The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell

  It was Streicher who initiated the Nuremberg rallies and promoted the Nuremberg decrees against the Jews. We now know from surviving correspondence that he became a great liability to the Nazi regime and was detested by Goebbels and hardly ever saw Hitler except at Nuremberg. Unity would not have known this: when she wrote to Streicher’s newspaper her motive was almost certainly to make Hitler and his immediate circle aware of her unqualified support, in a tone that she could hardly adopt in conversation. She was now playing with very big fish indeed, and the letter haunted her for the rest of her life.

  Dear Stürmer, [she wrote in German] As a British woman Fascist, I should like to express my admiration for you. I have lived in Munich for a year and read Der Stürmer every week. If only we had such a newspaper in England! The English have no notion of the

  Jewish danger. English Jews are always described as ‘decent’. Perhaps the Jews in England are more clever with their propaganda than in other countries. I cannot tell, but it is a certain fact that our struggle is extremely hard. Our worst Jews work only behind the scenes. They never come into the open, and therefore we cannot show them to the British public in their true dreadfulness. We hope, however, that you will see that we will soon win against the world enemy, in spite of all his cunning. We think with joy of the day when we shall be able to say with might and authority: England for the English! Out with the Jews! With German greeting, Heil Hitler!

  Unity Mitford.

  PS: If you find room in your newspaper for this letter, please publish my name in full . . . I want everyone to know that I am a Jew hater.

  The hysterical tone of this letter sounds remarkably like Nancy’s character Eugenia in Wigs on the Green, and if it was a deliberate ploy by Unity to ingratiate herself with top Nazis, then it worked. Streicher was intrigued enough to ask her to do an interview for the Münchener Zeitung, in which she spoke just as freely about the BUF and her hopes for Germany and Britain to be united in Fascism. He prefaced Unity’s remarks with the information that her father was a Graf and that she was related to Winston Churchill, so that there could be no doubt in the minds of potential readers that this was a young woman of status whose views should be regarded with respect.24 Next he invited her to the midsummer festival at Hesselberg, near Nuremberg, where, dressed in a military-style black shirt, and her favourite gauntlet gloves, she was treated as an honoured guest and asked to give an impromptu speech. It was widely covered in the British press under headlines such as ‘The Girl Who Adores Hitler’ and ‘Peer’s Daughter is Jew Hater,’ illustrated with photographs of Unity giving a Nazi salute. The Redesdales were appalled to be contacted by reporters from the national daily papers, and asked to comment on their daughter’s pronouncements. In the aftermath one reader from Kingston-on-Thames wrote, via the correspondence columns of a daily paper, to ask what Unity Mitford would do if she were put into a kindergarten ‘with a score of beautiful Jewish four-year-olds, and then given a gun and told to wipe out that much Jewry’.

  David and Sydney had been about to join her in Munich but now they cancelled their trip and ordered her home for the summer instead. Realizing how angry they were, and since they had yet to find out about the Stürmer letter, Unity thought she had better comply. She told them the Hesselberg incident had been ‘unavoidable’. She couldn’t have refused to go, for the sake of politeness, she wrote to Sydney, and once there she couldn’t wave away the bouquet presented to her, or refuse to take the microphone.25 But friends of Unity in Munich saw no signs of regret over any of the notoriety she subsequently attracted.26 In a sense she had achieved the ultimate success. All her life she had obtained pleasure from shocking people, now she had shocked so absolutely that people had to sit up and notice her. She was, at last, notable as someone in her own right. She had even begun to create her own legendary persona, building on the coincidence of her conception in Swastika and always calling herself Unity Walkyrie.

  At home, she was soon brought down to earth. From Mill Cottage in High Wycombe on the evening of 26 July, she wrote to Diana that David was in a vile temper with her, ‘mainly because of the letter in the Der Stürmer’. Its contents were reported in the Evening Standard that afternoon, and on the following day it was carried in the daily national press. She received a huge postbag of letters, some from people who were opposed to her views and some from people who supported them. Nancy wrote teasingly, ‘We were all very interested to see that you were Queen of the May this year at Hesselberg. “Call me early, Goering dear/For I’m to be Queen of the May.” Good gracious, that interview you sent us; fantasia! Fantasia!’27 But by then Unity and Nancy were scarcely on speaking terms. It was far more important to her that Decca wrote from a holiday in Brittany to say that she hated what her Boud had written but that she loved her nevertheless.

  Later in the month Unity went to visit friends at Hayling Island. They were out sailing when she arrived and Unity was greeted and welcomed by their father, an ‘old-style Times correspondent and a great Liberal’28 who, having left Unity to unpack and settle in, went off to do some work. Hearing the sound of gunfire in the garden he went to investigate. Unity was firing at targets with her pistol. When he asked her what she was doing she told him she was practising to kill Jews. Her friend reported, ‘Father almost left the house at once.’

  Unity’s pistol was a pearl-handled 6.35 Walther, which she sometimes wore in a small holster. Her biographer was unable to verify whether Hitler had given it to her, as Paulette Helleu claimed Unity had once told her,29 or whether she had simply purchased it to wear for effect with her Nazi regalia. One friend thought she had bought it during a trip to Belgium and this seems more likely. Although Hitler was keen that women should be able to defend themselves and know how to handle guns and shoot properly, a few years earlier he had suffered a significant personal loss when his half-niece, Geli, generally believed to have been the love of his life, committed suicide by shooting herself with his gun.

  To escape the censorious atmosphere at home Unity went to stay with Diana, but she made no attempt to keep a low profile while in London. There were several incidents during which she deliberately antagonized small crowds gathered around socialist speakers at Speaker’s Corner, calling out ‘Heil, Hitler’ and giving the Nazi salute.30 She was furious when Nancy teased her that she had done some research into the family history and had discovered a great-grandmother Fish, who made them one-sixteenth Jewish.

  During a visit to Swinbrook with Diana, Unity produced an autographed photograph of Julius Streicher, which she proposed to display prominently in the DFD to offset a bust of Lenin that Decca had recently installed. This was too much for Decca, and she objected violently, referring to Streicher as a filthy butcher. In her autobiography she made much of the argument: ‘“But, darling,”’ Diana drawled, opening her enormous blue eyes, “Streicher is a kitten.”’31 Diana’s short response to this, when asked about it some sixty years later, was ‘A kitten? Rubbish!’32

  9

  SECRET MARRIAGE (1935-7)

  In the autumn Unity was allowed to return to Munich, but David insisted on chaperoning her. There, he called on the British consul and asked, ‘Can’t you persuade Unity to go away from here?’ To others he would say mournfully, over a cup of tea, ‘I’m normal, my wife is normal, but my daughters are each more foolish than the other. What do you say about my daughters? Isn’t it very sad?’1 The wife of the consul thought it was very sad. She remembers seeing both the Redesdales in Munich and recalls that they were ‘distraught parents’, very nice and quite unable to cope with Unity’s obsessive behaviour.2 Yet surely David had the means to ensure that Unity could not stay in Germany. She was only able to live there because he provided her, as he did his other daughters, with an allowance of about £125 a year. This was hardly a fortune, but there was a special rate of exchange for sterling, which made it sufficient for her to enjoy a reasonable standard of living.

  When Unity became ill with tonsillitis, David insisted on staying on
to look after her. His English self-confidence coupled with his bumbling manner both endeared him to her and irritated her. The ice rink was closed and he could not skate, which made him determined to dislike the entire trip. ‘He refuses to take the least interest in anything and pines for home,’ Unity complained to Sydney. ‘He had much better let me come alone, like I planned. I must say one thing, he is very good-tempered.’ Most of the waiters and hotel staff in Munich spoke a little English, but David had only to hear one word of English, she said, before addressing them exactly as he would a waiter in London. ‘On the train he suddenly said to the dining car man, “I don’t think much of your permanent way, but the rolling stock is pretty good going on. These cigarettes are killing me by inches!” Then he fires questions at them,’ she continued, ‘like, “Do they sell Brambles [a type of country hat] here?” or talks about her ladyship and expects them to know it’s you. The poor things are so confused. I think they think he’s cracked.’3

  After her contretemps in June Unity had no option but to submit to her father’s presence with good grace. Her brief notoriety had upset her parents badly and she was fortunate to have been allowed to return to Munich at all. The situation had not been helped along by the publication of Nancy’s Wigs on the Green at the end of June, just as the papers got wind of Unity’s interview. Unity took her cue from Diana: it was not acceptable to mock either Mosley or Hitler.

  Nancy was well aware that the timing was bad and contacted both sisters, writing to Diana (firmly): ‘A book of this kind can’t do your movement any harm. Honestly if I thought it could set the Leader back by so much as half-an-hour I would have scrapped it ...’4 and to Unity (winningly):

  Darling Head of Bone & Heart of Stone,

  ... Please don’t read the book if it’s going to stone you up against me . . . Oh dear do write me a kind and non-stony-heart letter to say you don’t mind it nearly as much as you expected . . . Oh dear I’m going to Oxford with Nardie [Diana] tomorrow, our last day together I suppose before the clouds of her displeasure burst over me . . . oh dear, I wish I had called it mine uncomf now because uncomf is what I feel every time I think about it. So now don’t get together with Nardie and ban me forever or I shall die . . . oh dear, OH DEAR!5

  Perhaps it was asking too much of Diana, who had pinned her colours so positively to Mosley’s mast, to see the book in quite the gleeful way Nancy intended, and realizing this, albeit late in the day, Nancy had tried to soften the blow by forewarning her sister while she was writing: ‘Peter says I can’t put a movement like Fascism into a work of fiction by name so I am calling it the Union Jack movement . . . & their leader Colonel Jack . . . but I don’t want to Leadertease,’ she wrote appeasingly, ‘as the poor man could hardly have me up for libel under the circumstances! ’6 Diana was allowed to read the manuscript and although she suggested a rash of edits, which for the most part Nancy agreed to, both she and Unity had told Nancy they would never speak to her again if she published it. But Nancy had little option as Prod was not working and their only income besides her tiny allowance was the royalties from her books. She was unable to make their funds meet their outgoings and she had become used to visits from the bailiffs and receiving hand-outs from her father-in-law. ‘I really couldn’t afford to scrap the book,’ she told Diana.

  One problem was that the game had changed somewhat between the time that Nancy conceived Wigs on the Green and its publication. From being ‘almost respectable’ eighteen months earlier, Mosley had become, as Bernard Shaw put it, ‘ridiculed as impossible’.7 Since the infamous BUF Olympia rally in 1934, a scene of unprecedented violence in British politics (though worse was to come), Mosley had lost all chance of leading a conventional party. On the other hand, the active membership of the BUF had reached ten thousand with, Mosley’s biographer estimated, a further thirty thousand non-active members and supporters.8 Mosley pointed out that Fascism in Britain had grown faster than anywhere else in the world, and there was evidence of a significant amount of support for it as a political ideal from uncommitted voters. When one of the first Gallup polls asked interviewees to choose which they would prefer, Fascism or Communism, 70 per cent of people under thirty chose Fascism. In the upper echelons of society there is plenty of proof that the Cliveden set and a large slice of the upper classes, while not actively pro-Mosley, were supportive of a Fascist style of government because they were all terrified of the threat of Communism.

  Then there was Mosley’s style of dressing, which had hitherto been a neat black shirt under a well-cut dark suit. Suddenly, for marches and rallies, he and his lieutenants adopted a uniform that was distinctly military in design. The black jacket had brass buttons and epaulets, and was worn with a Sam Browne-type leather belt, and an officer’s peaked hat. Brown riding breeches were tucked into gleaming riding boots. It drew some pejorative comments from onlookers: ‘They look like Nazi jackboots’ was one obvious remark. ‘More like King Zog’s Imperial Dismounted Hussars’ was the retort. And, increasingly, BUF marches and grandiose rallies, apparently based on European models, became an excuse for aggressive and vicious thuggery. Bands of Communists and some who were simply anti-Fascist would begin by heckling or throwing missiles, and eventually order would deteriorate with the exchange of blows. Mosley never openly advocated anti-Semitism, but plenty of his supporters were willing to act against East End Jews in the name of the BUF. In the event the uniform was short-lived, for the wearing of it was banned by the Public Order Act of 1936, but it was not forgotten by the public.

  News of the treatment meted out to Jews in Germany was filtering through to the United Kingdom: national newspapers ran small reports of how Jews were increasingly being stripped of possessions, their shops and businesses closed and looted, and how they were being generally humiliated. German towns put up signs boasting that they were ‘Jew free’, park benches were marked ‘Aryan’ and ‘Jew’, shops proclaimed that Jews would not be served. Such news items were tucked away, a forerunner of what was to come. Those of the silent majority who read the reports did not know how seriously to take them, or decided that it was ‘not our business’, so there were no demonstrations of public anger, but some opprobrium inevitably clung to Mosley’s movement and - whether it was true or not - he was widely perceived as anti-Semitic. When questioned about the Nazi regime’s attitude to Germany’s Jewish population, he replied, ‘Whatever happens in Germany is Germany’s affair, and we are not going to lose British lives in a Jewish quarrel.’9

  Because of her affection for Diana, Nancy had accepted Mosley up to a point, had even casually joined the BUF with Prod and been present at the Olympia fiasco, but her allegiance soon waned. The Rodds decided that they did not like the direction in which British Fascism was moving. When they received an invitation, written in German, from Joachim von Ribbentrop to a function to celebrate his appointment to the London embassy, Prod declined for them both - in Yiddish.10 But Nancy had never really taken to Mosley; her book was the equivalent of a modern television satire and lampooned what he stood for. Mosley took himself very seriously, and though he never minded opposition, derision was a different matter.

  The publication of Wigs on the Green caused a serious rift between Nancy and Diana. In November, almost six months later, in a letter to a friend, Nancy wrote: ‘I saw Diana at a lunch . . . 2 days ago, she was cold but contained & I escaped with my full complement of teeth, eyes, etc.’ But even had Diana forgiven her, Mosley would not have done so. For the next four years he refused to allow Nancy to visit Diana at the house they acquired in early 1936. Indirectly, this rift led to more serious repercussions. Unity, too, was unforgiving, telling people she met in Munich that she was never going to speak to Nancy, so that Nancy could only reply affirmatively to John Betjeman’s query on reading the book: ‘I suppose it will be all up with Unity Valkyrie and you?’ Years later, when she had become a distinguished writer, Nancy refused to allow Wigs on the Green to be reissued, saying that too much had happened for jokes about Na
zis to be considered as anything but poor taste, but one suspects that the problems it caused within the family were just as likely to have been the reason.

  Unity attended the 1935 Nuremberg rally with Tom and Diana. On the eve of the event they met Hitler and Streicher at the opera; on the following day when they found their reserved seats they had been seated prominently, next to Eva Braun who had recently become Hitler’s mistress. There are many photographs of the trio of Mitfords in newspaper archives because by now the British press thought the Nazi rallies important enough to cover, and both Unity and Diana made good copy. So, there are photographs of Tom and Diana flanked by Nazi banners, of the two women against a backdrop of marching storm-troopers, of Unity giving the Nazi salute, and any number of poses that would later compromise them.

  Diana and Mosley had been together for more than three years. Their initial passion had stood the test of time and out of this a remarkably close intellectual friendship had also grown between them. They remained very much in love; and they wrote to each other, and often spoke to each other in the baby talk of lovers.11 As Mosley’s son, Nicholas, attests ‘There was an aura around her and my father such as there is around people who are in love.’12 Mosley, it is true, still flirted and continued to have casual affairs with other women. He was still sexually involved with Baba Metcalfe and there were numerous other infidelities during the thirties that are a matter of public record. There was even a bizarre court action brought by one woman for slander after she had initially alleged ‘breach of promise’.13 In view of his unquestionable love for Diana it is difficult to explain away his infidelities but many powerful men share the unattractive characteristic of sexual incontinence - Palmerston, Lloyd George, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton among them. One thing is for sure, neither Mosley nor Diana was ever wholly happy when they were apart.