Charlotte Mosley - The Mitfords - Letters between Six Sisters

2‘Kitten’; Diana’s nickname for Mosley.

3Diana’s marriage had been postponed until 6 October while the official paperwork was being arranged.

4W. E. D. Allen (1901–73). Chairman of an advertising company and Ulster MP for West Belfast who resigned his seat in 1931 to take up a senior post in Mosley’s New Party. He may also have been reporting back on the Mosleys to British intelligence services.

5Lillian Harvey (1907–68). The English-born actress spent her youth in Germany before moving to Hollywood in 1933. She released two films in 1936, Glückskinder and Schwarze Rosen.

6‘It has given me such pleasure that you came to the Party Rally and that you have attended every day.’

7‘The lackey of the Jews has almost become a National Socialist.’

8‘Your brother is a splendid young man.’

9Count Janos von Almasy (1893–1968). An Hungarian friend of Tom who lived at Bernstein Castle in the Austrian province of Burgenland. Tom introduced him to Unity who often stayed at Bernstein and became Janos’s lover. Married Princess Maria Esterhazy in 1929.

10Goebbels had recently bought a villa in the fashionable Berlin suburb and it is there that the Mosleys’ wedding lunch was given.

11Ribbentrop. Tom Mitford had made up the nickname, inspired, for no particular reason, by the medieval song, ‘Go to Joan Glover, and tell her I love her and at the mid of the moon I will come to her’.

1Robert Gordon-Canning was best man at Mosley’s wedding. Joined the BUF in 1934 before breaking with it in 1938 on personal grounds.

2Hitler presented Diana with a large signed photograph of himself in a silver frame.

3Maria Goebbels; Dr Goebbels’ younger sister lived with her brother until she married the film director Max W. Kimmich in 1938.

4Diana was unable to remember the exact reasons for this quarrel but could only suppose that Mosley was irritated by her admiration for Hitler. In her appointment diary for 10 October 1936, four days after her wedding, she noted, ‘We discuss H and the wedding, He compares H with Ramsay MacDonald. I am furious. We quarrel.’

5Hitler had addressed a meeting of the Winterhilfswerk, a Nazi charity that raised money to help the poor during the winter months.

1Adolf Wagner (1890–1944). Nazi provincial chief of Munich and Upper Bavaria; Bavarian Interior Minister from 1933.

2Gertrud Scholtz-Klink (1902–99). Reich Women’s Leader and the only woman to reach ministerial status in the Nazi Party.

1Diana was in Berlin trying to get Hitler’s agreement to Mosley’s plan to set up a commercial radio station in Germany to broadcast to Britain.

2It is not clear why Diana could not write to her son at the time.

3Wootton Lodge. An article in Country Life had described the house as ‘the home of the unexpected’.

4‘You certainly are a good soul.’

1The news of Jessica’s elopement had at last reached the Redesdales, two weeks after her disappearance.

2Hitler.

3‘Hen’ in ‘Honnish’, Jessica and Deborah’s private language.

4Esmond Romilly (1918–41). In her memoirs, Jessica described Esmond when she first met him as ‘a star around which everything revolved … He represented to me all that was bright, attractive and powerful’. Hons and Rebels, p. 105.

5Clementine Mitford (1915–2005). Posthumous daughter of Lord Redesdale’s eldest brother, Clement. Married Sir Alfred Beit in 1939.

1Nancy and Peter had returned from Bayonne where they had tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Jessica to come home.

2Nancy had endeavoured to persuade Jessica to hide in the train lavatory to avoid the press.

1The Redesdales refused to allow seventeen-year-old Deborah to visit Diana while her marriage to Mosley was still a secret and in the eyes of the world she was ‘living in sin’.

2John Beckett (1894–1964), ex-Labour MP, and William Joyce (1906–46) had been dismissed from their positions in the BUF, which was in financial trouble and was sacking many of its employees. After the war, Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) was accused of high treason for broadcasting from Germany – where he had fled to avoid arrest – and was executed.

3Frank Buchman (1878–1961). Founder of the Oxford Group, a fundamentalist religious movement renamed Moral Rearmament in 1938. In 1936, Buchman had publicly thanked heaven for the existence of Hitler as a defence against communism.

4Reginald Holme; author of memoirs, A Journalist for God (1995).

1‘Thanks for your letter.’

2Dorothy (Weenie) Bowles (1885–1971). Lady Redesdale’s disapproving younger sister. Married Percy Bailey in 1907.

3‘Best love from.’

1Deborah could not remember the origin of the rush of fantastic nicknames she and Jessica used in their letters to each other at the time of the elopement. They were perhaps a way of trying to re-establish their relationship which had been so shaken by Jessica’s disappearance.

2Lady Redesdale, worried that Jessica seemed depressed, had been planning to take Deborah and her on a world cruise in March.

3Derek Jackson (1906–82). Distinguished physicist, amateur jockey and heir to the News of the World. Married Pamela, as the second of his six wives, in December 1936. They were divorced in 1951. In 1940 he joined the RAF, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1941. The following year he transferred to Fighter Command and was decorated with the Air Force Cross.

4Gerald Tyrwhitt, 14th Baron Berners (1883–1950). Composer, painter and writer. A friend of both Nancy, who depicted him as Lord Merlin in The Pursuit of Love (1945), and Diana, who wrote an appreciation of him in Loved Ones (1985). He lived at Faringdon House, Berkshire.

5Robert Heber-Percy (1911–87). Known as the ‘Mad Boy’ because of his wild behaviour. Married twice, to Jennifer Fry, 1942–7, and to Lady Dorothy Lygon in 1985, but his liaisons were mostly with men, principally with Gerald Berners whom he met in 1932 and with whom he carried on a stormy relationship for eighteen years.

1George Howard (1920–84). A cousin of both Esmond Romilly and the Mitfords. Chairman of the BBC 1980–83.

2Dolly Wilde (1895–1941). Witty lesbian niece of Oscar Wilde. The sisters used to tease their mother by pretending to be in love with her.

3Michael Farrer (1920–68). A first cousin of the Mitfords.

4Winston Churchill (1874–1965). The statesman was related through his wife, Clementine Hozier, to both Esmond Romilly and the Mitfords. There was also a rumour in some circles that he was Esmond’s father.

1Unity had kept in touch with Baroness Laroche with whom she lodged when first in Munich.

1King George VI, who succeeded to the throne after the abdication of his brother Edward VIII, was crowned on 12 May 1937.

2In 1936, Peter Nevile, a friend of Jessica and Esmond, tried to stage a demonstration in favour of Edward VIII at a time when the government was putting pressure on the king to give up Wallis Simpson or abdicate.

3When the publicity surrounding Jessica’s elopement was at its height, Peter Nevile sold an interview with Esmond to the News Chronicle. Esmond and Nevile shared the proceeds.

1Georgina Wernher (1919–). Daughter of Sir Harold Wernher of Lubenham Hall, Leicestershire, one of the richest men in England, and Lady Zia, daughter of Grand Duke Michael of Russia. Married Harold Phillips in 1944.

2Lady Iris Mountbatten (1920–82). Great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

3Lady Jean Ogilvy (1918–2004). A cousin of the Mitfords and the eldest daughter of the 12th Earl of Airlie, who lived at Cortachy Castle in Scotland. Married 2nd Baron Lloyd in 1942.

1Lady Margaret Ogilvy (1920–). Daughter of the 12th Earl of Airlie and a great friend of Deborah. Married Sir Iain Tennant in 1946.