Black Diamonds: The Downfall of an Aristocratic Dynasty and the Fifty Years that Changed England

Summary (from the publisher):House of privilege, riches and secrets...

Wentworth is today a crumbling and forgotten palace in Yorkshire. Yet just a hundred years ago is was the ancestral pile of the Fitzwilliams - an aristocratic clan whose home and life were fuelled by coal mining.

Black Diamonds tells of the Fitzwilliams' spectacular decline: of inheritance fights; rumors of a changeling and of lunacy; philandering earls; illicit love; war heroism; a tragic connection to the Kennedys; violent death; mining poverty and squalor; and a class war that literally ripped apart the local landscape.

The demise of Wentworth and the Fitzwilliams is a riveting account of aristocratic decline and fall, set in the grandest house in England.

 

Review: Up until recent decades, the titled Fitzwilliam family was one of the wealthiest in England, living in one of the grandest homes in Europe, known as Wentworth. Yet today, the title of Earl has died out and the house is largely forgotten. This book uses the Fitzwilliam family as an example to illustrate some of the larger social and economic changes that took place in England in the twentieth century that led to the demise of many of the great ancestral homes and the lifestyle of the privileged few aristocrats.

 

Although the book does not dwell on the origins of the family and its more ancient history, the title of Earl Fitzwilliam was established in 1716. It was the fourth Earl who inherited the Wentworth estate from his uncle, Lord Rockingham, making him one of the greatest landowners in England. The house was said to have "a room for every day of the year and five miles of passageways." Wentworth was, and still is, the largest privately owned house in Britain. "In the late eighteenth century, the Fitzwilliams' Yorkshire estates - over 20,000 acres in total - were found to straddle the Barnsley seam, the main artery of the South Yorkshire coalfield." Thus the family was made fabulously wealthy off of coal - and the many miners who were paid a pittance to work long and dangerous hours underground in the family's coal mines. When the sixth Earl died, he left 2.8 million pounds, which is worth more than 3 billion pounds today. Yet by 1979 the title would die out and the great estate would be left unoccupied. 

 

Much of the book delves into several scandals that the Fitzwilliam family tried hard to cover up for years. Years worth of the family's papers were deliberately destroyed in a giant bonfire that burned night and day for three weeks, permanently destroying much of the record that could have illuminated some of the family's mysteries. For example, one of the greatest and most mysterious family scandals was that of the true origins of the Billy, the seventh Earl, who was presumably the son of the sixth Earl's eldest son, who died some years before his own father. Strangely, for such an important heir, Billy was born in the middle of the American wilderness and rumors abounded that his parents actually had a daughter, who was switched at birth for Billy, a "cuckoo in their nest."

 

Another great scandal was that of Billy's son and heir, Peter, who died in a plane crash with Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy, the sister of President John Kennedy. In the years before his death, the married Peter had had a longstanding affair with Kick, who was the widow of the heir to the Duke of Devonshire, who died in World War II. Peter's death effectively spelled the demise of the Fitzwilliam estate. Peter left no male heir, meaning an elderly bachelor cousin inherited. After this cousin died, another distant male relative with no male heirs inherited. He became the tenth and last early of Fitzwilliam. In 1988, the house that had been in the Fitzwilliam family for more than 250 years was put up for sale. Today it is owned be a reclusive and private figure about whom little is known. Thus the name of Wentworth House is barely recognized today.

 

I appreciated that the author contrasted the great house and privileged lifestyle of the Fitzwilliam family with detailed accounts of the suffering of the miners, whose efforts supported the Fitzwilliam lifestyle. Although it seems that the Fitzwilliam family treated their miners better than most, it's undeniable that the mining families lived in abject poverty, had incredibly high infant mortality rates, and lost many men and young boys to accidents in the mines. The decline of this way of life was also illustrated, as the coal industry was failing in the decades leading up to WWII. In effect, the Fitzwilliam's decline is symbolic of their way of life in England; it was no longer a sustainable option.  

 

This was such an interesting history of a family that is little known due to their own efforts to obscure their history. However, the book at times felt disorganized and more like a series of interesting tidbits, rather than a comprehensive family history. For example, a significant portion is devoted to telling the story of Edgar, presumed the illegitimate child of Billy Fitzwilliam. Edgar was born deaf and dumb and was eventually put in an institution for over fifty years, despite the fact that he was mentally sound. The book also spends nearly one hundred pages telling Kick Kennedy's personal story, which, although interesting, is mostly irrelevant to the Fitzwilliam tale, aside from her final years when she had a relationship with Peter Fitzwilliam. However, the family's destruction of the vast majority of all historical records likely made this book difficult to research and write. This work of non-fiction is an interesting look both at a personal family in England but also the turmoil of changing economic conditions and the repercussions for World War II, that spelled the end of the great landed estates in England.

 

Stars: 4