The Mitfords

by Charlotte Mosley

  10 Leo Schlageter (1894–1923). A Nazi martyr executed by the French for resisting their forces in the Ruhr.

  11 I’m thinking of my mother; she’d have understood hardly anything; it must be absolutely clear for the simplest and stupidest people.’

  12 Fritz Wiedemann (1891–1970). Hitler’s immediate superior during the First World War and subsequently one of his military aides and policy advisers.

  1 Mussolini’s state visit to Germany, during which Hitler put on a massive display of military power, was instrumental in convincing the Italian dictator to join forces with Germany.

  2 Karl Brandt (1904–1947). Surgeon who joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and served as Hitler’s doctor 1934–44.

  3 George Ward Price (1886–1961). Munich correspondent for the Daily Mail and author of I Know These Dictators (1937), a sympathetic portrait of Hitler and Mussolini.

  4 Margaret Mitchell’s bestseller had been published the previous year.

  1 Rosaleen, Bryan and Elizabeth Guinness’s first child, was born on 7 September 1937.

  1 Lady Bridget Coke (1891–1984). Mother of Deborah’s great friend Margaret (Maggot) Ogilvy. Married the 12th Earl of Airlie in 1917.

  1 Deborah’s Christmas present to Nancy was a bracelet of Hand of Fatima charms.

  2 The attack of measles had affected Deborah’s eyes. The sisters used to tease each other about syphilis, which can lead to blindness in its later stages.

  3 Helen Eaton (1899–1989). Nancy’s nickname for her hostess at West Wycombe was ‘Hell Bags’. Married Sir John Dashwood in 1922.

  4 ‘Get on’, Deborah’s way of addressing Nancy, was an interpretation of the sort of growl that the Mitfords’ groom used to greet people with. Deborah took it up as a way of fighting back at her eldest sister.

  5 When Deborah was small, Nancy used to tease her with a rhyme that never failed to make her little sister cry: ‘A little houseless match, it has no roof, no thatch / It lies alone, it makes no moan, that little, houseless match’. She put the poem into The Pursuit of Love, where it induced ‘rivers of tears’ in the heroine, Linda.

  1 Jessica’s daughter, Julia, was born on 20 December.

  2 Esmond had found work as a copywriter with a London advertising agency.

  1 The foreign policy speech that Hitler made four days later gave encouragement to the Austrian Nazi Party.

  2 Kurt von Schuschnigg (1897–1977). Anti-Nazi Chancellor of Austria since 1934. Hitler threatened to invade Austria unless concessions were made to the Nazi Party. Schuschnigg resigned and in March 1938 Germany annexed Austria.

  3 ‘Have you heard? Schuschnigg is with the Führer.’

  4 ‘Over there in the Reich.’

  1 Jessica and Esmond’s baby daughter, Julia, had just died from measles, aged five months. They had decided to go to Corsica for three months to try to recover.

  1 Lord Redesdale’s visits to Germany to see Unity had led him to revise his opinion of Nazism and, until Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939, he was sympathetic to the regime. In a speech to the House of Lords, he had announced that the Anschluss was the ‘sincere desire’ of a large majority of Austrians and that the gratitude of Europe was due to Hitler for averting bloodshed.

  1 Unity had flirted with the French officer when the sisters visited Corsica during their cruise of the Mediterranean in 1936.

  2 ‘Boud, I hope you haven’t forgotten your Boud.’

  3 Frances Mitford (1875–1951). Lord Redesdale’s eldest sister who was popular with all her nieces. Married Alexander (Alec) Kearsey in 1907.

  4 ‘A pretty woman’s hairstyle.’

  1 The Berghof was Hitler’s mountain retreat at Obersalzberg, which he had converted from a simple Alpine house into a residence suitable for receiving foreign dignitaries.

  2 The annexation of Austria.

  3 ‘Only much cleaner.’

  4 ‘She’s delighted to hear you say that.’ Unity’s dislike of Italians was a running joke between her and Hitler.

  5 Wilhelm Ohnesorge (d. 1962). German Minister of Posts and Telegraphs who was sympathetic to the Mosleys’ plan to set up a radio station.

  6 ‘Where is your sister?’

  7 Julius Schaub; Hitler’s personal adjutant and former head of his bodyguard.

  8 Gerdy Troost (1904–2003). Interior designer and a confidante of Hitler. Married to Paul Ludwig Troost (1878–1934), one of Hitler’s favourite architects.

  9 ‘Of course it’s a disadvantage for me because if I drive that fast I get there twenty minutes early, then I have to sit and wait in my hotel or at home for twenty minutes.’

  1 The Sudeten-German Party of Czechoslovakia, led by Konrad Henlein (1898–1945) who was instrumental in preparing the way for Hitler’s occupation of his country in 1939.

  2 Georg Wollner; Gauleiter of Reichenberg.

  3 ‘Because I have to bring the Führer out.’

  4 ‘The Führer is coming! The Führer is coming!’

  5 ‘It is a pleasure and an honour for me to greet you, my Führer.’

  6 Willy Kannenberg; Hitler’s cook.

  7 Franz Gürtner (1881–1941). Reich Minister of Justice since 1932 who opposed Nazi brutality but was unable to stand up to Hitler.

  8 ‘Next time the judges let that sort of man free, I’ll have him arrested by my bodyguards and sent to a concentration camp; then we’ll see who is stronger, the letter of Herr Gürtner’s law or my machine guns!’

  9 Dr Leopold von Hoesch (1881–1936). German ambassador to London 1932–6.

  1 Hitler’s special train.

  2 Gerhardt Wagner (1888–1938). Reich Medical Leader who was instrumental in formulating the infamous Nuremberg Laws that established anti-Semitism and euthanasia as official Nazi policy.

  3 Arthur Seyss-Inquart (1892–1946). Leader of the Austrian Nazi Party and keen supporter of Austria’s union with Germany, who became governor of Austria after the Anschluss.

  4 Hans von Tschammer-Osten (1887–1943). Reich Sports Leader and president of the German Olympic Committee in 1936.

  5 ‘Dear Führer, when are you coming to us?’ and ‘Führer, once again we swear undying loyalty to you’.

  6 Joseph (Sepp) Dietrich (1892–1966). Hitler’s close associate and head of his SS bodyguard.

  7 Winifred Williams (1897–1980). The English-born wife of Richard Wagner’s son, Siegfried, had been a friend and ardent admirer of Hitler since 1923. In 1930, she became head of the Bayreuth Festival and ran it until the end of the war.

  8 E. M. Forster’s novel was first published in 1924.

  1 This letter was transcribed in Lady Redesdale’s memoir of Unity. The original has not been found.

  2 ‘Power, table and ugh; penny cosy and racial disgrace,’ (i.e. interracial sex).

  3 Henry Bernstein (1876–1953). French boulevard-theatre playwright.

  4 Maud Burke (1872–1948). American-born widow of Sir Bache Cunard, the shipping-line magnate, whom she married in 1895. Changed her name to ‘Emerald’ in 1926 and was one of London’s leading society hostesses between the wars.

  1 Diana was expecting a baby in November.

  2 Theodor Morell (1886–1948). Hitler’s private physician.

  3 Ribbentrop.

  1 Lord Andrew Cavendish (1920–2004). Succeeded as nth Duke of Devonshire in 1950. Deborah’s future husband was a student at Cambridge when they first met.

  1 Unity had written to the Daily Express to deny an article in ‘William Hickey’ which said that ‘those members of Britain’s governing class whose Aryanism has been okayed by Unity Mitford are packing their bags for Nuremberg’. (2 September 1938) A photograph of her letter accompanying the article shows that it had been signed by Unity but was in Lady Redesdale’s handwriting.

  2 After more than four years of marriage, Nancy was at last expecting a child but in spite of carefully following her doctor’s instructions, she miscarried a few weeks later.

  1 Diana’s son, Alexander (Al) Mosley (1938–2005), was
born on 26 November.

  2 Nancy was editing the letters of her ancestors Maria Josepha, Lady Stanley of Alderley, and Henrietta Maria Stanley. Published as The Ladies of Alderley (1938) and The Stanleys of Alderley (1939).

  3 Roy Harrod (1900–78). Influential economist who taught at Christ Church, Oxford. Married Wilhelmine (Billa) Cresswell in 1938.

  4 Lord David Cecil (1902–86). Biographer and professor of English Literature at Oxford 1948–70. Married Rachel McCarthy in 1932. Their son Jonathan was born in 1939.

  1 Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia on 15 March violated the Munich Agreement and had brought all efforts at appeasement to an end.

  1 This extract was transcribed in Lady Redesdale’s memoir of Unity. The original has not been found.

  2 The cover name used by Hitler at the beginning of his political career and adopted as a nickname by his intimates. Neither Unity nor Diana used the name to his face but from 1938 often referred to him as ‘Wolf in letters.

  3 ‘Wisdom is no help.’

  1 On the previous day, the German army had invaded Poland. Hitler ignored Britain and France’s ultimatum to withdraw and on 3 September Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, declared war.

  2 ‘I have proposed friendship to England again and again and, when necessary, the closest collaboration. But love cannot be all one-sided, it must be reciprocated.’

  3 Unity’s Great Dane, given to her by Diana.

  THREE

  1939–1945

  Unity, Tom, Deborah, Diana, Jessica, Nancy and Pamela, 1935.

  On the afternoon of 3 September 1939, the day that Britain and France declared war on Germany, Unity went to the English Garden in the centre of Munich and put a pistol to her head. The bullet lodged in her brain, failed to kill her but inflicted irreversible damage. She was taken to a Munich hospital were she lay unconscious for several weeks. Communications between England and Germany were difficult in the early part of the war and on Hitler’s orders no report of Unity’s suicide attempt appeared in the German press. It was two months before the Redesdales received any definite news of their daughter and a further two months before they were able to fetch her home from a clinic in neutral Switzerland where Hitler had arranged for her to be sent. In January 1940, Lady Redesdale and Deborah travelled to Bern and found Unity still seriously ill, paralysed, with her hair matted and untouched since the day she had tried to shoot herself. They brought her back to England in an ambulance and Lady Redesdale took on the distressing task of looking after her daughter, who was left with the mental age of a twelve-year-old and in whom religious mania had replaced Hitler mania. Unity’s behaviour was unpredictable, alternating between bouts of fury and moments of pathetic vulnerability, and she was untidy, clumsy and incontinent at night. The Redesdales’ marriage was already under stress from political disagreements – when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia Lord Redesdale reverted to being violently anti-German while Lady Redesdale continued to regard the Führer as Germany’s saviour – and it deteriorated further with the strain of Unity’s infirmity. Lord Redesdale withdrew to Inch Kenneth, a small island off the coast of Mull in the Inner Hebrides which he had bought after selling Swinbrook House, taking with him Margaret Wright, the parlourmaid, who became his companion and remained with him until the end of his life. Lady Redesdale took Unity to Mill Cottage in Swinbrook, where they lived for most of the war.

  Nancy spent the ‘phoney war’, the months between the declaration of war and Hitler’s invasion of Norway and Denmark in April 1940, working in London at a first-aid post and writing her fourth novel, Pigeon Pie, a comic spy story that did not sell well. Peter joined up, ‘looking very pretty’ in his uniform, and they had a brief retour de flamme which resulted in a second miscarriage for Nancy. It was a depressing time and in her unhappiness she lashed out at her sisters: Deborah was ‘having a wild time with young cannon fodders at the Ritz’; Jessica was attacked for living in America: ‘You must be mad to stay there & like all mad people convinced you are sane’; Unity, whose suicide attempt had not yet reached the ears of her family, was rumoured to be in a concentration camp which was ‘a sort of poetic justice’; Pamela was living at Rignell, ‘in a round of boring gaiety of the neighbourly description’. Where Diana was concerned Nancy exulted when ‘Sir Oswald Quisling’ was imprisoned but thought it quite useless ‘if Lady Q is still at large’. Her hostility towards Diana did not stop at angry words. In June 1940, she was summoned by Gladwyn Jebb, an official at the Foreign Office, to give information on what she knew about Diana’s visits to Germany. She told him that she considered her ‘an extremely dangerous person’. ‘Not very sisterly behaviour’, she admitted to a family friend, ‘but in such times I think it is one’s duty?’ According to an MI5 report of the time, Nancy also informed on Pamela and Derek who she thought should be kept under observation because of being ‘anti-Semitic, anti-democratic and defeatist’.

  Although Diana would probably have been interned regardless of Nancy’s character reference, her sister’s testimony must have lent support to the government in their decision to detain her. She was arrested on 29 June 1940 and sent to Holloway, a women’s prison in north London. Diana did not learn of Nancy’s act of disloyalty until 1983, ten years after her death. Had she known, it is likely that she would have cut Nancy out of her life for ever. Even if she had wanted to keep up some kind of communication with her, it is certain that Mosley would have forbidden it. In the event, once Diana was in prison, the five-year estrangement between the two sisters, that had started with Wigs on the Green, began to heal. After the novel’s publication, Nancy had written just twice to Diana, to congratulate her on the births of her two Mosley sons, which, by painful coincidence, had occurred within a few weeks of Nancy’s two miscarriages. While Diana was in Holloway, prison regulations restricted her letter-writing but when she was released in 1943 and was living under house arrest the correspondence between them resumed. This was in spite of Nancy having once again performed her patriotic duty by going to the authorities when the Mosleys’ release was announced and volunteering that in her opinion Diana should not be let out of prison because she ‘sincerely desires the downfall of England and democracy generally’. Diana was never to know about this second betrayal as the government papers in which it was recorded were not made public until four months after her death.

  During the first two years of the war, Nancy worked in a canteen for French soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk and later looked after Jewish refugees billeted at Rutland Gate. In 1942, she found a job more to her liking at Heywood Hill, a bookshop in Mayfair, which soon became a meeting place for her London friends. In the same year she met Gaston Palewski, a Free French officer who was General de Gaulle’s right-hand man in London and who very quickly became the love of her life. This cultivated, sophisticated and amusing man was a passionate lover of women and a fiercely loyal supporter of de Gaulle – qualities that made up for his lack of physical charm. The ‘Colonel’, as Nancy always called him, worked the same powerful effect on her as Hitler, Mosley and Esmond had on her sisters. She became as indiscriminately pro-French as Unity had been pro-German; as ready to swallow her pride and put up with Palewski’s infidelities as Diana was with Mosley’s; as convinced that Gaullism was the answer to France’s problems as Jessica was that communism would solve the world’s injustices. Although Palewski was not in love with Nancy – and never pretended to be – he made her feel desired in a way that no other man had. The eight months that their affair lasted before he left to join de Gaulle in Algeria were among the happiest in her life and inspired The Pursuit of Love, the novel that made her famous. It is not clear when Nancy told her sisters about the affair; Palewski is not mentioned in her surviving letters until after the end of the war.

  Oswald Mosley’s message to his supporters on 9 May 1940 to ‘resist the foreign invasion with all that is in us’ did not forestall his arrest. On 23 May 1940, he was sent to Brixton Prison under Defence Regulation 18B, which
enabled the government to detain without trial anyone suspected of being a threat to the country. Diana, an ‘extremely dangerous and sinister young woman’ according to the Home Office official who signed her detention order, was arrested a month later. In October, she appeared before an Advisory Committee appointed to decide whether she should remain incarcerated. Diana treated her hearing with contempt, as ‘an absurd and insulting farce’, an attitude that she later admitted to regretting. Her loyalty to her friendship with Hitler and her refusal to repudiate Nazi policies led to the recommendation that she be kept locked up. On her arrest, Diana left her two youngest sons, Alexander, who was eighteen months old and Max, who was just eleven weeks and not yet weaned, with their nanny. Lady Redesdale would have taken them to live with her but she was fully occupied caring for Unity, so the children went to live at Rignell with Pamela, whose nickname ‘Woman’ belied the fact – unluckily for the little boys – that she was the least maternal of the sisters. After a year and a half at Rignell, they went with Nanny Higgs as paying guests to the new owners of Swinbrook House. Diana missed her four children terribly and their occasional brief visits were overshadowed by the anguish of having to part with them. But her greatest complaint was being separated from Mosley. Other couples detained under 18B had been moved to married quarters and the Mosleys began to press for permission to be housed together. At the end of 1941, they were reunited in Holloway and lodged in a flat in the prison grounds where they spent two further years in detention. In the autumn of 1943 Mosley contracted phlebitis and the prison doctors reported that his life could be in danger. The Mosleys were released in November and settled at Crux Easton, near Newbury, where they remained under house arrest until the end of the war. The government’s decision to release them was met with a storm of protest and countrywide demonstrations.

  Nancy was not the only sister to remonstrate against the decision to free the Mosleys: Jessica wrote to Winston Churchill to demand that they be kept in jail because their release was a ‘direct betrayal of those who have died for the cause of anti-fascism’, and she sent a copy of her letter to the San Francisco Chronicle. In her second volume of memoirs, A Fine Old Conflict, Jessica wrote that on re-reading this letter thirty years later, she found it ‘painfully stuffy and self-righteous’, and noted that Nancy had written condemning her action as ‘not very sisterly’ – the very same words that Nancy had used for her own behaviour when she denounced Diana in 1940. Jessica’s views, as she herself honestly admitted, were mixed with a ‘goodly dash of familial spitefulness’ and with bitterness over Esmond’s death in action in 1941. There is no evidence that Nancy ever told Jessica that she too had denounced Diana, or conceded that in performing her ‘duty’ she might also have been acting with a not insignificant dash of sisterly spite – and without Jessica’s justification of having lost a husband in the fighting.