The house that coal built

I opened this book expecting to  find the sort of volume a considerate host would place in your country- house bedroom. It is a bit more than that. Taking the decline of the Earls of Fitzwilliam and their enormous house Wentworth Woodhouse, outside Rother- ham, as her theme, Caroline Bailey evokes the social revolution that occurred in 20th- century Britain. The almost inconceivable riches of the Fitzwilliam family — coming- of-age parties were celebrated with entertainment for tens of thousands of people — are contrasted to the squalor in which local miners lived. The Fitzwilliams were not bad employers. It was unfortunate that a visit by George V and Queen Mary in 1919, made to bolster the position of the monarchy at a time of fermenting unrest, should have coincided with two explosions in Denaby Main. Billy, the 7th Earl Fitzwilliam, had studied mining; he had already warned the company concerned that an accident was likely to happen.  Mining was a vital industry throughout the first 70 years of the century. The rise and fall of its workforce is the history of organised labour. Remember Mrs Thatcher.

The book starts with a mystery that would have defeated most authors. In 1972, 16 tons of muniments were hauled from the big house and systematically burnt in a bonfire that lasted three weeks. It is not the only example of records being deliberately destroyed in the book. Almost every reference to George V’s visit has been expunged from the Prime Minister H. H. Asquith’s papers and even the Royal Library. (The inference is that nobody wanted posterity to know how close the ruling caste thought Britain had come to a revolution.) Like a detective attempting to reconstruct the identity of a villain whose fingerprints have been wiped clean, Bailey forensically reconstructs family history.