by Lisa Hilton
Lord Redesdale and Hitler had similar views on make-up. Much to the despair of his daughters, the former, like his alter ego Uncle Matthew, ‘liked to see female complexions in a state of nature and often pronounced that paint was for whores’. On her first trip to Paris Nancy had mourned the parental edict against powder (‘the others look too lovely’). No wonder, then, that the younger Mitfords slapped it on with such enthusiasm when safely out of sight, to the extent that Unity, who refused to do without lipstick, even scotched her first opportunity to meet Hitler rather than give up her warpaint. In the spring of 1933, Diana Guinness had been introduced to Putzi Hanfstaengl, a press-relations officer who had known Hitler for twelve years. This ‘very interesting German’5 promised to introduce Diana to the Chancellor if she could come to the Nazi Parteitag, the first Nuremberg rally, in September.
Tom Mosley (as Oswald was always known to family and friends) had begun an affair with his married sister-in-law Baba Curzon after his wife’s death. That summer, he was on a motor tour of France with his new mistress. Diana, in need of distraction from this latest evidence of the callousness of the man for whom she had sacrificed her life, suggested to Unity that they take a trip to Bavaria. They travelled from Munich to Nuremberg, where Putzi met them at the station and reacted with horror to their heavily made-up faces, not at all the sort of thing that pure, cosmetic-free Aryan womanhood was supposed to go in for. Despite vigorous backstage wiping, Putzi was unable to make good on his promise, but Unity and Diana were nonetheless overwhelmed by the Parteitag, three days of parades, speeches and rapturous saluting which confirmed them both in their absolute belief in Fascism. The Redesdales were disgusted and furious when they discovered what Diana had done. ‘I suppose you know without being told how absolutely horrified Muv and I were to think of you and Bobo accepting any form of hospitality from people we regard as a murderous gang of pests, ’ wrote Lord Redesdale, but Unity had already decided on returning to Nuremberg the following year to embark on her quest to meet her idol.
Given the Redesdales’ views on Nazism at the time, it seems astonishing that the next year Lady Redesdale accompanied Unity to Munich to settle her into 121 Königstrasse, the home of Baroness Laroche, who took in English girls en pension. From then until the end of Unity’s life, Germany was her home and Hitler her obsession. On 9 February 1935, after a prolonged campaign of stalking and staring, Unity was able to write to her father describing ‘the most wonderful and beautiful’ day of her life. Hitler summoned her to his table in the Osteria Bavaria restaurant and they had a long conversation, at the end of which the Führer presented his twenty-one-year-old fan with a signed postcard: ‘To Fräulein Unity Mitford as a friendly memento of Germany and Adolf Hitler.’ Four months later, Nancy was writing to her sister:
Darling Head of Bone and Heart of Stone,
Oh dear oh dear the book comes out on Tuesday. Oh dear, I won’t let Rodd give a party for it … oh dear I wish I had never been born into such a family of fanatics. Oh dear … I wish I had called it mein uncomf now because uncomf is what I feel when ever I think about it. Oh dear.
In many respects, Wigs on the Green is less a political novel than a ‘light, accomplished comedy of manners’, 6 like its two predecessors. If anything, it is less concerned with Fascism than with the problem of Peter, to whom it is dedicated. He appears as Jasper Aspect, a charming wastrel who lives ‘from one day to another, picking up by fair means or foul enough cash for the needs of the moment and being dragged out of the bankruptcy courts about once every three years by protesting relations’. Nancy’s narrative voice might be that of Amabelle Fortescue. Love is viewed with a fashionable, hard-edged cynicism, as an ‘unethical and anti-social emotion’ and Jasper’s fecklessness justified by his remark that wives might as well keep their husbands, since although women have to endure pregnancy, chaps get hangovers, after all. Her marriage is dissected briskly and sharply and turned into a joke, since a joke was what she had to live with.
The Fascist parts of the novel centre on the beautiful, fanatical heiress, Eugenia Malmains, Unity to the life: strapping, blonde, with eyes like ‘enormous blue headlamps’ and her evangelical zeal for the ‘Union Jack’ movement, led by Captain Jack (who, in deference to Diana, never appears in the novel at all). Nancy was quick to protest to Diana that the novel couldn’t possibly damage her beloved Mosley’s cause.
A book of this kind can’t do your movement any harm. Honestly, if I thought it could set the Leader back by so much as half an hour I would have scrapped it, or indeed never written it in the first place … I still maintain that it is far more in favour of Fascism than otherwise. Far the nicest character in the book is a Fascist and the others all become much nicer as soon as they have joined up. But I also know your point of view, that Fascism is something too serious to be dealt with in a funny book at all. Surely that is unreasonable? Fascism is now such a notable feature of modern life all over the world that it must be possible to consider it in any context when attempting to give a picture of life as it is lived today.
Diana and Unity were by no means the only people to be enraptured by Hitler. Despite the fact that, as a political movement, pacifism was by far stronger than either Fascism or Communism during this period, in the early Thirties Mosley was still respectable and Fascism was considered by many as a serious force for good. The Observer compared the two leaders in 1933: ‘Where Mosley is like Hitler is in his sense of the dramatic. There is an extraordinary sense of drama about a Mosley meeting, a sense that great things are about to happen.’ In January 1934, the Daily Mail was trumpeting ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ from its front page.
Nancy’s own declared support of Fascism was, as Diana knew, initially borne out by fact. Just before her marriage, Nancy had heard Oswald Mosley speak in Oxford and in 1934 she and Peter had bought black shirts and attended several BUF meetings, joining the 15,000 strong crowd at the notorious Olympia rally of 7 June 1934. Nancy herself chimed in that summer with an article for the Vanguard entitled ‘Fascism as I See It’. Possibly this departure from her usual field of Vogue and The Lady was a pre-emptive strike against potential criticism of her novel, and certainly its conclusion is strikingly similar to one of Eugenia’s rousing perorations. Nancy denounced a culture where ‘respect for parents, love of the home, veneration of marriage ties is at a discount’ and where only the authority of a great leader would be able to lift the country ‘from the slough of despond in which it has too long weltered’. Nancy’s article came out in July. But however sincere she may have been at Olympia, and however ‘pretty’ Peter looked in his black shirt, she now saw Fascism as a joke.
Unity, for once, was more prescient than the editor of the Left Review, who described the piece as ‘a very well-developed case of leaderolatry’. Unity, though, knew a Mitford gag when she saw one and recognized the article for the parody it was. ‘I’m furious about it, ’ she wrote. ‘You might have a little thought for poor me, all the boys know I’m your sister you know.’ She also warned Nancy that she had heard about Wigs from Lady Redesdale and threatened that she would never speak to her sister again if it was published.
But Nancy did publish, and she was prepared to risk her relationships with the Fascisters in order to do so. Hitler might not as yet have been considered a monster, and the BUF might have attracted an estimated 40,000 adherents at the peak of its respectability, but even at this stage there were dissenting voices, and those voices were audible in the Mitford sisters’ circle. In the autumn of 1933, while Diana was staying in Rome with Gerald Berners after her first Nuremberg rally, Victor Gollancz had published The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror by a group calling itself the World Committee for the Victims of German Fascism. Containing a list of over 250 murders carried out by the Nazis since 3 March that year, it detailed, with photographs, the appalling treatment of the Jews under the Reich, the application of anti-Semitic laws and the number of German intellectuals and scientists who had been driven into exile by those l
aws. In her autobiography, Jessica Mitford described her passionate reaction to the book and the ‘bitter rows’ that ensued between herself, Unity and Diana who, according to Jessica, claimed that these atrocities were justified in pursuit of the Nazi goal.
Unity was prepared to dismiss the claims of the Brown Book even though she had experienced them at first hand. In June 1933, she had attended an Oxford production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, staged by the great director Max Reinhardt. Having fled Germany along with Einstein and Thomas Mann, Reinhardt was reduced to working with undergraduates. Unity was also friends with Anthony Rumbold, whose father, Sir Horace, was British ambassador to Berlin from 1928 to 1933. Sir Horace was a virulent critic of Nazism, stating in his final dispatch: ‘It would be misleading to base any hopes on a return to sanity …[the German] government is encouraging an attitude of mind which can only end one way.’ His notes were shown by the then foreign secretary, Sir John Simon, to the Mitfords’ cousin Winston Churchill. They were found sufficiently ‘disquieting’ to make them instrumental in the passing of the 1936 Public Order Act, aimed largely at restraining the excesses of the increasingly militaristic BUF. In a well-publicized incident, Anthony Rumbold himself was beaten up by a stormtrooper captain and ejected from Germany in February 1934. That same month, two manifestos on ‘Liberty and Democratic Leadership’ were issued, numbering Harold Macmillan, the art historian Kenneth Clark and Virginia Woolf among their signatories, while in March, the establishment of the Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifascistes in Paris was reported in the British press. In 1935, the pro-Labour Daily Herald reported a survey finding that millions of Britons across the political spectrum disapproved of Fascism. Closer to home, Robert Byron, a friend of both Nancy and Diana, had been an outspoken opponent of the Nazis since the early Thirties.
When she stated in her autobiography, ‘it goes without saying that apart from the politicians who gave the orders and the unfortunates who obeyed them, nobody in Germany or Britain knew anything about what was happening’, Diana Mosley was articulating what has become a conventional view of the Holocaust. But the fact that most evidence about what was occurring in Germany in the 1930s was dismissed as left-wing propaganda does not mean that either politicians or ordinary people were entirely unaware of what was taking place. Collective ignorance was a more effective cognitive defence when the full horror of the camps was revealed, and this justification for a crime of monstrous neglect has remained broadly unchallenged.
Nancy’s biographers have been at a loss to explain the political change of heart that took place between her attendance at Fascist rallies early in 1933, her increasing disaffection by July 1934 and her evident contempt by the time of Wig’s publication. How had the cheering supporter at Olympia become the sharp satirist of just a month later? Nancy was not a hypocrite: she simply changed her mind, as careful consideration of the chronology of her dissent demonstrates.
Before their marriage, in May 1933, Peter had lunched at the Café Royal with Harold Nicolson. He described the atmosphere in Germany, from where he had just returned after his ignominiously brief stint as a Times correspondent, as one of ‘complete terror’. Conceivably, Nancy and Peter might initially have thought, along with far more experienced political players than themselves, that Mosley’s brand of Fascism was to be a form of National Socialism-lite, the dynamism without the brutality. Curiosity and family feeling accounted for the rest.
However, the events of the Olympia meeting soured Nancy’s perception of Fascism irrevocably. As Mosley waited for the fanfares of trumpets and cheering to die down before beginning his speech, violence broke out in the crowd. Medical evidence from the sixty or so protesters who were taken to hospital showed that Mosley’s Blackshirt guard had come prepared with knuckledusters and razors. In a civil yet pointed correspondence in the Daily Mail, Lord Rothermere firmly withdrew his support. ‘I have made it quite clear in my conversations with you [Mosley] that I could never support any movement with an anti-semitic bias, any movement which has dictatorship as one of its objectives or any movement which will support a “Corporate State” for the Parliamentary institutions of this country.’
In October 1934, between the publication of Nancy’s July article and the release of her novel in June 1935, Mosley addressed another crowd at Olympia in terms which were explicitly anti-Semitic. International Jewry, he stated, was mobilized six to one against Fascism, and he could prove that BUF members had been victimized by Jews, who ‘owe allegiance not to our empire but to friends, relatives and kith and kin in other nations, and they know that Fascism will not tolerate anyone who owes allegiance to a foreign country’. He concluded with the well-known statement that Britain would not fight Germany in a Jewish quarrel, a tacit admission of the persecution his followers were elsewhere so keen to deny as left-wing propaganda. In March 1935, in a speech at Leicester, his remarks were self-avowedly even more anti-Semitic, so much so that he received an encouraging telegram from the rabid German anti-Semite Julius Streicher.
Nancy had learned enough to turn her gushing support for Mosley’s charisma into what became an increasingly fervent hatred. The fact that in Wigs Fascism is seen as a joke has led her to be accused of political shallowness, an inability to react to the proximity in her own family of ‘a grotesque and sinister political movement’7 with anything other than schoolroom in-jokes. Yet as the German newspaper Der Spiegel recently commented: ‘The ultimate way to shrink a myth is to make it laughable.’ Nancy recognized an innate silliness in Fascism and ruthlessly sent up the pompously childish posturing, the uniforms and the marching that so enthralled her sisters.
‘The Union Jack movement is a youth movement, ’ Eugenia cried passionately, ‘we are tired of the old … We see nothing admirable in that debating society of old and corrupt men called Parliament.’
At this point a very old lady came up to the crowd …‘Eugenia, my child, ’ she said brokenly, ‘Do get off that tub … Oh! When her ladyship hears of this I don’t know what will happen.’
‘Go away, Nanny, ’ said Eugenia.
Nancy was not the only Mitford to perceive an inherent absurdity in Fascism. Pamela, in spite of her own distinctly right-wing politics, also objected to Mosley’s ‘ridiculous, play-acting behaviour’.8 Even in her letter to Diana describing the early Oxford rally, where she described him as a ‘wonderful speaker’, Nancy couldn’t resist exposing her sister to the reality of what Mosley’s supporters were doing. ‘There were several fascinating fights, as he brought along a few Neanderthal men with him … One man complained afterwards that the fascists’ nails had pierced his head to the skull. Bobo was wonderful, cheering on we few, we happy few. Longing to see you, darling …’ At this stage, Nancy’s absolute refusal to take her sisters’ politics seriously, employing a tone which permitted their relationships to continue in that arch, teasing Mitford style, was the only means she had of expressing her dismay to them, but there is an urgency to the comedy of Wigs on the Green, an attempt to defuse the myth before it went too tragically far. She herself regretted this attempt to reduce Fascism to nursery silliness, an approach that has taken three-quarters of a century to become palatable.
What would she have made of the fact that in 2009 stormtroopers once more paraded along the Unter den Linden in the guise of the tapdancing showgirls of Mel Brooks’s 1968 musical comedy The Producers? Doubtless she would have relished the detail that in publicity for the show the swastika, which is still banned as an unconstitutional symbol in Germany, had to be replaced with a large pretzel. Or of Daniel Levy’s film The Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler, featuring a dog in Nazi uniform, a joke anticipated by Nancy in Eugenia’s pet, Reichshund? Or of the rap ‘Cool Mein Führer’, featuring Hitler going street in a baseball cap? The novel’s picture of Fascism in the 1930s does not demonstrate a ‘failure of imagination, ’9 rather the hope that the movement would be recognized as the ridiculous showing off it then was. Perhaps what is really discomfiting about Wigs is th
at Nancy got there first, and the immeasurable pity that Europe took so long to get the joke.
Nancy had offered to let Diana see the book and excise any offensive passages, but she was not prepared to scrap it. She did make some amendments, observing to her sister, with her allowance from Bryan Guinness of £2,500 per year, that the Rodds’ finances had already been seriously affected by the novel’s having missed the spring list as a result. The sisters had a last day in Oxford together before publication on 25 June, after which Nancy had to endure the clouds of Diana’s displeasure. The estrangement begun by the book did not really end for ten years. Nancy and Diana met occasionally and wrote to one another, but after Diana married Mosley in 1936, Nancy was forbidden to stay at their Staffordshire home. The sisters did not really become close again until the Mosleys moved to the Temple de la Gloire at Orsay in the early 1950s.