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Mitford family

English aristocrats From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mitford family
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The Mitford family is an aristocratic British family who became particularly well known in the 1930s for the six Mitford sisters, the daughters of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, and his wife, Sydney Bowles.[a] They were celebrated and sometimes scandalous figures. One journalist described them as "Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Hitler-lover; Nancy the Novelist; Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur".[1]

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The Mitford family in 1928
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Background

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Arms of Freeman-Mitford

The family traces its origins in Northumberland back to the time of the Norman Conquest. In the Middle Ages they had been border reivers based in Redesdale. The main line had its family seat first at Mitford Castle, then Mitford Old Manor House, prior to building Mitford Hall in 1828. All three are near Mitford, Northumberland. Several heads of the family served as High Sheriff of Northumberland.

A junior line, with seats at Newton Park, Northumberland, and Exbury House, Hampshire, descends via the historian William Mitford (1744–1827) and were twice elevated to the British peerage, in 1802 and 1902, under the title Baron Redesdale.[2] This branch of the family, to whom the Mitford sisters belonged, were seated at Batsford Park, Gloucestershire, and then at Asthall Manor and Swinbrook, in Oxfordshire.

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Mitford siblings

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Mitford sisters

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Cover of The Sketch, 1932
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Family tree

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

Jessica and Deborah married nephews of prime ministers Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan, respectively. Deborah and Diana both married wealthy aristocrats. Unity and Diana were well known during the 1930s for being close to Adolf Hitler. Jessica turned her back on her inherited privileges and eloped with her cousin, Esmond Romilly, who was hoping to report on the Spanish Civil War for the News Chronicle, having briefly fought with the International Brigade.[10] Jessica's memoir, Hons and Rebels, describes their upbringing. Nancy drew upon her family members for characters in her novels. In 1981, Deborah became politically active when she and her husband Andrew Cavendish, 11th Duke of Devonshire, joined the new Social Democratic Party.[6]

The sisters and their brother Thomas were the children of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, and his wife Sydney, the daughter of Thomas Bowles. To their children, they were known as "Farve" and "Muv", respectively. David and Sydney married in 1904. The family homes changed from Batsford House to Asthall Manor beside the River Windrush in Oxfordshire, and then Swinbrook Cottage nearby, with a house at Rutland Gate in London.[11] They also lived in a cottage in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, which they used as a summer residence.[12]

The siblings grew up in an aristocratic country house with emotionally distant parents and a large household with numerous servants. This family dynamic was not unusual for upper-class families of the time. The parents disregarded formal education of women of the family, and they were expected to marry at a young age to a financially well-off husband. The children had a private language called "Boudledidge" (/ˈbdəldɪ/), and each had a different nickname for the others.

After the Nazi Regime started the Invasion of Poland, the Second World War began and their political views came into sharper relief. "Farve" remained a conservative who had long favoured Neville Chamberlain's approach of appeasing Nazi Germany. Once Britain declared war on Germany, he returned to being an anti-German British patriot. "Muv" continued her fascist sympathies and usually supported her fascist children. The couple separated in 1943 as a result of this conflict.[13]

Nancy, a moderate socialist, worked in London during the Blitz and informed on her fascist siblings to the British authorities.[13] Pamela remained seemingly non-political, although according to her sister Nancy, Pamela and Derek Jackson were virulent anti-Semites verbally during World War II, who had called for all Jews in England to be killed, and wanted an early end to the war with Nazi Germany before England lost any more money.[13]

Tom, a fascist,[citation needed] refused to fight Germany but volunteered to fight against Imperial Japan. He was killed in action in Burma in 1945. Diana, also a fascist, married to Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, was imprisoned in London from May 1940 until November 1943 under Defence Regulation 18B. Unity, fanatically devoted to Hitler and Nazism, was distraught over Britain's war declaration against Germany on 3 September 1939, and tried to commit suicide later that day by shooting herself in the head. She failed in the suicide attempt, but suffered brain damage that eventually led to her early death in 1948.[6]

Jessica, a communist, had moved to the U.S., but her husband Esmond Romilly, a Republican veteran from the Spanish Civil War who volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II, died in 1941 when his bomber developed mechanical problems over the North Sea and went down.[6] In many letters Jessica said that her daughter Constancia received a pension from the Canadian government after Esmond's death until she turned 18.[6]

The strong political rift between Jessica and Diana left them estranged from 1936 until their deaths, although they did speak to each other in 1973, as their eldest sister Nancy was on her deathbed. Aside from Jessica and Diana's estrangement, the sisters kept in frequent contact with each other in the decades after World War II. The sisters were prolific letter-writers, and a substantial body of correspondence still exists, principally letters between them.[1]

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Ancestry

More information Ancestors of the Mitford siblings ...
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  • Nancy Mitford's 1949 novel, Love in a Cold Climate, which was based on the family, was serialised by Thames Television in 1980 and by the BBC in 2001. Her novel The Pursuit of Love was serialised by the BBC in 2021.
  • The daughters were the subject of a 1981 musical, The Mitford Girls, by Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin, and of a song, "The Mitford Sisters", by Luke Haines.
  • A fictional family based on the Mitford sisters features prominently in Jo Walton's 2007 novel Ha'penny; Viola Lark, one of the point-of-view characters, is one of the sisters, another is married to Himmler, and a third is a communist spy.
  • The fictional "Combe sisters" in the BBC 2 series Bellamy's People, first broadcast in 2010, bear a striking resemblance to the Mitford sisters. Bellamy meets two of the surviving Combe sisters, said to have been notorious in the 1930s and '40s for their extreme political views, now living together in a strained relationship in the dramatically different political realities of 2010. One an avid fascist and the other a committed communist, the sisters have hit upon the solution of dividing their stately home down the middle, each converting her side into a homage to her ideology.
  • Sharon Horgan, Samantha Spiro and Sophie Ellis-Bextor played a version of the Mitford Sisters in a song-based sketch for season 2 of the Sky Arts comedy series Psychobitches, in the winter of 2014.
  • In his French-language trilogy of novelsLe Vent du soir (1985), Tous les hommes en sont fous (1985) and Le Bonheur à San Miniato (1987)—Jean d'Ormesson recounts a much-imagined version of the exploits of four of the Mitford sisters, through the characters Pandora, Vanessa, Atalanta and Jessica.
  • A portion of Jessica Mitford's writing is used as a spoken-word introduction to the song "Last Act of Defiance", about the New Mexico State Penitentiary riot, on thrash metal band Exodus's 1989 album Fabulous Disaster.
  • Jessica Fellowes has written six mystery novels, The Mitford Murders (2017), Bright Young Dead (2018), The Mitford Scandal (2020),The Mitford Trial (2021), The Mitford Vanishing (2022) and The Mitford Secret (2023), which feature the three oldest sisters, Nancy, Pamela and Diana as major characters, and the rest of the family in supporting roles.[14]
  • Diana Mitford is depicted in season 6 of the BBC/Netflix TV series Peaky Blinders (2022), played by British actress Amber Anderson. The show is set in the 1930s and depicts Diana and husband Oswald Mosley getting involved with fictional protagonist Tommy Shelby to advance their political goals.[15]
  • In the Discworld novel The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett, werewolf Watchwoman Angua von Überwald refers to two relatives of hers as Nancy and Unity. Angua's brother Wolfgang is a werewolf supremacist whose personal insignia reflect those of Nazism.
  • In the fourth series of BBC comedy television series The Thick of It, British Government minister Peter Mannion describes his special adviser Emma Messinger as having "turned into the wrong Mitford sister"[16] during a presentation where she remarks on the physical attractiveness of a likely candidate for Leader of the Opposition.
  • Outrageous is a 2025 British television series about the Mitford sisters.
  • Churchill's Ferret, a self published thriller on Amazon by author Glenn Ashton, has as the prime suspects Unity and Diana Mitford, who might be planning to assassinate Hitler in September 1938 when Chamberlain and Hitler meet.
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The Mitford sisters by William Acton:

References

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