Lady Mosley | |
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| Born | Diana Freeman-Mitford (1910-06-17)17 June 1910 London, England |
| Died | 11 August 2003(2003-08-11) (aged 93) Paris, France |
| Occupation(s) | Author, reviewer |
| Spouses | |
| Children | Jonathan Guinness, 3rd Baron Moyne Hon.Desmond Guinness Alexander Mosley Max Mosley |
| Parents |
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| Relatives | SeeMitford family |
Diana, Lady Mosley (néeMitford; 17 June 1910 – 11 August 2003), known asDiana Guinness between 1929 and 1936, was a British aristocrat, writer, editor andfascist sympathiser. She was one of theMitford sisters and the wife ofOswald Mosley, leader of theBritish Union of Fascists.
She was Initially married toBryan Guinness, heir to thebarony of Moyne, and both were part of theBright Young Things, a social group of youngBohemian socialites in 1920s London. Her marriage ended in divorce as she was pursuing a relationship with Oswald Mosley. In 1936, she married Mosley at the home of the propaganda minister forNazi Germany,Joseph Goebbels, withAdolf Hitler as guest of honour. Her involvement with fascist political causes resulted in three years'internment during theSecond World War, when Britain was at war with the fascist regime of Nazi Germany. She later moved to Paris and enjoyed some success as a writer. In the 1950s, she contributed diaries toTatler and edited the magazineThe European.[1] In 1977, she published her autobiography,A Life of Contrasts,[2] and two more biographies in the 1980s.[3]
Mosley's 1989 appearance onBBC Radio 4'sDesert Island Discs was controversial due to herHolocaust denial and admiration of Hitler.[4] She was also a regular book reviewer forBooks and Bookmen and later atThe Evening Standard in the 1990s.[5] A family friend,James Lees-Milne, wrote of her beauty, "She was the nearest thing toBotticelli'sVenus that I have ever seen".[6][7] She was described by obituary writers such as the historianAndrew Roberts as "unrepentant" about her previous political associations.[8][9][6]
Diana Mitford was the fourth child and third daughter ofDavid Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale (1878–1958), and his wife Sydney (1880–1963).[10] She was a first cousin once removed ofClementine Churchill,[11] second cousin of SirAngus Ogilvy, and first cousin, twice removed, ofBertrand Russell.[12] She was raised in the country estate ofBatsford Park, Gloucestershire, then from the age of 10 at the family home,Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire, and later at Swinbrook House, a home her father had built in the nearby village ofSwinbrook.[13]
She was educated at home by a series of governesses, except for a six-month period in 1926, when she was sent to a day school in Paris.[14] In childhood, her younger sistersJessica Mitford ("Decca") andDeborah ("Debo", later the Duchess of Devonshire), were particularly devoted to her. At the age of 18, shortly after herpresentation at Court, she became secretly engaged toBryan Guinness. In her youth, Mitford was considered part of the social set known as 'TheBright Young Things'.
Guinness, an Irish aristocrat, writer and brewing heir, would inherit thebarony of Moyne. Diana's parents were opposed to the engagement but in time were persuaded; Sydney was particularly uneasy at the thought of two such young people having possession of such a large fortune, but she was eventually convinced Bryan was a suitable husband. They married on 30 January 1929; her sisters Jessica and Deborah were too ill to attend the ceremony. The couple had an income of £20,000 a year, an estate atBiddesden in Wiltshire, and houses in London and Dublin. They were well known for hosting social events involving theBright Young People. The writerEvelyn Waugh exclaimed that her beauty "ran through the room like a peal of bells", and he dedicated the novelVile Bodies to her.[15] Portraits of her were painted byAugustus John,Pavel Tchelitchew andHenry Lamb.[16] She was one of a series of society beauties photographed as classical figures byMadame Yevonde.[17] The couple had two sons,Jonathan (born 1930) andDesmond (1931–2020).
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In February 1932, Diana met SirOswald Mosley at a garden party at the home of the society hostessEmerald Cunard. He soon became leader of the newly formedBritish Union of Fascists and Diana became his lover; Mosley was then married toLady Cynthia Mosley, a daughter ofLord Curzon, a formerViceroy of India, and his first wife, the American mercantile heiressMary Victoria Leiter. Diana left her husband, "moving with a skeleton staff of nanny, cook, house-parlourmaid and lady's maid to a house at 2Eaton Square, round the corner from Mosley's flat",[18] but Sir Oswald would not leave his wife. Quite suddenly, Cynthia died in 1933 ofperitonitis. Mosley was devastated by the death of his wife, but later started an affair with her younger sister,Lady Alexandra Metcalfe.[19][page needed]
Mitford's parents did not approve of her decision to leave Guinness for Mosley, and she was briefly estranged from most of her family. Her affair and eventual marriage to Mosley also strained relationships with her sisters. Jessica and Deborah were initially not permitted to see Diana, for she was "living in sin" with Mosley in London. Deborah eventually came to know Mosley and ended up liking him very much. Jessica despised Mosley's beliefs and became permanently estranged from Diana in the later 1930s. Pam and her husbandDerek Jackson got along well with Mosley. Nancy never liked Mosley and, like Jessica, despised his political beliefs, but was able to learn to tolerate him for the sake of her relationship with Diana. Nancy wrote the novelWigs on the Green, which satirised Mosley and his beliefs. After it was published in 1935, relations between the sisters became strained-to-non-existent and it was not until the mid-1940s that they were able to get back to being close again.[19][page needed]
The couple rentedWootton Lodge, a country house inStaffordshire that Diana had intended to buy. She furnished much of her new home with much of the Swinbrook furniture that her father was selling.[20] The Mosleys lived at Wootton Lodge along with their children from 1936 to 1939.
In 1934, Diana visited Germany with her then 19-year-old sister Unity. While there, they attended the firstNuremberg rally after the Nazi rise to power. Unity, a friend of Hitler, introduced Diana to him in March 1935. They returned for the second rally later that year and were entertained as his guests at the 1935 rally. In 1936, he provided aMercedes-Benz to chauffeur Diana to theBerlin Olympic games. She became well acquainted withWinifred Wagner andMagda Goebbels.
Diana and Oswald secretly married on 6 October 1936 in the drawing room of Nazi propaganda chiefJoseph Goebbels. Adolf Hitler,Robert Gordon-Canning andBill Allen were in attendance.[21] The marriage was kept secret until the birth of their first child in 1938. In August 1939, Hitler told Diana over lunch that war was inevitable.
Mosley and Diana had two sons: (Oswald) Alexander Mosley (born 1938) andMax Rufus Mosley (1940–2021). Hitler presented the couple with a silver framed picture of himself. The Mosleys were interned during much of the Second World War, underDefence Regulation 18B, along with other British fascists includingNorah Elam.[22]
MI5 documents released in 2002 described Lady Mosley and her political leanings. "Diana Mosley, wife of Sir Oswald Mosley, is reported on the 'best authority', that of her family and intimate circle, to be a public danger at the present time. Is said to be far cleverer and more dangerous than her husband and will stick at nothing to achieve her ambitions. She is wildly ambitious."[23] On 29 June 1940, eleven weeks after the birth of her fourth son, Max, Diana was arrested (hastily stuffing Hitler's photograph under Max's cot mattress when the police came to arrest her) and taken to a cell in F Block in London'sHolloway Prison for women. She and her husband were held without charge or trial under the provisions of 18B, on the advice of MI5. The couple were initially held separately but, after personal intervention by Churchill, in December 1941, Mosley and two other 18B husbands (one of them Mosley's friend Captain H. W. Luttman-Johnson) were permitted to join their wives at Holloway. After more than three years' imprisonment, they were both released in November 1943 on the grounds of Mosley's ill health; they were placed under house arrest until the end of the war and were deniedpassports until 1949.[24]
Lady Mosley's prison time failed to disturb her approach to life; she remarked in her later years that she felt better treated than earlier prisoners.[25]
According to an anecdote in herThe Daily Telegraph obituary,Evelyn Waugh saw Lady Mosley wear a diamondswastika brooch among her jewels as she left prison.[14]
After the war ended, the couple kept homes inIreland, with apartments in London and Paris. Their recently renovatedClonfert home, a former Bishop's palace, burned down in an accidental fire. In her memoirs, Diana blamed her cook, writing that the fire could have been extinguished had it not been for the cook who ran back to her room to retrieve her possessions and in doing so delayed efforts to control the fire. Following this, they moved to a home nearFermoy,County Cork, later settling permanently in France, at the Temple de la Gloire, a Palladian temple inOrsay, southwest of Paris, in 1950 (built in 1801 to honour the French victory of December 1800 at Hohenlinden, near Munich). Gaston and Bettina Bergery had told the Mosleys that the property was on the market. They were neighbours of theDuke andDuchess of Windsor, who lived in the neighbouring townGif-sur-Yvette, and soon became their close friends.
Once again they became known for entertaining, but were barred from all functions at the British Embassy.[26] During their time in France, the Mosleys quietly went through another marriage ceremony; Hitler had safeguarded their original marriage licence, and it was never found after the war. During this period, Mosley was unfaithful to Diana, but she found for the most part that she was able to learn to keep herself from getting too upset regarding his adulterous habits. She told an interviewer: "I think if you're going to mind infidelity, you better call it a day as far as marriage goes. Because who has ever remained faithful? I mean, they don't. There's passion and that's it."[26] Diana was also a lifelong supporter of theBritish Union of Fascists (BUF), and its postwar successor theUnion Movement.
At times, she was vague when discussing her loyalties to Britain, her strong belief in fascism, and her attitude to Jews. In her 1977 autobiographyA Life of Contrasts, she wrote, "I didn't love Hitler any more than I did Winston [Churchill]. I can't regret it, it was so interesting." In her final interviews withDuncan Fallowell in 2002, she responded that her reaction to the newsreels of death camps was "Well, of course, horror. Utter horror. Exactly the same probably as your reactions." However, when asked about having revulsion against Hitler for this, she said that "I had a complete revulsion against the people who did it but I could never efface from my memory the man I had actually experienced before the war. A very complicated feeling. I can't really relate those two things to each other. I know I'm not supposed to say that but I just have to."[26] At other times, however, she behaved so as to suggest intense anti-semitic attitudes; the journalistPaul Callan remembered mentioning that he was Jewish while interviewing her husband in Diana's presence. According to Callan, "I mentioned, just in the course of conversation, that I was Jewish—at which Lady Mosley went ashen, snapped a crimson nail and left the room ... No explanation was given but she would later write to a friend: 'A nice, polite reporter came to interview Tom [as Mosley was known] but he turned out to be Jewish and was sitting there at our table. They are a very clever race and come in all shapes and sizes.'"[7] Diana offered to entertain her teenage half-Jewish nephew, Benjamin Treuhaft, on a trip to France. The offer was refused by Benjamin's mother,Jessica, who remained estranged from Diana over the latter's political past.[27] In a 2000 interview withThe Guardian, Diana said that "Maybe instead they [European Jews] could have gone somewhere like Uganda: very empty and a lovely climate"[28] (a reference to theUganda Scheme proposed byZionists in 1903).
Her appearance on theBBC Radio 4 programmeDesert Island Discs withSue Lawley in 1989 remains controversial due to Mosley'sHolocaust denial and admiration of Hitler.[4] Mosley told Lawley that she had not believedthe extermination of Jews by Nazi Germany until "years" after the war, and that she thought theofficial death figure of six million Jewish victims was too high.[29] The broadcast of this episode had to be rescheduled several times because it kept coinciding withJewish holidays[26] and prompted hundreds of complaints to the BBC.[30] In 2016, a writer at the BBC described it as the most controversial of allDesert Island Discs episodes.[31] Her choices of music to be played on Desert Island Discs were:Symphony No. 41 (Mozart), "Casta Diva" fromNorma (Bellini),"Ode to Joy" (Beethoven),Die Walküre (Wagner),Liebestod (Wagner), "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle" fromCarmen (Bizet), "A Whiter Shade of Pale" (Procol Harum) andPolonaise in F-sharp minor (Chopin).[32]
After their early twenties, Diana and her sister Jessica only saw each other once, when they met for half an hour as their elder sister, Nancy, lay dying inVersailles. Diana said of Jessica in 1996: "I quite honestly don't mind what Decca [Jessica] says or thinks," adding that "She means absolutely nothing to me at all. Not because she's a Communist but simply because she's a rather boring person, really."[33]
In 1998, due to her advancing age, she moved out of the Temple de la Gloire and into an apartment in the7th arrondissement of Paris.[26] Temple de la Gloire was sold in 2000 for £1 million. Throughout much of her life, particularly after her years in prison, she was afflicted by regular bouts of migraines. In 1981, she underwent successful surgery to remove abrain tumour. She convalesced atChatsworth House, the residence of her sister Deborah. In the early 1990s, she was also successfully treated forskin cancer. In later life, she also suffered from deafness.[34]
Mosley attended the funeral ofRené de Chambrun, the son-in-law of Vichy France Prime MinisterPierre Laval, in 2002.[35]
Mosley was shunned in the British media for a period after the war, and the couple established their own publishing company, Euphorion Books, named after a character inGoethe'sFaust. This allowed Oswald to publish, and Diana was free to commission a cultural list. After his release from jail, Oswald declared the death of fascism. Diana initially translated Goethe'sFaust. Other notable books published by Euphorion under her aegis includedLa Princesse de Clèves (translated by Nancy, 1950),Niki Lauda's memoirs (1985), andHans-Ulrich Rudel's memoirs,Stuka Pilot. She also edited several of her husband's books.
While in France, Mosley edited the fascist cultural magazineThe European for six years, and to which she sometimes contributed material. She provided articles, book reviews, and regular diary entries. Many of her contributions were republished in 2008 inThe Pursuit of Laughter. In 1965, she was commissioned to write the regular column "Letters from Paris" forTatler. She reviewed autobiographical and biographical accounts as well as the occasional novel. Characteristically she would provide commentary of her own experiences and personal information of the subject of the book under discussion. She wrote regularly forBooks and Bookmen. Her 1980 review of a biography onMagda Goebbels attracted attention fromChristopher Hitchens.[36] Hitchens objected to a passage where Mosley wrote: "Everyone knows the tragic end. As the Russians surrounded Berlin, the Goebbels painlessly killed their children and then themselves. The dead children were described by people who saw them as looking 'peacefully asleep'. Those who condemn this appalling,Masada-like deed must consider the alternative facing the distraught Magda." Hitchens insisted that theNew Statesman issue an editorial condemning the Masada trope.[37] In her eighties, Mosley became the lead reviewer for theLondon Evening Standard duringA. N. Wilson's seven-year tenure as literary editor.[38] In 1996, following Wilson's departure, his successor was asked by the new editor of the newspaper,Max Hastings to stop running Mosley's reviews. Hastings is reported to have said that he did not want any more "bloody Lady Hitler" in the newspaper.[38]
Mosley wrote the foreword and introduction ofNancy Mitford: A Memoir byHarold Acton. She produced her own two books of memoirs:A Life of Contrasts (1977,Hamish Hamilton), andLoved Ones (1985). The latter is a collection of pen portraits of close relatives and friends such as the writerEvelyn Waugh among others. In 1980, she releasedThe Duchess of Windsor, a biography.
In 2007, letters between the Mitford sisters, including communications to and from Diana, were published in the compilationThe Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosley. A following collection consisting of her letters, articles, diaries and reviews was released asThe Pursuit of Laughter in December 2008.
Mosley died in Paris in August 2003, aged 93. Her cause of death was given as complications related to a stroke she had suffered a week earlier, but reports later surfaced that she had been one of the many elderly fatalities of theheat wave of 2003 in mostly non-air-conditioned Paris.[39] She was buried at St Mary's Churchyard,Swinbrook, Oxfordshire,[23] alongside her sisters.[40]
She was survived by her four sons:Jonathan andDesmond Guinness, and Alexander andMax Mosley. Her stepsonNicholas Mosley was a novelist who also wrote a critical memoir of his father for which Mosley reportedly never forgave him, despite their previously close relationship. A great-granddaughter,Jasmine Guinness, a great-niece,Stella Tennant and a granddaughter,Daphne Guinness are models.[41]
British journalistAndrew Roberts criticised Mosley following her death in the pages ofThe Daily Telegraph (16 August 2003), reporting that when he interviewed her for his bookEminent Churchillians, she had surprised him by not serving up a "David Irving-style refutation" of the Holocaust by declaring "I'm sure he [Hitler] was to blame for the extermination of the Jews. He was to blame for everything, and I say that as someone who approved of him." However, her other remarks about Hitler showed the lifelong "same disdain for equivocation" she had always displayed, prompting him to call her an "unrepentant Nazi and effortlessly charming", and her views "disgusting, unchanged" and "repulsive".[8] A. N. Wilson wrote for the same newspaper and said that her public loyalty for Oswald and Hitler were disastrous mistakes, claiming that privately Mosley had admitted that the Nazis were "really rather awful".[34] Three days later, letters to the editor from both her son, Jonathan Guinness, Lord Moyne, and his daughter (her granddaughter), Daphne Guinness, attempted to refute Roberts' statements by citing her "lack of hypocrisy", claiming Mosley's "upper-class etiquette" would prohibit giving any sort of explanation or an apology to a journalist, and that regardless of her giving a Hitler salute during the singing ofGod Save The King in 1935, she was never a threat to wartime Britain.[42]
A sarcastic commentary by Canadian columnistMark Steyn appeared in the same issue. He described Mosley’s unwavering allegiance to Hitler and fascism as that of "a silly kid".[43] An equally "indulgently dismissive attitude" of her opinions was seconded in theSunday edition in an interview with her stepson Nicholas Mosley, with whom she had refused to speak for over two decades after the publication ofBeyond the Pale, his unfavorable memoir of her husband.[44]
Mosley inspired the protagonist of the 2018 novelAfter the Party byCressida Connolly.[45] She is portrayed extensively in the sixth and final season of Peaky Blinders byAmber Anderson.[46]
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)Evelyn Waugh dedicatedVile Bodies to her.
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