The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family

by Mary S. Lovell

  David spent less than four years in Ceylon where evidently he did not take to the life of a planter. While he was on his first home leave in 1898, events unfolding in South Africa intervened in his future. Paul Kruger’s ultimatum concerning the independence of the Dutch republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State provoked war between the British and the Boers. This gave David the opportunity to be both a patriot and to engage in the career he had always longed for. With all thoughts of a return to Ceylon forgotten, he enlisted in the ranks of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers. His elder brother Clement also fought in the Boer War, serving in the crack regiment of the 10th Hussars.

  David’s letters to his parents confirm his early intuition that the Army was the career he would enjoy above all others. His commanding officer, Lord Brabazon, took a liking to the earnest and gallant young man and appointed him as his orderly, which David modestly considered ‘lucky’. Shortly afterwards, in March 1900, he received a flesh wound in the leg (his second wound of the war). Writing from the hospital at Bloemfontein, he asked his father to try to get him a commission, ‘. . . after this it would not be very difficult, and then I would have the career I always wanted’.11 It was not to be. In the following year, while in the thick of fighting, David was badly injured in the chest and lost a lung. He was nursed in the field hospital for four days, and when it was suspected that he might live he was carried back to camp in a bullock cart, his wound swarming with maggots. He recovered, and was invalided home in early 1902.

  Clearly, while David had been planting tea and soldiering, and Sydney was running her father’s home and making her début in Society, there had been some further contact between the two, for while David was in hospital he dictated a love letter to Sydney, to be given to her in the event of his death. Since their fathers were the closest of friends they would have met quite naturally at each other’s homes, and probably also at Prince’s ice-skating rink, for both David and Sydney were excellent skaters and regular patrons there. After his homecoming Sydney – with her experience of losing a boyfriend in the war – would undoubtedly have been especially sympathetic to a man shipped home wounded.

  In fact, little is known of the courtship of David and Sydney. Photographs confirm what witnesses recall: they made a handsome couple. He was tall with handsome patrician features, tanned skin and strikingly blue eyes. She was almost his height, elegant and self-composed. It is not difficult to see why she was reckoned a beauty as a young woman. What is not apparent from old photographs is the humour they shared. According to several contributors, David had ‘a terrific sense of fun – better than any professional comedian’, while several people commented on Sydney’s understated, dry wit. When David went to see Tap, to request the hand of his daughter, Tap replied dauntingly, ‘Which daughter?’ Having established that it was Sydney they were discussing (surely Tap was teasing?), Sydney’s father naturally wished to know how David intended to support her. ‘Well,’ said David, ‘I’ve got £400 a year, and these.’ And he held up his large competent-looking hands.12

  When they married on 6 February 1904, some ten years after that first meeting, Sydney was twenty-four years old. A couple of stories survive; the first was apparently widely circulated in London Society at the time. It was whispered that when she walked up the aisle of St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, towards her bridegroom, she was in tears, weeping – they said – for Jimmy Meade. The other story was that a few days before her wedding day a married friend told Sydney what to expect on her wedding night. Sydney was dumbfounded, ‘A gentleman would never do anything like that,’ she said.13

  The couple honeymooned aboard the Hoyden, and later visited Paris, after which they settled down in a modest house in Graham Street, a few steps from Sloane Square. By the standards of their class they were relatively poor. Apart from the allowance of £400 a year from David’s father, Sydney had a small income from Tap. However, even combined, this income was not enough to live on in comfort, and here Tap was able to assist the young couple in a practical manner. It was not to be expected that, as a self-made man, he would hand over large sums of money to the newly-weds, but he was happy to give David a job. Among Tap’s most successful business ventures had been the founding of several magazines. The first of these, Vanity Fair, had since been sold on, but he still owned the Lady (founded in 1885 and named at the suggestion of the Reverend Charles Dodgson), and he offered David the position of office manager.

  It must be said that it might have been a better business move had he made Sydney office manager, for she had a natural ability in accounting and enjoyed bookkeeping. David, however, hated being indoors, hated office work and office hours, and hardly ever bothered to read a book. There is a family legend that he had once read Jack London’s White Fang and found it so good he thought it unnecessary ever to read another book. Since there are references in some of his letters to books that he was reading it is safe to say that this was a joke and not fact. But he was not bookish and can have had little interest in a women’s magazine in which half the space was (and still is) given over to small advertisements for domestic staff and holiday accommodation.

  Indeed, the act for which he is best remembered during his days at the offices of the Lady is unconnected with the administration of the magazine itself. When the twenty-seven-year-old David arrived for work he found that the cellars of the building, and no doubt those adjoining it, were infested with rats. In Ceylon householders encouraged a mongoose to take up residence in their gardens to control rats and snakes, and by a piece of good fortune David had brought one home with him. He set it to work with significant success. The image of David spending his days hunting rats, to simulate country pursuits in order to avoid the office work he loathed, was fostered by Nancy through her character Uncle Matthew, and is not based on fact. He remained at the Lady, working in friendly harmony with Sydney’s eldest brother George (who was general manager and co-owner with his father) until the outbreak of war in 1914, and from all accounts tried hard to live up to his father-in-law’s trust in him. George Bowles had been president of the union at Cambridge, and editor of Granta. Would such a man have tolerated David as a passenger for ten years? It seems unlikely, and it is even less likely that Tap would have continued to employ David if he had not made some positive contribution. As for David, he described the first year of his marriage in correspondence as ‘a year of the greatest happiness to me’, so it is unlikely that he found the work too irksome.

  There is another, lesser-known, anecdote dating from David’s time at the Lady. His salary was paid weekly, in cash in an envelope, as all employees were paid in those days, and it was his custom to hand over his entire wages to Sydney but for a very small sum. For many years, every Friday afternoon, after he was paid, he would wander over to Covent Garden Market and buy the most perfect peach he could find. This he presented to Sydney. She always received it with every sign of enthusiasm and would eat it after supper, sometimes offering him a piece or two. Twenty years passed before he learned by accident that Sydney loathed peaches. She had never told him, knowing that it would spoil his pleasure at having cleverly discovered a gift that he considered both economical and acceptable.14

  With David’s salary the couple had a joint income of around a thousand pounds a year, and on this Sydney’s meticulous household accounts reveal that they employed five female servants. However, they lived quietly, seemingly content in each other’s company, and their limited social life revolved mostly around the Bowles or the Mitford families. The fact that the couple’s first child, a daughter, was born on 28 November a little more than nine months after their marriage was probably partially responsible for this. Sydney was initially disappointed for she had wanted, and absolutely expected, a boy, but David was ecstatic. They thought of calling the child Ruby but later decided upon Nancy. Though worried about ‘my Sydney’, as he affectionately referred to his wife (for the baby weighed nine and a half pounds at birth and the mother was uncomfortable for some
days afterwards), David thought the baby ‘the prettiest child . . . our happiness is very great,’ he wrote to his mother. Unusually for the time he had insisted on being present at her birth, and he reported that Sydney had been ‘sweet and brave’.

  It seems such an ordinary story, this handsome but otherwise unremarkable young couple settling down to a quietly happy marriage, looking forward to further children. Though they had no great prospects they were content with their lot in life. There was absolutely no indication that their children – there would be seven in all – would be so extraordinary that they would make the family a household name.

  2

  Edwardian Afternoon

  (1904–15)

  In the first decade of their marriage, life was simple and happy. David did not care to go into Society much, and although Sydney would probably have liked to1 she deferred to David’s wishes. David worked at the Lady during the week, and often at weekends they visited their parents in the country. Perhaps the attribute of David’s that Sydney found so attractive was his sense of humour. ‘She should really have married a more social man,’ one of her children said, ‘but she never complained . . . and she laughed tremendously at my father’s jokes; he could be brilliantly funny.’2

  That David was deeply in love with Sydney is obvious from letters he wrote to his parents.3 It is more difficult to quantify Sydney’s feeling for David. Her teenage diary and more especially her responses to her children as adults prove that she was sensitive and loving, though she always found it difficult to show affection. This was not necessarily unusual for a woman of her class at that time, but in Sydney’s case it was probably due to the example set by her parents.

  Sydney remembered her mother as ‘delicate’, kind and rather remote, though her letters apparently reveal her as an ‘affectionate and solicitous’ personality.4 Tap Bowles, left to bring up a family of four small children, the youngest of whom was only two, was a good father according to his lights, and his children worshipped him, but there is no doubt that he had some odd ideas about child-rearing. Clever, successful, opinionated Tap provided an adventurous life for his children, but although he doted on his youngest child Dorothy, always known as Weenie, there was a lack of warmth in the rearing of his other children.5 He did not believe, for example, in celebrating birthdays, and even though Sydney was running his home by the age of fourteen, she did not own a single party frock. Indeed, Tap did not think to provide her with any clothes other than her sailor suits until she was seventeen and needed to be ‘brought out’. Clearly, then, the lack of a mother affected Sydney in ways that would have been important to most children. Four of Sydney’s children commented that she seemed ‘remote and unaffectionate’ as they were growing up, and stated that they never became close to her, in the sense that they liked and appreciated her, until they were adults. It is probable that she did not know how to behave with her children.

  So why did Sydney – a pretty girl, whose greatest enjoyments in life were sailing, visiting France and ice-skating, and who loved the parties and dancing she attended as a débutante – marry David, who was a countryman at heart, actively disliked meeting new people and regarded ‘abroad’ with suspicion and horror? There can be no other reason but that she fell in love with him. He was a kind man and he was very funny. He made her laugh and unquestionably loved her. Many successful marriages have been founded on less.

  For Sydney, life changed only minimally after her marriage. Even motherhood scarcely ruffled her cool serenity, for her babies, as they appeared, were cared for by a series of nurses and nannies. Being in charge of an establishment was no novelty to her, having run her father’s house for ten years, and her own home was cared for by staffing levels that seem extravagant today but – bearing in mind Sydney’s lifelong financial prudence – were probably merely adequate in a world where there were no electrical appliances, detergents or easy-care fabrics. Advertisements in the National Press (cost, a halfpenny) for domestic servants reveal that a cook might command thirty pounds a year, a housemaid eighteen and a general servant twelve.

  In a house that Nancy described as ‘minute’,6 there was a cook, a parlourmaid, a housemaid, a kitchen maid, a nanny and a nursemaid. Nancy once asked her mother, ‘What did you do all day?’ and received a reply to the effect, ‘I lived for you all.’ Apart from overseeing the staff Sydney’s daily life would have consisted of letter-writing, reading, shopping – principally at the Army and Navy Stores and Harrods – visiting her sister Weenie, who had taken over the running of their father’s house after Sydney’s marriage, and keeping her household accounts, which are almost a work of art in their dark blue leather bindings, tooled in gold.

  Sydney was a good manager, and was of the school of thought that ‘a lazy master makes a lazy servant’. A note among her papers states that one of the reasons she so loved being aboard a sailing ship was ‘the beautiful cleanness . . . there is no luxury where there is dirt; and where everything is shining clean there is luxury’.7 A close family friend has described Sydney as ‘acutely perceptive, well read and fastidious; surprised by nothing and amused by everything . . . she encouraged her children’s interest in music, the arts and reading, and the mental independence that would distinguish them . . . one of her peculiar charms was her patrician reserve . . .’8 Judging from photographs of her various homes, she might easily, in another age, have made a name for herself as an interior designer. What is more she accomplished her furnishing and decorating schemes at minimal cost, for they were simple, relying more on her own natural style and good taste than on colours or artifice. One odd event jars this neat pattern of Edwardian days. The adult Nancy claimed that Sydney once confided to her that early in her marriage she nearly ran away with another man. She only stayed, she said, because of Nancy, who was two years old at the time.9 But Nancy’s stories have always to be taken with a grain of salt, for she invented freely, always teasing, always seeking to entertain or shock.

  Three years after Nancy’s birth another girl, Pamela, was born. Two years later, in 1909, Sydney gave birth to the long-awaited son, Tom, and quickly became pregnant again. Diana arrived only a year after Tom, so that she always felt they were ‘almost twins’. Although Sydney is said to have cried when she learned that her fourth baby was another girl, her disappointment was quickly dispelled, for Diana was beautiful from the first. Like all the Mitford children, except Nancy, Diana was blond-haired with clear fair skin and remarkable blue eyes. Nancy was dark, and her green eyes were later described by Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman and sister Decca as triangular in shape.

  When Nancy was born Sydney had engaged Lily ‘Ninny’ Kersey, daughter of the captain of Tap’s yacht, as her nanny. This worked beautifully until the arrival of Pam when the thoroughly spoiled little Nancy engaged in a series of jealous rages, alternating with plaintive cries of, ‘Oh, Ninny, I do wish you would still love me.’ Sydney overheard her daughter’s sad request and thought it best to engage a new nanny. Norah Evans came to look after the two little girls and remained until after Tom’s birth. She was replaced by a woman who has gone down in Mitford history as ‘the unkind nanny’. She is remembered for several things, first for her bad-fairy prediction on Diana’s birth, ‘She’s too beautiful; she can’t live long,’ and for banging Nancy’s head against the wooden bedpost, presumably as an effective form of punishment since she had been prohibited from uttering ‘a single angry word’ to the Mitford children. The head-banging came to the notice of David and Sydney, and Nancy wrote, ‘My mother retired to bed, as she often did when things became dramatic, leaving my father to perform the execution. There was a confrontation in the nursery as of two mastodons; oddly enough, throughout the terrifying battle which ensued, I felt entirely on the side of the nanny.’10

  The marvellous outcome of this traumatic episode was the recruitment of Laura Dicks. White-faced and red-haired, everything seemed against her at her interview. She was thirty-nine and Sydney feared at first that she would be too old to
care for the lively young family. Furthermore, although Miss Dicks was very religious she was Nonconformist, and she supported the Liberal Party. In a conventional household, to whom the Church of England was the personification of the Conservative Party at prayer, such things mattered. But Miss Dicks’ face when she first beheld baby Diana, and her genuine cry of delight, ‘Oh, what a lovely baby,’ must have convinced Sydney that this nanny could probably be trusted not to bang little heads against bedposts. She became known as ‘Nanny Blor’ and remained with the family for almost thirty years. She was a kind but firm surrogate mother to them, and in return they loved her. That she was also tactful and understanding was revealed by her manner on her first day in the Mitford household. As she went into the nursery Nancy was sitting reading, her ‘furious little round face . . . concealed behind the book’.11 The book (unusual perhaps for a six-year-old) was Ivanhoe but Blor made no comment, merely taking off her shiny black straw bonnet, and cape, and hanging them carefully behind the door before settling down to work without disturbing the child.

  In common with their contemporaries, the Mitford children saw little of their parents. They would be dressed and taken down to the dining room after breakfast to say ‘good morning’. Nancy recalled such an occasion when she was six, about the time that Blor joined the household. She entered the room, which she recalled was painted white with a green wreath papered around the cornice, to find her parents sitting at the table reading black-edged newspapers. To her surprise they appeared upset and they told her that the King, Edward VII, had died. Some days later she watched as the funeral cortège passed along the road under the balcony of her grandfather Redesdale’s house.