Wentworth Woodhouse, a rich History full of Scandals and feuds / VIDEO:1/4 Wentworth Woodhouse (Ep4) - The Country House Revealed

 Scandals and feuds that cost family a home bigger than the Queen's

BRITAIN'S most impressive stately home's future will be decided in a court dispute that will drag up a past of scandal, family rifts and class war. Wentworth Woodhouse, with a fascade wider than Buckingham Palace and a room for every day of the year, is the subject of a £100million legal action that last week attracted the attention of Prince Charles.

By DANNY BUCKLAND

PUBLISHED: 02:55, Sun, Jun 9, 2013

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/406155/Scandals-and-feuds-that-cost-family-a-home-bigger-than-the-Queen-s

In the grimmest of ironies, the current owners are suing the Coal Authority for compensation for subsidence caused by the honeycomb of mines running under its land, yet it was coal that made its original owners among the wealthiest families in the land.

The Fitzwilliams, who owned the south Yorkshire property from 1720 until 1979, were a dysfunctional dynasty who make events at ITV's Downton Abbey seem as scandalous as a misplayed card at whist.

The Fitzbillies, as they were known to 385 staff and the 115,000 miners employed in their 120 pits, favoured imploding on a grand scale. Their tainted history features an epileptic Earl banished to Canada who returned a national hero after charting a land route between the Atlantic and Pacific and surviving disease to become one of the first non-natives to cross the Rockies.

He died aged 37 and his buccaneering, womaniser son became embroiled in a protracted feud with aunts and uncles who accused him of being a changeling, a child switched at birth for a baby girl, to rob them of their inheritance.

A cousin was disowned for marrying the grand-daughter of a draper and another scion of the family caused controversy by becoming engaged to Kathleen Kennedy, the vivacious sister of JFK, Bobby and Teddy from another torn and tormented clan from the other side of the Atlantic.

They both died in a plane crash over France in 1948, three years before a court case erupted over whether heir Toby Fitzwilliam had been born illegitimate.

Throw in Wentworth Woodhouse losing 183 staff during the Great War while the estate's pits made the family £12million, and rumours of illegitimate children created by a droit du seigneur, and there is enough raw material to keep Downton Abbey scriptwriters busy for a decade.

Grade I-listed Wentworth Woodhouse, near Rotherham, took 15 years to build but was almost sent tumbling into the abyss when the Labour Minister of Power, Manny Shinwell, insisted that open cast pits and mines were pursued up "to its back door", despoiling the house's formal gardens and obliterating its pink shale driveway.

The coal was low grade but the statement was high-class war politics: "Downton has nothing on Wentworth Woodhouse. The story of the family is as epic as the house," says Catherine Bailey, whose book Black Diamonds charts the dynasty.

"In 1900, they were one of the richest and most powerful families in Britain, yet within 50 years they were stripped of power.

"Their ancestors had lived on that site since the 14th century. The 6th Earl had eight sons, all named William after him and you would think they were as solid as the house foundations. Yet they lost their mines, were hounded from their house and this once great dynasty was in danger of dying."

Prince Charles has visited the house and contacted ministers about the need to preserve it as part of the national heritage.

The high watermark of the family's influence was marked at the death of the 6th Earl, in 1902, who left a fortune equivalent to £3billion. His eldest son, the epileptic William, became the source of high intrigue when he insisted that his third child, Billy, was born in a Canadian frontier town wooden house on the shores of Lake Superior where he had made his reputation. Suspicion clouded the remote birth and reached fever pitch when William died aged 37 and Billy became the 7th Earl Fitzwilliam. Relatives denounced him as a changeling with no right to family riches.

Billy employed a private detective to trace the birth doctor, midwife and nurse to discredit the claim. He became a hero after winning a DSO in the Boer War, and became a Conservative MP and Mayor of Sheffield. All the time, £6million a year profits from coal rolled in. He had 80 racehorses, land in Ireland and Yorkshire, and a London property that is now the Italian Embassy.

Billy ruled with a gentle touch ensuring the Fitzwilliam collieries were the safest and his workers received help during economic blights including the 1926 General Strike, when he taught miners on pit ponies how to play polo on his front lawn and fed them during their eight months with no pay.

Scandal was never far away and his son Peter, who had made at least three pit village girls pregnant before his 21st birthday, pursued the life of a hard-drinking, gambling, womanising aristocrat. Billy, despite his enlightened approach to his workers, had incurred the wrath of firebrand Labour's Manny Shinwell for buying a racehorse for 8,000 guineas during the war. His revenge was to order open cast mining on the estate, even though loyal miners threatened to go on strike.

Peter inherited the title in 1943, aged 32, after his father's death from cancer but it didn't stop him joining the Special Operations Executive and volunteering for a vital mission to smuggle ball bearings from Sweden past the Nazis. He made eight trips in motorboats and won a DSO.

His private life became engulfed in more scandal when, despite being married, he fell in love with Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy at the end of the Second World War after meeting the 28-year-old widower at the Dorchester.

Kennedy patriarch Joe had been persuaded to consider them marrying, but tragedy struck as they took a premeeting holiday and their jet crashed in France during a storm. The title passed to a cousin, Eric, who died childless two years later, and then to Toby who was forced into court to prove he was not illegitimate, following his mother's outrage that he wed below his class. His parents had married after his birth and arcane legislation on aristocratic inheritance ruled him out.

His younger brother Tom inherited the earldom but the estate, stripped of its coal income, was drained by its upkeep. As the dynasty crumbled, he ordered 16 tons of family records on to a bonfire that reputedly burned for three weeks.

On Tom's death in 1979 Wentworth Woodhouse, which had become a teacher training college, was sold. It continued to disintegrate, allegedly blighted by Shinwell's mining, but current owners Clifford Newbold and his sons, who bought it for £1.5million, have a £200million plan for a museum, hotel and business centre.

Prince Charles has visited the house and contacted ministers about the need to preserve it as part of the national heritage.

As the battle for Wentworth Woodhouse's future rages, Catherine Bailey says: "You have the story of Britain wrapped up in that house as well as the extraordinary story of a family. It is wonderful that there is a chance it might be saved and have a happy ending after so many tragedies."

King coal

Roy Hattersley sifts through the romance to find the reality of a miner's life between the wars in Catherine Bailey's Black Diamonds

Roy Hattersley

Sat 14 Apr 2007 23.45 BST First published on Sat 14 Apr 2007 23.45 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/apr/14/featuresreviews.guardianreview31

Black Diamonds by Catherine Bailey

If books had human characteristics, Black Diamonds would suffer from a severe identity crisis. It begins with the mystery - written in the high romantic style of Baroness Orczy - of the seventh Earl Fitzwilliam's origins and the allegation that he was a changeling, smuggled into a Canadian log cabin to provide the heir that Lavinia, Lady Middleton, could not produce. It ends with the tragedy - written in the breathless prose of Elinor Glyn - of Katherine "Kick" Kennedy (JFK's sister), who married the Marquis of Hartington and, after his death in the war, became entangled with the disreputable eighth Earl Fitzwilliam and died with him in an air crash.

In between the extracts from the social register, Black Diamonds contains a great deal of worthwhile information and interesting analysis about the state of affairs in and about Wentworth House and its estate. Catherine Bailey contrasts the lavish lifestyle of the Fitzwilliam-Wentworths with the grinding poverty of the miners whose sweat paid for the aristocratic extravagance. But not even the worthy meat in the sandwich is left unblemished by the book's regularly recurring flaw. The language in which some of the serious passages are written reduces its best parts to the level of society gossip. It is bad enough that the chapter on the doomed affair between Kennedy and the eighth Earl Fitzwilliam Wentworth is heralded by the single sentence, "The affair seemed madness from the start." But the real offence is the "bogus reporting" which peppers the chapters on important social questions.

The visit of George V to Wentworth - meant to heal some of the wounds of the industrial upheavals of 1911 by producing newspaper pictures of the king with miners - was an important indication of the establishment's anxiety about the prospects of a general strike or worse. Black Diamonds deals with it adequately. But it is preceded by a description of the king's arrival which would be more appropriate to the beginning of a short story in Lady's Home Journal. "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 potpourri to release their aroma into the air."

The irritation caused by such flaws is increased by the way in which they diminish the chapters of Black Diamonds that have something sensible, and sometimes important, to say. The verbatim accounts of the miners' attitude to what south Yorkshire called "graft" - not corruption but back-breaking labour - has an air of absolute authenticity. Walter Brierley, a miner from a pit 40 miles from Wentworth who was unemployed for four years, longed to be back hewing coal. "The dependence on the state for money without having honestly earned it has made me creep within myself." Arthur Eaglestone remembered: "The most heinous of accusations lay in the terrible phrase 'He doesn't like work'." When Bailey stops writing like a romantic novelist, Black Diamonds admirably reflects both the true nobility of the inter-war miners and the undoubted degradation of the aristocracy who exploited them.

Wentworth Woodhouse comprises two joined houses, forming west and east fronts. The original house, now the west front, with the garden range facing northwest towards the village, was built of brick with stone details. The east front of unsurpassed length is credibly said to have been built as the result of a rivalry with the Stainborough branch of the Wentworth family, which inherited Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford's minor title of Baron Raby, but not his estates (including the notable series of Strafford portraits by Anthony van Dyck and Daniel Mytens), which went to Watson who added Wentworth to his surname. The Stainborough Wentworths, for whom the Strafford earldom was revived, lived at nearby Wentworth Castle, which was purchased in 1708 in a competitive spirit and strenuously rebuilt in a magnificent manner.

The English Baroque, brick-built, western range of Wentworth Woodhouse was begun in 1725 by Thomas Watson-Wentworth, (after 1728 Lord Malton) after he inherited it from his father in 1723. It replaced the Jacobean structure that was once the home of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, whom Charles I sacrificed in 1641 to appease Parliament. The builder to whom Wentworth's grandson turned for a plan for the grand scheme that he intended was a local builder and country architect, Ralph Tunnicliffe, who had a practice in Derbyshire and South Yorkshire. Tunnicliffe was pleased enough with this culmination of his provincial practice to issue an engraving signed "R. Tunniclif, architectus" which must date before 1734, as it is dedicated to Baron Malton, Watson-Wentworth's earlier title. However the Baroque style was disliked by Whigs, and the new house was not admired. In c. 1734, before the West Front was finished, Wentworth's grandson Thomas Watson-Wentworth commissioned Henry Flitcroft to build the East Front "extension", in fact a new and much larger house, facing the other way, southeastward. The model they settled on was Colen Campbell's Wanstead House, illustrated in Vitruvius Britannicus i, 1715.

That same year the rebuilding was already well underway. In a letter from the amateur architect Sir Thomas Robinson of Rokeby to his father-in-law Lord Carlisle of 6 June 1734, Sir Thomas reports that he found the garden front "finished" and that a start had been made on the main front: "when finished 'twill be a stupendous fabric, infinitely superior to anything we have now in England", and he adds "The whole finishing will be entirely submitted to Lord Burlington, and I know of no subject's house in Europe will have 7 such magnificent rooms so finely proportioned as these will be." In the 20th century, Nikolaus Pevsner would agree, but the mention of the architect-earl Burlington, arbiter of architectural taste, boded ill for the provincial surveyor-builder, Tunnicliffe. It is doubtless to Burlington's intervention that about this time, before the West Front was finished, the Earl of Malton, as he had now become, commissioned Henry Flitcroft to revise Tunnicliffe's plan there and build the East Front range. Flitcroft was Burlington's professional architectural amanuensis— "Burlington Harry" as he was called; he had prepared for the engravers the designs of Inigo Jones published by Burlington and William Kent in 1727, and in fact Kent was also called in for confabulation over Wentworth Woodhouse, mediated by Sir Thomas Robinson, though in the event the pedestrian Flitcroft was not unseated and continued to provide designs for the house over the following decade: he revised and enlarged Tunnicliffe's provincial Baroque West Front and added wings, as well as temples and other structures in the park. Contemporary engravings of the grand public East Front give Flitcroft as architect. Flitcroft, right-hand man of the architectural dilettanti and fully occupied as well at the Royal Board of Works, could not constantly be on-site, however: Francis Bickerton, surveyor and builder of York, paid bills in 1738 and 1743.

The grand East Front is the more often illustrated. The West front, the "garden front" that Sir Thomas Robinson found to be finished in 1734, is the private front that looked onto a giardino secreto between the house front and the walled kitchen garden, intended for family enjoyment rather than social and political ambitions expressed in the East Front. Most remnants of it were redesigned in the 19th century.

Wentworth Woodhouse was inherited by Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, briefly Prime Minister in 1765–66 and again in 1782. He received Benjamin Franklin here in 1771. The architect he employed at the house was John Carr of York, who added an extra storey to parts of the East Front and provided the porticoes to the matching wings, each the equivalent of a moderately grand country house. James "Athenian" Stuart contributed designs for panels in the Pillared Hall.The Whistlejacket Room was named for George Stubbs' portrait that hung in it of Whistlejacket, one of the most famous racehorses of all time. The additions were completed in 1772. The second Marquess envisaged a sculpture gallery at the house, which never came to fruition; four marbles by Joseph Nollekens were carried out to his commission, in expectation of the gallery; the Diana, signed and dated 1778, is now at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Juno, Venus and Minerva, grouped with a Roman antique marble of Paris, are at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Wentworth Woodhouse, with all its contents, subsequently passed to the family of the Marquess's sister, the Earls Fitzwilliam.

The park

Having finished the course of alterations in the hands of John Carr, Lord Fitzwilliam turned in 1790 to the most prominent landscape gardener, Humphry Repton, for whom this was the season's most ambitious project, one that he would describe in detail while the memory was still fresh, in Some Observations of the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1803). A terrace centred on the main block effected a transition between the house and the rolling grazing land. Four obelisks stood on the bowling green, dwarfed by the scale of the house; Repton re-sited them. Though the parkland had accumulated numerous eye-catcheres and features (see below), Repton found there were few trees, the house being surrounded by "coarse grass and boulders" which Repton also removed, before the large-scale earth-moving operations began, effected by men with shovels and donkey-carts, to reshape the lumpy ground into smooth swells. Two large pools, visible from the East Front and the approach drive, were excavated into a serpentine shape. Some of Flitcroft's outbuildings were demolished, though not Carr's handsome stable court (1768), entered through a pedimented Tuscan arch. Many trees were planted.

Follies

The grounds (and surrounding area) contain a number of follies, many with associations in the arena of 18th-century Whig politics. They include:

Hoober stand. A tapering pyramid with a hexagonal lantern, named for the ancient wood in which it was erected. It is 98 feet (30 m) high and was built to Flitcroft's design in 1747–48 to commemorate the defeat of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, in which Lord Malton and his surviving son took part; his defensive efforts for the Hanoverian Whig establishment were rewarded with the Lord Lieutenancy of Yorkshire and the title Marquess of Rockingham: thus the monument indirectly reflects the greater glory of the family. The tower, which surveys the surrounding landscape like a watchtower, is open to the public on Sunday afternoons throughout the summer.

Keppel's Column. A 115 ft (35 m) Tuscan column built to commemorate the acquittal of the court-martialed Admiral Keppel, a close friend of Rockingham. Its entasis visibly bulges owing to an adjustment in its height, made when funding problems reduced the height. It was designed by John Carr.

The Rockingham Mausoleum. A three-storey building 90 ft  high, situated in woodland, where only the top level is visible over the treetops. It was commissioned in 1783 by the Earl Fitzwilliam as a memorial to the late first Marquess of Rockingham; it was designed by John Carr, whose first design, for an obelisk, was rejected, in favour of an adaptation of the Roman Cenotaph of the Julii at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, near Arles.The ground floor is an enclosed hall containing a statue of the former prime minister by Joseph Nollekens, plus busts of his eight closest friends. The first floor is an open colonnade with Corinthian columns surrounding the (empty) sarcophagus. The top storey is a Roman-style cupola. Like Hoober Stand, the Mausoleum is open on summer Sunday afternoons.

Needle's Eye. A 46-foot (14 m) high, sandstone block pyramid with an ornamental urn on the top and a tall Gothic ogee arch through the middle, which straddles a disused roadway. It was built in the 18th century allegedly to win a bet after the second Marquess claimed he could drive a coach and horses through the eye of a needle.

Bear Pit. Accessible if patronising the nearby Garden centre. Built on two levels with a spiral stair. The outer doorway (about 1630) is part of the architecture of the original house. At the end of the garden is a grotto guarded by two life-sized statues of Roman soldiers

Royal visit of 1912

Arms of Watson, Earl of Rockingham: Argent, on a chevron azure between three martlets sable as many crescents or. Motto: "Mea Gloria Fides" ("Faith is My Glory")], which is displayed in large Roman capitals on the frieze of the classical pediment of Wentworth Woodhouse

King George V and Queen Mary visited South Yorkshire from 8 to 12 July 1912, and stayed at Wentworth Woodhouse for four days. The house party consisted of a large number of guests, including: Dr Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury; The 5th Earl of Harewood and The Countess of Harewood; The Marchioness of Londonderry; The 1st Marquess of Zetland and Lady Zetland; The 10th Earl of Scarborough and Lady Scarborough; The 5th Earl of Rosse and Lady Rosse; Admiral Lord Charles Beresford and Lady Mina Beresford; Mr Walter Long and Lady Doreen Long; and Lord Helmsley and Lady Helmsley.

The visit concluded on the evening of 11 July with a torchlight tattoo by miners, and a musical programme by members of the Sheffield Musical Union and the Wentworth Choral Society. A crowd of 25,000 gathered on the lawn to witness the King and Queen in the balcony of the portico, from which the King gave a speech.

The Intelligence connection in the Second World War

During the Second World War the house acted as a Training Depot and Headquarters of the Intelligence Corps, although by 1945 conditions for trainee intelligence soldiers had deteriorated to such a state that questions were asked in the House of Commons. Some of the training involved motorcycle dispatch rider skills, as Intelligence Corps personnel often used motorcycles. The grounds of the house and surrounding road network were used as motorcycle training areas.

Coal mining on the estate

Opencast mining reaching the back of the house. From The Sphere, 8 February 1947

In April 1946, on the orders of Manny Shinwell (the then Labour Party's Minister of Fuel and Power) a "column of lorries and heavy plant machinery" arrived at Wentworth. The objective was the mining of a large part of the estate close to the house for coal. This was an area where the prolific Barnsley seam was within 100 feet (30 m) of the surface and the area between the house and the Rockingham Mausoleum became the largest open cast mining site in Britain at that time: 132,000 tons of coal were removed solely from the gardens. Ostensibly the coal was desperately needed in Britain's austere post-war economy to fuel the railways, but the decision has been widely seen as useful cover for an act of class-war spite against the coal-owning aristocracy. A survey by Sheffield University, commissioned by Peter Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, the 8th Earl, found the coal to be "very poor stuff" and "not worth the getting"; this contrasted with Shinwell's assertion that it was "exceptionally good-quality."

Shinwell, intent on the destruction of the Fitzwilliams and "the privileged rich", decreed that the mining would continue to the back door of Wentworth, the family's east front. What followed saw the mining of 99 acres (400,000 m2) of lawns and woods, the renowned formal gardens and the show-piece pink shale driveway (a by-product of the family's collieries). Ancient trees were uprooted and the debris of earth and rubble was piled 50 ft (15 m) high in front of the family's living quarters.[36]

Despite Shinwell's vindictiveness, local opinion supported the earl - Joe Hall, President of the Yorkshire Area of the National Union of Mineworkers, said that the "miners in this area will go to almost any length rather than see Wentworth Woodhouse destroyed. To many mining communities it is sacred ground" – in an industry known for harsh treatment of workers, the Fitzwilliams were respected employers known for treating their employees well. The Yorkshire branch later threatened a strike over the Labour Government's plans for Wentworth, and Joe Hall wrote personally to Clement Attlee in a futile attempt to stop the mining. This spontaneous local activism, founded on the genuine popularity of the Fitzwilliam family among locals, was dismissed in Whitehall as "intrigue" sponsored by the earl.

The open-cast mining moved into the fields to the west of the house and continued into the early 1950s. The mined areas took many years to return to a natural state; much of the woodland and the formal gardens were not replaced. The current owners of the property allege that mining operations near the house caused substantial structural damage to the building due to subsidence, and lodged a claim in 2012 of £100 million for remedial works against the Coal Authority. The claim was heard by the Upper Tribunal (Lands Chamber)in April 2016. In its decision dated 4 October 2016 the Tribunal found that the damage claimed for was not caused by mining subsidence (2016 UKUT 0432 (LC).

Two sets of death duties in the 1940s, and the nationalization of their coal mines, greatly reduced the wealth of the Fitzwilliams, and most of the contents of the house were dispersed, in auction sales in 1948, 1986 and 1998. In the Christies sale in 1948, Rinaldo conquered by Love for Armida by Anthony van Dyck raised 4,600 Guineas[40] (equivalent to £161,180 in 2016).

Many items still remain in the family, with many works lent to museums by the "Trustees of the Fitzwilliam Estates".

On 23 November 2016, the Conservative Chancellor Philip Hammond announced that £7.6 million would be invested in reversing the damage caused by the mining that commenced in 1946, and restoring the house to conditions suitable for visiting.

Lease to Lady Mabel College

The Ministry of Health attempted to requisition the house as "housing for homeless industrial families". To prevent this, the Earl attempted to donate the house to the National Trust, however the Trust declined to take it. In the end, Lady Mabel Fitzwilliam, sister of the 7th Earl and a local alderman, brokered a deal whereby the West Riding County Council leased most of the house for an educational establishment, leaving forty rooms as a family apartment. Thus, from 1949 to 1979, the house was home to the Lady Mabel College of Physical Education, which trained female physical education teachers. The college later merged with Sheffield City Polytechnic (now Sheffield Hallam University), which eventually gave up the lease in 1988 as a result of high maintenance costs.

Sheffield City Polytechnic

1979 - 1988 saw students from Sheffield City Polytechnic (now Sheffield Hallam University) based at Wentworth Woodhouse. Two departments, Physical Education and B.A. Geography & Environmental Studies were based on site. The mansion building housed student accommodation (reputedly haunted, according to student accounts) and a dining room and kitchens for lunch and dinner for students living on site. Four separate blocks of modern student accommodation were built in the grounds of the deer park. The Stable Block became the centre of student life, housing offices, lecture rooms, laboratories, squash courts, a swimming pool, and a student bar.

Sold by Fitzwilliam family

By 1989, Wentworth Woodhouse was in a poor state of repair. With the polytechnic no longer a tenant, and with the family no longer requiring the house, the family trustees decided to sell it and the 70 acres (280,000 m2) surrounding it, but retained the Wentworth Estate's 15,000 acres (61 km2) of land. The house was bought by locally born businessman Wensley Grosvenor Haydon-Baillie, who started a programme of restoration. However a business failure caused it to be repossessed by a Swiss bank and put back on the market in 1998. Clifford Newbold (July 1926 – April 2015), an architect from Highgate, bought it for something over £1.5 million. Newbold progressed with a defined programme of renovation/restoration as evidenced in Country Life magazine dated 17 and 24 February 2010. The surrounding parkland is owned by the Wentworth Estates.

In 2014, the house was informally offered for sale by Newbold, with no price specified, but a figure of around £7 million was thought to be sought according to The Times. The house was reported to need works of around £40 million. Following the death of Mr. Newbold, the house was formally advertised for sale in May 2015 via Savills with an asking price of £8 million. In March 2017, the house was sold to the Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust for £7 million after a sale to the Hong Kong-based Lake House Group fell through.

In the United Kingdom Chancellor's budget statement of November 2016, it was announced that the Trust was to receive a grant of £7.6 million for restoration work; the Chancellor noted a claim that the property had been Jane Austen's inspiration for Pemberley in her novel Pride and Prejudice. It was thought that there might have been a connection to the house because Austen uses the name Fitzwilliam in her novel, but following the Chancellor's Autumn Statement the Jane Austen Society dismissed the likelihood that Austen had had the house in mind, given the absence of any evidence that she had visited the estate. Austen does, however, name a character Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion, and the eponymous heroine of Emma has the surname Woodhouse.