A warning: this contains spoilers. Do not read before you have completed the novel, unless you want to know what happens …
All the conversations in this book are completely fictional. However, there are some elements of the plot that are derived from real-life events.
The murder trial of Ella Fowler and Jim Evans was based on the real-life murder trial of Alma Rattenbury and George Stonor. Some of the cross-examinations in the novel (with the doctor and Ella) closely follow those of their real-life counterparts, with thanks to the British Newspaper Archive. Rattenbury and her lover Stonor (who was employed by the Rattenburys as their chauffeur) were accused of the murder of Alma’s husband Francis in 1935. In the trial, Stonor was found guilty and sentenced to death, but the public view was that Alma had masterminded the killing. Her treatment at the trial was criticised at the time. She committed suicide soon after, believing her lover faced execution. At Alma’s burial, police had to be brought in for crowd control – over three thousand people tried to watch the funeral, with women climbing on tombstones for a better view. At the cemetery, signatures were collected for a petition to commute Stonor’s sentence, which was successful. Over three hundred thousand signatures were presented to the Home Secretary and the sentence was changed to penal servitude for life. Stonor was released from prison in 1942, and died at the age of eighty-three on exactly the sixty-fifth anniversary of Francis Rattenbury’s murder.
Tom Mitford did indeed work ‘in a lowly capacity’ on the Rattenbury murder trial (a footnote in Charlotte Mosley’s The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, p.158), with Alma’s defence barrister, Mr F. J. O’Connor, KC. Tom’s chambers was 4 Paper Buildings, Temple, but his career as a barrister is not recorded as an illustrious one. There is little mention of his legal achievements in the public arena, but his passion for love affairs, particularly with the Austrian dancer and film star Tilly Losch, is information that reached me with the kind courtesy of Margaret Simmons, who holds Losch’s archive.
Iain is loosely based on Maxwell Knight, the leading agent-runner for MI5 before the war. He was head of section B5(b), responsible for infiltrating agents into subversive groups, and had particular success penetrating British fascist movements. He also favoured women agents as superior in skill to their male counterparts. Maxwell is widely believed to be the inspiration for ‘M’ in the James Bond books by Ian Fleming.
The MI5 file on Diana was opened on 26 September 1934, so I have taken the liberty of moving that date forward by a little over a year. The file on Sir Oswald Mosley, however, was opened in 1933, with a report from Detective Constable Edward Pierpoint, who had been at a fascist public meeting in Manchester.
MI5’s ‘third direction’, in which agents are permitted to commit illegal acts, was the basis of Wolfgang’s murder of Joseph and the subsequent cover-up by Iain.
Wolfgang von Bohlen and his family fortune is based on that of the Krupp family and the money they made through Nazi support after 1933 (and, later, through use of slave labour during the Holocaust). Their steel works were the centre of Hitler’s secret rearmament programme, expanding their employees from 35,000 to 112,000. In 1933, Hitler made Gustav Krupp – the only German to be accused of war crimes in both wars – chairman of the Reich Federation of Germany Industry. Jews were ousted from the company, the board was disbanded and Krupp became the sole decision-maker. (Wolfgang’s character and his part in Joseph’s murder is completely fictional.)
Wolfgang’s work as an agent for the British is not derived from any member of the Krupp family, but there was a Wolfgang Gans zu Putlitz who was the first secretary in charge of the consular section for the German Embassy in London, where he was sent in 1934. A member of the Nazi Party and the SS, he was an agent for MI5. He consistently warned the British government that appeasing Hitler in his apparently peaceful plans was the fastest route to war.
For those who wonder if the rest of the world was alarmed by the rise of Hitler as early as 1933, the Nazi boycotting of Jewish businesses and products was in full swing by March 1933, and was government-sanctioned by Goebbels from 1 April that year. There were meetings in New York soon after – with gatherings of over a thousand people – to discuss boycotting German exports because of this anti-Jewish policy. In short: people knew.
Regarding what Sir Clive told Louisa: in May 1933, Sir Robert Vansittart, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, forecast that: ‘The present regime in Germany will, on past and present form, loose off another European war just so soon as it feels strong enough … We are considering very crude people, who have few ideas in their noddles but brute force and militarism.’ Quoted in The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, p.195, by Christopher Andrew, who quotes the source ‘Security Service Archives’.
Mention of the KdF (Kraft durch Freude) leisure organisation is real. Translated as ‘Strength Through Joy’, it was part of the national German labour organisation and was dedicated to instilling and strengthening Nazi ideals and unity by providing leisure and travel opportunities for the German masses. One of these was a cruise brand that began in 1934 with chartered ships operating out of German ports with cruises to the Mediterranean.
The notion of Hitler’s potential investment in an architectural project around Blenheim Palace sprang from the lore that Hitler had his sights set on the Duke of Marlborough’s ancestral home as his UK base, and allegedly instructed the Luftwaffe not to bomb it.
Sir Oswald Mosley did indeed have an affair with his late wife’s sister Baba in the summer of 1933 (he had previously had a brief fling with the third sister, Irene, as well as their stepmother, Grace Curzon). With thanks to Anne de Courcy for these details, in her acclaimed biography, Diana Mosley.
Unity Mitford met Hitler in the Osteria Bavaria café in Munich, in February 1935, and went on to be a member of his inner circle. Her anti-Semitism was not hidden, and the Jewish Chronicle reported in August 1935 that she had written an article as the London correspondent of Der Stürmer, in which she declared that she thought with joy of the day when she would be able to say with authority ‘out with them’. She later had boyfriends who were in the SS.
Diana Guinness went on to marry Sir Oswald Mosley in Goebbel’s drawing room, with Hitler as a witness, on 6 October 1936.