Black Diamonds (43 page)

Ridiculing the idle was not exclusive to the Fitzwilliams’ villages; it happened in every pit village in the West Riding. Jim Bullock, from Bowers Row colliery, remembered one miner known as ‘Lazy Bill’. He wrote:

I could give you his last name, but for the sake of his relatives, I will not. Lazy Bill used to spend more time talking than working, always talking about the wonderful dreams he had. His workmates got completely fed up with him, and the manager got so tired of hearing complaints that he finally sent for Bill to come to his office and sacked him. Now he had a large family, because he had never been idle in that way, but in those days there were no relief benefits, no Social Security. The stark reality of his being sacked had to be faced by his wife.

To make ends meet, as Jim recalled, she resorted to taking in washing and ironing and doing housework for the neighbours. ‘I have never seen anyone get as low as she did. She went about looking miserable,’ he remembered, ‘without interest in herself or anything else.’

The ultimate fate of Lazy Bill was a story told and retold in Jim’s village; a salutary tale for would-be shirkers.

One day
, just at the top of our street, Lazy Bill was knocked down by a bicycle and killed. They put him on an old door, one which was laid against the fences. When they took him in his wife was getting the tea ready for the kids, and she did not show the slightest bit of emotion. Years ago some wit wrote – and it was quoted quite often then:

They brought him home dead on a shutter,
But she just kept on cutting bread and spreading the butter.

This was not the end of Lazy Bill’s story. His wife was so fed up with him that she expressed the wish to have him cremated, because she did not want the bother of tending his grave and she could not afford a headstone. She was not going to walk down to the churchyard to take him flowers, because he just was not worth it. The subscription towards the cremation was the first we had in the village, but the thing the villagers could not understand was the widow’s one request. This came when she was asked what she wanted the authorities to do with the ashes: ‘I want them, I’m taking them home,’ she said.

The neighbours soon found out the reason for this strange request. She put his ashes in an egg-timer, stood back and looked in real satisfaction as she said to the neighbours, ‘There now, I’ve got him just where I want him. He’s never worked for me. He’s never worked for the kids while he was alive, but I’ll make sure he’ll work for us now he’s dead, because every time I boil an egg, he’ll have to work in that egg-timer, and he won’t do any grumbling either.’

In the slump years of the early 1930s, Billy Fitzwilliam, at considerable cost to himself, saved his miners from the humiliation of long-term unemployment. At the start of 1931, to artificially maintain the prices, quotas had been set to limit the amount of coal each colliery could produce. Billy could easily have met his weekly quota by shutting down one of his pits; instead, to save the men’s jobs, he kept both pits open by operating them on alternate weeks.

In the weeks they were not working the men at New Stubbin and Elsecar were entitled to claim the dole. In order to qualify for unemployment benefit, a miner had to lose three days’ work in every six. Working the collieries one week on, one week off, was an enlightened strategy on Billy’s part, one that was in marked contrast to a number of other coal owners. In some mining regions, the bitterness and bad feeling generated by the 1926 Strike had continued: out of spite, to deprive the miners of the dole, the coal owners were operating their collieries on a four-day week, with the result that, in some areas, the miners were worse off for working. B. L. Coombes, who worked at a pit in the Brecknock Beacons in Wales, described this practice:

I remember
we were working only four turns every week for over six months, and yet not once getting eligible for the dole during that period, because we had to lose three in six to get paid. Often it was very difficult for the company to work the fourth shift, but they did so, and the men worked that shift at a loss, because had they not worked it, they would have qualified for three days’ dole. My feelings were not very pleasant when I had to go to work for eight shillings and I would have had fourteen and sixpence – three days’ dole – if we had not worked that night, while we knew that the colliery was bound to be idle again before many days. All that spring and summer I was working, but was not a penny better off than if I had been on the dole.

The human cost of the misery inflicted by the Great Depression was hard to measure; but by the summer of 1931, its impact on the Exchequer was all too calculable. On 11 July, Clive Wigram, George V’s Private Secretary, who, twenty years earlier, had accompanied him on his visit to Wentworth, wrote a stark letter to the King: ‘We are sitting on the top of a volcano, and the curious thing is the Press and the City have not really understood the critical situation. The Governor of the Bank of England is very pessimistic and depressed.’

The eruption came exactly one month later. On 11 August there was a dramatic run on the pound as foreign investors scrambled to remove their money from the City of London. Ramsay Mac-Donald’s Government was already grappling with a deficit in the forthcoming autumn budget; the flight from sterling threw it into crisis.
Interrupting his holiday
, the Prime Minister returned to Downing Street where he was met by a committee of bankers. Britain, they told him, ‘stood on the edge of the precipice’.

‘Deficit’ had been the political catchphrase of the preceding months. Earlier in the summer, two committees, the first headed by MacDonald’s former Lord Advocate Harold Macmillan, the second under the chairmanship of the eminent financier Sir George May, had concluded their reports. Macmillan’s focused attention on Britain’s balance of payments with the rest of the world. Hitherto, it had been assumed that the country lived by trade, exporting manufactured goods and raw materials which paid for the foodstuffs and other imports that came in. In fact, Britain’s trading account had not shown a credit balance since 1822. It was the ‘Invisibles’ – shipping and banking – that had always put the balance right. These were the very things that had been hit by the global Depression: receipts from shipping were £50 million less in 1931 than in 1929, and the return from foreign investment £70 million less. In the same period, the volume of Britain’s exports had almost halved. Macmillan’s report emphasized this decline; when May’s report was published, alarm intensified. Owing to the Depression, the yield from taxes had gone down, whereas expenditure – specifically on unemployment benefit – had rocketed. May’s report identified an immediate budget deficit of £120 million. It recommended that £24 million of this deficit should be met by increasing taxation: the remaining £94 million should be met by slashing unemployment benefit.

Faced with the flight from sterling, on 12 August MacDonald summoned his Cabinet to Downing Street. One way of propping up the pound was to secure loans in Paris and New York. But foreign bankers were unwilling to lend the Government money unless the budget deficit was resolved. Forced into a corner, the Prime Minister proposed cutting unemployment benefit by 10 per cent – a cut that nine members of the Cabinet were not prepared to make. As the country’s gold and currency reserves continued to drain away, the Government collapsed. On the evening of 23 August, MacDonald went to Buckingham Palace to hand in his resignation to the King.

Once again, labour – the impoverished working class in Britain’s old industries, a large percentage of them miners – was being asked to bear the cost of capital’s mistakes.

Historians would condemn the crisis of the summer of 1931 as the ‘bankers’ ramp’. The flight from sterling on 11 August was not precipitated by the budget deficit – the millions being paid out in unemployment benefit – but by the speculative activities of London’s bankers.

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.’