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Diana, Lady Mosley (17 June 1910 – 11 August 2003), born Diana
Freeman-Mitford and usually known as Diana Mitford, was one of Britain's noted
Mitford sisters. She was first married to
Bryan Walter Guinness, heir to the barony of Moyne, and upon her divorce
from him married Sir Oswald Mosley, 6th Baronet of Ancoats, leader of the
British Union of Fascists. Her second marriage, in 1936, took place at the
home of Joseph Goebbels, with Adolf Hitler as guest of honour. Subsequently,
her involvement with Fascist political causes resulted in three years'
internment during the Second World War. She later moved to Paris and enjoyed
some success as a writer. In the 1950s she contributed diaries to Tatler
and edited the magazine The European.[1]
In 1977 she published her autobiography, A Life of Contrasts,[2]
and two more biographies in the 1980s.[3]
She was also a regular book reviewer for Books & Bookmen and later at
The Evening Standard in the 1990s.[4]
She caused controversy when she appeared on Desert Island Discs in
1989.[5]
A family friend,
James Lees-Milne, wrote of her beauty, "She was the nearest thing to
Botticelli's Venus that I have ever seen".[6][7]
Diana Mitford was the fourth child and third daughter of David
Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale (1878–1958, son of Algernon
Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale), and his wife, Sydney (1880–1963),
daughter of Thomas Gibson Bowles, MP. She was a first cousin of Clementine
Churchill, second cousin of Angus Ogilvy, and first cousin, twice removed, of
Bertrand Russell. Mitford was born in Belgravia and raised in the country
estate of Batsford Park, 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 village of Swinbrook. 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. In childhood, her younger sisters Jessica Mitford ("Decca")
and Deborah Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire ("Debo"), were particularly
devoted to her.
At the age of 18, shortly after her presentation at Court, she became
secretly engaged to
Bryan Walter Guinness. Guinness, an Irish aristocrat, writer and brewing
heir, would inherit the barony of Moyne. Her parents were initially 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 (the
equivalent of £1,132,535.70 in 2016, adjusted for inflation[8]),
an estate at Biddesden in Wiltshire, and houses in London and Dublin. They
were well known for hosting aristocratic society events involving the Bright
Young People. The writer
Evelyn Waugh exclaimed that her beauty "ran through the room like a peal
of bells", and he dedicated the novel Vile Bodies, a satire of the
Roaring Twenties, to the couple.[9]
Her portrait was painted by Augustus John,
Pavel Tchelitchew
and Henry Lamb.[10]
The couple had two sons, Jonathan (b. 1930) and Desmond (b. 1931).
In February 1932, Diana met Sir Oswald Mosley at a garden party at the home
of the society hostess Emerald Cunard. He soon became leader of the newly
formed British Union of Fascists, and Diana's lover; he was at the time
married to Lady Cynthia Curzon, a daughter of Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of
India, and his first wife, the American mercantile heiress Mary Victoria
Leiter. Diana left her husband, 'moving with a skeleton staff of nanny, cook,
house-parlourmaid and lady's maid to a house at 2 Eaton Square, round the
corner from Mosley's flat',[11]
but Sir Oswald would not leave his wife. Quite suddenly, Cynthia died in 1933
of peritonitis. Mosley was devastated by the death of his wife, but later
started an affair with her younger sister Lady Alexandra Metcalfe.[12]
Owing to Diana's parents' disapproval over her decision to leave Guinness
for Mosley, she was briefly estranged from most of her family. Her affair and
eventual marriage to Mosley also strained relationships with her sisters.
Initially, Jessica and Deborah were not permitted to see Diana as she was
"living in sin" with Mosley in London. Deborah eventually got to know Mosley
and ended up liking him very much. Jessica despised Mosley's beliefs and
became permanently estranged from Diana after the late 1930s. Pam and her
husband Derek 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
novel Wigs 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.[12]
The couple rented Wootton Lodge, a country house in Staffordshire which
Diana had intended to buy. She furnished much of her new home with much of the
Swinbrook furniture that her father was selling.[13]
The Mosleys lived at Wootton Lodge along with their children from 1936 to
1939.
In 1934 Mitford went to Germany with her then 19-year-old sister Unity.
While there, they attended the first Nuremberg rally after the Nazi rise to
power. A friend of Hitler's, Unity introduced Diana to him in March 1935. They
returned again for the second rally later that year and were entertained as
his guests at the 1935 rally. In 1936 he provided a Mercedes-Benz to chauffeur
Diana to the Berlin Olympic games. She became well acquainted with Winifred
Wagner and Magda Goebbels.
Diana and Oswald wed in secret on 6 October 1936 in Nazi propaganda chief
Joseph Goebbels' drawing room. Adolf Hitler, Robert Gordon-Canning and Bill
Allen were in attendance.[14]
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. In Albert
Speer's memoir, Inside the Third Reich, Speer recounts that Mitford
consistently spoke up for England and would often plead with Hitler to make
peace.[15]
Mosley and Diana had two sons: (Oswald) Alexander Mosley (born 26 November
1938) and Max Rufus Mosley (born 13 April 1940), president of the Fédération
Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) for 16 years. Hitler presented the couple
with a silver framed picture of himself. The Mosleys were interned during much
of World War II, under Defence Regulation 18B along with other British
fascists including Norah Elam.[16]
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."[17]
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's
Holloway Prison for women. She and her husband were held without charge or
trial under the provisions of 18B, on the advice of MI5. The pair 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 denied passports until 1949.[18]
Lady Mosley's prison time failed to disturb her approach to life; she
remarked in her later years that she never grew fraises des bois (wild
strawberries) that tasted as good as those she had cultivated in the prison
garden. 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,"
when she compared her lot to the other women incarcerated at Holloway. Oswald
Mosley later mentioned this to Diana's sister Nancy, who in turn included the
line in her novel, Love in a Cold Climate.[19]
According to her obituary in the Daily Telegraph, a diamond swastika
was among her jewels.[20]
After the war ended the couple kept homes in Ireland, with apartments in
London and Paris. Their recently renovated Clonfert home, a former Bishop's
palace, burned down in an accidental fire. Following this, they moved to a
home near Fermoy, County Cork, later settling permanently in France, at the
Temple de la Gloire,[1]
a Palladian temple in Orsay, southwest of Paris, in 1950. Gaston and Bettina
Bergery had told the Mosleys that the property was on the market. They were
neighbours of Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who lived in the neighbouring town
Gif-sur-Yvette, and soon became close friends with them. The Duchess of
Windsor, upon seeing the "Temple de la Gloire" (built in 1801 to honour the
French victory of December 1800 at Hohenlinden, near Munich) for the first
time, was said to have remarked, "Oh, it's charming, charming but where do you
live?"
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 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. The only time she and sister Jessica communicated with each
other following their estrangement was when they were both taking care of
their sister Nancy. Nancy was at Versailles, and was battling Hodgkin's
disease. Soon after Nancy's death in 1973, all communication between the
sisters ceased. Diana was also a lifelong supporter of the British Union of
Fascists (BUF), and its postwar successor the Union Movement, to which she
made financial contributions until the 1994 death of its organiser Jeffrey
Hamm.
At times she was vague when discussing her loyalties to Britain, her strong
belief in fascism, and her attitude to Jews. In her 1977 autobiography A
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." At other
times, however, she behaved so as to suggest intense anti-semitic attitudes;
the journalist Paul 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]
On the other hand, when in 1989 she was invited to appear on the BBC Radio
4 programme Desert Island Discs with Sue Lawley, she caused controversy
by saying she had not believed in the fact of the extermination of Jews by
Hitler until "years" after the war, and, when asked if she now believed it, by
replying that she could not believe it was six million, a figure she described
as "not conceivable," adding that "whether it's six or one really makes no
difference morally, it's equally wrong; I think it was a dreadfully wicked
thing."[21]
Her choices of music to be played on Desert Island Discs were: Symphony No. 41
(Mozart), "Casta Diva" from Norma (Bellini), "Ode to Joy" (Beethoven),
Die Walküre (Wagner), Liebestod (Wagner), "L'amour est un oiseau
rebelle" from Carmen (Bizet), "A Whiter Shade of Pale" (Procol Harum)
and Polonaise in F-sharp minor (Chopin).[22]
In 1998, due to her advancing age, she moved out of the Temple de la Gloire
and into a Paris apartment. Temple de la Gloire was subsequently sold for £1
million in 2000. Throughout much of her life, particularly after her years in
prison, she was afflicted by regular bouts of migraines. In 1981, she
underwent a successful surgery to remove a brain tumour. She convalesced at
Chatsworth House, the residence of her sister Deborah. In the early 1990s, she
was also successfully treated for skin cancer. In later life she also suffered
from deafness.
Mitford attended the funeral of René de Chambrun, the son-in-law of Vichy
France Prime Minister Pierre Laval, in 2002.[23]
Diana 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
the heat wave of 2003 in mostly non-air-conditioned Paris.[26]
She was buried at St Mary's Churchyard, Swinbrook, Oxfordshire,[27]
alongside her sisters.[28]
She was survived by her four sons: Desmond Guinness; Jonathan Guinness, 3rd
Baron Moyne; Alexander and Max Mosley. Her stepson Nicholas Mosley is a
novelist who also wrote a critical memoir of his father for which Diana
reportedly never forgave him, despite their previously close relationship. One
of her great-granddaughters, Jasmine Guinness, a great-niece, Stella Tennant,
a granddaughter, Daphne Guinness and a grandson, Tom Guinness, are models.[29]
"I'm sure he (Hitler) was to blame for the extermination of the Jews," she
told British journalist Andrew Roberts, "[h]e was to blame for everything, and
I say that as someone who approved of him."[30]
Roberts criticised Lady Mosley following her death on the pages of The
Daily Telegraph (16 August 2003), declaring that she was an "unrepentant
Nazi and effortlessly charming." He, in turn, was assailed three days later,
in the same newspaper, by her son and granddaughter.[30]
She was portrayed by actress Emma Davies in the 1997 Channel Four TV
miniseries, Mosley.
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