Hitler's Valkyrie

by David R L Litchfield

  2

  THE ‘GOLDEN’ YEARS

  * * *

  1904–18

  * * *

  Golden boys and girls all must

  Like chimney sweeps

  Come to dust

  William Shakespeare

  Sydney Bowles finally married David Freeman-Mitford in 1904, when she was 24 and he was 26. Her father, Thomas, lent them his yacht, Hoyden, and its captain and crew for their honeymoon cruise. Afterwards he gave David a job on The Lady, but with his limited academic abilities, let alone administrative knowledge, it is difficult to tell exactly what his employment might have entailed. The only record of any work was of his having rid the building of rats with the assistance of his tame mongoose (the Indian subcontinent’s equivalent of a Jack Russell terrier), which he had brought back with him from Ceylon. Apart from the occasional foray into urban field sports, David admitted to being generally bored to death, yet he still continued diligently for ten years. Thomas also paid Sydney a small allowance.

  One or other of their fathers, probably Thomas, must have also bought them a house in Graham Street, Islington, where, despite a lack of space and limited income, David and Sydney Mitford immediately started a family. Nancy arrived in 1904, followed by Pam in 1907, Tom in 1909, Diana in 1910 and Unity in 1914.

  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. In a house that Nancy described as ‘minute’, there was a cook, a parlour maid, 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’.1

  While it is highly unlikely that Sydney would have spent much time in the kitchen, her cook and kitchen-maid being responsible for the preparation of the family’s food, both Jessica and Jonathan Guinness suggested Sydney had inherited her father’s somewhat unusual dietary principles. They alleged these principles were in fact based on kosher dietary laws, whose adoption by Sydney had been based on her belief that Jews did not get cancer, while her father vehemently believed ‘their diet had given them the necessary health to survive persecution through the centuries’. But the evidence to support their claim seemed to be based on Thomas’ refusal to consume pork or shellfish, which Sydney continued to enforce in the Mitford household.

  The consumption of either uncured pork or shellfish in the days before domestic refrigerators were readily available was considered far too risky for most English people to even consider. But that precaution hardly constituted a kosher diet. There was certainly never any evidence of the existence on their menu of such Jewish staples as chicken soup, latkes, chopped liver, matzos, gefilte fish or the like. Meanwhile, David never displayed any intention of being deprived of his smoked bacon and pork sausages.

  A far more dangerous inheritance was that of Thomas’ aversion to conventional medicine, which Sydney would also adopt. In broad terms they believed that the ‘Good Body’ supported by the aforementioned diet and plenty of fresh air was quite capable of overcoming illness without the introduction of medicines. However, if these principles had been adhered to without compromise, David would not have survived his injuries in the Boer War.

  David’s domestic requirements offered neither the staff nor his wife any particular challenge, apart from his three specific aversions. One was punctuality. The second was sickness, while the third was the spilling of drinks and generally ‘untidy’ eating. His reaction to any of these misdemeanours could be extreme. Fortunately, he was a lifelong abstainer from alcohol, not on grounds of health or moral principle, or even the incendiary effect it could have had on his temper; he just never liked the taste.

  He and his family certainly lived to a standard that today would be regarded as extremely comfortable; a standard considerably higher than either his responsibilities or his abilities warranted. Children continued to be born despite the fact that their first house was so small, but by 1914, just prior to the outbreak of war, they managed to move to a larger house on Victoria Road, Kensington, where Unity, their fifth child, was born.

  David would have been better prepared for what was in fact to be his future, if his own father had given him a house on his estate and sent him to be trained in agriculture or estate management. But he was the second son and there was no intention to leave him any land of his own.2

  David’s brother, educated at Eton and commissioned in the 10th Hussars, was unlikely to have ever intended to become seriously involved in farming.

  All things considered David’s – and thus the Mitfords’ – future prospects seemed unlikely to amount to a great deal.

  * * *

  Like most fathers, David Mitford probably found his daughters more appealing than he would have done sons, while Sydney would undoubtedly have preferred a family of Mitford boys. But six daughters were too much, even for David, and had a profoundly negative effect on his well-being. Attempts to convince the readers of numerous tomes that, rather than being a bad-tempered, self-centred if entertaining man, he was in fact sensitive and affectionate, seem somewhat far-fetched. He may have been ‘present at the births of all of his seven children, anticipating by many decades the vogue for paternal participation in childbirth’,3 but this was far more likely to have been the result of Sydney’s giving birth to her children at home, where David was invariably present, than his insistence of being present at the actual delivery. Few midwives would have stood for such a thing. ‘Whatever next?’ she would have said. It is certainly unlikely that his favourite daughter, Nancy, could confirm with any degree of accuracy who was at her own arrival in 1904.

  Favourite or not, Nancy liked to give the impression, particularly in her book The Water Beetle, that there was scant sensitivity or affection involved in her childhood, especially on the part of her mother: ‘I was never hugged or kissed [by our mother] as a small child … She was very cold and sarky [sarcastic] with me. I don’t reproach her for it, people have a perfect right to dislike their children.’ Decca, as Jessica was known amongst family and friends, agreed, claiming, ‘I guess it’s that awful disapproving quality that I always hated about her.’

  Jessica’s condemnation was probably true as far as parental affection was concerned, for like most young children of their financial and social position, they spent more time with their nanny than their parents. In a letter dated 20 July 1952, Sydney denied Nancy’s accusation. ‘You were terribly spoilt as a little child, and by all. It was Puma’s idea. She said you must never hear an angry word and you never did, but you used to get in tremendous rages, often shaming us in the street but the angry word was never allowed.’ Puma, more often known as Pussy, was in fact David’s eldest sister, Frances Kearsey.

  Giving their aunt two nicknames could be considered unremarkable, particularly in a family dominated by children for over thirty years. But there was something about the Mitford habit of giving everyone juvenile nicknames that, after a while, became rather tedious. Especially when they had nothing else particularly remarkable to say about many of the people in question.

  * * *

  While the Mitfords were busy breeding girls, Bertie began to develop his fascist ideals and an interest in Houston Stewart Chamberlain and his anti-Semitic Social Darwinism. Even though Chamberlain was English, wrote in German and became best known for his work of historical philosophy, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published in the original German in 1899.

  An ardent disciple of Wagner, Chamberlain eventually married the composer’s daughter, Eva. During the First World War he adopted German nationality, following which his own countrymen were said to have come to regard him as being ‘beyond the pale’. But this was probably more the result of propaganda than a true reflection of his English following, which remained loyal and sympathetic and included many of Bertie’s contemporaries. Chamberlainstrasse in Bayreuth was named after him and still exists to thi
s day.

  According to Jonathan Guinness, an ex-chairman of the Monday Club (renowned for its promotion of extreme right-wing views concerning race and immigration), ‘Chamberlain believed that culture was determined by racial character, that the races associated with the Indo-European or “Aryan” languages were the best in the world, and that of these races the Teutonic or Germanic people were pre-eminent.’

  Probably as a result of his interest in Chamberlain, on a number of occasions Bertie attended the Bayreuth Festival, at the time effectively run by the composer’s son, Siegfried. As a result, Bertie came to know the Wagner family well. He also accepted Wagner’s claim that ‘the music dramas of his maturity [were] not operas’, but something on a higher creative and spiritual level. Bertie’s descendants, Tom, Diana and Unity, and afterwards Diana’s sons Jonathan, Alexander and Max, were also to become devotees of his music and friends of the composer’s family. On numerous occasions they joined the annual pilgrimage to his house, Wahnfried, where, following the death of Wagner’s wife, Cosima, their hostess was Siegfried’s widow, Winifred. They were in no way discouraged – and in some cases appeared to have been positively encouraged – by Wagner’s subsequent reputation as an anti-Semite.

  * * *

  In 1906 David Lloyd George, the British-born, Welsh-bred Liberal politician, joined the new Liberal cabinet of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman as President of the Board of Trade after a landslide victory at the general election. He would be largely responsible for what would prove to be the basis of the Welfare State but which was known at the time as the ‘People’s Budget’. The bill was initially rejected by the House of Lords because it angered the landed gentry, and Lloyd George would anger their lordships even further by announcing, in a language none of the aristocracy could understand, his intention to stand up for the common man at the expense of what he called ‘The Dukes’, who were predictably incandescent with rage and indignation, even more so when he translated his speech from Welsh into English.

  With 10 million working men living in conditions of chronic destitution, and Russia and Poland having already entered the initial stages of armed revolution, it was hardly surprising that the English upper classes were feeling threatened. Death duties, land taxes and super tax would do little to improve their humour.

  While their fathers were reacting to political and social events, David and Sydney were celebrating the arrival of what they doubtless hoped would be their first son, Tom’s birth in 1909 having ‘delighted’ Sydney. However, a return to the Mitford form soon followed with the birth of Diana. It was due to Diana’s beauty, already apparent when she was only months old, that one of the most important additions to the family arrived in the form of Laura Dicks.

  After Sydney and the children had already worked their way through three nannies and advertised in The Lady for a fourth, Laura Dicks applied for the post.

  She was thin, pale, fine-featured, with curly reddish brown hair and a kindly expression. Sydney liked her on sight, but wondered, looking at her, if she was physically capable of coping with four children even though she was only thirty-nine. The same thing occurred independently to Laura. However, the sight of Diana as a baby decided her … ‘Oh! What a lovely baby!’4 she exclaimed and was accepted and signed on for life and immediately christened ‘Blor’.

  Dicks became in the process the best-known nanny in the country, apart from ‘Lillibeth’s’ beloved ‘Crawfie’.5

  Nancy, who admits, or to be more accurate proclaims, that she herself was vile to others, thinks she would have been much worse but for Blor: ‘My mother’s scoldings and my father’s whippings had little effect, but Blor [who had a reputation for fairness and consideration for others] at least made me feel ashamed of myself’.

  One wonders how children brought up under such a fine influence could develop such extreme fascist tendencies. Was it perhaps the ‘whippings’?

  As ‘whippings’, or ‘thrashings’, became less socially acceptable, their father’s physical reaction to major and sometimes minor annoying misdemeanours would be increasingly denied by the family. Doubtless, nannies were also encouraged to raise a hand from time to time. Schoolteachers certainly were. But it was not only the English who fostered their parental responsibilities into the hands of English nannies and governesses; American historian Jonathan Petropoulos has spoken of Friedrich Karl von Hesse and Margaret using the services of ‘a series of English governesses’ to educate their children. Apparently this was the case with many German princes.

  ‘Princess Margeret (“Peg”) von Hessen-Darmstadt (née Geddes and born in Dublin) noted: “a great deal of English was spoken in the house as a result of the English nannies, who supervised all six brothers when they were children”.’6 It was this German influence on the English accent that resulted in Oxford or Queen’s English, its adoption in Victoria’s Court and subsequent affectation by the upper echelons of England’s ‘posh’ society, exemplified by the Mitfords.

  * * *

  In 1911 the academic connection between the Mitfords, anti-Semitism and fascism was endorsed when the English translation of Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s The Foundation of the Nineteenth Century appeared with a lengthy and toe-curlingly embarrassing introduction by their grandfather, Bertie Redesdale, which included such phrases as ‘pages adorned with brilliant passages of the loftiest eloquence’ and ‘one of the masterpieces of the century’.

  Far less embarrassing, but considerably more worrying, was Chamberlain’s writing, which propounded such theories as, ‘Physically and mentally, the Aryans are pre-eminent among all peoples; for that reason they are by right … the lords of the world.’

  In the book he not only promoted the Aryans, but more specifically the German Aryans who he believed to be the only ones qualified to inherit the power and glory of ancient Greece and Rome. He also claimed that it was the Jews who had, since the first century, been preventing this inheritance from taking place.

  Having denigrated the Jews both racially and religiously and analysed them physically, Chamberlain recommended that the Germans had the right and the responsibility to reduce the risk of Jewish contamination. Presumably by whatever process they saw fit to employ.

  As the author David Pryce-Jones points out:

  The bogus apparatus of justified racial persecution was at hand, and the Nazis had only to pick it up from him … The association of Unity with [H. S.] Chamberlain through her grandfather won her a place by divine right [or so David believed] in the Nazi scheme of things. It was a source of wonder to Hitler and according to ‘Gaby’ Bentinck he referred to it often during conversations with Unity and others, as positive proof of the way that breeding and blood were the masters of destiny.

  While it is not too difficult to appreciate the effect such a book may have had on Adolf Hitler, its appeal was not limited to political extremists or Germans, and when its English translation was published in 1911 it was roundly praised and received positive reviews in much of the British press. By 1938 it would have sold a quarter of a million copies.

  As the English translation comprised 1,185 pages, it would also give a clear indication as to why its privileged readership were also known as the ‘leisured classes’. George Bernard Shaw called it a ‘historical masterpiece’ and it has remained in print and enthusiastically read up to the present day.

  So, there can be little doubt that the whole ghastly business had already started well before Hitler and the Nazis came to power and that the seeds had not just been sown in the Mitford family; they were sprouting in other, similar English families, and in some they were already well established.

  * * *

  In 1912 David Redesdale was said to have been persuaded by a chum at his club to purchase a gold mine in Canada consisting of claims totalling 40 acres on a new gold field in the Kirkland Lake district of northern Ontario. It was a remarkable undertaking. Just getting there and back, which they did on a number of occasions, would have presented considerable logistical and
financial problems. According to Unity, as revealed many years later to Gaby Bentinck, the whole enterprise was in fact financed by Sydney’s father, who was motivated by somewhat darker forces than mere fortune and adventure.

  Having already displayed a belief in the extreme social and political ideas symbolised by the swastika flag, Bertie was all too easily persuaded to invest in this particular claim. The name of the local town in Ontario, Swastika, being an overpowering omen that they all doubtless believed would have a profound effect upon their fortunes and in their involvement in the creation of a master race. The fact that David and Sydney accepted Bertie’s suggestion to call his granddaughter Valkyrie as a mark of reverence to Wagner, only serves to support the conjecture that even before her birth, Unity’s future was pre-ordained; particularly in view of her parents’ proud claim that she was conceived in Swastika.