Black Diamonds (10 page)

It was Henry who chose the words inscribed on Milton’s tomb.

Fear not for I have redeemed thee,
I have called thee by thy name,
Thou art mine

(Isaiah 43)

In siding against Alice and his other brothers and sisters, Henry headed off a scandalous court case that would have damaged the Fitzwilliams’ reputation. Yet days after the old Earl was buried, he was caught up in the fallout from the family dispute that he had done his best to ensure would remain private. Incredibly, for a man who had just inherited the early-twentieth-century equivalent of more than £3 billion pounds, so great was Billy’s hatred of his Aunt Alice that he would spend the next two years disputing the ownership of a handful of worthless trinkets and a few ordinary tables and chairs.

On 15 March 1902, less than three weeks after his grandfather’s funeral, word reached Billy that his aunt had been ‘thieving’.

Alice had hedged her bets. She knew that if she failed in her bid to oust her nephew, when Billy succeeded to her father’s title and fortune, she would be turned out of Wentworth House. Furtively, in collusion with a number of her sisters and behind the rest of the family’s back, she had been preparing for that day for years. From early in 1896, Alice had systematically removed large quantities of furniture and other household goods from Wentworth and from Coollattin, the Fitzwilliams’ Estate in Ireland. The last wagonload of booty had been smuggled out under Billy’s nose: it had left Wentworth a few days after the old Earl died.

Billy was incensed when he was tipped off about the thefts. Not knowing what had been stolen, or where the ‘spoil’, as he called it, had been hidden, he instructed his solicitor, Mr Barker, to confront his Aunt Alice. Reporting back to Billy, Barker wrote:

I asked her to furnish
me with a statement, showing all the articles which have been removed from Wentworth and Coollattin since the 5th April 1896 with the date of removal and showing the various articles which are claimed by her and her sisters specifying in each case upon what circumstances such claim is founded. I spoke about the things which had been removed from Wentworth since the late Earl’s death and told her they should be returned and she has promised to ascertain what they were and where they are.

Alice refused to return the things. Nor would she reveal what had been removed. As Billy’s solicitor discovered, she had hidden her ‘spoil’ well. Scattered around London, it had been stored at numerous furniture warehouses, or deposited at ‘places of safekeeping’, as Alice termed them. These included the London and Westminster Bank, the department store Barkers of Kensington, Mr Muntz’s antique shop in Bond Street, and her sister Mary’s house in South Street.

Under pressure from Billy and his solicitors, Alice finally produced an inventory. It ran to twenty-three pages – a list of more than 1,000 items. In spite of their number, their total value amounted to no more than a few hundred pounds. An extract from the inventory shows that most of the articles taken from Wentworth were pieces of day-to-day household furniture:

Pink bedroom: Easel, dressing stool, bath and footstools, looking glass, cupboard, bed and bedding, small square zither table.

Sitting-room: 3 round tables, small square table, 3 common easels, carved wood bracket shelves, blue backed music stand, small easy chair, 3 small occasional chairs, rough drawing table, small round table with a centre leg, small book cupboard and a rush bottom stool; 2 silver gilt tea spoons in case, silver gilt inkstand, small brass standard lamp, a pair of velvet frames.

Billy carefully went through every page of the inventory, determined to challenge anything he could. Placing a tick beside the items he believed to be his, he insisted they should be returned.
Claim followed counter-claim
, as aunt and nephew fought each other for particular items. Alice was adamant that she had only removed things that had belonged to her, claiming that she had bought them, or that they had been given to her by her parents or by other members of the family. She had stored a sizeable number of items at 4 Grosvenor Square, the Fitzwilliams’ palatial London residence. Under the terms of the old Earl’s will, Alice and her sisters were bequeathed the right to live there for twelve months after his death. Billy did not have access to the house. Fearing that in the course of their remaining tenure his aunts would steal yet more of his inheritance, he asked his trustees to instruct Messrs Robinson, a firm of probate valuers, to take an inventory. Not only did they list the heirlooms – the usual practice when settling a large estate after a death – they itemized the entire contents of the house. Their inventory shows that even in the servants’ rooms they were meticulous to the last:

4th and 5th housemaid bedroom: coal scuttle and scoop, shovel, kettle, linen basket, poker, wire fireguard, paper basket, two brass beds, a hammer and a broom.

The argument between Billy and his aunt tore through the family, causing further bitterness and anger. Henry, as the executor of the old Earl’s will, was compelled to act as mediator: his integrity, his sense of fair play and his exasperation at the behaviour of his brothers and sisters – and theirs at his – emerge in his reply to a letter from his younger brother, Charles, who had asked him to go to London to mollify Alice.

Dear Charley
I am very sorry Alice is seedy. I don’t agree with you about my going up to London.

I want everything to be on a business footing, so far as
my business
is concerned. I am not inclined to go and talk soft meaningless nothings with people who think nothing of doing their best behind my back to blacken me in any way they can. What is necessary is that everything taken from Wentworth after Father’s death, without my knowledge, shall be returned, and that satisfactory evidence shall be shown as to the ownership of all the items in that enormous list of things claimed. No one wants Alice or anyone else not to have what belongs to them, but surely, in a case of this kind, common sense will say that the claims must be satisfactorily substantiated.

I write in plain terms to you; if I write a business letter to my sisters I am supposed to be a devil and a wretch.

After a year of wrangling, an impasse had been reached: at the expense of huge legal bills, many times more than the articles under dispute were worth, Billy instructed Mr Barker to obtain further details from Lady Alice as to precisely why she claimed certain items were hers. In a letter, the deadpan tone of which was as absurd – given Billy’s vast wealth – as the solicitor’s instructions, he duly reported back to the Earl’s secretary:

The inkstand and his reading glasses are said to have been given to Lady Alice by Mr Thomas Fitzwilliam. The brass standard lamp is said to have been given to Lady Alice by her sisters and others. The two silver open work Sardinieres (small oval), one silver basket, and the silver mounted claret jug are all stated to have been purchased by Lady Alice. As regards the six china handled knives, the handles are said to have been given to Lady Alice by the late Lady FW and she had the blades put in. The silver sugar basin (blue lining) and sugar sifter – this it is said was a Christmas present to Lady Alice from the late Lord Fitzwilliam given in the presence of Mr Charles Fitzwilliam and it is said that it is a copy of an original at Wentworth which Lord Fitzwilliam wished to give to Lady Alice, but which she refused. Silver cruet said to have been bought by Lady Alice.

After a year of passing endless marked-up lists to and fro, Billy’s solicitor’s patience had been tested to the limit. Barker closed his letter with the suggestion that the matter should be brought to a close:

The case set up
by Lady Alice seems to me to depend upon allegations of hers that such and such things were given to her by the late Lord and Lady FW and others.

How far these allegations are warranted I do not know, but my experience is that in cases of this kind such allegations are always far more easily made than refuted, and I suppose (as for instance in the case of the Christmas present said to have been made in the presence of Mr Charles Fitzwilliam) Lady Alice would, if the matter were ever adjudicated in Court, produce some evidence in support of her contention. Moreover the onus of disproving the allegations made would, I think, rest on Lord Fitzwilliam.

I know the intrinsic value of the articles in question is not the prevailing element in the matter as far as Lord Fitzwilliam is concerned, but it seems to me he must now decide whether he will acquiesce in the matter now put forward on the part of Lady Alice Fitzwilliam, or have the whole matter dealt with in a Court of law.

But as Mr Barker knew, the dispute had nothing to do with inkstands or sugar basins: it was about revenge, and the pursuit of a personal vendetta.

Ultimately, Billy decided not to pursue the matter in the courts. Nervous of the publicity a high-profile court case would attract, he had already exacted his revenge. Alice left Wentworth, her home since childhood, the day after her father’s funeral. She never went back. One of the first things Billy did on becoming the 7th Earl Fitzwilliam was to turf her out of the house. Approaching her mid-sixties, after decades of living in the grand style, Alice was compelled to eke out her days on a small estate in Berkshire. Such was Billy’s loathing for her that he did not even allow her to return to Wentworth to collect her things.

With 365 rooms at his disposal, Billy would spend tens of thousands of pounds refurbishing Wentworth over the course of the next seven years. In transforming his grandfather’s house, he was stamping his mark on it: after the rows and bitterness that had overshadowed his succession, at last it was truly his.

PART II

8

I don’t know who
my forebears were, for storied urns and animated busts are not in our family keeping. Our names are not preserved in ornate brass, and long stone effigies stiffly recumbent are not of us and our house.

We have no ancient banneroles: no antiquity of rags on poles; no ancient heraldry; no splendid armour of Castile.

No mediaeval parchment has our name, no cunning fingers traced our lineaments, or gave us awkward life upon the old-time screed. And yet we are not upstart here. Our roots are deeply driven in the earth; and all we are and all we have is of the soil – how intimately you who do not know the mine can never guess. Three hundred years and more my horny-handed forebears were wrestling with the coal.

Roger Dataller:
From a Pitman’s Notebook
, 1925

In the 1920s, ‘Roger Dataller’ – or Arthur Eaglestone, as his real name was – worked at New Stubbin colliery, one of the Fitzwilliams’ pits. Writing under a pseudonym for fear of losing his job, he was one of a number of miners to record the working conditions underground.

Coal, one of the most emotive subjects in twentieth-century British politics, lies at the heart of the story of the Fitzwilliam family. In the first decades of the century, within a thirty-mile radius of Wentworth House, there were more than 120 collieries, employing some 115,000 men.

In photographs from the period the miners are of similar stature, short, with broad shoulders, and chests out of kilter with the rest of their frame. Coalmining was in their blood. It had shaped their bones. They were the children and grandchildren of men and women who had started work in the mines as young as five years old.

For generations of miners, the pit had a magnetic, almost mystical draw. Writing of his childhood in the years before the First World War, Jim Bullock, a miner at Bowers Row, a colliery village near Castleford, remarked,

As kids we
used to dodge the watchman and sneak up to the shaft mouth, and sometimes we used to climb over the guard fence and look down into the inky blackness of the pit shaft. Then we would throw a stone over and listen to its descent into the very bowels of the earth. We used to come away from this daring adventure very subdued, awed by the fearsome depth and blackness and sheer size of it all. But these shafts still drew us back, time after time, with a sort of hypnotic compulsion. Practically every kid in the village had a relative mauled, broken, or killed by this pit, and yet we still played round it and we all knew as we grew up, no matter what we did, that some day it would claim us.

‘“Well, aye, aye”, as we broad Yorkshire people say – but the Pit will claim its own. Seventy-five per cent? Perhaps it may be more,’ another miner said.