Tag Archives: Letters Between Six Sisters

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.

Letters Between Six Sisters part 2

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What have I been doing the last couple of days – reading the Mitford’s letters of course. There are a lot of letters from the 1960s as the sisters had realised by then that their correspondence was something which was unique and would be of interest to people. In fact one of them said that they would be gold for their heirs, so they were more careful to preserve them.

I’m the youngest of a large family too and I’ve always joked that my parents kept having kids until they reached perfection, in reality though I was a huge aftershock for them. Well Deborah, the youngest Mitford was an aftershock too as everybody had been desperate for her to be a boy, not a sixth sister. She was (is) definitely the best of the family though and as she avoided politics which had caused so much trouble in the past, she managed to keep in touch with all of her sisters over the years and did her best to smooth over the many grievances which they had against each other.

The older sisters didn’t seem to be able to put their childhood behind them and even into their 60s they were holding grudges, mainly against their mother. I do think this is quite a female thing though as women are much more critical of their mothers, I think, well that’s my experience anyway.

It doesn’t seem to have dawned on any of them that their mother suffered from bouts of depression – and who wouldn’t with six daughters (think of all those hormones flying around) and one son, and then add on a husband who was just about barking mad at times. Of course, Muv had a lot of help staff-wise but that brought its own problems. Nancy, the eldest Mitford had been unable to have children and due to a doctor having asked her if she had ever had any contact with syphilis, she asked her mother if it was possible and Muv Mitford admitted that Nancy’s nursemaid had had syphilis!! As she used the word ‘nursemaid’ and not nanny I think she must have meant that this woman was breast-feeding Nancy, which would definitely not have been healthy for her. It was 1904 and long before antibiotics so syphilis was incurable and in fact it was exactly like a mother today handing her new born baby over to a mother who has AIDS to breast-feed it. As you can imagine, Nancy blamed her mother for that. It’s amazing that any mother could be so stupid and uncaring, which is what leads me to think she was suffering from depression, and probably did so on and off for her whole life.

Muv Mitford always came up trumps though when she was really needed, like when she took care of Unity for years, which can have been no fun at all. Going back to 1935, there’s a letter from Jessica to Unity which mentions Muv looking after Diana who had just had her second abortion in two years, all very matter of fact. It says a lot about the family attitudes as the father of the aborted babies was the then married man Oswald Mosley and I couldn’t help thinking of what MY mother’s reaction would have been under the same circumstances. I think my mother would probably have cut my throat!

Anyway, the Mitfords obviously thought that the usual laws of decent behaviour didn’t apply to them ( like most of the so called upper classes I suppose) – Diana does mention in a 1970s letter that it was such a shame that her sons had been expelled from various schools and colleges, blaming the schools for not being willing to put up with rule breakers.

Although there isn’t so much in the way of politics in this section of the book it’s still interesting. Inevitably the whole thing is a bit of a name dropping-fest but it’s only because they were related to so many people like Winston Churchill, Harold MacMillan and the Kennedys.

What strikes me is that despite the fact the Mitford sisters were lucky enough to be born into a life of privilege and money, it didn’t stop them from allowing their choices of men to affect their lives for the worse.

Unity was besotted with Hitler and the Reich and followed him around like a puppy until she was noticed by him- which led to her trying to kill herself, which she managed to botch.

Diana was besotted with Oswald Mosley who treated her abominably and even when his wife did die suddenly, instead of that making things easier for Diana, it actually made them worse as Mosley immediately started an affair with his dead wife’s sister. It is thought that Diana was too stubborn to admit that she had been wrong in her choice of man and so she just stuck it out, even although he made her ill with the stress of her life with him.

Nancy was even worse as she moved to France after the war so that she would be on hand for her French lover who was obviously not in love with her. She had to be available for him whenever he could spare some time for her. She ended up being afraid to go out of her flat because she didn’t want to bump into any of his many other lovers who lived in the area. In the end he married one of her rivals, after leaving her hanging on for about 30 years.

Pamela was more sensible and seemed just to live for farming, although she had been married, it didn’t last.

Deborah, the youngest was obviously her parent’s favourite, but then she was the one who gave them no grief and worries as she married young, to the second son of the Devonshires (the spare). The heir was killed during the war, meaning that Deborah eventually became the Duchess of Devonshire, which she was very successfull at but it wasn’t all wine and roses.

DO ADMIT – as Debo would say – her sisters must have been fairly sick when their wee sister reached such dizzy heights.

Anyway, I read on, as I’m now at page 671 and it’s 1980. Just one more instalment I think!

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!