Netherwood Read Free

was a glorious, grandiose masterpiece. Built in 1710 for John Hoyland, the first Earl of Netherwood, whose forebears had ensured hisfortune through judicious marriages and the canny acquisition of land, the hall was the largest private house in England. An earlier, humbler, timber-framed manor house built in Tudor times by an ancestor was pulled down to make way for this new and potent symbol of the family’s wealth and status. At its furthest extremities, the east and west wings were identical, massively built square towers which jutted forwards like vigilant stone sentries. At the top of each tower was a cupola housing a great iron bell, and when both were rung together, on high days and holidays, their peals were said to be heard as far away as Derbyshire. Between the east and west towers, the main body of the house ran flat and simple, with two long rows of eighteen windows, each one identical to its neighbour. At the centre of the building stood a proud, eight-columned portico with curved stone staircases left and right leading up to a gallery from which one could view the gardens, and also to four towering French windows, each giving potential access to the fine reception rooms on the first floor. However, these doors were rarely used for any practical purpose, the portico being intended primarily to declare to the world the full pomp and circumstance of the noble family inside. Instead, the house was generally entered through a pair of great brass-studded wooden double doors in the shady recess beneath the portico. They opened on to a pillared entrance hall with a marble floor that rang out underfoot and a domed, painted ceiling depicting richly coloured images from the lives of the Roman emperors. Many a titled guest, visiting for the first time and being themselves the owners of a fine country estate, were nevertheless rendered temporarily speechless by the grandeur.
    To enter the gates and progress through the park and grounds of Netherwood Hall was to leave behind all trace of the corner of northern England that it inhabited. There were stately homes up and down the country where visitors gasped at the splendour of the estate yet barely noticed a change in the landscapeas they left the great park for the Surrey – or Sussex or Worcestershire or Norfolk – countryside beyond. But at Netherwood Hall, the contrast could not have been more marked between the worlds within and without the perimeter wall. In a thirty-mile radius there were just short of a hundred collieries, so that whichever direction you journeyed as you left, you were before long assailed by the scars inflicted by heavy industry on the hills, fields and valleys of this corner of the county. As their barouche or landau rattled its way north towards Barnsley or south towards Sheffield, the traveller’s view through the carriage window would be of slag heaps, headstocks, smoke stacks and railway tracks. Only with the blinds of the carriage window pulled down was it possible to imagine the verdant meadows of the agricultural past.
    But verdant meadows never made anyone’s fortune; it was the stuff beneath them that counted here, and which was the continued source of the now-fabled fortune of Edward Hoyland, sixth Earl of Netherwood. Because in 1710, when the building of the great hall began, John Hoyland unwittingly laid the foundations of the family seat on a wellspring of seemingly limitless wealth. At the end of the eighteenth century, when the prosperous family already wanted for nothing, their Yorkshire estate was discovered to include, far beneath it, one of the richest seams of coal the country had to offer.

    New Mill, Long Martley and Middlecar. These were the three collieries owned by the Earl of Netherwood and mined by his men. They were small pits by some standards – just over six hundred miners at each of them – but they were productive, yielding half a million tons a year of fine quality coal to help stoke the fires of industrial