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Diana Mosley - Loved Ones
The first time I met him was in 1932 at the twenty-first birthday party of a friend, Barbara Hutchinson, who afterwards married Victor Rothschild. We did not get on particularly well at that first meeting, but as he was out of Parliament and had plenty of free time, he and his wife Cynthia went about a good deal, as did my husband Bryan Guinness and I, and we saw one another frequently. He used to say he had seen me at a ball at Philip Sassoon's house a few months before. I was twenty-one and he was thirty-five; he had resigned from the Labour government in 1930, and with a few other M.P.s had founded the New Party. When it was defeated at the General Election in 193I he became a Fascist, and he was now writing a book, The Greater Britain, setting out his political and economic ideas. The word 'Fascist' in those days was not a term of abuse but described a system of government familiar to most people. Our hosts at this dinner party were Liberals, Philip Sassoon a Conservative Minister. Mosley had been asked to make a little birthday speech for Barbara, which he did. I knew of his reputation as a great orator and was rather disappointed by his performance; it suited the occasion and was no more than friendly banter directed at Barbara's father, St John Hutchinson, an old friend. Like everyone else, I also knew of his reputation as a lady killer, but this did not predispose me in his favour. A handsome, athletic-looking man, he was six foot two, well proportioned, and dark with brown eyes; he looked healthy, strong, and very clever. He walked with a pronounced limp. As time when on, wherever we met he sought me out, we talked by the hour; he had a beautiful voice. Most of the time he talked and I listened, but when years later I asked him why he did not fall in love with me at sight, he replied: 'I think it was because you were so opinionated.' He never changed this view, and right at the end of his life he once said: 'All our disputes are so intellectual.' This was partly a joke and yet partly true, because in one respect, up to a point, I could have said of him what Proust's Swann said of Odette, that he was not my genre. None of my other friends was the least bit like him; perhaps there never was anyone quite like him. Our increasingly close friendship did not endear him to my husband; we had many quarrels. I insisted upon my right to choose my own friends, and finally in November 1932 we decided to part company. Mosley had become indispensable to me, and I suppose I had become indispensable to him; at any rate he encouraged me in my decision to devote the rest of my life to him, and this I did. I think it would be true to say that everyone, without exception, was furious about it. The only disapproval I really minded was my brother's. Mosley was never called Oswald, from birth he had been Tom, an impossible name from my point of view because of my brother. Tom Mitford and I were near in age and we loved each other dearly. When we were children he was closer to me than my sisters; after he went to school we spent the holidays together, reading the same books, listening to the same music, even riding together, though he never cared for horses and hunting as the rest of us did. He was clever, and a gifted musician. We had an excellent library inherited and added to by my grandfather; it was a little way from the house in a large room with a grand piano and sofas. Tom played the piano for hours on end, I read, and listened. His friends who came to stay in the holidays became my friends, the library was our private paradise where we were never disturbed. When I parted from my first husband, Tom strongly disapproved and we had the nearest thing to a quarrel that ever marred our relationship. He was fond of Bryan; he also thought that for a temporary infatuation I was ruining my life and that I should bitterly regret it. As the years went by he revised his opinion, but at the beginning every one of my friends and relations deplored my decision, some in sorrow but most, like my parents, in impatient anger. It was a normal reaction which I understood perfectly well. I was only twenty-two; although I was convinced of the permanency of what I had decided to do, other people gave it a year at most. His New Party, as I have said, had failed in the election of 1931, when a huge Tory majority calling itself a National Government had been elected to pick up the pieces left by Labour, which had the misfortune to be in office when the financial world collapsed between 1929 and 1931. Extreme measures seemed to be required to meet a situation of exceptional gravity. Mosley's career hitherto must briefly be described. He came from a long line of landed gentry in the North and Midlands. The Mosleys were fairly rich; Manchester was built on land they owned, though they failed to profit greatly from this. They settled in Staffordshire at Rolleston-on-Dove, where in Jacobean times they built a house. They supported the Royalists in the Civil War. In the eighteenth century, what must have been a delightful Palladian house was built round the ancient hall, but a hundred years later a disastrous fire completely destroyed it together with almost all the family pictures and furniture. The plate, molten in the furnace, was to be seen streaming out of the strong room. A large Italianate mansion was built onto the shell of the old house in the 1870's. After the First World War it seemed too big and it was sold to a speculator and demolished, the park cut up and dotted with villas. Rolleston Hall was fairly ugly without and hideous within, but Kit loved the place and said that but for the great fire, long before he was born, he would never have left, and his life might have taken a different course. All that remains is the Spread Eagle Inn, with the Mosley family crest for its signboard, in Rolleston village. His mother, Maud Heathcoat, came from a similar family in Shropshire. She and his father parted, but with her three sons she spent a great deal of time staying with old Sir Oswald Mosley at Rolleston, hunting with the Meynell. Kit and his brothers were typical of their class and time, hating school, loving sport, and knowing Surtees by heart. 'Here's to the hounds of the Meynell. The world cannot boast such a kennel,' said Kit. Both grandfathers were devoted to him. Like so many eldest sons in similar families, he was destined for the army. When in 1914 the War began he was a Sandhurst cadet of seventeen. He immediately joined his regiment, the 16th Lancers, but as it was stationed at the Curragh in Ireland rather than in France, he got permission to join the Flying Corps, was sent to France, and was flying over the German lines as an observer before he was eighteen. He went to Shoreham to train as a pilot and had just got his wings and was flying solo when the wind changed, but owing to negligence on the ground the wind signal had not been changed so that when he landed he crashed and broke his leg badly. His regiment, which by now had suffered heavy losses of young officers, recalled him to France before the leg had completely healed; in the flooded trenches as time went on it swelled so that he could not get his boot on and was obliged to crawl or hop. This was discovered, and he was sent back to England where he had two operations. Surgeons saved his leg, but it was two inches shorter than the other one and for the rest of his life he wore a surgical shoe, built up to match the sound leg. He was then put on light duty and at the end of the war was sent to work in the Foreign Office. During his long spell in hospital he had read enormously, and in fact educated himself. He had no wish to go to a university; after his war experiences it seemed too much like going back to school. Neither Lloyd George nor Churchill had been to a university; it was not a prerequisite for politics, and it was to politics that his mind now turned. The appalling disasters and suffering of the war seemed to him the result of political failure within Europe. At this time, when he had leave he stayed with friends in country houses and made the acquaintance of prominent politicians. It was F.E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, who, recognizing the potential of the young man, said to him: 'If we were Frenchmen or Germans we should go into the army. But in England it must be politics.' Mosley was adopted as Conservative candidate at Harrow and elected in the khaki election of 1918, soon after his twenty-second birthday. He made his mark in the House of Commons almost at once as a brilliant speaker and witty debater. The facility and felicity with which he found the right word was as impressive to his listeners as the fact that he could keep seemingly inexhaustible supplies of figures and statistics in mind, available when required. Neither in Parliament nor on the platform did he use notes. As a boy his greatest pleasure had been hunting, and with his leg in irons he had hunted in Leicestershire when he was on leave at the end of the war, but now he sold his horses in order to devote himself entirely to politics, and embarked upon his arduous, life-long struggle. He, who was so gifted for the enjoyment of everything that makes life delightful for a healthy, handsome young man, often said: 'I must have been mad. Why could I not be content with my good fortune, being born to enjoy everything so much more than most people seem able to do?' Why had he spent his life attempting the impossible, first to prevent the decline of industrial Britain and solve the problem of mass unemployment and the semi-starvation of millions of people, and then to stop a second world war which ruined our continent and reduced our country to a shadow of its former greatness? The answer is that he was convinced he could see what must be done, and that with his brilliant gifts and dynamism he thought there was a chance he might succeed. When after experience in the ranks of the selfish and lazy post-war coalition in Parliament he crossed the floor of the House and joined Labour, he was sent round the country to speak at countless meetings. In the course of his journeys he had been infuriated by the disgusting housing conditions which prevailed nearly everywhere, but particularly in the North. The best description of what life was like for the unemployed, and for those with work, in the industrial North is George Orwell's notes for The Road to Wigan Pier. He came in for a good deal of criticism as a rich socialist, but that was to confound socialism with Christianity. A rich Christian must sell all he has and give it to the poor; a rich socialist on the other hand aspires to abolish poverty. When he joined the Labour Party there was a move to expel him from White's, but it was squashed by his friend Ivan Moore-Brabazon. Subsequently, throughout his unorthodox career, prison and so forth, he always remained a member. He never cared much for clubs, preferring solitude or the company of women. If he had a couple of hours to spare, he went to the Salle d'Armes and fenced with foil or epec. Sometimes lie took me: he fenced with skill, and the will to win indispensable to success in any game. His whole character was in evidence when he was fencing; the 'happy warrior'. Labour won the 1929 election and Ramsay MacDonald gave Mosley the task of curing unemployment. He was confident he could do it, and it was subsequently realized and admitted that his programme would have been successful-)-. His plans to find work for the unemployed included vast housing schemes and the creation of a modern infrastructure. Roads in those days were 'like goat tracks' he used to say. We now have roads, but more than half a century later Britain is still disfigured by slums, or sub-standard housing as it is now called. When his plans were dismissed by the Labour cabinet he resigned. He did not rate his chances of success with Fascism particularly high; he was said, through impatience, to have thrown away the leadership of the Labour Party which was within his grasp. But to the end of his life he maintained that the Labour Party could never be an instrument for action. 'It looks powerful, but it would always break in your hand,' he used to say. It was too deeply split within itself, something now obvious to everybody. On New Year's Eve 1931, after the defeat of the New Party, Mosley published a statement which showed that he realized he had embarked upon an adventure that might well fail, but he considered it dishonourable to take office unless it was possible to act: Better the great adventure, better the great attempt for England's sake, better defeat, disaster, better far the end of that trivial thing called a political career, than stifling in a uniform of blue and gold, strutting and posturing on the stage of little England amid the scenery of decadence, until history in turning over an heroic page of the human story writes of us the contemptuous postscript: These were the men to whom was entrusted the Empire of Great Britain, and whose idleness, ignorance and cowardice left it a Spain. He knew very well, and so did his companions, that it was a great adventure they had embarked upon. What he did not know, because it had nothing to do with English politics in 1931, was the fatal role Germany was to play in his destiny. Fascism was launched in England in the autumn of 1932, when Mosley's book The Greater Britain was published and he started speaking at meetings all over the country. Three months later, in January 1933, Hitler came to power. He kept his promises to the German people; six million unemployed were given work, the country prospered, the Versailles Treaty was set aside; as disarmament conferences got nowhere and other European countries refused to disarm, Germany left the League of Nations and rearmed. Hitler never was able to understand or to emulate Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy: he said what he meant and he meant what he said, a novelty in international affairs. He had a fatal intransigence, and above all his obsessive anti-semitism, endemic throughout Central Europe, antagonized the rest of the world and saddled Mosley with a problem unknown to him in his previous life both private and political. There had been many Jews in the New Party — he thought nothing of it either way. I shall not enlarge upon it here, it was a question of 'cet animal est tres mechant, quand on l'attaque il se defend.' And attack him they did. The more research done into the origins of this irrelevant quarrel the better, because the truth is simple. Mosley was not a man to turn the other cheek, but there is no question who was the aggressor. Why was he identified in any way with Hitler, who always said 'National Socialism is not for export'? It was partly because both were anti-Communist and, owing to the impossibility in some parts of the country of holding meetings unless they were stewarded by men prepared to fight organized violence and ensure free speech, BUF meetings had a similarity with those in Germany before Hitler was elected Chancellor. They were infinitely less violent than in Germany, where in the eight years before Hitler came to power one National Socialist was killed on average every week in political fights. BUF meetings were fairly rough, but nobody died, and in fact the violence of hooligans who came to try and break them up was much less vicious than violence now commonplace at football matches. Despite the astronomical rise in violent crime during the last few years, Englishmen do not murder for political reasons. There was also the question of black shirts, or political uniform. Even now journalists sometimes say how crazy it was to imagine that Englishmen would consent to dress up in a black shirt. This is most surprising, because in fact in no other civilized country do men so much enjoy wearing unusual clothes as they do in England and Scotland. From the velvet and plumes of the Garter robes to the little aprons of the Freemasons, they take inordinate pleasure in uniforms, disguises and fancy dress. It is the men who enjoy it so much — English women are on the whole strangely indifferent to clothes. The black shirt proved so popular that in 1936 an Act of Parliament was passed forbidding people to wear it. The Jews identified Mosley with Hitler, although he was not and never had been anti-Semitic; he had not hitherto looked upon them as a separate group within the nation, which they apparently felt themselves to be. After a year and a half of uncalled-for and one-sided attacks he took up the challenge in a speech in the Royal Albert Hall. He also had harsh words for the City of London; he considered it as short-sighted as it was unpatriotic that so much money was invested abroad and so little in the Empire, which desperately needed investment. After the Second World War there was no more Empire and he became an admirer of the City; with its unique expertise, it was one of our few remaining assets. The divergencies between him and Hitler were deep and wide. Far the most important was Kit's rejection of war as a means of settling differences. Most people agreed that the Versailles Treaty had been a fraud with regard to self-determination, but he firmly believed that reasonable men should be able to negotiate change. While looking upon another war as the greatest disaster that could befall mankind, he insisted that Britain must not remain disarmed in an armed world. It must be ready for any eventuality. Ironically, in view of what was to happen later, Kit strongly objected to imprisonment without trial as practised in the Third Reich; he always looked upon it as a monstrosity. Laws could be enacted and must be obeyed, but they should never be retroactive, and arbitrary arrest was inexcusable. But he never considered that Hitler's excesses were anything to do with him. 'Mind Britain's Business', he said. All over the world deplorable things were being done which were not our business. Some were done in our Empire, which was. Among these had been the atrocities committed in Ireland by the Black and Tans, an irregular force recruited by the British government after the First World War. Mosley discovered the facts and attacked the government in Parliament about what was happening, to the fury of the Conservatives. T.P. O'Connor, MP, wrote to Lady Cynthia Mosley: 'I regard him as the man who really began the break-up of the Black and Tan savagery; and I can never recall without admiration and wonder, the courage and self-sacrifice which such an attitude demanded on his part.' Another atrocity within our Empire which he publicly attacked was the massacre at Amritsar in India, where General Dyer had opened rapid and protracted fire upon an unarmed crowd which had no means of escape. These matters were 'Britain's Business'. What happened in other countries was not. Our own problems were quite enough to be going on with; there was no call upon us to solve those of other nations.
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IT may be considered
inappropriate to include a short memoir of Oswald Mosley in a book about
friends. We were married for forty-four years, my knowledge of him and
my love for him can obviously not be compared with the affection I bore
the other characters I have tried to describe. As I shall never write
his biography, which on the political side has been adequately done by
Robert Skidelsky and is certain to be done again, and as his autobiography
My Life was a highly-praised bestseller when it was published in 1968,
all that seems necessary is a short account of the man himself in private
life, and perhaps to clear up one or two mysteries.