BY THE SPRING of 1940 Diana’s father could no longer bear living with her mother. Their political differences were such that they found themselves looking at each other over an unbridgeable chasm. In Sydney’s eyes Hitler could do no wrong, while David, who had never been anything but deeply patriotic, had become totally disillusioned in March 1939 when Hitler had entered Prague. Remarks by Sydney like, ‘WHEN the Germans have won, everything will be wonderful. They’ll treat us very differently from those wretched beastly Poles’, infuriated and appalled him. Their constant, acrimonious quarrelling reached its height during the news bulletins, to which both listened avidly.
David was also made miserable by the sight of Unity. The cottage was small, she was loud, careless and physically clumsy. The paralysis that had afflicted one side of her body was improving, but her hand still hung heavily and was not entirely manageable. Sometimes silent, sometimes chattering with outbursts of frenetic, excitable laughter, she had lost her memory and did not know why she was ill – she believed that the doctors had made a hole in her head. For all of them it was agonising to hear her say, ‘I thought you all hated me – but I don’t remember why.’ For David, a man of fastidious personal habits who believed that women should be charming, dignified and feminine, it was more than he could bear. When, for instance, Unity reached across the table to help herself from the honey jar and brought the overflowing spoon back to her plate leaving a trail of honey across the tablecloth, all the while gabbling loudly, he would get up abruptly and leave the room.
Sydney’s patience was angelic. As well as an hour of lessons, she would teach Unity to crochet, take her for walks and talk to her endlessly. ‘The aeroplanes worry her rather as they make her think of the hateful war but she sleeps as well as ever and has a good appetite too.’ Diana, by now heavily pregnant again, came to their cottage at Wycombe as often as she could, her pity for Unity untinged by remorse or guilt at having organised that first, fatal visit to the Nuremberg Rally in 1933. ‘Unity was a revolutionary and passionately devoted to Hitler,’ she said later. ‘The end would have been the same whether I had taken her to Germany or not.’
David went first to Inch Kenneth and later to Redesdale Cottage in Northumberland. He was never to live with his wife or family again.
Sydney took Unity to Swinbrook, to the cottage next to the Swan Inn. Here she and Debo lived with the confused and incontinent Unity in a kind of grisly parody of the children’s early years; ‘here we lead a very regular life,’ she wrote to Diana on 29 April:
Bobo gets up at 8 to feed goat and chickens and then has breakfast and bath, and we do an hour of ‘lessons’. She is reading and writing better and can read quite a long bit to herself, and tell it back to me, so I hope will soon be reading to herself for pleasure quite comfortably again . . . Bobo makes and lays the tea, and cooks very good buttered eggs, the extent of her cooking for the present. The chickens are positive marvels and the eight of them lay eight or seven eggs every day. Of course it won’t go on much longer. One had to be killed, it was ill. Debo likes milking the goat but it is difficult for Bobo . . . Action is as good as ever.
Diana’s fourth son, Max, was born on 13 April in a Sutton nursing home. After three boys, many women would have wanted a daughter, but Diana was delighted. She had grown up in a household of girls and women; boys were a refreshing change. Born into an era when marriage was virtually the only female career, she was very conscious of the effect of a woman’s looks on her fate and she had a secret dread of giving birth to a plain daughter. Also, given her own height and Mosley’s (five feet ten inches and six feet two inches respectively), she imagined that any daughter would be extremely tall. The sight of Unity, her height now exaggerated by increasing weight, her once handsome face distorted by ill health, was like a caricature of her fears.
Late in April she returned to Savehay. Wootton had been given up at the end of the March quarter and Savehay was again the Mosley headquarters. The three youngest Mosley children – Micky, Alexander and Max – lived there with their respective nannies; Viv used it as a base; and Nicholas Mosley and Jonathan and Desmond Guinness returned there in the holidays.
Since the outbreak of war Mosley had been actively promulgating a negotiated peace. ‘I find his attitude quite dreadful,’ wrote Baba Metcalfe in her diary on 16 February 1940:
You can’t make him admit Germany is to blame. He thinks we will never win the war, with the present Government. They commit folly after folly. He thinks Germany has more staying power than us: a long war of waiting is to their advantage and not to ours. . . . At the end of a devastating war he thinks the Empire will be lost and we may be on our knees.
In March the Germans occupied Denmark and invaded Norway. In the 9 May issue of Action (which went to press about a week earlier) Mosley wrote that in the event of invasion: ‘every member of British Union would be at the disposal of the nation. Every one of us would resist the foreign invader with all that is in us. However rotten the existing government, and however much we detested its policies, we would throw ourselves into the effort of a united nation until the foreigner was driven from our soil.’ There was no doubt that he meant this and in fact many members of the BU were already fighting.
It was a time of acute anxiety over fifth columnists. The Norwegian traitor Vidkun Quisling and a substantial number of his supporters had played a significant part in Hitler’s conquest of Norway. Suspicion of Mosley was widespread, fuelled by his own pronouncements and by extreme right-wing cranks such as Admiral Barry Domvile, who declared themselves devoted to him. Mosley’s name was synonymous with anti-semitism, while through Diana and Unity he was perceived as closely linked to Hitler personally as well as politically. Many of his associates were known Nazi sympathisers. William Joyce, who had left the BU only two years earlier after being one of their best-known speakers, was already broadcasting Nazi propaganda from Germany (earning himself the nickname ‘Lord Haw Haw’).
The government had always kept a close eye on the BU, but had not initially seen it as a proto-Nazi organisation and therefore had not closed it down on the outbreak of war. However, from now on events led to a rapid change of view.
On 9 May the Germans launched their blitzkrieg against France, Holland and Belgium. The next day Neville Chamberlain resigned and Winston Churchill became Prime Minister at the head of a Coalition Government. The last flimsy possibilities of the negotiated peace Mosley had been advocating disappeared. If Hitler, who had never yet kept his word on anything, succeeded in seizing not only most of Europe but all the Channel ports, any such ‘negotiated peace’ would mean a Britain that could be picked off by Germany almost at will. And in the event of a German invasion, Mosley was perceived as a potential Quisling.
Rumours of spies abounded. There were stories of farmers planting their crops so that the growing seedlings formed an arrow pointing to nearby aerodromes. Everyone was on the lookout for parachutists – said to have been dropped in Holland disguised as nuns – and all signposts in rural areas were removed so that they would not know where they had landed. Britain was plastered with posters warning that ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives!’ In this climate, British fascism was inevitably seen as a vehicle for future Nazi influence in Britain.
The feeling was widespread that, while the nation was preparing for a possible struggle to the death against a cruel and aggressive enemy, it was either cowardly or unpatriotic – and probably both – to advocate suing for peace.
Irene was sent for by the Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, in mid-May, and asked if she had any evidence that Mosley would betray his country or if she thought that he was a fifth columnist. She did not – as she would have done a few years earlier – simply laugh. She said that while she had no evidence that he would be a traitor, quoting his statement that if Britain were ever attacked it would be the duty of every BU member to resist, she did believe that if he felt a British version of National Socialism, in conjunction with Hitler, was desirable for Britain ‘he might do anything’.
Then came the Tyler Kent affair. MI5 learned that Anna Wolkoff, a member of the Right Club, and Tyler Kent, a cipher clerk at the American Embassy, had shown to Captain Maule Ramsay, a British MP secret correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt, which was highly sensitive because Roosevelt was then pledged not to intervene in Europe. When MI5 further discovered that Maule Ramsay was linked with Mosley in an attempt to unite all the anti-war, anti-semitic fascist groups into a single movement, their fears were confirmed.
Suspicion of fascism was now intense. One woman BU member, Nellie Driver, who lived in Lancashire, recounts that the police had asked the man next door if they could take a few bricks out of his wall so they could listen to her conversation; he refused.
By 19 May the Germans had broken through the Allied lines, the French army was disintegrating and the British army was falling back on Dunkirk.
Invasion within the next few months now seemed a probability rather than a possibility. What the public thought of ‘the Mosley line’ was expressed by the results of a by-election at Middleton, where the BU candidate polled 418 votes and the Conservative 32,063. Mosley himself, who had gone up to speak for his man, was attacked by the crowd and had to be escorted to safety by the police.
On 22 May the government rushed through what became known as ‘18B’ to an amendment (A1) of Regulation 18, the Emergency Powers Bill of September 1939. Regulation 18, as it previously stood, had given the government power to detain anyone whom the Home Secretary ‘had reason to believe to be of hostile origin or associations’ or to have committed ‘acts prejudicial to public safety or to the defence of the realm’. The 22 May amendment now gave the Home Secretary the power to detain any members of an organisation which he believed to be ‘subject to foreign influence or control’ or of which the leaders ‘have or have had associations with persons concerned in the government of, or sympathetic with the system of government of, any power with which His Majesty is at war’. As soon as these wide-ranging powers became law, they were employed.
On the morning of 23 May the offices of the BU were raided. Several of its officers were arrested, so quickly that no one was able to telephone the Mosleys at Denham. It was chance that Mosley himself was not there: his usual routine was to drive himself up to the office in the morning, returning home in the late afternoon or evening. That day, however, Diana wanted to visit Desmond, who was in a nursing home with a gland infection. After she had finished breast-feeding the new baby, Max, the Mosleys were driven up to London together by their chauffeur Perrott. They left Denham at about two-thirty, planning to visit the Dolphin Square flats first, after which they would separate, returning home together in time for Diana to feed Max again at six.
As their car pulled up at the entrance to Hood House, they saw four men standing there in silence, looking about them. Their expectant attitude was unmistakable. ‘They must be coppers,’ said Diana unsuspectingly. As the Mosleys got out of their car the men stepped forward. ‘Sir Oswald Mosley?’ asked the first. ‘Yes?’ said Mosley. ‘We have a warrant for your arrest. Can we go upstairs to your flat?’
They crammed into the lift together and in the flat Mosley asked to see the warrant. ‘But what is the charge?’ he asked. ‘There is no charge,’ came the reply.
Diana, stunned at the suddenness of it all, asked where her husband would be going and when she could see him. ‘He will be taken to Brixton and you can come and see him tomorrow,’ she was told.
Within the protective walls of their flat they embraced. Then, downstairs again, she watched him get into the car with the policemen and be driven off.
At the nursing home, she told Desmond and his governess Miss Gillies, sitting with him, what had happened. Miss Gillies – understandably, in view of what Diana learned later – was much the more agitated of the two. Eight-year-old Desmond, taking his cue from his mother, was perfectly calm.
Diana’s first reaction was that the authorities would discover they had made a mistake and then release her husband. She had not heard of the new provisions of 18B, and she knew Mosley was not alone in wanting to see the war brought to an early end. The Catholic MP Richard Stokes had relayed Nazi peace feelers through the pacifist Lord Tavistock; Liddell Hart had been advocating a policy of restraint ‘until Germany showed herself willing to reach an agreed settlement’ and Lord Beaverbrook had openly agreed with the Duke of Windsor (during the Duke’s visit to London in January 1940) that the war should be ended at once by a peace offer to Germany. Mosley, of course, had been much more strident, but Diana believed that his known policy of instant co-operation with any police order or request, his statements that all BU members should loyally obey orders, would prove that he was law-abiding and, ultimately, patriotic. Even so, she felt she had better get back to Denham straight away. On the way she saw the words ‘M.P. Arrested’ on an evening paper placard. The MP was Maule Ramsay.
On the drive to Denham, Diana collected her thoughts. As soon as she arrived, she telephoned Nicholas’s Eton housemaster, J.C. Butterwick, to tell him about Mosley’s arrest and ask if he thought Nicky would be persecuted because of it. ‘Oh no,’ said Mr Butterwick. ‘You see, he’s grown up – he’s seventeen – and he’s got his friends and that’s that. If I were you, I’d be more worried about your boy at private school.’
Fortunately Jonathan, who had just gone to Summer Fields, was largely protected from victimisation because his surname was Guinness. Nor, though upset by the news of his stepfather’s arrest, was he particularly surprised. A highly intelligent child, he was well aware of Mosley’s anti-war stance, especially in contrast to the fervent schoolboy patriotism around him. Jonathan thought that it was no wonder the government regarded him as an enemy.
Viv’s reaction was both sympathetic and practical. Now on excellent terms with her stepmother, she realised that the complication of a large household was the last thing Diana needed at that moment. She would, she said, take Micky and Nanny Hyslop up to their Aunt Irene the next day.
That evening, as Diana and Viv sat at dinner, they saw the big wooden gate on the far side of the lawn open. Through it streamed the police. Diana got up from the table, went to meet them and asked if they had come to search the house. When they said they had, the Mitford urge to tease overcame her. ‘You’re going to have quite a job,’ she said. ‘It’s such a funny old house, full of hiding places and corners, and there are several big barns, all full of things from Wootton. It’ll take you weeks. And how do you know we haven’t buried a lot of things?’
The police response was courteous and they began a cursory search. While they were looking over the drawing room, Diana ran upstairs and slipped her favourite photograph of Hitler, with its warmly affectionate inscription, under the mattress of her sleeping baby as he lay in his cot – the large, silver-framed one which Hitler had given the Mosleys as a wedding present was already safe in its leather box in the bank.
At five past nine the telephone rang. Diana picked it up in the library, where a policeman was desultorily pulling books out of the shelves and turning over pages. It was her mother, who had just heard of Mosley’s arrest on the nine o’clock news. ‘It’s monstrous, isn’t it,’ said Diana. ‘What was the charge?’ asked Sydney. ‘No charge,’ replied Diana. ‘How monstrous!’ cried Sydney. ‘Yes, monstrous!’ repeated Diana, delighted that the policeman was listening.
Soon afterwards the police left, taking with them Mosley’s guns: his pair of Purdeys, a spare 12-bore shotgun kept largely for visitors, two 20-bore shotguns used by Nick and any friend he brought to stay, and a .22 rifle for shooting rabbits and rooks. Receipts were given for all of them.
Diana went straight to bed. Though anxious, she slept well. She believed that as soon as the police went through the papers and safes at the BU offices they would see that there was nothing with which Mosley could be charged. She had been worried at the beginning of the war that he might be arrested simply for being against it. Mosley had declared that BU members must do their duty, whereas pacifists were committedly and consistently anti-war. And yet pacifists remained free, thought Diana. So unable was she to see the difference between the conscientious objections of individuals and the effort of a highly organised group to work against the government of her country that she was unable to see how her husband’s policies could be viewed as posing any kind of threat.
Any impartial vision she might once have had was subsumed in her absolute belief in Mosley and all he stood for. She simply did not comprehend the authorities’ suspicion of a man known to sympathise with many of the ideals of Nazi Germany, a man who was a declared enemy of the Jews, who advocated handing her colonies back to Germany and allowing Germany to do what she would in Europe and, above all, who wanted to make peace with an enemy who might soon be poised just across the Channel.
Next day Vivien, Micky and Nanny left Denham. Diana drove to Brixton Prison, taking her husband a change of underclothes, soap, washing things and shaving tackle – he already had a day’s growth of stubble. A prison officer was there while they talked, sitting in embarrassment as he tried to give the impression of one not really listening to a conversation between husband and wife. The first thing they needed, said Mosley, was a lawyer. He felt sure that the family lawyer, Mr Sweet, would refuse to act for him, but there was another solicitor who had acted in some of his lawsuits. Then he gave Diana a list of the clothes he needed and asked if she would also bring some food, as what was on offer in Brixton was so awful.
She went straight to see Mr Sweet, but before she could even bring up the subject he refused to act for Mosley. When she went to the lawyers whom Mosley had suggested, she received the same answer. Her own divorce lawyer refused regretfully, on the grounds that with all the younger staff called up he was alone in the office; he could not, he said, take on a case where every conference with his client – and many would be needed – meant an outside visit. Instead, he gave her some helpful advice. ‘Go and see Oswald Hickson,’ he told Diana. When she approached Hickson, he agreed immediately to act for Mosley.
Though Diana was only allowed to visit Mosley once a week, there was no restriction on leaving parcels for him at Brixton. The days passed in a rush, dashing up from Denham, between Max’s feeds, to pay the staff at the BU office and sort out what queries she could for them, going to see Mr Hickson, writing to children, family and friends. She was wretched without Mosley but she managed not to cry when she saw him – she did not want to add to his suffering with her tears and she did not want to give ‘them’ the satisfaction of seeing her break down.
Alone in her room at Savehay, or holding her baby, she wept often. She was lonely, isolated and miserable; she was desperately anxious about her four sons; and it seemed the stuff of nightmare that her husband could be kept in prison without a specific charge to answer. ‘It seemed unbelievable that Englishmen could be held in prison indefinitely,’ she wrote of that time.
Five days later, while addressing his Cabinet in his room in the House of Commons, Churchill spelled out his complete opposition to Mosley’s views in words which explained the thinking behind Mosley’s arrest.
Churchill began by telling the Cabinet that it was a question of saving as many men as possible through Dunkirk and also that there would doubtless be attempts to invade Britain:
I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering into negotiations with That Man. But it is idle to think that if we try to make peace now we should get better terms than if we fought it out. The Germans would demand our fleet, our naval bases, and much else. We should become a slave state, though a British government which would be Hitler’s puppet would be set up, under Mosley or some such person.
When he concluded with the words: ‘If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground,’ there were cheers and shouts and many of the Cabinet ran round to his chair to clap him on the back.
With Mosley publicly identified as a wrongdoer – for few saw him as a political martyr – the slow demonisation of Diana began. She became a pariah, isolated from the rest of the world. The first to break through this cordon sanitaire of obloquy and disgrace were the press, who had heard a story that Unity had returned from Germany pregnant, given birth to Max and asked her sister to cover up for her. But numerous witnesses, from doctors and nurses to those who had helped Diana clamber on to buses, quickly eliminated this promising story. Gerald Berners, defying those who told him to avoid Diana, came over from Oxford; Pam and Derek Jackson, Debo, Sydney and Unity, who could now just about walk, all came to see her. Not so Nancy, whose long estrangement from Diana continued, whose political views were deeply opposed to Diana’s and who in any case hated her brother-in-law.