Major Thomas Mitford of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, died in Burma on Good Friday 30th March 1945—six months before the war ended. On the 24th March, he led a small force against a Japanese machine gun nest, where he was hit in the shoulder and neck. Forty-eight hours later he was operated on in the field hospital, where a bullet was found lodged in his spine, and so he was airlifted to the better equipped company headquarters in Sagang. Unfortunately complications set in, and he died of pneumonia. He was thirty six years old.
The joy in reading Tom Mitford: A Fearful Old Twister is how Will Cross snuffles out the obscurest of facts and places the spotlight on the largely unknown. Most people have heard of the Mitford sisters: the Hitler loving Unity, Diana -wife of Oswald Mosley, communist Jessica who settled in America, Pam who wanted to be a farmer’s wife and eventually found happiness with a woman, Debs, who became the Duchess of Devonshire, and perhaps most famous of all, the writer Nancy Mitford, who immortalised the family in The Pursuit of Love.
Will Cross makes a convincing argument, that none of these prickly, highly idiosyncratic women would have been so loving or driven had it not been for the now largely forgotten brother, Tom Mitford. He was the golden boy, heir to the dynasty. He had the education, his sisters each other, two eccentric parents and various governesses who flitted in and out of their lives. Tom became the focal point of intense love, irritation, perhaps even resentment from the less favoured sisters who fought to carve out their own destinies; Tom being the catalyst. The sisters had only marriage to look forward to, happy if they were lucky. And they were more than aware of Tom’s advantages, his considerable gifts and equally great failings. Unlike Tom, they couldn’t brandish a penis and boast what he had, and they hadn’t.
And in fairness, he used it. Sexual gratification became a driving force, and his conquests were many with both sexes. Few could resist him, for he was both good looking and could sweet talk his way in and out of most situations. Beneath the charm, though, was a certain coldness, a misogyny he probably picked up at Eton, where masturbation, buggery and beatings were the norm.
On the surface, Tom survived it unscathed. His beauty and charm made him a favoured one. ‘There was usually a line up for second or even third use of Tom Mitford’s bathwater or to help him dry.’ But by this time, Tom had discovered women.
Baba d’Erlanger
At the age of eighteen he was willingly seduced by the twenty-four year old Baba d’Erlanger, Jewish, beautiful and already married. But Tom was also beautiful and needed relieving of his virginity. From that moment on there was no going back; no attractive woman was safe from his charm—nor he from wanton women and predatory men.
Doris Castlerosse, a dazzling blonde had had Winston Churchill as well as his son, Randolph. Tom Mitford had no chance, but he was far luckier than some of her later conquests. Her husband, Lord Valentine Castlerosse was a violently jealous man and had a reputation for tracking down his wife’s lovers and beating them to pulp.
A blog post isn’t the place for an exhaustive list of Tom Mitford’s conquests or how he navigated between the advances of Lytton Strachey, Harold Nichelson, Tom Driberg et al. I would though suggest looking up the great love of his life, the beautiful Austrian Jewish adventuress, Tilly Losch, actress and dancer. Their romance was obsessive, passionate and destructive; it showed Tom Mitford at his best, his most vulnerable and at his worst.
Will Cross also illustrates how difficult it is to pin Tom Mitford down. Some of the great loves of his life were Jews. At the same time, he admired Hitler, though not as obsessively as sisters Unity and Diana.
He spoke flawless German and as a young man had spent some of the happiest years of his life in Austria. There were many in the upper echelons of British society who had similar feelings, seeing Hitler’s Germany as a bulwark against Bolshevism.
At the height of the war, August 1944, Tom Mitford was asked point blank by one of his oldest friends and unrequited lover, James Lee Milne, whether he still sympathised with the Nazis. “ He emphatically said yes. That all the best Germans were Nazis. That if he were a German, he would be one. That he was an imperialist. He considered that life without power and without might with which to strike fear into every other nation would not be worth living for an Englishman. I absolutely contradicted him. Told him I was an unrepentant pacifist, and would prefer to live in a country of tenth rate power, provided there were peace and freedom of action and speech. The sweet side of Tom is that he never minds how much an old friend disagrees with him. But woe betide an acquaintance."
12th Nov 1944 “Had a glass of sherry at Brooke’s with Tom, who walked in. He tells me he is off soon to Burma at his own request, for he does not wish to go to Germany killing German civilians, whom he likes. He prefers to kill Japanese whom he does not like.”
Before the war and pressured by Unity and Diana, Muv and Farve found themselves gravitating towards Hitler’s immediate circle. Farve was initially hesitant and retained a degree of ambivalence; he never totally forgave ‘the Boche’ for killing his brother in World War I. Muv too was initially cool but allowed that Hitler 'had a nice face.' Gradually, under the influence of her daughters and Hitler’s magnetism, she fell completely under his spell. ‘Never mind, when the Germans have won the war, everything will be wonderful.’
The American journalist, Virginia Cowes recorded Muv and Farve at the Grand Hotel in Nuremberg. 'Lord and Lady Redesdale seemed out of place. Lady Redesdale always seemed to be sitting over her needlework in the corner of the lounge, while Lord Redesdale helped her find her needles or wandered around with a bewildered air as though he were at a rather awkward house party where (curiously enough) nobody could speak English. '
As Farve became increasingly disenchanted and Muv more enamoured, their marriage gradually fell apart, Farve eventually settling on a Scottish island with his parlour maid, Margaret Wright.
Will Cross’s book provides a wonderful insight into a world of bedhopping, cross-dressing and drugs. It reminds us that that human nature doesn’t change to any significant degree and that the crusty old men who dominated politics and society, the men who harrumphed most loudly as the swinging sixties progressed, had their own peculiar pasts. It would have been nice to have seen how Tom Mitford might have fared had a sniper’s bullet not cut him down.
*As in all of Will Cross's books, A Fearful Old Twister has footnotes galore - nearly a thousand, which with the help of Google is a rabbit hole of hidden treasures.
* I would though like to know what happened to Dinky
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