The family gave little in the way of explanation as to why and how Jessica’s sympathy for communism might have developed when she was still only 14 years of age and living a life of considerable privilege. But in Hons and Rebels she claimed that it was the indictment of war and eloquent pleading for global disarmament contained in Beverley Nichol’s book Cry Havoc! that introduced her, like many young people at the time, to left-wing ideals. Socialists (in England, if not in Germany) were the main champions of pacifism and from there it was only a short step to communism.
* * *
Pam may have been the least colourful of the Mitford girls, and having been born three years after Nancy, who claimed to have resented her from birth, became the prime victim of her vicious wit, but she was the first of the girls to become engaged; if not married.
A few months before Diana became engaged to Bryan Guinness in 1928, Pam accepted a proposal from a member of another brewing family – Oliver Watney, otherwise known as Togo, ‘a tall, dark young man’45 who had only proposed under pressure from his father who subsequently died of a heart attack. Togo’s mother was less enthusiastic concerning the proposed marriage into the Mitford family, particularly regarding those ‘sharp, noisy sisters’, and sent him off on an extended cruise to reconsider the engagement. His trip had the desired effect and on his return he succumbed to his mother’s wishes and called the whole thing off; much to the fury of the Mitfords who immediately initiated a character assassination. They encouraged him to be described as having a stoop and being ‘rather deficient in vitality because he was plagued by chronic tuberculosis’46, and suggested he may even have demanded the return of the engagement ring. Tom certainly had to drive round London returning all the wedding presents, which must have been awfully embarrassing. But any sympathy for Pam was lost when she subsequently admitted that she had never been in love with him in the first place. This rather supported the suspicion amongst Mitford critics that she, or more specifically Sydney, may only ever have been attracted by Watney’s wealth. Though subsequently it came to light that there had almost certainly been sexual problems.
The whole ‘ghastly business’ was soon overshadowed by Diana’s engagement to an even larger fortune in the form of Bryan Guinness, who Charlotte Mosley, with hopefully at least the merest trace of bad conscience, described as ‘the sensitive and diffident elder son of Lord Moyne and heir to the brewing fortune. [He] was part of a group of Nancy’s Oxford friends that had [now grown to include] Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, Roy Harrod, Harold Acton, James Lees-Milne, Henry Yorke and Robert Byron.’ They were also said to be frightfully ‘clever, talented, witty and artistic’, or they certainly thought they were. According to Charlotte, these were ‘young men whose interests represented everything that Diana aspired to’. What she did not say was that unfortunately none of them, including Bryan, who was so obviously desperately in love, would eventually prove capable of fulfilling Diana’s emotional and sexual aspirations. But considering that he was heir to one of the largest fortunes in the country, her ready acceptance of his proposal of marriage was hardly surprising, regardless of the fact that she was, like her sister before her, so obviously not in love with Bryan. Or certainly not to the same degree that he was with her.
It has been claimed that Sydney responded by immediately refusing to sanction the wedding, insisting they waited two years; well, one year anyway! Apparently this was on the grounds that they were both much too young. All of which appeared highly unlikely, although there may have been other reasons for her reticence.
Granted, he was only 24 years old while Diana was only 18 and ‘barely out of the schoolroom’, but Sydney’s main objection, so it was claimed, was centred on her observation that Bryan was ‘so frightfully rich’. No one seemed prepared to swallow this story, preferring to believe suggestions that she may have found the source of their wealth and involvement in ‘trade’ to be unacceptable. For an arch snob like Sydney this seemed far more likely, and she certainly spent some time and effort trying to interest Diana in available young men of a somewhat grander lineage.
Bryan’s mother, Lady Evelyn, was, by contrast, reputed to have been entirely on the side of Bryan and Diana getting married as soon as possible.
Diana, accompanied by Nanny, was allowed to visit her future in-laws on the coast in Sussex, and when Bryan introduced her to his mother he broke the quite remarkable news: ‘And she can cook, Mummy’. Lady Evelyn, a delightful eccentric who only ever spoke in whispers, was dumbfounded. ‘I’ve never heard of such a thing. It’s too clever …’ [soon] even the nursery staff at Bailiffscourt had taken up the refrain: ‘To be able to cook – too wonderful’.47
So the date was fixed for 30 January 1929.
This did not prevent the besotted Randolph Churchill from trying to prevent their marriage by means of various warning letters. While he was doubtless motivated by jealousy, his warnings would prove both perceptive and remarkably accurate. As a result he remained quite unrepentant:
You know I never told Bryan anything about you which anyone could possibly resent. The most I ever said was that though you were basically of a good disposition, you have no fundamental moral sense. In other words, though you rarely do wrong, you do not actually see anything WRONG in sin … I do not think he is a character capable of retaining your affection.
According to Anne de Courcy:
If Bryan had taken any note at all of Randolph’s remarks about Diana’s flightiness, he might have thought that the enquiry she now made was somewhat portentous coming from one who professed herself so deeply in love. She asked him if he would mind if she went out with other men after they were married.
He said that indeed he would mind. Presumably she accepted this response, but Bryan can hardly have been reassured by the knowledge that his future wife would have preferred an open marriage.
Diana’s biographer eventually revealed Randolph’s and Bryan’s misgivings. One can only assume that Randolph had personal experience of Diana’s promiscuity. It also seems likely that he was influenced by his father’s less than generous opinion of Diana’s morality.
Sydney meanwhile appeared all too aware of her daughter’s sexual mores, and that they were not limited to Diana. While quite in keeping with ‘flappers’ and the Jazz Age, she must have known how dangerous it could be to the public’s perception of the Mitford girls, whether married or single, if such things became known. Thus, even within the family, their wilder excesses were played down.
Some years later, after a typically bacchanalian Chelsea Arts Ball attended by Nancy, Diana, Pam and Unity, where cross-dressing, excessive inebriation, nudity and vertical ‘rumpy-pumpy’ were common practice, ‘Muv’ ordered Unity, specifically, ‘You’re not to tell the children (Jessica and Deborah) what you’ve been doing.’
There was also reason to believe that both David and Sydney may have been suffering from pangs of bad conscience concerning Diana’s virginal white wedding; having initially raised objections to a church wedding. Their somewhat suspicious excuse was that ‘Diana had largely lost her faith’. The normally unassertive Bryan found this attitude quite extraordinary, which, of course, it was, and vehemently opposed it in a letter to Diana: ‘I insist on being married in a church because to do otherwise might be the death of my whole family.’ Poor Bryan may of course have been better advised to question the real reason for the Mitfords’ reluctance. But it was not in his nature, so ‘the usual announcement was sent to The Times and the Mitfords moved en masse to London to prepare for the wedding, and the reception that was to be held at the Guinnesses’ London house in Grosvenor Place’.48 The newspapers referred to it as the ‘wedding of the year’ and gave it acres of coverage. Ironically, it was the year of the Wall Street Crash, which would result in up to 70 per cent unemployment, hunger marches, an armed police response and work camps containing 200,000 unemployed men that remained in operation until 1939.
* * *
By 1928 Nancy had managed to persuade her
parents to allow her to attend the Slade School of Art in London, which also involved her moving away from the family’s supportive cast of domestic servants. It should have come as no surprise that she lasted less than a month, the problem being essentially one of service rather than skill or application, as she explained in one of her letters. ‘I wept … Oh, darling, but you should have seen it’, Nancy drawled. ‘After about a week I was knee-deep in underclothes. I literally had to wade through them. No-one to put them away.’
She ‘also began submitting items of gossip to Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and from this graduated to writing the occasional article. The first known to be published was “The Shooting Party, Some Hints for the Woman Guest”, by the Hon. Nancy Mitford.’49 And so the denied ‘Hon’ word became a marketing tool!
Meanwhile, Unity became the second Mitford girl to attempt any form of institutionalised education, when at her insistence she was finally, at 15 years of age, enrolled at boarding school. Her determination was largely the result of her desire to escape from the confines of Swinbrook. Her first port of call was St Margaret’s in Bushey. It was a girls’ school that had originally been created for the education of clergymen’s daughters, who still formed a large proportion of the pupils. This strongly influenced the school’s Christian commitment and consequently the staff were appalled when Unity refused to be confirmed, claiming she was an atheist.
St Margaret’s had been chosen because so many of Unity’s relatives and chums were there, including the Farrers and Rosemary and Clementine Mitford, the daughters of David’s late brother, Clement. But while Unity was delighted to be free to enjoy their company, she resolutely refused to endear herself to the staff. Aunt Joan claimed Unity had only enrolled there ‘to gain more ample room for wickedness and fresh fields to conquer’. Lady Onslow said, ‘Once in a scripture lesson we had the passage about he who calls his brother a fool is in danger of hell fire. Bobo put her hand up and asked, “Supposing your brother is a fool?” “Put your hand down, Unity Mitford”, was the answer.’
The awakening of Unity’s sexual awareness was particularly evident in her graphic skills. ‘Her talent was for drawing. She drew naked figures in her rough notebook, an Adam and an Eve, and you can guess what they were doing.’50
But they were not Adam and Eve. They were copulating ‘fallen angels’ and when an observant horrified schoolmistress noticed them she screamed, ‘Mitford! What is the meaning of this filth?’ According to Kathleen Atkins, the Burford doctor’s daughter, Unity replied, ‘It’s not filth. They are fallen angels from Blake’s Paradise Lost.’ Her lacrosse-playing school friends were suitably impressed by the mistress’ total inability to know how to react. The school authorities were also deeply suspicious of her ability to recite long passages of Blake and Milton from memory.
* * *
The social season that heralded the Wall Street Crash in 1929 and the worldwide Great Depression of 1929–32 that followed was arguably the most hectic ever known in London, demonstrating that for some the crash was of little consequence.
So it was with Bryan’s father, Walter Guinness, who supplied Bryan with sufficient funds to buy a country house of his own. His choice was Biddesden House, a substantial country seat near Andover in Wiltshire that Diana, soon known in the press as a society beauty, partygoer and hostess, would turn into a veritable bastion of social decadence. Regular visitors became known as ‘The Biddesden Gang’ and included, amongst others, John Betjeman, Harold Acton, John Sutro, Brian Howard, Cecil Beaton, Robert Byron, Mark Ogilvie-Grant, Christopher Sykes, James Lees-Milne, the Heskeths and all three Sitwells. Encouraged by the smell of money and promiscuity, Raymond Mortimer was soon a regular visitor. One of the best critics of his generation, like Evelyn Waugh he had also become an unofficial proofreader and literary adviser to Nancy.
Waugh’s Vile Bodies provided the gang’s maxim and was even dedicated ‘With love to Bryan and Diana Guinness’. In a letter to a friend, the author described his novel as, ‘A welter of sex and snobbery, written simply in the hope of selling some copies.’
Waugh was said to be, in a wholly platonic way, ‘of course’, a little in love with Diana. Maybe with Bryan as well! He saw the Guinness’ continually, especially after his own marriage broke up in July 1929, following which all three of them went to Berlin to witness the legendary nightlife. Brian Howard was one of those who encouraged them to take what he considered a pilgrimage. ‘It is the gayest town in Europe,’ he told Diana, though she needed little encouragement. Perhaps he thought the delights of Berlin could drag Bryan out of the closet. Perhaps they did!
It would not be long before Unity, whose relationship with Diana was growing closer, would also be dragged into her social maelstrom, though Cecil Beaton acutely observed, ‘Unity was not really a member of the Biddesden gang … She would not talk to people, only to herself.’ But Brian Howard was one of the few people capable of understanding Unity’s world and why she was there. Her relationship with her sister was largely based on her fascination with the intelligence of many of Diana’s friends, and her amorality, particularly concerning her sexual mores.
* * *
Bryan and Diana’s long honeymoon had taken them south towards Sicily where she first set eyes on the azure Mediterranean, cloudless sky, Greek and Roman temples, almond blossom and olive groves: ‘It seemed to me a mystery why anyone who is not obliged to do so by work should choose to live anywhere else.’
The young couple actually spent the first part of their honeymoon in Paris, staying at the Guinness family’s apartment at 12 rue de Poitiers. When they returned, it was to their new house in Buckingham Street which, with their excellent cook and full revenue of staff, quickly became a Mecca both for the Oxford coterie, who only had to pick up the telephone to be invited round by Diana, and for new friends such as Lotte Lenya, Peter Quennell and the Sitwells. John Betjeman even wrote a little ditty about it:
I too could be arty,
I too could get on.
With Sickert, the Guinnesses, Gertler and John.
The reference to ‘getting on’ gives an indication that the whole process may not have been as guileless and indolent as originally thought and involved, at least on a literary level, a great deal of mutual promotion.
Bryan soon became disenchanted with his new wife’s extravagant social decadence while Anne de Courcy described her as ‘the central star, the flame round which they all gathered and, increasingly, the shrine at which they worshipped. Impeccably dressed, beautiful, funny, warm and flatteringly attentive, she fascinated them all.’
This social hothouse inevitably led to a considerable degree of tension, not least that which resulted from Evelyn Waugh’s lack of loyalty:
Once in Diana’s company, Waugh was dazzled. For Nancy, this repetition of a familiar phenomenon must have been galling. Against the fact of Diana’s beauty, Nancy’s own wit, sparkle and considerable attractiveness, her years of friendship with Waugh, counted little. Without intention or coquetry, in fact, without even trying, her sister moved to the centre of Waugh’s life.51
Apparently Waugh was soon spending most of his time with Diana at her house on Buckingham Street. In the mornings, presumably when Bryan had left for the day, he would ‘sit on her bed, chatting, while she read or wrote her letters or telephoned’. He would then ‘accompany her on walks, drives or shopping, lunch with her and often return for dinner in the evening with both Guinness’s’.52 Diana was said to have found him an ‘enchanting companion’ and, who knows, possibly lover. They would certainly come to share political affiliations through their belief in fascism.
With almost as many servants as friends, there was certainly little reason for Diana to do any work, or invest effort in anything other than her relentless pursuit of pleasure. Mary Lovell told a wonderful anecdote concerning her attempts to achieve something as undemanding as keeping account of people to whom she may have owed money, having abandoned the tiresome habit of carrying any of her own. ‘W
hen Bryan’s eccentric mother, Lady Evelyn, discovered Diana bookkeeping she was horrified: “How barbarous of Bryan,” she whispered’. Diana never again kept anything that could, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered as ‘accounts’, or did anything a servant could not do for her; until after her divorce.
* * *
Having betrayed his Conservative background and developed a close relationship with Ramsay MacDonald, Oswald Mosley became extremely disillusioned after Labour won the 1929 general election and he was awarded nothing more than the position of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. For a man with the ambition, and many said the promise, to lead the country, it was a bitter pill. So, disillusioned by the Conservatives, Labour and Liberals, he had decided to create his own political party.
But as Mosley’s New Party became more radical and turned increasingly towards fascist policies, many previous supporters defected, while Lord Redesdale’s interest increased. This was especially true following Mosley’s visit to Benito Mussolini’s Italy in 1931, after which he returned inspired and determined to dominate Britain’s various fascist movements and ultimately lead them into battle.
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