Black Diamonds (55 page)

Shinwell’s requisition order had come as a bolt from the blue. In the last years of the war, Peter had willingly sacrificed his Estate to the country’s need for coal. Between 1943 and 1945, more than a million tons had been mined from the fields outside the boundaries of the Park. Months before the end of the war, Major Lloyd George, Shinwell’s predecessor at the Ministry of Fuel and Power, had given Peter a guarantee that the Park and formal gardens would not be mined. Shinwell’s order was in breach of his promise: ‘
An undertaking
was given that further workings would not be contemplated except in
a really desperate emergency
. It is considered that this was never meant to apply to any other than a war emergency,’ Peter and his land agent, Colonel Landon, complained vociferously to the new Minister in September 1945.

Shinwell claimed the coal under the Park and gardens at Wentworth was needed to keep Britain’s trains running. Arguing his case at a Cabinet meeting held at Downing Street on 24 January 1946, he said:

The total quantity of coal I desire to work on the Wentworth Estate is 371,000 tons, of which 220,000 tons is the good-quality Barnsley coal which is urgently required for the railways … The Barnsley coal I desire to work is equivalent to nearly three-quarters of a week’s requirements for the British railways. I have already reported the precarious position of railway stocks, and the losses suffered during the Christmas and New Year holidays have worsened it.

But, as Peter had argued in his letter to Shinwell, the Minister’s reasoning was illogical: ‘Coal cannot now be obtained in any quantity to relieve the necessity of what remains of the present winter. The coal position may be greatly improved before next winter, and if these workings were in the meantime carried out, it might well be found that the destruction had been wrought to no real purpose.’

Acting on his instinct that Shinwell’s requisition order was motivated by spite, Peter commissioned a group of mining engineers and geologists from the Department of Fuel Technology at Sheffield University to investigate the feasibility of the Minister’s proposal.

The team’s findings revealed that Shinwell’s plan to mine the garden site at Wentworth was deeply flawed. The coal, in the words of the experts from Sheffield, was ‘not worth the getting’. Far from being the ‘exceptionally good-quality coal … the fine South Yorkshire Hards suitable for firing locomotive boilers’ that Shinwell alleged, the geologists assessed after inspecting the site that it was ‘very poor stuff … reduced to very poor boiler slack by its nearness to the surface’. They also took issue with the Minister’s claim that the blasting operations would not damage the foundations of Wentworth House:

At the working place nearest the mansion (100 yards) the hard rock is forty-eight feet thick, at another place nearby fifty-three feet thick. At a point close to the area to be worked there is seventy-seven feet of rock. The proposed method of working is to bore down into the rock and blast it with a heavy charge. The rock is disrupted by a series of heavy earthquake shocks. It cannot sanely be held that any building will escape damage when its foundations are submitted to such shocks.

The team levelled further criticism at Shinwell’s boast that an ‘effective restoration programme’ would be launched to restore the land after the mining operations had finished. ‘“Effective restoration” forsooth,’ William Batley, a member of the team, wrote angrily to the Secretary of the Georgian Group, a society dedicated to the preservation of historic buildings. ‘What a cockeyed yarn. These Ministers of State must think we are a lot of simpletons – spinning us the tale. It is just bunkum, sheer bunk.’ The verdict of the Sheffield experts was damning: the proposed operations at the garden site did not in their view ‘justify the spoliation and destruction’.

Technically, Peter was powerless to stop Shinwell. The Defence Act brooked no opposition. He was philosophical about the nationalization of the mines and the end of his family’s association with coal, recognizing the necessity of the legislation, but the needless destruction of Wentworth House was a different matter. It was a question of principle: he was not prepared to give up the Fitzwilliams’ centuries-old tenure at the house without a fight.

To the Government’s amazement, the Yorkshire miners and the Labour-controlled local authorities were on Peter’s side.

‘
It is sacrilege
. Against all common sense,’ Joe Hall, President of the Yorkshire branch of the National Union of Mineworkers, told the Press in April 1946. ‘The miners in this area will go to almost any length rather than see Wentworth House destroyed. To many mining communities it is sacred ground. I have known the spot since boyhood and some of my happiest hours have been spent there. The Park at Wentworth is an oasis in an industrial desert. It has taken at least a century to produce these lovely grounds and gardens. Yorkshire people cannot stand by and see it all devastated in a few weeks.’

It was a landscape the Fitzwilliams had shared with their miners and the local communities. The woodlands and fields, the three ornamental lakes that cascaded down to the pit villages of Rawmarsh and Greasbrough, belonged in the collective memory. ‘You could go anywhere in the Park, you weren’t restricted at all,’ May Bailey remembered. ‘We used to go every Sunday and also in’t summer when’t nights were nice. All the villages used to go. We used to shout, “Are you goin’t Park? Oh ay, we’ll see you then. We’re going round Lily Pond first.” In winter, we’d skate on them ponds. There were three of them, lakes they were. We’d have a pit lamp, there were no torches in them days. When I was older, I went courting by them. You could go anywhere. You could walk right up’t Wentworth House. You couldn’t go in mind, but you could stand right in front of ’t. You were never stopped.’

For generations of miners, the Park at Wentworth was elemental in the life cycle of the pit villages. It was the venue for agricultural shows, flower competitions and the June garden fête, annual rituals attended by thousands of miners and their families. It was the place where the Fitzwilliams’ family landmarks – the weddings, christenings and comings of age – had been magnificently and collectively celebrated, and where a constant round of sports had been played out: games of cricket, football matches, pit pony races and tugs o’ war, all fiercely contested between the competing local villages and collieries. The Park had been the stage for events that had connected Wentworth and its community to the wider world: King George V’s visit in 1912 and the commemoration parades for local men killed in action in the Great War. And it had been a much-needed point of focus during the hard months of the 1926 coal strike when the Fitzwilliams had fed the miners’ children in the marquees. Outraged at the ‘frontal attack’, the ‘acts of vandalism’ and ‘ravaging’, in the winter of 1946 hundreds wrote letters of protest to the Minister of Fuel and Power.

Shinwell was unmoved.
Speciously
dismissing their letters as ‘half a dozen postcards, all in the same handwriting’, he accused Peter of ‘intrigue’, refusing to believe that the volume of local protest was based on genuine feeling. Adamant that the Earl had used the last remnants of his feudal powers to whip up a false storm, in an internal memo to his Cabinet colleagues Shinwell wrote, ‘claims made as to the enjoyment of the estate by the people are exaggerated. I have no intention of sacrificing the national interest to a nobleman’s palace and pleasure grounds, the sanctity of which is no longer respected to the same extent as heretofore.’

He was wrong. Incensed at the Minister’s high-handedness – particularly his refusal to meet a deputation of miners to discuss the issue – Joe Hall, President of the Yorkshire branch of the National Union of Mineworkers, resorted to the Press. ‘Whatever might be our view of the Gentry of this country, they certainly do not sacrifice natural beauty to easy profits,’ he told them on 6 April. ‘The Labour Government supposedly stands for the preservation of rural beauty. It is amazing to me that they persist in this scheme at Wentworth. Only a complete disregard of the beauties of the English countryside could prompt sheer vandalism of this description. I have almost got to the point of asking for a forty-eight-hour stoppage of work in this coalfield to put an end to this terrible sacrilege.’

Two days later Hall sent a letter to Clement Attlee, the Prime Minister:

My purpose
in writing to you is to vigorously protest against a scheme which is about to be operated at Wentworth, near Rotherham … As one who has been an auditor for the National Labour Party for twenty years, and who fought for you to get the Trades Union Movement affiliated to the Party I make this personal appeal to you to do all in your power to prevent what can only be described as vandalism.

Wentworth is the beauty spot of the Rotherham and Barnsley districts, the garden and spacious grounds having been enjoyed by our mining folk for very many years …

I sincerely hope you will, as my political leader in our first Labour Government in power, leave no stone unturned to save this pleasure resort.

A worried Private Secretary passed Hall’s letter to the Prime Minister, attaching an anxious memo:

Prime Minister, I should not have troubled you with the private protest against the proposal to extend open-cast coal mining to the gardens at Wentworth House, but you should see the letter which has now come in from Mr Hall, the President of the National Union of Mineworkers (Yorkshire area) … I have seen reports in the Press that the miners may strike for 48 hours if the present proposals are adhered to and though Mr Hall says nothing of this kind, and the Press reports may be incorrect, I should have thought the Minister [Shinwell] might find it necessary to reconsider the position if the miners persist in their opposition to the scheme.

‘Yes’, Attlee wrote at the bottom of the memo.

Conservation groups, the media and the local authorities in the neighbourhood of Wentworth joined the miners in the chorus of protest. ‘Nobody can possibly guarantee that this blasting will do no damage when it is carried out so close to the house,’ Lord Rosse, representing the National Trust, wrote to Captain Noel-Baker, a Conservative MP, urging him to put pressure on the Government in the House of Commons. ‘The best one can say is that it is a gamble which may come off, but to gamble with a building of real historic and national importance such as Wentworth is nothing short of criminal. There is still time to have this stopped or at least to have the programme modified so as to lessen the danger.’ Other public bodies took up the crusade: ‘
It is a thoroughly unnecessary
piece of vandalism,’ the Secretary of the Council for the Protection of Rural England wrote to an official at the Royal Institute of British Architects. ‘For the sake of a few hundred thousand tons of bad coal this priceless estate will be mined and lost irretrievably. It is a scandal if the PM and the Cabinet do not overrule Mr Shinwell.’ The
Economist
was equally critical: the coal, it claimed, would be ‘quickly produced and as quickly consumed, leaving the land ruined and useless for perhaps half a century and the coal problem just where it was before’.

Until the Government had wind of the South Yorkshire miners’ threat to strike, the volume of protest had fallen on deaf ears. Seizing his chance, Peter, who was in daily contact with Joe Hall, telephoned Downing Street to request a meeting with the Prime Minister. He wanted to show Attlee the plans that he, together with his miners at Elsecar colliery, had come up with for an alternative means of mining the coal. Drift mining – sinking shallow, walk-in tunnels beneath the land around Wentworth House – was the method they proposed. In this way, they argued, the site would yield a greater tonnage of coal, of a better quality, and at less cost. Crucially, the coal could be won without destroying a ‘single tree or shrub’, or running the risk of destroying the ‘mansion’ itself. Hall had endorsed the proposal: ‘I am confident,’ he assured the Prime Minister, ‘that within six months a greater quantity of cleaner coal could be won more economically without the least disturbance of the ground.’

‘I suppose I must see him,’ Attlee scrawled across the note his Private Secretary had sent him to advise him of Peter’s request. Even two years earlier, Peter’s wealth, his social position, and his connections in Churchill’s Coalition Government had enabled him to prevent the Park and gardens at Wentworth from being mined. Now, in the changed post-war world, he was barely able to secure an audience with the PM.

The minutes of the Cabinet meeting held on the morning of 15 April 1946 – the day Peter and Attlee were due to meet – show that before Peter even had the opportunity to present his drift-mining plan, the Prime Minister had rejected it out of hand. Marked ‘Secret’ – a standard procedure for minutes relating to Cabinet meetings – they summarize the discussion:

THE PRIME MINISTER
said that some local agitation had developed against the Government’s decision to extend the working of opencast coal in Wentworth Park; and the owner, Earl Fitzwilliam, was calling on him later in the day to discuss the matter. He was likely to ask whether this coal could not be secured by underground mining [drift mining]. Would this be possible?

Shinwell, as requested by Attlee, had ‘reconsidered the position’. But he had not changed his view. The Fitzwilliam Estate was to be the source ‘First of all, of coal. Secondly, of more coal.’ The Cabinet, according to the minutes of the meeting, was swayed by the Minister’s arguments:

THE MINISTER OF FUEL AND POWER said that underground working would not be appropriate on this site. It would take two years to get the coal which could be obtained in eight months by open-cast working, and underground miners would be needed: these were not available locally, and one of the main objects of open-cast working was to supplement the output of the underground labour force. The local agitation against this project had been worked up by a comparatively small number of people and did not, in his view, correctly reflect public opinion in the district … It would be a sign of weakness on the Government’s part to abandon or modify the scheme now that the contracts had been let and work was about to begin.