Diana Mosley Finally Dead

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Not a very nice lady, though she did lead a very long, privileged life, which I suppose one mustn’t begrudge her. Consideably cut-down, from today’s Telegraph:

Lady Mosley, who died in Paris on Monday aged 93, was a friend of both Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler, and decidedly more fascinated by the Führer. The third and the most beautiful of the six Mitford sisters (daughters of the 3rd Lord Redesdale), she left her first husband Bryan Guinness to unite her destiny with Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists. The uncompromising temperament of the Mitfords, combined with Mosley’s rebarbative politics, involved renouncing the social life of which she had previously been a leading ornament. Three of Diana Mosley’s sisters would follow her in forswearing England for a mixture of a man and ideology. Nancy, her eldest sister, found in Gaston Palewski the personification of her drooling Francophilia. Unity became enamoured of Hitler and shot herself at the outbreak of the war. Jessica became a Communist and married an American of that persuasion.

In Diana Mosley’s memory, Sir Oswald was a figure of unequalled glamour. “He had every gift, being handsome, generous, intelligent, and full of wonderful gaiety and joie de vivre. Of course I fell in love with him . . . and I have never regretted the step I took then.” It was as though the fairy princess had been carried off by the demon king. As Diana Guinness, she had been a leader of a set which included Augustus John, the Sitwells, Henry Yorke, Evelyn Waugh, Roy Harrod and Robert Byron. Lytton Strachey paid her court. “His eyes were dark blue,” Diana rhapsodised about Hitler, “his skin was fair and his brown hair exceptionally fine. In certain moods he could be very funny. He was extremely polite towards women. He was the most unselfconscious politician I have ever come across. He never sought to impress, he never bothered to act a part. If he felt morose, he was morose. If he was in high spirits he talked brilliantly.” She had several private late-night meetings with Hitler in the Chancellery, and he invited her to Bayreuth.

Interviewed by a Home Office Advisory Committee under Lord Birkett in 1940, she put her worst foot forward. She admitted that she would like to replace the British political system with the German one “because we think it has done well for that country”. Did she approve of the Nazi policies against Jews? “Up to point,” she declared. “I am not fond of Jews.” Evelyn Waugh, who encountered Diana Mosley when she was just out of prison, told his daughter that he was shocked to observe that his friend was wearing a swastika diamond brooch. But then the Mitfords had been brought up to pay scant attention to the opinion of others.

Although her book of memoirs, A Life of Contrasts (1977), was deliberately provocative, most of those who met her found her a delightful companion, while to her sisters’ children she was Aunt Honks. On one subject, however, she remained incorrigible. “They will go on persecuting me until I say Hitler was ghastly,” she acknowledged. “Well, what’s the point in saying that? We all know 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.” “I was very fond of him,” she admitted in an interview in 2000. “Very, very fond.”

2

A fascinating woman. I read the sororal biography of the sisters, which I found disappointing in some ways, and have meant to read up on her a little more.

3

I’m fascinated by all the Mitfords. The Duchess of Devonshire is the only one left now, isn’t she?

4

“the British Union of Fascists”

"Honey, who do you think we should invite over for the cookout? Fran and Jim are out of town, and both Jane and Dick are down with the flu?

Oh, I don’t know, how 'bout the British Union of Fascists? They’re always good for a laugh. And tell them to wear their brown shirts. They look so good in brown.

Splendid idea! Let’s drop a note to the Francos, too. I know that the Generalissimo is still dead, but maybe we can prop him up in the corner…it’ll do him a world of good."

5

May I assume that this is the same Jessica Mitford who wrote The American Way of Death?

Now I know of her Sympathies - the anti-capitalism tone of the book makes a little more sense.

6

Sugar coated poison pill.

She might have been charming, delightful, vivacious etc, but in the end she was still in love with fascism.

7

Yeah, I’m not sure anyone’s defending her as an admirable person – it’s just interesting to me that the daughters in that family all (well, 4 out of 6) became so rabidly political – and in two different directions. That is what I’d hoped whatsherface’s book would address, but didn’t.

8

I love British obits. You’d never catch the NY Times saying things like “drooling Francophilia” and “It was as though the fairy princess had been carried off by the demon king.”

9

I’ve never heard of the woman. Was she a well known public personality across the pond?

10

I read her autobiography way back when. IRC, she explained (but never apologized) why she eventually distanced herself from what communism became, both overseas and in America. I wish she’d get more attention for her work with civil rights in the 50s and 60s than for her idealistic membership in the Communist party.

11

Whatever privileged veneer of well schooled charm or veil of candy floss she used to make her bigotry more palatable, all of it merely concealed a putrid worm eaten interior of ill thought out philosophy and vile discrimination. Some people are so evil that, as human beings, we are honor bound to deny them any admiration whatsoever. Hitler was most certainly one of this sort.

12

The power of political admiration, Zenster is strong indeed. Expecially when it came from out of the chaos of the 1920s and 1930s.

My mother often mentioned the Mitford sisters and Diana Mosley in particular. Almost as if they were stock characters in some grand-scale Punch and Judy show. The danger of their political opinions, I suppose, never really impressed a young girl who grew up in the pre-War London.

13

El Marko, she was one of a very colorful family in England; probably not well-known by most people under the age of 40 on either side of the pond. Us history buffs know of them, though: google “Mitford Sisters” and see what comes up! They were beautiful and glamorous and bizarre, and sometimes very evil inded.

14

This makes me want to read that book I see about the Mitford sisters.
Did the obit say what she died of, besides old age and gallows humor?

Did she have any kids?

15

<cough>
Anyway, the view of A.N. Wilson:

“And Mosley’s beautiful wife, born a Mitford, is viewed in an even more hostile light than the leader of the Brown Shirts himself, since she is, I suspect, muddled in the public mind with her sister Unity, who had a crush on Hitler and wrote absurd letters about the “heavenly” Führer.

Diana is a much subtler and more mercurial person than her detractors could ever understand. I have lost count of the number of friends who, never having met her or heard her speak, have assured me that she has never retracted her beliefs.

In fact, she is a sort of centre-right conservative with passionately pro-European leanings. She has never voted - not even for her husband, when he stood for Parliament. She is a gentle, kind and witty person, and it is impossible for someone who knows her these days to imagine how such a woman could be regarded as a monster. The simple answer is that she refuses to lie - refuses to pretend that she did not, nearly 70 years ago, get to know Hitler and like him personally.

<snip>

I ask Diana why she has never made more attempt to distance herself from the gangsterism and murder that was part and parcel of the Nazi regime.

“Must I make a speech at Speaker’s Corner? I have written memoirs which have been published in which I deplore all the wicked things Hitler did. It’s there to read - in case my opinion is of any interest.”

She once told me, I point out, that she thought anti-semitism was a flaw of character in some people, and a mania in others. It was a mania in Hitler, obviously . . .

“Evelyn Waugh was very cross with me because I made John Sutro, who was Jewish, godfather to one of my sons. Does this make Evelyn an anti-semite?”

Yes, I say.

“I think it was on religious grounds.”
Fascinating family. Curious obit.

16

Yes, she had children. She left one behind when she left Guinness. I loved Hons and Rebels, Jessica’s autobiography. There’s quite a few books around about them as a family and about them as individuals. It’s curious how the son turned out so dull while the girls were all eccentric in one way or another.

I don’t think the Mitford Girls were evil, any of them. They were a product of their time – Unity and Diana fell in love with fascism at a time when many upperclass British people thought Hitler had some jolly fine ideas.

17

The poor son did not have much time to develop his eccentricities–he died in WWII. I firmly believe that he could have been as much of an individual as the others if he had lived longer.

I don’t think any of the Mitfords were evil. Their upbringing was so strange and isolated, even by turn-of-the-century British upper-class standards. Unity’s story is straight out of Greek tradagy–heartbroken when her two great loves, Britain and Germany, went to war, she shot herself, as Eve said. And lived, with a bullet in her brain, unable to care for herself, subject to great confused rages.