Six, page 24
In February 1940, David told Nancy that he felt he could no longer live with his wife. Sydney moved back to Swinbrook, to the stone cottage next door to the pub, beside the busily rustling mill; a very beautiful setting, a metaphorical retreat to the childhood that Unity now inhabited, just a few steps from the churchyard where she would be buried. David removed himself to Inch Kenneth, taking with him a parlourmaid named Margaret Wright, with whom he formed a close (presumably sexual) relationship. She treated him as no other woman now did, as if he were still a man of importance, and this was essential to him. He maintained a closeness to Nancy, perhaps because he intuited that she shared some of his feelings towards Sydney. For ‘personal and private reasons’ he resigned as director of the National Employers’ Mutual General Insurance Association, the last in the succession of his many dutiful public posts, although later – as if in an act of atonement – he would pull himself together sufficiently to join the Home Guard in London. And in March he wrote to The Times, a long letter that was his own bewildered De Profundis.
I have had, during the last few months, to put up with such a volume of publicity in certain sections of the Press, invariably followed by a flood of anonymous letters of abuse, that I am prompted to ask if you will be so generous as to allow me a short space in which to make a statement.
All this has now been resuscitated by the decision of His Majesty’s Government to refuse to allow me to take my daughter to my home in Scotland... It would be highly improper of me to question it. What I do resent, however, is the undoubted undercurrent of suspicion and resentment created by the publicity to which I refer...
My only crime, if it be a crime, so far as I know, is that I was one of many thousands in this country who thought that our best interests would be served by a friendly understanding with Germany. In this, though now proved to be wrong, I was in good company... there is many a man in this country who has changed his mind on this matter since the days when the Prime Minister flew to Munich. I could not pretend that I have ever rendered this country any signal service. But I am satisfied in my own conscience that my military record is one of which I have no reason to be ashamed, and certainly today my only desire is to see the earliest possible victory for the Allies. One other matter which I find very wounding is that I am constantly described as a ‘Fascist’. Now, I am not, never have been and am not likely to become a Fascist...
Reading this sincere and hopeless document, it is not hard to understand why Nancy – who knew her father’s weakness, and reproached him for it, but held to the memory of his strength – offered him the gift of Uncle Matthew, with his eternal hatred of the Hun.
II
Had Unity returned to Britain hale and hearty, she might have been imprisoned under the Emergency Defence Regulations. Whether anything worse would have happened to her, it is impossible to know. The usual charges against her – that she was a friend of Hitler, an admirer of the Third Reich – did not equate to traitorous activity. But Herbert Morrison had flung out the accusation that she had assisted the enemy. Doubtless there were many who did believe that she had been some kind of agent for the Nazis. What would one have thought, as a member of the public back in 1940? Probably just that.
How much truth there would have been to such a perception is difficult to say; and this nuance, this need to draw a line between pro-Nazi sympathies and unpatriotic sentiment, between those who wanted peace with Germany and those who supported German aims, would become a peculiarly vexed, quasi-philosophical point. Of course it was not really a good time for arguing subtleties of this kind. War was not High Table. And it was quite natural, to see present guilt within past allegiances. Whether it was justice, to condemn outright those whose behaviour had formerly been legal, if distasteful, and now looked suddenly dangerous, is another question. But such was war. The enemy was also anybody who had ever supported the enemy.
Well: Unity had certainly done that, and in her sui generis position she had also been a potential conduit for information, from Germany to England and the other way about. In 1937, for instance, she had nonchalantly told the British ambassador that Hitler did not like Mussolini. And Hitler had remarked, in a recorded conversation, that the Mitford sisters ‘are very much in the know, thanks to their relationship with influential people’. He had then said something else: that on one occasion, in 1939, Unity had ‘exclaimed that in the whole of London there were only three anti-aircraft guns!’ Diana, who was present at the time, was described by Hitler as staring at Unity ‘stonily’. She was used to her sister’s loose-cannon behaviour, but this was something rather more. Later, Diana was at pains to make clear that Unity was probably repeating newspaper gossip; that she was in no position to hold such lethal information in 1939. Nevertheless what Unity said teetered dangerously close to treason. Britain was ill prepared for war. The fact that Germany would have known that anyway was hardly the point. Perhaps it was simply the old desire to tell Hitler things that would please, with no thought to what they might really mean. Unity, in Diana’s words, ‘was incapable of disloyalty to England’.7
In April 1941, however, the Commons was again contesting this assertion. Unity had been seen in public that month at Deborah’s wedding to Lord Andrew Cavendish, at St Bartholomew’s church in Smithfield. Some families might have thought it politic not to have her there, but the Mitfords (and the Devonshires) were not the kind to be influenced by what ‘people’ might say. Unity was Deborah’s sister and that was that. Ever alert, the press glimpsed a woman among the guests who put a small handbag in front of her face; like a clue in a bad detective novel, the bag was embossed with the letters ‘U.M.’. So the furore started up again.
There is no question that in a photograph of the wedding, showing Unity outside the church with her old friend Mary Ormsby-Gore, she looked almost as good as new – certainly far better than her father. This was illusory, but it was understandable that a Labour MP in the House should have seized upon Unity’s resumption of her social life. Now that she was ‘recovered’, should she perhaps be detained? Perhaps her illness would be best described as ‘Quislingitis’,8 for which the most appropriate treatment would be found on the Isle of Man, in an internment camp?
Herbert Morrison, by this time Home Secretary in Churchill’s coalition government, clearly knew more about Unity’s true condition and had subtly shifted stance. If her health and circumstances changed, he said firmly, then her situation would be reconsidered, but at that time it was unnecessary. ‘What my honourable friend is putting to me is that I should put people I do not like under detention, and I cannot do that.’ When a Conservative MP asked, disingenuously, why Morrison did not like Unity, there was a Labour heckle of: ‘Hitler does.’
Another MP referred to the ‘widespread feeling’ among the public that Unity had been given special privileges. To this Morrison said: ‘It is not a special privilege for a British citizen to be at liberty.’
A dignified reply, in the face of the urgent desire for retribution against Unity; but if she had not been damaged, if she had not replaced her love of Hitler with that for her goat, would the principle thus stated by Morrison have been upheld? At the start of the war, Nancy had written to Deborah, saying that everybody she met asked whether their parents had been interned yet. This was Nancy in teasing-cum-righteous mode, although it was true that Lord Londonderry, that erstwhile supporter of Anglo-German fellowship, had been obliged to deny publicly his own detainment. There is something almost comical about the thought of these former appeasers, running around excitably and proving their patriotism. Sydney, however, did not do so. Quite the opposite. In October 1939 she had written to her MP to complain about attacks upon Hitler. ‘Last war she would have found herself in jail,’ wrote Nancy to Jessica, in a spirit of shared leftism, before going on to say that another family Fascist, Oswald Mosley, was going about his activities unchecked.
Again, with that peculiarly Mitfordian conflation of the personal and the political, Nancy – who had never liked Mosley – was now even more antagonistic. This was not just because of the war, but the war conveniently justified any dislike. Similarly, she was also both irritated and obscurely pleased by the new closeness between Sydney and Diana, who from this time on would be conjoined in a mutual loyalty and affection. Nancy stood outside that particular enclave: her relationship with her mother was what it was, and there had been no rapprochement with Diana since the publication of Wigs on the Green. Ordinarily she would have minded, but the outbreak of war had, in a sense, freed her from the cling of those tiresome old emotions. The resentment of her mother, the jealousy towards Diana, could be channelled into the fact that they were a pair of old Hitlerites: most satisfactory. Nancy’s mood, febrile from all the dark nights at her first-aid post scribbling away at Pigeon Pie, was full of enjoyable fury towards anybody who was insufficiently anti-German. This did not include her husband, who had straightaway applied for a commission in the Welsh Guards. Diana’s husband was a very different matter; as the authorities were all too aware.
It was pretty much true that Sir Oswald Quisling, as Nancy now called him, was still engaged upon his usual business, although he would not be for much longer. The BU fought three by-elections between the outbreak of war and May 1940, and received pitifully few votes (as The Times put it, Mosley’s party held ‘the blue riband of the deposit-forfeiting world’). Their hour was over – their old headquarters in Chelsea was attacked, as was Mosley himself – but the leader was unwilling to accept it. ‘The question has been put to me why I do not cease all political activity in an hour of danger to our country,’ he wrote in May, as the Germans marched towards Paris and the British retreated to Dunkirk. ‘The answer is that I intend to do my best to provide the people with an alternative to the present government if, and when, they desire to make peace with the British Empire intact and our people safe.’ Even as this proclamation was appearing in the BU magazine, so the government was rushing through an extremely wide-ranging Emergency Powers Act. Within it, as detailed in Regulation 18b, was the ability to detain in prison ‘any particular person if satisfied that it is necessary to do so’.
Special Branch had, naturally enough, been investigating the BU since the declaration of war. It had learned a key fact: that Mosley, whose name had been carefully kept off all official documents, was involved in an agreement to broadcast from a German wireless station. There is no evidence that this was anything other than a commercial venture. Yet it could hardly have looked more suspicious; particularly when William Joyce – who had been a prominent BU member – began his propaganda speeches on German radio in the guise of ‘Lord Haw-Haw’. Nancy’s ‘Phoney War’ novel, Pigeon Pie, made a very good joke on this. She created a character named Sir Ivor King, a popular old English songster who is kidnapped by the Nazis and forced to make broadcasts for them. (‘“Good night dears,” said the old König, “keep your hairs on. By the way, where is the Ark Royal?”’) To the authorities, however, Mosley’s activities looked supremely unfunny. Eventually Special Branch reported that the BU was ‘not merely a party advocating an anti-war and anti-Government policy, but a movement whose aim it is to assist the enemy in every way it can’.
Was this true? Or was it an assemblage of circumstantial bits and bobs, which when collected together looked like guilt without actually being it? Mosley had spoken in favour of a negotiated peace with Germany. From the modern perspective, which has seen the footage of Auschwitz, this seems rather dreadful. At the time it was nothing like so simple: the possibility of peace had not ended with the declaration of war. Hitler offered it several times between October 1939 and July 1940. He may not have meant it. Yet he did mysteriously order his troops to halt in France, thus allowing the evacuation at Dunkirk. In May 1940 even Churchill – by then prime minister – was discussing a negotiated peace with the War Cabinet (although that particular door was quickly closed). Meanwhile others in support included impressive men like R. A. Butler – later a friend of Sydney’s – as well as the usual suspects such as Lloyd George, who admired Hitler at least as much as Mosley did and had likened giving independence to Poland to giving a monkey a pocket watch. As late as 1942 there were those who still dreamed of withdrawal from the fray, leaving the Nazis and the Soviets to get on with it.9
So Mosley’s desire to reconcile with Germany was not outlandish. And in May 1940, even as he was still promulgating peace, he made this statement: ‘However rotten the existing government, and however much we detested its policies, we would throw ourselves into the effort of a united nation until the foreigner was driven from our soil.’ Many members of the BU had gone to fight; one of them would later be arrested in front of his men on the parade ground. (Meanwhile Esmond Romilly had been handed a white feather by his mother for having moved to America: ‘if it is your sincere conviction not to come home there is nothing more to say – but if Decca is holding you back from your country in her hour of anguish remember Uncle Winston’s words...’) Mosley himself tried to join his old regiment. He had never preached against fighting the war, only against the war itself, and in this he was not alone. It is hard, therefore, to see how he could be directly accused of being a non-patriot. It would have been just as easy to say it about Sydney Redesdale, and to have her interned. The problem, of course, was not what Mosley said, but what he was. This had always been the case. He had promoted the BU as a band of disciplined men, who obeyed police commands and never initiated violence; up to a point this was true, if one accepted that any aggression was enacted against official orders. Yet the mere existence of the organization was a provocation, a challenge to democracy, and Mosley’s rhetoric was a supreme exhortation to conflict. And now, not quite accurately but quite understandably, his movement was being equated with Nazism.
But could a man be detained under Regulations 18b, simply for the nebulous crime of being Sir Oswald Mosley? The threat of invasion was certainly making it desirable. Might he become Hitler’s puppet dictator in Britain, a Whitehall Quisling? Was he actually working for the Germans towards that end? Irene Ravensdale was summoned to the Home Office and asked whether she had any evidence that Mosley was a Fifth Columnist. Two years earlier, before she had learned about the secret marriage to Diana, she would have done her best for him. Now personal considerations were too powerful to be overcome. Since the death of Mosley’s first wife in 1933, Irene had given her life to him. She had cared for the three children of that marriage, and had even paid his share of the upkeep at Savehay – the family home in Buckinghamshire – while he chucked money at the BU. He had made a fool of her; she had been more than willing to let him, but that probably made it worse. So when the Home Office put its questions, she replied with lethal care for her words. No, she had no evidence against Mosley. Nevertheless: if he believed that a version of National Socialism, in conjunction with Hitler’s regime, would be good for Britain, then ‘he might do anything if he got angry and thought we were mucking [up] the whole thing’. An interesting sophistry, in which patriotism and treason became one and the same. ‘He [her questioner] said I had given him all he wanted,’ wrote Irene in her diary.
Still the Home Secretary (Morrison’s predecessor, Sir John Anderson) reported to the Cabinet that he had no power to detain Mosley under Regulation 18b. Yes, the man had met Hitler twice; there were strong rumours that Mussolini had put money into the then BUF; there was the uncomfortable fact of the radio deal, in which Germany owned more than 50 per cent of the company. And there was the great weight of all that past speechifying. Mosley was ‘too clever to put himself in the wrong by giving treasonable orders’, said Anderson, although that was not the end of the matter. ‘Notwithstanding the absence of such evidence, we should not run any risk in this matter however small.’ Rules were rules, in other words, but they could always be changed. Regulation 18b was amended to catch Mosley in its net. The government could now order the detention of members of any organization deemed ‘subject to foreign influence or control’, whose leaders had associated with ‘any power with which His Majesty is at war’. The BU denied these accusations; nevertheless it had become inevitable that Mosley, along with some 600 members of his movement, would be detained. On 23 May he was arrested at a flat in Dolphin Square to which he and Diana had recently moved, and taken to Brixton jail. ‘After Winchester,’ he later said, with a throwaway gallantry that commands a certain admiration, ‘prison was nothing.’ His son Nicholas, who did not share his politics, later wrote: ‘It was not in his nature to complain.’ In a further act of defiance, Mosley passed the time – which was by definition of an unspecified duration, since there had been no trial and no sentence – in teaching himself German. He also studied psychology, by which he was unconvinced. ‘The world’, as he put it, ‘is character.’10
