Black Diamonds (56 page)

Shinwell’s victory served notice on the raison d’être of Wentworth – the way of life that had been lived there for centuries. A grand house party could hardly be held on an industrial site, nor the hunt meet on a lawn that, as one local observed, would ‘resemble the fields of Passchendaele’. Among the miners, it left a bitter taste. Like Peter, they believed the desecration of Wentworth was an act of class hatred. ‘
Shinwell’s reaction
was, let him have it,’ Charles Booth recalled. ‘I was a trainee engineer at Elsecar at the time. I was one of the men who’d worked on the scheme to sink the drift mine. The Government wouldn’t hear of it. They had to desecrate the gardens. So desecrate them they did.’ The miners at the Fitzwilliams’ New Stubbin pit, as Ralph Boreham recalled, were of a similar view. ‘There were some at that time – the functionaries in the Labour Party, Communist types – as were saying, “Why should he [Earl Fitzwilliam] have all that and we’ve got nothing?” Idiots they were, powerful idiots. It were awful, I didn’t like it. I’ve never felt that way about nobody. Most of the men round here felt the same as me. That Estate were a beautiful place. We loved to see it as it were. We didn’t want to see it wrecked. Nationalization of the pits, that were different, mind. Time had come for that. It were right. But not the destruction of Wentworth House. There was some destruction. It all crumbled after that. It were spite, we reckoned. Simple as that.’

Maud Fitzwilliam was at Wentworth when the bulldozers turned up. ‘The brutes of contractors rushed in, two days before they were to start,’ she wrote to Lucia, Viscountess Galway,

mowing down shrubs, trees and specimen Rhododendrons of every kind, to say nothing of miles of every sort and kind of daffodils – things we had collected for years and the overburden is to be put 50 feet high in the gardens up to the gallery window. It is absolute vandalism, as the coal could have been got far better from below … they just would not listen – 10 feet of the spire of the church has already gone, and I should think the house is bound to crack. It is utterly heartbreaking.

At the eleventh hour, Peter decided he would rather give the house away than see it destroyed. Days after his meeting with the Prime Minister, he approached the National Trust to offer Wentworth to the nation. Some weeks later, James Lees-Milne and Lord Rosse, the National Trust’s representatives, travelled up from London to inspect the house and grounds. James Lees-Milne was both stunned and shocked by what he saw:

‘
It is certainly
the most enormous private house I have ever beheld,’ he noted in his diary.

I could not find my way about the interior and never once knew in what direction I was looking from a window. Strange to think that up until 1939 one man lived in the whole of it. All the contents are put away or stacked in heaps in a few rooms, the pictures taken out of their frames. The dirt is appalling. Everything is pitch black and the boles of the trees like thunder. To my surprise, the Park is not being worked for surface coal systematically, but in square patches here and there. One of these patches is the walled garden. Right up to the very wall of the Vanbrugh front every tree and shrub has been uprooted … Where the surface has been worked is waste chaos and, as Michael [Lord Rosse] said, far worse than anything he saw of French battlefields after D-Day. I was surprised too by the very high quality of the pre-Adam rooms and ceilings of Went-worth; by the amount of seventeenth-century work surviving; by the beautiful old wallpapers; and by the vast scale of the layout of the Park, with ornamental temples sometimes one-and-a-half miles or more away.

The National Trust was nervous of taking on a building which, potentially, faced imminent destruction: at Peter’s suggestion, it proposed to accept covenants over the Park and gardens to ring-fence the house from further mining operations. If these were in place, the negotiations for its transfer to the nation could proceed. But the last-minute rescue plan was quashed by the Government after the Ministry of Town and Country Planning intervened. Responding to a letter from one of the Trust’s officials seeking clarification as to whether, if the covenants were accepted, the open-cast mining would stop, a civil servant, on behalf of his Minister, warned the National Trust off. ‘It would be a great mistake for the Trust in this, or indeed, in any other case of threatened property where the owner still maintains a substantial interest, to accept covenants in the middle of a controversy as a means of protecting in effect, the owner, against what purports to be a public interest.’ Refusing to credit Peter’s decision to offer Wentworth to the nation at face value, the civil servant dismissed it as his ‘latest intrigue’, accusing him of ‘merely trying to preserve his own sovereignty and privacy against the public at large’.
Cautioning
the National Trust against accepting the covenants, he concluded, ‘A Covenant to preserve a thing of beauty that no one but the owner and his friends can see is not much public benefit.’ Once again, the Government, against the body of evidence, had persisted in Shinwell’s view that ‘claims made as to the enjoyment of the estate by the people’ were ‘exaggerated’.

Not wishing to ‘embarrass’ the Government by protesting against its decision, having failed to secure a guarantee that no further open-cast mining would be carried out, the National Trust’s Historic Buildings Committee voted to put the negotiations over the future of Wentworth House on hold.

The Whitehall vendetta continued; shortly after the National Trust rejected Peter’s offer, the Government served a second requisition order: this time, on the house itself. The Ministry of Health, so Peter was informed, proposed to take over the ‘greater part of Wentworth House for the housing of homeless industrial families’. The Park and formal gardens had been desecrated: the ‘seventeenth-century work’, ‘the beautiful old wallpapers’, the ‘high-quality’ mouldings and ceilings that James Lees-Milne had so admired, were unlikely to withstand such an assault from within.

It was Billy Fitzwilliam’s redoubtable sister, Lady Mabel Smith, who saved Wentworth House from the ‘industrial families’. Yet had Billy still been alive, he would rather have surrendered his home to the homeless than allow his sister to interfere in its fate.

‘Mabel was taboo at Wentworth when we were growing up. Absolutely taboo,’ Joyce Smith recalled of her aunt. ‘She was a rabid socialist. She didn’t get on with her brother at all. They hardly ever saw each other. She was horrified by Uncle Billy’s lifestyle at Wentworth. “He had so much and everyone else had so little” – that was her line. She was a bit of a crank about it, really. She had all these ideas about the equality of man. Uncle Billy would have run a mile rather than talk to her.’

Mabel, who was seventy-seven in 1947, had lived near Went-worth all her life. She was married to Joyce’s uncle, Colonel Mackenzie Smith, and her home was at Barnes Hall in Ecclesfield, a suburb of Sheffield. ‘
It was frightfully austere
,’ Joy Powlett-Smith, Joyce’s sister-in-law, remembered of a visit to the house in 1946. ‘It was a big place – about fourteen bedrooms, I’d say. Very exposed, up on the edge of the moors. It was horribly draughty. Mabel was very keen on “fresh air”. There were no coal fires, only portable gas fires. No carpets, just mats on the wooden floors, which were stained black. There was no electricity, only candlelight or gaslight. There was very little furniture: a few chairs, but hard, uncomfortable ones. The curtains, I remember, barely covered the length of the shutters. They were woven from untreated wool.’

Mabel was two years older than Billy. Part of their childhood had been spent at Hoober Hall, a house on the Fitzwilliam Estate a half a mile or so from Wentworth. It was here, when she was in her early teens, that Mabel’s social conscience was awakened. ‘I was very close to her,’ Joyce recalled. ‘She once told me what made her become a socialist. Every year, when she was a child, her mother gave a party for the village children from the schools near Hoober Hall. All the village children came. Well, of course they did, the Fitzwilliams owned and ran all the schools in those days. The children were invited for sports and Aunt Mabel and her brother and her sisters ran in these races. There was one village girl who was the same age as Mabel – she was twelve or thirteen – and they were great friends. One or other of them always won the race. One year this girl didn’t turn up and Mabel said, “Where’s Janie?” “Oh,” they said, “she’s left school now and gone into service. She won’t be coming any more.” Mabel was horrified to think that there she was being taught at home by her governess, and this, her little contemporary, had had to go into service. From that moment on, she told me, she made up her mind that she was going to get education for them all.’

A well-known and much-loved figure in the district, Mabel had been true to her promise. She had devoted her life to improving education in the pit villages in the West Riding, first as a local councillor, and then as a leading member of the board of the Workers’ Education Authority.

Early in 1947, after receiving the Ministry of Health’s requisition order, Peter asked his aunt for help. Despite – or possibly because of – his father’s antipathy they had always got on well. ‘
The funny thing was
,’ Joyce remembered, ‘Peter adored Mabel. She used to have these Christmas parties at Barnes Hall for all the cousins. I suppose Uncle Billy let him go because otherwise he would have felt left out, though I expect he thought he’d been contaminated when he came back!’

Mabel suggested turning Wentworth House into a school. In 1947, using her connections in the West Riding Education Authority, she persuaded the County Council to take it on a fifty-year, full-repairing lease. The Fitzwilliams were to be allowed to retain their private apartments in the West Front. Thanks to Lady Mabel, the house was to be converted into a training college for female PE teachers.

West Riding County Council signed the lease in September 1947. During the negotiations, the councillors made one stipulation: that Wentworth House should be renamed after Lady Mabel. It was to be called the Lady Mabel College of Physical Education. ‘It was a wonderful irony that the only Fitzwilliam to survive in the name of the place was Mabel,’ Joyce chuckled, ‘the person who had been so taboo in my Uncle Billy’s time. I was terribly pleased. I felt she’d come into her own. She’d been the only member of the family to have been of real public value.’

It was a huge relief to Peter. A specialist women-only teacher training college was a more palatable option than having the house overrun by scores of homeless families, and the County Council had guaranteed to pay its running costs and to repair any structural damage. Far from brooding over the loss of Wentworth and the coal inheritance he had grown up to expect, during the course of 1947, Peter threw himself into a variety of new business schemes.

He expanded his Stud Farm at Malton, the Fitzwilliams’ estate near York, and was hoping to secure the Coca-Cola franchise for the North of England. He was also negotiating with the Ministry of Food and Agriculture to import groundnuts from Africa. He hoped to convince the Ministry that, with the strict rationing in force, groundnuts, high in calories and protein, offered a nutritious supplement to the meagre post-war diet.

As James Lees-Milne, the National Trust official, was leaving Wentworth House, he was introduced to Obby Fitzwilliam, Peter’s wife. ‘
Lady Fitzwilliam
in a pair of slacks, rather dumpy and awkward, came downstairs for a word just before we left,’ he noted in his diary. ‘I fancy she is not very sensitive to the tragedy of it all.’

It was not that Obby was insensitive to the tragedy of Wentworth; a greater personal tragedy was unfolding. The war had imposed separate lives on Peter and Obby, placing a further strain on their heirless marriage. While Peter was serving with SOE, Obby had worked in a factory near Slough making parts for fighter aeroplanes. By the close of 1947, their marriage had fallen apart. ‘I think my mother was philosophical about my father’s temporary amours, realizing that (presumably until Kick Kennedy) they were not important,’ Juliet, their daughter recalled. ‘No other man really mattered to her, that I do know.’

Among the skeleton staff that remained at Wentworth, the rumours spread. ‘There were a lot of talk up at the house. They all talked. They said he was going to have a divorce.’

34

A thunderstorm
, the worst for as long as anyone could remember, was raging over the Ardèche, a mountainous region some fifty miles north of Avignon in southern France. It was late afternoon on 13 May 1948. Paul Petit, a farmer, would normally have been out on the slopes with his animals, but the violence of the storm was so great that he was resigned to staying at home. His farmhouse, a crumbling medieval building constructed from red stone, was situated a few hundred yards below the peak of Le Coran. He lived alone: in the rugged, desolate country, aside from his brother and his father, there were no other neighbours for miles around.

Gale-force winds, and hailstones the size of a two-pound coin, had battered the house for some hours. At about 5.30 p.m., Paul thought he heard the high-pitched scream of racing engines. Rushing outside, he watched in horror as a light aircraft shot out of the cloud base and disintegrated in mid-air, the pieces of the plane spiralling into a ravine on the mountainside opposite.

In the driving rain, running as fast as he could, Paul set off along the slippery stone trail that snaked its way to his father’s house to fetch help.

It took the two men three-quarters of an hour to find the wreckage. They struggled through the undergrowth, up the steep, heavily wooded slope where Paul had seen the plane crash, with torrents of water, running down from the mountain above, making the climb harder. They came across the starboard engine first: located near the bottom of the slope, it was twisted beyond recognition. Eighty yards further up, they found the petrol tank; 100 yards above it, the fuselage of the plane, resting on a narrow ridge. The starboard wing was missing, the cockpit flattened from top to bottom: the passenger compartment had been torn open by the rocks when it hit the ground.