In the years after the Great War, striving to restore the City’s position as the financial centre of the world, the bankers had borrowed money from French depositors at 2 per cent and lent it to Germany at 8 or 10 per cent. In the summer of 1931, a period of political tension between France and Germany, the French, objecting to the fact that their money was being used to help Germany, withdrew it from London. Simultaneously, a financial collapse in Central Europe caused the German banks to renege on their international loans. The London bankers were caught out, facing short-term foreign liabilities estimated at over £400 million. It was the Bank of England’s decision to allow them to draw on the gold reserve that had caused sterling to run down.
The upshot was a National Government and a National Emergency. On the evening of 23 August, George V, refusing to accept MacDonald’s resignation, had urged the Leaders of the Opposition to rally to the Prime Minister. The following day a coalition government was formed ‘to deal with’, as the official communiqué stated, ‘the National Emergency that now exists’.
A week later, the Milton Committee held an emergency meeting of its own, convened in secret, behind Billy’s back. The question its members debated was whether the National Emergency presented the opportunity to tell the Earl to his face what many of them had privately felt for months: that, in light of the economic crisis in the country and in the neighbourhood, the planned celebrations of Peter’s coming of age were in poor taste. It was a time, they concurred, to conceal wealth, not to flaunt it. The publicity could prove detrimental to the family’s interests: if the celebrations were to go ahead, the Fitzwilliams would be caught in the ‘glare of a spotlight on a dark stage’. The minutes of the meeting reveal their conclusion: ‘In view of the present financial crisis in the Country we recommend the cancellation of the festivities, and suggest a Garden Party to farm and principal tenants in the Summer, if opportune.’ For the remainder of the meeting, the Milton Committee debated which of them should break the news to Billy.
Billy was furious when he was told. He would not hear of the birthday celebrations being cancelled. Making a small concession to the Committee, he reluctantly agreed to reduce the number of parties from six to one large, spectacular, party on the day. He was adamant the commemorative donations to the collieries and the chemical works should go ahead as planned. The projected cost of the celebrations was £8,500 – more than £350,000 at today’s values.
‘It were the last hurrah at Wentworth. A feast of Bacchus!’ Walker Scales, the nephew of the butcher who supplied the ox for roasting, recalled.
Shortly after lunch, on New Year’s Eve 1931, the day of Peter’s birthday, the gates to Wentworth Park were opened.
The guests arrived early, in one-pony traps, farm carts and on foot. Some came on bicycles; a handful, the senior officials at the Fitzwilliams’ pits and factories, came in cars. Miners from the outlying pit villages had transport laid on for them: standing up in rows, they arrived in open-top charabancs, their hands clutching the sides to prevent them from tipping out on to the pot-holed, dirt-track roads.
To discourage gatecrashers, the Estate officials had insisted that lapel badges be sent out with the 15,000 invitations. Moments after the Park gates were opened, so great was the crush that the Fitzwilliams’ outdoor servants gave up trying to filter the crowds. The uninvited – miners and their families from all over the district – had come regardless, as Billy knew they would. By mid-afternoon, there were upwards of 40,000 people trampling over the lawn and fields in front of Wentworth House.
Everyone from Wentworth village had turned out: Dr Mills, wearing a heavy tweed coat and yellow chamois gloves; old Miss Bartlett – one of the spinsters of the village, renowned for taking a shorthand note of the Vicar’s sermon every Sunday – sporting her best sable tippet. Even the molecatcher was there. ‘You never saw him without his shovel and traps,’ a former stewards’ room boy, Charles Booth, remembered. ‘He was one of the village characters. You’d see him round Wentworth all the time. He carried this long shovel over his shoulder and had his mole traps slung round his neck. He was a very tall man, always dressed the same, in knee britches and a trilby hat.’
As dusk fell on the clear winter’s night, the ‘frost-fringed trees’, so the local paper reported, ‘added a note of enchantment’. Along the copse at the edge of the lawn, a giant projection screen had been put up: emblazoned in the Union colours were the words ‘Welcome to All’. To the marvel of the crowds, every so often the red, white and blue lights flickered and the words ‘Long Life and Prosperity to Lord Milton’ would appear instead. ‘Coloured lights were magic to us then,’ Charles Booth recalled. ‘When I were a little lad, we used to walk five or six miles to the hills above Sheffield, just so as we could see the lights. Me Mother used to take us. It were something to look forward to at the weekend. When they put traffic lights up at Hoyland Cross, it were a novelty. We’d go down and watch ’em too. Just to see ’em change.’
The classlessness of the party was applauded by the Press. ‘The freedom of Wentworth House and its Park was extended to all: the great house itself open to all comers, numbers only permitting,’ the South Yorkshire Times reported. ‘Throughout the afternoon and early evening, the classes mingled. Despite the inclement weather, all were dressed in their Sunday best.’ Young girls wore crisply starched white pinnies over their dresses; small boys fidgeted in their stiff collars and scratchy cloth jackets.
Ralph Boreham was one of them: ‘Me father and grandfather worked at Elsecar pit. On ’t birthday, the pitmen got a photograph of Lord Milton. It were like a plaque with fancy lettering, you know to mark the occasion. Some had it framed. Me mother took me and me brother to the party, me Dad and Grandad went separately – so as they could have a drink. I must have been about ten. I’d only ever been in the Park at Wentworth once before. The time before was with me mates. I remember, we followed this posh bloke, all dressed up fancy. He were smoking a big fat cigar. We trailed him all the way down through the village, waiting for him to drop it. When he did, bad old bugger trod on it, grinding it into ’t ground. It were no good to us then, were it? On’t day of birthday, we went through the gates at Wentworth Park and the first man we let on, he were laying there drunk. They called him Roland Locke. He were a Jehovah’s witness, teetotal like. He used to go round with an accordion preaching on Sundays. Me mother said, “Eh up, Roland. What tha’ doing here like this?!” “Ay,” he said, “it’s different, lady. It’s free!” There were some great big stables just down the Park, before you got to the Big House. And it were filled, totally filled, with barrels of beer. All the pitmen and workmen were there knocking it back. They roasted a bullock and there were all these special men turning it round. Lord Milton had the first slice. You were given a big slab of meat in a sandwich dripping with fat. It were beautiful. On the lawn in front of the house, there was a wooden frame. It must have been o’er a hundred foot high. It were for fireworks. When it were dark they lit it up. The whole thing went off. It were wonderful. I’ve not seen nought to match ’em since.’
The fireworks were spectacular. ‘The setting occupied several hundred yards along which dim diminutive figures hurried with torches,’ the Sheffield Daily Telegraph reported.
At the opposite end of the line, mythical jugglers began throwing up balls of fire to left and right in pastel shades of green, pink and pale blue, and then followed a fireworks boxing match that created unbounded amusement, rousing the hearty cheers of the crowds. Wonderfully realistic were the firework dovecotes, to and from which fiery pigeons winged their way across the Park. The finest art of the pyrotechnician was surely embodied in a remarkably life-like picture in fireworks of the personality of the day, Lord Milton. ‘A Fine Old English Gentleman’ played by the band was a fitting accompaniment. The most wonderful spectacle of all was the concluding number, an air and sea battle in which the attacking airship was brought down in flames.
The Elsecar Colliery Brass Band, stationed in front of
the house, accompanied the display. Mendelssohn’s ‘Spring Song’, Romberg’s ‘Desert Song’, the ‘WaltzSong’ and selections from Gounod’s Faust were among the pieces of music chosen. When the display ended, the 40,000-strong crowd joined in singing the ‘Londonderry Air’ and ‘We Won’t Come Home Till Morning’.
‘Ay, that party were a treat,’ Ralph remembered. ‘Everyone had a good time. Too good. At end of the night, there were that many drunks, all laid out in the Park asleep. They were all over the grass. They fetched some horses and a flat cart and tipped them out on’t road outside the gates. It were middle of winter. A freezing cold night. There were one poor bloke from Jump – it were a Fitzbilly village – he went home after and sat on’t fire. He were that drunk. He made a right mess of hisself. He got some real burns.
When it were time for us to go home, me mother took us the long way round. On’t road, it were about a mile’s walk to Elsecar. It were too dangerous to go back through Wentworth though, there were that many drunks. We went out of the village past the vinegar stone – for keeping the plague away – and down across the fields along “Forty Stiles”. The woods by there were where the King’s Troops mustered in the Civil War. She took us all the way round. A couple of miles it were. Up in’t hills, on’t tops, we could see great bonfires burning. Up at Hoober Stand, Hoyland Low – all over the place, a big circle of them. They’d lit beacons in Lord Milton’s honour, all wired up with the wood properly placed so they’d burn.’
For Peter, the birthday celebrations were an ordeal.
The long day began at ten o’clock with a ceremonial tour of the district. Peter travelled with his mother and father in the front car in a fleet of yellow Rolls-Royces, the family’s house guests and his sisters following behind. The whole of the eight-mile route, via Rawmarsh, Greasbrough and Elsecar, was lined with people who had turned out to wave the Wentworth party on. In the villages, the streets were festooned with bunting, painted in the Fitzwilliam colours: the district was en fête, every employee enjoying a day’s paid holiday, plus a special birthday gift of a brand-new ten-shilling note.
The entire morning had been taken up with speeches and presentations at the opening ceremonies of the buildings and recreational grounds built to commemorate the coming of age. At every stop, Peter opened the proceedings by cutting a ribbon with a gold pocket-knife given to him by his father.
Geoff Steer, the former garden boy at Wentworth and the son of an Elsecar miner, remembered standing outside Market Hall on the main street in the village. ‘There were a great gang of us, hundreds crowding the street outside the hall, all waiting to see Lord Milton. The car pulled up and he went inside. And we waited. Waited for Lord Milton to come out. But he never did. He went out a side door at the back. He didn’t want to face us. He weren’t one for creeping.’
Reporting on the speeches and presentations, the newspapers described Peter as looking ‘awkward’ and ‘embarrassed’. It was Billy who stole the limelight. At the two collieries and at the chemical works, one after another, the officials and trades union leaders used the occasion to pay tribute to the Earl’s generosity in the difficult times. Speaking at New Stubbin pit, Mr Humphries, the secretary of the local branch of the Yorkshire Miners’ Association, thanked Billy on behalf of the men: ‘As a Trades Union Secretary, I do believe we have in Earl Fitzwilliam the finest idealistic employer in the country today,’ he said to long applause from the gathered miners. ‘He is a man with some humanity, a man within our hearts, and quite different from some members of the upper class. I appreciate him for the humanity and kindness he has shown to his people.’ Humphries was followed by Alderman Tomlinson, who echoed his sentiments. ‘We have had reports throughout the years of the generosity of the family. We have said, when things were very bad, that if this country had more employers of the character and calibre of Lord Fitzwilliam there would be better relationships between employers and employed, capital and labour.’ At Elsecar, the message was the same: ‘The world is passing through a very troublous time,’ one of the pit officials said, speaking before a crowd of thousands of miners and their families.
To keep collieries going needs sacrifice if the workmen are not to suffer too greatly and Lord Fitzwilliam has made that sacrifice. He could have shut down Stubbin or Elsecar and still have got his quota out. He could have shut down the afternoon shift but there would have been a lot of men dismissed. He could have been better in pocket but he has not dismissed a single man. At the same time the work has been supplemented, and we have got the fullest benefits of the Unemployment Act. If he gave notice to half our men, it would be a dreadful thing for this district. I hope better times will soon be here and our pulley wheels will spin as in the former prosperous years.
Billy, confident, affable, his long speeches contrasting with his son’s muttered brevity, paid tribute to the miners in return. Looking back to his youth, when he had experienced working underground at Stubbin and Elsecar pits, he thanked them – as ‘a mining amateur’ – for having taught him everything that he knew. ‘Ever since,’ he told them, ‘it has always been my ambition to use the best machinery, the safest means: for safety to come first before profits.’ He spoke with pride of the fact that under his stewardship the number of miners employed at the family’s mines had increased from 700 to 3,600.
To Peter’s embarrassment – and to the amusement of the crowds – Billy recalled the first time he took Peter to the pit. ‘I remember when, wielding a tiny spade, a small bewildered boy dug a small hole in the ground. It is a long time since I brought Lord Milton to dig up the first sod which paved the way to the New Stubbin colliery. I thought at that time that if he digged [sic] in life as he did on that occasion, he would do well!’
As a local newspaper reporter transcribed, Billy closed his speech with a homily to his son:
There are two men in the house now and one will have to turn out. It is not going to be me. He [Lord Milton] has to learn his job. You have given him a wonderful reception. You have given him the welcome which Yorkshiremen give to one another; a feeling that can only be learnt by experiencing it. I agree that games make a land, teaching patience, which makes Englishmen good in business, reasonable and unconquerable in war – and also in love. (Laughter) I hope he will not have as much war as I have had, and I hope that he learns the game with you. He has to realize that he belongs to a miner’s family, the same as we always intend to be. (Cheers) I have taught him all I can; you can teach him now. If he knows how to go into the grievances of the men with them as a man he will have nothing to fear in the future.
After the loud applause finally subsided, Peter stood up to speak. He had very little to say: ‘I am overwhelmed by the welcome you have given me,’ he began. ‘You have made me realize how you respect my father and I only hope I can follow in his footsteps. I hope times will get better, and that there will be a lot of smoke from our chimneys, for they say that where there is a lot of smoke there is prosperity. I wish you all the very best of luck.’
‘He made a short speech, then he left,’ Walt Hammond remembered. Walt and a group of young miners – Peter’s old friends from the Rawmarsh football team – had got up especially early to reserve a place at the front of the crowd. Standing a few yards from Peter, they had hoped to be able to congratulate him personally on his coming of age. ‘We never spoke to him. I never saw him again. He got married soon after. He went from us. He’d done with us then. Miss Olive Plunket, that were her name. She were a lady, well thought of she was. Don’t think he were a bloody angel, mind. If he were, he had two sets of wings.’
In April 1933, to the delight of the gossip columnists, Peter married Olive ‘Obby’ Plunket, thought to be one of the most beautiful debutantes of her generation. The younger daughter of the Right Reverend Benjamin Plunket, the Bishop of Meath, she too was hugely rich. Her father had recently inherited a Guinness fortune from his uncle, along with St Anne’s, an imposing mansion situated at the mouth of the River Liffey, overlooking Dublin P
ort. Newspaper editorials crooned at the ‘fortuitous alignment of these two great noble houses’.
Obby was beautiful. Slim and petite, she had coppery-blonde hair. Her eyes were mesmerizing, a startling aquamarine in colour. Warm-hearted and full of joie de vivre, with an adventurous spirit that Peter found attractive, she shared his main interests: horses and speed. As a child, growing up at the Bishop’s Court in Navan, one of her favourite games was to prance around pretending to be a horse. Nicknamed ‘hobby horse’ by her nanny, the name, shortened to ‘Obby’, had stuck. Like Peter, she was easily bored: friends of the couple recalled weekend house parties at Wentworth when the two of them would pace about, complaining how dull things were and wondering what to do next. Spur-of-the-moment trips would be organized, with the house party decamping by private plane to Le Touquet and Paris.
‘Grandpa didn’t want Peter to marry Obby. He didn’t approve of her,’ Lady Barbara Ricardo, Billy’s granddaughter, recalled. ‘He didn’t think it would work. I suppose my grandfather recognized Obby for what she was. She was always a bit of a flibbertigibbet. It was my grandmother who was so keen on her. She doted on Peter. Went along with whatever he wanted. If he wanted to marry Obby, she wanted him to.’
The wedding, at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, was the society wedding of the decade: the 800-strong guest list read like a volume of Debrett’s. Tens of thousands lined the five-mile route from St Anne’s to St Patrick’s: ‘At the west end of the Cathedral,’ the Dublin Times reported, ‘every window was crowded with heads and the roofs clustered as thickly as flypapers in summer.’
The bride wore a dress of ice-blue satin with a fourteen-foot train. Her tulle veil, tinted a delicate shade of blue to match her dress, fell in luxurious folds from a coronet of orange blossom. In her hand, she carried a bouquet of pale pink and creamy-white orchids that had been specially grown in the greenhouses at Went-worth and shipped to Dublin overnight. The twelve bridesmaids – all but three of them titled – wore diamanté-embroidered silk dresses in varying shades of St Patrick’s blue, each carrying a bouquet of yellow roses that had also been cultivated at Wentworth. When the service was over, it took ten minutes for the police to clear the crowds to enable the cars to leave for the reception. Three of the Fitzwilliams’ Rolls-Royces, bearing the family crest, had been shipped over from England to transport the bridal party.
Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty Page 33