In the autumn Unity was allowed to return to Munich, but David insisted on chaperoning her. There, he called on the British consul and asked, ‘Can’t you persuade Unity to go away from here?’ To others he would say mournfully, over a cup of tea, ‘I’m normal, my wife is normal, but my daughters are each more foolish than the other. What do you say about my daughters? Isn’t it very sad?’1 The wife of the consul thought it was very sad. She remembers seeing both the Redesdales in Munich and recalls that they were ‘distraught parents’, very nice and quite unable to cope with Unity’s obsessive behaviour.2 Yet surely David had the means to ensure that Unity could not stay in Germany. She was only able to live there because he provided her, as he did his other daughters, with an allowance of about £125 a year. This was hardly a fortune, but there was a special rate of exchange for sterling, which made it sufficient for her to enjoy a reasonable standard of living.
When Unity became ill with tonsillitis, David insisted on staying on to look after her. His English self-confidence coupled with his bumbling manner both endeared him to her and irritated her. The ice rink was closed and he could not skate, which made him determined to dislike the entire trip. ‘He refuses to take the least interest in anything and pines for home,’ Unity complained to Sydney. ‘He had much better let me come alone, like I planned. I must say one thing, he is very good-tempered.’ Most of the waiters and hotel staff in Munich spoke a little English, but David had only to hear one word of English, she said, before addressing them exactly as he would a waiter in London. ‘On the train he suddenly said to the dining car man, “I don’t think much of your permanent way, but the rolling stock is pretty good going on. These cigarettes are killing me by inches!” Then he fires questions at them,’ she continued, ‘like, “Do they sell Brambles [a type of country hat] here?” or talks about her ladyship and expects them to know it’s you. The poor things are so confused. I think they think he’s cracked.’3
After her contretemps in June Unity had no option but to submit to her father’s presence with good grace. Her brief notoriety had upset her parents badly and she was fortunate to have been allowed to return to Munich at all. The situation had not been helped along by the publication of Nancy’s Wigs on the Green at the end of June, just as the papers got wind of Unity’s interview. Unity took her cue from Diana: it was not acceptable to mock either Mosley or Hitler.
Nancy was well aware that the timing was bad and contacted both sisters, writing to Diana (firmly): ‘A book of this kind can’t do your movement any harm. Honestly if I thought it could set the Leader back by so much as half-an-hour I would have scrapped it . . .’4 and to Unity (winningly):
Darling Head of Bone & Heart of Stone,
. . . Please don’t read the book if it’s going to stone you up against me . . . Oh dear do write me a kind and non-stony-heart letter to say you don’t mind it nearly as much as you expected . . . Oh dear I’m going to Oxford with Nardie [Diana] tomorrow, our last day together I suppose before the clouds of her displeasure burst over me . . . oh dear, I wish I had called it mine uncomf now because uncomf is what I feel every time I think about it. So now don’t get together with Nardie and ban me forever or I shall die . . . oh dear, OH DEAR!5
Perhaps it was asking too much of Diana, who had pinned her colours so positively to Mosley’s mast, to see the book in quite the gleeful way Nancy intended, and realizing this, albeit late in the day, Nancy had tried to soften the blow by forewarning her sister while she was writing: ‘Peter says I can’t put a movement like Fascism into a work of fiction by name so I am calling it the Union Jack movement . . . & their leader Colonel Jack . . . but I don’t want to Leadertease,’ she wrote appeasingly, ‘as the poor man could hardly have me up for libel under the circumstances!’6 Diana was allowed to read the manuscript and although she suggested a rash of edits, which for the most part Nancy agreed to, both she and Unity had told Nancy they would never speak to her again if she published it. But Nancy had little option as Prod was not working and their only income besides her tiny allowance was the royalties from her books. She was unable to make their funds meet their outgoings and she had become used to visits from the bailiffs and receiving handouts from her father-in-law. ‘I really couldn’t afford to scrap the book,’ she told Diana.
One problem was that the game had changed somewhat between the time that Nancy conceived Wigs on the Green and its publication. From being ‘almost respectable’ eighteen months earlier, Mosley had become, as Bernard Shaw put it, ‘ridiculed as impossible’.7 Since the infamous BUF Olympia rally in 1934, a scene of unprecedented violence in British politics (though worse was to come), Mosley had lost all chance of leading a conventional party. On the other hand, the active membership of the BUF had reached ten thousand with, Mosley’s biographer estimated, a further thirty thousand non-active members and supporters.8 Mosley pointed out that Fascism in Britain had grown faster than anywhere else in the world, and there was evidence of a significant amount of support for it as a political ideal from uncommitted voters. When one of the first Gallup polls asked interviewees to choose which they would prefer, Fascism or Communism, 70 per cent of people under thirty chose Fascism. In the upper echelons of society there is plenty of proof that the Cliveden set and a large slice of the upper classes, while not actively pro-Mosley, were supportive of a Fascist style of government because they were all terrified of the threat of Communism.
Then there was Mosley’s style of dressing, which had hitherto been a neat black shirt under a well-cut dark suit. Suddenly, for marches and rallies, he and his lieutenants adopted a uniform that was distinctly military in design. The black jacket had brass buttons and epaulets, and was worn with a Sam Browne-type leather belt, and an officer’s peaked hat. Brown riding breeches were tucked into gleaming riding boots. It drew some pejorative comments from onlookers: ‘They look like Nazi jackboots’ was one obvious remark. ‘More like King Zog’s Imperial Dismounted Hussars’ was the retort. And, increasingly, BUF marches and grandiose rallies, apparently based on European models, became an excuse for aggressive and vicious thuggery. Bands of Communists and some who were simply anti-Fascist would begin by heckling or throwing missiles, and eventually order would deteriorate with the exchange of blows. Mosley never openly advocated anti-Semitism, but plenty of his supporters were willing to act against East End Jews in the name of the BUF. In the event the uniform was short-lived, for the wearing of it was banned by the Public Order Act of 1936, but it was not forgotten by the public.
News of the treatment meted out to Jews in Germany was filtering through to the United Kingdom: national newspapers ran small reports of how Jews were increasingly being stripped of possessions, their shops and businesses closed and looted, and how they were being generally humiliated. German towns put up signs boasting that they were ‘Jew free’, park benches were marked ‘Aryan’ and ‘Jew’, shops proclaimed that Jews would not be served. Such news items were tucked away, a forerunner of what was to come. Those of the silent majority who read the reports did not know how seriously to take them, or decided that it was ‘not our business’, so there were no demonstrations of public anger, but some opprobrium inevitably clung to Mosley’s movement and – whether it was true or not – he was widely perceived as anti-Semitic. When questioned about the Nazi regime’s attitude to Germany’s Jewish population, he replied, ‘Whatever happens in Germany is Germany’s affair, and we are not going to lose British lives in a Jewish quarrel.’9
Because of her affection for Diana, Nancy had accepted Mosley up to a point, had even casually joined the BUF with Prod and been present at the Olympia fiasco, but her allegiance soon waned. The Rodds decided that they did not like the direction in which British Fascism was moving. When they received an invitation, written in German, from Joachim von Ribbentrop to a function to celebrate his appointment to the London embassy, Prod declined for them both – in Yiddish.10 But Nancy had never really taken to Mosley; her book was the equivalent of a modern television satire and lampooned what he stood for. Mosley took himself very seriously, and though he never minded opposition, derision was a different matter.
The publication of Wigs on the Green caused a serious rift between Nancy and Diana. In November, almost six months later, in a letter to a friend, Nancy wrote: ‘I saw Diana at a lunch . . . 2 days ago, she was cold but contained & I escaped with my full complement of teeth, eyes, etc.’ But even had Diana forgiven her, Mosley would not have done so. For the next four years he refused to allow Nancy to visit Diana at the house they acquired in early 1936. Indirectly, this rift led to more serious repercussions. Unity, too, was unforgiving, telling people she met in Munich that she was never going to speak to Nancy, so that Nancy could only reply affirmatively to John Betjeman’s query on reading the book: ‘I suppose it will be all up with Unity Valkyrie and you?’ Years later, when she had become a distinguished writer, Nancy refused to allow Wigs on the Green to be reissued, saying that too much had happened for jokes about Nazis to be considered as anything but poor taste, but one suspects that the problems it caused within the family were just as likely to have been the reason.
Unity attended the 1935 Nuremberg rally with Tom and Diana. On the eve of the event they met Hitler and Streicher at the opera; on the following day when they found their reserved seats they had been seated prominently, next to Eva Braun who had recently become Hitler’s mistress. There are many photographs of the trio of Mitfords in newspaper archives because by now the British press thought the Nazi rallies important enough to cover, and both Unity and Diana made good copy. So, there are photographs of Tom and Diana flanked by Nazi banners, of the two women against a backdrop of marching storm-troopers, of Unity giving the Nazi salute, and any number of poses that would later compromise them.
Diana and Mosley had been together for more than three years. Their initial passion had stood the test of time and out of this a remarkably close intellectual friendship had also grown between them. They remained very much in love; and they wrote to each other, and often spoke to each other in the baby talk of lovers.11 As Mosley’s son, Nicholas, attests ‘There was an aura around her and my father such as there is around people who are in love.’12 Mosley, it is true, still flirted and continued to have casual affairs with other women. He was still sexually involved with Baba Metcalfe and there were numerous other infidelities during the thirties that are a matter of public record. There was even a bizarre court action brought by one woman for slander after she had initially alleged ‘breach of promise’.13 In view of his unquestionable love for Diana it is difficult to explain away his infidelities but many powerful men share the unattractive characteristic of sexual incontinence – Palmerston, Lloyd George, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton among them. One thing is for sure, neither Mosley nor Diana was ever wholly happy when they were apart.
Diana tended to treat Mosley’s philandering as he had once advised Cimmie to do, as a tiresome ‘silliness’ that he somehow could not help. In 2000 she wrote that she was sometimes jealous, but ‘I was so confident about him. I knew he’d always come back to me.’14 But to very close friends at the time she admitted that she suffered ‘agonies of jealousy’,15 and during 1935 there is evidence of at least one major row between the two, concerning his relationship with Baba. That summer Mosley was staying with two of his children, Nicholas and Vivien, on the Bay of Naples; he had bought a thirty-foot motor yacht, which was moored below their rented villa16 and used for day trips to the islands and swimming. The arrangement was that Baba would spend the first half of the holiday with them, and Diana the second.
Diana had been injured recently in a car accident, and needed quite extensive plastic surgery to her face. While she was convalescing in a London clinic, Mosley wrote to her: ‘Hurry up and get well as this place is lovely – 1,000 steps down to the beach – soon get used to them – we run up and down them now – saying, “Won’t they be fun when Diana arrives!” I feel so badly being away while you are so bad . . .’17 The letter, with its promise of recuperation in the sunshine and Mosley’s company, was too much for Diana: with her face still in bandages she discharged herself at five-thirty one morning, a week earlier than her surgeon recommended. With David’s help – he hired a car and booked her plane ticket – she drove straight to Croydon airport and flew by seaplane to Naples. It is interesting to reflect that although this was only two years after her divorce David was prepared to assist her to get to Mosley.
She arrived at the villa four days earlier than planned – during a dinner at which Mosley and Baba were entertaining the Crown Princess of Italy – at almost the same time as the cable she had sent advising Mosley that she was coming. Diana recalls that she was ‘half-dead and only wanted to sleep’.18 Vivien remembered hearing a row between the grown-ups that night, and Nicholas recalls doors banging, and being prevented on the following morning from going into one of the bedrooms. ‘Do not go there,’ a servant warned him. ‘Eet ees Mrs Guinness.’19 With hindsight, Nicholas wrote that the situation was ‘a social and a personal challenge worthy of the mettle of someone like my father – on his tightrope, as it were, juggling his plates above Niagara!’20
After breakfast Mosley left with Baba and the children for Amalfi, where the adults booked into a hotel and the children slept on the boat. Diana was left alone with the servants at the villa, sitting in the shade and enjoying the peace until Mosley and the children returned on the date originally fixed for her arrival. She soon recovered from her injuries, and took boat trips with them, sitting on the prow with ‘an air of stillness about her like that of the sphinxes and classical statues that looked out over the sea from the terraces of the villas on Capri’.21
If she was annoyed with Mosley, Diana was quite likely to close the Eatonry and go abroad to stay with a friend in luxury and sunshine. She knew that the removal of her loyal support and love was effective punishment. Her beauty gave her a sort of invulnerability, for she always attracted admiring men wherever she went, and at a personal level this must have been the proverbial double-edged sword for Mosley. He was ‘apt to be jealous’, said Nicholas, when he was apart from Diana.
As well as the row in Italy that year, Diana became pregnant and had a termination. In those days illegitimacy was a serious stigma, not something to inflict lightly upon a child, and had Diana borne Mosley a child at this point the old scandal would have reopened, with all the resultant bad publicity for him, and hurt for the Redesdales. But the abortion provided some sort of catalyst in the relationship, for Diana loved her babies. Although by modern standards she spent little time with them, and even when she was at the Eatonry they were cared for by Nanny, rather than her, this was not unusual in their circle. Her son Jonathan insists that he and his brother saw as much of their mother as did any of their acquaintances. Diana is on record as saying, ‘Marriage meant nothing to me, yet three years after his wife’s death we did marry, because we wanted children, and in those days it was supposed to be better for children to be born in wedlock.’22
In the early part of 1936 Diana and Mosley decided to marry, but for various reasons that would become obvious – Baba for one, presumably – Mosley did not want news of this to leak out, so they had to find a way to do it in secret. At first they thought it would be possible to marry in Paris but discovered that the banns would have to be posted at the British consulate. Meanwhile there was the question of where to live. The Eatonry was too small: they needed a family home in the country.
Mosley’s two sisters-in-law were still running his home, Savehay Farm, and looking after the children with the help of dedicated and loyal staff. Diana occasionally visited there, always to a cool reception, and Nicholas recalled being instructed by his nanny that he must ‘never speak to Mrs Guinness’. Although Cimmie had been dead for nearly three years, Mosley knew it would have caused ructions if he had tried to move Diana in, so Diana set about looking for a suitable home, where they could accommodate all the children of their respective earlier marriages. It had to be convenient for Mosley’s campaigning, which continued unabated, especially in the Midlands and industrial north. She found Wootton Lodge in Staffordshire.
Wootton has been called ‘one of the most beautiful houses in England’, and is vast, magnificent, romantic, if somewhat impractical as a family home. It was built in 1610 and had been a Royalist stronghold during the civil war. Its architecture is reminiscent of the more famous Hardwick Hall (‘more glass than wall’) with huge mullioned windows, which give it an ethereal appearance. The estate agent openly regarded it as a white elephant – for in the prevailing economic climate it seemed unlikely to be taken off his hands – but Diana fell in love with it and persuaded the owner to lease it to her ‘for almost nothing’ with an option to buy later. Mosley paid the rent and installed a heating system, but they agreed that Diana would have to be responsible for the upkeep and staffing. Bryan had made her a generous settlement but she was not rich and she knew that living at Wootton would mean sacrifices. Fortunately for her, David chose this moment to have one of his regular ‘furniture sales’ Swinbrook was to be sold and already he, Sydney, Decca and Debo were living more or less permanently at Old Mill Cottage in High Wycombe. Diana was able to buy some of the best pieces of furniture and family paintings to furnish her beloved Wootton at a discount.
It was not quite so fortunate for Sydney: ‘From Batsford Mansion, to Asthall Manor, to Swinbrook House, to Old Mill Cottage’ was the derisive chant coined by Decca and Debo to describe the decline of the Redesdale family fortunes. Despite Sydney’s financial prudence, David’s various moneymaking schemes – the gold mine, and investments in ventures such as diving to a sunken galleon to raise gold bullion – ate into the Redesdale inheritance. He turned down schemes that subsequently made money, such as the first ice-cube-making machine to be introduced to England. Even worse, he seemed to have an uncanny knack for investing at the top of a market, and selling at the bottom.
As before, when David was selling their homes, Sydney took herself well out of the way. She, Decca, Debo and Unity, whose year of study was now over, went on holiday. After a week in Paris the party boarded the Donaldson-Atlantic Line’s SS Letitia on a ‘cultural cruise’ of ancient sites and places of architectural and archaeological interest such as Napoleon’s house in Corsica and the Parthenon in Athens, and there were a number of public-school parties on board. But there were enough passengers of the right sort to create some interest, and when Decca wrote to Nancy telling her ‘there is a Lord on board called Ld Rathcreedon, he’s rather nice too. His brother is travelling also . . .’ Nancy replied inimically:
There is a Lord on board,
A Lord on board, poor Decca roared,
But the Lord on board is a bit of a fraud,
’Cause the Lord on board has a wife called Maud,
There is a Lord on board . . .23
For the first time in years the three younger Mitford sisters were all together on holiday and Unity and Decca behaved like schoolgirls, giggling and misbehaving. It must have been wearing for Sydney for their cavorting began in Paris and seems to have lasted the entire holiday. In Paris they met Dolly Wilde, daughter of Oscar Wilde’s brother and a noted lesbian. Attractive and witty, she was a leading light in the rich, artistic crowd who peopled Paris Society in the thirties and knew everyone worth knowing. Nancy had provided introductions, and Unity and Decca deliberately irritated Sydney by pretending to be ‘in love’ with Dolly, fighting to sit next to her in a taxi, stroking her fur collar and accepting gifts of frilly nightgowns from her.24 Aboard ship they teased ‘the Lord on board’ and his pale-looking brother, and sang rude songs about sixteen-year-old Debo’s innocent holiday flirtation with ‘Red’ Rathcredon. ‘On the good ship Lollipop,/It’s a night trip, into bed you hop,/With Ld Rathcreedon/All aboard for the Garden of Eden.’25
They peppered their conversation with their favourite talk of white slavers; they teased other passengers with practical jokes, convincing one young man that Unity said her nightly prayers to Hitler while giving the Nazi salute. Even Decca joined in this one but in general all three followed Unity’s lead as they set out to shock while appearing models of innocence. It was common-room stuff: ‘Did you see the Canon’s balls today?’ one would enquire loudly of the others at dinner after a visit to a crusader castle. At one point following a tour of a haramlek in a palace in Istanbul Sydney summoned them to her room and looked so grave that they feared there had been bad news from home. ‘Now, children,’ she said, ‘you are not to mention that eunuch at dinner.’26 Unity even managed to put across her political message when one passenger, the noted left-wing Duchess of Atholl, gave a lecture on ‘Modern Despots’. Unity insisted on the right to reply, and did so. A few months later, when word of this debate, and in particular Unity’s platform, was being belatedly discussed in newspapers, Sydney wrote to the Daily Telegraph pointing out to the Duchess that ‘Nazism is from every point of view preferable to Communism.’
But the fun between the sisters came to an abrupt end when in Spain, just before the cruise ended, they went ashore to visit the Alhambra. As they got out of the cars in Granada’s town square, a small crowd gathered to see the tourists and Unity’s Fascist badge was spotted. It was a gold swastika, a special one presented by Hitler, and was engraved on the back with his signature. She was hugely proud of it. Before anyone realized what was happening she was surrounded by hostile Spaniards, trying to tear off the hated symbol. Other members of the party rescued her and the Mitfords were put back into a car and returned to the ship. On the journey Decca and Unity began a physical fight in the back of the car, scratching, hair-pulling and arguing. Sydney separated them, gave them ‘a good talking-to’ and confined them in separate cabins for the remainder of the trip. Decca spent the time mulishly plotting how she could escape and run away.
Following the cruise there was an uneasy truce between Decca and Unity, which was tested every so often by news of the advance of Fascism across Europe. That spring, 1936, Abyssinia fell to Mussolini’s forces and was annexed by Italy, and Hitler’s army marched into the Rhineland to be greeted rapturously by the inhabitants. To Decca’s dismay the British press began to echo her parents’ opinions, that Hitler and his Nazi troops were a bulwark for the rest of Europe against the threat of Communism. Even Beverly Nichols, whose book Cry Havoc had played such a pivotal role in Decca’s developing ideology, seemed to have changed his tune: in the Sunday Chronicle he admitted that Germany had ‘moral strength . . . There is so much in the new Germany that is beautiful, so much that is fine and great . . . all the time we are being trained to believe that the Germans are a nation of wild beasts who vary their time between roasting Jews and teaching babies to present arms. It is simply not true.’ In July Franco launched his attack on the Popular Front government in Spain and long-sighted commentators began referring to it as a rehearsal for a second world war. Shortly afterwards Decca heard on the family grapevine that Esmond, lucky thing, had run off to Spain to join the International Brigade. Then there were rumours that the King was involved with a married woman, an American for heaven’s sake, and she was to get a divorce – but was it in order for her to marry the King? The question was on everyone’s lips and swept the subject of Germany off the pages of newspapers.
But Unity was seldom at home while these things were coming to pass: she spent most of her time in Germany. Even before the cruise she had squeezed in a short trip, visiting the Goebbels family in Berlin in February, and joining Diana in Cologne for the general election held in April when Hitler was returned to power by 99 per cent of the electorate (there was, of course, no opposing candidate). They checked into the Dom Hotel and were having lunch when Hitler walked in, his face set, arm raised in a Nazi salute. Then his eye fell on the Mitford sisters and his face broke into a smile. ‘What, you two here?’ he said, and invited them to join him for tea. In the jubilant atmosphere that prevailed following his victory he invited them both as his personal guests to the Olympic Games to be held in Berlin in July, and to the Bayreuth Festival afterwards.
When she returned to England Diana received an invitation to lunch from the Churchills whom she had not seen since she threw in her lot with Mosley, although she had once been a frequent guest at Chartwell and numbered Randolph and Diana among her best friends. As an artist Churchill is generally known for his landscapes and still lifes, but Diana was among the few people he painted.27 Churchill wanted to hear Diana’s opinions on Hitler, and the others present – Lord Ivor Churchill and Sarah Churchill – were ‘simply fascinated’ as she told them about him. Earlier Hitler had asked her about Churchill, and it is worth noting that Diana was one of the very few, if indeed there were any others, who knew both Hitler and Churchill well at a personal level. She suggested that they should meet, convinced that the two great men would get on, though it was clear they already regarded themselves as rivals. ‘Oh, no. No!’ Winston replied.
It is tempting to wonder what might have happened had Diana been able to arrange a meeting. Might the war, which tore Europe apart, have been prevented? Hitler was pro-England, and had made a study of its culture and history. He was especially fascinated by the ability of such a small nation to control and apparently subjugate a vast empire containing millions of people. He regarded this as evidence of the superiority of the Aryan race and it is widely considered that this was what saved the United Kingdom from invasion. When Nazi chiefs of staff were poised and ready to strike, at a time when Britain was at its most vulnerable, Hitler hesitated to give the order until the moment was lost. Churchill, on the other hand, is a heroic figure to us now, but in the mid-1930s he was not regarded in that light. Most people in his own class, in his own party, in the government and in the establishment regarded him as an adventurer and a warmonger, with a great failure in his past. The disastrous First World War campaign at Gallipoli had been his initiative, and he had lost his post as First Lord of the Admiralty because of the huge loss of life there in 1915–16.
After the cruise Unity shot back to Munich, where she was living more or less permanently now, in a flat in the Pension Doering. She had her two white pet rats there and even a dog, a black Great Dane, called Flopsy as a puppy, but later Rebell. At the end of June she went to stay with Janos von Almassy in Austria for a week. Her time in Munich was spent in a ceaseless circle of waiting to be invited by Hitler to join him for lunch, tea or dinner – sometimes in his flat. ‘The greatest moment in my life,’ she told a friend, ‘was sitting at Hitler’s feet and having him stroke my hair.’28 She gave alcoholic parties in her apartment for her friends from ‘the heim’, and her favourite storm-troopers. One of the SS men, Erich Widemann, she regarded as a boyfriend for some years, but it is unlikely that there was any sexual activity between them. If she was ‘in love’ with anyone it was Hitler, in her naïve, adolescent way.
When they went to the Olympics later that summer, Diana and Unity were invited to stay with the Goebbels at their country house Schwanenwerder, just outside Berlin on the Wannsee Lake. The party was taken each day to the stadium by limousine, and, fortunately, Diana felt, she and Unity were not given seats next to their hosts – they found it boring to sit and watch track events for hour after hour: they preferred to get up and walk around. In the evenings there were social events, state banquets, and parties at which leading Nazis vied with each other to provide the best entertainments: von Ribbentrop gave a decorous ‘embassy-style’ dinner party; Goering held a dinner for eight hundred guests who were entertained by a ballet company, dancing in the moonlight, followed by a vast fête champêtre. Two days later Goebbels entertained two thousand guests on an island on the lake: guests reached the site across pontoons strung from the shore, guided by the light of torches held aloft by lines of Nazi maidens (the girls’ equivalent of the Hitler Youth movement).
When the Games ended Diana and Unity were driven to the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth, in a Mercedes provided by Hitler, for performances of The Ring and Parsifal. The latter was Diana’s least favourite of Wagner’s works and she said so to Hitler when he asked how she had enjoyed it. ‘That is because you are young,’ he told her. ‘You will find as you get older that you will love Parsifal more and more.’29 She states that his prediction was accurate.
The relationship between both women and Hitler had now progressed to a stage where they could even hector him gently. At one luncheon party at Goebbels’ home, he sat with Unity on one side and Diana on the other while they ‘attacked’ him for appointing Ribbentrop as ambassador to London. Ribbentrop was absolutely the wrong man for London, they told him. Such lèse majesté did not go down well with Nazi officials who were always on their guard in the presence of Hitler. No one ever contradicted him. For these two ‘over made-up British women’ to dare to do so did not make them popular. Increasingly Unity found them blocking her access to Hitler. Meanwhile Hitler appeared to enjoy their company, and there is one eyewitness account of them, both dressed in powder-blue jumpers, blonde and striking, sitting on either side of him while they all discussed the reason for the Mitfords’ peachy skin. The English rain was responsible, they told him. In their presence Hitler could be tempted into one or other of his party pieces, either an elaborate pantomime of himself carefully rolling and smoking a cigarette, or an impersonation of Mussolini strutting and bellowing and receiving the gift of ceremonial sword which he drew from its scabbard and flourished dramatically. Hitler usually finished this mimicry by saying in a self-deprecating manner guaranteed to draw good-humoured applause, ‘Of course I’m no good at that sort of thing. I’d just murmur, “Here, Schaub,* you hang on to this.”’30
But despite appearances, a more serious purpose than mere junketing lay behind Diana’s four visits to Germany in 1936.31 The BUF required huge sums of money to run its headquarters with full-time staff, its advertising and promotion, and the cost of Mosley’s hectic programme all over the country. Its revenue, which consisted of the combined income from BUF subscriptions and donations from wealthy sympathizers, were proving insufficient. Eventually, Mosley used virtually all of his own fortune propping up his party, but in 1936 he was confident he could find some way to provide for the necessary shortfall in income. Several schemes were floated but Mosley settled on the only really serious one, which, if it could be brought off, was the equivalent of a licence to print money.
In essence it was to start a commercial radio station, based in Germany and broadcasting in Britain. The BBC held a monopoly on radio transmission for the UK in the thirties, and there were no commercial stations. There were, however, two overseas radio stations that provided what the audiences wanted, and which the BBC staidly refused to offer: evening programmes offering popular music. The most famous of these, the foreign-owned Radio Luxembourg, which played modern recordings hour after hour, interspersed with advertisements, was the only commercial station available in most of England and Scotland, and even though reception was patchy at times it was extremely popular until well into the 1960s. The other station was owned and run by Captain Plugge, a Tory MP, who had obtained a wavelength from the French government. He called his station Radio Normandie and though it could only be received in southern England he made a small fortune from it. Bill Allen, a senior figure in the BUF, was in the advertising business and knew all about Radio Normandie. He backed the idea enthusiastically for he knew that large national companies were looking for alternative advertising platforms to the traditional ones of newspapers and magazines, and the huge success of radio advertising in the USA had pointed the way.
What was required was a medium-band wavelength, powerful enough to reach most of the United Kingdom, so Diana, whose German was by now fluent, was asked to use her friendships and contacts with top Nazis to try to secure permission for the establishment of such a radio station. Apart from the much-needed revenue that would be generated from advertising commercial products on such a station, Mosley and Diana planned a range of own-label cosmetics and other domestic items. And despite the station’s declared aim of being strictly commercial, and relaying only sport, sweet music, beauty hints and similar domestic delights, the opportunity for covert propaganda to the mainly young audience that such a station would attract was incalculable, though Diana refutes this was ever on the agenda. As bait Diana offered payment in hard currency to aid the Reich’s serious balance-of-payments deficit.
To ensure that advertisers would not be put off advertising on a station that was so firmly allied politically, no mention of Mosley’s name was ever made in connection with it. However, the directors of the company, Air Time Ltd, formed to float the idea were senior members of the BUF. The secrecy over Mosley’s involvement was not mere paranoia: in the previous year Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail complied instantly when a Jewish industrialist threatened to withdraw all advertising from the newspaper if it continued to support Mosley. For this reason absolute confidentiality concerning Diana’s mission was maintained, and even Unity – perhaps especially Unity, who was a chatterbox – was not party to the plan.
Immediately Diana ran up against a major hurdle. Her friendship with Joseph and Magda Goebbels might have led her to assume some support from the propaganda minister who was the person who most mattered in the scheme, but Goebbels was implacably opposed to any broadcasting from Germany over which he did not have ultimate control. Diana knew, however, that the right word from Hitler could change Goebbels’ mind and she was working to this end, while at the same time cementing other friendships that might prove useful. But although her friendship with Hitler was now a matter of record, ‘occasionally . . . we dined and watched a film or talked by the fire. We did not discuss the radio project,’ Diana wrote. ‘It was the sort of thing that bored him and was left to his ministers.’32
She did not get far with the radio station project in 1936, but one positive thing for her came out of the series of visits. Diana got on well with Magda Goebbels, and the two women spent a good deal of time together and were close enough for Magda to confide her unhappiness in her marriage. The women had something in common: Goebbels was a notorious womanizer and at one point the marriage almost ended in divorce over his affair with the beautiful Czechoslovakian film star Lida Baarova. On that occasion Magda appealed to Hitler asking for a divorce, but Hitler insisted the couple remain married and that Goebbels give up his lover. Press photographs of the apparently happily married couple with their six beautiful blond children projected too powerful an image of a perfect German family to be discarded. Furthermore, as Hitler had no wife, Magda occupied the position of ‘first lady’ in the Nazi administration. She complied on this occasion as on others, the chief reason, she said, being her children. In turn Diana told her about the problems she and Mosley had experienced in keeping their marriage ceremony secret from the British press. Here, Magda was able to help: she invited Diana to hold her marriage ceremony at her Berlin home. When this proposal was put to Hitler he agreed to ensure that no news of the ceremony would reach the German press, and furthermore that he would attend as guest of honour. Goebbels was less than enchanted by the arrangement, especially when he found that Mosley proposed Bill Allen as his witness. Allen was one of the directors of Air Time Ltd and Goebbels did not trust him (probably he was aware that Allen was an MI5 agent). He did not like or trust Mosley either, and quarrelled with Magda about the forthcoming wedding,33 but with Hitler’s sanction the plan went ahead
Diana and Mosley were married in the drawing room of the Goebbels’ apartment on 6 October 1936. In her autobiography Diana recalled that she wore a pale gold silk tunic dress.
Unity and I, standing at the window in an upstairs room, saw Hitler walking through the trees of the park-like garden . . . the leaves were turning yellow and there was bright sunshine. Behind him came an adjutant carrying a box and some flowers . . . The ceremony was short; the Registrar said a few words, we exchanged rings, signed our names and the deed was done. Hitler’s gift was a photograph in a silver frame with [the initials] A.H. and the German eagle.34
Apart from Hitler, Unity and their hosts, the only people present at the ceremony besides the bride and groom and the registrar were Mosley’s witnesses, Bill Allen and Captain Gordon-Canning, an officer in the 14th Hussars. The British consul had been advised of the marriage, for the sake of legality, but was asked not to publish information about the wedding, which he was not obliged to do since it was not performed under British jurisdiction. He was also invited to attend but declined owing to a previous engagement.35 The small party went straight from the ceremony to a wedding feast organized by Magda Goebbels, and there was no time for Mosley and Hitler to speak privately as Diana had hoped there would be. Afterwards they attended a meeting at the Sportsplatz where Hitler addressed a crowd of twenty thousand. Although Mosley spoke no German Diana thought it would be interesting for him to see Hitler’s technique. Hitler then left on a special train for Munich and the newly-weds went to their hotel, the Kaiserhof. It had been a long day and they were both tired. What should have been a romantic occasion was spoiled by a quarrel, ‘of which, try as I will, I cannot remember the reason,’ Diana wrote, ‘and we went to bed in dudgeon. Next day we flew home to England.’36
Apart from Unity, only David, Sydney and Tom were told of the marriage, under a strict vow of secrecy. Although David was not reconciled to Mosley, both the Redesdales were relieved that at least Diana was no longer living in sin and the rule that he must never be mentioned was relaxed. However, Sydney realized shortly afterwards that the world still thought Diana was living in sin, and that therefore she could still not allow Debo to visit Diana at Wootton. ‘The poor thing was quite distraught about it,’ Unity wrote to Diana, ‘and . . . did hope you would understand.’37
There was still no change in the relationship between Nancy, Diana and Unity. And the singular thing about this quarrel is that Nancy, the queen of all teasers, was deeply hurt by Diana’s continuation of the ‘non-speakers’ rule, and from this hurt grew an increasing bitterness. Perhaps she was not even aware of it herself, but it shows in waspish comments in her correspondence. During the summer she and Prod had taken Decca on holiday to Brittany. Decca enjoyed herself, especially as they treated her as a grown-up and took her to nightclubs, but it was traumatic for Nancy because Prod was in the middle of an emotional love affair, one of many but this one seemed more serious than the others. The girlfriend, Mary Sewell (née Lutyens, she was married for a short time to Unity and Decca’s ‘white slaver’), lived a few doors from Rutland Gate, and the Sewells and the Rodds used to meet regularly to play bridge together. Mary followed the Rodds to Brittany and stayed in the same hotel, causing an aura of emotional tension to pervade the holiday. The Rodd marriage, which had started off so well, was already a sham whose front was wholly maintained by Nancy. She might have accepted the infidelity, for she saw so much of it in the circles in which she moved, but Prod had also started to drink heavily, which made him unpleasant and aggressive. Also Nancy desperately wanted a child, and tried for years. It was altogether an unhappy period for her as the Rodds moved from their first married home, Rose Cottage, at Strand-on-the-Green, into a small Victorian house at 12 Blomfield Road in Maida Vale. The tiny garden backed on to the Grand Union Canal, which was ‘enchanting’ and the saving feature of the otherwise poky little house.
It could not have helped that Diana and Mosley had moved into beautiful Wootton Lodge earlier in the year. It was tranquil indoors and out: bluebell woods surrounded the house and clothed the valleys that were dotted with trout pools. Diana had made there ‘an atmosphere of extraordinary beauty and stillness,’ Nicholas Mosley recalled. ‘Whenever [my father] became exhausted or ill – such as the time he was hit by a brick at Liverpool – he would return to Wootton as if it were his fairy castle and Diana his princess.’ They were so happy there that they spent all their holidays at home in preference to going abroad. When they were apart they sent each other loving notes: ‘Today,’ wrote Diana, ‘as my heart is full of love I shall write what is always in my thoughts; and that is, that I love you more than all the world and more than life. Thank you my precious wonderful darling for the loveliest days I could possibly imagine . . .’ And Mosley wrote in kind, ‘Tried to ring you Saturday night but told no answer – nothing special – just love!’38 In Diana’s diaries during their time at Wootton the same entries occur over and over. ‘Perfect day with Kit [her name for Mosley],’ and ‘Wonderful day.’39
Romance was in the air, it seems, for Pam, the ‘most rural’ Mitford, had at last fallen in love. For some time she had been seeing Derek Ainslie Jackson, the thirty-year-old good-looking son of Sir Charles Jackson, founder of the News of the World.40 He had married Poppet John (daughter of Augustus John) in 1931 but a divorce was in progress when he and Pam began their relationship. Derek and his identical twin Vivian had been orphaned while still teenagers at Rugby, and were inseparable. They took scholarship examinations for different universities because it was thought best for their development that they were split up (Derek applied to Trinity, Cambridge, and Vivian to Oxford), and when they parted company at Bletchley Junction41 it was believed to be the first time in their lives that they had been apart. Although their guardian cheated them by selling blocks of their shares in News of the World at rock-bottom market price and then bought them back himself, they were gleefully aware that they would be millionaires when they reached their majority. They had a highly developed sense of fun and were great teasers. They could be bombastic and arrogant, but they were also lively, charming, generous, funny and devoted to animals.
They had first-class brains and read science subjects. When Derek graduated with a first, as anticipated,42 he was contacted by Professor Lindemann, who offered him laboratory facilities of his own at the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford to work on his doctorate. Later Derek would say that Professor Lindemann had ‘bought’ him, ‘just as you might buy a promising yearling. But this particular yearling was a spectacular winner, for at the age of only twenty-two his specialist research in the field of spectroscopy led to a leap of thought considered so brilliant that no book on physics could ever be written again without including his findings.43 He would go on to become a world-renowned physicist, and a professor at Oxford, and although his life outside his work was filled with activity and pleasurable pursuits, science was always what mattered most to him, ultimately taking precedence over everything else: nothing was so sacred that it could not be shelved or cancelled if he happened to be at a crucial point in his research.
Second only to his love of science was Derek’s love of horses. He rode with significant success and great bravery as an amateur in National Hunt races, including several times in the Grand National, and he hunted like a hawk with the Heythrop hounds two or even three days a week in the season. Compared to the Mitfords he was not tall at five foot eight; compactly built, he could hunt thoroughbreds when most men needed a heavyweight hunter – thus he had an incomparable advantage when following hounds across fast country. His riding, jumping and off-the-cuff quips (an important part of hunt social life), as well as his eccentricity, became the stuff of Heythrop legend. He once came off into a ditch and was soaked through but, undaunted, he dashed home, changed, and returned to finish the day. To sixteen-year-old Debo he had been a hero-figure for some time. She considered herself in love with him, and was delighted when Pam began going out with him, for it meant she got to see him at home. In the autumn of 1936, however, Pam moved into Derek’s home, Rignell House, anticipating his divorce by a few months, and the couple drove over to High Wycombe to announce their engagement to her family. On hearing their news the infatuated Debo ‘slid gracefully onto the flagstones in a dead faint’.44
That December saw the abdication of Edward VIII that most people had been hoping would somehow be avoided. James Lees-Milne recalls in his diary that he stayed overnight at Wootton with Diana and listened to the broadcast with her. ‘We both wept when Edward VIII made his abdication broadcast. I remember it well, and Diana speaking in eggy-peggy [baby talk] to Tom Mosley over the telephone.’45 Christmas carollers that year invented a new verse to add to the old favourite: ‘Hark the herald angels si-ing/Mrs Simpson’s pinched our King . . .’
Three weeks later, just two days before the end of 1936, Derek and Pam (the latter ‘laden with jewels, which her generous bridegroom had showered upon her’), were married at the Carlton register office. In the formal wedding picture, the small group of Mitfords and family friends are muffled in furs and dark winter clothes. No one is smiling, but this is probably because it was no more customary, then, to smile for formal photographs than it was when sitting for an artist for a portrait. The posed annual family photographs of the Mitfords are equally serious. Diana and Nancy, apparently with hatchets temporarily buried, stand shoulder-to-shoulder behind Pam, Derek and Sydney. Tom is half hidden behind David. Unity, Decca and the heartbroken Debo are not in evidence.
The newly-weds left for Austria on honeymoon. On arrival at their hotel in Vienna in early January the manager came out to meet them and asked Derek quietly if he could speak to him alone. Derek spoke fluent German and it was from this complete stranger that he received the news that his twin Vivian had been killed in St Moritz. A horse-drawn sleigh he was driving had overturned after hitting a telegraph pole. Pam told Diana that Derek was never the same again. ‘Part of him died with Vivian, who meant more to him than any other being on earth ever could.’46