Mrs Guinness

by Lyndsy Spence

  History has shown that a percentage of Britons and politicians admired Hitler when he came to power.* But, as 1935 wore on, many Britons changed their views and looked upon the German National Socialists as a terrifying movement, one that must be stopped. In the same vein, Mosley and the BUF were treated with similar disdain, especially when he changed the party’s name to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists, abbreviated to BU.**

  Hitler provoked disorder and yet, at the same time, claimed he was the only one who could maintain order. It was a significant move that he had mastered in the early days of his political career when he needed to prove to the desperate German population that he was a competent leader. Mosley, however, could not achieve the same; he created disorder, but he did not have the means to stop it. Chaos rang out wherever the BU marched and the name Mosley was associated with thuggery.

  Diana resented that she had been absent from Mosley’s most damning public displays; first at Olympia and then for his ill-judged march down Cable Street – an event that would happen in the near future. Was it this absence that clouded Diana’s judgement? For, once Irene witnessed the true nature of Mosley’s fascist meetings, she revoked all support for her brother-in-law. Eager to keep Diana away from his meetings where Baba was present, Mosley related the details to Diana in person. She trusted Mosley, and hearing his version of the truth – he was never at fault, he always maintained the Jews attacked first – was enough for her to support his ideology without pausing for a moment to consider the opponents’ view.

  Away from the political mania of Mosley and Hitler’s message, there was a core difference in its delivery. Hitler preached racial purity, whereas Mosley’s original manifesto was always directed at the British economy. Using the economy as his focal point, Mosley convinced his poor and unemployed followers that Jews were stealing their jobs. ‘Fascism was, essentially, a national creed – both its strength and its weakness – and therefore it took, in every country, a completely different form,’ he said in defence of his ideology. ‘We could not run a great empire made up of every sort of race and have a racialist policy. That was out of the question.’66

  For a nonconformist like Diana, who loathed restrictions and violence, and who once thought the repressive confines of Swinbrook too much to bear, it was astonishing that she could go along with Mosley’s point of view. What did unemployment mean to her? She had never had a job or, at least since marrying Bryan, she had never had to live off a small income. Diana was blindsided by the events that happened after her initial disenchantment with the British government and the physical signs of the economic depression in 1931. From 1931 onward, Diana was led by Mosley and he had altered her thinking to believe that he was the only saviour for the working classes. Possessing an unbending will – a trait in all of the Mitford offspring – Diana could see no alternative.

  True to his word, Hitler kept his promise and in the summer of 1935 Diana and Unity were treated as his guests of honour at a party given on the eve of the Parteitag. During an eclectic mix of folk dancing and rampant anti-Semitism, Streicher interrupted one of the numerous speeches to introduce the ladies at the top table: Leni Riefenstahl, Frau Troost and the ‘precious specimens’ Unity and Diana.

  The informal celebrations lapsed and finally it was time for the Parteitag, the event Unity and Diana had anticipated most. As Hitler’s guests, the sisters received the most hospitable treatment. They stayed at the Grand Hotel and arriving at the stadium they were given excellent seats next to Eva Braun, where they listened to Hitler’s official speech on the Nuremberg Laws. Lost in translation, Diana could have pleaded ignorance during the 1933 Parteitag, but two years had passed and, now fluent in German, she understood every word of Hitler’s speech and she later commented:

  The anti-Jewish laws were passed in Germany in the thirties with the object of inducing the Jews to leave the country. As Arthur Koestler has written: ‘The Old Testament laws, racial and economic against the stranger in Israel could have served as a model for the Nuremberg Code.’

  Her loyal support of Hitler and Mosley did not begin and end in Germany during its season of militant displays. Returning to England, Diana attended a rally at Hyde Park organised by the British Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi Council against German cruelties and promoting the boycott of German goods. The acting leader of the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, and Mrs Despard, the 91-year-old Irish suffragist, declared that there should be similar demonstrations throughout Europe. Responding to the audience’s triumphant cheers, Mrs Despard called for a show of support for the proposal. A sea of hands agreed with this notion, but one lone hand, Diana’s, rose to vote against it.

  Except for a few jeers, the crowd ignored Diana’s defiance and laughed at what they viewed as ignorance. Not to be ignored, Diana further expressed her views when, during a rendition of the National Anthem, she raised her hand in a fascist salute. It was a provocative gesture and the angry crowd charged forth to Diana. Moments from being attacked, she was pulled to safety by two passing members of the BU. Several newspapers reported on Diana’s stance against Attlee’s speech. Given Unity’s association with Hitler, printed almost daily in British newspapers, and Diana now attracting similar attention there was no relenting. It was a bold statement and one that confirmed her place in Mosley’s life.

  With support for the BU dwindling in London, Mosley began touring across the country on speaking engagements. He turned his political sights to the north of England, where he had a growing support from the unemployed whose livelihoods were crippled by the decline of the mining and steel industries. His schedule often made it impossible for the two to meet, even though Diana was prepared to join him at a moment’s notice. With this in mind, she thought it was logical for her and Mosley to not only live together, but for both of them to relocate somewhere closer to his work.

  The idea lingered in her mind, but for the present time Diana was busy with her frequent trips to Germany. Unity’s persistence and fanaticism finally served a purpose and she was the key person to promote the BU to Hitler, something she was only too enthusiastic to do. There was a motive in Mosley’s encouragement: he needed funds and having perplexed his usual sources it could only come from one place – Hitler.

  NOTES

  * The American publication TIME magazine voted Hitler as 1938’s Man of the Year.

  ** It shall be called BU from hereon in.

  66 Transcript from a television interview with William F. Buckley, 25 March 1972.

  32

  A LIFE TOGETHER

  Irene was not happy. She resented the loose chatter amongst the Mosley children, whom she had grown to think of as her own offspring, especially ‘the blessed one’ Micky. The children informed their nanny and Irene that Mrs Guinness planned to move her sons into Savehay. Further wounding to Irene was the gossip circulating around the nursery that a governess would soon take her place and, as such, Mosley planned to get rid of her in the autumn. ‘It was all that awful Diana,’ Irene wrote in her diary before she escaped on holiday.

  Diana harboured no ambition to move into Savehay; its upkeep was entirely paid for by the Mosley children’s trust fund. She also sensed the disapproval from the servants and how it would reflect on Mosley himself if his mistress suddenly imposed on the family home. But Irene’s perception was not entirely wrong. Diana did want to live with Mosley, in their own home in the countryside, close to his speaking engagements and a safe distance away from the temptation of Baba.

  Wootton Lodge, an early seventeenth-century house, captured Diana’s fancy. ‘How beautiful,’ she remarked when an estate agent produced a photograph. Declaring the house a white elephant, the estate agent warned her there was no hunting, few pheasants and no profitable farmland. It hardly mattered to Diana, who did not wish to generate a profit from the country pile, and she convinced Mosley to view the house.

  With Mosley behind the wheel, they motored down a mile-long avenue lined with beech trees, leading to the majest
ic three-storey house surrounded by wooded hills and the springtime bluebells in bloom. Diana envisioned living there forever, she imagined her children tobogganing down the sloped grounds in winter and Mosley fishing in their private stream in summer. Wootton’s owner, Captain Unwin VC, stood on the steps of the house, cordially greeting Diana with, ‘How do you do, Mrs Guinness …’ and, casting a gimlet eye over her companion, the elderly sailor added, ‘and Sir Oswald, too, I see.’ Leading the couple on a tour of the house, Captain Unwin explained to Diana and Mosley that he could no longer afford to run the place. If he hinted at any discomforts in living in such an old, draughty house, they went over Diana’s head. She was smitten by the large rooms, all containing sash windows and eighteenth-century panelling – the type of interior she loved most.

  Mosley, too, was enthusiastic about Wootton and Diana sensed this was because he wanted her ‘miles away from all inties [intellectuals] and different nationalities’. When they signed the lease, Mosley agreed to pay the rent of £400 a year and Diana agreed to pay the servants’ wages and the indoor utilities. She also tapped into her allowance from Bryan to install central heating – a necessity in ensuring their comfort during the icy cold winters even though, as she would learn, the oversized rooms were almost impossible to heat.

  With her usual flair for running a house, Diana engaged a cook, a gardener and enticed Cimmie’s footman James to come to Wootton with his wife. Unable to dissolve her lease on the Eatonry, Diana continued to pay the yearly rent of £300 until it lapsed at the end of the war. Budgeting her annual allowance of £2,000 to pay the servants’ wages and the indoor expenses left Diana with little disposable income for decorating Wootton. The furniture from the Eatonry barely filled one of the rooms and Mosley did not offer to help and, given his lack of interest, she never asked him to.

  After considering several avenues where she could find the extra money, Diana reluctantly sold the exquisite ruby and diamond bracelet which Bryan had given her during their marriage. It fetched £400, enough to furnish Wootton. Immediately after selling the bracelet, Diana wrote to Bryan and confessed what she had done. It must have pained Bryan that Diana, who had previously rebuffed his offer of a generous allowance, had to resort to such measures in this arrangement with Mosley.

  Mosley, too, made sacrifices. He gave up his flat on Ebury Street and took a lease on a newly converted nightclub at 129 Grosvenor Road, overlooking the Chelsea riverfront. Inspired by Grecian décor, Diana used a blue colour scheme to decorate the rooms, with the dramatic pillars in the drawing room painted white. Even Irene was impressed by Diana’s sophisticated eye and remarked: ‘Diana Guinness’s taste is lovely.’ That was about all the praise she could, and would, ever divulge. During her visit to the flat, Irene approached Mosley about his situation with Baba, Diana and the children. Talking for an hour and a half, Mosley eased her worries with his usual charm and persuaded her that he had everything under control. ‘[It] eased my poor heart,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘He said I had been a help and I left at 3.45 praising God.’

  In early 1936, Mosley began to plan his customary holiday with Baba and they decided on the Île de Porquerolles. Before he departed, Mosley asked Irene to take the children up to Wootton – ‘absolutely torture to me’ – for she did not care to see the ‘vile Mrs Guinness’. A pang of guilt must have struck Mosley’s conscience and he decided to tell Baba ahead of their trip that Diana would be joining them. Baba refused to go to the Île de Porquerolles and their relationship cooled. Mosley knew how Irene would react – she would immediately blame Diana – and owing to her involvement with the children, he was anxious not to disgruntle her.

  Irene was concerned with another aspect of her sister’s tangled love life. Baba had started an affair with the American millionaire Jock Whitney, and her inability to run away to the United States with him to start a new life plunged her into a deep depression. ‘How she cried!’ Irene recorded in her diary after spending the day with Baba. Meddling in Baba’s affairs was second nature to Irene and she only ever had one objective: to eradicate Mrs Guinness from Mosley’s life. She sent her footman over to Mosley’s flat with a note regarding his treatment of Baba and, sensing her words would draw blood, she escaped to Savehay with Micky. At midnight, Irene accepted a call from Mosley, asking her to meet him the following day for lunch.

  Over lunch, Irene found Mosley in a most congenial mood and she seized the opportunity to demand that he retract his invitation for Diana to join him on the Île de Porquerolles. He agreed. Triumphant with the results and hastily predicting that Mrs Guinness had been usurped, Irene rushed to Baba’s house on Cowley Street to deliver the good news. ‘In she came at four, exquisite and perfect, and after all I had done for her she merely said it was all too late and she was not going. What a woman!’67 Baba, for once, had the upper hand and the trip was cancelled.

  After a laborious round of speaking engagements across the north and the Midlands, not to mention the violence which became part of his speeches – once Diana had to press herself against a wall to avoid the stampede of his opponents – Mosley fell ill with appendicitis. The medical emergency, given Cimmie’s morbid outcome, was cause for great concern amongst Irene and Baba. With his usual zeal, Mosley pulled through and to recuperate from the operation he arranged a trip to Sorrento, where Diana vouched for the healing tranquillity of its Mediterranean climate.

  Mosley, Ma and his eldest children boarded a small boat at Naples and, without prior warning, Diana appeared. It was a potentially explosive situation. Ma was possessive of her son, seeing Cimmie’s death as a way of getting him back: ‘When my son married Lady Cynthia, she took her place by his side. Now she is dead and there must be someone to help him in this work and I am going to do my best to fill the gap,’ she told the Women’s Section of the BU. The gap she spoke of was not a vacancy for Diana. A straight talking, uncultured philistine, Ma loathed Diana, and Diana’s angelic politeness towards Ma only riled her further. ‘Unutterably awful and affected,’ she told Irene.

  In Mosley’s absence, the spirit of the BU was kept alive with young Blackshirts marching through the East End of London, yelling: ‘The Yids! The Yids! We’ve got to get rid of the Yids!’ They stopped at nothing to intimidate the Jews of the East End, painting the BU symbol onto street walls with the slogan: ‘Perish Judah!’ The Blackshirt magazine also busied itself with a staunch anti-Semitic theme, with its endless debates on whether all Jews should be exiled to Palestine or Madagascar. Irene was crushed by Mosley’s blatant anti-Semitism. It was a recruiting tactic for which he told her ‘one must have a scapegoat’. A scapegoat – or channel as he preferred to call it – was indeed the thing Mosley desired most.

  The blissful climate of Sorrento, without the threat of Baba, put Diana in an accommodating mood. Returning from the trip, she briefly stopped at Wootton and said goodbye to her two little boys. Desmond was complacent, but Jonathan, whom she was known to show favouritism towards, was inconsolable. Without a backward glance, Diana left for Berlin to join Unity and the Führer, to pitch to him an idea that might relieve the BU of their financial woes.

  NOTE

  67 Irene Curzon’s diary in The Viceroy’s Daughters, Anne de Courcy.

  33

  THE UPPER HAND

  The expensive villas on Schwanenwerder, an island on the Havel River in Berlin, once belonged to a colony of wealthy Jews. Under the Nuremberg Laws, the Jews were driven off the island or forced to part with their property for a meagre sum. Among those profiting from this scheme was Hitler’s minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda. The Goebbels’ villa at Inselstrasse 8, where Diana and Unity had been invited to stay, previously belonged to the Jewish banker Schlitter, who had since fled Germany.*

  For one so dedicated to fanaticism, Unity relished the idea of an island dedicated to Nazism. A swastika flag decorated the water tower, originally hung to intimidate the Jewish residents. Plans were underway to transform one of the larger villas int
o a Reichsbräuteschule, a concept thought up by Himmler to train young women to be ‘perfect Nazi brides’. Not only were the future brides taught domestic matters, they were also educated in ‘special knowledge of race and genetics’.

  On her first visit to Schwanenwerder, Diana was enchanted by the scene of natural beauty and although it was referred to as an island it was a peninsula, surrounded by water and concealed by oak, birch and pine trees. The grounds of the Goebbels’ villa contained three houses: the main house, Kavaliershaus, as well as an annex for guests and farm buildings that had been partly renovated into a cinema. The blonde-haired Goebbels children, ponies and sheep dogs ran around the garden which sloped down to the edge of a reedy lake, where a white motorised yacht was moored on the jetty. It was this display of wholesome domesticity that was often filmed and shown as part of the weekly newsreels in German cinemas.

  Diana was fond of Magda who, with her dyed blonde hair, matched Hitler’s ideal of Aryan womanhood, but she would soon discover the falseness of this image. Magda moved around the villa wearing a sorrowful expression, for she was desperately unhappy in her marriage and had remained with her husband because Hitler refused to let them part. She sought solace in her many little children. It seemed she was constantly pregnant and producing a child at a rate of one per year – a promise she had made to Hitler.