Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (32 page)

It was pretty much true that Sir Oswald Quisling, as Nancy now called him, was still engaged upon his usual business, although he would not be for much longer. The BU fought three by-elections between the outbreak of war and May 1940, and received pitifully few votes (as
The Times
put it, Mosley’s party held ‘the blue riband of the deposit-forfeiting world’). Their hour was over – their old headquarters in Chelsea was attacked, as was Mosley himself – but the leader was unwilling to accept it. ‘The question has been put to me why I do not cease all political activity in an hour of danger to our country,’ he wrote in May, as the Germans marched towards Paris and the British retreated to Dunkirk. ‘The answer is that I intend to do my best to provide the people with an alternative to the present government if, and when, they desire to make peace with the British Empire intact and our people safe.’ Even as this proclamation was appearing in the BU magazine, so the government was rushing through an extremely wide-ranging Emergency Powers Act. Within it, as detailed in Regulation 18b, was the ability to detain in prison ‘any particular person if satisfied that it is necessary to do so’.

Special Branch had, naturally enough, been investigating the BU since the declaration of war. It had learned a key fact: that Mosley, whose name had been carefully kept off all official documents, was involved in an agreement to broadcast from a German wireless station. There is no evidence that this was anything other than a commercial venture. Yet it could hardly have looked more suspicious; particularly when William Joyce – who had been a prominent BU member – began his propaganda speeches on German radio in the guise of ‘Lord Haw-Haw’. Nancy’s ‘Phoney War’ novel,
Pigeon Pie
, made a very good joke on this. She created a character named Sir Ivor King, a popular old English songster who is kidnapped by the Nazis and forced to make broadcasts for them. (‘“Good night dears,” said the old König, “keep your hairs on. By the way, where
is
the Ark Royal?”’) To the authorities, however, Mosley’s activities looked supremely unfunny. Eventually Special Branch reported that the BU was ‘not merely a party advocating an anti-war and anti-Government policy, but a movement whose aim it is to assist the enemy in every way it can’.

Was this true? Or was it an assemblage of circumstantial bits and bobs, which when collected together looked like guilt without actually being it? Mosley had spoken in favour of a negotiated peace with Germany. From the modern perspective, which has seen the footage of Auschwitz, this seems rather dreadful. At the time it was nothing like so simple: the possibility of peace had not ended with the declaration of war. Hitler offered it several times between October 1939 and July 1940. He may not have meant it. Yet he did mysteriously order his troops to halt in France, thus allowing the evacuation at Dunkirk. In May 1940 even Churchill – by then prime minister – was discussing a negotiated peace with the War Cabinet (although that particular door was quickly closed). Meanwhile others in support included impressive men like R. A. Butler – later a friend of Sydney’s – as well as the usual suspects such as Lloyd George, who admired Hitler at least as much as Mosley did and had likened giving independence to Poland to giving a monkey a pocket watch. As late as 1942 there were those who still dreamed of withdrawal from the fray, leaving the Nazis and the Soviets to get on with it.
⁹

So Mosley’s desire to reconcile with Germany was not outlandish. And in May 1940, even as he was still promulgating peace, he made this statement: ‘However rotten the existing government, and however much we detested its policies, we would throw ourselves into the effort of a united nation until the foreigner was driven from our soil.’ Many members of the BU
had
gone to fight; one of them would later be arrested in front of his men on the parade ground. (Meanwhile Esmond Romilly had been handed a white feather by his mother for having moved to America: ‘if it is your sincere conviction not to come home there is nothing more to say – but if Decca is holding you back from your country in her hour of anguish remember Uncle Winston’s words...’) Mosley himself tried to join his old regiment. He had never preached against
fighting
the war, only against the war itself, and in this he was not alone. It is hard, therefore, to see how he could be directly accused of being a non-patriot. It would have been just as easy to say it about Sydney Redesdale, and to have her interned. The problem, of course, was not what Mosley said, but what he was. This had always been the case. He had promoted the BU as a band of disciplined men, who obeyed police commands and never initiated violence; up to a point this was true, if one accepted that any aggression was enacted against official orders. Yet the mere existence of the organization was a provocation, a challenge to democracy, and Mosley’s rhetoric was a supreme exhortation to conflict. And now, not quite accurately but quite understandably, his movement was being equated with Nazism.

But could a man be detained under Regulations 18b, simply for the nebulous crime of being Sir Oswald Mosley? The threat of invasion was certainly making it desirable. Might he become Hitler’s puppet dictator in Britain, a Whitehall Quisling? Was he actually working for the Germans towards that end? Irene Ravensdale was summoned to the Home Office and asked whether she had any evidence that Mosley was a Fifth Columnist. Two years earlier, before she had learned about the secret marriage to Diana, she would have done her best for him. Now personal considerations were too powerful to be overcome. Since the death of Mosley’s first wife in 1933, Irene had given her life to him. She had cared for the three children of that marriage, and had even paid his share of the upkeep at Savehay – the family home in Buckinghamshire – while he chucked money at the BU. He had made a fool of her; she had been more than willing to let him, but that probably made it worse. So when the Home Office put its questions, she replied with lethal care for her words. No, she had no
evidence
against Mosley. Nevertheless: if he believed that a version of National Socialism, in conjunction with Hitler’s regime, would be good for Britain, then ‘he might do anything if he got angry and thought we were mucking [up] the whole thing’. An interesting sophistry, in which patriotism and treason became one and the same. ‘He [her questioner] said I had given him all he wanted,’ wrote Irene in her diary.

Still the Home Secretary (Morrison’s predecessor, Sir John Anderson) reported to the Cabinet that he had no power to detain Mosley under Regulation 18b. Yes, the man had met Hitler twice; there were strong rumours that Mussolini had put money into the then BUF; there was the uncomfortable fact of the radio deal, in which Germany owned more than 50 per cent of the company. And there was the great weight of all that past speechifying. Mosley was ‘too clever to put himself in the wrong by giving treasonable orders’, said Anderson, although that was not the end of the matter. ‘Notwithstanding the absence of such evidence, we should not run any risk in this matter however small.’ Rules were rules, in other words, but they could always be changed. Regulation 18b was amended to catch Mosley in its net. The government could now order the detention of members of any organization deemed ‘subject to foreign influence or control’, whose leaders had associated with ‘any power with which His Majesty is at war’. The BU denied these accusations; nevertheless it had become inevitable that Mosley, along with some 600 members of his movement, would be detained. On 23 May he was arrested at a flat in Dolphin Square to which he and Diana had recently moved, and taken to Brixton jail. ‘After Winchester,’ he later said, with a throwaway gallantry that commands a certain admiration, ‘prison was nothing.’ His son Nicholas, who did not share his politics, later wrote: ‘It was not in his nature to complain.’ In a further act of defiance, Mosley passed the time – which was by definition of an unspecified duration, since there had been no trial and no sentence – in teaching himself German. He also studied psychology, by which he was unconvinced. ‘The world’, as he put it, ‘is character.’
¹⁰

‘We were told at that time by Sir John Anderson that people were not put in prison for their opinions’, Diana later said, ‘and we took his word.’
¹¹

As Sydney Redesdale later bravely wrote to
The Observer
– which did not publish her letter – this was contrary to Magna Carta, which stated that ‘no Englishman may be kept in prison without trial.’ It was ironic, she suggested, that Britain had been fighting for freedoms that it did not itself uphold. This indeed was the paradox of war, and it has not gone away. ‘Sir Oswald and his followers were imprisoned because they opposed the war with Germany, on which our politicians were resolved, and for no other reason at all.’
¹²
Of course there
were
other reasons; with the threat of invasion, a frightened and angry public could not stand to see such a man still on the march. And the BU had been an authoritarian movement, had itself sought far-reaching powers of this kind. Nevertheless Sydney was right, in that 18b was all about what had happened and what might happen, what a person represented and what they were perceived to believe, rather than the proofs that peacetime would have required. Mosley’s remark about the need for scapegoats had been proved quite true. Now the scapegoat was him.

The idea that a successful German invasion would give Mosley the power he craved was almost certainly absurd. His relationship with Hitler was not strong – his admiration had mainly been for Mussolini – although in May Hitler did express the belief that ‘Mosley’s role hasn’t run its course yet’. However, as the historian Andrew Roberts wrote: ‘It is doubtful that, even if he had been prepared to serve (which is unlikely considering his orders of 9th May 1940 to fight “until the foreigner is driven from our soil”), Mosley would have been chosen to govern Britain. The BUF’s dismal political record in peacetime would have left any Blackshirt ministry far too transparently a puppet government.’
¹³
Thirty years after the war Diana expressed the same sentiment, albeit through her particular viewpoint: ‘As to the insulting suggestion that Mosley would in some way have benefited from a German occupation of England, it is enough to say that from 1932 he never ceased to press for rearmament, and that given his character and record it is impossible to imagine him as the lackey of a foreign power.’
¹⁴

Her loyalty was astounding; one might even say magnificent. Especially so, given what her connection to Mosley would now bring upon her.

III

Like her husband, Diana was imprisoned for who she was. Like him, she was also betrayed.

Her former father-in-law, Lord Moyne, had been extremely fond of her during the marriage to Bryan Guinness. Remarkably, he had also helped her when the marriage was over. In 1935 she had driven to visit Mosley at Savehay (the day after his other mistress, Baba Metcalfe, left the house); a couple of minutes into the journey, her little Voisin car was hit by a Rolls-Royce, and she smashed through the windscreen. She was taken, half conscious and asking desperately after her dog (which was unhurt) to St George’s Hospital in Hyde Park. There her wounds were stitched with coarse thread. Any woman would have been distraught about her face – a fabulously beautiful woman would have been out of her mind – but not Diana. After she was reassured about her dog, her thoughts were for Mosley; afraid that he would read about the accident in the newspapers, she insisted upon telephoning to tell him that she was all right. What saved her face was the intervention of Lord Moyne, who immediately summoned a leading plastic surgeon. When he had done his work, not a scar was left to be seen. Perhaps her father-in-law had been unable to contemplate the wreck of that Canova perfection; perhaps Bryan had urged his help; but the fact is that while Mosley went off on holiday to Italy – admittedly with his children – it was Diana’s abandoned associates who had rescued her.

When war broke out, Bryan wrote to Diana: ‘I am afraid this must be a time of more than ordinary difficulty and anxiety for you than for most people... your sympathy with the German regime conflicting with the great love I know you bear for your own country.’ Bryan was now happily remarried to an extremely nice woman, Elizabeth Nelson, but he retained his closeness to his former wife. Obviously they had two sons together, Jonathan and Desmond, whose care they shared. But Bryan’s generosity to Diana – for example he wrote to congratulate her on the birth of Alexander, her first son with Mosley – verged upon the superhuman. Anger and sadness had been apparently dissolved by his new life. Nevertheless when he met Diana by chance, fifty years after the end of their marriage, he said it was the first time he had seen her ‘and not wept’.
¹⁵
Lord Moyne surely knew this, and therefore surely still burned with resentment at the anguish she had caused to his sweet-natured son. So it is hard not to think that personal vengeance was in his mind when he replayed his old trick of setting somebody to spy upon her. As he had done with private detectives back in 1932, so now he asked Desmond’s governess, Jean Gillies, to report to him any signs of Nazi sympathies in the lady of the house.

In June 1940, Diana was visiting Mosley once a week at Brixton, planning to move her family to the home of Pam and Derek Jackson – Rignell House in Oxfordshire – and clearing up the muddled situation at the BU (paying wages and so on). She tried to publish the movement’s magazine,
Action
, but desisted when – as she later put it – ‘every time anybody started printing it, they were put in prison.’ In fact the BU was now banned by the government, which was much the most sensible thing.

Although BU members were being detained en masse, Diana seems to have had no sense that she herself was under threat. Lord Moyne, however, had written a letter to the Chairman of the Defence Security Executive, a secret body headed by his friend Lord Swinton; as with the plastic surgeon summoned to Diana’s hospital, Moyne was pulling vital strings. ‘It has been on my conscience for some time,’ he wrote, ‘to make sure that the authorities concerned are aware of the extremely dangerous character of my former daughter-in-law, now Lady Mosley.’ He went on to detail the evidence collected by the governess. ‘It is widely believed by those who are aware of Lady Mosley’s movements that her frequent visits to Germany were concerned with bringing over funds from the Nazi government’ (ah, that fateful radio station). ‘I also enclose a list of the dates on which Lady Mosley went to Germany, which the governess has extracted from her diary.’ Furthermore Jean Gillies – a truly valuable secret agent – reported private conversations. Mosley, she dutifully informed her employer, had said that Hitler would be justified in invading Czechoslovakia. When Belgium was overrun Diana had made ‘no secret of her delight in what was happening’.