General Chat

This is all true

New Year’s Eve in a village in Yorkshire, and 2006 has minutes to live. In the pub, the old locals gather at the back and the new locals, with outsiders’ accents and fancier cars, are ordering rounds from bar staff dressed as superheroes.

This is not just any village. Down the road there is a house with 1,000 windows, occupied by a recluse. You’ve never heard of him. As the clock approaches 12, a single light burns through five of his ground-floor windows, so that when the rest of Britain welcomes 2007, only 0.005% of this vast residence has any sign of life.

Who, loitering here on other New Year’s Eves, could have guessed it would come to this? Who now cares, even? And yet this place has a story. It is a tale of the relentlessness of change, and the resilience of class hatred. Partly it is about forbidden love. But the real theme is revenge.

The house in the dark is Britain’s biggest stately home. Called Wentworth Woodhouse, it is a forgotten palace. Its recent past is shrouded in secrecy. In 1972, the aristocrat who lived here burnt 16 tons of family papers in a fire that lasted three weeks. Yet there are some facts nobody can conceal. From the front, it is twice as wide as Buckingham Palace. It has a room for every day of the year and five miles of underground passageways. Now, thanks to research worthy of an unsolved serial killing, its history can be told.
The tale takes us into a world of unimaginable privilege, and shows two sides of the Labour party that rules us: the noble, necessary Labour, born 100 years after it was needed to fight the injustices of the industrial revolution, and the vicious, spiteful Labour that resented the wealthy.

“We don’t understand why he won’t take part in things,” says Martyn Johnson, a retired detective among the New Year drinkers, who wrote a letter to the recluse that went unanswered. But then, there are many things about this hidden palace that, until now, nobody has understood.

Go six miles north of Sheffield and you will find it. From the village, take the path into Wentworth Park. First you see what seems to be a Georgian stately home, with dirty windows. This is merely a stable block for 100 horses: the house is round the corner. You are entitled to look – it is a right of way – and there was a time when everyone was welcome on the lawn in front of this building, although today you will be chased away as soon as you step from the path.

Built in the 1730s as a poke in the eye for the owners of a nearby castle, the place is so big that guests were given confetti of different colours to strew so they could find their way back to their rooms. Its facade is the longest in Europe. Here is a taste of what this house once signified. On a winter’s night in 1902, it was filled with life and it was the village that was in darkness. The next day, a crowd of thousands shifted nervously on the lawn. They were waiting for a coffin. Two hundred servants dressed in black stood stiffly facing the mourners. Fog enveloped the statues and pediments crowning the house; nobody’s nostrils escaped the acrid smell that clung to the mist, of effluent from the pits, foundries and blast furnaces in the valley below.

At the stroke of midday, a coffin on a silver bier was carried out, followed by housemaids and footmen bearing hundreds of wreaths. The hearse was drawn by four black horses. In nearby villages the shops were closed and the curtains of the houses drawn. The oak coffin contained the body of William, the 6th Earl Fitzwilliam, one of the richest men in Britain. He left a legacy worth £3.3 billion today. The earl had lived alone with his unmarried daughter, Lady Alice, attended by more than 700 staff. Their money came partly from land and mostly from luck. In the late 18th century, the Fitzwilliams’ Yorkshire estates were found to straddle the Barnsley coal seam and tens of thousands of people across South Yorkshire became wholly dependent on the family.

Even though the earl was 86, it was hard for them to believe he was dead. For miners and their families, this was a time of danger and deprivation. Yet the fabulously rich old aristocrat was mourned. “Genuine sorrow cannot be bought with gold or wrung from the hearts of an unwilling community,” said the Sheffield Telegraph, surveying the thousands who had walked through slush and rain. “Old men who had worked for the Earl for 50 years risked serious illness for love of their noble master, and trudged sorrowfully from station or neighbouring village to swell the mournful gathering.”

Shortly after 1pm, a 5,000-strong cortege, led by 1,000 miners, walked to the village church. This family’s downfall was unimaginable. A respected man had left a great fortune, and four sons, each named William, survived him. Coal was booming. The family’s power seemed as solid as the foundations of their vast house. And yet, says Catherine Bailey, a TV documentary maker who has made Wentworth the subject of her first book: “What was unthinkable on that day in February 1902 happened.”

To Marcus Binney, the architectural historian, Wentworth is “unquestionably the finest Georgian house in England”. But its history is corrupted by secrecy. The Fitzwilliams had archived letters and papers since medieval times. In 1972 the transparency of ages stopped.

That July, the 10th and last Earl Fitzwilliam ordered his employees to destroy the bulk of Wentworth’s records. They were hauled by tractor from the stable block to a bonfire that blazed night and day for three weeks. Other, smaller fires had preceded it, hiding from history the private papers of the 7th, 8th and 9th earls, who lived at Wentworth in the first half of the 20th century. “They wanted to destroy things as they themselves had been destroyed,” says Ian Bond, one of the descendants. “They lived through the downfall of the family.”

Bailey’s investigation suggests that the secrets are to do with descent. Who was the real heir to Wentworth? Until quite recently, the home secretary was called to royal births to make sure heirs to the throne were genuine; the arrival of Prince Charles was the first to go unwitnessed. A similar anxiety over “changelings” – infants substituted at birth – haunts the landed. There is sex to conceal, too. Even today, there is a man in his early seventies who has no idea he is the son of the 8th Earl Fitzwilliam. But it was not lust that undid the dynasty at Wentworth. Downfall came when forbidden love – which we’ll get to later – coincided with class loathing.

Just as some consider the pit closures under Margaret Thatcher and John Major to be acts of revenge as well as historically inevitable, so, at one time, the abuses of power in mining were by the owners, not the unions, and revenge was craved by those who saw themselves as speaking for the workers. If outsiders think of Britain as preoccupied by class, that’s because it was: the reduction of the biggest stately home in Britain to, in effect, a single light bulb was the result of a political vendetta. The dead earl might have been respected, but he was also a feudal throwback. When his yellow coach, “horsed by four prancing chestnuts”, flanked by outriders and running-men dressed in the Fitzwilliam livery, travelled through the pit villages and the streets of Rotherham and Sheffield, women curtseyed and men removed their caps and bowed.

Half a mile below the forelock-tugging lay a shameful story. The Fitzwilliams were exemplary coal owners, highly regarded among their employees. But great political struggles involve groups, not individuals, and the circumstances of this miner or that toff become irrelevant. Some coal owners were barbaric, even by the standards of their day, and they beckoned the whirlwind that eventually swept away all of them.

In the 19th century, Samuel Scriven, one of the authors of a government report on mining, saw women and girls “chained, belted, harnessed like dogs in a go-cart, black, saturated with wet and more than half-naked, crawling upon their hands and knees and dragging heavy loads behind them”. As a result, women and children under 10 were banned from working underground. But in 1902 you only had to visit Denaby, a village eight miles from Wentworth, to see that little else had changed.

Before its pits were sunk, Denaby was a hamlet with a population of 240, lying in open country on fertile land. In summer, lavender and corn grew in fields that were broken by copses of dark elms. Then the population swelled to 8,000 and the “village” vanished under a blue-grey blanket of smog. The two mines at Denaby belonged to a new type of proprietor: the corporate coal owner. Unlike the Fitzwilliams, who felt a passion for mining and a complex connection with their workers, the new owners did not care. Their company constructed some of the worst slums in England, in a place so dusty that sweeping in front of your house would yield two barrowloads of muck. Phyllis Holcroft, a mother of 10, lived in one of the houses. Her family of 12 had no water, gas or electricity. “It’s a dirty hole,” she wrote. “You can never open the windows, what with the dust and the stink from the middens [open sewers]… There’s damp walls, damp floors, walls and floors leaving each other.”

Families were so overcrowded, people would share a bed with the dead until they could be buried. And death came often. If Britain’s status as the world’s most powerful nation depended on coal, then coal needed blood. When George V stayed at Wentworth in 1912, he woke to news of a pit disaster that created 61 widows and left 132 children fatherless. The explosions, caused by a lack of ventilation at Denaby, were unnecessary; in fact, they had been predicted by Earl Fitzwilliam, whose mines were much safer. Men were expendable. The year before, 160,000 miners had been injured and nearly 2,000 had died. For widows, bereavement meant eviction, allowing other miners to take their place.

The Fitzwilliams were excellent employers. “You won’t get anyone my age with a bad word to say about them,” says Martyn Johnson, our retired detective, who is the son and grandson of miners. And it is true. The safety of their mines and the social conditions in their villages were unequalled anywhere in Britain. Days before the 1926 general strike, a deputation called on Billy Fitzwilliam, the 7th earl, to say they did not want to walk out. “You must,” he told them privately, “or you’ll let the others down.” During the strike, and the months-long coal dispute that followed, “Billy Fitzbilly” fed the miners’ 2,500 children and turned the grounds at Wentworth into an amusement park to keep the families entertained, with £25 – more than four months’ wages – on offer for any cricketer who could break one of his windows from the middle of the lawn. Maud Fitzwilliam, Billy’s wife, toured the pit villages in a yellow Rolls-Royce packed with provisions for the poor, including the odd live chicken.

The Fitzwilliams’ generosity towards their miners was not motivated by socialist principles. As Billy saw it, providing the best conditions for his men protected him as well as them. In some districts, whole families resorted to searching sewage tips during the 1926 strike for lumps of precious coal that might have got into the open trenches. Billy, by contrast, allowed his colliers to mine the old surface workings on his land.

The catastrophe that befell coal was always coming. In 1870 the UK produced half the world’s black diamonds; by the mid-1920s it was producing little more than a fifth. Alternative fuels, such as oil and hydroelectric power, were hurting demand, while Africa, India and China could dig out supplies at a third of the cost. Perversely, the Versailles treaty, which was supposed to punish Germany after the first world war, dealt a further blow to Britain’s miners by arranging reparations in coal. The result was a halving of miners’ earnings, leading to the strike. Miners generally had a strong work ethic, expressed no class bitterness, and simply wanted a wage they could live on. But they were not well served by their union, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, which thought more in terms of class war, and had talked of seizing the land of the owners.

The owners, meanwhile – despite the fact that the Communist share of the vote between the wars averaged 0.3% – saw themselves as fighting socialism, and were determined not to give way. By November 1926 they had starved the miners back to work, on even lower pay for longer hours, and in the Depression of the 1930s conditions only got worse. By 1931, 432,000 miners (41.6% of the workforce) were unemployed. “We never forgot 1926,” recalled a miner from Sheffield. “The wicked 1930s came after.” It would be more than a decade before power passed into the hands of the miners’ representatives. When it did, Wentworth became a target for their revenge.

Where there is life, there is love, and where there are aristocrats, there are bastards. Wentworth has many examples. But it has taken a book to reveal the secrets the last earl was determined to hide.

In the crush of mourners at the 1902 funeral, one man walked alone behind the glass hearse. William Charles de Meuron Wentworth-Fitzwilliam – Billy Fitzbilly, as the miners called him, or Lord Milton, as his courtesy title styled him – was the heir. Along with the family seat and estate at Wentworth, his inheritance included a 100-room mansion and 90,000 acres in Ireland, a 50-room house in London’s Mayfair, 80 racehorses, a priceless collection of paintings and a massive portfolio of shares. In today’s money, his income from coal alone would be more than £6m a year. All these millions rested on the truth of who he really was. He was supposed to be the only son of Viscount Milton, the dead earl’s eldest son; Billy’s aunts and uncles, however, saw him as an imposter. If so, the legacy should pass down a different line.

Correspondence that escaped the bonfires shows that, according to his aunt Alice, Billy was a cuckoo in the gilded nest. He was born thousands of miles from Wentworth in the wilds of Canada, with no family witnesses present. Lady Alice claimed that moments after the birth, Billy, the son of a white settler, was exchanged for Lord and Lady Milton’s newborn girl.

The birth was overseas for reasons that were another family secret. Billy’s father was epileptic; at the time, fits were treated as madness and, in the words of Lord Shaftesbury, who had an epileptic son, “madness constitutes a right as it were to treat people as vermin”. The solution adopted by Billy’s grandfather, the late earl, was to keep Milton out of sight. Even so, in his short life he became one of the most feted of the 19th-century explorers, mapping a land route across Canada that linked the Atlantic to the Pacific. In England he was received like a hero. Yet his parents did everything to stop him getting married, for fear that epilepsy would taint the family line. In the end he married in secret and sought refuge in America, travelling to an isolated part of Canada just when Billy was born. By the time the old earl died, Milton was also dead, and Billy, the grandson, succeeded him.

In time he produced his own son, Peter: the infant was christened in Wentworth’s private chapel swathed in a piece of silk that William the Conqueror had awarded to one of his ancestors for valour at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. To celebrate the birth, Billy invited 60,000 people to a party in Wentworth Park. In the event, 100,000 showed up, mostly miners and their families. Peter was a sensitive little fatty, but he grew into a lean, handsome man who, in the space of three years, had three sons by girls from his father’s pit villages. This is where investigative research becomes delicate. Typically, an estate worker would be encouraged to marry the girl, and the family would be quietly looked after.

By the time of the next big party at Wentworth, Peter’s “coming of age” on New Year’s Eve, 1931, Britain was in crisis: after a run on sterling, the prime minister had offered to resign and unemployment in South Yorkshire was running at 45%. Again the Fitzwilliams showed themselves as enlightened. To qualify for unemployment benefit, a miner had to lose three days’ work in every six. Billy could easily have shut down one of his pits. But to save his men’s jobs, and at considerable cost to himself, he kept both pits open by operating them on alternate weeks, sparing the miners the humiliation of long-term unemployment at the same time as letting them claim the dole At Peter’s 21st-birthday party, Mr Humphries, the secretary of the local branch of the Yorkshire Miners’ Association, thanked Billy on behalf of the men. “As a trades union secretary, I do believe we have in Earl Fitzwilliam the finest idealistic employer in the country today… He is a man with some humanity, a man within our hearts, and quite different from some members of the upper class.” The birthday was the last hurrah at Wentworth. With the coming of war, the house was requisitioned. Chandeliers, suits of armour and paintings went into storage; damask curtains and tapestries were swathed in canvas. When the war ended, German bombs had spared Wentworth. But this would not be true of the newly elected Labour government.

On a cold, blustery day in April 1946, a column of lorries and heavy plant machinery trundled across Wentworth Park. Billy had died of cancer in 1943; Peter, now the 8th earl, whose war had been spent in dangerous missions for the Special Operations Executive, stood at an upper window in the house, watching from a distance. He could not bear to see the impending devastation close up. The army of contractors had been sent by Manny Shinwell, the minister of fuel and power. Ninety-eight acres of woodland in the park were to be quarried for coal, and next on the contractors’ list were the beautiful formal gardens. The coal, the minister had decreed, was to be mined right up to the back door of the house. To obtain fuel the country desperately needed, the park and gardens at Wentworth were to become the biggest opencast mining site in Britain.

This was not just about fuel. In its manifesto, Let Us Face the Future, Labour vowed to end the dominance of “the privileged rich”, who had prospered even in the Depression, and promised that the nationalisation of key industries – coal, gas, electricity, the railways, iron, steel – would secure greater productivity and efficiency, the profits to go into nourishing a fairer society. “For years, they have treated the miner abominably,” said Charles Grey, the new MP for Durham, who had been hewing coal only the year before. “Virtual slavery was the lot of the miner.” And it was true. But not at Wentworth, a distinction that was too detailed for the minister in charge.

Manny Shinwell was one of the “wild men of the Clyde”, a left-wing group of Glasgow Labour MPs. His hatred of the “old brigade” was well known. A supporter of the abolition of hereditary titles, Shinwell had identified Peter Fitzwilliam, without naming him, as an example of excess. Peter, in turn, was convinced that Shinwell’s decision to mine the gardens and park at Wentworth was vindictive. A magnificent 300-year-old beech avenue was to be uprooted, together with 99 acres of immaculately tended lawns. The overburden from the opencast mining – topsoil, mangled plants and pieces of rubble – was to be piled 50ft high outside the main entrance to the part of the house where the family lived, so that the top of the mound was directly level with Peter’s bedroom window.

Shinwell claimed the coal under the gardens was needed to keep Britain’s trains running. But the earl commissioned a group of geologists and mining engineers at Sheffield University, who said the coal was “not worth the getting”. Far from being “exceptionally good-quality coal… suitable for firing locomotive boilers”, as Shinwell alleged, it was “very poor stuff… reduced to very poor boiler slack by its nearness to the surface”.

To the government’s amazement, the Yorkshire miners and the Labour-controlled local authorities were on the earl’s side. “It is against all common sense,” Joe Hall, president of the Yorkshire branch of the National Union of Mineworkers, told the press in April 1946. “The miners in this area will go to almost any length rather than see Wentworth House destroyed. To many mining communities it is sacred ground. ”

Shinwell was unmoved. He refused to believe the protest came from genuine feeling. Adamant that the earl had used what remained of his feudal powers to whip up a storm, in an internal memo to his cabinet colleagues Shinwell wrote: “claims made as to the enjoyment of the estate by the people are exaggerated. I have no intention of sacrificing the national interest to a nobleman’s palace and pleasure grounds”.

He was wrong. Incensed, Joe Hall threatened a strike. Two days later, on April 8, 1946, Hall sent a letter to Clement Attlee, the prime minister. “As one who has been an auditor for the National Labour Party for 20 years, and who fought for you to get the Trades Union Movement affiliated to the Party, I make this personal appeal to you to do all in your power to prevent what can only be described as vandalism.”

The destruction was not even necessary: the earl and his miners offered an alternative means to get the coal, using drift mining – shallow, walk-in tunnels beneath the land around the house – to reach a greater tonnage, of higher quality, at lower cost, without destroying a single shrub. In the George & Dragon this New Year’s Eve, Charles Booth, a neat man of 83 who was among the team that came up with this plan, recalled what happened. “Shinwell wouldn’t have it,” he said. “He was intent that the estate would be destroyed. Who can deny it now?”

In the dark outside the huge house, Labour’s revenge can be seen not just in the lost gardens. Attlee’s government did not stop at a pointless opencast mine. The Ministry of Health decided to take over the house too, “for the housing of homeless industrial families”. Unlike the mining, this did not go ahead – Peter’s aunt, a socialist called Lady Mabel Smith, persuaded West Riding county council to lease the mansion as a teacher-training college, and eventually it became part of Sheffield Polytechnic. The Fitzwilliams and their priceless possessions were allowed part of the house.

The family’s fate was settled in May 1948 by a thunderstorm. For two years, Peter had been having a passionate affair with Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, daughter of the American ambassador and sister of Jack, the future president of the United States. They were star-cross’d lovers: he was already married, and Kick was a Catholic. Like much of the aristocracy, the Fitzwilliams were virulently anti-Catholic, and the Kennedys – who have never acknowledged the relationship – told Kick that if she married Peter, she would be disinherited. (This, too, helps explain the three-week bonfire at Wentworth.) But on May 13, 1948, wanting to reach the south of France with his lover, Peter persuaded a private pilot to fly into the worst storm anyone could remember over the Ardèche mountains in France. For the last minute or so on the flight, everyone on board must have known they were about to crash: the pilot and co-pilot stuffed handkerchiefs into their mouths, a military procedure to avoid biting through the tongue in a crash landing. Peter and Kick were killed. The new earl was Eric, an alcoholic. “When Peter got killed, that were it then,” Geoff Steer, a miner’s son who went to Peter’s funeral, recalled. “Wentworth House died with him.”




And so it was over. Eric spent most of his day in a sitting room overlooking an industrial site. The Marble Salon, where in 1912 the ballerina Anna Pavlova had danced for the king, was a college gymnasium filled with climbing ropes, vaulting horses and balancing beams. Walking through the majestic 50-yard picture gallery in Eric’s apartment, past the Titians and Van Dycks and the paintings by Guido and Raphael, the slag heaps that desecrated the gardens outside were framed in the window at its far end.

On Eric’s death, the last earl at Wentworth was Tom Fitzwilliam, who lived until 1979. He kept a suite of 40 rooms, but chose to live elsewhere. The local authority gave up its lease and in 1988 Tom’s daughter put the house and 30 acres up for sale. In 1989 they were bought by Wensley Haydon-Baillie, a flamboyant businessman whose tenure was short. He invested in a company that promised a cure for herpes. This never materialised, and in 1998 he admitted to debts of £13m and the place was repossessed. After standing empty for a year, its lawns neglected and the roof at risk of collapse, it was bought by an anonymous bidder for the knockdown price of £1.5m – at £7 per square foot, cheaper than a council house in nearby Rotherham. The new owner is Clifford Newbold, 80, an architect from Highgate, north London, and a past master of the Guild of Freemen of the City of London.

Nobody in the village of Wentworth knows what he looks like. He does not employ locals, apparently for fear of gossip, and does not answer letters. “I’ve never seen him,” remarked a former postmistress, “and no one I know ever has.”


From Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty

Your welcome Carol, quite a fascinating read I thought

Wentworth Woodhouse from Wiki

The house includes 240 rooms and covers an area of over 2.5 acres (10,000 m²). It is surrounded by a 150 acre (0.6 km²) park and a nearly 90,000-acre (360 km2) estate