The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters. Charlotte Mosley
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target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_af3c70c6-4b34-5a85-953d-2fe3f7c6a332">10 Goebbels had recently bought a villa in the fashionable Berlin suburb and it is there that the Mosleys’ wedding lunch was given.
11 Ribbentrop. 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’.
1 Robert Gordon-Canning was best man at Mosley’s wedding. Joined the BUF in 1934 before breaking with it in 1938 on personal grounds.
2 Hitler presented Diana with a large signed photograph of himself in a silver frame.
3 Maria Goebbels; Dr Goebbels’ younger sister lived with her brother until she married the film director Max W. Kimmich in 1938.
4 Diana 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.’
5 Hitler had addressed a meeting of the Winterhilfswerk, a Nazi charity that raised money to help the poor during the winter months.
1 Adolf Wagner (1890–1944). Nazi provincial chief of Munich and Upper Bavaria; Bavarian Interior Minister from 1933.
2 Gertrud Scholtz-Klink (1902–99). Reich Women’s Leader and the only woman to reach ministerial status in the Nazi Party.
1 Diana 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.
2 It is not clear why Diana could not write to her son at the time.
3 Wootton Lodge. An article in Country Life had described the house as ‘the home of the unexpected’.
4 ‘You certainly are a good soul.’
1 The news of Jessica’s elopement had at last reached the Redesdales, two weeks after her disappearance.
2 Hitler.
3 ‘Hen’ in ‘Honnish’, Jessica and Deborah’s private language.
4 Esmond 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.
5 Clementine Mitford (1915–2005). Posthumous daughter of Lord Redesdale’s eldest brother, Clement. Married Sir Alfred Beit in 1939.
1 Nancy and Peter had returned from Bayonne where they had tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Jessica to come home.
2 Nancy had endeavoured to persuade Jessica to hide in the train lavatory to avoid the press.
1 The 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’.
2 John 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.
3 Frank 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.
4 Reginald Holme; author of memoirs, A Journalist for God (1995).
1 ‘Thanks for your letter.’
2 Dorothy (Weenie) Bowles (1885–1971). Lady Redesdale’s disapproving younger sister. Married Percy Bailey in 1907.
3 ‘Best love from.’
1 Deborah 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.
2 Lady Redesdale, worried that Jessica seemed depressed, had been planning to take Deborah and her on a world cruise in March.
3 Derek 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.
4 Gerald 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.
5 Robert 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.
1 George Howard (1920–84). A cousin of both Esmond Romilly