By the end of 1936 the British Union was nearly bankrupt. The money from Italy had ceased, the fallout from the Cable Street affair had frightened off many supporters, and the Public Order Act, passed on December 18, 1936, forbade the wearing of uniforms and gave police the right to call off marches.
Tom’s first step was to sack many of the staff; his next to mortgage his estate for eighty thousand pounds and put one hundred thousand pounds into BU funds. His third, at the beginning of June, was to tell the Curzon sisters that he would be letting Savehay Farm and the children would have to spend their holidays at Wootton in future. Since no one knew of his marriage, this was the equivalent of saying that they must live with his mistress. Baba at once wrote to tell him that he had no right to put the sixteen-year-old Vivien in such a position.
On June 11 Irene was shocked to receive a telephone call from the Daily Mail correspondent in Berlin, Ward Price, saying that there was a report that Tom had married Diana Guinness in Berlin. She rushed over to tell Baba, who sensibly told her not to burst out with this to Tom or it would make him more furious on the subject than ever. Instead, she arranged to see the Mosley family solicitor the same day, who told her that Tom had mentioned neither the question of letting Denham nor having the children at Wootton when they had met the day before.
The next morning Lady Mosley asked Irene to come over, as she had a proposal from Tom to discuss with her. Before bringing it out, Lady Mosley told Irene how badly she felt about it. What Tom had suggested was that if Irene felt his children should remain in the family home, she should pay the annual running costs of fifteen hundred pounds herself and make arrangements for the children to repay her when they came of age. He justified this, said Lady Mosley, by saying that he had no more money to spend on them.
Later, at lunch, with Baba present, Tom put this to Irene himself. Irene’s solicitor said it was an outrageous suggestion to which he could never agree but she asked him to reach some accommodation with Tom so that for the next few years at least the children need not be uprooted from their home.
The next day her solicitor had a lengthy meeting with Tom, who had received an offer for an eighteen-month tenancy of Denham which he wanted to accept. Her solicitor found the whole business deplorable: apart from the moral considerations, Tom refused to offer any security and there was no time to make adequate alternative provisions. But Irene was adamant that the children must stay in their home, so, after a long argument with Tom, she agreed to take on the costs if he would agree to a two-year tenancy.
“All hopeless and vile,” she groaned to her diary, having tried in vain to make him promise that he would not bring Diana Guinness there, “but I took on the deal.” With additions from Baba, she compiled a letter of agreement which her solicitor refined and dispatched to Tom for signature.
They were not out of the woods yet. Lady Mosley rang to report that Tom was infuriated by her letter and had called off the deal, saying that his mother and secretary could run the house instead. Once again, it was Baba who managed to make Tom see reason, eventually persuading him to put his signature to a document that covered every point raised by Irene. She may have reminded Tom that both of them depended on Irene’s goodwill to look after their children during the summer holidays.
By the end of June 1937 more rumors about Tom’s remarriage had filtered out, but when Georgia Sitwell stayed with the Metcalfes for a weekend neither of them could confirm it. Instead, they regaled her with an account of the duke of Windsor’s wedding. “Most interesting—pathos and bathos combined” was Georgia’s response.
The summer followed the same pattern as earlier years, Irene’s total commitment to the children alternating with indignation at the way both Tom and Baba seemed to take her for granted. She took the older ones to Lord’s to watch the Eton-and-Harrow cricket match (it was the year that Eton won by seven wickets), she went down to Hastings to see Fruity, his sister Muriel and the twins on the beach, took Nick and Mick crab-hunting on the rocks or to the big pool at St. Leonards for a bathe and played spillikins with the older children after dinner. From there she went to the Isle of Wight, to spend a few days in a camp arranged for the Girls’ Clubs for which she worked, returning to St. Leonards in early August.
Irene’s other summer travels took her to Salzburg, Greece, Crete, Delos, Myklor, by ship from Salonika along the coast, and finally back to England from Milan by train on September 16. The next day she went to lunch with the duke and duchess of Kent. All of them would have been worried if they had known what their former king was planning.
While staying at the Château de Candé for his wedding, the duke of Windsor had got on well with his host, Charles Bedaux. Unbeknownst to the duke, Bedaux was trying to reestablish his business in Germany and was well aware of the satisfaction to the Nazi party if the former king of England could be persuaded to tour the country—and of the benefits it could bring to himself.
Bedaux also knew that the duke had always been interested in the working man and his conditions of labor, and during their conversations the idea of an exploratory visit to Germany came up. The duke was enthusiastic and preparations had begun soon after the wedding, with a list of conditions sent to Hitler’s aide-de-camp Captain Wiedemann. On September 3, the duke sent Wiedemann a statement that
he and the Duchess of Windsor would be visiting Germany and the United States in the near future for the purpose of studying housing and working conditions in these two countries.
The arrival in Berlin will be on the Nord Express on Monday morning, 11 October 1937. His Royal Highness would appreciate an attaché speaking English, this attaché to meet him in Paris by calling on Mrs. Charles Bedaux at the Ritz on 30 September at 3:00 in the afternoon, and desires that his plans be kept secret until 3 October.
He and the Duchess prefer not to exceed 80 kilometers per hour in automobiles, for luncheon he eats only green salad and drinks tea—though he would be happy to have one or two typically German luncheons in a factory cafeteria with some German workers present—he prefers receptions between 6–8 p.m. followed by a quiet dinner with a few personalities present. The party will consist of the Duke and Duchess, Dudley Forwood, the German attaché, his detective Mr. Storrier, a valet and two maids.
Bedaux also corresponded on the duke’s behalf with various American private and official dignitaries. To one, he concluded: “How right you were to suggest in April to the Duke of Windsor, who is proving himself to be as great a man as he was a King, a world leadership where what a writer has aptly termed his genius for service would be used.
“I have the personal feeling that it is going to be used and on a scale never known before. I wonder if the cruelty, the suffering, the distress are not the result of a Superior Will intent on ensuring a greater joy on earth.” The letter (dated August 23) was, as he pointed out in the second paragraph, authorized by the duke himself. It, too, enjoined secrecy.
Irene and Vivien left for Munich, where Viv was to be “finished,” on September 25, 1937. Viv had been worried about going to Germany—her headmistress said she thought it was because she hated fascism—but on the day itself she was perfectly calm. Irene could not help thinking of her own departure for Dresden, unaccompanied by any of her family, twenty-five years earlier, with Curzon desperately embarrassed when she burst into tears as they said farewell on the platform. On their arrival the following day she took Viv to the house where she would be staying, 16 Konradstrasse, and when she was settled in they made plans for exploring the city.
Three days later they were spectators at the arrival of Hitler and Mussolini (who was visiting Germany) at the Olympic stadium.
Goebbels in a ringing voice opened the tamasha,* followed by the Fuhrer whose voice was hard and clear [wrote Irene that evening]. He reeled out a string of praises for Musso and his regime amid storms of applause. Musso followed and jerked his German-spoken speech out like machine gun fire. It was the better of the two—his accent was very good for an Italian.
He actually said thousands of Italians had died in Spain to save the world from Moscow. I longed to be there to see those hundreds of thousands greeting the two dictators. Throughout dinner we listened to military bands in the Stadium. I played bridge with Viv after.
When Irene left Munich on October 3, Viv mumbled, “I am not really unhappy, Aunt,” in a way which so tore at Irene’s heartstrings that as soon as she got home she wrote her a long, comforting letter, with a note to the countess with whom Viv was staying. “I thank God for all the plans so far, may she be happy and safe,” wrote Irene that night. “I think Cim would be pleased.” Back at home at the beginning of November, she found it hard to swallow both Tom’s ingratitude and lack of concern over his daughter.
Tom’s politics were leading him into ever deeper water. With every fresh Nazi outrage, public hostility grew toward the British Union, and its continued marches and parades served as a focus for disturbance and, increasingly, violence. According to Thomas Jones, Sir Samuel Hoare (the newly appointed minister for Home Affairs) was “bothered by the Mosley processions but does not want to squash them in a hurry because the Civil Liberties group in the House is numerous and vocal.” At a meeting in Liverpool on October 10, Tom was hit on the head by a brick thrown at him and was so badly injured he had to remain in the hospital for a week.
While he was there, the result of a libel case brought against his newspaper, Action, was announced. He had lost. As Irene accurately put it, “Tom’s paper has to pay £20,000 to Lord Camrose for calling him a Jew and putting his interests before [those of] the Crown. I was amazed Tom has not got it in the neck before, his articles are such filth but Beckett has merely turned traitor to him in Court, having edited the paper at the time of the libel.”
John Beckett had not been called as a witness but had asked if he could make a statement. He said: “When I wrote that article I believed it to be true because the information in it was given by people on whom, rightly or wrongly, I placed great reliance. To me, to tell a man that he is a Jew and that his financial interests are far greater outside the country than in it are two of the greatest insults that can possibly be offered to any man. When I discovered that so far from the information my titled friend gave me about Lord Camrose being a Jew being true, he was a Welshman—and, if I may say so, an obvious Welshman—I did not want to go into the box to justify that.”
The “titled friend” was obviously—or so the jury thought—Tom. Lord Camrose was awarded twenty thousand pounds and costs; Beckett was unable to find the money and Action, owned by a company with a capital of one hundred pounds, went bankrupt. To the great relief of Irene, who feared the loss of Denham, Tom could not be held liable.
On October 12 the Kents asked Irene to lunch again, at their house in Bryanston Square, this time to meet her old admirer Nevile Henderson. There were only the four of them, and Henderson held the floor about his German experiences. Almost certainly they would also have talked of the visit of the duke of Windsor to Nazi Germany, which had begun only the day before, and about which no one had known anything until the duke’s office released a statement nine days earlier.
Despite the duke’s best intentions, the visit was of course used by the Nazis as a propaganda coup. For the Windsors, it was a serious faux pas, as their meetings with the Görings, Himmler, Hess and Goebbels, their gala dinner in Streicher’s Nuremberg house and, finally, the meeting with Hitler at which the duke sketched a half-hearted Nazi salute were duly chronicled—and photographed.
“There can be no doubt that his tour has strengthened the regime’s hold on the working classes,” said the New York Times, adding that the duke had lent himself “perhaps unconsciously, but easily, to National Socialist propaganda.” Herbert Morrison, in the Labour magazine Forward, put it more strongly, saying first that the duke had always failed to realize that in a constitutional monarchy neither the heir to the throne nor the king can publicly express opinions on controversial matters.
“If the Duke wants to study social problems he had far better quietly read books and get advice in private. What he is going to do with his knowledge I do not know, for he cannot be permitted to re-enter public life—in this country at any rate. The choice before ex-kings is either to fade out of the public eye or to be a nuisance. It is a hard choice, perhaps, for one of his temperament, but the Duke will be wise to fade.” Unfortunately, this was not advice the duke wished to follow.
The American tour never took place. Bedaux’s drive for greater efficiency in the workplace had made him so unpopular with organized labor that an attack on him was planned, while the publicity given to the German visit had turned much of the British press and public against the Windsor visit. This time, the duke listened to advice, and on November 9 wrote to Bedaux from his temporary base, the Hôtel Meurice in Paris, regretting that he had to cancel his trip. “If you have been embarrassed in any way I am sorry that I should have been the cause, but, as you know, I only had one aim and object from the outset, which was shared by yourself, that of learning something of the housing and industrial conditions in America today. Please let me know what expenses have been incurred that are my liability.”
But Bedaux had had enough. Terrified of the hostility, worried about his businesses, he fled to Canada and thence to Europe, never to return to America until he was flown there in 1943.*
On October 24 Irene and Baba received one of their regular invitations to Cliveden, both enjoyed and dreaded by many of those closest to their hostess. Nancy was still, as Victor Cazalet had jotted in his diary the previous year, “a very remarkable woman. Lives on her nerves. Possesses every contrast possible. Good, bad, full of angles, incredible insights and unbelievable bad judgment. One minute offering deepest confidence, next saying most insulting thing she can think of. Very religious. Terrific energy.”
She displayed many of these qualities on this occasion. It proved to be one of the most famous of the Astor house parties, its guests numbering many of those later dubbed “the Cliveden Set.”
As well as two Astor sons, Bill and David, and relations such as Nancy’s niece Alice and her husband, Reggie Winn, also there were Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and his wife, Beatrice; the speaker of the House of Commons, Captain Edward FitzRoy, and his wife; the editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson; Nevile Henderson; Tom Jones (deputy secretary of the cabinet until 1930, trusted counselor to Baldwin and a great friend of the Astors); Nancy Astor’s adored Lord Lothian, the Liberal peer who was appointed ambassador to the U.S. in 1939 and already known for his internationalist, anti-war stance; Mrs. Lionel Hitchens, Philip Nichols; Sir Alexander Cadogan (permanent undersecretary of the Foreign Office) and his brother Eddie (MP for Finchley until two years earlier), and Robert Bernays, now parliamentary secretary to the minister for health. Like the Curzon sisters, Bernays was such an intimate of the Astor family that he spent weekends alone with them, likening himself to “a sort of father confessor to these poor little rich boys (£25,000 a year each before they are 21).”
With both the foreign secretary, the ambassador to Berlin, senior Foreign Office men and the editor of The Times among the guests, the talk of course was of Germany. That night Irene wrote: “I talked to Nevile and Bob Bernays before dinner. Sat between Nevile and Eddie Cadogan at dinner. Late in the evening, Nevile Henderson, Bill and David Astor, Philip Nichols and I, joined by Baba (after a chat with that impossible rabbit-toothed Eden) talked on Germany till 1:00 a.m. and Nevile was very interesting to the degree Baba wondered if I had been wrong in refusing him.”
After dinner Alice Winn, who shared Nancy’s love of mischief, informed Irene that Nevile Henderson had proposed three times to a South American heiress. Beatrice Eden chimed in to say that he had even written to the Foreign Office from Buenos Aires to ask if he could marry an Argentine dancer.
Tom Jones wrote a description of the weekend that points up the differences between the foreign secretary and one of his most senior ambassadors:
Thirty to lunch today but this includes three boys from Eton. The Edens are the highest lights and Nevile Henderson the newest. Politics all day and all night. Eden has aged since I saw him six months ago and is dog-tired at the start of the Session. I sat between him and Henderson after the ladies left last night and found they differed widely in policy. Henderson struck me as sensible and informed but without distinction. He has lived in the countries we talked about and Eden has not and this was apparent.
Eden himself thinks the Cabinet very weak and the armament programme far in arrears. On the other hand, he seems to argue that we can’t do business with Germany until we are armed—say about 1940. This assumes that we can catch up with Germany—which we cannot—and that Hitler takes no dramatic step in the meantime, which is unlike Hitler. We have spurned his repeated offers. They will not be kept open indefinitely. His price will mount and he will want the naval agreement revised in his favour. It is believed that Mussolini has sold Austria to him at the recent meeting in return for what, I don’t know. All this the P.M. sees and says, but I think it goes no further and that meanwhile Vansittart is trying hard to bring N.C. round to the secular F.O. view.
Grandi has been the cleverest person on the non-Intervention Committee and has put flies all over Lord Plymouth. Seems to be a duel between Grandi and Maisky [the Russian ambassador] who each try to rig the press.
Baba, who had made the most of meeting Nevile Henderson at Cliveden, was going to stay at the British embassy in Berlin after seeing Viv in Munich. Fruity, suspicious that she would meet yet another admirer, wanted to follow her there, but Irene, who knew perfectly well what Baba’s reaction would be, managed to dissuade him.
When Baba returned from Germany, she was full of news. She had had a wonderful time staying with Nevile Henderson, she told her sister; also staying there was Lord Halifax, whom they had met (as Lord Irwin) briefly in India during his viceroyalty. Earlier that year he had become lord president of the council and would (in February 1938) become foreign secretary.
Halifax still believed that the Nazis were basically reasonable men with whom negotiation was possible and had persuaded the reluctant Eden to allow him to meet Hitler in Berlin under the pretext of accepting an invitation to attend a hunting exhibition and—which must have made this master of the Middleton Hunt shudder—shoot foxes. Neither he nor Baba could have guessed how closely their lives would entwine in the future.
Less happy was Baba’s disclosure a few days later that Tom did not propose to spend Christmas 1937 with his children at Denham because, wrote Irene, “Mrs. G was kicking up such a fuss. And still hangs the Sword of Damocles over our heads as to whether he is or is not married to her.” Baba, equally anxious to wrest Tom away from the Guinness influence, did her best to persuade him and soon reported success. “T. now seems to think he might manage Denham.”
But this triumph was short-lived. A few days later, Lady Mosley told Irene that Tom had been called abroad for Christmas. “D. G. won,” wrote Irene furiously. “May their Xmas be black with bickerings and recriminations.”
Neither reflected that, from the unpaternal Tom’s point of view, Christmas with Diana—beautiful, serene, gay, funny, adoring and gifted with the ability to produce a near-perfect home and food—might be preferable to one spent in a household riven by quarrels, jealousy, tensions and dramas.
When fourteen-year-old Nick realized that his father was not coming he wept, Irene was told when she arrived at Denham two days before Christmas. When the children were comforted and safely in bed, she and Nanny filled their stockings. “I had a quiet hymn of hate at T’s selfishness at going off for Xmas,” she wrote on Christmas Eve. “But for me I was blissful.” On Christmas Day Nick performed their regular Father Christmas routine.
As the holiday wore on the simmering emotional tensions in the Metcalfe marriage resurfaced. Fruity, who had been diagnosed as suffering from a depressive illness, was planning to take a break in Switzerland but did not really want to go and talked of canceling his hotel room; Baba wept and said nothing mattered, she would like to die if it were not for the children. Irene was relieved when they all left. That night she wrote: “Not one word, even for New Year, from Tom. He is the utter limit.”