A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley

by Diana Mitford

  But for Sir Harold Gillies it would have been, though it never occurred to me. I felt sorry I had smashed my car, annoyed at being stuck in London and having my plans upset, grateful for the flowers and the kind visits of M., Bryan, Tom, Lord Moyne and my sisters; but I thought the newspapers very exaggerated.

  After Gillies had operated on my nose and jaw I woke up in real pain. It felt as though somebody had banged my head with a hammer for a very long time. After three days I asked the nurse for a looking-glass. Lifting an eyelid with my finger, because the eyes were still closed by bruising, I saw a sort of pudding with no features sticking out of it. However, a few days more and the swelling went down and there was my face again.

  After an X-ray I was told I must have another operation, on the antrum. This was gloomy news. Back into the London Clinic, hope deferred. The second operation was less painful but almost more hateful. I began to feel very sorry for myself. Farve came to the Clinic.

  ‘I shall never get well here because I hate it so much,’ I told him.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ he said.

  ‘I want to fly to Naples, but they say I must stay another week.’

  I knew the habits of the Clinic. Farve came with his car before dawn when the night nurses were at breakfast and the day nurses still asleep. I dressed quietly and he helped me down the stairs. We dared not take the lift in case we were caught. He drove me to Croydon and saw me into the aeroplane. At Marseille I changed to a seaplane, flew to Rome and got to Naples that evening.

  M. had taken the Rennells’ villa at Posillipo. It was perched above the sea with the celebrated view across the bay to Vesuvius; an absurd house. According to Gerald, he and Gerry Wellesley and some others at the embassy in Rome twenty years before had held a competition for designing the most hideous house imaginable, and the winning drawing had been stuck on the wall of the Chancellery. Lady Rodd happened to see it. ‘My dream house!’ she exclaimed, and asked if she might borrow the drawing. She used it for the Posillipo villa, a crazy jumble of styles.

  The warmth and the sun soon cured me, though to begin with I could not manage the hundreds of steps down to the sea, nor bear the noonday light. After a few days I recovered from my injuries, swimming in the deep sea with M.

  Unity had lost no time in telling Hitler of our Parteitag adventures, of how Putzi, having invited us in 1933 and promised to introduce us to him, then did his best to prevent us going to Nuremberg at all in 1934. ‘Why?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Because of our lipstick,’ said Unity.

  Hitler laughed. He said it was typical of Hanfstaengl, who had bored him over and over again with old American women, not to introduce just for once somebody he would have liked to see. He was amused about our gate crashing and Parteigenosse Nummer Hundert. This year he promised we should be his guests. One night we were invited to a huge picnic-like out-of-doors dinner party on the Burg. I was put next to a little man with poached-egg blue eyes who was wearing dozens of medals on his brown shirt. I started to speak German but he said, ‘Let’s talk English,’ which I was only too pleased to do. When I asked how it was that he spoke so fluently, ‘Well, you see I’m an Eton boy,’ was the surprising answer. He was the Duke of Saxe-Coburg. He told me Hitler had visited him; asked to write something in the duke’s copy of Mein Kampf he put: ‘Mein Himmel auf Erde heisst: Vaterland.’ (My heaven on earth is called Fatherland.)

  There was a performance of Meistersinger at the opera, the rows of boxes had been garlanded from stalls to gallery with swags of fresh flowers.

  Before Hitler’s last speech at the closing session in the Congresshalle an orchestra played a Bruckner symphony. Like so many Germans, Hitler had a passion for music. For some obscure reason this love of music is hardly allowed to exist by his English biographers. (After the war I read a book by Alan Bullock in which he rather absurdly says that Hitler ‘did not get much further than Beethoven’. Musically speaking, what is further than Beethoven? Hoping to discover the answer to this conundrum I went to a lecture by Alan Bullock on Hitler at, of all unlikely places, the Army and Navy Stores. To my disappointment at the end of his lecture the lecturer disappeared; there were no questions. On the way out I found myself next to Sheila Birkenhead. ‘Too sad there were no questions,’ I said, to which, giving me a searching look, she replied, ‘I expect it was just as well.’)

  In February 1935 a plebiscite had been held in the Saar. For fifteen years the province was ruled by France; now, in accordance with the peace treaty, the Saarlanders were to choose their own future. They could vote for the status quo, or for League of Nations rule, or to join Germany once again. English soldiers ensured the secrecy of the ballot.

  There was much speculation in the press, because although the Saarlanders were German the theory was that since Hitler was now in power nobody of his own free will would vote to be incorporated in the Reich. Probably the journalists genuinely believed this, for they cannot have hoped to influence the vote in a German-speaking province. The referendum on one subject or another had been a fairly frequent feature of German politics during the previous two years and the result was always a large majority for the National Socialist government, but according to English newspapers either these votes were simply faked or else people had been dragooned by ‘jack-booted storm troopers’ into going to the polls and putting an X in the required place. The result of the Saar plebiscite, run by the League of Nations, was almost exactly the same as for plebiscites within Germany itself, ninety-seven per cent voted for incorporation in the Reich. This was a great disappointment to the English press as well as the English Left, but after a while, assuming that the circumstances of the Saar vote had been forgotten by their readers, the old theory about faking and dragooning cropped up once more in the newspapers.

  The truth is that Germany supported Hitler. As to the Jews, thousands of whom had come in from eastern Europe after the war, most Germans probably hoped they would remove themselves to some other part of the globe. World Jewry with its immense wealth could find the money, and England and France with the resources of their vast empires could find the living space, it was imagined. English, French and American newspapers were at one in describing the Jews as Germany’s cleverest and most desirable citizens, hence it was assumed by Germans that they would get a warmer welcome in any of these countries than proved in fact to be the case. The Jews who left did not make things easier for those who remained behind. Their virulent attacks upon all things German and their insistent calls for trade boycotts, military encirclement and even war, hardened the hearts of the many Germans who were well-disposed towards them. 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.’13

  Since those days there have been many rough and cruel expulsions of unwanted citizens by intransigent nationalist governments, the Indians driven out of East Africa, for example, or the Israeli bulldozing of Arab villages, not to mention millions of Germans forced out of Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania and Bohemia. These uprootings have been among the most painful episodes in our violent and barbarous century. It was a tragedy that world Jewry did not make a greater effort in the thirties to accommodate its co-racialists from central Europe elsewhere in the world.

  When Hitler came to power, large numbers of his political opponents were arrested and put in concentration camps. This blot on the régime was always condemned by M., who said that imprisonment without trial was wrong in itself and a sign of incompetence in a government. Imprisonment without trial was used by the English government in Northern Ireland, and political opponents were constantly being imprisoned in India and in our African colonies. Pandit Nehru spent sixteen years in British prisons in India. Ignoring these well-known facts, English journalists and politicians pretended to think that such practices were unique to Germany.

>   As the years went by almost all the prisoners in Germany’s camps were released: what happened during the war is another matter. By then, we ourselves were imprisoned and silenced.

  14.

  WOOTTON

  Meanwhile in London, since launching the British Union of Fascists, M. had held a number of successful meetings at the Albert Hall. It was always full to capacity and people had to be turned away, therefore in the summer of 1934 he hired Olympia which, almost twice the size, holds an audience of fifteen thousand.

  The communists decided to wreck this meeting. For weeks beforehand the Daily Worker drummed up its supporters to gather at Olympia and smash fascism. It even printed a map showing them how to get there. A few friends dined with me before the meeting but they went off without me; I had a temperature and felt far from well. I have always regretted this, for the Olympia meeting and its fierce fights have been argued about ever since and I wish I had seen it for myself.

  The communists and their allies came well armed with razors and such like and there is a first-hand account of the behaviour of two of them in Philip Toynbee’s book Friends Apart. He describes how he and Esmond Romilly bought knuckledusters at an ironmonger to help them smash fascism, but they were thrown out of the meeting, in tears, before they could do much harm. No doubt our people were very ready with their fists, but they did not fight with razors and knuckle-dusters, and it was their own meeting they were defending. There was a great controversy in the days that followed, letters to The Times and so forth, but it was Lloyd George who hit the nail on the head: ‘It is difficult to explain why the fury of the champions of free speech should be concentrated so exclusively, not on those who deliberately and resolutely attempted to prevent the public expression of opinions of which they disapproved, but against those who fought, however roughly, for freedom of speech. Personally, I have suffered as much as anyone in public life today from hostile interruptions by opponents determined to make it impossible for me to put my case before audiences… and I feel that men who enter meetings with the deliberate intention of suppressing free speech have no right to complain if an exasperated audience handles them rudely.’14

  M. was invited by the BBC to discuss the violence at the meeting on the wireless. After he had said his say, Gerald Barry, editor of the Weekend Review, spoke. M. was not allowed to answer a number of untrue allegations he made, and Barry had the last word. Nowadays, with television, there would presumably be a face-to-face confrontation, a much fairer procedure. This broadcast in 1934 was the last permitted to M. by the BBC for thirty-four years. It was not until 1968, and after he had brought an action in the High Court, that he, like every other politician, was able to speak for himself on the wireless and television controlled by the BBC, although he had throughout been the subject of frequent comment by other people, and wildly hostile comment at that.

  Our opponents exaggerated the violence at Olympia. If half their stories had been true the hall would have been strewn with dead and dying and the hospitals full of casualties. As it was they gave themselves a bad fright, and on the whole subsequent meetings were quieter.

  Forty years afterwards Harold Macmillan wrote a book about prominent politicians entitled The Past Masters in which there is a photograph of M. holding what looks like a fleur de lys. In fact, it was the top of a London park iron railing, and was part of the arsenal of weapons used against him to be confiscated from the reds by his supporters at Olympia.

  Two years after Olympia there was a meeting in Oxford at the Carfax Rooms which has also been the subject of legend and controversy. I happened to be there as I was on my way from Swinbrook to London and decided to wait in Oxford and hear M. speak. The hall was full; in the front sat some youngish dons. I recognized Frank Pakenham and Richard Crossman, and some undergraduates. At the back were rougher looking men. When M. began to speak the undergraduates opened large newspapers and pretended to read them. At first M. paid no attention to this absurdity, nor to various interruptions and shouts, but when they began ostentatiously rustling their papers he said: ‘I am glad to see the young gentlemen are studying, I believe they are very backward in their lessons this year,’ a mild sarcasm which was the signal for all the undergraduates and their rougher allies in the rows behind to jump up and start shouting. After the customary three warnings from M. ‘to give order or leave the hall’ our stewards began putting the noisy men out. Crossman leapt at the platform and was immediately seized and chucked out. The iron chairs were freely used as weapons against the stewards and there was a great noise and pandemonium. I flattened myself against the wall in order to keep as far as possible from the assailants. Within twenty minutes calm was restored, all the trouble-makers had been put out in the street, and M. resumed his speech. A large and peaceful audience listened to his economic policy for an hour, and then put questions to him for almost another hour. This was a typical ‘violent’ meeting. It was always a surprise to see how few in numbers the noisy interrupters had been—a couple of dozen in an audience of several hundred on this occasion. Needless to say the fight, which had been short and sharp, was all that was reported in the newspapers. The peaceful meeting which followed was not mentioned, nor, obviously, the points made by M. in his speech. .

  There was a sequel many years afterwards. When Robert Skidelsky was writing his life of M he went to see Maurice Bowra, the Warden of Wadham, who had described the meeting in his memoirs. Maurice said: ‘I think you should see this,’ and he gave Robert a letter written to him by the man who had been Chief Constable of Oxford in 1936. The Chief Constable said he had read Maurice’s book and his (second-hand) account of the Carfax Rooms meeting, and felt it was unfair to M. That Sir Oswald was very patient with interrupters until they all jumped up and began shouting and fighting, was the gist of the letter.

  It was honest of Maurice to show Skidelsky the Chief Constable’s letter; since, however, his book of memoirs was already published when he received it his contribution to the controversy is the usual condemnation of ‘fascist violence’. As the memoirs, unlike Maurice himself, are dull, no second edition ever gave the Chief Constable’s reaction.

  The Oxford meeting reputedly made Frank Pakenham, at the time a conservative, into a socialist. He got a bang on the head in the mêlée. How true this is 1 do not know, but M. subsequently claimed full credit for ‘putting him on the Labour front bench’.

  In 1936 M. and I decided to get married. I also made up my mind to leave Eaton Square and live in the country. I asked the agent to look for a house within reach of Manchester, because M. spent so much time in the Midlands and north of England and it would be a great convenience if we had a house there where he could stay rather than going to hotels and inns. One day the house-agent showed me a photograph of Wootton Lodge in Staffordshire. ‘How beautiful,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a white elephant,’ said the agent.

  M. and I went to have a look at it. We drove down a long avenue of beech trees and after about a mile we saw the house. It is a magically beautiful place, an early seventeenth-century stone house with windows that remind one of Hardwick: ‘Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall.’ It stands on a rocky eminence surrounded by wooded hills. It belonged to a handsome old sailor, Captain Unwin V.C. We rented it unfurnished, intending to buy it later on, as he was anxious to sell. This was the second time in my life that I had the good fortune to live in a perfectly lovely house; I imagined it was to be my home for good.

  Just before I moved in Farve had one of his periodic sales at which I bought quantities of furniture for a song; the market for antiques was still in the depths of slump. I was pleased to have these old familiar things about me at Wootton, which was as perfect inside as out, with splendid early eighteenth-century panelling in almost every room.

  The garden was arranged in terraces because the ground descended steeply to lakes far below. Here M. fished for trout on summer evenings. The, woods were full of bluebells in spring, there were streams and immensely aged oaks. There
were few pheasants and no hunting; we kept a couple of horses for hacking and a pony for the boys. Everybody was happy at Wootton, it had a delightful atmosphere as well as a noble aspect; each day there was perfection. When snow fell great soft heaps of it weighed down the boughs of an old cedar on the lawn beneath the drawing-room windows, outlined the walls and the two pavilions flanking the entrance, and lit the interior of the house with white reflections. A few miles away the Weaver Hill was the shape of a miniature mountain; it kept its snowy peak for most of the winter. The boys took their toboggans on the steep slopes near the house, the very same toboggans Tom and I had used when I crashed into the electric light house at Batsford. Wootton looked magic, glittering in the snow.

  Sometimes in winter and more often in summer an even, dark grey sky made the whole place sombre. The gardeners said it was millions of little flies far away up in the air which hid the sun. Really I suppose it was an encroachment from the black country, from Sheffield, Manchester, Bolton, Derby and the Staffordshire potteries, none of them a great distance from Wootton. The wind changed and soon drove away the swarming flies, or smuts, and then nowhere on earth could be more delicately and brightly coloured than the Wootton garden and woods and lakes. We treasured our days spent in this heavenly place and imagined a long future together there, which was not to be.

  Just before I left Eaton Square and went to live at Wootton the Churchills invited me to luncheon at a flat they had near Westminster Cathedral. It was some time since I had seen them, though I remember going down to Chartwell one day and meeting there a wonderfully beautiful girl: she was Angela, Johnny Churchill’s wife. At the flat the other guest was Ivor Churchill; Sarah ran in for a moment on her way to a dancing lesson. She was already determined upon a stage career. Out of the unpromising material of a house that was frankly ugly, Clementine with her usual talent had succeeded in creating loveliness.