The Sisters: the Saga of the Mitford Family

English aristocrats

The Mitford family is an aloof English family, whose primary line had its seats at Mitford, Northumberland. Several heads of the family served as High Sheriff of Northumberland. A inferior line, with seats at Newton Park, Northumberland, and Exbury House, Hampshire, descends via the historian William Mitford (1744–1827) and were twice elevated to the British peerage, in 1802 and 1902, under the title Baron Redesdale.^[1]

The family became particularly known in the 1930s and after for the six Mitford sisters, great-great-great-granddaughters of William Mitford, and the daughters of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Businesswoman Redesdale, and his wife Sydney Bowles.^[a] They were celebrated and at times scandalous figures, who were described by The Times announcer Ben Macintyre equally "Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Hitler-lover; Nancy the Novelist; Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur".^[two]

Background [edit]

The family traces its origins in Northumberland dorsum to the time of the Norman conquest. In the Middle Ages they had been Border Reivers based in Redesdale. The principal line had its family seat first at Mitford Castle, and then Mitford Old Manor House, prior to building Mitford Hall in 1828; all 3 are most Mitford, Northumberland.

Mitford siblings [edit]

• Nancy Mitford (28 November 1904 – 30 June 1973) married Peter Rodd, whom she afterwards divorced, and had a longstanding human relationship with French politician and statesman Gaston Palewski. She lived in France for much of her adult life. She wrote many novels, including the semi-autobiographical The Pursuit of Love and Dear in a Cold Climate. She was also a biographer of historical figures, including the Sun Rex.
• Pamela "Pam" Mitford (25 November 1907 – 12 April 1994) was called "Adult female" past her siblings.^[iii] John Betjeman, who for a time was in love with her, referred to her as the "Rural Mitford". She married and later divorced millionaire physicist Derek Jackson, and spent the remainder of her life living with Giuditta Tommasi (died 1993), an Italian horsewoman.^[4]
• Thomas "Tom" Mitford (ii January 1909 – 30 March 1945), the only son, was educated at Eton, where he had an affair with James Lees-Milne.^[5] He later had a lengthy affair with Austrian Jewish dancer Tilly Losch during her marriage to Edward James. According to Jessica's messages, Thomas supported British fascism and was posted to the Burma entrada after he had refused to fight in Europe.^[six] He died in action.
• Diana Mitford (17 June 1910 – 11 August 2003) married blueblood and writer Bryan Walter Guinness in 1929. She left him in 1933 for British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, with whom she had two sons, Alexander and Max Mosley. The couple were interned in Holloway Prison from May 1940 until November 1943.
• Unity Mitford (8 August 1914 – 28 May 1948) was known equally "Bobo" or "Boud" to her siblings. Her adulation of, and friendship with, Adolf Hitler was widely publicised. She shot herself in the caput simply hours after United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland declared state of war on Federal republic of germany,^[vi] but failed to kill herself. The incident left her mentally infirm for the remainder of her life. In 1944 her family sent her to the Scottish islet of Inch Kenneth, where she lived out the state of war.^[7] She died of pneumococcal meningitis at West Highland Cottage Hospital, Oban.
• Jessica "Decca" Mitford (11 September 1917 – 22 July 1996), unlike the residuum of her family, was a Communist. She eloped with Esmond Romilly to Spain to partake in the Civil State of war; they subsequently moved to the United States, and Esmond died in action in the Second Earth State of war. She remained in the U.Due south. most of her adult life, where she married Robert Treuhaft and was a fellow member of the American Communist Party until 1958. She wrote several volumes of memoirs and several volumes of polemical investigation, including the best-selling The American Way of Expiry (1963) about the funeral industry. She was the grandmother of James Forman Jr. and Chaka Forman, sons of the African-American civil rights leader James Forman by her daughter Constancia Romilly.
• Deborah "Debo" Mitford (31 March 1920 – 24 September 2014) married Andrew Cavendish, who afterwards became the Duke of Devonshire, and with him turned his ancestral abode Chatsworth House into one of U.k.'s almost successful stately homes. She wrote several books.

Mitford sisters [edit]

Jessica, Nancy, Diana, Unity, and Pamela Mitford in 1935. Of the six sisters, the youngest, Deborah, is absent-minded.

The sisters gained widespread attention for their stylish and controversial lives as young people, and for their public political divisions between communism and fascism. Nancy and Jessica became well-known writers: Nancy wrote The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, and Jessica The American Fashion of Decease (1963). Deborah managed Chatsworth, ane of the most successful stately homes in England.

Jessica and Deborah married nephews of prime ministers Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan, respectively. Deborah and Diana both married wealthy aristocrats. Unity and Diana were well known during the 1930s for being shut to Adolf Hitler. Jessica turned her back on her inherited privileges and eloped with her cousin, Esmond Romilly, who was hoping to study on the Spanish Civil State of war for the News Chronicle, having briefly fought with the International Brigade.^[8] Jessica's memoir, Hons and Rebels, describes their upbringing, and Nancy drew upon her family members for characters in her novels. In 1981, Deborah became politically agile when she and her husband Andrew Cavendish, 11th Duke of Devonshire, joined the new Social Democratic Political party.^[half-dozen]

The sisters and their brother Thomas were the children of David Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, known to his children as "Farve" and past various other nicknames. Their mother was Sydney Freeman-Mitford, Baroness Redesdale, known as "Muv", the girl of Thomas Bowles. David and Sydney married in 1904. The family homes changed from Batsford Firm to Asthall Manor beside the River Windrush in Oxfordshire, and so Swinbrook Cottage nearby, with a firm at Rutland Gate in London.^[9] They also lived in a cottage in Loftier Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, which they used as a summertime residence.^[x] The siblings grew upwards in an aristocratic country house with emotionally distant parents and a large household with numerous servants; this family dynamic was not unusual for upper-class families of the time. The parents disregarded formal pedagogy of women of the family, and they were expected to marry at a immature historic period to a financially well-off husband. The children had a private language chosen "Boudledidge" (pronounced "bowdledidge"), and each had a different nickname for the others.

On the outbreak of the 2d World State of war, their political views came into sharper relief. "Farve" remained a conservative who had long favoured the Chamberlain approach of appeasing Germany, but once Britain declared state of war on Federal republic of germany, he returned to being an anti-German language British patriot and discarded his previous sympathy for the Nazis, while "Muv" connected her fascist sympathies and unremarkably supported her fascist children. The couple separated in 1943 every bit a result of this disharmonize. Nancy, a moderate socialist, worked in London during the Rush and informed on her fascist siblings to the British authorities.^[11] Pamela remained seemingly not-political, although co-ordinate to her sister Nancy, Pamela and Derek Jackson were virulent anti-Semites verbally during Earth War II who had called for all Jews in England to be killed, and also wanted an early end to the war with Germany before England lost any more than money.^[11]

Tom, a fascist, refused to fight Federal republic of germany but volunteered to fight against Imperial Japan; he was killed in action in Burma in 1945. Diana, as well a fascist, married to Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, was imprisoned in London from May 1940 until Nov 1943 under Defence Regulation 18B. Unity, fanatically devoted to Hitler and Nazism, was distraught over Britain'south war proclamation against Germany on 3 September 1939, and tried to commit suicide afterward that day by shooting herself in the head. She failed in the suicide try, but suffered brain damage that eventually led to her early decease in 1948. Jessica, a communist, had moved to the US, but her hubby Esmond Romilly, a Republican veteran from the Spanish Civil War who volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II, died in 1941 when his bomber adult mechanical problems over the North Sea and went down.^{[half dozen]} In numerous messages Jessica said that her daughter Constancia received a pension from the Canadian authorities after Esmond'due south expiry until she turned 18.^[6] The potent political rift between Jessica and Diana left them estranged from 1936 until their deaths, although they did speak to each other in 1973, as their eldest sister Nancy was on her deathbed. Bated from Jessica and Diana'south estrangement, the sisters kept in frequent contact with each other in the decades from World War Ii. The sisters were prolific letter of the alphabet-writers, and a substantial body of correspondence still exists, principally messages between them.^[2]

Ancestry [edit]

In popular culture [edit]

• Nancy Mitford's 1949 novel, Love in a Cold Climate, which was based on the family, was serialised by Thames Tv in 1980 and by the BBC in 2001. Her novel The Pursuit of Dear was serialised by the BBC in 2021.
• The daughters were the discipline of a 1981 musical, The Mitford Girls, by Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin, and of a vocal, "The Mitford Sisters", by Luke Haines.
• A fictional family based on the Mitford sisters features prominently in Jo Walton'southward 2007 novel Ha'penny; Viola Lark, one of the betoken-of-view characters, is i of the sisters, another is married to Himmler, and a 3rd is a Communist spy.
• The fictional "Combe sisters" in the BBC two series Bellamy's People, first broadcast in 2010, bear a striking resemblance to the Mitford sisters. Bellamy meets ii of the surviving Combe sisters, said to have been notorious in the 1930s and '40s for their extreme political views, now living together in a strained relationship in the dramatically unlike political realities of 2010. One an gorging fascist and the other a committed Communist, the sisters have hit upon the solution of dividing their stately home downwardly the center, each converting her side into an homage to her ideology.
• Sharon Horgan, Samantha Spiro, and Sophie Ellis-Bextor played a version of the Mitford Sisters in a vocal-based sketch for Season 2 of the Sky Arts comedy series Psychobitches, in the wintertime of 2014.
• In his French language trilogy of novels – Le Vent du soir (1985), Tous les hommes en sont fous (1985), and Le Bonheur à San Miniato (1987) – Jean d'Ormesson recounts a much-imagined version of the exploits of four of the Mitford sisters, through the characters Pandora, Vanessa, Atalanta, and Jessica.
• A portion of Jessica Mitford's writing is used as a spoken-word introduction to the vocal "Last Human activity of Defiance", about the New United mexican states State Penitentiary riot, on thrash metallic band Exodus's 1989 album Fabulous Disaster.
• Jessica Fellowes has written iv mystery novels, The Mitford Murders (2017), Bright Young Dead (2018), The Mitford Scandal (2020), and The Mitford Trial (2021), which feature the three oldest sisters, Nancy, Pamela, and Diana equally major characters, and the residual of the family in supporting roles.^[12]

Gallery [edit]

The Mitford sisters by William Acton:

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References [edit]

Informational notes

1. ^ Daughter of Thomas Gibson Bowles.

Citations

1. ^ Shush'due south Peerage, 107th edn. (London 2003).
2. ^ ^{a b} "Those utterly maddening Mitford girls", Ben Macintyre, The Times, London, 12 Oct 2007. Retrieved 28 July 2009. Archived 26 July 2008 at the Wayback Motorcar
3. ^ Mitford 2010, p. ix.
4. ^ Charlotte Mosley, editor, The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, London: Fourth Estate, 2007, p. 264. According to her sis Jessica, Pamela Mitford had become "a you-know-what-bian" [lesbian].
5. ^ Mitford 2010, p. 40.
6. ^ ^{a b c d e} Mitford, Jessica (2006). Sussman, Peter Y. (ed.). Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
7. ^ "The strange example of the aristocrat, Hitler and the tiny Scottish island New book to reveal concluding years of Mitford sister". HeraldScotland. 26 June 2005. Retrieved 31 May 2021.
8. ^ Boadilla by Esmond Romilly, The Clapton Printing Limited, London, 2018 ISBN 978-1999654306
9. ^ 26 Rutland Gate, Knightsbridge, SW7 > Notable Abodes |http://world wide web.notableabodes.com/home-search-results/dwelling house-details/139176/26-rutland-gate-knightsbridge-london
10. ^ Mitford Girls at 'This Is Local London' 2001. Retrieved 14 Dec 2013
11. ^ ^{a b} Reynolds, Paul (14 November 2003). "Nancy Mitford spied on sisters". BBC News . Retrieved 25 November 2010.
12. ^ "Jessica Fellowes". Amazon . Retrieved five September 2010.

Bibliography

• Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire (2010). Wait for Me!: Memoirs. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN978-0-374-20768-7.

Further reading

• Burke, John (1835). A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Nifty Britain and Ireland, Enjoying Territorial Possessions Or High Official Rank. Keen Britain: Nabu Press. ISBN978-1-171-81928-eight.
• Guinness, Jonathan (1984). The House of Mitford. London: Hutchinson. ISBN978-0-753-81803-nine.
• Lovell, Mary S. (2001). The Mitford Girls: The Sage of the Mitford Family unit . London: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN978-0-393-01043-5.
• Mosley, Charlotte (2007). The Mitfords: Letters Betwixt Half-dozen Sisters. London: Fourth Estate. ISBN978-0-061-37540-8.
• Thompson, Laura (2016). The Half dozen: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters. New York: St. Martin'south Press. ISBN978-1-250-09953-2.

External links [edit]

• Nancy Mitford Website
• Genealogical pictures of the Mitford family unit at the Wayback Machine (archived 21 Oct 2008)
• Sound interview with Christopher Hitchens of Jessica Mitford (1988) at archive.today (archived 21 January 2013)
• The Mitford Society, Facebook

jamesonmest1943.blogspot.com

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitford_family

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