Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  The battle lines had been drawn, the outlook appeared ominous. Twenty-four hours after the War Office mobilized the armed forces, it had no option but to send a telegram to the Admiralty. The loyalty of some sections of the Army appeared to be in doubt: ‘The M.T. [Military Transport] Drivers of transport detailed to take the Aldershot Brigade to Yorkshire are unreliable and may join strikers,’ the cable read. ‘Prepare to take the Brigade by sea.’

  ‘There are very few light hearts in England today,’ Baldwin told the House of Commons, speaking hours before the TUC’s deadline ran out. ‘The only people who are happy in this situation are those who envy us or hate us, because they see the home of democratic freedom entering on a course which, if successful on the part of those who enter it, can only substitute tyranny.’ That evening, Lord Salisbury, the son of the former Conservative Prime Minister, ran into Lady Sybil Middleton at a cocktail party. ‘All of Europe is watching,’ he told her, ‘absolutely shivering in their shoes with fright in case we should go under, for they realize that if we do, nothing could save them.’

  On the front line, in the pit villages, the day the crisis broke, the enemy – for the most part – was asleep, enjoying a collective lie-in.

  In the Fitzwilliams’ pit villages little stirred. In the absence of the dust and smog that normally choked the air, overnight the mining communities in the neighbourhood of Wentworth had turned into prosperous-looking rural settlements. At Elsecar and Greasbrough, and in Harley and Jump, along row after row of the yellow-stone cottages, flowers trailed from the baskets hanging under the eaves of the slate roofs. In the front gardens, the roses were in bud. It was a bright spring morning: the green-painted doors and guttering, and the white window frames, the ubiquitous two-colour signature of the Fitzwilliam Estate, glistened in the sun.

  Arthur Eaglestone, the miner at the Fitzwilliams’ New Stubbin colliery, described the sounds that usually woke him in the morning. He lived at Netherhaugh, a small hamlet that straddled the main road to the pit:

  Clip-clop! … Clip-clop! … Someone is walking in the dim and shadowy corridors of the mind … it fades and dreams away, drifting to a point of nothingness … A hammer plaything – some one fooling with a hammer, in the darkness too … shurrup! … sleep! … it isn’t light … it isn’t dawn …

  I open my eyes at last and gaze into the darkened room, marking the blurred outline of familiar furniture, and noting how the gas lamp in the street below throws up a sickly, yet none the less accommodating circle of illumination. A little light invades the room, shining on the brass knob of the bedstead foot, the white painted washstand and the chair with trousers slung across … Cold it is … and misty too … b-r-r-r! I bury my nose beneath the sheets … dark, quite dark.

  Clip-clop! … Clip-clop! There it is again – the sound of clogs, collier clogs. It must be five o’clock, or thereabouts; a little later perhaps, for the morning shift begins at six with a promptitude unvarying and institutional …

  … Some one whistles now between his teeth. Occasionally the foot-falls are lighter, much more sprightly, with a tripping quality. These are the boys I guess, and I am not long left guessing. A mellow little voice comes up, singing? I know not what …

  Other sounds woke the hamlet: the blast of a ship’s foghorn blown at the pit top to mark the start of the shift; the echo of others – ‘buzzers’, as they were called – from the pits in the valley below. For the deep sleepers, there was the ‘knocker-up’; a human alarm clock, he used a long pole to rattle the window panes of the households that paid him a few pennies each week.

  On the morning of 1 May, with the collieries closed, none of these sounds disturbed Netherhaugh: much later than usual, the hamlet was woken by the clanging of a handbell. That day, the same sound roused every mining community in Britain. In the midst of a very twentieth-century crisis, the eighteenth century had wandered in. Few people had radios and newspapers were not always widely read. The time-honoured method was necessary to communicate the State of Emergency that George V had proclaimed the night before. To the cry of ‘Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye’, the bellmen paced the pit villages, pausing only at street corners to read the proclamation from the King:

  ‘GEORGE REX IMPERATOR,’ they shouted:

  Whereas by the Emergency Powers Act 1920, it is enacted that if it appears to Us that any action has been taken or is immediately threatened by any persons or body of persons in such a nature and on so extensive a scale as to be calculated, by interfering with the supply and distribution of food, water, fuel, or light, or with the means of locomotion, to deprive the community, or any substantial portion of the community, of the essentials of life, We may, by Proclamation, declare that a state of emergency exists:

  And whereas the present immediate threat of cessation of work in the Coal Mines does, in Our opinion, constitute a state of emergency within the meaning of the said Act:

  Now therefore, in pursuance of the said Act, We do, by and with the advice of Our Privy Council, hereby declare that a state of emergency exists.

  Given at Our Court at Buckingham Palace, this thirtieth day of April, in the year of our Lord One thousand nine hundred and twenty-six, and in the Sixteenth year of Our Reign. GOD SAVE THE KING.

  The King’s Proclamation awarded draconian powers to Baldwin’s Government. The authority of Parliament was suspended and civil liberties swept aside. Anyone suspected of attempting to cause sedition or mutiny among His Majesty’s forces or among the civilian population was liable to instant arrest and imprisonment. Interfering with or impeding the supply and distribution of vital commodities – food, water, light, fuel and electricity – was also an imprisonable offence. Freedom of speech was withdrawn and ‘seditious’ literature banned.

  In the Fitzwilliam villages, the King’s Proclamation caused alarm. ‘“If tha’ goes out, tha’ll get nowt!” That’s what Fitzbilly’s miners used to say,’ recalled the son of one miner working at New Stubbin pit in 1926. ‘They wanted nothing to do with the General Strike. No one, my dad said, ever got rich from going out on strike. 1926: that were a really bad job. People were afraid.’

  In the days leading up to the strike, a deputation from New Stubbin and Elsecar had called on Billy Fitzwilliam at Wentworth. They told him they did not want to strike. ‘You must,’ he told them privately, ‘or you will let the others down.’ Elsecar and New Stubbin were ‘happy pits’, an expression used locally to describe pits where relations between the management and the miners were harmonious. In the difficult years after the First World War, while the miners at both the Fitzwilliam collieries had come out in the national coal strikes of 1919, 1921 and 1925 – as they were bound to do through the unionization of the industry – neither pit had been subject to the one-off disputes and wildcat strikes that had hit other collieries during the mid-1920s. As Arthur Eaglestone, writing of his years at New Stubbin during this period, recalled, ‘There was never a major dispute while I was at the pit, a tribute to the commonsense and flexibility displayed by both the management and the men’s representatives.’ Billy was popular among the miners. When he visited his pits, it caused, as Eaglestone wrote, ‘a condition of high excitement that set the wires tingling into every quarter of the workings … Earl Fitzwilliam always reminded me of Charlie Markham. He had the same informal approach and was regarded generally by the miners (not without affection) as “a bit of a lad”.’ ‘He was generous when things went wrong,’ remembered Jim McGuinness, a miner from Elsecar. ‘Lordie was liked. He looked after you. He was good at thinking of ways to keep his miners happy.’

  Ironically, given that the 1926 dispute was about wages, the miners at New Stubbin and Elsecar were paid less than miners at other pits in the neighbourhood. ‘Wages-wise we were worse off, but you see Fitzbilly’s mines were perfect,’ Ralph Boreham, a miner from Elsecar, whose father and grandfather had worked there before him, explained. ‘Everything was safe. Even the King went down our pit. Some of the others around, the roads weren’t much higher t
han a chair. But Fitzbilly used to keep them high, so the miners could walk. And all the air were fresh. Air was moving through, you see. You were safe. You could breathe.’

  ‘We knew our place. You had security. You had your cottage,’ one miner recalled. It was not that the men at Elsecar and New Stubbin were unsympathetic to the cause of their fellow miners, or that they did not support their fight – Arthur Eaglestone, though writing under a pseudonym, had risked his job to expose the treacherous, badly paid conditions under which all miners of the period worked. But they were fatalistic and had more to lose than most.

  It was with a sense of foreboding that Arthur Eaglestone, on the evening of 3 May, presented himself for guard duty at New Stubbin colliery. He and a number of other men had been appointed to protect its coal and timber stocks for the duration of the strike. Rotating in shifts, they patrolled in pairs:

  Bearing each a formidable stick, we circled, that first evening of inaction, the half mile length of the sidings that connected the colliery with the railway station. The air was ominously quiet. The setting sun threw enormous shadows from the headstocks and the serried stacks of timber. There was no wind. The grasses, the wild parsley, with which the wagon road was bordered, were perfect as an etching. Soon darkness fell, the stars emerged, and in and out of the silent avenues of loaded trucks we paced speaking softly. Was this the beginning of the Twentieth Century Revolution? We walked, and sat, and smoked, and talked till midnight … In spite of outward appearance, all was not well. All that the ear apprehended – the chuffing of a locomotive, the rhythm of the winding engine, the impact of a hammer, the rattle of screens, even the tramp of colliers’ feet – had vanished. When the church clock struck midnight, and its stroke resounded across the valley to where we stood under the shadow of the coal-drops, it carried with it impressive undertones. The town was not asleep. It lay silent, brooding in the darkness.

  His disquiet was voiced by others. ‘Here we are in the throes of revolution and it’s unpleasant,’ wrote Sir Walter Riddell, Principal of Hertford College, Oxford. ‘We’re dependent for news mainly on what the Government choose to tell us by wireless and their official paper: and there is an uneasy, and I suppose inevitable, suspicion they don’t tell all. Rumours are countless and mainly depressing.’ Lady Manners, writing from Cobham in Surrey, had seen the soldiers moving along the Portsmouth Road: ‘Yesterday 20 tanks went up to London. Today, 40 charabancs filled with troops, steel helmets and all. I felt like crying. It brought the war straight back. They all looked such babies too and one felt would be of no use … The atmosphere is all of war.’

  In London, people were gloomiest of all. ‘Its citizens looked very strained and over-tired,’ Riddell reported on his return to Oxford, after spending a few days in the city. ‘The whole place,’ he wrote, ‘was painfully war-like – reduced lights, theatres mostly shut, barbed and boarded buses, Specials [constables] by the score and at certain places knots of rather hostile strikers.’ In Mayfair and Belgravia, many of the residents believed they would soon be facing the barricades. ‘I don’t think I ever felt anything was so beastly as this strike,’ bemoaned Mabel, Countess Grey, ‘the whole atmosphere reminds me indescribably of the war … without any of the glamour or the glow of patriotic feeling … I don’t think anyone can doubt a very well-organized really revolutionary bolshevist element.’

  On Tuesday 4 May, the first day of the General Strike, Government officials in Whitehall waited nervously for the enciphered reports from the GOCs in the Home Commands to come in. At 14.30 hours, the War Office issued its second situation report of the day; the first had gone out at 09.00 hours. Marked ‘Secret’, its circulation was confined to the Cabinet, the Civil Commissioners, Chief Constables and the Army Chiefs.

  ‘General Situation,’ it reported, ‘No change’:

  5th Infantry Brigade was ordered at 12.00 hours to commence as soon as possible the move by road to Northern Command. 5th Brigade H.Q. and 3 Battalions proceed to Catterick, 1 Battalion to Beverley. The units are due to arrive on the night 5/6th May.

  1st and 2nd Battalions, Scots Guards, temporarily at Pirbright Camp, have been ordered to return today to London.

  2nd Battalion Black Watch have been ordered from Fort George to Stirling.

  HQ 8th Infantry Brigade, 2nd South Stafford Regt, 2nd Hampshire Regt, 1st Wilts Regt and 14/20th Hussars all under orders to move at 24 hours notice.

  The country held its breath.

  23

  Two hundred miles north of Whitehall on the afternoon of 4 May, Billy Fitzwilliam was playing polo in a field in front of Wentworth House. The clipped cries of cavalry officers, the soft applause from polite, white-gloved hands, were noticeably absent. Broad Yorkshire dialect echoed across the pitch: ‘C’m on, Tartar, you bugger.’ ‘Eh up, Walt, o’er here.’ ‘Put one in’t bakka’t net!’

  Billy, his horse towering above the others, was teaching his miners to play polo on their pit ponies. Some of the ponies were barely taller than a large dog. Twenty-four hours earlier they had been shackled in pit gear a quarter of a mile underground; in their heavy bridles, the bonnet fortified around the eyes and along the nose, they might have stepped from the Bayeux tapestry. Freed of the harnesses, the ponies skittered and scrambled across the field. A tall man could stand astride the smallest, a Shetland called Caesar.

  The last time the ponies had come up from the pits was the previous summer. Year round, except for two weeks in August when the collieries closed for the holidays, they were stabled underground. Caesar was one of the miners’ favourites. At New Stubbin colliery he had saved many a man’s – and a boy’s – life. Arthur Eaglestone was working underground with the pony the night his reputation was made:

  Caesar had been restless for something more than an hour and a half, wandering hither, thither (within the limitation of the place), swinging his head slightly from side to side, and turning sharply well within his own length. The rattle of chains, the clinking of metal, had exasperated us. ‘Damn thee,’ said Sturgess the trammer, ‘damn thy hide! Be still! Did ye ever see sich a hoss in all thi life? A bloody clothes hoss ud make a better pony nor ’im!’ ‘He’s put out about something,’ I said. ‘He’s strange. He may be ill for all we know. It may be belly ache.’ ‘Belly ache be buggered, if ’e’d belly ache ’e’d roll abart an’ make a noise. Be still – damn your rags.’

  Seconds later, the props cracked, bringing down the roof, tons of dust and rubble falling like sand, burying the two men and the pony. Luckily, a rescue party was on hand to dig them out.

  Billy had organized the polo match between Elsecar and New Stubbin collieries. The players, boys aged between thirteen and sixteen years old, were the pony drivers at the two pits. The voices of the younger ones had not yet broken; many still wore short trousers. All their faces were bleached. It had been a long winter on the day shift. Six days a week, they had gone down the mine before dawn and come up after dark.

  It had been Billy’s idea to teach the boys to play polo. The previous evening, he had ordered the ponies to be brought out of the pits. In the past, when the ponies came up for their annual rest, they had always been let loose in fields outside the Park walls. Breaking with tradition, he had instructed that for the duration of the strike they were to be put out to grass in a field alongside Wentworth House itself.

  Early that morning, hours before the polo match began, a line of upwards of thirty boys stretched along the edge of the field, feeding the ponies bits of carrots and turnips pinched from allotments, or titbits they had saved from home. Every boy had his own pony, the one he worked with day in and day out. Some of the boys had whistled or called as they approached and their pony had come sprinting down the line. ‘The horses knew the boys not by their features,’ one miner recalled, they had only seen them with blackened faces; they recognized them by their ‘whistle, voice and smell’.

  The polo match and the decision to put the ponies in a field within yards of the house were symbolic gestures on B
illy’s part: a signal of unity and solidarity with his men. ‘My father adored his miners,’ his daughter Elfrida remembered. ‘He was passionately interested in mines and mining. It was more important to him than anything else to do with the Estate.’

  Billy depended on his miners; it was where his money came from. But he also had a genuine empathy and understanding with them. Most of the boys working at his pits had started work in the mines the first Monday after their thirteenth birthdays. As Billy knew, the drivers and their ponies had a particular place in a miner’s psyche – and in his heart. In the first decades of the twentieth century, pony driving was the first job a miner did down the pit, one of the ways he learnt his trade.

  For every miner, the first shift was a rite of passage, a descent from childhood that stayed with him for the rest of his life.

  Jim Bullock was one of the few miners to write an account of what it was like to be a pony driver at a West Yorkshire mine in the early decades of the twentieth century. Two months after his thirteenth birthday, in the spring of 1917, he said goodbye to his mother and set off up Princess Street to Bowers colliery, a coalmine employing several hundred miners in the village of Bowers Row, near Castleford: ‘My mother put her arm around me and said, “Be careful,”’ he remembered. ‘I was the only one she had left. All my brothers were fighting in the First World War.’

  The time was 8.45 p.m. Jim’s first shift was the night shift; his wage, 1 shilling (5 new pence). Wearing a pair of shorts and a new pair of clogs, he was barely five feet tall; he carried a two-pint Dudley filled with water and a snap tin containing two rounds of bread and dripping, his food for the night.