Noble Endeavours by Miranda Seymour

Author:Miranda Seymour [Seymour, Miranda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847378262
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

20

FALLING IN LOVE AGAIN: TOM MITFORD

(1909–45)

Tom Mitford was born in 1909, the year before his doting grandfather, Lord Redesdale, wrote an admiring introduction to the book that would become a sacred text of the Nazi Party. Barty Redesdale’s own published view was that the Jews had greatly enriched and improved the civilised world; nevertheless, he thought highly enough of Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century to mail copies of the new English translation to his friends. Edmund Gosse approved. Richard Haldane did not. In 1912, however, Redesdale was able to inform the author that his niece’s husband, Winston Churchill, had spoken of it with ‘unmeasured praise’. 1

In 1912, when his family were still dividing their time between London and Batsford Park – a mansion that he had built in the grounds of the family’s old Gloucestershire estate and surrounded with magnificent trees named in honour of various Mitfords – Lord Redesdale’s mood was still sufficiently pro-German for him to approve the decision by Jack, his youngest son, to take a job with one of Germany’s greatest coal magnates, Baron von Friedlander-Fuld, and to welcome Jack’s subsequent engagement to the rich Baron’s daughter.

The extreme brevity of Jack’s marriage cannot be blamed on the war, since Annie left her husband in May 1914. Nevertheless, a marriage that lasted only five months must have hurt his father’s pride. The following year, Clement Mitford, Jack’s eldest brother and his father’s favourite child, was killed in action in Flanders, aged thirty-eight. Now cursing the Germans with a passion that he passed on to his soldierly second son, David (along with the heavily encumbered estate), a heartbroken Bertram Redesdale died in 1917.

Tom, like his sisters, had fond memories of Batsford Park. His grandfather had doted on him, especially since Tom, even as a little boy, showed signs of having inherited the exceptionally handsome features of the Mitford males. David Redesdale was no scholar. When the family left Batsford in 1918, to settle more modestly into an Oxfordshire manor house a few miles away, at Swinbrook, Tom, aged nine, was put in charge of choosing which books should be saved. In 1918, Germanophobia was at its height. The new Lord Redesdale hated the Germans to a degree that would later provide splendid comic opportunities for the lethal pen of his first-born, Nancy. Nevertheless, young Tom scrupulously – and rather courageously – chose to preserve the collection of German books that had meant so much to his grandfather.

Erected in a separate building from the main house and equipped with comfortable sofas and a piano, the Asthall library became a favourite refuge for the younger Mitfords. Nancy, the eldest child by five years, knew the bookshelves well enough to observe – in a collection of essays entitled The Water Beetle – that the German section was poorly equipped in poetry and fiction, but not so well as to remember correctly the name of ‘Stewart Houston Chamberlain’ [ sic ]. Pamela, the Redesdales’ second daughter, showed a keener interest in her grandfather’s books and later married Derek Jackson, an ardent Germanophile.

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