In the early twenty-first century, electronic search engines make it possible to reveal what no one in Evie’s lifetime – and for many decades after her death – could have known: her identity, it appears, was false.
Evie was born in 1867. There is no record of a Charles Stephen Lyster, the man she claimed as her father, in the UK Census Records between 1851 and 1881. A search of the medical directories listing doctors practising in Britain in the mid-to late nineteenth century also draws a blank. Nor does Evie herself appear in any official records under her given name – Daisy Evelyn Lyster. Her birth, despite the fact that the registration of births became mandatory after 1837, was not recorded; in the 1871 and 1881 Census records for the United Kingdom there is no one of that name. On her marriage certificate, issued in 1888, ‘Lyster’ was the name she gave: it appears that she had even deceived her husband, Toby’s father, George.
Evie’s chauffeur was waiting for Toby when his train pulled in to Peterborough station. Meeting him on the platform, the chauffeur handed him a note from his mother, which read:
Dear Toby
Please don’t for one moment think that I asked to see you because I did not. If you want to come and say goodbye you can do so.
Toby almost turned on his heel to catch the next train back to London. There, he could at least snatch a few hours with Beryl before his regiment left for France.
He did not. So convinced was he of his own moral rectitude in the rift with his mother that he decided to go on to Milton. Not for his own sake, but for hers. ‘My feelings were, if I went out to France and got shot,’ he later recalled, ‘if I had not gone to see my mother she would have been the one to suffer.’
The chauffeur drove Toby to Milton Hall. It was a fifteen-minute journey from the station, five of them along the two-mile drive that led up to the imposing Elizabethan house. Passing the familiar landmarks in the park – the follies, the great oaks, the hedges that traversed the flat grazing fields – it was strange to see the landscape he knew so intimately. He had been brought up to believe that one day it would all be his. Yet now, after six months’ absence, it did not feel like coming home. His mother had sworn that she would ‘never have Beryl here again’: even if he were to be reconciled with his parents, which he doubted from the tone of Evie’s note, for as long as his wife was banned from Milton, he could not bring himself to regard it as home.
To Toby’s surprise, Evie greeted him warmly. After giving him lunch, she showed him around the hospital that she and George had set up in a wing for officers wounded at the Front. ‘My mother was very correct and very nice,’ Toby remembered. ‘She did not raise any of the old rows.’
After a harmonious few hours together, Toby left Milton to return to his regiment. What he did not know then – and would only discover after he joined the long lists of casualties on the Western Front – was that Evie’s charm had been a sham.
Years later, when a barrister questioned him about the meeting, the pain at the recollection of its outcome was evident in his monosyllabic replies.
‘There was nothing in the nature of a reconciliation?’ the barrister asked.
‘No,’ Toby replied.
‘I think you were rather badly wounded in France, were not you?’ the QC continued.
‘I was shell-shocked.’
‘Were you in hospital for some time?’
‘Yes. In London.’
‘Did either of your parents come and see you there?’
‘My father came to see me, yes.’
‘What year would that be?’
‘Just before Christmas, 1914.’
‘Your mother did not come to see you? In fact, I do not think you ever saw your mother again?’
‘I never saw my mother again, no.’
‘We know that during the war your children were born.’
‘Yes.’
‘I have not got the exact dates. About 1917?’
‘1916 and 1918.’
‘Did your mother ever see your children?’
‘No, never saw them.’
Evie lived for more than a decade after her last meeting with Toby. Until her death in March 1925, despite George’s entreaties, she never forgave her elder son. ‘Evie was a woman of very strong character, just as George was a very weak character,’ Margot Lorne, the daughter of the secretary to the Fitzwilliam Hunt, remembered: ‘She completely dominated him, and he gave in to her every wish. They were obviously devoted to each other. She was a woman of extremes. She made friends quickly and easily, then just as suddenly dropped them and would be rude about them. She had a very vindictive and stubborn streak in her character. Once her mind was made up nothing could move her. I know that she remained vindictive towards Toby and Beryl from the time they married until she died.’
Evie’s vindictiveness began as soon as Toby left Milton – his last visit to the house in her lifetime. As he risked his life fighting at the Front, she gave instructions to her friends and to the household staff that his name should never be mentioned in her presence. Nor was it to be mentioned in the family. Toby’s younger brother, Tom, was ten years old at the time. ‘I went to school in 1914 and the war had started and Toby was never there after that date and his name was never mentioned,’ he recalled. ‘I asked where I could get his address because I wanted to write to him, and I think I was told that the butler had his address and I got it from him.’
Evie’s unnatural cruelty towards her elder son did not end there. To the shock of her friends, her vindictiveness appeared to take the form of a vendetta – even if it meant destroying her own reputation in the process. In the weeks after Toby left Milton, she cast doubt over his right to succeed to the estate by telling her friends that he had been born before she and George married. ‘A little time after the outbreak of war in 1914 I heard it said in the neighbourhood that Evie was saying that Toby was not legitimate,’ remembered Margot Lorne. ‘I heard that Toby was going to be proved illegitimate in order that Tom should succeed. She told everyone. Everyone was very fond of Toby and this shocked people greatly, because it so obviously came as a consequence of the row over the marriage. I would say this story was not generally accepted, but was attributed to vindictiveness on Evelyn’s part. This complete change of attitude caused a great deal of very adverse comment. I remember my parents coming back from Milton one day very upset because she had told them that Toby was illegitimate.’
Evie had set a time bomb ticking under the House of Fitzwilliam: almost half a century later, it would explode.
PART IV
17
Wentworth, January 1920, barely a year after Armistice Day: the house was under siege.
Thousands of black-suited men, scarves muffled at their throats against the piercing cold, stood along the border of the lawn. Hundreds more crowded the raised grass bank at its southern edge, directly opposite the house. Many bore the wretched scars of war: empty sleeves, wooden legs, black patches worn over blind eyes.
In the grey January sky flocks of crows circled, scattered by the disturbance. The men waited, shadowy figures, flitting among the trees that edged the lawn. Winter had dulled its emerald sheen, yet still, eleven acres in extent, it stretched before them like a piece of stencilled silk. Thick parallel lines, hand-rolled by the Fitzwilliams’ groundsmen, were etched on its surface: razor-straight, they each ran to a point on the 600-yard-long façade.
As the men stood watching the house, their breath condensed on the sharp air. They were fortunate to have come home from the Great War. Fifty thousand Yorkshire miners had served in the trenches; more than 5,000 had been killed in action.
Tension from the cold, the anticipation, the knowledge that they were forbidden to be there, rippled through the crowd. It was a Sunday morning. The rules at Wentworth on the Sabbath were strict, posted on noticeboards in outbuildings and workshops dotted around the Estate. The immediate vicinity of the house was categorically out of bounds: ‘On Sundays, the Park gates are all to be closed to horses, c
arriages and vehicles of every description.’ No one had foreseen an invasion by foot.
The miners had come across the surrounding country, climbing into the Park over stiles a mile south at Greasbrough, or slipping through the turnstiles at Doric Lodge and Lion’s Gate. By lunchtime, 10,000 had gathered at the edge of the lawn.
An echo of war drifted across the ranks of men: coming from the direction of the Riding School behind the North Tower, a lone voice called ‘A-TTEN-TION’. It was followed by the dull rumble of hundreds of feet on sawdust.
Up at a window of the house, Billy and his guest for the weekend, Field Marshal Earl Haig, watched anxiously. They were old friends: Billy had served under Haig in the Boer War and on the General Staff in Flanders. Both men were profoundly unsettled by what they saw. Along the perimeter of the lawn, the smudgy winter colours had been obliterated by dense lines of black. It was clear to Billy that they were miners; he knew from the way some of them squatted, the pose all colliers assumed to eat their ‘snap’ underground at the pit. Jack May, the groom of chambers at Wentworth, was on duty that morning. ‘They did not know what to do,’ he told Billy’s cousin later. ‘They did not know why they had come. They were frightened. They thought the miners were going to storm the house.’
The two Earls debated whether to call in troops to disperse the crowd. The house was surrounded: across the Park, through the gaunt branches of the great oaks, they could see the dark silhouettes of thousands more men, massing from all directions to join their former brothers-in-arms.
It was a situation both Haig and Fitzwilliam feared, and one they had anticipated for more than a year. The Great War had destroyed their peace of mind.
In 1919 the spectre of revolution haunted England’s ruling class. Within months of the Armistice, the class conflict of the pre-war years had again erupted. Thirty million working days were lost as a result of industrial disputes, fought out in a world transformed by the apocalypse on the Western and Eastern Fronts. Ancient continental dynasties and empires had fallen; the red flag flew over Moscow: it was only a matter of time, people felt, before Bolshevism would subsume Britain.
Earl Haig’s anxieties had fixed upon the returning armies: the demobilization of four million men. The year began ominously. In the month of January alone there were fifty mutinies in the British armed forces. ‘For the manufacturer of revolution there is no more incendiary material than soldiers returning from war,’ wrote Haig’s biographer Duff Cooper, a Lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards during the First World War. ‘They have grown careless of danger and accustomed to risks. The peace to which they have long looked forward is likely to disappoint them. The homes are never worthy of heroes. They see others who have not endured the same hardships enjoying greater prosperity, and they are easy to persuade that they have much to gain and little to lose.’
In the five years of war on the Western Front, five out of every nine in the Army were killed, missing or wounded. The question that preoccupied Haig and the heads of British Intelligence throughout 1919 was whether something else had been lost in the carnage. Lord Annan, writing in his memoirs, Our Age, described the ‘ideal’ of an Englishman, one that he and his contemporaries had been taught to admire as children in the years before the First World War. ‘It went back to the eighteenth century’, he wrote. ‘Wellington embodied it, Waterloo exhibited it. According to this code an Englishman should be guided by an overpowering sense of civic duty and diligence. Every man’s first loyalty should be to the country of his birth and the institution in which he served. Loyalty to the institutions came before loyalty to people. Individuals should sacrifice their careers, their family, and certainly their personal happiness or whims, to the regiment, the college, the school, the services, the ministry, the profession or the firm.’
In 1919, Britain’s intelligence chiefs believed that the old prewar loyalties had been buried in the Flanders mud. That summer, Sir Basil Thomson, Head of the Intelligence Section at the Home Office, called on Haig to ask his permission to use officers in British Army units as government informers in order to obtain forewarning of ‘internal unrest’. Haig refused. ‘I said that I would not authorize any men being used as spies,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Officers must act straightforwardly and as Englishmen. Espionage amongst our own men is hateful to us army men.’
Hateful also to Haig was the thought of having to use troops in the suppression of civil disorder. ‘It is not their duty to act as policemen,’ he had argued with the hawks at the Home Office. As he stood with Billy Fitzwilliam watching the men gathering on the borders of the lawn at Wentworth, there were five days to go until 31 January, when he was due to leave his post as Commander-in-Chief of the Home Forces. The likelihood, as it had seemed throughout 1919, of being driven to employ force against some of the very men who had fought for him in France was one of the main reasons behind his willingness to relinquish his command. There were 10,000 miners massed around Wentworth House; might this be his own eleventh hour, a hideous postscript to the victory he had won in 1918 at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month?
In the scores of pit villages that ringed the house, and in coalmining regions across Britain, the rumble of revolution had been loudest of all.
Colonel Mitchell, a landowner in Wath, a village a few miles from Wentworth, railing against the popularity of the ‘Bolshevik anthem’, ‘the Red Flag’, observed in a letter to the local newspaper, ‘Chatter about revolution is becoming so respectable now-a-days that nobody feels very much shocked or annoyed at hearing this rather mournful ditty sung.’
The lifting of wartime financial controls had caused a sharp escalation in the cost of living; in the course of the year, prices had doubled from pre-war levels, placing a strain on family budgets. The rash of strikes that had broken out in the country’s biggest industries – textiles, shipping and among railway workers – were primarily disputes over wages: once wage increases had been agreed, the disputes had been quickly settled.
But the miners’ union, the MFGB, was fighting for more than wages: its battle was political. Stoking the fear of revolution, blatantly, unashamedly, within months of the end of the First World War, the MFGB declared its objective: to depose the coal-owning aristocrats and confiscate their pits. The more radical of its representatives wanted to seize their land. Calling for the redistribution of wealth and the levelling of social injustice, the union urged the Government to place Britain’s collieries under ‘joint control and administration by the workmen and the state’.
The MFGB had embraced Communist doctrine; so, it seemed, had its members.
Across Britain’s coalfields, district after district balloted in favour of nationalizing the collieries. There were 1¼ million miners; their dependants included, it was estimated that the industry touched more than 5 million people, a tenth of Britain’s population. It was a community the Government and the coal owners ignored at their peril.
The Whistlejacket Room became a temporary HQ and OP. Located on the raised principal floor at the centre of Wentworth House, it commanded the best view over the lawn outside on that bleak Sunday morning in January 1920.
The room was symbolic of all Billy Fitzwilliam stood to lose. Forty feet square, its splendour was breathtaking. Eight doors decorated with Palladian pediments led into it. The walls and the ceiling, a brilliant white, were sculpted with stucco panelling embossed in gilt, depicting vases of flowers, heroes from Homer’s mythology and eagles with spreading wings. A sumptuous Aubusson rug lay across the glazed wooden floor, polished with beeswax from the apiary in the grounds. Gold glittered from the furniture: a pair of gilt candelabra, seven feet high, holding twenty-four candles, stood at opposite corners; flush against one wall there was a long gilt settee, its cushions covered in Prussian blue. There were twelve matching armchairs positioned around the room. Most striking of all, though, was its centrepiece: Stubbs’s portrait of the famous racehorse Whistlejacket, commissioned by the Marquess of Rockingham.
There is neither shadow nor background in the picture but it was intended that some portrait-painter should place King George III on the horse’s back, and that a landscape painter should put in the background. But, when the Marquis heard how nearly the picture had been destroyed by the horse, who caught a sight of his own portrait just as it was finished, and would have furiously attacked it, he preferred keeping it in its present state in memory of the occurrence.
The scale of luxury, the sheer beauty of the Whistlejacket Room, were replicated 300 times over in the other rooms at Wentworth House – paid for and maintained by the profits from coal.
The previous February, when the result of the miners’ ballot to nationalize Britain’s collieries had been announced, Billy Fitzwilliam had moved to defend his interests. Field Marshal Earl Haig had rejected the use of covert methods to fight Communism. Billy welcomed them. His horror of publicity, combined with an acute sense of realpolitik – that he risked further jeopardizing his wealth by making public pronouncements in favour of the private ownership of the coal industry – dictated that his war against Communism was waged covertly.
In essence it was a battle for hearts and minds: overnight, the churches and chapels in the towns and pit villages around Wentworth became one of the first fields of engagement. The Rector of Barnsley, a radical socialist, fired a warning shot. ‘Nothing,’ he said, preaching from the pulpit to a packed congregation, ‘is likely to revive the spirit of revolution so much as the sight of the extravagant follies of the rich, more especially when riches represent the profits of war, at a time when others were sacrificing all, even life itself.’
Billy retaliated, using the power he wielded in his own churches. Twenty vicars in the parishes around Wentworth were dependent on the Earl for their livings. Under their auspices, he arranged for an Oxford don, Professor Wilden-Hart, to tour the parish halls lecturing on the dangers of Bolshevism. The Mexborough and Swinton Times carried a report of a well-attended lecture at Swinton Church Hall:
Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty Page 19