Mrs Guinness

by Lyndsy Spence

  When Mosley returned to England, he dedicated his attentions towards the BUF, which had been expanding at a rapid pace. This expansion was owed to the meagre membership fees which encouraged enrolment – 1s a month if employed and 4d a month if unemployed. However, uniforms were bought at the members’ own expense. The uniforms were aimed at the youth of the nation who, according to Mosley, longed more than anything for something alive, something colourful.55

  He found larger headquarters, settling on a former Whitelands Teacher Training College on the Kings Road in Chelsea, renaming it ‘Black House’. The building could hold 5,000 bodies at full capacity and from the headquarters Mosley also ran a small printing press responsible for churning out BUF posters and leaflets. Using the unemployment crisis to drive his message of fascism, Mosley opened Black House to those in dire straits, for even the most menial of jobs guaranteed a bed and £1 or £2 a week in pay. Soon, 200 Blackshirts moved in, living under strict military conditions. Furthermore, centres and offices were set up around the country and the London staff became salaried.

  Regular funding for the BUF did not come entirely from Mosley himself, for he had already plunged his personal wealth into the party. Private funding came from aristocrats who, in 1933, saw the movement as respectable. Lord Rothermere, founder of the Daily Mail, became the main financier, alongside the shipping magnate Lord Nuffield. A generous gift of £200,000 was pledged by Lady Houston. Left-wing supporters tried to uncover Mosley’s secret backers but failed to find any hard evidence, and Mosley himself was secretive about such matters. Mussolini donated around £60,000 per year, paid monthly in a foreign currency lodged into a Swiss bank account, then transferred into the account of ‘an individual in this country’. This individual was believed to be Bill Allen, an advertising magnate from Northern Ireland, who provided the perfect decoy for Mussolini’s generous donations.

  In the same vein as Hitler’s creative collaboration with Leni Riefenstahl, Mosley had ambitions to consult with a British film studio in producing a film about fascism. During a visit to a film studio, he met Mary Russell Taviner (also known as Mary Russell Tavernan), a former actress turned producer, and for obvious reasons Mosley was interested in starting an affair with her. Like Baba, Taviner could be useful to this branch of BUF propaganda. Taviner made no secret of wanting to marry Mosley. She sent him lengthy, rambling letters, spiteful in their tone about Diana, whom she declared was ‘of easy virtue’. During their meetings, Mosley played down his affair with ‘that blonde lady’ and he accused Diana of pursuing him – ‘The type who will stop at nothing to satisfy their urge to possess,’ Taviner warned him.

  The fling with Taviner was becoming too risky, even for the philandering Mosley. He feared Diana and Baba would discover the true nature of their involvement with one another. Taviner began to stalk Mosley, often calling at Black House demanding to see him. But most alarmingly to Mosley, just when he needed support from Diana, she was not in the country. So used to having her at his disposal, this independent stance from Diana perplexed him.

  Finally, after spending the summer apart, Diana and Mosley were reunited in early October. For their own personal reasons, they were relieved to be in one another’s company again. Diana could hardly wait to tell him about Nuremberg and the physical displays of fascism at work in mending a broken country. And Mosley, unnerved by Taviner’s behaviour and the complicated mess left behind from his affair with Baba, found Diana a welcome relief.

  Unaware of Mosley’s private turmoil over his affairs, Diana’s attentions were spent elsewhere when a surprise note arrived from Swan Court. Had it emerged earlier, it might have given Diana a reason to think twice. It was from Bryan and his offer was simple and direct: ‘If the situation ever changes you will let me know, won’t you? A wire saying “Come” would enable me to make preparations to take you to China. All this is madness because it doesn’t arise and is only a way of sending my love.’ Eager to retain a friendship with Diana, Bryan bought her a generous birthday present of a watercolour painting by F. Nicholson, circa 1830. Bryan’s offering, a comfort to any woman in Diana’s predicament, was soon discarded. After all, Mosley had forsaken all others and returned to her.

  In December, Nancy moved out of the Eatonry when she accepted Peter Rodd’s proposal of marriage. The relationship with her parents was still tense, but Diana braved David and Sydney’s scorn to attend Nancy’s wedding, where Jonathan and Desmond served as page boys. Standing with her little boys, wrapped in cream cashmere shawls, Diana concealed her pregnancy, which, had it become known, would have further severed the fragile familial relations.

  As she had once told James Lees-Milne, ‘free love’ would ‘lead to endless misery and poverty among women’. And, having been deserted by their capricious lovers, they would have to maintain large families on nothing for years.56 For a capricious lover such as Mosley, there was no question of marrying Diana, and he still used Cimmie’s death as an excuse. Compassionate towards his grief, she consented to an abortion. A dangerous and illegal act in 1933.

  NOTES

  55 Quotes in the Glasgow Herald, 13 December 1983.

  56 A letter from Diana to James Lees-Milne dated September 1926, James Lees-Milne: The Life, Michael Bloch.

  28

  THE FALL OF FASCISM

  The rise of fascism had become another recreational topic of conversation for the upper classes. Alice Keppel, once mistress to King Edward VII, possessed ‘immense superficial knowledge’57 and in this frame of mind she ventured to Berlin to hear Hitler speak. For Emerald Cunard, one of Diana’s earliest influences, it was another carefree fancy and an outlet for her to shock her contemporaries with her risqué machine-gun conversation. She, too, was pro-Hitler.

  The British Union of Fascists peaked at 55,000 members and 1933 became the pinnacle year for the party. In a rare move in politics, Mosley established the women’s section of the BUF, presided over by his mother and assisted by Mary Richardson, a suffragette leader. Several suffragettes had transferred their hero worship from Emmeline Pankhurst to Mosley, and Mary Richardson spoke for those women when she told Blackshirt: ‘I saw in them the courage, the action, the loyalty, the gift of service and the ability to serve which I had known in the suffragette movement.’ Whereas the Nazi Party fostered an image of wholesome domesticity in German women, Mosley, although he believed men and women should know their place in society and in the home, was promoting women in a man’s arena – politics – where they were ‘accepted as an independent, free-thinking individual’. Still, regardless of joining a movement which prided itself in masculinity, the women of the BUF condoned the Nazi view: ‘If National Socialism can dignify motherhood and develop a healthier race for Germany, then a Fascist government can do it for England.’

  This appealed to Diana, and it must have served to further validate Mosley’s political message. At the heart of Diana’s unhappiness in childhood was the constant reminder that she could not indulge in certain things because she was not a boy. This patriarchal point of view was not restricted to the home. David opposed the idea of having life peeresses sit in the upper house in the House of Lords, believing the sight of a woman in the House was ‘lower than the belly of a snake’. And, as much as the BUF thrived on militant conformity, Mosley inviting women to join his party seemed an entirely modern and advanced concept. Diana saw it as progress and, therefore, it was right.

  Appealing to the growing number of women joining the BUF, Mosley founded The Fascist Woman, a short-lived magazine which ceased publication in the autumn of 1933. Undeterred, Mosley kept up the momentum of the propaganda machine and launched Fascist Week,* a privately circulated newspaper.

  Suffering from overwork, Mosley’s old ailment phlebitis flared up and, to ease the burden of pain, he planned to escape to Provence at the first opportunity. And, still juggling several women, Mosley told Irene and Baba he was holidaying alone. Irene was satisfied for the time being that Baba’s obsession and devotion would keep
him from that Guinness woman. Ever the skilled deceiver, Mosley could see through Irene’s plan and he played along, which pleased her immensely: ‘I cannot get over Tom’s consideration to Baba,’ she wrote in her diary. Having successfully fulfilled his duty of taking Baba on holiday, it was his turn to escape with Diana.

  The trip offered Mosley an opportunity to relax and he found a charming house near Grasse, which he rented from Sir Louis Mallet. A far cry from his jaunt across France with Baba, who demanded luxurious hotels, Diana was content to lounge in the sun by day and dine in front of a wood-burning fire by night. While Mosley slept, she went for long walks in the hills, encountering washerwomen beating their linen on oaken boards in the crystal-clear steams, their voices of Provençal dialect echoing together as they worked. She compared the animated scene to James Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabel. This level of simplicity was enough for Diana, for all she had wanted was Mosley to herself.

  After two weeks of ‘a sweet reunion’, Diana returned to the Eatonry, where life continued on as before. She sat for Tchelichew, a famous artist in Paris but relatively unknown in London. He imagined Diana and her children with long golden hair and their faces gold with blue shadows and bright blue eyes. Her boys, aged 4 and 6, grew restless with the posing and the artist was unable to engage their attention as he spoke no English. They had to sit separately, accompanied by Nanny Higgs, who related their session to Diana: ‘Mr Tchelichew was so kind, oh he was kind, but Desmond turned his head and wouldn’t look, even when Mr Tchelichew gave him a sweet.’ The children made matters worse when Tchelichew placed Desmond’s hand lovingly on Diana’s shoulder, which provoked a fit of jealousy in Jonathan and he threatened, ‘I won’t have Desmond hugging her. I won’t sit.’

  The daily routine of artists and friends calling to the Eatonry was reminiscent of Cheyne Walk. Her old, familiar friends Doris Castlerosse and Phyllis de Janze became regular callers; the two women shared a common link in that each relied on rich men for their keep. Diana was delighted when they brought along their Cartier boxes containing elaborate baubles from their admirers. And John Sutro, a wealthy member of Evelyn Waugh’s circle, came to lunch every Sunday. Surprisingly, given Mosley’s views, Sutro’s Jewishness did not trouble Diana.

  Although Diana could cherish a friend regardless of race or religion, such familiar feelings could not force her to change her outlook – and her outlook was firmly influenced by Mosley. She did not break off her friendship with Sutro, but she did sympathise with Mosley, who claimed the BUF only attacked the Jews because the Jews had attacked him first. In contrast to Diana’s empathy towards Mosley, Irene recorded a painful incident in her diary, an example of his early hostility towards the Jews. He had forbidden Irene to entertain her Jewish friends, the Sieffs, at one of her musical soirees, threatening to remove the children from her care if she did. ‘I was quite shattered by it,’ she said.

  The Jewish subject posed an interesting juxtaposition in looking at Diana’s continued friendship towards those who possessed qualities the BUF and the Nazi Party abhorred. Her lifelong loyalty towards her homosexual friends, a quality reciprocated despite her admiration for Hitler, challenged the party’s political message.

  Homosexuality was classed as ‘a degenerate form of behaviour’ that threatened the nation’s ‘disciplined masculinity’. Joseph Goebbels emphasised the Nazi Party’s intolerance when he announced: ‘We must exterminate these people root and branch; the homosexual must be eliminated.’ Heinrich Himmler estimated that there were 2 million homosexuals in Nazi Germany and he warned that if any SS man was found to be homosexual he would be arrested, publicly humiliated and sent to a concentration camp where ‘they will be shot while attempting to escape’, and those accused of homosexuality were forced to wear a pink triangle on their clothing. But this intolerance was not limited to the Nazi Party. Mussolini preached a similar message and declared homosexuality to be ‘a social disease’.

  This negative outlook was not confined to militant organisations trying desperately to convert society to their views. In Britain, homosexuality was a crime worthy of imprisonment. Unsurprisingly, Mosley was not averse to dismissing homosexuality, and he admitted to feeling wary of men who were attracted to their own sex, an attitude founded during his days at Winchester College. Later he adjusted his views ‘on basic ground of liberty that adults should be free to do what they wished in private, provided they do not interfere with others’.

  Professor Lindemann had warned her against the dangers of homosexuality becoming socially acceptable, yet, at the impressionable age of 17, Diana could rise above adversity to maintain she loved her friends regardless of their sexuality. This was a serving example of Diana’s loyalty towards those she loved; she could tolerate anything regardless of social opposition, and it was merely another issue in her private life which conflicted with Mosley’s beliefs.

  For the first time in their relationship, Mosley invited Diana to Savehay Farm. In doing so, he must have been aware of the scrutiny he would have faced. The staff were outraged, though, given their place, they kept their opinions to themselves. The children’s nanny, however, managed to manipulate her charges when she declared ‘that fright Mrs Guinness’ was responsible for their mother’s death. Irene, not so silent in her views, agreed that Diana’s presence at Savehay was offensive and a direct insult to Cimmie’s memory. The loyal staff had scurried to alert Irene to the situation, and without hesitation she sent her car to ferry the children to Baba’s house.

  Since Cimmie’s death, Mosley had fallen out of favour with the couple’s once devoted friends. They were inclined to agree with Irene that he had been a ‘cad’ for inflicting needless suffering on his wife, who had devoted her life to him and his politics. Caring little for their criticism, he busied himself with the BUF, which had become his main priority. Though, as he warned Diana when she left Bryan: his politics came first, his wife second and his children third. Now that Cimmie was dead, Diana expected to move up a notch, but this hope was dispelled when he informed her that his children now came second and she would have to make do with third.

  It was nothing short of a farce to imagine Mosley as a family man. The children were not his priority and he was particularly quick tempered and brutal towards his daughter, Vivien. Prone to attacking her in public, as he had done to Cimmie, the treatment had a devastating effect on her mental health. Irene did her best to boost Vivien’s confidence and she often chastised Mosley for his cruelty, but after one callous outburst all she could muster was ‘ugh!’ This negligence trickled down to his sons. Nick’s debilitating stammer had become worse and Micky would grow up barely knowing his father. By contrast, Diana thought Mosley ‘so marvellous’ with her boys: ‘he knows what to say to children and jollies them along and makes things interesting for them.’

  Despite the scandal that Diana openly courted when she left Bryan, those closest to her could not fault her as a mother. ‘She was a remarkable lady and a marvellous mother. She was very beautiful, very funny … She was very jolly and made everyone around her very happy,’ Desmond said. When small, Jonathan and Desmond, whom Diana nicknamed ‘the kittens’, crawled into her bed every morning and with great patience she taught them to read. She made time to have tea with her sons every day and if she was at home Diana lunched with them, too. Shunning the rules of a traditional nursery, she often called in on the children throughout the day to play with them. And, on nanny’s day off, Diana bathed and put them to bed, instead of leaving this to the nursery maid.

  There was an ulterior motive on Mosley’s behalf where his children were concerned. Vivien, Nick and Micky were his main source of income. Mosley’s father, the previous baronet, had squandered the bulk of the family fortune, which left Mosley with an income eventually rising to £20,000 per year.58 Although it was a generous sum, it was not enough to fund the BUF, support his mother, run Savehay and pay for his children’s schooling and staff. But a window of opportunity presented itself when Cimmie’s wi
ll was eventually published. Her property value for probate stood at £20,951, with the whole of her residuary estate to be held in trust for her children. Savehay was left to Mosley, who had been appointed executor along with the public trustee. The children were also bequeathed £10,000 per year from the Leiter Trust in Chicago, originally set up by Cimmie’s paternal grandfather, the American millionaire, Levi Leiter.

  Arguing that Savehay was the children’s family home, Mosley successfully convinced the solicitor that he should be given the £10,000 per year, claiming that he could not afford the upkeep of the house on his own. Consequently, any cash Mosley could obtain (and this was largely derived from suing newspapers that printed defamatory information about the party) was invested into the BUF. In 1934 he brought a libel case against the Daily Star for reporting that his movement was ready to ‘take over government with machine guns when the moment arrived’ and was awarded £5,000 in damages.

  Exploring another avenue to generate income, Mosley contemplated asking his children to refund him the money he had spent on Savehay when they came of age and were able to access their trust funds left by Cimmie. It did not alleviate his burden when Ma confided that Cimmie had sent a psychic message, warning that she did not want the children to associate with Mrs Guinness.

  In April 1934, Mosley held a rally before an audience of 10,000 at the Albert Hall in London. It was a formal affair in the style of a gala evening and an orchestra had been engaged to play the ‘Horse Wessel Lied’ and ‘Giovienzza’, as well as ‘Mosley’,* a song especially composed for the event. A militant display had been choreographed; a procession of flags and banners were carried up the aisle, pausing before the spotlights as they were swung back to punctuate Mosley’s appearance onstage. With his pronounced limp, his chest out and his head flung back, he took his place behind the lectern to address the spellbound audience. Watching from a private box, Irene’s thoughts turned to Cimmie, whom she felt ‘must be there and seeing all that, she would be glad’. Her thoughts were justified when the audience rose to their feet and erupted: ‘Hail Mosley! Mosley! Mosley!’ Encouraged by the enthusiasm of his supporters, he spoke to the captivated audience for an hour and a half.