The Mitfords

by Charlotte Mosley

  2 Arnold Goodman (1913–95). Solicitor whose close friendship with Harold Wilson made him one of the most powerful, behind-the-scenes figures in Britain during the 1960s and ‘70S-Created life peer in 1965.

  3 Caspar Fleming (1952–75). Ian and Ann Fleming’s only son died of a drug overdose aged twenty three.

  1 Mating.

  1 Cristiana Agnelli (1928-). One of the models for Northey in Don’t Tell Alfred. Married Count Brandolino Brandolini d’Adda in 1947.

  2 The Paris uprisings of May 1968, which started as a student protest and quickly spread nationwide, had reached near-revolutionary proportions.

  1 Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in Los Angeles on 5 June while in California campaigning for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. He and his wife, Ethel, had eleven children.

  1 Following the May strikes and demonstrations, General de Gaulle had dissolved Parliament and held new elections which the Gaullists won by a large majority

  2 Agricultural shows.

  1 Deborah’s Shetland pony, Easter Bonnet, bred by Lady Redesdale, was champion at a breed show. Princess Margaret handed out the winner’s cup.

  1 Peter Rodd had recently died of cancer.

  2 Francis Rodd, 2nd Baron Rennell (1895–1978). Peter Rodd’s elder brother.

  3 Daniel Cohn-Bendit (1945-). Leader of the 1968 student uprising in Paris. Member of the European Parliament since 1994.

  1 Bertram Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale (1837–1916). A great admirer of Wagner and a regular visitor to the Bayreuth Festival which was run, in the early part of the twentieth century, by Siegfried Wagner, the composer’s son.

  2 Rosamond Lehmann (1901–90). In her autobiography, The Swan in the Evening (1967), the novelist described the sudden death of her adored daughter, Sally, and her attempts to communicate with her in the spirit world.

  3 In Dr Spock’s Baby and Childcare, Benjamin Spock had addressed the problem of bed-wetting.

  1 Nancy was planning a visit to Czechoslovakia to research Frederick the Great.

  2 Irma Grese (1923–45). Notorious camp guard at Auschwitz and Belsen.

  1 Mosley had appeared on the BBC programme, interviewed by James Mossman, to coincide with the publication of his autobiography.

  1 Colin Coote (1893–1979). The former editor of the Daily Telegraph described My Life as ‘the best-written volume of memoirs emanating from my generation’, but said that his feelings towards Mosley, ‘after admiration waned, have always been pity, possibly; and regret, certainly. Pity, because … so potentially great a man should have so distressingly ill led; and regret to see so many wasted talents.’ Sunday Telegraph, 20 October 1968.

  2 ‘Basically she’s a star-it will all end in marriage on a millionaire’s yacht.’ Jacqueline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipowner, on 20 October; their wedding reception was held on the Christina O, Onassis’s super-yacht.

  1 Nancy objected to Mosley having written in his memoirs that Tom Mitford had been a paid-up member of the British Union of Fascists. My Life, p. 409.

  2 11th Earl of Drogheda (1910–90). Chairman of Royal Opera House 1958–74.

  1 Andrew Devonshire was battling with alcoholism.

  1 Nancy was interviewed by Jillian Page for the Sunday Express, 24 November 1968.

  1 Nancy had described how at a Parisian lunch party before the war Jessica, aged seventeen, when asked which party she supported had declared that she was a communist.

  2 Claud Cockburn (1904–81). The author, journalist and editor of the communist newspaper, The Week, 1933–46, described My Life as ‘almost unbearably tedious’ and ‘depressing’. Sunday Times, 20 October 1968.

  1 Jessica had sent Deborah a recipe for fig pudding.

  2 Simon Head (1944-). Writer, journalist and author of The New Ruthless Economy (2003).

  1 Mark Ogilvie-Grant was in London dying of cancer of the oesophagus.

  1 Edward Gathorne-Hardy (1901–78). Authority on eighteenth-century antiquarian books and a keen amateur botanist.

  1 Lady Elizabeth Fitzmaurice (1927-). Married Major Charles Lambton in 1950.

  2 The brothers Jean and Thierry Feray.

  3 Jean de Baglion’s house in the country was called ‘Le Donjon’.

  4 Violette de Talleyrand-Périgord had been Nancy’s rival for Palewski’s affections for many years.

  1 Nancy’s cleaner.

  2 Kenneth Clark’s thirteen-part television series, Civilisation, was being serialized in The Listener.

  3 Field Marshal Montgomery had confused the Thirty Years War (1618–48) with the Seven Years War (1756–63), which was won by Prussia and England, largely thanks to Frederick the Great’s military skills.

  1 Frances Mossiker (1906–85). Author whose The Affair of the Poisons, Louis XIV, Madame de Montespan and One of History’s Great Unsolved Mysteries was first published in 1969.

  1 Nancy’s cook was retiring after twenty-two years.

  1 ‘He says the thing they took out was “highly malignant” … and the blood is full of “bunches” of dreadery, so that it is sort of universal and being continually circulated so it might fix itself anywhere in the body at any time OR it might go on like this for some time.’ (Deborah to Jessica, 13 July 1969)

  1 Nancy’s new housekeeper who had replaced Marie.

  1 Nancy had written to Deborah to commiserate after Andrew Devonshire’s mare Park Top was beaten by ¾ length in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe at Longchamp. Her jockey, Lester Piggott, told the racing commentator Peter O’Sullevan that he blamed himself for her defeat.

  2 7th Earl of Sefton (1898–1972). Deborah was a frequent guest at Abbeystead, Lord Sefton’s Lancashire estate. She wrote of her host, ‘He was a curiosity, stranded in the 20th century, sort of touching in ridiculous grandness and so funny. People were terrified of him but I happened not to be.’ (Deborah in a letter to the editor)

  3 Private Eye’s nickname for the Queen. After the BBC documentary ‘The Royal Family’ was shown in June 1969, the satirical magazine gave each member of the family a working-class nickname, as though they were characters out of Coronation Street, Britain’s longest-running soap opera. Prince Charles was ‘Brian’, the Duke of Edinburgh, ‘Keith’, and Princess Margaret, ‘Yvonne’.

  1 Nancy had returned from her trip to East Germany.

  2 Josephine Loewenstein went to Alexis de Redé’s Oriental ball dressed not as Joan Yarde Buller, the Aga Khan’s mother, but as an odalisque.

  1 Constancia’s and James Forman’s younger son, Chaka, became an actor.

  2 Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial classic, The Wretched of the Earth, was published in 1961.

  3 A young Moroccan who succeeded the unsatisfactory ‘Newling’ and who was nicknamed ‘Beamish’ because of his cheerful presence.

  4 Esmond Romilly’s account of the Spanish Civil War was first published in 1937 when he was eighteen.

  5 Hugh Thomas (1931-). Historian, author of The Spanish Civil War (1961), whom Nancy had known since he was a student in Paris.

  1 For The Trial of Dr Spock.

  1 Laski had panned The Water Beetle: ‘Despite some illustrations on nice grey paper by Mr Osbert Lancaster, this collection of mostly reprinted trivia hardly adds up to more than a non-book.’ Observer, 21 October 1962.

  2 Pamela meant the Plaza Athenée.

  *Naturally she’s got a book of European restaurants.

  1 David Pryce-Jones (1936-). Journalist, novelist and biographer who had exchanged houses with Jessica for the summer. He interviewed Nancy for a profile in the Daily Telegraph and subsequently wrote a biography of Unity.

  1 In one of many misdiagnoses, the doctors had ruled out Nancy as having cancer.

  1 Alan Pryce-Jones (1908–2000). David’s father was a journalist and editor of the Times Literary Supplement 1948–59. Married Thérèse Fould-Springer in 1934.

  2 Mary (Mollie) Lascelles (1900–93). Cousin and companion of Alan Pryce-Jones. Married 8th Duke of Buccleuch in 1921.


  1 According to the rumour, Nancy had told Pryce-Jones that Hitler had wanted to marry Unity but would not because she had been promiscuous with so many SS men.

  1 Jessica was writing an article for Atlantic Monthly about the Californian prison system, which she later developed into a book, Kind and Usual Punishment, The American Prison Business (1973).

  1 Virginia Foster (1903–99). Southern belle who became a leader of the civil rights movement. Married Alabama attorney Clifford Durr in 1926. The couple were among Jessica’s closest friends in America.

  2 In 1959, Jessica described this incident in a letter to her husband: ‘Muv began laughing the inner laugh of one who has thought of something frightfully funny. I said what’s the joke, she said “I was just wondering if Woman has been kidnapped for ransom on her way to London.” I suggested we should start making pledges in that case, and offered 10 pounds for a start; Muv said “I’ll double that.” “We should make Debo cough up, don’t you think?” I suggested. Midst gales of laughter, Muv said, “Debo will have to plunge.”’ Decca, p. 225.

  1 Jessica had written to say that although very busy she would rush to be with Nancy if she was wanted and relied on Deborah to let her know whether to come.

  2 The Chatsworth children’s farmyard opened in 1973. ‘One little boy from the middle of Sheffield said, “It’s the most disgustin’ thing I’ve ever seen in me life. I’m never going to drink milk again.”’ Deborah Devonshire, Round About Chatsworth (Frances Lincoln, 2005), p. 46.

  3 Edward Heath.

  1 Birds of America (1971).

  1 The accuracy of Jessica’s memory of this incident, which she described in greater detail in A Fine Old Conflict, is open to question. James Jean’s book on astronomy was published in 1931, the year Jessica turned 14. Burford Grammar School, which was founded in 1571 for the sons of farmers, did not admit girls until the early 1960s.

  2 ‘I think I was telling lies if I said Muv wanted to marry me off. I think I was probably in a blind temper about something else & talked wildly.’ (Nancy to Jessica, 18 October 1971.)

  3 An American who rented the Mill Cottage at Swinbrook before the war.

  1 Virginia Brett (1916–90). Daughter of 3rd Viscount Esher.

  2 John Jacob Astor (1918–2000). Conservative MP 1951–9 and successful racehorse owner and breeder.

  1 Michael Mosley (1932-). Oswald Mosley’s younger son from his first marriage.

  2 Jo Siffert (1936–71). Swiss racing driver who won the British Grand Prix in 1968 at Brand’s Hatch, the circuit on which he died three years later.

  3 Lady Patricia Blackwood (1902–83). One-time fiancée of Lord Redesdale’s younger brother Jack. Married to Henry Russell 1926–37.

  1 Violet Guthrie (d.1953). Peter Rodd’s maternal aunt. Married Major-General Edward Stuart-Wortley in 1891. Nancy wrote an introduction to her memoirs, Grow Old Along With Me (1952), in which she described the months staying with her at Highcliffe Castle as ‘among the truly happy times of my life’.

  2 Lady Celina Cavendish (1971-). Elder daughter of Deborah’s son, Peregrine.

  1 7th Earl of Longford (1905–2001). The unconventional peer had set up a private study group to investigate the ‘incipient menace’ of pornography in Britain. Published as the Longford Report in 1972, it earned him the sobriquet ‘Lord Porn’.

  1 ‘How I wish I could help you.’

  2 A cheap cardboard coffin.

  1 James Lees-Milne described Lady Redesdale as ‘acutely perceptive, well read, fastidious, yet surprised by nothing and amused by practically everything … Nothing, however, is further from the truth than the popular conception of her gleaned from Hons and Rebels, as a philistine mother with hide-bound social standards’. The Times, 28 May 1963.

  1 Dr Stephen Blaikie; so called because, to Nancy’s annoyance, he used to address her thus.

  1 Sir Ian Walker-Okeover (1902–82). Lord Lieutenant of Derbyshire 1951–77.

  2 2nd Viscount Scarsdale (1898–1977). A nephew of Lord Curzon.

  1 Ronnie Peterson (1944–78). The Swedish Grand Prix driver made his debut in 1970 with March, the racing team that Max Mosley had started in 1969. He died after an accident at the Italian Grand Prix.

  2 Jackie Stewart (1939-). The British driver won the World Championship in 1971.

  3 Emmy and Jerry Lehane’s eleven-year-old son.

  1 Cabinet papers had been released concerning Mosley’s arrest and internment in 1940.

  1 William Cavendish Bentinck, 7th Duke of Portland (1893–1977). Married Ivy Gordon-Lennox in 1915.

  2 A miners’ strike had caused power cuts throughout Britain.

  1 In an interview with Penelope Leach about sisters, Nancy had said that she pitied children with few siblings because there was nobody ‘to stand between them and life’s cruel circumstances’. To this Jessica had retorted that as a child her sisters were the cruel circumstances, ‘particularly Nancy, who was immensely clever and sharp’. Observer, 20 February 1972.

  2 Mosley was in America promoting his autobiography.

  3 This exchange took place over dinner (and not during a TV interview) between Diana and a friend of Mosley’s editor at Arlington House, his US publisher.

  *Fr. tax payers still believe in punishments you see.

  1 Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables was published in 1862 and Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo in 1844–5.

  1 Teresa Hayter, Hayter of the Bourgeoisie (1971). Nancy described the book written by the left-wing daughter of her diplomat friend Sir William Hayter as ‘a better written more educated less funny Hons & Rebels.’ Love From Nancy (Hodder & Stoughton, 1993), p. 515.

  2 Enoch Powell (1912—98). Conservative MP who campaigned against Commonwealth immigration to Britain.

  3 ‘Your faithful servant.’

  4 Birds of America.

  1 Harold Macmillan refused a peerage after his resignation in 1964 but accepted the title of the Earl of Stockton twenty years later. Evelyn Waugh refused the CBE in 1959 and later regretted it.

  1 Lord Drogheda had been made a Knight of the Garter.

  2 In 1942, Alexander and Max had been paying guests at the MacKinnons’, who had bought Swinbrook from Lord Redesdale.

  1 Patricia Lowry-Corry (1905–2003). A cousin of Pamela Mackinnon and a frequent visitor to Swinbrook.

  2 Two of Deborah’s grandchildren, Stella Tennant (1970-), the future fashion model, and William Burlington (1969-), the future photographer.

  1 The Duke of Windsor had died on 28 May.

  2 The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were interviewed by Kenneth Harris for the BBC in 1970.

  3 A. J. P. Taylor (1906–90). Controversial left-wing historian.

  4 Bridget Hore-Ruthven (1896–1982). Married, in 1947, Sir Walter Monckton, the Duke of Windsor’s legal adviser during the Abdication crisis.

  1 A London gambling club.

  2 The phrase used by the Duke of Windsor in 1936 (when he was King) when he saw the suffering caused by mass unemployment in Wales.

  1 The manuscript of Oswald Mosley, published in 1975.

  2 Irene Ravensdale, In Many Rhythms.

  3 ‘Too bad.’

  1 Deborah had sat next to the Liberal Party leader, Jeremy Thorpe (1929–), who did ‘a perfect imitation’ of Harold Macmillan and the Archbishop of Canterbury

  2 Mosley’s nickname for Diana was ‘Percheron’.

  1 Louise de Vilmorin had the teeth of an aged nanny goat.

  1 Nancy spent six months in hospital in London where she was eventually diagnosed and treated for Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer of the lymph cells which in her case was rooted in the spine.

  2 Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (1945), a memoir of rural life at the turn of the twentieth century.

  3 Joy Spira (1927–). Picture researcher for Madame de Pompadour, The Sun King and Frederick the Great. Married Richard Law in 1955.

  1 Constant Plantin; a close friend of Jean de Baglion.

  2 ‘A heavy bl
ow.’

  3 ‘She was always delicate.’

  4 Tout compte fait (1972).

  5 Jean Orieux, Talleyrand ou Le Sphinx incompris (1970).

  6 The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) had urinated on the tomb of the illustrious nineteenth-century author to demonstrate his contempt for the notion of ‘a great writer’.

  1 The 1st Baron Redesdale had been sent by the Foreign Office to China in 1865.

  1 Liliane Fould-Springer (1916–2003). Art collector and philanthropist. Married Baron Elie de Rothschild, by proxy, in 1942.

  1 This is the only post-war letter from Jessica to Diana.

  2 A New Zealand nurse who was looking after Nancy.

  1 Jessica noted at the top of Diana’s letter,‘I stayed with N in June&a few days later she died. After the funeral I got an incredibly nice letter from my sister Diana.’ Diana wrote one other letter to Jessica, in 1996, when she learnt that Jessica was dying but the letter has not been found.

  1 Kind and Usual Punishment.

  2 Jessica was teaching a semester at California State University.

  EIGHT

  1974–1994

  Letter from Pamela to Deborah

  The rapprochement between Jessica and her sisters that followed Nancy’s death was soon tested by a biography of Unity by David Pryce-Jones. The project was opposed from the outset by Pamela, Diana and Deborah, who were angered by what they saw as Jessica’s cooperation with an unsympathetic author and by her refusal to condemn the book when it appeared. In the climate of mistrust created by Jessica’s perceived disloyalty, a further row erupted over a missing scrapbook that threatened to sever relations completely. Jessica described the incident as a nightmare, ‘one of the worst things that’s happened (in a long life of awful things)’.

  Over the ensuing two decades, books, articles, documentaries, a television series and even a musical about the Mitfords all served to resurrect old rivalries, and many of the sisters’ letters were taken up with managing the runaway family image and mediating old resentments that were revived as a result. The established pattern was that of Diana and Deborah seeing eye-to-eye, Pamela following their lead, and Jessica disputing their version of family events. Because Diana and Jessica never communicated, and Pamela and Jessica wrote only occasionally, most of the disagreements were expressed in angry letters between Jessica and Deborah. Jessica dreaded being cut off from Deborah completely, but resented Deborah appointing herself arbiter of all that went on in the family, especially since, as she wrote to a friend, ‘I am 3 years older than she is.’