The Truth About the Mitford Sisters

The Mitfords could rank as the strangest family of the 20th century. Unity and Diana were passionate fascists who became obsessed with Adolf Hitler, while Jessica became a communist. Unity even became mates with Hitler and was in Germany as the war broke out. How did these aristocrats move in such controversial circles? What happened when the Second World War broke out? How did their stories end? Joining Kate today is the author and cartoonist, Mimi Pond, who has written a new book https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/468003/do-admit-by-pond-mimi/9781787335561 about the Mitford sisters. This episode was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

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• 0:35Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters! It's me, Kate Lister. You are listening to Betwixt the Sheets. If this isn't the podcast that you wanted to listen to, you can get out now. Be off with you. Don't be hanging around, slowing the rest of us down. And if you did want to stay, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults, other adults about adulty things, in an adulty way, covering a range of subjects you should be an adult to. Shall we proceed together? Let's do it.

• 1:00Kate Lister?

  It's September 1939, and British socialite Unity Mitford has just found out that her beloved homeland has declared war on Germany. It's fair to say that this poses something of a moral quandary for Unity, who has gone all in for the fascist movement that swept Europe and the UK, and is an obsessed follower, almost groupie, of none other than Adolf fricking Hitler. Yikes. It's said that she actually went to Germany, and she met Adolf over 100 times. Which all became particularly awkward in the Mitford family, given that her sister Jessica was a devoted communist. The six Mitford sisters are the stuff of legend.

• 1:42Kate Lister?

  It wasn't just Unity that was signing up to the fascist cause in that family. Other sisters went on to be world famous novelists. One of them became the Duchess of Devonshire. You couldn't accuse anyone of indoctrinating someone in that family. And how did all of this unfold, you might be wondering? Well, dramatically, to say the least. Shall we find out more? I think so.

• 2:30Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Groupies are an interesting social and historical phenomenon, aren't they? And we usually associate them with rock groups. Well, weirdly fascist dictators have groupies as well. And I think it's fair to say that Unity and Diana Mitford were fascist groupies. And that was just two of the Mitford sisters. Wait till you hear about the rest of them. Joining me today to help me get to know their story a little bit better is the fabulous cartoonist and author Mimi Pond, who has created an amazing graphic biography about all of them. So without further ado, let's crack on.

• 3:16Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Mimi Pond. How are you doing?

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Well, I'm just so excited to be here. I'm such an enormous fan.

• 3:26Kate Lister?

  And I am a huge fan of your work, Mimi. This book is absolutely incredible. It's beautiful. Graphic biography of the Mitford sisters.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Oh, well, thanks.

• 3:37Kate Lister?

  The Mitford sisters, Mimi. Why are you so fascinated with them? Where did this come from?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Well, my parents first stumbled across Jessica Mitford's American Way of Death at their local library in 1963, when it came out. And then they just couldn't get enough of it. They just never stopped talking about it. And it was hilarious and wonderful. And my parents are working class autodidacts. The library was like our church. Religiously, every two weeks, we went to the library. And they loved the idea that she'd uncovered this mainstream graft on the part of the funeral industry. They were nothing if not like, that's how they get you. And they joined a funeral society. And as a result, my mother saved 90% on the cost of her own cremation, which would have thrilled her to no end.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  So I only knew about Jessica until I was an adult and I was at some party in New York and I was blabbing about her and someone turned to me and said, you know, she had sisters. I was like, what? Then I started to read everything I could, all the books that were coming out by them and about them, their letters to each others, their letters to other people. There was this river of books that came out in the, I want to say the late 90s, early 2000s, kind of capitalizing on it. But everything that's been written has been sort of very polite, for the most part.

• 4:55Kate Lister?

  Well, there's a lot to be polite about. They were aristocrats from wealth. I suppose you can be polite, but my God, there's a lot to be impolite about, isn't there?

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:06Kate Lister?

  Holy shitballs, man. That was what a family.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. I feel like in these books, Jessica gets a short shrift. You know, she's the one who left, who kind of turned her back on the aristocracy and that whole way of life and became essentially very much an American.

• 5:25Kate Lister?

  Hmm. Can we paint a bit of a picture? Because there might be people listening who they're not quite sure who we're talking about here. Who were the Mitford sisters?

• 5:35Speaker 01

  All right. The Mitford sisters were six aristocratic sisters born between 1904 and 1920 to a minor aristocrat, the Baron Reedesdale, David Mitford and his wife Sydney Mitford. They were raised in isolation in the Cotswolds in Swinbrook. Their father was the second son of the first Baron Reedesdale, who was the ambassador to Japan. And when his older brother was killed in World War I, he inherited the estate and inherited this massive Victorian pile that his father had built, Batsford House and, you know, thousands and thousands of acres and other properties. And he was in no way prepared to be, you know, the one inheriting the lot of stuff. And he had a terrible business

• 6:20Speaker 01

  sense, like monumentally bad business sense. And he couldn't afford to keep this immense estate. So he sold it. They moved to Astle Manor in Swinbrook. He didn't believe in educating girls, so his six daughters were all educated at home by a series of governesses. And Nancy was the oldest, and Nancy became the famous comic novelist who wrote The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, among other great works. And she was just extremely funny, and she set the bar really high. So they were in this hothouse environment where they all had to be clever and funny and smart. They had their grandfather's library to fall back on, which was impressive. And they were cousins of Winston

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Churchill. David Mitford was Clementine Churchill's cousin, first cousin. And so they spent a lot of time with the Churchills and other family members, but they didn't really even socialize that much. So it very much was this hothouse environment where Nancy was calling the shots. And she was kind of mean.

• 7:22Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  And, you know, you had to like be quick enough to keep up with Nancy. And they were just very odd. They were, I mean, the parents were very eccentric in our own classic

• 7:33Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  English, upper class eccentric way. And their mother was always pinching pennies, even though they had a staff of seven and a, you know, this beautiful home. She had to do things like economize, like she decided they would do away with the use of table napkins because it costs so much a week to, to launder and, and iron them. And so they all learned to just be extremely careful sitting at the dinner table. And she also was raising chickens to sell the eggs in the poultry at markets. So it was a really odd combination of, you know, very upper class and very kind of just oddball behavior.

• 8:14Kate Lister?

  And they had a son as well, and he went off to

• 8:17Speaker 01

  They had a son.

• 8:17Kate Lister?

  To Eton, right?

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Tom went to Eton, Tom went to Oxford. Tom was going to study to become a lawyer. Tom was killed in World War II.

• 8:26Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  You know, meanwhile, the girls are at home trying to, and their father had made it clear there was no money for them. You know, forget about it. You know, you're on your own. So they're all planning their exit strategies early on. So having become smi- With Diana's love interest after she left her husband Brian Guinness of the Guinness Beer Fortune. She'd scandalously left him after three years of marriage to be with Oswald Mosley, head of the British Union of Fascists. And teenage Unity had a mad crush on Oswald Mosley and decided Hitler was the bee's knees and said, well, I'm going to meet Hitler. And Jessica, who was then about 12, said, well, I'm a communist. You know, just because they're competing with each other.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  And a little Debo, who was about 10, said, well, I'm going to marry a duke. And all of these things happened.

• 9:17Kate Lister?

  Wow. I suppose it's one of the things that they're most famous for is being part of the Bright Young Things set, which we'll talk about in a minute. But also for being so oppositional in their views from this one family. They've got, they've got communists and people that absolutely love Hitler. It's, it's such a strain. Like, was there any sense of this in early childhood about how these women were going to become so different?

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Well, I think if there were any indications at all, I think possibly Unity was probably somewhere out there on a spectrum.

• 9:50Kate Lister?

  Oh, that's interesting. Okay.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  If she didn't like the way the conversation was going at the dinner table, she would just slowly slide under the table. And of course, everyone would just ignore her.

• 10:02Kate Lister?

  I love that. I might try that, just, just vanishing from view. That's brilliant.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  And she only ate like mashed potatoes for years, you know, and they just kind of like, okay.

• 10:14Kate Lister?

  Whenever you get people in history and people try and go back and diagnose them with some kind of neurodivergent condition, you're like, oh, you've got to be careful. I think that one's a safe bet, Mimi. That's if you're.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  I think it, I think it really is. Yeah. And, and apparently she was very funny. And, and despite the fact that she was a rabid fascist who became almost literally Hitler's best friend. It was almost like they were each other's. Imaginary friends, I don't know if that makes sense, but she went to Munich to go to, you know, finishing school, that was her excuse, but she really went to Munich to stalk Hitler, which she did successfully. She went to the same cafe where he, she knew he went day in and day out for months and months until finally he showed up. And eventually he invited her over to his table and she drove his cabinet mad because she was so kind of outrageous. And he found her charming. He thought, oh, you know, she's from an older

• 11:08Speaker 01

  English aristocratic family. He loved that. And he also loved the fact that her name was Unity Valkyrie Mitford. And that she was actually conceived, this is true, she was conceived in a town in Canada called Swastika.

• 11:24Kate Lister?

  Holy shit. Wow.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Her father had, another one of his harebrained schemes was prospecting for gold. So he had staked a claim in a town in Canada called Swastika.

• 11:34Kate Lister?

  Is it still called Swastika?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 11:38Kate Lister?

  You'd change that, wouldn't you? You'd have, you'd have a meeting and change that.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  I think there might be a city council meeting.

• 11:44Kate Lister?

  Sure. Surely. So, but so how old is this girl when she goes over to Germany? And even before that, how does she get radicalized in a family home where they're just being taught by governesses?

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Because of Oswald Mosley.

• 11:59Kate Lister?

  Oh, yes. Yeah, okay.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  So she's just following behind, you know, puppy dog, following along behind Diana and Oswald Mosley, who's apparently very charismatic. And everyone else is horrified that Diana, who's had two children in rapid succession with Brian Guinness, has rebelled and suddenly left him to openly live as the mistress of the married Oswald Mosley.

• 12:23Kate Lister?

  That's crazy.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  He was a super creep.

• 12:25Kate Lister?

  Yes. Yeah. I mean, like, even if it wasn't for the fascism, which is pretty bad, he's, he was creepy.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Oh, he's a, yeah, I mean, he was a completely notorious womanizer. He was sleeping with his wife's sisters, two sisters, and their stepmother.

• 12:41Kate Lister?

  Ew, ew, ew.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  And their stepmother.

• 12:43Kate Lister?

  Oh, no. What in the Jerry Springer nonsense is that?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  And one of the superstitions their father clung to was that if you wrote your enemy's name on a piece of paper and put it in a drawer, doom was sure to befall them. So Oswald's name on a piece of paper went straight in that drawer.

• 13:01Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  It didn't work.

• 13:02Kate Lister?

  Wow. How did she even meet Oswald Mosley?

• 13:06Speaker 01

  At a party, you know, at a party.

• 13:08Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  He was a legitimate politician for, for a time and was a member of the Conservative Party and then he jumped over and became a Liberal and then eventually started the British Union of Fascists because, you know, obviously the world needs more fascists, right?

• 13:23Kate Lister?

  You can see the progression.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  At the time fascism was not perceived the way it is today. Now we know it's bad. Then it was, you know, Mussolini had come up with this great idea and the trains were running on time and everyone thought, well, this is, this is a new way of looking at things. Whereas communism, communism, you know, the aristocrats had their, their panties in a twist because the communists had just murdered the cousins of the royal family in, in Russia, you know?

• 13:52Kate Lister?

  We forget in this country just how pro fascist we were for a while there. I mean, not everybody.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, Charles Lindbergh, big, you know, America first.

• 14:03Kate Lister?

  Yeah, big fascist. I think the Daily Mail over here ran a support article about fascism in the lead up to, to World War Two, saying how great it was and that we should all be doing that. It was, it was popular, alarmingly popular.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, it was.

• 14:18Kate Lister?

  And Oswald Mosley, he was the kind of, the ringleader of this. He was the leader of the fascist party in Britain.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:26Kate Lister?

  Asshole.

• 14:31Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Mimi after this short break.

• 14:42Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right. It took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 15:24Kate Lister?

  So they meet at a party. He's already married and having sex with everybody, it seems.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Everybody.

• 15:31Kate Lister?

  How does it go from they're both married to they both end up together?

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Well, his wife, Oswald Mosley's wife, Simi, who was the daughter of the former viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, she's not only the daughter of the viceroy of India, but her mother, who had died, was an American heiress, I think a Marshall Field department store heiress. So, you know, he was opportunistic as well. So Simi, who campaigned with him and was devoted to him, developed, I think, appendicitis and developed peritonitis and there was no antibiotics then. And she died. And, you know, of course, the doctors said things like, she didn't want to live, you know, she'd lost the will to live because her husband was so terrible. We don't know this for sure. But anyway, she's dead and

• 16:19Speaker 01

  now he's kind of footloose and fancy free. And they didn't really care about getting married. But at the time, Diana, who was not stupid, had an idea. By that point, Oswald Mosley had been banned from British radio for his views. And Diana saw the opportunity of building a radio station on an island off the coast of Germany in the North Sea and broadcasting to Britain from there, and campaigned Hitler to get a radio license from Germany to do so. And I met with him many, many times to try to talk him into it. And she finally talked him into it. She, they were going to have like no, supposedly no propaganda, just like light, light news, the women's programs.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this is the closest, I think, they come to being Kardashian-like, is that she wanted to have a line of cosmetics that she would advertise on this radio station. And she wasn't getting anywhere with him. And she knew, you know, his views on, on marriage were very strong. You know, he believed in all that kind of. Home and hearth and family and, you know, the wife stays at home and has the children and does that. And so she decided she and Oswald Mosley should get married. And who offered up their home for her to get married in but Magda Gobels, Joseph Goble's wife? So they get married at Magda and Joseph Goble's house, you know, basically just pretty

• 17:46Speaker 01

  much to please Hitler. And then they're still working, they're building that radio station. And then 1939 comes along and oops.

• 17:55Kate Lister?

  Oops-a-daisy.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Fuck.

• 17:58Kate Lister?

  So she's mates with Hitler as well then?

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. She took it upon herself to learn German. And in fact, Oswald Mosley, yeah, Oswald Mosley did not speak German and the wedding vows were all in German. And he picked a fight with her that day. He was in a really bad mood because a couple of days earlier, he had had his march through East London, you know, this famous riot called the Battle of Cable Street that went really badly. He and his fascist troops marched through the largely Jewish East End and were met by somewhere between, I don't know, the numbers ranged between 20,000 and 200,000 protesters.

• 18:41Kate Lister?

  Nice, nice.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  So.

• 18:43Kate Lister?

  Good.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, he wasn't in the best of moods.

• 18:46Kate Lister?

  Oh, to go and get married in the Gobels' house. See, I suppose there's a tiny, tiny part of me that thought, maybe, maybe Diana hasn't bought into the propaganda hook, line and sinker. Maybe she's.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, no.

• 18:59Kate Lister?

  No, no.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, no. By the end of Oswald's life, he's regretting having ever started the B U F.

• 19:06Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Diana remained a diehard fascist until the end of her life.

• 19:10Kate Lister?

  Wow. Okay, okay. So what happens at the outbreak of war and they're running this light fascism slash makeup radio station?

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Well, no, the station never made it because the war came along. So, no, they go back to Britain and the following year, you get, here's where the really fun intrigue starts. You've got Nancy, who disapproves of them mightily, has already gone to the authorities. And said, I think my sister should be imprisoned. I think she's a danger to our country.

• 19:40Kate Lister?

  And this is Nancy, the author.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  The author, the eldest, yeah. But the authorities have had their eye on Mosley and Diana for a while anyway. So the war is declared. They have a wartime act, Regulation 18B, that says that they can put you in prison if they even just suspect you of treason. 1940 rolls around and they arrest Oswald Mosley. And Diana is outraged, you know, what are the charges? And like, ma'am, there are no charges.

• 20:07Kate Lister?

  What did he do?

• 20:08Speaker 01

  And she's outraged, just outraged. But what does she do? She goes and hides her autographed, silver framed photo of Hitler that he's given them as a wedding present, under her baby's mattress.

• 20:18Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 20:20Kate Lister?

  Oh, it's so bad. It's so bad.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  And then a month later, they came for her. And so they were in prison for three and a half years. And she was in Holloway Prison and like very grim conditions, very grim. And Nancy finally wrote to her and said, darling, I had no idea I was allowed to write.

• 20:39Kate Lister?

  Nancy.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Completely a lie because her sisters, you know, Unity and Pam, their sister Pam and their mother had been writing and visiting for some time. And in fact, the really juiciest bit of all is that Diana did not know that Nancy had dropped a dime on her until after Nancy was dead, after she had nursed Nancy through her painful battle with cancer in like 1972.

• 21:13Kate Lister?

  I can't, I can't say that I think she did the wrong thing, though. I think that she, yeah, I think that they should have been in prison.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And eventually they were allowed to be housed together in a cottage on the grounds of the prison. And then Oswald Mosley developed phlebitis and Churchill relented and let them out early. And the public was outraged. He was like, put them back, put them back. There was riots and marches. And it was nuts.

• 21:43Kate Lister?

  So at the time then, they

• 21:45Speaker 01

  They were the most hated couple in Britain.

• 21:47Kate Lister?

  Wow. God, well, I thought maybe, maybe they'd kept it a bit quieter, but they, I mean, I know Oswald Mosley was well known for this. But Diana was, everyone knew as well, and she was a publicly reviled figure too.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:01Kate Lister?

  Okay, good, good. What was it like in jail for her? I mean, the time that they did?

• 22:06Speaker 01

  It was hideous because it was like, you know, absolutely Victorian horror conditions, rats and open sewage. And this is all happening during the Blitz. Imagine you're in prison and you're being bombed by your best buddies. And so, you know.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  So, so yeah, it was truly grim and, you know, they're allowed something like four ounces of water, drinking water a day. But at the same time, there was no charges against them. So they could order food brought in from like Harrods. And there was a newspaper that had said something about Diana that wasn't true. She sued them and won. And with the proceeds, bought a fur coat to wear in prison because it was so cold.

• 22:53Kate Lister?

  Wow. Okay. So a very mixed bag then. That's, all right. So how long were they in jail for? When were they let out?

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Three and a half years.

• 23:02Kate Lister?

  Okay, okay. Was the war over by that point when they got let out?

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then they had to go find someplace else to live. And there was a great housing shortage. And they wound up in this medieval inn in a small village somewhere where they had to, you know, tidy it up just to live there. And now this place is some kind of exclusive, you know, destination spa hotel.

• 23:25Kate Lister?

  Hmm. And was there any regret? Because like, obviously, you know, the war happened. It's terrible. Nazism and fascism has been revealed in all its awful glory. Surely there must have been like a whole lot of people going, oh, yeah. Sort of, no. Any regrets at all from those two?

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. And it and and here's here's what no one else I have to give myself credit here because I'm I'm going through all these books about the Mitfords and all these books about Diana and Mosley. And nowhere do I see any mention of this. They in around 1950, they started their own publishing imprint called Euphorion Books. And the only book they ever had that that made a profit that became a best seller was a book by a former Nazi fighter pilot called Stuka Pilot. And I can't remember his name, but I looked him up and it turns out that this guy.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  This guy is responsible for ferrying former Nazis out of Germany to South America.

• 24:29Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:31Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:35Kate Lister?

  Oh, it's awful.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  So, you know, it was just like, oh, no, she's too beautiful. We'll just brush that under the rug because Diana, I mean, she was like ridiculously beautiful. It was just completely unfair.

• 24:46Kate Lister?

  And we will. We will let you get away with a lot if you're very pretty, but we do. We have to draw the line at hardcore Nazism, I think. Even the Brits.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Apparently not.

• 24:55Kate Lister?

  Even the British. Hey, what about what about the younger one? What about Unity? What's she doing when her older sisters in jail getting fur coats?

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Oh, my. Oh, well, OK, let's back up a little bit.

• 25:08Kate Lister?

  OK.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Britain declares war on Germany. Unity is living in Munich. She's bereft. She's heartbroken. The two countries she loves most are now at war with each other. She's been telling people she's going to do this if this happened. She has this little pistol. She goes to the English Garden in Munich and she shoots herself in the head. But she's well known enough that, of course, you know, somebody notices and they know it's her and she's raced to the hospital. They can't get the bullet out of her brain. Hitler comes to visit her. So she's alive, but she has brain damage and she wakes up enough to realize where she is and she tries to swallow her. Diamond studded Nazi swastika pin that Hitler has given her so that she can finish

• 25:54Speaker 01

  the job, but that doesn't work. So she's packed off back to England. She's sent on a private railway car to Switzerland where her mother Sydney and her youngest sister Debo are there to meet the train and bring her back to England. And there's a huge, huge kerfuffle when she arrives in Britain because by now she's absolutely hated because she's published a letter in Der Stürmer, which was Germany's most vitriolically anti-Semitic newspaper there was. And in fact, even Hitler and Goebbels were like, you know, ich nein on the U-Jay. Fuck. Like it's too much even for them. But she's published a letter in

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Der Stürmer saying, I want the world to know that I am a Jew hater, you know, and she's already made herself famous through that. And everybody hates her. So she's taken off to recover in, you know, in the English countryside with her mother and, and her youngest, youngest sister Debo, who's still living at home. And she's just very erratic. She's been reduced, they say, to the mental age of 12. So she oddly enough recovers enough that she's allowed to drive. And ultimately Sydney, her mother, takes her to a small island in the Hebrides called Inch Kenneth, where their father has so wisely bought the island and a house there.

• 27:18Kate Lister?

  Smart.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Debo later would say it took longer to get to Inch Kenneth than it took to fly to Brazil. But this is a, a house they keep there. And so they're living on Inch Kenneth. And in 1948, I think it was Unity succumbed to meningitis from the infection from the bullet still in her brain.

• 27:40Kate Lister?

  Wow. Okay. Okay. So that's, it's difficult, isn't it? Because you want to say that's a sad story, but then again, she wrote a horrible article in a horrible paper and sounds like quite a horrible person.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  I mean, I think there was just something, just something really wrong with her. You know, I, I feel sorrier for Unity than I do. I have no patience with, with Diana at all. Diana was, was very smart. And Diana knew exactly what she was doing. And I think Unity was just cracked.

• 28:08Kate Lister?

  She sounds a bit, I know that's not a professional diagnosis, but she sounds a bit cracked.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Not a professional diagnosis.

• 28:17Kate Lister?

  But she like, she sounds like she's like, she's quite unstable. Like she's gone over there like to suddenly up and move to Germany to stalk Hitler. Like that's got to rate pretty high on anyone's criteria list of cracked. What were the rest of the family doing at this point? Like, were they, were they worried about these two?

• 28:35Speaker 01

  They were terribly worried about Unity. They got a call finally on like Christmas Eve from Unity, who was in a hospital saying, I want to come home.

• 28:44Kate Lister?

  How old was she?

• 28:45Speaker 01

  And they hadn't heard anything. They had gotten a letter from a friend of the family who'd said that she was ill and in the hospital, but they didn't know anything else.

• 28:53Kate Lister?

  How old was she when she, when she did this, when she would end up in the hospital?

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Um, let's see. I think she was about 23 or so.

• 29:00Kate Lister?

  So she's, she's young then, and she's just kind of vanished to Germany with no, and the family didn't know where she was. She's just off stalking Hitler.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:09Kate Lister?

  That would terrify you. That would absolutely terrify the family.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. They were out of their minds. And at the same time, though, Jessica had run away. Jessica, the communist and started a running-

• 29:20Kate Lister?

  I'd almost forgotten about her.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, there's so much. There's just so many sisters and so much. Jessica had started a running away fund when she was 12. Like I said, they all had their exit strategies. And she said, she kept saying, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna run away. I'm getting out of here. This is Nowheresville. She had a cousin named Esmond Romilly, who was Winston Churchill's nephew, who was like, he was like the wild child. He had started the equivalent of an underground newspaper that was distributed at boys' boarding schools in England, all about how evil boys' boarding schools were and the corruption and the sexual abuse and all that stuff. And it was being widely distributed. And he, he wrote a book

• 30:02Speaker 01

  that was, was reviewed by George Bernard Shaw. And he was like, literally the fair-haired child of the revolutionary movement and a just complete wild rebel. He ran away to fight in the Spanish Civil War. And almost everyone in his division was killed and he was invalided back to England with cholera or something. And they had a mutual cousin who had a country house where Jessica was invited for a weekend party and met him there. And she had been following his exploits in the media and already had developed this mad crush on him.

• 30:34Kate Lister?

  They do this a lot, the Mitfords. They just seem like, she seems to get crushes from afar. They read about someone and they're just like, yeah, that's the one for me.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  That's the one for me. And they double down, man. Do they ever double down? They are the queens of the doubling down.

• 30:49Kate Lister?

  Oh, damn.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  And over dinner, she says, you know, are you going back to Spain? And he says, yeah. And he says, can I come with you? And he says, well, she says, I've got 50 pounds, which was like the equivalent of like a thousand dollars today. It was a lot of money. And he's like, OK, let's go, you know? And so they they ran away together to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War. Her family, for a time, also didn't know where she was. And this was before Unity had tried to commit suicide. And the family was completely beside themselves. They, you know, there were headlines in the newspapers like Mitford daughter trapped in hut in the Pyrenees, all kinds of speculation.

• 31:28Kate Lister?

  Oh, good. Wow.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  And finally, they found out that they were in Spain. And they had enough pull with the government where they sent a British destroyer that was going to go down there and pick up Spanish refugees and take them to a refugee camp in in France to pick up Jessica and Esmond Romilly. And of course, they said, no, we're not going. We're not getting on that boat. And I like, oh, gee, you know, we were going to take these refugees to to France. But if you're not getting on the boat, we can't do that.

• 31:59Kate Lister?

  Smart.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  So they had to get on the boat and go back to France. And Nancy and her then husband, Peter Rodd, met them at the boat. And Nancy told Jessica, oh, you know, Unity is so jealous. You were on posters, you know, meeting those big posters they would, the newspapers would have at newspaper stands that would, you know, trumpet the the headlines of the day. By then, of course, Jessica was pregnant and they got married and eventually came back to to to London and and lived in the slums and had a baby daughter who sadly died of the measles because there was a measles outbreak. And she had been told by at a local clinic that she would pass her immunity on through her breast milk. But their mother was kind of like the original anti-vaxxer, Sidney was.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  She's like, the good, the good body will heal itself. So she never had any of those childhood diseases. And so her, her daughter died. And after that, they decided to leave Britain. They came to the States and embarked, she and Esmond embarked upon their American adventure. And because of their aristocratic connections, they met Eugene Meyer. And it was Eugene Meyer bought the Washington Post and gave Esmond a job as like a roving reporter, reporting on things from time to time. They both worked at a lot of different jobs. They hustled. They decided to, they were gonna like drive to New Orleans and Esmond was gonna become a waiter and they could make money that way. But they took a wrong turn and they wound up in Miami where they ran a bar in an Italian restaurant for a while.

• 33:30Kate Lister?

  Wow, okay.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  But they had made friends with people in DC who were very influential, the Durs. This couple, who he was a lawyer and his wife was an activist. They were from Birmingham, Alabama. And Virginia Durr became extremely active in trying to get the poll tax repealed in the South, which was keeping black people from voting. And so she became a huge influence on Jessica. And Jessica went to work, Esmond went to Canada to join the, the Canadian Royal Air Force so that he could get in the fight. And he was shot down over the North Sea and she was absolutely devastated.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  By then they had another daughter, Constancia, named after a Spanish Civil War heroine, who's then her name actually was and still is Dinky, Dinky Romilly. And she's a good friend and she's been very helpful to me.

• 34:26Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  I know.

• 34:28Kate Lister?

  Oh my God, that's amazing.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Jessica went to work doing clerical work for the government in DC and rose in the ranks of the typing pool and became involved in the Office of OPA. There was price protections during the war. So people weren't getting screwed over by wildly fluctuating prices. And met this lawyer who was working for the same organization and Bob Truhoft. And they got married, moved to San Francisco after the war and became active in civil rights and union rights activism in the Bay Area throughout the 1950s.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Also went with three other women, drove to Mississippi to campaign for a wrongly convicted black man who'd been convicted of rape and went door to door in Laurel, Mississippi, asking people to sign a petition to overthrow his conviction.

• 35:17Kate Lister?

  Oh, Jessica.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Which sadly did not happen. I mean, she was boots on the ground always. And the two of them were very committed communists for years and years. And then were also got caught up in the HUAC hearings. And oh, there's so much.

• 35:32Kate Lister?

  It really is.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  How much, how much time have you got?

• 35:39Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Mimi after this short break.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  What started the Civil War? What ended the conflict in Vietnam? Who was Paul Revere? And did the Vikings ever reach America? I'm Don Wildman, and on American History Hit, my expert guests and I are journeying across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made America. We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where the nation was formed, meet the characters who have altered it with their touch, and count the votes that have changed the direction of our laws and leadership. Find American History Hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit.

• 36:50Kate Lister?

  We should briefly mention Deborah Mitford, who went on to become the Duchess of Devonshire. Because as if, as if these sisters haven't covered enough ground.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, the thing is, is through, they, they, they knew everyone, every, they like, everything they did and, and said had something to do with every aspect of world history throughout the 20th century. So. Diana was a debutante alongside of Kick Kennedy, who was Kathleen's Kennedy, who was the sister of John F. Kennedy, and it's the daughter of Joseph Kennedy, who was at the time the American ambassador at the Court of St. James. And they became good friends, partly because Kick Kennedy was always engaged to the Duke of Devonshire's older son. They got married against the wishes of both their families. And then, three months later, he died in action.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  And then Deborah had married his younger brother, Andrew, and now she and he were poised to become the next Duke and Duchess of Devonshire through this tragic act. And then Kick Kennedy was dallying around with another aristocrat in about 1947, and they died in a plane crash. And her family wouldn't take the body, so she's buried at Chatsworth in Enser, in the churchyard there. And so Deborah became good friends, some say more than good friends, with JFK.

• 38:15Kate Lister?

  Oh, well JFK, I mean, like, he would, if anything stayed still long enough, he'd have a go at it, wouldn't he? That's, that's my understanding.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Right. Right. I mean, and if you're unhappily married to an alcoholic, you know, and you've got an opportunity to be with the leader of the free world, why wouldn't you?

• 38:32Kate Lister?

  Flashy, handsome smile, right? And then, and then there's Pamela Mitford, who I think might actually be my favorite, just the quiet one, looking around at everyone going, what the fuck is going on here?

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Pam married Derek Jackson, who I like to refer to as a vigorous bisexual.

• 38:48Kate Lister?

  Oh, I like that. Okay, so not entirely quiet, then?

• 38:51Speaker 01

  No, no. And here's the thing, Derek Jackson's father started the News of the World, and so he was the heir to the, heir to this great fortune. And he was also a frickin' rocket scientist, a literal rocket scientist. But he also kind of had fascist leanings, and he was in the RAF. And he would blither this fascist nonsense at them and, you know, make disparaging remarks about Jews, and they just kind of had to put up with it because he was so good at his job. So she may have like, you know, been more over to that side of things.

• 39:29Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  But she like, she was very, she was very soft spoken and I think she and Unity may have had a kind of sense of humor that was so ineffable that not even their most articulate sister, Jessica, sisters Jessica or Nancy could tell you why it was they were so funny, but there were. And Benji, Jessica's younger son with Bob Truhoft told me that he met her a couple of times and that she was absolutely hilarious.

• 39:59Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  And she, she was, you know, she just wanted to stay in the background because she had had polio as a child and had been cruelly taunted by Nancy for that. And just kind of like stayed in the background, wanted to live a quiet country life, loved animals. She ran the farm for Brian Guinness and for Diana when they were still married. They had a farm and she became the manager of the farm and learned a lot as she went along. In fact, she, one of the first things she did was go to an auction to buy a cow, only to discover that the cow she'd bought was not a cow. She said, the brute is bagless.

• 40:36Kate Lister?

  Oh, we've all been there.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  But she became quite the, the poultry expert. And Debo, late in life, said Pam should have her own chicken chat show.

• 40:47Kate Lister?

  Just such, such different people from one family. It really is quite extraordinary. So as a final question then, I'm sure you've been asked this one before, but if you were gonna meet one of them, if you're gonna go out for dinner with one of them, not who'd you like the best, who would you like to sit down with and have, and have a conversation? Who are you going with?

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Well, I think Jessica's always gonna be my favorite. She was so funny and so sharp and so witty and just would be so much fun. I'd be a bit afraid of Nancy because she hated Americans. She never visited America. She just like hated them on principle. She'd, she'd worked at Haywood Hill Bookshop in London during the war and encountered American tourists and had just made up her mind that was it. She was never gonna deal with Americans. So Jessica would be my choice, first of all, then maybe, maybe Debo. Nancy, of course, would be. A dream, but again, she could, she really could be very mean. Her, her mother described her as being like a sparkling fish lure that is disguised

• 41:54Speaker 01

  under the feathers as a nasty hook.

• 41:56Kate Lister?

  Oh, oh, okay. Oh, Mimi, you have been fascinating to talk to. Thank you so much for dropping by to tell us about this completely bonkers family. Shall we give you the title of your book again because people should run out and get it?

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Do Admit, The Mitford Sisters and Me. And the do admit is they would fight with each other and, you know, to like, try to convince you to come over to their side of the argument of like, a do admit.

• 42:25Kate Lister?

  Oh, I love that.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Being the only sister of two brothers, I could never get my brothers to admit. They would never admit.

• 42:33Kate Lister?

  No, my siblings never admit with me either. Thank you so much, Mimi. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Well, I have a website, mimi pond.com and I'm on Instagram at mimi dot pond. So I'm posting all the time. I, I post little, little videos, can't compare to yours, of course, but I've been doing a series called Mitfords in a Minute.

• 42:55Kate Lister?

  Amazing.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Where I spew out, you know, all these incredible crazy facts about them.

• 43:01Kate Lister?

  Oh, I love that. Right, we'll go and check that out. Thank you so much. You have been spectacular.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Well, thanks. It's been absolutely a pleasure. I could go on.

• 43:15Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Mimi for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we have got episodes on the origins of Aphrodite and the truth about mythical women all coming your way. If you want us to explore a subject, or if you just fancy saying hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.