The Viceroy's Daughters (16 page)

Many of those close to the Mosleys thought that Tom exploited his wife's willingness too freely, often persuading her to speak when she was exhausted or under the weather. Harold Nicolson in particular believed that this often amounted to cruelty—but then, a streak of cruelty often underlay what Tom described as “teasing.”

When his devoted friend and closest lieutenant John Strachey married (in April 1929) and rice was produced to throw at the bride—an American woman all his friends disliked—Tom, his best man, whispered to the bridesmaids, “Throw it upwards. It hurts more.” Yet his charismatic presence, brilliance and oratory won back those with reservations, like Irene, when she heard him speak at Birmingham town hall.

Cim campaigned for her husband as well as herself. In a red dress with a buttonhole of white heather, she addressed a gathering of three thousand at Stoke after an introduction by Ramsay MacDonald; the next day Cim spoke several times in Tom's constituency of Smethwick before leaving for a day of speeches, open-air meetings and talks in schools as well as canvassing in Stoke.

Her hard work paid off: most of the people she spoke to said they would vote for her. All her life she had had the ability to get on with all sorts and kinds of people, and to make herself loved by anyone who knew her well. When she knocked at the poorest doors she evoked not resentment at her obvious wealth and her title but admiration and liking.

Her growing popularity caused her opponent Colonel Ward to start a rumor that despite the Leiter millions she had a brother whom she callously allowed to remain in the workhouse. When Irene heard this slander she went to Colonel Ward's meeting and heckled him from the floor, yelling that he was telling a lie, she was the candidate's sister and knew more about the Leiter fortune than he did.

“Ward was as white as a sheet, the Chairwoman called for the police and I left the room taking three quarters of the clapping, shrieking women with me. I was cheered all the way down the streets to Longton.” There, buoyed up with triumph, she spoke to the two thousand people waiting for Cim (who was delayed and did not arrive), telling them of her sister's sincerity and capability. The excitement and stress of her unexpected intervention took its toll, and after being violently sick Irene spent a sleepless night wondering if she had done the right thing.

More strenuous canvassing followed, knocking on door after door of mean streets, Cim in a red suit, a red toque on her dark hair, and a car bedecked with red and yellow ribbons to take her to the larger meetings. By now she was well known and acclaimed, and the large square in Stoke-on-Trent was packed with a yelling, cheering throng for her final meetings. On Polling Day her supporters encouraged voters out and Irene took a number to the booths in her car. The excitement was intense. After a quick dinner, Irene took Cim in her car to Smethwick, to hear Tom's result. He achieved a majority of 7,340. “His and Cim's reception was tremendous when he came out and spoke to them,” recorded Irene. “We then went to the
Labour Club where he was carried round the room and Cim was rushed round it too.”

Then it was Cim's turn. Back they all went to Stoke for the count. At 3:30
a.m
. it was announced: Cim had not only beaten Colonel Ward by 7,850—an unheard-of result in that safe Conservative seat—but had polled over twenty-six thousand votes as against thirteen thousand Labour votes in the previous election.

As Cim, shaking with emotion, was given a rapturous reception, Irene was aware of the elation around her as more and more Conservative seats in Birmingham fell to Labour. “Everyone murmured that night that Cim and Tom had broken the great Chamberlain backbone in Brum,” she wrote joyously. “Seldom have I taken part in such a frenzy of thrill and nervous tension. The huge crowds watching the twelve white placards coming out and being hung on the side of the Town Hall throughout the night was a most dramatic picture.”

The morning confirmed victory: this first election in which there was universal adult suffrage brought Labour back to power with the first majority Labour government. Irene gave Cim the present she had bought for her, so sure was she of her sister's victory: a gold bracelet with “Stoke 1929” on it in diamonds.

As the Mosleys left to meet Ramsay MacDonald and celebrate, Irene returned to London. Still elated, she went to see Baba. It was like a douche of cold water: Baba did not approve of Irene's new political allegiance—or, as she put it, “turning Labour.” It was, said Baba, a traitorous act; what would all their friends say? She herself had helped Nancy Astor, who had just scraped in with a majority of 250. Besides, Labour children were so badly behaved.

Six days after the election, the exhausted Cim had a miscarriage.

 

When the new government was formed Tom, though not in the cabinet, was asked to be chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and to coordinate the government's policy on the most serious problem facing them: unemployment. This now stood at 1,164,000 and was increasing by the month. Very quickly, it became obvious that Tom was the party's rising star, and many of its younger members gravitated to him. John Strachey, elected as member for Aston, became his parliamentary private secretary.

However, until the parliamentary recess was over, the summer was for playing. That year, all the sisters flung themselves into the season. But though the Mosleys were as social as ever, not everyone had forgiven them for what was still seen as a kind of treachery. Irene walked out of Georgia Sitwell's party, where she had been talking to Harold Acton and William Walton, when Lady Eleanor Smith arrived, “because of all the filthy things she said about Cim and her election in sables and pearls. I told Georgia to tell her why I had left.”

Irene's literary and theatrical friendships increased: she was on terms of intimacy with the Lunts, Paul Robeson and his wife, the John McCormacks—and Arthur Rubinstein, who accompanied her home on several evenings. She was trying her best to forget Gordon, but it was difficult.

The Metcalfes' lives remained as intertwined with the Prince of Wales and his circle as before. They shared a house at Sandwich with the prince for golfing tournaments, they holidayed in Biarritz with him and Thelma Furness, accompanied also by Lord Ednam and G Trotter. With Edwina Mountbatten, Baba opened a club called Master's, at 7 Savile Row, intended as a counterpart to Buck's, the men's club next door. It only lasted a year, although Captain Buckmaster, owner and founder of Buck's, advised them on the running of it and allowed them to use the last part of his name: its lady members preferred lunching with men, and men who did lunch with them felt intensely uncomfortable when their hostesses, as members, had to do the paying.

Like Irene, the Metcalfes stayed with the Mosleys in Antibes (though it was the last year they would do so: Fruity hated the Riviera life). Also there were Bobby Casa Maury and his beautiful blond, green-eyed wife Paula, a former model and Tom's longstanding mistress; and staying at the Eden Roc Hotel were the film star John Gilbert and his wife. Everyone wanted a crack at John Gilbert, from Daisy Fellowes, hoping to be asked to the Gilberts' moonlight party on the top balcony of the Eden Roc, to Baba, who successfully pounced for the seat beside him at dinner.

Next day it was Irene's turn, trying to make sparkling conversation while Tom, opposite, whispered almost under his breath the whole time to Paula Casa Maury about which of the three Curzon sisters was ahead in the Gilbert stakes, “the heavyweight, the light or the middle.” As Irene was classed as the heavyweight she was justifiably annoyed.

At such close quarters it was impossible to conceal the difficulties in the Mosley marriage. Tom, who alternated between cutting Cimmie dead and making sarcastic remarks, was so unpleasant to his wife when she asked him about plans for her birthday that Irene lost her temper and called him a cad. When the holiday ended—after a brief detour to Marienbad, where she managed to lose six pounds—Irene saw Gracie in Paris, staying at the Ritz. “She was as ever when alone disarmingly sweet and loving. I had an hour of delightful chat with her over myself—and Scatters.”

For the long affair between Gracie and Scatters had finally frayed and disintegrated. By ill-judged financial advice, by encouraging her to pour more and more money into their joint racing venture, he had ruined her. Gracie, who had never had to think about money and who had always lived the life of an exceptionally wealthy woman, did not at first notice the gradual diminution of her fortune. As it dwindled, so the pace of her losses increased. Although Arctic Star, far and away the best horse in their jointly owned stud, ran in the 1929 Caesarewitch in Gracie's colors—brown and pink halved, with pink cap—it was the last fling. Arctic Star, Arctic Light, Irish Moor, Okanagan and Economy (a sad misnomer) were put up for sale during Cambridgeshire Week at the end of October.

A few days later, on October 31, Cimmie made her maiden speech in the House of Commons, on the second reading of the bill to amend the Widows, Orphans and Old Age Pensions Act. Again her appearance made its way into the parliamentary reporters' accounts; described as “the bright star of the debate,” she cut “an aristocratic figure dressed in black and with a white fichu ornamented with red and white carnations.” She expressed herself with great freedom and frankness against her opponents' contention that increasing pensions and thereby giving people something for nothing would weaken the moral fiber of the nation. “Demoralization is something I know a great deal about,” she declared. “All my life I have got something for nothing. That is entirely due to luck and I think a great many members opposite”—here she pointed to the Conservatives—“are in the same position. We have all got something for nothing. The question is: are we demoralized?
I
am not demoralized.”

Although she had to be reminded to address her remarks to the speaker rather than the benches opposite, it was considered an excellent performance.

15

The Mosley Memorandum

For the Mosleys, the autumn of 1929 was taken up by politics. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 had brought the question of unemployment into sharp focus; Tom, for whom the subject was all-consuming, had written and spoken about it to such effect that he was asked to work out a practical policy for dealing with it.

Unfortunately, he was under the overall direction of J. H. Thomas, the former general secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen, Lord Privy Seal to Tom's chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Thomas was old, set in his ways, unable to grasp economic theory—especially when (as often) fuddled by drink—and as a Labour politician of the old sort, he was in any case suspicious of Tom. He believed that Tom was an adventurer, using the Labour Party for what he could get out of it; Tom thought Thomas a dinosaur. It did not help that the prime minister, already frowned on by many in his party for preferring to spend his leisure with aristocrats rather than trade unionists, was clearly taken with both the Mosleys.

As Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary at the time: “Mosley, whom I met at lunch, is contemptuous of Thomas's incapacity, of the infirmity of manual working Cabinet Ministers generally and very complacent about his own qualifications for the leadership of the Labour Party. That young man has too much aristocratic insolence in his make-up.”

Cimmie, she added, had charmed the House. The subjects on which she had chosen to speak were those about which many felt strongly but which had not always had much of a public airing. In February 1930 Cimmie asked Parliament to consider some form of what is now known as planning control. “Powers should be given to the local authority to decide whether a house is suitable to the surroundings, whether it is wisely and properly placed and is the right coloring,” she said.

Tom was well aware of the undercurrents in the Labour Party. Knowing that any radical new theory he submitted to Thomas would automatically elicit a negative response, he worked on his own. With his friend John Strachey, Allan Young (now his parliamentary private secretary), the veteran politician George Lansbury and the Scottish Labour leader Tom Johnston, he evolved what came to be known as the Mosley Memorandum. It was largely based on the economic principles of his friend John Maynard Keynes; and proposed a large-scale program of public works and the mobilization of national resources to fight unemployment. It also embodied a principle that instinctively scared his party: the focusing of power in the hands of a small inner group.

Tom, never a team player, would soon refine this ethos still further to its ultimate principle: personal power. But at that moment, with unemployment the major issue in the western hemisphere—in the U.S. it had risen to over seven million, in Germany to over five million—ambition and idealism had coalesced into a single strand and his anxiety was simply to get things done. Among his intimates, he bewailed the “crass stupidity” of the Labour ministers with whom he had to deal.

He was a young man in a hurry—but from Thomas's point of view, Tom was seriously at fault in showing his work to outside helpers without so much as consulting Thomas. There was further acrimony when Tom sent his memorandum to the prime minister on January 23, 1930, asking him to place it before the cabinet—again without consulting Thomas. This time, Thomas offered his resignation to the prime minister, which was refused, and Ramsay MacDonald delivered a private rebuke to Tom.

After discussing the Mosley Memorandum, the cabinet appointed a subcommittee chaired by Philip Snowden to consider it in depth. As the subcommittee procrastinated there was an atmosphere of crisis within the Mosley household. “Will Tom resign?” wondered Georgia Sitwell on February 22.

Gradually it became clear that the government would reject the Mosley Memorandum, and on May 9 it did so. Accepting it would have meant abandoning free trade and the gold standard, measures which would have caused disruption and disunity within the entire party. Conscious that the economic blizzard was about to commence, conscious that the new and untried party must be seen to hang together, the government closed ranks.

“Oswald and Cynthia Mosley here for the night, at a critical moment in his career,” wrote Beatrice Webb on May 19. “Is he or is he not going to resign?”

By the next day Tom had made up his mind. He went to see the prime minister and, though MacDonald tried to dissuade him, resigned his government office (the other two ministers concerned with combating unemployment, Lansbury and Johnston, remained). In his letter of resignation of May 20 Tom said he found it inconsistent with honor to remain in a government that would not discuss its election pledges. MacDonald, who regarded the tone of his letter as one of “graceless pompousness,” wrote in his diary that night: “Test of a man's personality is his behavior in disagreement. In every test he failed.”

In the House Tom began to attack what he saw as the government's apathy and lack of constructive action. Then, no longer bound by cabinet rules, he put the Mosley Memorandum to a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party on May 22. It evoked sympathy and interest but provoked a general feeling that Tom should not be seen to attack his own government at this crucial moment. The experienced politician Arthur Henderson asked Tom to take the “noble line” of withdrawing his censure motion against the government to allow them to consider his plan more fully. This attempt to shift him from his intransigent stance failed: Tom insisted that his proposals be put to the vote. Despite an eloquent speech, he achieved only twenty-nine votes against 210. Although his courage was admired, forcing the issue in this way was widely considered a tactical mistake—or, as Irene put it, “a stupid egotistical error,” though she was thankful that Cim was wholeheartedly in agreement with Tom over his stance. “That is all that matters to them both.”

On May 28 Tom made his resignation speech as a minister in the House of Commons. It was a tour de force. “Mosley's speech in the second attack on Thomas is acclaimed as that of a distinguished parliamentary orator, wholly admirable in manner and style,” wrote Bea
trice Webb. She went on to ask the question at the back of many minds.

Has MacDonald found his superseder in Oswald Mosley? MacDonald owes his pre-eminence largely to the fact that he is the only artist, the only aristocrat by temperament and talent, in a party of plebeians and plain men. Hitherto he has had no competitor in personal charm and good looks, delightful voice and the gift of oratory. But Mosley has all these with the élan of youth, wealth and social position added to them.

Mosley still has a young man's zeal. He lacks MacDonald's strongest point—genuine puritanism. He is entangled in the smart set and luxurious habits; he is reputed to be loose with women; he rouses suspicion, he knows little or nothing about trade unionism or Co-operation, he cannot get on terms of intimacy with working men or with the lower middle-class brainworker. He is, in fact, an intruder, a foreign substance in the labour movement, not easily assimilated.

 

In Melton, Irene was finding the life she had chosen for herself increasingly hollow. The most noticeable difference made by the Prince of Wales's departure was an increase in the wildness of the parties. Drunkenness that would have been frowned upon in his presence was becoming commonplace—“Charlie took off his trousers and did fearful dances in white pants,” “Peter Ackroyd was found drunk in a spare room in the morning, stark naked in bed.” At the Melton Ball Irene ran out of the building to escape the harassing advances of one man only to have another, whom she did not care for, propose to her on the way home.

Everything seemed to conspire to depress her. She was losing money constantly at bridge and, though this was not a financial worry, it made her feel stupid and incompetent. She saw the same old faces at all the parties; one evening, with a similarly disillusioned woman friend, she worked out what it was about them that so irked her. “Diagnosed our disgust and antipathy to 90 percent of the hunting people as their being really common, no breeding—tho' I hate that word—and so having no rare sensitiveness or exquisite feeling which jars so badly on one day after day.”

Yet “breeding” was not really the problem: Irene made friends delightedly with writers, artists and musicians, black, white or Jewish, without a thought as to their lineage. She sent roses to Mrs. Paul Robeson, she went constantly to the Polish embassy with her friend Jan Masaryk (the future foreign minister of Czechoslovakia), she was half in love with Arthur Rubinstein.

The underlying cause of her unhappiness was the knowledge that her love for Gordon had no future. She should, she knew, avoid seeing him—but this would mean giving up hunting. As it was, every sight of him was a pang. Unable to cut him out of her life completely, she saw him occasionally, with disastrous results. “G dined with me. Had a ghastly breakdown of weeping and misery after and had to get Lena [Lena Sibley, her lady's maid] down or else I should have gone mad. Devotedly Lena held my hand with hankies on my aching brow till I fell asleep at about three.”

She was less unhappy when she returned to London in the late spring. Although her future looked barren, the present, with its wider circle of friends, its plays, concerts and galleries, and its physical proximity to her sisters, was more agreeable. There were teas with Cim at Smith Square, where politicians and housemaids would pass one another on the single staircase, and a chance to play with the children in their nursery or watch them being bathed.

In default of the motherhood for which she longed, she was a devoted aunt. When seven-year-old Nicky had appendicitis she was a constant visitor; when she went to Baba's house there was two-and-a-half-year-old David toddling across the nursery floor toward her ready for the games and romps he did not always get from his mother. “I seem to understand my sisters' children so much better than they do,” she reflected with a touch of complacency.

Although Ascot was rained out, the social round scarcely faltered. Every hour of the day seemed packed with concerts, plays, dances, private views, fancy-dress parties, cocktail parties followed by dinner, followed by bridge, followed by supper at the Hungaria or the Savoy. The Mosleys gave enormous weekend house parties, or invited friends for the day to Denham, where they played tennis, lay on the lawn, bathed in the river or unwillingly listened to a sparring match between Cim and Tom.

After one of these episodes, perhaps because Irene had witnessed it, Cim was unpleasant to her at that evening's ball (on July 8). “You do not look your best. I think you had better go home.” Irene fled in tears, to be consoled by the faithful Lena. A few days later Cim rubbed in the message that Irene should acquire a husband before it was too late by telling her how Bendor [the duke of Westminster] adored Loelia Ponsonby and how Irene should be in that position—but wasn't.

It was a rare display of nastiness from the normally sweet-natured Cim. Tom's unfaithfulnesses brought out qualities alien to her happy, carefree nature. Despite the urging of Baba and Irene, who wanted her to give Tom a fright, she had always refused to visit the bachelor flat in Ebury Street that Tom had taken; it would have smacked of snooping and spying and she could well imagine his jibes about such activities, but she could hardly stop herself imagining what went on there.

Meanwhile the arguments went on. When Irene returned to her house in Deanery Street one evening at eleven-thirty it was to find Cim and Tom there having a row. “It was just about some stupid bill and he rushed off in the car in a rage and poor dazed Cim still could not see how it had all arisen.” That night, Cimmie stayed on at Irene's house and wrote miserably to Tom:

I am entirely bewildered. I just don't understand—why have you been so horrid to me not only tonight but ever since I got up from chickenpox. As the sound of my voice and my presence (and you've seen so little of me) seem to drive you demented I resort to poor Irene's method of putting pen to paper.

You leave me
alone
in London for the weekend to look after Nicky [their son Nicholas, aged seven, had just been operated on for appendicitis] and go away with another woman for the weekend. You never see Nicky from before his op. Saturday morning till Monday evening . . .

 

It was little better in Cowley Street. Baba, when not disagreeable (“Of course she criticized my lovely black fur coat and said the collar was wrong”) seemed always to be “in the extremes of gloom.” Baba was pregnant again, but what was causing her depression was a gradual disillusionment with her marriage. The truth was that she and Fruity were very different people, and after the natural decline in the sexual excitement of the first years they had little in common. Fruity was charming, kind, delightful, funny and supremely loyal, but even his best friends did not call him clever. “Fruity is a sweet man but too stupid,” wrote Georgia Sitwell in her diary, after an evening in a party with him at the Kit-Cat Club.

Baba's shift in perspective had been brought about by several factors. Fruity running the Prince of Wales's horses, trying hunters for him, managing his stables, was a man doing a job at which he was expert, and like all professionals actively exercising a supreme skill, commanded respect. But now that the prince had given up hunting, Fruity's job had disappeared. He was still the prince's best friend and the Metcalfes still moved constantly in the prince's circle, but there was a great difference between a husband active, occupied and full of plans and one often hanging around the house.