorus girls!’ One long-standing affair with a former Variety girl, Rosie Boot, married to the Marquess of Headfort, became the subject of family legend. ‘He used to take her on his yacht. It was a beautiful boat, huge, with State Rooms and lots of bedrooms,’ Griffith Philipps, Billy’s grandson, recalled. ‘When the tender launch carrying the guests left shore, the Captain used to scrutinize its occupants with a pair of binoculars to see whether it was the Marchioness of Headfort or the Countess Fitzwilliam coming on board. Depending on which it was, he would order the crew to rearrange the furniture in the time it took for the launch to reach the yacht. The Marchioness and the Countess liked the state rooms furnished in a different way.’

Stories that assumed a similarly legendary status circulated among Billy’s servants. Years after his death, Robert Tottie, the deputy agent at Wentworth, recalled a conversation with Billy’s former chauffeur, Jim Swift. ‘In the 1920s there used to be a wind-up phone connected from the Big House to Jim’s house in the village. His Lordship used to call him in the middle of the night. “Hello Jim,” he’d say. “Maudie’s locked her bedroom door again. Come on, we’re going down to London.” It was the middle of the night. London was four hours away. But off they’d go!’ It seems Billy also regarded the servants as fair game. Bert May remembered the gossip his wife, Margaret, brought back from the Big House. ‘
Lordie was a bit of lad
. There was one girl, a housemaid, they called her Marina. A big fine lass, good-looking girl and all. She used to go up to his room. He thought the world of her, old Lordie. They said he wanted to buy her a house in London.’

The Fitzwilliams moved in a fast set. Drawn from the hunting field and the enclosures of England’s smartest racecourses, their friends included wealthy second-or third-generation aristocrats, the heirs to great shipping, industrial or banking fortunes. It was a world where extra-marital love affairs were regarded as the norm. ‘You didn’t marry a person, you married into a social group in those days,’ Peter Diggle, the son of Colonel Diggle, one of Billy’s closest friends, recalled. ‘But you married for life. Everything else was peccadilloes. You had your code and you stuck to it.’ Maud Fitzwilliam, the daughter of the Marquess of Zetland, who had married Billy when she was seventeen, was also rumoured to have had affairs with various men. One relationship of long standing was with Peter’s uncle, John Diggle. ‘Billy’s flirtations made it very difficult for Maud,’ Peter, who remembers Maud with great affection, recalled. ‘She was a very lonely person in many ways. She was often on her own. But she was a tremendously warm person, very kind, with a great sense of fun and rather mischievous herself. There was a touch of vulgarity about her sense of humour. I remember she once said of her unmarried daughters, “They don’t lead very satisfying lives. They’ve too many unused things in their drawers.” A very risqué double entendre at the time!’

Growing up at the Vicarage in Wentworth, as Joyce grew older, she became aware that her parents felt compromised by the Fitzwilliams’ lifestyle. ‘My mother was a very cosy person, a very comfortable person. Rather stout and pink-cheeked, the sort of person you wanted to hug. But quite different from the Fitzwilliams. I don’t think they liked her very much. They were never at ease with her. She was hardly ever invited to parties at the house. I’m sure Lady Fitzwilliam felt the difference, that she belonged to a different kind of life, a different kind of society altogether. I daresay she felt she disapproved of her. Which she did. My mother came from a long line of clergymen. She was very moral, very disapproving of what she called “immorality”. My mother told me that Lord Fitzwilliam had lots of girlfriends. She felt that Lady Fitzwilliam was much too easy-going with the men – I’m sure only because he was so flirtatious. I think in that layer of society, people accepted these things, thought of them as perfectly normal, though a bit of a nuisance perhaps, or a bit embarrassing. My parents weren’t used to it. They used to worry dreadfully because they had to teach morality in the parish, and there were the Fitzwilliams, the heads of the parish, being as they thought, most immoral, a lot of the time. My father did all the services at the church in the village. Everyone who was C of E turned out for them. They all knew about Lord and Lady Fitzwilliam’s carryings-on. I don’t think they missed much. Wentworth was feudal. They were all in the pay of the Fitzwilliams. The whole village was. I don’t think there was anybody independent, except perhaps a few of the shopkeepers and the postmistress. Even the doctor was paid by them. Well, of course, the servants of the house, the miners and the men who worked on the farm all gossiped among each other. It was a funny artificial kind of life in the village. It was like a double life really. It upset my mother dreadfully, she was never happy there. She knew this double life was going on.’

It was the illegitimate children at Wentworth that caused the Vicar’s wife the most anguish, the offspring of the ‘double life’ lived by scions of the Fitzwilliam family for generations. ‘When we were there the sons of the old Lord Fitzwilliam had illegitimate children living in the village,’ Joyce remembered. ‘Two of them taught at the school, and there was another family – a widow who had two daughters – they were supposed to have Fitzwilliam blood. As I grew up and could understand anything, I was led to believe that it was a “droit de seigneur”. Because they were Fitzwilliams, you couldn’t refuse them.’

At the turn of the twentieth century, in the pit villages around Wentworth, to be born illegitimate, regardless of the identity of the father, marked a child for life. ‘
The fact of my illegitimacy
, of my being a bastard, caused me more mental anguish in the first years of my life than any other influence,’ Fred Smith, from Kiveton colliery, wrote.

The old adage that the sins of the father fall upon the children has no better example to prove its truth than the example of the bastard. He is the victim; he suffers the penalty of a sin committed before he was born. In a village where every cupboard skeleton is the common knowledge of all, where every tongue that has a weakness for wagging, has plenty of material to wag about, the existence of an illicit sexual union is not made a pleasant one. As I grew up the epithet ‘bastard’ was thrown at me as a method of putting me into my place at the bottom of the social strata. If the user of the word was within striking distance, I was always struck. On the principle that bastards always beget bastards, I was looked upon as a potential ravager of all the females in the village. Up to my seventeenth year I had not been on speaking terms with any girl except in one case and she immediately cut me on learning the facts of my birth. The grand dames of the village many times within my hearing, prophesied that I should end my days on the gallows.

Ironically, the Smith family were themselves the product of illegitimacy: Joyce’s mother, Katharine Smith, was a direct descendant of Lavinia Fenton, an actress who had played the part of Polly Peacham in the first production of Gay’s
Beggar’s Opera
in 1728. Lavinia had lived in France for twenty years as the Duke of Bolton’s mistress, having three illegitimate sons by him before becoming the Duchess of Bolton late in life. It was one of Joyce and her brothers’ and sisters’ favourite family stories. ‘
We thought
it was great fun! We had a baton sinister in our coat of arms! We loved our Polly! It was where our noble blood came from. But my mother would never talk about this descent. She didn’t like having to disclose that she was descended from illegitimate children. She wasn’t allowed to think of it as fun. She had been brought up to think of it as something you mustn’t tell anybody because Polly’s sons and their sons and grandsons had gone on to be Admirals and clergymen and it was not on.’

During her eight years at Wentworth, Katharine Smith, in spite of her own sensitivity to the taboo of illegitimacy – or perhaps because of it – devoted her energies to looking after one particular single mother in the village. Her name was May Bower.