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  Henry left the Foreign Service shortly after their marriage in 1828, following the death of his grandfather and the subsequent inheritance of a house at Exbury on the Solent. There he adopted the life of a country squire, with the customary seat on the magistrates’ bench. Several children were born to the marriage, of whom three boys survived: twins named Percy and Henry, born in 1833, and Bertie, born on 24 February 1837, who in truth was fathered by Lady Georgina’s lover, Francis Molyneux, the youngest son of the second Earl of Sefton. It was said, rather cruelly, that Henry, ‘being a somewhat naïve innocent with little strength of character, never suspected a thing’.6

  Rumours that Francis Molyneux was Bertie’s real father persisted for centuries. They resurfaced as late as 1941, when Deborah Mitford was about to marry the then Lord Andrew Cavendish, son of the 10th Duke of Devonshire. ‘The Duke was chatting to a friend in his club about it, and went to get a Burke’s Peerage to look up the Mitfords. “If you want to see who they really are,” said the friend, “look under Sefton.”’

  * * *

  The maternal side of the Mitford family was also not without its skeletons, though in this case they were far less grand; almost a Dickensian cliché in fact. The action in question was perpetrated in 1844 by Thomas Milner-Gibson, a Suffolk landowner and Liberal politician, who returned home one evening with a blond, three-year-old boy whom he introduced to his wife Susanna as Thomas Gibson Bowles, his extremely fortunate but illegitimate son. He admitted the boy’s mother was his mistress, Susannah (with an ‘h’) Bowles, a servant and daughter of William Bowles, a brushmaker. Susannah apparently worked as a servant in the London town house of Milner-Gibson, at 48 Eaton Square. It was the same house in which Thomas Bowles had been conceived.

  While he settled the boy’s mother into a small house in Gravesend, and presumably supplied her with an allowance, his wife, who had already lost a previous son, somewhat surprisingly welcomed the new foster son as her own.

  Thomas Bowles grew up much loved by his father and stepmother, who made his childhood happy and secure. Thomas assumed his role as eldest son, apparently none the worse for his parental substitution, his stepmother giving birth to a further two surviving sons. But it was Thomas who his father would favour, taking him sailing and introducing him to country sports and politics. He appeared also to have been the brightest of the boys. While Thomas’ relations with both his father and stepmother remained close and warm to the end of their lives, no mention was ever made of his relationship with his real mother.

  One disadvantage, if it could be considered such a thing, which was said to have been ‘imposed by his illegitimacy’, was that the boy could not attend any English public school. However, it was difficult to comprehend how the schools would have known, apart from the fact that his father had not seen fit to honour the boy with his own name. But perhaps the bright young boy was also sufficiently intelligent to have used it as a means of avoiding what he knew to be the ghastliness of English public schools at that time. It was thus perhaps as a result of his stepmother’s love of France, and their collusion, that he was enrolled at a school in Normandy. From there Thomas progressed to King’s College, London, before being nominated by his father to a position as a junior clerk in the Legacy and Succession Duty office at Somerset House.

  Unsurprisingly, Thomas Bowles soon found his work as a clerk to be as boring as Bertie Mitford was finding his endless copying of dispatches at the Foreign Office; where he had arrived via Eton and Oxford. But while Bertie busied himself both socially and physically, playing racquets at the same club as the Prince of Wales, Thomas discovered a cure for his boredom and a supplement to his income by submitting social stories to The Morning Post. He soon proved himself to be a natural journalist and also enjoyed considerable self-assurance which, combined with a degree of sensitivity, empowered him with a great deal of persuasive charm.

  * * *

  Bertie may have found the Foreign Office to be ‘blindingly tedious’ but he was more than appreciative of the social advantages it offered. ‘A clerk in the FO at that time carried with him a passport to all that was best in political, diplomatic, literary and artistic society’, and being both bright, gregarious and extremely ambitious he was said to have royally exploited these social opportunities: ‘Bertie met, and impressed, Benjamin Disraeli… [He] also became rather a favourite of the Palmerstons. He met Thackeray at dinner with the Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir John Millais. He also came to know the Prince of Wales, at whose wedding in 1863 he was a gentleman usher.’7

  Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford’s first foreign posting was to St Petersburg, while his next was Peking in 1865, from where he wrote long and detailed letters home. These same letters would become the basis of his book, The Attaché at Peking.

  Apart from developing his extreme right-wing political views, Bertie’s main occupation was learning to speak Chinese. This was in the days when raising one’s voice was usually considered a perfectly acceptable means of communicating with foreigners; army officers being advised to use their swagger sticks for additional emphasis.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, in order to devote more time to the fulfilment both of his entrepreneurial and journalistic ambitions, the Mitford girls’ maternal grandfather, Thomas Gibson Bowles, resigned from the civil service. While he was said to be capable of selling any story he cared to write, he yearned for the freedom and excitement to be gained from publishing his own magazine. So, with virtually no resources to found and edit a new weekly magazine, he launched Vanity Fair whose title, taken from Thackeray’s novel, was suggested by his friend Frederick Burnaby, an officer in the Royal Horse Guards, or ‘Blues’. Burnaby also became a contributor to the magazine, providing it with a large proportion of its social gossip; much to the annoyance of his fellow officers.

  The magazine also contained political comment both foreign and domestic, as well as social news, humour and arts criticism. By 1870 Vanity Fair was established and profitable. It could also be considered the first step in what would prove to be the Mitfords’ personal capitalisation of their knowledge of the press.

  * * *

  In 1866, after less than a year in China, Bertie Mitford was posted to Yokohama in Japan; a country that was to have a profound effect upon him. It appeared that the major reason for his affinity with the country was the martial spirit it shared with medieval Europe, complete with Samurai knights in armour. Since 1185 Japan had remained a feudal country in the sense that medieval Europe had been feudal. Perhaps because of this it had also retained a constitutional monarchy and little interest in democracy. Shogun warlords and their clans ran the country, while the emperor’s role comprised little more than that of a ceremonial figurehead with limited real power. It was hardly surprising that Japan would so readily adopt fascism and ally itself to Hitler and the Nazi Party, or that Bertie would be so enamoured with the country. He explicitly compared the Samurai with the class of which he considered himself to be a member, namely the English aristocracy, with its roots in medieval chivalry. Bertie was, of course, a screaming snob and a rank fascist at heart, qualities that most of the Mitfords would inherit in various degrees.

  By the time Bertie returned home in 1870, he claimed to have become fluent in Japanese, though one of the family told how, having stopped in the park in Paris to speak to a small Japanese child in their own tongue, ‘They couldn’t understand a word he said!’

  * * *

  Despite much of the population living in abject poverty, Britain was now the richest country on earth and at the height of its imperial power. Germany, on the other hand, had yet to become a unified nation. However, that hadn’t prevented their successful invasion of Queen Victoria’s German-speaking Court, which was largely the result of her having married most of her children off to Protestant German princes.

  After the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, the North German Confederation came into existence as a military alliance of the twenty-two princely states of northern Germany wi
th the kingdom of Prussia as their leader. After the Franco-Prussian war in 1871 the Confederation was joined by the southern states of Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden, and parts of the Grand Duchy of Hesse, to form the second German Empire with the King of Prussia, William I, as its president and Otto von Bismarck as chancellor.

  With the Prussians’ propensity for violence, both ritualised and realised, and increasing industrial and colonial competition between Germany, Britain and America, a full-scale confrontation between the three was inevitable. Perhaps it should have been predictable that the human catalyst for a later war, though little more than an enthusiastic participant in the first conflict, would be a man from a country whose descent into chaos had already started.

  Hitler was born in 1889 into an almost ungovernable Austro-Hungarian Empire of dual sovereignty, eleven principal national groups and eight languages (for the various Slavic peoples). Still largely under the control of the Catholic Church and the Habsburg monarchy, it was this old, imperial order to which Hitler’s customs-officer father had devoted his life, and which he brutally forced his son to adopt.

  Rarely a day went by that the young boy did not receive a vicious beating, whose legal limit of severity was ‘to within an inch of his life’. In addition to this savage and joyless existence, when he was still only 11 years old Hitler suffered the tragic death of his younger brother. The death of his father in 1903 (which was followed by his beloved mother’s demise in 1907) must at least have brought him some small degree of relief.

  Desperate to rise above his father’s hated subservience to the monarchy, Hitler had intended to devote his life to art and culture. However, his father had forced him to attend a Realschule (technical school) in Linz where he failed his exams, only receiving any appreciation for his diligence in drawing and gymnastics.

  Despite his having been expelled from a second Realschule in Linz at the age of 17 and rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, Hitler attended the local theatre, joined the musical club and a local library and tried desperately to move into a better class of society. But instead of being accepted as middle class, he found himself treated as a rough-hewn provincial and an outsider among the sons of academics.

  It was hardly surprising that the suffering and rejection of Hitler’s childhood and youth resulted in his withdrawal into his own complex fantasy world. There he dreamt of a new world order, whose style and content was massively influenced by the monumental style and content of Richard Wagner’s operas and writing. Its importance to him was illustrated by his attendance at forty performances of Tristan und Isolde while still in his teens; immersing himself in Teutonic legend and Nordic mythology while rejecting the oppressive Catholic Church.

  Increasingly, Hitler also adopted the prejudices, slogans, anxieties and demands of contemporary upper-class Viennese society. Among the elements were anti-Semitism and Social Darwinism, the latter advocating a rigorous process of selective extermination and breeding that was believed to be capable of preventing faulty lines of evolution and assuring one nation’s superiority over all others; in other words, the master race theory. He also readily adopted a deep hatred of socialism.

  In 1905 Hitler was still only 16 when he moved to Vienna, the bourgeois German city of Georg Ritter von Schönerer, the far right Pan-German politician, and Karl Lueger, the city’s self-professed anti-Semitic mayor and a serious disciple of various occult organisations and theories. Schönerer was also obsessed with being overwhelmed by foreigners, considering the presence of the Jews, Roman Catholics, Slavs, Habsburgs and socialists to be a threat to the ever-increasing climate of nationalism. On their watch-chains, his followers wore the insignia of the committed anti-Semite in the shape of a hanged Jew, while Schönerer also coined the pseudo-medieval greeting ‘heil’ and insisted on his followers referring to him as the ‘Führer’.

  * * *

  In 1870, reluctant to join White’s because of its restrictions on smoking, the Prince of Wales formed a new club, the Marlborough, which Bertie Mitford also joined. In the spring of 1871 his book, Tales of Old Japan, was published by Macmillan and enjoyed considerable success.

  At the age of 37, having very nearly succumbed to illness in Japan, Bertie decided that it was time to leave the diplomatic service and settle down. He was rewarded for his foreign service with a post that was socially acceptable, congenial and remarkably stress free. He also found an ‘entirely suitable wife’ (referring no doubt both to her social and financial position) and bought Lindsey House in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where he was to live until he inherited Batsford in 1886.

  The post of Secretary to the Board of Works appeared to be quite stultifying compared with his previous endeavours but Bertie displayed equal diligence and did work of lasting importance in the improvement of London parks and the restoration of the Tower of London. Meanwhile, his new wife, Lady Clementine Ogilvy, daughter of the 10th Earl of Airlie, added immeasurably to his social standing. At 21 she was sixteen years younger than Bertie.

  One of the more interesting rumours that circulated in the family was that before transferring his affections to Clementine, Bertie had been having an affair with her mother, Blanche, the Countess Airlie, who was said to have strongly resented his relationship with her daughter. But her reputed bad humour failed to prevent their marriage on 31 December 1874 in the chapel of the family’s Cortachy Castle, at the foot of Glen Prosen in eastern Scotland. It was a grand affair, celebrated with feasting and bagpipes in the kind of feudal setting most calculated to appeal to ‘Dirty’ Bertie, who may quite well have continued his affair with his mother-in-law even after the wedding and subsequent breeding programme with her daughter.

  * * *

  At the same time as Thomas Bowles was establishing his publishing company, he was also developing what appeared to be a social conscience, which was somewhat at odds with such a commitment to free enterprise. He wondered, ‘Is it not strange that men should be found who can amass a fortune out of the blood and bone of their fellows, and who yet thoroughly believe that they have no duties to fulfil towards them?’ Albeit, his charitable and moral view of mankind was largely confined to white Protestants; such undoubtedly unusual thinking, particularly amongst the privileged of the time, should not be confused with liberalism, or even worse, socialism.

  He had also adopted an extreme dislike for the English class system and a deep distrust of groups in general, remarking, ‘We seem to think that when we follow a multitude to do evil, the evil thereby becomes good.’

  Thomas Bowles had a particularly forthright character, which resulted in his aggressive rudeness to anyone unwise enough to express disagreement with his opinions. Fortunately, he also never lost his power to charm, an accomplishment that his future in-law, Lady Clementine Mitford, never failed to find extremely irritating.

  While Bertie had been busy acquiring a family and securing his future, Thomas was indulging a passion for the sea and sailing that he had inherited from his father, who had taught him how to handle sailing ships and navigate like a professional. Having obtained his master mariner’s certificate in 1874, Thomas invested in a yacht called Billy Baby. Only then did he consider marriage. Jessica was seemingly like all young gals of that time, described as ‘tall, fair-haired and slim. She was the youngest daughter of Major-General Charles Evans-Gordon, said to be descended from that other ‘notable’ Scots family, ‘the Gordons of Lochinvar’. Unfortunately, her father and her five brothers were deeply unimpressed both by Thomas’8 ebullience and his birthright. Even so, the couple’s mutual attraction and determination was rewarded with their marriage, which finally took place in 1876.

  They settled at Cleeve Lodge in Kensington where Jessica, despite her physical frailty and lack of enthusiasm for motherhood, gave birth to four children. Tragically, though somewhat predictably, she died during her fifth pregnancy when Sydney, the Mitford girls’ mother, was still only 7 years old.

  * * *

  David Mitford was born on 13 March 1878.
He was Bertie’s third child and second son, and was grumpy from birth. Fortunately he was also ‘strikingly handsome’ and endowed with ‘his father’s luminous blue eyes’. Some also saw fit to mention that he ‘took early to field sports, most especially shooting’.

  Surprisingly, Bertie sent David not to Eton, but to Radley. ‘Because he thought that David would behave badly and hinder [his elder brother] Clement in his Eton career.’ It appears that David may have also lacked the necessary academic abilities to justify such investment, as he also failed to follow his brother to Summer Fields preparatory school; leaving him free to roam the countryside and concentrate on his ferrets, rod, lurcher and gun. Predictably, following such a profound lack of preparation, his stay at Radley proved notably unremarkable; achieving little, apart from establishing his social position.

  David apparently planned to go into the army but failed to get into Sandhurst; another demonstration of his lack of even the most basic academic abilities. Determined that the boy should ‘amount to something’, Bertie found him a job tea planting in Ceylon; a position that was often awarded to ‘remittance boys’. But for some unexplained reason, David returned home after a few years. It may have been due to his undiminished determination to serve in the army, for the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899 gave him the opportunity to join the Northumberland Fusiliers, a regiment with undoubted family connections but a great deal less social status than the 10th Hussars, into which his golden elder brother was commissioned, presumably after some considerable financial investment on the part of his father; as was ‘the done thing’ at the time.