Arnold Leese was yet another somewhat eccentric fascist who attempted to start his own political party, the Imperial Fascist League, in 1928. Motivated by his understandable aversion to kashrut, the Jewish laws dictating the slaughtering of animals, Leese, a veterinarian by training, was a particular expert on the diseases of camels. Perhaps as a result of his love of animals, his aversion quickly grew into hysterical anti-Semitism and a perceived Jewish threat to the British Empire. His anti-Semitism was so extreme that he would later accuse Mosley of being a ‘kosher fascist’ in charge of the ‘British Jewnion of Fascists’.
The league was also strongly influenced by Mussolini and included black-shirted legions, violent street battles and a fasces as its symbol. But eventually, as the movement started to be more influenced by Hitler, they adopted the swastika superimposed on a Union Jack. Initially Leese, who had been a member of the British Fascists, was elected a councillor in Stamford, Lincolnshire, along with fellow fascist Henry Simpson. In his autobiography, Leese wrote, “We were the first constitutionally elected Fascists in England.”
It often seems to have been the English inability to take life entirely seriously that undermined their fascist ambitions. It was certainly difficult to believe that any man who titled his autobiography, Out of Step: Events in the Two Lives of an Anti-Jewish Camel Doctor, lacked a sense of humour. Thankfully, he also lacked Mosley’s sex appeal, wealth and ‘breeding’, which attracted so many, including Lord Redesdale and his daughters, to Mosley’s political party; though not all for the same reasons.
4
DANCING ON THE EDGE …
* * *
1930–34
* * *
Transcendenta! Transcendenta!
We shall dance a mad cadenza!
Jack Kerouac
While unemployment in Britain rose and the global financial situation headed towards the abyss, the Mitfords and their ilk continued to dance on the edge of the volcano:
Brian Howard blithely threw a party at St George’s Swimming Baths at which guests were asked to bring a bottle and a bathing-suit: a black orchestra provided the music and a ‘bathwater cocktail’ was served … the Hon. Stephen Tennant had a party for which the guests had to dress as shepherds [from a Watteau painting].1
Clubs, gay, straight, and those in between, continued to open and close. Fashionable people used the Embassy Club in Old Bond Street ‘to get drunk with an element of decorum’2. After that there was always Rosa Lewis’ Cavendish Hotel, a house halfway between the fantasy of nightclubs and the reality of dawn. There were also drugs available from a dealer called Brilliant Chang, who specialised in cocaine, or ‘happy powder’, and from Harrods, where one could purchase all manner of chemical stimulants.
Some people, such as Charles Jennings, at least attempted to give such decadence a degree of justification: ‘People might scoff at London Society and its conventions, its artificiality, and its apparent devotion to pleasure as the main object in life; but there it was: it represented the elite of the governing classes of the British Empire.’
Jennings also realised that the social order was in a far more serious state of flux than the Mitford girls and many members of the privileged classes were prepared to admit:
Mabell, Countess of Airlie, Mistress of the Bedchamber to Queen Mary and quintessential Establishment figure … [quoted] in her memoirs a letter written to her by her brother, the 6th Earl of Arran: ‘The days of family pedigrees are over … They are clinging to the past and will not realise that an old family only remains such as long as it continues to own the family house and landed property … I turn nostalgically to those halcyon years with delight and remember how much I enjoyed them. Yet I understand that even were I able to afford to live again as I did then it would be impossible owing to the march of democracy. To live that life demanded that domestic servants should be slaves and contented with their slavery. It was only by slavery that the old regime could be carried on’.3
In Germany, particularly in Berlin, there was more than just a change in social order. It seemed as if the whole culture of a nation was changing under the Weimar Republic, a transition graphically recorded by John Heygate:
Whatever aspect of the town’s nightlife one chose to explore, sexual, sadistic, or the combination of the two that have always flourished in a military-minded nation, one came up against the same fact: Berlin was rotten … Germany had gone coituscrazy … The Imperial Capital of Germany had become the European market of bodies … The Empire of Flesh’.
Berlin attracted as many as 2 million tourists annually during the best economic times of the Weimar Republic. It was the most popular urban tourist attraction in Germany and a magnet for foreign travellers. Nearly 40,000 American visitors were reported in Berlin hotels and inns in 1930.
But there were shadows moving across Germany that were far more sinister than Berlin’s taste for hedonism. Highly decorated First World War veteran and legendary nationalistic German writer Ernst Jünger elevated war, giving it the status of a quasi-religious, life-affirming art form, asking, ‘What could be more sacred than a man doing battle?’ He claimed war elevated the soldier’s life, isolated from normal humanity, into a mystical experience. Jünger criticised the fragile and unstable democracy of the Weimar Republic, stating that he ‘hated the democracy like the plague’. He rejected the liberal values of liberty, security, ease and comfort and sought instead the measure of man in his capacity to withstand pain and sacrifice.
While the English could still quite easily be motivated to take part in military action using such incentives as ‘heroism’ and ‘duty to king and country’, the feeling was that the German type of extreme warrior worship and the elevation of ritualised violence to a mystical level had largely lost its appeal in England after the Crusades. But the popularity of Blake’s poetry and imagery, which reflected remarkably similar sentiments to the Germans, if more directly related to Christianity as opposed to the Norse gods, indicated that such beliefs held much greater influence in England than would subsequently be admitted. While Jerusalem remained the most popular nationalistic anthem classic, A War Song to Englishmen reflected the English propensity for giving the terrors of war God’s blessing.
The arrows of Almighty God are drawn!
Angels of Death stand in the louring heavens!
Thousands of souls must seek the realms of light,
And walk together on the clouds of heaven!
Prepare, prepare!
Soldiers, prepare! Our cause is Heavens cause;
Soldiers, prepare! Be worthy of our cause;
Prepare to meet our fathers in the sky;
Prepare, O troops, that are to fall to-day!
Prepare, prepare!
Unity Mitford shared such convictions. But in 1930 she was still a strong-willed, sexually aware 16-year-old girl searching for her Jerusalem and an altar on which to sacrifice herself.
* * *
While Unity searched for her altar, Hitler continued his relentless rise to power. In part he achieved this by his continued courting of the German nobility, sustaining their belief that he intended to reinstate the Hohenzollern monarchy. The proof of his success was that ‘between a third and half of the princes eligible to do so joined his Nazi Party [and] among the 312 families from the old aristocracy there were 3,592 individuals who joined’.
But the party’s gaining of 107 seats in the Reichstag, after winning nearly 6.5 million votes in the German elections of September 1930, came as a surprise not only to Hitler’s enemies, but also to the Nazis themselves. At the time, party membership in the whole of Germany only amounted to some 100,000. Walter Laqueur claimed, ‘The only reason that could be given was that the vote for Hitler and his party was at that stage a demonstration against the existing state of affairs rather than a vote in favour of any specific political program … The growth of the Nazis on one hand and the advance of the Communists on the other were both the result of the economic crisis (that had started on
Wall Street).’ With 6 million unemployed it was hardly surprising that the Communists outnumbered the Nazis, and they should have never been defeated. But they had one major disadvantage. In the street fighting which became a daily feature of German politics in 1930–32, the Communists still lacked the military support of the Freikorps.
In 1930, Ernst von Salomon’s novel Die Geächteten (The Outlaws) was published, which drew on his experience as a member of the Freikorps fighting against the Bolsheviks in Latvia. He left little doubt that another war was inevitable, and that for many the horror would be gloriously limitless:
We smashed our way into startled crowds, raging and shooting and beating and hunting. We drove the Latvians across the fields like frightened hares; we set fire to their houses; buckled their telegraph poles, pulverised their bridges. We hurled the corpses into wells and threw hand grenades after them. Anything that came within our grasp was decimated; we burned whatever we could. We have seen red, and our hearts were emptied of human feelings. At every stage of our journey the earth groaned under the weight of our destruction. Where there had been houses, there was now only rubble and ashes, smouldering woodpiles, ulcers festering on naked terrain. Giant smoke plumes marked our passage across the landscape. We had built a funeral pyre to burn dead matter; but more than this, we burned our hopes and longings, codes of civil conduct, the laws and values of civilisation, the whole burden of fusty verbiage we carried, our belief in the things and ideas of a time that had rejected us. We withdrew, swaggering, intoxicated, and booty-laden.
For Hitler, to achieve his ambition of total power over the Germanic ‘master race’ by such savage means was a fantasy he aimed to realise, and which he believed to be his destiny. A destiny that Unity Mitford, still only 16 years old, could not wait to share.
* * *
After the end of the Michaelmas term in 1930, it was made clear that Unity would not be welcome back at St Margaret’s School. Sydney was reported to have said, ‘I visited the headmistress, who explained to me that many girls left school at 16 and Unity could well be one of them.’
While this may have been true, her alleged statement fails to address the reason ‘why’ the headmistress was recommending that Unity leave after only one year. The reason seems quite likely to have been encapsulated in Jonathan Guinness’ version of the episode and to have involved Lord Redesdale and his daughters’ unabashed socio-political opinions:
This puts paid to the legend, told to Pryce-Jones by more than one of his informants, that it was David who visited the headmistress and that in the course of the interview he was grossly and personally offensive. This was always improbable; David could be irascible, but he was never ill-bred.
It does not seem to have occurred to Jonathan that the concept that human behaviour was dependent on breeding, rather than parental and peer group influence and education, has chilling connotations. But it was something that many of the British middle and upper classes firmly believed in. Only some time after the war did it become generally unacceptable to voice such opinions.
* * *
In the summer of 1930 Bryan and Diana visited Tom, who was said to have ‘just begun reading law at Berlin University’4, presumably intending at one time to settle and practice there. According to Diana it was the first time she heard the word ‘Nazi’ used to describe those in favour of fascism. “‘Do you take sides?” Diana asked. “Oh no,” [Tom] replied. “It’s their own affair. But if I were a German, I suppose I would be a Nazi”.’ Apparently there were only two choices, fascism or communism, and the latter was of course totally unacceptable.
In 1928 the Nationalist Socialist Lawyers’ League had been formed. It was the first special organisation by means of which the NSDAP (National Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeite Partei) gained a foothold in public life, and probably said more about the character of lawyers than Nazis. They were not the only professional body to choose to accept the abandonment of human rights, morality and ethics. By 1933, for example, German doctors had abandoned the Hippocratic oath and were actively participating in the euthanising of both mental and physical cripples in persuit of the Nazi policy of eugenics.
In 1934 the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei) or ‘Secret State Police’ was established, under the control of Heinrich Himmler. His right-hand man, Werner Best, declared, ‘As long as the police (and the judiciary) carries out the will of the leadership, it is acting legally.’ In 1935 a law was passed officially permitting the Gestapo to act without judicial oversight. At its height, it had 45,000 members. It also controlled the camps and the extermination of the Jews.
Meanwhile, any form of intelligent, independent thought was actively discouraged: ‘Intellectuals, however patriotic, were socially not quite acceptable in a conservative world still dominated by Junkers, generals and captains of industry. They were quite out of place amongst the Nazi elite.’5
* * *
Sydney was insisting that she was totally unconcerned by politics and that her main worry was her daughters’ moral welfare, or more specifically Unity’s and Jessica’s obsession with ‘matters risqué or mildly improper’. She claimed that the girls ‘[still] thought a lot about the White Slave Trade, always expecting to be whisked off to Buenos Aires’. Actually, ‘hoping’ may be a more accurate description of what was obviously now more of an erotic fantasy than a fear. Particularly in the case of Unity, for who sex was already a reality.
Although Decca claimed that it was her interest in politics that stimulated Unity’s, it appears that the 16-year-old Unity, who was of course three years older than Decca, had already become interested in proto-fascist literature in 1930; three years before Decca had displayed any interest in politics. David Pryce-Jones came across a book Unity had signed and dated in 1930. It was a copy of Jew Süss, Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel about an eighteenth-century Jewish financial-adventurer. Because of its stereotypical Jewish characters, it was used in Germany to encourage anti-Semitism.
As far as Jessica’s commitment to Communism was concerned there were one or two contradictions, particularly in her choice of Julius Caesar as a role model. Unity’s choice of Joan of Arc, arguably the ultimate female spiritual fantasist, made a great deal more sense. Jessica also revealed that Unity’s political sympathies were more than likely to have been affected not only by her cultural and literary influences but also by her father: ‘When Bobo was 16, my father’s feelings for her shifted from total loathing to adoration.’
Jessica’s credibility as a ‘lefty’ would also have been particularly difficult to establish, due in part to her accent, which simply screamed privilege. And the manner in which they said things could be as equally revealing as their accent. The Mitford girls were renowned for the manner of their speech but despite it handicapping any serious credibility as a communist, Decca appeared to make no attempt to change it. Journalist Philip Toynbee recalled her once asking a burly working man, ‘Could you be absolutely sweet and tell us where we can get some delicious tea?’
The Mitford voice was often said to be affected because of its drawl and exaggerated emphasis’ which of course it was. It certainly wasn’t accidental. One was taught to speak in that manner to establish one’s superiority over commoners, assisted of course by those wonderfully arrogant and patronising prefixes, such as ‘My good man’. Then there was the emphasis. Writer and critic Lytton Strachey’s voice had more than enough of the Lady Bracknell ‘bray’, but it was this that established his social superiority. “‘What is coconut matting”, Lytton had said, “Is it really made of coconut?”’
Meanwhile, the age gap between the girls and their eldest sister must have seemed immense, while her total disdain for them would have made any influence, political or otherwise, highly unlikely. By 1930 Nancy was 26 years old; dark-haired, with green eyes, which were later reputedly ‘described by Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman and sister Decca as triangular in shape’. But despite such attractive physical attributes, as she grew older her character if anything grew even mo
re ‘grievous’. “‘The Queen of Teasers”, or “a cosmic teaser” as her sister Decca would describe her.’6
‘She once upset us,’ Debo recalled, ‘by saying to Unity, Decca and me, “Do you realise that the middle of your names are nit, sick and bore?”’
David Pryce-Jones was under no illusion concerning Nancy’s corrosive character, nor Evelyn Waugh’s caustic encouragement: ‘The cruelty of the Waugh/Mitford novels has often been caught, but the weak child’s need to jeer before being jeered at is there too.’ Neither was Mary Lovell: ‘Nancy called Debo “Nine” until she married, saying it was her mental age.’ Her sisters were very generous to describe all this as ‘teasing’, but it was obviously more than that. More than once Nancy was described as a ‘prize bitch’, and not only towards her siblings.
It is difficult to believe that The Lady magazine hired Nancy to write articles for five guineas a week without a modicum of nepotistic influence. For it was an extremely cost-effective means of promoting both her first novel and ‘Brand Mitford’ to the ideal class of reader and, even more so, to those who thought they were.
The magazine also presented an opportunity for somewhat less honest financial advancement. Apparently Gladys, her mother’s maid and a particularly gifted seamstress, was also responsible for making clothes for Nancy on the understanding that she paid for the material. Without announcement Nancy then sold the clothes for a handsome profit to a doctor’s wife, whom she had discovered via a classified advertisement in the magazine. Jonathan Guinness thought it far more important to mention that Sydney, rather than Gladys, was kept in the dark concerning such exploitation.
Hitler's Valkyrie Page 12