The Other Mitford (8 page)

John Betjeman had been a friend of Bryan’s since their Oxford days when they were successful editors of the university magazine
Cherwell
. He was on the rebound from an unsuccessful love affair but when he met Pam at Biddesden he fell in love with her. She had formed no romantic attachment since the Togo debacle and the two spent a lot of time in one another’s company.

Betjeman at that time was mad on kite-flying and always arrived with a kite to fly with Pam. They would also drive round Wiltshire and Hampshire looking at churches and picnicking in the glorious countryside. On Sundays they cycled to the old church at nearby Appleshaw for matins, both enjoying the traditional liturgy and hymns. In these outings with ‘Miss Pam’, as he called her, it is possible to see the beginning of the interest in churches and church liturgy which remained with Betjeman for the rest of his life.

Since riding was the sport which all the sisters (except Jessica) adored, Pam decided to teach her latest admirer to ride. She put him on an old pony and sent him off into the woods behind the house where she thought he would be safe. But the local hunt was abroad and the sound of the horn was too much even for this ‘bombproof’ old mount, who ditched the future poet laureate and galloped off to look for foxes.

Betjeman was reluctant to make any obvious advances, partly because he had heard of Pam’s attraction to a friend of Tom’s, an Austrian aristocrat named Janos von Almasy, referred to by his English rival as ‘that ghastly Czecheslovakian count’. Diana, however, was very much in favour of Betjeman and he continued his frequent visits to Biddesden where many a night was whiled away by Bryan doing conjuring tricks after dinner and the guests singing round the piano.

Betjeman proposed twice to Pam and the first time she turned him down without hesitation. On the second occasion he asked her to take some time to think about it. Before she could refuse again a tragedy occurred at Biddesden. Two weeks after Lytton Strachey’s death from cancer, Dora Carrington shot herself on the estate with a gun she had borrowed from Bryan. After things had quietened down, and still with no definite reply from Pam, Betjeman wrote semi-jokingly to Nancy: ‘If Pamela Mitford refuses me finally, you might marry me – I’m rich, handsome and aristocratic.’ It is interesting to speculate how playing second fiddle, even in jest, to the sister of whom she had always been particularly jealous, went down with Nancy.

Many years later Pam told Betjeman’s daughter, Candida Lycett Green: ‘Betj made me laugh. I was very, very fond of him, but I wasn’t in love with him. He said he’d like to marry me but I rather declined.’ But they remained very good friends and when Betjeman was old and ill and many of his friends had stopped visiting him, he could always rely on a visit from kind Pam, the Rural Mitford, as he liked to call her.

It was Betjeman, too, who first coined the now well-known phrase which collectively describes the sisters when he wrote a little poem ‘in honour of the Mitford Girls, but especially in honour of Miss Pamela’:

The Mitford Girls! The Mitford Girls

I love them for their sins

The young ones all like ‘Cavalcade,’

The old like ‘Maskelyns’

SOPHISTICATION, Blessed dame

Sure they have heard her call

Yes, even Gentle Pamela

Most rural of them all.

It was even rumoured at one time that Betjeman’s celebrated tennis girl, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, the subject of his poem ‘Pot Pourri in a Surrey Garden’, whose identity had caused speculation for many years, was actually Pam. ‘Oh, no,’ she declared when I
asked her. ‘It couldn’t have been me. I was
hopeless
at tennis.’

After leaving Biddesden in the mid-1930s, Pam became an intrepid and adventurous traveller, driving round Europe in her little Morris car. ‘I called it the Stork because I had it specially painted grey with red wheels,’ she said. Several of the countries she visited were absorbed behind the Iron Curtain after the Second World War and she must have been one of the last people to see them as they once were.

One such trip, which she related to me many years later, was to the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. While in Vienna she had met a young man who needed to get to a shooting party in that region.

I offered to take him because I thought that the Carpathians were just beyond the Dolomites, but in fact it was a two-day drive along unmade roads. While it was dry we couldn’t see for the dust and when it rained the water poured down the roads in torrents. But the greatest hazard was the horses. None of them had ever seen a car before – we didn’t see any either, during the whole journey – so they were very frightened by the sight. We had the choice of whizzing past and getting the ‘danger’ over quickly or stopping and letting them pass. But whatever we did they took fright and dumped their drivers in the ditch.

Finally, the faithful Stork got them to their destination, whereupon their hostess expressed her pleasure that they had had a safe journey and her surprise that they hadn’t had a puncture. ‘And that is just as well as I see you only have one spare tyre. In Czechoslovakia we always carry three.’ But Pam had no intention of having British customs criticised, however well meant that criticism might be. ‘Ah, but I bet your tyres aren’t Dunlops,’ she replied, with a sharpness which would have done credit to any of her sisters.

On her second visit to Germany in 1935 Unity introduced Pam to Hitler. The two girls had just finished eating lunch at the Osteria Bavaria in Munich, where Unity had previously hung about for hours hoping for a glimpse of the Führer before eventually being invited to his table. Suddenly there was a flurry of activity and Hitler and his henchmen arrived. Unity sent Pam to stand by the door in order to get a good look at him and he immediately spotted the tall, blonde young woman whose eyes were an even brighter blue than Unity’s. He surmised that she was Unity’s sister and the two were invited to eat a second lunch, which they happily did.

Pam was not impressed by Hitler, describing him on her return to England as ‘very ordinary, like an old farmer in his brown suit’. Nevertheless, she remembered the meal they had eaten in every detail, especially the delicious new potatoes. In this she more than lived up to her sisters’ boast that she could recall every detail of every meal she had ever eaten.

She also took no notice of Hitler’s warning, when he heard of her motoring exploits, that ‘it is very dangerous for a young woman to travel around Europe without a chaperone’. It was lucky that she disregarded him because she was fortunate enough to see some of the most beautiful European countries and their traditions before he brought about their ruin.

Unlike Diana, Unity and Jessica, Pam’s political leanings were not a subject for much discussion. Fascism certainly did not appeal and although she always got on well with Sir Oswald Mosley, she never shared his, Diana’s nor Unity’s political opinions. Nor did Jessica’s extreme left-wing views hold any attraction for her.

Life for Pam, however, was about to change in a big way, for in 1936 she met and married a most remarkable man.

D
avid, Lord Redesdale, is reputed to have referred to three of his sons-in-law as ‘the man Mosley’, ‘the boy Romilly’ (the cousin of Churchill with whom Jessica ran away when they were both 19) and ‘the bore Rodd’. Peter Rodd was the husband of Nancy but the marriage did not last. He does not, however, seem to have found an adjective to describe Derek Jackson, whom Pam married at the end of 1936. This is hardly surprising since there was no category into which Derek fitted. He was truly a man of many parts.

Derek Jackson and his brother Vivian were the twin sons of Sir Charles Jackson, a Welshman who was by turns an architect, barrister and an expert on antique silver. He was also one of the founders of the
News of the World
whose shares meant that the twins inherited a large fortune, in spite of the actions of their guardian and trustee Lord Riddell who diverted many of the shares for his own use.

The brothers were educated at Rugby School, referred to as Bugry by Derek and not without reason, for he remained bisexual for much of his life. According to Pam, he said, in horse-racing jargon, ‘I ride under both rules’. In the end he settled for women, marrying no less than six of them.

At Rugby the emphasis on Christianity and the Classics, prevalent since the founding of the school by the famous Dr Thomas Arnold, had shifted in favour of the sciences. It was at Rugby that the Jackson twins’ love affair with science began and both won important prizes for practical chemistry. It was here also that Derek’s interest (an interest which developed into a passion) in spectroscopy began. He became Professor of Spectroscopy at Oxford, was later made a Fellow of the Royal Society and later still an officer of the Legion of Honour. In spite of his other interests, which included fox hunting and horse racing – he rode in the Grand National as an amateur on three occasions – his first love was always science.

The twins were separated only for the second time in their lives (the first was when they were sent to separate prep. schools) when Vivian went to Oriel College, Oxford, and Derek won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge. This was the college where Ernest Rutherford, the first man to split the atom, had been a student, and Derek had access to the Nobel prize-winner at the Cavendish laboratories and at lectures for the Natural Sciences Tripos. After graduation Rutherford asked him to undertake research on a particular aspect of nuclear physics but Derek was determined to work on a subject of his own choosing – investigating properties of the nucleus by means of optical spectroscopy.

Professor Frederick Lindemann of the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford offered him exactly what he wanted. ‘Oxford bought me, just as you might buy a promising yearling,’ he confessed, again resorting to racing parlance. Lindemann had taken a risk in appointing a young, unknown scientist to raise the profile of the Clarendon, but he was not disappointed. Aged only 22 Derek produced his seminal paper for the Proceedings of the Royal Society on ‘hyperfine structure in the arc spectrum of caesium and nuclear rotation’. It was a scientific breakthrough and earned Derek a place in the history of atomic physics.

Next to his love of science came his love of horses and he was an owner/rider who enjoyed success at race meetings; he came second in the Grand Military Gold Cup at Sandown, a race which still holds considerable prestige, and at his final attempt at the Grand National, when he was 40 and his horse Tulyra was 11, the pair reached the third to last fence where the horse refused to jump after racing in a sea of mud. Hunting was also one of his great delights and while at the Clarendon Laboratory he bought Rignell Hall, near Banbury, where he could keep his hunters and go out with the Heythrop Hunt. It was at Rignell that he and Pam spent the early part of their married life.

Before this, in 1931, Derek had married Poppet John, the teenage wild child of artist Augustus John, whom he met almost certainly on the hunting field. The marriage did not get off to a good start when after the ceremony, Augustus got into the back of the car with the bride, leaving Derek to sit disconsolately in the front with the chauffeur. Derek and Augustus never got on and this did not help the marriage. ‘Neither of these remarkable men saw the point of each other,’ wrote Diana Mosley much later. But the marriage was not destined to last. Poppet was young, party-going, promiscuous and somewhat daunted by Derek’s way of life. Officially they were married for five years, but the cracks had appeared long before that.

Derek and Pam married on 29 December 1936 and the very next day tragedy struck. They arrived in Vienna on their honeymoon to find a message for Derek telling him that Vivian had been killed when a sleigh he had been driving overturned in frozen snow at St Moritz. For two days Derek spoke to no one, not even Pam, who later told Diana that part of him had died that day. To lose an identical twin is to lose part of oneself. He never spoke of the accident but the loneliness of the separation remained with him for the rest of his life.

When the Second World War broke out in the autumn of 1939, Derek was at the Clarendon Laboratory which was soon taken over by the Admiralty and he was set to work on the development of radar, then very much in its infancy. Although he always professed his opposition to war with Germany, when war finally broke out he was determined to be part of it and to join the RAF, the only service he considered to be worth fighting in. But his was a reserved occupation and Lindemann refused to let him go. Luckily for Derek, Group Captain Bill Elliot, later to become Air Vice Marshal Elliot, was assistant secretary to the War Cabinet and was also a friend of Pam’s. He met Derek and was so impressed by his scientific knowledge, which would be invaluable to the RAF as it entered the radar war, that he persuaded Churchill to prevail on Lindemann to release his protégé. ‘He’s just the sort of person that England needs and thank God she’s got the likes of him – intelligent, determined and full of guts. I’m proud to know him.’ With that recommendation Derek joined RAF Loughborough at the time of the fall of France.

He trained first as a gunner but then, after another approach by Pam to Bill Elliot, as a radar operator and navigator in night fighters, training at Middle Wallop in Hampshire. Here he gained a reputation for being imperturbable under pressure and an outstanding interpreter of radar signals and was much in demand by pilots. In June 1941 he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for devotion to duty while successfully operating a secret device (radar) which contributed to the destruction of several enemy aircraft. His accuracy in taking a radar fix was impeccable, as illustrated by the occasion when his suitcase fell out of the aircraft in which he was flying because the hatch was not properly secured. ‘Lesser men might have watched its fall; Jackson at once went to his equipment, took a radar fix on his position, and after suitable estimation of the probable trajectory of a suitcase, was able to tell the Wiltshire police exactly where they would find it,’ reported the pilot. The suitcase was recovered unopened near Devizes and Derek was greatly relieved because it contained his favourite red silk dressing gown, as well as his change of clothes.