Black Diamonds (26 page)

In the five years of war on the Western Front, five out of every nine in the Army were killed, missing or wounded. The question that preoccupied Haig and the heads of British Intelligence throughout 1919 was whether something else had been lost in the carnage. Lord Annan, writing in his memoirs,
Our Age
, described the ‘ideal’ of an Englishman, one that he and his contemporaries had been taught to admire as children in the years before the First World War. ‘It went back to the eighteenth century’, he wrote. ‘Wellington embodied it, Waterloo exhibited it. According to this code an Englishman should be guided by an overpowering sense of civic duty and diligence. Every man’s first loyalty should be to the country of his birth and the institution in which he served. Loyalty to the institutions came before loyalty to people. Individuals should sacrifice their careers, their family, and certainly their personal happiness or whims, to the regiment, the college, the school, the services, the ministry, the profession or the firm.’

In 1919, Britain’s intelligence chiefs believed that the old prewar loyalties had been buried in the Flanders mud. That summer, Sir Basil Thomson, Head of the Intelligence Section at the Home Office, called on Haig to ask his permission to use officers in British Army units as government informers in order to obtain forewarning of ‘internal unrest’. Haig refused. ‘I said that I would not authorize any men being used as spies,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Officers must act straightforwardly and as Englishmen. Espionage amongst our own men is hateful to us army men.’

Hateful also to Haig was the thought of having to use troops in the suppression of civil disorder. ‘
It is not their duty
to act as policemen,’ he had argued with the hawks at the Home Office. As he stood with Billy Fitzwilliam watching the men gathering on the borders of the lawn at Wentworth, there were five days to go until 31 January, when he was due to leave his post as Commander-in-Chief of the Home Forces. The likelihood, as it had seemed throughout 1919, of being driven to employ force against some of the very men who had fought for him in France was one of the main reasons behind his willingness to relinquish his command. There were 10,000 miners massed around Wentworth House; might this be his own eleventh hour, a hideous postscript to the victory he had won in 1918 at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month?

In the scores of pit villages that ringed the house, and in coalmining regions across Britain, the rumble of revolution had been loudest of all.

Colonel Mitchell, a landowner in Wath, a village a few miles from Wentworth, railing against the popularity of the ‘Bolshevik anthem’, ‘the Red Flag’, observed in a letter to the local newspaper, ‘Chatter about revolution is becoming so respectable now-a-days that nobody feels very much shocked or annoyed at hearing this rather mournful ditty sung.’

The lifting of wartime financial controls had caused a sharp escalation in the cost of living; in the course of the year, prices had doubled from pre-war levels, placing a strain on family budgets. The rash of strikes that had broken out in the country’s biggest industries – textiles, shipping and among railway workers – were primarily disputes over wages: once wage increases had been agreed, the disputes had been quickly settled.

But the miners’ union, the MFGB, was fighting for more than wages: its battle was political. Stoking the fear of revolution, blatantly, unashamedly, within months of the end of the First World War, the MFGB declared its objective: to depose the coal-owning aristocrats and confiscate their pits. The more radical of its representatives wanted to seize their land. Calling for the redistribution of wealth and the levelling of social injustice, the union urged the Government to place Britain’s collieries under ‘joint control and administration by the workmen and the state’.

The MFGB had embraced Communist doctrine; so, it seemed, had its members.

Across Britain’s coalfields, district after district balloted in favour of nationalizing the collieries. There were 1¼ million miners; their dependants included, it was estimated that the industry touched more than 5 million people, a tenth of Britain’s population. It was a community the Government and the coal owners ignored at their peril.

The Whistlejacket Room became a temporary HQ and OP. Located on the raised principal floor at the centre of Wentworth House, it commanded the best view over the lawn outside on that bleak Sunday morning in January 1920.

The room was symbolic of all Billy Fitzwilliam stood to lose. Forty feet square, its splendour was breathtaking. Eight doors decorated with Palladian pediments led into it. The walls and the ceiling, a brilliant white, were sculpted with stucco panelling embossed in gilt, depicting vases of flowers, heroes from Homer’s mythology and eagles with spreading wings. A sumptuous Aubusson rug lay across the glazed wooden floor, polished with beeswax from the apiary in the grounds. Gold glittered from the furniture: a pair of gilt candelabra, seven feet high, holding twenty-four candles, stood at opposite corners; flush against one wall there was a long gilt settee, its cushions covered in Prussian blue. There were twelve matching armchairs positioned around the room. Most striking of all, though, was its centrepiece: Stubbs’s portrait of the famous racehorse Whistlejacket, commissioned by the Marquess of Rockingham.

The Fitzwilliams were descended from the Marquess through the female line. Family legend, according to a visitor to Wentworth in the late nineteenth century, explained the portrait’s unusual composition:

There is neither shadow
nor background in the picture but it was intended that some portrait-painter should place King George III on the horse’s back, and that a landscape painter should put in the background. But, when the Marquis heard how nearly the picture had been destroyed by the horse, who caught a sight of his own portrait just as it was finished, and would have furiously attacked it, he preferred keeping it in its present state in memory of the occurrence.

The scale of luxury, the sheer beauty of the Whistlejacket Room, were replicated 300 times over in the other rooms at Wentworth House – paid for and maintained by the profits from coal.

The previous February, when the result of the miners’ ballot to nationalize Britain’s collieries had been announced, Billy Fitzwilliam had moved to defend his interests. Field Marshal Earl Haig had rejected the use of covert methods to fight Communism. Billy welcomed them. His horror of publicity, combined with an acute sense of realpolitik – that he risked further jeopardizing his wealth by making public pronouncements in favour of the private ownership of the coal industry – dictated that his war against Communism was waged covertly.

In essence it was a battle for hearts and minds: overnight, the churches and chapels in the towns and pit villages around Wentworth became one of the first fields of engagement. The Rector of Barnsley, a radical socialist, fired a warning shot. ‘Nothing,’ he said, preaching from the pulpit to a packed congregation, ‘is likely to revive the spirit of revolution so much as the sight of the extravagant follies of the rich, more especially when riches represent the profits of war, at a time when others were sacrificing all, even life itself.’

Billy retaliated, using the power he wielded in his own churches. Twenty vicars in the parishes around Wentworth were dependent on the Earl for their livings. Under their auspices, he arranged for an Oxford don, Professor Wilden-Hart, to tour the parish halls lecturing on the dangers of Bolshevism. The
Mexborough and Swinton Times
carried a report of a well-attended lecture at Swinton Church Hall:

The lecturer said
that the Russian workmen had never suffered as much as they were doing at the present moment. The workmen were confined to their factories by force, the right of meeting was prohibited, all Socialist papers were suppressed, and any Socialist who did not agree with the terroristic policy of the Bolsheviks was at once imprisoned or killed …

The Professor went on to say that the Bolsheviks had abolished God, and had forbidden children to say their prayers, therefore it was not surprising to find that archbishops had been massacred and mutilated, bishops had been buried alive, and priests and monks had been massacred wholesale …

Reading from captured German documents, the lecturer then startled his audience by declaring that Bolshevism was not Russian at all, but was a German-made instrument … The majority of the Bolshevik leaders, he said, were German Jews.

Billy did not confine his crusade against Communism to South Yorkshire. At the start of 1919, he revived a secret society that had lain dormant during the Great War. With the unedifying name of the Mineral Owners’ Association of Great Britain (MOAGB), its members were some of the richest and most powerful men in Britain. So secretive was the organization that later that year a Government inquiry failed to elicit their names.

The association was established on a pact: should it ever be disbanded, its records would be burnt precisely twelve months after. The society closed in 1947; a year later the documents were duly destroyed.

Nevertheless, a few papers have survived. They reveal that in the years between the two World Wars over fifty peers joined the MOAGB. ‘Mowbray and Stourton, Buccleuch, Carnarvon, Leeds, Northumberland, Scarbrough …’, the list reads on, a throwback to the Middle Ages, a roll-call of the country’s wealthiest aristocrats. Between them, they owned great swathes of Britain; they also, as mineral royalty owners, owned a sizeable proportion of the country’s largest and most lucrative export: coal.

The principal aim of the MOAGB was to stop the Government nationalizing the collieries. Based on intelligence supplied by its network of informers in the coalmines and exploiting its members’ close links to the Press barons and to the Cabinet, in March 1919 the Association launched a public relations campaign to convince the nation that the country’s pits should remain in private hands. But within weeks of the launch, it went disastrously wrong: by the summer of 1919, the men Billy had chosen to defend were among the most vilified in Britain.

Six months later, looking out from the Whistlejacket Room across the thousands of men surrounding his house, Billy knew that relations between the coal owners and the miners had never been worse.

The bad blood stemmed from a Royal Commission that had mesmerized Britain. Its outcome had enraged the MFGB: the miners, in the words of a member of the union’s Executive Committee, had been ‘duped, deceived and betrayed’. It had also shaken Billy Fitzwilliam and the members of the MOAGB to the core. Eight peers of the realm, representatives of Billy’s association, had been coerced to appear as supplicants to plead their cause.

The stage for their humiliation was the King’s Robing Room at the House of Lords.

18

The Duke of Northumberland, twenty-first in the Dukes’ table of precedence, the owner of five stately homes, a quarter of a million acres and a townhouse in London’s Kensington, stood in the witness box, facing twelve Commissioners, seated at tables arranged in a horseshoe around him.

Under subpoena and against every fibre of his aristocratic being, the Duke had been compelled to answer a question that few, if any, had ever dared ask him. Precisely how much income did his coal royalties bring in per annum?
At his answer
– £69,194
^*
– the assembled audience gasped.

Behind the Duke, members of the public and Press crowded every inch of the room. Hundreds had been turned away. The setting was magnificent: the carved ceiling owed its inspiration to Cardinal Wolsey’s closet at Hampton Court; frescoes depicting the Arthurian legend, among them ‘Generosity’, ‘Courtesy’, ‘Mercy’ and ‘Courage’, were painted on the walls. The Winterhalter portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, almost nine feet in height, flanked the Cloth of Estate. But for the handwoven royal blue carpet, a pin could have been heard to drop.

Leaning forward, looking the Duke directly in the eye, Commissioner Sir Leo Money, representing the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, began his interrogation.

‘Don’t you think it is a bad thing for one man to own as much as you do?’ he asked.

‘No. I think it is an excellent thing,’ replied the Duke.

The assembled public and Press roared with laughter. It was excellent entertainment. Class war had come to court.

Commissioner Herbert Smith, President of the Yorkshire Miners’ Association, continued the cross-examination. ‘
If this Commission
recommend nationalization,’ he asked, ‘you would use your influence in the House of Lords to defeat it?’

‘Certainly. What has this Commission got to do with me?’ the Duke replied.

‘The House of Lords has always opposed reform in the country,’ retorted Smith.

‘That is a matter of opinion. I do not agree.’

‘Will you give me any reform that they have voted for that has brought about better conditions for the people?’ challenged Smith.

‘I think there have been many,’ said the Duke.

‘Why do you oppose nationalization?’

‘Because it is only a blind – perhaps it is correct to say a stage to something more revolutionary.’

It had been the Earl of Durham’s turn to be interrogated before the Duke of Northumberland. He was the owner of Lambton Castle and one other stately home; the coal royalties from his 12,411 acres brought in an annual income averaging £40,000 a year.
^*

Lord Durham was cross-examined by Commissioner
Robert Smillie
, the President of the MFGB. The true extent of the union leader’s revolutionary intentions swiftly became clear.

‘I suppose it may be taken that the land, which includes the minerals and metals, is essential to the life of the people? Do you agree?’ he asked him.

‘If you like, I accept that. They cannot live in the air,’ Durham replied.