Authors: Diana Alexander
The British press had a field day when the news of Unity’s friendship with Hitler became common knowledge, especially after she wrote a letter to the German newspaper
Der Stürmer
in which she confessed to being a Jew-hater. It was certainly no secret since she was proud of her German connection but it must have been torture for David and Sydney, even though they and also Tom had met Hitler and been impressed by what he had done for Germany.
Diana and Tom were photographed at Hitler’s rallies, but what was kept a secret was Diana’s marriage to Mosley. This took place in 1936 in the Berlin house of Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda, with whom both girls had become friends, and with Hitler as a guest. The secrecy was for several reasons: to protect Mosley’s image, to keep the news from Baba Metcalfe with whom he was still having an affair, but mainly to keep from the press Diana’s visits to Germany for the purpose of setting up a commercial radio station; the aim of this was to broadcast from Germany to southern England (in those days there were no such British stations) in order to raise money for the BUF whose funds were running low. After much negotiation Diana did finally get Hitler’s permission to set up such a station, but the outbreak of war meant that it never happened. The marriage was finally disclosed when the Mosleys’ eldest son Alexander was born in 1938.
Nancy had not been idle while her sisters embraced fascism. She and Peter, who became known in the family as ‘Prod’, had attended several BUF rallies and bought black shirts – the symbol of Mosley’s followers – but Nancy was too much of a tease to become a fanatic. Such people, she felt, had to be made fun of. She did this in her third book,
Wigs on the Green
, which was published in 1935 and in which the heroine, Eugenia Malmains, is very obviously modelled on Unity. This caused Diana and Nancy to be ‘non-speakers’ for four years and Unity swore she would never speak to Nancy again but failed to carry out her threat. Diana and Unity could both be teasing and mocking in other respects, but woe betide anyone who made fun of Mosley or Hitler.
The activities of their elder daughters may have caused the Redesdales to take their eyes off the ball as far as Jessica was concerned. Aged 16, Jessica and her first cousin Ann Farrer, known as Idden in Boudledidge, travelled to Paris to study at the Sorbonne and also, unknown to their parents, to enjoy the delights of the city, including visiting the Folies Bergère. When she returned to England she, like all the others, went through her debutante season and confessed, much against her will, to be rather enjoying herself. But like Diana and Unity, Jessica was forming opinions which would soon lead to an obsession as great as theirs and further tear the family apart.
In the early 1930s Jessica had become interested in politics, although her views were in a totally opposite direction to those Diana and Unity eventually espoused. When she read Beverley Nichols’ book
Cry Havoc
, which described the worst horrors of the First World War and the growing social and financial problems in Europe, together with the communist manifesto, the unformed ideas which had been in her mind suddenly clicked into place and she began to champion the extreme left-wing politics which obsessed her for the rest of her life.
Jessica’s socialist ideas were further hardened when she read
The Brown Book of Hitler Terror
, which described the rounding-up of communists and other opponents of Nazism after the burning of the Reichstag building; a time when many were beaten and some murdered. But it was when she read a book called
Out of Bounds: the Education of Giles and Esmond Romilly
that she began to find a serious reason for putting her ideas into practice. The Romilly brothers were cousins both of the Mitfords and the Churchills, and for several years Jessica had worshipped Esmond and his left-wing activities. He had started a magazine attacking public schools and had run away from Wellington College aged 16 and gone to work in a left-wing London bookshop but she had never had the chance to meet him. When they finally met by chance early in 1937, at the weekend house party of another cousin, she couldn’t believe her luck.
Esmond had been fighting in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the left-wing International Brigade and was planning to return as a war correspondent for the
News Chronicle
. He didn’t need much persuading to take his pretty and committed cousin with him. Jessica forged a letter from some friends asking her to go on holiday with them in Europe, so that her parents would not suspect for some time where she had actually gone, and the cousins simply disappeared to Spain. When the Redesdales found out they were distraught and so were the rest of the family, who all gathered at the London house in Rutland Gate to decide how to get Jessica back. Unity ‘scrammed back’ from Germany, Pam and Derek came from Oxfordshire and Prod told everyone what he thought they ought to do. Even Churchill and the Foreign Office were involved: Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden informed the British consul in Bilbao and allowed Nancy and Peter to travel in a naval destroyer to persuade the runaways to come home. This they refused to do and finally the Redesdales agreed to them being married (they were both underage and needed parental permission) in Bayonne on 18 May 1937; the long-suffering Sydney, as usual making the best of a bad job, was in attendance. The newspapers had yet another field day – ‘Peer’s Daughter Elopes to Spain’ and ‘Mixed Up Mitford Girls Still Confusing Europe’ were only two. The
Daily Express
lived to regret its scoop since it confused Jessica with Debo: Debo sued for libel and settled out of court for £1,000 which she spent on a fur coat.
Jessica had told her mother that she was pregnant before the marriage took place which was another good reason for her parents to allow it. The couple returned from Spain to London later in the summer, rented a house in Rotherhithe in London’s East End and the baby, Julia, was born just before Christmas. The new parents, despite their irresponsible behaviour on many fronts, were besotted with their daughter; they were heartbroken when she died of pneumonia, following a measles attack, aged only 5 months old. In February 1939, faced with mounting bills at home, they left for the United States on the understanding that in the event of war with Germany, Esmond would return home to fight.
Jessica’s running away and consequential marriage had a more divisive effect on the family than either Diana’s or Unity’s activities. Diana and Jessica never made contact again until Nancy was dying in the 1970s. With the exception of Tom, Esmond refused to see Jessica’s family, whom he regarded as fascists, and she had to meet them secretly. Perhaps surprisingly, Jessica and Unity never gave up on each other – they were too good friends for that – and it is possible that, although they were so diametrically opposed politically, each recognised and accepted the commitment of the other. For David and Sydney, Jessica’s behaviour took its toll and made them feel even more beleaguered by their headline-provoking family.
For Debo, who together with Pam and Tom never gave her parents any cause for anxiety, the latter half of the 1930s was as traumatic as for any of the family. Swinbrook House, hated by the others but loved by her since she had spent most of her childhood there, was sold in 1936 because the state of David’s finances in the Depression made its upkeep impossible. They moved to Old Mill Cottage on the outskirts of High Wycombe, causing the family to chant, ‘from Batsford Mansion to Asthall Manor, to Swinbrook House, to Old Mill Cottage’ as an indication of their declining fortunes. Only Debo and Jessica moved there with their parents; at the end of 1936 Pam married Derek Jackson with whom Debo, aged 15, imagined herself in love. But Jessica’s flight to Spain, which she kept a secret even from her youngest sister, was a body blow for Debo. This was something which Jessica never realised and it also meant that Debo was often alone with nanny and the governess at Old Mill Cottage, which she hated. The cruise on which Sydney had planned to take the three younger girls early in 1937, and to which Debo was looking forward, was inevitably cancelled; she was not allowed to go to Jessica’s wedding either and thereafter was only able to meet her occasionally because she and Esmond did not see eye to eye.
Added to this, as the decade progressed, the deterioration of relations between her parents became more obvious. Although both of them had at first been impressed by Hitler and what he was doing for Germany, David eventually did a U-turn and the Germans once more became ‘beastly Huns’ to him; Sydney meanwhile stuck to her guns. Like Pam, Debo was apolitical, but the atmosphere which her parents’ opposing views inevitably created rubbed off on her, the only child left at home. She deserved that fur coat.
It was not all misery for Debo, however, because in 1938, just after her debutante season had ended, she met and fell in love with Lord Andrew Cavendish, the younger son of the Duke of Devonshire, to whom she later became engaged.
The tragedies of the turbulent thirties were not yet over for the Redesdales. Unity had vowed to shoot herself if her two beloved countries, England and Germany, went to war with one another, though she felt that Hitler’s admiration for England meant he would never attack. There was great relief when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain came back from meeting Hitler in Munich in 1938, claiming that he had achieved Peace with Honour.
But Hitler had no intention of keeping his side of the agreement. In March 1939 he invaded Czechoslovakia and then, ignoring warnings from Britain, followed this with an invasion of Poland at the beginning of September. Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September. That same day, Unity went to the English Garden in Munich, took out her ivory-handled pistol and shot herself in the head.
D
iana Mosley once remarked that Derek Jackson had been in love with most of the Mitfords, including Tom. He and Pam had first met at Biddesden while she was running the Guinnesses’ farm and it is possible that he chose her because she was the most readily available. In fact, it turned out to be one of the better choices he made in his private life. Her kind and calm nature combined with her housewifely skills made her the ideal wife for Derek at this most frenetic time of his career: he was at the cutting edge of the scientific world, had a particularly exacting role with the RAF during the war, to say nothing of his horse-racing exploits. Unlike Derek, Pam was neither clever, creative nor complex, but her lifelong friend, writer James Lees-Milne, paid tribute to her ‘nobility of character and unadulterated goodness’, adding that she was also quite unaware of her own beauty. No one who knew her would argue with him.
Pam moved into Rignell Hall with Derek in the autumn of 1936, anticipating his forthcoming divorce from Poppet John by a few months, and it was from here that they drove to High Wycombe, where the Redesdale family was now living, to announce their engagement. Fifteen-year-old Deborah, who had met Derek on the hunting field and imagined herself in love with him, fainted on hearing the news.
Derek was madly in love with Pam, as his letters during their courtship show beyond doubt. This one was written early in 1936 while she was motoring in Austria:
Darling, you are so wonderful and beautiful and I adore you and always will; all the time I am not with you is not only time wasted, it is time spent in misery … You are the whole world for me and nothing else matters at all. How I wish I could see your darling blue eyes now …
Darling, you are everything in the world to me, and every moment away from you is dead to me.
Pam and Derek were married in London, at Carlton registry office, on 29 December 1936, while the British were still reeling over the abdication of Edward VIII. Pam was ‘laden with jewels which her generous husband had showered upon her’ but in their wedding photograph all the women appear to be wearing black. This, however, was a trend for smart occasions in those days because London in winter was often beset by filthy smog – a mixture of smoke (before the introduction of smokeless fuel) and fog – which made light colours look grubby within minutes. No one is smiling, though this may be because it was not the fashion at that time to smile for formal photographs. With hindsight, this somewhat funereal picture might be said to be prophetic, for within hours of it being taken Derek’s twin brother Vivian, who mysteriously was not at the wedding, was killed in a sleigh accident in Switzerland, an event which scarred Derek’s life forever.
Pam and Derek settled down (if this mercurial man could ever be said to settle anywhere) at Rignell, a former hunting lodge with distant views over the Heythrop country. Diana had once described the house as hideous and the interior decor became something of a laughing stock among the Mitford family. Derek’s taste was for Heal’s furniture and bright contrasting colours. The main bedroom had pink walls and green furniture which he said were the colours of apple trees in spring. He had taken great trouble to reproduce the exact colours and Pam must have liked them because she kept one of the green chests of drawers in her bedroom all her life. When Pam and Derek moved to Tullamaine Castle in County Tipperary after the war, Pam set about redecorating the rooms. Lady Redesdale was the first of the family to visit her there and was later asked what it was like by one of the other sisters. ‘I’m not going to say,’ was her tactful reply.
One of the things which bound this very different couple together was their love of horses and dogs. Their particular passion was for long-haired dachshunds which were probably a substitute for the children Pam never had. Derek did not want children and made his views on the matter clear, but even so, Pam underwent gynaecological surgery in 1937. Clearly this was not successful because although she became pregnant at least twice, she never carried a child to full term. Meanwhile, they acquired Wuda, their first long-haired dachshund who later presented them with puppies, which were called Hamelin and Weser from the story of the Pied Piper. They were the first of a succession of dachshunds, the last of which died many years later just before Pam returned from Switzerland to live in England. Early in the marriage a trip to Paris was cancelled when Pam and Derek, on their way to the boat train, realised that they had left their tickets behind. When they drove back to Rignell to get them, Wuda jumped into the back seat as soon as the butler opened the door and gave them such a pleading look that they changed their plans and spent the weekend with Wuda instead of at Claridges (Derek’s favourite hotel).