The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters. Charlotte Mosley
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visit Nazi Germany had been made Foreign Press Secretary in 1931. Alienated from Hitler in 1937, he left Germany for England and later lived in the United States. Married to Helene Neemeyer 1920–36.
6 Ann (Id, Idden) Farrer (1916–95). A first cousin of the Mitfords and lifelong friend and correspondent of Jessica. Worked as an actress and married the actor David Horne in 1941. Author, under the pseudonym Catherine York, of If Hopes Were Dupes (1966), an account of her nervous breakdown.
7 The Poor Old Leader, i.e. Mosley.
8 Desmond Guinness (1931–). Diana’s second son. President of the Irish Georgian Society 1958–91 and author of books on architecture. Married to Princess Mariga von Urach 1954–81 and to Penelope Cuthbertson in 1985.
1 ‘A heavenly evening bag’; a sophisticated present for a thirteen-year-old.
1 Nancy had married Peter (Prod) Rodd (1904–68) in London on 4 December. They were honeymooning in his parents’ flat in Rome.
1 Wigs on the Green (1935). Nancy’s satirical novel, which poked fun at Unity and Diana’s extremism, was the only one of her books never to be reissued after the war. She wrote to Evelyn Waugh, ‘Too much has happened for jokes about Nazis to be regarded as funny or as anything but the worst of taste.’ The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, edited by Charlotte Mosley (Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), p. 249.
2 The Poor Tremorgan Poor Old Female.
3 Dorothy Cordes (1887–1967). Married Lord Redesdale’s younger brother Bertram (Tommy) in 1925.
1 Mosley had addressed a huge audience at Olympia, Kensington, where violent fights broke out between Blackshirts and communists. Diana was unable to attend the meeting because she had a high fever.
2 William Anstruther-Gray (1905–85). Conservative MP who co-signed a letter to The Times accusing the uniformed Blackshirts at Olympia of ‘wholly unnecessary violence’.
3 Adolf Hitler (1889–1945). Eighteen months after his appointment as Chancellor, the Führer’s Nazification of Germany was well under way.
4 Derek Hill (1916–2000). Painter, notable for his portraits and landscapes, who was studying stage design in Munich.
5 ‘The kittens’; i.e. Diana’s two sons, Jonathan and Desmond.
1 Ottilie (Tilly) Losch (1907–75). Austrian dancer and actress who had been a girlfriend of Tom. Married the capricious poet and collector Edward James in 1931 and sued for separation in 1934, charging him with homosexuality among other things. James scandalized everyone by counter-suing, accusing her of adultery with Prince Serge Obolensky.
2 The Daily Express was waging a vendetta against Hanfstaengl for expelling their Munich correspondent, and reported that on a visit to America he had fallen in love with a nightclub hostess and invited her to Germany where he would ‘personally supervise’ her career. (20 June 1934)
3 The Nazi Party headquarters in Munich.
4 Ernst Röhm (1887–1934). Chief of Staff of the Sturmabteilung (SA), a large, unruly army that constituted a potential threat to Hitler’s dictatorship. On 30 June, in the Night of the Long Knives, Röhm and members of his staff were dragged from their beds and shot, ostensibly for plotting a coup.
5 Josef Goebbels (1897–1945). Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda since March 1933. Married his secretary, Magda Ritschel-Friedländer, in 1931.
6 Kurt von Schleicher (1882–1934). The former Chancellor of Germany and his wife were murdered by the SS in Berlin on 30 June.
7 Edmund Heines (1898–1934). The SA commander who, like Röhm, was a homosexual, was also executed for his part in the alleged plot.
1 Lady Redesdale’s maid who ran up the sisters’ evening dresses for £1 a time.
2 Wigs on the Green.
3 Nancy had written an ambivalent article in which she began by decrying Britain’s ‘decaying democracy’ that could be saved only by a ‘great Leader’, before going on to lampoon Mosley in the same mocking tones that she had used in Wigs on the Green. ‘Fascism as I See It’, Vanguard, July 1934.
4 Unity, Jessica and Lady Redesdale had attended the 300th anniversary performance of the Passionsspiel, the annual re-enactment of Christ’s Passion performed at Oberammergau, where Hitler was also present.
Jessica (left) on her second visit to Germany, with Unity. Weilheim, 1935.
5 Lady Redesdale.
1 Lady Redesdale considered it too expensive to keep a governess just for Deborah and had enrolled her as a day girl at Wychwood, a weekly boarding school in Oxford, where she lasted for just one term.
2 A newsreel at the cinema was showing a short interview with Mosley. Diana complained that in order to see it twice she twice had to sit through a boring documentary called Amazing Maize.
1 Mosley had brought a libel case against the Daily Star for reporting that his movement was ready to ‘take over government with machine guns when the moment arrived’. He was awarded £5,000 damages.
2 Count Serge Orloff-Davidoff (d.1945). Married Elisabeth Scott-Ellis in 1935.
1 Derek Hill.
1 Jessica.