Meanwhile, as a result of his father’s refusal to invest in his younger son’s commission, David was obliged to join up in the ranks. It was a courageous act of determination, but David paid a heavy price for his bravery and commitment when he was badly wounded. His injuries resulted in the loss of one of his lungs and his being ‘invalided out’ of the regiment. Such a debilitating injury should also have rendered him unfit for any further military service.
By now it had been accepted that he was not very good at reading or writing and it was said, rather generously, that none of Bertie’s nine children inherited his intellectual interests. Unfortunately, this did not include his political views, which David certainly did inherit. He was also said to have possessed a distinct way with words, whatever that may have meant, for his use of words appeared to have been quite typical, if somewhat limited, for someone of his socio-political persuasion, and would by modern standards have appeared almost comical, peppered with evidence of his firm belief in his own social, political and racial superiority. Sydney Bowles, on the other hand, while rebelling against her father and developing extreme right-wing views, inherited Thomas’ confidence as a prolific writer; with a useful knowledge of the press.
* * *
The pomp and splendour of Britain’s aristocracy was threatened by a fatal decline in the 1880s. Much of the trouble was economic, based on the fact that the land, the territorial holdings, those broad acres that defined one’s membership of the upper classes, were becoming less of an asset and more of a liability as time passed.
The debts and mortgages that encumbered most estates were easy enough to service in the mid-1800s, when farming was profitable, but as incomes fell the debt burden became more difficult to sustain. Taxation also became a major problem, especially in the form of death duties. Worse still were the great houses at the centre of the large estates, all of which were remorseless drains on the unstable incomes from the surrounding fields and needed endless repair and refurbishment. It was a constant fight against dry rot, leaking roofs and disintegrating stonework.
There was also the problem of labour. The days of peasant farmers who would work all hours that God made for little more than subsistence food and a hovel were long since gone, as agricultural labour increasingly moved to the urban environment created by the Industrial Revolution. Labour-saving machinery was being developed, but landowners such as David Mitford were reluctant to invest the necessary capital. The management of estates wasn’t helped by the habit of insisting that the eldest son should inherit, regardless of his intelligence or suitability. They often possessed little knowledge of farming; considering it beneath them. Instead, they regarded the sole purpose for a gentleman’s interest in woods, fields and streams to be that of blood and field sports. The ownership of land was generally accepted as a qualification for ennoblement rather than a commercial asset; financial endeavour still being considered somewhat vulgar.
With the inclement agricultural conditions and the ever-increasing power of industry, the balance of financial power and influence was moving away from the landed gentry into the hands of the meritocracy or ‘nouveau riche’. They were even being awarded peerages and gaining a foothold on the social ladder.
‘The richest of the traditional landed aristocracy, such as the Devonshires and the Westminsters, were, of course, so rich and had so many various forms of income, much of it from the colonies, that they could still afford to maintain their estates while remaining reasonably optimistic about their future prospects.’9
For those less blessed, ‘selling off the family possessions, as the seventh and eighth Dukes of Marlborough did spectacularly in 1875, 1881 and 1886, was one way to keep afloat’10. The other way was to marry into American money.
This refinancing of old-world aristocracy with new-world money involved the simple expedient of selling British prestige to American heiresses. The most historically well publicised would be Lord Randolph Churchill’s marriage to the American Jennie Jerome. While the Mitfords did not profit directly from American money, they certainly used their connections with the Churchills to their advantage.
Clementine (Airley), wife of Bertie Mitford, had a sister, Lady Blanche Hozier, otherwise known as ‘Aunt Natty’, who had a daughter also called Clementine who married Winston Churchill, or to be more precise, Bertie’s wife’s sister’s daughter married him. Whichever way you put it, it was an extremely tenuous relationship but it did not prevent the Mitfords from exploiting Winston’s political power to bail them out of various embarrassing and unpleasant situations. This would be particularly obvious in the case of Unity.
* * *
Having inherited the baronial Batsford House in 1886, with its large estate and considerable local responsibilities, which included accepting the roles of local magistrate and Lord Lieutenant of Gloucestershire, Bertie Mitford had to give up his post at the Board of Works. After a couple of years he also gave up his position as Member of Parliament for Stratford-upon-Avon.
During his first years at Batsford, ‘Bertie threw himself with enthusiasm into country life and local pursuits, going rather little to London.’11 In 1889, in an effort to afford him the opportunity of socialising with Edward VII and Wilhelm II of Germany, both keen yachtsmen, he also purchased a yacht and, despite having never served in the navy, was accepted as a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight.
Bertie also retained an interest in gardening, though more in the monumental style than the herbaceous, and when the Prince of Wales was crowned Edward VII, he apparently ‘made great use of Bertie as a gardening advisor for Windsor Castle, Sandringham and the other royal residences’. Years later, King George VI would inform Lord Dulverton that he was having trouble with polygonum (Fallopia japonica): ‘Old Redesdale got my grandfather to plant it at Sandringham and we can’t get rid of it.’12
Among the Cotswold gentry, Bertie was said to be ‘well liked’, if a bit ‘full of himself’. It was also claimed that ‘he was regarded with special respect, since he possessed in addition [to his perceived social standing] the glamour of a scholar and a traveller’.13 However, the cost of achieving these social ambitions meant that he continually lived beyond his means.
Bertie was doubtless a gifted man of considerable intelligence, but unfortunately he lacked modesty and was prone to a bumptious demeanour and overtly formal manners. He was also in the habit of exaggerating his own achievements or getting others to exaggerate on his behalf. One of the Mitfords’ favourite family myths was born during Cowes Week at The Royal Yacht Squadron when, in 1905, Bertie was invited to give a welcoming speech to a French naval squadron. ‘He spoke so beautifully (in French) that the French officers wept, and the Admiral, Caillard, said he could not speak more than a few words in reply.’14
* * *
Early in 1885, Thomas Bowles made what was to become his most successful publishing decision when he chose to start the first weekly magazine ‘for gentlewomen’. It was a success from the start, particularly its small ads that concentrated on vacancies for cooks, butlers and other domestic staff. The Lady is still owned by descendants of the Bowles family and run from the same offices in Bedford Street, in London’s Covent Garden.
Having established his new publication, Thomas Bowles also decided to buy a yacht, but less for social effect than for the pure adventure and ‘edification’ of his family, with whom he intended embarking on an astonishingly ambitious extended cruise with a crew of ten Aldeburgh fishermen, Tello the governess, a nurse, a steward and a cook. In August 1888, they departed and for the next twelve months the Bowles family home was the Thomas’ 200-ton schooner, Nereid, named after the sea nymph in Greek mythology.
In the spring of 1889, after many adventures, they reached Beirut and from there travelled to Jerusalem. Following a trip to the Wailing Wall, the Mitford girls’ maternal grandfather recorded in his log a somewhat disturbing side to his character:
I don’t see what the Jews have got to wail about. If they have been ex
pelled from Jerusalem, they are the rulers of London, Paris and Berlin. If they are no longer governors of Palestine, they are the tyrants of Europe and I cannot believe that they really hold themselves to be worse off for the change. Nor shall I believe it till I see the great house of Rothschild abandon London in order to set up as bankers in Jerusalem; Baron de Hirsch leave Paris in order to make a railway from Jerusalem to Jericho, with a free refreshment bar at the place where the man fell among thieves; and all the Jewish controllers of the European Press, from Mr Levy Lawson downwards, cease printing startling intelligence in the West, and take to achieving the largest circulation in the world in Hebrew near the Gate of Damascus.
Thomas also displayed little of his reputed pro-Semitic ‘sympathy’ towards the less financially privileged Jewish refugees from Russia, writing, ‘There is, I suppose, no human animal more utterly devoid of all dignity and nobility, none that bears an aspect at once so abject and so dangerous as the lower class of Russian Jews who have recently overrun the Holy City.’ He talks of ‘their pale womanly faces, rendered loathsome by a long, greasy curled lock in front of each ear; their narrow shoulders, bent carriage, filthy gabardines and furtive glances.’
These views, not uncommon at that time, serve as a reminder that Britain had already started playing her part in ‘laying the foundations for inter-war racist and fascist thinking’.15
In 1899, when Adolf Hitler was still only 10 years old, the English-born Houston Stewart Chamberlain published The Foundations of The Nineteenth Century, which confirmed the author’s belief that ‘our’ race was threatened by ‘impurity’, the worst agents of which were the Jews; as he put it, ‘A mongrel is frequently very clever, but never reliable, morally he is always a weed.’ Some twenty-five years later Hitler would draw upon Chamberlain’s anti-Semitic writing for his own theory of race. But by then the English had already pre-empted both his and Oswald Mosley’s use of racism as a political tool with the formation of The British Brothers League (BBL):
A British proto-fascist group that attempted to organise along paramilitary lines. The group was formed in 1902 in East London in response to the arrival of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe that had begun in 1880. The Aliens Act of 1905, which restricted immigration, was largely seen as a success for the BBL and, as a result, the movement, if not its aims, largely disappeared. 16
Meanwhile, Austria would inherit the baton.
On Christmas day, some two years later, a Swastika flag would be flying for the first time over Werfenstein Castle, situated on the Danube near Linz, where a defrocked priest by the name of Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels had set up the headquarters of the newly formed Order of the New Templars. Funded by wealthy industrialists, he had bought the castle from where he planned to direct the creation of a ‘heroic Aryan league that was to form the advance guard of the blond and blue-eyed master race’. He also promised ‘to counter the socialist class struggle by a race struggle “to the hilt of the castration knife”’ with a ‘systematic program of breeding and extermination’. Apart from sterilisation, Lanz von Liebenfels promoted deportation to the ‘ape jungle’ and liquidation by forced labour or murder. He also launched Ostara, a magazine named after the German goddess of spring, from which he proclaimed a deranged and dangerous doctrine that included a ‘heroic struggle between men he called Asings or Heldings and dwarfish, apelike creatures called Äfflings or Schrättlings’.
Having arrived in the Austrian capital in 1908, where he was rejected by The Vienna Academy of Arts for the second time, the young Hitler immersed himself in the music of Richard Wagner and became an avid reader of Ostara and the writing of Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
* * *
Having eventually reached Malta, via Alexandria, with his family, Thomas Bowles was reported to have received mail that informed him of urgent business matters that required his immediate return to England. This was thought to include an offer for the purchase of Vanity Fair that resulted in its sale for £20,000 to Arthur H. Evans at the end of March 1889, by which time Thomas had become, by anyone’s standards, a very rich man.
Presumably because it was in need of a major refit following its lengthy sojourn, Thomas sold Nereid in 1889 and as if to illustrate his eccentricity he insisted on successfully fighting the next general election from his new yacht, Hoyden (the term for a woman of saucy, boisterous or carefree behaviour). This resulted in his being frequently depicted ‘in Punch as “The Cap’en”, in pirate dress with pistol and bandanna’.17 It also resulted in his finally winning a parliamentary seat as Conservative member for King’s Lynn in 1892.
Around this time yet another ‘Mitfordesque’ scandal arose, which by today’s standards would probably have stopped Thomas Bowles’ political career dead in its tracks. At some time during the cruise of the Nereid, Tello (Rita Stewart), the governess, had become pregnant and a son, John Stewart, was born to her not long after their return. There can be little doubt that Thomas was the father, for despite the fact that he never married her or even admitted his responsibility, he installed her in a house in London and gave her a job on The Lady, where after about three years she rose to the position of editor. She also found time to bear him three more sons while remaining ‘on friendly terms not only with him but also with his children throughout their lives’.18 However, neither she nor their four sons appear as part of Thomas Gibson Bowles’ family trees! This was not an unusual situation at the time, either in England or Germany, where it was somewhat more extreme:
It has frequently been demonstrated that the typical master of the Wilhelmine bourgeois household thought that a kind of right to sexual access went along with hiring a servant girl. He would often encourage his sons to have their first sexual experiences with the servant girls, when the boys were still too young to visit brothels. From the very beginning, therefore, relations within society created a tendency to equate the servant girl with the prostitute.19
Though it has to be said, a governess would have considered herself a considerable cut above a ‘mere’20 servant girl.
In the meantime Sydney, whose education had been limited to that imparted by the wayward Miss Stewart, and privileged to some rich and varied experience of life, was considered, at 14 years of age, ‘old enough to start doing the housekeeping’. This arrangement, which also consisted of control of the household servants, apparently lasted for ten years, or until she left home in 1904 to marry David Mitford.
* * *
By now it had become obvious that neither of the Mitford grandfathers were quite what they seemed. Thomas, the pugnacious journalist and publisher, appeared to have been ‘fortunately’ illegitimate, while Bertie, the courtly and cultured landowner was, through inheritance, also undoubtedly fortunate! This same good fortune would continue to bless the Freeman-Mitfords, both financially and socially.
During the three years when they were in Parliament together, Bertie representing Stratford and Thomas King’s Lynn, they ‘were both on what would now be called the right of the Conservative Party’21 and so perfectly qualified to develop in their offspring a sympathy with the fascist movement. But first the two families had to come together and it was politics that would enable this union.
The first visit of the Bowles family to Batsford took place in the winter of 1894/95. Bertie Mitford had apparently asked Thomas Bowles to come and speak for him at a political meeting, to which he had agreed. But there also appeared to be something distinctly non-political on the agenda: an informal but carefully stage-managed progeny ‘presentation’.
Having been ushered into the library, the visitors were greeted by Bertie and Clementine. As Sydney recalled:
Their daughters Frances and Iris were there as well, and, with his back to the fire, standing half on the fender, and wearing an old velveteen coat such as keepers wore in those days, stood a wonderful figure of a young man. It was David, aged 17. So, when I was 14 and he was 17, I fell in love with him. Certainly, I fell out again, and we did not marry for nine years aft
er that.
The meeting was obviously considered a success by the Bowles family, ‘for they went fairly often after that’.22 Unfortunately, while David’s social pedigree and his ‘handsome patrician features, tanned skin and strikingly blue eyes’ may have been viewed as appropriate attributes for marriage to Sydney Bowles, some effort was required to try and encourage the boy to amount to something beyond that of amateur gamekeeper. It was obviously this parental pressure, rather than his own motivation, that resulted in his attempting to pass the written entrance examination to Sandhurst and subsequent banishment to a Ceylonese tea plantation, while Sydney continued to manage her father’s household and spend at least part of every long summer aboard their yacht in Trouville.
With a love of the sea and the outdoor country life, it was perhaps surprising that Sydney should ‘grow up to be so tall, slim and good-looking;’23 ‘some considered her a beauty, with her light brown hair, blue eyes, regular features and slim figure.’24
Having not been totally convinced that ‘young Mitford’ might develop into a suitable husband for his daughter, the decision was made by Thomas to advertise her marital potential by preparing Sydney for presentation at Court, a process that she found particularly tedious. This was evident by her reaction to the first party of her season as a debutante at the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire’s. ‘The latter I thought too awful for words, dreadfully painted with a hideous set grin on her face,’ she later recalled.
Sydney was far happier in Scotland where the family and their servants took up residence at Birsemhor Lodge in Aboyne. There she learnt to shoot and to play golf and cricket. There were picnics, bicycle rides and long tiring walks up the misty, gorse-covered mountains. All her life Sydney was said to have had a ‘feeling’ for Scotland and its romantic scenery, though of course it would have been considered frightfully bad form not to display an appropriate enthusiasm for the Highlands. However, she soon developed an even greater enthusiasm for skating, and in particular for a Swedish skating instructor called Grenander. Sydney even daydreamed about him proposing to her: ‘If he were English, and in every way a man of my own station, I know I would say yes.’ She also fell ‘passionately in love’ with a somewhat notorious and very good-looking womaniser called Edward, known to his friends as Jimmy Meade. But his reputation went before him and marriage was considered quite out of the question, although it was said ‘tears were streaming down her cheeks as she walked up the aisle to get married to David and that this was due to the fact that her heart still belonged to Jimmy Meade’.25
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