WHILE DIANA WAS dashing backwards and forwards to Germany, another of the Mitford sisters was in the headlines. Jessica, youngest but one of the family, had been presented at court in the spring of 1935. She had been bored by her first season and was even more bored by her second. At the beginning of 1937 she ran away with her second cousin Esmond Romilly (she is thinly disguised as Jassy in Nancy’s novel The Pursuit of Love).
Pretty, clever, sharp and irreverent, Jessica was the little sister with whom Diana had had the strongest bond during their childhood, the protégée whom she had helped and encouraged; in the factors that led up to Jessica’s elopement there were echoes of Diana’s own life.
Like Diana, Jessica longed to get away from Swinbrook and to break into a different world. Like Diana, she had been deeply affected by the miseries of the 1920s and the Depression of the 1930s and, as with Diana, these had formed her political views. As with Diana, these views were extreme – though to the left rather than the right. Like Diana, she had no difficulty in discounting the horror stories reported as committed in the name of her chosen creed as unreliable propaganda by ideological enemies. Above all, for both sisters, man and cause together crystallised into one irresistible, indivisible whole.
Esmond Romilly, almost a year younger than Jessica, was physically unprepossessing – short, thick-set and round-shouldered, with a square white face and dark hair that lay dankly across his head. But his personality was so powerful that his looks were quickly forgotten. He was clever, fearless, unscrupulous and enterprising, an originator and natural leader. When still at school he had founded Out of Bounds, a magazine with the subtitle The Public Schools’ Journal Against Fascism, Militarism and Reaction. It was designed to encourage public schoolboys to rebel against the system and its material came from the disaffected among them.
Esmond himself was always getting into trouble and quickly became too much for his parents – at one point he was sent to a remand home for six weeks. He and his brother Giles wrote a book (also called Out of Bounds), telling the story of the magazine and their adventures in founding it, which enhanced his glamorous reputation among his peers, while his energy, fluency and vitality allowed him effortlessly to dominate friends such as Philip Toynbee. When the Spanish Civil War broke out Esmond took part in the Republican government’s successful defence of Madrid in the winter of 1936,fighting gallantly in an action in which almost all his comrades were killed, before being sent home on sick leave in January 1937. He was one of Jessica’s heroes before she had even met him; when she did, she fell instantly in love. It was not long before she said she longed to work for the communist cause in the Civil War and Esmond, whose instinct was always to rebel against the conventional, agreed to take her back with him to Spain.
First, though, she had to get away from Swinbrook and her parents’ watchful eyes without arousing suspicion. She told her mother that she had been invited to stay in Dieppe with friends known to Sydney, and she got permission to go. She even went to Dieppe, but the ‘friends’ were, of course, Esmond. It was here he told her that he had fallen in love with her and the escapade became an elopement. Together they set off for Bilbao, having made arrangements for cards and letters to be posted regularly from Dieppe to continue the deception as long as possible.
When the truth was discovered at Swinbrook it was as if a volcano had exploded. David’s rage was worse than anyone could remember and Sydney was miserable. She realised, however, that any parental intervention was likely to be counter-productive; far better that Nancy, whose political credentials would be the most acceptable, should try and persuade her sister to return.
Nancy and her husband Peter Rodd met the runaways at St Jean-de-Luz and invited them to a splendid lunch on a destroyer – once on board they could be brought home. But although the Rodds too were working for the Republican cause, Esmond was wary. Despite their ‘watering mouths’, he and Jessica refused the lunch invitation, and evaded the trap.
To escape further pursuit they moved to Bayonne, staying in a cheap room above a café; here they were found by Sydney, who had set off after Nancy’s failure to lure them back. She hoped that if she could see Jessica on her own, she could persuade her of the awfulness of what she was doing. When she arrived at the café, she sent the owner up to tell Jessica that ‘a lady’ wanted to see her. Jessica came down and immediately told her mother she would not return home. Sydney grasped the nettle and asked to be taken upstairs to meet Esmond.
She was not struck by him and quickly launched into a furious denunciation of his behaviour. ‘I told them how abominably they had behaved and informed him what a coward he must be not to have the courage to face Farve and ask to be engaged to Decca – and I said his conduct was what you would expect from a communist.’
Somewhat to Sydney’s surprise, Esmond took this meekly, agreeing that they had behaved very badly, ‘but it was the only way’. Sydney soon came to the conclusion that encouraging them to get married was the best of the three solutions available – the alternatives were leaving Jessica there unmarried or dragging her home by force. She gave her daughter the box of clothes she had thoughtfully brought with her, dined with the errant pair and then caught her train back.
‘They came to see me off in pouring rain,’ she wrote to Diana on 27 March. ‘So I gave Decca my umbrella as a parting gift. It was terrible to see them go off in the rain. But there again, she seems happy.’
Though at first David would not hear of marriage, he finally agreed when he found that Tom and most of the older generation of the family advised it. Jessica was married in Bayonne at noon on 18 May, in an outfit hastily put together by Sydney, who had brought with her a silk dress from Harrods, and had taken her daughter out that morning to buy coat, hat, gloves and shoes before a hasty visit to the hairdresser. ‘Little D looked very sweet,’ she reported to Diana.
Diana’s wedding present to the sister who had so adored her during their childhood was an amethyst and pearl necklace. This pretty jewel, which would once have been welcomed with ecstatic cries, was not well received. Esmond, so extreme a communist that he called himself an anarchist, disapproved deeply of Diana and her political views and Jessica, madly in love and drawn into his world, soon began to regard her once-favourite sister as a villain. But the schoolroom bond with Unity was too strong to sever and Jessica still saw Unity on her visits to England, meetings that on Jessica’s side were conducted clandestinely for fear of Esmond’s disapproval.
In December 1937 Jessica gave birth to a daughter, Julia. This event signalled the last communication between Diana and Jessica:fn1 when Diana sent her sister a dress for the baby Jessica wrote back, ‘Thank you so much for the lovely dress but please don’t send any more presents because Esmond doesn’t like it.’
The Romillys’ ideological correctness had a tragic outcome. When they wanted to go to Belgium for Easter, Sydney suggested that they leave Julia at the Old Mill Cottage with Nanny, ‘who would love to look after her’. This drew a horrified refusal from Jessica: ‘Esmond wouldn’t hear of our baby going to a house with a nanny in it.’ Jessica, like the working-class mothers whom Esmond so admired in the Bermondsey slums around them, took Julia to a clinic. Here the baby caught measles, infecting Jessica. Both were very ill; Jessica recovered but Julia, who was only four months old, died.
Don’t know whether you are back at Wootton or not but I write in case you have not heard to tell you the sad and heartrending news that Decca’s baby died on Saturday [wrote Sydney to Diana on 30 May]. They went to the seaside the same day, and are now to move, leaving England, she says, for a long time, going first to France. I think it is best they should go right away. I have had such a terribly sad letter from her. It was such a particularly sweet little baby. She doesn’t want to see anyonefn2 before she goes.’
Diana, who now knew that she was expecting her own first child by Mosley, was horrified by the tragedy, and miserable when she realised that the last sentence of Sydney’s letter was a delicate way of explaining that Jessica wanted no further contact with her.fn3
Another casualty of Diana’s dedication to Mosley was her friendship with Professor Lindemann. ‘When I was married [to Bryan] he gave me a beautiful gold watch in different coloured golds,’ she wrote later to James Lees-Milne. ‘After I married Kit he never liked me again.’
It had become clear that the idea of a radio station on Sark was a non-starter. Although Lawton’s researches had shown that permission might, theoretically, be granted by the Dame of Sark, it was obvious that the British government would pull out every stop to prevent what they saw as a ‘pirate’ station.
The Belgian option also appeared to be falling through. Mosley and Allen had believed there was an influential Belgian Cabinet minister who could be bribed to persuade his government to give the necessary permission and Lawton visited Brussels a number of times to lay the legal groundwork. But whether because the bribe was not big enough, the Minister’s honesty was unassailable or the government was adamant, this deal collapsed too. It was time to put every effort into the Heligoland project.
One evening in May Mosley told Lawton that Air Time was now going to concentrate on the possibility of a radio station in Germany, saying that the suggestion had come from ‘a fashionable Berlin jeweller’. Lawton was suspicious and he remarked that, to him, it sounded like the opening move in a confidence trick. He advised Mosley to look at the approaches of the ‘jeweller’ very carefully indeed, and dismissed the matter from his mind.
A fortnight later his telephone rang late one evening. ‘Could you possibly go to Berlin tomorrow?’ asked Mosley. Lawton, whose legal career had not yet taken off, said he could. ‘I’d like you to meet my wife there,’ said Mosley. ‘She thinks she will be able to start negotiations with the German government and I’d like you to help her. She’ll book you a room at the Kaiserhof, where she’s staying. I’d be grateful if you could give her all the help you can.’
Early next morning Lawton was at Croydon airport, where there was a seat on the Berlin plane. It was only the second time he had flown, and the journey at 3,000 feet over Germany – daily occupying more of the world’s headlines – fascinated him.
His visit lasted four days and he and Diana lunched together daily. She had little to report to him of her meetings, so entertained him with stories of her family and her childhood. She talked of David and his eccentricities and his tempers, she told the fascinated young man about the Hons cupboard and the private Mitford childhood language of Boudledidge, talking to him in it fluently for minutes at a time. She told him about exhibitions she had seen, of visiting Frau Goering to admire her baby daughter, Edda, born on 2 June and the cause of great excitement – Goering had become a father for the first time at the age of forty-five. She told him the gossip that was scandalising the Nazi inner circle: it had been discovered that the beautiful 24-year-old wife of the newly married Field-Marshal Blomberg, who was sixty, the War Minister and Goering’s arch-rival, had been a prostitute and Hitler was demanding that the Field-Marshal give her up. Of politics Diana did not speak, but she made plain her admiration for all that Hitler had done for Germany.
Though her affection for Hitler had grown to the extent that she had a portrait of him hanging at Wootton, Diana found the process of negotiating with his officials intensely boring. Thirty years later she was to write (à propos of the government):
As to the haphazard way in which a Cabinet works, I am sure one can’t exaggerate the extent of it . . . But businessmen are even worse. I was once involved for two years in a business venture in which hundreds of thousands of pounds were involved. I can never tell [sic] the frightful boredom one suffered from the drawn-out negotiations, the wordiness, the irrelevancy of much of what was said. One would have to be a real saint to put up with businessmen.
Diana and Lawton returned to Berlin in July 1938. A day or two after their arrival, Diana was able to report during their usual luncheon together that success now seemed likely and they discussed what she should ask for if the question of detailed proposals came up. The following day, she arrived at their rendezvous with the news that she was to visit the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs that afternoon, just before the Ministry closed for the day; would Lawton accompany her? They set off together and were shown into the office of the Minister, a man who had the inappropriate name of Ohnesorge (which means without care). He was short and unattractive, with a ratlike face; Lawton had scarcely recovered from his astonishment that such a powerful country as Germany should have such a peculiarly undistinguished man in this position before the meeting was over. The German government, said the Minister, was prepared to grant Mrs Guinness a concession for a commercial radio station, the details to be negotiated with their representatives. ‘Thank you very much, good evening, good night.’
That evening Diana and Lawton went off together for a celebratory dinner at the Hausvaterland, a large building in the Potsdammerplatz with a restaurant on every floor – some, like the one they had chosen, with a variety show. For Lawton, the gaiety and exhilaration of the evening abruptly disappeared when Diana, in the midst of her flow of chat, told him something that was to disturb him for years. She had dined the previous night, she said, with Hitler, Goering and other senior Nazis and the topic of conversation had been what they would do when they took over Czechoslovakia.
That night Lawton lay awake wondering what he should do about this dangerous information. Should he report it to the War Office? Or should he preserve the confidentiality of his client? In the end, he came to the conclusion that the rules of his profession demanded that he remain silent. The next day they flew home.
Once back with the good news that the station was ‘on’, a new company was formed, Wire Broadcasting Ltd, with offices first at 11 Garrick Street and then in the Adelphi building in the Strand. The company was incorporated on 24 December with capital of £15,000. The Memorandum of Association shows that one of its objects was ‘to carry into effect an agreement already prepared and expressed to be made between Peter Pendleton Eckersley and Dr Francis Stafford Clark’, who were directors. Another director was Bill Allen; among the shareholders was the firm of David Allen and Sons. Mosley’s name was, of course, nowhere mentioned.
Mosley’s need for secrecy caused semi-farcical complications. The Allen brothers had agreed to pay him £5,000 for their one-third share in the proposed enterprise and neither they nor Mosley wanted this money to be traceable back to them. Once again, it was to Lawton they turned, Bill Allen handing the money over in used notes to be slipped to Mosley the next day. At this point Lawton’s young wife put her foot down. She would not, she said, have £5,000 in cash overnight in their flat. Packing the money in a suitcase, she took it round to her bank and paid it in. The next day it was withdrawn and handed over to a trusted member of Mosley’s staff. Soon afterwards, James Herd’s Nazi opposite number, von Kaufmann, came over to discuss the proposed station and horrified the discreet Herd by greeting him with a ‘Heil Hitler!’
Diana knew nothing of this byplay. Once initial agreement had been secured, her part in the negotiations was over. With only a few months to wait until the birth of her baby, she retired to her secluded life at Wootton. A few friends, including James Lees-Milne and Lord Berners, came to stay and Mosley returned between speaking engagements and visits to London, where he pursued his affair with Baba whose infatuation with him showed no sign of waning. ‘All through the thirties it was as if I had two wives,’ he once commented.
The chief excitement of the late summer for Diana occurred when Grimwood, the chef, and James, the butler, gave notice simultaneously. There had, been a fight during the preparations for a luncheon party (fortunately the lunch was already cooked) and the hot-tempered Grimwood had hurled all the Dresden plates at James’s head. When Diana rang the bell to find out why lunch was so late, the hallboy arrived in the drawing room with the words, ‘James is lying on the pantry floor in a pool of blood.’ Next morning, on her breakfast tray, were two notes, saying that the warring pair were very sorry but they had to leave her service. Diana, who like most of her friends found it impossible to envisage life without servants, was distraught at the prospect of losing two such good ones and straight away went to see James and his wife in their cottage in the stables, and then Grimwood. By dint of tact, flattery and appeals to their loyalty she persuaded them both to withdraw their notice. ‘Managing to get them both to stay was the most brilliant thing I ever did in my life,’ she said afterwards.
Her pregnancy was now impossible to conceal. Though she did not care a fig for ‘public opinion’, she did not want to hurt those near to her. Her family knew the position and she had written to Bryan and told of her remarriage.
Bryan had also remarried. Three weeks before Mosley and Diana had been married in Germany, he had begun a long and happy married life with Elizabeth Nelson. Now with his customary generosity, he wrote, ‘Betty and I are so very pleased and excited about your news . . . we won’t breathe a word about it.’
Yet for all public purposes Diana was still ‘living in sin’ and the time was rapidly approaching when, if she did not want a scandal over her ‘illegitimate’ baby, she would have to announce her marriage to Mosley. As it was, Debo, now grown up, was still forbidden to stay at Wootton – though that August, driving nearby with her future husband Lord Andrew Cavendish and a friend, she paid a surreptitious ten-minute visit, to find Mosley fishing in the lake, Diana, Jonathan and Desmond beside him.
On the other hand, public disclosure would mean that Mosley’s involvement in the German negotiations would be guessed instantly. A letter from Bryan on 14 August summed up all the awkwardnesses.
You didn’t say in your last letter whether you have told them [Jonathan and Desmond] about your coming event. Have you? or whether you have mentioned to them your marriage: nor when and how you are going to announce it. I don’t know that there is any need to tell me if you don’t want to but you may have simply forgotten to answer these questions. Only I would like to know what to tell the boys supposing they hear something and ask questions. Nobody outside your family seems to know of your marriage though there was a wave of rumours, as you know, last year. Wouldn’t it be easier to announce the marriage before the birth? Or are you going to put ‘To Lady Mosley, a son’ and leave it to people to realise that you have been married?
Finalising the radio contract seemed to be dragging on endlessly. One reason was that all meetings had to take place on neutral ground. Mosley was well aware that if anyone came over from Germany, British intelligence would immediately become suspicious. Taking Lawton with him, he would meet the German side in Paris. For Lawton, struggling to make a living at the Bar, the luxury of the Crillon and the Georges V hotel, as well as the excitement of Mosley’s company, made these trips an exotic experience he remembered all his life.
The German negotiators were an odd pair. The deal was in the hands of an astute and knowledgeable businessman called Dr Johannes Bernhardt. Accompanying him, presumably so that he could report direct to the führer, was Hitler’s aide, Captain Wiedemann, a tall, thin, former professional soldier who looked like the popular idea of a Prussian officer and whose main talent was his outstanding horsemanship. Fritz Wiedemann had originally met Hitler during the First World War, when he was Adjutant of the Bavarian infantry regiment in which Hitler had been a corporal. It was Wiedemann who had recommended Hitler for his decoration (he received the Iron Cross, second class). In 1935 Hitler had appointed him to his personal staff.
Mosley courted these men in a way familiar to anyone who has ever experienced corporate hospitality. A connoisseur of both food and wine, he would invite them to a sumptuous luncheon, with everything of the best, in a private room to preserve secrecy.
A further softening-up operation was a tour of the Paris night clubs. At the request of the two Germans, the first stop was the Sphynxe, Paris’s most fashionable brothel (shortly to be shut down). Lawton’s eyes opened wide at its Egyptian decor and the Cleopatra-handmaiden attire of the girls, but the party stayed only a quarter of an hour before leaving for the equally well-known but much more reputable night club, the Schéhérazade. The first to leave, at four-thirty, was Lawton, who ill-advisedly returned in his dinner jacket to the Crillon by metro, encountering hostile jibes and jeers from the early-morning workmen. Mosley did not return until much later, but showed little sign next day of his sleepless night.
That September Diana, seven months pregnant, did not attend the Parteitag or the Bayreuth Festival which preceded it. Unity, who went to Bayreuth as usual, developed pneumonia afterwards and was put in the Bayreuth Clinic. So close to Hitler had she become that he sent his personal physician, Doctor Morell, to look after her – a mixed blessing: Morell was appallingly ignorant and inefficient but for Unity this was yet another example of the führer’s supreme kindness.
Even Unity, blindly worshipping as she was, understood that Germany and England were now on a collision course. Like Diana, she had heard Hitler talking of the invasion of Czechoslovakia – since the Anschluss surrounded on three sides by Germany – despite his public denials of any such intention. As she lay in the clinic, she came to a decision: should there ever be war between her own country and the one she now loved so deeply, she would kill herself. She told Diana of this, as she told her of everything.
When Sydney came to Bayreuth to see her, Unity persuaded her mother to accompany her to the Nuremberg Rally. From having been bitterly opposed to Hitler and everything he stood for, Sydney was completely won over. Hitler, always overly impressed by British aristocrats and, thanks to Ribbentrop, convinced that they wielded much political influence, had turned the full force of his charm on her, to such effect that she would never afterwards hear a word against him.
When Sydney returned home, she went to Scotland. With some of the proceeds of the sale of Swinbrook, the Redesdales had bought the small island of Inch Kenneth, in the Inner Hebrides. The only buildings on it were the ruins of an abbey and a beautiful, rather grand eighteenth-century house. Sydney furnished it with her usual taste, buying furniture cheaply at auctions. No chest of drawers cost more than £310s, with elegant eighteenth-century tallboys for £7. She put her grand piano in the drawing room, where she hung pencil sketches by William Acton of her six daughters, framed in red brocade.
The island itself was flat and green, beneath the high cliffs of the Grievan rocks. The weather was often appalling. Nancy described it in horror-struck terms.
There is a perpetual howling wind, shrieking gulls, driving rain, water water wherever you look, streaming mountains with waterfalls every few yards, squelch, squelch if you put a foot out of doors (which of course I don’t). The only colour in the landscape is provided by dead bracken and seaweed which exactly matches it. No heather, black rocks shiny like coal with wet, and a little colourless grass clinging to them.
She was there when Unity went down with a bad bout of flu after the Parteitag. This time it was David who went to collect his daughter and bring her home. He too had become a firm Hitler supporter. ‘Farve really does adore him in the same way we do,’ wrote Unity to Diana on 12 September. ‘He treasures every word and every expression.’ When, on Friday 30 September, the Munich Agreement was signed, it was proof positive to the Redesdales that Herr Hitler’s intentions had all along been peaceable. Irene took the two eldest Mosley children to Heston aerodrome, where they stood in the rain to watch Chamberlain’s triumphant return, waving the piece of paper that bore the German leader’s empty promises. Diana and Mosley listened to the news in their cavernous Grosvenor Road flat.
Eventually the broadcasting contract, drawn up by Lawton, was finalised. It was dated 18 July 1938, the day on which agreement had finally been reached. It was a complicated affair. As, under Nazi laws, only a German company was permitted to receive a broadcasting licence from the German government – though once granted it could later be transferred to a British company – the Germans agreed to finance the construction of the station and to cover all operating costs over a period of fourteen months. Programmes, recorded music and announcers would be provided by another company, Radio Variety, to be set up specifically for this purpose (on 12 April 1939) and to sell advertising. Radio Variety had a capital of £5,000; Eckersley and Herd were co-directors, each holding 2,500 shares, and the Allens were to sell the advertising. The British would pay their share of the construction costs, plus interest of 5 per cent on the German capital involved; whatever profit remained would be divided 55/45 in favour of the Germans.
There were various clauses designed to save both sides from either hostility or ridicule. Section B of clause four stated that ‘programmes shall contain no matter which can reasonably be construed as political propaganda or cause offence in Greater Germany or Great Britain’. Under this, even news bulletins were forbidden. There was, however, no doubt that by playing German music and presenting ‘educational talks’ on German life, the impression of a cultured and reasonable nation would be subtly conveyed – especially as the Germans insisted on a clause forbidding any jokes about the Nazi regime by British comedians. They backed this up with a clause stating that a Nazi official should be present in the studio during such programmes to pass or if necessary censor whatever went out on the air.
The agreement was finally signed on 9 November, in Paris, for the German side by Bernhardt and Kurt von Schroeder, a prominent investment banker who was President of the Cologne Chamber of Commerce and a member of the International Chamber of Commerce and who had embraced Nazism just before Hitler’s rise to power. The British signatories were Diana, Mosley and Bill Allen. They stayed at the Crillon – Diana, who was expecting her baby at any moment, had her monthly nurse with her.
‘Now there is no reason to keep our marriage a secret any longer,’ said Diana to her husband. ‘And the moment to announce it is when our baby is born.’ Two days later, on 26 November at 129 Grosvenor Road, Diana gave birth to their first son, Alexander.
fn1> Apart from a brief meeting over Nancy’s deathbed.
fn2 Jessica did, however, see Unity, who had returned from Austria – when the Anschluss took place on 12 March Unity had rushed to Vienna to witness Hitler’s arrival.
fn3 Jessica and Esmond went to America on 18 February 1939. They said goodbye to Unity and Sydney; Tom, Nancy and Philip Toynbee saw them off at the station. When war broke out, Esmond joined up, training in Canada. He was posted to Britain as a navigator with the rank of Pilot Officer. In November 1941 he failed to return from a raid on Hamburg.