It was horribly impressive—the banners, the processional, the atmosphere of virility and enthusiasm and the cheers that greeted Mosley’s ridicule of the democratic system. He has perfect foils in Ramsay and Baldwin. His imitation of Ramsay at the Disarmament Conference and his description of Baldwin as the perfect representative of Britain asleep, with the Blackshirts as the incarnation of Britain awake, was perfectly done. He spoke for one hour and 45 minutes and the audience was riveted to him. It was nothing more than extreme Toryism, the curbing of the power of democracy through the so-called reform of Parliament, the strong hand in India, parity in the air, extreme economic nationalism, etc. But it was put across in a way that I have never heard Toryism put across before. It was political argument of a very high order, dignified, restrained, and expressed in superb language. The audience consisted of young toughs from the shops and the banks and that type of ageing ex-serviceman who has pathetically retained his military rank from the war. It was the people of England who, in Chesterton’s poem, have not yet spoken. God help England if they ever do, for they are a mass of prejudice, ignorance, intolerance and cruelty.
Two days later, Irene was back in London, where she plunged with hardly a breath back into her social life, going the following night to Lady Portarlington’s party, where she came upon her friend Sir Charles Mendl. He had heard that Nevile Henderson was pursuing her and immediately began to pay him glowing tributes, which Irene received coldly. There too was her former fiancé, Miles Graham, “who never left me and who was delightful and highly flirtatious”—altogether an evening to restore her confidence.
She went down to Denham straight away, with presents for her nephews and niece, and lunched in the nursery where little Micky so enchanted her that she wished his mother could have seen him. The only discordant note was the relationship between Baba and Tom; after three months away she saw it with a fresh, more objective eye. She discussed it with Nanny—treated as a family friend and confidante rather than a servant—who was infuriated by Baba’s behavior and who told her that the Metcalfe children would be arriving for the summer holidays.
The days followed one another. Irene played poker with the older children and spent all the time she could in the nursery. Tom and Baba walked and embraced on the lawns in the May sunshine, talking softly together. Baba, thought Irene, appeared quite besotted.
The problem was that Baba had become generally bored with the pattern of her life. She was not, like Irene, a person who naturally adored children, and the customary upper-class practice of putting them in the charge of a nanny suited her very well. She enjoyed clothes, the business of making herself look beautiful and the tributes it elicited. Like others in her set, she did a little charity work, largely for the new Save the Children Fund.
This “set” was that of the Prince of Wales, with its regular outings to the same places with the same group of people. Though she enjoyed golf, she did not share Fruity’s other sporting interests and in any case the great bond of hunting, which had tied him so closely to the prince and caused him to give up his career in the Indian army, had been snapped—and Fruity without a purpose in life was very different from Fruity excelling at the job he loved.
The Metcalfes argued constantly about the sameness of their life and Baba’s relationship with Tom Mosley, whose meetings she attended as regularly as she could (earning herself the nickname Baba Blackshirt from the diarist Chips Channon). The years of semi-sexual teasing had fed the passion she now felt for her brother-in-law; hypnotized by his physicality, his sexual expertise and the charm he could bring into play at will, Baba was hopelessly in love. Thus the advent of a powerful newcomer on the Metcalfes’ social landscape went almost unremarked. When Thelma Furness had left on a trip to America in January 1934 she had asked her friend and fellow American, Wallis Simpson, to help entertain the prince. By the time Thelma returned in March, Wallis was in an impregnable position, though it took the prince’s circle many months to realize the extent of her influence.
For Baba and Fruity, she merely replaced Freda Dudley Ward and Thelma Furness as dancing partners for the prince on the regular Thursday evenings at the embassy. Neither of them knew that Freda’s dismissal after seventeen years of close affection and, on the prince’s side, devotion, was as cruel as it was unexpected: one day when she telephoned the prince she was told by the weeping operator: “Madam, I have something so terrible to tell you I do not know how to say it. I have orders not to put you through.” If they had heard of this, they might have wondered how secure their own position was in the prince’s life—and whether the job that he had promised Fruity on his eventual accession would materialize.
Sympathetic as Irene was to Baba’s dissatisfaction with her life, she put the interest of her late sister’s children first. More and more, she was becoming their surrogate mother rather than a devoted aunt. When Baba wanted her to entertain Fruity one night so that she herself could go out to dinner with Tom, Irene firmly refused, saying that it was near the anniversary of their sister’s illness and death, and she was determined to go to Denham to support Viv through this sad time.
Tom won back a few good points by turning up—with Baba—at the nursing home where Micky was to have his tonsils out. The four of them sat in the waiting room with Nanny, who was struggling to hold back her tears during her precious baby’s operation. “The beloved one went in so gallantly, giving the nurses the fascist salute,” wrote Irene that night. The operation was a complete success.
Baba’s obsession with Tom had made her careless of her reputation. When she slipped away from one of Irene’s dinner parties to go down and see him at Denham, Irene feared that such conduct would make people talk—if they were not already doing so. “I think it unnecessarily provocative and stupid on her part,” she wrote. Georgia Sitwell, one of Cim’s closest friends and Tom’s former mistress, was already aware of the situation and seized the opportunity to stir the pot. “Went to see Baba, made mischief, deliberately, with her about Diana Guinness,” runs her diary entry for March 1, 1934. Tom and Baba seemed to be becoming a couple, with Baba adopting Tom’s views and both subtly patronizing Irene as not really understanding what fascism stood for.
On June 7 both sisters went to Tom’s great meeting at Olympia. The BUF was now at the height of its popularity, with somewhere between thirty thousand and forty thousand members, many of them tough young men drawn to it by its aura of aggression. These trained at Blackshirt House, practicing judo, marching, drill and boxing, and, when needed, were taken to meetings in large vans with protective plating at the sides and wire mesh at the windows. Although the earlier meeting at the Albert Hall had passed off peacefully, trouble was expected on this occasion. The fascists’ great claim was that they stood for law and order, while the communists were determined to expose them as thugs and bully boys.
The meeting started half an hour late, as those who tried to enter the hall were obstructed, but the fascist band played on brightly—Blackshirt songs to the music of the Giovinezza and the Horst Wessel Song. A new one had recently been added, called simply “Mosley!” It began:
Mosley, Leader of thousands!
Hope of our manhood, we proudly hail thee!
Raise we the song of allegiance
For we are sworn and shall not fail thee.
The BUF’s use of banners, spotlights, music and uniforms was reminiscent of a Nuremberg rally in miniature. First, down the center aisle of the huge auditorium, packed with around fifteen thousand people, came Blackshirts carrying the banners of the various London districts, with their names in brass on top. After a sufficient pause to build up expectations came Tom, all in black—boots, breeches, shirt—his arm raised in the fascist salute with four of his lieutenants just behind him. With spotlights focused on him he mounted the platform and stood with the banners grouped below and his uniformed bodyguards to each side as thunderous roars of “Hail Mosley!” swept the hall. “I felt that Cim must be there,” wrote Irene, “and seeing
all that she would be glad.”
Trouble came quickly, with constant heckling interruptions from communist opponents followed by, in Irene’s phrase, “screaming, surging evictions,” with hand-to-hand fighting and weapons ranging from chair legs to spiked instruments and stockings filled with broken glass used as flails. “Very unpleasant,” wrote Georgia Sitwell, there with Baba and Irene, “terrifying crowd of roughs, dozens of fights, casualties, broken heads and glass. Left in middle feeling ill.”
Two days later the Blackshirts camped at Denham in one of the big barns at the side of the drive. Irene, who had driven down largely to see Micky, left quickly and drove over to Cliveden, but she could not escape discussion of her brother-in-law. Nancy Astor brought up the subject of Tom and his philandering yet again as they listened to him on the nine o’clock news. He was followed by Gerald Barry condemning the brutal bullying of the Blackshirt stewards, which he said was worse than during the Irish Troubles, and Brendan Bracken told Baba, when she eventually appeared indoors after hours spent walking the terrace with Grandi, that the Conservatives were so frightened of the BUF that they might rush a bill through forbidding the wearing of black shirts.
The rest of the house party also roundly condemned the Blackshirts’ behavior. Irene, apart from Baba the only one who had actually attended the meeting, felt indignant: she believed it was the communists rather than the fascists who had initiated the rioting and disturbances. Soon afterward Baba left, to return to Fruity’s bedside—he had pneumonia, a serious illness then. “I wish he would either die or recover,” said Nancy characteristically, “and not spoil Baba’s happiness.”
On June 14, 1934, Cimmie’s will was published. She had left property valued for probate at £20,951, with the whole of her residuary estate to be held in trust for her children and her jewelry, personal ornaments and watches to go to Viv as soon as she was eighteen. She left Savehay Farm to Tom, who was appointed executor along with the public trustee; with this official’s agreement, the children’s Leiter Trust money could be used for the upkeep of the family home.
As the season gathered momentum both sisters moved from party to party. Irene’s pleasure in such gaiety was rudely shaken when one of her friends told her that all her Jewish friends were turning against her because she was to be hostess at a fascist ball. The event in question was a dance arranged by Lady Mosley to raise money for the BUF, which took place at Prince’s Galleries on June 27.
The ball drew an attendance of about seven hundred; Irene, Tom, Baba, Lady Mosley and the writer Francis Yeats-Brown shared a table. Tom spoke briefly in an appeal for funds to build an election machine, telling his listeners: “Within the last twenty months a flame has been lit in this land which time will not extinguish or destroy.” At midnight Irene, elegant and distinguished looking in tiara and a sapphire blue dress that made the most of her dark coloring, presented program prizes.
She had played her part loyally at the ball, but she was finding herself more disenchanted than ever with the behavior of Tom and Baba. Her sister now told her to prepare herself for another English seaside holiday with Nanny and the younger children, as she had organized a rented villa in Toulon for Tom, herself and the older Mosley children.
On and on went the summer balls. At the Astors’ (“ultra grand,” wrote Robert Bernays, “with the American Ambassador, the Elliots, Anthony Eden and Lothian”), the party took place against the background of disturbing news from Germany. One of Hitler’s closest colleagues, Ernst Roehm, the brutal, homosexual and overambitious head of Hitler’s brownshirts, had been “liquidated” on June 30 in what became known as “the Night of the Long Knives.” At least eighty-four others whom Hitler believed were implicated in a counterrevolutionary plot also lost their lives.
A few days later, a ball at the Hurlingham Club was made memorable for Irene when she sat at a table with Miles Graham’s former mistress, Winnie Portarlington, who remarked to her: “I am going to Le Touquet to see Miles play in the Bucks Handicap Golf Tournament.” Irene was so disturbed that she left at twelve-thirty. “What vile taste to show me she still owned him,” she scrawled in her diary.
There was no comfort at Savehay Farm. Tom and Baba seemed, she thought, to take her absolutely for granted. “I resent the way I am looked on as a sort of governess, no thanks, no love, and Baba and Tom arm-in-arm all over the place and Ma and I looking like two waiting housemaids. Tom’s fighting bull terrier came and slept on my chest. It was lonely too.” But Tom, who realized that without Irene to play a central role at Denham his own life would be immeasurably more difficult, was not going to push her too far. The first time he saw her alone, at the end of July, he set himself to win her over, deploying all his charm and gift for intimacy; Irene, who still found him fascinating, melted completely.
At the beginning of August she and Nanny set off for the seaside with Micky and the twins, where she would also have a chance to think over the Nevile Henderson question in peace. She realized that she would soon have to give him a definite answer one way or the other. She was fond of him, but she was not in love. After a week, she left Nanny and the children and motored to Padstow, where she had arranged to meet Nevile. They swam in a tinglingly cold sea and Irene noted with faint scorn that he shivered for half an hour afterward. His good qualities were legion, she knew; he was a clever man with an interesting life still ahead of him in which she could share and he was endlessly patient—so much so that his acquiescence in her moods and whims irritated her.
She could not put her feelings into words, so she wrote her suitor a letter, begging him to understand that she wanted to leave. “Oh, oh dear! Why do I feel so violently that if he touched me or kissed me I would shudder and yet he is so sweet with all his conceits and tics and would make some less strong-minded woman blissful. I walked to and fro with him beating around the marriage question. When we sat on the lawn before tea he was touching, calling me My Sweet and kissing my fingers and saying how he loved me being with him and it does not move a tremor in me. Oh dear!”
Next morning at breakfast she told him she had meant what she had said in her note; then, leaving a speechless Nevile, she went upstairs to pack. But when she felt his arm around her shivering with tension as if, she thought, he were about to explode, her soft heart got the better of her for the time being.
It was all too much. When Nancy Astor, who always tried to run her friends’ lives, wrote telling her to accept Nevile—a protégé of Nancy’s and a popular guest at Cliveden—Irene asked Nancy to leave her alone. “The very attempts of people tend to drive me in the opposite direction, as I resent being dictated to like a child when I must know my own mind as a woman of 39, though I am fully aware you all do it in love and friendship. Can you see that, dearest Nancy, and understand? Your always loving Irene.” When another friend lectured her at length on Nevile’s merits and why she should marry him, Irene recorded that she felt like a cornered, snarling vixen.
At the beginning of September she went to stay with other friends, who had also invited Nevile. They talked on the terrace from six until it was time to change for dinner and for the first time ever Irene felt truly relaxed with him. After dinner another talk, warm and understanding, made her feel that perhaps there was a flicker between them. But when he woke her at eight the following morning for a walk in the sun it had gone. “I was cold, grumpy and unforthcoming and really wanted none of him or any male at that hour.” At breakfast, her host held forth spiritedly against independent selfish spinsters, with frequent nods of the head toward Irene, reducing her and her hostess to hysterical giggles. Although she received an endearing letter from Nevile, written in the train on the return journey, at last her mind was finally made up. She would not marry him.
After the Albert Hall meeting, it seemed that Tom’s fascists were a viable political force. “Baldwin is convinced that his main job is to keep his party together,” wrote MP Robert Bernays that autumn. “I think he is probably right. A split in the Conservative party is
Mosley’s hope. Without the aid of the Rothermere press he was able to fill the Albert Hall last month. No other politician could come within measure of that but of course London is peculiarly susceptible to stunt politics. Still, it was a great achievement. It seems to indicate that Hitlerism is not nearly as unpopular as we would like to imagine.”
As for the communists, they were more determined than ever to demonstrate against what they saw as the fascist threat. On September 9, they held an enormous counter-Mosley rally in Hyde Park, in which Tom’s former lieutenant, John Strachey, played a prominent role.
By mid-September the Mosley family was back at Denham. While Tom and Nick were occupying a rainy afternoon by shooting rats in the barns, Irene crept to Cim’s pink marble sarcophagus, now installed in its memorial garden, and prayed to God and her sister’s spirit to guide her in her dealings with Cim’s children—and husband. “I was nervously worried at the dim future of all those children and the babe and wished to God they were my own. Tom is such an undependable quantity.” This anxiety was dispelled when Tom—who must have been delighted at Irene’s ready assumption of domestic responsibilities—agreed without hesitation to all her plans and suggestions for the future.
But this halcyon period did not last. Tom soon reverted to his former ways with the children, in particular his malicious teasing of his daughter. He was quick-tempered, brutal and sarcastic, suddenly rounding on her—as he had done with Cimmie—in public. Irene was an unwilling spectator and did her best to redress this by teaching Viv bridge and spending as much time with her as she could manage, though after one particularly cruel jibe all she could write in her diary was “Ugh!”
Though Baba was so deeply involved with Tom, she was still anxious to keep her other admirer, Count Dino Grandi, on a string. When she returned from a visit or the country she would wire to Tom, and if he was at Denham he would rush up to meet her; if he could not, she would arrange an assignation with Grandi by note. “Naldera darling,” he wrote from the Italian embassy in September 1934, “I get your letter just now, coming back from Virginia Water. I had in mind to ask you to come, one of the next days. I cannot today. I will try to ring you tomorrow evening and have a quiet hour with you.” On another occasion Irene, calling on her sister for an impromptu cup of tea, found Grandi there. “Gulped tea and bolted,” she wrote. “He stayed till 7:30!!”
The Viceroy's Daughters Page 24