The Mitfords were always more impressed with the German version of fascism, both socially and ideologically. There was certainly never any indication, even historically, of any reticence concerning Nazi racial policies or even their appalling realisation. It was also somewhat ironic that the empowerment of women and liberalisation of attitudes during the Weimar period should have enabled Pam, Diana and Unity to live in and travel around greater Germany with such ease and independence.
Mosley’s audience with Mussolini hardened his resolve to emulate the European fascists. But Harold Nicolson, ‘wrote in his diary for 18 January that Mosley “does not want to do anything at present. What he would like would be to lie low till the autumn, write a book, then rope in Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, Rothermere and if possible Beaverbrook, into a League of Youth. Then launch an autumn campaign”’, from which the British Union of Fascists would rise from the ashes of the New Party; a party that had proved so dramatically ineffectual during the most recent elections.
That year, ‘Irene Curzon, Mosley’s sister-in-law, who was frightfully well connected and enjoyed numerous adulterous affairs with wealthy members of the Melton Mowbray hunt, organised a fund-raising ball and helped to persuade figures such as Lord Rothermere to contribute to the BUF coffers, with whose leader it appeared highly likely she had also slept.’19
In The Greater Britain, published through the BUF Press in 1932, Mosley ‘unashamedly advocated totalitarian government: freedom for the individual but within complete state control; a democratically elected government headed by an authoritarian leader … unlike Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in which Jews are specifically mentioned as the enemy of the people, Mosley’s book made no reference to Jews.’20 It would be nice to think that Baroness Curzon’s sexual relationship with the legendary pianist Arthur Rubinstein may have obliged the opportunistic Mosley to temper his public encouragement of anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, any selflessness in this regard was not to last, but for the time being it caused the Nazi Julius Streicher to accuse Mosley of being ‘the tool of the Jews’ in his magazine, Der Stürmer.
* * *
Despite ever-increasing independence and time spent at school, Unity was still very much tied to Swinbrook, her parents, her sister Jessica and perhaps, most surprisingly, for those not familiar with the aristocracy’s reliance on surrogate mothers, Nanny:
Boud [Unity] and I [Jessica] both avoided the company of the Grown-Ups at this time as much as we could. At Swinbrook, we lived in the D.F.D. except for mealtimes. We divided it down the middle, and Boud decorated her side with Fascist insignia of all kinds – the Italian ‘fasces’, a bundle of sticks bound with rope; photographs of Mussolini framed in passe-partout; photographs of Mosley trying to look like Mussolini; the new German swastika, a record collection of Nazi and Italian youth songs. My side was fixed up with my Communist library, a small bust of Lenin purchased for a shilling in a second-hand shop, a file of Daily Workers. Sometimes we would build barricades with chairs and stage pitched battles, throwing books and records until Nanny came to tell us to stop the noise.
This version of their political leanings is rather typical of the Mitfords’ habit of hiding anything that could subsequently be considered embarrassing behind a smokescreen of nursery humour. Rather surprisingly, some of the best examples were included in Jessica’s Hons and Rebels:
Although Boud’s interest in Fascism had at first been kept a secret from the grown-ups, it soon leaked out. She begged to be allowed to go to Germany … Boud wouldn’t be teased about her devotion to the Nazis. She was completely and utterly sold on them. The Nazi salute – ‘Heil Hitler!’ with hand upraised – became her standard greeting to every-one, family, friends, the astonished postmistress in Swinbrook village. Her collection of Nazi trophies and paraphernalia now overflowed our little sitting-room – bundles of Streicher’s anti-Semitic paper, Der Stürmer; an autographed copy of Mein Kampf; the works of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a 19th century forerunner of Fascist ideologists; albums of photographs of Nazi leaders.
Jessica made no attempt to explain exactly where Unity might have obtained such things. It certainly would not have been at Swinbrook post office, and seems highly unlikely that they could have entered the house without her parents’ knowledge, with or without Nanny’s assistance.
Jessica also claimed:
My parents at first looked on Boud’s newfound interest as rather a joke. Conservative opinion of Hitler at that time ranged from out-right disapproval of him as a dangerous, lower-class demagogue to a grudging sympathy for his aims and methods – after all, had he not decisively crushed the German Communist Party and destroyed the labour unions in a surprisingly short time? Thus the words ‘that feller Hitler’ on the lips of countless English squires could be expressed equally in tones of derision or of admiration. Indeed, with Hitler’s rise to power the concept of ‘filthy huns’ had mysteriously been completely discarded.
This statement would prove unsurprisingly accurate, particularly when Unity and Diana subsequently begged the ‘Revereds’ (parents) to go with them to Germany and see for themselves what life was like under a fascist dictatorship, where euthanasia and racial and political cleansing were already operating. Obviously, they did not have to beg too hard:
‘Farve is really one of Nature’s Fascists. He’d simply love the Führer’, they insisted. Before long they would prevail and Muv and Farve would be given a royal time in Germany. They would be lent a chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz, shown all the gaudy trappings of the new regime and they return full of praise for what they had seen. 21
This response would owe more to Unity’s relationship with Hitler than Diana’s, Hitler never having much time for Mosley.
* * *
Unity was undoubtedly attractive, albeit in that delightfully English sort of way, though most Mitford biographers seem determined to denigrate her with such comments as, ‘Someone said that looking at her was like looking at Diana in a slightly distorted mirror.’22
Mary Lovell claimed Unity ‘felt awkward about her appearance’ and had endured a full complement of sisterly taunts about her size, but her character and behaviour made her what Decca called a sui generis [unique] personality. However, aware that her information came largely from Unity’s sisters, presumably Lovell must also have known that Hitler declared both Unity and Diana to be ‘perfect specimens of Aryan womanhood’. His appreciation of their physical qualities was manifest in a Ziegler painting of four nude models bearing remarkable similarity to the Mitford girls, that hung over the fireplace in the Führer Room at the Brown House.
The fact that Hitler would come to consider Unity and Diana equally attractive would have been a welcome relief for Unity, for whom the constant reference to Diana as the beauty of the family must have been wearing. But in bidding for attention, Unity was certainly more than capable of rivalling her sister.
According to Kathleen Atkins, Unity did indeed have a magnificent body. When she was 16 she had overheard two men using this word to describe what they thought she must look like naked, and realised she thought so too. She took to repeating the word ‘magnificent’ over and over again to herself, as a sexual mantra.
Unity still thought a lot about William Blake, and also thought a lot about sex, and often both – the former encouraging the latter. Kathleen remembered Unity showing her a notebook, on the front of which, underneath her drawing of the copulating angels, she had written, ‘excess is sex spelt backwards’, for she now firmly believed that what Blake had really meant was that the path of sex leads to the Palace of Wisdom, but spelt sex backwards so only those who talked to angels would understand.
She also continued to read Milton, and learnt quite a lot about sex and the power of her imagination from more contemporary writers whose illicit work was circulated by various girlfriends, one of whose brothers had returned from Italy with a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which with the aid of an Italian/English dictionary caused considerable excitement.
> While Nancy enjoyed teasing, Unity liked to shock, though in her teenage years her behaviour sometimes seemed more Dada-like than truly shocking. Her releasing of a white rat at a ‘deb’ ball is typical of the type of story that the Mitfords considered suitable for inclusion as part of their charmingly eccentric family saga, while less socially acceptable behaviour has remained buried. Kathleen Atkins, who grew up in the small town of Burford, next door to Swinbrook, delighted in recounting how Unity successfully shocked post office customers by raising her skirt to illustrate her preference for wearing no knickers. This may also have been the same ‘lewd sex act’ that Pryce-Jones was ‘obliged’ by the family to remove from his book.
While the decision by Unity’s family and many of her friends to establish her lack of physical attraction appeared to have been motivated by their post-war determination to dispel rumours of any sexual activity between Unity and either Hitler or his SS officers, others had more personal reasons to establish her lack of attraction.
Elizabeth Powell, later to become Lady Glenconnor, remained quite determined to support the myth of Unity’s ‘exceptional height’; doubtless aware that it would have been a considerable handicap in the competitive business of finding a suitable match. ‘I also came out in January 1932. I made friends with Unity at Queen Charlotte’s Ball. We were both nearly six feet tall, bringing up the back of that procession with the cake, rebellious girls in white, it was ghastly.’ In fact, it was more than likely that they were stuck at the back due to their propensity for bad behaviour.
The political animosity that developed between Jessica and her sister equipped the former with more than sufficient motivation for commenting, ‘Boud had grown from a giant-sized schoolgirl into a huge and rather alarming debutante.’
The social media remained less easily convinced however. The Daily Express on 2 June 1932 was quoted as saying, ‘I thought that the prettiest girl at Epsom was Hon Unity Mitford.’ No mention was made of her exceptional height. As is obvious from photographs, Unity was very little, if any, taller than either Nancy or Diana.
The following week Tatler, by coincidence, featured ‘a full-page portrait of Hitler as man-about-town, with the curious information [which they obviously considered relevant], that he had refused to look the camera in the eye’.
On 10 March 1932, the Daily Express featured a large photograph of Unity, to explain among other things that ‘she will find it difficult to retain her obvious clear-eyed freshness throughout the season, which year by year seems to become for debutantes more of an endurance test than a period of social delights’.23
The William Hickey column was in fact written by Tom Driberg, who was not actually very interested in girls, but his colleagues on the Evening Standard’s ‘Londoner’s Diary’ backed him up by printing another photograph of Unity on the same day.
The ‘obvious clear-eyed freshness’ of the girls may have had other, more exotic, reasons for not fading; reasons that mothers would of course strongly deny, particularly in the case of Unity Mitford. But such things were quite obviously far more common than could possibly be admitted. Georgia Sitwell even admitted, ‘Of course I went to bed with Tom [Mosley]. We all did, and then felt bad about it afterwards.’
God knows how many girls Oswald Mosley had slept with during the many seasons prior to his twelve years of marriage to Cimmie. And marriage did little to curtail his sexual extravagance; during his years with Cimmie he became involved with some three-dozen different women. He even invested in a property that was strictly reserved for such activities. He claimed that his flat in Ebury Street was essential for his work, but that would hardly have been a justifiable reason for his insistence that it remained off-limits to his wife. There can be little doubt that such time-consuming sexual activity was a major factor in Mosley’s failure to fulfil his political ambitions. Thus, the girls who slept with Oswald Mosley could be seen to have contributed to England’s avoidance of submitting to fascism.
But despite her mother’s best efforts and the sexual opportunities on offer, Unity was still proving unresponsive to the whole process of ‘coming-out’. Sydney was so concerned that she even persuaded David’s sister, Joan, who had as little interest in the social season as Unity, to bring out her daughter Rudbin at the same time in order to try and encourage Unity’s motivation; but to little effect.
The London season opened with a ball at Buckingham Palace (in May) at which debutantes were presented to the king and queen. Unity would have been required to walk up to the royal couple, curtsey twice and retreat backwards gracefully. Unity would have considered such a ritual and the following three months of non-stop social events as a perfect butt for her humour and an opportunity for generally outrageous behaviour.
* * *
To celebrate Diana’s twenty-second birthday in June 1932, the Guinnesses held a grand party at their house on Cheyne Walk. She was then said to be:
‘At the height of her beauty’, having been painted by half a dozen leading portrait artists and her face, which had become virtually an icon for the era with its classical planes, carefully composed, so as not to encourage wrinkles, appeared in newspaper Society columns regularly. She was the woman who apparently had everything: youth, riches, a happy marriage, a charming [and incredibly wealthy] husband who worshipped her and [by now] two healthy children.24
Not to mention a highly skilled and experienced fascist lover who lacked any degree of loyalty and refused to appreciate even the concept, let alone the reality, of monogamy.
According to Diana:
We invited everyone we knew, young and old, poor and rich, clever and silly. It was a warm night and the garden looked twice its real size with the trees lit from beneath. A few things about this party dwell in my memory: myself managing to propel Augustus John, rather the worse for wear, out of the house into a taxi; Winston Churchill inveighing against a large picture by Stanley Spencer of Cookham war memorial which hung on the staircase, and Eddie Marsh defending it against his onslaught. I wore a pale grey dress of chiffon and tulle and all the diamonds I could lay my hands on. We danced until day broke, a pink and orange sunrise which gilded the river.
It was said to be ‘the party of the year’. It was also the first time that Oswald Mosley had been to the Guinnesses’ Cheyne Walk residence, but his affair with Diana was already established. Despite the fact that Diana quite obviously shared many of Mosley’s more unpleasant character traits, as a result of her wealth and beauty most social observers seemed quite determined to excuse, or even justify her behaviour. ‘Diana genuinely cared for Bryan and was mindful of how she could wound him. But when she compared what she felt for Mosley with her affection for Bryan it was as the sun to a candle … nine months later Diana petitioned for divorce.’25
By then, Diana was, according to De Courcy:
…in the grip of a physical passion so strong that it blinded her to everything else. She knew that Mosley was a philanderer, but she did not care. Gentle seeming; amusing and affectionate as Diana was, she was also completely ruthless. She took not the slightest notice of Bryan’s objections to her lunching with Mosley even when he took the painful step of writing her a letter forbidding it. She was very fond of Bryan but she was not going to let loyalty to him, the effect on their two children should the marriage be threatened, or the devastation she might cause, stand in her way.
By now it must have become undeniably obvious to everyone who knew Diana that she was totally amoral and quite appallingly selfish – qualities the Churchills had recognised and the unfortunate Bryan had chosen to ignore.
According to Jonathan Guinness, ‘Mosley was a married man with children; Diana had no thought of breaking up his home.’ Had she not insisted on a divorce, this statement might have been more believable; though, once again, quite how Guinness could possibly have known with any degree of accuracy, or Diana made such a claim, remains a mystery. ‘But she herself must be free of ties, to love him as she could but above all to serve him, to s
erve his cause of Fascism which, he convinced her, was the only way to save the country.’
Although Mosley had only recently formed the British Union of Fascists and it was claimed, ‘she fell simultaneously for his ideas and for his person’, it seems somewhat more likely that Diana’s prime source of motivation was sexual. Certainly, it was an activity at which Mosley could claim a considerably greater degree of success than politics.
Mosley’s avowed love for both his wife and Diana did not prevent him from also having an affair with Lady Alexandra Metcalfe. Known as ‘Baba’, she was the wife of the (apparently consenting) Prince of Wales’ equerry and close friend, Major Edward ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe. She justified her behaviour as a presumably pleasurable, if unsuccessful, attempt to keep Mosley away from ‘the Horror’, as she and her sister Lady Ravensdale called Diana. But Diana had already told Celia Keppel (subsequently Celia McKenna), ‘I’m in love with the Leader and I want to leave Bryan.’
Cynics insisted Diana had only been in love with Bryan’s money, so that when he ‘suddenly developed a [active] sympathy with those who wrote to the newspapers criticizing their “disgraceful flaunting of wealth and privilege in the face of growing unemployment and real poverty”’26, he became imminently less attractive.
However, it was claimed, possibly by Sydney, that Diana had written, ‘it was not necessary to have a particularly awakened social conscience to see that “Something must be done”’. Unfortunately, this remark was identical to that inaccurately claimed to have been made by the Prince of Wales, which made it difficult to believe that Diana was expressing genuine concern, so much as appeasing Mitford critics. Certainly, there had been no previous evidence that either she or her chums had displayed any concern for the appalling living conditions endured by millions of unemployed, whose attitude towards the privileged classes would hardly have been improved by the space devoted to society extravagance by the newspapers.
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