One piece of advice mother of Mitford sisters gave Hitler at their fir | UK | News

Everyone knows about the six flamboyant Mitford girls, particularly since the release of the sensational TV drama, Outrageous. But there were in fact seven exceptional women in the famous family – the seventh being Sydney Redesdale, known to her notorious daughters as “Muv”.

Too often falsely portrayed being outside the girl gang or notably different from them, Lady Redesdale was really the original member. Much of her daughters’ strong will, self-confidence and interest in politics came from her. Yet Sydney was a divisive figure among her daughters; for Nancy and Jessica, she was often cast as a sinner, and for Unity, Diana, Debo and Pam, more of a saint.

Biographers have been equally divided. Many wondered how such extraordinary children could spring from such ordinary parents – but was Sydney really so ordinary? One thing all her daughters agreed on was that their mother was “so very unusual”.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the publication of Nancy Mitford’s novel, The Pursuit Of Love. Most people only know Muv through Aunt Sadie, the character in the book based on Lady Redesdale. But Sydney was a far cry from this vague, one-dimensional figure.

While the character is forgettable and flimsy compared to her husband, the blustering – raging but hilarious Uncle Matthew – the real woman was far more interesting than the real-life “Farve”, as he was known. Muv was as eccentric, opinionated and as ultimately misguided as her more extreme daughters and, before they were born, she had adventures of her own which rivalled their escapades.

To understand Lady Redesdale, played by Anna Chancellor in Outrageous, is to look back at her childhood. Her charismatic father, the self-made publisher and politician Thomas Gibson Bowles, was the greatest influence on her life. The illegitimate son of a cabinet minister and a maid, Thomas could never pin-point the exact date of his birth, explaining: “I am no more certain of it than I am of the birthday of Julius Caesar.”

Despite this dubious birthright, he rose to the top of Victorian society, founding both Vanity Fair and The Lady magazines. When he became a Conservative MP, he continued to be his own man – quite the maverick.

As Lady Redesdale’s mother died when Sydney was only seven, her father became the centre of her world. He gave her a tough childhood, more suited to a boy than a genteel Victorian girl. Dressing her in a sailor suit, he took her on a dangerous adventure in his boat the Nereid.

That trip, which involved being becalmed in the Med then nearly shipwrecked in a savage storm, was formative. She could either sink or swim – and she chose to swim.

Sydney grew into a tall, striking girl with attitude.

After falling in love with an unsuitable rogue, Jimmy Meade, she married David Freeman Mitford, later known as Lord Redesdale, or Farve, on the rebound.

With his tall, well-built physique and piercing blue eyes, David was exceptionally handsome and very funny, but he was not Sydney’s intellectual equal. According to society gossip, it was whispered that on their wedding day in February 1904, as the 24-year-old bride walked up the aisle she was in tears, weeping for Jimmy Meade.

Another story circulated that a few days before Sydney’s wedding, a married friend told the naïve bride what to expect on her wedding night. She was so shocked she replied: “A gentleman would never do anything like that.”

Nine months later Sydney did what was expected of her and gave birth to her first child, Nancy. She dreamt of having six sons, but over the next 16 years she was to have six daughters and only one boy. Never maternal, Sydney dismissed most of her babies as “too ugly for words”.

Muv’s daughters later complained that she was a cold, undemonstrative mother. Vague and distant, she always seemed preoccupied with something else. However, seen from Lady Redesdale’s perspective the story is very different.

As Sydney’s mother had died, she did not have a maternal role model.

If Muv was preoccupied, maybe that was because she was not happy herself. Farve was not an easy man to live with because he had a violent temper. Finances were also tight by the standards of their class.

Unfortunately Farve’s attempts to become an entrepreneur only proved that he had an unerring eye for a white elephant. Over the years, he got involved in a series of hair-brained schemes, which lost money. Sydney wanted to create a permanent home for her family, but her husband’s financial misadventures meant that every few years, they had to move on.

If Muv rather than Farve had been in charge of the finances, it could have been very different. Lady Redesdale had an excellent business brain and in a different era could have been a successful businesswoman.

Influenced by her father, Sydney was also a very political woman who had many of the skills to make her an effective political wife, or even politician in her own right.

Throughout the 1920s she was deeply involved in the Conservative Party locally. During the turbulent 1930s, Sydney’s daughters were to show their compulsion to find a cause to fight for and it seems they inherited this impulse from their mother. While Jessica turned to Communism, Unity, like her elder sister Diana, was attracted to Fascism.

As passion merged with politics, Diana married Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists; Unity became obsessed with Hitler; and Jessica eloped with her communist cousin to the Spanish Civil War.

Through Diana, Jessica and Unity’s actions the Redesdales found themselves frequently in the newspapers. Muv said that every time she saw the headline “peer’s daughter” in the papers, she feared it was about one of her children.

However, Lord and Lady Redesdale were soon causing controversy themselves. When they visited Unity in Germany, she introduced her parents to Hitler. Muv liked him, writing to Jessica that he had “such very good manners”.

As the leader of the Third Reich was a fellow health food fanatic, she lectured him on the value of wholemeal bread. In Germany, she was shown what Hitler wanted her to see. Taken in by Nazi propaganda, back in Britain the Redesdales became increasingly involved in pro-German groups.

After the Munich Agreement in September 1938, Lady Redesdale wrote to prime minister Neville Chamberlain – championing Hitler as “above all a person of heart”. She urged Chamberlain to reach out to the Führer and build Anglo-German friendship.

Apparently, Lady Redesdale’s views did not change even after war was declared. When the conflict began, Nancy was staying with her mother. During a drive, the novelist made a disparaging comment about Hitler which made Lady Redesdale so furious, she ordered Nancy to shut up or get out of the car and walk.

Muv’s extreme views not only threatened her relationship with her daughter, but also had wider domestic consequences, breaking up her marriage and dividing her family.

Although Lord Redesdale had also been taken in by the Führer, once war began, he patriotically supported his country. Both husband and wife felt so strongly about the political chasm between them that ultimately Lord Redesdale decided he could no longer live with his wife. Instead, he moved to a remote island, Inch Kenneth in Scotland, where he lived with his former parlour maid.

As always, politics was personal with the Mitfords. In Germany, once war was declared, Unity shot herself in the head. For several weeks, Lady Redesdale had no news about Unity and did not know if she was alive or dead.

Eventually, Sydney heard her daughter had survived but had brain damage. In January 1940, Muv travelled across a war-torn Europe to collect her daughter.

From now on, Lady Redesdale’s life would be dedicated to caring for Unity. Inevitably looking after her temperamental and doubly incontinent daughter was physically and mentally exhausting, but Muv just kept calm and carried on.

Unity was not the only family casualty of the war. At the end of the conflict, the Redesdales’ only son, Tom, was killed in Burma. Friends thought Sydney never got over this loss; she wrote to a family friend that she was “sadly heartbroken”.

After the war, Lady Redesdale had to build a new life for herself. Muv became the linchpin who kept her family together as she did everything she could to rebuild the relationships between her surviving daughters.

In 1948 she made the long journey to America to see Jessica and her family. To Jessica’s surprise, her right-wing mother got on exceptionally well with her communist friends. After the visit, she revised her opinion of Muv, admitting: “I really rather adored her.”

Back from America, Lady Redesdale soon faced another family crisis. In May 1948, Unity developed meningitis. Doctors could not save her and she died aged just 33. The death left a huge gap in Lady Redesdale’s life, but she was resilient. Responding to an obituary for her daughter, Sydney explained that Unity never wanted pity, nor did Muv now. She lived the rest of her life as positively as possible, dividing her time between Inch Kenneth and London, as well as making visits to see her surviving children.

As a biographer, rarely has my opinion of my subject fluctuated so much. What seems certain is she would not have wanted our pity, or been bothered about our censure.

All that mattered to Lady Redesdale was that she believed she was right. Like her father, she was at heart a master mariner, who steered her own course and faced the consequences.

● Muv: The Story Of The Mitford Girls’ Mother, by Rachel Trethewey (The History Press, £22.99) is out now