Mrs Guinness

by Lyndsy Spence

  As Diana learned, the divorce would be the least of her worries; the scandal of her actions had erupted through London society. Adele Astaire, modern in her views, confided to Nancy: ‘I don’t mind people going off and fucking but I do object to all this free love!’46

  To Nancy, Diana’s life seemed the epitome of glamour. Unmarried, approaching 30 and surviving on a meagre allowance from her father and the small sums which she accumulated from her writing, it was not difficult for Nancy to feel envious of her younger sister’s life of luxury; a life which Diana seemed intent on throwing away on a whim. The golden cage that Diana complained about did not seem so awful to an outsider looking in. Nancy was one of the few on Diana’s side, but her jealousy of Diana was well known, and could there have been an element of spite in the advice she so freely dispensed?

  ‘It would be so awful later to feel that I had been, even in a tiny way, instrumental in messing up your life,’ Nancy wrote to Diana. Grateful for Nancy’s support, Diana’s judgement was obscured and she assured her eldest sister: ‘Darling you are my one ally.’ Regardless of Bryan’s swift exit and Mosley’s absence, Nancy sensed the eerie calmness would soon erupt into an explosive scene. Nancy retreated from Cheyne Walk, out of the firing line to the safety and isolation of Swinbrook House, offering Diana the vague excuse: ‘I should stay here at present.’

  Writing to Diana, Nancy stuck to her role of older sister soliciting advice, whether it was wanted or not: ‘You are so young to begin getting in wrong with the world, if that’s what is going to happen.’ Nancy discussed the situation with their brother Tom, who warned that Diana’s ‘social position will be nil’ if she continued on with her plan to divorce Bryan. ‘Whatever happens I shall always be on your side as you know,’ Nancy told her. ‘And so will anybody who cares for you and perhaps the rest really don’t matter.’

  Personal feelings hardly mattered when it came to protecting the family name. David and Sydney were furious with Diana and they had forbidden Jessica and Deborah from visiting her. It was a bitter blow for Diana, who loved her little sisters, and she could tolerate just about anyone’s disapproval except her brother’s, and Tom strongly disapproved. He was fond of Bryan and thought that for a temporary infatuation Diana was ruining her life and would live to regret it.

  Addressing the situation with Mosley, Diana adopted a new tactic. Believing David and Sydney would understand her philosophy, she told her furious parents that Mosley had never been faithful to Cimmie. His wife would think nothing of it. What was meant as a consolation hardly seemed appealing to David and Sydney, when she added: ‘I was just another girl he fancied.’47 They hastened to remind their daughter that she was not just ‘another girl’, she was a married woman. Diana understood the permanency of what she was about to do – ‘I looked forward to a long life alone’ – though most sceptics predicted it would last a year, at the most. She naively believed she could continue on as before, seeing her friends and socialising.

  ‘I believe you have a much worse time in store for you than you imagine,’ Nancy warned Diana. The anger which David and Sydney had felt, gradually gave way to authority. Given her young age, her two young children and her lack of personal wealth (Bryan was her only source of income), her parents, Tom, Randolph Churchill and Colonel Guinness banded together with the hope of bullying Diana into changing her mind.

  If anyone could have understood how Diana felt it would have been her mother. Two years after her marriage to David, Sydney fell out of love with him and considered running away with another man. She packed her bag and was on the verge of leaving when her conscience was pricked by the sight of Nancy, then a baby, up in the nursery. Perhaps she realised the scandal that would have followed and she knew her position in society, as a woman without means to an income, was nil. Abandoning this fancy, Sydney stayed with her husband and soon had a second baby and then another, until she had seven children.

  Diana knew if she were to stay with Bryan, the same fate of producing more children would feature in the near future. By succumbing to what everybody else wanted for her, a type of prison Diana thought, she risked incarcerating herself in the role society had chosen for her. ‘It was not surprising that my parents reacted angrily to my rather wild decision to leave Bryan and attach myself to Mosley. I was twenty-two, happily married with two baby boys and a husband the whole family had become fond of.’48

  It was a small victory and a testament to her character that Diana did not relent. When Colonel Guinness returned from one of his lengthy voyages, he was horrified by the situation. Once fond of Diana, he abandoned his past feelings towards her in favour of Bryan, whose dignity and wealth he sought to preserve. The familiar topic of hypocrisy did not arise when Colonel Guinness observed the matter in hand. He was no stranger to infidelity, often departing on one of his cruises with a mistress in tow. His most notable mistress, Vera, Lady Broughton, was the unhappy first wife of Jock Broughton, the disgraced member of Kenya’s Happy Valley set, who would later stand trial for the murder of the Earl of Errol in 1941. And, although unofficially confirmed, Colonel Guinness was also rumoured to be the potential father of the actor Alec Guinness, whose mother had ‘slept with the entire crew on Lord Moyne’s yacht’.

  In terms of his own indiscretions, Colonel Guinness found there was no comparison to Diana; she was openly cavorting with Mosley and any hint of scandal in the family was enough for everyone to close rank. Diana did not care what her father-in-law thought and Bryan’s wealth, with the prospect of a permanent income through alimony, did not sway her decision.

  Failing to influence Diana, Colonel Guinness and David agreed to target the source of her reckless behaviour and visited Mosley at his flat on Ebury Street. This supposed scene was exaggerated by Nancy for her own comical purposes, and she portrayed Mosley as the ultimate villain, ‘dead white and armed with knuckle dusters’. Both men repeated the same plea: ‘You must stop this. You are ruining a young marriage, with young children, and this is awful. She’s only twenty-two, how can you do such a thing? You must give your word you will not see her any more …’

  ‘Diana must be allowed to do what she wants,’ argued Mosley.

  With his patience wearing thin, David interjected: ‘Are you prepared to give up Diana now?’ It was more of a command than a question.

  ‘No,’ Mosley responded.

  ‘Then,’ said Colonel Guinness, ‘we shall put detectives on you.’

  ‘Very well,’ replied Mosley, undeterred by the threat.

  Divorce at that time required one of the partners to take responsibility as the named guilty party. Colonel Guinness was determined to prevent a divorce – he knew Bryan would shoulder the blame – and Diana was determined not to be divorced and refused to give ‘a particle of evidence’.

  David unwittingly sullied his daughter’s reputation further when he told Colonel Guinness: ‘I suppose you know that my daughter is laying in a store of furs and diamonds against the time when she is divorced.’ He had been the victim of a Mitford tease. The truth was that Diana said to one of her sisters: ‘I hate country shoes and had better get some while I’m rich.’ And so Colonel Guinness, who was willing to restore familial relations with Diana once the idea of a divorce and Mosley were abandoned, suddenly turned violently against her.

  True to his word, Colonel Guinness did set the detectives on Diana – ‘a great army’ of them at his own expense. He hoped to gain enough damning evidence against her to use in a future divorce hearing. She found it all ‘extremely amusing … It is rather heavenly to feel that they are around – no pick-pockets can approach.’

  Mosley escaped relatively unscathed. Cimmie was still suffering from bouts of illness and, distracted by her propaganda duties for the BUF, she managed to remain in the dark where the advancements on Diana were concerned. By the end of 1932, the BUF claimed 50,000 members and had the financial and propaganda support of Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail: ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’, the newspaper’s headli
ne screamed. Proud of Mosley’s success with the party, Cimmie also fooled herself and her husband into thinking her health was on the mend. Feeling wretched, she opted to overlook the burden of pain and used her feminine wiles to win him back. She took great care in selecting her new winter wardrobe, which she bought from Paris. But it was still not enough to oust Diana.

  Bryan went to Switzerland with the Mitfords on their annual holiday, leaving Diana alone at Cheyne Walk with her children and staff to celebrate Christmas. Hoping to maintain a cordial relationship with her daughter-in-law, Lady Evelyn invited Diana to the Grosvenor Place Christmas party. Declining the invitation, Diana used Colonel Guinness’s hiring of the detectives to make a joke at her in-law’s expense: ‘It is such a big house to surround so thought it more friendly to save half a dozen men and stay at home.’

  She did not stay at home and, in a startling turn of events, Diana received an invitation to the Mosleys’ New Year’s Eve fancy-dress party. It was a family affair with Irene, Baba and her husband, Fruity Metcalfe, and their three children in attendance, having spent the festive season with Cimmie and Mosley. The Mosley/Metcalfe Christmas was a disaster on all fronts, with Baba and Fruity bickering since their arrival – he disapproved of Baba’s private lunches with Mosley and she accused her husband of being unreasonable.

  It was unknown why Cimmie had invited Diana into the family circle. Many believed her tactic lay in her old custom of inviting Mosley’s mistresses so she could observe their interaction with her husband and to see how they fitted in with his inner circle, thus creating an intimidating environment for them. Having grown up in a family where the nurturing of self-esteem was not a priority, Diana was not always aware when she was being mistreated and she had become indifferent to criticism. ‘I was perfectly accustomed to snubs – they were the normal thing; it was admiration that astonished,’ she said. Without incessant fawning or encouragement, the seed of individuality germinated in Diana, and without an ounce of self-consciousness she exerted her personality. Jessica commented on her siblings, her reasoning applying to Diana’s all too baffling actions: ‘My family was its own nationality. Each of us needed an interpreter.’

  The unapologetic presence of Diana at Cimmie’s New Year’s Eve party did not inspire her harshest critics to interpret the reasoning behind her attendance. Irene and Baba continued to curse Diana’s existence, more so than ever when they noticed the pain Cimmie was going through over ‘Diana Guinness bitching up her life’.49 They firmly believed that Diana wanted ‘to bolt with Mosley’, why else would she ‘nail her colours to the mast’ and leave Bryan to venture into the unknown?

  Diana accepted Mosley’s decision to remain with his wife and children. She left Bryan because she wanted to be free from her own marriage; she did not expect to become the second Lady Mosley. Knowing of Mosley’s unfaithfulness to Cimmie, Diana did not think she would cause Cimmie any more anguish than Mosley’s other liaisons. She repeated her familiar phrase: ‘What difference would it make?’ Years later, when mutual friends told her of Cimmie’s plight, Diana agreed that nothing would have made her give up Mosley, but had she been aware of Cimmie’s pain, she would have perhaps altered the course of her actions.

  Before Bryan’s Swiss holiday, Diana managed to discuss financial matters with him. Bryan offered her a ‘tiny’ alimony of £2,000 per year, but David, who was acting as her trustee, was advised by Tom ‘to stand out for more’. Diana planned for Jonathan and Desmond to live with her, and Bryan did not fight her decision. Given the heartbreak she had already caused him, Diana never refused Bryan access to their children. She also arranged to take with her Nanny Higgs, her lady’s maid, a manservant, a housemaid and their cook, Mrs Mack, who had been with them since their Buckingham Street days. Mrs Mack preferred Diana over Bryan, and was all too willing to follow her to the new house and, given her mistress’s reduced living arrangements, to accept a lower wage.

  As the New Year beckoned, Diana prepared to leave Cheyne Walk and her marriage. But, in an ironic turn of events, Bryan decided to leave Diana. With Colonel Guinness making her life difficult, she chose to remain at Cheyne Walk, thus forcing Bryan to leave her. ‘The onus will be on HIM,’ she wrote to Nancy. The unhappiness of remaining in their marital home was too much and Bryan moved into his parents’ house at Grosvenor Place.

  With Bryan out of the picture there seemed little reason why Diana could not continue living at Cheyne Walk. But, with the detectives camping on the pavement outside the house hoping to catch evidence of Mosley’s visits, she realised it was time to find her own premises.

  NOTES

  46 A letter from Nancy to Diana, 25 January 1933, The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters, Charlotte Mosley (ed.)

  47 ‘I explained to my furious parents that as M had never been faithful to her, his wife would think nothing of it; to her I was just another girl he fancied.’ A Life of Contrasts, Diana Mosley.

  48 Source as above.

  49 The comment was recorded in Irene Ravensdale’s diary, published in The Viceroy’s Daughters, Anne de Courcy.

  24

  SOCIAL PARIAH

  The location of Diana’s new townhouse at 2 Eaton Square was largely inspired by its close proximity to Ebury Street. In her new role as devoted mistress, Diana realised she would have to adapt to Mosley’s schedule and living close by allowed him to drop in unannounced between his political and family engagements.

  The Great Depression contributed to a slump in rental properties in the affluent areas of London and, owing to such economic despair, Diana negotiated a token rent of £300 per year. The house, having remained vacant for some time, had become dilapidated. On conditions presented to her from the Grosvenor estate, Diana agreed to repair the house herself, for which she was given a grant. As such, the move was delayed by a month or two.

  Bryan remained at his parents’ house at Grosvenor Place and, sorry for the inconvenience she had caused him, Diana offered to find him a flat. Tom Mitford recommended Swan Court, where he kept a bachelor flat. Touched by her gesture, Bryan took the opportunity to send her a note, awkward in its tone, confessing: ‘I do love you for it. I mean, I would if you wanted me to.’ She did not want him to and she ignored his note. Taking a formal approach, Bryan had his secretary, Miss Moore, write Diana a letter regarding Cheyne Walk and the servants:

  Dear Mrs Guinness, would you mind seeing the servants yourself about the dissolution of Cheyne Walk and consequent future arrangements? They are so hurt that it has come through me and not through their mistress. We all want the road to be as smooth as we can make it and it would help very considerably if you would do this.

  Bryan added, ‘The servants are resenting your going away so much.’ From under the watchful eye of his father, Bryan also wrote a letter to Diana to protest her lunching with Mosley at the Ritz. ‘I cannot consent to your associating with Mosley, either at Cheyne Walk or anywhere else. I do not mean that I shall send a policeman to fling him out but I cannot in any way condone your meeting him.’ He broke his stern tone to add: ‘Love from Bryan.’

  Once the house at Eaton Square was ready, Bryan sold Cheyne Walk, giving Diana all of the furniture from it – it had been more to her taste, anyway. He preferred to live modestly and the flat at Swan Court suited his needs, though he still kept Biddesden. So far the transition for Diana had been relatively painless.

  Mosley gave her a car, which she kept at a nearby garage for 9s a week. It was an incentive for her to form her own life; he was still worried that she might become a demanding element in his. And, sensing she might feel lonely in her new house with a small staff and only her two children for company, Diana invited Nancy to move into the spare bedroom at Eaton Square, or the ‘Eatonry’ as her sisters nicknamed it.

  Struggling to adapt to this new situation which had been sprung upon him, and without much of a say in anything, Bryan compared the loss of Diana to ‘having a limb amputated’. Jonathan and Desmond spent alternate fortnights with each
parent, and when Bryan had the children he often invited Diana to join them for tea. If he had anything harsh to say about her conduct, he kept it to himself.

  Not everyone was so gallant. The news of Diana publicly establishing herself as Mosley’s mistress spread through London society, and Irene responded venomously when ‘the whole of London’ quizzed her and Baba for gossip about the affair. Abandoning discretion, Irene let her feelings be known: Diana was a ‘blithering cow faced fool insanely dithering recklessly trying to ruin Cim’s life’.50

  With false bravado, Bryan, who was in bed with flu, wrote to Diana from Swan Court: ‘It is very bad for us to think of each other. We must stop it.’ He admitted to weeping over their breakup: ‘All the dye will be washed out of my eiderdown if I go on like this.’ Their wedding anniversary was coming up and he wondered if she, too, would ‘shed a tear’. He added that his novel, Singing out of Tune, which he began writing in Paris during her confinement, would soon be published. The plot centred on a couple who separate, and he begged her to dismiss anyone who asked if it was inspired by their marriage.

  The thoughts which Bryan warned her not to have were one-sided. However, Diana agreed that they should remain friends and, hearing that he had the flu, she paid a cordial visit to Swan Court. Still confined to his bed and feeling wretched, Bryan made an effort to be cheerful for her sake, but she misread his magnanimous mood as making an effort to move on. After her departure, Bryan wrote a letter to her, pouring out his feelings, hoping to convince Diana to return to him. ‘Don’t you find that I am the one you will miss most? Are you sure – are you really sure that the circle of our love is complete … are you positive that you love Tom* [Mosley] more than me?’ For Diana, the answer was yes. She read on, his tone remained the same, pleading with her to return. ‘Which of us would you most want to breathe in your ear if you were dying? I have this strong feeling that we both belong to one another, that we are bound by our mutually broken virginity.’ He begged, ‘Ask yourself the question night and day.’51