Black Diamonds (46 page)

Early in 1943, Peter was recruited by SOE, the Special Operations Executive in charge of top-secret wartime operations. He was one of five officers handpicked to lead a highly dangerous mission in the North Sea. Code-named ‘Operation Bridford’, its objective was to secure desperately needed supplies of a small but essential aircraft part: tiny ball-bearings obtainable only in Sweden.

Three years earlier, the supply line had been cut when the Germans occupied Norway, gaining control of the Skagerrak, the narrow sea channel leading to Sweden’s ports. Unless the German blockade could be broken, Britain’s aircraft-assembly lines were at risk. A memo circulated by the Ministry of Aircraft Production at the end of 1942 spelt out in simple terms what a delivery of 100 tons of the ball-bearings would achieve: ‘
100 tons would be sufficient
to cover 75 per cent of the airframe work on 1,200 Lancasters and 60 per cent of the airframe work on 1,600 Mosquitos.’ Realistically, the Ministry of Aircraft Production calculated, 500 tons of the ball-bearings were needed.

Operation Bridford, devised by Sir George Binney, one of the founders of SOE, was a last-ditch attempt to break the German blockade. Dubbed the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ for his audacity, Binney proposed deploying five high-speed motor gunboats (MGBs), disguised as merchant shipping, to slip undetected – and under the noses of the Germans – through the Skagerrak to a remote inlet along the rocky Swedish coast where secret agents would be waiting to load the ships with a precious cargo of ball-bearings. Speed was of the essence; after a quick turnaround, the heavily laden ‘grey ladies’, as the boats became known, would steal out of the inlet to run the gauntlet of enemy shipping on the return journey back to their base at Immingham, a small fishing port on the Humber. ‘We have our traditions in
Nonsuch
, our aspirations in
Hopewell
, and our light-heartedness in
Gay Viking
and
Gay Corsair
,’ Binney wrote as the boats, each powered by three diesel engines, were being fitted up for their mission. ‘I have been groping to find a suitable name which would crystallize the steadfastness of our purpose. I think
Master Standfast
will do that.’

Peter, operating under the cover name ‘Peter Lawrence’ to save him from being singled out in case of capture, was assigned as Chief Officer to the
Hopewell
. ‘None of the family knew what Peter was doing. We weren’t supposed to know, it was secret,’ Barbara recalled. ‘We knew he was doing something hush-hush.

If my grandmother had known how dangerous it was, she would have been horrified.’

The Ministry of Transport had accepted responsibility for Operation Bridford on one condition: that the MGBs’ twenty-man crews – all volunteers – were fully aware of the level of risk.

It was a round trip of 1,000 miles to the pick-up point on the Skagerrak and back to the grey ladies’ base at Immingham. The window of opportunity was small: the boats, armed with machine guns and scuttling charges in case of capture, would sail on moonless winter nights when moderate weather conditions were exceptional in the northern latitudes of the North Sea. Their course lay across channels bristling with enemy shipping – and enemy aircraft. By day, they would use fog banks for concealment. By night, they would run with no lights, moving in diamond formation at an average speed of twenty knots, following the foaming phosphorescent wake of the boat ahead. German patrols on the lookout for blockade runners did not use lights either: the risk of collision was added to the likelihood of detection and perilous seas. With the exception of their speed and their shallow draughts – meaning the boats could glide through minefields with impunity – they were ill-equipped for their mission. They had not been designed to carry heavy loads; their powerful engines, early experiments in jetengine technology, were notoriously unreliable. Above all, they had not been built to endure the notorious storm-force conditions that could whip up on the North Sea.

Binney had mounted the operation once before: ‘Cabaret’, the code-name given to his previous attempt, had been a disaster. The crew had almost died, not under enemy fire, but from exhaustion and dehydration brought on by severe seasickness. ‘
Service with the Motor Gunboats
,’ Binney wrote in a top-secret report on the failure of Operation Cabaret,

is essentially a young man’s occupation owing to the exceptional physical strain and stress in rough weather. Experience with naval crews in Operation Cabaret opened our eyes to the fact that in any long spell of bad weather at sea one must expect at least half of the ship’s company (not excluding junior officers) to be completely ‘flaked out’, however good their sense of discipline under normal conditions. Fatigue induced sea-sickness – or vice versa – to the point of complete physical collapse.

The corkscrew motion produced by the triple-screw vessels was unlike anything the Royal Navy crews had experienced before. In the depths of winter, the seas in the northern latitudes were short and steep: the grey ladies’ ballast was poor – the motion they produced was different from the usual pitch and roll. Long and narrow – 117 feet in length with a ten-foot beam – the boats barely fitted between the troughs: to get into the succeeding trough, they had to leap over each oncoming wave. ‘
The boats didn’t
cut through water, they bounced,’ one crewman grimly recalled. ‘They were like corks,’ remembered another, ‘the motion was that bad.’

Tougher crews, Binney had concluded, were required for Operation Bridford. Jettisoning the Royal Navy crews, he recruited trawlermen from the docks at Grimsby and Hull. Hardened sailors, they were men who had grown up in the slum districts that fringed the harbours and whose sea legs had been formed in their early teens as ‘Deckie Learners’ on the fishing fleets that sailed in any weather beyond the coastal reaches of the North Sea. As conditions on board the MGBs proved, even they were not immune to sea-sickness. But they were at least inured to it. ‘There were three of us working below deck in the engine room,’ Irwin Jones, an able seaman on the
Gay Viking
, remembered. ‘The diesel fumes were sickening. You couldn’t eat a thing. If I’d been on that boat 100 days I couldn’t have ate nought. You couldn’t sleep when you were off watch, the motion was that bad. There was only one bloke out of all the boats who wasn’t sea sick. When the weather were rough, which it nearly always was, the rest of us were sick most of the way through the trip. You just had to work through it. We had a bucket each and a bottle of fruit juice cordial to take the taste away.’

Depending on the weather, it took a minimum of thirty-six hours to reach the pick-up point on the Skagerrak. ‘During many subsequent years at sea I never met crews so completely compatible, especially in such cramped conditions,’ one of the crewmen remembered. The living quarters on board the MGBs were primitive. Only the Captain had his own room: the rest of the eighteen-man crew were accommodated in the deckhouse below the bridge, a sparse room built of plywood measuring thirty-six feet by fourteen feet. To keep the weight of the boats to a minimum, it was devoid of comfort or decoration, the crews resting – rather than sleeping – when they were off watch in the rows of hammocks. A portrait of Churchill was one of the few ornaments allowed. It was a far cry from the luxuriousness and spaciousness of Britain’s biggest house.

‘
We were wary of him
to begin with,’ Able Seaman Jack Baron, who served on board the
Hopewell
with Peter, recalled. ‘We knew he was an Earl. You wouldn’t have thought anyone in his position would want to do anything like that. But he seemed to take it all in his stride. He came down to our level, he didn’t expect us to go up to his.’

‘I think he drove himself to do it,’ Barbara explained. ‘It was probably because so much was put on him as a boy – by his mother, his father, his four sisters expecting him to be frightfully good at everything. He had been so overprotected. It annoyed him. He wanted to escape. Being brave, doing something frightfully dangerous, was a way of escaping, of proving something to himself.’

Operation Bridford began on 26 October 1943. In the gathering gloom of a late autumn afternoon, the flotilla put to sea from Immingham, proceeding down the Humber in diamond formation. Wisps of blue diesel smoke trailed from the 3,000-horsepower engines: braced at low speed, they fired intermittently, like weapons, emitting a sudden, short, explosive sound. Half an hour after leaving the Humber Boom, the boats ran into thick fog, reducing visibility to less than half a cable. Rounding the Bull Light Vessel off Spurn Point, they steered northwards via the inner route for Flamborough Head. There, they executed a wide turn to starboard on to 030 degrees to pass through the cleared channel that would take them through the coastal minefield. Once through, pushing out a broad bow-wave, the boats increased speed to fifteen knots, shaping a north-easterly course for the Skagerrak.

The men who had recruited and trained the ninety-five crewmen – George Binney and his five Chief Officers, one of them Peter Fitzwilliam – stood on the bridges of the boats. ‘
They didn’t stand
on the quay and wave us goodbye,’ remembered one Able Seaman. ‘They came with us.’

At Wentworth, the clocks had stopped in the East Front. Along the miles of passages, in the state apartments, up in the North and South Towers and in ‘Bedlam’ and ‘The Village’ – the guest accommodation in the outer reaches of the house – a thousand hands told a different time.

Bracket clocks, carriage clocks, eight-day clocks, mantel clocks, long-case clocks, wall clocks – there were more clocks than there were rooms; a dazzling array of timepieces collected over the centuries. Housed in cases of polished wood, smooth and shiny as chocolate, or fashioned from gold and brass, their dials were carved from ebony and ormolu, or sculpted in painted enamel. Some showed the phases of the moon or Elysian scenes; others bore the sombre hallmarks of the Master Clockmakers of the North: Fletcher Brothers of Barnsley, Stott of Wakefield, Slater of Burslem. There were quarter-chiming clocks that rang carillons and clocks that struck only on the hour, their chime rods and strike hammers set to ring a named sequence of bells. Potsdam, Parsifal, Canterbury, Tennyson and Trinity – for hundreds of years the peal of the four-, five- and six-bell chimes had resonated in the labyrinth of rooms.

Now the Army had silenced them. With the East Wing under occupation, its rooms were out of bounds to the ‘clockman’, the servant employed by the Fitzwilliams to wind Wentworth’s clocks.

Dust sheets covered the furniture that remained in the Van Dyck Room. The Nanking vases, the eighteenth-century ormolu chandelier, the gilt marble-topped console table, inlaid with a lute border, had all been packed away. Grey metal filing cabinets – standard Army issue – stood haphazardly between the officers’ desks. The lack of symmetry in their arrangement was in pointed contrast to the perfect classical forms etched on the panelled ceiling above. Pale squares, defined by layers of coal dust that had settled over time, marked the spaces on the walls where the Fitzwilliams’ valuable collection of Van Dycks had hung. ‘
There was a family
superstition surrounding one of the Van Dycks,’ Lady Barbara Ricardo recalled. ‘It was the famous picture of the Earl of Strafford. The saying was that if his portrait was ever moved, the family would lose Wentworth.’

The Fitzwilliams’ estates had descended through the female line: ‘Black Tom Tyrant’, the notorious Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, was one of their ancestors. Chief adviser, trusted friend and confidant to Charles I, he was beheaded on Tower Hill in May 1641 when the King, under pressure from Parliament and the people, was forced to sign his death warrant. Wentworth was Strafford’s home: a fine Tudor mansion had once stood on the site of the Palladian house. The years following his execution had been the family’s darkest hour. Parliament, by an Act of Attainder, had confiscated Strafford’s honours and estates. It was not until Charles II came to the throne that the attainder was reversed.

In the portrait painted by Van Dyck in 1640, the Earl is shown with his secretary, Sir Philip Mainwaring, months before his impeachment for high treason. ‘Whoever names him without thinking of those harsh dark features, ennobled by their expression with more than the majesty of an antique Jupiter,’ Thomas Macaulay, the great nineteenth-century historian, felt moved to write after seeing the painting:

of that brow, that eye, that cheek, that lip, wherein, as in a chronicle, are written the events of many stormy and disastrous years, high enterprise accomplished, frightful dangers braved, power unsparingly exercised, suffering unshrinkingly borne; of that fixed look so full of severity, of mournful anxiety, of deep thought, of dauntless resolution, which seems at once to forbode and defy a terrible fate, as it lowers on us from the living canvas of Van Dyck.

The canvas – in defiance of family superstition – was moved in 1941.

Nemesis – when it came – did not come in the form of a German bullet. War was the making of Peter Fitzwilliam. In 1944 he was awarded a Distinguished Service Order for his courage after completing twelve missions on the MGBs. It came instead in the shape of Kathleen ‘Kick’ Kennedy, the sister of the future President of the United States.

Two dynasties: one ancient, one aspirant. Their meeting – in June 1946 – is not the starting-point, but a compass fix to which to return. The tragic prologue to their story leaps from the pages of Shakespeare: ‘Star-crossed lovers’, the ‘fearful passage of their death-marked love’ began before they ever met.

On 25 June 1943, an oppressively humid day, wearing a Red Cross uniform under her raincoat, loaded down with a gas mask, a tin helmet, a thirty-five-pound knapsack, a first-aid kit and a water flask strapped to her waist, Kick Kennedy boarded the
Queen Mary
in New York, bound for England.

30

‘
Mother
, you wouldn’t recognize this boat as the same one you made that comfortable luxury cruise on in 1936,’ Kick wrote excitedly to Rose Kennedy a few days into her voyage. ‘There are eight of us in a cabin and when I say on top of one another I do mean on top of one another! We didn’t leave New York until the following day at noon after nearly 18,000 troops had been packed in all over the ship. They are sleeping in the hallways, decks etc. It really is the most pathetic-looking sight in the world to see the way they are living.’