Diana Mitford
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Diana Freeman-Mitford, The Hon Lady Mosley (17 June 1910 – 11 August 2003) was one of Britain's noted Mitford sisters. Known for her friendship with Adolf Hitler, her involvement with right-wing political causes resulted in three years' internment during the Second World War. Her obituary in The Daily Telegraph referred to her as an "unrepentant Nazi and effortlessly charming."
Contents |
[edit] Early life
Daughter of David Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, Diana was raised at the Mitford family home, Asthall Manor, in Oxfordshire. She was educated there by a series of governesses except for a six month period in 1926 when she was sent to a school in Paris.
Shortly after her introduction to society at age 18 she met, and became secretly engaged to Bryan Walter Guinness, an Irish aristocrat, writer and brewing heir who would inherit the barony of Moyne. Her parents were initially opposed to the match but in time were convinced. The marriage on 30 January 1929, was the society marriage of the year.
The couple had an income of £20,000 a year, an estate, Biddesden in Hampshire, and houses in London and Dublin. They were well known for hosting glittering society events involving writers such as Evelyn Waugh, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington and John Betjeman, or politicians such as Winston Churchill. Waugh dedicated the novel Vile Bodies, a satire of the Roaring Twenties, to the couple. They had two sons, Jonathon, and Desmond.
In 1932 she became the mistress of British Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley; he was then married to Lady Cynthia Curzon, a daughter of Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India and his first wife, American mercantile heiress Mary Victoria Leiter. Diana soon left her husband but Sir Oswald would not leave his wife.
[edit] Connections to the Third Reich
Sir Oswald's wife died of peritonitis in May 1933, and the grief-stricken Oswald began an affair with his youngest sister-in-law Baba Metcalfe. Diana went to Germany with her then 19 year old sister Unity. While there they attended the first Nuremberg rally after the Nazi seizure of power. They returned again for the second rally the next year during which Unity struck up a friendship with Hitler. She introduced Diana to him in March 1935. They were his guests at the 1935 rally and, in 1936, Hitler provided a Mercedes-Benz to chauffeur Diana to the Berlin Olympic games.
On 6 October 1936, in the Berlin drawing room of Joseph Goebbels, she became Sir Oswald Mosley's second wife. Other than the witnesses, the only guests were Goebbels, and Hitler. Hitler presented the couple with a silver framed picture of himself. The marriage was kept secret until the birth of their first child Alexander in 1938. In August 1939, Hitler told Diana over lunch that war was inevitable.
The Mosleys were interned throughout much of World War II, under Defence Regulation 18B, for their Fascist sympathies. (MI5 documents released in 2002 gave a harsh view of 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.") Diana was arrested on June 29, 1940 and taken to a cell in F Block in London's Holloway Prison for women.
The pair were initially held separately but, after personal intervention by Churchill, Sir Oswald and two other 18B husbands (one of them Mosley's friend Captain H.W. Luttman-Johnson) were permitted to join their wives at Holloway. The couples lived in an old cottage on the prison grounds, had a little garden but were not allowed to mix with any other prisoners. After two years imprisonment, in November 1943, they were both released on grounds of Sir Oswald's health. They were placed under house arrest until the end of the war.
Lady Mosley's prison time failed to disturb her eccentric approach to life, remarking in her later years that she never grew fraises des bois that tasted as good as those she cultivated in the prison garden. She also survived her time there by basking in her own imperishable self-regard: Though prison was not something she would have chosen, she said, "It was still lovely to wake up in the morning and feel that one was lovely one."
[edit] After the War
After the war ended Diana and her husband moved to the Irish Free State for a few years and then settled in France where they lived in an exquisite house at Orsay, near Paris called Temple de la Gloire. They were neighbours, and soon became close friends of, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Once again they were well known for entertaining but were barred from all functions at the British Embassy. During their time in France, the Mosleys quietly remarried as Hitler had safeguarded their original marriage license which was never found after the war.
While in France, Diana edited the right-wing magazine The European to which she also contributed. She was also a lifelong supporter of the British Union of Fascists and its postwar successor the Union Movement, to which she made financial contributions until the 1994 death of its organiser Jeffrey Hamm. She often attended its annual dinners.
Diana Mosley, however, continued to admire Hitler and the tenets of Nazism throughout her life but was open in addressing the Führer's faults. "I'm sure he was to blame for the extermination of the Jews," she told British journalist Andrew Roberts, "he was to blame for everything, and I say that as someone who approved of him." Following her death Roberts severely criticised Lady Mosley in The Daily Telegraph (16 August 2003), and was in turn attacked three days later, in the same newspaper, by her son, Lord Moyne, and granddaughter, Daphne.
Diana Mosley was nothing if not ambiguous when discussing her loyalties to Britain or to her strong belief in fascism. In her 1977 autobiography 'A Life Of Contrasts' she said ""But I didn't love Hitler any more than I did Winston. I can't regret it, it was so interesting,".
[edit] Death
Lady Mosley died in Paris in August 2003, aged 93, apparently due to 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 the heat wave in mostly non-air-conditioned Paris. Her death leaves but one sister still living: Deborah, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire.
She had four children, among whom are the Irish preservationist Desmond Guinness, the writer Jonathan Guinness, 3rd Baron Moyne, and Max Mosley, president of the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, the governing body of world motorsport. Her stepson Nicholas Mosley is a novelist who also wrote a memoir of his father for which Diana never forgave him despite their previously close relationship. One of her great-granddaughters, Jasmine Guinness, and a great-niece, Stella Tennant, are models.[1]
She wrote two books of memoirs, A Life of Contrasts (1977), and Loved Ones (1985), as well as a biography of the Duchess of Windsor.
[edit] References
- Mosley, Diana, A Life of Contrasts, (1st edition, Hamish Hamilton, 1977) reissued in paperback, London, 2003, ISBN 1-903933-20-X
- Guinness, Jonathan, with Catherine Guinness, The House of Mitford, Hutchinson & Co., London, 1984, ISBN 0-09-155560-4
- Mosley, Diana, Loved Ones, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1985, ISBN 0-283-99155-0
- Dalley, Jan, Diana Mosley - A Life, Faber & Faber, London,1999, ISBN 0-571-14448-9
[edit] References
- ^ Lovell, Mary S., The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, 2002, ISBN 0-393-01043-0
[edit] External links
- Diana Mosley: The MI5 View - new files released from the National Archives shed new light on M15 surveillance of Mosley.
