The Viceroy's Daughters (17 page)

There was also the financial discrepancy. During the Melton years, when her husband filled a role that they and their circle considered important, the difference between Fruity's income and Baba's had not seemed important. In London, with a different way of life, friends with wider interests, and a house and nursery to run, the balance shifted. From the early days of their courtship the devoted Fruity had always tried to do what his “Babs” wanted and the pattern, set in stone by the fact that Baba paid most of the bills, emphasized her dominance in the relationship.

She had so far indulged only in mild flirtations, but she was conscious of her sexual power. She was beautiful, with high-cheekboned, aristocratic looks, her witty remarks delivered in a languid drawl; her slim figure was always exquisitely dressed. The sophisticated assurance she exuded masked the powerful libido she had inherited from her father. It was a combination many men found challenging—and irresistible.

More crucially, at twenty-six Baba was not the same person as the dazzled girl who had fallen so headlong in love with a man whom no dispassionate observer would have picked as her husband. She had grown up and her mind was expanding. She had just begun, also, to take an interest in the charity that would occupy so much of her time in later life—the Save the Children Fund. She wanted occupation, conversation and company that was intelligent as well as fun.

 

The Mosleys went off as usual to Antibes on August 2, 1930. Irene, still hankering after Gordon, decided once again to put the sea between them. Before she left on a tour of Norway, the Baltic and Russia, she went to one of the last house parties given by Grace at Hackwood. It was dominated by Margot Asquith, more eccentric and outspoken than ever. “Margot tyrannical over her bridge. I had her both evenings with Chips [Channon] and Alfred [Duggan]. She got me so rattled I was paralysed. I lost £43 and the old girl won £38 and Chips £56. The tennis was poor. Margot played golf with Chips in black shoes, red socks and white silk stockings, a baby's shetland and a black and white spotted skirt, the ball ricocheting off every mole hill.”

Irene returned in September, but even the consolation of an old admirer and a happy dinner with Fruity, Baba, Cim and Tom at Smith Square was not enough to blot out thoughts of Gordon. She set off again in October, this time for the Middle East. She was called home from her travels when Baba gave birth to twin daughters on November 14, 1930, after a long and hard labor, and became so ill that it was feared she might not live.

Irene's anxiety over Baba was such that she did not leave London to hunt until the New Year. Even Cliveden was depressing. “A dark autumnal day,” wrote Harold Nicolson, visiting it in late November. “Thirty-two people in the house. Cold and draughty. Great sofas in vast cathedrals. Duff and Diana Cooper, Tom and Cimmie, Oliver and Lady Maureen Stanley, Harold Macmillan and Lady Dorothy, Brendan Bracken, Bob Boothby, Malcolm Bullock and Garvin [the editor of the
Observer
]. After dinner Nancy, fearful that her party was falling apart, whisked out her false teeth and put on a Victorian hat to make the party go. It did not.”

When Georgia Sitwell went to tea with Cim and Tom at Smith Square the talk was of politics and Baba's poor health. Baba stayed with Cim and Tom at Savehay Farm to recuperate from the birth of the twins, refusing to allow Fruity to leave her side. When Cim took him off to Hackwood one day there were scenes: Baba, accustomed to having her own way, had a full-scale temper tantrum. Irene, there to keep her company in the intervals of looking after her maid Lena, who had just been diagnosed with cancer, listened crossly as Baba yelled that she had been left alone and no one loved her. A few days later, back in Cowley Street, she was cheerful again.

Irene was dividing her time between dashing back to London to see Baba and Lena, whose tumor was so large it was inoperable, hunting—often with Fruity—and the inevitable games of poker. There was one notable absentee, she recorded. “Thelma, due to join Duke in Africa, produced mysterious appendicitis in Paris, returned after ten days there and is now off again!!! What is the ‘Princess of Wales' up to? I lost £8.”

In February 1931 Fruity, worried by Baba's continuing pallor and thinness, took her to Torquay for a fortnight in the hope that the sea air would restore her health. It was not until March 4 that the twins, Davina and Linda, were christened at the Chapel Royal, Baba exquisite in a broad-tail coat with sable collar and cuffs, tight black hat and orchids pinned on her collar. Cimmie, in an eerie foreshadowing of her future, was dressed completely in black.

16

The New Party

“Tom is organising his new party,” wrote Harold Nicolson, staying at Savehay Farm for the weekend, in his diary for February 15, 1931. “Poor Cimmie cannot follow his repudiation of all the things he has taught her to say previously. She was not made for politics. She was made for society and the home.”

For Tom had decided that the only way to achieve what he wanted was to strike out on his own. He was disillusioned with what he saw as the apathy of the government, he lacked the patience necessary to make the political machinery work for rather than against him, he believed that something had to be done quickly—and he very much wanted personal power. He decided to found a new political party, which he called, quite simply, the New Party.

He planned his resignation from the Labour Party for February 20; after him would go, one after the other to ensure maximum publicity, the five other members of the group who had signed the Mosley Manifesto—Cimmie, John Strachey, W. J. Brown, Oliver Baldwin and Robert Forgan. He also hoped eventually to draw into the New Party other young and restless MPs sympathetic to his ideas, including some of the younger Conservatives such as Harold Macmillan, Bob Boothby, Oliver Stanley and Walter Elliot.

“An amazing act of arrogance,” Beatrice Webb commented in her diary on February 25, 1931. “Oswald Mosley's melodramatic defection from the Labour Party, slamming the door with a bang to resound through the political world . . . Mosley's sensational exit will matter supremely to himself and his half-dozen followers but very little to the Labour Party . . . except that it means the loss of five seats, the other resignations are of no importance to the Labour movement. The New Party will never get born alive; it will be a political abortion.”

The first to hand in their resignations were Strachey and Baldwin. Then, on March 3, Cimmie resigned. Her letter to the prime minister said:

I have been forced to the conclusion that the present Labour Government differs little from the preceding Tory and Liberal Governments.

Every attempt to make the Front Bench face up to the situation and put through an adequate and comprehensive policy to deal with unemployment has met with complete failure.

The Government has pursued a policy which leaves the electorate tragically disillusioned, as I confess I am myself.

The speech of the Chancellor of the Exchequer the other day finally confirms my opinion that the Government has abdicated to a complete acceptance of the philosophy of their most reactionary opponents.

 

Ramsay MacDonald replied privately in a vein that mixed the regretful with the savagely ironic.

When you came in a year or two ago we gave you a very hearty welcome and assumed that you knew what was the policy of the predominant socialist party in this country and that, with that knowledge, you asked us to accept you as a candidate and to go to your constituency and assist you in your fight.

You are disappointed with us; you have been mistaken in your choice of political companions, and you are re-selecting them so as to surround yourself with a sturdier, more courageous and more intelligent socialism for your encouragement and strength. You remain true, while all the rest of us are false. Whoever examines manifestos and schemes and rejects them, partly because they are not the sort of socialism that any socialist has ever devised, or because they amount to nothing but words, is regarded by you as inept or incompetent.

We must just tolerate your censure and even contempt; and, in the spare moments we have, cast occasional glances at you pursuing your heroic role with exemplary rectitude and stiff straightness to a disastrous futility and an empty sound. We have experienced so much of this in the building up of the Party that we must not become too cynical when the experience is repeated in the new phase of its existence. Perhaps before the end roads may cross again and we shall wonder why we ever diverged.

 

The reaction to Cimmie's resignation by her outraged constituents was immediate. The same day the political council of the Burslem and District Industrial Co-operative Society sent her a resolution expressing “great dissatisfaction” at her reported attitude and requesting her to reconsider the proposed policy of resignation and breaking away from the party. The chairman of her constituency committee wrote reproachfully: “While I have always felt you were sincere in your desire to improve the lot of the people, I think your secession from the Labour Party is a bad let-down for all those who worked so wholeheartedly for you in your contest.”

Tom's behavior also caused much ill feeling in his Smethwick constituency, especially as Allan Young was approaching members of the Labour organization there, offering those known for their platform qualities five pounds week to speak for the New Party.

We of the Birmingham Labour movement feel that you have let us down badly and justified all that your critics said when you came over to us [wrote the editor of the local Birmingham Labour newspaper]. Had you devoted your ability and eloquence to the task of converting a majority of the people to the socialist policy of the Labour party, thus ensuring the return of a majority Labour Government at the next election, you would have been a great figure in our Movement—honoured for your service and well rewarded with office. But you could not wait. And now you are being likened to Winston Churchill. I am sorry.

Tom had planned the New Party carefully. His devoted lieutenant, John Strachey, would provide much of the intellectual firepower, the able Allan Young was the organizer and Cyril Joad, from the Independent Labour Party, became director of propaganda. Tom had secured some financial backing from the car magnate Sir William Morris, and was prepared to pour his own fortune, now largely liquid, into the New Party coffers.

Irene went with Tom's mother and brother to the inaugural meeting of the New Party in the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, on March 5, 1931. So many people turned up that the overflow was put in another room and more than a thousand were turned away. The only person missing was the one for whom they were all waiting—Tom had developed raging pleurisy. W. J. Brown, another good orator, was also ill, and the burden of putting across Tom's message to a noisy and controversial audience fell upon Cimmie, backed up by Strachey and Forgan.

Irene recorded: “Cim was magnificent and undaunted by two ghastly hecklers, a communist and a drunken Labourite. She dealt with them and the crowd finally got livid with them and wanted them evicted. She gave dramatic touches and Forgan drab stuff. Countless questions followed.”

The repercussions over Cimmie's resignation continued for some time. On the evening of March 6 a special meeting of the Stoke, Fenton and Longton Labour Party called upon her to resign her seat in Parliament: of the twenty-one delegates present, only three voted against this motion. The secretary for the Labour Party in the constituency, who had also been Cimmie's election agent, fell on his sword, and his resignation was instantly accepted.

Not so Cimmie. Three nights later, speaking to a meeting of three thousand at the King's Hall, Stoke, with queues outside the door, she made it plain that she did not intend to resign her seat. She plunged into the attack straight away.

“I want to say this as to the demand—of which I have received no notice—that I should resign my seat. I look upon it as the most tremendous cheek and humbug [cheers]. When I came to Stoke the Labour vote was twelve thousand. At the last election I brought it up to twenty-six thousand.”

“You won't get it again!” shouted a voice from the balcony. Swinging around, she shouted back indignantly: “Well, give us a chance!”

There were such constant interruptions that at one point she shouted, “Please, please, please give order!” before she made her final point.

“If it came to a break with the Socialist Party I would rather go on with my fight than stick to a government that is not doing its job,” she said. “I am just as much a socialist as I have ever been, and even more so.”

On March 13 the Stoke, Fenton and Longton Divisional Labour Party passed a resolution stating that in view of the resignation of Lady Cynthia Mosley, MP for Stoke-on-Trent, from the Parliamentary Labour Party, they confirmed the action of the executive committee in requesting her to resign her seat. Their anger was understandable, as was their feeling that she should either vacate the constituency or fight it as a member of the Labour Party. But neither Mosley wished to leave Parliament.

Immediately after her immense effort on behalf of Tom at the inaugural meeting Cimmie had come down with a bad cough, but, with the New Party to nurse, she had to get up to continue campaigning. Tom was still ill, his temperature spurting up to 105 at times; all through the spring of 1931 Cimmie, Strachey and Robert Forgan undertook a series of meetings up and down the country, all three making speeches that were constantly heckled. When Cimmie spoke in Birmingham to launch the New Party the first question from the audience was: “Have you brought your money bags?” In Dundee the three of them joined arms and led the audience in singing “The Red Flag.”

At the end of March Tom went with Cimmie and Baba—still recuperating after the birth of the twins—to convalesce at Lord Beaverbrook's villa in the South of France. While there, he heard of the first chance to test the New Party publicly: a by-election at Ashton-under-Lyme, a Lancashire cotton town with 4,690 unemployed, caused by the death of the sitting Labour member, whose majority was 3,407. The election was to take place
on April 30—yet Tom remained in Monte Carlo and perforce another candidate, Allan Young, was chosen.

The New Party needed all the help it could get. One of the most effective speakers it hired was the former miner, laborer and trade-union official Jack Jones, who used the back of a lorry as his platform. “When I presented myself at the headquarters of the Party it was to find the political flotsam and jetsam of 1929 floating around,” he wrote. “Ex-candidates of all parties, and to give the thing tone, one ex–Cabinet Minister in the person of Sir John Pratt [a former Liberal junior lord of the Treasury].”

Jones, a tough former agitator, had little time for the New Party toffs who stayed in comfort at the Midland Hotel, arriving by car for meetings. But he had a great admiration for Cimmie, who joined him on the road: “The two most willing workers were Cynthia Mosley and Strachey's American wife. Mrs. Strachey was by no means an effective speaker, but she could hold a crowd long enough to rest some of those whose throats were wearing [out].”

Most of the speaking took place in the large cobbled marketplace. Here Jones and two ex-communist assistants tried to pull in the crowds in competition with the Conservative and Labour speakers. First to emerge from the hall would be Cimmie, to be helped onto the loudspeaker lorry by Jones, where she would take her turn speaking. Her fearlessness, and her readiness to face the noisy crowds—many of whom were Labour supporters angry with the Mosleys for splitting the vote—deeply impressed Jones.

Cynthia Mosley was both able and willing. With me she must have addressed at least a score of very big outdoor crowds during the campaign and also scores of “in our street” talks to women. Whilst her husband and Strachey and the others of the first flight were looking important in the presence of reporters or talking about the hooking of the floating Liberal vote, the cornering of the Catholic vote, and preparing their speeches for the well-stewarded big meetings indoors each evening, Cynthia Mosley was out getting the few votes that were got. It was her work that saved our deposit, for she worked like a Trojan. She always answered my SOS's for speakers.

Six days before the by-election Tom made his first appearance in front of a crowd of almost seven thousand at an indoor meeting, but even the famed Mosley eloquence failed to win the seat. On the night of the poll the market square was filled with people waiting to hear the result. When it was announced—Conservatives 12,420 votes, Labour 11,005 and New Party 4,472—a howl went up from the furious Labour
supporters who blamed the New Party for allowing the Conservatives into a safe Labour seat. When they caught a glimpse of Cimmie and Tom they booed and hissed.

So great was the crowd's anger that the police advised Tom to slip out through the back of the town hall. Never lacking in courage, he refused, though he told Cimmie to let the police smuggle her out to shelter in the house of a local supporter while he faced the angry crowd, described by Jack Jones as having all the appearance of an American lynch mob.

I looked at Mosley sideways [wrote Jones]. Certainly didn't have the wind up. More savage than frightened. White with rage, not fear; he showed his teeth as he smiled contemptuously out onto the crowd that was howling at him and calling him names—many of which I had been called in my time.

“Come on,” he said impatiently. We others packed around him and the police packed around us as we plunged into the crowd. Men cursed, women shrieked and spat at us. We got through to the shelter of the hotel and the first thing Mosley did when he got there was to rush to the phone to make inquiries about his wife's safety.

 

Few of Tom's friends cared much for his new associates. “Lunched Tom and his not very nice satellite Allan at Carlton,” wrote Georgia Sitwell on May 19. “Talk of politics. Find Tom a little disappointing as a political figure. He is too preoccupied with Freud. It may be a joke but it goes too far.”