Black Diamonds (18 page)

He was on his feet,
speaking not so much to the apprehensive faces around him, as to the miners themselves. He begged them to stay the havoc with which the country was confronted: he recited once again the efforts which had been made, how hopes had risen and hopes had been shattered. ‘We laboured hard,’ he said. He turned to the packed Labour benches. If their case for the five shillings and the two shillings was strong, would they not trust the district boards to provide these rates? Must the country be subjected to further hardship? ‘I speak under the stress of very strong feeling,’ he went on; and hesitating between words – he, who was always so impassive, so lucid – begged Parliament to pass the Bill. ‘We have exhausted all our powers of persuasion and argument and negotiation,’ he concluded, in low thick halting tones. ‘But we claim we have done our best in the public interest – with perfect fairness and impartiality.’ He stood there, struggling for words; and they would not come. The House watched him, fascinated and appalled: something was taking place before its eyes which not one of its members had ever expected to see.

The Prime Minister was weeping.

Asquith’s were tears of exhaustion and humiliation. For the first time since the English Civil War, the sanctity of Parliament had been breached: the miners, a non-elected body, had forced the Prime Minister to legislate. Further humiliation threatened. The Bill had failed to stipulate the amount of the minimum wage – the ‘fives and twos’ the miners demanded: it was possible that it would not persuade them to call off the strike.

Here was power indeed. At the height of her Imperial wealth and glory, and for the first time in her history, the miners had combined to bring Britain to her knees. Syndicalism, a continental movement the revolutionary socialist ideas of which had struck a chord in some industrial areas, was blamed. Lord Cecil, the son of the former Conservative Prime Minister, believed the strike posed a ‘profound danger to civilization’. It was ‘part of a great conspiracy’, an attempt, he said, to gain ‘dictatorial powers over the industries of this country by a small band of revolutionaries’.

At Downing Street, Herbert Asquith’s anxiety was echoed by his wife. In an entry in her diary, Margot confided, ‘
I was terribly harassed
by the living danger and for H’s anxiety over the strike.’ Out of desperation, in mid-March at the height of the strike, when her husband was deadlocked in heated negotiations with the miners’ trades union leaders – and behind his back – she endeavoured to arrange a secret meeting with Robert Smillie, the Vice-President of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain and a key figure in the negotiations. The day after meeting Smillie at a lunch party, hosted by the industrialist Sir George Askwith, Margot sent him a letter:

I was pleased to meet you yesterday. You will keep your promise of being at the Westminster Palace Hotel at 3.30 tomorrow, where I shall meet you. The big question I long to ask a man of your ability, sympathy, and possibly very painful experience is: What do you want? Do you want everyone to be equal in their material prosperity? Do you think quality of brain could be made equal if we had equal prosperity? Do you think in trying or even succeeding in making Human Nature equal in their bankbooks, they would also be equal in the sight of God and Man? Equal in motive, in unselfishness, in grandeur of character?

Margot concluded her letter with a plea: ‘I don’t like to see my husband suffer in his longing to be fair, just and kind to both sides in this tragic quarrel,’ she wrote. ‘Keep your blood warm. Don’t let it get cold. Use your great power for an honourable settlement. Destruction is a sad exchange for construction. Help my husband. He is a self-made man like yourself …’

Smillie reneged on his promise to meet her. Undeterred, she wrote again, imploring him:

I don’t see why anyone should know we have met. I am afraid I vexed you in my letter, which was written quite freely. (Perhaps you did not get my letter?) Do the masters and the miners live at your hotel? Do let us meet again. I don’t want to talk about the strike at all. It is only for the pleasure of discussing abstract ideas with a man whose temperament and views interest me. I am very sorry you have thrown me over. I’ve never been afraid of any individual, or any situation, or rumour, or gossip in my life; but can assure you that I would meet you at 3 Queen Anne’s Gate, Sir Edward Grey’s house, at 3.30. Even he need not know. I would just ask him if he would allow me to have private talk with a friend for 15 minutes. He would say ‘Yes’ and never even ask, nor would I tell anyone. If you won’t do this, do answer my letter.

Smillie does not appear to have answered either of Margot Asquith’s letters, yet the answers to the questions she sought were simple, expressed by John Cairns, a miner from Northumberland. ‘
Our men have been
under the thumbs of the masters from at least 1870 until now and our men are more refined than they were forty years ago,’ he said, ‘they desire better homes, better food, better clothing, better conditions.’

The core issue of the miners’ strike was wages, as it had been in the railwaymen’s, dockers’ and transport workers’ strikes that had preceded it. In the winter of 1912, the British working man was poorer than he had been in 1900. Between 1896 and 1910, food prices had risen by 25 per cent, causing the real level of wages to drop. In presenting the case for a minimum wage, George Barker, a trades union leader from South Wales, illustrated his argument using the example of the average miner whose nominal wage was 27 shillings
^*
for a six-day week living in a household of six. ‘He does not work full-time,’ Barker said,

there is the slack time, trade and general holidays to be taken into account, which will reduce the average from six days to five-and-a-half-per-week, and reduces his average wages from 27 shillings to 24 shillings 9 pence per week. Let us look now at the family budget, which will work out at something like this for a family of six persons. Rent 6 shillings per week, coal 1 shilling and 6 pence, fuel 1 shilling, clothing and footwear per week 5 shillings, club doctor and Federation per week 1 shilling, making a total of 14 shillings and 6 pence. This leaves 10sh and 3 pence per week for food to feed six persons for a week. Allowing a bare three meals per day, eighteen meals per week – 126 meals – with 123 pence to pay for them, or less than 1 pence per meal per head. Have we overstated the case? No; if anything it is understated. There are thousands in this movement that are existing for less than 1 pence per meal per head.

In the event, the miners did not, as the Prime Minister had feared, continue their strike. Reluctantly, divided over the fact that the Minimum Wage Bill had failed to stipulate the ‘fives and twos’, they returned to work at the beginning of April. The crisis had passed, but it left a profound feeling of unease. The miners had returned not just with a sense of grievance, but with a sense of power. They were not alone. The transport workers, the dockers and the railwaymen had come out before them: it was felt that it was simply a question of time before they joined forces to mount the final assault of a General Strike.

George V’s visit to Wentworth was triggered by the unprecedented industrial militancy that overshadowed the first twelve months of his reign; that it was a deliberately conceived public relations exercise designed to strengthen the position of his throne is suggested by an entry in the Archbishop of York’s diary. It was he who first thought of the idea while staying with the King and Queen at Balmoral. Intrigued, George V asked the Archbishop to submit a memo. He recorded its substance in his diary: ‘
I urged the importance
of his [the King’s] coming into contact with the masses of his people, that it was not enough that they should assemble in the streets on ceremonial occasions to see him, but that he might, so to say, go to see them – move about with as little ceremony as possible through their own towns, villages and workshops.’

Cosmo Gordon Lang, the Archbishop of York, was a member of the Edwardian ‘liberal’ establishment; he subscribed to its belief that society would have to be modified if its essential features were to be preserved. As a close personal friend and adviser to George V, it was this belief that motivated him to suggest that the King should alter his modus operandi too. As prelate in one of the great industrial dioceses, Gordon Lang was sensitive to the suffering of the working class. Presciently, on the eve of George V’s coronation, he addressed an audience in the Queen’s Hall. ‘
The nineteenth century,
’ he told them,

was concerned with the creation of wealth: the twentieth century will be concerned with its distribution. There is none of us, whatever may be his political views, who does not feel that this is a problem which needs adjusting. We cannot but be appalled by the contrast of increasing prosperity and great wealth and of great poverty, of increasing luxury and of great squalor … When I think of that great multitude of our working folk among whom I have laboured, whom I have learnt to revere, I cannot but see the picture of the monotony of toil which they are called upon to bear, of the uncertainty of employment which haunts them day by day, of the overcrowded houses in which we ask and expect them to rear British homes, of the mean streets from which every sign not only of the beauty of God’s earth but of the comforts and conveniences that are common to ours are shut out … Our best self in the contemplation of this inequality says that these things ought not to be.

In the weeks immediately following the coal strike, George V’s courtiers and advisers worked on the concept that Lang had outlined in his memo. The intention was to show the King’s subjects that he sympathized with the plight of the working man, with particular emphasis on the miner. Wentworth was the obvious base for the duration of the royal tour. The Fitzwilliam family had a track record, stretching back over a century, that showed their concern for the welfare of their employees; the house, situated close to Sheffield and in the heart of the South Yorkshire coalfield, was located in a major industrial area – and it was maintained in a style that was appropriate for the King and Queen. No other coal-owning family could match these criteria.

The tour was orchestrated with the precision of a military campaign.
Five-minute stops
were scheduled for maximum effect: at one, at Clifton Park outside Rotherham, the King was to meet a fourteen-year-old boy who had had both his legs amputated after a bout of scarlet fever. A pair of artificial limbs, to enable the boy to walk again, was sent ahead seven weeks in advance of the visit with a personal note from the King attached.

Billy Fitzwilliam’s brief as host of the royal tour was to show the King ‘three million of his working people’. On the afternoon of 8 July, the royal train pulled in at Doncaster station. On the fifteen-mile journey to Wentworth, along streets festooned with bunting and the cross of St George, tens of thousands from the pit villages en route turned out to greet the royal party. At Conisbrough Castle, where the King and Queen stopped for tea with the Earl and Countess of Yarborough, 7,000 miners lined the castle’s keep. Cosmo Gordon Lang was travelling in the King’s car. As the open Daimler approached Wentworth, it was held up outside Rotherham by a crowd of thousands more. In his diary, the Archbishop records overhearing the following conversation:

‘Na then, which is t’King?’
‘It’s little chap i’ the front wi’ a billycock hat.’
‘Nay, he ain’t seech a fine man as Teddy [King Edward VII].’
‘Well, anyway, he’s gotten him a fine oopstanding wife.’

At first, as Lang noted, the King and Queen ‘seemed to be somewhat disconcerted by such free remarks’, but as he described, the warmth of the welcome was overwhelming. On their arrival at Wentworth, 40,000 spectators were gathered in the Park. To the cheers of the huge crowd, the King and Queen descended from the royal car. Crossing the drive, they mounted the steps leading to the balcony beneath the portico from where they were to watch the assembled soldiers parade. As they did so, a lady-in-waiting bent down discreetly to remove a piece of pit shale from the pink drive that had caught in the Queen’s long skirt.

13

Some hours later at Wentworth, a servant rang the gong for dinner in the Pillared Hall. A single metal disc, the size of a manhole cover, it was mounted on a wooden frame. He rang it once, using a long drumstick with a large felt-cushioned tip. The noise was ear-splitting, ricocheting off the stone pillars to the Marble Salon above. A sixty-foot cube, the room was a perfect echo chamber: the marble walls and floors transmitted the sound to the farthest reaches of the house.

Below stairs, the servants had finished their dinner. The custom at Wentworth was for the staff to eat early. ‘
An army fights
on its stomach as they say,’ recalled Elfrida, Countess of Wharncliffe, Billy’s daughter. ‘They were much happier, they liked it much better than in some other houses where they had to wait until the dining-room dinner was over and they didn’t get their supper until 11 o’clock which I thought was disgraceful.’ Dinner in the Steward’s Room had been as formal an affair as the one that was about to take place upstairs. ‘There were six separate dining halls for the servants, depending on your place in the hierarchy,’ recalled Peter Diggle, the son of Colonel Heathcote Diggle, the manager of Billy Fitzwilliam’s estates. ‘The Steward’s Room was the top dining room, reserved for the Upper Ten. It was terribly smart. They sat on Chippendale chairs.’ The Upper Ten were the most senior servants in the hierarchy. They included the groom of the chambers, the housekeeper, the house steward, the butler, the under-butler, the head housemaid, the Fitzwilliams’ valets and ladies’ maids and those of their visiting guests. They dined in style: a footman served them at a table laid with fine china and glass; the men wore smoking jackets or evening dress, the women, long silk gowns. Precedence was strictly observed.