Black Diamonds (22 page)

Both the King and the Queen were visibly shocked by what the miners and pit officials told them. When the Queen emerged from the pit office she was in tears. Later that evening, Lady Mary Fitzwilliam, one of the guests at Wentworth, wrote in her diary, ‘Today the deep shadow was cast over us all of the awful mine explosions at Cadeby mine near Conisbrough: so many killed. After their heavy day’s work was over the King and Queen started again for Cadeby to see the poor people and to show their deep sympathy. It has really saddened us all – one could see how the Queen had cried.’ The miners and their families were touched by the King and Queen’s visit. The local paper described the scene as the royal car drove away from Denaby.

Their obvious sympathy with the sufferers had a remarkable effect upon the spectators, many of whom, as the Royal party left the village, involuntarily burst into cheers which, although somewhat misplaced, denoted their warm appreciation of the kindliness which had prompted the King and Queen to visit the stricken village. Their visit touched the hearts of the villagers and women sobbed aloud as they drove away.

Lord Halifax at nearby Hickleton Hall was more cynical. Mindful of the impact of the disaster in terms of the King and Queen’s public relations, he wrote in a letter to a friend,

Their visit to the pit after the explosion has done a quite untold good. They, the miners and all the people, were much impressed by the King going down the pit in the afternoon after the accident in the morning. And I am told the women were so moved when the King and Queen came to the scene of the accident in the evening and spoke themselves to the miners that they were ready to go down on their knees and kiss the Queen’s feet.

For two days – night and day – the women of Denaby kept vigil at the pit. They refused to leave until the bodies had left the Pay Station, the makeshift morgue. Fifty still remained, waiting to be identified – and waiting for coffins. The undertakers in the district had run out: their stock had been filled by the first batch of dead. On the Wednesday, the day after the explosions, the Coroner visited the Pay Station:

A horrible sight
met my gaze. There outstretched on the tables were the bodies of the victims, each tenderly covered with a white cloth. The first I saw was the body of a fine muscular man. His face was bronzed, and he seemed to be asleep. The next was a body, the face of which was almost beyond recognition. The poor fellow must have met an awful death. There were several others in a similar state, whilst one man, I shall never forget him, had no legs at all. His clogs were lying underneath the table. And so I proceeded viewing the mangled frames of men – men who had died doing their duty.

The disaster had created sixty-one widows, and left 132 children fatherless. There were no death benefits at Cadeby Main colliery: the management made no provision for a miner’s family in the event of his accidental death underground. The widows’ housing was tied to the colliery: the loss of their husbands meant the loss of the roof over their heads. For the majority, the future now depended on private donations and parish relief. In the coming months, people gave generously, not only from the district, but from all over the country. But still the bereaved families were left to subsist on a pittance – 5 shillings for each widow, and 1 shilling for every child under fourteen.
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The night before Denaby buried her dead, Billy Fitzwilliam held a party in the Park at Wentworth. It had been planned as a celebration to mark the end of the King and Queen’s visit. With the morning’s burials pending, it became a wake.

It was a beautiful summer’s night. The sweet smell from the mounds of grass that had been cut, ready for haymaking, drifted across the Park from the surrounding fields. Twenty-five thousand people were gathered in front of the house, stretching as far as the eye could see. They had come from all over the district. On the high balcony, beneath the portico, the King and Queen sat facing the crowd in the middle of the row of house guests. To their right, on a raised crescent-shaped platform, the Sheffield Symphony Orchestra, hired by Billy specially for the occasion, and 300 choristers, dressed in white, waited for the light to fall. When the sun had almost set, the choir began to sing. Their voices were drowned by the crowd joining in:

When Britain first, at heaven’s command,
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sang this strain:
Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves.
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.

‘It Comes from the Misty Ages’, the chorus from Elgar’s
Banner of St George
, followed.

Dusk had fallen. The recital ended with Handel’s
Messiah
. As the choir sang the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus, 600 miners, bearing flaming torches and walking four abreast, appeared beneath the North and South Towers that marked each end of the house. The miners worked at Billy Fitzwilliam’s pits. Parading in, with great precision, swinging round in front of the King and Queen, they executed two figures of the Lancers, including the grand chain. The crowd pressed forward into the light cast by their torches. When the music stopped, George V stood up, gesturing to them to come closer. ‘
My friends,
’ he shouted, ‘the Queen and I are very glad to meet so many miners from this district here tonight, and I wish to tell you how delighted we have been with the beautiful torchlight procession and the excellent singing of the choir. It has been a great pleasure to us to visit your homes and see you at your daily work. We are deeply touched by the enthusiastic reception given to us wherever we have been during the past four days – a reception which we shall never forget and which has made us feel that we are amongst true friends.’ The crowd cheered. ‘One shadow,’ the King continued, ‘and a very dark one has, alas, been cast over the joy and brightness of our visit to the West Riding by the terrible disaster at Cadeby, in which so many brave men lost their lives; I am sure that you know that the Queen and I feel deeply for those who mourn for their dear ones. Again we thank you most sincerely for your hearty welcome, and we wish you goodnight and good luck.’

For the moment the neighbourhood was united in grief. The anger and retribution would come two months later when the Government launched an official investigation into the disaster.

The explosions at Cadeby Main could have been avoided. The inquiry found that the union officials were right to accuse the pit management of having sacrificed the lives of the victims on the ‘altar of output’. South District, where the explosions had occurred, was – so the investigation revealed – particularly prone to gobfires. A fire had broken out two nights before the disaster. The Inspector of Mines concluded that the pit manager, Mr Chambers, should have withdrawn the miners from that district until the gobfire had been made safe. His failure to do so, after it was first reported, meant that the miners working the night shift on 8 July had been placed in ‘grave and unnecessary danger’.

There was no question of the pit manager being prosecuted. Health and safety legislation in the days before the Great War was minimal: broadly, safety issues were left to the discretion of the manager of the individual pit. At the inquiry into the disaster, with the final death toll standing at ninety-three, Mr Chambers gave a series of monosyllabic replies in answer to the investigator’s questions. He showed no remorse:

‘
Mr Chambers,
you said that if these men were withdrawn you would have a pit of gobfires and nothing else?’

‘Yes.’

‘That means you would not get any output, is that it?’

‘That is so.’

‘Would there not be great consideration expected to be given to the men more than to the output?’

‘If you have to have a pit at all you must have men down.’

For managers like Mr Chambers – and there were many like him – the high injury and death toll among miners was simply a way of life. Almost 2,000 miners had been killed and 160,000 injured in 1911. In the pursuit of profits, the men were expendable.

But the tragedy at Cadeby Main, covered extensively in the national Press, had raised the political stakes. Editorials appeared, pointing to the glaring injustice in the coalmining industry. In the
Yorkshire Post
, one of the most widely read northern newspapers, the following challenge was posed:

Every ton of coal represents so much in money to an idle royalty owner or drawer of fat wayleaves who does nothing: it represents so much in money to the capitalist who has put brains into the concern as well as gold; it represents so much money to the collier and – so much life. An arithmetician could calculate for you in terms of gold, silver, copper, blood, bone and breath the value to a decimal fraction of each ton of black diamonds that comes to the surface … For every 137,000 tons of coal one collier is killed, and the question is ought not this killing part of the trade be extended to the royalty owners and the mine-owners?

The King and Queen left Wentworth on the morning of Friday 12 July. The Archbishop of York, the man who had thought up the idea of a Royal Tour of the North, sent a letter to his mother a few days later: ‘
All my hopes,
’ he wrote, ‘have been more than fulfilled. I can testify to the delight of the people on seeing him and Queen Mary in the midst of them in their own familiar surroundings. I feel sure that these tours did much to create and sustain their sense that he belonged to them and they to him in a very human and personal way.’

On his return to Buckingham Palace, the King sent a thank-you letter – written in his own hand – to Billy Fitzwilliam:

My dear Fitzwilliam
I send you these few lines to repeat how greatly the Queen and I appreciated the very kind hospitality shown to us by you and Lady Fitzwilliam during our charming stay at Wentworth. Our visit to the West Riding was a new experience to us and if I may say so a most successful one and chiefly due to the admirable arrangements which you made and carried out. We shall never forget the splendid reception given to us by the thousands of people we saw during those few days wherever we went. I was very glad to have been able to see so many miners and their families and was especially interested in going down the Elsecar Mine; the different mills and factories which we visited were also most interesting and gave us an insight into the daily life of the people which we were so anxious to get.

Lady Fitzwilliam and you made us most comfortable in your beautiful house and the Queen and I wish once more to express to you both our warmest thanks for all your kindness.

The heat here for the last three days has been very great. I am glad we were spared that last week.

Believe me, very sincerely yours, George R.I. [Rex Imperator]

The Cadeby disaster had overshadowed the royal visit. Yet in the King’s letter to Billy Fitzwilliam, it was as if it had never happened. The Queen, in a brief letter to the Archbishop of York, did not mention the disaster either: ‘I am delighted,’ she wrote, ‘to hear that our visit to the West Riding was so much appreciated and I hope it will do permanent good. We were intensely interested in everything we saw and are gratified by our kind welcome from all classes. Believe me, yours very sincerely – Mary.’

In 1914, the class war that had threatened to erupt in the early years of George V’s reign would be forgotten as the country united behind the war against Germany.

15

Within days of the outbreak of war, the front lawn at Wentworth was transformed into a troop training ground.

Two batteries of the Royal Horse Artillery – 400 men and forty-eight gun carriages – thundered and rattled up and down the length of the great house. The soldiers were stylishly turned out. Wearing black gold-frogged jackets fitted tightly at the waist, they sported plumed shako caps: these were the Wentworth batteries, personally raised by Billy from his farms, factories and pits. He had equipped the men out of his own pocket, spending thousands of pounds on their uniforms and their mounts: the finest hunters in the county.

In that sweltering summer of 1914, as Commanding Officer of the Wentworth Batteries, Billy prepared his troops for battle. At his instigation, they were among the first to use motorized artillery. Motor-cars were one of Billy’s main interests. Since 1905, he had bankrolled the manufacture of the Sheffield Simplex, a luxury touring vehicle intended to rival the Rolls-Royce. At the outbreak of war, he ordered a fleet of them to be driven over to Wentworth from his factory at Sheffield. After a morning spent practising traditional gun drills and manoeuvres on the lawn in front of the house, the men dismounted to the open-top cars. Criss-crossing the roads through the Park, they progressed in single-column cavalcades, gun-carriages in tow. There was space for four gunners in each of the cars: standing smartly to attention, two stood in the front, and two at the back. Within months, barbed wire and trench warfare would render these specialized drills obsolete.

Billy would not see the war out with his men. In the autumn of 1914 he was called up to serve on the General Staff in Flanders as Assistant Director of Transport. In the last days of October, the outdoor servants and the household staff assembled on the steps beneath the great portico at Wentworth to wave him off and wish him luck.

Ninety miles south, at Milton Hall, near Peterborough, a palatial Elizabethan mansion owned by the Fitzwilliams for 400 years, a drama was about to be played out which would prove of far more significance to the family’s destiny than events on the international stage.

16

3 November 1914. The ninety-second day of the war. King’s Cross railway station was teeming with armies on the march. Khaki columns snaked through the crowds, NCOs and orderlies jostling alongside, frantically counting heads and ticking off the long lists of men and supplies. Clad in sober dress, the troops marched in silence: their cornets, tubas and drums had been left behind.