It is thirty years since the death on 23rd July 1996 of Jessica Mitford (b.1917), the liveliest of that lively brood of sisters.
What an extraordinary sextet they were: Nancy, Pam, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah; with the only brother, Tom, in the middle. Six variations of the same face and voice, they were each quite distinctive but all clever, vivid and driven, a dangerous combination for girls who were finished but not educated. Jessica’s death came nearly fifty years after the first, that of her favourite sister, Unity; and nearly twenty years before the last, that of her youngest sister, Deborah.
As Rosemary Hill observed in her elegant and astute review for the London Review of Books of the latest, most scholarly biography of Jessica [Carla Kaplan’s Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford (2026)] ‘What Jessica… called “the Mitford Industry” has powered on in spite of the absence of its principals (and in some cases because of it), refueled by access to new material and a reduced fear of libel’ revolving ‘lighthouse-like’, between the six sisters. There have been close to two score of memoirs, biographies, collective histories, letters, and novels written about the gels – even the unknown, delightful, bucolic Pamela (dubbed ‘Doreen’ by Private Eye) has scored one.
Named after her maternal grandmother, Jessica Lucy (always Decca), conceived when Lord Redesdale (‘Farve’) was home on leave from the Front, was born on 11th September 1917. (84 years later, Nine Eleven would forever become a date of universal gloom). She was Farve and Muv’s second last child wedged between Unity and Deborah. Another disappointment as they craved a second son.
Life at Asthall Manor and Swinbrook House (‘Swinebrook’ to Jessica) by the River Windrush in Oxfordshire was full of shrieks, roars, teases and tears - probably not so different from Nancy’s fictional Radletts, which were the prism through which Decca recalled her childhood in her memoir, Hons and Rebels (1960). When, much later in life, Jessica was told that Nancy had regarded sisters as ‘standing between one and life’s cruel circumstances’, Jessica countered that sisters were life’s cruel circumstances. It was said that Muv did not believe in illness and Jessica claims that at twelve she had to call the doctor herself to have her appendix removed.
Even among best-selling writer Nancy, beautiful, scandalous Diana, Hitler-obsessed Unity, and dazzling duchess Debo, Decca was still a stand-out - the only red in a pool of blue-eyed, blue bloods. Her pluck and spark leap from her correspondence [collected as Decca, edited by Peter Y. Sussman(2006)] - from her first letter, when she was six to her mother (to say she had stopped sucking her thumb), to her last, ten days before she died, to Debo (inviting her to Cape Cod for one last holiday).
As a child, she had long promised to run away and began saving at 11. Drummonds Bank wrote to ‘respectfully beg leave to acknowledge receipt of ten shillings as initial deposit in your Running Away Account… We remain, dear Madam, your obedient servants…’ And she did so spectacularly, at 19, by eloping to warring Spain with her cousin, Esmond Romilly. (Hitler prevented the German papers from reporting it; ‘which was nice of him, wasn’t it?’ wrote Unity) Her nanny was concerned that she had taken no fighting clothes with her; Muv and Farve did all they could to reclaim her; the papers made hay with the headlines, while the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, instructed the British consul in Bilbao to find her. He then sent a British naval ship to kidnap her, which she evaded by refusing the captain’s repeated offers to dine on board. Finally the British government threatened to stop receiving all Basque refugees unless the couple departed Spain, so they returned to France. Decca was adamant, confided she was pregnant and they were allowed to wed.
In their brief time in England - in Rotherhithe, every light and appliance blazed day and night but the resulting electricity bill was completely unexpected by the unworldly pair; among their ruses to avoid the process server was to lie in bed as Esmond believed it was a violation of the Magna Carta to serve process on people in bed. Emigration to the US was the answer. Before she left, Decca went in search of Miranda, the pet sheep she snuck into bed as a child, ‘I got a train to Shipton, went to Miranda’s field, called her out of the flock – “Come along, Miranda” – so she hobbled out, huge, a vast plateau of a sheep, all her feet gone with foot rot. I sobbed all the way back to London.’
The young Romillys, charming chancers, traveled about the States. At one stage they were selling silk-stockings door-to-door. When war broke Esmond settled Decca in Washington. She had no luck with job applications until someone told her that ‘color’ meant skin colour; not hair. She stopped writing ‘brown’, began writing ‘white’, and got a job straight away. Esmond signed up; joining the Canadian Air Force to fight the fascists. He disappeared over the North Sea in November 1941. For months Decca refused to believe he was dead.
She moved with their daughter Constancia (‘Dinky’) to California and in 1943 wed the son of Jewish Hungarian immigrants, Bob Treuhaft, an attorney who shared her wit and her politics and made her happy. He said he fell for her when he saw her stealing her lunch in the office canteen.
She had her fill of loss. Her first child, Julia Romilly, had died at five months and Nicky, her second Treuhaft son, was killed by a bus when he was ten. Her brother Tom had also died in 1945 and in a sense brain-damaged Unity (whom, strangely, she never renounced) and Diana were lost to her by then too. She had adored Diana as a child but despised her for supporting the regime that killed Esmond.
Following her elopement, she never saw Farve again. His will was peppered with the phrase ‘except Jessica’ but, through Tom, she had been left one-sixth of the family’s Hebridean island, Inch Kenneth. She made efforts to leave it to the Communist Party – but the Party did not want it.
Both Decca and Bob appeared before the Un-American Activities Committee. Decca asked her mother-in-law, ‘Could you be an angel and send me a smart hat from your shop to wear at the hearings?’ She left the Communist Party in 1958, not because of Stalin or Hungary, but because it had ‘got rather drab and useless.’ Civil rights had always been her focus and this continued.
Hounded out of jobs because of her politics she turned to writing, beginning with a childhood memoir, Hons and Rebels (1960). She wanted to call it Red Sheep or Revolting Daughters. Although Nancy, whose opinion she craved, said she liked it, the family considered it distorted and too detached while readers on both sides of the Atlantic lapped it up.
In 1963 her lethal exposé of the unscrupulous and sinister funeral industry, The American Way of Death (1963), became a classic (it was, apparently, David Bowie’s favourite book) and, after decades of sibling infamy, she at last tasted fame in her own right. Evelyn Waugh reviewed it positively, but, as Decca wrote to Debo, he ‘said I don’t have a “plainly, stated attitude to death.” So if you see him, tell him of course I’m against it.’ Her book even influenced Bobby Kennedy in his choice of his brother JFK’s coffin. Offered a choice between one for $900 and one for $2,000, Bobby chose the former, telling Decca that were it not for her book he would have felt obliged to order the more expensive choice.
When her old Communist links were thrown at her, she rallied with the line that ‘all the best embalmers are Communists vide Lenin.’
A steady stream of books and journalism followed, including a study of the American prison system, Kind and Usual Punishment (1973). There was a defence of Dr Spock (1969); an account of her years as a communist, A Fine Old Conflict (1977); and The American Way of Birth, (1992) a neat counterpoint to her funereal opus. She also exposed, in shorter pieces, an Elizabeth Arden fat farm and the Famous Writers’ School.
She had friends everywhere. Vanessa Redgrave suggested a film in which she would play Decca while her sister Lynn played Unity. Julie Andrews and Hillary Clinton, who briefly worked for Bob’s firm, were pen-pals. Muv, Nancy and Debo, drew her back into the Honish family circle and provoked their share of spats, but it was mainly Mitford shrieks and roars. Despite her bizarre, abiding regard for Hitler, Muv proved the true heroine of the family - caring for Unity, visiting Decca, keeping in touch and trying to keep the peace.
Even from her flaws Decca showed real strength. Advised to give up alcohol after decades of heavy drinking and a series of falls she simply stopped. Smoking was not so easy to ditch. To help her, Bob ‘collected a ton of disgusting butts & ashes, and all I did was to breathe in deeply & say “HOW divine.”’
She was devastated to learn from Bob in her last years that he had been having a long affair with their friend, Joanne Grant. By this time it was over and the marriage endured. One of her last letters, in July 1996, was written at 3am to ‘Darling Old Bob’ while he lay sleeping: ‘Bob — it’s so ODD to be dying, so I must just jot a few thoughts — starting with the fact that I’ve SO enjoyed life with you in all ways…” After a suspected stroke, a few days before Decca died, the admissions nurse at the hospital asked her to name the President of the United States. She shot back, ‘That’s not my fault!’
On Decca’s instructions, her assistant wrote to the head of an American conglomerate of undertakers after her death (aged 78) including a bill for funeral expenses: ‘Ms. Mitford feels that you should pay the bill. In her own words “after all, look at all the fame I've brought them”’. In the end, her funeral was without frills, a casket or any ceremony – simply a cremation, which cost $475, plus $58.31 for filing fees and the required disposal permit.
Witty, wicked, plucky and a rebel to the end.
Mark McGinness
14th July 2026
