When Deborah Cavendish, duchess of Devonshire, died at the age of 94 in September 2014, the obituary headlines rang the changes on ‘the end of an era’ and ‘the last of the Mitford sisters’. If the first was true, the second was not. It sometimes feels as if we shall never hear the last of the Mitfords. What Jessica, one of Deborah Devonshire’s older siblings, called ‘the Mitford Industry’ has powered on in spite of the absence of its principals (and in some cases because of it), refuelled by access to new material and a reduced fear of libel. Of the seven children of David and Sydney, Lord and Lady Redesdale, six were girls; the Mitford industry revolves, lighthouse-like, between them. Nancy, the novelist, wit and Bright Young Thing, comes to prominence whenever her books are dramatised; Unity and Diana, the Nazis, are subjects for studies of British upper-class fascism; Debo, as she was always known, the châtelaine of Chatsworth, attracts the interest of architectural historians and fans of the aristocracy; Jessica, known as Decca, is the communist. Pamela, once satirised in Private Eye as ‘Doreen: the unknown Mitford sister’, was the only one never to make international news, her lesbianism causing no more than a local disturbance. They were all monsters, sacred monsters at times, but monstrous nonetheless in the sheer scale of their lives and characters and in the self-belief that propelled what might have been, in smaller personalities, merely enthusiasms or inclinations onto the world stage. Lady Redesdale said that whenever she saw a headline beginning ‘Peer’s Daughter …’ she knew it would be one of hers. They started the industry themselves. Nancy’s novel The Pursuit of Love (1945) gave a witty account of family life which was less exaggerated than most readers must have imagined, and Decca’s memoir Hons and Rebels (1960) was an instant bestseller. The Times found it ‘extremely funny’; her sisters, without exception, hated it. The growing numbers of Mitfordists took sides.
Carla Kaplan’s Troublemaker is the first scholarly biography of Jessica, and it is both opportune and persuasive. At any given moment, the most obscure historical period is the one that is still within living memory. There are too many vested interests at stake. Too much material is in private hands, and in the hands of the Mitford sisters documents could appear and disappear unaccountably. Kaplan began work just as her subject was slipping over the time horizon. Though they never met, Kaplan talked to surviving friends and family, including Debo, with whom she spent a day in 2008. As well as the depth of her well-digested research, Kaplan’s strength is that she writes about Decca, as she sensibly decides to call her in most contexts, as ‘an American communist’ with an unusual background in the English aristocracy. The more familiar British attitudes to Decca range from benign but limited admiration for the amusing author of Hons and Rebels and The American Way of Death to antipathy. She has been cast as ‘a malcontent whose childhood was ideal and her bitterness about it … “inexplicable”’. A daughter-in-law of Diana, who married Oswald Mosley, spent much of the Second World War in prison with her husband and never renounced her belief in fascism or her support for Hitler, felt that it was Jessica who was temperamentally lacking: an adolescent rebel who never grew up or acquired that ‘well-adjusted disposition’ – the mental equivalent of deportment – which made Debo so content. Kaplan deals with this briskly enough, as symptomatic of ‘a certain absence of social curiosity … at the heart of the British aristocracy’, but not all aristocrats are so complacent. Where Decca was perhaps an outlier in her family was that she possessed a degree of empathy, something none of her sisters appears to have had. She alone noticed that the people who lived in the cottages on her parents’ estate had bad teeth and inadequate clothes, and she was never content with the view, accepted not only among the aristocracy during her childhood, that ‘the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate’ were part of a divinely ordered social structure.
Rebellion set in early. When she was eleven, in 1928, Decca started saving up. Drummonds Bank wrote to ‘respectfully beg leave to acknowledge receipt of ten shillings as initial deposit in your Running Away Account … We remain, dear Madam, your obedient servants’ etc. Her first vision of freedom was in the form of the fashionable new interwar housing type, the ‘bedsitting room’. When her older sister Nancy got one in London, she was first jealous and then dismayed when Nancy gave it up. The rising tide of underclothes had been too much: ‘I literally had to wade through them. No one to put them away.’ Even by the standards of the time, the Mitfords’ childhood was removed from the realities of life. Edwardian conventions, which were giving way elsewhere, hung on at Swinbrook, the family’s ugly country house in Oxfordshire, known unaffectionately as Swinebrook. The shibboleth most resented by Decca was the refusal to educate girls properly, though her later career was helped by the fact that she was an autodidact. She brought an innocent eye and extra determination to her subject matter, but the lack of formal schooling rankled. Her parents were still, mentally, Victorians and Kaplan gives brief but revealing accounts of their earlier lives. David, whose career as ‘a soldier and a gentleman’ had cost him a lung but no qualms about the rightness of the empire, married Sydney Bowles in 1904. Sydney, who emerges from Kaplan’s book as more sensitive and more practical than is generally supposed, had lost her own mother young and learned to cope with a tyrannical father who took his four children to sea for a year on his yacht. (In the course of the voyage, the children got lice and he got their governess pregnant.) The first time Sydney and David met she was fourteen. On that occasion, she got a fishbone stuck in her throat at dinner and, knowing better than to mention it, saved her own life by going upstairs and removing the bone with a button hook. Once married, the Redesdales lived and raised their children in the aristocratic discomfort they took for granted. When Decca first stayed with well-off Americans she was astonished by the absence of ‘cold bathwater, electric lights that don’t work, inedible food’ and draughts that characterised the stately homes of England.
It was partly an attempt to keep warm that drove the sisters to the large airing cupboard, known to them as the Hons Cupboard (Hons being either slang for ‘hens’ or simply used to mean ‘people’, but not short for their titles). Here the sisters huddled and talked, and the Mitford mythos began with their own stories, quarrels and teases. Asked later in life to confirm whether the bond with her sisters had ‘stood between her and life’s cruel circumstances’, Decca replied: ‘Sisters were life’s cruel circumstances.’ She would never escape her family and its entanglements, but she was serious about running away. The opportunity came when she met her distant cousin Esmond Romilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill, a natural rebel and a charmer of flexible principles. He had already run away from school and been one of the first Englishmen to go to Spain to fight Franco. He saw action at Boadilla del Monte and had been invalided home when Decca met him at a country-house weekend party and asked if he was going back. He was and she inquired whether ‘you could possibly take me with you?’ He could and he did.
It was in one sense a rebellion, and at the same time a conventional upper-class marriage through the looking-glass: their families were related, they belonged to the same social circles, and their similar upbringings had fitted them for nothing practical. The experience of Spain was a combination of tragedy and farce. Decca was homesick and Romilly so inept he could barely tie his shoelaces. Since they weren’t married, the Mitford parents went to law to try to get their underage daughter back (Sydney also sent out copies of Vogue). Unity, Decca’s favourite sister, by now a committed Nazi and personal friend of Hitler, was in Germany and confided her worries about Decca to the Führer, who was apparently very consoling. As Europe slid towards war the sisters shared the front pages with the international situation: ‘Mixed Up Mitford Girls Still Confusing Europe’. Decca, a naive 19-year-old, was under Romilly’s sway, and his charm had its dark side. He attempted to cut her off from her family rather than win them round. He had a flexible attitude to truth and was light-fingered even with his friends’ possessions. The couple married eventually in Bayonne in 1937, after Decca got pregnant, and came back to England. Their daughter Julia was born in London in the communal house they had taken in Rotherhithe; she died at five months of measles. The district nurse had assumed that the baby, being breast-fed, would acquire her mother’s immunity. But Decca and her sisters had been brought up in such isolation they had never had measles. Decca said almost nothing about this first great grief, but Kaplan sees its implications running as a thin vein through the rest of her life. Decca shared the family distaste for expressed emotion (except, in her own case, outbursts of wild enthusiasm). Kaplan construes this as a peculiarly aristocratic tendency but it is perhaps more generally English. There is a national tendency to avoid discussion of anything ‘unpleasant’, a preference for a register somewhere between stoicism and repression.
Having no more idea than Nancy about everyday life, Decca and Romilly were astonished to get bills for gas and electricity. After some months hiding from creditors, they decided to go to America. Romilly’s proposal (‘plan’ is too strong a word for the various grandiose projects he conceived; he was, as Decca remarked, ‘congenitally incapable of dwelling on the pitfalls … in a situation’) was to embark on a lecture tour. Suggested topics included ‘How to Meet the King’ and ‘Sex Life at Oxford University’. In fairness, he was qualified to talk about both. In the US, as Unity’s sister and Churchill’s nephew they were instant stars, the ‘Blueblood Adventurers’. They did some journalism but no lecturing. Attempts to find work gave Decca an early encounter with the inequalities she would spend the rest of her life fighting. She had no luck with applications until someone told her that ‘colour’ meant skin colour not hair. She stopped writing ‘brown’, started writing ‘white’, and immediately got a job. In 1939 she was selling tweeds in the Merrie England Village at the New York World’s Fair; she would never settle permanently in England again. For a natural rebel, emigration has advantages. Kaplan teases out the nuances of Decca’s self-presentation in America as an insider or outsider according to need. She knew when to dial up the English aristocrat, presumably good for tweed sales in the Merrie England Village, and when to let it drop. Some friends thought she deployed her most aristocratic vowels when arguing ‘with recalcitrant Americans’, but she could play both sides against the middle. When Debo came to visit after the war, she was appalled, reporting back to Diana that ‘the accent is what struck me most … she not only does the accent but says completely American sentences.’ As Decca’s career in political activism and investigative journalism developed, she used variants. Researching The American Way of Death, her exposé of the exploitative funeral trade, Decca appeared in undertakers’ offices in the form of ‘a smart, slightly dowdy, vaguely eccentric housewife, carrying a small notebook in her large black handbag’. She had no interest in fashion – her sisters were dismayed by her lack of taste in clothes – but she could dress for a part. On her 34th birthday, she was on the stand in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, carefully dressed in ‘a pastel-coloured suit with a rounded, feminine collar and a dark silk blouse’ accessorised with the swept-up cat-eye glasses that were the respectable lady’s eyewear of the day. She got off.
Her public image was never wholly under her control, however. Kaplan suggests that the early years in America as one half of ‘a funny couple’ dogged her long after it bore any relation to the facts. By 1940, Romilly was training with the Canadian forces and Decca, pregnant again, was working in a department store while reading her way through five volumes of Roosevelt’s speeches. Across the Atlantic, the Mitford myth was becoming florid. Unity attempted suicide at the outbreak of war and was brought home with a bullet in her brain, never fully to recover. Diana, who had left her first husband for Mosley, was interned in Holloway Prison. Nobody could say the sisters weren’t serious about their ideals. For Decca, the war years brought different horrors. A daughter was born and named Constancia, after Constancia de la Mora, who had renounced her aristocratic Spanish family to fight fascism. Alone with her baby, Decca was under constant surveillance by the FBI, suspected of communist sympathies because of Romilly and fascist leanings because of her sisters. Another pregnancy ended in a miscarriage in a gas station toilet. Romilly was by this time a navigator in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He was reported missing over the North Sea in November 1941, but it was many months before Decca could be brought to believe that he was dead. Their friends agreed it seemed so unlike him.
The war broke the Mitford family. Afterwards it reformed along different lines. The Redesdales’ marriage was a permanent casualty. Sydney, who never wavered in her sympathy for fascism, left her husband. Churchill, who spent Christmas at the White House in 1941, sent for Decca and apologised for jailing the Mosleys. He explained that he had arranged for other prisoners to clean and housekeep for them. Decca was furious. She told Churchill that she blamed the Mosleys and their followers for the war and for Romilly’s death. Disconcerted, Churchill gave her $500, which she badly needed, but she said it was ‘blood money’ and donated it to her friend Virginia Durr’s campaign against the poll tax. Their meeting may, Kaplan suggests, have been behind Churchill’s noticeable gloom that Christmas and his ‘retreat into silence’ at the White House dinner. In 1945, Tom Mitford was killed in action at the age of 36. Decca wrote to her mother that she ‘couldn’t think of anything comforting to say’ because he had been lost to such a ‘magnificent cause’. In truth, nobody ever had much to say about Tom. Decca’s praise for him was negative; the only sibling who was not a ‘hater’, he remains an empty outline amid the glare of his sisters’ personalities, the real ‘unknown Mitford’. Sydney managed the heroic feat of keeping on terms with all her daughters, sending Decca magazine cuttings and dealing gamely with requests to ‘ring up the Daily Worker … & ask them whether they know of any interesting mass meetings or demonstrations’, though she was baffled by some of Decca’s news, admitting she had no idea what a trade union was. Unity died in 1948 at the age of 33. Decca never renounced her. She was the sister she had loved most because ‘her dissatisfaction with life mirrored my own.’ Perhaps it was the unexpressed anger and sorrow about Unity that fuelled her implacable hostility to Diana.
By the end of the war, Decca was transformed. Adolescent ‘dissatisfaction’ with the order of things found focus in the Communist Party and the civil rights movement. She was now a naturalised American citizen, living in San Francisco with her second husband, the Jewish lawyer and communist Bob Treuhaft. There could be no going back. The intellect that developed through her programme of political self-education was ‘detail-oriented and disciplined’, but she retained a useful obliviousness to forms and norms, as well as a capacity to reinvent her life from scratch. She had several careers ahead of her, as activist, author, teacher and public figure. Planning was one of her strengths, but, as Kaplan observes, ‘pivots were her superpower.’ The war years saw the biggest pivot. From then on her life was part of American political history and Kaplan’s perspective as an American historian allows her biography to expand into the fervid politics of the postwar years. By 1945, there was already a climate of fear on the left. The failure of Durr’s campaign against the poll tax was more than a single setback. Durr and her lawyer husband, Clifford, were now ‘in the crosshairs’ of Congressman Martin Dies, scourge of suspected left-wing government workers. ‘Both our families had come over here in the early 1700s,’ Durr wrote, ‘and had fought in the Revolutionary War. We had a sense … that we owned the country … I felt absolutely safe. I was an American.’ Nobody felt that kind of safety again for the next 25 years. By 1948, Communist Party members were being arrested as part of J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign to prove that Marxism advocated violence. Marxist beliefs, even if not acted on, were crimes.
Decca was assistant director of the East Bay Civil Rights Congress, which issued a document with the title ‘We Charge Genocide’. It detailed cases of violence, lynching and the racism that was ‘everywhere in American life’, creating a climate of ‘psychological terror and mass intimidation’. The Treuhafts and their friends were constantly watched and expected arrest at any moment. Decca remained aware of her privilege as a white woman, and of her relatively comfortable material status. She and Bob had paid work and they had a growing family (Constancia now had two young half-brothers). But any interaction with authority – a doctor’s visit, a child’s registration at school – might trigger a denunciation. While the image of 1950s middle-class America sent waves of aspirational envy across the Atlantic for its shiny kitchens, breakfast cereal and Chevrolets, the Jim Crow laws remained in place. Opinion polls suggested 80 per cent of Americans thought that communists should lose their citizenship. Kaplan conveys the grinding sense of oppression felt over decades by anyone thought to be ‘radical’. The Treuhafts and their friends battled on while losing their own right to passports or to organise legally. Of the individual cases on which they campaigned, one of the bleakest was that of Willie McGee, a Black man accused of rape and hastily convicted on inadequate evidence. After six years of trials, appeals and two lynching attempts, the case had become a national cause célèbre. McGee was executed on 8 May 1951; the execution by electric chair was broadcast live on local radio.
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