For the Mosleys, the autumn of 1929 was taken up by politics. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 had brought the question of unemployment into sharp focus; Tom, for whom the subject was all-consuming, had written and spoken about it to such effect that he was asked to work out a practical policy for dealing with it.
Unfortunately, he was under the overall direction of J. H. Thomas, the former general secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen, Lord Privy Seal to Tom’s chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Thomas was old, set in his ways, unable to grasp economic theory—especially when (as often) fuddled by drink—and as a Labour politician of the old sort, he was in any case suspicious of Tom. He believed that Tom was an adventurer, using the Labour Party for what he could get out of it; Tom thought Thomas a dinosaur. It did not help that the prime minister, already frowned on by many in his party for preferring to spend his leisure with aristocrats rather than trade unionists, was clearly taken with both the Mosleys.
As Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary at the time: “Mosley, whom I met at lunch, is contemptuous of Thomas’s incapacity, of the infirmity of manual working Cabinet Ministers generally and very complacent about his own qualifications for the leadership of the Labour Party. That young man has too much aristocratic insolence in his make-up.”
Cimmie, she added, had charmed the House. The subjects on which she had chosen to speak were those about which many felt strongly but which had not always had much of a public airing. In February 1930 Cimmie asked Parliament to consider some form of what is now known as planning control. “Powers should be given to the local authority to decide whether a house is suitable to the surroundings, whether it is wisely and properly placed and is the right coloring,” she said.
Tom was well aware of the undercurrents in the Labour Party. Knowing that any radical new theory he submitted to Thomas would automatically elicit a negative response, he worked on his own. With his friend John Strachey, Allan Young (now his parliamentary private secretary), the veteran politician George Lansbury and the Scottish Labour leader Tom Johnston, he evolved what came to be known as the Mosley Memorandum. It was largely based on the economic principles of his friend John Maynard Keynes; and proposed a large-scale program of public works and the mobilization of national resources to fight unemployment. It also embodied a principle that instinctively scared his party: the focusing of power in the hands of a small inner group.
Tom, never a team player, would soon refine this ethos still further to its ultimate principle: personal power. But at that moment, with unemployment the major issue in the western hemisphere—in the U.S. it had risen to over seven million, in Germany to over five million—ambition and idealism had coalesced into a single strand and his anxiety was simply to get things done. Among his intimates, he bewailed the “crass stupidity” of the Labour ministers with whom he had to deal.
He was a young man in a hurry—but from Thomas’s point of view, Tom was seriously at fault in showing his work to outside helpers without so much as consulting Thomas. There was further acrimony when Tom sent his memorandum to the prime minister on January 23, 1930, asking him to place it before the cabinet—again without consulting Thomas. This time, Thomas offered his resignation to the prime minister, which was refused, and Ramsay MacDonald delivered a private rebuke to Tom.
After discussing the Mosley Memorandum, the cabinet appointed a subcommittee chaired by Philip Snowden to consider it in depth. As the subcommittee procrastinated there was an atmosphere of crisis within the Mosley household. “Will Tom resign?” wondered Georgia Sitwell on February 22.
Gradually it became clear that the government would reject the Mosley Memorandum, and on May 9 it did so. Accepting it would have meant abandoning free trade and the gold standard, measures which would have caused disruption and disunity within the entire party. Conscious that the economic blizzard was about to commence, conscious that the new and untried party must be seen to hang together, the government closed ranks.
“Oswald and Cynthia Mosley here for the night, at a critical moment in his career,” wrote Beatrice Webb on May 19. “Is he or is he not going to resign?”
By the next day Tom had made up his mind. He went to see the prime minister and, though MacDonald tried to dissuade him, resigned his government office (the other two ministers concerned with combating unemployment, Lansbury and Johnston, remained). In his letter of resignation of May 20 Tom said he found it inconsistent with honor to remain in a government that would not discuss its election pledges. MacDonald, who regarded the tone of his letter as one of “graceless pompousness,” wrote in his diary that night: “Test of a man’s personality is his behavior in disagreement. In every test he failed.”
In the House Tom began to attack what he saw as the government’s apathy and lack of constructive action. Then, no longer bound by cabinet rules, he put the Mosley Memorandum to a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party on May 22. It evoked sympathy and interest but provoked a general feeling that Tom should not be seen to attack his own government at this crucial moment. The experienced politician Arthur Henderson asked Tom to take the “noble line” of withdrawing his censure motion against the government to allow them to consider his plan more fully. This attempt to shift him from his intransigent stance failed: Tom insisted that his proposals be put to the vote. Despite an eloquent speech, he achieved only twenty-nine votes against 210. Although his courage was admired, forcing the issue in this way was widely considered a tactical mistake—or, as Irene put it, “a stupid egotistical error,” though she was thankful that Cim was wholeheartedly in agreement with Tom over his stance. “That is all that matters to them both.”
On May 28 Tom made his resignation speech as a minister in the House of Commons. It was a tour de force. “Mosley’s speech in the second attack on Thomas is acclaimed as that of a distinguished parliamentary orator, wholly admirable in manner and style,” wrote Beatrice Webb. She went on to ask the question at the back of many minds.
Has MacDonald found his superseder in Oswald Mosley? MacDonald owes his pre-eminence largely to the fact that he is the only artist, the only aristocrat by temperament and talent, in a party of plebeians and plain men. Hitherto he has had no competitor in personal charm and good looks, delightful voice and the gift of oratory. But Mosley has all these with the élan of youth, wealth and social position added to them.
Mosley still has a young man’s zeal. He lacks MacDonald’s strongest point—genuine puritanism. He is entangled in the smart set and luxurious habits; he is reputed to be loose with women; he rouses suspicion, he knows little or nothing about trade unionism or Co-operation, he cannot get on terms of intimacy with working men or with the lower middle-class brainworker. He is, in fact, an intruder, a foreign substance in the labour movement, not easily assimilated.
In Melton, Irene was finding the life she had chosen for herself increasingly hollow. The most noticeable difference made by the Prince of Wales’s departure was an increase in the wildness of the parties. Drunkenness that would have been frowned upon in his presence was becoming commonplace—“Charlie took off his trousers and did fearful dances in white pants,” “Peter Ackroyd was found drunk in a spare room in the morning, stark naked in bed.” At the Melton Ball Irene ran out of the building to escape the harassing advances of one man only to have another, whom she did not care for, propose to her on the way home.
Everything seemed to conspire to depress her. She was losing money constantly at bridge and, though this was not a financial worry, it made her feel stupid and incompetent. She saw the same old faces at all the parties; one evening, with a similarly disillusioned woman friend, she worked out what it was about them that so irked her. “Diagnosed our disgust and antipathy to 90 percent of the hunting people as their being really common, no breeding—tho’ I hate that word—and so having no rare sensitiveness or exquisite feeling which jars so badly on one day after day.”
Yet “breeding” was not really the problem: Irene made friends delightedly with writers, artists and musicians, black, white or Jewish, without a thought as to their lineage. She sent roses to Mrs. Paul Robeson, she went constantly to the Polish embassy with her friend Jan Masaryk (the future foreign minister of Czechoslovakia), she was half in love with Arthur Rubinstein.
The underlying cause of her unhappiness was the knowledge that her love for Gordon had no future. She should, she knew, avoid seeing him—but this would mean giving up hunting. As it was, every sight of him was a pang. Unable to cut him out of her life completely, she saw him occasionally, with disastrous results. “G dined with me. Had a ghastly breakdown of weeping and misery after and had to get Lena [Lena Sibley, her lady’s maid] down or else I should have gone mad. Devotedly Lena held my hand with hankies on my aching brow till I fell asleep at about three.”
She was less unhappy when she returned to London in the late spring. Although her future looked barren, the present, with its wider circle of friends, its plays, concerts and galleries, and its physical proximity to her sisters, was more agreeable. There were teas with Cim at Smith Square, where politicians and housemaids would pass one another on the single staircase, and a chance to play with the children in their nursery or watch them being bathed.
In default of the motherhood for which she longed, she was a devoted aunt. When seven-year-old Nicky had appendicitis she was a constant visitor; when she went to Baba’s house there was two-and-a-half-year-old David toddling across the nursery floor toward her ready for the games and romps he did not always get from his mother. “I seem to understand my sisters’ children so much better than they do,” she reflected with a touch of complacency.
Although Ascot was rained out, the social round scarcely faltered. Every hour of the day seemed packed with concerts, plays, dances, private views, fancy-dress parties, cocktail parties followed by dinner, followed by bridge, followed by supper at the Hungaria or the Savoy. The Mosleys gave enormous weekend house parties, or invited friends for the day to Denham, where they played tennis, lay on the lawn, bathed in the river or unwillingly listened to a sparring match between Cim and Tom.
After one of these episodes, perhaps because Irene had witnessed it, Cim was unpleasant to her at that evening’s ball (on July 8). “You do not look your best. I think you had better go home.” Irene fled in tears, to be consoled by the faithful Lena. A few days later Cim rubbed in the message that Irene should acquire a husband before it was too late by telling her how Bendor [the duke of Westminster] adored Loelia Ponsonby and how Irene should be in that position—but wasn’t.
It was a rare display of nastiness from the normally sweet-natured Cim. Tom’s unfaithfulnesses brought out qualities alien to her happy, carefree nature. Despite the urging of Baba and Irene, who wanted her to give Tom a fright, she had always refused to visit the bachelor flat in Ebury Street that Tom had taken; it would have smacked of snooping and spying and she could well imagine his jibes about such activities, but she could hardly stop herself imagining what went on there.
Meanwhile the arguments went on. When Irene returned to her house in Deanery Street one evening at eleven-thirty it was to find Cim and Tom there having a row. “It was just about some stupid bill and he rushed off in the car in a rage and poor dazed Cim still could not see how it had all arisen.” That night, Cimmie stayed on at Irene’s house and wrote miserably to Tom:
I am entirely bewildered. I just don’t understand—why have you been so horrid to me not only tonight but ever since I got up from chickenpox. As the sound of my voice and my presence (and you’ve seen so little of me) seem to drive you demented I resort to poor Irene’s method of putting pen to paper.
You leave me alone in London for the weekend to look after Nicky [their son Nicholas, aged seven, had just been operated on for appendicitis] and go away with another woman for the weekend. You never see Nicky from before his op. Saturday morning till Monday evening . . .
It was little better in Cowley Street. Baba, when not disagreeable (“Of course she criticized my lovely black fur coat and said the collar was wrong”) seemed always to be “in the extremes of gloom.” Baba was pregnant again, but what was causing her depression was a gradual disillusionment with her marriage. The truth was that she and Fruity were very different people, and after the natural decline in the sexual excitement of the first years they had little in common. Fruity was charming, kind, delightful, funny and supremely loyal, but even his best friends did not call him clever. “Fruity is a sweet man but too stupid,” wrote Georgia Sitwell in her diary, after an evening in a party with him at the Kit-Cat Club.
Baba’s shift in perspective had been brought about by several factors. Fruity running the Prince of Wales’s horses, trying hunters for him, managing his stables, was a man doing a job at which he was expert, and like all professionals actively exercising a supreme skill, commanded respect. But now that the prince had given up hunting, Fruity’s job had disappeared. He was still the prince’s best friend and the Metcalfes still moved constantly in the prince’s circle, but there was a great difference between a husband active, occupied and full of plans and one often hanging around the house.
There was also the financial discrepancy. During the Melton years, when her husband filled a role that they and their circle considered important, the difference between Fruity’s income and Baba’s had not seemed important. In London, with a different way of life, friends with wider interests, and a house and nursery to run, the balance shifted. From the early days of their courtship the devoted Fruity had always tried to do what his “Babs” wanted and the pattern, set in stone by the fact that Baba paid most of the bills, emphasized her dominance in the relationship.
She had so far indulged only in mild flirtations, but she was conscious of her sexual power. She was beautiful, with high-cheekboned, aristocratic looks, her witty remarks delivered in a languid drawl; her slim figure was always exquisitely dressed. The sophisticated assurance she exuded masked the powerful libido she had inherited from her father. It was a combination many men found challenging—and irresistible.
More crucially, at twenty-six Baba was not the same person as the dazzled girl who had fallen so headlong in love with a man whom no dispassionate observer would have picked as her husband. She had grown up and her mind was expanding. She had just begun, also, to take an interest in the charity that would occupy so much of her time in later life—the Save the Children Fund. She wanted occupation, conversation and company that was intelligent as well as fun.
The Mosleys went off as usual to Antibes on August 2, 1930. Irene, still hankering after Gordon, decided once again to put the sea between them. Before she left on a tour of Norway, the Baltic and Russia, she went to one of the last house parties given by Grace at Hackwood. It was dominated by Margot Asquith, more eccentric and outspoken than ever. “Margot tyrannical over her bridge. I had her both evenings with Chips [Channon] and Alfred [Duggan]. She got me so rattled I was paralysed. I lost £43 and the old girl won £38 and Chips £56. The tennis was poor. Margot played golf with Chips in black shoes, red socks and white silk stockings, a baby’s shetland and a black and white spotted skirt, the ball ricocheting off every mole hill.”
Irene returned in September, but even the consolation of an old admirer and a happy dinner with Fruity, Baba, Cim and Tom at Smith Square was not enough to blot out thoughts of Gordon. She set off again in October, this time for the Middle East. She was called home from her travels when Baba gave birth to twin daughters on November 14, 1930, after a long and hard labor, and became so ill that it was feared she might not live.
Irene’s anxiety over Baba was such that she did not leave London to hunt until the New Year. Even Cliveden was depressing. “A dark autumnal day,” wrote Harold Nicolson, visiting it in late November. “Thirty-two people in the house. Cold and draughty. Great sofas in vast cathedrals. Duff and Diana Cooper, Tom and Cimmie, Oliver and Lady Maureen Stanley, Harold Macmillan and Lady Dorothy, Brendan Bracken, Bob Boothby, Malcolm Bullock and Garvin [the editor of the Observer]. After dinner Nancy, fearful that her party was falling apart, whisked out her false teeth and put on a Victorian hat to make the party go. It did not.”
When Georgia Sitwell went to tea with Cim and Tom at Smith Square the talk was of politics and Baba’s poor health. Baba stayed with Cim and Tom at Savehay Farm to recuperate from the birth of the twins, refusing to allow Fruity to leave her side. When Cim took him off to Hackwood one day there were scenes: Baba, accustomed to having her own way, had a full-scale temper tantrum. Irene, there to keep her company in the intervals of looking after her maid Lena, who had just been diagnosed with cancer, listened crossly as Baba yelled that she had been left alone and no one loved her. A few days later, back in Cowley Street, she was cheerful again.
Irene was dividing her time between dashing back to London to see Baba and Lena, whose tumor was so large it was inoperable, hunting—often with Fruity—and the inevitable games of poker. There was one notable absentee, she recorded. “Thelma, due to join Duke in Africa, produced mysterious appendicitis in Paris, returned after ten days there and is now off again!!! What is the ‘Princess of Wales’ up to? I lost £8.”
In February 1931 Fruity, worried by Baba’s continuing pallor and thinness, took her to Torquay for a fortnight in the hope that the sea air would restore her health. It was not until March 4 that the twins, Davina and Linda, were christened at the Chapel Royal, Baba exquisite in a broad-tail coat with sable collar and cuffs, tight black hat and orchids pinned on her collar. Cimmie, in an eerie foreshadowing of her future, was dressed completely in black.