Black Diamonds (33 page)

Behind the scenes in Whitehall, the Cabinet, in liaison with the Chiefs of the Defence Staff and the Chiefs of Police, prepared for civil war. All military leave was cancelled; soldiers suspected of Communist leanings were placed under observation, and troops dispatched to guard ‘vulnerable points’, a pre-determined list of strategic sites that included explosives factories, oil depots and power stations across the length and breadth of Britain. Five battalions of troops were mobilized to potential sites of conflict in the coalfields, and to the dockyards in the main shipping ports, to ensure the flow of essential supplies. Priority destinations included Glasgow, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Bury, Bradford, Cardiff and Hull. ‘
It should be impressed
upon all Commanding Officers,’ the War Office cabled the Home Commands, ‘that early and accurate information as to the possible trend of events and as to the temper of the populace in any particular area is of paramount importance. To this end selected officers should be employed by officers in command of bodies acting in aid of civil power to move about in plain clothes and keep in close touch with the civil authorities and with the populace generally.’ Anticipating the likelihood that insurgents would target telegraph poles across the country, the War Office was leaving nothing to chance. Commanders in the field were notified of the Emergency Wireless Scheme, a secret network of wireless stations to be used ‘in the event of a serious breakdown of the normal means of inter-communication’. They lay off Britain’s coastline, on Royal Navy ships positioned to operate as makeshift communication centres of the last resort: if the telegraph wires were brought down, key signals staff were to be ferried out to the ships to relay enciphered messages back to Whitehall.

The battle lines had been drawn, the outlook appeared ominous. Twenty-four hours after the War Office mobilized the armed forces, it had no option but to send a telegram to the Admiralty. The loyalty of some sections of the Army appeared to be in doubt: ‘The M.T. [Military Transport] Drivers of transport detailed to take the Aldershot Brigade to Yorkshire are unreliable and may join strikers,’ the cable read. ‘Prepare to take the Brigade by sea.’

‘There are very few light hearts in England today,’ Baldwin told the House of Commons, speaking hours before the TUC’s deadline ran out. ‘The only people who are happy in this situation are those who envy us or hate us, because they see the home of democratic freedom entering on a course which, if successful on the part of those who enter it, can only substitute tyranny.’ That evening, Lord Salisbury, the son of the former Conservative Prime Minister, ran into Lady Sybil Middleton at a cocktail party. ‘
All of Europe
is watching,’ he told her, ‘absolutely shivering in their shoes with fright in case we should go under, for they realize that if we do, nothing could save them.’

On the front line, in the pit villages, the day the crisis broke, the enemy – for the most part – was asleep, enjoying a collective lie-in.

In the Fitzwilliams’ pit villages little stirred. In the absence of the dust and smog that normally choked the air, overnight the mining communities in the neighbourhood of Wentworth had turned into prosperous-looking rural settlements. At Elsecar and Greasbrough, and in Harley and Jump, along row after row of the yellow-stone cottages, flowers trailed from the baskets hanging under the eaves of the slate roofs. In the front gardens, the roses were in bud. It was a bright spring morning: the green-painted doors and guttering, and the white window frames, the ubiquitous two-colour signature of the Fitzwilliam Estate, glistened in the sun.

Arthur Eaglestone, the miner at the Fitzwilliams’ New Stubbin colliery, described the sounds that usually woke him in the morning. He lived at Netherhaugh, a small hamlet that straddled the main road to the pit:

Clip-clop! … Clip-clop! … Someone is walking in the dim and shadowy corridors of the mind … it fades and dreams away, drifting to a point of nothingness … A hammer plaything – some one fooling with a hammer, in the darkness too … shurrup! … sleep! … it isn’t light … it isn’t dawn …

I open my eyes at last and gaze into the darkened room, marking the blurred outline of familiar furniture, and noting how the gas lamp in the street below throws up a sickly, yet none the less accommodating circle of illumination. A little light invades the room, shining on the brass knob of the bedstead foot, the white painted washstand and the chair with trousers slung across … Cold it is … and misty too … b-r-r-r! I bury my nose beneath the sheets … dark, quite dark.

Clip-clop! … Clip-clop! There it is again – the sound of clogs, collier clogs. It must be five o’clock, or thereabouts; a little later perhaps, for the morning shift begins at six with a promptitude unvarying and institutional …

… Some one whistles now between his teeth. Occasionally the foot-falls are lighter, much more sprightly, with a tripping quality. These are the boys I guess, and I am not long left guessing. A mellow little voice comes up, singing? I know not what …

Other sounds woke the hamlet: the blast of a ship’s foghorn blown at the pit top to mark the start of the shift; the echo of others – ‘buzzers’, as they were called – from the pits in the valley below. For the deep sleepers, there was the ‘knocker-up’; a human alarm clock, he used a long pole to rattle the window panes of the households that paid him a few pennies each week.

On the morning of 1 May, with the collieries closed, none of these sounds disturbed Netherhaugh: much later than usual, the hamlet was woken by the clanging of a handbell. That day, the same sound roused every mining community in Britain. In the midst of a very twentieth-century crisis, the eighteenth century had wandered in. Few people had radios and newspapers were not always widely read. The time-honoured method was necessary to communicate the State of Emergency that George V had proclaimed the night before. To the cry of ‘Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye’, the bellmen paced the pit villages, pausing only at street corners to read the proclamation from the King:

‘
GEORGE REX
IMPERATOR,’ they shouted:

Whereas by the Emergency Powers Act 1920, it is enacted that if it appears to Us that any action has been taken or is immediately threatened by any persons or body of persons in such a nature and on so extensive a scale as to be calculated, by interfering with the supply and distribution of food, water, fuel, or light, or with the means of locomotion, to deprive the community, or any substantial portion of the community, of the essentials of life, We may, by Proclamation, declare that a state of emergency exists:

And whereas the present immediate threat of cessation of work in the Coal Mines does, in Our opinion, constitute a state of emergency within the meaning of the said Act:

Now therefore, in pursuance of the said Act, We do, by and with the advice of Our Privy Council, hereby declare that a state of emergency exists.

Given at Our Court at Buckingham Palace, this thirtieth day of April, in the year of our Lord One thousand nine hundred and twenty-six, and in the Sixteenth year of Our Reign. GOD SAVE THE KING.

The King’s Proclamation awarded draconian powers to Baldwin’s Government. The authority of Parliament was suspended and civil liberties swept aside. Anyone suspected of attempting to cause sedition or mutiny among His Majesty’s forces or among the civilian population was liable to instant arrest and imprisonment. Interfering with or impeding the supply and distribution of vital commodities – food, water, light, fuel and electricity – was also an imprisonable offence. Freedom of speech was withdrawn and ‘seditious’ literature banned.

In the Fitzwilliam villages, the King’s Proclamation caused alarm. ‘“
If tha’ goes out
, tha’ll get
nowt
!” That’s what Fitzbilly’s miners used to say,’ recalled the son of one miner working at New Stubbin pit in 1926. ‘They wanted nothing to do with the General Strike. No one, my dad said, ever got rich from going out on strike. 1926: that were a really bad job. People were afraid.’

In the days leading up to the strike, a deputation from New Stubbin and Elsecar had called on Billy Fitzwilliam at Wentworth. They told him they did not want to strike. ‘You must,’ he told them privately, ‘or you will let the others down.’ Elsecar and New Stubbin were ‘happy pits’, an expression used locally to describe pits where relations between the management and the miners were harmonious. In the difficult years after the First World War, while the miners at both the Fitzwilliam collieries had come out in the national coal strikes of 1919, 1921 and 1925 – as they were bound to do through the unionization of the industry – neither pit had been subject to the one-off disputes and wildcat strikes that had hit other collieries during the mid-1920s. As Arthur Eaglestone, writing of his years at New Stubbin during this period, recalled, ‘
There was never a major
dispute while I was at the pit, a tribute to the commonsense and flexibility displayed by both the management and the men’s representatives.’ Billy was popular among the miners. When he visited his pits, it caused, as Eaglestone wrote, ‘a condition of high excitement that set the wires tingling into every quarter of the workings … Earl Fitzwilliam always reminded me of Charlie Markham. He had the same informal approach and was regarded generally by the miners (not without affection) as “a bit of a lad”.’ ‘He was generous when things went wrong,’ remembered Jim McGuinness, a miner from Elsecar. ‘Lordie was liked. He looked after you. He was good at thinking of ways to keep his miners happy.’

Ironically, given that the 1926 dispute was about wages, the miners at New Stubbin and Elsecar were paid less than miners at other pits in the neighbourhood. ‘Wages-wise we were worse off, but you see Fitzbilly’s mines were perfect,’ Ralph Boreham, a miner from Elsecar, whose father and grandfather had worked there before him, explained. ‘Everything was safe. Even the King went down our pit. Some of the others around, the roads weren’t much higher than a chair. But Fitzbilly used to keep them high, so the miners could walk. And all the air were fresh. Air was moving through, you see. You were safe. You could breathe.’

‘We knew our place. You had security. You had your cottage,’ one miner recalled. It was not that the men at Elsecar and New Stubbin were unsympathetic to the cause of their fellow miners, or that they did not support their fight – Arthur Eaglestone, though writing under a pseudonym, had risked his job to expose the treacherous, badly paid conditions under which all miners of the period worked. But they were fatalistic and had more to lose than most.

It was with a sense of foreboding that Arthur Eaglestone, on the evening of 3 May, presented himself for guard duty at New Stubbin colliery. He and a number of other men had been appointed to protect its coal and timber stocks for the duration of the strike. Rotating in shifts, they patrolled in pairs:

Bearing each a
formidable stick, we circled, that first evening of inaction, the half mile length of the sidings that connected the colliery with the railway station. The air was ominously quiet. The setting sun threw enormous shadows from the headstocks and the serried stacks of timber. There was no wind. The grasses, the wild parsley, with which the wagon road was bordered, were perfect as an etching. Soon darkness fell, the stars emerged, and in and out of the silent avenues of loaded trucks we paced speaking softly. Was this the beginning of the Twentieth Century Revolution? We walked, and sat, and smoked, and talked till midnight … In spite of outward appearance, all was not well. All that the ear apprehended – the chuffing of a locomotive, the rhythm of the winding engine, the impact of a hammer, the rattle of screens, even the tramp of colliers’ feet – had vanished. When the church clock struck midnight, and its stroke resounded across the valley to where we stood under the shadow of the coal-drops, it carried with it impressive undertones. The town was not asleep. It lay silent, brooding in the darkness.

His disquiet was voiced by others. ‘Here we are in the throes of revolution and it’s unpleasant,’ wrote Sir Walter Riddell, Principal of Hertford College, Oxford. ‘We’re dependent for news mainly on what the Government choose to tell us by wireless and their official paper: and there is an uneasy, and I suppose inevitable, suspicion they don’t tell all. Rumours are countless and mainly depressing.’ Lady Manners, writing from Cobham in Surrey, had seen the soldiers moving along the Portsmouth Road: ‘Yesterday 20 tanks went up to London. Today, 40 charabancs filled with troops, steel helmets and all. I felt like crying. It brought the war straight back. They all looked such babies too and one felt would be of no use … The atmosphere is all of war.’

In London, people were gloomiest of all. ‘Its citizens looked very strained and over-tired,’ Riddell reported on his return to Oxford, after spending a few days in the city. ‘The whole place,’ he wrote, ‘was painfully war-like – reduced lights, theatres mostly shut, barbed and boarded buses, Specials [constables] by the score and at certain places knots of rather hostile strikers.’ In Mayfair and Belgravia, many of the residents believed they would soon be facing the barricades. ‘
I don’t think
I ever felt anything was so beastly as this strike,’ bemoaned Mabel, Countess Grey, ‘the whole atmosphere reminds me indescribably of the war … without any of the glamour or the glow of patriotic feeling … I don’t think anyone can doubt a very well-organized really revolutionary bolshevist element.’

On Tuesday 4 May, the first day of the General Strike, Government officials in Whitehall waited nervously for the enciphered reports from the GOCs in the Home Commands to come in. At 14.30 hours, the War Office issued its second situation report of the day; the first had gone out at 09.00 hours. Marked ‘Secret’, its circulation was confined to the Cabinet, the Civil Commissioners, Chief Constables and the Army Chiefs.