On the day the quarrying in the Park began, Arthur Eaglestone, the miner who had worked at New Stubbin colliery before the war, was among a small group of men gathered on the footpath that ran alongside the contractor’s site. ‘The Germans have landed after all,’ one of them remarked. They had come to watch what Peter could not bear to observe at close hand. Standing in the shadow of the great oaks planted in commemoration of victory at the Battle of Blenheim, they looked on in horror as the cranes and excavators swung into action, their claws gouging into the soil, exposing great tracts of limestone below. ‘Daffodil bulbs were uprooted by the thousand,’ Eaglestone wrote afterwards, ‘and hundreds of trees wrenched from the earth and flung to one side, strewn white and fatally wounded.’ As he witnessed the devastation, Eaglestone recalled a meeting at Wentworth House half a century earlier when a delegation of miners and their wives had crossed the Park from Rawmarsh to plead with the 6th Earl to be allowed to return to work after weeks on strike. ‘He lectured them on the folly of agitators,’ Eaglestone remembered, ‘and the virtue of work. They thanked him – one can imagine with what bitter resignation – and straggling home again across the Park, a woman who was in the company gave birth to a child. And now the children of that child were taking over.’
It was Peter’s inheritance that was being ripped up. Writing to Lucia, Viscountess Galway, Maud admitted one blessing: ‘Am thankful my beloved Billy is not able to see it – or anyway to be beyond minding.’
Midway through the war, in February 1943, Billy Fitzwilliam had died at Wentworth from cancer at the age of seventy. Speaking at his funeral, the Bishop of Sheffield had praised the Earl’s relationship with his thousands of employees: ‘It would be a sad day for this country,’ he told the congregation, ‘if there were lost that association of inheritance with responsibility, and of wealth with social service, which was the tradition of stewardship that the late Earl received and has quietly and conscientiously maintained.’
The Bishop’s remarks were hopelessly out of kilter with the sentiments of the British electorate. Two years after Billy died, in July 1945 – in the first General Election in a decade – a Labour Government was elected with a landslide majority and a mandate for radical reform. ‘After the long storm of war, we saw the sunrise,’ Hugh Dalton, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, wrote. ‘No one wanted to return to the Britain of the 30s. They wanted to go forward, and were confident that they could do so.’
By laying the foundations of a Welfare State, Labour had pledged to build a new Britain – to eradicate the ‘five giant evils’ Beveridge had identified in his 1943 report: Want, Squalor, Disease, Ignorance and Unemployment. For the first time, old age pensions and unemployment, sickness, widows and maternity benefits were to be available for all.
Class politics and the memory of the hardship of the 1930s underpinned the Labour victory: the notion of a clean break with a dark past. In its manifesto, Let Us Face the Future, Labour had vowed to end the hegemony of ‘the privileged rich’, the ‘Czars of Big Business’, ‘the hard-faced men and their political friends’ who had prospered in the inter-war depression, the controllers of ‘the banks, the mines, the big industries’ in whose hands ‘the concentration of too much economic power’ had led to ‘great economic blizzards’ and mass poverty. The nationalization of Britain’s key industries – coal, gas, electricity, the railways, iron and steel – was Labour’s second talisman. The transfer of the country’s great industries to public ownership would secure greater productivity and efficiency, the profits to be ploughed into nourishing a fairer society.
The consequences of the Labour victory were catastrophic for Peter in almost every respect. Virtually overnight, the Government’s proposals for social reform – paid for partly by high taxation of the super-rich – and their plans to nationalize the coal industry had decimated the putative value of his father’s legacy.
Billy Fitzwilliam had left almost £2 million in his will; £60 million at today’s values, it was substantially less than the £2.8 million his grandfather, the 6th Earl, had bequeathed, but the true extent of Billy’s wealth was masked by the transfer of the family’s historic coal holdings into a limited company for tax avoidance purposes in 1933. With the nationalization of the collieries, the massive coal revenues which had sustained Wentworth House, and on which the family’s fortune had been built, were set to go. There was to be no income from the open-cast mining operations either. The land had been requisitioned under the regulations of the Defence Act, introduced at the start of the war. Under the Emergency Powers they conferred, the Government could compulsorily seize any piece of land or property in Britain to do with it as it pleased. Compensation was payable solely for loss of rent: no compensation was awarded for ‘any diminution or depreciation in value ascribable only to loss of pleasure or amenity’, nor was the owner entitled to a share in the profits from the commercial exploitation of the land.
The nationalization of coal had also rendered Peter, now the 8th Earl Fitzwilliam, more or less redundant. Historically, the power and status of the Earls Fitzwilliam in their neighbourhood had been based on their ownership of coal via the huge numbers of men they employed. Without it, the obligations of ‘inheritance with responsibility, and of wealth with social service’ that the Bishop of Sheffield had spoken of at his father’s funeral no longer applied. Propelled by a huge mandate from the country, the Labour Government – to use the words of the 6th and 7th Earls – had severed ‘the ties that bound’.
Of all the major transfers of ownership, coal was the most romantic in Labour mythology, the industry where the excesses of capitalism had left ‘blood on the coal’. The miners had waited a quarter of a century for Britain’s pits to be nationalized: it was way back in 1919 when the interim report of the Sankey inquiry, the Royal Commission set up by Prime Minister David Lloyd George to investigate the coal industry, had concluded that ‘even upon the evidence already given, the present system of ownership and working in the coal industry stands condemned and some other system must be substituted for it, either nationalization or a method of unification by national purchase and/or by joint control.’ Within weeks of the 1945 General Election, the Coal Nationalization Bill was among the first of Labour’s radical legislative proposals to be introduced to Parliament.
After the hard, desperate years of the 1930s, power was at last in the miners’ hands and they seized it. Almost a tenth of the Parliamentary Labour Party were miners’ representatives – newly elected MPs who had worked underground, or in the industry’s affiliated unions. Many of them chose the passage of the Bill through the House of Commons as the moment to make their maiden speeches. And the moment for revenge. As the Bill went through its second and third readings, one by one they stood up to vent their bitterness at the coal owners’ historic stranglehold over the industry.
‘I was hewing in a Durham colliery as recently as June last year and my experience embraces almost every activity in and around a mine,’ Charles Grey, MP for Durham, began. ‘For years, they [the coal owners] have treated the miner abominably. Low wages, long hours, miserable compensation, bad conditions, wretched death benefits and virtual slavery were the lot of the miner.’
Speaking of his own experience, he said: ‘I have had the distressing and demoralizing effect of working for 6 shillings, sixpence ha’penny a day, and taking wages into a home which could not produce the minimum of necessities for a decent standard of existence. I recognized years ago that I was enmeshed in a vicious system designed for profit, in which the whole human element was subordinated to production for profit.’ Frank Fairhurst, MP for Oldham, had spoken before him. ‘I was born in the year of the 1892 strike. My father was a miner, and my four brothers were miners, so I know something of what it is to live in a mining home in a mining village,’ he told the House. ‘The history of coal mining is one of the blackest in existence and is a terrible indictment of the system under which we, in this country, have lived. It is saturated with the blood, swe
at and toil of the miners, and the drawn and pinched faces of women of past generations are imprinted on the industry.’ Recent history – the collective experience of Britain’s million miners in the bleak inter-war years – drew the most fire from the new intake of MPs: their abandonment by successive Governments, the 1926 coal strike, but above all else, the failure of the Sankey inquiry. ‘Instead of honouring the findings of the Commission,’ Fairhurst exclaimed angrily, ‘at the request of the coal owners, the Government of that time washed their hands of it and gave back control to 1,400 owners and 4,000 mineral royalty owners. There began a period of mismanagement, conflict and strife, with the resulting poverty, misery, depressed areas and depressed communities almost unparalleled.’ The time had come for the coal owners to atone for the misery they had inflicted: ‘Never again will the present mine owners have a chance to work the mines,’ Fairhurst vowed. ‘They will never be forgiven for what happened after 1926.’ Pointing at the Tory benches opposite, he accused them of being ‘poor nebulous-minded troglodytes and Rip Van Winkles’. So ‘vicious, concentrated and channellized’ had their ‘ideology on profits, privilege and power become’, he continued, ‘they cannot appreciate the fact their world is dying: and if the future is to live, then die it must.’
The Government met with little resistance from the Opposition. There was no sympathy for the coal owners. In the last years of the war, Britain’s coalmines had been under state control: the consensus was that the nationalization of the collieries was long overdue. The Tories’ chief concern was to ensure that the coal owners were properly compensated for the loss of their pits. On the Labour benches, the far left argued that the mines should be confiscated, with no compensation at all paid to the coal owners. ‘One would think, from the compensation they are expecting, that they had been guardian angels,’ one former miner said bitterly in the debate. ‘When I was taking home 30 shillings a week, I had quite another name than angels for them. I thought they wanted horns. I am not concerned about how much compensation they are to get. I think in terms of confiscation, and the less the owners get, the better I shall like it.’
This was the backdrop against which Peter was fighting to save Wentworth House. The Coal Nationalization Act was making its way through Parliament between January and May 1946: for months the fate of the house hung in the balance. Manny Shinwell, the senior Government official who had served the requisition order, was responsible for steering the legislation through the House of Commons. Shinwell was one of the ‘wild men of the Clyde’, a left-wing group of Glasgow Labour MPs returned in the General Election of 1922. President of the Maritime Workers’ Union – a ‘stormy petrel of trade unionism’, as a fellow socialist described him – Shinwell had been imprisoned for sedition in the George Square riots of January 1919. Born in 1884, the son of Jewish immigrants, he had grown up in a two-room flat in a tenement block in Glasgow, ‘a grim and squalid-looking building’, he later wrote, ‘on the banks of the Clyde’.
As a newly appointed Minister, Shinwell toed the Cabinet line during the passage of the Bill, concurring that the coal owners should be compensated for the loss of their pits, but his hatred of the ‘old brigade’, the men who had run the ‘foolish, callous, profit-hunting system’ which, as he believed, had operated in British industry before the war, was well known. In 1944, he had published a political pamphlet entitled When the Men Come Home in which he set out his vision of a post-war Britain: The ‘old brigade are busy’, he wrote.
They talk blandly of the necessity of returning to the pre-war economic set-up of this country, of the sanctity of the rights of private enterprise. All the old-time balderdash which since the beginning of Britain’s industrial power has been trotted out to support an unequal, wasteful and poverty-ridden social order is with us again. Are you going to be simple enough to swallow it? I hope not … We must plan in the interests of the community as a whole, stamping out with ruthless severity any attempt on the part of the ‘interests’ – landed, financial, industrial and the rest – to defeat the common will.
A supporter of the abolishment of hereditary titles, Shinwell, without naming him, had identified Peter Fitzwilliam as an example of the excesses of the ‘old brigade’. Midway through the war, Peter had made the headlines when he paid the highest recorded price for a horse at the Newmarket sales. ‘Surely you are not so dull,’ Shinwell appealed to his readers, ‘that you cannot appreciate that whatever misery you may have endured, everything is as it should be in a country where at the recent yearling sales at Newmarket a filly was sold for 8,000 guineas. This sum represents about forty years’ wages of what is commonly regarded as a well-paid workman. Need anything more be said?’
Peter was convinced that Manny Shinwell’s decision to mine the gardens and Park at Wentworth was vindictive. ‘It was the most ghastly period,’ remembered Joy Powlett-Smith, a cousin of Peter’s by marriage, who was living in Wentworth village in 1946. ‘It was the time of the rise of the Socialist Party. They were as red as hell and they were only down the road at Elsecar. There was a big contingent of them there. They didn’t mind drinking the Lord’s beer every year when he gave his party for all his tenants. It was an awful time. They sent this darn thing – a massive digger. Huge it was, as high as the village church, and they dug and dug. It was politically vicious. The impression we all had was that it was a vicious, spiteful act.’
It was the proposal to mine the formal gardens – a site directly behind the baroque West Front – that threatened to blight Went-worth House. The magnificent 300-year-old beech avenue that ran down the Long Terrace, the raised walkway along the western edge of the gardens, the pink shale path, with its dramatic floral rondels, together with ninety-nine acres of immaculately tended lawns, shrubbery and luxuriant herbaceous borders, were scheduled to be uprooted – scars to the landscape that would not heal in Peter’s generation. The overburden from the open-cast mining – top soil, mangled plants and pieces of rubble – was to be piled fifty feet high outside the main entrance to the West Front, the top of the mound directly level with Peter’s bedroom window and the guest rooms in the private apartments at the back of the house. Next to the tip, space was to be allocated for repair shops and machinery parks, as well as canteens and offices for the site workers.
Half a mile away, in Wentworth village, the locals had been living next to the noise and devastation wrought by the contractor’s excavator – a ninety-foot walking crane, called a Monaghan – for more than two years. Bert May lived in Church Drive, the lane that ran alongside the field where the first open-cast operations had begun. ‘Every time it scraped the floor it picked six tons up. The engine inside of that machine was as big as a submarine engine. It came right up to our railings, he could have put his bucket in our garden. It wasn’t towed, it could walk. It moved on steel plates. First time I saw it coming down the road towards me, it frightened me to death. It was like a dinosaur. He used to work all through the night – thump, thump, thump, thump. You could hear the bucket clanging as it swung round. If we got to sleep before he had his break at midnight, it were all right – otherwise it were awful, you barely slept. There were these powerful lights up on the gib. You could see the glare of them for miles. Then there was the dust. The muck he blew were awful. Great clouds of it everywhere day and night.’
Shinwell’s requisition order had come as a bolt from the blue. In the last years of the war, Peter had willingly sacrificed his Estate to the country’s need for coal. Between 1943 and 1945, more than a million tons had been mined from the fields outside the boundaries of the Park. Months before the end of the war, Major Lloyd George, Shinwell’s predecessor at the Ministry of Fuel and Power, had given Peter a guarantee that the Park and formal gardens would not be mined. Shinwell’s order was in breach of his promise: ‘An undertaking was given that further workings would not be contemplated except in a really desperate emergency. It is considered that this was never meant to apply to any other than a war emergency,’ Peter and his land agent, C
olonel Landon, complained vociferously to the new Minister in September 1945.
Shinwell claimed the coal under the Park and gardens at Wentworth was needed to keep Britain’s trains running. Arguing his case at a Cabinet meeting held at Downing Street on 24 January 1946, he said:
The total quantity of coal I desire to work on the Wentworth Estate is 371,000 tons, of which 220,000 tons is the good-quality Barnsley coal which is urgently required for the railways … The Barnsley coal I desire to work is equivalent to nearly three-quarters of a week’s requirements for the British railways. I have already reported the precarious position of railway stocks, and the losses suffered during the Christmas and New Year holidays have worsened it.
But, as Peter had argued in his letter to Shinwell, the Minister’s reasoning was illogical: ‘Coal cannot now be obtained in any quantity to relieve the necessity of what remains of the present winter. The coal position may be greatly improved before next winter, and if these workings were in the meantime carried out, it might well be found that the destruction had been wrought to no real purpose.’
Acting on his instinct that Shinwell’s requisition order was motivated by spite, Peter commissioned a group of mining engineers and geologists from the Department of Fuel Technology at Sheffield University to investigate the feasibility of the Minister’s proposal.
The team’s findings revealed that Shinwell’s plan to mine the garden site at Wentworth was deeply flawed. The coal, in the words of the experts from Sheffield, was ‘not worth the getting’. Far from being the ‘exceptionally good-quality coal … the fine South Yorkshire Hards suitable for firing locomotive boilers’ that Shinwell alleged, the geologists assessed after inspecting the site that it was ‘very poor stuff … reduced to very poor boiler slack by its nearness to the surface’. They also took issue with the Minister’s claim that the blasting operations would not damage the foundations of Wentworth House:
Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty Page 41