Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  Throughout his marriage, among his family, his staff and in the villages around Wentworth, Billy’s philandering was well known. ‘He was very keen on hunting – of all kinds,’ his cousin Charles Doyne remarked dryly, a memory Lady Barbara Ricardo, his granddaughter, shared: ‘He had many girlfriends. He was especially fond of actresses and chorus girls!’ One long-standing affair with a former Variety girl, Rosie Boot, married to the Marquess of Headfort, became the subject of family legend. ‘He used to take her on his yacht. It was a beautiful boat, huge, with State Rooms and lots of bedrooms,’ Griffith Philipps, Billy’s grandson, recalled. ‘When the tender launch carrying the guests left shore, the Captain used to scrutinize its occupants with a pair of binoculars to see whether it was the Marchioness of Headfort or the Countess Fitzwilliam coming on board. Depending on which it was, he would order the crew to rearrange the furniture in the time it took for the launch to reach the yacht. The Marchioness and the Countess liked the state rooms furnished in a different way.’

  Stories that assumed a similarly legendary status circulated among Billy’s servants. Years after his death, Robert Tottie, the deputy agent at Wentworth, recalled a conversation with Billy’s former chauffeur, Jim Swift. ‘In the 1920s there used to be a wind-up phone connected from the Big House to Jim’s house in the village. His Lordship used to call him in the middle of the night. “Hello Jim,” he’d say. “Maudie’s locked her bedroom door again. Come on, we’re going down to London.” It was the middle of the night. London was four hours away. But off they’d go!’ It seems Billy also regarded the servants as fair game. Bert May remembered the gossip his wife, Margaret, brought back from the Big House. ‘Lordie was a bit of lad. There was one girl, a housemaid, they called her Marina. A big fine lass, good-looking girl and all. She used to go up to his room. He thought the world of her, old Lordie. They said he wanted to buy her a house in London.’

  The Fitzwilliams moved in a fast set. Drawn from the hunting field and the enclosures of England’s smartest racecourses, their friends included wealthy second-or third-generation aristocrats, the heirs to great shipping, industrial or banking fortunes. It was a world where extra-marital love affairs were regarded as the norm. ‘You didn’t marry a person, you married into a social group in those days,’ Peter Diggle, the son of Colonel Diggle, one of Billy’s closest friends, recalled. ‘But you married for life. Everything else was peccadilloes. You had your code and you stuck to it.’ Maud Fitzwilliam, the daughter of the Marquess of Zetland, who had married Billy when she was seventeen, was also rumoured to have had affairs with various men. One relationship of long standing was with Peter’s uncle, John Diggle. ‘Billy’s flirtations made it very difficult for Maud,’ Peter, who remembers Maud with great affection, recalled. ‘She was a very lonely person in many ways. She was often on her own. But she was a tremendously warm person, very kind, with a great sense of fun and rather mischievous herself. There was a touch of vulgarity about her sense of humour. I remember she once said of her unmarried daughters, “They don’t lead very satisfying lives. They’ve too many unused things in their drawers.” A very risqué double entendre at the time!’

  Growing up at the Vicarage in Wentworth, as Joyce grew older, she became aware that her parents felt compromised by the Fitzwilliams’ lifestyle. ‘My mother was a very cosy person, a very comfortable person. Rather stout and pink-cheeked, the sort of person you wanted to hug. But quite different from the Fitzwilliams. I don’t think they liked her very much. They were never at ease with her. She was hardly ever invited to parties at the house. I’m sure Lady Fitzwilliam felt the difference, that she belonged to a different kind of life, a different kind of society altogether. I daresay she felt she disapproved of her. Which she did. My mother came from a long line of clergymen. She was very moral, very disapproving of what she called “immorality”. My mother told me that Lord Fitzwilliam had lots of girlfriends. She felt that Lady Fitzwilliam was much too easy-going with the men – I’m sure only because he was so flirtatious. I think in that layer of society, people accepted these things, thought of them as perfectly normal, though a bit of a nuisance perhaps, or a bit embarrassing. My parents weren’t used to it. They used to worry dreadfully because they had to teach morality in the parish, and there were the Fitzwilliams, the heads of the parish, being as they thought, most immoral, a lot of the time. My father did all the services at the church in the village. Everyone who was C of E turned out for them. They all knew about Lord and Lady Fitzwilliam’s carryings-on. I don’t think they missed much. Wentworth was feudal. They were all in the pay of the Fitzwilliams. The whole village was. I don’t think there was anybody independent, except perhaps a few of the shopkeepers and the postmistress. Even the doctor was paid by them. Well, of course, the servants of the house, the miners and the men who worked on the farm all gossiped among each other. It was a funny artificial kind of life in the village. It was like a double life really. It upset my mother dreadfully, she was never happy there. She knew this double life was going on.’

  It was the illegitimate children at Wentworth that caused the Vicar’s wife the most anguish, the offspring of the ‘double life’ lived by scions of the Fitzwilliam family for generations. ‘When we were there the sons of the old Lord Fitzwilliam had illegitimate children living in the village,’ Joyce remembered. ‘Two of them taught at the school, and there was another family – a widow who had two daughters – they were supposed to have Fitzwilliam blood. As I grew up and could understand anything, I was led to believe that it was a “droit de seigneur”. Because they were Fitzwilliams, you couldn’t refuse them.’

  At the turn of the twentieth century, in the pit villages around Wentworth, to be born illegitimate, regardless of the identity of the father, marked a child for life. ‘The fact of my illegitimacy, of my being a bastard, caused me more mental anguish in the first years of my life than any other influence,’ Fred Smith, from Kiveton colliery, wrote.

  The old adage that the sins of the father fall upon the children has no better example to prove its truth than the example of the bastard. He is the victim; he suffers the penalty of a sin committed before he was born. In a village where every cupboard skeleton is the common knowledge of all, where every tongue that has a weakness for wagging, has plenty of material to wag about, the existence of an illicit sexual union is not made a pleasant one. As I grew up the epithet ‘bastard’ was thrown at me as a method of putting me into my place at the bottom of the social strata. If the user of the word was within striking distance, I was always struck. On the principle that bastards always beget bastards, I was looked upon as a potential ravager of all the females in the village. Up to my seventeenth year I had not been on speaking terms with any girl except in one case and she immediately cut me on learning the facts of my birth. The grand dames of the village many times within my hearing, prophesied that I should end my days on the gallows.

  Ironically, the Smith family were themselves the product of illegitimacy: Joyce’s mother, Katharine Smith, was a direct descendant of Lavinia Fenton, an actress who had played the part of Polly Peacham in the first production of Gay’s Beggar’s Opera in 1728. Lavinia had lived in France for twenty years as the Duke of Bolton’s mistress, having three illegitimate sons by him before becoming the Duchess of Bolton late in life. It was one of Joyce and her brothers’ and sisters’ favourite family stories. ‘We thought it was great fun! We had a baton sinister in our coat of arms! We loved our Polly! It was where our noble blood came from. But my mother would never talk about this descent. She didn’t like having to disclose that she was descended from illegitimate children. She wasn’t allowed to think of it as fun. She had been brought up to think of it as something you mustn’t tell anybody because Polly’s sons and their sons and grandsons had gone on to be Admirals and clergymen and it was not on.’

  During her eight years at Wentworth, Katharine Smith, in spite of her own sensitivity to the taboo of illegitimacy – or perhaps because of it – devoted her energies to
looking after one particular single mother in the village. Her name was May Bower.

  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.’