The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family

by Mary S. Lovell

  There is a Lord on board,

  A Lord on board, poor Decca roared,

  But the Lord on board is a bit of a fraud,

  ’Cause the Lord on board has a wife called Maud,

  There is a Lord on board . . .23

  For the first time in years the three younger Mitford sisters were all together on holiday and Unity and Decca behaved like schoolgirls, giggling and misbehaving. It must have been wearing for Sydney for their cavorting began in Paris and seems to have lasted the entire holiday. In Paris they met Dolly Wilde, daughter of Oscar Wilde’s brother and a noted lesbian. Attractive and witty, she was a leading light in the rich, artistic crowd who peopled Paris Society in the thirties and knew everyone worth knowing. Nancy had provided introductions, and Unity and Decca deliberately irritated Sydney by pretending to be ‘in love’ with Dolly, fighting to sit next to her in a taxi, stroking her fur collar and accepting gifts of frilly nightgowns from her.24 Aboard ship they teased ‘the Lord on board’ and his pale-looking brother, and sang rude songs about sixteen-year-old Debo’s innocent holiday flirtation with ‘Red’ Rathcredon. ‘On the good ship Lollipop,/It’s a night trip, into bed you hop,/With Ld Rathcreedon/All aboard for the Garden of Eden.’25

  They peppered their conversation with their favourite talk of white slavers; they teased other passengers with practical jokes, convincing one young man that Unity said her nightly prayers to Hitler while giving the Nazi salute. Even Decca joined in this one but in general all three followed Unity’s lead as they set out to shock while appearing models of innocence. It was common-room stuff: ‘Did you see the Canon’s balls today?’ one would enquire loudly of the others at dinner after a visit to a crusader castle. At one point following a tour of a haramlek in a palace in Istanbul Sydney summoned them to her room and looked so grave that they feared there had been bad news from home. ‘Now, children,’ she said, ‘you are not to mention that eunuch at dinner.’26 Unity even managed to put across her political message when one passenger, the noted left-wing Duchess of Atholl, gave a lecture on ‘Modern Despots’. Unity insisted on the right to reply, and did so. A few months later, when word of this debate, and in particular Unity’s platform, was being belatedly discussed in newspapers, Sydney wrote to the Daily Telegraph pointing out to the Duchess that ‘Nazism is from every point of view preferable to Communism.’

  But the fun between the sisters came to an abrupt end when in Spain, just before the cruise ended, they went ashore to visit the Alhambra. As they got out of the cars in Granada’s town square, a small crowd gathered to see the tourists and Unity’s Fascist badge was spotted. It was a gold swastika, a special one presented by Hitler, and was engraved on the back with his signature. She was hugely proud of it. Before anyone realized what was happening she was surrounded by hostile Spaniards, trying to tear off the hated symbol. Other members of the party rescued her and the Mitfords were put back into a car and returned to the ship. On the journey Decca and Unity began a physical fight in the back of the car, scratching, hair-pulling and arguing. Sydney separated them, gave them ‘a good talking-to’ and confined them in separate cabins for the remainder of the trip. Decca spent the time mulishly plotting how she could escape and run away.

  Following the cruise there was an uneasy truce between Decca and Unity, which was tested every so often by news of the advance of Fascism across Europe. That spring, 1936, Abyssinia fell to Mussolini’s forces and was annexed by Italy, and Hitler’s army marched into the Rhineland to be greeted rapturously by the inhabitants. To Decca’s dismay the British press began to echo her parents’ opinions, that Hitler and his Nazi troops were a bulwark for the rest of Europe against the threat of Communism. Even Beverly Nichols, whose book Cry Havoc had played such a pivotal role in Decca’s developing ideology, seemed to have changed his tune: in the Sunday Chronicle he admitted that Germany had ‘moral strength . . . There is so much in the new Germany that is beautiful, so much that is fine and great . . . all the time we are being trained to believe that the Germans are a nation of wild beasts who vary their time between roasting Jews and teaching babies to present arms. It is simply not true.’ In July Franco launched his attack on the Popular Front government in Spain and long-sighted commentators began referring to it as a rehearsal for a second world war. Shortly afterwards Decca heard on the family grapevine that Esmond, lucky thing, had run off to Spain to join the International Brigade. Then there were rumours that the King was involved with a married woman, an American for heaven’s sake, and she was to get a divorce – but was it in order for her to marry the King? The question was on everyone’s lips and swept the subject of Germany off the pages of newspapers.

  But Unity was seldom at home while these things were coming to pass: she spent most of her time in Germany. Even before the cruise she had squeezed in a short trip, visiting the Goebbels family in Berlin in February, and joining Diana in Cologne for the general election held in April when Hitler was returned to power by 99 per cent of the electorate (there was, of course, no opposing candidate). They checked into the Dom Hotel and were having lunch when Hitler walked in, his face set, arm raised in a Nazi salute. Then his eye fell on the Mitford sisters and his face broke into a smile. ‘What, you two here?’ he said, and invited them to join him for tea. In the jubilant atmosphere that prevailed following his victory he invited them both as his personal guests to the Olympic Games to be held in Berlin in July, and to the Bayreuth Festival afterwards.

  When she returned to England Diana received an invitation to lunch from the Churchills whom she had not seen since she threw in her lot with Mosley, although she had once been a frequent guest at Chartwell and numbered Randolph and Diana among her best friends. As an artist Churchill is generally known for his landscapes and still lifes, but Diana was among the few people he painted.27 Churchill wanted to hear Diana’s opinions on Hitler, and the others present – Lord Ivor Churchill and Sarah Churchill – were ‘simply fascinated’ as she told them about him. Earlier Hitler had asked her about Churchill, and it is worth noting that Diana was one of the very few, if indeed there were any others, who knew both Hitler and Churchill well at a personal level. She suggested that they should meet, convinced that the two great men would get on, though it was clear they already regarded themselves as rivals. ‘Oh, no. No!’ Winston replied.

  It is tempting to wonder what might have happened had Diana been able to arrange a meeting. Might the war, which tore Europe apart, have been prevented? Hitler was pro-England, and had made a study of its culture and history. He was especially fascinated by the ability of such a small nation to control and apparently subjugate a vast empire containing millions of people. He regarded this as evidence of the superiority of the Aryan race and it is widely considered that this was what saved the United Kingdom from invasion. When Nazi chiefs of staff were poised and ready to strike, at a time when Britain was at its most vulnerable, Hitler hesitated to give the order until the moment was lost. Churchill, on the other hand, is a heroic figure to us now, but in the mid-1930s he was not regarded in that light. Most people in his own class, in his own party, in the government and in the establishment regarded him as an adventurer and a warmonger, with a great failure in his past. The disastrous First World War campaign at Gallipoli had been his initiative, and he had lost his post as First Lord of the Admiralty because of the huge loss of life there in 1915–16.

  After the cruise Unity shot back to Munich, where she was living more or less permanently now, in a flat in the Pension Doering. She had her two white pet rats there and even a dog, a black Great Dane, called Flopsy as a puppy, but later Rebell. At the end of June she went to stay with Janos von Almassy in Austria for a week. Her time in Munich was spent in a ceaseless circle of waiting to be invited by Hitler to join him for lunch, tea or dinner – sometimes in his flat. ‘The greatest moment in my life,’ she told a friend, ‘was sitting at Hitler’s feet and having him stroke my hair.’28 She gave alcoholic parties in her apartment for her friends from ‘the h
eim’, and her favourite storm-troopers. One of the SS men, Erich Widemann, she regarded as a boyfriend for some years, but it is unlikely that there was any sexual activity between them. If she was ‘in love’ with anyone it was Hitler, in her naïve, adolescent way.

  When they went to the Olympics later that summer, Diana and Unity were invited to stay with the Goebbels at their country house Schwanenwerder, just outside Berlin on the Wannsee Lake. The party was taken each day to the stadium by limousine, and, fortunately, Diana felt, she and Unity were not given seats next to their hosts – they found it boring to sit and watch track events for hour after hour: they preferred to get up and walk around. In the evenings there were social events, state banquets, and parties at which leading Nazis vied with each other to provide the best entertainments: von Ribbentrop gave a decorous ‘embassy-style’ dinner party; Goering held a dinner for eight hundred guests who were entertained by a ballet company, dancing in the moonlight, followed by a vast fête champêtre. Two days later Goebbels entertained two thousand guests on an island on the lake: guests reached the site across pontoons strung from the shore, guided by the light of torches held aloft by lines of Nazi maidens (the girls’ equivalent of the Hitler Youth movement).

  When the Games ended Diana and Unity were driven to the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth, in a Mercedes provided by Hitler, for performances of The Ring and Parsifal. The latter was Diana’s least favourite of Wagner’s works and she said so to Hitler when he asked how she had enjoyed it. ‘That is because you are young,’ he told her. ‘You will find as you get older that you will love Parsifal more and more.’29 She states that his prediction was accurate.

  The relationship between both women and Hitler had now progressed to a stage where they could even hector him gently. At one luncheon party at Goebbels’ home, he sat with Unity on one side and Diana on the other while they ‘attacked’ him for appointing Ribbentrop as ambassador to London. Ribbentrop was absolutely the wrong man for London, they told him. Such lèse majesté did not go down well with Nazi officials who were always on their guard in the presence of Hitler. No one ever contradicted him. For these two ‘over made-up British women’ to dare to do so did not make them popular. Increasingly Unity found them blocking her access to Hitler. Meanwhile Hitler appeared to enjoy their company, and there is one eyewitness account of them, both dressed in powder-blue jumpers, blonde and striking, sitting on either side of him while they all discussed the reason for the Mitfords’ peachy skin. The English rain was responsible, they told him. In their presence Hitler could be tempted into one or other of his party pieces, either an elaborate pantomime of himself carefully rolling and smoking a cigarette, or an impersonation of Mussolini strutting and bellowing and receiving the gift of ceremonial sword which he drew from its scabbard and flourished dramatically. Hitler usually finished this mimicry by saying in a self-deprecating manner guaranteed to draw good-humoured applause, ‘Of course I’m no good at that sort of thing. I’d just murmur, “Here, Schaub,* you hang on to this.”’30

  But despite appearances, a more serious purpose than mere junketing lay behind Diana’s four visits to Germany in 1936.31 The BUF required huge sums of money to run its headquarters with full-time staff, its advertising and promotion, and the cost of Mosley’s hectic programme all over the country. Its revenue, which consisted of the combined income from BUF subscriptions and donations from wealthy sympathizers, were proving insufficient. Eventually, Mosley used virtually all of his own fortune propping up his party, but in 1936 he was confident he could find some way to provide for the necessary shortfall in income. Several schemes were floated but Mosley settled on the only really serious one, which, if it could be brought off, was the equivalent of a licence to print money.

  In essence it was to start a commercial radio station, based in Germany and broadcasting in Britain. The BBC held a monopoly on radio transmission for the UK in the thirties, and there were no commercial stations. There were, however, two overseas radio stations that provided what the audiences wanted, and which the BBC staidly refused to offer: evening programmes offering popular music. The most famous of these, the foreign-owned Radio Luxembourg, which played modern recordings hour after hour, interspersed with advertisements, was the only commercial station available in most of England and Scotland, and even though reception was patchy at times it was extremely popular until well into the 1960s. The other station was owned and run by Captain Plugge, a Tory MP, who had obtained a wavelength from the French government. He called his station Radio Normandie and though it could only be received in southern England he made a small fortune from it. Bill Allen, a senior figure in the BUF, was in the advertising business and knew all about Radio Normandie. He backed the idea enthusiastically for he knew that large national companies were looking for alternative advertising platforms to the traditional ones of newspapers and magazines, and the huge success of radio advertising in the USA had pointed the way.

  What was required was a medium-band wavelength, powerful enough to reach most of the United Kingdom, so Diana, whose German was by now fluent, was asked to use her friendships and contacts with top Nazis to try to secure permission for the establishment of such a radio station. Apart from the much-needed revenue that would be generated from advertising commercial products on such a station, Mosley and Diana planned a range of own-label cosmetics and other domestic items. And despite the station’s declared aim of being strictly commercial, and relaying only sport, sweet music, beauty hints and similar domestic delights, the opportunity for covert propaganda to the mainly young audience that such a station would attract was incalculable, though Diana refutes this was ever on the agenda. As bait Diana offered payment in hard currency to aid the Reich’s serious balance-of-payments deficit.

  To ensure that advertisers would not be put off advertising on a station that was so firmly allied politically, no mention of Mosley’s name was ever made in connection with it. However, the directors of the company, Air Time Ltd, formed to float the idea were senior members of the BUF. The secrecy over Mosley’s involvement was not mere paranoia: in the previous year Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail complied instantly when a Jewish industrialist threatened to withdraw all advertising from the newspaper if it continued to support Mosley. For this reason absolute confidentiality concerning Diana’s mission was maintained, and even Unity – perhaps especially Unity, who was a chatterbox – was not party to the plan.

  Immediately Diana ran up against a major hurdle. Her friendship with Joseph and Magda Goebbels might have led her to assume some support from the propaganda minister who was the person who most mattered in the scheme, but Goebbels was implacably opposed to any broadcasting from Germany over which he did not have ultimate control. Diana knew, however, that the right word from Hitler could change Goebbels’ mind and she was working to this end, while at the same time cementing other friendships that might prove useful. But although her friendship with Hitler was now a matter of record, ‘occasionally . . . we dined and watched a film or talked by the fire. We did not discuss the radio project,’ Diana wrote. ‘It was the sort of thing that bored him and was left to his ministers.’32

  She did not get far with the radio station project in 1936, but one positive thing for her came out of the series of visits. Diana got on well with Magda Goebbels, and the two women spent a good deal of time together and were close enough for Magda to confide her unhappiness in her marriage. The women had something in common: Goebbels was a notorious womanizer and at one point the marriage almost ended in divorce over his affair with the beautiful Czechoslovakian film star Lida Baarova. On that occasion Magda appealed to Hitler asking for a divorce, but Hitler insisted the couple remain married and that Goebbels give up his lover. Press photographs of the apparently happily married couple with their six beautiful blond children projected too powerful an image of a perfect German family to be discarded. Furthermore, as Hitler had no wife, Magda occupied the position of ‘first lady’ in the Nazi administration. She complied on thi
s occasion as on others, the chief reason, she said, being her children. In turn Diana told her about the problems she and Mosley had experienced in keeping their marriage ceremony secret from the British press. Here, Magda was able to help: she invited Diana to hold her marriage ceremony at her Berlin home. When this proposal was put to Hitler he agreed to ensure that no news of the ceremony would reach the German press, and furthermore that he would attend as guest of honour. Goebbels was less than enchanted by the arrangement, especially when he found that Mosley proposed Bill Allen as his witness. Allen was one of the directors of Air Time Ltd and Goebbels did not trust him (probably he was aware that Allen was an MI5 agent). He did not like or trust Mosley either, and quarrelled with Magda about the forthcoming wedding,33 but with Hitler’s sanction the plan went ahead

  Diana and Mosley were married in the drawing room of the Goebbels’ apartment on 6 October 1936. In her autobiography Diana recalled that she wore a pale gold silk tunic dress.

  Unity and I, standing at the window in an upstairs room, saw Hitler walking through the trees of the park-like garden . . . the leaves were turning yellow and there was bright sunshine. Behind him came an adjutant carrying a box and some flowers . . . The ceremony was short; the Registrar said a few words, we exchanged rings, signed our names and the deed was done. Hitler’s gift was a photograph in a silver frame with [the initials] A.H. and the German eagle.34

  Apart from Hitler, Unity and their hosts, the only people present at the ceremony besides the bride and groom and the registrar were Mosley’s witnesses, Bill Allen and Captain Gordon-Canning, an officer in the 14th Hussars. The British consul had been advised of the marriage, for the sake of legality, but was asked not to publish information about the wedding, which he was not obliged to do since it was not performed under British jurisdiction. He was also invited to attend but declined owing to a previous engagement.35 The small party went straight from the ceremony to a wedding feast organized by Magda Goebbels, and there was no time for Mosley and Hitler to speak privately as Diana had hoped there would be. Afterwards they attended a meeting at the Sportsplatz where Hitler addressed a crowd of twenty thousand. Although Mosley spoke no German Diana thought it would be interesting for him to see Hitler’s technique. Hitler then left on a special train for Munich and the newly-weds went to their hotel, the Kaiserhof. It had been a long day and they were both tired. What should have been a romantic occasion was spoiled by a quarrel, ‘of which, try as I will, I cannot remember the reason,’ Diana wrote, ‘and we went to bed in dudgeon. Next day we flew home to England.’36