Black Diamonds (39 page)

In 1924, Arthur Eaglestone, the miner at Billy Fitzwilliam’s New Stubbin pit, wrote an article for the
Adelphi
magazine. It was a bitter polemic, written at the time of the French occupation of the Ruhr when the British coal industry was experiencing a brief boom. He railed against what he perceived to be the class-prejudiced characterization of the miners in the tabloid press:

‘
Well?
’, it was entitled.

There are one and a quarter millions of us. What are you going to do about it? We are human as yourselves. ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, do we not revenge?’ Who are you, reader of these lines? And what your information? Are we still the worshippers of whippets? – hoary wife beaters? – the drinking den loungers? – the rapacious condottiere of the Picture Press? Do you remember our President’s cloth cap, and hold it against us? Or that, earning fabulously, we squandered our wealth in riotous living, in grand pianos and chinchilla furs? Thus the daily, thus the Sunday Press!!! …

But there is a daily round which still remains curiously unreported. Split thumbs are not romantic things. Chronic rupture offers small delight even to the reading public. A bursted eye is a little boring – (you will readily understand that I am excluding the recipient?) A crushed foot? Any damn fool can crush his foot! And when the collier, emerging into God’s own sunshine, finds that his eyes are streaming tears, and that his eye lids are uncontrollably fluttering – well, it’s only nystagmus! And doesn’t he get ‘compo’ dammit?

Well then …

‘What are you going to do about it?’ The answer to Eaglestone’s question was, absolutely nothing. No steps were taken in the ten years after the General Strike to restructure the coal industry or to improve working conditions.

It was a catastrophic failure of government, one that would have tragic consequences for the miners. In the decade after the General Strike, conditions in the coalfields steadily worsened as lower wages and longer hours combined with unemployment to create widespread hardship. By 1931, 432,000 miners – 41.6 per cent of the workforce – were unemployed. The owners had the whiphand and kept it; the global slump that followed the 1929 Wall Street Crash, in combination with the wage cuts they had imposed, depressed trade in the coal regions, creating a pool of unemployed labour that ensured wages remained low. The miners’ defeat in the 1926 coal strike determined that it was they who paid the price of Britain’s economic ills. ‘
Through forces
utterly beyond their individual control,’ wrote the novelist John Galsworthy of their predicament in the early 1930s, ‘a heart-breaking process is going on among a million in one of the best classes of our people … idle, hopeless and increasingly destitute.’

In the end, the owners’ victory destroyed them. ‘We never forgot 1926. The wicked 30s came after,’ a miner from Sheffield recalled. ‘Them as went through them, they’ll never forget them days. They were hard times. We were on the poverty line.’

It would be more than a decade before power passed into the hands of the miners’ representatives. When it did, Wentworth House would become a target for their revenge.

26

It was four years later, mid-April 1930. The senior members of the Fitzwilliam family were gathered in the private chapel at Went-worth, a square, simply decorated room, fitted out in oak. Its centrepiece was a large bronze eighteenth-century chandelier; oil paintings of the Twelve Apostles hung above the oak quarter-panelling on the plain white walls. Sunlight streamed through the spun glass in the Venetian window behind the altar, the light refracting in luminous circles on to the faces of the servants seated in the pews.

Morning Prayers at Wentworth were always well attended. The pews for the household staff were unusually arranged: inlaid into the oak panelling, they ran in a single row around the walls of the chapel, framing the chequered marble floor. This exceptional layout had been purposefully designed: it offered the servants, seated sideways to the altar, a clear view of the family seated above them in the raised gallery that faced the transept. ‘
Morning Prayers were a chance
to get a good look at them,’ May Bailey, the scullery maid, recalled. ‘When we were working in the house, we didn’t see much of the family. We were below stairs. They were up in the heights. If they passed you anywhere, you always stood. You never moved. You just stood with your eyes cast down at the floor. At Prayers, we tried not to stare but we used to like looking at them. It were nice to see them. They seemed such a happy family. We’d think of our lives compared to theirs and of course naturally we used to think, Oh, I wish it were me.’

Besides the junior staff, the senior members of the household were also present; Alex Third, the dour head gardener who had won a DSO in the Great War; Mrs Lloyd, the housekeeper, who was known among her charges – the housemaids and undermaids – to be vicious with her tongue, and Jack May, the butler. As ever, he was immaculately turned out. ‘
By golly
, he always looked a treat,’ his son Bert recalled. ‘When he polished his shoes, he used to polish the instep. Me mother always used to say, “When your Dad’s cleaned me shoes, it’ll last me a month.” I tell you something else about Father. When he put his boots on, he used to put his foot up on a chair to lace them and the laces had to be flat – not just twisted and tied any old way – they had to be flat on the top.’

Spring had come early to Wentworth that year; in the gardens that stretched beyond the courtyard outside the chapel, the magnolias and rhododendrons were in full bloom. It had not lifted Billy Fitzwilliam’s mood. The country was in the grip of the worst economic crisis in living memory: he had been forced to put both his pits on short-time.

Of far greater concern to him, though, was the behaviour of his son.

Peter was seated with his father. He had left Eton at seventeen. Some six months away from his twenty-first birthday, he was now an officer in the Scots Greys. The fat, unattractive little boy had grown into a lean and handsome young man, well over six feet tall. His eyes were hazel-coloured; his hair, worn slicked back from a pencil-straight side parting, a deep chestnut brown. The diffident, troubled expression that had haunted his face as a child was still evident in the heavy set of his brow. It conferred a smouldering appeal: he might easily have been mistaken for one of the matinee idols whose faces adorned the billboards outside the new picture palaces in the nearby towns.

Seated alongside each other, there was little resemblance between father and son – except in profile, in the gentle, aristocratic curve of the nose. Billy was almost fifty. In recent years he had gained weight. Flecks of grey tinged his side whiskers and his luxuriant Edwardian moustache; his hair had receded beyond the crown of his head and the chiselled features of his youth had become puffed and jowled. Physically, Peter had grown into the son that his father could at last be proud of; to Billy’s delight, he had even developed a late but passionate interest in horses and hunting. Yet in every other respect, the boy was a source of grave anxiety to Billy. The tension between them, a feature of his childhood, had continued. In recent years their relationship had been a stormy one, as Peter had persisted in defying him at every turn.

It was indeed a tense moment when, half-way through the Vicar’s address, Peter stood up and left. His feet clattering on the oak floor, he strode up the steps to the door leading to Chapel Corridor – the family’s private entrance from the house. Below, along the servants’ pews, all eyes were raised as it slammed shut behind him.

It was not the first time Peter had walked out. Charles Booth, the steward’s boy at Wentworth House, regularly attended Sunday Matins at the village church. ‘
I was a choir boy
. We sat in the stalls opposite the Fitzwilliams’ pew,’ he remembered. ‘Peter used to sit there and glower at us. Many a Sunday I’ve seen him get up and walk out half-way through. Browned off he was. Up he jumped and out he went. He didn’t stand on ceremony the way his father did.’

From his early teens, Peter had rebelled against his parents’ values and the lifestyle at Wentworth House. Shunning boys of his own social class, most days, during his school holidays from Eton, he would set off across the Park on his bicycle to the pit villages of Greasbrough and Rawmarsh, or to the farm labourers’ cottages north of Wentworth along Burying Lane.

The villages hugged the boundaries of the Park wall. An almost seamless extension of it, the ranks of two-up, two-down cottages were built in the same coal-blackened yellow stone. Here, Peter sought refuge from the formality of life at home. ‘He was a grand fellow, nothing stuck up about him, he was a real grand bloke,’ Walker Scales, the butcher at Greasbrough, recalled. ‘He were just the opposite to old Lordie, he were rough and ready. He were one of us.’

Walker first met Peter by the ponds at the bottom of the Park. ‘There were five of us lads from the village – we were about fourteen or fifteen years old, I suppose – and we spotted him on his own. We were going to have a bit of fun. We were going to throw him in the dam. We went up to him, and he were straightforward with us, a good mixer, friendly like. And he said, “Come on, let’s all go swimming.” It were a blisteringly hot day and it were against the Estate’s rules to swim there. There were reeds under the water and the big house didn’t want the young uns drowning. So in we went. Then we used to see him all the time. Played football together, knocked about the lanes. Went drinking with him. He were a down-to-earth young man.’

Peter also made friends among the young miners at his father’s pits – boys in their mid-teens who were working as pony drivers underground. ‘
He were a friend
of mine,’ remembers Walt Hammond, a ninety-year-old miner who spent his working life at New Stubbin colliery. ‘Everybody thought well of young Lordie. He were all right. Course we liked him! He were spending money on us!’

Most of the pit boys gave their wages to their mothers to ease the family budget. Swiftly, Peter gained a reputation among them – at his father’s expense – as a latter-day Robin Hood. Every Sunday afternoon, as Walt described, he would take the New Stubbin junior football team to Bassindale’s, the sweetshop at Wentworth, where Billy had an account. ‘We could have whatever we wanted. To a certain degree, like. The shopkeeper would be in a right fluster. He used to say, “I can’t serve you all at once, I’ll take you one at a time.” Course, everyone used to choose chocolate. They didn’t get it much. Our mothers only gave us a ha’penny a week for spice [sweets].’

May Bailey, the scullery maid at Wentworth, also remembers Peter. ‘He’d mix around. He’d go in’t Rockingham Arms and he’d have a drink, have a chat, and he’d go to pits. If anything happened at pits he’d go, if someone was fast down pit, he’d go.’

Cycling around the pit villages on his own, Peter’s accessibility and his genuine friendships with the miners were in pointed contrast to his father’s patrician style. In the early 1930s, on the Sunday afternoons when Billy was at Wentworth, a feudal ritual was enacted. Riding in a pony and trap, with a servant or one of the senior household officials in tow, he toured his villages. ‘Everyone used to come out in front of their houses. It would run like a ripple down the street,’ Walker Scales recalled. ‘You’d hear the cheering and shouts of “Quick, Old Lordie’s coming” and you’d all run out to the porches. The men nipped their caps and everyone waved and cheered. There was an old joke that ran about. Anyone who wasn’t seen to wave would be finished at the pit on Monday. Course they weren’t.’ A triumphal progress was Billy’s chosen style: ‘
He never went anywhere
on his own. He was always accompanied by someone from his retinue. Even when he went out riding, he’d have a groom with him to open and shut gates, or to knock on someone’s door,’ recalled Peter Diggle, whose uncle ran the Fitzwilliam estates.

‘God lived in t’ big house, didn’t he? And when God came tot’ village, you kowtowed,’ said one old miner. Peter’s friendships in the villages soon caused tongues to wag. As Walt remembers, the older generation were unsettled by what they regarded as his over-familiarity: it eroded the mystique and confused the old feudal rules. ‘There were a lot of talk among some,’ said Walt, ‘they’d say Old Lordie were far out in front. Peter were too rough and ready.’

Billy was equally disapproving of his son’s friendships with the miners’ children. Realizing that it was more than just a passing phase, he put Peter on a tight rein. He reduced his allowance and ordered a block to be put on his account at the village shop. At home, increasingly, Peter’s conduct became the subject of family rows. ‘There was a boy up at the farm by the flour mill called Albert Sylvester,’ remembered Bert May. ‘We called him Cocky. Cocky Sylvester. He was a bit of a daredevil. I don’t know what age Peter would have been when he met him, fifteen or sixteen, something like that. Well, they stuck like glue. They went everywhere together. One day, they were up at Wentworth House on the drive by the entrance to the Pillared Hall. There were two flights of stone steps there, the curving ones. Ay, there must be more than twenty steps. And young Lordie said to Cocky, “I bet you daren’t ride down those steps on my bike.” “I dare,” he says. “Go on then. You can take it home with you if you do.” And Cocky did. There was hell to pay. His father was furious. It were a brand-new bike that he’d been given for his birthday.’

The row over the bicycle was the first of many involving Cocky Sylvester.

The Sylvester family had come to Wentworth from the Potteries in the late 1870s when Cocky’s grandfather had been hired as a stonemason to work on the building of the New Church, commissioned by the 6th Earl Fitzwilliam as a memorial to his father. Cocky, the son of a miner, had left school at fourteen. When he and Peter became friends he was working as a loader at Newton Chambers, the ironworks outside Sheffield. ‘His Lordship regarded him as a bad influence,’ Bert May remembered. ‘Lord Milton was coming back to the house at night blind drunk. His Lordship thought it were Cocky who’d introduced him to drinking. After that, he forbade him to see him.’ Ignoring his father’s ban, in the evenings, Peter would sneak out of Wentworth and go round to Cocky’s house in the village. ‘
My grandmother
lived behind the shop on Main Street. My mother told me she used to get besides herself with worry over Lord Milton’s friendship with my father,’ David Sylvester recalled. ‘He would be in and out of her house as if it were his own. He used to walk in through the back door. One of her jobs in the village was to lay out the bodies. They didn’t use undertakers in those days. My uncle was a joiner and he made the coffins. When someone in the village passed away, he and his men would go and collect them and take them round to my grandmother’s. She used to wash and prepare the bodies for burial. She’d put two old pennies on their eyes to close them before rigor mortis set in. Often as not there’d be a corpse on the kitchen table. She hated the idea of Lord Milton seeing these bodies – which he did because he’d just walk straight in through the back door. It worried her sick the way he’d turn up. My mother said she couldn’t come to terms with the fact that it were him coming in. He were like royalty to her. It frightened her. She was a timid sort of woman. She knew that he was coming to her house without his father knowing. She thought it would get the family into trouble.’