Meet history’s most dysfunctional family Email a friend BEFORE women’s rights fuelled a global debate, there were the Mitford girls. This extraordinary family mixed intelligence and determination, sex, politics, and tragedy. The last member of the clan, Deborah the Duchess of Devonshire , died this week aged 94. She is being mourned by many younger Britons including Mary McCartney who today tweeted, “RIP the Dowager Duchess”. Debt, as her sisters called her, was grandmother of supermodel Stella Tennant and a fixture of the aristocracy. With her goes the last contact with the remarkable Mitford women who lived extraordinary lives they shaped for themselves. One was in love with Hitler, another was a socialist who organised workers in California. Yet another was an author and mistress to some of the most powerful figures of Europe These were Debo’s sisters. JESSICA (1917-1996) Jessica "Decca" Mitford, with her husband Esmond Romilly at Roma Bar in Miami. Jessica was a socialist author, and an outcast from her family.

Picture: Mitford/family Historical Romilly/familySource:News Corp Australia The woman known as Decca moved to Spain aged 19 during its civil war in the late 1930s. She married a cousin after opposition from her family, and had a daughter, Julia whom she later ignored, not even mentioning her in an autobiography. Jessica had another daughter, Constance in Washington in 1941. Her husband joined the Canadian air force and went missing in action. She became a US citizen in 1944 and married a civil rights activist. This led her to a life of protests, renouncing her privileged upbringing by supporting Communist campaigns. She was also an investigative journalist and wrote a hugely influential book, “The American Way of Death” exposing the mortuary industry. “You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty,” she said at one point. She died having never reconciled with sisters who took a different path. DIANA (1910-2003) Diana Mosley (nee Mitford) (right), and her sister Unity pictured in Germany.

Picture from book: Diana Mosley by Anne de Coucy.Source:News Limited Diana was a great beauty whose second husband was Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists which supported Hitler’s Nazis while rejecting a German invasion. The 1936 wedding was held at the home of Joseph Goebbels (Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda), with Hitler himself a guest of honour. Writer and admirer Evelyn Waugh said her beauty “ran through the room like a peal of bells”, but many Britons found her politics unattractive and there were demands she and her husband be detained for the duration of WWII. In an autobiography she said of her political life, “I can’t regret it, it was so interesting.” Another sister went even further in right wing politics. UNITY VALKYRIE (1914-1948) Adolf Hitler and Unity Mitford were understood to have been very close.Source:News Corp Australia Following Diana’s lead, Unity travelled to German, fell in love with Hitler and became part of his close group of friends and advisers. She was torn when war was declared between Britain and Germany. In Munich she tried with kill herself with a small pistol Hitler had given her for protection.

The suicide bid failed, and she was sent back to Britain for health care. She never recovered the botched attempt on her own life. Watching these personal and family dramas was the most sophisticated of the Mitfords. NANCY (1904-1973) Author Nancy Mitford was renown for her fiction work Love in a Cold Climate.Source:News Corp Australia The eldest sister was an author and journalist who examined her own aristocratic class in books such as “Noblesse Oblige”. Her fiction includes the big selling “Love in a Cold Climate”. After WWII she ended a sham marriage in which both partners had a variety of affairs, and moved to Paris. She had fallen in love with a French military officer whom she never married. When Nancy was dying Jessica and Diana came to Paris to be with her. But they still could not speak to each other, their political positions kept them forever apart. Nancy was the worldly Mitford, chain smoking, a competitive drinker, acclaimed writer and adventure lover. She was a stark contrast to her sibling closest in age. PAM (1907-1994) The Mitfords. One of modern history’s most remarkable families.

Back row (L-R) Lady Redesdale, Nancy, Diana, Tom, Pamela and Lord Redesdale. Front (L-R) Unity, Jessica and Deborah, 1934. Picture: Mitford family / suppliedSource:News Corp Australia Pam was teased by her sisters who usually referred to her simply as Woman. She made no great impact on world affairs and kept to her farm life. But her ability to live as she wanted rather than be drawn into Mitford fights showed a strong determination. After a divorce she set up a home with an Italian horse woman, her companion for the rest of her life. “She’s a you-know-what-bias,” Jessica explained in a family letter. The End of the Mitford Sisters The End of the Mitford Sisters 54.48K Mitford Sisters Deborah Mitford, the last of the "Mitford Girls," died this week in England at the age of 94. She and her five sisters, Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity and Jessica (called Decca), were the Middletons of their day. That is, if Kate had literary talent, and was ever called upon to utter a political opinion. And if Pippa married a fascist.

Deborah was, by marriage, the Duchess of Devonshire. She was not the quietest of the Mitfords; that would be Pamela, a woman who in adult life mostly farmed and was much less of a gadabout than the rest. Deborah wrote books, as Nancy and Decca did, though they were mostly about Chatsworth House, the family seat (and which Barry Lyndon fans will recognize as the house where it was filmed ). Her Mitfordian-ness comes out more clearly in her letters to her sisters, and in the sort of laconic high-mindedness she displayed in television interviews late in life, as she does in this BBC documentary about the debutantes of the late 1930s. As the baby Debo was picked on, particularly by the brilliant eldest, Nancy. Nancy was honing the biting satirical wit which would become the trademark of her novels, like The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate , a gimlet-eyed take on the English country romance.

"Debo," as the youngest was called, would write later that Nancy "once upset us by saying to Unity, Decca and me, 'Do you realize that the middle of your names are nit, sick and bore?'" Debo claimed not to resent such insults. This sort of repartee was the preferred mode of communication in the Mitford's household. And besides, she'd tell an interviewer in 2010 , I should think the social services would be called in now... But I adored [Nancy]. I used to sit on her bed for hours being mentally tortured. I would be in tears succeeded by roars of laughter. She was so funny, you see, and people don't seem to be quite so funny any more. Few people were probably ever as funny as Nancy Mitford, to be fair. But Debo was not wrong to observe that some kind of era has passed. There was a certain kind of lacerating intelligence intrinsic to Mitford wit; now someone might hear these jokes and call them cruel, and they were cruel, because sharpness was a quality the Mitford sisters prized among themselves. They loved each other dearly but also fought each other with every scrap of emotional energy that implies.

And their sharpness didn't always work out well for them. The key example: You cannot write about the Mitford sisters without mentioning Hitler. First there is the matter of Unity, who became intrigued by fascism at a young age. Diana would also divorce a baron to marry the head of the British Union of Fascists (in Goebbels' living room) but she still could not match the dramatics with which Unity lived her extreme-right-wing beliefs. Unity had an obsessive turn of mind overall, was a natural fanatic. As her biographers recount, by 1935 21-year-old Unity was trying to stalk Hitler in the papers, figuring out where he'd be so she could lurk nearby to meet him. She figured out his favourite restaurant, and staked it out. The scheme worked, as detailed in Mary S. Lovell's The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family : The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family When he appeared she made small attempts to be noticed, such as dropping her book. Eventually this paid off.

Hitler became used to seeing the tall, Nordic-looking girl — often alone — sitting in the same seat every time he visited the Osteria, and saw that her attention was fixed constantly on him. To her huge delight he began to nod to her sometimes as he passed her table. Eventually he became curious enough, exactly as she'd hoped, to enquire of the restaurant owner, Herr Deutelmoser, who she was. Once they started talking it appears they rarely stopped. Per Lovell, Unity's diary records over a hundred conversations with Hitler from 1935 through 1939. Over the course of their friendship he did all the usual nice-Hitler things like gift her a pistol (apparently Hitler was into women's self-defense) and get her and Diana seats next to Eva Braun at the 1935 Nuremberg rally and take Unity to a great many Wagner operas. There were always questions about whether the relationship was sexual but Unity's sisters denied it late in life — you can watch Debo emphatically dismiss the idea on television four years ago here . Still they had pet names for each other: Wolf for Hitler, Kind (child) for Unity.

Whatever her romantic intentions, largely it seems that Unity saw herself as building an alliance between Nazi Germany and the Brits, not that she seems to have gotten very far. By 1938 Unity was finding that the atmosphere in England was inhospitable to her fascist beliefs; at a rally in Hyde Park someone tore a swastika badge from her shirt and she was kicked and mauled by the crowd. She remained defiant in her beliefs right up to the day Britain declared war on Germany. After learning the news at the British consulate, she went home, wrote a suicide note, made some personal arrangements, drove to a park, and shot herself in the head. Unity survived the suicide attempt. She was taken to a hospital in a coma. Hitler visited her there. When she regained consciousness, Unity told him she wanted to go home to England, and eventually he managed to get her to Switzerland. There Unity's mother and Debo went to pick her up. By then months had passed, and they found a girl totally ruined, Debo told Lovell, She had an odd vacant expression... the most pathetic sight. I was very shocked and I can't begin to imagine what it must have been like for my mother seeing her like that...

But it wasn't just her appearance; she was a completely changed person, like somebody who has had a stroke. When she got back to England there were calls for Unity to be brought up on charges of treason. But given her condition — she is often said to have been left with "the mind of a 12-year-old," and she had a sudden mania for Christian Science which displaced the fascism — she was simply left to her mother's care. Unity died in 1948, still dependent on her parents, after ten years of letters between the sisters flying back and forth expressing concern. ("Birdie is here & is so terribly pathetic, it really makes one miserable to see her," went one letter from Debo to Decca.) The cause was meningitis brought on by a sudden swelling around the bullet that was still in her head. Most of the family dipped a toe in fascism at one time or another, particularly the Mitfords' father and older brother. But most of the sisters had some involvement, even met Hitler themselves, at one time or another. And Diana was interned, along with her husband, Oswald Moseley, for most of World War II.

She'd continued to defend Hitler long after the war was over, a fact her descendant Charlotte Mosley claims is "mainly explained by her devotion and undeviating commitment to her husband." If that's correct, Diana manages to give an awfully convincing impression of a true believer in interviews, but no matter. Only one sister who clearly dissented: Decca, the second-youngest. She fell in love with a man she read a book about. He was Esmond Romilly, a nephew of Churchill's, and when she finally met him in early 1937 he was just back from fighting with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. In other words, he was a Red, through and through. By March of that year Decca had run away and married Romilly. The family was horrified by the scandal — "Muv cries all night & Farve has to make her tea, and they both look ten years older" — but Decca married Romilly in May. Yet Decca's marriage, and the anti-fascist beliefs she shared with her new husband, severed her connection to Diana for the rest of her life. Oddly, though, Decca and Unity kept up with each other.

A letter from Unity to Decca. pre-suicide attempt, sets out the compromise entailed: Of course one can't separate one's politics & one's private life, as you know Nazism is my life & I very much despise that democratic- liberal- conservative- English idea of walking about arm- in- arm with one's opponent in private life and looking upon politics as a business or hobby; but I do think that family ties ought to make a difference. After all, violent differences of opinion didn't prevent you & me from remaining good friends did they. My attitude to Esmond is as follows – and I rather expect his to me to be the same. I naturally wouldn't hesitate to shoot him if it was necessary for my cause, and I should expect him to do the same to me. But in the meanwhile, as that isn't necessary, I don't see why we shouldn't be quite good friends, do you. I wonder if he agrees. This sort of thing guaranteed that Decca would never be as close to her sisters again. And the start of the marriage was marked by poverty and a baby dead of measles. In the end, needing a new start, Romilly and Decca moved to America just before war broke out.

He died patrolling the Atlantic for the Canadian Air Force a couple of years later, leaving Decca widowed with a ten-month-old in a foreign country and estranged from her wider family. She recovered well, marrying a civil rights lawyer named Bob Treuhaft within two years and becoming a Bay Area civil rights activist and journalist. She would eventually make herself a household name The American Way of Death, which exposed the grifter-y practices of the funeral industry. Naturally the funeral industry hated her for it. She greeted their ire with classic Mitfordian good humor: A new menace had loomed on their horizon: the Menace of Jessica Mitford. Headines began to appear in the undertakers' journals: JESSICA MITFORD PLANS ANTI-FUNERAL BOOK, AND MITFORD DAY DRAWS CLOSER! When Mortuary Management began referring to me as Jessica tout court, I felt I had arrived at that special pinnacle of fame where the first name only is sufficient identification, as with Zsa Zsa, Jackie, or Adlai.

Greedily I gobbled up the denunciations: "the notorious Jessica Mitford"; "shocker"; "stormy petrel." Even in rebellion, in other words, Mitfords almost couldn't help themselves from getting in the thick of things. It was what they enjoyed. It might surprise you to learn, after all of this, that the six Mitford sisters had barely a shred of formal schooling between them. There were occasional stints at boarding schools between them but none took university classes. Their parents didn't believe, in short, in educating girls. So their wit was a product they cultivated themselves. If you read their letters — there are a couple collections but the best for this purpose is The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters — you can observe the laboratory in action. There are so many nicknames — Susan, Bobo, Birdie, Boud, Hen, Henderson, Nard — that one begins to lose track. Special languages were not just a childhood trick either — one of my favourite phrases of theirs comes only when the sisters, in adulthood, begin themselves bearing children.

The process of getting pregnant is often described in their books as follows: Well, dear, I've smacked my ovary and taken it to Madame Bovary and the result is I'm in pig... The Mitfords themselves produced entire books about their childhoods, the best known of which is Jessica's Hons and Rebels (sometimes Daughters and Rebels, its original American title). Unity, Debo and I were thrown much on our own resources. As a lost tribe, separated from its fellow men, gradually develops distinctive characteristics of language, behaviour, outlook, so we developed idiosyncracies that would no doubt have made us a little eccentric to other children our age. Even for England, in those far-off days of the mid-1920s, ours wasn't exactly a conventional upbringing. Our accomplishments and amusements took distinctly unusual forms. Thus, at an age when other children would be occupied with dolls, group sports, piano lessons or ballet, Debo spent silent hours in the chicken house learning to do an exact imitation of the look of pained concentration that comes over a hen's face when it's laying an egg.

Each morning she methodically checked over and listed in a notebook the stillbirths reported in the vital statistics columns of the Times. I amused myself by giving my father daily Palsy Practice, which consisted of gently shaking his hand while he was drinking his tea: 'In a few years, when you're really old, you'll probably have palsy. I must give you a little practice now, before you actually get it, so that you won't be dropping things all the time.' These eccentricities are funny but also obviously the product of a childhood spent feeling lonely and cloistered. The Mitfords were privileged in a way, born minor aristocrats. But the family was not rich, at least not rich in the way that titles like Lord and Lady might imply. No one could possibly nostalgic for an era when girls were kept boxed-up before marriage like this, even if it recalls the idylls of Little Women. Yet it gave the Mitfords the unique imaginative energy. And even if that energy led them down some terrible, awful, very bad paths, there is still something about it that keeps us talking all these 80 years later. There are, of course, still Mitford descendants kicking around. A few are even famous.

The model Stella Tennant is Debo's granddaughter. And the artist Daphne Guinness is Diana's . But it seems to say something about the way things have changed that Guinness's nephew Stavros Niarchos is probably best known to you, anyway, for his association with what our present day delivers to us as famous, accomplished sisters: the Hiltons and the Olsen twins. [Image by Tara Jacoby, from a photo of the Mitford family.] Why the Enduring Fascination with the Mitford Sisters Won’t Die | Vanity Fair THE SISTERS ISSUE Why the Enduring Fascination with the Mitford Sisters Won’t Die What explains the endless obsession with six British socialites of a bygone era? Probably their beauty, wit, eccentricity . . . and epic split over Hitler’s rise. by Unity, Tom, Deborah, Diana, Jessica, Nancy, and Pamela Mitford at Swinbrook House, in Oxfordshire, England, 1935. Photograph from Bridgeman Images; Digital Colorization by Lee Ruelle.

In those footloose days when I thought little of popping off to London once or twice a year to pad around Piccadilly and catch the latest shows, I found myself at a new musical called The Mitford Girls. Why I chose that concoction over so many other marquee-blazers remains a muddle and a mystery, my awareness of the Mitford clan and their fabled rap sheet being somewhat sketchy. Perhaps it was the Brideshead Effect that prompted me. The lavish mini-series adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s elegiac postwar romance, Brideshead Revisited—starring Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews, Diana Quick, Claire Bloom, and Laurence Olivier—premiered within a week of The Mitford Girls’ opening in 1981, and the sumptuous trappings and muffled intrigues of the landed nobility made for a cultural moment that had everyone abuzz then and has endured, all the way up to Downton Abbey. Anyway, there I was. It was not an evening in the theater to bring Kenneth Tynan springing out of retirement.

What I recall through the fogbank of jet lag is that the musical started off on a fishy note with the six sisters (like the Andrews Sisters, times two) greeting the audience onstage with a harmonizing “Thanks for the Memory,” a song so familiar as Bob Hope’s sign-off that planting it here seemed like borderline larceny. Other numbers included piano-bar perennials (such as Cole Porter’s cheeky “Let’s Do It”), the entire score a pastiche of paste diamonds dressing up a script heavy on hubbub and girlish antics until things went darker in Act II, when Adolf Hitler made an appearance. The Mitford Girls ran only a few months, not simply because it was creaky but because not even the Brideshead Effect in lilac bloom could salvage the Mitford mystique from looking spindly, dated, played-out—or so I halfway figured. Wrong. The Mitford cult not only survived the 20th century but has made a spirited go of it in the 21st with no sign of becoming winded.

What was known as the Mitford Industry in its heyday has not slowed production, even after the deaths of the six sisters, as individual and group biographies (coming this September, The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters, by Laura Thompson), docudramas, documentaries, reminiscences, volumes of letters, and even a self-help title (The Mitford Girls’ Guide to Life, by Lyndsy Spence) quench an apparently unslakable thirst for Mitford lore. The Mitford sisters have become the stuff of myth, a glittering constellation no matter how much tarnish remains. Why? It can’t be just because the Bloomsbury cult ran out of gas. For the sake of clarity, not to mention sanity, let’s fill out the lineup card first. Scion of an aristocratic family that traced its heritage back to the Norman Conquest, David Freeman-Mitford, who would become Baron Redesdale, and his wife, Sydney, bestowed upon the world six daughters—in order of birth, Nancy, Pam, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah—and a son, Tom.

They grew up in a series of country houses and cottages where their eccentricities and enthusiasms flowered like orchids. Only the son was formally schooled (owing to finances as much as to male entitlement—the Mitfords were socially privileged but not economically flush); the girls’ education was a more spotty, haphazard affair, with their mother and an array of governesses teaching lessons in reading, arithmetic, and French, leaving big blanks in the curriculum. Left to their own madcap devices, the girls formed a tribal bond, speaking their own slanguage and minting a clattering thicket of nicknames for their parents (Dad was Farve, Mum was Muv), one another (Unity was Bobo, Diana was Honks, Jessica was Decca, Deborah was Debo, and so on), their nannies, governesses, menagerie of pets, and anyone else who strayed across their radar.

Although taken to extremes by the Mitfords, with their “shrieks of laughter and floods of tears,” as Nancy would later put it, this sort of upper-class twittering was very common in the pre- and postwar eras among the smart set, as anyone who has waded knee-deep through the footnotes explaining nicknames, barnacled in-jokes, veiled allusions, and genealogical connections (who was whose idiot cousin) in the biographies and journals of the period can wearily attest. What elevated the Mitfords above the prattle and privileges of their upbringing and put their reputation on a collision course with history was the fissure in the household between the two raging ideologies that would rip apart the 20th century: Fascism and Communism. “When they talked about what they wanted to be when they were grown-ups,” writes Mary S. Lovell in The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, “Unity would say, ‘I’m going to Germany to meet Hitler,’ and Decca would say, ‘I’m going to run away and be a Communist.’ ” And so they did. Flighty as they might have appeared, the Mitford girls did not lack for follow-through.

In 1933, Unity and Diana traveled to Germany as delegation members of the British Union of Fascists, whose chrome-domed leader was Oswald Mosley, with whom Diana was having an affair—both were married to others at the time—and whom she would later secretly marry in the home of Nazi propaganda maestro Joseph Goebbels with Adolf Hitler among the guests. To many, Mosley resembled a knockoff version of Hitler, the black moon to Hitler’s black sun, but he possessed his own magnetic exertion. Dec­ades later, Clive James, writing about a television interview with Mosley, observed, “As always, the streamlined head of Sir Oswald looked simultaneously ageless and out of date, like some Art Deco metal sculpture recently discovered in its original wrappings. Nor have his vocal cords lost anything of their tensile strength.” Where Hitler had his Brownshirts busting chops and smashing glass, Mosley recruited his own paramilitary band of bullyboys, the Blackshirts, which the sainted P. G. Wodehouse would parody as the Black Shorts in The Code of the Woosters. Mosley wasn’t the demonic orator Hitler was. He lacked the infernal throb.

Attending the Nuremberg rally on their 1933 visit, Unity and Diana saw Hitler in oratorical action for the first time, and he more than lived up to advance billing. The spectacle was spellbinding, the message drum-pounding. Compared with the maundering walruses running En­gland and Europe downhill, here was a man who had dynamized, industrialized, and mobilized a nation—destiny incarnate. A year later, Unity, reborn in the spirit of fanaticism, alighted in Munich, took a German-language course near the Nazi Party headquarters, and put out her feelers for an opportunity to meet her hero. Didn’t take long. In 1934, Hitler’s movements and routines were well known, and one of the frequent stops was a restaurant, the Osteria Bavaria, which Unity staked out. They soon met—he couldn’t help but notice her—and into his orbit she was drawn. It wasn’t just that she was young, attractive, English, self-possessed, and shared his vision.

Hitler was steeped in superstition, susceptible to portents, and here was Unity, who was conceived in a Canadian town called Swastika and whose middle name was Valkyrie, in honor of Richard Wagner. (There was a family connection to Wagner and Bayreuth through her grandfather Bertie.) According to Unity’s careful tabulations, she met Hitler on 140 occasions, their flirty friendliness causing great distress to Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun, who attempted suicide to swerve Hitler’s attention back her way, which it did. Braun was probably never in serious danger from Unity as a romantic rival. Unity was too uninhibited and tongue-flapping. Secrets weren’t safe with her, which would never do in the tense, pin-drop deliberations of the Nazi high command. It’s become somewhat customary to contemporize Unity’s behavior as that of a groupie supplicating herself before a rock deity, a crush gone supernova, but Unity wasn’t content to pay homage offstage. She craved her own stardom.

She snapped a Nazi salute before thousands at a Hitler Youth rally (for which Hitler awarded her a gold swastika badge that she swanked around in) and wrote an open letter to Der Stürmer, the scurrilous anti-Semitic propaganda rag edited by the surpassingly odious Julius Streicher, which ended, “We think with joy of the day when we shall be able to say with might and authority: England for the English! Out with the Jews!,” then added a PS in which she asked that her whole name, not her initials, be used. “I want everyone to know I’m a Jew hater.” And as a Jew hater, what befell the Jews didn’t disturb a hair on her head. “We know she thought Strei­cher’s act in making Jews crop grass with their teeth amusing, and that she approved when a group of Jews were taken to an island in the Danube and left there to starve,” writes Lovell in The Sisters. Despite Unity’s mad devotion to Hitler, she insisted that if Germany and Britain went to war she would commit suicide. She couldn’t bear the prospect of the two countries she loved shedding each other’s blood. This wasn’t a verbal pose.

As I say, the Mitford girls had follow-through. When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939 after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Unity went to the English Garden in Munich, took the small pistol Hitler had given her for her protection, pressed it to her temple, and fired. The bullet lodged in her brain, but she survived—she had somehow bungled the self-hit. She was spirited off to neutral Switzerland, where her mother and Debo retrieved her and returned to England to an understandable firestorm of flashbulbs and tabloid snoops. Why was this little Fascista given such special, protective treatment? Despite her intimate proximity to Hitler and his trusted lackeys, Unity, brain-stricken, was not searched or questioned, even after her faculties somewhat recovered, thanks to the intervention of her father with the home secretary. She would lead a placid, child-like half-life until the bullet residing in her brain led to meningitis and she died, eight years later. Sister Diana wasn’t as lucky staying out of the clink.

The outbreak of war led to a sweep-up of the Fascists in England, and Oswald Mosley and Diana Mitford (who had given birth to her fourth child weeks before) were arrested without charge and interned for security purposes. Interviewed by authorities in prison, Diana was asked if she agreed with the Nazi policy on Jews. “Up to a point,” she replied. “I am not fond of Jews.” There were those who would later try to extenuate this remark. In The House of Mitford, written by Jonathan Guinness with Catherine Guinness, the authors deplore Diana’s statement. “One should never condemn a whole group in this way. Yet we have never seen anyone taken to task for saying they were not fond of, for example, Germans.” Given the context, this is remarkably obtuse, not to mention tasteless. The Nazi divide made it impossible for the sisters to maintain a united front. As a teenager, Decca had etched a hammer and sickle into her bedroom window with her diamond ring, and her first husband, Esmond Romilly, was the antithesis of Oswald Mosley: “Mosley with a red flag,” as Laura Thompson puts it in The Six.

So when Diana was finally released from prison, Decca petitioned Prime Minister Winston Churchill, whose wife Clementine was a cousin to the Mitfords, to have her put back in. “The fact that Diana is my sister doesn’t alter my opinion in the least.” (It was Decca who, when confronted with Nancy’s affirmation that “sisters are a shield against life’s cruel adversity,” riposted, “But sisters ARE life’s cruel adversity!”) Unlike many who start out on the Communist left only to sag sideways into religion or, worse, neoconservatism, she stayed put as an upright underdog defender. Immigrating to the United States in 1939 and making it her home base, Decca became an opponent of the Red Scare and a crusading reporter on civil rights, but her American reputation rested less on her political writings than on her best-selling muckraking book about the funeral industry, The American Way of Death, and her memoir Hons and Rebels.

She became a doyenne of the Old New Left (the 60s radicals who had entered middle age), defying the stereotype of the aging dour lefty by fronting a band called Decca and the Dectones, who I’m sure whipped up quite an earful. Of all the Mitfords, Nancy is the one who means the most to me. (Pam is the most inconspicuous and hence most uncharacteristic Mitford sister, though The House of Mitford informs us that she would “become well known in the poultry world” for importing “a picturesque breed of chicken” into Britain, and the poultry world doesn’t accept just anybody.) Nancy is the one with the lasting literary eminence—her comic novels (Christmas Pudding, The Blessing, Don’t Tell Alfred, among others) a staircase rising to the twin pillars of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, a conjoined classic of beauty, wisdom, acuity, humor, affection, and bruised worldliness, as close as one could get to Colette without cats underfoot—and her life is in many ways the most poignant in its final punctuation.

Unity toyed with evil, but after she put the barrel to her head, her life was a drawn-out anticlimax, her consciousness packed with clouds. Nancy’s romantic disappointment was an extended letdown leading to physical anguish. Falling in love with a French politician of Polish origin named Gaston Palewski, she moved to Paris so that the two of them could be together, and so they were, but they never married, and he was prolifically unfaithful, eventually marrying an aristocrat whose name was an impressive mouthful: Hélène Violette de Talleyrand-Périgord. The Horror of Love, the title of a biographical study of the Mitford-Palewski liaison by Lisa Hilton, smacks of melodrama, but it was a love unfulfilled. Suffering for years from headaches and other ailments, Nancy was diagnosed in 1972 with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and the final six months of her life were a rack of pain. Diana, unrepentant to the last for her adulation of Hitler, would outlive Nancy by 30 years, proof that health and mortality are the most fickle monsters of all.

Debo, the youngest, would outlive them all and give the real-life roman-fleuve of the Mitfords the closest thing to a happy ending that it deserved. Treated as the runt of the litter by her older, splashier sisters, who nicknamed her “Stubby” because of her legs and “Nine” because that was the mental age Nancy said she was stunted at, Debo would grandly come into her own after years of feeling left behind. (Wait for Me! was the title of her memoir about Growing Up Mitford.) At the age of 21, she married Andrew Cavendish, the second son of the 10th Duke of Devonshire. “An heir and a spare,” as the saying goes, and when Andrew’s brother, Billy, who was married to John F. Kennedy’s sister Kick, died in action during the Second World War, Andrew would become the 11th Duke of Devonshire, and Debo thereby the mistress of Chatsworth, a stately pile of 126 rooms with gardens covering more than a hundred acres, stables—the works. Quite the emerald spread.

(It was used as a location for Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.) Debo, who would die at the age of 94, nipping Diana’s longevity rec­ord by a year, devoted herself to the preservation and promotion of Chatsworth, writing book after book on the estate, an entrepreneurial Earth Mother who named one of her memoirs Counting My Chickens, its cover showing her holding a big clucker. The buoyant aplomb of her reign at Chatsworth in her last dec­ade as Dowager Duchess (her husband died in 2004) had a healing, redemptive grace, as if the spirit of Demeter moved through her to repair some of the damage done by her sisters’ association with destroyers and restore a portion of paradise. Reichs rise and fall, sisters shriek and sob, beauty fades, famous names come and go, and in the end ain’t nobody here but us chickens.

Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire has died aged 94 | Daily Mail Online Last of the Mitford sisters the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire has died aged 94 Born Deborah Mitford in 1920, she was the youngest of the six Mitford girls Prince of Wales paid tribute to her 'unique personality' and 'original approach to life' She had tea with Hitler, with whom her sister, Unity, was besotted, in 1937 Married Lord Andrew Cavendish in 1941 and moved into Chatsworth House Known as Debo, the Duchess had seven children of whom three survived Her son, Peregrine, 70, became the 12th Duke when Andrew died in 2004 They also had daughters Lady Emma, now 71, and Lady Sophia, now 57 After her husband's death, she left Chatsworth, Derbys, for nearby vicarage 1000+ images about The Mitford Sisters on Pinterest | Nancy dell'olio, Lady diana and Civil rights lawyer Forward Jessica Mitford and her first husband (and second cousin, Winston Churchill's nephew) Esmond Romilly.

They eloped to Spain together in 1937 to fight against the fascist regime during the Spanish Civil War. In 1939 they moved to America. Esmond was killed in action during the war in 1941. Jessica later married Jewish-American civil rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft. They were married until her death in 1996. See More The Other Mitford: Pamela's Story: Amazon.co.uk: Diana Alexander: 9780752471211: Books By SRH on 27 Sept. 2012 Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase What I was expecting was a new biography of Pamela Jackson (nee Mitford). What I got was a re-hash of information taken from virtually every other book I've read about the Mitford Sisters, with a few pages highlighting Pam at the end. I believe that Diana Alexander genuinely wanted to write a book to match the quality of Selina Hasting's definitive (to my mind) biography of Nancy Mitford, realised that she didn't have the resources to do the necessary in-depth research and so settled for padding out what would have just about made an acceptable magazine article.

Sadly, reading the book has not increased my knowledge of Pam, nor my understanding of her character one iota. Although the author spoke to Max Mosley and Lady Emma Tennent, Pam's nephew and niece, about their aunt, there's hardly anything substantial from them in the text. The many years Pam spent in Switzerland are dealt with in some half-a-dozen pages. Its all so superficial. The book is nicely produced and reasonably well written, although the content is very weak. I have to say that the constant 'Jessica-bashing' got on my nerves and is, in my opinion, unjust. In addition, there is a fair amount of repetition, which I found irritating. During the course of the book, Diana Alexander mentions the 'Mitford Industry' a couple of times. Many people, myself included, have a genuine interest in this fascinating family and because of this, any book with 'Mitford' in the title is bound to sell regardless of its quality. 'The Other Mitford - Pamela's Story' is yet another example of someone with an average writing ability jumping on to the Mitford Bandwagon. There is definitely room for a definitive biography of Pamela Jackson; sadly, this isn't it. Very, very disappointing.

By DugaldF on 18 Dec. 2012 Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase A deeply disappointing book. The author appears to have embarked on an 'I was a close friend of Pam. Now I' a close friend of Debo' exercise which rehashes old stories, leaves out the bits that might embarrass Debo and snarks at Jessica at every opportunity. Unbalanced, written in shoddy journalese and repetitive. Don't buy. If you must read it borrow from a library and spend the money saved on a decent book. 1 Comment 7 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again By Meemselle on 26 Oct. 2012 Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase I am a self-confessed "Mitford Maniac," obsessively reading every biography of every member of the family, as well as their own works, and any works in which they might be mentioned.

It was intriguing to me that "The Other Mitford" would chronicle the life of Pamela Mitford Jackson, and I wondered how it would be done, as Pamela did not leave as extensive a cache of letters and published items as all of the other sisters except Unity. I should not have held my breath waiting for this one. What a waste of time! It is so poorly written, badly organized, repetitive, and borderline plagerized. The same anecdotes are told over and over again; chronology is just all over the place, and many facts are just plain wrong. For example, when Ms. Alexander describes a visit in 1949 that the Jacksons made to the Romillys in the US, (p. 147), she writes, "they called in on Jessica and Esmond, who by this time were living in Greenwich." There is a big difference, a huge difference, a world of difference between Greenwich (one of the richest towns along the Connecticut "Gold Coast") and Greenwich Village, which is where the Romillys actually lived. There is no excuse for this kind of sloppiness.

There is no attempt at insight, or analysis, or informed understanding of Pamela's life...and I am sure there are other adjectives besides "gentle" that could have been used to describe her. I will say that there are two photos of the family I had not seen before, and for this, I am grateful. Comment 10 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again By Meredith Whitford on 7 Oct. 2013 Format: Hardcover In all the many, many books about "the Mitford Girls", not a great deal is usually said about Pamela (2nd eldest), in comparison to the others. Of course, Pam was "the quiet one", the peacable, private, domestic one. She didn't elope with Churchill's nephew-by-marriage, stalk Hitler, become a fanatical fascist or Nazi, deny the Holocaust, commit adultery, become a duchess, or write books. She just got on with life in her own way and on her own terms, probably laughing a little at her sisters' excitements.

She was by all accounts a wonderful cook, said to remember every meal she'd ever eaten. Even after their divorce she stayed on excellent terms with her ex-husband, the brilliant physicist Derek Jackson. Childless herself, she was said to be a favourite with her nieces and nephews. But... it has to be said that she wasn't really very interesting to anyone who didn't know her. Nor was she any sort of saint. In fact, the things people tend to remember about her, and the incidents rehashed in this book, make her sound rather unpleasant -- grasping when it came to money, hard on the Mosley children who lived with her during the war, ready to accuse a sister of theft (the famous to-do when Deborah and Pam tacitly supported Unity's Nazism by accusing Jessica of stealing a family scrapbook as material for David Pryce-Jones's book about Unity; the scrapbook was discovered where it'd always been, and only Deborah apologised, decades later.) Alexander knew and liked the modest, pleasant Pam, and has probably done her best to write an interesting biography of her, but she lacks the ability to convey what made Pam likeable.

Also,she had little material to work with; the book is more a memoir than a thoroughly researched biography. Read more › Comment 8 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again The Last of the Titanically Eccentric Mitford Sisters Has Died The Last of the Titanically Eccentric Mitford Sisters Has Died The last member of the twentieth century's most scandalously wacky family has passed beyond the veil: Deborah Cavendish, nee Mitford, has died at 94. It would be fair to say she lived a full life. Advertisement If you're not familiar with the astounding reality that was the Mitford sisters, fixtures of British society, the New York Times' obituary for Deborah provides a great summary: Being a Mitford, Deborah could hardly have been conventional. Diana married a fascist in the presence of Goebbels and Hitler. Jessica was a Communist and wrote witty books. Unity Valkyrie, in love with Hitler, shot herself when Britain declared war. Pamela as a child wanted to be a horse and married a fabled jockey.

Nancy's books satirized the upper classes. Deborah, tentatively, became a connoisseur of fine poultry. So: a fascist, a novelist, a Nazi, a Red, a quiet one and a Duchess. (The Toast ranks them here.) They fought a lot. Advertisement Their parents didn't think that girls needed much in the way of formal schooling, which is likely a major reason their childhood eccentricities ran completely amuck in adulthood. Really there's no point in any hipster attempting to cultivate any affectations ever, given that the Mitfords once existed on this planet: In their drafty old Oxfordshire manse, she and her sisters hid in a linen cupboard heated by water pipes and made up secret languages. Her father, an irascible baron, hunted his children on horseback, with hounds. Visiting Munich with Unity in 1937, Deborah, 17, wrote home: "We have had quite a nice time here & we've had tea with Hitler & seen all the other sights." Presumably that would have been arranged by her sister, Unity, who was fucking obsessed with Hitler. Like a Belieber, but for Hitler. Deborah, for her part, was not impressed.

(Jessica Mitford, on the other hand, was a dedicated Red who ran off to America and wrote books such as Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking.) (It's pretty easy to guess my favorite Mitford.) Deborah, who described herself as housewife and collected Elvis memorabilia, was really an accidental duchess. She married the Duke of Devonshire's younger brother, but the heir (who, fun fact, was married to JFK's younger sister, who also died tragically) was killed during World War II. So they inherited the massive Chatsworth estate, which was actually a pretty shitty deal—they had to auction off a bunch of heirlooms to pay their enormous inheritance tax bill. Sponsored She then went to work straightening the place out, a downright Herculean undertaking: She put in central heating, phones, new wiring and plumbing for 17 new bathrooms; opened gift shops and a market that employed 100 people and sold meat and produce, including the Duchess's Marmalade and the Duke's Favorite Sausages, and began farming lectures that drew 200,000 people a year.

Later came restaurants, catering services, boutiques and other moneymakers, including two hotels near Chatsworth. 600,000 people now visit the property every year. Not bad, Debo. Not bad at all. Advertisement

Question: Deborah, Diana, Jessica and Pamela were some of the members of which family?
Answer: Mitford