The Viceroy's Daughters

by Anne de Courcy

  On May 28 Tom made his resignation speech as a minister in the House of Commons. It was a tour de force. “Mosley’s speech in the second attack on Thomas is acclaimed as that of a distinguished parliamentary orator, wholly admirable in manner and style,” wrote Beatrice Webb. She went on to ask the question at the back of many minds.

  Has MacDonald found his superseder in Oswald Mosley? MacDonald owes his pre-eminence largely to the fact that he is the only artist, the only aristocrat by temperament and talent, in a party of plebeians and plain men. Hitherto he has had no competitor in personal charm and good looks, delightful voice and the gift of oratory. But Mosley has all these with the élan of youth, wealth and social position added to them.

  Mosley still has a young man’s zeal. He lacks MacDonald’s strongest point—genuine puritanism. He is entangled in the smart set and luxurious habits; he is reputed to be loose with women; he rouses suspicion, he knows little or nothing about trade unionism or Co-operation, he cannot get on terms of intimacy with working men or with the lower middle-class brainworker. He is, in fact, an intruder, a foreign substance in the labour movement, not easily assimilated.

  In Melton, Irene was finding the life she had chosen for herself increasingly hollow. The most noticeable difference made by the Prince of Wales’s departure was an increase in the wildness of the parties. Drunkenness that would have been frowned upon in his presence was becoming commonplace—“Charlie took off his trousers and did fearful dances in white pants,” “Peter Ackroyd was found drunk in a spare room in the morning, stark naked in bed.” At the Melton Ball Irene ran out of the building to escape the harassing advances of one man only to have another, whom she did not care for, propose to her on the way home.

  Everything seemed to conspire to depress her. She was losing money constantly at bridge and, though this was not a financial worry, it made her feel stupid and incompetent. She saw the same old faces at all the parties; one evening, with a similarly disillusioned woman friend, she worked out what it was about them that so irked her. “Diagnosed our disgust and antipathy to 90 percent of the hunting people as their being really common, no breeding—tho’ I hate that word—and so having no rare sensitiveness or exquisite feeling which jars so badly on one day after day.”

  Yet “breeding” was not really the problem: Irene made friends delightedly with writers, artists and musicians, black, white or Jewish, without a thought as to their lineage. She sent roses to Mrs. Paul Robeson, she went constantly to the Polish embassy with her friend Jan Masaryk (the future foreign minister of Czechoslovakia), she was half in love with Arthur Rubinstein.

  The underlying cause of her unhappiness was the knowledge that her love for Gordon had no future. She should, she knew, avoid seeing him—but this would mean giving up hunting. As it was, every sight of him was a pang. Unable to cut him out of her life completely, she saw him occasionally, with disastrous results. “G dined with me. Had a ghastly breakdown of weeping and misery after and had to get Lena [Lena Sibley, her lady’s maid] down or else I should have gone mad. Devotedly Lena held my hand with hankies on my aching brow till I fell asleep at about three.”

  She was less unhappy when she returned to London in the late spring. Although her future looked barren, the present, with its wider circle of friends, its plays, concerts and galleries, and its physical proximity to her sisters, was more agreeable. There were teas with Cim at Smith Square, where politicians and housemaids would pass one another on the single staircase, and a chance to play with the children in their nursery or watch them being bathed.

  In default of the motherhood for which she longed, she was a devoted aunt. When seven-year-old Nicky had appendicitis she was a constant visitor; when she went to Baba’s house there was two-and-a-half-year-old David toddling across the nursery floor toward her ready for the games and romps he did not always get from his mother. “I seem to understand my sisters’ children so much better than they do,” she reflected with a touch of complacency.

  Although Ascot was rained out, the social round scarcely faltered. Every hour of the day seemed packed with concerts, plays, dances, private views, fancy-dress parties, cocktail parties followed by dinner, followed by bridge, followed by supper at the Hungaria or the Savoy. The Mosleys gave enormous weekend house parties, or invited friends for the day to Denham, where they played tennis, lay on the lawn, bathed in the river or unwillingly listened to a sparring match between Cim and Tom.

  After one of these episodes, perhaps because Irene had witnessed it, Cim was unpleasant to her at that evening’s ball (on July 8). “You do not look your best. I think you had better go home.” Irene fled in tears, to be consoled by the faithful Lena. A few days later Cim rubbed in the message that Irene should acquire a husband before it was too late by telling her how Bendor [the duke of Westminster] adored Loelia Ponsonby and how Irene should be in that position—but wasn’t.

  It was a rare display of nastiness from the normally sweet-natured Cim. Tom’s unfaithfulnesses brought out qualities alien to her happy, carefree nature. Despite the urging of Baba and Irene, who wanted her to give Tom a fright, she had always refused to visit the bachelor flat in Ebury Street that Tom had taken; it would have smacked of snooping and spying and she could well imagine his jibes about such activities, but she could hardly stop herself imagining what went on there.

  Meanwhile the arguments went on. When Irene returned to her house in Deanery Street one evening at eleven-thirty it was to find Cim and Tom there having a row. “It was just about some stupid bill and he rushed off in the car in a rage and poor dazed Cim still could not see how it had all arisen.” That night, Cimmie stayed on at Irene’s house and wrote miserably to Tom:

  I am entirely bewildered. I just don’t understand—why have you been so horrid to me not only tonight but ever since I got up from chickenpox. As the sound of my voice and my presence (and you’ve seen so little of me) seem to drive you demented I resort to poor Irene’s method of putting pen to paper.

  You leave me alone in London for the weekend to look after Nicky [their son Nicholas, aged seven, had just been operated on for appendicitis] and go away with another woman for the weekend. You never see Nicky from before his op. Saturday morning till Monday evening . . .

  It was little better in Cowley Street. Baba, when not disagreeable (“Of course she criticized my lovely black fur coat and said the collar was wrong”) seemed always to be “in the extremes of gloom.” Baba was pregnant again, but what was causing her depression was a gradual disillusionment with her marriage. The truth was that she and Fruity were very different people, and after the natural decline in the sexual excitement of the first years they had little in common. Fruity was charming, kind, delightful, funny and supremely loyal, but even his best friends did not call him clever. “Fruity is a sweet man but too stupid,” wrote Georgia Sitwell in her diary, after an evening in a party with him at the Kit-Cat Club.

  Baba’s shift in perspective had been brought about by several factors. Fruity running the Prince of Wales’s horses, trying hunters for him, managing his stables, was a man doing a job at which he was expert, and like all professionals actively exercising a supreme skill, commanded respect. But now that the prince had given up hunting, Fruity’s job had disappeared. He was still the prince’s best friend and the Metcalfes still moved constantly in the prince’s circle, but there was a great difference between a husband active, occupied and full of plans and one often hanging around the house.

  There was also the financial discrepancy. During the Melton years, when her husband filled a role that they and their circle considered important, the difference between Fruity’s income and Baba’s had not seemed important. In London, with a different way of life, friends with wider interests, and a house and nursery to run, the balance shifted. From the early days of their courtship the devoted Fruity had always tried to do what his “Babs” wanted and the pattern, set in stone by the fact that Baba paid most of the bills, emphasized her dominance in the relati
onship.

  She had so far indulged only in mild flirtations, but she was conscious of her sexual power. She was beautiful, with high-cheekboned, aristocratic looks, her witty remarks delivered in a languid drawl; her slim figure was always exquisitely dressed. The sophisticated assurance she exuded masked the powerful libido she had inherited from her father. It was a combination many men found challenging—and irresistible.

  More crucially, at twenty-six Baba was not the same person as the dazzled girl who had fallen so headlong in love with a man whom no dispassionate observer would have picked as her husband. She had grown up and her mind was expanding. She had just begun, also, to take an interest in the charity that would occupy so much of her time in later life—the Save the Children Fund. She wanted occupation, conversation and company that was intelligent as well as fun.

  The Mosleys went off as usual to Antibes on August 2, 1930. Irene, still hankering after Gordon, decided once again to put the sea between them. Before she left on a tour of Norway, the Baltic and Russia, she went to one of the last house parties given by Grace at Hackwood. It was dominated by Margot Asquith, more eccentric and outspoken than ever. “Margot tyrannical over her bridge. I had her both evenings with Chips [Channon] and Alfred [Duggan]. She got me so rattled I was paralysed. I lost £43 and the old girl won £38 and Chips £56. The tennis was poor. Margot played golf with Chips in black shoes, red socks and white silk stockings, a baby’s shetland and a black and white spotted skirt, the ball ricocheting off every mole hill.”

  Irene returned in September, but even the consolation of an old admirer and a happy dinner with Fruity, Baba, Cim and Tom at Smith Square was not enough to blot out thoughts of Gordon. She set off again in October, this time for the Middle East. She was called home from her travels when Baba gave birth to twin daughters on November 14, 1930, after a long and hard labor, and became so ill that it was feared she might not live.

  Irene’s anxiety over Baba was such that she did not leave London to hunt until the New Year. Even Cliveden was depressing. “A dark autumnal day,” wrote Harold Nicolson, visiting it in late November. “Thirty-two people in the house. Cold and draughty. Great sofas in vast cathedrals. Duff and Diana Cooper, Tom and Cimmie, Oliver and Lady Maureen Stanley, Harold Macmillan and Lady Dorothy, Brendan Bracken, Bob Boothby, Malcolm Bullock and Garvin [the editor of the Observer]. After dinner Nancy, fearful that her party was falling apart, whisked out her false teeth and put on a Victorian hat to make the party go. It did not.”

  When Georgia Sitwell went to tea with Cim and Tom at Smith Square the talk was of politics and Baba’s poor health. Baba stayed with Cim and Tom at Savehay Farm to recuperate from the birth of the twins, refusing to allow Fruity to leave her side. When Cim took him off to Hackwood one day there were scenes: Baba, accustomed to having her own way, had a full-scale temper tantrum. Irene, there to keep her company in the intervals of looking after her maid Lena, who had just been diagnosed with cancer, listened crossly as Baba yelled that she had been left alone and no one loved her. A few days later, back in Cowley Street, she was cheerful again.

  Irene was dividing her time between dashing back to London to see Baba and Lena, whose tumor was so large it was inoperable, hunting—often with Fruity—and the inevitable games of poker. There was one notable absentee, she recorded. “Thelma, due to join Duke in Africa, produced mysterious appendicitis in Paris, returned after ten days there and is now off again!!! What is the ‘Princess of Wales’ up to? I lost £8.”

  In February 1931 Fruity, worried by Baba’s continuing pallor and thinness, took her to Torquay for a fortnight in the hope that the sea air would restore her health. It was not until March 4 that the twins, Davina and Linda, were christened at the Chapel Royal, Baba exquisite in a broad-tail coat with sable collar and cuffs, tight black hat and orchids pinned on her collar. Cimmie, in an eerie foreshadowing of her future, was dressed completely in black.

  16

  The New Party

  “Tom is organising his new party,” wrote Harold Nicolson, staying at Savehay Farm for the weekend, in his diary for February 15, 1931. “Poor Cimmie cannot follow his repudiation of all the things he has taught her to say previously. She was not made for politics. She was made for society and the home.”

  For Tom had decided that the only way to achieve what he wanted was to strike out on his own. He was disillusioned with what he saw as the apathy of the government, he lacked the patience necessary to make the political machinery work for rather than against him, he believed that something had to be done quickly—and he very much wanted personal power. He decided to found a new political party, which he called, quite simply, the New Party.

  He planned his resignation from the Labour Party for February 20; after him would go, one after the other to ensure maximum publicity, the five other members of the group who had signed the Mosley Manifesto—Cimmie, John Strachey, W. J. Brown, Oliver Baldwin and Robert Forgan. He also hoped eventually to draw into the New Party other young and restless MPs sympathetic to his ideas, including some of the younger Conservatives such as Harold Macmillan, Bob Boothby, Oliver Stanley and Walter Elliot.

  “An amazing act of arrogance,” Beatrice Webb commented in her diary on February 25, 1931. “Oswald Mosley’s melodramatic defection from the Labour Party, slamming the door with a bang to resound through the political world . . . Mosley’s sensational exit will matter supremely to himself and his half-dozen followers but very little to the Labour Party . . . except that it means the loss of five seats, the other resignations are of no importance to the Labour movement. The New Party will never get born alive; it will be a political abortion.”

  The first to hand in their resignations were Strachey and Baldwin. Then, on March 3, Cimmie resigned. Her letter to the prime minister said:

  I have been forced to the conclusion that the present Labour Government differs little from the preceding Tory and Liberal Governments.

  Every attempt to make the Front Bench face up to the situation and put through an adequate and comprehensive policy to deal with unemployment has met with complete failure.

  The Government has pursued a policy which leaves the electorate tragically disillusioned, as I confess I am myself.

  The speech of the Chancellor of the Exchequer the other day finally confirms my opinion that the Government has abdicated to a complete acceptance of the philosophy of their most reactionary opponents.

  Ramsay MacDonald replied privately in a vein that mixed the regretful with the savagely ironic.

  When you came in a year or two ago we gave you a very hearty welcome and assumed that you knew what was the policy of the predominant socialist party in this country and that, with that knowledge, you asked us to accept you as a candidate and to go to your constituency and assist you in your fight.

  You are disappointed with us; you have been mistaken in your choice of political companions, and you are re-selecting them so as to surround yourself with a sturdier, more courageous and more intelligent socialism for your encouragement and strength. You remain true, while all the rest of us are false. Whoever examines manifestos and schemes and rejects them, partly because they are not the sort of socialism that any socialist has ever devised, or because they amount to nothing but words, is regarded by you as inept or incompetent.

  We must just tolerate your censure and even contempt; and, in the spare moments we have, cast occasional glances at you pursuing your heroic role with exemplary rectitude and stiff straightness to a disastrous futility and an empty sound. We have experienced so much of this in the building up of the Party that we must not become too cynical when the experience is repeated in the new phase of its existence. Perhaps before the end roads may cross again and we shall wonder why we ever diverged.

  The reaction to Cimmie’s resignation by her outraged constituents was immediate. The same day the political council of the Burslem and District Industrial Co-operative Society sent her a resolution expressing “great dissatisfaction” at her reporte
d attitude and requesting her to reconsider the proposed policy of resignation and breaking away from the party. The chairman of her constituency committee wrote reproachfully: “While I have always felt you were sincere in your desire to improve the lot of the people, I think your secession from the Labour Party is a bad let-down for all those who worked so wholeheartedly for you in your contest.”

  Tom’s behavior also caused much ill feeling in his Smethwick constituency, especially as Allan Young was approaching members of the Labour organization there, offering those known for their platform qualities five pounds week to speak for the New Party.

  We of the Birmingham Labour movement feel that you have let us down badly and justified all that your critics said when you came over to us [wrote the editor of the local Birmingham Labour newspaper]. Had you devoted your ability and eloquence to the task of converting a majority of the people to the socialist policy of the Labour party, thus ensuring the return of a majority Labour Government at the next election, you would have been a great figure in our Movement—honoured for your service and well rewarded with office. But you could not wait. And now you are being likened to Winston Churchill. I am sorry.

  Tom had planned the New Party carefully. His devoted lieutenant, John Strachey, would provide much of the intellectual firepower, the able Allan Young was the organizer and Cyril Joad, from the Independent Labour Party, became director of propaganda. Tom had secured some financial backing from the car magnate Sir William Morris, and was prepared to pour his own fortune, now largely liquid, into the New Party coffers.