The Mitford Sisters – The True Story Behind Britain’s Most Scandalous Family

In the summer of 1936, in a Berlin drawing room decorated with fresh flowers, a British aristocrat named Diana Mitford married the leader of the British Union of Fascists. The guest of honor at her wedding was Adolf Hitler. He gave the bride a signed photograph in a silver frame and stayed for tea. 3 years later in September 1939, on the day Britain declared war on Germany, Diana’s younger sister, Unity, walked into a Munich park, sat down on a bench, took a pearl handled pistol from her handbag, and turned it on herself. 2

years after that, another sister, Jessica, was living in a workingclass neighborhood in San Francisco, a proud member of the American Communist Party, editing pamphlets that denounced everything her family stood for. Their older sister, Nancy, who had turned all of them into fiction in her best-selling novels, was quietly reporting Diana to British intelligence as a threat to national security.

Their youngest sister, Deborah, was about to marry a duke and become the mistress of one of the great houses of England. And the sixth sister, Pamela, was quietly running a farm in the Cotswwells, keeping chickens, saying almost nothing. Six girls, one family, one decade in which they somehow managed to appear on almost every side of the greatest ideological battle of the 20th century fascism, communism, aristocracy, journalism, war, often while writing to each other in the same afternoon in the same private language they had invented

as children, signing off with the same childhood nicknames. They were called the Mittford sisters. And their story is not just the story of six women. It is the story of what happens when the private eccentricities of one aristocratic family collide all at once with the largest catastrophes of the modern world and of what it costs on both sides.

 This is the story of the Mitfords. All six of them, Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah. Told sister by sister, life by life, until you can see at the end what history did to them and what they did to each other. If you’re enjoying this video, please like and subscribe to our channel so you never miss out on more fascinating stories.

To understand any of them, you have to understand the household. Their father was David Freeman Mittford, second Baron Redsdale. He was a country gentleman of the old kind, a man who hunted, farmed badly, hated foreigners on principle, and read by his eldest daughter’s affectionate account exactly one book in his life.

That book was Jack London’s White Fang. He had liked it so much, Nancy would later say, that he saw no reason to read another. Their mother was Sydney BS, the daughter of a press baron. Raised on schooners, taught to navigate by the stars. She was formidable, precise, and emotionally withheld in the particular way that upperass English women of her generation had made into an art form.

She had loved David since she was 14 and married him at 24. She ran his household with the discipline of a naval officer. Between 1904 and 1920, David and Sydney produced seven children. One son, Tom, who would be killed in Burma in 1945, and six daughters born across 16 years, Nancy in 1904, Pamela in 1907, Diana in 1910, Unity in 1914, Jessica in 1917, and Deborah in 1920.

 They were not by the standards of their class rich, but they had land a series of country houses in Glostershare and Oxfordshire, and they had lineage that reached back before the Norman conquest, which in England has sometimes been the more valuable currency. The girls were educated at home by a series of governnesses.

 Sydney did not believe in sending daughters to school. This decision made without any great ideological weight at the time would turn out to be one of the most consequential parenting choices of the 20th century. Six intelligent, competitive, fiercely opinionated girls raised together in isolation, without formal education, without external friends, without any authority in the house except each other, and a father who believed his own drawing room was the only place worth being this produced.

 inevitably six sisters who would grow up to think of the world as an extension of their childhood arguments. Every ideology they later encountered, fascism, communism, aristocracy, revolution, would be filtered through the same instinct that had made them argue at the nursery table. Whatever the other sisters believed, one of them would believe the opposite, harder.

 They gave each other nicknames that they used for the rest of their lives. Nancy was Naunt. Pamela was woman, sometimes Woo. Diana was honks. Unity was Bobo. Jessica was Deca. Deborah was Debo or Nine or sometimes Miss. Their parents were Move and Favre. Their brother Tom, the only boy in the family, was Tuty.

 These names were not childhood affections that faded with adolescence. They were used in every letter every sister wrote to every other sister for the rest of their lives into their 90s on Buckingham Palace note paper and Californian civil rights office stationary and postwar Paris letterheads. They also invented as small children two entire private languages.

One was called Bowel Digage spoken between Unity and Deca half invented nonsense syllables strung together on English grammar. The other was called Hanish, the language of the Hish Society, which was Decker and Debo’s secret club whose members had to be able to imitate a chicken convincingly.

 They wrote to each other in these languages as adults. Some of the most important letters in the entire Mittford correspondents are almost incomprehensible to outsiders because they are half in a nonsense language to English aristocrats invented in a nursery in 1925. 12,000 of their letters survive, 4 million words. It may be the largest single body of intimate correspondence between siblings ever preserved in the English language.

 And it is written on almost every page in a mixture of formal grown-up English and the private jokes of a nursery. None of them ever really left. That is the raw material of who these six women became. Everything else in this story grew out of that closed house. Before we take the sisters one at a time, there is one more figure who has to be named because his shadow falls across every one of their stories.

 Their brother Tom Tudamy was the only boy. Born in 1909, adored by all his sisters and by his mother above every other child, he was clever, charming, musical, and in the 1930s drawn into the same currents that would claim Diana and Unity. Tom developed genuine fascist sympathies. He was a friend of Randolph Churchill and of Diana’s husband, Mosley.

 When war came, he could not bring himself to fight against Germany, a country he loved, and whose culture he had studied, and he volunteered instead to serve in the Far East. He was killed in action in Burma in March 1945, only weeks before the war in Europe ended. He was 36. Sydney and David never recovered from it.

Tom’s death is the private grief that sits underneath everything the sisters did in the second half of their lives. The one loss they could all agree to mourn without qualification, no matter how far apart their politics had driven them. Now, let us take the sisters one at a time. She was the eldest.

 Born in November 1904, she ruled the nursery until the arrival of Pamela 3 years later dethroned her forever. And Nancy Mittford spent the rest of her life responding to that specific betrayal. Her weapon was language. She was by every account the wittiest of the six and the crulest. She could shred a person in a sentence and often did.

 Her sisters were her first and best material. She sharpened her teeth on them for two decades before she ever published a book. She wrote her first novel, Highland Fling, in her late 20s. It was a small success. Her second, Christmas Pudding, followed. Her third, Wigs on the Green, published in 1935, was the one that changed everything, a satirical comedy about a fascist movement in the English countryside, in which Nancy took her sister Diana’s new lover, Oswald Mosley, and her sister Unity’s new obsession with Hitler, and

turned them into figures of ridicule. Diana never quite forgave her. Their relationship, once close, was fractured for years by that single book. It was the first great Mittford lesson in what happens when one sister makes fiction out of another. But NY’s private life was worse than any novel she wrote. In her 20ies, she fell in love with a young man named Haish Erskin.

 Charming, handsome, unsuitable, and though Nancy either did not know or would not admit it, entirely uninterested in women, she wasted four years on him, planning a wedding that was never going to happen. When it finally ended when he invented a fake engagement to another woman rather than tell Nancy the truth, she was devastated.

Within weeks, she agreed to marry Peter Rod. Peter was tall, drunk, and in her sister Diana’s later description. Had proposed to at least two other women in the same week he proposed to Nancy. He was a disaster from the day of the wedding onward, he borrowed money he did not repay. He talked constantly and about nothing. He cheated openly.

 Nancy called him prod in her letters. She stayed married to him for 22 years anyway. She wrote through all of it. In 1945, she published The Pursuit of Love based transparently on her own family. It was a bestseller. It made her name. She followed it with Love in a Cold Climate, which did the same thing again with slightly different pieces of the same family.

Everyone she had ever known was in those books, thinly disguised. Some of them were hurt, some of them were flattered. Nancy did not stop. She fell in love finally and properly with a free French officer named Gaston Palooi during the war. He was the great love of her life. He did not love her back, not with anything like the intensity she poured into him.

 He was charming, married other women, went home to France, married a duchess. Nancy followed him to Paris and stayed there for the rest of her life, writing him letters, waiting for visits, arranging her entire existence around a man who was fond of her and going home to someone else. There is one more thing about Nancy Mittford that took decades to become public knowledge, and it is the darkest single fact in the entire relationship between these six sisters.

During the war, when her sister Diana was interned by the British government for her fascist ties, Nancy quietly walked into the offices of MI5 in the summer of 1940 and told them everything she knew. She said Diana was an extremely dangerous person. She said Diana was more devoted to fascism than her husband Mosley was and more intelligent about it.

 She said Diana should not be released under any circumstances. She was in effect making sure her own sister stayed in prison. Diana was at that moment breastfeeding an 11week old baby in Holay. Nancy never told Diana what she had done. She continued to write to her, to visit her in prison, to laugh with her, to holiday with her in France after the war, to sit in her drawing rooms and gossip with her about the family and their childhoods for the next 33 years.

 Their correspondence in that period is warm, teasing, chatty, full of the private nicknames and bowledge nonsense of the nursery. All of it on Diana’s side was said to a woman who had gone to British intelligence and asked them to lock her up and keep her locked up. Diana learned what her sister had done years after Nancy was dead.

Nancy died in 1973. It was in the 1980s through published biographies, letters, and diaries of contemporaries that the outlines of what Nancy had told the authorities began to appear in print. Diana was in her 70s by then. She read what her sister had said about her 40 years earlier.

 She never got to read the official intelligence files themselves. Those were not formally declassified until November 2003, 3 months after Diana’s own death in August of that year. She died without ever having seen the words on the page. She only ever knew what other biographers said had been written. She said publicly that she forgave Nancy in private.

 Close friends said something in her had gone cold. There is no way to know what she felt in her last decades. Sitting in her beautiful house outside Paris, thinking about the sister who had written her thousands of loving letters, knowing all along what she had done. There is only the record. The record is what it is.

 Nancy died of Hodgkins lymphoma in 1973 in her Paris apartment at the age of 68. Palooi visited her at the end. She left almost everything to the sister who would need at least Deborah, the Duchess of Devincshire, because she believed correctly that Deborah would look after everything with the practical seriousness Nancy herself had never quite managed for her own life.

 She was the second daughter, born in 1907, and in a family this loud, being quiet was itself a kind of statement. Nancy hated her from the moment of her birth, as we have seen. But Pamela did not fight back. She was, by every account, simply not built for the family theater. Where Nancy stabbed and Diana glided and Unity roared, Pamela wanted to feed the chickens and go to bed at 9.

 She contracted polio as a child. It left her with a permanent limp and more importantly with a sense of her own separateness from her sisters. She loved horses, dogs, the countryside, and simple domestic order. She had from very early absolutely no interest in politics, celebrity, or the London social world that would consume the rest of her family.

When Diana was being introduced to Hitler, and Jessica was running away to fight fascists in Spain, and Nancy was skewering everyone she knew in her novels, Pamela was reading recipes. In 1936, she married Derek Jackson, a physicist and a jockey, a wildly eccentric man, brilliant, rich, and bisexual.

 He was one of the few husbands in the whole Mittford story, who was genuinely a match for the family’s oddness on his own terms. Their marriage lasted 15 years. It ended, more or less, when Derek fell in love with Pamela’s own younger sister-in-law by a previous marriage, an entirely characteristic Mittford piece of family symmetry.

 After the divorce, Pamela lived with a horsewoman named Juda Tamari for nearly two decades. It was in the discrete language of upperass England in the 1950s and 1960s, a partnership that friends and family understood perfectly well without discussing. Pamela never called it what it was. She did not need to.

 She had always, more than any of her sisters, known how to keep the important things to herself. She spent the rest of her life in the Cotswwells, raising her poultry, cooking for friends, and being visited by her sisters when they wanted to be somewhere quiet for a weekend. She had, by every account, the happiest and most peaceful life of the six.

One journalist described the sisters this way. Diana the fascist, Jessica the communist, Unity the Hitler lover, Nancy the novelist, Deborah the Duchess, and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur. That was in the end exactly the summary Pamela would have chosen for herself. She died of an embolism in April 1994, aged 86, after breaking her leg on the way home from the opera.

 Her sisters wept. She had all her life been the one who did not want to be a Mittford. In her own quiet way, she had almost succeeded. She was the third sister and the beauty. Everyone who ever met her said it. James Lee’s Mil seeing her at 18, wrote that she was the nearest thing to physical perfection he had ever encountered.

 Photographs from her 20ies still confirm it. Diana Mitford’s beauty was the first thing anyone noticed about her, and the last thing anyone was ever able to fully separate from what came afterward. In 1929, at 18, she married Brian Guinness. He was heir to a Guinness barren, part of the great brewing fortune, and he was by every account gentle, decent, adoring, and completely mad about her.

They lived in one of London’s most glittering houses. She had two sons with him. She was at 19 the golden queen of a whole generation of bright young things, the aristocratic, glamorous, deliberately frivolous set who had turned London social life into a rolling costume party in the late 1920s. She threw all of it away for a fascist.

Oswald Mosley’s sixth baronet was 36 when Diana met him in 1932. He was married to Lady Cynthia Kerzon, a daughter of the former viceroy of India. He was a former Conservative MP, a former Labour MP and had just founded the British Union of Fascists. He was, in the summary of nearly everyone who knew him, a man of extraordinary charisma, extraordinary vanity, and extraordinary cruelty in his personal relationships.

He seduced Diana. He had no intention at first of leaving his wife. He told Diana so directly. Diana left Guinness anyway. She set up her own house in London, a beautiful house filled with beautiful things and lived there openly as Mosley’s mistress with her two young children waiting for Mosley to be free.

Her father, David, was so appalled that he cut off contact and forbade the rest of the family from speaking to her. Her mother, Sydney, tried to maintain relations privately. Her sister Nancy wrote Wigs on the Green, the novel mocking Mosley and Unity’s obsessions, which nearly ended that sister relationship entirely.

Only Unity, who was by then developing her own passion for the man Mosley worshiped in Munich, took Diana’s side wholeheartedly. In May 1933, Mosley’s wife Cynthia Simei died at 34. And the way she died is one of the most complicated details in the entire Mitford record. She had been sinking for months.

 Her husband’s affair with Diana was the talk of London, and Simei had watched it happen from the sidelines of her own marriage, growing lonier and more depressed as it accelerated. She was taken to hospital in early May for an appendix operation. The surgery itself was successful. On the evening of the operation, believing his wife to be out of danger, Mosley left her hospital room and went to spend the evening with Diana.

 It was in the days after that surgery that peritonitis set in and Sime began to fail. Once he understood she was dying, Mosley did come to her bedside. By multiple accounts, he stayed there night and day for her final days, genuinely stricken, pleading with her to fight. She would not. Her friends said afterwards that Sime, having watched her husband conduct his affair openly for the better part of a year, had simply lost the will to live.

 She died on the 16th of May 1933. Mosley’s grief was by every account real. He was all the same. The man who had produced it. Within months he had begun a fresh affair with Simey’s own sister, Baba Met, and was moving between her and Diana with the same casual cruelty he had shown to his wife. Diana waited. Diana always waited.

 She would say afterwards, in her own defense, that she had always assumed Simei understood the arrangement. Whether that was ever true or whether it was one of the stories Diana told herself in order to keep functioning at all is a question the historical record cannot settle. What is settled is that a young woman had lost the will to live watching her husband conduct an affair in public with her rival, and that Diana would spend the rest of her long life refusing to say a single word, suggesting that she felt guilty about any of it. Free at

last, Mosley did not immediately marry Diana. Extraordinarily, given what he had put her through, he kept her in a suspended. Unofficial status for another 3 years, while he continued to conduct affairs with other women. Diana waited. She built a house. She raised her two Guinness sons.

 She started to travel more and more with her sister Unity, to Germany, the country whose new leader Mosley had begun to admire and whose politics Diana had begun to absorb as if by osmosis. She started going to the Nuremberg rallies. She was given personally by Hitler a chauffeur and a Mercedes for the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

 She was by the middle of that decade moving inside a world that most British aristocrats knew only from newspapers. In October 1936, Mosley finally married her not in London, not in England, but in Berlin in the drawing room of the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Gbles. Only six people were present. Adolf Hitler was the guest of honor.

 He arrived carrying a wedding gift, a signed photograph of himself in a heavy silver frame. The wedding was kept secret. Diana did not tell her family. She did not tell the British public. It was more than 2 years before the news leaked, at which point Diana’s transformation from society beauty to public villain became complete and permanent.

 In May 1940, with Britain now at war with Germany, Diana was arrested under Defense Regulation 18B, the emergency wartime law that allowed the internment of British citizens, considered a threat to national security. She was 3 months into breastfeeding her second son with Mosley Max. She was taken to Holay prison and held without trial.

 She would remain in prison for 3 and 1/2 years while London burned around her. Winston Churchill, who was a first cousin of Diana’s mother-in-law by her first marriage, the Mitfords existed in a network of cousin that was almost impossible to escape, personally intervened to allow the Mosley’s to be imprisoned together and eventually released under house arrest in 1943 when Mosley’s health was failing. Diana never renounced anything.

Not Mosley, not Hitler, not fascism, not her past. She lived for another 60 years, most of it in a beautiful house outside Paris called the Temple Deagua, the Temple of Glory. She was interviewed by the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 1989 and used the airtime to defend Hitler as fascinating.

 In her 90s, she was still denying the Holocaust in the pages of British newspapers. She died in 2003, aged 93, still married to Mosley in memory he had died in 1980. Still elegant, still unrepentant. Her funeral was small and private. Her name still could not be spoken in Britain without a fight breaking out. She had spent 70 years being the most beautiful woman anyone had ever seen, and 70 years being the most hated.

 Both had been true. Neither had canceled the other out. She was the fourth daughter born on the 8th of August 1914 which was as her father liked to remind people the month the first world war began. Her middle name was Valkyrie. She was conceived her family joked darkly in a place called Swastika in Ontario, Canada, where her father had briefly invested in a gold mine.

 These coincidences, harmless enough at the time, would come to look like the setup of a story so on the nose that only real life would dare tell it. She was the odd one from the beginning. Not clever like Nancy, not beautiful like Diana, not practical like Pamela. She was tall, nearly 6 feet, and physically ungainainely, and by every account both fearless and completely uninterested in what anyone else thought of her.

 She brought a pet rat to her debutant ball. She stole writing paper from Buckingham Palace at a court presentation, apparently for the pleasure of the theft itself. What Unity Mitford needed and what her upbringing had given her no shape for was a cause to devote herself to absolutely. When she found it, she found it in the worst place available in the 20th century.

 She met Diana on a trip in 1933 and was introduced through Diana’s Mosley connection to Nazism as a serious political movement where Diana’s fascism was intellectual, aesthetic, coldly political, an alignment of taste and philosophy. That Diana believed in the way one might believe in a school of art unities was religious in its intensity.

She did not become a fascist. She became a fanatical devote. She had spent her whole childhood looking for something big enough to fill the shape of what was inside her. and she had until this point found nothing. Nazism gave her something the size of her hunger. In 1934 she moved to Munich alone with her mother’s uneasy permission ostensibly to learn German. She was 19 years old.

 Her family thought it was a temporary trip. It was not. What she did in Munich was track down the German dictator. She had learned that he ate lunch most days at a particular restaurant in the city called the Auststeria Bavaria. And she began going there for lunch herself. Everyday for 10 months she would sit alone at a table near his in her tweed skirts and her sensible English shoes, reading, drinking coffee, arranging herself to be noticeable.

 Hitler and his party saw her everyday and for the better part of a year ignored her entirely. She did not stop coming. On the 9th of February 1935, Hitler finally sent an aid over to invite her to join his table. It was one of the strangest social introductions in the history of the 20th century. She was from that moment part of his personal circle.

 She was invited to Nazi party events. She was given the seats she wanted at rallies. She was traveled with, dined with, photographed on the arm of the man who was at that moment planning what would become the largest crime in human history. She wore a swastika badge that Hitler had given her personally. She learned enough German to hold conversations with him.

 She wrote home to her sisters in a mixture of English, German, and the family’s private nursery languages, giving them accounts of what he had said to her over lunch. Between February 1935 and the outbreak of the war in September 1939, according to her own diaries that were recovered and published in recent years, Unity Mittford met Adolf Hitler at least 139 times.

 What that friendship was exactly has been debated for 80 years. There was no romance in any conventional sense. The evidence for a physical relationship is thin. What is not in doubt is that Unity Mittford had access to the most dangerous man in the world in a way that virtually no other foreigner ever did. She sat with him at rallies. She traveled with his party.

She was photographed at Nuremberg wearing a swastika armband. She wrote a letter to a Nazi propaganda newspaper at the dictator’s suggestion declaring herself openly and virolently anti-semitic. She was in Germany treated as something between a curiosity and a mascot evidence in Hitler’s carefully staged inner circle that even English aristocrats understood what he was doing.

 On the 3rd of September 1939, Britain declared war on Germany. Unity understood immediately that the two loyalties of her life, England and the Furer, could no longer be reconciled. She went to Munich’s English garden, sat down on a bench, and turned a small pistol on herself, a weapon the dictator himself had given her. She survived.

 The bullet had lodged in her brain, but had not killed her. Hitler personally arranged for her to receive medical care in Munich, then arranged for her through Switzerland to be sent home to England, still alive, but with a bullet permanently embedded in her skull. She arrived back at Focus in January 1940 as a stretcher case.

 She had the mental capacity, according to her mother’s private accounts, of a small child. She could not walk properly. She was incontinent. She was afraid of the dark. She had, in every sense that mattered, ceased to exist as the person her family had known. Her mother, Sydney, nursed her alongside a series of hired carers for the next 8 years, first in London, then on the remote family island of Inch Kenneth off the Scottish coast, which David had bought as an escape.

 Unity was cared for. Unity was fed. Unity was walked out into the wind. She was, by every account of those years, a shell. She died in May 1948 of menitis caused by the wound she had never fully recovered from. She was 33 years old. She was buried at the small parish church in Swinbrook, where her family’s Oxfordshire home had been.

 Her gravestone reads, “Say not the struggle not of Alith.” It is a line from a Victorian poem about perseverance in a lost cause. Reading it now on a stone in an English churchyard belonging to a girl who had devoted herself so completely to a foreign dictator is one of the strangest experiences a visitor to the 20th century can have.

She was born in 1917 the fifth daughter. Everyone called her Deca. And where Unity had chosen the far right absolutely and Diana had chosen it more coldly, Deca went the other way. And she went there just as hard. She was Unity’s closest sister in childhood. The two of them shared a bedroom and characteristically for this family drew a chalk line down the middle of it unities half decorated with swastikas and photographs of Hitler.

 Deca’s half with hammer and sickles and pictures of Lenin. It was a joke and it was not a joke. Both of them by their late teens meant it. Deca opened a bank account as a child. She called it her running away money. She saved into it for years. What she meant to run from was never in serious doubt she wanted out of the family, out of the class, out of the entire suffocating world Sydney had built around them.

 In 1937, she got her chance. Her second cousin, Esmond Romy, a nephew of Winston Churchill, and by legend, though never proved, possibly his illegitimate son, had run away at 15 to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. He came back a hero of the British left, published a book about his experiences, and at 19 was preparing to return to Spain to cover the war as a journalist.

 Deca met him at a country weekend, fell in love within hours, and told him she was coming with him. She was 19. She emptied her running away account. They eloped to Spain. When her family discovered where she had gone, Sydney demanded action. The British government on the personal request of the Redsales dispatched a Royal Navy destroyer to the Spanish coast to bring Deca home.

 Deca refused to board. She married Desmond in Bayon instead. They returned to London and lived deliberately in poverty in a shabby flat in Rotherive among workingclass neighbors as far away as it was possible to get from Swinbrook and Rutland Gate. In February 1937, Deca gave birth to a daughter Julia in the spring of 1938.

 A measles epidemic swept through their neighborhood. Julia caught it. She was 4 months old. She did not survive. Deca almost never spoke or wrote about Julia afterwards. It is one of the great silences in the Mittford correspondence. 4 million words that go around the wound rather than through it. Deca and Esmond left England after Julia’s death, went first to Corsica, and then in early 1939 sailed for America.

 she would never live in England again. They lived in Washington and then Miami doing odd jobs before Esman joined the Canadian Air Force in 1941. On a bombing raid over the North Sea in November 1941, his plane went down. Esmond was 23. Deca was 24 and had a second infant daughter, Constansia, called Dinky. She stayed in America. She met a Jewish civil rights lawyer named Bob Troy Haft and married him in 1943.

They moved to Oakland, California, and together they joined the American Communist Party not as fashionable fellow travelers but as genuine card carrying members at a moment when American Communism was becoming a life destroying association. They stayed in the party for 15 years. Deca worked for the Civil Rights Congress, an organization the US government would later brand a subversive front.

 She raised money for the defense of black defendants in racist southern courts. She was, by the standards of the American establishment in the 1950s, exactly the kind of person the McCarthy hearings had been designed to break. In 1953, she was subpoenaed to testify before the House on American Activities Committee.

 She showed up in a hat, took the Fifth Amendment, refused to name a single other American communist, and walked out. She was all her life an unbelievably effective operator inside American political culture, partly because she had grown up in a household where you learn to argue back at your father before you learn to read. She marched in the American South during the civil rights movement.

 She was arrested for it. She wrote pamphlets, letters, articles. She was by the mid 1950s, one of the most well-known left-wing figures in California. And then in 1963, she became a best-selling author. Her book was called The American Way of Death, and it was a devastating investigative expose of the American funeral industry, The Racket, by which grieving families were talked into ever more expensive coffins, embalming, and rituals they did not need and often could not afford.

 It changed the industry. It made her famous. She was in the second half of her life one of the most respected muckreking journalists in America. She never spoke to Diana again. Not really, not properly. Diana’s fascism and unities and the shadow of it all on their brother Tom, who had drifted toward fascism himself before dying in Burma, was for Deca unforgivable.

 She kept in touch with Deborah. She was in later years fond of Nancy. But between Deca and Diana, there was a wall that neither ever climbed. When Diana was released from prison in 1943, Deca wrote to Churchill demanding that she be re-imprisoned. She meant it. Deca died of lung cancer in July 1996, aged 78.

 Maya Angelou, whom Deca had befriended late in life, visited her everyday at the end, and sang to her. She was buried according to her instructions without ceremony. Her ashes were scattered at sea. Her funeral, when it happened, was an Irish wake at which, when the Saints Go Marching In was played. She was, of all six sisters, the one who had chosen most consciously what she wanted to be, and had most consistently become it.

She was the youngest, born in 1920, and she outlived them all. Deborah was called Debo and sometimes nine a nickname Nancy had given her, meaning that Nancy considered her mental age to be permanently fixed at that number. It was not a nickname a kinder sister would have chosen. Nancy was not most of the time a kind sister.

 Debo was practical, cheerful, and by the standards of the Mittford family, almost aggressively normal. She was interested in horses, houses, land, and family. She was not interested in ideology. She had been born into the last quiet stretch of Sydney’s parenting when her mother had grown tired, and she had grown up watching her older sisters explode outward across the political map.

 She drew the lesson that most sensible youngest children in dramatic families draw. Whatever they did, don’t. Her friend from her teenage years was Kathleen Kennedy Kick, the sister of John F. Kennedy. Kick was in England because her father was serving as US ambassador to the court of saint. James, she and Debo became close and through kick dbo met the entire Kennedy clan.

She danced with JFK at a debutant ball. She would remain for the rest of her long life connected to the American Kennedy story in a way that no other Mittford was. In April 1941 at 20, Debo married Lord Andrew Caendish, the youngest son of the 10th Duke of Devonshire. He was not expected to inherit.

 His older brother Billy was the heir and Billy was engaged to Kick Kennedy. In 1944, Billy married Kick. 4 months later, Billy was killed in action in Belgium. 4 years after that, Kick herself was killed in a plane crash in France. And Debo’s husband Andrew entirely unexpectedly became the 11th Duke of Devshshire. Debo became the Duchess of Devshshire, mistress of Chhatzsworth House, one of the greatest country houses in England.

 A palace built for kings across three centuries, containing a collection of paintings, books, and treasures that ranked among the finest in private hands anywhere in the world. Debo and Andrew inherited it in the late 1940s in a state of near ruin. Death duties on the 10th Duke had come in at 80% of the estate’s value.

The family owed the British government £7 million, an unthinkable sum for the period. Everyone assumed Chhatzworth was finished along with the rest of the great English country houses that were being demolished by the hundreds in the postwar years. Taken down for scrap by families who could no longer afford to heat them.

 What Debo did next is the reason Chhatzsworth still stands today. She and Andrew agreed in a decision that horrified other members of their class that the house would have to earn its own keep and that this meant opening it to the public. She threw the doors open. She let the public in. She sold postcards in the gift shop.

 She priced the tickets carefully. She built farm shops and restaurants and eventually a whole commercial operation around the estate. She wrote books, plainly written, cheerfully unlitery books about her house and her hens and her chickens and her memories of her Kennedy friends that became unexpected bestsellers.

 The other sisters found this hilarious. Nancy in Paris teased her mercilessly about becoming a shopkeeper. Debo did not mind. She was the least intellectually flashy of the six sisters and in the actual practical work of preserving something across a lifetime, by far the most successful. Every visitor to Chhatzworth today walking through rooms that would have been dismantled and sold off long ago if Debo had not made the decision she made in the 1950s and 1960s.

Is walking through the achievement of the sister everyone had underestimated. Her marriage to Andrew was long and unequal. He drank heavily and cheated openly, most notably with the writer and socialite Kick Kennedy’s own former friends. Debo endured it. She said later that she had loved him without illusion and that this had been the secret to lasting 59 years married to him. He died in 2004.

She lived another decade. She was the last Mittford. In her 90s, she still gave interviews, still wrote thank you letters in her own hand. still knew the name of every gamekeeper at Chadzsworth. She died in September 2014, aged 94. Her coffin was plain. Tributes poured in from farmers, journalists, royalty, the surviving Kennedys, and the whole extended cousinage of the aristocratic world she had spent her lifeeping in working order.

 She had outlived not just her sisters, but the century that had made them. Six sisters, six lives that between them touched fascism and communism, Buckingham Palace and Nuremberg, McCarthy hearings and civil rights marches, prison cells and jugal palaces. One of them married Hitler’s favorite British aristocrat. One of them worshiped Hitler personally.

 One of them married a communist and marched with the Narc. One of them wrote the family’s history into best-selling fiction and secretly into an MI5 file. One of them saved a palace. One of them kept chickens. The question people have always asked about the Mitfords and never answered is how one household could produce such wildly divergent lives.

 The convenient explanation is ideology the 1930s made everyone choose. And these were girls raised to be interesting rather than to be safe. The harder explanation is temperamental. Nancy needed to wound. Diana needed to worship. Unity needed to belong to something. Absolutely. Jessica needed to escape. Debo needed a house to run. Pamela needed to be left alone.

 Their ideologies in every case seemed to have been chosen to fit the shape of a personal need that came first. Fascism did not make unity what she was. Unity was already what she was. And fascism gave her something big enough to attach herself to. That is the darker version of their story.

 In the family they were born into talented, aristocratic, uneducated, isolated, competitive, obsessed with each other, the 20th century simply handed each of them a costume that fit. Communism for the runaway, fascism for the worshipper, aristocracy for the beautiful youngest, fiction for the wounded eldest. Each of them found the ideology her nature had prepared her for.

 And then because they were sisters, they spent the rest of their lives fighting about it in letters they wrote to each other in a language they had invented as children. 12,000 letters, six lives. One brother who fell in Burma at the very end of the war. Two parents who lived to see one daughter die with a Nazi bullet still lodged in her brain.

 Another daughter emerged from three and a half years in a British prison. A third daughter marching for civil rights in America. A fourth writing bestsellers in Paris. a fifth running a duche and a sixth quietly running a farm. David Reersdale died in 1958, having barely spoken to his surviving daughters for years, worn out by the family he had somehow produced.

 Sydney lived until 1963. She survived four of her seven children and outlived by the end the entire political century she had been born into. Sit for a moment with what that meant for her. She had married a broken man from a hospital bed in 1904 for love, and she had raised seven children in one of the most quietly extraordinary experiments in 20th century, parenting no schools, no outside friends.

 No external checks on any of it. And the results of that experiment had been laid out in front of her one at a time in the newspapers and in the letters that kept arriving for the entire second half of her life. She lived to bury Tom in Burma. She lived to nurse unity for 8 years after the wound that had broken her mind.

 She lived to visit Diana in Holay prison. She lived through NY’s public disasters, Jessica’s flight to America, Deborah becoming a duchess. She said near the end of her life that of all her daughters, the one she felt she had understood least was Diana. She did not say which she had understood most. She would probably have said it was Pamela, the daughter, who had chosen not to be a Mitford at all.

 The grandeur and the grief as always lived side by side. The Mitfords produced beauty and cruelty and brilliance and unforgivable politics. Sometimes in the same person, sometimes in the same afternoon. They did not fit any single moral. They did not resolve into any tidy lesson. They were all six of them gloriously, catastrophically, uncontainably alive.

And they went at the 20th century, every side of it, every corner of it, with the same instinct their whole family had brought to every argument since the nursery. Whatever you believe, believe it harder. And never let a sister have the last word. They almost never did. There is always in a Mittford story one more letter arriving, one more sister replying, one more voice from the past still trying to be heard.

 And now the letters have stopped. The last of them, Debo, went in 2014. What remains is the archive 12,000 letters, dozens of books, a whole centuries worth of contradictions preserved in six voices that argued their way through everything, and in the end could not stop writing to each other, even when they had nothing left to say.

 Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, Deborah, six sisters, one family, and a story that whatever else you say about it will never come again. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to our channel so you never miss out on more fascinating stories.