Black Diamonds Quotes

“As a boy, he had worked as a carter for the 5th Duke of Portland, wheeling stone from the local quarry, used to construct a vast network of underground rooms that extended for twelve miles under the Welbeck estate. There was a ballroom that could accommodate 2,000 people and a riding school with a gallop a quarter of a mile long, lit by 8,000 jets of gas. One tunnel led to a suite of rooms covering four acres, and another to stables, cow-houses and dairies, where more than sixty people were employed.”
― Catherine Bailey, Black Diamonds: The Downfall of an Aristocratic Dynasty and the Fifty Years That Changed England

“The Duke of Portland was one of the richest coal owners in England. In the 1860s, when construction first began, a miner working at one of his collieries earned around £50 a year. The Duke’s annual income was in the region of £108,000. Whimsy, not wages, drove him to burrow underground; an eccentric and a recluse, he could not bear to be seen. The Duke spent his life wandering”
― Catherine Bailey, Black Diamonds: The Downfall of an Aristocratic Dynasty and the Fifty Years That Changed England

“Traipsing the tunnels alone, the boys depended on the ponies for companionship; if their lamps went out, as they frequently did, a pony could guide them home. 'The ponies knew their way around their own district of the pit and could always find their way back to the pit bottom. They did this by travelling against the air which was being fed down the shaft,' Jim remembered. 'If you got caught in the dark, you grasped your pony's tail and tried to get your head just below the level of his back while he walked slowly - never offering to kick you - straight back to the pit bottom.”
― Catherine Bailey, Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty

“Other sounds woke the hamlet: the blast of a ship's foghorn blown at the pit top to mark the start of the shift; the echo of others - 'buzzers', as they were called - from the pits in the valley below. For the deep sleepers, there was the 'knocker-up'; a human alarm clock, he used a long pole to rattle the window panes of the households that paid him a few pennies each week.”
― Catherine Bailey, Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty

“The old adage that the sins of the father fall upon the children has no better example to prove its truth than the example of the bastard. He is the victim; he suffers the penalty of a sin committed before he was born. In a village where every cupboard skeleton is the common knowledge of all, where every tongue hat has a weakness for wagging, has plenty of material to wag about, the existence of an illicit sexual union is not made a pleasant one.”
― Catherine Bailey, Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty

“According to this [ideal] code an Englishman should be guided by an overpowering sense of civic duty and diligence. Every man's first loyalty should be to the country of his birth and the institution in which he served. Loyalty to the institutions came before loyalty to people. Individuals should sacrifice their careers, their family, and certainly their personal happiness or whims, to the regiment, the college, the school, the services, the ministry, the profession or the firm.”
― Catherine Bailey, Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty

“In the first decades of the twentieth century, 88 per cent of the British population owned nothing. As defined by the statisticians, it meant they were worth less than £100. One per cent of the population owned two-thirds of the nation's wealth. Over the years that followed, in the battle to redress the flagrant social injustices inherent in these statistics, coal would become the driving force behind social, political and economic reform: the quest by those who owned nothing to have something.”
― Catherine Bailey, Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty

“The Duke [of Portland] spent his life wandering his estate at Welbeck. Tenants, labourers and servants were forbidden to speak to him, or even to acknowledge his presence. If they chanced upon the Duke, their instructions were to pass him by 'as they would a tree'. The man who dared touch his hat would be instantly dismissed. The temptation to stare must have been strong. Winter or summer, the Duke dressed in the same peculiar fashion. His trousers were tied inches above the ankle with a piece of string; he wore a heavy sable coat that touched the ground, and an old-fashioned wig. On top of the long wig, he wore a hat two feet high. Rain or sunshine, he carried an umbrella to hide beneath if anyone passed. He never mingled in society and was never seen at court. When he drove out on his estate, it was alone, in a black carriage, drawn by black horses, with the blinds down.”
― Catherine Bailey, Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty

“In the mid-nineteenth century, the sons and daughters of the aristocracy were obliged to marry well. A 'good' match was never a romantic one; social rank and fortune were the priorities - love came last.”
― Catherine Bailey, Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty

“But they turned out to be prescriptions for medicines, and not for the common cold: opium, lavender oil, belladonna, orange rind, chloral hydrate, strychnine, potassium bromide. Such sedatives and stimulants were common remedies at that time for epilepsy.”
― Catherine Bailey, Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty

“cloak of secrecy: the private asylums and single-lodging establishments, both”
― Catherine Bailey, Black Diamonds: The Downfall of an Aristocratic Dynasty and the Fifty Years That Changed England