Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (19 page)

III

Her fate was bound up with Diana’s, although Diana disclaimed any responsibility. ‘Unity was a revolutionary,’ she later said. ‘The end would have been the same whether I had taken her to Germany or not.’

There was, too, the question of what the end would have been had Diana not met Sir Oswald Mosley at a lunch party in February 1932.

On that occasion she took so little notice in the great seducer that Bryan, who watched his wife with a sad relentless constancy that must have driven her mad, saw no cause for concern. Soon afterwards, however, Mosley began his pursuit; and all changed. He had been observing Diana since a ball the previous summer, given at the Park Lane house owned by her brother’s friend, Sir Philip Sassoon. He had an eye on her, naturally. Pre-publicity is a great aid to desire, and no woman in London had more of that than Diana. Afterwards he wrote that she had the ‘ineffable expression of a Gothic madonna’; it is interesting that whereas romantics like James Lees-Milne saw her in Italianate form, as a Raphael, for Mosley her beauty was that of the older, northern European kind.

The Mosley of 1931 – that is to say, before history did its work upon him – was not exactly the male counterpart to Diana, but he was a figure of similar note in society. He had already been the coming man, a star from the very first, when he entered Parliament after the First World War. Now he was taking a breather –
reculer pour mieux sauter
, as he would have seen it – and planning to launch himself on the political stage: this time on his own terms. He was also famous within upper-class London circles as a formidable philanderer, despite his marriage to Lady Cynthia Curzon. Using the phraseology of the field sportsman, he called his pursuit of married women ‘flushing the covers’. He was, in modern parlance, a textbook alpha male: the first that Diana had encountered as a potential mate, although she had grown up regarding such men as the norm – her two grandfathers in particular and, to an extent, her father.

Born in 1896 into the Staffordshire squirearchy, Mosley came from a family of considerable wealth, who had owned part of the land on which central Manchester was built. Named after his father, he was generally known as Tom, although Diana called him Kit (and Nancy called him Sir Ogre). He was brought up in the main by his grandfather, his parents having separated when he was five. ‘It was,’ he said, ‘a Corinthian childhood’:
⁸
deliberately tough and manly. His grandfather (whom he remembered with fondness) had been a boxer, and one day knocked him out with a single punch. Mosley was always remarkably keen on fitness, a fine rider and fencer, although at Winchester he disliked team games. His high-toned physical presence – standing braced, as if for action of who knew what kind – was central to his extraordinary confidence, to his political dynamism and sexual allure.

Having served in the army and the Royal Flying Corps, he won the safe seat of Harrow for the Conservatives in 1918 and, in 1920, made an alliance with the Curzon family that was, in career terms, quasi-dynastic. Lord Curzon was Foreign Secretary and former Viceroy of India. He was viewed as heir apparent to Andrew Bonar Law as prime minister, although it was (tellingly) middle-class Baldwin who got the job. He had three daughters, Cynthia being the second; always known as ‘Cimmie’, she was a good-looking girl and a prize by any standards. Her wedding to Mosley, the build-up to which was reported for days in the newspapers, was at the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace – by permission of George V, who attended along with a spectacular guest list including the Dowager Countess of Airlie, Diana’s great-grandmother. The reception was at Lord Curzon’s superb house on Carlton House Terrace.

Curzon’s money, which was in the Guinness league, came mostly from America; like a lot of peers he had shored up the family with commercial wealth. His first wife Mary was the daughter of a Jewish millionaire from Chicago. His second, Grace, was the widow of a hugely rich American. In between times he had an affair with the novelist Elinor Glyn, creator of the ‘It’ girl phenomenon. He had something in common with his son-in-law, in fact, although Mosley outstripped the competition by some distance. At one point after their marriage he confessed all his liaisons to Cimmie: ‘Well’, he remarked to Bob Boothby, ‘all except her stepmother and her sister.’ The sister referred to was Irene, Lady Ravensdale (a title she inherited in her own right). In the Mosley variation on a Chekhovian theme he later conducted an additional relationship with the other, married sister, Alexandra ‘Baba’ Metcalfe.

Infidelity is perfectly normal, of course, as is recreational sex. In Mosley’s circles it was almost expected for a man to pursue a pretty married woman (the uxorious Bryan Guinness was probably more unusual in his behaviour). Certainly nobody would have been shocked by it – everybody knew that people crept about country houses at night, looking for the desired nameplate on the bedroom door. Nevertheless there was a peculiar wilfulness about Mosley’s approach. He took lovers even though he much preferred the primary women in his life – Cimmie, then Diana – to any alternative; he did so to ridiculous excess; and one senses that he did it, as much as anything, to show off. Along with his sisters-in-law his conquests in the 1920s included Sylvia, Lady Ashley (a former chorus girl who later married Clark Gable) and Sacheverell Sitwell’s wife, Georgia. During a summer weekend at the Mosleys’ country house, Savehay, in Buckinghamshire, Georgia Sitwell wrote: ‘Tom evidently fancies himself very much in bathing shorts.’ How one can picture it. In the twelve years between his marriage and his meeting with Diana, Mosley had some three dozen affairs. This secondary career was facilitated when he acquired a ‘bachelor flat’ in Ebury Street in 1929; he also used ‘fencing practice’ as an alibi. Cimmie, in the main, was deceived. A kind and popular woman, an extremely supportive (and rich) wife, the mother of three children, she thought the best of Mosley and assuredly deserved better from him.

He quickly made a name for himself in politics, but again in that slightly deviant show-off way, almost as if he sought to put himself outside a situation that was comfortable and promising. In this, as in much else, he resembled Diana. By 1922 he was standing as an ‘Independent Conservative’ – railing against the government’s ‘failure to check excessive expenditure’ and the use of the Black and Tans in Ireland – and in 1924 he crossed the floor to join Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Party. Needless to say this was highly remarkable, given his class background, and much deplored by Lord Curzon. It was probably motivated less by conviction than by a desire to extricate himself from the Conservatives, with whom he had become rather unpopular; although, again like Diana, he was a staunch supporter of the miners in the General Strike, and genuinely exercised by the shameful levels of unemployment. At any rate, more than seventy local Labour constituencies invited him to stand as their candidate in the 1924 election. It was characteristic of Mosley that he chose to stand against Neville Chamberlain, a future prime minister whose family had held the Ladywood seat for fifty years. He nearly won. Two years later he took Smethwick for Labour in a by-election, and in 1927 he spoke at a meeting that was broken up by a pesky little group calling itself the British National Fascists. Cimmie, loyal to Mosley’s defection and a political animal herself, decided to stand as a Labour candidate: she won Stoke-on-Trent in 1929. Mosley gave her a brooch with the figures of her majority spelled out in rubies. The previous year his father had died, leaving him a baronetcy – ‘not worth renouncing’, Mosley airily decreed – and some £250,000. The couple’s massive combined wealth and continued presence in high society was, inevitably, repellent and baffling to many in the party. ‘It was truly an amazing and saddening spectacle,’ wrote a commentator upon the way in which Mosley was embraced by Labour, ‘to see these working men... literally prostrate themselves in their worship of the Golden Calf.’ But the British relationship with class is complex, antagonistic yet underpinned by mysterious yearnings. The conjunction in Mosley of old-style paternalism and modern dynamism created an astonishing force that some, for sure, found irresistible.

A young German journalist described Mosley’s appearance at a Labour Party meeting in London in 1924:

Suddenly there was a movement in the crowd and a young man with the face of the ruling class of Great Britain but with the gait of a Douglas Fairbanks thrust himself forward through the throng to the platform followed by a lady [Cimmie] in heavy, costly furs. There stood Oswald Mosley, whose later ascent was to be one of the strangest phenomena of the working class movement of the world...

The new man spoke... It was a hymn, an emotional appeal directed not to the intellect, but to the Socialist idea.

Here, then, was the great orator in action. At the end of speech, the crowd was described as beside itself, ‘in uproar; as at a boxing match, or a fair’.

Given this mass appeal, which reads uncomfortably like a Nuremberg
en petit
, it was unsurprising that there were those in Parliament who distrusted the dashing young Labour baronet. Mosley would look around at his fellow MPs with an air of disdain and pronounce: ‘A dead fish rots from the head down.’ Nevertheless, as Bob Boothby wrote to Cimmie: ‘I think your husband (damned Socialist though he is By God) will be Prime Minister for a very very long time, because he has the Divine Spark which is almost lost nowadays...’ He was indeed spoken of in these terms. Stanley Baldwin growled that ‘Tom Mosley is a cad and a wrong ’un’, but in 1929, when he was promoted to Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster with the brief of tackling unemployment, it was Baldwin – and wary Labour men like Herbert Morrison – who seemed out of step.

The following year came the ‘Mosley Memorandum’: a manifesto for recovery that was subsequently described as both a generation ahead of its time and an alarming hint of tendencies to come. It combined Keynesian-style economics (for instance, unemployment to be dealt with in the short term by expensive road-building) with a plan for much stronger, indeed authoritarian executive powers. A large section of the Labour Party supported the Memorandum – although others thought it far too bold – and it was only narrowly defeated at the party conference in 1930. Typically, this spurred Mosley into irreversible action. He resigned from Labour, and in 1931 MacDonald formed a National Government. Effectively the party had been split, not exactly because of the Memorandum, but because of the divergent views that it exposed. Mosley, had he held on, would almost certainly have become Labour leader. His belief, however, was that he could bring his followers – who included Aneurin Bevan – to the New Party that he then formed. These events almost certainly explain the contempt that Diana later expressed for Ramsay MacDonald, and for the ‘Tory in all but name’ government that he led until 1935. (She often used her writings to settle old scores: for example Lady Diana Cooper’s husband Duff, who in 1923 described Mosley as a ‘canting, sliming, slobbering Bolshie [sic]’, was ripped to shreds thirty years on.
⁹
) Mosley was surely right in one thing: that more radical solutions were needed to the problem of unemployment, which stood at 2 million when he wrote the Memorandum, and would rise to 3 million by 1933. By then the New Party had evolved into the British Union of Fascists.

At the time of his first proper meeting with Diana, Mosley was in a limbo stage: out of Parliament, preparing for his next move, fatally available to pursue the goddess. The New Party had come and gone. In the 1931 election, all twenty-four of its candidates lost. James Lees-Milne had campaigned briefly for Mosley, although he was not really a convert. Years later he would recall his impressions of that time, and what he wrote is a fascinating indicator of the direction in which Mosley’s oratorical skills, his rock-star-like power to command an audience, were taking him. ‘He was in those days a man of overweening egotism... The posturing, the grimacing, the switching on and off of those gleaming teeth and the overall swashbuckling so purposeful and so calculated, were more likely to appeal to Mayfair flappers than to sway indigent workers in the Potteries.’ A previous supporter, Harold Nicolson, accompanied Mosley on a visit to Mussolini. He wrote: ‘He believes in fascism. I don’t.’ Yet Diana, who despite appearances was no Mayfair flapper, became convinced over the course of 1932 that Mosley was the man who could rescue Britain. ‘Occasionally we argued,’ she wrote. ‘But on the whole I was completely converted.’ She believed in his belief. And, as Mitfords did, she gave him a nickname: ‘The Leader’.

IV

On the evening of Unity’s dance at Cheyne Walk, at which Diana wore a grey tulle dress of surpassing beauty and quantities of diamonds, she and Mosley finally pledged themselves to each other. At the same time he told her that he would never leave Cimmie. What Diana thought about this, who knows, but she accepted it to the extent that she did not give him up. This arrogant, errant lover weighed heavier in the balance than her husband (who wrote her a letter, poignant in its formal understatement, asking her to stop ‘lunching’ with Mosley), her two sons, her remarkable perfect life. The following morning Mosley rang the house and, heedless of who had answered the phone, said to the maid: ‘Darling, when can I see you again?’

During this same key period – between the ball in July and the launch of the BUF in October – the Guinnesses held a
fête champêtre
at Biddesden. Diana was crowned with a silver wig made by Robert Byron, Mosley was all in black (no surprise there), and according to a guest at the party: ‘Diana was telling everyone how thrilling she found him, like having a crush on a film star.’ She was, of course, only twenty-two. To the painter Henry Lamb, whom she caught looking at Mosley askance, she said in her smiling, self-mocking way: ‘You’re thinking what a frightful bounder he is.’ Her own behaviour was careless. She and Mosley spent much of the evening upstairs inside the house. Cimmie, dressed meekly as a shepherdess, was apparently aware of what was happening: the loyal wife, who followed her husband’s politics like one of her imaginary lambs and had painstakingly made a banner for the BUF, was being cheated on by her hostess while most of those present pretended not to notice. What Bryan thought can only be imagined. But he cannot have been wholly amazed when, in November 1932, Diana told him that she wanted to leave. Whether he believed that she meant it is another story. On New Year’s Eve she walked calmly into a party held by Mosley and Cimmie, at which the two other Curzon sisters, spitting blood on behalf of all three of them, were also present. It was a quite extraordinary thing to do, possible only if one is young, indifferent and high on conviction. The following day she took a lease on a little house in Eaton Square, cut-price because of its poor condition but close to Mosley’s flat – ‘Bloody damnable cursed Ebury,’ said Cimmie, who for all her saintliness was a woman of passion, ‘how often does she come there?’ Diana set up home with her sons and four servants; she had, at a stroke, become a highly public and unabashed Other Woman.