The Mitford Girls Read online

John Betjeman and she ‘walked out’ for a while. ‘He was mad on kite-flying at the time,’ Pam would tell Betjeman’s biographer. ‘He used to bring his kite down for the weekend.’ Sometimes they drove around Hampshire and Wiltshire together, exploring old churches and villages, picnicking on the downs, visiting his (hated) old school, Marlborough. On Sundays they always cycled down to the old church at nearby Appleshaw for matins, with the glorious ancient liturgy and hymns that David had insisted on at Swinbrook. Once Pam persuaded Betjeman to ride, putting him on a reliable old pony and sending him off into the woods behind the house where he would be ‘safe’. Unfortunately, the local hunt was drawing there: at the sound of the horn the reliable old pony reared with joy, and happily decanted its passenger before galloping off to join in the fun.

  Betjeman was too shy to advance his suit aggressively but he persisted quietly for over a year. ‘My thoughts are still with Miss Pam,’ he wrote to Diana in February 1932 from a hotel in Devon. ‘I have been seeing whether a little absence makes the heart grow fonder and, my God, it does. Does Miss Pam’s heart still warm towards that ghastly Czechoslovakian [sic] Count? . . . I do want . . . to hear whether this severe test has improved my chances and done down my rival. I have written a confession of my tactics to Miss Pam today. Was that wise?’34 Diana encouraged him, and Betjeman continued as a frequent weekend visitor. He recalled that after dinner Bryan did conjuring tricks and guests used to gather round the piano for parlour songs, and ‘rounds’, but the absolute favourites were the old evangelical hymns. Diana’s parlourmaid, May Amende, disapproved thinking that they were mocking them, but they were not, Betjeman insisted, ‘We sang them in the car, too.’35 Unity’s favourite was also Sydney’s, the old Moody and Sankey hymn about the lost sheep, which was almost prophetic.

  There were nine and ninety that safely lay

  In the shelter of the fold

  But one was out, on the hills away,

  Far off from the hills of gold . . .

  Betjeman proposed twice. Pam turned him down flat the first time but on the second occasion he asked her to take some time to think it over. A month later, however, he was writing to an old friend, ‘I suppose you have heard about the death of poor old Lytton Strachey [of cancer] and how about a fortnight later [sic] Carrington borrowed Bryan Guinness’s gun and shot herself down at Biddesden. You may have heard too that I fell slightly in love with Pamela, the rural Mitford. I don’t know whether I still am ...’36 Later still, with no favourable reply from Pam, he added a light-hearted PS in a letter to Nancy: ‘If Pamela Mitford refuses me finally, you might marry me - I’m rich, handsome and aristocratic.’37 Finally he wrote to Diana that Pam’s fondness for the Austrian count, Tom’s friend Janos von Almassy, ‘that “Austrian Betjeman” about whom I am continually hearing, and about whose success I have had little reason to doubt’ had killed his love for her and that he was now interested in ‘another jolly girl’.38 Years later Pam told Betjeman’s daughter, ‘Betj made me laugh. I was very, very fond of him, but I wasn’t in love with him . . . He said he’d like to marry me but I rather declined.’39 The future poet laureate, first person to use the term the Mitford Girls - in print, at least - consoled his disappointment by writing a ditty ‘in honour of The Mitford Girls, but especially in honour of Miss Pamela’:

  The Mitford girls! The Mitford Girls

  I love them for their sins

  The young ones all like ‘Cavalcade’,

  The old like ‘Maskelyns’ 40

  SOPHISTICATION, Blessed dame

  Sure they have heard her call

  Yes, even Gentle Pamela

  Most rural of them all 41

  Betjeman and the girl who subsequently became his wife, Penelope Chetwode, were frequent visitors to Biddesden over the years that followed despite the effect of the house on him. Like Diana, he was affected by the supernatural ambience and on one occasion had a disturbing dream in which he was handed a card inscribed with a date. He declined to reveal the details but said he was convinced it was the date of his death.

  To celebrate Diana’s twenty-second birthday in June 1932 the Guinnesses held a party at Cheyne Walk. She was then at the height of her beauty, had been painted by half a dozen leading portrait artists and her face - which had become virtually an icon for the era with its classical planes - carefully composed, so as not to encourage wrinkles, appeared in newspaper Society columns regularly. She was the woman who apparently had everything: youth, riches, a happy marriage, a charming husband who worshipped her, and two healthy children. For her party she dressed in pale grey chiffon and tulle, and wore ‘all the diamonds I could lay hands on’.42 Their guests included Winston Churchill, Augustus John, first-time visitor Oswald Mosley, and ‘everyone we knew, young and old, poor and rich, clever and silly’. It was a still, warm summer night and dancing went on until the glassy surface of the river was gilded with the pink and orange of sunrise.

  There was a singular significance to this one party out of all the others for Diana, which is no doubt why she recalls it so graphically. A short time earlier, during the spring of 1932, she had met the dashing and dangerous Sir Oswald Mosley and had fallen madly in love with him. It was the real thing, a love that would triumphantly defy the world no matter what the cost, and endure for the rest of her life, but she could not have known that then, only wonder, perhaps, at the intensity of her feelings.

  They met first at a dinner party, and little could the hostess have realized the part she was playing in history by seating them next to each other. Diana was not especially impressed with him that evening, but she found what he had to say interesting. Although he had not been previously introduced to her, they moved in the same circles and he had certainly noticed her on several occasions. The first time had been at a ball given by Sir Philip Sassoon at his magnificent Park Lane home. ‘She looked wonderful among the rose entwined pillars,’ Mosley wrote of Diana in his autobiography, ‘. . . as the music of the best orchestras wafted together with the best scents through air heavy laden with Sassoon’s most hospitable artifices. Her starry blue eyes, golden hair and ineffable expression of a Gothic Madonna seemed remote from the occasion but strangely enough not entirely inappropriate . . .’43 He spotted her again during a visit to Venice but they did not meet then either. At the back of Diana’s mind was the knowledge that Mosley had a reputation as ‘a lady-killer’, which did not dispose her to favour him.44

  It was only a matter of time, however, for soon the popular princess of London Society was completely under the spell of the man who was rapidly earning for himself a reputation as the enfant terrible of British politics. They met everywhere, trying to discover which function the other was attending - such as the coming-of-age party thrown by the Churchills for Randolph - seeking each other out at every opportunity, trying to suppress their feelings but unable to draw back from the delicious thrill of being in each other’s company. As the attachment deepened they were both aware of the need for discretion, and of the furore there would be if word of their attraction got out. Also, Diana genuinely cared for Bryan and was mindful of how she could wound him. But when she compared what she felt for Mosley with her affection for Bryan it was as the sun to a candle. At her birthday party Mosley declared for the first time to Diana that he was passionately in love with her. On the following morning Diana’s parlourmaid, May Amende, answered the phone. With his customary impatience, Mosley paused long enough only to identify the voice as female before he asked, ‘Darling, when can I see you again?’45

  Prior to meeting Mosley, Diana had been miserable following the deaths of Strachey and Carrington; Carrington’s upset her particularly, because she had innocently loaned her the shotgun. Diana has a good mind, and during this period she began to use it. On the face of it she had everything, just as the papers simpered, but she concluded that, with the exception of the birth of her babies, her existence since her marriage to Bryan had been trivial and that there must be more to life. She began to recognize di
mly that much of what her parents had said was right, and that she had really married ‘in order to escape the boredom, and sort of fatal atmosphere that families make when too cooped up together’.46 She also began to notice the world outside her cosseted existence.

  The teenage Decca was not alone in the Mitford family in recognizing that there were unacceptable aspects to Society, ‘although,’ Diana wrote, ‘it was not necessary to have a particularly awakened social conscience to see that “Something must be done.” The distressed areas, as they were called, contained millions of unemployed kept barely alive by a miserable dole. Undernourished, overcrowded, their circumstances were a disgrace which it was impossible to ignore or forget. The Labour Party had failed to deal with the problem, the Conservatives could be relied upon to do the strict minimum, yet radical reform was imperative.’ More than most Diana realized that, for the rich, life had gone on as before the depression had struck, and would continue to do so. ‘Nothing will stop young people enjoying themselves,’ she continued.47 Unlike Decca, Diana did not accept that axiomatically the rich had to be brought down in order to raise the poor: she felt instinctively that there must be a way of resolving the conundrum. She was seeking some sort of answer that she had not yet identified. When she met Mosley, and listened to his stirring ideas, the missing piece seemed to fall into place.

  To anyone who lived through the Second World War the name Oswald Mosley has a sinister ring. During those years he became - after members of the German Nazi regime - public enemy number one. But a decade before the war Mosley was admired, fêted and listened to with respect. Arguably one of the most brilliant young politicians of his time, in the late twenties and early thirties he was widely regarded in political circles as a prime minister-in-waiting. It was simply a matter of time, and of him finding his place. By the time Diana met him, Mosley had already begun to take the bold steps that would sever him for ever from conventional politics.

  The eldest of three sons, Mosley came from a similar background to Diana’s. He graduated from Sandhurst on the outbreak of the First World War at the age of seventeen. He served gallantly in the trenches and in the air, but was badly injured in a landing accident and was invalided out of the forces, with a pronounced limp, before he was twenty. With a military career denied to him he turned to politics and was elected Conservative MP for Harrow in the so-called ‘khaki election’ of 1918, becoming the youngest member of the Commons. Thus began his meteoric rise. Confident, rich, darkly good-looking, he was over six feet tall and athletic: he rode well, played tennis and fenced at international level. Above all, he was charismatic; he excelled in debate and was a polished performer on the hustings. In those pre-television days political meetings were attended in numbers only dreamed of by present-day politicians and he thought nothing of addressing a crowd of thousands. With his impassioned speeches, delivered in a powerful, if unusually pitched, voice he found it easy to carry his audience with him when he called for political reform to ‘get the unemployed back to work’. His speeches were as full of stirring phrases as were Churchill’s: ‘. . . the tents of ease are struck, and the soul of man is once more on the move’ and ‘Supposing people had stood on the shore when Drake and Ralegh . . . set out to sea and said, “Don’t go. The sea is very rough and there will be trouble at the other end . . .”’48 During the 1931 election the Manchester Guardian wrote:

  When Sir Oswald Mosley sat down after his Free Trade Hall speech in Manchester and the audience, stirred as an audience rarely is, rose and swept a storm of applause towards the platform - who could doubt that here was one of those root-and-branch men who have been thrown up from time to time in the religious, political and business story of England.49

  Two years after being elected, impatient for office and disillusioned by, among other things, Conservative inactivity to help former servicemen, Mosley crossed the floor of the Commons and joined the Labour Party. Nine years later, still only in his early thirties, he was made Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in Ramsay MacDonald’s government, and was one of a quartet of ministers given responsibility for dealing with unemployment, which had then reached the unheard-of level of two and a half million. The memorandum he produced on the subject was described several decades later by a political pundit as ‘brilliant . . . a whole generation ahead of Labour thinking’,50 but his recommendations were rejected, and in May 1930 he resigned in protest, ‘slamming the door with a bang to resound through the political world’. It was, wrote one respected political commentator, ‘an amazing act of arrogance’.51 Frank Pakenham met Mosley at a dinner party at the Astors’ house, Cliveden, soon afterwards. ‘It was a Conservative household but they entertained politicians of all persuasions there,’ he said. ‘I sat next to Tom [Mosley] and he looked at me with that odd look with which he seemed to transfix women . . . he had very dark, mesmeric eyes. Anyway, he said to me, “After Peel comes Disraeli. After Baldwin and MacDonald comes . . .?” And he left the question hanging in the air. “Who comes next?” I asked him. “Comes someone very different,” he growled.’52

  At this point Mosley had reached the pinnacle of his career in conventional British politics. ‘He had become a major political personality in his own right,’ his biographer stated, ‘with a wide, and almost unique, range of support and goodwill across the political spectrum.’ Churchill himself proposed Mosley for membership to the Other Club, which Churchill had founded with F. E. Smith, later Lord Birkenhead, in 1911, as a dining club for men prominent in political life. Shortly after Mosley’s resignation from the Labour Party, the government fell, caught by the effects of the world depression. Mosley could easily have gone back to the Conservative Party and they would have welcomed him, but he could see no radical thinking there, and a radical solution was - he insisted - the only way to deal with the worsening economic situation.53

  Instead, he charted a courageous course. Prompted by George Bernard Shaw, and with the financial backing of Sir William Morris (later Lord Nuffield), who donated fifty thousand pounds, he formed his own party, which he called, rather unimaginatively, the New Party, and campaigned in the 1931 election. The result was a Tory landslide. Not one New Party candidate was elected and Mosley lost his own parliamentary seat. The handful of notables who had supported him, such as Oliver Baldwin, Harold Nicholson, John Strachey and Alan Young, quickly faded away, but Mosley was far from defeated. Over the next twelve months the New Party evolved into the British Union of Fascists (BUF), which was officially launched on 1 October 1932. It proposed a totalitarian concept of government, uniforms for its active members, and support of European Fascist parties, although Mosley was nothing if not strongly nationalistic.

  There is an informed and objective portrait of Mosley during this period. At the request of a favourite aunt, James Lees-Milne spent a fortnight during the election canvassing and performing menial tasks for Oswald Mosley’s party. What he saw of Mosley, from his subordinate position, made Lees-Milne uneasy: ‘He was in those days a man of overweening egotism. He did not know the meaning of humility. He brooked no argument, would accept no advice. He was overbearing and over-confident. He had in him the stuff of which zealots are made. His eyes flashed fire, dilated and contracted like a mesmerist’s. His voice rose and fell in hypnotic cadences. He was madly in love with his own words,’ Lees-Milne concluded, after noting ‘. . . the posturing, the grimacing, the switching on and off of those gleaming teeth and the overall swashbuckling’. This was written many years later when Mosley was in a political wilderness, and Lees-Milne added, ‘I believe Mosley is no longer like this. He has acquired tolerance and wisdom which, had he only cultivated them forty years ago, might have made him into a great moral leader.’54 A number of people made similar observations to me while I was researching this book.

  Mosley continued to campaign with his ideas at public meetings and paid ministerial-style visits to Mussolini. Unlike the two main parties, the BUF had no major newspaper as a platform, although initially Lord Rothermere’s D
aily Mail gave Mosley some limited support. His meetings were often rowdy, indeed he encouraged hecklers for he was so confident and clever that he found it easy to turn interruptions to his advantage. The Daily Worker printed constant encouragement to its readers to break up Mosley’s meetings, and as matters began to get out of hand, he appointed ‘bouncers’ from within his ranks of supporters. They rapidly evolved into silent and sinister-looking bullyboys, presenting BUF meetings in a light guaranteed to be unappealing to the average British voter. It is surprising that Mosley, with his political acumen, did not grasp that this was a major error of judgement.

  From the start, once he struck out on his own, Mosley promoted Fascism as the answer to the global collapse of the economic order. Capitalism, he argued, had shown that it could not resolve the current problems of poverty and mass unemployment, while Bolshevism was to be avoided at all costs. Some of the horrors of the Bolshevik administration were known, though not by any means the true extent, and there was an undercurrent of fear among the upper classes and British middle-class Conservatives that the proletariat masses might seize power and ‘ruin’ the country. If one was to be radical in that period there were only two directions in which to travel, far right or far left: Fascism or Communism. It is important to recall that at that time Fascism, as a political model, was unmarred by the horrors we now associate with Nazism. Indeed, there was practical contemporary evidence in Europe that right-wing radicalism worked well, and did not necessarily lead to abuse of power.

  Mussolini, whom Mosley admired, claimed that Fascism was the only alternative to Communism and, unlike the Bolsheviks, he did not seek to change the monarchy or the Church or confiscate private property. He seemed to offer action without revolution, and Mosley needed to point no further than Italy’s economic resurgence during the late twenties under Mussolini. In addition there were the exciting ideas of Adolf Hitler, the leading National Socialist in Germany, tipped as the next chancellor. What he had done in Germany was apparently a miracle: he had taken a nation with five million unemployed and put men to work building roads and factories. To the British voter Mosley might have had extreme ideas, but he was then untouched by the bogeyman image that history has since applied.