Things Diana Mosley Told Me

I WAS WORKING at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire for a few weeks in the early spring of 1990. I’d flown across alone from Virginia after staying with friends on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay. Chatsworth is the home of the Dukes of Devonshire. The house is open to the public most days. I was there to carry out the first descriptive analysis of the eight-eenth-century library of Lord Burlington, the neo-Palladian architect earl. This work materialised as “Burlington’s Library at Chiswick”, published in 1992 by the leading journal in its field, Studies in Bibliography (University of Virginia; http://etext. virginia.edu/bsuva.sb), and later it formed a part of my work on classicism and culture in eighteenth-century England, published as a book by Cambridge University Press in 1997. A generation after Burlington died, his library was transferred from his London home, Chiswick Villa, to Chatsworth as a result of a marriage joining the two families, and it has remained part of the Chatsworth library ever since.

Renting a car at Heathrow, I drove directly up to Bakewell, a couple of miles from Chatsworth, paid for a three-week stay at a homely bed-and-breakfast place I’d booked from America, hung my clothes in the closet and drove across the hill through the mist and drizzle and down to the big house. It was freezing cold and there were just one or two cars in the parking lot, with no one walking about.

If you are carrying out any research here, you register, and then they show you to a room in the basement. The books or manuscripts you wish to consult are brought down to you. No one works in the library itself, which is up on the second storey, part of the tour of the house (visitors can look into it, but not walk into it). They gave me Burlington’s 1743 library catalogue to work from, and by using that I could ask to see any of the books it listed, but I found it quite impractical to make an efficient study of Burlington’s library from the basement.

On the second day the Duchess of Devonshire came down with an assistant to make some photocopies, and spoke to me.

She asked what I was working on, and where I came from. I told her. “Well, you must stay with us, then,” she said very kindly. Though I had nothing formal with me to wear to dinner, I should have accepted on the spot, but instead I explained that I’d paid a deposit and was committed to staying in the town. I could have cancelled there easily enough, but I was expecting a call to that number from a party in Germany, my wife, to whom I’d sent the number before leaving Virginia—she was planning to visit me in Derbyshire, and I didn’t have her telephone number with me to ring her and give her a different number, so I was stuck with the joint in town.

When I explained to the Duchess that I was preparing a detailed descriptive analysis of Lord Burlington’s library from his 1743 catalogue and the books themselves, she arranged for me to work up in the library instead of down in the basement. I was told by the curator that it was the first time in years that any visitor had worked up there. It’s a beautiful library, restrained baroque, with exquisite bookcases and desks including one that was Burlington’s own. I worked at that desk, with the books from his Chiswick library all around me. I could examine them, make all my notes and photograph examples of the beautiful bindings. It was pleasant work. Down the other end visitors would peer in: “Oh look! Somebody’s reading in there …”

For lunch I’d buy sandwiches and eat in the gardens, exploring the rhododendron walk, the yew maze, the river bank and the deer park. At the bookshop I’d flip through the stuff they had.

There were several books about the Mitford sisters. One of these sisters was Deborah Mitford, now the Duchess of Devonshire and mistress of Chatsworth, whom I’d just met. I knew something about a couple of the others from their books, or from books about them (like David Pryce-Jones’s book on Unity Mitford, aka “Hitler’s girlfriend”), but I didn’t know much about the one whose pictures most took my eye, Diana Mitford, later Diana Guinness, subsequently Diana Mosley, married to Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists during the 1930s. She had been described as “the most beautiful woman in the world”. I was curious to know more about her because of her looks. The photos were from the 1930s.

In between periods of research I started reading about the Mosleys and their love affair with National Socialism. Diana, like Unity, was often in Germany. Hitler was witness at her wedding to Mosley. Just how well did she know Hitler? Then I read that she was also friends with the Goerings and the Goebbels.

I was thinking about this side-reading while I was photographing the Burlington bindings. Lord Burlington was a man of impeccable and studied taste in every detail of his life and work, from the houses he designed to the bespoke mathematical instruments he used to design them, and one expects and finds a style of considerable elegance in the bindings of his books. His binder was Thomas Elliott, also binder to the Harleian Library.

I was reading how they locked her up after the war broke out, her own account of that. They stuck this beautiful woman in a rat-hole where the female warders treated her with the kind of sadism I guess envy exacerbates. They didn’t exactly tie her up, but you get the picture.

I didn’t have a copying stand and I didn’t have a flash, so I was flirting with failure by hand-holding my Olympus OM1 and photographing under reading lamps the books I chose to illustrate for my article, using a macro lens, fast transparency film, and exposures of 1/250th of a second to obviate camera-shake, with correspondingly large aperture settings. Luck was with me because they all came out sharp. I didn’t know much about bindings of that sort. However pretty, they’re not exactly my idea of exciting.

After many months of mistreatment they let this gorgeous girl out because she was no longer perceived to be a public danger. She hadn’t been punished because of conviction of crime, but for constituting a public danger. You could maybe call her a public enemy. They hadn’t broken her spirit or changed her views. Several years later she and her husband went to live in France, in a house built for one of Napoleon’s generals, called “Le Temple de la Gloire”. They were in the Windsors’ circle, which must have been depressing.

One day I was back down in the basement where the photocopying machines were, and I was copying Lord Burlington’s 1743 catalogue when the Duchess’s secretary (I think it was) happened to be there too, so I asked her was Lady Mosley still alive.

“Yes, she lives in France. She visits here from time to time.”

I said I might write to her, and did they have her address? “Yes,” and she wrote it down. So now I had it folded in my warm inside jacket pocket and what was I going to do with it?

I DID NOTHING for a month or two after I’d returned to Melbourne, then I wrote off to her. I told her how I’d come by the address. I said I’d just read her autobiography. I said I’d often thought about the historians who stupidly failed to interview Napoleon, or the Kaiser (not that she was in that league) or many others now dead, and that I would like to ask her some questions through letters, not too presumptuously I hoped, questions she hadn’t dealt with in her autobiography in the detail I would have liked.

What sort of questions? Well, not profound ones. To the profound ones I thought I already had the answers. Not leading questions, I loathe them. But questions phrased in a courteous way. This was a beautiful woman. To gain her confidence I obviously had to show an understanding for her and her husband. I wasn’t going to get anywhere at all if I wrote in a hostile tone, and anyway I didn’t feel hostile towards her, as I’ve sufficiently indicated. I’d read her account of her life in prison, and while I understood perfectly well why she was locked up, the conditions as she described them would make most men with balls feel like they wanted to rescue her, especially given her looks. Me anyway. I could dream about a woman like that.

She asked me, in her first letter, to read a book that had just been published on that very subject, and the book influenced me. She asked could I publish a review of it and I promised her I’d try. I wrote a review and sent it off to Quadrant, then being edited by Robert Manne, but for whatever reason, some perceived lack of didactic intent perhaps, whatever, he didn’t publish it. Fair enough. She was still alive then, and considered to be one of the “lost” or “damned”, but then plenty of us are lost or close to damned, and we’re taught to love them and not cast them out, if we’re Christian.

Basically, I wanted to write to the woman in the photographs, about a turbulent and frightful period, and maybe get some new facts. As Mr M’Choakumchild says in Dickens’ Hard Times, “Facts are what’s wanted”, new facts, facts unpublished, “hard research”, “What did you do, and what did you think?” That’s what I wanted, and a connection with her.

She agreed to co-operate, and across a correspondence that ran several times in each direction I received a few new facts in reply to my letters, facts I present here for the small change they’re worth. I don’t pretend they’re important, they’re mostly trivial, because my questions were trivial, and I offer the answers up without editorial comment. I could moralise but was taught that a writer should show, not tell, that is, not write, “This was a wrong thing to say”. If I missed my calling it wasn’t as a preacher, so I ask the questions and the last of the First Ladies of Fascism speaks for herself, and the reader’s the judge. She died a few years ago. The letters are from the period 1990–93 and still in my possession.

I ASKED DIANA MOSLEY to comment on the Depression and the general atmosphere in England, saying I was thinking of writing something about it. She did so, going on (of her own accord) to compare the case of Germany. She told me:

“I should have to write reams in order to answer it adequately. In the thirties England was so badly administered, what was called poverty in the midst of plenty, that millions of people were suffering from hunger, rotten slums to live in etc, and the politicians seemed quite unable to deal with the situation. England was by way of “owning” a quarter of the globe with unimaginable riches of every sort and yet this is how very many people lived. My husband came up with an answer which seemed and still seems valid. In fact I think it is admitted now that he was right. In Germany they also had poverty and suffering, 6 million unemployed. Hitler came and within 2 or 3 years the whole country was transformed. They had no external “riches” but Hitler said the real riches of a country were the people. As you know from what has happened since the mound of rubble Germany was in 1945, he was perfectly right. In the thirties there was quickly tremendous prosperity for all, new housing, splendid roads etc. It seemed a very rich and happy country, after having been a miserably poor one.”

Then she added, “Hitler is to blame for the war, along with our own local war-lovers headed by Churchill. He is also to blame for appalling murders and horrors. Therefore everyone has forgotten his political genius, of before the war.”

I asked her about the philosophical influences on her husband Sir Oswald Mosley. She told me:

“He was much influenced by Nietzsche. After he learnt German he could quote long passages by heart. He loved the poetry of it. He was influenced by Spengler (whom you may not consider a philosopher at all). He considered that the fact of science and its giant strides would enable the West to disprove Spengler’s pessimistic conclusions. All in all, besides Plato, the philosophy that influenced his thinking most was Goethe’s. He saw Nature as being the pattern for mankind to follow and he thought Goethe’s theory of the stimulating influence of evil in the world profoundly interesting. He liked the idea of a Pflanzschule, and never disbelieved in an after-life, saying we do not know and cannot know. He was not a Christian, I suppose he was a Pantheist.”

There were other observations but these were the most interesting. Still, I thought, this is not enough. Hitler and the other Nazis she knew are more to the point historically, interesting though her husband was as a political phenomenon. I thought, “She knows things that aren’t in print about extremely notorious people, and through her I’m one degree of separation from them. She’s now in her eighties, time is of the essence, I need to get to the point.”

I SAID TO DIANA MOSLEY that I had noted that Magda Goebbels was a friend of hers. What did Lady Mosley think of the action of Magda and Josef Goebbels in killing their children before they took their own lives? In her autobiography she had almost appeared to justify it, but not very specifically. What was she thinking?—that the Goebbels had been worried about their children being raped or murdered by the Russians? Was she thinking of the children of the Tsar? How could she justify it?

“I don’t exactly defend Frau Goebbels’s action,” Diana Mosley confided to me, “I only say I understand it, Philip. Very possibly the Russians would have killed the children. Almost worse, they might have been scattered, and ill treated. The Allies (not sure which) were vile to Goering’s wife and daughter.” Then she went on to tell me, “I was fond of Magda, a very loyal and sweet woman and loving mother.”

I asked her what Hitler was like as company, understanding, from what I’d read, that she was sometimes with him alone in the Reich Chancellery in 1939. She told me, “Hitler was a fascinator, as many people found. Part of the charm was his extreme naturalness and lack of affectation.”

I asked her to comment on Hitler’s view, as expressed to her, of Czechoslovakia and Munich, and I was writing just after Czechoslovakia had split into two states following the break-up of the Soviet Union and the end of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, which explains how she answered.

“He thought Czechoslovakia a country manufactured at Versailles, bound sooner or later to split into its component parts,” she told me. “He did not think ‘Munich’ particularly important and thought England was using the whole ‘crisis’ as an excuse to attack Germany. His prophecy about the split of Czechoslovakia has now come true.”

I asked her what other things they discussed during her visits to the Reich Chancellery in the late 1930s. “I can’t tell you much,” she replied:

“… so long ago. We usually talked politics, the events of the day, or about politicians I knew. Once when I came from Paris he said how much he would love to go (he was by then too well-known for a private visit to be possible) and he said rather sadly, “Cafés, Variétés, und ich gehe so gern ins Theater!” He loved seeing Rome, and was excited by Michelangelo as architect, saying that he had told Speer to make cornices and mouldings deeper and more important since seeing the Capitol and St Peter’s.”

I thought that was interesting, and I asked her how he treated her. “He was solicitous when I expected a baby,” she confided to me, “and very solicitous to Unity when she had pneumonia, sending his own doctor. Also of course when she shot herself.” She said she was struck by the fact that “his manners were very ceremonious, but that is the German way”.

I asked whether they ever watched films together or listened to music. “Yes,” she told me, “he would laugh and comment on films. I never listened to a gramophone with him,” she added, “he liked conversation.”

She went on to tell me:

“He often spoke of England in a very complimentary way. I remember him saying England was fortunate to have “diese kleine Prinzessin”, Princess Elizabeth, then aged about 8. He asked once: “Wie baut man jetzt in England?” and of course the answer was they built only villas and cheap housing. Of course he was the most interesting person on earth to talk to at that time, and so much depended upon him. Certainly one felt he was a man of destiny, it was a plain fact.”

I asked her for her view of the July 20, 1944, bomb plot. She told me:

“I thought the bomb plot despicable. Stauffenberg, as a serving officer, had a pistol, he was in the bunker, he could have shot Hitler at close range. Instead, he planted a time bomb and ran away to Berlin hoping to head a new government. To shoot Hitler would have cost him his own life, but instead he chose to behave like the I.R.A. Hitler was not killed, but many of Stauffenberg’s colleagues were, and many horribly maimed (for example General Bodenschatz, as I read after the war. I knew him slightly.)”

Still, I wondered whether, had the plot succeeded, it might have shortened the war. She disagreed. “I think the Allies would have gone on to the bitter end. Russia would have forced them to.”

I asked her what she thought of the new regional nationalisms (in the former Yugoslavia, the Basque country, and so on). She told me her husband “always hoped that within Europe regionalism would flourish, and that for example it would solve the Irish problem”. I thought it interesting that she chose to answer me with reference to what her husband thought—she was obviously still in love with him, but she was also thinking for herself. “Since the break-up of Yugoslavia,” she added, “this may be over-optimistic. Unfortunately many people really love fighting.”

I asked her view of the current extreme right in Europe. “Most parties of the extreme right,” she told me, “are wedded to nationalism, which O.M. deplored as completely out of date.”

Diana Mosley told me as clearly as she could put it that “I still regard the war as a terrible crime against Europe and I blame him [Hitler] for setting it in motion”, and then she went on to say that she had no regrets about continuing to oppose the war after September 3, 1939:

“We campaigned for peace during the “phoney war”. I am thankful, despite the horrors of the [English] prisons, that we did so. None of the war atrocities could have happened in peace, and a civilized solution to minority problems was perfectly possible. It looks as if Europe will be made, despite English dragging of feet.”

Because Diana Mosley was almost deaf (as she told me), these interviews had to be conducted by post, but the advantage of that is that one has the hand-written letters to show for them and not just an erasable tape recording. What made the exercise an experience for me was not so much the information at the end of it (mostly trivial, though original—all the important questions have been put and answered many times over; it’s hard to think of a fresh one, one you’d get an answer to, that is). The interest for me was more in the path itself (“DO NOT ENTER”), the way I’d come across this beautiful lady, flipping through a book with its photographs of her when she was young, looking at those photographs there in the house of her sister, who was friendly and helpful to me in the course of my work on Burlington, all wrapped up in the atmosphere of that place in a cold and lonely spring.