IN THE FIRST few years after the war most of the Mitfords moved house. Nancy, with no one to please except herself, settled in Paris to be near Gaston Palewski. Derek Jackson, enormously rich, for whom Rignell had been ideal – he could hunt with the Heythrop and it was close to his laboratory in Oxford – was so indignant when the Labour Government introduced a top rate of tax at 97.5 per cent that he and Pam decided to move to Ireland.fn1
Sydney and Unity moved 500 miles north. The island of Inch Kenneth had been part of Tom’s inheritance. He had willed it to his sisters and there was general consensus that it should be sold. Then, on 21 May, Jessica announced that her one-sixth of the proceeds should go to the Communist Party. ‘One way to look at it is that my share will go to undo some of the harm our family has done, particularly the Mosleys and Farve when he was in the House of Lords.’
It was too much. With the consent of all the sisters, including Jessica, Sydney now took it over and made her home there. David, who with his failing sight, increasing deafness and general frailty found island life too difficult, moved to Northumberland to a cottage in Redesdale, where Margaret continued to look after him.
Sydney had always loved Inch Kenneth and had visited it as often as she could during the war – perhaps its isolation and encirclement by the sea subconsciously reminded her of her early life on her father’s boat. Unity was less enraptured: she did not want to leave her life of hymn-singing, churchgoing and the Oxford cinemas for a wet, remote island and the company of goats.
Sydney was sixty-six and it was a dramatic change in lifestyle. Even the journey to Inch Kenneth was difficult, sometimes hideous, if wind or weather made the two sea crossings impossible. The first stage was the night sleeper to Oban, followed by the notoriously rough crossing to Mull. If this was impassable, it meant waiting in Oban until the following day. Once on Mull, there was a fifteen-mile drive along winding roads to the little village of Gribun, followed by a second crossing, by motorboat, to Inch Kenneth a mile offshore. When Sydney had established herself, she garaged her ancient Morris at Gribun, whence it would be driven to meet the Oban steamer. At Gribun her boatman, with her motorboat, Puffin, would be waiting.
Contact with the outside world was fitful. There was no telephone and, when the sea was rough, no post. If a black spot, visible through binoculars, was fixed on her garage door on the Mull shoreline opposite, she knew there was a telegram for her and would send her boatman in Puffin. Supplies of coal arrived once every four years, brought by the coal boat, which came as close to the jetty as it could at high tide and then tipped the coal into the sea. It was shovelled up at low tide by the islanders, who gathered with ponies and carts.
Sydney surmounted every problem triumphantly, adapting quickly to the hard life of a small island farmer. She reared sheep, Shetland ponies, goats, hens and cattle (the bull had to be swum over from Mull, attached to Puffin by a rope through the ring in his nose). She had always made her own bread and she had become an expert cheese and butter maker. Her amusements were simple: the wireless, two-day-old newspapers and library books – chiefly biographies and diaries – sent by post. She would also look through her field glasses to see if there were people on the opposite shore and would often send her boatman to ask picnickers or those from boats anchored in the bay to come and have tea with her. Among those she met in this way were the politician R.A. Butlerfn2 and his wife Mollie, who later often came to visit her.
The house, with its white-painted, bow-fronted, eighteenth-century elegance, was itself an unlikely piece of architecture to find on a Scottish island; inside, as Mollie Butler said, ‘It was impossible to imagine you were in the Highlands rather than an elegant London drawing room.’ The delicate cornices were picked out, there were satin curtains in the pale oyster drawing room with Sydney’s favourite French furniture and pictures from Swinbrook. David, devastated by the loss of his adored only son, had instinctively wished to disembarrass himself of everything that had once been so carefully guarded as Tom’s inheritance and had told Sydney to take whatever she wanted. Sydney had, however, managed to dissuade him from the wholesale dispersal of family treasures:
Farve . . . will not sell family pictures, books or the Crown Derby (white and gold). The Crown Derby has 90 dinner plates, four soup tureens, 15 sauce boats and everything else en suite, including 13 flower bowls. Warren Hastings (they call it Berlin china) is not quite so big, five dozen plates and two soup tureens, etc as well as several large round dishes and all the knives, forks and spoons with china handles.
Diana was not to move for some years. The last link with the old life had been severed when, on 1 January 1946, Savehay Farm was sold to Mr Frank Cakebread, to be followed three weeks later by a sale of the Savehay furniture. Everything went for enormous prices: Cimmie’s bulbous-legged oak refectory table, abhorred by Diana, sold for £300, a carved oak coffer for £140. Even the drawing-room curtains fetched £70.
Mosley had flung himself into farming with enthusiasm but soon, unsurprisingly, it was not enough. He resumed his political life, focusing on the aspect that now most interested him, the economic situation. He believed there would soon be an economic crisis of catastrophic proportions; in the ensuing chaos there would be a chance for the voice which spoke with reason and authority on such matters to be heard. If he could only regain a seat in parliament, he believed, his ideas and oratorical skills would do the rest. He organised large meetings, in London chiefly at Porchester Hall and Kensington Town Hall, in Manchester at the Free Trade Hall; and when he could not hire a hall he held meetings in the street.
For success, he needed to reach an audience far larger than those at his meetings – and to publish his views, he needed paper, then on quota and available only to those whose business was printing. Accordingly, he and Diana became publishers. My Answer, Mosley’s explanation and defence of his past political life and the policies which had caused him to be imprisoned, was published by Mosley Publications in 1946. The following year saw The Alternative, a proposal that Africa, with its vast wealth of raw materials, should serve as a kind of garden estate for the more civilised European races; it would be run, said Mosley, by a new and superior type of white man specifically bred to carry out this task in the most efficient and altruistic way. After this Mosley Publications became the Euphorian Press, which – as well as a constant flow of Mosley’s pamphlets – published classics, among them Nancy’s translation of La Princesse de Clèves and two Balzac short stories translated by Diana. Stuka Pilot, an account of the air war on the Eastern Front by the German air ace Hans-Ulrich Rudel, with a foreword by Group-Captain Douglas Bader, became a best-seller.
Ostensibly, Mosley had given up fascism. The British Union, put down by the government at the beginning of the war, no longer existed, and the day the war ended Mosley himself had said, ‘Fascism is dead. Now we must make Europe.’ But few believed that this particular leopard had changed his political spots; once again, his meetings were disrupted, there were counter-demonstrations and street fights with communists.
For those on both sides of the House of Commons, his past record clung about his shoulders. When he tried yet again for the return of his passport, his application was one of five refused by the Home Secretary, Chuter Ede, on the grounds that it was undesirable that the Mosleys should be allowed to travel.
Lord Jowitt, the Lord Chancellor, disclosing this ban to the House of Lords on 12 December 1946, explained that the government believed there was ‘a reasonable chance’ that Sir Oswald Mosley might make mischief abroad. ‘Fascism and Nazism have not been rooted out,’ said Lord Jowitt, in the first official statement that ex-detainees could be stopped from going abroad under the New Emergency Laws (Transitional Provisions) Act of 1946. ‘They are lying dormant but it is possible that they might once more be fanned into life. If I were a Jew living in Europe today I could imagine that I should feel deeply annoyed at the visit to the country where I was living of a man who had, rightly or wrongly, been identified as being very anti-Jew in this country.’
Ten days later, Lord Jowitt must have felt justified when an East End ‘Welcome Home’ party was given for Mosley by many of his old followers – former 18Bs, party workers, members of book clubs started by Mosley and other sympathisers. ‘There is stirring again in England and in the world some of those things we felt so deeply together,’ said Mosley in his speech of thanks. ‘I have always regarded the East End as the birthplace of those ideas . . . They tried to shame us, they did their best to throw us in gaols, into concentration camps but they never shook the faith within us and they never will.’ The party finished with ‘Auld Lang Syne’, followed by the fascist salute and ‘God Save the King’ in uneasy conjunction.
An episode in Paris showed how strongly fascism and the Mitford name were connected. Nancy was now comfortably installed in a charming ground-floor flat at 20 rue Bonaparte, where she completed her new novel, The Pursuit of Love, dedicating it, naturally, to the man who was the centre of her own life. For discretion’s sake, she had wanted to use only the Colonel’s initials but he had insisted on his full name appearing. Neither of them foresaw the book’s immediate and lasting success on its publication in February 1947 – nor the furore the dedication would cause. ‘Hitler’s mistress’s sister dedicates daring book to M. Palewski,’ howled the headlines in the French papers. The Colonel was angry, upset and fearful for his political future; Nancy prudently left Paris for several months. Fortunately the French papers did not realise she had gone to stay with the Mosleys at Crowood.
Two years into peace, the Mosleys’ unpopularity showed no signs of diminishing. Graffiti were scrawled on the door of Diana’s Dolphin Square flat, pleas to some of her oldest friends to invite them to dinner met with smiling acquiescence – but no invitation followed. She wrote to her old admirer Evelyn Waugh and received a charming letter in reply (‘Dearest Diana, how very nice to have a letter from you. I think of you often, and of my poor heathen godson’) but no visit, although he told her that Debo had asked him to stay with her in Ireland. When Cynthia Jebb, whose husband, Gladwyn, Nancy had urged to imprison Diana, ran into the Mosleys in Heywood Hill’s bookshop, she recorded in her diary that they had ‘the look in the eye that people no doubt acquire when they are accustomed to being shunned – a kind of studied indifference’. When half a dozen pistols brought back by Nicholas from the war were stolen from Crowood, the thief claimed in his defence that he had discovered an ‘arms cache’ at the house of the notorious fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley. And when Micky, in a fit of adolescent rebellion, rang up his father one day from Eton pretending to be a communist agitator and saying in a threatening voice, ‘We’re coming to get you!’ Mosley was so accustomed to such threats that he contacted the police immediately on another line. They traced the call at once and the luckless Micky found the police outside the box as he rang off. Characteristically, far from being annoyed, Mosley was amused at this show of boldness and intrigued, as always, by any sign of political consciousness in his son.
Unable to go abroad, the Mosleys spent three weeks in August 1947 with Sydney on Inch Kenneth, a visit which cemented Mosley’s place in Sydney’s affections as her favourite son-in-law. It was extraordinarily hot and the island was seen at its best, an idyllic place of peace and warm sunshine, made even happier for Diana by a letter from Bryan telling her of Jonathan’s ‘glowing’ Eton reports. He was top of his division in German – interpretership standard, said his form master – had good Russian and an excellent history report.
Privately, it was a time for building bridges. At Crowood, relations were sufficiently restored for a visit by Irene, who had just returned from Africa. Although ‘Auntie Ni’, as the children called her, still loathed Diana, she was determined to be polite for the sake of her nephews and niece, a forbearance which bore fruit when Nicholas became engaged later in the year, necessitating family consultations about the wedding. Diana wrote to Winston Churchill at the instigation of Daisy Fellowes, who had told him of Diana’s outburst against him in prison in the depths of her misery. Churchill, who had always been fond of Diana was so pleased to get her affectionate letter that he immediately wired his thanks.
That autumn Diana began to suffer from occasional migraines. The printer who printed the Euphorian Press books would often invite both Mosleys to a splendid lunch in London. At one of them, to celebrate the publication of Mosley’s The Alternative – a short political treatise published in October 1947 – within minutes of sipping a glass of the delicious Pouilly Fuissé offered by their host, Diana had a headache so terrible she had to leave the table and lie down. Only after several hours did the pain abate, leaving her exhausted and shaking. After several such episodes, she realised that white wine was one trigger, though she could safely drink a glass of red wine.
Mosley was steadily returning to his earlier political format: a party outside mainstream politics with himself as its unquestioned head. At the end of the year he decided to formalise his remaining support. Despite the events of the past, his whole character inclined him towards a precisely outlined body of support rather than an amorphous band of followers. On 15 November 1947 he attended a conference of Mosley Book Club fans at the Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street – where, eighteen years earlier, the New Party had held its inaugural meeting – and announced his intention of founding a new political party. It was to be called the Union Movement.
A fortnight later he gave a press conference in Pimlico to fifty-odd largely hostile reporters. As one of them ironically recorded, ‘Purely from “a sense of stern and very painful duty” he has decided to float a new party.’ Its aim, Mosley told the assembled gentlemen of the press, was to bring about a union of the European peoples, with the exception of Russia, after which Europe and the British Dominions would be asked to join with Britain in developing Africa for the white man. As the Daily Mail reporter pointed out, ‘In the Mosley Plan, there will be no nonsense about “trusteeship for the natives”.’ There would be a direct Yes or No vote every four years on a Mosley Government and its programme, the Communist Party would be suppressed, Jews who had not had their roots in Britain for ‘about three generations’ would be resettled outside the country, perhaps in Eritrea. ‘Something more vehement and violent than we have known in British politics for a decade was reborn last night in Pimlico,’ concluded the Daily Mail.
The Union Movement’s first meeting, at Kensington Town Hall, was in February 1948. In effect, it was fascism under another name: its members were largely former BU members and its aim was ‘the Greater Britain that shall be born of the National-Socialist and Fascist creed’. It was already a lost cause. There were disturbances, riots, marches and demonstrations, but even in local government elections not a single seat was won. This did not deter Mosley, who was not only brave and tenacious but convinced of his own rightness.
At Inch Kenneth, Unity’s health suddenly deteriorated. For the first time Sydney’s self-imposed isolation seemed a penance rather than a joy. ‘Bobo is much less well and I feel greatly worried,’ she wrote to Diana on 27 May 1948:
It is her poor head. The doctor here is bringing out a man from Oban hospital to consult. It is really terrible being here where it is so impossible to move anyone. No aeroplane can land on Mull and there seem to be no seaplanes. I wanted a specialist from Edinburgh or Glasgow but the doctor said they would require X-rays and all sorts of things before they would do anything. She is very fast asleep now I am glad to say. There is not a terrible deal of pain, thank heavens, but she can’t move her head at all. Neck completely stiff. I have a day nurse who has been here since Monday.
Hardly had Sydney written this letter than Unity’s condition worsened rapidly. The following day, 28 May, Sydney took her to Oban. It was an appalling journey, first the usual motorboat to Gribun, then by ambulance across Mull to Salen, where they arrived long after the daily steamer had departed. They crossed to Oban in a small hired motorboat, a journey that took five hours, Unity sedated with morphia so that she was not in pain, and arrived at the West Highland Cottage Hospital at one a.m. The following day, as the long, light Highland evening wore on, it became clear that the desperate trip had been in vain. At ten o’clock Unity died, the cause of her death given as meningitis stemming from the bullet wound she had inflicted on herself almost nine years earlier.
Her funeral was on 1 June at Swinbrook. Diana, with Mosley, was at the graveside of the sister once the closest to her in the family. Afterwards Sydney came to Crowood for a fortnight.
The years at Crowood were among the most domestic and enclosed of Diana’s life. Her horizons had shrunk to the affairs of her immediate family, and outings were largely confined to those friends still faithful. She sent clothes to Frau Wagner, poverty-stricken among the ruins of Germany (‘that beautiful warm dressing gown fitted as if it was made for me!’) and a last link with Unity. Once, one April 21, she said wistfully: ‘It’s the führer’s birthday today. He did love his birthday.’ But for most of the time the past was behind her. She sent hams and scented soap to Sydney on Inch Kenneth; she visited her sons at school – when she went to Eton, boys would hang out of the windows to gaze at her and the bolder ones would ask Desmond for a photograph (‘Darling Mummy, do send Christopher the photograph. He doesn’t want to hang it up, only gloat’).
All her energies were bent towards creating for Mosley a cherishing, efficient framework for his life and work. He was a man who expected his household to revolve round him, its timetable geared to his needs, pleasures and wishes. If he was reading, noise was frowned on; if he wanted entertaining, he liked sparkling people – he had a low boredom threshold and loved jokes. The house had to be well run, the food good, with plenty of agreeable society. Diana, who had always wanted to write, found herself kept busy editing her husband’s pamphlets and books; his autobiography took priority over anything she might think of writing for herself.
The most dramatic events were changes within the family circle. Nicholas became engaged to Rosemary Salmond. Desmond left Eton for Gordonstoun, where he could keep his horse. The usual preliminary talk with the founder, Kurt Hahn, lasted two hours (said by the Gordonstoun boys to be a record) and, as Desmond later wrote to his mother,
I could see that Bryan had given him the impression that I hated Kit and Kit me. What Hahn would have said if I had told him that I would go to Kit for advice and not Bryan I don’t know. There is but one thing that makes the dread of Gordonstoun less persistent and that is that I shall be allowed to take that Tom Thumb, the apple of my eye, to ride. Darling Bryan is going to buy me a proper horse at last, possibly for my birthday, possibly to cancel out Jonathan’s gun. The only remark I have to make about Gordonstoun is that it is not the place for me, but it is more the place for me than Eton.
Desmond rode Tom Thumb to such effect that they won the Open Jumping class at the nearby county show.
Intellectually, Diana may have been dedicated only to the furtherance of Mosley’s happiness, but in practice she soon began to find the everyday routine of life at Crowood stifling. Apart from her editorial work, she had never been involved in Mosley’s political activities and he was often away from home. Her own amusements had always been metropolitan and the slow, unvarying passage of days on the farm was uncomfortably reminiscent of the boredom she had suffered at Swinbrook. Her social life was confined to those who still allowed themselves to know the Mosleys. She had always travelled a lot and could hardly imagine a ‘normal’ life without going to her favourite parts of Europe whenever she wished. She felt this emotional claustrophobia most strongly in the summer, when she and Mosley were used to spending long holidays in Italy or France, followed by a fortnight in Venice. The absence abroad of friends such as Daisy Fellowes, now revisiting all the places that the Mosleys so loved, only served to underline the constriction of her own life. It seemed to her bitterly unfair that after three years in prison without trial and with no criminal charge against her, she was now denied the right of any ordinary citizen to ‘travel abroad without let or hindrance’.
Mosley’s ingenuity came to the rescue. He had discovered that a British subject had the right to leave his country and return to it at will – and a passport was needed only to gain entry to another country. The answer was to go to sea. He bought a sea-going motorboat and they visited the Channel Islands. It was not far, and they were still on British territory, but it gave them a feeling of liberation.
The trip was such a success that they bought a larger boat, a sixty-ton ketch called the Alianora, for which they engaged a captain and an engineer. Without passports, they were not allowed to take money abroad, so every detail down to the last tin of food had to be carefully thought out. They planned to leave in June 1949 but just before they set off, with Alexander and Max, aged ten and nine respectively, they were given passports. That summer, revelling in the freedom of going exactly where they wanted, they spent four months away. The first leg of the trip was across the Bay of Biscay to the Gironde estuary, then on to Corunna, Lisbon and Tangier, where they ran into a storm. The Alianora had to be repaired at Gibraltar so they went by train to Madrid, then to Formentor, Majorca, where they boarded the Alianora again. At Cassis they met Nancy, and Daisy Fellowes’s yacht Sister Anne, which they followed down the Riviera. At Monte Carlo Nick and his wife Rosemary arrived and the boys went off to spend the rest of the summer with their grandmother on Inch Kenneth. When it was wet, they devised an impromptu skating rink on the parquet floor of Sydney’s large drawing room. ‘I was pleased as it polished the floor,’ reported Sydney. ‘It went on for several hours and they sang quite a lot, which your two really enjoy.’ Alexander, she added, needed a man’s company. ‘He doesn’t think much of women (his age!) and of course Nanny has less than no authority and makes no impression. He has been reading Henty, Moby Dick and Heart of Midlothian.’
Diana and Mosley, spending most of their time at Daisy Fellowes’s villa on Cap Martin, bathing in its seawater pool, were picking up old friendships. It was the same story in Venice: people from the past were returning and seemed delighted to see them. It was an enormous contrast to England, where they were still deeply unpopular, often cut and almost invariably referred to in hostile tones.
They began to consider living in Europe. There was little to keep them in their own country. Inch Kenneth was no more difficult to reach from Paris than from London. Nancy, in Paris, was well established: as an intimate of Diana and Duff Cooper, who had settled in Chantilly after leaving the embassy in 1948, she was at the hub of Parisian society. Pam and Derek Jackson (who had been appointed Professor of Spectroscopy at Oxford in 1947) were living at Tullamaine Castle in County Tipperary. Jessica – though between Decca and Diana lay a frozen waste of silence – was in America. Only Debo, now the Marchioness of Hartington,fn3 was in England. After a final cruise in 1950, the Alianora was sold, and the Mosleys decided to leave England.
fn1 Income tax stood at 9s in the £. In addition surtax was payable on incomes over £2,000 p.a., rising to 10s 6d in the £ for incomes over £20,000. The top rate of tax on income was thus 19s 6d in the £.
fn2 Shortly to become Chancellor of the Exchequer and, later, Home Secretary.
fn3 Lord Andrew Cavendish assumed the courtesy title of Hartington when his elder brother was killed in action in September 1944, and became Duke of Devonshire on the death of his father in 1950.