Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> In the twentieth century the 6th Earl Fitzwilliam was one of Britain’s richest aristocrats. During his lifetime his wealth increased a thousand times over; when he died his family spent ?45000 equipping his servants in mourning livery for his funeral. He lived at Wentworth House one of the finest Georgian houses in England. Situated five miles outside Sheffield it is still the largest private house in Europe. It has 1000 windows 365 rooms and five miles of passageways. Few have heard of it and fewer still have seen it – it is England’s forgotten palace. Wentworth House lies at the core of this extraordinary story. Shrouded now in mystery it was owned for 200 years by the Fitzwilliam family whose great fortune was built on coal. At the dawn of the twentieth century Wentworth stood at the centre of the South Yorkshire coalfield ‘a jewel in a crown of poverty and grime. Ringed by scores of collieries where tens of thousands of miners were employed it was a symbol of one of the bleakest statistics of the time: 88 per cent of the population owned nothing I per cent owned two thirds of the nation’s wealth. In the struggle to set right this social injustice Britain’s one million miners were destined to become the driving force.