Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (58 page)

10 From ‘Less than Zero’ on the album
My Aim is True
(1977)
.
Costello later wrote that he conceived the song ‘after seeing the despicable Oswald Mosley being interviewed on BBC television. The former leader of the British Union of Fascists seemed unrepentant about his poisonous actions of the 1930s. The song was more of a slandering fantasy than a reasoned argument.’

11 Mosley had a good relationship with Benito Mussolini, and in April 1933 was invited to appear with the Italian leader on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome. He always denied that Mussolini gave him money. A report in
The Times
(13 November 1936), for example, had Mosley firmly refuting the allegation that he received foreign subsidies, as claimed in the House of Commons by the then Home Secretary, Sir John Simon (‘We demand that Sir John Simon produces his evidence in support of this statement’). Italian records, however, prove that the Home Secretary’s information was correct. In her biography of Diana, Anne de Courcy writes that Mussolini subsidized British fascism between 1933 and 1935.

12 From
Beyond the Pale
by Nicholas Mosley (Secker & Warburg, 1983).

13 Ibid.

14 Review in
Books and Bookmen
, 1975, of
The Impact of Hitler: British Politics and British Policy 1933–1940
by M. Cowling.

15 The description comes from Elsie Corrigan, the maid at Mosley’s country house, Savehay; she is quoted by Anne de Courcy in
Diana Mosley.

16 An interesting reference to British fascism comes in Agatha Christie’s 1940 novel
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe.
A young man, suspected of an attempted shooting, is described to Hercule Poirot by his girlfriend as ‘one of those Imperial Shirts, you know – they march with banners and have a ridiculous salute’. The organizers of this movement, she suggests, ‘just work up these poor young men – quite harmless ones like Frank – until they think they are doing something wonderful and patriotic’.

17 Dietrich Eckart’s ‘Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin’ (1925).

18 James wrote this in his capacity as peerless television critic for
The Observer
, reviewing a 1976 episode of the BBC Television programme
Tonight
, in which Sir Oswald Mosley and David Pryce-Jones discussed the latter’s new biography of Unity.

19 In
Nancy Mitford
– A Portrait by her Sisters.

20 From a 1978 review in
Books and Bookmen
of
Longford: A Biographical Portrait
by Mary Craig. In 1936, Lord Longford – then Frank Pakenham – had attended an infamous Mosley meeting in Oxford, where he was badly hurt (in his own account, ‘someone stamped on my kidneys’) and where Mosley’s followers attacked hecklers with ‘steel chairs and bicycle belts’. Diana, who was not unfriendly towards Longford, calmly questioned this version of events (‘What is a bicycle belt?’) and dismissed the disputatious undergraduates in the audience – who had sought to break up the meeting – as ‘sillies’.

21 In his
Nancy Mitford: A Memoir
(Hamish Hamilton, 1975).

22 Quoted in
Unity Mitford: A Quest
by David Pryce-Jones
.

23 From an unpublished manuscript, held with Jessica’s papers in the Rare Books and MSS Department of Ohio State University.

24 By David Pryce-Jones in
Unity Mitford: A Quest.
Pryce-Jones found a copy of this novel, autographed and dated by Unity, and understandably thought it significant. Mary S. Lovell, on the other hand, regards Unity’s choice of reading at this stage as incidental rather than formative.

25 According to Diana, in conversation with the author, none of Nancy’s brothers-in-law liked her. ‘Derek Jackson really hated her. And Kit – well.’ (Although Mosley was known as Tom, Diana used the name Kit to differentiate him from her brother.) Diana did not mention Nancy’s relationship with Andrew Devonshire, although the pair definitely quarrelled in 1967. As for Esmond Romilly: ‘Of course [he] didn’t like anyone, that’s different.’

26 Weenie’s son, Timothy Bailey, was quoted in
Unity Mitford: A Quest
: ‘I took Aunt Sydney and Debo and Tom to one of Mosley’s last big rallies in London.’ This may be taken to refer to the major event at Earl’s Court in 1939, which Tom certainly attended, but when Diana mentioned the rally in a letter to Deborah she made no allusion to her sister’s presence (nor was there a sense that Deborah had ever been at
any
rally).

27 From
Nancy Mitford
– A Portrait by her Sisters.

28 In conversation with the author.

29 From
Prophesying Peace: Diaries 1944–45
(Chatto & Windus, 1977).

30 
The Times
, 26 April 1945.

31 In
Unity Mitford: A Quest.

32 From Clive James’s 1976
Observer
review of
Tonight.

33 Said by the porter of the fictional Oxford college, Shrewsbury, in Dorothy L. Sayers’s
Gaudy Night.

34 Quoted in
Unity Mitford: A Quest.

35 Ibid.

36 Throughout most of the Second World War, Joyce broadcast an English-language radio programme, entitled
Germany Calling
, to audiences in Britain and the US. A vehicle for Nazi propaganda, and widely known to be such, the programme was designed to sap the morale of the Allied war effort. It acquired a large audience, as it frequently gave the only available news from behind enemy lines. The ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ nickname referred to Joyce’s bizarre, almost absurdly upper-class accent, and was designed to make him a figure of fun rather than danger. Joyce, who was American-born and raised in Ireland, became a naturalized German citizen. Nevertheless he was convicted of treason at the Old Bailey – on the grounds that he had begun broadcasting while in possession of a British passport – and was hanged in January 1946.

37 Noël Coward’s intensely patriotic play, first produced in 1931, was filmed two years later. Its subject matter includes the British struggle against Germany in the First World War.

38 Diana made this point very firmly – and convincingly – in a 1975 review in
Books and Bookmen
of
Eva and Adolf
by G. Infield.

39 This was stated in a 2007 Channel 4 television documentary,
Hitler’s British Girl.
The information came from the investigative reporter Martin Bright, who five years earlier had published an article in
The Observer
, suggesting that Unity’s suicide attempt may have been faked in order to prevent her being questioned, as a possible traitor, on her return to Britain from Germany in 1940. Bright based his thesis upon newly declassified documents including the diary of the wartime head of MI5, Guy Liddell, who wrote: ‘We had no evidence to support the press allegations that she was in a serious state of health and it might well be that she was brought in on a stretcher in order to avoid publicity and unpleasantness to her family.’ In a subsequent article Bright made it clear that Liddell had been mistaken, and that Unity’s injuries were genuine.

In December 2007, in a further article about Unity, Bright wrote in the
New Statesman
that he had been contacted by a woman whose aunt had run a maternity hospital in Oxford during the war, where (according to the informant’s family) Unity had a baby that was given up for adoption. The father was said to be Hitler. Bright viewed the story with scepticism, although he spoke to an elderly woman who suggested that Unity
had
attended the hospital, albeit for treatment for a nervous breakdown; this claim was roundly refuted by Deborah. Further research by Channel 4 found a very large number of birth registrations relating to the hospital. Unsurprisingly, none bore the name ‘Mitford’.

40 Cited in
Hitler’s Table Talk
, ed. Hugh Trevor-Roper (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953).

41 As quoted by Clive James in his 1976
Observer
review of the television programme
Tonight.

42 Jessica to Deborah, 26 October 1976.

43 Mary S. Lovell suggests this convincingly in
The Mitford Girls.

44 From
A Fine Old Conflict
(Michael Joseph, 1977).

45 This particular calculation, based on intensive research but inevitably an approximation, was cited by Timothy Snyder in
The New York Review of Books
, 27 January 2011.

46 To Evelyn Waugh, 24 May 1960.

47 Letter dated 26 October 1976.

48 
Daily Telegraph
, 25 March 1960.

49 In the 1966 ABC Television programme,
Tempo.

50 In an essay entitled ‘Hitler’s England: What if Germany had invaded Britain in May 1940?’, published in
Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals
, ed. Niall Ferguson (Picador, 1997).

51 From
Wait for Me!

52 As described in
Beyond Nab End
(Little, Brown, 2003) by William Woodruff, who lodged in East London in the 1930s. His landlady, he wrote, ‘would have had to burn the house down’ to defeat the bugs.

53 
The Times,
31 March 1960.

54 In
Friends Apart
(MacGibbon & Kee, 1954).

55 Quoted in
Unity Mitford: A Quest.

56 As described by David Pryce-Jones, ibid.

57 Ibid.

PART III

  1 A desert-explorer and aviator, László (or Teddy) Almasy was the figure upon whom Michael Ondaatje loosely based the protagonist of his 1992 novel
The English Patient
(later an Oscar-winning film).

  2 She expressed this view in a sad, alarmed letter to Violet Hammersley, 7 January 1940.

  3 See p. 356, note 39.

  4 In the 1966 interview for
Tempo
.

  5 Quoted in
Unity Mitford: A Quest.

  6 Again, this was written to Violet Hammersley, 10 February 1940.

  7 Diana said this to Mary S. Lovell in 2000; it is quoted in
The Mitford Girls.

  8 A reference to the Norwegian fascist politician Vidkun Quisling, whose name has become synonymous with the concept of collaboration. Backed by the Nazis, he seized power in 1940 at the time of the German invasion of Norway. Between 1942 and 1945 he led a puppet government of the kind that Pétain headed in Vichy France, and that Mosley was suspected of wishing to lead in Britain. He was executed in late 1945.

  9 A Tory minister, John Moore-Brabazon, was obliged to resign that year for saying that a struggle between Germany and Russia would have ‘suited us’. Quite a lot of people agreed with him, nonetheless. As Andrew Roberts writes in the essay ‘Hitler’s England’ in
Virtual History
(ed. Ferguson): ‘It was the same stance as Henry Kissinger took during the Iran–Iraq War: “A pity they both can’t lose”.’

10 Said to
The Times
, 6 October 1967.

11 Part of Diana’s evidence to the Advisory Committee that met on 2 October 1940, led by Norman Birkett KC (later a judge at the Nuremberg Trials). The committee was set up by the Home Office to establish whether those held under Regulation 18b should be released or kept in detention.

12 The letter was reproduced in Diana’s diary for
The European
. Sydney had been responding coldly to a ‘Comment’ piece in
The Observer
, which stated that wartime political prisoners, such as Mosley, had been treated with admirable restraint in Britain.

13 From Andrew Roberts’s essay ‘Hitler’s England’ in
Virtual History
(ed. Ferguson).

14 From the 1975 review in
Books and Bookmen
of M. Cowling’s
The Impact of Hitler
.

15 Bryan said this to Selina Hastings – Nancy’s biographer – in reference to the meeting with Diana in 1983, when she hailed him in the House of Lords and he asked: ‘Which of you is it?’ Much mirth ensued, but it is interesting that Bryan, then aged seventy-eight, was still so aware of Diana’s effect upon his emotions.

16 In a 1978 review in
Books and Bookmen
of
The Goebbels Diaries
, ed. Hugh Trevor-Roper.

17 In a 1969 review in
Books and Bookmen
of
Political Violence and Public Order
by Robert Benewick.

18 Martin Rynja, in the Editor’s Note to
The Pursuit of Laughter
(Gibson Square, 2009).

19 In a letter dated 23 November 2000.

20 In a 1955 review in
The European
of
Against the Law
by Peter Wildeblood.

21 From the diary written for
The European.

22 Ibid.

23 From
Diana Mosley
by Jan Dalley (Faber and Faber, 2000).

24 In conversation with the author, 2001.

25 In conversation with the author.

26 In
A Fine Old Conflict.

27 In her 1966 television interview, Nancy said that David himself would write ‘Occupation: Honourable’.

28 From
Hons and Rebels.

29 Constancia’s nickname was given before she was even born: when Jessica was pregnant, the vigorous movements of the baby led her friend, Virginia Durr, to joke that it was the kicking of the Democratic Donkey (symbol of the US Democratic Party). Jessica called her unborn baby ‘the Donk’ and the name – or its variant ‘Dinky’ – stuck.

30 From a series of interviews, given in 1988–9 to Robert Larsen, for the Berkeley Oral History Project of the Berkeley Historical Society.

31 Letter dated 28 June 1943.

32 From the interviews given to the Berkeley Historical Society.

33 Diana told this story in
Nancy Mitford
– A Portrait by her Sisters.

34 This description made its way into
The Pursuit of Love.

35 Sir Joseph Paxton, who designed the Crystal Palace in London, had been made head gardener at Chatsworth by the 6th Duke of Devonshire in 1826.