Diana Mitford
The Honourable Diana Mitford (The Honourable Lady Mosley) (
17 June,
1910 –
11 August,
2003) was one of Britain's noted
Mitford sisters. Known for her friendship with
Adolf Hitler, her involvement with right-wing political causes resulted in three years'
internment during the
Second World War. Her obituary in
The Daily Telegraph referred to her as an "unrepentant
Nazi and effortlessly charming." She was also well known as one of the few close friends of the
Duchess of Windsor.
Diana was raised at the Mitford family home, Asthall Manor, in
Oxfordshire. She was educated there by a series of governesses except for a six month period in 1926 when she was sent to a school in
Paris.
Shortly after her introduction to society at age 18 she met, and became secretly engaged to
Bryan Walter Guinness, an Irish aristocrat, writer and brewing heir who would inherit the
barony of Moyne. Her parents were initially opposed to the match but in time were convinced. The marriage on
30 January,
1929, was the society marriage of the year.
The couple had an income of £20,000 a year, an estate, Biddesden in Hampshire, and houses in
London and
Dublin. They were well known for hosting glittering society events involving writers such as
Evelyn Waugh,
Lytton Strachey,
Dora Carrington and
John Betjeman, or politicians such as
Winston Churchill. Waugh dedicated the novel
Vile Bodies, a satire of the Roaring Twenties, to the couple. They had two sons,
Jonathon, and Desmond.
In 1932 she became the mistress of British
Fascist leader Sir
Oswald Mosley; he was then married to Lady Cynthia Curzon, a daughter of
Lord Curzon, former
Viceroy of India and his first wife, American mercantile heiress Mary Victoria Leiter. Diana soon left her husband but Sir Oswald would not leave his wife.
In 1934 Guinness provided fake evidence of his infidelity so that the couple could be divorced. Diana and the children moved to
Belgravia where Sir Oswald continued to visit.
Sir Oswald's wife died of
peritonitis in May 1933, and the grief-stricken Oswald began an affair with his youngest sister-in-law Baba Metcalfe. Diana went to
Germany with her then 19 year old sister
Unity. While there they attended the first
Nuremberg rally. They returned again for the second rally the next year during which Unity struck up a friendship with Hitler. She introduced Diana to him in March 1935. They were his guests at the 1935 rally and, in 1936, Hitler provided a
Mercedes-Benz to chauffeur Diana to the
Berlin Olympic games.
She continued to be Sir Oswald's public mistress despite his continued affairs with other women. On
6 October,
1936, in the Berlin drawing room of
Joseph Goebbels, she became Sir Oswald Mosley's second wife. Other than the witnesses, the only guests were Goebbels, and Hitler. Hitler presented the couple with a silver framed picture of himself. The marriage was kept secret until the birth of their first child Alexander in 1938.
In August 1939, Hitler told Diana over lunch that war was inevitable. She and her husband were interned throughout much of
World War II, under
Defence Regulation 18B, for their Fascist sympathies. They were initially held separately but, after personal intervention by Churchill, Sir Oswald and two other 18B husbands were permitted to join their wives at London's
Holloway Prison. The couples lived in an old cottage on the prison grounds, had a little garden but were not allowed to mix with any other prisoners. After two years imprisonment, in November 1943, they were both released on grounds of Sir Oswald's health. They were placed under house arrest until the end of the war.
Lady Mosley's prison time failed to disturb her eccentric approach to life, remarking in her later years that she never grew
fraises des bois that tasted as good as those she cultivated in the prison garden. She also survived her time there by basking in her own imperishable self-regard: Though prison was not something she would have chosen, she said, "It was still lovely to wake up in the morning and feel that one was lovely one."
After the war ended she and her husband (unsurprisingly) moved to the
Irish Free State for a few years and then settled in
France where they lived in a large house at
Orsay, near Paris called
Temple de la Gloire. They were neighbours, and soon became close friends of, the
Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
They were well known for entertaining but were barred from all functions at the British Embassy. During their time in France, the Mosleys quietly remarried as Hitler had safeguarded their original marriage license which was never found after the war.
While in France, Diana edited the right-wing magazine
The European to which she also contributed.
After her marriage, she was a lifelong supporter of the
British Union of Fascists and its postwar successor the
Union Movement, to which she made financial contributions until the 1994 death of its organiser
Jeffrey Hamm. She often attended its annual dinners. Diana Mosley's 80th birthday was celebrated by a huge birthday dinner at the Eccleston Hotel in London, with an impressive turn-out of many figures on the British Right, at which she stood and made a 20 minute speech.
MI5 documents released in 2002 gave a harsh view of Lady Mosley and her politicial leanings. "Diana Mosley, wife of Sir Oswald Mosley, is reported on the 'best authority', that of her family and intimate circle, to be a public danger at the present time. Is said to be far cleverer and more dangerous than her husband and will stick at nothing to achieve her ambitions. She is wildly ambitious."
Diana Mosley, however, continued to admire Hitler and the tenets of
Nazism throughout her life but was open in addressing the Führer's faults. "I'm sure he was to blame for the extermination of the Jews," she told British journalist Andrew Roberts, "he was to blame for everything, and I say that as someone who approved of him." Following her death Roberts severely criticised Lady Mosley in
The Daily Telegraph (16 August 2003), and was in turn attacked three days later, in the same newspaper, by her son, Lord Moyne, and granddaughter, Daphne.
Diana Mosley was nothing if not ambiguous when discussing her loyalties to Britain or to her strong belief in facism. In her 1977 autobiography 'A Life Of Contrasts' she said ""But I didn't love Hitler any more than I did Winston. I can't regret it, it was so interesting,".
Lady Mosley died in Paris in August 2003, aged 93, apparently due to complications related to a stroke she had suffered a week earlier, but reports later surfaced that she had been one of the many elderly fatalities of the heat wave in mostly non-air-conditioned Paris. Her deaths leaves but one sister still living: Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire.
She had four children, among whom are the Irish preservationist
Desmond Guinness, the writer
Jonathan Guinness (3rd Lord Moyne), and
Max Mosley, president of the
Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, the governing body of world motorsport. Her stepson
Nicholas Mosley is a well-known British novelist who also wrote a memoir of his father for which Diana never forgave him despite their previously close relationship. One of her great-granddaughters, Jasmine Guinness, and a great-niece, Stella Tennant, are models.
[Lovell, Mary S., The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, 2002, ISBN 0393010430]She wrote two books of memoirs,
A Life of Contrasts (1977), and
Loved Ones (1985), as well as a biography of the
Duchess of Windsor.
* Mosley, Diana,
A Life of Contrasts, (1st edition,
Hamish Hamilton,
1977) reissued in paperback, London, 2003, ISBN 1-903933-20-X
* Guinness, Jonathan, with Catherine Guinness,
The House of Mitford, Hutchinson & Co., London, 1984, ISBN 0-09155560-4
* Mosley, Diana,
Loved Ones, Sidgwick & Jackson, London,
1985, ISBN 0-283-99155-0
* Dalley, Jan,
Diana Mosley - A Life,
Faber & Faber, London,
1999, ISBN 0-571-14448-9
*
Diana Mosley: The MI5 View - new files released from the National Archives shed new light on M15 surveillance of Mosley.
