The Mitford Sisters were British aristocrats who gained immense notoriety in the 20th century  for often scandalous reasons. As such, some were hated but others were loved! The six  have been dubbed, the duchess, the fascist, the communist, the Nazi, the novelist and the  other one.

 So, why were they so controversial and just how did they become famous? Join me  as we go in deep into the life of each sister! The Mitford Family Before we explore the lives of each sister, we need to look at their  family History. The Mitford Family from which the six Mitford Sisters hailed can trace its origins  in England to back before the Norman Conquest of the country in the eleventh century.

 At the time  William the Conqueror crossed over from France with his Norman knights to conquer England  the family was headed by Sir John de Mitford who ruled Mitford Castle in Northumberland  in the north of the country on the Scottish border. Incredibly, the Mitfords retained a  landed presence here for the next 800 years. The sisters’ father was David  Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford, the second Baron Redesdale in the English  peerage.

 He was notoriously eccentric, but the family was relatively accomplished. For  instance, his great-great-grandfather had been a noted British historian in the early nineteenth  century. Their mother was Sydney Bowles, whose father Thomas was a member of parliament  and a prominent writer and publisher who founded several well-known British magazines of the  time, including the original Vanity Fair.

David and Sydney had seven children in all  following their marriage in 1904. The eldest Nancy was born just months after their wedding.  Pamela was born in 1907 and was followed soon after by Thomas, their only son, in January 1909.  Their third daughter was born in 1910. There was a lull before Unity was born in August 1914, just  days after the outbreak of the First World War in which David served in France. Jessica was born  in 1917 followed finally by Deborah in 1920.

Thomas would only live until his mid-thirties  as he was killed in service in the final months of the Second World War in 1945 fighting in  the Pacific theatre. The sisters, though, would nearly all go on to live long lives. These  were shaped significantly by their parents, with David being staunchly conservative,  while Sarah flirted throughout the 1930s and 1940s with fascism.

 The family would go  on to become one of the most notorious in England during the twentieth century, with  some members lauded and others scorned. NANCY MITFORD Nancy Mitford was born on the  28th of November 1904 in London. Nancy’s childhood was a peculiar one. Her parents  were eccentrics who briefly experimented with a novel idea for the time that children should not  be rebuked or spoken to in anger.

 The result, according to biographers of the eldest Mitford  sister, was that she became a troublesome child who would descend into fits of rage if she  did not get what she wanted. As a result, her parents abandoned their experiment and began  parenting in a manner more typical of the times. Nancy and her siblings were educated for the  most part by private tutors and governesses at the family estate of Redesdale.

 It was often a  strained environment, one in which the sisters fought over many issues and in which Nancy was  known to be a domineering figure who teased her younger siblings. Yet there were also signs  of her future work as a writer emerging in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Nancy, for instance,  took the lead in editing and producing a family magazine called The Boiler which she and  her siblings contributed pieces to.

 At this early stage in her literary development, Nancy  primarily composed murder and mystery stories. The ‘Bright Young Things’ Nancy turned eighteen in November 1922. This was an era in which  one’s debutante ball was still a major event, one made even more so by the fact that Nancy’s  life had been so sheltered for most of her youth, and the event marked Nancy’s entry into British  high society at the time.

 The following summer she was introduced to the royal court and  met King George V at Buckingham Palace. Nancy soon established herself as  part of the ‘Bright Young Things’, a group of daughters and sons of the British  aristocracy in the 1920s who became known for their artistic pursuits and bohemian lifestyles.

  This included some of the Mitford sisters, the Sitwell siblings, Anthony Powell, John  Betjeman and several others. Eventually, many of these went on to become noted writers,  painters and poets in the 1930s and 1940s. None though became as accomplished as Evelyn Waugh, the  author of Brideshead Revisited which was published in 1945. Waugh and Nancy became close friends  and would remain so for the rest of their lives.

The ‘Bright Young Things’ became well-known at the  time for throwing lavish parties in London and for their heavy drinking and drug use. This was a  time of heightened partying in many countries, driven by the incredible economic boom  which had followed from the end of the First World War, and the social scene  in England became very extravagant.

Early Works & Marriage In part owing to Waugh’s encouragement and in part because of  her own long-held interest in doing so, Nancy began writing in a more sustained  manner in the second half of the 1920s. This was not a new departure for her family.  Nancy’s great-great-great-grandfather on her father’s side had been a well-respected  historian in the early nineteenth century, while her maternal grandfather, Thomas Bowles had  been a considerable writer himself who established several prominent magazines in the nineteenth  century, notably the original Vanity Fair. Thus,

Nancy’s decision to become a writer was  in keeping with the family background. By the end of the 1920s she was writing a regular  column for The Lady magazine. Soon after acquiring this position, she began work on a fictional  novel, one which would eventually be published in the spring of 1931 as Highland Fling.

 It recounts  a meeting of some aristocrats at a party in the Scottish Highlands, one which was characterised  by excess and acrimony between the guests. The work contained elements of a thinly disguised  biography and many of the characters in Highland Fling were based on friends and acquaintances of  Nancy’s amongst the ‘Bright Young Things’. Her subsequent efforts in the 1930s, such as Christmas  Pudding, published in 1932, and Wigs on the Green, which appeared in print in 1935, continued  this pattern of drawing on her own experiences.

In the midst of working on these books Nancy’s  love life had shifted. In the late 1920s she had been seeing Hamish St Clair Erskine, a son of  the Earl of Rosslyn, however the relationship was unfulfilling, primarily because Erskine  was gay, though Nancy appears to have been unaware of this fact at the time.

 She was also  seemingly oblivious to the fact that Erskine had been in a relationship with her brother Tom  at Oxford University whilst he was also dating Nancy. Nevertheless, their affair continued  until 1933 when Hamish abruptly ended it. Shocked, Nancy quickly began a relationship  with Peter Rodd, the son of the newly ennobled, Sir Rennell Rodd, first Baron Rennell.

 They  married in December 1933 after just a few months of courtship. However, the marriage was  almost immediately unhappy, with Peter engaging in extra-marital affairs. They would never have  children, though Nancy became pregnant on several occasions, but suffered miscarriages in each  instance. By the late 1930s it was clear to many that it was a marriage in name only to avoid  divorce, which still carried a social stigma.

World War II & Palewski In the late 1930s Nancy spent time editing the family letters  of the Stanley Family of Adderley, to whom the Mitfords were distantly related. In  early 1939 she went to the south of France and there helped care for wounded Spaniards who had  crossed the border along the Pyrenees fleeing from General Francisco Franco’s regime as it  solidified its control of Spain in the dying stages of the Spanish Civil War.

 This experience  hardened her political views against fascism, a political ideology which several of her  younger siblings were keen advocates of, notably, Diana who had married Oswald Mosley, the  leader of the British Union of Fascists, in 1936. When the Second World War broke out in the  autumn of 1939 it divided the Mitford family. Nancy supported British opposition to the Germans  and volunteered in numerous different capacities as an aid-worker during the war.

 In the course of  it, in September 1942, she met Gaston Palewski, a Frenchman who was living in London as an  aide to General Charles de Gaulle, the head of the Free French government in exile.  She soon became smitten with Palewski, who was evidently the real love of her  life, though Palewski’s attraction to her was less enthusiastic.

 As a result, when  the war ended in 1945 Nancy relocated to France shortly afterwards and went to live in  Paris. There she lived apart from Palewski, though near to his apartment. Her marriage  to Peter was effectively over by this time, though they would remain married on paper  and did not finally divorce until 1957. Life in France By the time Nancy settled in France she had finally achieved  the literary success that she had long aspired to. Her fifth book, The Pursuit of Love,  was published in 1945.

 A romantic comedy, it became a major hit in post-war Britain, where  readers were enthusiastic about an escapist novel at the end of six bleak years of war. It sold  200,000 copies in its first year on sale and made Nancy an established writer in Britain for the  first time. On the back of it she was offered a position writing a regular column for The Sunday  Times and became financially self-sufficient.

Despite the success of The Pursuit of Love  and her subsequent fiction works such as Love in a Cold Climate, published in 1949,  and Don’t Tell Alfred, published in 1960, which formed a trilogy alongside The  Pursuit of Love, Nancy moved away from writing fiction in the early 1950s, developing  instead a keen interest in writing historical biographies.

 The first such work which she  published was a book on Madame de Pompadour, a famous mistress of King Louis XV of France  between 1745 and 1751. The book was denigrated by historians and critics as a piece of popcorn  history which focused more on the scandalous elements of de Pompadour’s life rather than the  hard historical facts of the time, but it sold well and Nancy would spend much of the remainder  of her life writing historical biographies.

Palewski & Later Writings Throughout these years, Nancy’s relationship with Palewski remained a curious one. They never lived  together, though they spent much of their free time in each other’s company. However, they would  not marry and Palewski was unfaithful, engaging in a string of other relationships and gaining  a reputation in post-war France as a notorious womaniser.

 Moreover, as the years went by his work  often ensured he had little time to see Mitford, serving as Vice-President of the French parliament  for several years in the 1950s and thereafter being sent to Italy as the French ambassador to  the country in 1957. He would spend five years there during which Nancy rarely saw him. Moreover,  their relationship remained a secret for the most part and although Nancy finally divorced  Rodd in 1957 she and Palewski never married.

She also continued to write and publish  during these years. Three more works of historical biography followed on from Madame de  Pompadour. These were Voltaire in Love, a study of the eighteenth-century French philosopher’s  relationship with the Marquise de Chatelet in the 1740s, and studies of King Louis XIV of France  and King Frederick II of Prussia, two of early modern Europe’s foremost rulers.

 Her study of  Voltaire, in particular, was well received and is still considered a substantial study today of  the emotional life of the intellectual heavyweight of the French Enlightenment, while the  study of Louis XIV was a well-produced coffee table book with many illustrations of  Versailles Palace. It sold well as a result. Last Years & Death By the time she was writing these books in the late 1950s and 1960s  Nancy was in increasingly poor health.

 In particular she suffered from frequent headaches  and diminishing eyesight and feared that she was going blind. She was also increasingly downhearted  at the decline of her relationship with Palewski, whom she saw less and less frequently following  his return to Paris from Italy in 1962. Eventually he married the wealthy Duchesse de Sagan  in 1969, a move which deeply hurt Mitford.

By that time Nancy had moved to a new home  in Versailles in the suburbs of Paris. She was suffering from cancer by then, from  which she would never fully recover. In 1972 she was made a Chevalier of the  Legion d’Honneur for her contribution to French letters.

 Shortly thereafter she  returned to England for medical treatment, but her condition was dire and she spent the  last months of her life in considerable pain. Nancy Mitford died on the 30th of June  1973, aged 68 at home in Versailles. Her remains were cremated and were sent back  to England for burial in the family plot. PAMELA MITFORD Pamela Mitford was born on the  25th of November 1907 in Wilbury, Wiltshire in Southwest England.

 Pamela  was her parents’ second child as Nancy, another daughter had been  born three years earlier. The Mitfords had a peculiar childhood, raised by  extremely eccentric parents and home-schooled for the most part. Unlike many of her siblings,  Pamela never developed a great taste for city life and even in her childhood she loved the  animals on the Mitford country estate.

 This was a passion which would define much of her  adult life. Yet there were also troublesome aspects to her youth. She and her sisters were  strong-willed and highly opinionated on all manner of things. As they grew up a considerable  rivalry developed between them. Nancy, in particular, teased her younger sister  remorselessly, but as they grew older, she and Nancy remained closer, whereas the  sisters’ relationship with the middle sisters, Diana and Unity, and with Tom,  would be strained by their politics.

Pamela’s love of the outdoors, animals and  horse-riding developed despite physical limitations which plagued her in her  youth. She suffered from polio which had left her partially lame in one leg, but  she managed to overcome this and lead a life which was largely unaffected by it, though the  condition did hamper her movements in old age.

Younger Years As Pamela grew up her interest in all things rural, from gardening to cooking  with foraged ingredients became ever stronger. Her affection for animals was also notable and would  characterise much of her life. She spent time in London amongst the high society of the ‘Bright  Young Things’, with which her older sister Nancy and her younger sister Diana were associated,  but her heart remained in the countryside.

 The poet John Betjeman, whom Pamela knew in the 1920s  and 1930s and who was clearly besotted by her for a time, described her in an unpublished poem  of his entitled The Mitford Sisters as, quote, ‘Miss Pamela, most rural of them all’ on account  of her love of farm animals and preference for living a quiet life in the countryside tending  gardens and looking after horses, ponies and dogs.

The early 1930s were peculiar years for a young  woman who was interested in the simple things in life. The Mitford family’s politics were deeply  divided at this time. The sisters’ mother leaned towards fascism, which was spreading across  continental Europe at alarming speed during these years.

 Sydney’s political views rubbed  off on two of her daughters, Diana and Unity, and her and David’s only son, Tom. And these  political views became political ties from 1932 onwards when Diana first became the mistress of  Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, and then his wife. These ties ensured  that the Mitfords spent time in Germany with senior members of the Nazi regime, where Diana’s  marriage to Mosley took place in 1936.

 Yet Pamela seems to never have backed any of Diana, Unity  and Tom’s political views. Instead, when she and her mother met Adolf Hitler in the mid-1930s  Pamela exchanged recipes for wholemeal bread with the Nazi leader and her primary interest lay  in the baby potatoes which were served at lunch. Such practicalities were typical of  Pamela’s personality.

 Her sisters, who called her ‘Woman’, relied on her for  practical advice and it was noted that, quote, ‘Pam was often right but  seldom listened to’. In times of adversity throughout their lives many of her  siblings turned to her as a rock of stability. Sexuality and Marriage to Derek Jackson In the mid-1930s Pamela began a relationship with Derek Jackson.

 They bonded over a shared love  of equestrian activities, Jackson being a noted jockey, riding in the Grand National at Aintree  in 1935. He hailed from a wealthy Welsh family, his father, Sir Charles Jackson, having  been a chairman of the News of the World, but Jackson was independently successful  himself, having emerged as one of Britain’s leading atomic physicists in the 1930s and  acquiring a position at Oxford University.

Pamela and Derek’s relationship has long been  understood to have been one of convenience. Derek was bisexual, while Pamela was almost  certainly a lesbian, but since she was so private about her personal life, there is little  concrete evidence to confirm this. They married in 1936 and whatever their relationship might  have been in private it is clear that they were close to one another.

 Yet they did not have  children and Pamela would never become a mother, despite her sister Jessica once noting  that she would have made an ideal parent. When the Second World War broke out in the autumn  of 1939 Derek was called away often from their farm in Berkshire. His abilities as a physicist  made him valuable to the government and he spent much of the early years of the war helping to  improve the Royal Air Force’s air defence system and radars. Consequently, he flew more than a  thousand hours as a navigator during the conflict.

In stark contrast to Pamela’s husband’s wartime  service, in the summer of 1940 her sister Diana and Oswald Mosley were arrested on account of  their ties to Nazi Germany. The Nazis had just conquered France and with the Blitz of Britain  beginning in an effort to bomb or starve Britain into surrendering, Nazi sympathisers like the  Mosleys were arrested as a potential fifth column in the country who would feed information  to Berlin and possibly work to undermine the British war effort from within. Thus, Diana  would remain under arrest until November 1943.

The upshot of this was that some of her  children were taken in by Pamela and Derek at Rignell House, their country farm in Berkshire.  Despite her sister’s political affiliations, Pamela wrote regularly to Diana at  Holloway Prison and never disowned her, in contrast to the eldest of the Mitfords,  Nancy, who denounced Diana as a, quote, ‘sinister woman’.

 Eventually, as the defeat of  Nazi Germany became inevitable in the course of 1943 the Mosleys were released from prison  and allowed to remain under house arrest, at which time Alexander and Desmond  left Pamela and Derek’s home. Life at Tullamaine Castle In the aftermath of the Second World War Derek left his academic position and they  relocated to Ireland to live at Tullymaine Castle near Fethard in county Tipperary in the Irish  midlands.

 Built in the early nineteenth century, the castle was the centrepiece of a stud  farm and Pamela was in her element here, with her love for all things rural,  as was Derek owing to the fact that a major hunting meet was held here. Their  decision to relocate to Ireland was largely owing to a desire to avoid the high post-war  taxes which were being imposed on the landed gentry in Britain in the aftermath of the war  to pay for the enormously expensive conflict.

At Tullymaine, Pamela was not entirely shut off  from her remaining sisters. Deborah had married Andrew Cavendish, a son of the tenth Duke of  Devonshire, in 1941 and a few years later he had become the heir to the Cavendish estate, which  included Lismore Castle in county Waterford in Ireland, not far to the south of Tullymaine.

  Thus, in the spring and early summer Deborah would visit Ireland, while guests at Tullymaine  also included her elder sister Nancy and her lifelong literary friend, Evelyn Waugh, author  of Brideshead Revisited, whom Pamela also knew from the social circles they had moved in in  London during the 1920s and 1930s. A perhaps less welcome addition to the Mitford presence  in Ireland was the arrival of Pamela’s younger sister Diana in 1951 with her husband, Oswald  Mosley, after they purchased a house in Galway.

The Mosleys had become social exiles in post-war  Britain and had decided to leave the country. Pamela and Derek’s early years at Tullymaine  were happy ones, but while she was content to remain in the Irish countryside with  her horses, dogs and vegetable gardens, Derek eventually grew restless and wanted  to return to the lab.

 He began spending more and more time away in England and this,  combined with their complicated sexualities, led to them divorcing in 1950. The split  was formalised the following year. They sold Tullymaine Castle and Derek headed to  take up a position at the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris, but Pamela  worked out an arrangement whereby she continued to rent Tullymaine from the buyer even after  they had sold it. She stayed there until 1958.

Relationship with GiudittaTommasi During the years that Pamela and Derek had lived together at Tullymaine a friend  of theirs, an Italian horse-rider and trainer by the name Giuditta Tommasi had been a frequent  visitor there. She continued to call regularly throughout the 1950s after Derek and Pamela  separated and she and Pamela became companions, though the exact nature of their relationship  from a sexual standpoint remains somewhat unclear.

In 1958 when she elected to leave Tullymaine, Pamela relocated to Switzerland to live  with Tommasi. Evidently there was little disguising their relationship at this  point as Pamela’s sister Jessica said she had become a “you-know-what-bian” and referred  to Tommasi as Pamela’s, quote, ‘German wife’, though why she described the Italian woman as  German remains something of a mystery.

 Pamela and she were evidently happy here for many years and  she lived in Switzerland throughout most of the 1960s. Eventually they decided to part ways, but  Pamela did not leave Switzerland until her dogs, many of which were old at that time had died as  she was unwilling to force them to relocate to England in their old age. It was an indication  of where her priorities lay throughout her life.

When she eventually did leave Switzerland in  1972 it was to live in the rural Cotswolds in Gloucestershire. Her return to England  brought her the distinction of being the woman who introduced the Appenzeller Spitzhauben  breed of chicken to Britain from Switzerland. Last Years & Death Pamela’s old age was spent in rural England with her animals and garden. Yet  it was not an entirely quiet or solitary life.

She visited Ireland on occasion when Deborah  was at Lismore and despite the family’s very differing politics she spent some winters in South  Africa with Diana, where the Mosleys’ political views did not make them persona non grata with the  Afrikaner community in the context of Apartheid. In the 1980s she belatedly had a brief television  career.

 In 1980 she appeared in a documentary entitled Nancy Mitford: A Portrait by her Sisters  in which she offered numerous recollections of her older sister while sitting by the River  Windrush in Gloucestershire and posing by her ponies on her farm. Four years later she was  invited on a chat show to discuss chickens, a performance which was evidently noteworthy  enough for Deborah to ironically state that Pamela should have her own chat show  exclusively on the subject of poultry.

Pamela was staying with a friend in London in  the early 1990s when she fell down a flight of stairs and broke two bones in the leg which had  been weak throughout her life on account of her childhood polio. She had surgery, but never  fully recovered, and died in hospital on the 12th of April 1994 at the age of 86.

 True to  her equine passions throughout her life, with her last words she is believed to have inquired  what horse had won the Grand National at Aintree three days earlier. DIANA MITFORD Diana Mitford was born on the 17th of June  1910 in London in England. She was the third daughter and fourth child of David  Freeman-Mitford, second Baron Redesdale, and Sydney Freeman-Mitford, whose maiden name  was Bowles and who hailed from a literary family.

Diana, like the other Mitford children  grew up in a somewhat isolated environment, being home schooled on their parents’ estates in  Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. Yet, in 1926, she was briefly sent to be schooled in Paris for  about six months. She cannot have known it at the time, but she would live much of her later  life in the French capital.

 Even by that time, Diana had developed an easy charm which pulled  people into her circle and her younger sisters, Unity, Jessica and Deborah looked up to her  rather than the two eldest Mitford sisters, Nancy and Pamela. Eventually the spell  would break for Jessica and Deborah, but Unity’s adoration of her sister would  contribute to her own tragic life story.

Marriage to Bryan Guinness The Mitfords had long remained secluded in Oxfordshire, but by the 1920s the eldest sisters,  Nancy and Pamela, had been introduced at the royal court and into London society, socialising with  some of the mid-twentieth century’s most prominent writers and artistic figures in their youth.

 Each  of the Mitford sisters responded to these newfound freedoms in different ways. Diana, who was well  noted by the late 1920s as the prettiest of the Mitford sisters, married almost as soon as she  was released from the shackles of the Mitford estate in Oxfordshire. When she was just 18 years  of age, she secretly got engaged to the handsome and charming Bryan Guinness, heir to the Irish  brewing dynasty whose surname graces pints of porter all over the world.

 When she informed her  parents, they were initially reluctant to allow her to marry due to her young age. However,  they eventually gave in and when Diana and Guinness married in January 1929 it was one of  the weddings of the year in British high society. Her marriage to Guinness was something of  a culture shock for Diana. The family was incredibly wealthy and with armies of staff and  servants at their homes in Ireland and England, Diana’s new mother-in-law expressed amazement at  the fact that Diana was able to fry an egg.

 The couple lived on an allowance of £20,000  a year until Bryan would come into his inheritance and, along with a mansion  in London, they had a home in Dublin, not far from the Guinness brewery and an estate  in Hampshire. Two sons, Jonathan and Desmond, followed in 1930 and 1931, but before they had  even left infancy Diana was being drawn elsewhere.

Oswald Mosley & British Fascism In February 1932 Diana met Sir Oswald Mosley while attending a party at the house of Emerald Cunard  in London. Mosley was judged by many to be one of the most promising politicians in Britain in the  1920s, one who had previously been a member of the Conservative Party before crossing the aisle  to the Labour Party in the mid-1920s.

 When Labour entered government in 1929, he was appointed as  Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. However, when the Labour party membership rejected  a memorandum which he had drawn up in 1930, one which outlined a plan for how to reduce the  massive levels of unemployment which had emerged in Britain following the Wall Street Crash and the  Great Depression, he left Labour too and started the New Party, as it was originally called.

  In 1932, right around the time he met Diana, the New Party became the British Union  of Fascists, with Mosley as its leader. Despite the fact that both Diana and Mosley  were married and their fourteen-year age gap, they were soon having an affair. Shortly  thereafter, Diana decided to leaveher husband and became Mosley’s mistress, horrifying her family  and scandalising British society.

 Oswald on the other hand refused to leave his wife Lady Cynthia  Mosley, but she died not too long after in 1933, due to complications arising from peritonitis.  Despite Diana’s divorce and the Death of Lady Cynthia, the couple wouldn’t marry until  1936 as Mosley didn’t fully commit to the relationship for several years.

 For example, he  was briefly involved in a separate relationship with his sister-in-law, Lady Alexandra  Metcalfe, after his first wife died. Oswald and Diana finally married on the 6th  of October 1936. This took place in Germany, in one of the homes of the Nazi propaganda  minister, Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler was even present at the event.

 By that  time Diana had been regularly visiting Germany with Oswald to attend Nazi rallies  in Nuremburg and Oswald forged ties to the German fascists as he believed that his  party would assume control of Britain one day. Two sons followed soon after their  marriage, Alexander in 1938 and Max in 1940. Though her marital affairs had led to tensions  with the Mitford family, Diana’s mother Sydney, brother Tom and sister Unity shared her affinity  for fascism.

 And there is no doubting that Diana was a committed fascist. She was not blindly led  into political extremism in Britain as a result of some infatuation with her new husband, though  her views in later life on the racial policies of the Nazis and their genocidal actions were  complicated. At certain times she expressed some horror for what had happened, but on  others her statements were more neutral.

Nevertheless, her politics in the 1930s caused  a complete split with her elder sister Nancy. The Second World War When the Second World War broke out in the autumn of 1939 following Germany’s invasion  of Poland, Diana and Oswald’s political and social position in Britain collapsed.

 This was in stark  contrast to the summer of 1939 before hostilities broke out, when a British Union of Fascist  rally in London had drawn 30,000 attendees, one of the biggest political rallies in British  history. Compromised by his earlier support for the Nazis, Oswald began calling now for a  negotiated peace agreement with Germany. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, given the danger it  posed, the British government did not move to ban the British Union of Fascists until the 23rd of  May 1940 following the passage of the Treachery Act that day. Five weeks later Diana and  Oswald were arrested on the back of undoubtedly

well-founded fears that the British government  had that the Mosleys and their followers would act as a fifth column for the Nazis in England  if they were allowed to remain free. Thus, Diana was imprisoned in Holloway Prison in  London. Oswald was held separately at first, but in December 1941 the Prime Minister, Winston  Churchill, who knew Mosley well since the 1910s, intervened personally to allow Mosley to  be moved to Holloway Prison as well.

 They remained there until late 1943. By that time  the fate of the war was clear and the Mosleys were no longer perceived of as a grave  threat to British security. Consequently, they were released from prison, but remained  under house arrest for the remainder of the war. Post-War & Exile The Mosleys were effectively social outcasts in Britain after the war ended.

 Nevertheless, Oswald  attempted to revive his political career, in large part by reimagining himself as an advocate of  a pan-European state. This was popular at the time as several Western European states began the  process of creating what would eventually become the European Coal and Steel Community and then the  European Economic Community. He also established the Union Movement as a far-right successor to the  British Union of Fascists in 1948, but it didn’t gain any traction in the short term.

 Ultimately,  the Mosleys were unable to leave behind the shame which came with their association with the  Nazis in the 1930s. Accordingly, once they were given their passports back by the government  in 1949, they began making plans to leave Britain. Diana, Oswald and their two sons left Britain  in 1951, relocating first to Ireland where they first settled in Galway and then at Fermoy in  county Cork.

 Yet, they spent most of their years in exile living at Orsay in Paris, with occasional  visits to South Africa as well, where their politics were more acceptable to the far-right  Apartheid regime run by the National Party. It was a curious life in exile. Oswald was  frequently unfaithful and Diana was certainly aware of his affairs, but she ignored them for  the most part.

 When asked about her ties to the Nazis in the 1930s, she expressed outward  revulsion for the Holocaust and the genocidal and racial policies of the Nazi regime, but she  also refused to entirely disavow her friendships with Hitler and the other senior Nazis. In one  interview she had the following to say “”They’ll go on persecuting me until I say Hitler was  ghastly.

” “Well, what’s the point in saying that? We all know that he was a monster, that  he was very cruel and did terrible things. But that doesn’t alter the fact that he was obviously  an interesting figure.”It was fascinating for me, at 24, to sit and talk with him, to  ask him questions and get answers, even if they weren’t true ones. No torture on  earth would get me to say anything different.

” In the many interviews she gave over the years and  accounts of her which friends and acquaintances provided, there is little doubting that she was  Anti-Semitic, once pondering in an interview with The Guardian newspaper that Europe’s  Jews should have been relocated to Uganda, a thinly disguised allusion to a Nazi  plan to deport the continent’s Jewish people to the African island of Madagascar  which had been briefly considered in 1940.

Writer While the Mosleys were effectively unable to involve  themselves in any substantive fashion in British politics after the war, both she  and Oswald wrote and published extensively during these decades. In order to facilitate  this work, they established Euphorion Books, their own publishing company which they named  after a character in Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust.

Mosley subsequently translated Goethe’s  work and published it through Euphorion. Much of Diana’s writing was political.  For instance, she edited The European for six years between 1953 and 1959 while  living in France, a political and cultural magazine which tried to further many of  the Mosleys’ political ideas.

 Curiously, the magazine was in favour of British entry  into the newly founded European Economic Community. More broadly The European included  contributions from the American poet Ezra Pound, who had been a fan of Benito Mussolini and  Italian fascism, and the South African poet, Roy Campbell, and the British writer and  rural advocate, Henry Williamson, who when not creating the character of Tarka the Otter  was a supporter of European fascism in the 1930s.

Diana also published several books. One of  these, The Duchess of Windsor, published in 1980, was a biography of Wallis Simpson, who King Edward  VIII’s desire to marry in 1936 had caused the abdication crisis that year. Edward and Wallis,  by that time the Duke of Duchess of Windsor, had lived next door to Diana and Oswald in Paris and  had also seen controversy by visiting Germany in 1937 and meeting Hitler and the other Nazi leaders  after Edward lost his throne.

 Two personal memoirs also appeared, first came A Life of Contrasts in  1977, which was a straight-forward autobiography and Loved Ones, published in 1985, in which she  reflected on some of the famous figures she had known over the years, including her sisters and  the author of Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh. Finally, Diana wrote for several other prominent  publications, including articles for Tatler in the late 1960s and as a book reviewer for both The  New Statesman and the London Evening Standard from the 1970s through to the 1990s. Her background  and her writings, including a defence of Magda

Goebbels’ decision to kill her six children in the  Fuhrer Bunker at the end of the Second World War, caused controversy and infamous clashes with  the late Christopher Hitchens and Max Hastings, a prominent historian of the Second  World War and newspaper editor. Later Life & Death Diana’s husband Oswald died on the 3rd of December 1980 at  Orsay in Paris.

 Many obituaries and news reports noted the passing of the  leader of the British fascist movement, but his demise was not greeted with the sort  of outpouring of anger at Mosley’s political career as it might have occurred had he  died closer to the Second World War. Many people had simply forgotten the Mosleys or had  not been alive in the 1930s and early 1940s.

After her husband’s death, Diana remained in  France and continued to write extensively, though she lost her position as a book  reviewer at the London Evening Standard in the mid-1990s when Max Hastings determined  that he didn’t want any more reviews by, quote, ‘bloody Lady Hitler’, run in the paper.

  Her reputation as the leading female British fascist was still alive and  well fifty years after the war ended. Diana eventually died in Paris on the 11th of  August 2003 following complications arising from a stroke she had suffered a week earlier.  This was compounded by the heatwave which hit Western Europe that late summer as temperatures  topped 40 degrees Celsius for ten days in a row in France. Diana was 93 years of age at the time.

  She was buried back in England in Oxfordshire in the Mitford family plot next to her sisters.  Obituaries were scornful of her ties to the Nazis, though debated her own political views, which  remain somewhat unclear and contested even today. UNITY MITFORD Unity Mitford was born on the 8th of August 1914.

 Her parents,  David Freeman-Mitford, second Baron Redesdale, and Sydney Mitford, née Bowles, decided to name  her Unity as a symbolic gesture owing to the fact that Britain had entered what would eventually  become known as the First World War four days before she was born.Although initially of no  significance, Unity Mitford was conceived in the town of Swastika, Ontario, in Canada which is  curious when considering how her life played out.

Unlike her older siblings, who had been almost  entirely home-schooled, by the time Unity was of school-going age the family had relocated  to Oxfordshire and her parents had become more willing to allow their younger daughters  to attend formal schooling. Consequently, she attended St Margaret’s School at Bushey  in Hertfordshire.

 As a child she struggled to assert herself within the large family unit.  By the time she was in her early teens her older sisters were already prominent figures on the  London social scene and they were all opinionated and strong-willed, with various literary and  social ambitions. Amongst them Unity struggled to carve out her own identity and this would  later play a part in how her life developed.

Visit to Germany In the early 1930s Unity began to show an affinity for the fascist  politics which was sweeping across Europe in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and  the Great Depression which followed. Her mother, older sister Diana and brother Tom shared her  political views and from 1932 onwards when Diana began seeing Oswald Mosley, the leader  of the British Union of Fascists, the family became tied into Britain’s own fledgling fascist  politics. This contrasted sharply with Unity’s

younger sister Jessica, who had a growing affinity  with communist politics. The pair shared a room in the family home in Oxfordshire and during  the early 1930s it was divided down the middle with a chalk line. Jessica decorated her side with  pictures of the first leader of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, and the hammer and sickle insignia  of Russian Communism, while Unity put up a photo of Adolf Hitler, the leader of the German  Nazi Party, and a swastika, the Nazis’ symbol.

It would be easy to dismiss these actions as two  teenage sisters trying to antagonise each other, but this political divide became  all too real in the mid-1930s. Well, Jessica would eventually elope to Spain to join  the Communist side in the Spanish Civil War. But before even that had happened, Unity had headed  off to Germany with Diana to accompany Oswald Mosley to the annual Nazi rally in the southern  German city of Nuremburg in the mid-autumn of 1933. There she met Adolf Hitler for the first  time and quickly became infatuated with him.

In Hitler’s Inner Circle Following this initial meeting with Hitler in 1933 Unity became determined  to win her way into the German leader’s inner circle. She later stated of this initial contact  that “The first time I saw him I knew there was no one I would rather meet.”.

 By this time, Unity  was convinced about Hitler and this soon turned into worship. She was now set on being as near  to Hitler as she possibly could and to win his affections despite the fact that he was already  into his mid-forties and she was not yet twenty. As a result, Unity soon returned to Germany in  the summer of 1934 and enrolled in a language school in Munich.

 Unity was so obsessedwith the  Nazi leader that she soon began stalking him, taking note of his daily activities and tracking  which hotels and cafes he frequented. It wasn’t long until she noticed that Hitler would  often eat in the Osteria Bavaria in Munich, so she decided to sit near the entrance every  day and when Hitler came in, he would notice her. Then after ten months of sitting  in the Osteria Bavaria restaurant, Hitler finally invited her to his  table and after talking for 30 minutes, Hitler pickedup the bill. Unity wrote the  following to her father about the encounter:

“It was the most wonderful and beautiful [day] of  my life. I am so happy that I wouldn’t mind a bit, dying. I’d suppose I am the luckiest girl in the  world. For me he is the greatest man of all time”. Soon, Hitler also became somewhat infatuated with  the young, blonde British student who he described as “a perfect specimen of Aryan womanhood”.

 He  was impressed by her intriguing ties to Germanic culture, such as her middle name, Valkyrie  and the fact that Unity’s grandfather had been friends with Richard Wagner, one of his idols.  It should be noted that Hitler was an extremely superstitious man, and he believed that Unity  was sort of sent to him as if it was destined. Following this, Hitler began inviting Unity  to various party rallies and state events and he used her to create jealousy in his current  partner, Eva Braun, who was two years older than Unity. As Unity spent more and more time with  the Nazi leader, Braun’s psychological state

deteriorated and she attempted to kill herself in  May 1935, the second such suicide attempt. After that Hitler committed to their relationship,  seemingly in the belief that Braun had shown adequate loyalty to him in her willingness  to take her own life should he reject her. Despite Hitler settling on Eva Braun at  this time, Unity continued to move in the German leader’s inner circle.

 She accompanied him  during several events held at the Summer Olympics in Berlin in 1936 and was present in Vienna in  March 1938 after the Nazis had managed to annex Austria in a bloodless coup. The Nazi leader,  even arranged for her to be given an apartment in the city of Munich from which a Jewish couple  were evicted. In total it is believed that Unity met Hitler on more than 100 occasions and this  consequently means that she spent more time in the company of the Nazi leader following his ascent  to power in 1933 than any other British person.

The peculiar ascent of Unity within the Nazi  party was looked at suspiciously by many senior Nazi figures, even if she had gained favour with  Hitler. Some worried that she might be a British spy of some kind. Others were simply confounded  as to why Hitler allowed her to attend social gatherings of his inner circle, many of whom  he had known since the mid-1920s.

 Yet in time she won many over. On her copy of Mein Kampf,  Hitler’s autobiographical political manifesto, Unity not only managed to acquire Hitler’s  signature, but also those of Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler as well as the other  most senior members of the Nazi regime. Anti-Semitism & Political Views Unity’s political views are hard to get a clear picture of.

 She espoused  many of the attitudes of German fascism, including its severe racial antipathy towards the  Jewish people and other groups in Eastern Europe. At a Hitler Youth rally in the mid-1930s  she proudly asserted that she was a, quote, ‘Jew hater’ and she was ardent in  her fascism in other ways. For instance, when in England she would show up to social events  wearing the blackshirt uniform of the British Union of Fascists and even attend communist  meetings to heckle the speakers.

 However, whether this was the political outlook of someone  who had reflected on fascist theories and ideology and began to advocate it, or was the immature  actions of a confused young woman who ardently wanted to belong to something, regardless of  what that something might be, is open to debate. In one respect alone do we see Unity ploughing  her own path when it came to her political outlook. She was unquestionably a British  nationalist.

 As the years went by through the late 1930’s and war between Germany  and Britain became more and more likely, she was known to express her desire that the  Nazis would find a way to reach an agreement with Britain and avoid war with her native  country. Unity made her feelings in this respect known to Hitler and in the end  her inability to reconcile her worship of Hitler and German fascism with her love  for her homeland would be her downfall.

Outbreak of WWII Hitler had informed both Diana and Unity in the summer of 1939 that war between  Britain and Germany was inevitable, as the Nazis fully intended to invade Poland within a matter  of weeks and Britain and France had made it clear that such an action would result in a state of war  existing between them and Germany.

 As the fateful day approached the two sisters deliberated on  what to do. Ultimately Diana took the decision to return home with Oswald and the Mosleys no doubt  began preparing to acquire a position of some prominence in Britain if the Nazis succeeded in  defeating their own native country. Unity took the opposite decision and remained in Germany, despite  her family’s pleas for her to return to England.

Tragically, Unity’s psychological state  was very poor in the days leading up the outbreak of the Second World War. Before  Diana left Germany her younger sister had told her that she might take her own life  if the two countries ended up at war. And so it proved.

 When Britain declared war  on Germany on the 3rd of September 1939, following the Nazi invasion of Poland two days  earlier, Unity shot herself in the head with a pistol in Munich. But the bullet did not kill  her, though it did become lodged in her head. Return to England & Illness After her attempted suicide Unity was sent to a Munich hospital where she remained  unconscious for the next two months.

 During this time Hitler visited her on several occasions  and paid her medical bills. When she finally regained consciousness, she was sent across the  Alpine border to neutral Switzerland. There, her mother and youngest sister, Deborah,  arrived to the city of Bern and arranged for her to be brought back home to England.

  When they eventually arrived to Switzerland in January 1940, they found Unity  in a dreadful condition. Deborah, writing over sixty years later described  her sister in the following words: “We were not prepared for what we found – the  person lying in bed was desperately ill. She had lost two stone, was all huge eyes and matted  hair, untouched since the bullet went through her skull. The bullet was still in her head,  inoperable the doctor said.

 She could not walk, talked with difficulty and was a changed  personality, like one who had had a stroke. Not only was her appearance shocking, she  was a stranger, someone we did not know.” Her mother and Deborah arranged for her to be  brought back to England with the bullet still in Unity’s head.

 There, despite calls for  her to be interred as a Nazi sympathiser, as Diana was from the summer of 1940 onwards,  Unity remained at the family home in Oxford. This was in part thanks to the intervention of  the Home Secretary John Anderson, at the behest of her father and because she wasn’t deemed  a threat given her physical and psychological state.

 There she was cared for by her mother,  but despite re-learning how to walk and carry out some basic tasks she never really regained  any of her mental faculties. An assessment by one of her medical team a few years later described  her as having the mental age of a ten-year-old. In spite of this, Unity is alleged to have  had a relationship with the RAF Pilot Officer John Andrews.

 He was stationed nearby and  although he was a married man and father, the affair would last until the 11th  of September 1941. It only ended as MI5 soon caught wind of what was occurring and  they immediately reported it to Herbert Morrison, the Home Secretary at the time. It was also  rumoured at this time that Unity “drives about the countryside … and picks up airmen,  etc, and … interrogates them.

” As a result, Andrews was reposted to the far north of Scotland  where he later died in a Spitfire crash in 1945. In the late spring of 1948 Unity became  ill while on a family visit to the tiny island of Inch Kenneth off the west coast  of Scotland. This was a piece of land which the Mitfords had acquired some years earlier.

  The bullet in her head had moved and her brain began to swell. She was taken to hospital,  but doctors decided it was not possible to operate. Shortly afterwards, on the 28th of  May 1948 she died from meningitis, aged 33. Conspiracy Theories In death a number of rumours and conspiracy theories attached themselves to Unity.

 One emerged  after reports concerning her made by MI5 were declassified in 2002. At that time a British  journalist, Martin Bright, published an article in The Observer in which he speculated that Unity  had not shot herself at all, but that the injury had likely been fabricated to avoid her being  arrested on her return to Britain. The article by Bright occasioned a stern response by Deborah  Mitford in the pages of the same newspaper.

Bright accepted he had been wrong in a subsequent  article in The New Statesman published in 2007. A second conspiracy theory which concerned  Unity also involved Martin Bright. In the same New Statesman article in 2007 he stated that  following his initial publication in 2002 he had received a tip that Unity had actually returned  to Britain pregnant in 1940 and had given birth to a child at a maternity hospital in Oxford.

 Bright  consequently speculated that Unity might have been carrying Hitler’s child and that the Nazi leader’s  offspring had thus lived unknowingly in Britain throughout the second half of the twentieth  century. A Channel4 documentary entitled Hitler’s British Girl was subsequently aired late in 2007,  but the claims remained entirely speculative as no record of Unity giving birth in Oxford in 1940 was  ever uncovered, though this was not uncommon as birth records for the first years of the war were  patchy given the unrest caused by the conflict.

JESSICA MITFORD Jessica Lucy Freeman-Mitford, who would be known as ‘Decca’ by those who knew her from  her early years onwards, was born on the 11th of September 1917 at Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire.    Jessica and her siblings had a somewhat dysfunctional upbringing.

 Their parents were  eccentrics who largely home-schooled them, though by the time that Jessica was born this idea had  been relaxed and Jessica had some limited formal schooling, though she was largely self-taught in  terms of much of her reading and political views. By the early 1930s as Jessica entered  her teenage years, the Mitford family was becoming increasingly divided politically.

  The middle Mitford sisters, Diana and Unity, and the sole brother, Tom, were advocates  of fascism. Moreover, when Diana began a relationship with Oswald Mosley, the head  of the British Union of Fascists in 1932, the family’s ties to the British fascist  movement became very real indeed, while from 1933 Diana and Unity were spending  increasing amounts of time in Germany attending Nazi gatherings and associating with Hitler  and the other leaders of the Nazi party.

 This manifested itself at home in Oxfordshire where  Jessica and Unity, who were closest in age, became antagonistic towards each other as Jessica  increasingly favoured socialism and communism, the ideological enemy of fascism. As a result,  she was known as the “red sheep” of the family. Eloping to Spain In the spring of 1937 Jessica, at just 19 years of age, made national headlines  in Britain.

 Shortly before this she had met and quickly fallen in love with Esmond Romilly, a  British socialist, anti-fascist and nephew-in-law of Winston Churchill, the future Prime Minister of  Britain and war leader. Mitford and Romilly were being reported on in the newspaper that spring as  they had eloped from Britain and headed for Spain to support the Communist and Republican movement  there in the civil war against the Nationalists, who would eventually fall under the absolute  command of General Francisco Franco.

Jessica and Esmond arrived to Spain  later that spring, where they remained, despite the dispatch of a British war ship to  the region to try to bring home this daughter of a British aristocrat and nephew-in-law of one of  the nation’s foremost political figures. However, once their Spanish visas were threatened with  revocation they agreed to pass back over the border to France. There they were married in a  civil ceremony at Bayonne on the 18th of May 1937.

The young couple remained in France for some  time with hopes of returning to Spain to report on the war, but eventually had to abandon this  aim. They consequently returned to London where Esmond worked on a memoir entitled Boadilla,  an account of his time with the English brigade fighting with the Communists in Spain back in 1936  before Jessica joined him on his travels.

 There they lived in the East End in an apartment that a  friend of Esmond had provided to them. Tragically, a daughter, named Jessica after her  mother, who was born in December 1937, died the following May from a measles  outbreak in the British capital. Life in America Jessica and Esmond did not remain in England long after returning  there.

 In February 1939 they emigrated to the United States where they lived a largely  penniless, itinerant lifestyle, despite their affluent backgrounds. Eventually they settled  in Greenwich Village in New York which was already developing its reputation as a bohemian  heartland in Lower Manhattan. There Jessica briefly found work at a fashion house, while  Esmond attempted to find work as a journalist.

This brief period was interrupted when the Second  World War broke out in Europe in September 1939 as the fascists Jessica had always deplored went to  war with her native country. Esmond immediately headed for Canada to enlist in the Royal Canadian  Air Force. Jessica spent the early years of the war living with Virginia and Clifford Durr, two  civil rights activists who lived in Washington D.C. There Decca gave birth to a daughter that  she named Constancia in February 1941.

 Sadly, Constancia’s father would be dead before her  first birthday. Esmond went missing in action while flying in an air raid against the city of  Hamburg in Germany on the 30th of November 1941. It is assumed that his plane was lost over the  North Sea. He was 23 years age of age at the time. Second Marriage Jessica responded to the disappearance of her husband by burying herself  in work, volunteering with numerous organisations in the US as the country was drawn into the  conflict just a week after Romilly’s death

following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.  During the course of this she met Robert Treuhaft, a Harvard law graduate who became involved  in the civil rights movement along with her even before the war ended. The movement was  gathering pace at this time as civil rights leaders argued that African-Americans needed to  have equal rights in the United States when they began arriving home from Europe and the Pacific  after the war, having fought for their country.

Jessica and Treuhaft married in 1943 and she  became a US citizen the following year. They had two sons soon after. Nicholas was born  in 1944, with Benjamin arriving in 1947. Sadly Nicholas died when still a child in  1955 after being hit by a bus. By that time her parents were heavily involved in the civil  rights movement in America and had also joined the Communist Party of the United States, a  political affiliation which became extremely hazardous during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s  Communist witch hunts during the 1950s.

As a mother Jessica clearly left a lot to be  desired. Interviewed in 2006, her children, Constancia from her marriage to Romilly,  and Benjamin born to her and Treuhaft, stated that she was not a neglectful mother, but  her work was always a priority over motherhood. She had little time for the intricacies of  raising children and was not exactly a homemaker, rarely undertaking housework or cooking.

 Her  children called her Decca rather than mom, while Benjamin claimed that he had largely been raised  by his older half-sister rather than his mother. While her parenting style was less than perfect,  Jessica flourished as a writer in the post-war period. She contributed to numerous publications  in the 1950s before publishing her first book in 1960, a celebrated memoir entitled in Hons  and Rebels.

 This autobiographical account of her upbringing presented a picture of  herself protesting against the growing inclination of her family towards fascism. In  one memorable passage she describes her sister Unity carving swastikas into the windows  of their Oxfordshire manor in the 1930s, over which Jessica subsequently carved the Soviet  hammer and sickle.

 The memoir became a classic and has been widely praised since by figures as  notable as Christopher Hitchens and J. K. Rowling. The American Way of Death The 1960s were a remarkable period in the history of the United States and  in Jessica Mitford’s life. It all kicked off for her with encounters with the Ku Klux Klan,  the Freedom Riders and Martin Luther King in 1961.

 On a research trip to Montgomery,  Alabama, one of the most significant sites in the ongoing civil rights movement, Mitford  and a friend ended up meeting a group of civil rights activists who rode buses between American  towns and cities to drum up support for an end to Segregation of black and white Americans  in the southern states. Shortly afterwards the group was attacked by a branch of the Ku  Klux Klan, following which Mitford made her way to a gathering at which King was the prime  speaker.

 The Klan again sent a group to break up the rally in what was a striking introduction  to the south and its politics for Mitford. Shortly thereafter Mitford’s attention  was drawn away from the American south to the funeral industry in the United States.  She began investigating the more nefarious elements of an industry which pretended to  be directed towards helping grieving people, but which Mitford increasingly came  to believe was exploiting them.

The result in 1963 was a new book entitled  The American Way of Death. In this Mitford argued that funeral directors across the  United States was exploiting the shock and grief experienced by the bereaved to convince  the families and loved ones of those who had died to pay for an array of services which  they didn’t really need.

 This ranged from lavish funeral services and ornate coffins  to the provision of ‘grief counsellors’. A particularly striking aspect of this  was her description of mortuary practices, which were deemed to be so graphic by  the standards of the 1960s that Jessica initially struggled to find a publisher.

  She also described at length the manner in which grieving families were sold designer  clothes to dress the dead and everything from expensive cosmetics and grooming to  teeth whitening were added on to bills. Mitford’s research was meticulous, based on  records she consulted from funeral parlours and state records’ offices in various parts  of the country.

 The book subsequently became a bestseller and led to a Congressional  hearing in Washington D.C. to deliberate on whether the funeral industry needed to be  more tightly regulated across the country. Later Life & Death With the publication of Hons and Rebels and The American Way of Death  Jessica became a well-established literary figure and social commentator in the United States.

  She consequently became a regular article writer with numerous publications such as The  Atlantic Monthly and Vanity Fair. Many of her pieces continued to skewer corporate America  and its practices and Decca became known as one of the pre-eminent muckrakers of her day.  Other journalism focused on the Vietnam War and the draft and the prison system, which at  that time was already expanding to become the prison-industrial complex of the late twentieth  and early twenty-first centuries in America.

 The latter reporting was published as a book in  1973 entitled Kind and Unusual Punishment: The Prison Business. She also published many  other books over the years including: The Trial of Dr. Spock, The Making of a Muckraker,  The American Way of Birth among others. Decca also taught at several institutions from  the late 1960s onwards, notably at San Jose State University not far from San Francisco where  she had lived with her two surviving children and second husband for the most part since  the mid-1940s. This latter position became

a cause celebre in 1973 when Mitford refused to  acquiesce to a demand that all staff swear an oath of allegiance to the constitution of the United  States, which combined with her known position as a prominent Communist during the 1950s led to  campus protests both for and against her continued presence as a lecturer there.

 In 1977 she  published a second memoir, A Fine Old Conflict, which largely dealt with her experiences as a  member of the US Communist movement in the 1940s and 1950s, a movement which she had since departed  from and was critical of in many respects. Though there was a lighter side to Decca. In  the 1970s she recorded some music albums while her television appearances in the 1980s showed  a light-hearted, witty side to her personality despite the seriousness of the topics which she  had dealt with in her work over the decades.

 In the 1990s she became ill with lung cancer and  eventually died from the disease in the summer of 1996, aged 78. Her wishes, in line with her  criticism of the funeral industry over the years, were for an inexpensive ceremony. When the  cremation costs were taken out of the equation it cost just $58. Her ashes were scattered at  sea.

 A memorial service was held in San Francisco, where famous speakers praised her mordant  sense of humour and lifelong unorthodoxy. At the time of her death, the San Francisco  Chronicle wrote “In this strangely flat era of ‘diversity,’ she was the rarest of  birds, an exotic creature who rose each morning to become the sun around  whom thousands of lives revolved.

” She was survived by her husband Robert  Treuhaft, who died 5 years later, and by her children Constancia Romilly  and Benjamin Treuhaft both of whom are still alive as of the making of this  video and are 82 and 75 respectively. DEBORAH MITFORD Deborah Vivien Freeman-Mitford, who would be known as ‘Debo’ by  her family and later her in-laws, was born on the 31st of March 1920  at Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire.

Her childhood was complex. Her parents had  wanted a second son and so she was dismissed to a large extent. They were also eccentric  and their marriage was extremely strained in Deborah’s younger years, eventually collapsing  altogether in the late 1930s and early 1940s. As the youngest of six sisters she was overshadowed  and teased extensively by her older siblings, though they had affection for her which  is typical when you’re the youngest member of a large family. Growing up, young  Deborah would spend her Saturdays fox

hunting while on Sundays she would ice  skate. She had little formal schooling, instead she was primarily taught  by a governess and various tutors. Debo was still only a child when Diana began  seeing Oswald Mosley, the leader of the recently formed British Union of Fascists, in 1932.

 The  family were soon drawn into the upper echelons of European fascism, with Unity essentially moving  to Germany in the mid-1930s when she was barely an adult to take up a position as one of Adolf  Hitler’s closest female confidantes. Consequently, when she was still just a teenager Deborah had  the strange experience of dining with Adolf Hitler in Munich, though her recollection of the event  many years later emphasised that there was little by way of open conversation. Hitler didn’t  speak English and Unity had to translate.

Family Politics By the mid-1930s the Mitford family’s politics were taking a toll  on relations between different members of it. While Diana and Unity became closely aligned with  British and German fascism, and were joined in that political outlook by their mother Sydney and  brother Tom, Jessica, the second youngest sister, was a Communist, while Nancy was appalled  by Diana’s associations in particular.

The girls’ father David was also opposed to German  fascism and the tensions this created with his wife eventually led to their final separation.  Deborah and also to some extent her older sister Pamela, both of whom shared a love of all things  rural throughout their lives, became the neutral members of the family, maintaining good relations  for the most part with all members, where others had bitter fallings out, notably between  Nancy and Diana and between Jessica and Unity.

Deborah later wrote of her sisters “I  do not share [Diana’s fascist] views, but my love for her overcame this side of  her character,” and “Unity was always the odd one out.” The British author and  biographer Selina Hastings wrote that Deborah was “by far the most balanced of  all the sisters. She was down to earth.

” This role as peacemaker and arbitrator  made Deborah, who was just nineteen at the time that the Second World War broke out, the  daughter who headed off with her mother to Europe late in 1939 when Unity showed up in Switzerland  with a bullet in her head, having attempted to take her own life on the 3rd of September,  the day Britain declared war on Germany.

Deborah and her mother chaperoned Unity back to  England, but she never recovered from the brain damage which occurred when she shot herself  and died in the late 1940s when the bullet, which could not be removed, changed position  in her head. Deborah would remain a stalwart defender of her sister’s actions for decades  thereafter, clashing with media and even her in-laws when her sister’s dubious associations  with the leaders of Nazi Germany were raised.

This aside, Debo had no affinity for any  of National Socialism’s political views, but was rather a traditional British  Conservative throughout her long life, though one who flirted along with her husband  with a new liberal movement in the 1980s, as we will see.

 Her defence of Unity was  based solely on family loyalty and long after the war Deborah remained on good  terms with all of her surviving siblings. Marriage to Andrew Cavendish Not long after her trip to Switzerland to fetch Unity back from war-torn Europe,  Deborah agreed to marry Andrew Cavendish, a younger son of Edward Cavendish, tenth Duke  of Devonshire, one of the most senior peers of Britain.

 They were married in the Priory Church  of St Bartholomew the Great in West Smithfield in London in 1941. Shortly afterwards  their first child, a boy called Mark, was born on the 14th of November 1941,  but he died just minutes after his birth. As we will see, further children  came in the years that followed, but Deborah’s natal history was complicated.  So too was married life.

 Her brother-in-law, William, the heir to the dukedom, was killed  in September 1944 while leading a division of the Coldstream Guards, the oldest regiment in the  British army. This occurred in Belgium following the Allied invasion of France and the opening  of a Western Front in the summer of that year. William or Billy as he was known had married  Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy just four months prior.

She was the sister of the future president  and would face her own tragic end. Despite their brief marriage, this connection  placed Deborah in the Kennedy circle and she and her husband would later be guests  of President John F. Kennedy in Washington. With his brothers passing Andrew became  the heir designate and when his father also died unexpectedly of a heart  attack in the early winter of 1950, Andrew succeeded as eleventh Duke of Devonshire.

  With this, Deborah, who would not have expected to acquire such a title when she married  Andrew in 1941, became Duchess of Devonshire. The Face of Chatsworth House As Duchess of Devonshire Deborah became the lady of one of Britain’s most  prized stately homes, Chatsworth House. The Chatsworth estate had first passed into  the ownership of the Cavendish family back in 1549 when Sir William Cavendish, a prominent  royal official, purchased it.

 His descendant, William Cavendish, fourth earl of Devonshire  and subsequently first Duke of Devonshire, began building the modern house in 1687, which  eventually became a sprawling five-storey, 81,000 square metre abode with 300  rooms. His descendant, the fourth Duke, later married Lady Charlotte Boyle, the sole  heiress to the vast Boyle estate in Ireland, which brought enormous wealth to the family.

  Thus, Chatsworth House had flourished as one of the great centres of the British aristocracy  in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Deborah transformed it into a modern  stately home during the 54 year period that she held the title of Duchess  alongside her husband as Duke. It was an uphill struggle. Despite  the family’s historic wealth, they were heavily indebted by the time Andrew  and Deborah became Duke and Duchess in 1950.

Some £7 million, the equivalent of well  over £200 million in today’s money, was owed to the government. This was  due to extensive wealth taxes which were imposed in Britain after the Second  World War and the death duties charged on the passing of the tenth Duke in  1950 on the vast Chatsworth estate.

Many of Andrew and Deborah’s advisors at  this stage believed the financial situation to be unfixable and advised carving up the  Chatsworth estate and selling chunks of it, but they took another approach. They  decided to sell many valuable works of art, as well as second 16th-century palace,  Hardwick Hall.

 The couple was determined to redevelop Chatsworth and turn it into one of  the largest tourist centres in northern England. When Andrew and Deborah took this decision  Chatsworth House itself was run down as the Dukes of Devonshire had not used it as their  primary residence for many years. Instead it had been leased out as a private girl’s  boarding school for a time.

 Accordingly, the house had to be restored. Debo became the  chief decorator in the restoration process, overseeing the repainting and repair of the family  rooms and renovating many of the sprawling common areas. By 1959 the house and main grounds  were sufficiently well restored to move in. This was just the beginning of a long process.

  The grounds immediately surrounding the house were transformed by Deborah, with large gardens  planted to begin a cottage industry of sorts. The result many years later was a self-sufficient  estate and tourists visiting Chatsworth House today can eat in a restaurant where most  of the produce comes from the surrounding farm and gardens. This was expanded  later to open Chatsworth Farm Shop.

Deborah was fully immersed in the country  life; she had dogs, horses and livestock, enjoyed shooting and hosted a variety  agricultural shows and equestrian events. Eventually in the 1990s she even began  publishing books on the farm and gardens, notably The Garden at Chatsworth in 1999  and The Chatsworth Cookery Book in 2003.

This was just one element of the rejuvenation  of Chatsworth. Chatsworth House sits at the centre of a 35,000 acre estate on which are  to be found many important tourist sites, notably the Tudor mansion of Bess of Hardwick,  a famed companion of Queen Elizabeth I. Beyond this, the scenic beauty of the  Peak District in which the estate is located makes the estate a considerable  draw for tourists in northern England.

Debo was front and central to this  development in the early years, even manning the ticket office at the house  when it first became a tourist site. She also oversaw the establishment and redevelopment  of several hotels on or adjoining the estate in Baslow and other villages between  the house and the town of Chesterfield.

As a result of all this work, by the 1990s  Chatsworth had become one of the most popular tourist destinations in England.  This is a substantial part of Deborah’s legacy as Duchess. Today over half a million  visitors arrive to Chatsworth every year, putting it on the same level as the Tower  of London and the Royal Albert Hall.

Family Life While Chatsworth House became a resounding success under Deborah’s  stewardship, her family life was strained in many ways. Andrew was repeatedly unfaithful and this  came to public attention when he was called to testify at a burglary trial in the course of  which he was forced to admit that he had been with another woman on the night in question.

  Debo tolerated his infidelities for many years, as well as his borderline alcoholism which she  openly wrote about. She eventually confronted this in the 1980s telling her husband that  it was her or the booze. In her memoir she states “For two decades, until the day  he died, he never had another drink.” Deborah also maintained a public show of  solidarity, campaigning with him in the 1980s when he became involved with the  short-lived Social Democratic Party, a pro-Europe centrist party largely formed out  of former members of the Labour Party who were

disaffected by its drift to the left at the time.  Asked years later why she stayed with her husband, she stated it was because he wasn’t boring. Andrew and Deborah’s position as parents was also difficult. After the death at birth of Mark  in 1941, two healthy children, Emma and Peregrine, were born in 1943 and 1944, but thereafter Deborah  suffered a miscarriage in 1946 and two children who died shortly after they were born in 1947 and  1953.

 The tragedy of having lost four children at a time when such levels of infant mortality  were becoming unusual owing to medical advances, was somewhat alleviated when a healthy child  whom they named Sophia was born in 1957. Later Life By the late 1990s Chatsworth House had become a tremendous  success and the Devonshire’s were able to engage in a wide array of philanthropic  activity.

 For her actions in contributing to the Royal Collection Trust, the  largest art collection in the world, Deborah was made a Dame Commander of the Royal  Victorian Order by Queen Elizabeth II in 1999. In 2004 Andrew died at 84 years of age and his  and Deborah’s only surviving son, Peregrine, succeeded as twelfth Duke of Devonshire, a  position which he still holds.

 Following this, Deborah moved out of Chatsworth to make  way for her son and moved back to the old rectory on the Chatsworth’s estate where  she had lived in the 1950s with her husband. The Cavendish family have been repeatedly  featured on The Sunday Times Rich List and in 2023 it was estimated that their wealth  amounted to £905 million, a result of their extensive landholdings and also investment in  hotel chains abroad.

 Deborah’s business acumen had not only saved the Dukedom from the financial  difficulties it had been in during the 1950s, but had made the Cavendish’s once again one  of England’s wealthiest aristocratic families. Deborah died on the 24th of September 2014  at 94 years of age. By that time she had been the last surviving Mitford sister for  over a decade, Diana having died in 2003 and Pamela and Jessica before her in the  mid-1990s.

 At her funeral over 600 staff, hundreds of members of the public and even  members of the royal family lined the route from Chatsworth House to St Peter’s Church  at Edensor, where she was buried. Elvis, her favourite musician, was played at the  funeral. Deborah Mitford, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire was survived by her son and two  daughters as well as eight grandchildren; and 18 great-grandchildren. It was a fitting end to  the eccentric and controversial Mitford sisters.

Thank you so much for watching this video on the  Mitford sisters I hope you found it interesting and if you watched it whole way through a special  thanks to you if you want more long type videos like this be sure to let me know Down Below in  the comments and if you have any other suggestions of people you would like covered also be sure to  leave them down below in the comments I hope you guys are subscribed and have notifications turned  on to get all my videos as soon as I upload them anyway that’s all from me so I’ll see all  of you in the next forgotten life thanks!