The Mitfords

by Charlotte Mosley

  4 A waitress at the Osteria Bavaria.

  5 Hitler suffered from a chronic stomach condition.

  6 Heinrich Hoffmann (1885–1957). Hitler’s official photographer and author of The Hitler Nobody Knows (1933).

  7 Otto Dietrich (1897–1952). Hitler’s press chief 1933–45.

  8 ‘Just ran away.’

  9 James Rennell Rodd, 1st Baron Rennell (1858–1941). Nancy’s father-in-law was a diplomat, poet and scholar. Married Lilias Guthrie in 1894. He and his wife attended the 1936 Olympic Games.

  10 ‘The most beautiful moment of my life.’

  1 Lady Redesdale had taken Jessica and Deborah to Paris for a few weeks.

  2 Liliane (Baba) d’Erlanger (1902–45). A girlfriend of Tom Mitford. Married Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge in 1923.

  3 A Mitford word for spaniel, hence anything very sweet.

  4 The Duke of Gloucester (1900–74), third son of King George V, and Lady Alice Montagu-Douglas-Scott (1901–2004) were married on 6 November 1935.

  1 Ann Farrer.

  2 ‘Love forever, Your Boud.’

  1 Max Schmeling (1905–2005). German world heavyweight boxing champion 1930–32. In June 1936, he beat Joe Louis in his first fight against the black American heavyweight champion.

  2 Eva Baum was a keen Nazi who taught German to Unity. Having been friends, they fell out when Baum reported Unity to the SS, claiming, amongst other things, that she was bloodthirsty and had an ‘hysterical’ passion for Hitler. She also reported that Unity was having ‘a real affair’ with Erich Widmann and that she was not a suitable friend for an SS member. (Unity to Diana, 8 February 1935) The rumour that Unity had in turn denounced Baum for being Jewish is not borne out by this letter.

  3 An SS doctor who ran a children’s clinic in Munich.

  4 Armida (1917–) and Rosemary (1918–) Macindoe were English sisters studying German in Munich.

  1 7th Marquess of Londonderry (1878–1949). Until 1938, the former Air Minister was an admirer of Hitler and worked for rapprochement with Germany. His wife, Edith, was more sceptical and saw that ‘to live in the upper levels of National Socialism may be quite pleasant, but woe to the poor folk who do not belong to the upper orders’. (Quoted in Anne de Courcy, Circe, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992, p. 270) After their visit to Germany, the Londonderrys and their fourteen-year-old daughter, Mairi, left bearing photographs of the Nazi leaders in silver frames, which may have made Unity jealous.

  2 Mary Pollen (1892–1983). Married Colonel J. D. Macindoe in 1915 and K. W. Newall in 1933. Contrary to what Unity believed, the mother of her friends Armida and Rosemary was not an admirer of Hitler.

  3 Rudolf Hess (1894–1987). Deputy leader of the Nazi Party since 1933.

  4 Mary Wooddisse; an exact contemporary and close friend of Unity who was also studying German in Munich.

  5 A small gathering.’

  6 Paula Hitler (1896–1960). Hitler’s younger sister was the only one of his five full siblings to survive to adulthood.

  1 Lady Redesdale transcribed this letter in her unpublished memoir of Unity. The original has not been found.

  2 Lady Redesdale was taking Unity, Jessica and Deborah on a cultural cruise of the Mediterranean.

  1 Jessica was on holiday in Brittany with Nancy and Peter.

  2 As children, Jessica and Deborah imagined that Anthony Sewell, a neighbour at Rutland Gate, was a white-slave trader – their nanny having warned them that London was the centre of the traffic. Sewell was married, 1930–45, to Mary Lutyens, daughter of the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens.

  3 ‘Popo is sixty, she is guaranteed for a hundred.’

  4 It is more likely that Nancy stayed at home because her husband and Mary Sewell were having an affair.

  1 Alexandra Cecilia Hay (1922–91). A friend of Deborah who did lessons with her at Swinbrook.

  2 Peter Ramsbotham (1919–). The future distinguished diplomat had made friends with the sisters during their Mediterranean cruise.

  3 Unity had cancelled her plan to travel down the Danube and on to Constantinople with Tom and Jessica because the Redesdales had forbidden Jessica to go.

  4 Deborah’s dachshund.

  5 Ivan Hay (1884–1936). Cecilia’s father.

  1 Magda Ritschel-Friedländer (1901–45). The ideal of German motherhood married Dr Joseph Goebbels in 1931 in order to be close to Hitler, whom she idolized. Her first marriage in 1921 to Gunther Quandt, a rich industrialist, ended in 1929.

  2 ‘Kitten’; Diana’s nickname for Mosley.

  3 Diana’s marriage had been postponed until 6 October while the official paperwork was being arranged.

  4 W. E. D. Allen (1901–73). Chairman of an advertising company and Ulster MP for West Belfast who resigned his seat in 1931 to take up a senior post in Mosley’s New Party. He may also have been reporting back on the Mosleys to British intelligence services.

  5 Lillian Harvey (1907–68). The English-born actress spent her youth in Germany before moving to Hollywood in 1933. She released two films in 1936, Glückskinder and Schwarze Rosen.

  6 ‘It has given me such pleasure that you came to the Party Rally and that you have attended every day.’

  7 ‘The lackey of the Jews has almost become a National Socialist.’

  8 ‘Your brother is a splendid young man.’

  9 Count Janos von Almasy (1893–1968). An Hungarian friend of Tom who lived at Bernstein Castle in the Austrian province of Burgenland. Tom introduced him to Unity who often stayed at Bernstein and became Janos’s lover. Married Princess Maria Esterhazy in 1929.

  10 Goebbels had recently bought a villa in the fashionable Berlin suburb and it is there that the Mosleys’ wedding lunch was given.

  11 Ribbentrop. Tom Mitford had made up the nickname, inspired, for no particular reason, by the medieval song, ‘Go to Joan Glover, and tell her I love her and at the mid of the moon I will come to her’.

  1 Robert Gordon-Canning was best man at Mosley’s wedding. Joined the BUF in 1934 before breaking with it in 1938 on personal grounds.

  2 Hitler presented Diana with a large signed photograph of himself in a silver frame.

  3 Maria Goebbels; Dr Goebbels’ younger sister lived with her brother until she married the film director Max W. Kimmich in 1938.

  4 Diana was unable to remember the exact reasons for this quarrel but could only suppose that Mosley was irritated by her admiration for Hitler. In her appointment diary for 10 October 1936, four days after her wedding, she noted, ‘We discuss H and the wedding, He compares H with Ramsay MacDonald. I am furious. We quarrel.’

  5 Hitler had addressed a meeting of the Winterhilfswerk, a Nazi charity that raised money to help the poor during the winter months.

  1 Adolf Wagner (1890–1944). Nazi provincial chief of Munich and Upper Bavaria; Bavarian Interior Minister from 1933.

  2 Gertrud Scholtz-Klink (1902–99). Reich Women’s Leader and the only woman to reach ministerial status in the Nazi Party.

  1 Diana was in Berlin trying to get Hitler’s agreement to Mosley’s plan to set up a commercial radio station in Germany to broadcast to Britain.

  2 It is not clear why Diana could not write to her son at the time.

  3 Wootton Lodge. An article in Country Life had described the house as ‘the home of the unexpected’.

  4 ‘You certainly are a good soul.’

  1 The news of Jessica’s elopement had at last reached the Redesdales, two weeks after her disappearance.

  2 Hitler.

  3 ‘Hen’ in ‘Honnish’, Jessica and Deborah’s private language.

  4 Esmond Romilly (1918–41). In her memoirs, Jessica described Esmond when she first met him as ‘a star around which everything revolved … He represented to me all that was bright, attractive and powerful’. Hons and Rebels, p. 105.

  5 Clementine Mitford (1915–2005). Posthumous daughter of Lord Redesdale’s eldest brother, Clement. Married Sir Alfred Beit in 1939.

  1 Nancy and Peter had returned from
Bayonne where they had tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Jessica to come home.

  2 Nancy had endeavoured to persuade Jessica to hide in the train lavatory to avoid the press.

  1 The Redesdales refused to allow seventeen-year-old Deborah to visit Diana while her marriage to Mosley was still a secret and in the eyes of the world she was ‘living in sin’.

  2 John Beckett (1894–1964), ex-Labour MP, and William Joyce (1906–46) had been dismissed from their positions in the BUF, which was in financial trouble and was sacking many of its employees. After the war, Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) was accused of high treason for broadcasting from Germany – where he had fled to avoid arrest – and was executed.

  3 Frank Buchman (1878–1961). Founder of the Oxford Group, a fundamentalist religious movement renamed Moral Rearmament in 1938. In 1936, Buchman had publicly thanked heaven for the existence of Hitler as a defence against communism.

  4 Reginald Holme; author of memoirs, A Journalist for God (1995).

  1 ‘Thanks for your letter.’

  2 Dorothy (Weenie) Bowles (1885–1971). Lady Redesdale’s disapproving younger sister. Married Percy Bailey in 1907.

  3 ‘Best love from.’

  1 Deborah could not remember the origin of the rush of fantastic nicknames she and Jessica used in their letters to each other at the time of the elopement. They were perhaps a way of trying to re-establish their relationship which had been so shaken by Jessica’s disappearance.

  2 Lady Redesdale, worried that Jessica seemed depressed, had been planning to take Deborah and her on a world cruise in March.

  3 Derek Jackson (1906–82). Distinguished physicist, amateur jockey and heir to the News of the World. Married Pamela, as the second of his six wives, in December 1936. They were divorced in 1951. In 1940 he joined the RAF, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1941. The following year he transferred to Fighter Command and was decorated with the Air Force Cross.

  4 Gerald Tyrwhitt, 14th Baron Berners (1883–1950). Composer, painter and writer. A friend of both Nancy, who depicted him as Lord Merlin in The Pursuit of Love (1945), and Diana, who wrote an appreciation of him in Loved Ones (1985). He lived at Faringdon House, Berkshire.

  5 Robert Heber-Percy (1911–87). Known as the ‘Mad Boy’ because of his wild behaviour. Married twice, to Jennifer Fry, 1942–7, and to Lady Dorothy Lygon in 1985, but his liaisons were mostly with men, principally with Gerald Berners whom he met in 1932 and with whom he carried on a stormy relationship for eighteen years.

  1 George Howard (1920–84). A cousin of both Esmond Romilly and the Mitfords. Chairman of the BBC 1980–83.

  2 Dolly Wilde (1895–1941). Witty lesbian niece of Oscar Wilde. The sisters used to tease their mother by pretending to be in love with her.

  3 Michael Farrer (1920–68). A first cousin of the Mitfords.

  4 Winston Churchill (1874–1965). The statesman was related through his wife, Clementine Hozier, to both Esmond Romilly and the Mitfords. There was also a rumour in some circles that he was Esmond’s father.

  1 Unity had kept in touch with Baroness Laroche with whom she lodged when first in Munich.

  1 King George VI, who succeeded to the throne after the abdication of his brother Edward VIII, was crowned on 12 May 1937.

  2 In 1936, Peter Nevile, a friend of Jessica and Esmond, tried to stage a demonstration in favour of Edward VIII at a time when the government was putting pressure on the king to give up Wallis Simpson or abdicate.

  3 When the publicity surrounding Jessica’s elopement was at its height, Peter Nevile sold an interview with Esmond to the News Chronicle. Esmond and Nevile shared the proceeds.

  1 Georgina Wernher (1919–). Daughter of Sir Harold Wernher of Lubenham Hall, Leicestershire, one of the richest men in England, and Lady Zia, daughter of Grand Duke Michael of Russia. Married Harold Phillips in 1944.

  2 Lady Iris Mountbatten (1920–82). Great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

  3 Lady Jean Ogilvy (1918–2004). A cousin of the Mitfords and the eldest daughter of the 12th Earl of Airlie, who lived at Cortachy Castle in Scotland. Married 2nd Baron Lloyd in 1942.

  1 Lady Margaret Ogilvy (1920–). Daughter of the 12th Earl of Airlie and a great friend of Deborah. Married Sir Iain Tennant in 1946.

  1 From the windows of the Marlborough Club, Deborah could watch the coronation procession on its way to Westminster Abbey. As a peer of the realm, Lord Redesdale attended the service with Lady Redesdale, who was dressed in coronation robes of ermine-trimmed crimson velvet with a three-foot train.

  2 Phyllis Earle; a hairdresser and beauty parlour in Dover Street.

  3 Tom Mitford.

  1 A necklace and earrings of pearls and amethysts.

  2 Nellie Hozier (1888–1955). Esmond’s mother was a first cousin of Lord Redesdale and a sister-in-law of Winston Churchill. Married Bertram Romilly in 1915.

  1 Countess Francesca (Baby) Palffy-Erdödy a girlfriend of Tom Mitford, and her older sister, Johanna (Jimmy), were friends of Unity and lived at Kohfidisch, Austria.

  2 Angela Brazil (1868–1947). Prolific author of racy books about schoolgirls.

  1 A letter from Deborah sent on 16 May from Florence.

  2 Henrietta (Tello) Shell (1864–1950). Governess to Lady Redesdale and her siblings when they were children. After their mother’s death in 1887, she became their father’s mistress, bore him three sons and assumed the name Mrs John Stewart. In 1894 she became editor of The Lady, a position she occupied for twenty-five years.

  3 Lady Redesdale’s unusual Christian name came from one of her father’s half-sisters, Sydney Isabella, who was a goddaughter of Sydney, Lady Morgan, the nineteenth-century Irish novelist.

  4 Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel was banned on publication in 1928 and not republished in Britain until 1949.

  1 Barnabas von Géczy (1897–1971). Hungarian-born leader of one of the most popular swing orchestras of the time. Deborah’s admiration for him was reciprocated: when Unity saw the band the following year, Géczy whispered into her ear, ‘Wheer ees Debo?’ (Unity to Lady Redesdale, 12 July 1938).

  2 Franchot Tone (1905–68). Suave American actor who starred in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). Married to Joan Crawford 1935–9.

  3 Maurice Chevalier (1888–1972). Actor who played the quintessential Frenchman in 1930s American cinema.

  4 Deborah’s whippets.

  5 Lady Elizabeth Wellesley (1918–). Daughter of the 7th Duke of Wellington.

  1 Deborah had sued the Daily Express for saying that she, not Jessica, had eloped with Esmond. The case was settled out of court and Deborah was awarded £1,000.

  1 After the sale of Swinbrook, Lord Redesdale rented a cottage in the village so that he could continue fishing on the Windrush.

  2 Terence O’Connor (1891–1940). Conservative MP and Solicitor-General 1936–40. A keen follower of the Heythrop, he died after straining his heart on the hunting field. Married Cecil Cook in 1920.

  1 Tom Driberg (1905–76). Labour MP, author and journalist. Since 1933 he had been the ‘William Hickey’ gossip columnist on the Daily Express. The press suspected that Diana and Mosley were married but were unable to find proof. Of the family, only the Redesdales, Unity and Tom knew about the marriage; Nancy, who was incapable of keeping a secret, had not been told.

  2 ‘The Poor Old Leader’, i.e. Mosley.

  3 Lord Redesdale’s favourite term of abuse derived from ‘suar’, meaning ‘pig’ in Hindi, a word he learnt when he worked as a tea planter in Ceylon.

  1 From a popular song of 1937, ‘Somebody Stole my Gal’.

  1 Lady Redesdale, whose admiration for Nelson was as great as her distrust of the medical profession, used to give lectures at the Women’s Institute on bread-making.

  1 When one of the Mitford children’s guinea pigs was pregnant, the sisters called it ‘in pig’, as ‘in foal’, and used the expression for humans and animals alike.

  1 ‘The Parent Birds’, i.e. the Redesdales.

  2 Nancy’s
French bulldog.

  1 Dorothy L. Sayers’ eleventh thriller featuring Lord Peter Wimsey (1937).

  1 Hitler’s autobiography, My Struggle, was first published in two volumes, in 1925 and 1926.

  2 Annemarie Ortaus; a keen German follower of Moral Rearmament whom Diana had met in Munich.

  3 Miles Phillimore (1915–72). Author of Just for Today, a Moral Rearmament pamphlet (1940).

  4 Vivien Mosley (1921–2002). Diana’s stepdaughter. Married Desmond Forbes-Adam in 1949.

  5 Nicholas Mosley, 3rd Baron Ravensdale (1923–). Diana’s stepson became a novelist and biographer. His books include Accident (1964), Julian Grenfell (1976), Hopeful Monsters (1990) and a two-volume life of his father, Rules of the Game (1982) and Beyond the Pale (1983). Married to Rosemary Salmon 1947–74 and to Verity Raymond in 1974.

  6 The Princesses Edda and Carmen von Wrede were twin daughters of a German father and Argentinian mother. They lived at Schloss Fantaisie near Bayreuth and had been friends of Unity’s since 1935.

  1 The celebrated exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art’, comprising pictures that had been removed from state collections, was designed to educate the Germans on the ‘evils’ of modern art. Works by Max Beckmann, Chagall, Otto Dix, Max Ernst, Kandinsky and Nolde attracted five times as many visitors as a show of Nazi-approved art held at the same time.

  1 The wife of Benno von Arent (1898–1956), Hitler’s favourite theatre designer.

  2 ‘But Decca was so nice! She was so funny and charming!’

  3 The city park in the centre of Munich where two years later Unity attempted to commit suicide.

  1 ‘Really too stupid, much too easy.’

  2 ‘But you’ve only got to think logically, I’d have guessed it in two minutes.’

  3 ‘Fiery red.’

  4 ‘A full-bodied wine.’

  * I have marked my own contributions with a star.

  5 ‘Landscape.’

  6 ‘A tall, beautiful blonde woman.’

  7 Harald Quandt (1921–67). Magda Goebbels’ son by her first marriage.

  8 ‘But children, it’s obvious, it couldn’t be anyone else.’

  9 ‘I was thinking of the Führer all along, but he drinks only water!’