King Charles won’t drag us out of the doldrums
In 1946, lorries and diggers rumbled into the grounds of Wentworth Woodhouse, then one of England’s grandest mansions. Its manicured lawns, gardens, and parkland stood on a coal seam that neared the surface, and the Labour Party’s Minister for Fuel and Power, Manny Shinwell, wanted to mine it. His aim was to address a national fuel crisis — and also, as historian Catherine Bailey shows, to strike a blow against the hereditary privilege Shinwell believed the mansion’s owner, the Earl Fitzwilliam, to represent.
