Tom Mitford was born in 1909, the year before his doting grandfather, Lord Redesdale, wrote an admiring introduction to the book that would become a sacred text of the Nazi Party. Barty Redesdale’s own published view was that the Jews had greatly enriched and improved the civilised world; nevertheless, he thought highly enough of Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century to mail copies of the new English translation to his friends. Edmund Gosse approved. Richard Haldane did not. In 1912, however, Redesdale was able to inform the author that his niece’s husband, Winston Churchill, had spoken of it with ‘unmeasured praise’.1
In 1912, when his family were still dividing their time between London and Batsford Park – a mansion that he had built in the grounds of the family’s old Gloucestershire estate and surrounded with magnificent trees named in honour of various Mitfords – Lord Redesdale’s mood was still sufficiently pro-German for him to approve the decision by Jack, his youngest son, to take a job with one of Germany’s greatest coal magnates, Baron von Friedlander-Fuld, and to welcome Jack’s subsequent engagement to the rich Baron’s daughter.
The extreme brevity of Jack’s marriage cannot be blamed on the war, since Annie left her husband in May 1914. Nevertheless, a marriage that lasted only five months must have hurt his father’s pride. The following year, Clement Mitford, Jack’s eldest brother and his father’s favourite child, was killed in action in Flanders, aged thirty-eight. Now cursing the Germans with a passion that he passed on to his soldierly second son, David (along with the heavily encumbered estate), a heartbroken Bertram Redesdale died in 1917.
Tom, like his sisters, had fond memories of Batsford Park. His grandfather had doted on him, especially since Tom, even as a little boy, showed signs of having inherited the exceptionally handsome features of the Mitford males. David Redesdale was no scholar. When the family left Batsford in 1918, to settle more modestly into an Oxfordshire manor house a few miles away, at Swinbrook, Tom, aged nine, was put in charge of choosing which books should be saved. In 1918, Germanophobia was at its height. The new Lord Redesdale hated the Germans to a degree that would later provide splendid comic opportunities for the lethal pen of his first-born, Nancy. Nevertheless, young Tom scrupulously – and rather courageously – chose to preserve the collection of German books that had meant so much to his grandfather.
Erected in a separate building from the main house and equipped with comfortable sofas and a piano, the Asthall library became a favourite refuge for the younger Mitfords. Nancy, the eldest child by five years, knew the bookshelves well enough to observe – in a collection of essays entitled The Water Beetle – that the German section was poorly equipped in poetry and fiction, but not so well as to remember correctly the name of ‘Stewart Houston Chamberlain’ [sic]. Pamela, the Redesdales’ second daughter, showed a keener interest in her grandfather’s books and later married Derek Jackson, an ardent Germanophile. Tom, during his school years at Eton, was sufficiently interested in them to work his way through Kant (translated by his erudite grandfather) and to discover a taste for Schopenhauer. Tom also claimed to have liked Gibbon’s Decline and Fall so much that he read it through three times.
At school, where he enjoyed several homosexual liaisons, Tom displayed an unnerving combination of confidence, careless beauty, considerable musical talent and a merciless wit that his young second cousin, Randolph Churchill, was taught to fear. (‘“My dear Randolph!” he would cry in his loud tenor voice, very Oxfordish in intonation. “I have heard a great many stupid remarks, but this is a masterpiece of its kind.”’2)
Home for the holidays, Tom paid his less-educated younger sisters (Nancy would have scorned such condescension) a shilling each to practise the art of debate that formed part of every young Etonian’s training. Quite possibly, the debating classes presided over by an idolised brother fuelled the interest that Tom’s siblings began to display, from an early age, in radical politics.3
To inherit an estate, especially from a father like David Redesdale, whose idea of financial management was to go gold-prospecting in Canada or to gamble – with more success – on the Grand National, was not viewed as a blessing by the younger generation of the post-war years. (A well-known Punch cartoon showed an elderly land-owner taunting his languid heir with the ultimate threat: ‘Stop fooling about or I’ll leave you The House!’) Behind the depressing silliness of the twenties’ treasure hunts, pranks and masquerades lay a desperate impulse to escape responsibilities of the kind that had fallen so heavily upon young Hansel Pless.
For Tom, a bright and thoughtful boy who had taken the top musical prize during his final year at Eton, the moment of decision came in 1927. All the family loved sleepy, pretty old Asthall Manor, but David, remorseful about the loss – incurred by death duties – of Batsford, had recklessly decided that it behoved him to restore the family to finer surroundings. Swinbrook – promptly renamed Swinebrook by the unenthusiastic young inhabitants – was built to David Redesdale’s own design, to look down upon the village, church and winding river from a haughty height that quite eclipsed secluded little Asthall. Swinbrook, not Asthall, was to represent Tom’s inheritance, and Tom hated it. With a remarkable lack of foresight, given his son’s passion for music, Lord Redesdale had even neglected to leave space for a piano.
The expectation must have been that Tom would go to Oxford, marry, sire an heir and settle down to the business of running Swinbrook. Instead, aged eighteen in 1927, he requested to be allowed to go to Vienna, to study music and German culture.
Vienna, at least, was not Berlin. Assent was unwillingly given; Tom’s next news (sent from Vienna) was that he wanted to move out of the city and rent rooms at the home of a new and captivating friend called Janos Almasy, an ‘extremely clever’ Hungarian count, aged about forty, who lived with his crippled wife in a hilltop castle called Schloss Bernstein. ‘I have never seen a view to approach it,’ Tom pleaded, ‘and being on the top of a small but steep hill, it looks out in every direction.’ Staying with the Almasys would also, as Tom artfully added, be a real economy: ‘money does trickle away so in a town’.4 Never able to resist their son (Diana Mosley described how irresistibly Tom could make his voice ‘sag with desire’ when he wanted something), the Redesdales gave their approval.
There is no doubt that the English-educated Count Almasy was both charismatic and fascinating. (His brother, László, an explorer and much decorated pilot, was the model for the mysterious hero of Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient.) Diana Mosley remembered Janos as ‘intellectually stimulating and with a Don Juan-like temperament. He took Tom to all the neighbouring castles . . .’5
Dwelling, with the most graceful of hints, on the effect that a handsome young Englishman might have had on the wives and daughters of Count Almasy’s neighbours, Diana Mosley skirted the trickier subject of politics. Almasy, at the time that Tom arrived at Schloss Bernstein, was already committed to the burgeoning Nazi Party.
Almasy proved a powerful mentor. Tom was studying law in Berlin when his sister Diana, together with her first husband, Bryan Guinness, paid him a visit in 1928 and heard not only that Tom approved of the Nazi Party, but that he was willing to overlook the violence of their methods. Back in England the following year, however, Tom was less forthcoming. Attending a fancy-dress party given by Diana and Bryan, he appeared as Bruno Hat, a black-wigged and heavily accented German artist whose works, catalogued by Evelyn Waugh and painted by Brian Howard, seem to have been poor pastiches of Otto Dix. Hindsight might cause us to wince when we remember how the Nazis would soon be treating the makers of ‘degenerate’ art; at the time, according to the social columnists, Tom’s prank seemed quite clever.
In 1930, the Nazi Party won its first major victory and celebrated it with an attack that targeted the big Jewish-owned department stores like Wertheims, Tietz and Nathan Israel. Harry Kessler and the Jewish journalist Bella Fromm were dismayed. Did Tom approve? If the paper trail ever existed to reveal his thoughts – and the lack of family letters from Tom is, even for a dilatory correspondent, quite remarkable – it seems not to have survived. The solitary published letter from Tom in 1930 blandly shares with his mother the fun of going on a pier-hopping plane trip with some chums, along the south coast of England. But Tom, according to his fond youngest sister, Deborah, was not a man who ever bothered to pick up a pen. That’s how it was, she has said. ‘Tom never wrote.’6
It seems, in a family of ardent correspondents, a little unlikely. And while proof is hard to demonstrate by its absence – in the form of letters that may have been tucked out of view – it is clear that Tom Mitford, by demonstrating his own approval, paved the way for two of his admiring sisters to embrace the Nazis during the first years that they came to power.
Officially, the connection between the Mitford sisters and the Nazis began when Putzi Hanfstaengl attended a party given by the mother of two of London’s most effervescent socialites, the Jungmann sisters. Introduced to the exceptionally beautiful Diana Guinness (already in thrall to Oswald Mosley), Putzi painted an enticing picture of the warm reception that would be offered, should she wish to visit his country and see – so he assured her – how well the Jews were treated there, despite a few unpleasant items in the papers. Unity, who had been planning a holiday in France or Italy, was easily persuaded by Diana to change her mind and accompany an admired older sister on the first trip that either girl had ever made to Germany.
It was Putzi who provided the invitation (although not, on this occasion, the promised introduction to Hitler); it was Tom who helpfully provided his sisters with the chaperones for their German adventure. And it was Tom who, when Lord Redesdale expressed his furious opposition to any connection between his girls and the Nazis – a party he considered to be a ‘murderous gang of pests’ – promised Diana that he would exert what she described as Tom’s ‘enormous influence’ over a father who always gave in where his son was concerned.
Diana was right. Lord Redesdale could never resist Tom’s charm; Tom himself, while sternly disapproving of the way that Diana had abandoned her kindly and cultivated husband for an intensely promiscuous married man, found it equally impossible to resist his sister. Reassured by their son’s calming words, the Redesdales duly visited Munich and (despite Lady Redesdale’s refusal to pay homage at the hallowed shrine of the Nazi martyrs of the 1923 putsch) did not embarrass their daughters.
In the summer of 1935, when Unity was completely under Hitler’s spell, Tom encouraged a further step. The Redesdales were persuaded to offer tea, at the House of Lords, to a Nazi director of Daimler-Benz. Tom, who seems to have engineered the occasion, was present in the role of interpreter. ‘I talked with him most of the time,’ Tom reported to an excited Unity, ‘and he told me what a high opinion Hitler has of you and how unusually intelligent he [AH] thinks you are.’7
Tom, clearly, was taking pains to give happiness to an impressionable young sister whose love for Hitler had become the most dominant emotion in her life. A few weeks later, Tom allowed Unity to introduce him to her hero. Briefly, at least, Tom seemed impressed. Unity, while gratified to hear from Diana that Hitler thought Tom was ‘ein fabelhafter Junge’ (a wonderful young man), was less sure about her brother’s response. At the time, it had seemed that Tom ‘adored the Führer’, but later? Wistfully, Unity confessed her suspicion that ‘he will have cooled down by the time he gets home . . .’8
Did he? Tom had declined, back in 1934, to attend the rallies at which an increasingly outspoken and anti-Semitic Oswald Mosley endorsed the murderous ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in Munich as a welcome cleansing of the Nazi regime. Even Nancy Mitford, while hating Mosley’s politics and mocking them in her first novel, Wigs on the Green, dutifully showed up for an Oxford rally that year. Gerald Berners, a family friend, (while warning Mosley to tone down his remarks about Jews and homosexuals) contributed ‘a dreary little tune’ to the event. Tom stayed away. In 1936, however, the year of the Nazi Olympics, Tom attended the annual Parteitag and even an al fresco dinner given by the SS and presided over by Himmler; the following year, Tom was present at the Parteitag once again, and with him came Almasy. An inscrutably handsome figure, standing at Diana’s side, Tom Mitford – as a sister with whom he shared all his secrets was fond of pointing out – could pass for her twin.
In 1938, Tom gave his coveted pass to the annual rally to a friend, Robert Byron, who (as Tom was mischievously aware) viewed the Nazi regime with abhorrence. In 1939, however, having dutifully signed up with the Rifle Brigade to fight for his country, Tom donned his new uniform to stand, on 16 July, beside Diana and Unity at the biggest peace meeting that had ever been held in England. The speaker, Oswald Mosley, asked the audience to back his mission to protect England from becoming involved in what he memorably dismissed as ‘a Jews’ quarrel’. Randolph Churchill walked out. Tom Mitford raised his arm in the fascist salute. Two days later, a delighted and almost disbelieving Hitler hailed Mosley’s speech as England’s voice of reason, raised against the pernicious influence of ‘Jewry’.
Tom Mitford’s first loyalty was not to a party, but to his family. In September 1939, it was Tom’s friend Almasy, described by Diana Mosley as ‘the faithful Janos’ (and to whom Unity had become extremely close during her last two years in Germany), who accompanied that pathetic young woman’s stretcher, following Unity’s attempt to shoot herself in the head as a forlornly egotistical demonstration against the outbreak of war. (Hitler, who seems to have been genuinely fond of Unity, would provide an ambulance train to Switzerland, where Lady Redesdale arrived in December, to collect her now unrecognisable child and take her home.) But it was Tom who came to the rescue the following year.
The Mosleys, not least because of Diana’s many visits to Germany and her friendship with Hitler, were judged dangerous enough, in the summer of 1940, to be seized and imprisoned. Diana, still feeding a month-old baby (Max), was taken to Holloway, while Mosley himself went to Brixton. David Redesdale could have chosen to plead with his cousin, Winston Churchill, for a gentler fate; in the end, it was the irresistible – and perhaps implacable – Tom who convinced the Prime Minister that the couple should be given married quarters, and in conditions of uncommon comfort. (The Mosleys were not only given a small garden, but were permitted to recruit fellow prisoners to work for them.) While impossible to prove a connection, it would seem likely that Tom also had a hand in persuading a normally cautious Home Secretary (Herbert Morrison) to sign the permission that granted an intensely unpopular couple’s early release in November 1943.
How deep was Tom Mitford’s commitment to the Nazis? Tom gave his own answer by electing to fight in Italy and North Africa. Returning to England in 1944, he visited a greatly diminished Unity in the company of James Lees-Milne, a friend from Eton days. Talking to Lees-Milne (who was struck by, and could not get out of his mind, the absolute sadness of his former lover’s gauntly handsome face), Tom expressed his personal horror of the anti-Semitism espoused by Unity and Diana. And yet, he still could not bear the thought of fighting against a Germany, and a German people, that he had loved so much. ‘All the best Germans are Nazis,’ Tom told Lees-Milne at that encounter, echoing his words to Diana and Bryan in 1928, ‘and if I were a German I would be one.’9
On Good Friday, 30 March 1945, while serving in Burma with the Devonshire Regiment, Major Tom Mitford died of his wounds, having been shot by a Japanese sniper. He was thirty-six years old. ‘His loss’, Diana Mosley wrote, ‘was something from which I never recovered for the rest of my life.’10 David Redesdale, who also never recovered from the death of his only son, arranged for an oval memorial tablet to preserve Tom’s memory in the tranquil little church at Swinbrook. Placed above the pew that commemorated Clement Mitford’s death in the previous war, it mourns Tom as ‘a perfect son and brother’.
Beloved by his family in his lifetime, Tom Mitford has almost vanished from public memory, buried by the loving hands of a clan of sisters who did not, perhaps, wish others to consider just how far the obsessive anti-Semitism of Diana and Unity had strayed from the ideals of the brother they had revered and followed. It was diminishing of Nancy, years later, to refer to Tom as ‘a fearful old twister’, meaning that, having no true views of his own, he simply adapted to reflect the views of those around him.11 It was also untrue. For Tom to tell Diana and her husband, back in 1928, that he espoused the Nazis (and to repeat that sentiment in 1944) was, contrary to Nancy’s declaration, unprompted and uncompromisingly direct.
It was Tom who led the way from Swinbrook to Germany and who, moving in the musical circles of Vienna, reached the view that it was intolerable to be anti-Semitic. That view has a value in the Mitford story; the deliberate reduction of Tom to a ghost on the sidelines has, while preserving him from harm, skewed the angle from which we stare at the six sisters. More sadly, it has robbed a remarkable young man of his significant position within a complex clan.