NANCY, WHO HAD suffered desperately when Hamish had jilted her, was in love again within weeks. This time, the object of her affections was infinitely more suitable in one respect. There was no doubt, no doubt at all, that Peter Rodd was heterosexual.
He was a clever, good-looking man of impeccable family: his father, Lord Rennell, was a successful diplomat, his mother was a woman of formidable uprightness. Peter was a great disappointment to them. He was sacked from job after job, he was constantly in debt and his frequent love affairs ended in tears. Possibly his worst drawback from a Mitford point of view was that, although intelligent and well informed, he was a bore; conversation to Peter meant the lengthy imparting of the copious facts with which his mind was so well stocked.
But for Nancy, capable of endless self-deception in her search for love, he appeared like an answer to prayer. During the last miserable months of the Hamish affair she was constantly at the Eatonry: the sight of Diana, carelessly chucking away a glamorous life with one adoring man, exuding the physical glow of shared passion with another, hugging and cuddling her two small boys, must have brought her own single, solitary and childless state sharply home to her. She longed to get married and have children, but though she had had a number of love affairs (‘shop-soiled’ was how Peter’s sister described her) all had been unsatisfactory. Despite her looks, her savoir-faire, her funniness and wit, Nancy lacked Diana’s fundamental self-assurance, while neither friends nor family were safe from her malicious barbs. On the whole her happiest relationships were with the homosexuals who surrounded her in a kind of cordon sanitaire. Now, with Peter Rodd, she was going to be part of the married world to which she had always aspired – and free finally, from Swinbrook and all that it stood for. The moment she was engaged (on 18 July) she left home, going to the room Diana gave her at the Eatonry.
It was perhaps hardly surprising that Nancy briefly became an ardent fascist. If gratitude for Diana’s support and kindness had not accounted for it, there was the influence of Peter Rodd. Thrilled by the movement’s declared intentions of helping both the poor and the unemployed, he had already joined the BUF. He and Nancy bought black shirts, fervently embraced fascist dogma and attended meetings, clapping enthusiastically.
One of the biggest of these meetings was at Oxford Town Hall on 3 November 1933. Mosley had chosen the university town because he was anxious to capture the country’s youth. For some time the BUF had been establishing youth sections, divided into senior and junior groups, and these had now begun to penetrate the public school system. Youth Groups had been established in Winchester, Stowe, Beaumont and Worksop College. It is difficult to avoid drawing a parallel with the Hitler Jugend. But what Mosley may not have known was that the Home Office was carefully monitoring such groups as BUF membership grew.fn1
As the audience filed in to the Oxford meeting, one of the 100-odd Blackshirt stewards ran his hands over the pockets of anyone who looked as if he might be carrying some form of hidden weapon and, as soon as the meeting had started, any interruptions were summarily dealt with by forcible ejection from the hall. Nancy and Unity were there. ‘The hall was full of Oxfordshire Conservatives who sat in hostile and phlegmatic silence,’ wrote Nancy to Diana, adding that there had been several fascinating fights, as the Leader had ‘brought along a few Neanderthal men with him and they fell tooth and (literally) nail on anyone who shifted his chair or coughed’.
The tough, well-armed Blackshirts invariably got the best of such scrimmages, attacking individual offenders in groups of two or three. At the Oxford meeting, heads were banged on stone floors, faces gashed with knuckledusters and objectors thrown down the stairs. Two of the victims needed hospital treatment and the President of Ruskin College took several sworn affidavits from undergraduates who said they had been roughly handled.
Nancy was married on 5 December at St John’s, Smith Square; Jonathan and Desmond, aged two and three and wrapped in cashmere shawls against the cold, were two of ten little pages dressed in white satin. Nancy and Peter, who had very little money – she always claimed they lived on her Bridge winnings – took a small house in Strand-on-the-Green.
At the same time, Diana became pregnant. Abortion was a crime, but for a pregnancy only a few weeks advanced an understanding gynaecologist would recommend curettage, which required only two or three days in a nursing home. It was this that Diana now underwent. The last thing that either she or Mosley wanted at this stage was an unplanned baby. Still on bad terms with her parents, she told her mother only that she was having a minor operation.
She recovered to what for her were two pieces of good news. On 15 January 1934 her divorce from Bryan became final and, on the same day, Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail, publicly offered his support to the BUF with a signed article in his paper. ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ ran the headline. ‘Because fascism comes from Italy, shortsighted people in this country think they show a sturdy national spirit by deriding it,’ he began, before continuing that in every country fascism stood for the party of youth. ‘The Blackshirt movement is the organised effort of the younger generation to break the stranglehold which senile politicians have so long maintained on our public affairs.’
He followed this up with a full-page blast on 22 January. ‘Give the Blackshirts a Helping Hand!’ thundered the Mail and its owner. ‘Sheer ignorance is an obstacle that every new political development has to face at its start. The hysterical abuse and misrepresentation at present being poured out on the British Blackshirt movement have had their counterpart at each successive stage of our constitutional progress.’ In Germany and Italy, he said, he had seen peace and prosperity, confidence and enthusiasm. ‘Our young men and women are no less patriotic, courageous and capable of organised effort . . . I appeal to them not just to stand idly by but to take a share in this great task by giving the Blackshirts a helping hand.’
In conclusion, he declared that the Blackshirts would respect the principles of tolerance which were traditional in British politics. ‘They have no prejudice either of class or race.’ It was an opinion he would soon change.
The backing of an influential national newspaper was exactly what Mosley needed if he was to have a chance of securing votes in a general election. So far, the BUF’s electoral record had been dismal; not even a local councillor had been elected. If political power was to be more than a mirage, seats in the House of Commons were essential – and seats in sufficient number to bring about the sweeping changes he envisaged. The ten points of his fascist policy (see Appendix A) spoke not only of patriotism, the need for everyone to serve the country and the expansion of trade with the Empire (it was these points, coupled with Mosley’s promise to combat unemployment, which had attracted Lord Rothermere) but also of state intervention and protection on a grand scale (‘the total exclusion of foreign goods . . . no alien will enter this country and take a British job and Blackshirts will deal not only with poor aliens but also the great alien financiers of the City of London’). There was a hint only of Mosley’s plan to change the format of government by reducing the parliamentary process to an Inner Cabinet of five – with himself, naturally, as the unquestioned Leader.
Soon after Lord Rothermere’s heartening support of the Blackshirts, Mosley had had a recurrence of the phlebitis which troubled him all his life. This time it was so severe that he was temporarily incapacitated and his doctors advised rest. He went with Diana to the warmth of Provence, staying in a rented house, to recover.
Although Diana’s family knew where she was, Mosley’s had no idea that she was with him. He was still conducting a raging affair with Baba and wanted his sisters-in-law to think that he was travelling by himself. Because of the secrecy in which he had visited Diana over the past six months between the decree nisi and the decree absolute, Irene and, more importantly, Baba had been lulled into the agreeable belief that he had given up any serious thoughts of Diana. Both the Curzon sisters were convinced that Mosley was now obsessed with Baba, who had frequently expressed her loathing of Diana and her conviction that no one would take him seriously as a future leader if it were known that Diana had left her husband for him and that their affair was continuing. Mosley reassured her, telling her how her suspicions hurt him and that he dined with Diana only occasionally, and then platonically.
It was a tribute to Mosley’s unscrupulousness, charm and powers of dissimulation that he was able to juggle the emotions of the four women closest to him, at least two of whom were deeply in love with him. All wanted to help the man at the centre of their lives in any way they could. Irene, anxious to show loyalty (‘I cannot get over Tom’s consideration to Baba’), presided at fascist fund-raising meetings; his mother was head of the Women’s Section. The atmosphere at Savehay was one of domestic calm, in which even the sight of Mosley walking across the lawns with his arm round Baba was accepted by Irene: anything was better than ‘the Guinness’. All this would be jeopardised if any of them knew that, far from giving up Diana, increasingly she was becoming part of his life.
In pursuit of the clandestine, no detail was too small to overlook. Unity, for instance, was forbidden to wear the fascist badge Mosley had given her: the faithful could identify it as a personal present and mark of special favour from the Leader and thus it might lead back to Diana. Cimmie’s friends, however, were not quite so wide-eyed as her sisters. ‘Went to see Baba and made mischief, deliberately, with her about Diana Guinness,’ wrote Georgia Sitwell in her diary that spring.
To Diana herself Mosley explained, with truth, that he had a horror of her becoming actively involved in politics. He felt, he told her, that Cimmie might have died partly because her health had been weakened by constant rushing round to meetings, speaking on draughty platforms and travelling in all weathers. He cited the miscarriage Cimmie had suffered two days after being elected to parliament and he implored Diana to stay outside his political life. She was only too happy to comply; though fascinated by politics, by now believing unquestioningly in everything he said, the idea of making a speech or campaigning filled her with horror.
She had plenty to fill her time. She listened to music with her brother Tom, and went to the cinema with friends. She stayed with Lord Berners at Faringdon, where the pigeons were dyed saffron yellow, bright pink and turquoise. The Russian mosaicist Boris Anrep, one of the Bloomsbury circle, depicted her as Polymnia (the muse of sacred music and oratory) in his group of the Nine Muses on the floor of the National Gallery, and artists clamoured to paint her. That winter Henry Lamb painted her portrait, calling it ‘Lady in Blue’. It hung at the Leicester Galleries (‘everyone recognised that Mrs Bryan Guinness, who spent the greater part of the afternoon at the exhibition, is the model’, reported the Evening Standard). Adrian Daintrey, who introduced her to Proust, also painted her, as did Tchelichew, brought over to England to design the sets and costumes for a ballet. The Tchelichew portrait, which depicts Diana and her children with flowing golden hair, blue eyes and blue shadows on their pale gold faces, proved to be her favourite.
It was on the visit to France that Diana acquired the pet name that Mosley used all his life. Driving past a field, he pointed at a chestnut carthorse with blond mane and tail and said, ‘Look at that horse with a yellow mane, just like yours.’ It was, she told him, a Percheron; from then on, he often called her Percher (pronounced Persher).
The lovers returned to a scene full of promise. BUF membership was now up to 17,000 and rising. Mosley himself felt restored to full health and ready for the arduous round of speeches, meetings, heckling – and, increasingly, violence.
At larger meetings, Mosley was usually the speaker. Others were W.E.D. Allen, Robert Forgan and William Joyce, whose oratory at a meeting at Paddington Baths so impressed John Beckett that ‘I ordered a Blackshirt uniform from Forgan’s tailor’. Beckett himself was soon co-opted as a fascist speaker and member of the executive, on a salary of £5 a week. Most of the other officials were of a much lower calibre: men with little or no political experience who spoke at street corners or in local halls for a weekly wage of anything from ten shillings and their keep (at the Black House) to £2.
Many of the meetings were characterised by confrontations with the communists. Shouting and heckling were commonplace, but as BUF membership grew these gave way to more forceful tactics. Sometimes Red Front members would obtain seats in the front row, bursting into the Internationale as the BUF speaker strode to the platform and chanting it continuously in order to prevent him being heard. When Blackshirt stewards came to eject them, fights would break out.
On 7 June 1934 the biggest and most important meeting to date took place in the huge Exhibition Hall at Olympia. Diana had given a dinner party for it, asking Nancy, Vivian Jackson, Lord Berners and the young man who was living with him, Robert Heber-Percy. To her distress, a sudden attack of gastritis prevented her going with them to the meeting.
She missed a dramatic few hours. At first everything seemed as usual, with blackshirted stewards standing at the end of every row of seats, turning this way and that as they watched for any sign of ‘trouble’ in the 12,000-strong audience (this included 2,000 Blackshirts, about half of whom were stewards). There were also 750 police in reserve: Special Branch believed that Mosley’s communist opponents were planning to throw the main power switch at a crucial moment, blacking out microphone and lights and probably causing chaos, riots and a stampede.
As the minutes passed, expectation built up. Suddenly, fanfares sounded from hidden trumpets and arc lights flooded the central aisle. The fascist anthem struck up and Mosley, flanked by four blond young Blackshirts, strode into the brilliant pathway of white light. He was followed by a platoon of Blackshirts carrying banners. As the crowd cheered and shouted, arms upraised in the fascist salute, the procession marched slowly to the da?¨s. Here Mosley, one thumb tucked negligently into his wide black belt, chin raised as he gazed commandingly round the hall, waited until the noise had died down before his own arm shot up in salute.
Just as his mouth opened to speak came the interruption. Three young men and a girl standing with them began to chant: ‘Hitler and Mosley, what are they for?/Thuggery, buggery, hunger and war.’ It was the anti-fascist response to the Blackshirt chant ‘Two, four, six, eight/Who do we appreciate?/M.O.S.L.E.Y. Mosley.’
The quartet had scarcely shouted the last word before they were submerged in a sea of black-clad stewards. The girl screamed, and fighting began. Many of the audience had come prepared for violent hostility to the BUF. Philip Toynbee and Esmond Romilly had both bought knuckledusters that afternoon from an ironmonger in Drury Lane. Now they threw themselves on the stewards’ backs. They were quickly overwhelmed and separated; Toynbee, bruised and bloodied, was thrown out into the street, where he was picked up by communist sympathisers and taken to a makeshift first-aid post. About sixty other people were taken to hospital, where medical evidence pointed to the use of knuckledusters and razors.
The Olympia meeting marked the peak of the BUF’s success in Britain. After it Mosley was even invited by the BBC to speak on the wireless. It was the last time for thirty-four years that such an invitation would be extended.
For Nancy the violence she had witnessed caused a complete volte-face. Overnight her fascist convictions fell away. By the time an article she had written a few weeks earlier, extolling fascism as ‘the hope of the future’, appeared in the July issue of Vanguard, Nancy was busy explaining the perniciousness of its ideology. True to form, she immediately began to use everything she had learned, filtered through the prism of ridicule, as material for her next novel.
Nancy’s defection heralded a much more important one. Lord Rothermere had become alarmed by the worsening public image of the BUF, exacerbated by the bad publicity arising from the Olympia meeting. Now he withdrew the support that had been so crucial. The correspondence which he printed in the Daily Mail of 19 July was friendly, but clearly marked an irrevocable break.
Mosley’s letter, dated 12 July, appears to be an attempt to put the best possible gloss on the divergences which had appeared in their private conversations. ‘We Blackshirts are fascists. We hold the new creed of the modern world . . . it is our task to convert the British people to the new faith. You, on the other hand, are a Conservative and would like to see a revived Conservative Party.’ He went on to state that no Jew was admitted to membership of the BUF because ‘they have bitterly attacked us and they have organised as an international movement, setting their racial interests above the national interests’.
Rothermere’s reply, on 14 July, was a polite but vigorous rebuttal of the Mosley version of fascism.
As you know, I have never thought that a movement calling itself ‘Fascist’ could be successful in this country, and I have also made it quite clear in my conversations with you that I never could support any movement with an anti-semitic bias, any movement which had dictatorship as one of its objectives, or any movement which will substitute a ‘Corporate State’ for the Parliamentary institutions of this country.
His assistance, he declared, had been given in the hope that Mosley would be prepared to ally himself with the Conservative forces to defeat socialism in the next election. He concluded with a final broadside:
I have never thought that the political situation here bears any resemblance to the political situation in Italy or Germany. In each of these countries Parliamentary institutions were largely of exotic growth, whereas in England they have, since the time of Queen Elizabeth, exercised the real decisive influence.
Rothermere’s public rejection was a devastating blow. If not the coup de grâce, it was certainly the turning point in the fortunes of the BUF. Membership, which with the assistance of the Daily Mail had reached a high point of 50,000, immediately began to decline. Mosley’s Jewish opponents were confirmed in their antagonism and the trades unions in their belief that if Mosley gained power he would suppress them – especially since his more extreme speakers, such as William Joyce, were already stating that freedom of speech could not be tolerated in a fascist state. Mosley himself told his followers that Rothermere had withdrawn his support because some Jewish advertisers had intimated that they would no longer advertise with him if he supported British Union, and fascist graffiti declaring ‘Jews want War’ were daubed on walls. With this polarisation came an increase in violent confrontations and the loss of many of the more moderate members. Equally inevitably, those who did join were often those for whom opportunities for physical aggression were the main attraction.
August brought a welcome switch to private life. It was time for Mosley to resume his parental role. Every year, he and Cimmie had taken a large house by the sea somewhere in Europe, usually on the Mediterranean, where they spent a month with the children. This August, Baba and Irene, with the assistance of Mosley’s mother, had settled on Toulon. They found a white house with a large terrace, above a rocky shore.
The Toulon house saw the first cracks in the domestic contentment so carefully established at Savehay. When the Curzon sisters learned that Diana was to spend the first two weeks there before Baba arrived for the remainder of the holiday, there were furious and emotional scenes, tears and reproaches, while Mosley protested that she was ‘just a friend’.
For the Mosley children, it was their first meeting with Diana on anything other than a fleeting basis. That first holiday none of them was aware that she stood in any special relationship to their father – weekends at home, and all their family holidays, had always been crowded with their parents’ grown-up friends. When she arrived, accompanied by her maid, they thought of her as no more than ‘Dad’s friend Mrs Guinness’. She left the day before Baba’s arrival, flying to Ravello to stay with her art-connoisseur friend Edward James in the Villa Cimbrone, where they swam, visited the Greek temples at Paestum and dined in the garden under the stars.
She returned to London in time for the arrival of her children from Ireland; they had been staying with Bryan at Knockmaroon, where he was entertaining the usual August houseparty. ‘I wonder what Pansy and Dig [Yorke] reported to you,’ he wrote. ‘I long to see you and tell you all the stories.’ Pansy Lamb wrote to say how well the children were and that ‘we only went to the theatre once, and that was made tolerable by a delicious dinner Mr Peake, one of the brewers, gave us at the Kildare Street Club. It was flowing with champagne and delicacies and we all went to the Abbey pretty tight.’
Diana was a loving and conscientious mother who spent more time than was then usual with her two boys. When they were small they came into her bed every morning, where she taught them both to read. She had tea with them every day and often lunch as well and she would go up to the nursery and play with them during odd hours in the day. On their nanny’s day out she bathed and put them both to bed instead of – as was the usual custom – leaving this to the nurserymaid. If she had a fault as a mother, it was favouritism; it was impossible for her to conceal that Jonathan, her first-born, was her most adored. Fortunately, Nanny’s passion was for Desmond.
Bryan and Diana had been constantly in touch since their divorce. He longed to see her; she was determined to retain his friendship. He confided in her about the book he was writing, she found him a cook. He asked her if she liked the sound of the birthday present he had chosen for her, ‘a watercolour by F. Nicholson, circa 1830 . . . an eighteenth century kind of a view of a ruin, with bridges and people on the bank, lovely trees hanging richly over them all’; if not, he would choose her something else. ‘I must only add one thing: that you are still the only person I know who makes me cry when you go away in the train.’
It was the same when, wretched and lonely, he sought diversion in travelling. ‘I am very lonely and sad,’ he wrote in May 1934 from the Empress of Australia.
There is no one at all to be in love with, and the journey seems to stretch endlessly ahead. The ship is comfortable in the extreme and the food excellent but there is no one to be fond of or even to admire. I miss you so much. Sometimes they play our tune from Carmen at dinner, and I water the soup with my tears.
Earlier, back at home, he wrote to her from Swan Court on 6 September to say how sad he was to miss her by such a narrow margin. ‘I expect you are now at Nuremberg.’ She was.
fn1 A Home Office memorandum of 15 February 1934 gives the names of the boys in charge of these groups at their respective schools.