Black Diamonds (31 page)

The year the Smith family moved into the Vicarage, May, then in her early twenties, was living opposite in a two-bedroomed cottage with her parents, grandparents and her two-year-old son, Edgar. The Bower family was one of the poorest in the village. To help them out, in 1918, Katharine Smith took May on as a junior housemaid. As Joyce remembered, leftovers from the Smith family’s meals and her brothers’ old clothes were always sent to the cottage across the road. In taking May and Edgar under her wing, Katharine was forcing herself to confront daily, and under her own roof, the suggestion of the ‘double life’ she so loathed.

The village rumour was that Edgar Bower was Billy Fitzwilliam’s son. A few months after his birth, in the winter of 1916, he had been baptized at Wentworth Church. His father was stated as ‘unknown’; unusually for a boy of his class, he was christened with two middle names, ‘William Wentworth’, names no villagers would normally dare choose. They were the names traditionally given to every Fitzwilliam son. Almost nine decadess later, Gracie Woodcock, an old lady of ninety who lived at Wentworth all her life, exclaimed, ‘
It was a lot of rot
! People in the village used to say Edgar was Fitzwilliam’s boy. But May was so plain and so simple, it couldn’t be true.’ Gracie’s view was the exception: in the years after the First World War most of the village believed that Billy Fitzwilliam was the father of May’s child. ‘It weren’t her face or her mind he were after, were it?’ said one old miner. ‘Lordie were never known to be very select in love.’

May Bower was nineteen when Edgar was born. Her family came from a long line of Estate employees; her father and grandfather were miners at the Fitzwilliams’ pits, her uncles and cousins hunt servants at the Dog Kennels, the eighteenth-century building that housed the Wentworth pack of hounds. When Edgar was conceived, May was working as the gatekeeper at Doric Lodge, one of eight gatehouses that stood along the perimeter of Went worth Park. ‘
The gatekeepers were expected
to be on standby around the clock,’ recalled Gordon Hempsey, whose grandmother had been a gatekeeper at Mausoleum Lodge on the Greasbrough side of the Park. ‘At the end of the nineteenth century, to stop the carriages being interfered with on the through run, his Lordship dug these trenches through the Park with a grating over them. They put wires in the trenches and these ran down to the Lodges. When the carriages passed over a plate, a bell would ring at the Gatehouse. Out my Grandmother would come, mop cap on, apron on, and then depending on what mood his Lordship was in, sixpence or a shilling would fly through the air on to the grass. She’d then spend the rest of the day trying to find it.’

Doric Lodge, where May Bower worked, was one of the gatehouses most frequently used by the Fitzwilliams. It stood on the old coach road from Wentworth towards Sheffield, the quickest route up to the house coming from the city, and from the village and the pit at Elsecar. In 1915, the year before Edgar was born, Billy, suffering from nervous exhaustion, was given extended leave from his wartime duties as Assistant Transport Director at the British Army’s supply depot at Calais. He did not return to France until the end of 1916.

Whether the rumour that Edgar Bower was Billy Fitzwilliam’s son was true or merely a figment of his mother’s or Wentworth’s imagination will never be known. There is no evidence to suggest that he was, but nor is there anything to prove that he was not. Yet whatever the truth of Edgar’s provenance, the question mark over his identity determined the horrendous arc of his life. At best, it is the story of a handicapped boy rejected and abandoned by the village – a misguided closing of ranks to protect the Fitzwilliam family name. At worst, if Edgar was Billy’s son, the Fitzwilliams did nothing to save him from his truly appalling fate.

More than fifty years after Edgar was last seen in the village, the men and women who had played with him as children remembered him well. ‘He used to haunt our lives,’ Joyce recalled. ‘He lived with his mother in the cottage opposite the Vicarage gate. He would come out and shout at us and make strange noises. My mother wanted us to be kind to him, but we found him very tiresome. You couldn’t talk to him. You couldn’t understand him. We thought he was mental.’ Mrs Bradley, a former schoolmistress, also remembered Edgar:

During the school
holidays, myself and a number of other children from the village would meet at Woodcock’s farm. We played games, joined in the usual farm activities and sang songs together in the evening. Edgar Bower, who lived close by, would join us and yet not be one of us. He obviously liked being with us but, because of his handicaps of speech and hearing, remained an onlooker. The most vivid memory I have of Edgar is of the awful sounds he made when distressed or trying to say something. As evening approached, his mother would come to fetch him for bed. But he would disappear, running across the fields to the hills. In the distance we could hear the most dreadful noises – a mixture of moaning and screaming. Chris, the oldest Woodcock son, would go and persuade the boy to come home. But it was quite a task. Chris was the only one who could do anything with Edgar. It was difficult to communicate with him, or to know how much he comprehended. I was left with the impression his mother was unable to cope.

Edgar, so the village thought, had been born deaf and dumb. In 1922, when he was six years old, the Estate officials at Wentworth decided that it would be better for all concerned to send the boy away. He was sent to the Royal School for the Deaf at Derby. His school fees were paid by Billy Fitzwilliam via one of his charitable trusts: whether his motive in doing so was simply an innocent gesture of kindness to a handicapped boy in the village, or a tacit acceptance of paternal responsibility, is not known. Edgar stayed at the school in Derby until he was sixteen years old, returning home to the village in the school holidays. ‘He is a backward type of boy,’ the headmaster reported in the Easter term of 1932, Edgar’s last before leaving the school.

I am very doubtful whether he can ever become self-supporting. He has had a course of boot-repairing in our shop here and shapes fairly well at the practical side. I don’t want you to be under any misapprehension as to the type of boy he is. He is quite clean in his habits, well made physically and knows how to look after himself. He has done nothing in school work and has a wry kink somewhere.

In the months after Edgar left the Royal School for the Deaf, the record is blank until, that is, August 1933, when, at the age of seventeen, he was certified insane at Wentworth by Dr Mills, the village doctor, who was appointed by the Estate. Edgar was sent to the West Riding Paupers Lunatic Asylum at Wakefield, a vast and forbidding Victorian building that accommodated up to 2,000 patients. He remained there for the next fifty-three years of his life.

Edgar Bower was not insane.
According to his
Admittance File at the asylum, he was committed because he had been ‘observed pulling out the hairs on his arms and grimacing’. No other grounds for insanity were given. A Statement of Particulars, taken shortly after Edgar was admitted, reveals that he was neither suicidal nor a danger to others. No form of mental illness was diagnosed; his ‘attack of insanity’ had been temporary: according to the document, it had lasted for a mere ‘few days’.

A few days that turned into most of the rest of his life.

‘I was frightened the first time I saw him. He was like an alien. He was doubled over and could barely walk. His nails were all long and bent,’ remembered Lily Fletcher, a hospital social worker for Wakefield Social Services, who met Edgar in 1987 when he was seventy-one years old. ‘I’d read his patient history. It was a ghastly history. You could see from the file that no one had visited him in fifty-odd years. He was on every medication going. The only thing they didn’t do was give him a lobotomy. He’d been verbally, sexually, physically and mentally abused. You couldn’t get him into a bed. He used to sit in his chair all night. The psychiatric staff called him “The Dummy”. He was no dummy. No dummy at all. That first meeting, I gave him a pen and paper. In cases like his, sometimes it’s the only thing you can do.’

Edgar, as Lily discovered, was not deaf. Though he was speech-impaired, the staff at the Paupers Lunatic Asylum, later renamed Stanley Royd Psychiatric Hospital, had not thought to give him a pen and paper in fifty years. Lily was the first person to find a means of communicating with Edgar; through this simple method her patience enabled him to give voice to thoughts and feelings that no one had given him the time or the opportunity to express since the day he had been locked away.

The first word Edgar wrote down was ‘Mother’.

May Bower had been dead for sixty years. She had died in 1928 from scarlet fever in an isolation hospital near Wentworth while Edgar was at the Royal School for the Deaf. In 1988, though he knew his mother was dead, he asked Lily to help him write a letter to her. Sixty years after her death, he gave it a title: ‘Mother said I would go home’:

Dear Mother

What did I do wrong? Why was I taken away from my home, my family and friends? I know at times I have been naughty and difficult, but you see I didn’t understand other people’s attitudes towards me and they didn’t understand my handicap. They thought I was deaf and dumb. I could hear what people were saying, but for some reason I couldn’t speak. You see I cannot use my tongue properly. I have a voice, a proper man’s voice, but I have difficulty speaking like other people, something I so very much want to do. I remember how we all lived together in our cottage, you, grandmother, great grandfather and great grandmother. The tales you all used to tell me about our ancestors, who all worked on the Estate. I know you were only 18 when you were taken advantage of, but you gave me a lot of love and care and we were all so happy. You know Mother if I hadn’t been taken away when I was a young boy, I’m sure the Estate would have cared for me and found me work.

May Bower had told Edgar that he was Billy Fitzwilliam’s son. ‘When he told me,’ Lily said, ‘he said his mother had said to him, “You go to school. You’ll be all right. They’ll look after you. There’ll be money when you come home.”’ As Lily began to unlock the story of Edgar’s life, she was profoundly shaken by what she discovered. ‘The thing that haunted me, the thing that I couldn’t get out of my mind, was that someone must have cut out his tongue.’

If Billy Fitzwilliam was the father of Edgar Bower, the advice May had given her son was correct. Historically, the Fitzwilliams had looked after their illegitimate children in the villages around Wentworth, though always on their own terms. Over the centuries, a convention had emerged: male Estate employees were persuaded to admit paternity and to marry the mother of the child. The pay-off was a good job, a decent house and an understanding that the Estate would look after the family for the rest of their lives.

So why was this convention not followed in Edgar Bower’s case? The answer, possibly, is to be found in May’s religious beliefs. The Bowers were Quakers who believed that God married people, not the magistrate or the priest: according to their faith, the social aspect of a marriage – the umbrella of respectability – was of little significance. May was a devout Quaker and it is conceivable that her religious faith caused her to reject the offer of an Estate-arranged marriage.

Had the offer been made, and refused, it was May’s failure to conform that partially sealed Edgar’s fate. Because she flouted the conventions of the village, the community was no longer bound to accept her child. When Edgar returned to Wentworth from the Royal School for the Deaf in 1932, May Bower had been dead for four years. No one wanted to look after him; his severe handicap, his reputation as a difficult, troublesome child, and the rumour and taboo surrounding the identity of his father, determined that the village closed ranks and rejected him. Had Katharine Smith still been living at the Vicarage she might have taken him under her wing as she had done when he was a child – or at least seen that he was found a home. But the Smith family had long since gone; they had left the village in 1926.

The one person who might have looked after Edgar was unable to. Four years before she died, May had married an outsider to the village, a man from London called Charles Garwood. They had two children, Albert and Gladys, born in 1925 and 1927. After May died, Garwood had struggled to raise the two younger children on his own; in the late 1920s, he had been forced to send Albert, Edgar’s half-brother, to an orphanage in Rotherham.

Fifty-three years after Edgar left the village, it was Lily Fletcher who uncovered the secret it had tried to conceal. ‘
I believed Edgar
,’ she said. ‘After he told me he was the Earl’s son, I got hold of a copy of his birth certificate. That’s when I found out that his name was Edgar William Wentworth Bower. I then went back to check his hospital file. It was very odd. There was no mention of his middle names. He was admitted to the asylum under the name of Edgar Bower. The hospitals always recorded the full name of a patient. They were always very strong on that. I can only think that the village doctor who certified Edgar must have deliberately left those names off his admittance form.’

An error of omission on the part of Dr Mills, the Estate doctor? The action of a loyal retainer anxious to protect the Fitzwilliams’ reputation? Or, conceivably, did the doctor omit Edgar’s middle names, sacrosanct in the village at the time, because he knew he had no right to bear them? Following the great bonfire at Wentworth in 1972, the Estate archives that could have revealed the answer have not been preserved; the old villagers, who might have known, are now mostly dead. But among those still alive – still anxious to protect the Fitzwilliams’ reputation – there is one point on which they are adamant: the family played no part in the doctor’s decision to certify Edgar insane.

The truth, it appears, is more prosaic. In 1933, when Edgar returned to the village after leaving school, Charles Garwood, his stepfather, was working as gardener and chauffeur to Dr Mills. ‘The doctor sent Edgar away because Mr Garwood was his gardener. He didn’t want to lose him,’ Gracie Woodcock explained. ‘Too much of Garwood’s time would have been taken up with looking after Edgar. It was easier to send him away.’