The bullet entered Unity Mitford’s skull on the morning of September 3, 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany. She had shot herself in a Munich park, and the bullet did not kill her. It lodged in her head, inoperable, and she lay unconscious in a Munich hospital while Hitler paid her medical bills and visited her several times. When she finally regained consciousness, she was sent across the Alps to neutral Switzerland, where her mother and her youngest sister Deborah arrived to bring her home.
They found her in a condition they were not prepared for: she had lost two stone, her hair was matted and untouched since the bullet went through her skull, and she could barely walk or talk. Deborah wrote more than sixty years later that her sister was like one who had had a stroke, a stranger, someone they did not know. The bullet would remain in Unity’s head for the rest of her life, and its slow movement would eventually kill her. How the six Mitford sisters arrived at such a moment is a story of a single English aristocratic family split down the middle by the great political convulsions of the twentieth century.
The family could trace its origins in England back before the Norman Conquest, when Sir John de Mitford ruled Mitford Castle in Northumberland on the Scottish border. The Mitfords retained a landed presence there for the next eight hundred years. The sisters’ father, David Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford, the second Baron Redesdale, was notoriously eccentric. Their mother, Sydney Bowles, came from a literary family; her father Thomas had been a Member of Parliament, a writer, and a publisher who founded several well-known British magazines of the time, including the original *Vanity Fair*.
David and Sydney married in 1904 and had seven children. Nancy was born within months of the wedding. Pamela followed in 1907, and their only son Tom in 1909. A third daughter was born in 1910.
Unity arrived in August 1914, just days after the outbreak of the First World War, in which David served in France. Jessica came in 1917, and finally Deborah in 1920. Tom would be killed in the final months of the Second World War, fighting in the Pacific in 1945. The six sisters, however, would go on to live long lives shaped by a deeply divided household.
Nancy Mitford was born on November 28, 1904, in London. Her childhood was peculiar. Her parents briefly experimented with the then-novel idea that children should not be rebuked or spoken to in anger. The result, according to her biographers, was that Nancy became a troublesome child who flew into fits of rage when she did not get what she wanted.
Her parents abandoned the experiment and returned to more conventional parenting. Nancy and her siblings were educated mostly by private tutors and governesses at the family estate of Swinbrook. It was a strained environment, one in which Nancy was a domineering figure who teased her younger siblings. Yet signs of her future emerged in the late 1910s, when she took the lead in editing and producing a family magazine called *The Boiler*, to which she and her siblings contributed, mostly murder and mystery stories.
Nancy turned eighteen in November 1922, in an era when a debutante ball was still a major event, made even more significant by how sheltered her life had been. The following summer she was presented to King George V at Buckingham Palace. She soon established herself among the Bright Young Things, the daughters and sons of the British aristocracy in the 1920s known for their artistic pursuits and bohemian lifestyles. Among them were the Sitwell siblings, Anthony Powell, John Betjeman, and Evelyn Waugh, who became Nancy’s close friend for the rest of her life and who would publish *Brideshead Revisited* in 1945.
The Bright Young Things became notorious for lavish London parties, heavy drinking, and drug use, in a time of heightened partying driven by the economic boom that followed the First World War. Thanks in part to Waugh’s encouragement and her own long-held interest, Nancy began writing more seriously in the second half of the 1920s. By the end of the decade she was writing a regular column for *The Lady* magazine. Her first novel, *Highland Fling*, published in the spring of 1931, was a thinly disguised account of aristocrats at a party in the Scottish Highlands, with many characters based on her friends among the Bright Young Things.
Her subsequent novels, *Christmas Pudding* in 1932 and *Wigs on the Green* in 1935, continued drawing on her own experiences. Her love life in these years was complicated. In the late 1920s she was seeing Hamish St Clair-Erskine, a son of the Earl of Rosslyn, but the relationship was unfulfilling, primarily because Erskine was gay, though Nancy appears to have been unaware that he was also in a relationship with her brother Tom at Oxford. Their affair continued until 1933, when Erskine abruptly ended it.
Shocked, Nancy quickly began a relationship with Peter Rodd, the son of the newly ennobled Lord Rennell, and they married in December 1933 after just a few months of courtship. The marriage was almost immediately unhappy, with Peter engaging in extramarital affairs. They never had children; Nancy became pregnant several times but suffered miscarriages each time. By the late 1930s it was a marriage in name only.
To avoid divorce, which still carried social stigma, Nancy spent time editing the family letters of the Stanley family of Alderley, to whom the Mitfords were distantly related. In early 1939 she went to the south of France and helped care for wounded Spaniards who had crossed the Pyrenees fleeing General Francisco Franco’s regime in the dying stage of the Spanish Civil War. The experience hardened her political views against fascism, an ideology several of her younger siblings keenly advocated, 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, Nancy volunteered in numerous capacities as an aid worker.
In September 1942 she met Gaston Palewski, a Frenchman living in London as an aide to General Charles de Gaulle, head of the Free French government in exile. She became smitten with him; he was evidently the real love of her life, though his attraction to her was less enthusiastic. When the war ended in 1945, Nancy relocated to France and went to live in Paris, apart from Palewski but near his apartment. Her marriage to Peter was effectively over, though they remained married on paper until 1957.
By the time she settled in France she had achieved the literary success she had long aspired to. Her fifth book, *The Pursuit of Love*, published in 1945, a romantic comedy, became a major popular success in Britain, where readers welcomed an escapist novel at the end of six bleak years of war. It sold two hundred thousand copies in its first year and made her an established writer. On the back of it she was offered a regular column for the *Sunday Times* and became financially self-sufficient.
She moved away from fiction in the early 1950s, developing instead a keen interest in historical biography. Her first such work, on Madame de Pompadour, the famous mistress of King Louis XV, was dismissed by historians as “popcorn history,” focusing more on scandalous elements than hard historical facts, but it sold well. She would spend much of the remainder of her life writing historical biographies, including studies of Voltaire, Louis XIV, and Frederick II of Prussia. Her relationship with Palewski remained curious.
They never lived together, though they spent much of their free time in each other’s company. They never married. Palewski was unfaithful, gaining a reputation in postwar France as a notorious womanizer, and his work assured he had little time to see her; he served as vice president of the French Parliament for several years in the 1950s and was then sent to Italy as French ambassador in 1957, spending five years there during which Nancy rarely saw him. In 1969 he married the wealthy Duchess de Saint-Seine, a move that deeply hurt her.
By then Nancy had moved to a new home in Versailles and was suffering from cancer from which she would never recover. In 1972 she was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur for her contribution to French letters. She returned to England for medical treatment, but her condition was dire, and she spent the last months of her life in considerable pain. She died on June 30, 1973, aged sixty-eight, at home in Versailles.
Her remains were cremated and sent back to England for burial in the family plot. Pamela Mitford was born on November 25, 1907, in Wilbury, Wiltshire. Unlike many of her siblings, she never developed a taste for city life; even in childhood she loved the animals on the Mitford country estate, a passion that would define much of her adult life. She and her sisters were strong-willed and highly opinionated, and a considerable rivalry developed between them.
Nancy in particular teased her younger sister mercilessly, but as they grew older they remained close, whereas Pamela’s relationships with the middle sisters Diana and Unity, and with Tom, became strained by their politics. Pamela’s love of the outdoors, animals, and horse riding developed despite physical limitations: she suffered from polio, which left her partially lame in one leg, though she managed to overcome it and led a life largely unaffected by it, apart from hampered movement in old age. The poet John Betjeman, clearly smitten with her for a time, described her in an unpublished poem, “The Mitford Sisters,” as “Miss Pamela, most rural of them all. ” Her sisters called her “Woman” and relied on her for practical advice; it was noted that Pam was often right but seldom listened to.
In the mid-1930s Pamela began a relationship with Derek Jackson. They bonded over a shared love of equestrian activities, Jackson being an accomplished jockey who rode in the Grand National at Aintree in 1935. He came from a wealthy Welsh family but was independently successful, having emerged as one of Britain’s leading atomic physicists and acquiring a position at Oxford University. Their relationship has long been understood to have been one of convenience: Derek was bisexual, while Pamela was almost certainly a lesbian, though she was so private about her personal life that there is little concrete evidence.
They married in 1936 and were close, but they did not have children, and Pamela would never become a mother, despite her sister Jessica once noting she would have made an ideal parent. When the war broke out in 1939, Derek was often called away from their farm in Berkshire; his abilities as a physicist made him valuable to the government, and he spent much of the early war improving the Royal Air Force’s air defense system and radar, flying more than a thousand hours as a navigator. In the summer of 1940, Pamela’s sister Diana and Oswald Mosley were arrested on account of their ties to Nazi Germany. With France conquered and the Blitz beginning, Nazi sympathizers like the Mosleys were arrested as a potential fifth column.
Diana would remain under arrest until November 1943, and some of her children were taken in by Pamela and Derek at Rignell House, their country farm. Despite her sister’s political affiliations, Pamela wrote regularly to Diana at Holloway Prison and never disowned her, in contrast to Nancy, who denounced Diana as a “sinister woman. ” When the Mosleys were released from prison in 1943 and placed under house arrest, the children left Pamela and Derek’s home. After the war Derek left his academic position, and they relocated to Ireland, to live at Tuly-man Castle near Fethard in County Tipperary, a centerpiece of a stud farm, built in the early nineteenth century.
Their decision was largely motivated by a desire to avoid the high postwar taxes imposed on the landed gentry in Britain. At Tuly-man, Pamela was in her element, and the early years were happy ones. But Derek grew restless, wanting to return to the laboratory, and he began spending more time away in England. Combined with their complicated sexualities, this led to their divorce, formalized in 1951.
They sold Tuly-man, and Derek took up a position in Paris, but Pamela worked out an arrangement to continue renting it. She stayed until 1958. During their years at Tuly-man, an Italian horse rider and trainer named Giuditta Tommasi had been a frequent visitor, and she and Pamela became companions after Derek left. The exact nature of their relationship remains somewhat unclear, but when Pamela left Tuly-man in 1958 she relocated to Switzerland to live with Tommasi.
Jessica crudely referred to Tommasi as Pamela’s “German wife,” though why she described an Italian woman as German remains a mystery. Pamela lived in Switzerland through most of the 1960s until they decided to part ways, but she did not leave until her dogs, many of them old, had died, unwilling to force them to relocate to England in their old age. When she finally returned to England in 1972, it was to live in the rural Cotswolds in Gloucestershire, and she brought with her the distinction of introducing the Appenzell Spitzhauben breed of chicken to Britain from Switzerland. In the 1980s she had a brief television career, appearing in a documentary about Nancy and, four years later, on a chat show to discuss chickens, a performance noteworthy enough for Deborah to joke she should have her own show exclusively on poultry.
In the early 1990s, staying with a friend in London, Pamela fell down a flight of stairs and broke two bones in the leg that had been weak throughout her life. She had surgery but never fully recovered. She died in hospital on April 12, 1994, aged eighty-six. Her last words, it is believed, inquired which horse had won the Grand National at Aintree three days earlier.
Diana Mitford was born on June 17, 1910, in London. She grew up in the isolated environment of the family estate, but in 1926 she was briefly sent to school in Paris for about six months. She could not have known it then, but she would live much of her later life in the French capital. Even by that time Diana had developed an easy charm that pulled people into her circle, and her younger sisters Unity, Jessica, and Deborah looked up to her rather than to Nancy and Pamela.
Eventually the spell would break for Jessica and Deborah, but Unity’s adoration would contribute to her own tragic story. Diana, well noted by the late 1920s as the prettiest of the Mitford sisters, married almost as soon as she was released from the family estate, at just eighteen. She secretly got engaged to the handsome and charming Bryan Guinness, heir to the Irish brewing dynasty. When she informed her parents, they were initially reluctant to allow the marriage because of her age, but 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.
The marriage was something of a culture shock; the family was incredibly wealthy, with armies of staff and servants, and Diana’s new mother-in-law expressed amazement that Diana was able to fry an egg. Two sons, Jonathan and Desmond, followed in 1930 and 1931. Before they had even left infancy, Diana was being drawn elsewhere. In February 1932 she met Sir Oswald Mosley at a party at the house of Emerald Cunard in London.
Mosley had been judged by many to be one of the most promising politicians in Britain in the 1920s, a former Conservative who had crossed to Labour and been appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster when Labour entered government in 1929. When the Labour Party rejected a memorandum outlining a plan to reduce mass unemployment following the Wall Street Crash, he left Labour too and started the New Party, which in 1932, around the time he met Diana, became the British Union of Fascists, with Mosley as its leader. Despite the fact that both were married and there was a fourteen-year age gap, they were soon having an affair. Shortly thereafter Diana decided to leave her husband and became Mosley’s mistress, horrifying her family and scandalizing British society.
Mosley refused to leave his wife, Lady Cynthia, but she died in 1933 from complications of peritonitis. Still, the couple would not marry until 1936, as Mosley did not commit for several years, even briefly becoming involved with his sister-in-law Lady Alexandra Metcalfe. Oswald and Diana finally married on October 6, 1936, in Germany, in one of the homes of the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Adolf Hitler was present.
By that time Diana had regularly been visiting Germany with Oswald to attend Nazi rallies in Nuremberg, and Oswald had forged ties to the German fascists, believing his party would one day assume control of Britain. Two sons followed soon after their marriage, Alexander in 1938 and Max in 1940. Diana’s mother, Sydney, brother Tom, and sister Unity shared her affinity for fascism. There is no doubting that Diana was a committed fascist, not blindly led into political extremism by an infatuation with her new husband.
Her views in later life on the racial policies of the Nazis were complicated; at certain times she expressed horror, but at others her statements were more neutral. Her politics in the 1930s caused a complete split with her elder sister Nancy. When the war broke out in 1939, Diana and Oswald’s political and social position in Britain collapsed, in stark contrast to the summer of 1939, when a British Union of Fascists rally in London had drawn thirty thousand attendees, one of the biggest political rallies in British history. Compromised by his early support for the Nazis, Oswald began calling for a negotiated peace with Germany.
The British government did not move to ban the British Union of Fascists until May 23, 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 Mosleys and their followers would act as a fifth column for the Nazis. Diana was imprisoned in Holloway Prison in London; Oswald was held separately at first, but in December 1941 Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had known Mosley well since the 1910s, intervened personally to allow Mosley to be moved to Holloway as well. They remained there until late 1943, when the fate of the war was clear and they were no longer perceived as a great threat.
They were released but remained under house arrest for the remainder of the war. The Mosleys were effectively social outcasts in Britain after the war. Nevertheless Oswald attempted to revive his political career, reimagining himself as an advocate of a pan-European state, popular at the time as several Western European states began the process of creating what would eventually become the European Economic Community. He also established a Union Movement as a far-right successor to the British Union of Fascists in 1948, but it gained no traction.
Once their passports were returned by the government in 1949, they made plans to leave Britain. In 1951 they relocated first to Ireland, settling in Galway and then at Fermoy in County Cork, and then spent most of their years in exile living in Paris, with occasional visits to South Africa, where their politics were far more acceptable to the apartheid regime. It was a curious life in exile. Oswald was frequently unfaithful, and Diana was certainly aware but ignored his affairs for the most part.
When asked about her ties to the Nazis, she expressed outward revulsion for the Holocaust but refused to entirely disavow her friendships with Hitler and other senior Nazis. In one interview she said: “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 did very cruel and 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 to 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 many interviews and accounts there is little doubting that she was anti-Semitic, once pondering to the *Guardian* that Europe’s Jews should have been relocated to Uganda, a thinly disguised allusion to the Nazi plan to deport the continent’s Jewish people to Madagascar, briefly considered in 1940.
Both Mosleys wrote and published extensively during these decades. They established Euphorion Books, their own publishing company, named after a character in Goethe’s *Faust*, through which Oswald translated and published Goethe’s work. Diana edited *The European* for six years between 1953 and 1959, a political and cultural magazine that furthered many of the Mosleys’ political ideas and included contributions from the American poet Ezra Pound, a supporter of Italian Fascism, the South African poet Roy Campbell, and the British writer Henry Williamson. Diana also published several books, including a biography of Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, in 1980, and two memoirs: *A Life of Contrasts* in 1977 and *Loved Ones* in 1985.
Her background and writings, including a defense of Magda Goebbels’s decision to kill her six children in the Führerbunker at the end of the war, caused controversy and infamous clashes with Christopher Hitchens and Max Hastings. Oswald died on December 3, 1980, in Paris. Many obituaries noted the passing of the leader of the British fascist movement, but his demise was not greeted with an outpouring of anger; many people had simply forgotten the Mosleys or had not been alive in the 1930s. 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 decided he did not want any more reviews by “bloody Lady Hitler” in his paper.
Diana died in Paris on August 11, 2003, following complications from a stroke she had suffered a week earlier, compounded by the heat wave that hit Western Europe that late summer, when temperatures topped forty degrees Celsius for ten days in a row. She was ninety-three. She was buried back in England in the Mitford family plot. Unity Mitford was born on August 8, 1914.
Her parents named her Unity as a symbolic gesture, because Britain had entered the war four days before she was born. She was actually conceived in the town of Swastika, Ontario, in Canada, a curiosity given how her life played out. Unlike her older siblings, who had been almost entirely homeschooled, Unity attended St Margaret’s School at Bushey in Hertfordshire. She struggled to assert herself within a large family unit; by her early teens her older sisters were prominent figures on the London social scene, opinionated and strong-willed.
Unity struggled to carve out her own identity. In the early 1930s she began to show an affinity for fascist politics. Her mother, older sister Diana, and brother Tom shared her views, and from 1932 onward, when Diana began seeing Oswald Mosley, the family became tied into Britain’s fledgling fascist politics. This contrasted sharply with her younger sister Jessica, who had a growing affinity for 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 Vladimir Lenin and the hammer and sickle; Unity put up a photo of Adolf Hitler and the swastika. In the mid-autumn of 1933, Unity accompanied Diana and Oswald Mosley to the annual Nazi rally in Nuremberg. There she met Adolf Hitler for the first time and quickly became infatuated with him.
She later stated: “The first time I saw him I knew there was no one I would rather meet. ” She was now set on being as near to Hitler as she possibly could, despite the fact he was in his mid-forties and she was not yet twenty. She returned to Germany in the summer of 1934 and enrolled in a language school in Munich. She became so obsessed that she began stalking him, noting his daily activities and tracking which hotels and cafés he frequented.
She noticed he often ate in the Osteria Bavaria in Munich, so she sat near the entrance every day, and when Hitler came in he would notice her. After ten months, Hitler finally invited her to his table, and after talking for thirty minutes, Hitler picked up the bill. Unity wrote to her father: “It was the most wonderful and beautiful day of my life, and I am so happy that I wouldn’t mind a bit dying. I’d suppose I’m the luckiest girl in the world, for he is the greatest man of all time.
” Soon Hitler also became somewhat infatuated with the young blonde British student, describing her as a “perfect specimen of Aryan womanhood. ” He was impressed by her ties to Germanic culture, such as her middle name Valkyrie, and the fact that Unity’s grandfather had been friends with Richard Wagner. Hitler was also extremely superstitious and believed Unity was sent to him as if destined. He began inviting her to party rallies and state events, and used her to create jealousy in his current partner Eva Braun, two years older than Unity.
As Unity spent more time with the Nazi leader, Braun’s psychological state deteriorated, and she attempted suicide in May 1935, the second such attempt. After that, Hitler committed to their relationship, seemingly believing Braun had shown adequate loyalty in her willingness to take her own life. Despite Hitler settling on Eva Braun, Unity continued to move in the leader’s inner circle. She accompanied him to events at the Summer Olympics in Berlin in 1936 and was present in Vienna in March 1938 after the Nazis annexed Austria.
Hitler even arranged for her to be given an apartment in Munich, from which a Jewish couple were evicted. In total it is believed Unity met Hitler on more than a hundred occasions, meaning she spent more time in the company of the Nazi leader after his rise to power than any other British person. Her ascent was looked at suspiciously by many senior Nazi figures; some worried she might be a British spy, others were confounded as to why Hitler allowed her to attend social gatherings of his inner circle. Yet in time she won many over.
On her copy of *Mein Kampf*, Unity managed to acquire not only Hitler’s signature but also those of Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, and other senior Nazi leaders. Her political views are hard to get a clear picture of. She espoused many of the attitudes of German fascism, including its severe racial antipathy toward Jewish people; at a Hitler Youth rally in the mid-1930s she proudly asserted she was a “Jew hater. ” When in England she would show up to social events wearing the black shirt uniform of the British Union of Fascists and even attended communist meetings to heckle the speakers.
Whether this was the political outlook of someone who had reflected on fascist theory or the immature actions of a confused young woman who wanted to belong is open to debate. In one respect alone did Unity plow her own path: she was unquestionably a British nationalist. As war between Germany and Britain became more likely, she expressed her desire that the Nazis would find a way to reach an agreement with Britain and avoid war with her native country. She made her feelings known to Hitler, and in the end her inability to reconcile her worship of Hitler with her love for her homeland would be her downfall.
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 weeks and Britain and France had made it clear such action would result in war. The two sisters deliberated on what to do. Diana took the decision to return home with Oswald Mosley. Unity took the opposite decision and remained in Germany, despite her family’s pleas to return to England.
In the days before Diana left, Unity told her 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 September 3, 1939, Unity shot herself in the head with a pistol in Munich. After her attempted suicide she was sent to a Munich hospital, where she remained unconscious for two months.
When she finally regained consciousness, she was sent to neutral Switzerland, where her mother and Deborah arrived and arranged for her to be brought home, with the bullet still in her head. Despite cause for her to be interned as a Nazi sympathizer, as Diana was from the summer of 1940, Unity remained at the family home in Oxford, thanks in part to the intervention of Home Secretary John Anderson and because she was not deemed a threat given her physical and psychological state. She was cared for by her mother, and despite relearning to walk and carry out some basic tasks, she never really regained her mental faculties. An assessment by one of her medical team described her as having the mental age of a ten-year-old.
In spite of this, Unity was alleged to have had a relationship with RAF pilot officer John Andrews, stationed nearby. Although he was a married man and father, the affair lasted until September 11, 1941, when MI5 caught wind and reported it to Home Secretary Herbert Morrison. It was also rumored that Unity drove about the countryside picking up airmen and interrogating them. Andrews was reposted to the far north of Scotland, where he possibly 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. 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 afterward, on May 28, 1948, she died from meningitis, aged thirty-three.
In death, a number of rumors and conspiracy theories attached themselves to Unity. One emerged after MI5 reports were declassified in 2002, when the British journalist Martin Bright published an article in the *Observer* speculating that Unity had not shot herself at all, but that the injury had likely been fabricated to avoid her arrest on return to Britain. Deborah responded sternly in the same newspaper, and Bright accepted he had been wrong. The same Martin Bright, in a 2007 article in the *New Statesman*, stated that following his initial publication he had received a tip that Unity had returned to Britain pregnant in 1940 and given birth at a maternity hospital in Oxford.
He speculated that Unity might have been carrying Hitler’s child, and that the Nazi leader’s offspring had lived unknowingly in Britain through the second half of the twentieth century. A Channel 4 documentary, *Hitler’s British Girl*, aired late in 2007, but the claims remained entirely speculative, as no record of Unity giving birth in Oxford in 1940 was ever uncovered. Jessica Lucy Freeman-Mitford, known as Decca from her early years, was born on September 11, 1917, at Swinbrook Manor in Oxfordshire. By the early 1930s, as she entered her teenage years, the family was becoming increasingly divided politically.
Diana and Unity and their brother Tom were advocates of fascism, and from 1933 Diana and Unity were spending increasing amounts of time in Germany. At home in Oxfordshire, Jessica and Unity became antagonistic toward each other as Jessica increasingly favored socialism and communism. She was known as the red sheep of the family. In the spring of 1937, Jessica, just nineteen, made national headlines.
She had met and quickly fallen in love with Esmond Romilly, a British socialist, anti-fascist, and nephew-in-law of Winston Churchill. Mitford and Romilly eloped from Britain and headed for Spain to support the Communist and Republican movement in the civil war against the Nationalists. They remained there despite the dispatch of a British warship to try to bring home the daughter of a British aristocrat and nephew-in-law of one of the nation’s foremost political figures. Once their Spanish visas were threatened with revocation, they crossed back over the border to France, where they married in a civil ceremony at Bayonne on May 18, 1937.
The young couple returned to London, where Esmond worked on a memoir, *Boadilla*, an account of his time with the English Brigade fighting with the Communists in Spain in 1936, before Jessica joined him. A daughter, named Jessica after her mother, was born in December 1937 but died the following May from measles. In February 1939 Jessica and Esmond emigrated to the United States, living a largely penniless itinerant lifestyle despite their affluent backgrounds. They eventually settled in Greenwich Village in New York, where Jessica briefly found work at a fashion house while Esmond attempted to work as a journalist.
When the war broke out in September 1939, Esmond immediately headed for Canada to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Jessica spent the early war years living with Virginia and Clifford Durr, two civil rights activists in Washington DC, and gave birth to a daughter, Constancia, in February 1941. Constancia’s father would be dead before her first birthday: Esmond went missing in action while flying in an air raid against Hamburg on November 30, 1941, at just twenty-three years of age. It is assumed his plane was lost over the North Sea.
Jessica responded by burying herself in work, volunteering with numerous organizations as the United States was drawn into the conflict just a week after Romilly’s death, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. During this time she met Robert Treuhaft, a Harvard Law graduate who became involved in the civil rights movement along with her. They married in 1943, and she became a US citizen the following year. They had two sons, Nicholas in 1944 and Benjamin in 1947.
Nicholas died when still a child in 1955, after being hit by a bus. By that time his parents were heavily involved in the civil rights movement and had also joined the Communist Party of the United States, an affiliation that became extremely hazardous during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunts in the 1950s. As a mother, Jessica clearly left a lot to be desired. Her children stated that she was not a neglectful mother, but her work was always a priority; 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, and Benjamin claimed he had largely been raised by his older half-sister. While her parenting style was less than perfect, Jessica flourished as a writer in the postwar period. She published her first book in 1960, a celebrated memoir entitled *Hons and Rebels*, an account of her upbringing that presented a picture of herself protesting against her family’s growing inclination toward fascism. In one memorable passage she describes her sister Unity carving swastikas into the windows of the Oxford manor in the 1930s, over which Jessica subsequently carved the Soviet hammer and sickle.
The memoir became a classic, praised by figures as notable as Christopher Hitchens and J. K. Rowling. The 1960s were a remarkable period in Jessica Mitford’s life.
It began 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 civil rights movement. Mitford and a friend ended up meeting a group of Freedom Riders, civil rights activists who rode buses between American towns to drum up support for an end to segregation. Shortly afterward 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 a prime speaker. The Klan again sent a group to break up the rally, a striking introduction to the South and its politics.
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 that pretended to help grieving people but which she increasingly came to believe was exploiting them. The result, in 1963, was *The American Way of Death*, in which she argued that funeral directors across the United States were exploiting the shock and grief of the bereaved to convince families to pay for services they did not really need, from lavish funeral services and ornate coffins to grief counselors. A particularly striking aspect was her description of mortuary practices deemed so graphic by 1960s standards that she initially struggled to find a publisher.
She 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 onto bills. Her research was meticulous, based on records from funeral parlors and state records offices. The book became a bestseller and led to a congressional hearing in Washington DC to deliberate on whether the funeral industry needed to be more tightly regulated. With the publication of *Hons and Rebels* and *The American Way of Death*, Jessica became a well-established literary figure and social commentator.
She became a regular article writer for publications such as the *Atlantic Monthly* and *Vanity Fair*, and became known as one of the preeminent muckrakers of her day. Other journalism focused on the Vietnam War and the draft, and on the prison system, which was already expanding to become the prison industrial complex of the late twentieth century. That reporting was published as a book in 1973, *Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business*. She published many other books over the years, including *The Trial of Dr.
Spock*, *The Making of a Muckraker*, and *The American Way of Birth*. She also taught at several institutions from the late 1960s onward, notably at San Jose State University, near San Francisco, where she had lived with her two surviving children and second husband for the most part since the mid-1940s. This position became celebrated in 1973 when Mitford refused to accede 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. In 1977 she published a second memoir, *A Fine Old Conflict*, largely dealing with her experiences as a member of the US communist movement in the 1940s and 1950s, a movement she had since departed from.
In the 1970s she recorded some music albums, and her television appearances in the 1980s showed a light-hearted, witty side. In the 1990s she became ill with lung cancer and died from the disease in the summer of 1996, aged seventy-eight. In line with her criticism of the funeral industry, her wishes were for an inexpensive ceremony; when cremation costs were taken out of the equation, it cost just $58. Her ashes were scattered at sea.
At 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. ”
Deborah Vivien Freeman-Mitford, known as Debo, was born on March 31, 1920, at Swinbrook, Oxfordshire. Her parents had wanted a second son, and so she was dismissed to a large extent. Their marriage was extremely strained in her younger years, collapsing altogether in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
As the youngest of the six sisters she was overshadowed and teased extensively, though her siblings had an affection for her typical of a youngest member of a large family. Growing up, she spent Saturdays fox hunting and Sundays ice skating. She had little formal schooling, taught primarily by a governess and various tutors. Debo was still a child when Diana began seeing Oswald Mosley in 1932, and as a teenager she had the strange experience of dining with Adolf Hitler in Munich, though her recollection many years later emphasized that there was little open conversation; Hitler did not speak English, and Unity had to translate.
While Diana and Unity became closely aligned with British and German fascism, joined by her mother and brother Tom, and Jessica was a communist, and Nancy was appalled by Diana’s associations, Deborah and, to some extent, Pamela became the neutral members of the family, maintaining good relations with all. Deborah later wrote: “I do not share Diana’s fascist views but my love for her overcame the side of her character, and Unity was always the odd one out. ” The biographer Selina Hastings wrote that Deborah was by far the most balanced of all the sisters, down to earth, a peacemaker and arbitrator. This made Deborah, just nineteen when the war broke out, the daughter who headed off with her mother late in 1939 when Unity showed up in Switzerland with a bullet in her head.
She remained a staunch defender of her sister’s actions for decades thereafter, clashing with media and even her in-laws. She was not drawn to national socialism, but was rather a traditional British conservative, though one who flirted with the new Liberal movement in the 1980s. Her defense of Unity was based solely on family loyalty. Not long after her trip to Switzerland, Deborah agreed to marry Andrew Cavendish, a younger son of the 10th 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, London, in 1941. Their first child, a boy called Mark, was born on November 14, 1941, but died just minutes after his birth. Deborah’s natal history would be complicated. Her brother-in-law William, the heir to the dukedom, was killed in September 1944 while leading a division of the Coldstream Guards in Belgium, following the Allied invasion of France.
William, known as Billy, had married Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy just four months prior; she was a sister of the future president and would face her own tragic end. 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 William’s passing, Andrew became the heir designate, and when his father died unexpectedly of a heart attack in the early winter of 1950, Andrew succeeded as the 11th Duke of Devonshire.
Deborah, who would not have expected to acquire such a title when she married in 1941, became Duchess of Devonshire. As Duchess, Deborah became the lady of one of Britain’s most prized stately homes, Chatsworth House. The estate had passed into the ownership of the Cavendish family in 1549, when Sir William Cavendish, a prominent royal official, purchased it. His descendant William Cavendish, the fourth Earl and subsequently first Duke of Devonshire, began building the modern house in 1687, which eventually became a sprawling five-story, 81,000-square-foot abode with three hundred rooms.
A later duke married Lady Charlotte Boyle, heiress to the vast Boyle estate in Ireland, which brought enormous wealth to the family. By the time Andrew and Deborah became Duke and Duchess in 1950, however, the family was heavily indebted, owing some £7 million, the equivalent of well over £200 million today, to the government, due to extensive postwar wealth taxes and death duties on the passing of the 10th Duke. Many advisers believed the financial situation unfixable and advised carving up the estate and selling chunks of it. But Andrew and Deborah took another approach.
They decided to sell many valuable works of art as well as a second sixteenth-century palace, Hardwick Hall, and were determined to redevelop Chatsworth into one of the largest tourist centers in northern England. The house itself was run down, as the Dukes of Devonshire had not used it as their primary residence for many years; it had been leased out as a private girls’ boarding school. Deborah became the chief decorator in the restoration process, overseeing the repainting and repair of the family rooms and renovating the sprawling common areas. By 1959 the house and main grounds were sufficiently restored to move in.
The grounds were transformed with large gardens planted to begin a cottage industry; years later the result was a self-sufficient estate, where tourists today can eat in a restaurant supplied by the surrounding farm and gardens. A Chatsworth Farm Shop was eventually opened. Deborah was fully immersed in country life, with dogs, horses, and livestock, enjoying shooting and hosting agricultural shows and equestrian events. 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.
Chatsworth House sits at the center 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. The scenic beauty of the Peak District makes the estate a considerable draw for tourists. Debo was front and central to this development, in the early years even manning the ticket office when the house first became a tourist site. She also oversaw the establishment and redevelopment of several hotels on or adjoining the estate.
As a result of all this work, by the 1990s Chatsworth had become one of the most popular tourist destinations in England, with over half a million visitors every year, putting it on the same level as the Tower of London and the Royal Albert Hall. While Chatsworth was a resounding success, Deborah’s family life was strained. Andrew was repeatedly unfaithful, and this came to public attention when he was called to testify at a burglary trial and was forced to admit 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 he openly wrote about.
She eventually confronted this in the 1980s, telling her husband it was her or the booze. In her memoir she states: “For two decades until the day he died he never had another drink. ” She 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 formed out of former Labour members. Asked years later why she stayed with her husband, she stated it was because he wasn’t boring.
Their position as parents was also difficult. After the death of Mark in 1941, two healthy children, Emma and Peregrine, were born in 1943 and 1944. Thereafter Deborah suffered a miscarriage in 1946 and two children who died shortly after birth in 1947 and 1953. The tragedy of having lost four children at a time when such infant mortality was becoming unusual was somewhat alleviated when a healthy child, Sophia, was born in 1957.
By the late 1990s Chatsworth had become a tremendous success, and the Devonshires engaged in a wide array of philanthropic activities. 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 eighty-four, and his and Deborah’s only surviving son, Peregrine, succeeded as the 12th Duke of Devonshire, a position he still holds. Deborah moved out of Chatsworth to make way for her son and moved back to the old dairy on the estate where she had lived in the 1950s.
The Cavendish family had been repeatedly featured on the *Sunday Times* Rich List, and in 2023 it was estimated their wealth amounted to £95 million, a result of their extensive land holdings and investments in hotel chains abroad. Deborah’s business acumen had not only saved the dukedom from financial difficulties but had made the Cavendishes once again one of England’s wealthiest aristocratic families. Deborah died on September 24, 2014, at ninety-four, having been the last surviving Mitford sister for over a decade. At her funeral, over six hundred staff, hundreds of members of the public, and members of the royal family lined the route from Chatsworth House to St Peter’s Church at Edensor, where she was buried.
Elvis, her favorite 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 eighteen great-grandchildren. It was a fitting end to the eccentric and controversial Mitford sisters.
