A young aristocratic English girl goes to Berlin to learn German. There she meets, becomes obsessed by and falls in love with a rabid fascism-promoting, anti- Jewish monster. At the outbreak of war, both governments arrange to have her brought back to England.
Sound familiar?
But the date of the girl’s going to Germany is 1909; the monster is the appalling master-race theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain; the war’s outbreak is 1914; and the girl is my mother’s eldest sister, Iris Ponsonby. It’s a telling augury of one of the many predicaments to be faced by the subject of this intriguing and informative biography.
Both my aunt Iris and Sydney Bowles (1880-1963) – aka Muv, mother of the Mitford siblings – were born towards the end of the 19th century. The fashion for fascism was gathering steam, soon to be given a boost by pan-European revolution, disorder and the Treaty of Versailles; within a few years, it would erupt as the supposed bulwark against communism.
This country had its fair share of neo-fascists – somewhere there’s a list as long as your arm of the Brit grandees slated eventually to be Gauleiters in Hitler’s England. Germany was utterly in the clutches of Hitler, who admired the virulent antisemitism and racial hatred propounded by Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927).
Chamberlain was totally Germanised, an intimate of Wagner’s widow Winifred and married to his daughter Eva. He expounded his rabid theories in his book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century; the foreword to the English edition of Chamberlain’s diatribe was written by none other than Lord Redesdale, the father of the man Sydney was eventually to marry.
Sydney Bowles’s own father, Thomas, was a radical-thinking, anti- establishment figure with distorted views, and a keen mariner. He founded the magazine Vanity Fair as a scourge of pompous parliamentarians. Articles by Thomas – expounding his startling racial leanings – and Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde’s more profound brother, Willie, were illustrated by Tissot and the cartoonist Spy. As the author notes, a person was not truly famous until appearing in Vanity Fair.
Sydney’s milder-minded mother took little interest in her offspring, dying soon after her last’s birth. Bowles, however, doted on his young daughter, taking her on his yachts to destinations as distant as Syria, instilling in her not only his ethnic philosophies but also a lifelong empathy for oceans and solitude, a trait that was to be advantageous in later life on a remote Hebridean island.
Remaining single – though keeping a mistress called Tello, by whom he had seven more children – Bowles charged the 14-year-old Sydney with the running of his large Lowndes Square house and the exquisite Palladian villa, Wilbury, in Hampshire. She developed into a strong-minded, numerate, intelligent (enough to consider a place at Girton) young woman with above-average good looks, though James Lees-Milne, that connoisseur of feminine allure, wrote admiringly of ‘her eyes ... her divinely formed mouth, her melancholy beauty’.
A first romance, with the Swedish ice-skating champion Henning Grenander, chilled, but soon after, when she was taken to stay at the Redesdales’ newly-built Batsford, Sydney’s fire was ignited by the tall, staggeringly handsome David Mitford.
As a second son, Mitford possessed little money or intellect but, along with the height and looks, had a certain easy charm. Despite his irrational temper, their marriage was harmonious if somewhat mouvementé.
Seeking a possible fortune, Mitford, like many other contemporary young men (including the then Prince of Wales), staked a gold mine in wildest Canada.
Sydney accompanied him on several forays to this prospecting township named, with hilarious irony, Swastika, where their second child, Unity, was conceived. The others were sired in the less taxing environs of Sloane Square or the Cotswolds; Debo, the last, in 1920.
Thus, in her fifties, Sydney, now unexpectedly Lady Redesdale, a creature of staid Edwardiana, found herself the mother of six short-skirted, shingled, sleekly sophisticated daughters.
‘Poor Sydney, with all those rowdy girls,’ a contemporary wrote. Given their later escapades, it must have been daunting. But this is her story, not theirs.
She seems to have coped thanks to a kind of baffled courage, lack of indulgence and blind loyalty, declaring that these self-evident beauties were ‘too ugly for words’. She elected not to send them to school, a decision that instilled a lifelong gripe in the eldest, Nancy, though Trethewey tells us that in fact she went to both Frances Holland and Hatherop.
For the younger sisters, Sydney engaged a series of governesses who taught them, principally, to defy authority and shoplift.
Given the Redesdales’ often- documented prejudices (‘She thought of Hitler almost as a son-in law’), alongside the circumstances of their marriage and the still-reverberating shock and furore of her daughters’ liaisons, as well as Nancy’s repositioning of the family in two delicious novels and revealing autobiographies by Diana and Jessica, it is difficult to detach Sydney the Muv from Sydney the woman.
She was ‘unconventional’ in ways other than her intractable beliefs, which, unlike Lord Redesdale’s, became stronger with age. She had firm feelings about health, believing, à la Mary Baker Eddy, the ‘good body will heal itself’, and expounded on the benefits of healthy food. At tea in the Reichskanzlei, she recommended wholewheat bread to Schön Adolf.
Not an atheist, she was outwardly religious only in the patrician sense. Possessing the sangfroid of her upbringing, she would simply say, ‘Orrnnhh, fancy,’ when told anything unexpected.
She had a feisty pen, drafting admonishing missives to newspaper editors, and wrote columns for the Rothermere-owned press, and an admiring letter to Prime Minister Chamberlain, suggesting he give a party for her beloved Führer.
She had no time for rancour, not even when her husband abandoned her to live ever after with one of her servants, but retained a loving friendship. Stoic beyond compare, she never inflicted her overwhelming grief at the death of two favourite children, Unity and Tom, on others. And, though somehow incapable of talking frankly to her children, she would write to them often and touchingly.
And there’s much that is conventional. In London, she was always up with the dawn, getting to Harrods on the opening dot, before nipping into a delightful- sounding draper’s, Owles and Beaumont. She was a dab hand at improvising – once creating, in her bomb-dishevelled drawing-room, curtains from rolls of wallpaper.
She ordered the daily provisions, before settling at her desk: or in the country tending her garden, goats and hens and, daily, wild water swimming. She loved to give presents but was embarrassed to receive any.
She was an expert at embroidery; played Scrabble; read voraciously while listening to opera. Making all her homes elegantly pretty, she tended towards 18th-century French or Vogue Regency English in rooms painted the tenderer colours, with sofas covered in pink chintzes; there is a photograph of Debo sitting pretty on one.
She had no taste for ‘modern art’, but commissioned Harold Acton’s brother, William, to make the renowned portraits of her daughters (pictured). Dressing economically and appropriately, she had little time for cosmetics, sensibly sleeping the night before King George VI’s coronation in full hair-and-make-up.
She possessed fewer and fewer good jewels but, wearing her diamonds on black velvet, ‘looked the most elegant woman there’ at a royal ball at Windsor.
The onset of Parkinson’s failed to stop her sea-swimming and island-walking, chasing the goats with her umbrella. And, to the very end, though she was outwardly fragile, increasingly deaf, her inner being remained the epitome of courage.
Sydney died, contentious but cherished, surrounded by her remaining daughters, in her storm-lashed Hebridean fastness off the coast of Mull.
A decade later, Aunt Iris, her past forgotten, died in a seaside flat, in Hove.
Nicky Haslam is author of Redeeming Features: A Memoir
