TEN DAYS AFTER her arrest, Diana demanded through her solicitor, Oswald Hickson, to know on what grounds she had been detained, and applied to be seen by the Advisory Committee. But it was not for another two months that she received an answer.
The aim of everyone held under 18B was to be seen as soon as possible by the Advisory Committee. This was headed by Norman Birkett, KC, an advocate famous for his conduct of criminal defences and libel actions, who was to be the second British judge at the Nuremberg Trials after the war. The Committee had been set up by the Home Office to decide whether those caught in the wide net of 18B should remain in detention or be freed. In the event, the majority were released, but in the early months no one anticipated this.
For the women waiting either for a date or for the results of their hearing – often months later, such were the numbers to be assessed – it was a dreadful time. The stress was exacerbated by the poor diet, on which virtually everyone lost weight. Some became so anaemic they ceased to menstruate while, as the months went by, fatigue, inability to concentrate, lassitude and depression were commonplace. Worst affected were those with families and young children, who worried themselves to distraction. Some wrote to their MPs in the hope that they might be able to help or at least speed things up – Nellie Driver, still a convinced fascist, was surprised and delighted when her MP, the left-wing socialist Sidney Silverman, came to see her in prison.
Mosley’s examination by the Advisory Committee had begun on Monday 15 July 1940,at 6 Burlington Gardens. It was immensely complex and long-lasting – the transcript is the size of a small book – and enlivened by shafts between Mosley and Birkett, who had faced each other before in one of the numerous libel actions brought by Mosley, which he always conducted himself. At the end of it the committee of seven were in no doubt that Mosley should remain in prison.
Neither Mosley nor Diana knew that he might have suffered the same fate as Napoleon: exile to St Helena. It had been suggested in the Home Office that the 600-odd members of the BU detained under 18B should be confined overseas. Jamaica, St Lucia (too many droughts), Ceylon, the Seychelles (too primitive) and Mauritius were considered. ‘From a security point of view, St Helena would be the most satisfactory,’ ran a Home Office memorandum dated 20 July 1940. ‘But it was thought that, if Australia and New Zealand were willing, they would be more suitable.’
This idea eventually foundered on the distaste of all concerned for tampering with the Habeas Corpus Act. The problem was that if detainees were sent to Australia or New Zealand (self-governing dominions as opposed to colonies) they would be outside the jurisdiction of the Home Secretary and he would not be able to require their return; nor would the government have any control over the conditions in which British subjects were kept, or their release.
Such imprisonment was in any case unlawful under the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679. This provided:
And for preventing illegall imprisonments in prisons beyond the seas bee it further enacted by the authoritie aforesaid that noe subject of this realme that now is or hereafter shall bee an inhabitant or residant of this kingdome of England dominion of Wales or towne of Berwicke upon Tweede shall or may be sent prisoner into Scotland Ireland Jersey Gaurnsey Tangeir or into any parts garrisons islands or places beyond the seas which are or at any time hereafter [shall be] within or without the dominions of His Majestie his heires or successors and that every such imprisonment is hereby enacted and adjudged to be illegall.
The only way round this was an Act of Parliament. The conclusion of a meeting on 22 July, at which the plan was decisively rejected, was that ‘To send them abroad would require legislation and the Home Secretary thinks this would be controversial.’ Even in the desperate circumstances of 1940, the National Government jibbed at amending the Habeas Corpus Act.
Mosley’s experience on arrival at Brixton had been similar to Diana’s, with the same small reception cell, carbolic bath, medical inspection and registering of property. But the prison governor, Captain Clayton, and the chief warder, Watson, described by Mosley as ‘fair and honourable men’, did their best to see that the 18Bs were treated like remand prisoners. Mosley had been allotted No 1 cell in F wing, previously condemned as unfit for use and seething with bedbugs; next door to him was his former follower John Beckett, furiously resentful that Mosley had been allowed a wireless and he had not. To add to Beckett’s irritation, he could hear when Mosley’s wireless was on but not what was being said. ‘Nothing in the world was more frustrating than to hear fucking Tom Mosley’s radio,’ he would remark for years afterwards. ‘To know that he could hear the news and I couldn’t.’
Brixton was not built on Holloway’s radial plan, but had blocks of three and four storeys surrounding a long narrow hall open to the air at each end, with iron staircases halfway along each wall. Facing the stairway on each of the floors was a recess between the cells, holding a lavatory with a half-door, a sink and a cold-water tap. Cells had the same furniture as in Holloway, with a plank bed about two inches from the floor. There were clean sheets once a month, only one pane in each of the four-pane windows could be opened, and throughout the blocks electricity was on a low-voltage system so that prisoners could not kill themselves.
At first, the 18Bs were treated like the other prisoners: let out at 6.45 for slopping-out, locked up again until breakfast was brought round at 7.15, let out at 9.00 for another slopping-out, locked up again until it was time for an hour’s exercise on a narrow stone pavement round a grass plot. After this, they could be together until 11.30 when they were locked up again until 2.00. Dinner was brought round at 11.40. In the afternoon they went outside again for more exercise, until 3.30. The last meal of the day was at 4.00, after which they were locked up for the night except for a last slopping-out at 6.30. Lights-out was at 9.00. But it was not too long before the cells of male 18Bs were left unlocked except at night.
‘Imagine trying to read in a genial babble of Mediterranean voices,’ wrote Mosley cheerfully to Diana (many internees were the Italian waiters who had staffed the most famous restaurants in London). ‘The final nightmare was permission to bring in a ping-pong table, when the echoing seashell of a building resounded with ping and pong and Latin laughter. The subsequent discomfort of being locked in cells while bombs were falling round the prison was nothing to it.’
As in the outside world, Mosley was a dominant figure. He would wander round the exercise yard surrounded by a dozen or so followers at a discreet and respectful distance and, as in the world outside, the scent of violence seemed to hang around him. Many of Mosley’s former disciples were now, like John Beckett, bitterly opposed to him, and two hostile camps emerged. Beckett himself formed unexpected alliances, with IRA prisoners, and with Arnold Lees, a vet who thought the trouble with the BU was that it was not sufficiently anti-semitic. Viewing the scene in the exercise yard, Beckett would remark caustically, ‘There goes Mosley with his kosher fascists.’
Where another internee might have been pathetically grateful for a visit, Mosley allowed neither the isolation of prison nor ties of friendship to affect his view of the loyalty due to him. He had refused, for instance, to see Harold Nicolson, who arrived at Brixton to visit him, on the grounds that in a broadcast the previous evening Nicolson had said something ‘disobliging’ about him. It weighed not at all with Mosley that Nicolson, as a junior Minister, had shown great moral courage in acknowledging the tie of friendship with a man assumed by many to be a traitor.
Mosley manifested the same stubborn sense of his position in his attitude to the three children of his first marriage. Less than two months after being jailed, he had more or less divested himself of them. They had earlier been made wards of court and for a number of years their aunt, Irene Ravensdale, had been virtually running their lives. With their father in jail, his role would be more distant than ever and she had been asked if she would be their joint guardian with Mosley. She replied that she thought ‘the difficulties and divergences of views would make this unworkable’. Her solicitor, who had acted for her when Mosley had pushed her into paying his share of the Denham bills, strongly endorsed her view. Almost at once, the court hearing proved her point.
The judge was willing to leave all question of guardianship and cooperate with Tom on important issues [records her diary]. Tom flatly refused it and wants entire and complete control for the boys – he was not interested in the girl. After discussion and deliberation the judge could only ask for outside guardianship as Tom had refused to have any assistance, and my name was put up. He sent me a lamentable message saying that I must understand he would never later have anything to do with the care or guardianship of any of his children.
From then on, Mosley and Irene hardly ever saw each other.
‘The children today were duly removed,’ he wrote to Diana. ‘The judge took the line that I should remain guardian in name, but as it was clear that I should have no direction in their education or anything else, I declined responsibility without authority, and Lady R. was made guardian.’ Or, as ‘Lady R’s’ diary puts it, ‘God in his illimitable mercy has handed me Cim’s children.’
Diana’s concerns for her own children were very different. Explaining her imprisonment to her two older sons had worried her deeply. Bryan, now stationed in Aldershot, had not seen Jonathan for some months but had managed to reassure Desmond, at home at Biddesden with glandular trouble in the neck:
I don’t think he is worrying over you. I told him about your imprisonment as being like an hotel for that very reason. I didn’t suppose conditions were quite like that – but it seemed the best way of putting things to him . . . I shall be leaving here soon to go to a battalion but I don’t know where that will be. I will give Desmond many messages from you and explain that though probably rather bored you aren’t unhappy and that as soon as he is well enough he is to go and see you. Jonathan is being brought to me by Pam and Derek [Jackson] next Saturday. He evidently did very well last term and won lots of prizes.
At first prisoners were allowed only two letters a week. Diana’s, naturally, were from Mosley; charming, loving, encouraging letters that did much to keep up her spirits: ‘Darling Percher, I do miss you so – you are such a brave and wonderful Percher. I do hope you are not too depressed . . . the present hysteria must pass quite quickly and we might soon be together again.’ Like all letters written to prisoners, these were censored but the warders soon gave up attempting to read Mosley’s letters: to anyone except his family, his handwriting was virtually illegible.
Soon there was little restriction on incoming mail. ‘Darling Honks,’ wrote Debo from Inch Kenneth on 25 August, ‘Syd writes saying one can write to you at last. Oh, I do so long to see your cell. I haven’t seen you or your pigs for such ages that I have almost forgotten what you look like.’ She went on to recount exactly the sort of chatty, day-to-day gossip Diana loved, from details of the weather (‘never stops raining’) to an improvement on the béarnaise sauce they had both learned to make in the cookery course that now seemed so long ago:
I now put in equal amounts of wine, lemon juice and vinegar. I hear you cook like a mad thing too. I do hope you are given eatable ingredients? . . . If ever you were short of a visitor, I would come hurrying to Holloway.
I wonder what Syd’s form is now, I mean whether she’s in a good temper or not. Her favourite thing is going to see you. She always writes ‘I’m going to see D’ or ‘I’ve just been to see D’, usually from the tea room at Paddington. She will be the death of me. Much love, Debo.
On 7 September the bombing of London began. During the following twenty-two days and nights almost 7,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the capital and the Docks were on fire almost every night. Holloway was more crowded then than at any other point in the war – there were 682 18Bs and internees and 181 convicted or remand prisoners. ‘We were horrified to see “Bombs drop outside London prison”,’ wrote Debo from Swinbrook on 14 September:
I hope all the well-known inmates were all right. I long to come and see you and I long for Cyril but what with one thing and another I shan’t come to London this week because Syd announces her intention of living up in Scotland . . . Syd is learning to milk my goat but as she always either shuts her eyes or gazes into the middle distance the milk goes anywhere but in the bucket. She is the maddest lady.
Five days later Diana received a letter of a different kind: an answer to her solicitor’s letter two months earlier asking why she had been detained. ‘The Secretary of State has reasonable cause to believe that you have been active in the furtherance of the objects of the organisation now known as the British Union and that it is necessary to exercise control over you.’
It continued:
a) You have acted as a channel of communication between Oswald Ernald Mosley, leader of the said organisation, and leaders of the German Government.
b) After the detention of the said Oswald Ernald Mosley you gave instructions for the carrying on of the said organisation.
c) You have supported the said Oswald Ernald Mosley in his position as leader of the said organisation both publicly and privately.
d) You have publicly and privately given expression to pro-fascist and pro-German sentiments.
How true were these charges? There is little doubt of the accuracy of the first and most serious. As to the third and fourth, Diana would have proudly agreed. She had attended as many of his meetings as possible, sitting near the front, and she thought everything he did and said was right. She also believed that what Hitler had done for Germany was little short of a miracle. The answer to the second charge was less clear: on Mosley’s behalf, she had continued to pay the wages of those staff still left in BU headquarters but she had not in any way concerned herself with BU strategy.
Diana viewed the charges as – to use one of her favourite words – monstrous. She thought that free speech was one of the things the country was fighting for, she believed totally in her husband’s views and in his right to express them. She admired and liked Hitler and she was not about to deny a friendship. For many years, she had shut her eyes to the evils of Nazi Germany and to the reflection of Nazi attitudes in Mosley’s fascism. She arrived for questioning on 2 October in a state of contemptuous, hostile defiance. She was also looking forward to her first decent meal for months.
It was a glorious day for her brief outing from prison. She was driven, with an escort, to Ascot – the house in Burlington Gardens where the committee had previously sat had been destroyed by a bomb. The committee was headed by Norman Birkett; its other two members were Sir Arthur Hazlerigg and Sir George Clerk – with whom Diana had lunched in 1931, when he was Ambassador in Athens.
She was questioned on everything from her visits to Rome (‘Were they to meet Mussolini?’ ‘No, they were purely social’) to her views on Hitler. ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder,’ said Norman Birkett. ‘Do you still entertain the same feeling for him?’ ‘As regards private and personal friendship, of course I do,’ replied Diana. ‘The history of Hitler in recent years has not affected your view about that?’ continued Birkett. ‘I do not know what his history has been,’ Diana responded coolly. She told them that she liked Himmler ‘very much’ and that she did not believe what she had read of the Gestapo’s actions. Even more indefensible was her statement that she agreed ‘up to a point’ with the German policy towards Jews. Finally she expressed the ludicrous opinion that England had been ‘dying for a war’ when, in the general view, the Chamberlain government had betrayed Czechoslovakia in order to avoid a war which was universally dreaded.
Her arrogant refusal to admit the slightest fault in the enemy of her country did for her. Nor can Mosley’s testimony – when asked why he and Diana were allowed to marry secretly in the Goebbels’ drawing room – that ‘Frau Wagner, Frau Goebbels and my wife are the three women for whom Hitler has the greatest regard in the world’ (in front of his earlier Advisory Committee) have helped her cause.fn1 When she answered ‘Yes’ to the question ‘If you had power, you would displace the present form of government in this country with a fascist regime?’ the committee must have felt they had little choice. ‘You have a great contempt for democracy?’ asked Sir Arthur Hazlerigg. ‘Yes,’ she replied shortly. Later, at lunch, a bottle of claret from Sir Arthur arrived at her table; Diana shared it with her escort.
Two days later, on 4 October, Birkett wrote to Sir Alexander Maxwell to say that the Advisory Committee recommended unanimously that Diana should continue to be detained. Indeed, in the prevailing climate, she might have been in some danger if released.
His letter said:
They felt that there was no other possible course open to them. It would be quite impossible, having regard to her expressed attitude and her past activities with the leaders of Nazi Germany to allow her to remain at liberty in these critical days. Lady Mosley appeared to the Committee to be an attractive and forceful personality who stated her views with clearness and without ambiguity; and the Committee formed the opinion that the views which she entertained were held quite sincerely. In these circumstances, Lady Mosley could be extremely dangerous if she were at large and the Committee entertained no doubt that the proper decision was to recommend that the detention be continued.
In their report the Committee commented on the fact that her second marriage was in Germany and kept secret by Hitler himself; this incident illustrates in the clearest way the terms of extreme intimacy which existed between the Mosleys and the leaders of the Nazi Party in Germany. The Committee entertain no doubt whatever that the friendship of Hitler was entirely due to the attitude of the Mosleys to the Nazi regime. Lady Mosley made no secret of the fact that she was a very great admirer of the Nazi regime and every fact that was investigated by the Committee confirmed this in every detail. They also say that it may very well be that the views of Hitler on the British statesmen have been to some extent coloured by the views put forward by Lady Mosley.
Though at the time Diana believed that Birkett was deeply hostile to her, short of releasing her he had tried his best to help her. His letter continued:
Lady Mosley would desire to have some opportunities of seeing her husband and the Committee felt this was a very natural wish that they would like to support. If it were possible that Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley could be detained in the same camp no possible harm could arise therefrom, and it would to some extent mitigate the detention, which may last some considerable time. Furthermore, Lady Mosley has two very young children by Sir Oswald Mosley, being babies of two years and five months respectively. Quite naturally, she feels very keenly not being allowed to see her very young babies and the Committee also felt that it was quite natural that she should desire some opportunity of seeing these young children. These are matters which strictly are outside the province of the Committee, but they felt that they were matters which, if they were brought to your notice, could be dealt with on humanitarian lines.
You know better than anybody else that even in the case of convicted criminals opportunities for visits are allowed and the Committee felt that they would like to bring to your notice the situation of Lady Mosley with regard to her husband and particularly her very young children and to ask you if it is possible to see that her very human desire can be met.
I would have sent this letter direct to the Home Secretary but in view of the very recent change [Herbert Morrison had succeeded Sir John Anderson the previous day, 3 October] I thought it would be more speedy to send it to you.
Diana was at the time allowed one half-hour visit a fortnight in the presence of a warder – the nicer ones pretended not to listen, though they had to make a report of all conversations. Only two people were permitted to see her at a time and she had not asked for her children because London was now being bombed more frequently.
Sir Alexander Maxwell replied to Birkett on 19 October, saying that there would be no difficulty about the children being taken to Holloway to see their mother – a special sitting room had been set aside for the visits of children to their mothers – and the only reason Diana’s children had not been to see her before was that she had not requested it.
A meeting with Mosley was not to be allowed, continued Maxwell’s letter, the reason being that other husbands and wives who were detained were miles apart from each other all over the country and such visits would set a precedent that the Home Office could not fulfil.
It would look like favouritism if we allowed the Mosleys to exchange visits merely because they are both detained in London. Another difficulty is that, if such a visit were allowed, if expenses and transport were paid out of public funds, there would, I imagine, be public comment and criticism, and if it were not paid out of public funds, there would be inequality between rich and poor.
Birkett tried once more, saying that the Advisory Committee were suggesting that Lady Mosley be allowed out of prison on parole to visit her children. ‘It is entirely natural that she does not want her children to come into the prison. The Committee are quite satisfied she could be entirely trusted if this course were possible. The Committee hope very much that arrangements of this kind, i.e., the children and parole, and being interned with her husband, can be made.’
He was turned down again, but there would soon be one much desired improvement in Diana’s life.
On 11 December the MP Richard Stokes declared in the House of Commons that ‘it was quite insufferable that people should be locked up for an indefinite period and not be allowed to have even an open trial’. His view chimed with that of Churchill, to whom the Habeas Corpus Act was at the heart of the liberty that Britain was defending, and on 22 December the Prime Minister asked the Home Secretary if conditions for detainees could be improved. Why were letters restricted to two a week, asked Churchill; were newspapers allowed, what were the facilities for exercise and, most important of all, what arrangements were permitted to husbands and wives to see each other?
As a result of the Churchill note, Mosley was to be allowed to visit Holloway once a month to see Diana.
Many years afterwards, Diana was to confide in a friend, ‘I regarded my appearance in front of the Advisory Committee as an absurd and insulting farce. I was to regret this bitterly.’
fn1 Later Diana was to claim that this extract was a forgery, put in to discredit her ‘by Blunt or one of the Communists. Kit would never have said anything like that’. In the opinion of the author, it is genuine and, when seen in context (see Sources for Chapter XXVI) perfectly understandable.