Black Diamonds (17 page)

Using the minutest lengths of garden twine, they sewed rose heads and single chrysanthemums, grown in Wentworth’s hothouses, on to the trellis of fern, covering the cloth between the settings with a lattice of flowers. They were watched by locals from the village, relatives of the household servants and the Fitzwilliams’ colliery and Estate employees who had filed into the dining room throughout the morning. ‘
It was the
custom at Wentworth,’ the son of one of them recalled. ‘Whenever there was a big do on, the locals were invited to inspect, to have a look round. It was because everyone had been involved in making everything look so beautiful. People took pride in the work that had gone into it.’

Upstairs, the housekeeper was completing her final rounds. Each bedroom had to be checked to ensure that stationery supplies were plentiful, the inkstands were full, and the wardrobes and drawers dusted and freshly lined. She had walked the full length of the house. Thirty-six bedrooms were required: in the top and lower wings in the North and South Towers in the Village, the name given to the wing at the farthest end of the house, so called because of its proximity to the village; in Bedlam, the suite traditionally reserved for bachelors, and, of course, the principal guest bedrooms in the central block of the East Front. A further forty bedrooms were needed for the guests’ valets, ladies’ maids and chauffeurs. It had been many decades since the house had looked so spruce. Following the death of the 6th Earl in 1902, Billy Fitzwilliam had spent a small fortune on modernization and refurbishment. The mustiness, the feudal style of the old Earl’s last years had vanished. Bathrooms and lavatories had been installed; sofas and chairs had been re-covered and new curtains and furnishings bought. Gone were the smoky oil lamps and wall sconces; above the light switches in the bedrooms, discreet black and white enamel plaques boasted ‘Electric Light’.

Walking briskly through the corridors, the housekeeper missed nothing. From time to time she stopped to adjust the arrangements in the vases of flowers or to knead the bowls of pot-pourri to release their aroma into the air. The smell permeated everywhere. The housekeeper had made the pot-pourri herself, following closely guarded recipes handed down by her predecessors. Scrawled above some of the recipes were the words ‘NOT TO BE GIVEN AWAY’.
The secret of one scent
that lingered in the corridors and rooms at Wentworth is revealed in a recipe that has survived:

2 pecks of Damask Roses part blown, part in bud. Violets, orange flowers and Jasmine – a handful of each. Orice root sliced. Benjamin and Storax 2 oz each. A quarter of an ounce of Musk. 4 oz Angelica root sliced. 1 quart of the red part of Clove Gilly flowers. 2 handfuls of Lavender flowers. Half a handful of Rosemary flowers. Bay and Laurel leaves – half a handful each. 3 Seville oranges stuck as full of cloves as possible, dried in an oven, cooled and pounded. Half a handful of knotted marjoram. 2 handfuls of balm of Gilead dried. Chop all together and put the ingredients in layers in a jar with pounded Bay salt strewed between each layer.

By four o’clock that afternoon, the house was ready. The guests were due to arrive at five. In the Pillared Hall, the main entrance to the house, thirty footmen stood among the stone columns, chatting softly, waiting to escort the guests to their rooms. Behind the hall, in the Upper Servants’ Room, the valets and ladies’ maids who had travelled ahead of their employers to unpack their luggage stole a quick cup of tea. They introduced themselves to one another, as was the custom, not by their own names but by the titled names of their employers: ‘Londonderry’, ‘Rosse’, ‘Scarbrough’, ‘Zetland’, ‘Harewood’; it solved the problem of having to remember the visiting servants’ names.

Outside, on the lawn in front of the house, battalions of soldiers from the West Riding National Reserve had been arriving throughout the afternoon. ‘The men had a good long march from the railway stations,’ reported the local newspaper, ‘but they made light of it and swung into the park in fine style.’ They had come from all over Yorkshire: from Leeds, Bradford, York and the neighbouring towns of Barnsley, Rotherham and Sheffield. There were six battalions in total. Watched by a crowd of 40,000 that had gathered at the edge of the lawn, the soldiers had formed up into columns, flanked by mounted police and a battery of the West Riding Royal Horse Artillery.
The place of honour,
directly in front of the entrance to the Pillared Hall, was reserved for thirty ‘Boys of the Old Brigade’. Standing bent and grey, their medals had been won in the Indian Mutiny, and at the Charge of the Light Brigade.

At precisely one minute to five o’clock, a bugle sounded, and an expectant hush fell over the crowd. A plumed officer on a grey charger galloped across the lawn, reining his horse to a crunching stop on the drive. Seconds later a fleet of grand cars, moving at walking pace, came into view, As they drew to a halt at the entrance to the Pillared Hall, the royal standard unfurled from the flagstaff above, catching in the breeze.

It was not a social visit. The King and Queen had come to Wentworth on business. The day before they arrived, Billy Fitzwilliam had issued a statement to the Press:

I am instructed by His Majesty that he wishes ‘informality’ to be the watchword. It is in no sense a state visit. The King and Queen have expressed a desire to see working men and working women in working conditions. We have impressed upon the owners of works and establishments to be honoured by the royal visit that a great deal of whitewash is not what is required.

In the course of their four-day stay, George V and Queen Mary planned to visit collieries, factories, engineering works and steel foundries. The highlight of the tour – a personal coup for Billy and a first for a British monarch – was to be George V’s descent underground at Elsecar Main, Billy’s own pit.

The Royal Tour of the North, as it became officially known, was radical in concept. It was also unprecedented. No British monarch had previously toured the industrial heartlands. Yet, historic though it was, the minutiae of the tour have not been preserved for the historical record. As in most matters relating to Wentworth, the details are blurred. The correspondence between the King’s officials and Billy Fitzwilliam in the months prior to the royal visit has been destroyed – both at Wentworth and in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle.

The destruction of the Fitzwilliam side of the correspondence is not in itself odd; a reasonable assumption would be that the papers were among those burnt in the great bonfire of 1972. At Windsor, the Registrar of the Royal Archives explained why the King’s correspondence has not been preserved: ‘Many of the files from the Private Secretary’s Office in the reign of George V were destroyed many years ago. They ran out of space. There was nowhere to store the papers.’ Yet the suggestion is, from other historical sources, that George V’s visit to Wentworth was instigated by worried courtiers. Mysteriously, as the Registrar at Windsor confirmed, important correspondence between the King and the Prime Minister in the months leading up to his visit to Wentworth – and directly relevant to it – was also deliberately destroyed: not for reasons of space, but due to the sensitivity of the letters. The aim of the Royal Tour of the North, as George V himself stated, was ‘to see working men and working women in working conditions’. Why then were the stewards of the Crown so determined to hide the traces of the events that led to a four-day public appointment that on the face of it demonstrated an admirable engagement with the lives of the working classes?

It is necessary to look elsewhere. A Cabinet memo suggests that the tour was hastily arranged. George V, so it reveals, had never intended to go to Wentworth. He had originally planned to spend the summer conducting a series of state visits to his European cousins. At the Cabinet meeting at Downing Street on 6 March, the King’s proposed tour of the ‘royal houses of Europe’ was one of the main subjects of discussion. ‘
After careful consideration
of the matter in all its aspects,’ the Prime Minister wrote to the King, ‘it was the general opinion of the Cabinet that Your Majesty should be advised to postpone the visits until next year.’ Chief in the Cabinet’s reasoning was ‘the unsettled social and industrial aspect at home’. It was a masterful flourish of understatement; the subtext was that the political situation was too precarious to permit the King to leave the country.

In the first months of George V’s reign, Britain had been convulsed by strikes. In the summer of 1911, soon after his coronation, a pamphlet was circulated by radical trade unionists to soldiers serving in His Majesty’s armed forces at garrisons in the north of England.

Men! Comrades!
Brothers! You are in the army. So are we. You, in the army of Destruction. We, in the Industrial army of Construction.

We work at mine, mill, forge, factory or dock, producing and transporting all the goods, clothing stuffs, etc, which makes it possible for people to live.

You are Working men’s Sons.

When we go on Strike to better Our lot, which is the lot also of Your Fathers, Mothers, Brothers, and Sisters, YOU are called upon by your Officers to MURDER US. Don’t do it.

On 17 August 1911, the newly crowned King, staying with the Duke of Devonshire at Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire, was compelled to send a telegram from the grouse moors to Winston Churchill, the Home Secretary. Was he satisfied, he inquired, that order in the country could be preserved? Two hundred miles south, the Aldershot Garrison had been mobilized to the capital. Along St James’s Street and Pall Mall, gunmakers had sold out of revolvers in twenty-four hours. ‘The difficulty,’ Churchill replied, ‘is not to maintain order but to maintain order without loss of life.’

The country was in the grip of a national railway strike – a strike that, as the King described, caused him the ‘greatest possible anxiety’. It had been preceded by a national dock strike and a national transport workers’ strike. Collectively, they indicated a new mood among the working classes, one that would become increasingly belligerent as the year progressed.
The King
’s distress – and his alarm – is evident in a letter his Private Secretary wrote to Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister, on 6 September, shortly after the King returned from Bolton Abbey.

The King is very much disturbed by the present unrest among the working classes and by the possibility, if not probability, of further strikes breaking out at any moment. He is afraid that if there were a renewal of recent occurrences, the disturbances might lead to political elements being introduced into the conflict which might perhaps affect, not the existence, but the position of the Crown – independent of other evils. He desires me therefore to urge most strongly on the Government the importance (& it is also their duty) of their taking advantage of the lull, and of Parliament not meeting until the end of October, to devise a scheme, which although not entirely preventing strikes (perhaps that is not possible) would to a large extent prevent a threatened strike from coming to a head, and might be the means of preventing ‘sympathetic’ strikes from taking place.

The Liberal Party had repealed the punitive Taff Vale Judgement of 1902. The Prime Minister was not prepared, as he perceived, to legislate against the grain of democracy. Five months later the storm the King had anticipated was unleashed.

On 1 March 1912, the country was faced with a situation that had never been experienced, never even dreamt of. One million miners went out on strike, the number downing tools unequalled in any industry in Britain or Europe. The closest parallel was the General Strike of 1905 in Russia. The miners were striking for a minimum wage – the ‘fives and twos’ – 5 shillings for a man per shift and 2 shillings for a boy. It was the gravest of all the challenges from organized labour: in the Prime Minister’s words, British trade was as dependent on coal as ‘we all of us’ depend on agriculture ‘for our daily bread’.

Within days of the start of the strike, industry began to stagger, then it stopped.

It is at this point that the letters between the King and his Prime Minister also stop.

In the Archives at Windsor Castle and at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where Herbert Asquith’s papers are deposited, the letters between the two men in the month of March 1912 are missing. In point of fact, there are very few letters for the entire first year of the King’s reign.

George V’s correspondence with Herbert Asquith has been systematically pruned. The King’s letter to the Prime Minister, written on 6 September 1911, by his Private Secretary, is to be found in Herbert Asquith’s papers. It is the only letter from the period. Stark in its revelation of the King’s anxieties, it appears to have slipped through the net: after the correspondence between George V and the Prime Minister was destroyed at Windsor Castle, there was obviously a clear instruction to ensure that the originals among Asquith’s papers were also destroyed.

The gravity of the crisis engendered by the miners’ strike is apparent in the Cabinet’s decision on 6 March – a week after it began – to advise the King to postpone his European tour. That George V and the Prime Minister regarded the strike as a threat to the very existence of the Crown, as opposed merely to its position, is suggested by the missing correspondence. Further clues lie among the fragments of historical record that remain. They are to be found in the private papers – and in the behaviour – of the Prime Minister and his wife.

Three weeks after the Cabinet meeting on 7 March, an extra-ordinary scene took place in the House of Commons.
On 27 March,
Margot Asquith recorded the following entry in her diary: ‘Last night an emergency coal bill – the Minimum Wage Bill – was carried at 3 o’clock this morning by 213 votes to 48. I should say this is perhaps the most dangerous and unhappy moment of our or indeed anyone’s political experience.’

Faced with the paralysis of industry and deadlock between the coal owners and the miners, Asquith was forced to rush a Minimum Wage Bill through Parliament in an attempt to resolve the strike. At 10.30 on the evening of 26 March, he opened the speeches at the Bill’s third reading. It was by no means certain that the Bill would resolve the strike, or that Parliament would pass it. The historian George Dangerfield, based on the testimony of those who witnessed the Prime Minister’s speech, described what followed: