The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell

  Hitler’s contingent left Breslau and flew to Nuremberg in two planes, and continued on by car to Bayreuth. By now Unity was feeling so ill that she chose to fly in the second plane, fearing that she might infect Hitler. On arrival at Bayreuth she collapsed with pneumonia and was admitted to a private clinic. Hitler instructed that all medical bills were to be sent to him and before he left for Berlin he sent Unity flowers and ordered his personal physician to remain in Bayreuth to care for her. Sydney flew out immediately, and was horrified to find that instead of relying on the natural healing processes of ‘the good body’, Unity was submitting to ten or fifteen different injections each day from Theodor Morrell. She was very unhappy about this, but as Hitler - who trusted the doctor implicitly, even though it was later discovered that Morrell’s treatments caused him harm - had sent a telegram begging Unity to do everything the doctor ordered, she realized that any protests were pointless.16

  Ten days later David flew out to take over as bedside-sitter while Sydney returned to England. On the day Unity was discharged David discovered that Hitler had already paid her bill and sent signed photographs of himself to her nurses.17 There were no circumstances under which David would have been prepared to allow another man to foot the expenses of his unmarried daughter. However, his immense old-fashioned charm ensured that no feelings were ruffled when he reimbursed Hitler, and during Unity’s convalescence the two men met several times. With the exception of Derek Jackson, whom he scarcely understood, David seldom liked the men his daughters liked, and referred to his sons-in-law as ‘the man Mosley, the boy Romilly and the bore Rodd’. Somewhat to his surprise, however, he found that he rather liked Hitler. ‘Farve really does adore him in the way we do,’ Unity wrote to Diana, grossly exaggerating this, ‘and treasures every word and expression.’18

  Considering the state of European politics in August 1938, one might be forgiven for assuming that Sydney left because she was in danger of being trapped in a war zone. However, she flew home because Nancy had had a miscarriage; within three weeks she was back again for the Nuremberg Parteitag. The Redesdales stayed at the Grand Hotel where, a witness recalled, they seemed out of place. Lady Redesdale was always to be found sitting over her needlework in a corner of the lounge while Lord Redesdale helped her find her needles or wandered around ‘with a bewildered air as though he were at a rather awkward house party where (curiously enough) nobody could speak English’.19

  In the interim Dr Morrell’s injections, or perhaps the Good Body, had done their work and Unity was well enough to attend the rally with her parents. Nancy’s friend Robert Byron joined them, using the ticket Unity had obtained for Tom, who at the last minute found he could not attend. Byron was vehemently anti-Fascist and attended out of curiosity to compare Germany with his experiences on a recent visit to Moscow. Unity’s party was seated in the front row, so close that Byron found he could meet the eyes of ‘Hitler and his henchmen’. Not surprisingly, Nuremberg was the focal point of the international press corps that year, and over tea one day Unity found herself sharing a table with freelance correspondent Virginia Cowles, who had earlier noticed the Nazi hierarchy ‘bowing and scraping’ to Unity, and kissing her hand. ‘She seemed rather embarrassed by their attention,’ she wrote. Hitler took his reserved table with Lord Stamp, Lord Brocket, Ward Price and Herr Henlein. He looked grim and his eyes swept the room but when his gaze lighted on Unity he suddenly smiled and saluted her. She saluted back, and shortly afterwards an orderly came over and invited her to Hitler’s suite in the Hotel Deutscher Hof after tea. When Cowles saw her a few hours later she asked Unity what Hitler had said and if she thought there would be a war. ‘I don’t think so,’ Unity replied ingenuously. ‘The Führer doesn’t want his new buildings bombed,’20

  But Hitler’s closing speech on 12 September, in which he ‘promised’ the Sudeten Germans his help, made conflict in some form inevitable, and Byron left immediately to avoid being trapped.21 Three days later, in a last-ditch attempt to prevent war, sixty-nine-year-old Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made the first flight of his life, arriving in Germany for what would be a series of high-level talks at Hitler’s mountain home. In all, Chamberlain made three visits in two weeks. Meanwhile, the Redesdales departed to England, unable to persuade Unity to accompany them, though she promised to fly home for Christmas.22 In the meantime she went to Austria to Janos von Almassy’s home and the two went on to Venice. Members of the Mitford family, who have read her diaries at the time of this holiday, are ‘fairly sure she had a brief love affair’ with him.23

  Diana’s statement about Decca in connection with the May Day parade was only partially correct. She was not aware of it but Decca was pregnant in 1938. The exact dates are not known but Decca wrote that she was ‘twenty-one . . . when I had my one and only abortion’, which, if strictly accurate, would place the event after her birthday on 11 September. To have been pregnant during the 1938 May Day march means she conceived soon after Julia’s birth so she must have had the abortion between the May Day march and Julia’s death on the twenty-eighth of that month, after which the Romillys ‘ran away’ to Corsica. And it raises questions. By her own admission both Esmond and Philip Toynbee knew of the pregnancy. Why did she need to terminate it? Perhaps the thought of two tiny babies within a year was too much for her to countenance, or for the Romillys to finance. Yet it must have happened then if Decca’s recollection in Hons and Rebels is accurate. If not, she must have run several incidents together: her acute memory of the huge May Day rally, and of seeing her sisters protesting on another day.

  Most likely Decca had the termination some weeks after she and Esmond returned to London from Corsica. There are no further details and speculation is pointless, but it is known that she found it a traumatic experience. Twenty years later she wrote about it during a campaign to legalize abortion in the USA. By then she was a leading civil-rights campaigner and had recently tried to help a young woman who needed a pregnancy terminated. She was appalled to find that in California in the 1950s there was still one rule for the poor, the back-street abortionist, and another for the rich, the private clinic that didn’t ask too many questions. Just one. ‘Tell your friend,’ the Californian doctor instructed Decca, ‘that if she’s had the merchandise for more than three months it can’t be returned.’

  When she decided to have her abortion in 1938, Decca wrote, it was not only an illegal act but the subject was taboo. Clearly she was not aware of Diana’s terminated pregnancy some years earlier for she stated that she did not even consider consulting anybody in her family because they ‘wouldn’t have been likely to have useful ideas on the subject’ and furthermore she was ‘estranged’ from them. Instead she sought advice from a friend, a woman older than herself who was ‘a Bohemian’, and was given an address: ‘There’s no telephone,’ her friend said. ‘Just go there, and take five pounds in cash.’ This represented a week’s wages for Esmond, as Decca indirectly pointed out. She took a bus and a tube to where the abortionist lived ‘deep in the East End slums’, rang the bell and announced nervously, while holding out five one-pound notes, that she had an introduction from a friend:

  She wasn’t what I had expected - a hard-bitten Dickensian crone. No, just an ordinary middle-aged Englishwoman plying her trade . . . At her direction I undressed and lay on a bed. I was a bit surprised that there was no sign of sterilization of the instruments, which she fished out of her underclothes drawer . . . Her method was injection of soap into the uterus, which would in about five hours induce labour. The procedure was horribly painful, hardly ameliorated when the abortionist cautioned just as I was leaving, ‘If you get sick, don’t call in the doctor, because if you should die, I’ll swing.’ [A reminder that the death penalty was in force] . . . I did get sick, I did call a doctor - and I survived. Years later I read in a magazine that abortion by soap injection was by far the most dangerous of all methods, resulting in a huge number of deaths . . .24

  Because Diana was also pregna
nt through the summer of 1938, her presence - even accidentally - at any march after August (when Unity was in Germany) is questionable. She certainly felt that her pregnancy was too advanced to attend the Parteitag and was taking things easy at Wootton. That month Debo had paid her a surprise visit accompanied by two young men, one of whom was Lord Andrew Cavendish, younger son of the 10th Duke of Devonshire. The couple had met a short time earlier in a restaurant off Curzon Street. ‘I first saw her at Eton, when she was fifteen or sixteen, and stunningly beautiful,’ he recalled in an interview. ‘Then we met at a dinner party . . . and if it wasn’t love at first sight it was certainly attraction at first sight.’25 For the moment, however, they were keeping this to themselves. Debo had been expressly forbidden to visit Wootton and her companions were clearly nervous when Diana introduced Mosley, who had been fishing in the lake with Diana’s two sons from her first marriage. ‘They all looked as if they had seen a ghost,’ Diana reported to Unity. ‘Debo said they were frightened they might be shot at.’26

  Diana’s third child, Alexander, was born in November. Mosley had given up his flat in Ebury Street for a house in Grosvenor Road. It was a five-minute walk from the Houses of Parliament and the windows overlooked the Thames. It was here that Diana had her baby. ‘From my bed I could see across the black November water to the wharves on the far bank: they were blanketed in snow,’ she wrote.27 Later, she took the baby home to Wootton, which became for her, for the first time, a real family home. Nanny Higgs, who had formerly looked after Jonathan and Desmond, ran the nursery.

  Alexander’s birth obliged the Mosleys to make public the fact that they were married. Following a year of concentrated networking in Germany, Diana was advised shortly after the Anschluss, when Germany acquired all the Austrian wavelengths, ‘You have your wavelength, and a very nice one too.’28 The contract was signed and sealed three weeks before Alexander’s birth and work began immediately to construct a transmitter on the island of Borkum in the North Sea. The secrecy felt to be essential in 1936 was no longer a major issue, but Mosley’s name did not feature in the contracts. However, there was a price to pay. The news of the two-year-old marriage was a sensation, and filled the front pages of newspapers with stories trumpeting (incorrectly) that ‘Hitler Was Mosley’s Best Man at Secret Wedding’, and articles such as ‘The Family That Mosley Has Married Into’, which detailed the colourful histories of Diana’s divorce, Decca’s elopement and Unity’s close friendship with Hitler. The Redesdales were upset: they seemed never to grow hardened to publicity about their daughters. But their reaction was tame compared to that of Mosley’s family connections. Nobody in his family knew of the marriage, not even his mother who had supported him and filled the role of ‘first lady’ of the Blackshirt movement since the death of Cimmie, or his eldest son, fifteen-year-old Nicholas, who was then at Eton. They found out about the marriage, and the new baby, from the newspapers.

  Mosley’s Curzon sisters-in-law could scarcely believe it was true. Initially, one reporter got the detail wrong and asked Mosley outright whether it was true that he had been married secretly in Munich a year earlier. Mosley denied the story cleverly, stating simply that he had not been in Munich for the previous two years, and there is a strong suggestion here that even at this late stage he would have preferred that the marriage remained secret. But it was soon evident that there had been a marriage, and it was confirmed in the BUF newspaper Action. Baba, who was on a train between London and Paris when she read the news, was understandably distraught since her relationship with Mosley had continued unchecked since the summer following Cimmie’s death. Later she stated that she would not have allowed the affair to continue, had she known that Mosley and Diana were married. Since she was married herself this seems a curious morality, but that is another story. Mosley claimed to journalists that the reason for secrecy was that he was concerned Diana would suffer abuse and even personal danger were it known she was married to him. Diana was confident that the real reason was the secrecy necessary to establish the radio station without any traceable link to Mosley. But Cimmie’s sisters, Irene Ravensdale and Baba Metcalfe, and Nicholas Mosley, always believed that the real reason was that Mosley did not want his affair with Baba to end.29

  Irene Ravensdale was in America when the news broke, and she wrote in her autobiography that she nearly fainted when she was told. There had been a vague rumour a year earlier about a marriage, but Mosley had categorically denied it to her. Now it appeared the story had been true, and ‘that Hitler had been the best man [sic] and Goebbels the chief witness’. She claimed to have found this shocking,30 but she wrote this twenty years later, after Hitler and the British Fascist movement had been thoroughly discredited. Irene Ravensdale was a keen supporter of Mosley and the BUF throughout the thirties, and her latterday statements seem designed to distance herself from that. She knew all about Mosley’s affair with Baba, and sanctioned it as a means of weaning him from Diana, so her remark that she felt Mosley’s ‘excuses of the need for secrecy . . . were pretty sordid’31 sounds much closer to the truth.

  That summer Nancy had also discovered, to her great joy, that she was pregnant. Like Pam she had been trying unsuccessfully to have a baby for some years and the conventional treatment, dilation and curettage (also used for legal abortions), was, no doubt, why she referred to foetuses as ‘the scrapage’. Having submitted to this treatment in the spring of 1938 her pregnancy was confirmed in July. She was advised to remain in bed for the first four weeks and thereafter to rest as much as possible. In August, when Sydney flew home from Munich, leaving Unity in hospital, she took Nancy to stay with her friend Helen Dashwood at West Wycombe. After this Nancy went to the cottage to look after Debo, while Sydney returned to Munich for the Parteitag.

  After a week the two sisters moved to Rutland Gate, where Nancy kept up her chatty teasing correspondence to amuse herself during the tedious ‘resting’ stage. As usual the Rodds were desperately short of money, and could scarcely afford to live themselves, let alone raise a child. ‘Of course it is lunatic really,’ she wrote happily to Robert Byron, ‘I quite see that but one must never be deterred from doing what one wants for lack of money don’t you agree?’ An aunt had written and hoped it would be a boy so that it could inherit from Lord Rodd, but Nancy said, ‘If I thought for a minute it would be a boy I’d go for a bicycle ride here & now - 2 Peter Rodds in 1 house is unthinkable.’32 By the time David and Sydney arrived at Rutland Gate from Munich, on 17 September, Nancy was in bed recovering from the miscarriage that had occurred a day or so earlier. Nancy never wrote about her loss, but it seems that she felt it deeply. She was thirty-four, and although her doctor had told her there was no reason why she should not conceive again it seemed unlikely to her as Prod had embarked on yet another of his serial love affairs. Added to which he was out of work again. She blamed her inability to conceive on her mother: apparently, as a small child, she had suffered from an infection of the urethra and, of course, Sydney had refused to call a doctor. Nancy always felt that the damage this caused was the reason for the gynaecological problems she suffered as an adult.33

  Decca was taking part in a market-research survey in Southampton when the Prime Minister returned from Munich in apparent triumph but, of course, having given in to all of Hitler’s demands over Czechoslovakia. A visitor who called on the Romillys at this point recalls that, although Decca was young, her ‘intellectual brilliance in matters of political vision made her almost clairvoyant: she predicted the Nazi attack on Poland and on the Soviet Union, and . . . the incredible period of suffering for the British people’.34 Decca firmly believed, and did so for a long time, however, that it was just her ‘class’, people like her parents, uncles, aunts, and the suited members of the Cliveden set ‘with their furled umbrellas, so symbolic of furled minds’, that was the cause of Britain being swept into war, because of their acceptance - or even active support - of Fascism in Europe. Perhaps this view was hardly surprising when half of her family was
in Germany that month, enjoying Hitler’s hospitality.

  But Decca was astonished when Chamberlain returned, clutching his furled umbrella and waving his bit of paper, to find that the working people she spoke to were overjoyed. ‘But it’s peace,’ they told her, ‘peace in our time. That’s good, isn’t it?’ More than anything she wanted to finish her work and get back to London and Esmond, for surely, she thought, there this capitulation to Fascism would have made people sit up and take notice. But she found Esmond profoundly depressed: the storm of public indignation he had anticipated over Czechoslovakia had simply not materialized.35 In a sense this put an end to what Philip Toynbee referred to as ‘the wild and comical capers . . . cut by Esmond and Decca’. People suddenly woke up to the fact that war was now a strong possibility, despite Mr Chamberlain’s signed contract with Hitler, and the government began to take the measures to prepare for conflict that Winston Churchill had advocated for several years. What Diana calls ‘war fever’ now affected everybody in Britain. Gas masks were issued to every citizen, trenches were dug in London parks, conscription was to be brought in, and armament production speeded up.