8 E. M. Forster’s novel was first published in 1924.
1 This letter was transcribed in Lady Redesdale’s memoir of Unity. The original has not been found.
2 ‘Power, table and ugh; penny cosy and racial disgrace,’ (i.e. interracial sex).
3 Henry Bernstein (1876–1953). French boulevard-theatre playwright.
4 Maud Burke (1872–1948). American-born widow of Sir Bache Cunard, the shipping-line magnate, whom she married in 1895. Changed her name to ‘Emerald’ in 1926 and was one of London’s leading society hostesses between the wars.
1 Diana was expecting a baby in November.
2 Theodor Morell (1886–1948). Hitler’s private physician.
3 Ribbentrop.
1 Lord Andrew Cavendish (1920–2004). Succeeded as nth Duke of Devonshire in 1950. Deborah’s future husband was a student at Cambridge when they first met.
1 Unity had written to the Daily Express to deny an article in ‘William Hickey’ which said that ‘those members of Britain’s governing class whose Aryanism has been okayed by Unity Mitford are packing their bags for Nuremberg’. (2 September 1938) A photograph of her letter accompanying the article shows that it had been signed by Unity but was in Lady Redesdale’s handwriting.
2 After more than four years of marriage, Nancy was at last expecting a child but in spite of carefully following her doctor’s instructions, she miscarried a few weeks later.
1 Diana’s son, Alexander (Al) Mosley (1938–2005), was born on 26 November.
2 Nancy was editing the letters of her ancestors Maria Josepha, Lady Stanley of Alderley, and Henrietta Maria Stanley. Published as The Ladies of Alderley (1938) and The Stanleys of Alderley (1939).
3 Roy Harrod (1900–78). Influential economist who taught at Christ Church, Oxford. Married Wilhelmine (Billa) Cresswell in 1938.
4 Lord David Cecil (1902–86). Biographer and professor of English Literature at Oxford 1948–70. Married Rachel McCarthy in 1932. Their son Jonathan was born in 1939.
1 Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia on 15 March violated the Munich Agreement and had brought all efforts at appeasement to an end.
1 This extract was transcribed in Lady Redesdale’s memoir of Unity. The original has not been found.
2 The cover name used by Hitler at the beginning of his political career and adopted as a nickname by his intimates. Neither Unity nor Diana used the name to his face but from 1938 often referred to him as ‘Wolf in letters.
3 ‘Wisdom is no help.’
1 On the previous day, the German army had invaded Poland. Hitler ignored Britain and France’s ultimatum to withdraw and on 3 September Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, declared war.
2 ‘I have proposed friendship to England again and again and, when necessary, the closest collaboration. But love cannot be all one-sided, it must be reciprocated.’
3 Unity’s Great Dane, given to her by Diana.
Unity, Tom, Deborah, Diana, Jessica, Nancy and Pamela, 1935.
On the afternoon of 3 September 1939, the day that Britain and France declared war on Germany, Unity went to the English Garden in the centre of Munich and put a pistol to her head. The bullet lodged in her brain, failed to kill her but inflicted irreversible damage. She was taken to a Munich hospital were she lay unconscious for several weeks. Communications between England and Germany were difficult in the early part of the war and on Hitler’s orders no report of Unity’s suicide attempt appeared in the German press. It was two months before the Redesdales received any definite news of their daughter and a further two months before they were able to fetch her home from a clinic in neutral Switzerland where Hitler had arranged for her to be sent. In January 1940, Lady Redesdale and Deborah travelled to Bern and found Unity still seriously ill, paralysed, with her hair matted and untouched since the day she had tried to shoot herself. They brought her back to England in an ambulance and Lady Redesdale took on the distressing task of looking after her daughter, who was left with the mental age of a twelve-year-old and in whom religious mania had replaced Hitler mania. Unity’s behaviour was unpredictable, alternating between bouts of fury and moments of pathetic vulnerability, and she was untidy, clumsy and incontinent at night. The Redesdales’ marriage was already under stress from political disagreements – when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia Lord Redesdale reverted to being violently anti-German while Lady Redesdale continued to regard the Führer as Germany’s saviour – and it deteriorated further with the strain of Unity’s infirmity. Lord Redesdale withdrew to Inch Kenneth, a small island off the coast of Mull in the Inner Hebrides which he had bought after selling Swinbrook House, taking with him Margaret Wright, the parlourmaid, who became his companion and remained with him until the end of his life. Lady Redesdale took Unity to Mill Cottage in Swinbrook, where they lived for most of the war.
Nancy spent the ‘phoney war’, the months between the declaration of war and Hitler’s invasion of Norway and Denmark in April 1940, working in London at a first-aid post and writing her fourth novel, Pigeon Pie, a comic spy story that did not sell well. Peter joined up, ‘looking very pretty’ in his uniform, and they had a brief retour de flamme which resulted in a second miscarriage for Nancy. It was a depressing time and in her unhappiness she lashed out at her sisters: Deborah was ‘having a wild time with young cannon fodders at the Ritz’; Jessica was attacked for living in America: ‘You must be mad to stay there & like all mad people convinced you are sane’; Unity, whose suicide attempt had not yet reached the ears of her family, was rumoured to be in a concentration camp which was ‘a sort of poetic justice’; Pamela was living at Rignell, ‘in a round of boring gaiety of the neighbourly description’. Where Diana was concerned Nancy exulted when ‘Sir Oswald Quisling’ was imprisoned but thought it quite useless