Mrs Guinness

by Lyndsy Spence

  Diana packed a change of clothes and a pocket edition of Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex. Fighting back tears so as to not upset the children, she handed baby Max to Nanny Higgs and kissed 18-month-old Alexander goodbye. They watched from an upstairs window as the police escorted Diana to the car.

  After what seemed like an endless journey from Denham to London, the police car drew forth to Holloway prison, its grim building within sight. Outside the prison gates, a poster warned: ‘YOUR FREEDOM IS IN DANGER.’ Led through the entrance, Diana passed the stone dragons with their menacing fangs exposed. The jingle of keys and caterwauling of female inmates grew louder as she walked down the long and echoing corridor.

  Diana underwent the routine fingerprinting, followed by the humiliating inspection for fleas and venereal disease. When it was time for a delousing bath, she protested, saying she had had a bath that morning. Satisfied with Diana’s response, the sinister-looking female doctor with dyed hair and long finger nails painted blood red, examined her, noting her weight and asked if she was pregnant.

  Once the procedure was complete, Diana was taken to reception – prison jargon for a four-by-four wooden box with a roof of wire netting. She later learned that this was a practical joke on the prison authorities’ behalf, for there was no reason why she could not go straight to a cell. The filth seemed contagious, it coated everything: the walls, the floor, utensils and the thin, damp mattress on the floor were saturated in dirt.

  The phantom weekend stay had passed and Diana realised that her internment under Regulation 18B meant she could be held for as long as the government saw fit. Her mind turned to Mosley in his cell at Brixton and to the small children she had left behind. As much as she ached for ‘the sweet baby’, she was glad she had not brought Max to Holloway.

  Alexander and Max were entrusted to Pamela, who preferred her dogs and had little patience for young children. Faithfully writing to Diana, Pamela updated her on the progress of the babies. Alexander, she wrote, toddled through a field of thistles. With her letters rationed, Diana could not respond immediately, which added to her worries for her children. ‘His poor little legs,’ Diana said of the incident, before reasoning, ‘it’s not her fault she doesn’t like babies …’

  Each day followed the same pattern as the next. She fell into the rigorous prison schedule of scrubbing floors and sitting in her cold, concrete cell on Holloway’s F-wing, the window so dirty not even a glimmer of sunlight could shine through. She slept sitting upright against the wall and refused everything by way of prison food. Women from the BU arrested under Regulation 18B rallied to Diana’s cell. They had never met her before, but given their loyalty to Mosley they became subservient, offering to clean her cell and anything they could do to ensure her comfort. This embedded a level of resentment in Diana – in their own small way these strangers attempted to ease her burden, while her acquaintances in the government did not.

  Finally, three months later, the familiar clinking of keys alerted Diana and she sprung forth, hoping that the internment had come to an end. She was disheartened to learn it was not so, but Diana remained optimistic that she might be able to argue her case when she was brought before the Advisory Committee for questioning.

  Sitting before the Advisory Committee, Diana was pale and thin, her appearance worn from the rough conditions of prison life. She instantly sensed their feelings of hostility towards her. ‘Have you reflected during your detention why you were detained?’ they asked.83

  ‘Yes often,’ Diana truthfully replied.

  ‘What conclusion did you come to?’

  And, with more than an ounce of truth in her answer, Diana said: ‘It was because I married Sir Oswald Mosley.’

  Following the ineffective appointment with the Advisory Committee, Diana was led back to her cell. Adopting her familiar position beneath the dirt-encrusted window, she realised that any hopes of freedom were pointless. She was no longer frightened. It had nothing to do with courage, ‘it was simply that I hardly cared whether I lived or died’.

  After a separation lasting a year and a half, Diana and Mosley were finally reunited. This unusual arrangement came about when Tom Mitford dined with Winston Churchill and asked him to find a way for the Mosleys to be together. Sending word to Holloway, Churchill ordered the governor and prison commissioner to find a solution. A former parcels house on the grounds of Holloway, renamed the Preventive Detention Block, became Diana and Mosley’s prison abode where they lived with another couple; a prominent BU member, Major de Laessoe and his wife.

  Detached from the main part of the prison and its unbending routine, the Mosleys and the de Laessoes lived an almost self-sufficient existence. The men took responsibility for the boiler, each taking it in turns to stoke the coals so at least the women could have the luxury of hot water. Tending to the small patch of soil, formerly used as a victory garden, Diana transformed the few mouldering cabbages into edible kitchen produce and grew Jersey pea-bean and fraises des bois. They borrowed dozens of books on gardening and set to work, maintaining their vegetable patch and battling the weeds. Food was scarce and there was little variety, but compared to the oily greyish water in which swam a few bits of darker grey gristle and meat served from the prison cauldrons, it was fine cuisine.

  In some ways prison life had become bearable and Diana was able to find a few pleasantries for which she could be grateful. As the seasons changed, she wandered around the yard every day, in fog and snow, rain and wind, and in the airless heat of a London summer, Diana sunbathed on the small patch of lawn. A visiting priest, astonished at the scene, commented to a prison warden: ‘It’s the garden of Eden out there, Lady Mosley in her little knickers.’ The newspapers kept the public informed of Diana’s prison life and those who were appalled at the lenience shown towards the couple referred to the parcels house as ‘Lady Mosley’s Suite’.

  A wardress brought two convicts to clean the parcels house. ‘You don’t want petty pilfering so I’m sending sex offenders; they are always clean and honest,’ she said. Diana was forbidden to talk to them, but once out of the wardress’s sight she conversed freely. One convict was a bigamist, though she confessed it was a mistake and told Diana that she had been sentenced to nine months. Diana said she was lucky, at least she knew that she would be released when the nine months were up. ‘We seem to be here for life,’ she added.

  Visiting rules had become more lenient. Deborah came, now married to Lord Andrew Cavendish, and sprinted across the yard with her two whippets. Pamela and Unity visited and Sydney brought the two Mosley boys. As much as Diana delighted in seeing her two toddlers, she was faced with the reality that in her long absence she had become a stranger to them. Alexander and Max stayed overnight, but after the second visit they did not want to leave. Alexander clung to Diana’s skirt and had to be torn away, he wailed and begged to stay with his mother. It was an agonising decision but in the best interests of her children, Diana agreed the visits must be stopped.

  Mosley’s physical health was failing and his old ailment, phlebitis, caused him great agony. Tom, now abroad with his regiment, could no longer serve as Diana’s channel to Churchill. Recalling Randolph’s message relayed through Tom, that Churchill wanted to release her, Diana asked Sydney to appeal to Clementine. But Clementine did not converse seriously about the imprisonment and offhandedly remarked that the Mosleys were better off in prison, since if they were to be released the furious populace would be after them. Sydney said Diana was willing to take that chance.

  Their fate was ultimately sealed when Dr Geoffrey Evans’ medical report on Mosley’s declining health managed to sway the prison commissioner’s decision, warning the Home Office that if Mosley developed so much as a chill or influenza in his present condition ‘he would not answer for the consequences’. Diana, too, had suffered ill-health and was weakened from a bout of dysentery. Major de Laessoe gave Diana a pill from his medicine chest. He promised it had cured him from the same affliction during his day
s in the African bush. The ancient pills had become more potent over time and Diana almost died from opium poisoning. But when she came to and gathered her strength, her thoughts turned to Mosley and his suffering.

  On a cold morning in November 1943, Diana stood at the stove making Mosley his morning porridge when a wardress rushed into the dimly lit kitchen and announced: ‘You’re released!’ After three and a half years of imprisonment without trial, Diana had given up hope. Confirming that the news had been broadcast over the wireless, the wardress convinced Diana that it was true. Abandoning the porridge, she flew to Mosley’s bedside to deliver the good news.

  A penance had been served and Diana, ‘filled with inexpressible joy’, believed Mosley was to be saved, the family would be reunited and their life could begin anew. She had come to the end of a dark tunnel and, seeing a glimmer of sunshine, Diana thought the nightmare was over.84

  Diana’s marriage to Bryan had been a gilded cage. On that afternoon in 1932 when she told Bryan, ‘I am in love with the Leader …’, she, at the age of 22, was prepared to give up her marriage in exchange for freedom. The condemnation Diana experienced since her marriage to Mosley in 1936 and the hardship she would suffer was all too apparent. She had brought it on herself. ‘I was in love with him, I was in love with life and to me they were more or less identical.’ She could not bear a metaphysical prison with someone she did not love or respect and, although she resented Holloway and the banishment of her liberties, she had Mosley, and their prison reunion was ‘one of the happiest days of her life’. It was not only passion that fuelled this attraction to Mosley; together with a profound faith in his ideals, Diana believed they were made for each other.

  NOTES

  * Defence Regulation 18B, often referred to as simply 18B, was the most famous of the Defence Regulations used by the British government during the Second World War. It allowed the internment of individuals suspected of being Nazi sympathizers. Winston Churchill, originally a strong supporter of the regulation, later recognised its danger to democratic freedom, prompting him to describe it as ‘in the highest degree odious’.

  80 ‘We should become a slave state, though a British government which would be Hitler’s puppet would be set up, under Mosley or some such person.’ Winston Churchill’s address to his Cabinet in his room in the House of Commons.

  81 Lady Astor’s speech referred to a raid on the Anti-Vivisectionists Society.

  82 Diana discovered this betrayal after Nancy’s death.

  83 Diana was questioned by the Advisory Committee during a meeting held at the Berystede Hotel, Ascot, on Wednesday, 7 October 1940.

  84 Described by Diana in A Life of Contrasts.

  EPILOGUE

  In the summer of 1983, Diana made a rare visit to London. She cut a lonely figure as she sat in an armchair in the House of Lords, where she planned to lunch with Frank Pakenham, the 7th Earl of Longford. Sitting in contemplative silence in a place that had once denounced her as the enemy, she heard the sound of footsteps approach. Looking up she could see an elderly gentleman, frail, with unruly white hair, dressed in corduroys and carrying a plastic bag. He tottered to the cloakroom and removed a filthy macintosh, hanging it on a hook. There was something familiar about his unassuming manner – an alarming contrast to the intimidating grandeur of the House of Lords. A flood of memories jolted Diana from her pensive mood and she quietly called out, ‘Bryan?’ The unique drawl disturbed him and without a moment’s hesitation he rushed to Diana and kissed her.

  ‘Which of you is it?’ Bryan’s eyes searched her face.

  At that juncture Frank Longford loomed. ‘Look who’s here and he doesn’t know me,’ Diana said with a mischievous grin. The former husband and wife laughed as though not a trace of bitterness existed and they were old friends. It had been the first time Bryan had met Diana in fifty years that he had not wept. Their long, eventful lives had been lived; the sting of past events long forgiven and forgotten.

  Bryan’s ominous statement, ‘which of you is it?’, often inspired the same question in those who loved Diana. There was Diana, the kind and tolerant friend. And Lady Mosley, who had not only endorsed National Socialism85 but remained loyal to the memory of her friendship with Hitler and his politics. Although Diana admitted to being horrified at the Holocaust – ‘I thought it appalling, wicked, monstrous’ – it could not force her to denounce the man who had charmed her as a young woman and who had led the world into war. ‘What about the Gulag? Stalin killed many more than Hitler. Or the thirty million the Chinese killed in the so-called Cultural Revolution,’ she responded when asked of her views. ‘The fact is, we live in a cruel world.’86

  As for Mosley, he had aimed very high, he had gambled and he had failed. He formed the Union Movement, which called for a single nation state to cover the continent of Europe and he later attempted to launch a National Party of Europe. In 1958, Mosley made a brief return to Britain to stand in the 1959 general election at Kensington North, where he unsuccessfully campaigned for the repatriation of Caribbean immigrants as well as a prohibition upon interracial marriages. He stood again in the 1966 general election at Shoreditch and Finsbury, but this, too, resulted in failure. He returned to France, where he and Diana had been living in semi-exile since the 1950s.

  Although Diana had dedicated her life to Mosley for forty-eight years, he never remained faithful. She never admitted it, but suspicion about his infidelity plagued her. And, although she retained the view that ‘monogamy was supremely foolish’, Diana remained faithful to him. She promoted Mosley’s beliefs after he had abandoned them, and continued to praise his political folly long after his death in 1980. ‘Unrepentant’ until the end, she died in Paris at the age of ninety-three.

  NOTE

  85 Diana was interviewed by Sue Lawley on ‘Desert Island Discs’. When asked of Hitler and the Holocaust, Diana answered: ‘Having been in Germany a good bit it was years before I could really believe such things happened.’ Sue Lawley asked: ‘And do you believe it now?’ Diana replied: ‘I don’t really, I’m afraid, believe that six million people were killed, I think this is just not conceivable. It’s too many – but whether it’s six or whether it’s one makes no difference morally. It’s completely wrong. I think it was a dreadfully wicked thing.’ Originally broadcast on BBC Radio, Sunday, 26 November 1989.

  … To interviewers she would respond with practised ease.

  Diana Mosley, Anne de Courcy

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