A close scrutiny of the unusual number of both small and large advertisements told a hidden story. All kinds of goods and services were being offered at knockdown prices: in Hyde Park, a nine-bedroom Regency house was up for sale at the ‘sacrificial price’ of £3,400; at Harrods, under the blazing headline ‘Reduce House-keeping Costs’, ‘best Norfolk Ducklings’ had been slashed from 10 shillings to 5 shillings each, and a bundle of fifty spears of asparagus reduced to a shilling; the White Star Shipping Line was offering an eighteen-day cruise around the islands of Scandinavia ‘from £23’. Britain was feeling the pinch: the global slump that had followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929 had sent the economy into a spiral. Across the country, almost 3 million people were unemployed.
The Milton Committee convened punctually at eleven o’clock at 10 Grosvenor Street in Mayfair, the London headquarters of the Fitzwilliam empire. Lavish celebrations – not economies – and Edwardian-style class gradations would dominate the discussion: a minimum of 15,000 people were to be invited to Peter’s coming-of-age celebrations, the style of entertainment offered to each guest to be determined by their social rank. ‘There are,’ Captain North informed the assembled men, ‘various classes of persons to be catered for:
Classes 1 and 2: the Officials, Heads of Department and House-hold staff, numbering 302
Classes 3 and 4: the Estate employees and the Colliery and Chemical Works employees (other than Officials), numbering 3,990
Class 5: the farm tenants, 261
Class 6: the cottage and other tenants, 1,268
Class 7: the leaseholders, of which there are 1,300
Lastly, in two further classes of their own, named rather than numbered, were the local gentry and the ‘county’ – the Yorkshire aristocracy.
Only Classes 1 and 2 and Classes 3, 4 and 6 could be expected to rub shoulders together: according to social convention – and to avoid giving offence – separate entertainment was to be arranged for the remaining classes.
Class segregation, as one villager recalled, had always been imposed at Wentworth. ‘Once a year you went up to the Big House to pay your rent. You were given a meal in return. The different classes had different rent days; they got different meals and ate in different rooms. You were either a farm tenant, a house tenant or a cottage tenant. House tenants regarded themselves as better than the other tenants. They were offered wine. The farm tenants got whisky and the cottagers had beer. Farm and house tenants ate off china plates in the Upper Servants rooms. The cottagers were fed in the Lower Servants Hall. At cottage grade you ate off a wooden plate made of elm. It had the initials “EFW”, standing for Earl Fitzwilliam, burnt on to it and a number. It came – and stayed – with your cottage. You brought it out once a year to take up to the big house for rent days. It was double-sided with a flat top and a small edge to it. One side was for your main course and then you turned it over and it was dished for a pudding on the other side. EFW was stamped on everything. It was even on the snow shovels. Every cottage tenant was given a shovel. It hung on a peg outside their back doors. They had obligations to “Lordie” that the farm and house tenants didn’t. There were four acres of roof on top of Wentworth House, and flat at that. At first snowflake, the cottagers were expected to report to the house with their shovels. They had to go up to the roof and shovel the snow as fast as it fell.’
The Milton Committee had been assembled for each of its members to submit his proposal for the birthday celebrations. Captain North began by suggesting a total of six separate parties, to take place over the course of a week. On the night of the birthday he proposed a ball in the Marble Salon at Wentworth for the household staff and senior Estate officials, to be preceded during the day by a funfair in the Park for the cottage tenants, miners and factory hands. To avoid the risk of the classes mingling, he suggested that a dance floor be laid out in the Riding School in order that stragglers from the party in the Park could continue to enjoy themselves in the evening while the ball for Classes 1 and 2 was going on in the main house. The leaseholders, he argued, should have a separate garden party and the farm tenants, a separate ball of their own. In addition, he proposed two further balls: a ‘Gentry’s Ball’ and a ‘Grand Ball’ for the ‘county’.
Admiral Hugh Douglas, Billy’s elderly cousin and the former agent at Wentworth, proposed that the miners and factory hands should be treated to ‘Meat Teas’ and a ‘Concert and Social’ in heated marquees, as well as a funfair. For the ‘home’ circle – the Estate and household staff – he proposed a buffet supper in the Pillared Hall, after which the ‘stretchers for drunks’ would be called. Come the evening, he thought it prudent that the lower classes should be given the chance to sober up: ‘sandwiches and temperance drinks’ only were to be on offer in the Riding School. He was also in favour of staging character-building games: ‘Tugs of War between townships – 10 a side – each member of the winning team to be presented with an engraved pewter pot.’
In 1931, even among the Fitzwilliams’ aristocratic contemporaries, there were few families in England who could afford to host a party on the scale that was being proposed.
‘Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse,’ the Duke of Portland mourned in the prologue to his memoirs, written in 1937. Cushioned by his huge revenues from coal, comfortable in the turreted Welbeck Abbey, the Duke observed the unravelling of the England he had known. ‘Hardly anything in life is the same today as it was in my youth,’ he wrote.
Then there was a happy sense of stability and security; but now, it seems to me, there is little or none of either … Large country estates, which had been in the possession of the same families for years without number, have been and are still being broken up, and the houses attached to them sold to individuals, most of whom have had little or no connection with the land.
The Duke was writing of a class in crisis: in the years immediately before and after the Great War a quarter of England, some 6–8 million acres, had changed hands, a transfer of territorial holdings unrivalled since the Norman Conquest and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The assets of the aristocracy – land and the iconic seat of their power, the grand country house – were being stripped.
‘A silent revolution’, as Edward Wood, the heir to Lord Halifax, told the House of Commons in 1924. was in progress: ‘We are, unless I mistake it,’ he continued, ‘witnessing in England the gradual disappearance of the old landed classes.’
Five years later, the decimation of stock market portfolios in the Wall Street Crash had served to make matters worse. As estate after estate tumbled on to the market, the glut of houses meant that many were impossible to sell. One, Sudbrooke Holme in Lincolnshire, was to be purchased by a film company to be burnt to the ground ‘in order to produce a spectacular scene on the cinematograph’. Members of the aristocracy conjured their own fantastical visions: ‘If I close my eyes for a moment, I can see before me a great castle now in the hands of caretakers, its reception rooms are shrouded in Holland coverings, its servants’ quarters given over to dust and cobwebs,’ imagined Lady Warwick, the former mistress of Edward VII, writing in 1931. ‘Then my thoughts turn to a certain house in Park Lane, and I see the phantom of a dead woman, sitting solitary at a great table in a vast dining-room, with phantom flunkeys in attendance.’
A shortage of servants and the tragic slaughter of the scions of the aristocracy in the First World War are among the nostalgic and sentimental reasons offered for the dissolution of Britain’s stately homes. But prior to the Wall Street Crash, the primary cause of the ‘decay’ had been more prosaic; the English aristocracy had been undone by the refrigerator and the steam engine.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the cultivation of the prairies and grasslands of the New World, combined with the development of fast purpose-built refrigerator ships and cheaper rail transport, led to a global glut of grain products and chilled meats, causing the prices of British agricultural produce to plummet. In 1870, Britain had been a thriving agricultural
nation, virtually self-sufficient in what she produced and consumed. By the inter-war years, she had become heavily dependent on imported foodstuffs of all kinds.
For the landed classes with their broad acres, the consequences of the agricultural depression which bit deep over fifty long years were catastrophic. During the period, the continuous contraction in the amount of land under cultivation sent rental values and the profit on yields into freefall. Many estates were burdened by mortgages secured in the boom years of the 1860s; the resultant collapse in the capital values of land pushed the landowners into negative equity. Rising interest rates, the fixed costs of estate maintenance, combined with traditional commitments – the jointures, settlements and annuities that the aristocratic tenant-for-life was bound to pay out to family members and retainers – meant that estates were saddled with outgoings that could not be reduced. After 1906, straitened landowners found themselves politically assaulted as a succession of governments, with increasing severity, imposed taxes on both their capital and their income: in the years between 1914 and 1930, death duties, for example, rose from 15 per cent to 50 per cent.
A collective psyche had also played its part in the great sell-off: the fear that the future of property was politically vulnerable coalesced with the belief that a bigger and – crucially – a safer return could be secured by stripping landed assets to invest the proceeds elsewhere. Equities and overseas investments were the preferred choice: the former was liquid, the latter free of British taxes. The Wall Street Crash, followed as it was by the collapse of the world’s stock markets, made a mockery of the putative foresight: family heirlooms flooded the sale rooms as those hit hardest struggled to raise cash.
But it was the divestments of the super-rich that most shocked their contemporaries, nowhere more evident than in the heart of the capital itself. One by one the London palaces of Imperial Britain’s wealthiest families were abandoned, surrendered to the auctioneer, to tenants or to demolition crews. In the early 1930s, Lord Harewood, the Duke of Sutherland, Lord Curzon, Lord Derby and Lord Brooke put their London houses on the market. The mansions belonging to the Duke of Devonshire, Lord Lansdowne and Lord Dorchester had already gone; those of the Duke of Buccleuch, the Duke of Norfolk and the Duke of Westminster would follow shortly. ‘Nearly all these great houses were thrown open every season for large social gatherings,’ the Duke of Portland recalled of the years before the Great War.
Now, except four, they are closed, and the pictures and other works of art which they contained have, generally speaking, been scattered all over the world. At present, only Londonderry House, Apsley House, Bridgewater House and Holland House remain as private residences … Vast and, in my opinion, hideous buildings have taken the place of Grosvenor House and Lansdowne House, and another, if possible more hideous still, that of the beautiful Dorchester House; while from a social point of view, restaurants, cabarets and night-clubs have risen in their place. Sic transit gloria mundi – a glory which, in this instance, I fear can never be revived.
Lady Frances Warwick, a convert to socialism, chastised her aristocratic contemporaries for failing to face up to the fact that the world had defeated them. ‘Times change, and we must learn to change with them. It is in this clinging to what is dead, either in practice, thought, or custom, that the real danger lies,’ she wrote. ‘The Stately Homes of England have had their selfish day. Nothing could be better than that they should make atonement, in emptiness and disrepair, in the hope that a nobler future awaits them.’
In the midst of this unravelling, the lifestyle at Billy Fitzwilliam’s various residences astounded his guests. Margaret Sweeny, the future Duchess of Argyll, who stayed at Wentworth in the early 1930s, marvelled at the ‘magnificent reception rooms’, the ‘liveried footman standing behind each chair’, the ‘scene of unforgettale splendour’.
Far from breaking up his estates, Billy had bought new ones. The fifty-room Grosvenor Square townhouse was still the family’s London residence: in addition, in the decade after the First World War, he had acquired two other houses in Mayfair.
In the spring of 1931, the Fitzwilliams’ glory at least was un-diminished.
On 10 June, at the end of the morning, the Milton Committee adjourned to Claridges, where a private dining room had been booked for lunch. Over Grapefruit Supreme, Truite Saumonée Carmen, Volaille Grillé Diable, Haricots Verts à L’Isigny, Pommes à La Fourchette, Fraises Parisienne and Pâtisserie, they continued to discuss the proposals for the party to celebrate Peter’s twenty-first. They had divided into two camps: those who felt the celebrations should be of benefit to the community, or at least bind it closer together, and those who wanted to celebrate the birthday in high Edwardian style.
The old world was opposed to the new, the heads of department representing the Fitzwilliams’ landed estates siding against the managers of their industrial interests. Mr Danby, the manager at New Stubbin colliery, voiced his frustration:
I want to suggest, instead of attempting to give a party for the four thousand people employed at the collieries, together with their wives and children, which in itself seems to me rather an impossible job in midwinter, that the Elsecar Market Hall should be converted into a really nice concert hall with rooms suitable for small social events and that it should be called the ‘Peter Milton Hall’ or the ‘Lord Milton Hall’ and that a Sports Ground be donated to New Stubbin colliery and that we put up a small pavilion, and make a cricket and football pitch.
Mr Hebden, the manager of the South Yorkshire Chemical Works, agreed. Putting in a bid for his own factory, he further suggested that ‘to permanently mark the occasion, the Company should build a suitable canteen for the use of the Staff and work-people’. He also proposed that an extra day’s pay be given to all the Fitzwilliams’ employees.
Alfred Wright, the manager of Billy’s London office, was out on a limb on his own. Reading his eccentric proposal to the Committee, he suggested setting up a trust fund to distribute prizes of £25 each to thirty-two men and women. The men’s prizes were to be awarded for ‘Long Service’ – ‘to those who could demonstrate good behaviour towards his employer and the same quality towards his fellow workmen’ – and ‘Good Tenantry’ – ‘for the best-kept farms including hedges, ditches, gates and husbandry’. The women’s prizes were to be allocated for the
four best-kept homes, the four best examples of embroidery, needlework, or other handicraft, and for the four women whose families can show the best records in any of the following directions: (a) the greatest number of children with the greatest aggregate ages who have the greatest aggregate period to their credit of good honest work to the satisfaction of their employers (2 prizes); (b) the greatest scholastic or musical or artistic achievements (2 prizes); (c) outstanding nursing or secretarial service (2 prizes); (d) the four women who can prove to the satisfaction of the judges and jury that they have never quarrelled with their husbands and have consistently shown the best good temper towards and camaraderie with their husbands; the judges to consist of two ladies and a gentleman and the jury of three ladies and three gentlemen, a Counsel to be employed on both sides to cross examine the applicant. This might be productive of considerable amusement.
After considering the Milton Committee’s recommendations, Billy concluded that Peter’s birthday should be celebrated over the course of a week. Beginning with a ball at Wentworth House for the Yorkshire gentry, a further two balls were to be held, one for the farm tenants, the other for the Fitzwilliams’ 4,200 employees. The biggest party of the week was to be on the day of the birthday itself; scheduled to take place in the Park at Wentworth, over 15,000 invitations were to be sent out. There was to be a fairground in Menagerie Paddock and scores of buffet tents to feed the guests. Three thousand bottles of Audit Ale – beer that had been specially brewed and laid down in the vast cellars at Wentworth at Peter’s birth – were to be distributed, and an ox roasted. Throughout the week, in the afternoons, cinema shows and concert troupes were to
be staged for the children at the Fitzwilliams’ two collieries and at the chemical works. All employees were to be given a day’s holiday and a day’s pay. Lastly, to commemorate the coming of age, New Stubbin colliery would receive a sports ground and a cricket pavilion; Elsecar colliery, a new market hall; and the chemical works, a new canteen.
The cost of the celebrations was estimated by the Committee to run to tens of thousands of pounds. Privately, a number of its members believed the entertainments to be in poor taste. The slump that had followed the 1929 Wall Street Crash had decimated the British coal industry. In the summer of 1931 almost half the miners in the neighbourhood of Wentworth were unemployed.
28
The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her – her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that ‘It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us’, and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her – understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.
Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty Page 31