Rutland Gate was far less of an extravagance as it was frequently let, which unfortunately rendered it unavailable for entertaining. When this happened the family usually retained the mews flat over the garage as a pied-à-terre, which they always referred to, with a great flash of inspiration, as ‘The Garage’. It was also claimed that: ‘Sydney was always a help with her methodical housekeeping, her shrewd poultry farming and her small but steady income from holding 19 per cent of The Lady.’
It happened that the family’s arrival at Swinbrook coincided with major changes in the lives of all the ‘children’. Nancy, already 24, left home to share a flat in London. Tom left Eton, and somewhat surprisingly, as someone for whom it would have been safe to assume that ‘going up to Oxford’ would have been a forgone conclusion, went to Vienna to study German and music. Two years after the move Diana married Bryan Guinness, and set up house with him in Wiltshire and London. Finally, Unity went to boarding school at the age of 14. So, only the two youngest, Decca and Debo, actually lived continuously at Swinbrook for any length of time.
In 1926 the Nazi Party was busy forming the Hitler Youth, while in London Lady Maud Cunard, who was busy adopting Diana Mitford as her new ‘pet salon siren’, was changing her own name to Emerald. For some, such as gossip columnist Patrick Balfour, this was a moment of high significance. Both he and (subsequently) Charles Jennings seemed to think that it meant that (the new) Lady Emerald Cunard was ‘now so confident of her social powers that she could brashly re-christen herself in order to draw attention to her place at the very peak of the new wave of wealthy American imports’.37 Of course, the name Maud, with its music-hall connotations, would have been considered a rather ‘common’ name at the time, which was perhaps brought to her attention. But then to the English, if not Maud, the name Emerald would have been considered even more so!
While fascism was taking hold in Europe, London (and thus England) remained obsessed with snobbery and social position; fuelled and encouraged by the injection of conspicuous wealth by new American hostesses. The English, who had long prided themselves on their ability to avoid being seduced by such vulgarity, finally gave in, encouraged in their susceptibility by the monarchy.
Neither the money, nor the parties, the golden gifts [which Laura Corrigan, the American social mountaineer, famously presented to the social elite to encourage their attendance at her ‘soirees’ in what became an intensely competitive activity], the intrigues, the bad behaviour, nor the gradual annexation of London society by American wealth would have greatly mattered if it hadn’t been for the Prince of Wales. It was when he began his affair with (the Swiss born, US national) Lady Furness at the end of 1926 that what had been seen as a mildly distressing, mildly amusing, social trend suddenly hardened into a crisis in the making.38
This crisis being the result of Lady Furness’ replacement by the infinitely more dangerous Wallace Simpson, whose relationship with the prince would, of course, lead to his abdication.
However, apart from Diana’s involvement in this social strata and the Mitfords’ investment in court presentation, the family would become largely committed to fascism and casually indifferent to royalty.
* * *
The year 1926 also saw the General Strike, initiated by 1 million miners locked out by their employers for refusing to take a pay cut and work longer hours, and for generally having to cope with ‘a land’ that was anything but ‘fit for heroes’; as had been promised. Many men who had returned from fighting in the Great War were unable to get work and, by 1926, 1,751,000 were unemployed. In those days before the welfare state, without charity food parcels, soup kitchens and begging, many would have faced starvation. Men who had watched their brothers and friends being ‘blown to buggery and fuckin’ bits’39 while fighting for king and country, talked of only being in work for two Christmases between 1918 and 1939. This situation wasn’t limited to the working classes. Many supporters of the 2.5 million strikers were ex-officers who, once they had removed their uniforms, ceased to be heroes and were simply unemployed.
The strike came close to overthrowing the elected government of Stanley Baldwin, while failing to develop into the communist revolution and takeover of the country that had been predicted by the British Fascists. That did not stop intelligence reports claiming that the General Strike was financed by the Soviet Union to the tune of £380,000, or that the British Communist Party had been funded from the same source.
But what most unsettled the right, pushing many of them away from their loyalty to the monarchy, was the royal reaction. King George V took exception to suggestions that the strikers were communist ‘revolutionaries’ saying, ‘Try living on their wages before you judge them.’
The Duke of Windsor’s (claimed) comment on visiting mining villages in South Wales that ‘something must be done’ for the unemployed coal miners, was also often quoted as an example of his sympathy with the miners and read as being directly critical of the government. But the duke had, in fact, far greater sympathy with fascists than workers and what he actually said, when visiting an abandoned mine in 1936 was, ‘These works brought all these people here. Something should be done to get them at work again.’
The Mitfords continued to pay scant regard for the royal family and, apart from Jessica, even less for the working class. One of Lady Redesdale’s more ‘killing’ and telling remarks followed Jessica’s accusation that her mother was a ‘class enemy’, to which she replied angrily, ‘I am not an enemy of the working class! I think some of them are perfectly sweet!’ Even from an early age, Unity made no such attempt to hide her disdain. Mary Ormsby-Gore told David Pryce-Jones, ‘Unity also disliked the working class for being so powerful.’
* * *
When Diana attended her first ball at Oxford’s Radcliffe Infirmary, in the autumn of 1927, Clementine and Diana stayed at Swinbrook and went to the ball with the Mitfords. Next day Professor Lindemann rang Diana to see how many proposals she had received. It was his little joke, but Diana’s beauty guaranteed that she would be a sensational debutante and although she was watched extra carefully by Sydney, she took London by storm in the following spring when she was presented to the King and Queen.
So wrote Mary Lovell; but Anne de Courcy, despite describing Lindemann as ‘a brilliant older man’ and ‘dazzlingly erudite’, revealed more sinister personal details than were contained in Lovell’s social commentary. ‘[The German educated] Professor Lindemann (the Prof) was the first person Diana had heard abusing someone for being a Jew. His target was author Brian Howard, of whom it was apparently his chief complaint.’ He also tried to persuade Diana to learn to speak German in order that she could appreciate Schopenhauer, the sexually provocative, pro-genetic engineering, anti-Semitic philosopher by whom Hitler claimed to have been influenced.
Lovell then speculated on the effect such criticism may have had upon Brian who, it was generally agreed, was not Jewish. It would scarcely have affected the brilliant writer, poet and legendry wit, for whom abuse was little more than cerebral stimulation and his Anglo-American birth right a delightful subject of endless inventive possibilities. Brian was far more interested in Nancy and her savage wit than Diana and her sexual attraction. He told Harold Acton that she was a ‘delicious creature, quite pyrotechnical my dear, and sometimes even profound and would you believe it, she’s hidden among the cabbages of the Cotswolds’.
Both Brian Howard and Harold Acton were part of a group of Oxford aesthetes who were star players in what is now known as the ‘Brideshead generation’, all represented as thinly disguised characters in Waugh’s – and subsequently Nancy’s – ‘novels’.
Nancy impressed these young men, many of whom were homosexual, with her highly affected manner of speaking, her irreverent, if rather superficial, camp witticisms and her sense of the absurd. But on one occasion when ‘a neighbour of the Redesdales spotted Nancy and Brian Howard walking together in Oxford without a chaperone, David [who had been informed by the said neighbour
] was furious and roared at her that her reputation was ruined and that as a result, no respectable man would marry her’40. In fact, David got on rather well with Brian, and as he was doubtless fully aware that he was, in the words of the time, ‘a bugger’ or ‘a pansy’, must have also been aware that he presented no possible threat to his daughter. Well, certainly no sexual threat at least.
Fortunately, with a country seat so close to Oxford equipped with an ample supply of both comfort and servants, Nancy’s new ‘aesthete’ friends were soon being invited to country-house weekends, with additional entertainment being supplied by the highly inflammatory Lord Redesdale.
There was little doubt the Mitford girls were in awe of their father, or that it was partly due to his being so strikingly handsome. But it was his violent temper that they found most entertaining. Debo particularly remembered his rages, ‘… sometimes about small things like Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough, [who] was never asked to the house again because she left a paper handkerchief on a hedge.’ David also turned one young man out of the house because a comb fell out of his pocket. Both anecdotes, while considered screamingly funny by the girls, were also manifestations of their father’s extreme snobbery.
But the motivation for his fury was often more political than social, giving far greater potential for discussion, even while his right-wing fascist views were often hidden behind a cloak of contrived blimpish pomposity after the outbreak of war:
Farve’s defence of the peerage and the hereditary system offered one of the more obvious butts for his children [and their guests], though the suggestion of his that the abolition of the House of Lords would ‘undermine the foundations of Christianity’ attracted the derision of the political scientist Prof. Harold Laski, no less.41
Laski, who had rejected his Jewish faith, was a professor at the London School of Economics and was a proponent of Karl Marx, who was, of course, also Jewish; a fact that would not have escaped comment in the Mitford household.
Even David Pryce-Jones, the most critical of the Mitford biographers, seemed quite prepared to describe Lord Redesdale as a ‘poor lovable ogre of a father’, though his description of Sydney as a ‘blindly opinionated mother’ seemed more realistic. He was also prepared to accept the Mitfords’ claim that Unity’s childhood could hardly have been expected to be anything less than ‘out of the ordinary’, though this was undoubtedly the result of the Mitfords girls’ determination to develop a reputation as charmingly eccentric aristocrats. They would fail to appreciate Pryce-Jones’ quite independently developed opinion that Unity was less of an ‘innocent romantic’ than was usually portrayed. However, his opinion was not as independent as he would perhaps have liked. An example of this was his submission to the Mitfords’ insistence that he removed the claimed ‘rumour that Unity had [at one time] performed a lewd act’.
The family was also quite happy to promote ‘Rudbin’s’ (Joan Rodzianko, née Farrer) claim that, ‘Uncle David was frightfully pleased to have such brilliant and clever daughters’, or that he became ‘mad about Unity’. But they (particularly the Duchess of Devonshire (Debo)) subsequently became very grumpy when Pryce-Jones quoted her conversation with Unity in his book. “‘Oh Rudbin, they’re Jews”, she would say when I was in a fury at the way they were being treated. “They’re just Jews and must be got rid of.”’
* * *
Lord Redesdale was delighted with the move to Swinbrook, despite everyone else hating the new house. Nancy christened it ‘Swinebrook’, while Jessica described it as having aspects of a medieval fortress. It was also while at Swinbrook that David adopted the habit of taking sudden – and what the family insisted were inexplicable – dislikes to individual daughters, doubtless the result of their individual attainment of that age when young girls’ emotions become particularly vulnerable and manifest in what sometimes appears to be terminal sulking. The only exception to this prioritised belligerence was Unity. While it is quite possible that even as early as 1926, when Unity was still only 12 years old, their political sympathies had already begun to develop symbiotically, the one other passion she and her father shared was skating. Unity displayed sufficient talent and bravery to win a bronze medal, of which her father was ‘frightfully proud’.
What was particularly surprising was that he was prepared to take part in an activity that required him to share the ice with members of the general public or ‘commoners’. This was something he found much easier to endure during regular visits to fashionable, German-speaking resorts in Switzerland than at ice rinks in London and Oxford; though the family admitted to his having enjoyed partnering the German wife of one of the skating instructors.
Socially, Lord Redesdale had a particular aversion to sharing the company of anyone outside the family circle. But Nancy was prepared to brave her father’s outbursts, along with his downright rudeness to her friends and anyone to whom he had not been formally introduced, by insisting on inviting them home for tea or dinner, and sometimes even to stay for the aforementioned weekends.
‘If neighbours had to be tolerated, cousins were a given fact of life’;42 particularly if they were socially important. David was one of a family of nine and Sydney one of four, so there were lots of comings and goings between the Mitfords and their relatives.
Favourites among them were the Baileys, the Farrers, and, of course, the Churchills, though in truth cousin Winston had little time for the children, while their parents claimed never to have cared for Churchill’s politics and ‘late in life Lady Redesdale took to referring to him as “that wicked man”’.43 That did not stop the girls taking advantage of their relationship and his political power, or Diana adopting his wife, Lady Clementine, as a role model of elegance and beauty.
With so many cousins, uncles and aunts there was never a shortage of gossip. This was something that Mary Lovell found to be of particular interest. ‘Clementine’s sister, Nellie Romilly, was regarded as permissive, her mother even more so. “Aunt Natty” Hozier’s marriage was desperately unhappy and she was credited with at least nine lovers.’ But Aunt Natty had been a favourite visitor to Batsford. ‘As for Natty’s daughter, naughty Nellie Romilly, it was whispered that her brother-in-law, Winston Churchill, fathered one of her two sons, Esmond.’
While Mrs Violet Hammersley was not related to the Redesdales, she was sufficiently close to qualify for a number of nicknames including, ‘Mrs Ham’, ‘The Widow’ and even the ‘Wid’. The Hammersleys had lived in Lowndes Square, close to the Bowles family, and the two groups had also met in yachting days in the north of France. After the death of her husband, Arthur, in 1913, Mrs Hammersley lived between Tite Street, Chelsea, and Wilmington, in Totland Bay, on the Isle of Wight. She was referred to by David Pryce-Jones as ‘a blue-stocking, a woman of letters in her own right, an enigmatic but persistent presence’. She appeared not to have been as taken in by the Mitford girls as many other friends of the family; referring to them as ‘the Horror Sisters’. However, her morbid fascination with the Redesdales’ adoption of Nazi sympathies would no doubt contribute to her finding herself unable to resist the opportunity of visiting Unity in Munich.
Being a member of the family did not, however, necessarily qualify one for Lord Redesdale’s affections. As Jonathan Guinness wrote, in one of his favourite anecdotes:
Joan, [David’s] sister, was married to Denis Farrer and had six children whom the Mitfords knew well; resulting in frequent mutual visits … of Joan’s husband, David is supposed to have said: ‘He’d be all right if he wasn’t married to that ghastly woman’. [His friend replied] ‘But I thought he was married to your sister’. ‘He is,’ assented David.
Unsurprisingly, as his daughters began to attract an increasing number of visitors and their teasing became more intense, David began to spend somewhat more time away from home in the peace and quiet of his – and previously his father’s – London club, believed to be The Marlborough.
* * *
By now Tom had fallen in love with Austria
, ‘the land, the culture, the music, the literature’44, but most of all with Janos Almasy, a handsome Hungarian count to whom he had been introduced by a mutual friend. Janos lived in an ancient Gothic castle called Schloss Bernstein in Burgenland, where Tom was said to have stayed as a paying guest, though it was some way from Vienna, where he was also said to have been studying.
Back at the ‘Hons Cupboard’ in Swinbrook House, when the girls talked about what they wanted to be when they were grown-ups, Unity reportedly exclaimed, ‘I’m going to Germany to meet Hitler’, while Decca insisted, ‘I’m going to run away and be a Communist.’
Exactly where the influence came from to form such political ambitions at such a young age, if indeed Unity and Decca had done so (they were, respectively, still only 16 and 13 years old), seems to have been lost in the records of the development of the Mitford girls’ ‘saga’. As far as Unity was concerned, the only likely influences would have been Lord Redesdale or her brother, Tom. It may have been both.
While the Mitford girls were only too happy to bring to their public’s attention their father’s more eccentric diatribes, they remained predictably unwilling to mention the increasingly extreme, right-wing views that he aired during his rare speeches in the House of Lords. While many members of the House were sympathetic to his criticism of the government, it was becoming ever more obvious that Germany’s fledgling fascists were more in tune with Lord Redesdale and his sympathisers’ socio-political demands than the British government were.
Jonathan Guinness was insistent that ‘the question above all which divided parents from children at that time was the question of Germany’, and maintains the Mitford girls’ stance that their father was violently against the Germans. While this may, or may not, have been the case during the First World War, soon afterwards Lord Redesdale’s claimed traditional enemy, ‘the filthy Hun’, had certainly been replaced by the ‘Bolshies’ and ‘Reds’, while his admiration for the opposing Nazi Party would replace any ill-feeling or animosity that may have still existed towards Germans. His newfound enthusiastic commitment was manifest in his financial support for Tom’s – and subsequently Unity’s – residency in Austria and Germany; it was also obvious from his membership of the Anglo-German Fellowship, the anti-Semitic pro-fascist Right Club and the Link, a non-political organisation that encouraged Anglo-German friendship and attracted pro-Nazi sympathisers.
Hitler's Valkyrie Page 10