Life in a Cold Climate

by Laura Thompson

  There were further sightings in Mozambique. It was suggested that Lucan had lived there with a German woman (his German was certainly better than his French). In 2002 photographs were passed to Scotland Yard of a man using the name John Crawford and bearing a resemblance to the earl.

  31. Daily Mirror, 27 April 1976.

  32. In 1982 a convicted murderer on the run saw Lucan in a Harare hotel: ‘I called him Lucky, like people used to, and he didn’t even raise an eyebrow’ (Daily Mirror, 1 March 2012). In 2001 the former detective John Stalker said that he, like ‘the cops in charge of the case’, believed Lucan to be living in Africa. ‘One of them went to, I think it was Zambia, or Zimbabwe, and is absolutely sure he came within a day of laying a hand on him.’ (Daily Mail, 25 February 2001)

  33. In 2012 a former secretary to John Aspinall named Shirley Robey claimed that she had been asked to organize passports for Lucan’s two elder children, Frances and George, to visit Kenya and Gabon. She also stated that she did not know Lucan had been named as a murderer: ‘The last thing I would look at would be scandalous news.’ As reported in the Daily Telegraph, 20 May 2012, her story detailed arrangements between Aspinall and his then business associate, Sir James Goldsmith (both men were safely dead by this time). ‘It suggests’, the article stated, ‘that John Aspinall, the casino owner who died twelve years ago, was in prolonged and regular contact with the peer. It also implicates Sir James Goldsmith, who in the 1970s sued Private Eye, the satirical magazine, over claims he had helped Lucan after his disappearance.

  ‘They were talking about John Bingham [Lucan],’ Miss Robey says. ‘The conversations were, “What are we going to do?”; “Have you been in touch?” I was just making notes. At the end of the meeting, John Aspinall was saying, “Quite definitely, we need to do something about this” and there was a bit of a disagreement between him and Sir James Goldsmith.

  ‘“No we mustn’t do anything; causes too much trouble, we just wait,” and then the end of that meeting closed with James saying, “You speak to him”, and it was then said, “You only speak to him on that phone don’t you?” gesturing to the private phone.

  ‘He [Goldsmith] looked at me, he didn’t even know my name, and said, “What does she know about anything?” And Mr Aspinall said, “She knows a bit, I’m going to bring her in on it”.’

  The plan, enacted in both 1979 and 1980, was to fly Frances and George to Gabon, where Aspinall had a gorilla centre, then to Kenya. Miss Robey also stated that Aspinall was convinced of Lucan’s innocence. ‘I’m not saying, and I can’t say, whether he would have covered up for him if he thought he was guilty but I think he’s made of better stuff than that.’

  Some years after Aspinall’s death in 2000, when according to her best belief Lucan was still alive, Miss Robey contacted the police. ‘They said to me, everything you’ve said, we’re already aware of.’ She also wrote to George Bingham, who did not acknowledge her letter and later firmly refuted the story. ‘The trip to Kenya was much later,’ he said, ‘I think nearer 1985. I was nearly 18. Both my sisters were present as were two other families, neither of which had any connection to John Aspinall.’ This was confirmed, surely unanswerably, in a statement from his mother Lady Lucan. ‘The children were wards of court, at boarding school. I was their carer. I would have known if they had gone to Africa. I can guarantee they didn’t go to Africa. I had to get permission from the court to take them abroad.’

  In 2000, Lucan’s children Frances and George visited a ‘luxury holiday lodge’ near Windhoek. An investigator named Ian Crosby later seized upon these holidays as suggesting that Lucan had been in Namibia at that time. The story was reported in the Daily Mail, 10 March 2012: ‘We do not doubt that he [George] has not knowingly set eyes on his father since 1974. However, who is to say that his father was not watching him on a visit to Namibia?’

  34. The Sun, 28 February 2012. The ‘links to Botswana’ cited in the article are unknown. In 1993 Lucan was sighted once more in Gaborone, at the Cresta Riley’s hotel.

  35. An article in the Daily Mail, 3 February 2013, examined the findings of the BBC1 Inside Out documentary broadcast in December 2012. The programme was presented by Glenn Campbell, who had uncovered new evidence regarding the hunt for Lucan, as well as a hitherto unseen police statement given by Lucan’s sister, Lady Sarah Gibbs (see p.272). The Daily Mail wrote:

  Lord Lucan’s brother has told the BBC that the fugitive aristocrat died in 2004 and is buried in Africa. Hugh Bingham is said to have made the startling disclosure in an ‘unguarded moment’ after an interview at his Johannesburg home. When the cameras stopped rolling, he was pressed by a journalist on the Inside Out programme about whether Lucan – accused of murdering his children’s nanny, Sandra Rivett, in 1974 – was ‘dead or alive’. Mr Bingham, 72, replied: ‘I know for a fact my brother died in 2004 and that his grave is in Africa.’ The alleged admission – which would mean Lucan was 70 when he died – was revealed by Mrs Rivett’s 46-year-old son, Neil Berriman.

  None of the facts about this ‘revelation’ has ever been corroborated.

  36. It was revealed on Inside Out that Scotland Yard had considered sending an undercover detective to the Hebridean island of Eigg. Lucan was rumoured to be hiding near the ruins of Kildonan monastery, having used a powerboat to cross from the Scottish mainland. ‘That explains a lot,’ was a comment on Facebook. ‘It’s rural and isolated. I’m from Mull and even we don’t visit Eigg.’

  37. An ex-SAS bounty hunter named John Miller, who had previously found the escaped prisoner Ronald Biggs (a member of the Great Train Robbery gang), claimed that Lucan had been captured and was being held by employees of Miller’s security company. This story was revealed to be a hoax after a television reporter paid Miller $4,000 for the story and took a boat to Caracas in search of Lucan. A former drug dealer had been paid to act the part of the vanished earl.

  There was also a police report suggesting that a British citizen, living on Barbados, had been sending money to Lucan in an unidentified South American country. This rumour has echoes of a 1974 story that a telegram had been found at Lucan’s Elizabeth Street flat, sent by an unidentified relation, offering him the use of a property on Haiti.

  38. Quoted in The Times, 6 March 2012.

  39. Quoted in the Daily Mail, 27 October 2004.

  40. Many of the facts in this section come from Dominic Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain 1974–79 (Allen Lane, 2012).

  41. Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow (Jonathan Cape, 2010).

  Available now

  Picture section

  Nancy in the 1920s

  Batsford Park, the house built by Nancy’s grandfather

  Asthall Manor, where life was ‘all summers’, with its view overlooking the graveyard of St Nicholas Church

  Nancy’s parents, Lord and Lady Redesdale

  Unity Mitford, aged eight, with her younger sister Jessica, at Asthall

  Swinbrook House, built by Lord Redesdale and named ‘Swinebrook’ by Nancy

  The Mitford town house at Rutland Gate: Lord Redesdale installed a lift for negotiating its six storeys

  Nancy aged twenty-seven, when her career as a novelist was just beginning

  The Mitford girls

  Unity, wearing her Nazi swastika

  Diana, ‘born beautiful, always beautiful’, Nancy said of her sister

  Pamela, described by Betjeman as ‘the most rural of them all’

  Deborah, on the day of her wedding to Lord Andrew Cavendish

  Jessica, the rebellious Hon

  Nancy’s marriage to Peter Rodd

  Unity (left) and Diana in 1935, with her two sons from her first marriage, Desmond and Jonathan Guinness

  Lord and Lady Redesdale sit with Unity (again wearing her swastika) at an aAnglo-German Fellowship meeting held in 1938. Dr Fitz-Randolph of the German Embassy is on Unity’s left

  Unity returns to England in 1940 after her attempted suicide

 
Gaston Palewski, the real life Fabrice du Sauveterre

  Nancy in the happy years of the 1950s, in the salon of her beloved flat at Rue Monsieur

  Duff and Diana Cooper: their tenure at the British Embassy in Paris helped to provide Nancy with a glorious social life during her early years in France

  Cyril Connolly, ‘Boots’: butt of some of the best jokes in the letters of Nancy and Evelyn Waugh

  Lady Pamela Berry, a good friend of Nancy’s during the 1950s, seen here at a 1955 party to celebrate London fashion (a barely existent concept, in Nancy’s view, although Norman Hartnell – pictured to the left of Pam Berry – would not have agreed with her)

  Evelyn Waugh in 1955, Nancy’s favourite correspondent: ‘I loved Evelyn I really think the best of all my friends...’

  Programme for The Little Hut, ‘Nancy Mitford’s naughty thing’, the risqué boulevard comedy that she translated from the French and that ran for three years in the West End

  An original programme for the play, signed by Nancy

  A rehearsal still from The Little Hut: Nancy’s friend Robert Morley plays the husband, with Joan Tetzel as the wife

  Ava Gardner as the wife in the film version of The Little Hut. Her grass skirt was by Dior, Nancy’s favourite designer

  Nancy at Rue Monsieur in the late 1950s, when she had become a writer of dedication and substance

  A book signing from around the same time

  Nancy at her house in Versailles. Her love of clothes stayed with her until the end of her life: will you be dignified or ridiculous?, she was asked when the mini-skirt came into fashion. Oh, ridiculous, of course, was her reply

  Nancy in her sixties

  The last letter written by Nancy to her friend Theodore Besterman, who had given her invaluable help in the writing of Voltaire in Love. By this time she had become very ill, although she would live for almost three more years

  The little churchyard of St Mary, Swinbrook, where Nancy is buried next to Unity

  The interior of St Mary’s, where in 1973 Nancy’s funeral was attended by the ageing beau monde

  Nancy’s grave

  Nancy in 1970

  Acknowledgments

  This book was written when two of Nancy’s sisters were alive, and I remain hugely grateful to Lady Mosley and the Duchess of Devonshire, both of whom received me with great kindness. I shall remember our conversations with enormous pleasure. Without Lady Mosley’s initial help – which was offered freely and unquestioningly, to a person of whom she knew nothing – I doubt very much that my book could have been written; I am deeply indebted to her for such generosity.

  I should like to thank Alexander Mosley, who has also sadly died, and Viscount Norwich; Fran Blackwall, Peter Brook, Jacques Brousse, Lord Dulverton, Natasha Fairweather and Helen Marchant; the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham, which was quite wonderfully helpful to me; the Bodleian Library; Bristol University Library; Cambridge University Library; the London Library; the Public Record Office at Kew; and the Taylor Institution in Oxford for showing me the correspondence between Nancy Mitford and Theodore Besterman.

  I owe a huge debt to Selina Hastings for her 1985 biography of Nancy Mitford: although our interpretations of Nancy’s life differ in several ways, I could not have written my book without reference to this earlier work. I am also greatly indebted to the work of Charlotte Mosley, wonderful editor of Nancy’s extensive correspondence.

  My thanks to my original publishers, Headline. Lastly I am hugely grateful to all at Head of Zeus, and to my agent Georgina Capel, for enabling this book to appear in a new edition.

  Notes

  Chapter 1

  1 This story was told by the Duchess of Devonshire during a BBC Omnibus programme about Nancy, broadcast in 2001.

  2 David Mitford’s father, Bertram, was created first Baron Redesdale in 1902 (this extinct title had been revived for him). David did not become heir to the title until his older brother, Clement, was killed in the First World War in 1916.

  3 Unless specified otherwise, all quotations from Lady Mosley are from conversation with the author.

  4 ‘Decca’ was a family nickname for Nancy’s sister Jessica.

  5 Notwithstanding Sydney’s misgivings this essay was published, along with thirteen others by Nancy, in a collection called The Water Beetle (Hamish Hamilton, 1962). In the book the essay has the title ‘Blor’.

  6 Unless specified otherwise, all quotations from the Duchess of Devonshire are from conversation with the author.

  7 In a letter to Diana, 29 July 1946, Nancy wrote of a meeting with Sydney’s sister Weenie, in which it was implied by her aunt that Nancy had ‘gone to the bad’ (by that time her marriage was over and she was having an affair in Paris). ‘If I have become what they all regard as wicked, that is Muv’s fault because if I had had a family there would have been no Col [her lover] & that’s quite certain. But I can’t say that...’

  8 From The House of Mitford, by Jonathan Guinness with Catherine Guinness.

  9 Clementine’s daughter, Mary Soames, ended the speculation about her mother’s parentage in 2002. Notwithstanding Clementine’s so-called resemblance to David Mitford, her father was named by Lady Soames to be Captain Bay Middleton, another of Blanche’s lovers. The dashing Captain Middleton died in a riding accident when Clementine was a young girl.

  10 In The House of Mitford.

  11 In an interview for ABC TV’s Tempo, broadcast in 1966.

  12 In his book Ancient as the Hills: Diaries 1973–1974, James Lees-Milne records that shortly after Nancy’s death he was asked by her publishers, Hamish Hamilton, to write her biography. He told them that he had several reservations: ‘The chief one was that I did not admire Nancy’s prose style; never had. They took this badly and were, I could see, amazed...’ (In the end no formal biography was written at this time; instead Harold Acton published his memoir of Nancy, chiefly made up of her own letters, in 1975.)

  Chapter 2

  1 The word ‘Hons’ (whose ‘h’ is pronounced) became resonant within the Mitford family: according to Jessica’s Hons and Rebels it originated as a derivation of ‘Hens’, which she and Deborah kept when young. Of course it also – annoyingly, to some – meant ‘Honourable’, the title held by the Mitford children. Evelyn Waugh refers to Nancy and her sisters as ‘Hons’ in this sense. But they themselves would use it as a natural term of approval for anyone they liked, as when Linda says of Davey Warbeck (Aunt Emily’s husband in The Pursuit of Love) that he ‘seems a terrific Hon’. Conversely someone nasty could be a ‘Counter-Hon’.

  2 In a radio talk given in 1946 for the BBC programme Women’s Magazine.

  3 Nancy’s article ‘The English Aristocracy’, published in Encounter in 1955, contained the famous ‘U and Non-U’ theory which categorised the way people spoke as either ‘Upper-class’ or ‘Non-Upper-class’. It caused a furore. Waugh’s ‘Open Letter’, which constituted a reply of sorts to Nancy’s article, appeared in Encounter in December 1955. Both essays were published in 1956 in Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy (‘I think the book should have a pompous name’, wrote Waugh to Nancy).

  4 From Unity Mitford: A Quest by David Pryce-Jones.

  5 All quotations from Alexander Mosley are from conversation with the author.

  6 Quoted in The House of Mitford.

  7 From a letter to Nancy’s friend Robert Byron, 18 September 1931.

  8 This story was told in the 1980 BBC documentary Nancy Mitford: A Portrait by Her Sisters.

  9 Quoted in the 1980 BBC documentary.

  10 From A Life of Contrasts by Diana Mosley.

  11 Ibid.

  12 From a letter to Evelyn Waugh, 31 January 1951.

  13 In an interview with David Pryce-Jones.

  14 In the 1946 BBC radio broadcast.

  15 This story was told in The Sunday Times in an article by Julian Jebb, published to coincide with the broadcasting of his 1980 BBC film.<
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  16 Quoted by Diana in the 1980 BBC documentary.

  17 In a letter to Nancy describing a book by Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave, in which Connolly reflected upon his past and his beliefs, Waugh wrote: ‘There was a large blank in my acquaintance with Cyril which must I suppose have been a deformative period in his life.’

  18 From an interview in Unity Mitford: A Quest.

  19 In the 1980 BBC documentary.

  20 Raymond Mortimer (1895–1980) credited himself with having taught Nancy the difference between a comma and a semi-colon (‘...Raymond says he can teach grammar & if I put him up in the Continental with a suite on the Tuileries gardens he will teach me in return, so I’m considering it’, wrote Nancy to Evelyn Waugh in 1950). A highly literate man who worked as a critic and editor, Mortimer became a good friend to Nancy after she moved to France and a precious one at the end of her life.