Black Diamonds (61 page)

Peter’s great-grandfather had been Earl for almost half a century. In the mid-1800s, he had produced eight sons; by any reckoning, it was a firm guarantee of his family’s title. But just two of his sons had produced sons themselves: William, Lord Milton, the father of Billy, the 7th Earl, and William Charles Fitzwilliam, Eric’s father. Genes, rather than untimely deaths in colonial wars or the twentieth century’s two World Wars, were to blame. Four of the 6th Earl’s sons had died childless before they reached fifty: aside from Billy and Eric, the others had produced eight daughters. With Peter’s death, the Fitzwilliam title was in danger of becoming extinct.

Eric drew cold stares from the villagers as he shuffled past. ‘
No one wanted him
. No one liked him. He weren’t someone you could respect. “Him,” they’d say, nodding at ’t big house. Then they’d tip their hand. “Him as ’ud like a drink.”’

Eric’s minder, Harold Brown, paid for by a Fitzwilliam family trust, hovered behind the new Earl. A solitary and eccentric bachelor, for much of his life Eric had been a hopeless alcoholic. In his youth, his wild excesses of drinking and extravagance had led his father to declare him bankrupt. Now approaching his seventies, he was mysteriously proud of his family nickname, ‘Bottle by Bottle’ – a name he sometimes used when introducing himself to strangers.

All hope that Wentworth House and the Estate could pull through this dark period in its history had gone. ‘When Peter got killed, that were it then,’ Geoff Steer, a miner’s son who was at the funeral, recalled. ‘Wentworth House died with him.’

The village church was packed; there was standing room only at the back. The congregation was half-way through the 23rd Psalm when hundreds of miners, still wearing their working clothes, their faces blackened by coal dust and grime, came hurrying up the path. The day shift at New Stubbin and Elsecar, the Fitzwilliams’ former pits, had just ended. Under the new management, they had not been allowed to leave the shift any earlier. Crowding into the back of the church, the men spilled out among the gravestones outside.

These were the sons and grandsons of the miners who had led the 6th Earl’s funeral cortège in 1902. In four decades, the Fitzwilliam family and Wentworth House had been all but destroyed.

It was the turn of the miners and their families next.

The titanic battle between capital and labour that rumbled through Britain’s coalfields in the twentieth century, sweeping up Wentworth, was not over. By the mid 1990s, fifty years after the nationalization of the coal industry, of the seventy pits in the South Yorkshire coalfield that in 1900 had employed 115,000 miners, only four remained, employing a workforce of under 2,500 men. By the close of the century, Wentworth, and the pit villages for miles around, had been devastated by blight: criss-crossed by more motorways per square mile than in any other part of the country, they were roads to nowhere, funded by the Government and Europe in a futile attempt to generate employment in a region afflicted by the highest numbers of unemployed in Britain.

For all the saints, who from their labours rest,
Who Thee by faith before the world confessed,
Thy name O Jesus be forever blessed
Alleluia, Alleluia …

Vaughan Williams’s hymn was the last to be sung at Peter’s funeral. Midway through the singing, the voices of the congregation, and those of the hundreds of miners standing among the gravestones outside, were drowned by the roar of the engines from two approaching Lancaster Bombers, flying at a few hundred feet.

Swooping low over the church with the missing spire, the pilots performed an aerial salute, dipping the planes’ wings in tribute to a brave man.

Epilogue

Six months after Peter was killed, Wentworth House was taken over by the Lady Mabel College of Physical Education.

The grand Marble Salon, where in 1912 the celebrated prima ballerina Anna Pavlova had danced for the King, became the college gymnasium, filled with climbing ropes, vaulting horses and balancing beams. The other once magnificent state rooms suffered a similar fate. The Whistlejacket Room, with Stubbs’s famous portrait of the racehorse still in situ, was converted into a dance studio; the gilded Ante-Room, where Peter and the vicarage children had learnt to waltz, was designated a Junior Common Room for the first intake of forty students.

The trainee sports mistresses slept and dressed in dormitories in Bedlam, the wing along the East Front where the bedrooms for the Fitzwilliams’ bachelor guests had traditionally been. ‘
We were
absolutely in awe of the place. It was so vast, it was overpowering,’ a former student recalled. An air of disorder and decay, as another remembered, pervaded the grandeur. ‘We had to kill the rats with our hockey sticks. At night it sounded like thunder above. You could hear them running through. It was so loud it would wake you up.’ In the daytime, the sheep that grazed on the front lawn would wander into the house. ‘They would get into Bedlam and drink the water out of the toilets in the bathrooms that had been installed at the end of the wing. We used to have to shoo them down the corridor with a broom. Whenever we went out to play lacrosse, the games mistress would shout “Charge”, to disperse them, but they still kept coming into the house.’

‘Bottle by Bottle’, the dissolute 9th Earl Fitzwilliam, posed a further hazard. ‘He used to roam the house with his Jack Russell terriers. One was called Peril. You could hear him coming: “Peril! Peril! Come on, Peril!” Sometimes he’d stagger into our classes, or turn up in the middle of our dinner. He’d be absolutely cut. Somehow, the Principal managed to usher him out; it wasn’t the sort of thing she wanted her girls to see.’

Eric was living at the back of the house in the apartment that Billy and Maud had occupied during the war. The suite of forty rooms resembled an Aladdin’s Cave, crammed with paintings, fine pieces of furniture, porcelain and silver – the precious family heirlooms that had once filled the other 325 rooms in the house. A few months after Peter’s death, there had been a massive clearout. Five hundred items, a mere fraction of the contents of the house, had been auctioned in one of the first of the great country house sales. The unwanted furniture had raised £55,000, almost £1 million at today’s values. With the arrival of the Lady Mabel College, space was the issue, not money. The family was still immensely rich. Their estate boasted tens of thousands of acres of land in Yorkshire and Ireland and a number of houses in Mayfair; the compensation due for the nationalization of their coal interests had been fixed at several millions.

Wentworth House had not been structurally damaged by the open-cast mining operations, despite the Sheffield geologists’ predictions. But aesthetically, it was ruined. Anyone walking along the majestic fifty-yard Picture Gallery in Eric’s apartment, past the Titians, Van Dycks and paintings by Guido and Raphael, would see the slag heaps that had desecrated the gardens outside, framed in the window at its far end.

Eric spent most of his day in a sitting room overlooking the industrial site. ‘
He would
do nothing but drink all day,’ Godfrey Broadhead, a forester on the Estate, recalled. ‘Sometimes the Earl would ask me to go out into the Park to see what I could find. I’d come back with feathers and birds’ eggs, and bits and pieces that I’d picked up from the ground. He liked that.’ A staff of seven servants had been kept on to look after him: as one housemaid recalled, they dreaded going into the room. ‘I never saw him sober. He used to drink whisky and smoke Pasha cigarettes around the clock. You can imagine going into his room. It was horrible.’

The 9th Earl’s alcoholism was steadily killing him. As Eric’s health disintegrated, two brothers, Tom and Toby, were contesting which of them should succeed him. The time bomb their mother, Evie, had set under the noble house of Fitzwilliam in 1914 was about to explode.

The final act in the Fitzwilliam drama was played out at the Royal Courts of Justice in central London in the winter of 1951. The case between the two brothers was heard before a judge in the Chancery Division. It was left to him to resolve a mystery that for more than half a century the family had kept secret, hoping it would never come to light. Was Toby, the elder son of George and Evie Fitzwilliam, legitimate, or had they married after he was born? It was a question none of the family’s surviving members could conclusively answer, least of all Toby himself.

The Fitzwilliams were in danger of being undone by their obsession with secrecy and their inclination to destroy their own records. Evie and George were dead and there was no marriage certificate: mere scraps of evidence had survived from the late nineteenth century when the marriage was supposed to have taken place.

Peter’s sudden death, and the absence of male heirs in the main branch of the family, had forced the case. Eric, the 9th Earl, was the last of the 6th Earl’s male descendants; there being no living male descendants of the 7th and 8th Earls Fitzwilliam, it was necessary to go back to George, the third son of the 5th Earl, to find an heir. The 5th Earl had died in 1857; Tom and Toby were his great-grandsons, the last of the male heirs left.

It was not simply the devolution of the family’s title and great fortune that was at stake; the future of the Earldom depended on the outcome of the case. Toby, who was sixty-three, had a son and a grandson to carry on the title. Tom, who was forty-seven, had never married. For almost twenty years Tom had been in love with the wife of the heir to the Duke of Norfolk by whom he had an illegitimate daughter and with whom he was still very much involved. It was doubtful whether he would ever produce a son: unless Toby won the case, the centuries-old Earldom would die with Tom.

It was, as the judge was keen to stress, a ‘friendly contest’. Eighteen months before the court hearing began, the two brothers had exchanged letters. ‘
I would like
you to know that I am really delighted you are clearing this matter up now & once and for all,’ Tom wrote to Toby. ‘If the case should go in your favour (or for that matter in mine) I would like you to know that my affection & feelings for you will not be altered in the very smallest degree.’ Toby, the elder sibling, was less sanguine. Riddled with self-doubt, and ‘very unhappy’, he expressed his ‘utmost dislike for the whole thing’. ‘I feel very deeply being the person responsible for bringing all these family skeletons into the limelight,’ he confessed to his brother.

The moral character and motives of George and Evie Fitzwilliam – and particularly their mother, Evie – lay at the heart of the case. The brothers’ relationship with their parents had determined both their lives. Ultimately, Tom had supplanted his brother in his parents’ affections after Toby, the elder by sixteen years, was cast out. It was Tom who had inherited the family’s spectacular Elizabethan mansion, Milton Hall, and the gracious lifestyle of a gentleman farmer. Toby, cut off in his father’s will, had been forced to work, earning a living as Secretary to the British Field Sports Society. ‘So far as I am concerned I have no faith in the case whatsoever,’ he wrote to Tom.

Nor from my own point of view have I much concern about which way it goes. Many years ago I realized nothing would be coming my way so I have faced nothing on expectations. For nearly twenty years I have had a marvellous job which has made me more happy than I can say. What more does a man want? … I should be the happiest man on earth if it wasn’t for this b----y case.

For Toby, the case involved raking over a past he had vowed to forget. Both his parents, so he believed, had betrayed his love. He was convinced his mother had destroyed the papers proving his legitimacy out of spite.

In June 1920, shortly before undergoing a serious operation, Evie Fitzwilliam had written a letter to her husband, George, to be handed to him in the event of her death. ‘
My darling
one,’ she began.

You and I have loved one another as no other man and wife ever did. I have always played the game with you and you have been goodness and straightness itself. For all this I am grateful … I hate leaving you and Tom as I love you both so much and you have both loved and honoured me. God help you to bear my loss. Keep straight for Tom’s sake. Let him look to us
both
as two of his best friends.

In what she believed to be her last words to her family, Evie had excised Toby. She could not have been a worse friend to her elder son. At the time of writing, they had been estranged for six years. She had not seen or spoken to him since the day in November 1914 when he had been given special leave by his Commanding Officer to go to Milton Hall before leaving for France to fight on the Western Front. Toby’s marriage to Beryl Morgan had been the cause of their falling out. Evie never forgave him for marrying ‘the granddaughter of a draper’. She had even refused to meet her grandchildren.

The rift had been a source of lasting unhappiness to Toby. Until the day Evie died, in March 1925 – five years after the operation she thought would kill her – he had tried to make it up with his mother. Ten years after their last meeting, he had almost succeeded. ‘The prospect of seeing you again is too splendid,’ he wrote excitedly in January 1924, after she had issued an invitation for him to come and stay for the weekend. ‘I must keep all I’ve got to tell you till we meet. I do hope you are strong and well now. I heard how ill you had been for a long time. As for me, you’ll find me thinner than ever and going bald very fast. The result I think of an obstreperous family.’

Toby had assumed that Beryl and their two children, Rosemary and Richard, were also invited for the weekend. He was wrong. Ten years after the event, his mother’s anger over his marriage had not subsided. She wrote back by return: ‘I want you to quite understand that we do not intend to have anything whatsoever to do with your wife and her family, nor do we wish them discussed. Now having got the unpleasant part of my letter over I wish to say that if you agree to this
you
will always be welcome here.’ Toby was devastated. Writing to his father, he said, ‘
I can
hardly tell you how much I was looking forward to seeing everyone this weekend … I believe I know what your opinion would be of any man, most of all your son, if he accepted such a condition and have therefore most reluctantly written to Mother refusing. I cannot tell you what a grief and disappointment it is to me and can only hope that some day things will come right.’