Black Diamonds (44 page)

The fireworks were spectacular. ‘
The setting
occupied several hundred yards along which dim diminutive figures hurried with torches,’ the
Sheffield Daily Telegraph
reported.

At the opposite end of the line, mythical jugglers began throwing up balls of fire to left and right in pastel shades of green, pink and pale blue, and then followed a fireworks boxing match that created unbounded amusement, rousing the hearty cheers of the crowds. Wonderfully realistic were the firework dovecotes, to and from which fiery pigeons winged their way across the Park. The finest art of the pyrotechnician was surely embodied in a remarkably life-like picture in fireworks of the personality of the day, Lord Milton. ‘A Fine Old English Gentleman’ played by the band was a fitting accompaniment. The most wonderful spectacle of all was the concluding number, an air and sea battle in which the attacking airship was brought down in flames.

The Elsecar Colliery Brass Band, stationed in front of the house, accompanied the display. Mendelssohn’s ‘Spring Song’, Romberg’s ‘Desert Song’, the ‘WaltzSong’ and selections from Gounod’s
Faust
were among the pieces of music chosen. When the display ended, the 40,000-strong crowd joined in singing the ‘Londonderry Air’ and ‘We Won’t Come Home Till Morning’.

‘
Ay, that party were a treat
,’ Ralph remembered. ‘Everyone had a good time. Too good. At end of the night, there were that many drunks, all laid out in the Park asleep. They were all over the grass. They fetched some horses and a flat cart and tipped them out on’t road outside the gates. It were middle of winter. A freezing cold night. There were one poor bloke from Jump – it were a Fitzbilly village – he went home after and sat on’t fire. He were that drunk. He made a right mess of hisself. He got some real burns.

When it were time for us to go home, me mother took us the long way round. On’t road, it were about a mile’s walk to Elsecar. It were too dangerous to go back through Wentworth though, there were that many drunks. We went out of the village past the vinegar stone – for keeping the plague away – and down across the fields along “Forty Stiles”. The woods by there were where the King’s Troops mustered in the Civil War. She took us all the way round. A couple of miles it were. Up in’t hills, on’t tops, we could see great bonfires burning. Up at Hoober Stand, Hoyland Low – all over the place, a big circle of them. They’d lit beacons in Lord Milton’s honour, all wired up with the wood properly placed so they’d burn.’

For Peter, the birthday celebrations were an ordeal.

The long day began at ten o’clock with a ceremonial tour of the district. Peter travelled with his mother and father in the front car in a fleet of yellow Rolls-Royces, the family’s house guests and his sisters following behind. The whole of the eight-mile route, via Rawmarsh, Greasbrough and Elsecar, was lined with people who had turned out to wave the Wentworth party on. In the villages, the streets were festooned with bunting, painted in the Fitzwilliam colours: the district was en fête, every employee enjoying a day’s paid holiday, plus a special birthday gift of a brand-new ten-shilling note.

The entire morning had been taken up with speeches and presentations at the opening ceremonies of the buildings and recreational grounds built to commemorate the coming of age. At every stop, Peter opened the proceedings by cutting a ribbon with a gold pocket-knife given to him by his father.

Geoff Steer, the former garden boy at Wentworth and the son of an Elsecar miner, remembered standing outside Market Hall on the main street in the village. ‘
There were a great gang of us
, hundreds crowding the street outside the hall, all waiting to see Lord Milton. The car pulled up and he went inside. And we waited. Waited for Lord Milton to come out. But he never did. He went out a side door at the back. He didn’t want to face us. He weren’t one for creeping.’

Reporting on the speeches and presentations, the newspapers described Peter as looking ‘awkward’ and ‘embarrassed’. It was Billy who stole the limelight. At the two collieries and at the chemical works, one after another, the officials and trades union leaders used the occasion to pay tribute to the Earl’s generosity in the difficult times. Speaking at New Stubbin pit, Mr Humphries, the secretary of the local branch of the Yorkshire Miners’ Association, thanked Billy on behalf of the men: ‘As a Trades Union Secretary, I do believe we have in Earl Fitzwilliam the finest idealistic employer in the country today,’ he said to long applause from the gathered miners. ‘He is a man with some humanity, a man within our hearts, and quite different from some members of the upper class. I appreciate him for the humanity and kindness he has shown to his people.’ Humphries was followed by Alderman Tomlinson, who echoed his sentiments. ‘We have had reports throughout the years of the generosity of the family. We have said, when things were very bad, that if this country had more employers of the character and calibre of Lord Fitzwilliam there would be better relationships between employers and employed, capital and labour.’
At Elsecar
, the message was the same: ‘The world is passing through a very troublous time,’ one of the pit officials said, speaking before a crowd of thousands of miners and their families.

To keep collieries going needs sacrifice if the workmen are not to suffer too greatly and Lord Fitzwilliam has made that sacrifice. He could have shut down Stubbin or Elsecar and still have got his quota out. He could have shut down the afternoon shift but there would have been a lot of men dismissed. He could have been better in pocket but he has not dismissed a single man. At the same time the work has been supplemented, and we have got the fullest benefits of the Unemployment Act. If he gave notice to half our men, it would be a dreadful thing for this district. I hope better times will soon be here and our pulley wheels will spin as in the former prosperous years.

Billy, confident, affable, his long speeches contrasting with his son’s muttered brevity, paid tribute to the miners in return. Looking back to his youth, when he had experienced working underground at Stubbin and Elsecar pits, he thanked them – as ‘a mining amateur’ – for having taught him everything that he knew. ‘Ever since,’ he told them, ‘it has always been my ambition to use the best machinery, the safest means: for safety to come first before profits.’ He spoke with pride of the fact that under his stewardship the number of miners employed at the family’s mines had increased from 700 to 3,600.

To Peter’s embarrassment – and to the amusement of the crowds – Billy recalled the first time he took Peter to the pit. ‘I remember when, wielding a tiny spade, a small bewildered boy dug a small hole in the ground. It is a long time since I brought Lord Milton to dig up the first sod which paved the way to the New Stubbin colliery. I thought at that time that if he digged [
sic
] in life as he did on that occasion, he would do well!’

As a local newspaper reporter transcribed, Billy closed his speech with a homily to his son:

There are two men
in the house now and one will have to turn out. It is not going to be me. He [Lord Milton] has to learn his job. You have given him a wonderful reception. You have given him the welcome which Yorkshiremen give to one another; a feeling that can only be learnt by experiencing it. I agree that games make a land, teaching patience, which makes Englishmen good in business, reasonable and unconquerable in war – and also in love. (Laughter) I hope he will not have as much war as I have had, and I hope that he learns the game with you. He has to realize that he belongs to a miner’s family, the same as we always intend to be. (Cheers) I have taught him all I can; you can teach him now. If he knows how to go into the grievances of the men with them as a man he will have nothing to fear in the future.

After the loud applause finally subsided, Peter stood up to speak. He had very little to say: ‘I am overwhelmed by the welcome you have given me,’ he began. ‘You have made me realize how you respect my father and I only hope I can follow in his footsteps. I hope times will get better, and that there will be a lot of smoke from our chimneys, for they say that where there is a lot of smoke there is prosperity. I wish you all the very best of luck.’

‘He made a short speech, then he left,’ Walt Hammond remembered. Walt and a group of young miners – Peter’s old friends from the Rawmarsh football team – had got up especially early to reserve a place at the front of the crowd. Standing a few yards from Peter, they had hoped to be able to congratulate him personally on his coming of age. ‘We never spoke to him. I never saw him again. He got married soon after. He went from us. He’d done with us then. Miss Olive Plunket, that were her name. She were a lady, well thought of she was. Don’t think he were a bloody angel, mind. If he were, he had two sets of wings.’

In April 1933, to the delight of the gossip columnists, Peter married Olive ‘Obby’ Plunket, thought to be one of the most beautiful debutantes of her generation. The younger daughter of the Right Reverend Benjamin Plunket, the Bishop of Meath, she too was hugely rich. Her father had recently inherited a Guinness fortune from his uncle, along with St Anne’s, an imposing mansion situated at the mouth of the River Liffey, overlooking Dublin Port. Newspaper editorials crooned at the ‘fortuitous alignment of these two great noble houses’.

Obby
was
beautiful. Slim and petite, she had coppery-blonde hair. Her eyes were mesmerizing, a startling aquamarine in colour. Warm-hearted and full of joie de vivre, with an adventurous spirit that Peter found attractive, she shared his main interests: horses and speed.
As a child
, growing up at the Bishop’s Court in Navan, one of her favourite games was to prance around pretending to be a horse. Nicknamed ‘hobby horse’ by her nanny, the name, shortened to ‘Obby’, had stuck. Like Peter, she was easily bored: friends of the couple recalled weekend house parties at Wentworth when the two of them would pace about, complaining how dull things were and wondering what to do next. Spur-of-the-moment trips would be organized, with the house party decamping by private plane to Le Touquet and Paris.

‘Grandpa didn’t want Peter to marry Obby. He didn’t approve of her,’ Lady Barbara Ricardo, Billy’s granddaughter, recalled. ‘He didn’t think it would work. I suppose my grandfather recognized Obby for what she was. She was always a bit of a flibbertigibbet. It was my grandmother who was so keen on her. She doted on Peter. Went along with whatever he wanted. If he wanted to marry Obby, she wanted him to.’

The wedding, at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, was the society wedding of the decade: the 800-strong guest list read like a volume of
Debrett’s
. Tens of thousands lined the five-mile route from St Anne’s to St Patrick’s: ‘At the west end of the Cathedral,’ the
Dublin Times
reported, ‘every window was crowded with heads and the roofs clustered as thickly as flypapers in summer.’

The bride wore a dress of ice-blue satin with a fourteen-foot train. Her tulle veil, tinted a delicate shade of blue to match her dress, fell in luxurious folds from a coronet of orange blossom. In her hand, she carried a bouquet of pale pink and creamy-white orchids that had been specially grown in the greenhouses at Went-worth and shipped to Dublin overnight. The twelve bridesmaids – all but three of them titled – wore diamanté-embroidered silk dresses in varying shades of St Patrick’s blue, each carrying a bouquet of yellow roses that had also been cultivated at Wentworth. When the service was over, it took ten minutes for the police to clear the crowds to enable the cars to leave for the reception. Three of the Fitzwilliams’ Rolls-Royces, bearing the family crest, had been shipped over from England to transport the bridal party.

A single event marred the day. En route from St Patrick’s to the reception at St Anne’s, the wedding cavalcade was held up by a funeral cortège. Peter and Obby’s car was forced to stop while the hearse passed directly in front of it. It was a bad omen: in Ireland, according to superstition, it meant the marriage was doomed.

Some days later, at Coollattin, the Fitzwilliams’ Irish estate, the portent appeared to come true. ‘
I was sitting
in the drawing-room at Coollattin with my mother and my sister,’ Lady Barbara remembered, ‘when suddenly, in walked Obby. We were all astonished to see her. Peter had left her in the middle of their honeymoon. He had gone off somewhere else.’

Barbara was thirteen at the time. Her mother, Elfrida – Peter’s sister – told her to leave the room. ‘I remember Obby was terribly upset. We were all frightfully shocked. What could she possibly be doing there, what could have happened? I was too young then to be allowed to know. I left the room, as my mother asked. It was obviously a matter for the grown-ups.’ Years later, when Barbara was older, her mother told her what had happened. ‘Obby was a Bishop’s daughter! Poor thing probably hadn’t been told anything much about sex. There was Peter. He had had all those girlfriends – some of them very experienced. It was probably not very interesting for him! He got bored and left. Poor Obby, I think she had a very grim time with him.’