by Andrew Marr
Scene six: April 1937. Bilbao, northern Spain: a war zone. Refugees are streaming into the Basque town as Franco’s forces push the Republicans back. Bilbao itself will fall in just six weeks’ time. In a hotel we find Jessica, who had the communist half of the room and aged nineteen has now run off with Esmond Romilly, a cousin and also Winston Churchill’s nephew. Since the age of twelve Jessica had been accumulating money from birthday presents and other sources and placing it in an account at Drummonds Bank in London, labelled clearly as her ‘running-away fund’. When she had enough, she duly ran away. She did so having long admired Esmond from a distance. Known to the popular papers as ‘Winston’s Red Nephew’, Romilly had started a left-wing pacifist magazine, Out of Bounds, at his public school, Wellington, and circulated it round almost all the main private schools. He was expelled and sent to a remand home before setting himself up in a left-wing bookshop in London and continuing to produce his magazine. Aged seventeen, he set out for Spain to join the International Brigade and was involved in the Battle of Boadilla del Monte before being sent home with dysentery. There, at a house party near Marlborough, the romantic rebel met Jessica and she almost immediately asked whether he was returning to Spain and if so, whether she could go with him. After some subterfuge the two teenagers decamped and, in love, finally arrived at Bilbao, where Esmond was determined to make his way as a war reporter. But then the British papers, already fascinated by the fascists in the family, got hold of the story and, with the parents distraught, the foreign secretary Anthony Eden intervened. Jessica and Esmond were tracked down, blackmailed into getting onto a Royal Naval destroyer at a nearby port and taken to southern France. The story was reported across Europe. Hitler was much amused and, according to Unity, solicitous for Jessica’s well-being. She married Esmond and they eventually returned to Britain to live in the East End of London, carrying out vigorous anti-fascist activities directed mainly at Jessica’s brother-in-law Oswald Mosley.120
It is hardly surprising that the story of the Mitfords, the six sisters and their brother Tom, has lasted. It still seems impossible to quite believe. This is partly because the family itself spun its own myths. The oldest daughter, Nancy, lightly fictionalized their childhoods and parents in a sequence of novels which were almost as engaging as those of her friend Evelyn Waugh. She made their father Lord Redesdale, who appears in her books as ‘Uncle Matthew’, into such a grand comic figure that it is hard now to properly disentangle the admittedly wild-eyed but kindly peer from the caricature. Jessica Mitford’s autobiographical books are as good. The press picked up the stories early and followed the girls from the early-twenties parties to the disasters and dramas of the late thirties, simplifying and distorting and glamorizing all the way. Yet the kernel of the story is true. The girls did divide into a novelist, a duchess, a farmer, two fascists and a left-wing muckraker. Unity, the Hitler-lover, really was conceived in a small Canadian town called Swastika, where her parents were prospecting unsuccessfully for gold: her middle name really was Valkyrie. Lord Redesdale, who fought in the First World War as well as the Boer War, really did loathe foreigners, just like his fictional alter ego, and fell into violent rages, during which he would pick people up and shake them. Life at his country homes was just as uncomfortable and disconcerting as it seemed.
But does their story tell us anything beyond its symmetries and lurid humour? First, this is a story of the right-wing gentry. Jessica, who became a socialist and eventually settled in America, was very much the odd one out. After she married Mosley, Diana served time in prison during the Second World War. Unity became a fanatical Nazi and anti-Semite. The novelist Nancy, though she sometimes claimed to be on the left, and worked for a while in a refugee camp, also briefly joined the Blackshirts and was a notorious snob. Both Lord Redesdale and their mother, Sydney, were enthused by Hitler. Redesdale was initially anti-Nazi, telling Diana after an early visit to Germany that he was ‘absolutely horrified’ that she had accepted the hospitality of ‘people we regard as a gang of murderous pests’. But when he was brought to see Hitler by Unity, he changed his mind. Lady Redesdale underwent the same conversion. During the war she continued to speak out loudly and inconveniently in support of Nazi ideas, though her husband broke with all that, and consequently with her too. Another of the sisters, Pamela, had attended British Union of Fascist meetings and later married a brilliant scientist called Derek Jackson. He too strongly admired Mosley’s brand of fascism. Tom, the brother, met Hitler under Unity’s influence, went to Nazi rallies and, though not overtly political, told friends that, had he been German, he would have been a Nazi. The scene with the girls’ floor equally divided between red and black, a basic of Mitford storytelling, is hardly a full account of the balance of the family politics. It is a little too twee, making a joke of extremism that was all too real.
The Mitfords were not typical, but their interest in far-right politics was not at all unusual for the upper classes of the thirties. As we have already seen, the landed gentry were in fast retreat in these years. Mosley had to sell his family estates, like hundreds of other once-landed families. After Lord Redesdale inherited his first large country house he soon found he had not the cash to keep it up, and the family was trading down throughout the inter-war years. When the family moved to Old Mill Cottage in High Wycombe again, the younger children would chant their downward curve in the property market: ‘From Batsford Mansion, to Asthall Manor, to Swinbrook House, to Old Mill Cottage.’ The unthinking support for Conservative politics was shaken, and not just in the Mitford home, by the steady squeeze on the old rural order. Brought up to fear the unknown but surely seething urban masses and the possibility of communism, many people began to talk of ‘that Hitler feller’ as being not all bad. During the General Strike, Jessica had even taken her pet lamb indoors in case the Bolsheviks came to shoot it. When war with Nazi Germany eventually came, almost all of the British followers of fascism would drop their previous attachments and serve their country. Only a tiny number became traitors and the official line of the BUF was to serve. But most of the wealthier British who fell out of love with the National Government were looking further to the right. Communism was their real enemy, not fascism.
This produced strange friendships across political boundaries, as well as breaking up relationships inside families. Again, the Mitford story is instructive. As we have seen, Jessica ran off with Churchill’s nephew, Esmond; earlier he had been one of the leftists who caused the trouble at Mosley’s Olympia rally. When he was killed, during a bombing run against Germany, Churchill was much distressed. But the entanglements only start there. One of Diana’s closest friends was Churchill’s daughter and Diana stayed with the family at Chartwell as well as later, when Churchill was Chancellor of the Exchequer, at 11 Downing Street. Diana remained a bewitching and welcome guest after she had given her life to Mosley and when she was regularly visiting Nazi Germany. This meant that she was in the extraordinary position of knowing both Churchill and Hitler well throughout the key years of pre-war crisis. She tried in vain to persuade Churchill that Hitler had his good points. None of this is to suggest that British high society was riddled with pro-Nazis to the point where a German takeover would have been easy. Churchill remained immune: the so-called ‘Cliveden set’ of upper-class appeasers was relatively small and, when the moment of crisis came, uninfluential. But the people who led the far right in Britain were well known to the people who remained in the political mainstream. Had the economic crisis been worse, or had there not been a modest recovery in the south of England and the Midlands well before the war, British politics might have been grimmer.
All of which is starting to become heavy-handed, perhaps. Are the Mitfords not also a confection to be enjoyed? That too is part of the story, and one which reflects better on much of the family. Their eccentricities emerged from a world in which more people were cut off from the mainstream, in relatively isolated family groups, more ready to shock, and to create private languages,
than the more homogenized mass-media British of today. Some of them at least were great mockers, and a very large part of Mosley’s problem was that he became easy to mock. In his jackboots, peaked cap, riding breeches and semi-military tunic, strutting and shouting, he was simply unEnglish. Even Hitler thought he would have done better to stop copying Germans and Italians. Nancy Mitford’s least-known novel, Wigs on the Green, published in 1935, is a satire on the Blackshirts featuring a very funny caricature of her sister Unity. As Eugenia Malmains she is a young and ardent supporter of the ‘Social Unionists’ or ‘Union Jackshirts’ and first appears in a grey woollen skirt, plimsolls, a Union Jack jumper and a leather belt, with a large dagger, standing on an upturned washtub, haranguing the yokels of Chalford, a Cotswold village. Her nanny tries to haul her down but is arrested by Union Jackshirts as a filthy pacifist. Eugenia goes on about the dangers of putrescent democracy: ‘In England today, society is rotten with vice, selfishness and indolence. The rich have betrayed their trust, preferring the fetid atmosphere of cocktail bars and nightclubs to the sanity of a useful country life. The great houses of England, one of her most envied attributes, stand empty – why? Because the great families of England herd together in luxury flats and spend their patrimony in the divorce courts.’
The answer is the leadership of the Captain, wise, stern, ‘a man and not a tortoise’.121 This is quite gentle satire, and the book’s story is a comic romance, but it clearly drove both Diana and Unity mad with anger. Mosley banned Nancy Mitford from his house for the next four years and Unity said she would never speak to her oldest sister again. The book, though funny in a sub-P. J. Wodehouse way, was never republished, probably because of the sisters’ reaction. They could take outright communist opposition – Jessica and Unity remained friends throughout – but they could not stand being laughed at. Wodehouse himself, who naively ended up broadcasting from Berlin during the war, nonetheless also mocked the BUF. In his Code of the Woosters, perhaps mimicking Nancy Mitford’s book of two years earlier, Wodehouse creates Sir Roderick Spode, leader of the Saviours of Britain or the Black Shorts, a ‘big chap with a small moustache and the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces’. Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, needless to say, see him off. A national sense of the ridiculous has helped Britain keep her balance more than once.
Yet the final message of the Mitford saga was that it was tragic as well as comic. For a final scene one could choose the broken man that Lord Redesdale later became, driven to despair by his daughters’ extremism; or the miserable existence of the society beauty Diana in Holloway Prison as Hitler’s bombs fell on London; or the separation of Jessica from most of the rest of the family. But the obvious scene took place in the ‘English Garden’, a park by the River Isar in Munich on 3 September 1939 when Unity Mitford stood outside an art gallery, pulled out her pearl-handled pistol and shot herself in the head. Her equally beloved Nazi Germany and Britain were at war and she could not bear it. As she lay brain-injured and possibly dying, Hitler visited her once more. She survived, however, and was taken to Switzerland and thence to Britain. Her mother looked after her through the war, in High Wycombe, London and their Scottish island, Inch Kenneth, until she died of meningitis in 1948. But though she could talk, walk and visit friends, she was left with the mind of a twelve-year-old child, and incontinent. It was a terrible end but a devilishly accurate commentary on those pre-war lives of infantile politics. The private language of sisterly jokes, the collusive sense that Britain could play-act as upper-class farce, what lesser breeds took seriously . . . that too was shredded by the story of the Mitfords.
The Lion in Winter
When you don’t know what to do, write a book. In the summer of 1932, by now an old-looking man at fifty-seven, Churchill was touring the battlefields where his great ancestor Marlborough had conquered, doing research for a multi-volume biography. He had fallen out with the Conservative leadership. When the National Government was formed, he was pointedly not invited back. Thus he could be found in Munich staying at a hotel with his family. Here he was introduced to the same man who had helped the Mitford girls meet Hitler, the Harvard graduate, art dealer and passionate Nazi Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengel. Putzi was very keen to introduce the two great men – Mr Churchill and Herr Hitler – and brought good news: Hitler came to this very hotel most afternoons. Interestingly, Churchill agreed to have a quiet chat with Hitler, though complaining about the would-be Führer’s anti-Jewish views. It was Hitler who decided not to come. Churchill was out of office, wasn’t he? Nobody listened to him, he told Putzi. Hanfstaengel rather boldly retorted that the same could be said of Hitler. He later said he thought Hitler was nervous of meeting Churchill, whose party left the hotel a couple of days later.
It would have been some after-dinner chat. Churchill had been avidly watching the rise of the Nazi movement well before Hitler finally achieved power, and warning that his victory would threaten European peace. It would take a heroically blinkered Churchill-worshipper to claim that his career had been a triumph of clear thinking since he left the Liberals. We have noted his backing until the late twenties for the ten-year rule, which pushed British defence spending to its lowest as a proportion of national wealth until very modern times. We have observed his wrong-headed, tedious obstruction of the Government of India Bill, a moderate and temporizing measure which seemed to derange his romantic mind. And a little earlier there was his paranoia about Bolshevik insurrection in Britain – though to be fair he was always right about the Soviet Union itself. All of this led Baldwin by 1936 to muse to the Number Ten official and diarist Tom Jones that one day he would say ‘a few words in passing’ about Churchill – not a speech, but he had it ready: ‘I am going to say that when Winston was born lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle with gifts – imagination, eloquence, industry, ability, and then came a fairy who said, “No one person has a right to so many gifts,” picked him up, and gave him such a shake and a twist that with all these gifts he was denied judgement and wisdom. And that is why while we delight to listen to him in this House we do not take his advice.’ Words replayed by Denis Healey many years later, talking of David Owen, though with a rather cruder finale, they expressed a general view of Churchill at this time. He was frankly laughed at by Oxford students when he lectured them on disarmament. He was mocked into near-silence at a gathering of the Conservative Central Council, and routinely abused in the Commons by Tory and opposition MPs who thought him rude, over the top and windy. Most newspapers applauded MacDonald and Baldwin for keeping him out of office. The Labour Party constantly attacked him as a reactionary warmonger. Many of his old friends, like Lords Londonderry and Rothermere, sympathized with German diplomats who complained about Churchill’s rudeness towards Hitler. He was genuinely isolated.
Yet when it came to Germany, Churchill was early and Churchill was right and Churchill was utterly dogged. Once Hitler was in power, Churchill’s demands for faster rearmament never flagged. He was passionate but tried hard to keep to facts and to accurate numbers. In Edwardian times the arms race had focused on Dreadnought battleships; in the thirties it was all about air power. Much of the argument between Churchill and the ministers was therefore about numbers of planes, the preparedness of Germany’s aircraft industry, pilot training, and so on. Again and again he told the Commons that the Germans were further ahead than the government admitted, and that the RAF was further behind. Again and again he was proved right. Churchill based his political assault on the National Government from a clear vantage point, looking down at Nazi Germany as a land full of ‘war spirit’, ‘the pitiless ill-treatment of minorities’ and sloughing off civilized values ‘solely on the grounds of race’. It cannot be said that he misunderstood in any way what was happening. He may not have met Hitler, but he seems to have understood him. In the early thirties this led to him being abused as a man obsessed, pursuing some kind of strange vendetta, even plotting for power.
Armed with inside information supplied t
o him by a series of patriotic but rule-breaking civil servants, he began to unsettle ministers, then very slowly to turn them round. Desmond Morton, the head of industrial intelligence for the Imperial Defence Staff, was a key Churchill source, visiting him frequently and passing on huge amounts of classified documents. Then there was Ralph Wigram, a Foreign Office official, working with his wife Ava and also with the private knowledge of his boss, Sir Robert Vansittart. Wigram went down to Chartwell and had Churchill round to his house, breaking every rule in the civil-service book; he died in mysterious circumstances, either because of a heart attack or by suicide, at the age of forty-six, greatly to Churchill’s distress. There was Vansittart too: Churchill took to striding into ‘Van’s’ rooms at the Foreign Office and haranguing him, rather disconcerting the man who was, after all, chief servant of the very people Churchill was opposing. There was Reginald Leeper, the head of news at the same department. But there were many others, up to twenty sources, including serving RAF, naval and army officers, who began to use Churchill as their only public weapon against a slow, appeasing and unimaginative government. Thanks to them he became extraordinarily well informed – about the exact condition of Britain’s feeble tank technology and night-flying training, the number of anti-aircraft guns in Malta and the poor training of RAF technicians, the deicing of aircraft wings and the latest issues in propeller technology. He knew a phenomenal amount, thanks to leaky diplomats and businessmen, about the German aircraft industry and the order books in Britain. Again and again, when he attacked publicly, he was better informed than ministers themselves.