I hoped to discover some explanation for the diverse range of opinion between the Mitford sisters. They had sprung from a privileged background, but it was no more privileged than that of their childhood friends’ and their cousins’, who had a similar upbringing and education without becoming celebrities. Had Nancy’s colourful portraits of ‘Uncle Matthew’ and ‘Aunt Sadie’ been true reflections of her parents, much might be explained. But Nancy’s portraits were only colourful exaggerations. And these six girls, brought up in exactly the same way yet developing in such an individual manner, seem to have taken the twentieth century by the throat. It is not so much that they were historically important – except perhaps in the case of Diana, who as the second wife of Sir Oswald Mosley became arguably the most hated woman in England for a while, and was imprisoned without trial for most of the Second World War on the insistence of Labour ministers in the wartime coalition government – but that they are so much larger than life – easily as interesting as the characters in Nancy’s novels.
As political alternatives both Communism and Fascism are probably equally unpalatable to the majority, so it is natural to be curious that Decca seems wholeheartedly accepted by the media, while Diana has always been regarded as a bête noire. The difference may lie in that Decca looked back at the historical picture, and on learning that Stalin had massacred 10 million people in the early thirties, publicly admitted that she had been wrong about parts of the Communist ideology she had so passionately espoused.3 On the other hand Diana, although deploring the unspeakable atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, and Hitler’s subsequent activities, has always rejected hindsight to rewrite the contemporary opinions of Hitler that she formed prior to 1939. She liked and admired him as a man when she met him, and she still believes that ‘It is not a question of right or wrong, but the impressions of a young woman in the thirties. Of course it would be easy just to deny these, but it would not be very interesting, or true.’4 She has, still, only to put pen to paper, or appear on the radio, for the word ‘unrepentant’ to be hurled about by her critics.
I have been fortunate enough to meet four of the sisters. I contacted Debo and Diana first to research this book. I met Pam at a dinner party in Gloucestershire, in the eighties, where I was introduced to a pleasant woman by the name of Pamela Jackson, who was interested in my hunter, Flashman, and his breeding.5 During dinner a remark made about a television programme in which the Mitfords had featured made me suspect who she might be, and when the ladies retired I asked my hostess if Mrs Jackson was one of the Mitford sisters. ‘Oh, yes, she’s the second eldest,’ she replied. ‘Wonderful eyes, hasn’t she? She ordered her Aga to match them, you know.’ I didn’t quite believe this, but some years later I watched a television programme in which Pam was interviewed in her kitchen, and there was the amazing blue Aga. Recently I was told a story about her, which is probably true. Apparently at a dinner party she was placed next to Lord Louis Mountbatten, who said to her, ‘I know who you are, you’re one of the Mitford girls, aren’t you?’ ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Pam replied kindly. ‘And you are . . .?’
‘Meet’ is perhaps the wrong word to describe my contact with Decca. I was packing in a hotel room in California one morning in 1986 when the phone rang and the caller identified herself as Decca Treuhaft which meant little to me. ‘Jessica Mitford then?’ she continued, in a delightfully deep and fruity English voice. I was there to see a publisher in Berkeley, about a book of short stories by Beryl Markham which I had compiled. Decca, who lived near Berkeley, had learned from a mutual friend that I was in town and telephoned to see if we could meet. She had been given a pre-publication review copy of my biography of Beryl Markham, and was kind enough to say that she had enjoyed it. So much so, she told me, that she was going to pass on her copy to a well-known Hollywood lawyer6 with the suggestion that it would make a good movie.7
I was due to leave the area within the hour for an appointment in Santa Barbara with an old friend of Markham’s who had eluded me for months. At the time, meeting him seemed more important so I never saw Decca in person, though we spoke several times afterwards by telephone. Perhaps it was just as well I did not know then of Decca’s devastating reputation as a book critic – I simply thought of her as the author of the highly entertaining Hons and Rebels, the only book of hers that I had read – for the Markham book was my first biography and I was nervous about the reviews. In a later telephone conversation I told her I was coming to San Francisco on a book-signing tour. We could not meet then because she was going out of town, but she told me a favourite story. A famous writer was in Australia on a book-signing tour. As one woman handed him a book he asked her name and duly wrote, ‘To Emma Chisit with best wishes . . .’ ‘It turned out,’ Decca chuckled, ‘that the woman had only been asking the price.’
It was a typical Decca conversation. I experienced only the warm and generous facets of her clever, complex nature, and was surprised to find, during research, that she could also be implacable and vindictive. I bitterly regret, now, that I did not make time to take up her several kind invitations to visit her in Oakland. Life, and research for other books, got in the way and she died before this book was ever thought of.
With the assistance of Decca’s family, however, I was able to access her private papers, and as the first biographer to see them was privileged to a behind-the-scenes view of the Mitford sisters through family letters covering more than sixty years. As well as letters she received, Decca kept copies of almost every letter she wrote and was so naturally funny that it was all I could do not to laugh out loud in the hushed sanctity of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department of the University Library where I was researching.8 The letters to Decca, especially from Debo, for the two kept up a regular correspondence from the 1960s until Decca’s death in 1996, are equally amusing, not in terms of repeatable jokes but in their reactions to everyday events; what several of their contemporaries describe as a ‘Mitford way of talking’. Their irreverent and hilarious comments on daily life, and every subject under the sun from the Royal Family to growing old, are not really part of a biographical study, but thankfully will not be lost to a dusty archive, for Decca’s letters are presently being compiled for publication.9
Debo was initially concerned that my lengthy research into Decca’s papers would give me a biased view of the family relationships. But I also had access to the unpublished papers of diarist James Lees-Milne and the objective correspondence between him and the other sisters covering a period of more than seventy years, particularly from Diana who wrote to him from the age of fourteen in 1924 until his death in December 1997. Furthermore, both Debo and Diana and other members of the family have been unfailingly helpful in submitting to interviews, patiently answering my letters of enquiry, and suggesting people to whom I should talk. Debo was also kind enough to allow me access to some Mitford family papers in the remarkable Chatsworth archives, and to help me in any number of ways since then. She is the youngest Mitford sister, and she possesses an endearing characteristic of treating everyone with whom she comes into contact in exactly the same way, always showing the same intelligent interest in what people have to say to her.
Diana invited me to visit her in her flat in the heart of Paris. Warned before our first meeting by a mutual friend that Diana was extremely deaf (‘she’s ninety this year’) I was not sure what to expect, or even that it would be possible to conduct a formal interview. I found a beautiful woman, in a lovely setting. Willowy, smiling, warm and self-assured, she might have been a youthful seventy-odd. As she had recently been fitted with two hearing-aids she was able (to my relief) to hear speech perfectly, though not (to her regret) music. Her physical beauty took me by surprise. Everyone I had met spoke of Diana’s remarkable beauty as a young woman, but somehow one does not expect a woman of ninety to be beautiful per se and, indeed, recent photographs of her are not flattering. I suspect that her beauty lies as much in her attitude and sharp intelligence as her skin texture, bone-str
ucture, delicate colouring, thick soft white hair and those blue Mitford eyes. She speaks clearly and evenly, going over old ground without hesitation, displaying mild passion when the name of her late husband, Sir Oswald Mosley, crops up. Her memory is phenomenal and she is known to be utterly truthful (which has frequently rebounded on her when she might have done better to prevaricate, as others have done). Although she would rather I had not written this book she could not have been more helpful to me in its preparation
Mary S. Lovell
Stroat, Gloucestershire
February 2001
1
Victorian Roots
(1894–1904)
Sydney Bowles was fourteen years old when she first set eyes on David Freeman Mitford. He was seventeen, classically handsome, as were all members of his family, and with luminous blue eyes. Dressed comfortably in an old brown velveteen keeper’s jacket, he stood with his back to the fire, one foot casually resting on the fender. As Sydney entered the brightly lit library of his father’s country house at Batsford in Gloucestershire, she was dazzled by light and warmth after a drive through dark winter lanes in the waggonette from the station. Her first impression as she walked through the hall had been of the sweet smell of beeswax, woodsmoke and oriental spices, but as soon as she saw David all this was forgotten. At that moment, Sydney wrote in an unpublished memoir, she lost her heart.
It was 1894. Sydney’s father Thomas Bowles, a ‘consistently eccentric, back-bench MP’1 had taken his children to visit his good friend Lord Redesdale, Algernon Bertram ‘Bertie’, universally pronounced ‘Barty’, Mitford.2 Both men were high achievers, and hugely successful personalities in their own fields.
Tall, angular, and dressed in the shapeless sailor suit that was the prescribed all-purpose day-wear for Victorian children, Sydney felt all the natural frustration of a teenager wanting to look older to impress this handsome and apparently confident young man with her newly blossoming womanhood. Yet she was miserably aware that her outfit labelled her a child, along with her siblings. At fourteen she was scarcely more, but Sydney’s had been an unusual childhood for the time.
Thomas Bowles was a widower and for some months, ever since he had purchased a substantial London house in Lowndes Square, Sydney had been its young chatelaine, in sole charge of the running of the household and the not inconsiderable finances of the establishment. Her father was Member of Parliament for King’s Lynn. A man of character, he had a vast network of friends and entertained a good deal. Sydney apparently managed her responsibilities with distinction, failing only in the area of being able to control the male servants. Quarrelling footmen and drunken butlers were amused by her rather than respectful of her, and caused her a good deal of heartache. From that time, until the end of her life, she only ever employed women as indoor servants.
Prior to his buying the London house, the children of ‘Tap’ Bowles had spent much of the previous six years at sea, on their father’s boats. Shortly after the death of his wife, when Sydney was eight, Bowles took them aboard his 150-ton sailing schooner Nereid and set off on a year-long voyage to the Middle East.3 His published log of the voyage4 gives details of horrendous storms, weathered with aplomb by his four motherless children while their governess and nurse were prostrated with seasickness. After their return to England, during election campaigns, he made his second yacht, the Hoyden, his temporary home and campaign headquarters; his children often accompanied him on those electioneering trips, and each year during the parliamentary summer recess the family lived on the yacht, usually sailing to France. So, though she had been as protected as any upper-class girl in the Victorian era, Sydney’s exceptional experiences had given her a seriousness beyond her years.
We do not know what David Mitford thought of Sydney at that first meeting. His insouciant pose, which so impressed Sydney, disguised his status as the undervalued second son of the extraordinarily energetic Bertie Mitford. David lived in the shadow of his elder brother Clement, who was adored by everyone – if asked, David would probably have said he lived in Clement’s sunlight. It was Clement who would one day inherit the title and family fortune, and he was as outgoing and confident as his father, a notable traveller, linguist, writer and MP. Like his father, Clement had attended Eton, an experience he found wholly enriching. Three further sons followed David and at least one, Jack (known as Jicksy, who was ‘brave as a lion and clever as a monkey’ and his parents’ favourite child), attended Eton. David, however, was sent to Radley, which was considered second rate.
No secret was made of the fact that this choice of school was deliberate. Lord and Lady Redesdale did not wish Clement’s career at Eton to be affected by David’s behaviour. All his life David was liable to erupt in sudden violent rages if upset or frustrated. Unlike his gifted father, he was a poor reader and slow to learn, and his only real interest was in country sports. It seems probable that he suffered from undiagnosed dyslexia for he was not unintelligent, as his adult speeches in the House of Lords and his surviving letters reveal, and he spoke and wrote fluent French. Described by a grandson as ‘impulsive, naïve and rather humble, with a touching idealism’,5 David was sensitive and disliked team games, so he was never popular at Radley, and he loathed his time there. And there is no doubting his fearsome temper: on one occasion having been locked in his room as a punishment for some misdemeanour he heated a poker in the fire until it became red hot, then threatened to attack his father and kill him with it. He was eventually released and calmed by ‘Monsieur’, the French tutor who taught them so well that all of the Redesdale children were bilingual and all lessons were conducted in French. Monsieur, who became known as ‘Douze-Temps’ because of his demonstrations of rifle drill, ‘Un! Deux! Trois! . . .’, had served in the Franco-Prussian War and kept the boys – especially David – spellbound with stories of his experiences.
When Sydney first met him, David must have been experiencing a huge sense of relief that his years at the hated boarding-school had come to an end. He had hoped to make a career in the Army (perhaps because of Monsieur’s influence), but having failed the written examination for Sandhurst it was decided that he would emulate many younger sons of good family by going east, to Ceylon, to make his fortune as a tea-planter.
Sydney’s teenage crush on him did not last. While David was in Ceylon she grew up and was launched into Society. She had been educated at home, latterly by a very able governess (who subsequently became Thomas Bowles’ mistress).6 There was talk of Sydney going to Girton, the women’s college at Cambridge, and she went to view the college, but for some unknown reason the idea was dropped.7 Only a handful of women attended university at the end of the nineteenth century; perhaps Sydney did not wish to be regarded as a ‘blue-stocking’. With her tall, slender figure, a cloud of light brown hair, generous sulky mouth, and large blue eyes she was pronounced beautiful, and she thoroughly enjoyed the experience of being a débutante: the dances and balls and parties, riding in the crowded Row with her father, which was ‘like an amusing party taking place every day’,8 and, especially, meeting new people.
But above everything, Sydney – in common with her father – loved the sea. Those weeks every summer when Tap’s family lived aboard his yacht and sailed to Trouville or Deauville were the highlight of her young life. At Trouville Tap gravitated naturally towards the artistic community which gathered there, and among his acquaintances were Boldini and Tissot. More important to Sydney was Paul-César Helleu, a fashionable portrait painter who liked to spend his summers with his family, aboard his yacht the Étoile. The Bowles and Helleu families met when the Hoyden and Étoile were moored up alongside each other, and from this small incident would spring a lifelong family friendship. After that they met every year and Helleu painted several portraits of Sydney at the height of her beauty.9
It was inevitable that Sydney would receive the attentions of young men and she fell in and out of love with several, some more suitable than others. In London ice-skating was a favou
rite pastime, and her instructor, a Swede named Grenander, was one of the men she particularly favoured. ‘I love being with him,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘I would do almost anything he asked me. I would let him call me Sydney, I would even let him kiss me . . .’10 It was Grenander who came to her aid when she fell and hurt herself badly. Because of her attachment to him, Sydney managed stoically not to cry, or even wince, at the shattering pain as he manipulated what was later diagnosed as a broken ankle. But she realized that there was no future for her in a relationship with a skating professional, and eventually the infatuation faded.
One relationship ended sadly when the young man was killed in the Boer War. But the suitor who made the greatest impression on her was Edward ‘Jimmy’ Meade. Her love for Jimmy, in 1903, was apparently both deep and passionate, and was moving towards an engagement when Sydney discovered that he was a womanizer. She wisely broke off the relationship, and it was generally believed in London Society that she took up with David Mitford on the rebound.
The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family Page 2