`One heck of a good read . . . brilliant, gripping . . . 'Black
Diamonds' will keep you bolt upright all night'

`A compelling new history . . . fascinating insights into the
dynasty that once ruled this Yorkshire roost'

`A finely researched piece of social history'

`An aristocratic tale of epic proportions, this gripping novel
cleverly interweaves interviews, letters and historical fact . . .
Fascinating'

'Magnificent . . . peels back the grand façade of Wentworth to
reveal a family riven with fueds, mental illness and forbidden love'

Wentworth is in Yorkshire and was surrounded by seventy collieries employing tens of thousands of men. It is the finest and largest Georgian house in Britain and belonged to the Fitzwilliam family. It is England's forgotten palace and belonged to Britain's richest aristocrats. "Black Diamonds" tells the story of its demise: family feuds, forbidden love, class war, and a tragic and violent death played their part. But coal, one of the most emotive issues in twentieth-century British politics, lies at its heart. This is the extraordinary story of how the fabric of English society shifted beyond recognition in fifty turbulent years in the twentieth century.

Catherine Bailey read history at Oxford University. She is a
successful, award-winning television producer and director, making a range
of critically acclaimed documentary films inspired by her interest in
twentieth century history. This is her first book. She lives in West
London.

It had been raining for days: torrents of water, blackened by coal dust, cascaded from the roof gutters. Squalls of wind, blowing straight off the moors, whipped across the Park, driving the rain horizontally against the thousand windows, as if tiny fragments from the gravel drive around the house were being hurled from outside. The clock in the North Tower at the furthest end of the East Front stuck three, the signal on a dark winter afternoon for the lampmen to begin their evening round.

Upstairs, in the `Duchess of Kent', the state bedroom reserved for royalty and other important guests, the body of the dead Earl lay in a four-poster bed that was crowned by a cornice of gold. A pistachio-coloured silk valance ran beneath it, trailing luxurious hangings and thick braided tassels. Gold and green were the primary colours of the state bedroom; the principal items of furniture - the intricately carved mahogany Louis Quinze bed and a pair of Sheraton cabinets, eight feet tall - were formal and austere. The hand-painted wallpaper, a heavy yew-green, embossed with tiny clusters of silk flowers, added to the room's sombre tone.

The body had been there for five days. Even in death, the retinues of staff at Wentworth continued to serve the Earl. His servants had washed and dressed his corpse, and a plain oak coffin, made by the Estate carpenters from one of the oaks in the Park, chosen by the Earl some years before he died, stood ready for the following morning's burial.

The temperature in the room was as cold as the dead Earl; deliberately so, the chill necessary to slow the process of decomposition. A ring of white and gold oval-backed chairs formed a crescent around the bed, carefully positioned by footmen for the succession of visitors - members of the family, senior servants and the local nobility - who had come to pay their last respects.

It was a world away from the pit villages nearby, where the Earl's miners stood up their family corpses in the corner of their front parlour rooms to make way for the crush of mourners, and where, in the overcrowded cottages, dead relatives frequently shared the family's beds. As late as the 1920s, a boy from Greaseborough, one of the Fitzwilliams' villages, told his teacher, `Please, Miss, they're goin' ter bury ou Ernest tomorrow, he's in t' big bed in t'room now. Our Jimmy wouldn't sleep wi' him last night - `e wor frightened - but I worn't, `e carn't hurt ya, `e's dead and wrapped in a sheet, so I sleep next `im and our Alice next to me, an' our Joe at t' bottom.'

2007-10-31 Dam good read

My Gt Gt grandfather was a miner in Greasbrough, as were the following
3 generations, as a child I spent many hours fishing and playing around the Fitzwilliam estate, so I am amazed at my lack of knowledge of the local history.This book is not only informative it is a DAM good read.