In April 1933 Kit [Oswald Mosley] and his wife Cynthia, known as Cimmie, went to Rome and they both came back enthusiastic about what they had been shown in the new Italy. The Pontine Marshes had been drained, villages built and crops grown. This would now be regarded as a crime; wetlands, the fashionable name for marshes, are said to harbour irreplaceable water rats, tiddlers and moorhens, and must on no account be used to grow food for humans. In those days Mussolini was praised for it; most Conservatives admired him, Churchill was positively lyrical.
Soon after their return Cimmie had to be operated on for appendicitis; it was not regarded as dangerous and at first all went well. Then she developed peritonitis; in the days before the widespread use of penicillin this was often fatal. She died in May 1933. The tragedy of her death was shattering to Kit. He loved her very much, and he blamed himself for having allowed her to work too hard — he thought her physical resistance had been undermined by her political exertions. She had supported him, addressed rough meetings, travelled round the country. Although she-looked strong, she was not robust.
Thereafter he became so concerned about me that he stopped me doing many things I well could have. If ever I was ill he thought I was going to die; he imagined it might be the result of the tension caused by his own life of struggle and strife. For many years I suffered from migraines, and I had the greatest difficulty in convincing him that they were purely physical and unconnected with anxiety. I pointed to friends whose lives were smooth and trouble-free but who also had migraines. Unforgettable is the concern and tenderness he showed for what must seem a rather tiresome disability.
Another effect of his wife's death was his attitude to their three children. He was determined that, apart from their terrible loss, there was to be no change in their lives. The same nanny, aunts and grandmother surrounded them and they lived in an old house, Savehay Farm at Denham, which their mother had arranged to her taste and remained unchanged until it was requisitioned by the army in 1940. The three children were rich from their mother's American money, and they helped to finance this separate establishment themselves.
When Kit rented a house on the Mediterranean for his annual holiday, the elder children went with him. He wanted them to have everything they would have enjoyed if their mother had lived. I used to think he was a model father, because except for these holidays he worked extremely hard — speaking, writing, and organizing.
In the North he was frequently fog-bound. I have never known anyone who hated fog as much as he did. He seemed to be the only politician who combined every quality necessary to lead the country out of the depths to which it had sunk after victory in the war. The economic policy had proved disastrous, with Churchill a conspicuously unsuccessful Chancellor of the Exchequer in the twenties, and then world recession hit Britain hard. There were millions of half-starved unemployed. The hunger marches were just that; people were hungry. Yet we were supposed to be a rich country, 'owning' a quarter of the globe. It was obviously political failure on an unacceptable scale.
He was joined by thousands of people who agreed with him that change was essential and that the Labour and Conservative leadership lacked the will and intelligence to bring it about. These people came from the whole spectrum of politics, Communism to Conservatism. One of the cleverest and most effective was Raven Thomson, a former Communist, but the majority were ordinary patriotic men and women who thought Britain had lost its way. Mosley said: 'We cannot muddle through this time.' However we did muddle through, after a fashion, at the cost of unnecessary, widespread suffering, and ultimately war.
As regards my personal position, I loved Kit but never considered marrying him. Marriage as such meant little to me; yet three years after his wife's death we did marry, because we wanted children, and in those days it was supposed to be better for children to be born in wedlock.
In three ways 1936 was a watershed year for Kit and me. I left my little house in Eaton Square to go to live in the depths of the country at Wootton Lodge in Staffordshire, described recently by Mark Girouard as the most beautiful of Elizabethan houses, and by the house agent in 1936 as a white elephant. We rented it for almost nothing and intended to buy it later on. It was a boon to Kit, who slept there after his meetings in the Midlands and North instead of an uncomfortable inn. He spent as many days at Wootton as he could spare; we even gave up going to the Mediterranean in August and the last three summers before the war we stayed in this lovely place. I see from old engagement diaries over and over again how happy we were. 'Perfect day with Kit', 'Wonderful day' are frequent entries.
Although I travelled a good deal and often went to Munich with Unity, I was frequently alone at Wootton. This was an important change, because until then there are few blanks in my diaries. I seem to have lunched and dined out a great deal when I lived in London; there were operas and concerts and films, and I constantly saw Kit, who was nearby in Ebury Street, as well as dozens of friends. Yet I was not lonely at Wootton. I suppose our great happiness when we were there together, so often noted in my diary, was partly due to the contrast for him of peaceful days wandering in the wild country and woods full of bluebells in which Wootton is set, compared with the turmoil of his political life. He loved fishing for trout in the pools below the house, or stalking rabbits with a .22 rifle, and listening to music after dinner. The food at Wootton was delicious beyond words; Mr Grimwood, the cook, an artist. We lay on the grass in the sun in summer and trudged through snow in winter. We were alone as a rule. Kit had a talent for 'switching off, and living in the moment.
Unity came sometimes, and so did Tom; he and Kit were now friends and at this time he joined the BUF — also, in case of war, the Territorials. Kit's love of Wootton had the paradoxical result that he saw more of my Guinness sons than of his own children. Nicholas came to Wootton once or twice; he seemed to me a nice boy with a paralysing stammer. His brilliant, eloquent father took enormous pains never to allow him to feel this was a disability or to be shy about it, and I think he succeeded. Nicholas describes himself as having been 'crafty', but if he was it passed unnoticed by me, although he obviously lacked his father's openness. Kit and Nicky were as unlike one another as it is possible for father and son to be, but Kit was fond of him, in his rather detached way, and was always anxious for him to enjoy his holidays.
About four months after we went to Wootton we got married. Kit was rather wondering whether in this, to me, completely new part of England I might be in some way harassed as his wife; politics were rough and Wootton was near many great industrial centres. He spent a week in hospital in Liverpool when he was knocked unconscious by a brick hurled at him at an open-air meeting. In the event I received nothing but kindness, and forty-five years later, after his death, when I went to a nearby school, Abbotsholme, to speak about him, several people, now old, came to remind me of our Wootton years; some of them showed me photographs taken all those years ago at village functions.
At the same time as we embarked upon a new way of life, a third important thing happened: politics are extremely expensive, and although British Union branches had to be self-supporting, the headquarters of the organization cost a lot of money. Rich benefactors who had given large sums in the early days had stopped subscribing since the worst of the crisis was over and we appeared to be muddling through. Kit was not nearly rich enough to pay for the whole thing himself, though he spent £100,000 of his own money, the equivalent of two million of today's pounds. One of his supporters was an ex-MP, W.E.D. Alien, who was chairman of a family advertising business. He and one or two others managed the financing of the movement, from which as far as possible Kit kept aloof. Bill Alien knew that another Conservative MP, Leonard Plugge, was making fortunes from radio advertising. He had a concession from the French government, and set up a station, Radio Normandy, beamed to England. There was also advertising from Luxemburg. The BBC disliked it intensely; Reith's puritan soul revolted at the mere idea of anything so vulgar and enjoyable, but the public loved it. Bill Alien had hopes of a concession from the Irish government, and after he told us about it, Kit thought he might get one from Sark, where he had an influential supporter, but of course that would have entailed a pirated wavelength, since Sark possessed no wavelength of its own. If we could get a concession from Belgium, or Germany, similar to Plugge's from France and Bill Alien's possible one from Ireland, we and the Allens would make a fortune and Kit's anxieties about how to finance the British Union would be solved. Germany was notoriously short of foreign currency, and we thought the proposition might be attractive to it.
I had met Hitler many times with Unity, and I went to Germany and asked him about it. He handed the project over to one of his adjutants, Wiedemaim, whom I thereafter ceaselessly badgered in letters. After a while he wrote and said the military had vetoed the plan. As it had no conceivable military significance, this was just an example of the unthinking conservatism of soldiers everywhere. I went on trying. Sometimes it seemed as if I might succeed. Secrecy was essential; in London we had all signed a secrecy agreement. Kit had already had trouble years before when advertisers threatened to boycott the Daily Mail unless Rothermere stopped supporting him. I sometimes had a team with me in Berlin; Bill Alien for the advertising, a clever young barrister, and a former chief engineer for the BBC who had been sacked by Reith because he was involved in a divorce. None of them spoke German. We thought my frequent presence in Berlin as interpreter might sooner or later start some investigation by a journalist if I was known to be Kit's wife, and we therefore kept our marriage secret while these negotiations proceeded.
For me to go to Munich was natural as Unity was living there, but the ministers were in Berlin. Often alone, I spent boring days in the hotel waiting for the telephone which never rang and went by myself to the opera in the evenings. I saw various ministers and explained the simple beauty of our scheme; my trump card was that France was doing it successfully and profitably already, but the idea was novel and nobody seemed as enthusiastic as I had hoped. Although I have no evidence, I believe it may have been Dr Goebbels who, when things looked hopeful, always put a spoke in the wheel. As Propaganda Minister he wished to keep radio entirely in his own hands.
Occasionally I saw Hitler; we dined and watched a film or talked by the fire. We did not discuss the radio project, it was the sort of thing that bored him and was left to his ministers. He worked in Berlin but never stayed there longer than was necessary, much preferring Munich and the Obersalzberg.
Finally it was the Minister of Posts, Ohnesorge, who, though initially unwilling to relinquish a wavelength, saw the point of it for Germany's foreign currency position and became my valuable ally. We got the concession in May 1938; it had taken me nearly two years. The terms were tough — Germany got more foreign currency out of it than France had got from Plugge. Of course, written into the contract was the purely commercial nature of the station. There was to be nothing controversial, no politics or propaganda, nothing but sport, or sweet music and beauty hints, and similar delights. It was aimed at the housewife, and would have covered eastern England including the whole London area. As was said of commercial television years later, and as Plugge had discovered, it was a licence to print money.
Shortly before our first son, Alexander, was born, Kit and I went to Paris and he met the German who had been assigned to work with us, a brilliant member of Goering's Four Year Plan team. I took the monthly nurse with me to Paris in case the baby decided to be born, but he did not, and we went back to London with the agreement signed and sealed. A week or two later I had the baby and Kit announced our marriage of two years before; there was no more reason for secrecy. Just when broadcasting would have begun, the following summer, Britain declared war on Germany and our house of cards collapsed.
In the two years leading up to the war, and particularly after the Munich settlement in 1938, considered to have been a diplomatic defeat for the democracies, the possibility of war was present in everyone's mind. Kit maintained that Chamberlain should have gone to the country and had an election after Munich; he would have won it with ease. The vociferous war faction within the Conservative Party had not much echo, and the Left had made itself ridiculous by calling for war and at the same time opposing rearmament and voting against the service estimates. Kit said: 'The Labour Party is always for war on three conditions; that the war serves no British interest, that we have no arms to fight with and that none of the Labour leaders is expected to join up.' Thus, though many people either hoped for war or thought it inevitable, many others did not. Rearmament, which Kit had been demanding for years past, was stepped up.
My frequent visits to Berlin in 1937 and early 1938 did not go unobserved. I assumed that the famous Secret Service knew why I was there. I only tried to avoid the Press; in any case, the newspapers were interested in Unity, not in me. It was not difficult for the Secret Service to put one and one together: Bill Alien, advertising; Eckersley, radio engineer; myself hanging about doing nothing and then seeing the Minister of Posts. In fact, it appears that the transaction was known but not its terms, or that, compared with Plugge's concession from France, our concession was more profitable to Germany. It seems to have been imagined that it was a gift to us from the Germans. Had it been so I should not have been obliged to go to Berlin at all, or to argue the Allens' case with any minister. On the contrary, for Germany the foreign currency it would have earned was the whole point of the business, just as it was for France.
At the end of July 1939 Unity and I were invited to the Bayreuth Festival, where we saw Hitler frequently. He stayed at the Siegfried Wagner Haus at Wahnfried. On our last day he told us that in his opinion war was inevitable. The British guarantee to Poland had convinced the Poles that in some unexplained way we should come to their assistance if they resisted the absorption of the German city of Danzig into the Reich. This terrible news was not unexpected; in Britain preparations for war were evident in every sphere.
I knew Unity would not survive. She had always said that if England and Germany went to war she would prefer to die; her loyalties were too fatally divided. I told Hitler I thought my husband would continue to campaign for peace, as he had been doing for the past year. 'If he does he will probably be assassinated, like Jaures in 1914,' said Hitler.
A few months before, George Orwell had written to Herbert Read: 'I don't know whether Mosley will have the sense and the guts to stick out against war with Germany, he might decide to cash in on the patriotism business.' As we know, he had the sense and the guts. He did what he did because he foresaw that, win or lose, we should emerge from the war diminished, and because he was convinced that war solves nothing. In other words it was the 'patriotism business' that made him take a stand which is always unpopular and often dangerous.
On the outbreak of war he and I were in London; all the children, including Michael and his aunt Lady Ravensdale, went to Wootton, considered fairly safe from the bombing which many people imagined would follow our declaration of war.
On Ist September Kit issued a statement to his followers: To our members my message is plain and clear. Our country is involved in war. Therefore I ask you to do nothing to injure our country, or to help any other power. Our members should do what the law requires of them, and if they are members of any of the forces or services of the Crown they should obey their orders and in particular obey the rules of their service . . . We have said a hundred times that if the life of Britain were threatened we would fight again.
Practically all our members of military age, including my brother Tom, were already in the services, or in the process of joining. If at the beginning of the war the government had said there was to be no more free speech for the duration, Kit would have conducted no campaign for negotiated peace. On the contrary, however, it was continually emphasized that abolition of free speech was one of the evil things we were fighting against, and therefore to have kept silent would have been cowardly in the extreme.
There was a long tradition in England of political opposition to war, from Chatham in the American War of Independence, Fox in the Napoleonic Wars down to Lloyd George in the Boer War and Ramsay MacDonald in the 1914 War. The latter two were assaulted by the public at their meetings, but Kit never was. There was not much enthusiasm for war over Danzig. He advocated a negotiated peace unless Britain or the Empire were threatened or attacked, combined with rearmament. It was we who had declared war, but the German army had moved east. The Polish campaign was quickly over; Russia occupied the eastern half of the country and for the following seven months we had the phoney war. There was a flurry among Conservatives when Russia attacked Finland and voices were raised in Parliament in favour of aiding the gallant Finns. Harold Macmillan hoped to join in this fight and bought a white fur hat, but the Finns gave in. He was able to wear his hat years later for a Russian Summit and told the Press the origin of his curious headgear.
Although I was again pregnant I often went to Kit's meetings at this time. There was never the slightest disturbance - large crowds listened quietly to what he had to say, and applauded him. There were times during the phoney war when it was possible to believe that neither side would attack and that there could be negotiations with no loss of face.
We had news of Unity from a Hungarian friend, Janos von Almasy, who wrote from Budapest. After she shot herself on the morning war was declared she had been rushed to a clinic where her life was saved by devoted nuns. She was unconscious for weeks, and had suffered brain damage. Hitler asked her, when she was able to understand his question, whether she would like to go back to her family in England. She said she would, and he sent her to neutral Switzerland in an ambulance train; she was brought home by my mother and my sister Debo early in January. All this tragic story I have described in my memoirs.
We had spent Christmas for the last time at Wootton but we had to give it up; it was too unpractical, too big, too remote. Kit and I stayed in London until my baby, Max, was born in April and then the whole family went to Denham. From London and Denham I could see Unity constantly; she was very gradually recovering.
Diana Mosley - Loved Ones - Part 3
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