Tag Archives: Deborah Devonshire

In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire & Patrick Leigh Fermor

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The letters have been edited by Charlotte Mosley.

I’ve read quite a few books now by both of the writers of these letters and it seemed the right time to read a book by the two of them together in the shape of letters which they had sent to each other over a period of 53 years from 1954 to 2007.

Whilst it isn’t a book to read if you don’t know either of the two writers, you’ll definitely find it interesting and entertaining if you do know them and at least some of the people who feature in the letters. That’s giving you quite a lot of scope because so many people are mentioned, obviously not in any sort of name dropping way, it’s just that they knew/know so many well known and influential people.

Deborah Devonshire is the youngest of the Mitford girls and is related by marriage to both Harold MacMillan (British Prime Minister) and John F Kennedy and people like Evelyn Waugh and Ian Fleming also have parts in the letters. It is mentioned that Mary Russell Mitford, author of a book called Our Village about rural life and published in the 1820s was actually a distant relative of the Mitford girls.

That’s all interesting in itself but there’s just as much written about unknown private people as there is about royalty or war heroes. Sometimes it’s mentions of people they just come across in life which have amused them and they feel the urge to share it with each other. They both had a good sense of humour, veering towards the daft, like when Debo asked Paddy for suggestions for spoof book titles, he gave her a long list, she only needed 28, but here are a few of them to give you an idea.

Reduced to the Ranks by D. Motion
Haute Cuisine by Aga Khan
St Symeon Stylites by A. Columnist
Intuition by Ivor Hunch
Dipsomania by Mustafa Swig
In the Soup by A. Crouton

The last one is The Ruined Honeymoon by Mary Fitzgerald and Gerald Fitzgeorge.

As you would expect from a correspondence over so many years there are ups and down in their lives and in common with Letters Between Six Sisters – it gets quite sad towards the end as the family, friends and latterly even their respective spouses disappear, much to their chagrin.

I’m wondering what to read next in the Devonshire or Fermor line. Any suggestions?

The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sister part 3

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Well, I got there fairly quickly I suppose – page 804 – the end. I did enjoy this book. The letters range from 1925 to 2002 when Diana, the second last of the Mitford sisters dies. Of course, the youngest, Deborah is still alive and according to how she looked on a BBC programme about Chatsworth which was on the TV just a couple of weeks ago, she seems in fine form aged 92.

The collection of letters has been edited by Charlotte Mosley, a granddaughter of Diana Mitford, I believe, and I think she did choose interesting letters. I’m presuming that there were a lot more for her to choose from and it does help if you are old enough to remember the people who are mentioned in them. Politicians like Lord Lambton feature in the book, he was all over the news at one point in the 1970s a Tory politician who had to resign for the usual Tory reason in those days – sex scandal. It was always Tories = sex scandal and Labour = money scandal. Now nobody seems to resign at all, no matter how despicable they are. Anyway I’m meandering!

The latter parts of this book inevitably feature the deaths of the sisters as one by one the grim reaper comes to claim them but they were still writing letters and latterly faxing each other regularly and it’s amazing how even at their ages they were still the same girls they had been in many ways, with Jessica at one point complaining that after all she was three years older than Debo, as if that means anything, but she was feeling that Debo was getting too uppity for a young thing. So typical of a family, the youngest one never grows up in the eyes of the others.

They were still talking over their experiences. Diana was bemoaning the waste of the three and a half years that she had to spend in Holloway prison during World War II as she was deemed to be a danger to the country in wartime, being the wife of the fascist and Hitler supporter Sir Oswald Mosley. Her sister Nancy had been asked by the authorities if Diana would be a danger to Britain’s security and she said that Diana should definitely be put in prison. There’s no doubt that Nancy did suffer from jealousy and was spiteful to all of her sisters but from things which Diana herself says in some of her letters, I think that it is just as well that she was banged up away from the temptation to assist the Nazi cause.

After the war the Mosleys lived in France, Sir Oswald was never going to be able to continue with a political career in Britain and they did try to rewrite history by saying things like he had never been anti-semitic. Ho Hum!

Diana spent a lot of time going through his papers and – burning them! When you think that politicians normally take care to conserve their speeches and articles, in the knowledge that they will be treasured in the archives of a famous library somewhere, it speaks volumes that Diana was busy getting rid of Sir Oswald’s life’s work.

At one point Diana had told a journalist that she had been fond of Hitler and she was still saying it. Now how stupid do you have to be, not to realise that that is going to upset people. It’s not as if she said that she had been fond of Hitler and had been shocked when he turned out to be an evil despot. So she had known Hitler since the early 1930s and was a friend of his but we’ve all had friends, family, husbands or whatever who we have been more than fond of but through their actions we have radically changed our views of them. I think nowadays it’s called having a moral compass. I can only think that despite knowing exactly what Hitler was doing she never felt the need to reassess her view of him. What does that say about Diana? She even implied that World War II was Britain’s fault!! Hang on while I get on my high horse. The same thing was implied to me the last time I was in Bavaria, and I was wondering which altenative world I had fallen into, then I realised that it was that same old Nazi one of yore. The mind boggles!

The amazing thing is that there could be such disparate characters within one family and I can quite see why Deborah never wanted to have anything to do with politics. The sisters did all have fallings out, Jessica and Diana never really had anything to do with each other, except when they could not avoid each other, usually at family death beds. Jessica had lived for most of her life in America. In fact considering that the Mitfords were seen as being so very English, they were all keen to get out of Blighty apart from Deborah who has lived at Chatsworth for most of her life.

Towards the end of the book Princess Diana is mentioned as she is at a ‘do’ which the Devonshires are also attending. About Diana Wales: The trouble is she’s mad but she is a brilliant actress/manipulator and can twist and turn people with her little finger. My thoughts exactly.

Anyway, it was an interesting enjoyable read. The inside covers of this book has old photographs of the principal houses which the Mitfords lived in, including one of the Scottish island Inch Kenneth which the family had owned. In my stupidity I had been imagining that they had lived in a typically Scottish house but in fact the photograph is of a four storey Scottish baronial huge pile of a castle – and they thought they were hard up!

There’s an absolute plethora of Mitford stuff on you tube, you might be interested in this one which shows photographs of the six sisters.
It’s actually an advert for one of her properties but it might be nice for people to hear that sort of 1930s voice which she has and is so rare nowadays.

The Mitfords – Letters Between Six Sisters

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My idea had been to read 30 or 40 pages every day of this massive unwieldy tome of a book but when I started to read it I found that after 40 pages I just wanted to read on and on so within a couple of days I’ve reached page 320 which takes us up to the end of 1959, which, I have to say was a very good year for me anyway.

I’ve decided to blog about that first section of the book which begins in 1925. I’ll give you a bit of a summary of the family in case you don’t know about them. The Mitford parents were of course Lord and Lady Redesdale a sort of mis-matched couple belonging to what I think you could call the minor British aristocracy, rather than the first eleven such as the Devonshires. They are always written about as if they are terribly poor but it’s all comparative and I’m sure that when compared with the average family income at that time then they would have been very well off indeed, even after the financial troubles of the 1930s. The eccentric behaviour of Lord Redesdale in particular turned out to be great copy for his daughters who wrote about their unusual childhoods with their father hunting them across his fields with his dogs, to the horror of the villagers.

It was a time when the British public were obsessed with ‘their betters’ and as the six Mitford girls grew up they were hardly out of the newspaper gossip columns or magazine front pages. At least some of the Mitford girls did eventually earn their fame through their writing but for Diana and Unity it was their choice of men which brought them notoriety.

During the early 1930s they both became interested in fascist politicians, maybe I should say they were entranced. Diana was besotted with Sir Oswald Mosley, the already married leader of the British Fascist Party which led to lots of trouble and violence in streets as fascists and communists/socialists clashed in demonstrations. In the end he had to be imprisoned during World War II as he would have been likely to have helped the Nazis in any way that he could. The same fate befell Diana who was by that time married to him. The Mitfords were related to Winston Churchill and lots of other influential people so until then they had mixed in very high society, including that other couple of fascistic sewers/suars, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Unity was even more deluded than Diana as she was obsessed with Hitler and didn’t worry at all about the inhumanity of the Nazis. I hadn’t realised just how ‘pally’ she was with him and when you read that she wrote to Diana saying: Hitler had given her a flat which had belonged to a young Jewish couple who were going abroad. It’s horrific how matter of fact she was about it all. In fact just about the whole family seems to have met Hitler in Munich, including the parents, Lady Redesdale seems to have been won over to the Nazi cause and stayed that way until her death.

It was a time when lots of the so called aristocracy were on the far right side, just as they are now I suppose but a lot of the war time shenanigans were hushed up.

As you can imagine the early letters in this book can be fascinating, with Unity describing her visit to Berchtesgaden and that massive glass window, the biggest piece of glass in the world, with that breathtaking but somehow soulless view of the mountains. I hadn’t realised it could be wound down like a car window.

The sisters called each other by numerous family nicknames but there’s a list of them at the front of the book and I must admit that I did have to look a few times to see who was being written about. It’s not all politics and plenty of the letters are about family matters which often didn’t run smoothly. In fact there are plenty of real tragedies along the way, especially with children who came to grief, but it was the days of the stiff upper lip and these things are hardly mentioned at all.

The (Dowager) Duchess of Devonshire (Deborah Mitford) has had seven pregnancies I think, but only three living children to show for them all. It must have been heart-breaking for her. All that money and social position doesn’t really count for much when you get down to it.

Of course Deborah had married ‘the spare’ second son of the Duke of Devonshire but due to the heir being killed in the war her husband eventually became the duke. The eldest son had married one of the (JFK)Kennedy girls – Kathleen, known as Kick, and she came to grief too as so many of that clan did.

The letters are witty and gossipy, for instance, their nickname for the Queen Mother was – no not gin but ‘Cake’. I haven’t mentioned the communist sister yet, I’ll keep that for a later post. I’m enjoying the book so it seems like a quick read, despite the 804 pages, I just wish it was easier to read in bed.

Oh and my top tip – if you want to marry money, marry into a brewery family. The Guinness and Tennant families feature in the family tree and a Watney almost did – I kid you not!

Wait For Me by Deborah Devonshire

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I was told that I would enjoy this autobiography, and I did. In fact it was fascinating and it’s a must read for anyone interested in the Mitfords or even 20th century Britain.

I’ve always felt a sort of affinity with Debo Mitford just because I know how it feels to be the youngest in a large family and have a mother who wanted boys, as my mother did too. That’s where the resemblence ends though and it’s easy to feel envious of someone who has had such a full and seemingly charmed life. But, we can’t all be duchesses and all hasn’t been as wonderful as her life seemed on the surface.

It’s a book with plenty of funny moments in it but there’s lots of sadness too and when Deborah Devonshire relates the history of her many pregnancies it’s really heartbreaking. Three of her children survived but another three died within hours of their birth and she also suffered a miscarriage. My first pregnancy ended in miscarriage and that was bad enough, I can’t imagine how she must have felt or how she managed to cope with it all. The war years brought too many deaths of family and close friends in combat too. So it hasn’t all been a charmed life.

I’m just annoyed that I didn’t get around to reading this book before visiting Chatsworth House for the first time during the summer because it would have made it even more enjoyable. I’m sure we’ll be going back there some day though as it isn’t possible to take it all in in one visit.

I hadn’t realised that the Devonshires were related to the Kennedys by marriage with ‘Kick’ Kennedy (Jack’s favourite sister) being married to Debo’s husband’s brother. She is buried near Chatsworth. So there is quite a bit about the Kennedys and a description of JFK’s inauguration and funeral.

Having just finished reading three of Nancy’s books it was an eyeopener to me to discover that she had ‘done the dirty’ on her sister Diana during the war and was instrumental in Diana being put in prison. Nancy apparently had a jealous nature and bore grudges.

I borrowed this one from the library but I might end up buying it anyway as I enjoyed it so much and it’s one for dipping into again I think.

I’m definitely going to have to read something by Patrick Leigh Fermor as he’s mentioned so often in this one and I’m now looking for John Buchan’s biography of Montrose – JFK’s favourite apparently.

Library Haul

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I’m not supposed to be buying books or even borrowing any from the libray at the moment, due to the vast amount of unread volumes in my house, but what are you supposed to do when you want to read something in particular. I had to put in a request for a Linda Gillard book as I want to see what her books are like. When I went to pick up the book I couldn’t stop myself from going in and having a wee bit of a browse the upshot of which is I came home with:

Emotional Geology by Linda Gillard

Wait for Me by Deborah Devonshire

Mary and The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

Crime by Ferdinand von Schirach

All authors who are new to me, so it’ll be interesting to see what they’re like!