As the summer of 1932 drew to a close, Bryan felt as though he might have a breakthrough with Diana. When the season ended, the smart and fashionable set departed London for Venice. At the end of August, Diana and Bryan left for Europe with their friends Barbara Hutchinson and Victor Rothschild, who were engaged to be married. The foursome motored through the south of France en route to Venice, stopping at Saintes Maries de la Mer. Prior to leaving London, Diana and Mosley conspired to meet up in Arles, as he too was motoring down.
Cimmie, who had recently given birth to her third child, was suffering from kidney trouble. Deeming the motor journey too uncomfortable, Cimmie, her children and lady’s maid, Andree, travelled by train. Mosley calculated this would delay Cimmie’s arrival, thus giving him a day or two with Diana. In their desperation at being parted for ten days, Mosley and Diana did not consider any obstacles that could have thwarted their plan.
In Avignon, whilst staying at the Jules César, Diana developed diphtheria. A sympathetic doctor permitted her to remain in the comfort of the hotel room rather than moving her to the clinical isolation of a hospital. For Diana it was a major crisis, not because of her illness, which kept her bed bound, but because she was terrified a letter might arrive at the hotel from Mosley and be opened by Bryan. The placid, easy-going trip quickly became a comedy of errors. After exhausting all of her options, Diana decided to take Barbara and Victor into her confidence, whereupon she explained the delicate situation to them. They did not condone her betrayal of Bryan, but to save further anguish they managed to send a telegram to Mosley in Arles, telling him to meet Diana in Venice.
Nine days later, she made a full recovery and they set forth for Venice. Giddy at the prospect of reuniting with Mosley, Diana was in a most congenial mood. Bryan appreciated her high spirits, but he could not have realised what lay behind this veil of happiness.
Venice, a playground for the wealthy, attracted sophisticated travellers in their droves. As soon as the Guinnesses arrived at their hotel, Diana wasted no time in becoming reacquainted with her old friends from the London social scene. Tom Mitford was there, staying at Malcontenta with Baroness d’Erlanger, whose guests included the scandalous courtesan Doris Castlerosse and, most importantly, the Mosleys. The scene unfolded before Bryan’s eyes; it was not the quiet holiday he had anticipated and, before long, Diana had invited everyone to join them on the Lido.
Shadowing Diana was Randolph Churchill who, since becoming Jonathan’s godfather, had firmly re-established himself as part of her scene. The tiresome behaviour from his youth had not subsided and this disregard for others was also apparent at a party at Cheyne Walk, prior to Venice, where Nancy claimed Randolph ‘tried to rape’ her. ‘It was very funny,’ she wrote to Mark Ogilvie-Grant, imploring him to keep it a secret.43
Bryan sulked under a cloud of misery; he disliked raucous crowds at best. Joining him in this feeling of misery was Cimmie, who was still plagued by bouts of ill health. Randolph, as always, was making a nuisance of himself by playing pranks on the unsuspecting Brendan Bracken, once poking fun at his dubious paternity by calling him ‘my brother’. A fight escalated, with Bracken chasing Randolph down the Lido, and an American tourist, echoing Bryan’s exasperation, exclaimed: ‘Fun is fun, but that Randolph Churchill goes too far!’
The crowd quickly packed up for a late afternoon of sightseeing. The rigorous tour brought them to St Mark’s Square, where they overheard a flighty American girl asking her friend: ‘Is this Florence or Venice?’ ‘Consult your itinerary,’ was the reply. ‘If it’s Monday, it’s Florence, if it’s Tuesday it’s Venice …’ The throng of tourists, standing elbow to elbow, peering at their tour guides and snapping photographs provided Diana and Mosley with the perfect cover.
They were forever plotting an escape, waiting for an opportunity to steal away, hiding down narrow alleyways and sneaking into a gondola to ferry them to a tiny, nondescript hotel for an illicit afternoon. Appearing hours later, they conjured up a feeble excuse, but no one was deceived. When the entire group had quite enough of tourist attractions and decided to spend their afternoons on the Lido, it became impossible for Diana and Mosley to leave. They were desperate to be alone, and over lunch Mosley leant across to his friend Robert Boothy and told him: ‘Bob, I shall need your room tonight between midnight and 4 a.m.’
Boothy was astonished at Mosley’s request and he was certain Bryan and Cimmie, who were sitting within earshot, had overheard. ‘But Tom, where shall I sleep?’ he jokingly responded.
‘On the beach,’ he answered. It was not a joke. Mosley was serious and Boothy spent the night sleeping on a recliner in a beach hut.
Selfishly caught up in his and Diana’s happiness, Mosley lacked sympathy for Cimmie, who spent the remainder of the holiday in excruciating pain from her illness and in tears from his betrayal. For Bryan, it was not only a realisation that he had failed to prevent Diana from ‘running off with the demon king’, but tangible evidence that his wife was in love with another man. Humiliation and scorn raged through him, but in spite of Diana’s behaviour, he still loved her.
The splendour of Venice and Mosley’s agreeable company contributed to Diana’s euphoric mood. Not even the realities of Biddesden could taint her happiness. And, to ease the guilt she had once felt, Diana told herself that Bryan finally understood the situation with Mosley. This, she hoped, might relieve her from upsetting him more than she needed to. To prove her point and to demonstrate her commitment to Mosley, Diana refrained from the physical aspect of their marriage. As far as Bryan was concerned, Diana might as well have withdrawn her love.
Bryan could not accept that his marriage had taken the discourse of an aristocratic union. He became passive aggressive and adopted the semi-whispering voice which Diana loathed. ‘Prison’ was her exact term for Biddesden and her marriage. Endless questions prevailed when Diana left the room or made a phone call: ‘Who were you with?’, ‘Where are you going?’, ‘What are you doing?’ he repeatedly asked. She could feel his eyes obsessively following her as she moved around the room, prompting her to react with a snide remark. A remark so cruel it caused Pamela, who had been spending her evenings with them, to gasp with horror. Pamela echoed the thoughts of those who knew the couple: ‘He worshipped her, and she walked all over him.’44
The tense atmosphere of Biddesden was relieved by Diana’s delight in being reunited with Jonathan and Desmond. She was a good and thoughtful mother, not even Bryan could deny that. He clung to the image of Diana tending to the children on their brief visits from the nursery. This image of faux domesticity gave Bryan a glimmer of hope that, in some way, Diana was still attainable to him.
NOTES
43 Letter to Mark Ogilvie-Grant, 20 June 1932, Love from Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford, Charlotte Mosley (ed.).
44 As told to Anne de Courcy, author of Diana Mosley.
22
COURTING SCANDAL
Cimmie was loyal to Mosley in marriage and in politics, and she oversaw the tedious details of his political propaganda. She designed flags bearing the newly designed fascist emblem and chose the music for the party’s anthem. It was far-fetched, but Cimmie managed to convince Mosley that the tune of Sousa’s ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ could be used, with original words by their friend Robert Sitwell.
With great fanfare, Mosley launched the British Union of Fascists (BUF) at its headquarters in Great George Street. A fortnight later, the BUF’s first public demonstration took place in Trafalgar Square. With his tanned complexion set off by a white shirt and dark suit, Mosley made quite an impression as he posed on a plinth at the bottom of Nelson’s column. He was surrounded by a protective barrier of eight bodyguards, all wearing black shirts – the trademark of their (future) uniform and origin of their nickname, the ‘Blackshirts’.
Taking the daring and symbolic step, Diana began to attend Mosley’s political meetings. Accompanied by Doris Castlerosse – who cared little about her questionable reputation – the
two beautiful women sat amongst the crowd of upper-class supporters and working-class militants, both equally spellbound by Mosley’s speeches. Mosley played to the gallery, cutting an impressive figure in his full fascist regalia of black shirt, breeches and jackboots, flanked by his bodyguards as he took to the stage. ‘All the swagger and vanity to Mrs Bryan Guinness and Doris Castlerosse,’ Irene Curzon recorded in her diary.
Irene, the eldest of the three Curzon sisters, was the self-appointed matriarch of the family, when upon the death of their father, Lord Curzon, in 1925, she became a baroness in her own right, inheriting the barony of Ravensdale.* A striking woman, with black hair and dark eyes, Irene emphasised her exotic looks by dressing in a ‘flamboyant, colourful, hit and miss style’. Although she wallowed in luxury, Irene was not as superficial as the aristocratic set who were intrigued by Mosley’s BUF. She donated large sums of her personal wealth to the founding of youth clubs in the impoverished East End of London. Dedicating three nights a week to this, Irene played down her wealth and travelled on the tube to the clubs. Aside from the clubs’ frequent outings, once a year she took the children on holidays around the British Isles and abroad. To the boys and girls of the East End, Irene became a cherished friend.
The youngest Curzon sister, Baba, ‘confident in her own impeccable chic’, was equally enthralled with Mosley, each sister having slept with him during his marriage to Cimmie. Unlike Irene, whose affair with Mosley was brief, Baba had an ongoing relationship with him and viewed Diana as a rival for his affections.
Even though she did not compete with Diana, Irene still felt an uneasiness about her presence in Mosley’s life. She was extremely protective of Cimmie and, since becoming aware of the affair and the unhappiness it had caused her sister, feelings of hatred for Diana simmered beneath her jolly exterior. ‘How that battered washed-out woman could have produced those six hooligan girls I do not know,’ she said of Sydney and her spirited daughters.
In 1932, the same year the BUF was founded, Mosley had a historic debate with Jimmy Maxton, the leader of the Independent Labour Party. It was held at the Friends House in Euston Road with David Lloyd George in the chair. The hall was policed by Mosley’s Blackshirts, and Redshirts from Maxton’s party. All of Mayfair turned out to watch the encounter and the audience was impressed by the brilliant and profound exposition of fascism, still unfamiliar to a majority of Britons at that time. Maxton called himself the average working man, opposing Mosley’s social rank and position.
Lloyd George interjected on the debate and told the audience: ‘If you have complete dictatorship, or a socialist policy in its entity then the king himself must go or else remain as a puppet, as he is in Italy.’ Many argued that fascism and Nazism grew in Italy and Germany out of chaos, but as the horror of a revolution was not yet upon Britain, they could not see it spreading without the whip of national bankruptcy.
Mosley agreed that revolution was not an issue, although he reminded the audience that the unemployment crisis was spreading, as it had done in Germany before Hitler came to power. Mosley reassured those who opposed a dictatorship that he would only bring fascism to England by constitutional methods and honest elections.
In a sense, Diana already had reason to believe in Mosley’s ideology. The political hero from her youth, Lloyd George, had given Mosley an endorsement when he declared that his extension of fascism was far more attractive and sensible than Labour’s socialism: ‘I have never heard in a short time a case put with such brilliant oratory as Sir Oswald has done.’
At the end of October, Diana and Bryan threw a costume ball at Biddesden and, fresh from the political stage, Mosley and Cimmie featured prominently on the guest list. Keeping within the lavishness of Diana’s parties, many guests consulted the theatrical costume designer, Oliver Messel, to make their costumes. Cimmie came as a shepherdess, Mosley opted for all black – BUF colours – and Diana, draped in a white gown, appeared as a Greek goddess.
Familiar friends from the early days of Buckingham Street and acquaintances from Ham Spray spilled through the doors of Biddesden to view the spectacle of Diana and Mosley for themselves. The affair had become common knowledge in their circle. Rosamond Lehmann, intimate with the Bloomsbury set, recalled: ‘Diana was in a Grecian dress looking greatly beautiful but sinister, which I always thought she was with that huge white face.’
If sinister was a quiet observation, it certainly played out in Diana and Mosley’s treatment of Bryan. They danced all night as though ‘magnetised together’ and Diana cared little of scorn; the guests observed her joyous expression, laughing with her mouth wide open, in the arms of Mosley. Bryan stood off to the side, silent and ‘looking like a shattered white rabbit’.
Bryan’s presence did nothing to suppress Diana’s glowing admiration of Mosley. Prior to the ball, Bryan tried to exert authority and had forbidden Diana from seeing Mosley. A great argument escalated and she defiantly warned him that she had a right to choose her friends. Rebelling against Bryan, she told her guests of Mosley’s greatness – ‘like having a crush on a film star’ – and this greatly played to his ego.
Mosley, drunk on political power, was throwing his weight around, knowing that Bryan wanted to intervene but did not have the nerve to stop him. Drawing on his customary method of using ‘the good clean English fist’ to settle a dispute, and knowing Bryan would never challenge him to a physical fight, Mosley believed this gave him the right to carry Diana off as his prize. He had won. Diana must have caught the horrified expression on Henry Lamb’s face, who felt protective of Bryan, for she coyly added: ‘You’re thinking what a frightful bounder he is …’
During supper, Diana and Mosley vanished from the table, having gone upstairs, only appearing hours later when the guests were leaving. Unlike Venice, she made no effort to invent a feeble excuse for her lengthy disappearance. Cimmie, a decade older than Diana, had begun to lose her looks as the reoccurring bouts of illness following the birth of her last child began to take its toll. Her recent weight gain and frumpy costume did nothing to dispel the guests’ pitiful looks in her direction. The pity humiliated Bryan, further fuelled by his powerlessness in stopping Diana from seeing Mosley.
That same evening Mosley and Diana committed themselves to one another, and when she spoke of her decision to leave Bryan, Mosley encouraged it. The excitement was incredible, like Mosley she had decided to stake her life as he was doing, on something she believed in – him. The following morning she told Cela Keppel: ‘I’m in love with the Leader and I want to leave Bryan.’
Mosley firmly believed he had the right to have two wives, a state of affairs which he tried to rationalise to Cimmie. His unfaithfulness and the pain it caused her could be eased if she could accept his desire to appoint a full-time mistress. He tried to convince her they could have a ‘lovely life together’ if only she could accept his ‘frolicsome ways’.
Diana fitted the bill – she was eager, enthusiastic and supportive. His proposition to Diana was clear: yes, he loved her, but he would never divorce Cimmie for her. Cimmie, he explained, was too respected by his political cronies, and to divorce the mother of his children would cause great scandal and reflect badly on the BUF. Something he did not need given the lack of success with the New Party.
Accepting Mosley’s conditions, Diana had secondary reasons for leaving Bryan. Marriage, she had found, did not agree with her free-thinking ways. Despite Bryan remaining faithful to her and his financial generosity, he oppressed her with his possessiveness, and their differing ideals exasperated her. Diana thought she had been in love with him, and in the first year of their marriage she had been very happy, but four years later she found he had only appealed to her because she needed to escape from home.
Although she did not regret any of it, Diana knew she could not continue to be with Bryan. She could not go on hurting him, chastising him and eventually succeeding in breaking his gentle spirit. It would be a betrayal to herself, and she was certain that one day Bryan
would find the sort of wife he needed.45 Weighing up her options, she took her own personal happiness into account.
Before Diana told Bryan of her decision to leave him, she broke the news to her closest friends. ‘Youthfully arrogant,’ Georgia Sitwell berated Diana over tea at the Ritz. She ought to have known, after all, as she reminded her friend, Mosley had abandoned her as soon as he met Diana. Aside from Diana’s treatment of Bryan, they were horrified at Mosley’s manipulation of her. He had persuaded this inexperienced, infatuated young woman to throw away her entire life in order to make herself more available to him. As much as they tried, her friends could not make her see sense. ‘Advice is given by the unworldly. Perhaps worldly people know from experience that it is never taken,’ she said.
At the end of November, Diana approached Bryan with the words he had been dreading. It was not a rash decision, for Diana had waited a month before breaking the news to him. Despite her friends’ best efforts to persuade her otherwise, she could not bear to hurt Bryan any longer. It had taken only a few minutes to dissolve their life together. To argue the case would have proved pointless, for behind the brief parting, Bryan sensed her uncompromising determination.
NOTES
* Irene was created a life peer in 1958 for her tireless work for youth clubs. Taking her seat in the House of Lords, Irene spoke of the importance of youth work in the East End, and argued on behalf of female prostitutes – a subject she knew well from her charity work. Shocking, and impressing, the men with her typical bawdy language, she informed the House: ‘They will charge a fiver, your Lordships will forgive me for being so sordid and vulgar, for a long spell and £1 for a quick bash.’
45 ‘I felt quite sure he would find the sort of wife he needed.’ A Life of Contrasts, Diana Mosley.
23
A CLEAN BREAK
Bryan fled to Switzerland for three weeks, and before his departure he warned Diana that Mosley was forbidden to visit Cheyne Walk. He need not have worried; during his absence, she hardly saw Mosley. His devotion to building up the BUF eclipsed any attention he might have spared for Diana, who had given up so much for him. This limbo in which Bryan had left her did not sway her decision to become Mosley’s full-time mistress, and she patiently awaited his return to broach the subject of divorce.
Mrs Guinness Page 14