BY 1956, MOSLEY had found a focus for his political activity. Large numbers of immigrants from the West Indies were being encouraged to enter Britain by the offer of jobs and housing, and many settled in North Kensington. Mosley now chose this area as his political arena, once more seeking to whip up racial antagonism in an eerie echo of his pre-war anti-semitism. ‘I say, let the Jamaicans have their country back and let us have ours,’ he would declaim, views that involved him in passionate argument with his son Nicholas.
While Mosley was making inflammatory speeches, Diana was immersed in family affairs. She was deeply worried about her father’s health and her mother’s isolation. For Sydney, the loss of two of her seven children had become a pain that was increasingly difficult to bear. ‘It was so kind of you to think of sending a word for Tom’s birthday,’ she wrote to Diana in January 1957. ‘I fear the sorrow for him gets no less. One misses him more as time goes on. I know also that you are the same.’
Her daughters were anxious that she come south, and the Duke of Devonshire thought of buying the Swinbrook School House, ostensibly to have a stake in Swinbrook, but in reality to help his mother-in-law. ‘Debo and I thought it might do for me to retire to when really too old for the island but I fear it has many drawbacks,’ reported Sydney to Diana in March:
No outlook, practically no garden, a sitting tenant, no water laid on, and so on. Everything to do, in fact, but correspondingly cheap, £1,200 . . . I remember when we got the ‘lodge’ ready for Grandfather Tap at great trouble and expense. When it was all set for him to go and live there, he said: ‘Two voices there are. One is of the mountains, one the sea, each a mighty voice. The “lodge” has neither. I cannot live there.’ I fear this applies to all Swinbrook village.
It was her family’s last attempt to persuade her to lead a less arduous life. She loved the island and was perfectly content there. She dealt with her illness by ignoring it (‘the Good Body’) and obediently it advanced but slowly. She was happy, busy and social: she loved her garden, her cows – except when they escaped on to her lawn – and she picked the fruit from her orchard, made hay and walked her little dachshund Joseé. Every summer her grandchildren came to stay; there was bathing off the rocks, fishing and long spells of fine weather (‘we had breakfast out of doors every day’). Other friends visited – ‘we have been a party of eight every meal’ – and she filled the role of local grande dame with unpretentious charm. ‘On Saturday had the W.I. to tea, about 30 old dears.’
David’s life was in sad contrast. He seemed detached not only from his family but from life. He had never read, nor was he interested in politics or world affairs; he could no longer practise the country sports of shooting and fishing which he had once so enjoyed, nor was he a gardener; and he had become extremely deaf. Sydney and Debo had arranged to go and see him for his eightieth birthday. At the last minute Diana, who was in London, had a premonition. She raced to King’s Cross, running along the platform until she found the carriage in which her mother and sister were sitting. All three stayed at Redesdale for two days and then went on to Inch Kenneth. Diana returned to London and three days later, on 17 March 1958, her father died. He was buried at Swinbrook, his ashes brought down from Northumberland in the sort of parcel he once used to bring home from the Army & Navy – thick brown paper and neatly knotted string.
David had cut Jessica out of his will after her earlier declaration that she would give anything she inherited to the Communist Party. He had not seen her since her departure for the United States in the spring of 1939. Three years before his death, when it was apparent that he might not live much longer, Sydney had written to Jessica, asking if she would like to come and visit him. Jessica had replied that she would love to – if he would promise not to roar at Bob and their daughter Constancia (true to the Mitford passion for nicknames, known always as Dinky). Sydney responded crisply that ‘since you have set impossible conditions, I shall not arrange a visit with Farve’, and Jessica never saw her father again. Nancy, feeling that her sister had been unfairly treated, gave Jessica her share of Inch Kenneth; a little later, Jessica bought out her other three sisters – the market value put on the island by an outside agent was £7,000. ‘Decca and Bob and Dinky all seem really to like it,’ wrote Sydney to Diana. ‘The idea is that Dinky will have it one day.’ Meanwhile, Sydney was able to go on living there.
In February 1958 Mosley relaunched his Union Movement. It was really the BU under another name: it consisted largely of former members, who rallied to him with the same aggressive fervour as before. There was the same demagoguery, the same salute, the same phalanx of tough young men surrounding the Leader and the same racialist bias, albeit this time with a different target, ‘coloured immigrants’. The TUC described the Union Movement as ‘fanning the flames of racial violence’, a judgement borne out by the riots in Notting Hill later that year. The Times, while pointing out that the Union Movement was exploiting rather than creating the disturbances, summed it up accurately, dispassionately and damningly.
A clear distinction must be drawn between official Union Movement policy which has been formulated by Sir Oswald Mosley and the reasons most members have for joining. Those immediately below the Leader look to him for political guidance and seem to have a genuine desire to see his policies instituted. All this is incomprehensible to the majority of his followers, who understand the clichés in which the ideas are expressed rather than the ideas themselves. They have joined the Movement for a variety of reasons: some because they are anti-semitic but the largest number, it seems, because they like fighting Communists and painting slogans on railway bridges. They fight because they have an instinctive desire to do so. It is admitted by the leaders that these elements are out of the control of the party, and probably would not have joined it were it not for the sinister avocation of the word ‘movement’, the dramatic salute, the hero-worship implied in the word ‘Leader’ and the fanatical hatred of the word ‘Communism’.
Diana, as always, supported the Leader’s political stance wholeheartedly. The peaceful serenity of her manner gave an uncomfortable edge to the sharpness of views that had hardened through the years. The mild anti-semitic prejudice of early days had become a full-blown conviction that ‘international Jewry’ was an enemy of both her country and her husband; now, endorsing his view that coloured immigration was to be resisted at all costs, Diana would cite the many ills it would supposedly bring, from overcrowding to resentment bred by competition for scarce jobs, housing or benefits. Even more specious was her argument that if employers got black labour cheaply they would not invest in new machinery and thus Britain would fall behind the rest of the world.
Domestically, she was miserable. Her migraines, always exacerbated by stress, became more numerous, with one following hard on another. She was now certain that Mosley had returned to his former habits, and was being unfaithful to her. Many of these women were drawn from their immediate circle. When he had deceived Cimmie with her own women friends, he had used the pretext of fencing bouts; now there was the excuse of appointments in Paris. Instead of the bachelor flat in Ebury Street, there was now the third-floor apartment at 5 rue Villedo (bought when the Mosleys sold their Montparnasse flat in 1956).
Although Diana declared, ‘I knew what to expect when I married him,’ she had believed that their great, all-consuming love, their sense of joint destiny, the unique bonding of their prison experience, the cocoon of love and cherishing in which she had wrapped him since, would be enough. Since she met Mosley no other man had held any attraction for her other than as a friend; dismissing her previous marriage from her mind, she regarded herself, as she put it, ‘like my sisters, a one-man girl’. Her beauty could easily have brought her consolation, but the idea of paying Mosley back in his own coin or even of distracting herself with an affair never once crossed her mind. ‘In all my life, I never once wanted to be unfaithful to Kit,’ she said in old age. ‘It simply didn’t interest me.’
She was, though, better able to handle his infidelity than Cimmie had been. She was older, she was more sophisticated by nature, she was far more certain that she was the great love of his life and she had an inner core of steel that poor Cimmie had not possessed. She used what weapons she had: freezing disdain; clever, catty, unanswerable asides; and wittily malicious comments on the women concerned, a technique that sometimes cowed even Mosley. Yet it was still a terrible shock. She had no real fear that any of these liaisons might cause him to contemplate leaving her – or even affect his love for her. Nevertheless they caused her acute pain. ‘There is no jealousy like sexual jealousy,’ she wrote to one confidant. She tried to excuse Mosley by telling herself how attractive to women he was – he had always far preferred them to men, not only as sexual conquests but also as friends – but it did not help. Long after Mosley’s death she said more than once:
I knew from the very start it was no good being possessive with Kit – he was just somebody who would not be possessed. He was often unfaithful. The leopard does not change his spots. I guessed some of them and knew others. It made me miserable. Although I knew he loved me best it was wounding and annoying. One would feel very resentful. I minded terribly, even though I knew it wasn’t going to make any real difference.
In France, Mosley’s conquests included Rita Luke and Lotsie Fabre-Luce, both wives of writers. In England, his most ardent pursuit was reserved for Jeannie Campbell, Lord Beaverbrook’s granddaughter. She was tall, dark, vivacious and buxom, with round rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes and a strong feeling for the conspiratorial. She was fascinated by Mosley’s views, the power of his personality and the frisson of intrigue involved in such an affair. They spoke constantly on the telephone and Mosley would bombard her with huge bunches of flowers. When he came to London they would use chauffeur-driven Daimlers and meet in various flats – sometimes one borrowed by Jeannie, sometimes one Mosley rented from Nicholas. Nicholas and his wife Rosemary occasionally bumped into his father and Jeannie, realised what was going on – and realised also that Diana knew. It made for a painful conversational ‘black hole’.
For Mosley, part of Jeannie’s appeal lay in her relationship to Beaver-brook. She was the press lord’s favourite grandchild and had lived and travelled with him for several years. Mosley hoped that she would further his cause with her grandfather and persuade him to give favourable publicity to the Union Movement. But Beaverbrook was far too canny to be drawn in this way. He called a family conference and told Jeannie that either she stopped seeing Mosley or he would cut her off. He resolved the matter by despatching Jeannie to the United States, there to write for the Evening Standard.
Diana’s unhappiness over Mosley’s unfaithfulness was aggravated by their quarrels over money for Alexander and Max. Mosley had always resented spending money on his family; to Diana he said that if their sons were healthy, clever and given a good education they should be able to make a life of their own. ‘They’ve had far more advantages than 90 per cent of the population,’ he would tell her. ‘They don’t need money as well.’ Diana had never minded any economy that Mosley had imposed on her, but she felt desperately bitter over what she saw as his meanness to their sons. He and she lived in a substantial household, entertained lavishly and travelled constantly. Mosley’s older children were well off in their own right thanks to the Leiter money they had inherited from their mother. Her Guinness boys were the sons of a rich father. She thought it deeply unfair that Alexander and Max, alone of the family, should not have some kind of annual allowance. She had a little capital of her own which she could always use on their behalf in a crisis, but it was not enough to provide a sufficient regular income.
She was especially worried about Alexander. He and his father were thoroughly at odds. Mosley had refused to allow him to go to university, saying that as he could not write an essay there was no point. He dismissed his son’s political ambitions with the words (to Diana), ‘It is a terrible thing for a boy of twenty years and three months who is politically ambitious never to have addressed a big crowd or even had an article published.’ Alexander’s work for a travel firm (later surfacing in Nancy’s novel Don’t Tell Alfred) had come to an end and he was now talking of going to South America. The prospect of her son adrift there with no money, no friends and no knowledge of Spanish or Portuguese appalled Diana. ‘It must be a torment – what can I say?’ wrote one of her friends:
I have always had the feeling that of all Kit’s children he was the one who came nearest to appreciating what a great man Kit is, and was the most crushed by this appreciation. He is large like Kit, brilliantly clever in an intuitive, rather rebellious way like Kit and was thus faced with an awful problem, either to submit and just be a total imitation of the father he so much resembles, or to break free and be as unlike as possible . . . hence I appreciate the South American idea: a country Kit has never been to and a language he doesn’t speak. Manual work? because Kit has never lived this way.
Nicholas too was deeply concerned about his half-brother. He had always written as regularly to Diana as to his father; throughout the 1950s they had conducted vigorous but amicable arguments by letter about Christianity (Nicholas was then a committed Christian) and later about the question of race. Emotion crept into the arguments with his father, not so much because Mosley was scathingly anti-Christian as because Nicholas could not bear to see his father make the same political mistake twice – once again using racial hatred to recruit followers.
He now tackled his father on behalf of his brother. A meeting in Mosley’s office erupted into a blazing row. Nicholas accused Mosley of being a terrible father, of always shrugging off responsibility for his children and of never learning politically from his past mistakes. Diana, who must certainly have agreed with Nicholas on the first two points, if not on the third, stood quietly by her husband. When Mosley said to Nicholas, ‘I will never speak to you again,’ she remained silent. ‘Well, I’ll always speak to you,’ replied Nicholas and left.
His arguments had no effect at all on his father. In the Notting Hill race riots of 1958 Mosley had seen a chance of returning to parliament and was determined to seize it. He planned to stand for this district of west London in the next general election. Accordingly, he closed the European, diverting funds and effort into building up his following in the Union Movement. A steady stream of propaganda, much of it in the form of leaflets on the theme of ‘Keep Britain white’, heightened racial tension.
Mosley fought Notting Hill as the Union Movement candidate in the general election of October 1959. His platform combined a programme for economic reform based on the future need for a United Europe, with the logical outcome of the racialist divisiveness he preached – the repatriation of coloured immigrants. He was convinced of victory (‘people running out of their houses to shake him by the hand as he passed’, wrote Diana to a friend). But, despite his campaign to appeal via racist hatred to the lowest common denominator, he polled a mere 2,821 votes out of a total of 34,912. This result was so abysmal that at first he could not believe it and even contemplated bringing a legal action on the basis of irregularities in the poll.
The spring of the following year brought a distraction. Jessica’s book Hons and Rebels, much of it taken up with a description of the Mitford childhood, was published. It was very funny and read with glee by the public, but it upset her sisters greatly. They disliked what they saw as its hurtful disloyalty and its inaccuracies – all of them, for instance, denied Jessica’s descriptions of shoplifting expeditions to Oxford. As Nancy wrote to Heywood Hill (on 16 March 1960), ‘It is rather dishonest for an autobiography because she alters facts to suit herself in a way that I suppose is allowed in a novel . . . Diana is outraged for my mother – I had expected worse, to tell the truth – and of course minds being portrayed as a dumb society beauty.’
Friends wrote to Diana to commiserate. ‘Whenever I pass Burford I think of you all at Asthall, and Swinbrook, and the Elysium of it in my memory, and in Decca’s such hell,’ wrote Jim Lees-Milne adding loyally, ‘Of course she wrote rot.’
The glacial breach that had opened between Diana and Jessica, originally instigated by Esmond Romilly, had been of Jessica’s choosing. Unlike Diana, she had always been open about their estrangement publicly as well as privately. When her friend Philip Toynbee asked her, ‘But didn’t sheer curiosity drive you to want to see her again?’ she answered, ‘It well might have, if I hadn’t once, long ago, adored her so intensely. To meet her as an historical curiosity on a casual acquaintance level would be incredibly awkward; on a basis of sisterly fondness, unthinkable. Too much bitterness had set in, at least on my part.’
After Hons and Rebels was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement – a review that focused on the deficiencies of the children’s upbringing – Diana was for once stung to public retaliation, though largely on behalf of her parents. She adored her mother and could not bear the portrayal of her in Jessica’s book. On 8 April she wrote to the editor of the TLS, an icy and scathing rebuttal of Jessica’s picture of their childhood.
Your reviewer of my sister Jessica’s book, Hons and Rebels, says that she describes ‘an early environment of almost incredible aridity – tasteless, stupid, wasteful and idiosyncratic only in its scorn of all intellectual and aesthetic values . . . Her portraits of Lord and Lady Redesdale show them as monsters of arrogance and dullness whose neglect, in all but a material sense, of their children might well have resulted not in that rebellious pattern of behaviour so prized by the author but in alcoholism or the analyst’s couch.’ Does Miss Mitford realise, he concludes, ‘how supremely unpleasant her father and mother appear, as seen by the most brilliant of their daughters . . . if she does, she is too wise and loyal to stress these points’.
Doubtless the author realises how ‘supremely unpleasant’ she makes her family appear. Perhaps the object of the exercise was to demonstrate her good fortune in escaping from them and their way of life. May I, however, be permitted to correct one or two matters of fact?
As children we had access at home to an exceptionally well-chosen library; therefore scorn of intellectual values was a matter of choice for the individual child, not of necessity. My brother was a talented pianist, contemporaries will remember, and through him our childhood was filled with the music of Handel, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. Jessica does not mention this; she is concerned to denigrate and belittle.
Of my sisters’ marriages your reviewer states, quoting from this book: ‘one married a jockey’. The ‘jockey’ in question is a distinguished physicist, a Fellow of the Royal Society who occupied the Chair of Spectroscopy at Oxford University. He also rode in the Grand National.
The portraits of my parents are equally grotesque. My sister’s book was probably meant to amuse rather than to be ‘wise’ or ‘loyal’. Or truthful.
After this, any possible reconciliation was out of the question.
Nancy’s sympathy with Diana over Jessica’s book did not preclude her writing (on 20 August 1960) to Violet Hammersley, the regular recipient of the acid drops about Diana, ‘Diana says Sir O has never been so busy – it makes my flesh creep. No doubt we shall all be in camps soon.’
Nancy’s familiar waspishness now overlaid real unhappiness – as usual, over Gaston Palewski. For some time she had been seeing less of him and she was miserable when she heard he was having an affair with a married woman, who had borne him a son – something she, Nancy, could never do. Three years earlier he had been sent as French Ambassador to Rome (where he quickly became known as l’Embrassadeur) and she hardly saw him. ‘When things go badly you don’t need me,’ she wailed to him, ‘when they go well you turn to other, prettier ladies. So I seem to have no function . . .’ But it did not stop her stream of work: her novel Don’t Tell Alfred came out in the same year, 1960.
It was quite true that Mosley had intensified his political activity. So inexplicable did he find the Notting Hill fiasco that he decided to make one more serious attempt to win a seat in parliament. In the autumn of 1960 he and Diana moved to England. They took a flat in London, in Lowndes Court, where they planned to spend winters. Emmy and Jerry and their small son John came with them.
For Diana London meant a chance to see more of her mother, as Sydney spent winters in the Rutland Mews house. They would meet most days, sometimes on the sofas in Harrods’ Bank in the mornings, or for tea and Scrabble at the Mews. Sydney, whose little dog had just died, was now a free agent and she came often to Lowndes Street. When Mosley held a meeting she would always insist on being there, whatever the danger of disturbance, which was now becoming a regular feature – at one meeting she attended, in Kensington Town Hall, opponents had managed to put tear gas in the heating pipes. Mosley, high above the fumes on the platform, wondered why his audience of the faithful was coughing and sneezing. Finally, with streaming eyes, everyone left the building.
Another regular attender was Max, who had just left Oxford, where, at the age of twenty, he had married Jean Taylor. He was reading for the Bar, but quickly became his father’s right-hand man, at one point saving Mosley from a severe beating-up. On 31 July, 1962, at a meeting in Ridley Road, Dalston, a number of opponents managed to break through the cordon of 200 police surrounding Mosley and he was knocked down and pummelled. Max, who hurled himself to his father’s rescue, was arrested, to cries of ‘Down with Mosley!’ and ‘Germany calling!’ Five minutes later the police shut down the meeting and Mosley’s car drove off amid a hail of apples, oranges, copper coins and horse manure. The next day Max defended himself ably before the magistrates and was acquitted.
Alexander, in South America, was supporting himself by teaching English and French and working for the British Council. Nicholas, who had always thought his half-brother should have the chance of going to a university, now suggested that he go to an American one. A family friend was a professor at Columbus University, in Ohio, and was prepared to act as an anchor for Alexander – so Columbus it was to be. When the question of payment arose, Mosley argued that by suggesting that Alexander go to a university in defiance of his, Mosley’s, expressed wish, Nicholas had taken on the responsibility for his brother. In his eyes, this meant one thing. ‘About paying for it,’ wrote Diana to Nicholas in August 1961, ‘Dad is saying “Nick started this. He took Aly away etc.” This is half a joke but you know what he is.’
It was more than ‘half a joke’. Diana had to keep silent about her own contribution of £200 a year to each of her Mosley sons (from her £12,000 share of her father’s estate), so much did Mosley resent the idea that his own income, or hers, should be used to assist his children. ‘I could give Aly another £100 a year while he is at university out of my very tiny capital, but Max doesn’t get enough and I must help him. Dad knows nothing of either, of course.’ Generously, Nicholas and Micky agreed to settle Alexander’s £1,400-a-year fees at Columbus, each of them making him a seven-year covenant for £700 p.a. There were no thanks from his father, but Diana was enormously grateful.
That winter, Diana went to Morocco to stay with friends, travelling south of the Atlas mountains and then visiting Tangier. For the first time in years, her migraines lessened dramatically; seeking for a reason for this miraculous remission, she put it down to being away from all her worries.
Mosley was still in constant contact with extreme right-wing groups abroad, representing Britain at a congress of these groups in Venice in 1962. The post-war Labour Government’s fear that he would encourage such German groups to think that fascism was alive and well in Britain was justified by the fact that fourteen years later he was making neo-fascist speeches in Germany. In Britain, disruption at his rallies was such a regular occurrence that eventually, in 1962, he was forbidden to hold any more meetings in Trafalgar Square or most of the major halls.
In the spring of 1963 the Mosleys’ Irish house Ileclash was sold. Max could no longer spend winters hunting in Ireland and for Mosley politics was once more a priority.
After three years in England, the Mosleys returned to Paris. At the beginning of May Diana received a telegram: her mother, who had just returned to Inch Kenneth, was very ill. Diana flew at once to Scotland. At Oban she had to wait for the next day’s steamer to Mull. She had arrived too late for dinner – after seven p.m. no food was available – but eventually persuaded the hotel to produce a cheese sandwich, which she ate while attempting to telephone for news. She finally arrived at Inch Kenneth at teatime the following day.
Nancy, Pam and Debo were already there. It was her mother’s eighty-third birthday and her friend Madeau Stewart had come to stay. Also there were Desmond’s children Patrick and Marina Guinness with their nanny, Sydney’s cook and maid and her boatman and his family. They managed to get from the mainland two nurses who did not mind the idea of being cut off by violent storms or the lack of a telephone.
Although it was clear that Sydney was dying, her heart was so strong that she lingered for three weeks. For her daughters it was misery to watch her discomfort as, desperately ill with Parkinson’s disease, she lay unable to read and barely able to swallow or talk. She asked to see Desmond, who came at once. After five days in a coma, she died on 25 May. She made her last journey in Puffin across to Mull, as a piper played a lament. She was buried next to David at Swinbrook. ‘I shall miss her terribly,’ wrote Diana in reply to a letter from her prison friend Louise Irvine. ‘Always so marvellous and loyal to O.M.’
For Diana, ‘loyalty to O.M.’ was prized above all. When The River Watcher, by Hugo Charteris, was published in 1965, Mosley felt he had been libelled – one of the characters was a mysterious fascist landowner, described by the hero as ‘Hitler’s best man’, who ‘did a trick with his eyes, blinking and making something flash with the pupils’. Mosley further claimed that Nicholas too had been libelled and through his solicitors – he was still refusing to communicate with his son directly – asked Nicholas to join him in his action. The River Watcher himself, said Mosley, was an unflattering portrait of Nicholas. Diana, who had never ceased her stream of affectionate though often argumentative letters to Nicholas, now wrote immediately to urge him to join in his father’s action ‘as any loyal son would’.
Nicholas, however, did not want to sue Charteris, who was a cousin of his wife Rosemary, a family friend and a fellow novelist. Though Charteris was known for putting traits or characteristics of friends in his novels, Nicholas, as he explained to Diana, did not feel that he himself had been libelled, nor did he think that the landowner in the novel was particularly like his father. Any lawsuit, he felt, would simply draw attention to what would probably otherwise pass unnoticed. In any case, he added, it was difficult to feel family solidarity with someone who would not answer his letters and communicated only through his solicitors.
Nicholas’s decision brought a furious riposte from Diana. ‘You are so lucky to be the son of the cleverest, bravest, dearest person in the world. I would have thought you wouldn’t be able to wait to squash a spiteful insect like Hugo after it tried to annoy him.’ But they went on writing, Diana’s letters becoming gradually less spiky. Mosley, she knew, wanted a reconciliation: he was anxious to see Nicholas’s sons Shaun and Ivo, his two eldest grandsons. In February 1966 Diana signified that she too had finally forgiven Nicholas’s ‘disloyalty’. ‘Let us leave Hugo – what does it all matter really.’
By then, there were other preoccupations. Mosley had decided to make one last attempt to enter parliament, choosing as his arena his old stamping ground of the East End. In the general election of 8 March 1966,he contested Shoreditch as the Union Movement candidate.
The result was devastating. He polled only 1,600 votes – 4.6 per cent of the total. ‘The people we worked with were perfect and this made it bearable for me,’ wrote Diana to a friend:
People from East London are often brilliantly amusing and when you add the loyalty and love they feel for Kit it was an extraordinary experience to work with them day by day for a month or whatever. We did not canvass and the result was no surprise. There was a feeling of enormous apathy reflected in the high rate of abstentions.
They were brave words, but Mosley had finally accepted that the call would never come. He gave up the leadership of the Union Movement and, with it, active politics. In all the years he had spent promoting his beliefs, his movements had never won so much as a single local council seat.