The Viceroy's Daughters (23 page)

Irene's public work and good causes continued. She was the first woman to speak at the annual gala in commemoration of the Magna Carta at Runnymede, she had been the only white woman to attend the emperor of Abyssinia's coronation in November 1930 and she was as active as ever in her East End club work. She was also involved with the Shilling Theatre Company, which aimed to bring good plays and performances within reach of the poor—a growing number in that era of unemployment. Seats cost only one shilling and three pence (the three pence was entertainment tax), there were two performances a night and a new play was put on every week with well-known actors. The company played in the Fulham Theatre by Putney Bridge, where Irene, who subsidized it heavily, organized the painting of the interior in a bright grass green to set off the heavy gilt ceiling, ready for its opening date on the twenty-third.

Her main concern was Tom's children. She was the one to drive Nick back to school—lunching afterward with her old beau Arthur Rubinstein—who took Micky and Viv to the Metcalfe twins' birthday party, who sympathized with Tom when he had a return of his old enemy, phlebitis. She herself was suffering from the rheumatism that had attacked so many of her hunting friends after their numerous falls, but recovered in time to spend the following weekend at Cliveden. It would bring Fruity further cause for jealousy, and Baba another lover—Mussolini's ambassador to London, Count Dino Grandi.

Ironically, it was Irene who met him first, sitting between the count and Walter Elliot at dinner. On Signor Grandi's other side was Nancy Astor's sister Irene Gibson, famed for her beauty twenty years earlier but extraordinarily irritating to Irene for the “garrulous Langhorne fluffy stuf
f
” that she talked to Grandi while Irene longed for some serious political discussion. When she and Grandi did begin to talk she found him full of charm and distinction. “He was thrilling on Tom. He watches every move of Tom's and as the press gives no fair verdict of his speeches, writes home himself the truth. He predicted the spread of fascism here after a Labour government. He spoke reverently of Cim and asked to go to the chapel.”

Grandi had that quality essential in a successful diplomat: the gift of saying exactly what all those to whom he wished to appeal wanted to hear. At thirty-eight he was young for an ambassador; he had joined Mussolini early on in his career and was one of the four fascist leaders who had led the march on Rome in 1923. Two years later he became a minister in the Italian Foreign Office, where he showed great skill as a diplomat, communicating Italy's keenness on disarmament to the League of Nations while at home convincing Mussolini of the need to build up her military strength. His success brought him a title and Italy's highest decoration, the Order of the Annunciata. When, in 1932, he became ambassador in London, he saw his job mainly as a propagandist for fascism.

Grandi was intensely social, charming, and a convinced anglophile (his first thought on arriving in England was that he was in the country which had beaten Napoleon). He quickly became London's most popular ambassador and the darling of what became known as “the Cliveden Set.” He entertained frequently at his sumptuous embassy in Grosvenor Square, the former home of the Fitzwilliam family, where guests marveled at the eighty-two rare museum pieces—tapestries and mirrors from the court of the Medicis, six of them from the Uffizi Gallery, silver candelabra made for the Bourbon kings of Naples. The fifty pictures included two Titians and some rare works of the primitive school; in the entrance hall stood an agate-and-lapis-
lazuli table from the Barberini Palace flanked by a two-thousand-year-old statue of a boy riding a seahorse.

Women loved Grandi. He was tall and good-looking, with a pointed beard and dark flashing eyes that lit up with pleasure at the sight of a pretty woman. His approach to his marriage was Latin rather than the model of domesticity favored by Il Duce's
fascisti
: his petite, elegant wife, Antonietta, and his children were at the center of his life, but, as a traditional Italian male, he took it for granted that he could play away from home. He marked Baba down from the start and took the first opportunity to make her acquaintance. Fruity, who quickly spotted that Grandi found his wife attractive and that Baba appeared to be responding, would not settle down but played the gramophone most of the evening “and nearly drove us mad,” commented Irene.

The next day when Irene came down for tea, Baba and Grandi were nose to nose on the sofa again and Nancy and Phyllis (another of Nancy's sisters), for whom he had been asked as a beau, were angry. Irene stood up for her sister. “Leave them alone,” she said. “It is the first time she has talked to a good brain in years.”

Grandi's effect on the women of the party was pronounced. “Nancy foamed over dinner as Baba had her teeth into him and Nancy had to talk over Baba and Grandi to Eddie on Baba's right and they were quite oblivious,” recorded Irene jubilantly. After dinner, while the men were downstairs drinking port, the women vied with each other over the intimacy of their conversations with him. Baba won easily when she reported that he had confided in her that he and his wife were so exhausted after the summer diplomatic season that they had had to give up their double bed for a while. Her status as Grandi's favorite was confirmed when the men came in after dinner and he made straight for her, sitting with her all evening.

Later, playing bridge, Irene and her four got the giggles when this time Fruity's retaliation took the form of reading a hunting novel aloud to Mrs. Pakenham (later Lady Longford) until, recorded Irene, “he started that awful gramophone again with Mrs. Eden.”

It was clear that Baba was drawing away from her husband. A week later she worried even the loyal Irene by saying that Tom looked so wretched that he ought to go on a cruise. As he refused to go alone she suggested taking him halfway to Kenya. For Fruity, who by now detested Tom, this would be the last straw, thought Irene. Fortunately, Baba dropped the idea. She herself was still depressed after the break-up with Miles, though she cheered up a bit when Signor Grandi called to see her on December 14.

Tactfully he praised Irene's bravery over a recent small operation and then, with equal tact, managed to slip into the conversation a reassuring phrase or two about how much he loved his wife—perhaps because he knew that “lovely Baba” would arrive to whisk him away at six-thirty before they both went to the same dinner party an hour later. The same thing happened the following week, only this time the nature of the relationship was more apparent: when Grandi called on Irene for a cocktail Baba turned up and demanded to know how long he had been there. At a quarter to seven she looked at her watch and said imperiously: “Come on, give me a lift to Lancaster Gate.” Grandi stood up, Irene quickly handed him some books she had promised to lend him and the couple departed.

Irene did her best to see that the Mosley children had a happy Christmas, spending most of the holidays with them. For part of the time, Cimmie's friend Zita James came down to help in the absence of Nanny, whose father had died. Just before the holiday itself Tom and Baba arrived. Irene, though conscious that her duty lay with her bereaved nephews and niece, was unhappily aware that the people doing least well were her own servants, who could not have the usual day off after receiving their presents from her because they were needed at Denham. She was in no doubt who had caused all this. “It is Baba and her affairs that have ruined and corrupted the last weeks at Deanery Street and she never seems to mind,” she wrote bitterly on Christmas Eve 1933.

21

The Blackshirt Phenomenon

Irene took her duties toward Cim's children very seriously. Instead of returning to Melton and her hunting life there, she stayed on at Denham into the new year, spending much of the day with them. This usually ended with hearing the prayers of the youngest, Micky, as he sat on her lap, when she did her best to keep his memory of his mother alive by showing him her photograph.

To add to Irene's unhappiness her little dog Winks was, at fifteen, clearly at the end of his life. Even a new suitor, the fifty-one-year-old diplomat Nevile Henderson, was no solace. Telling him about Winks, whom she had loved almost like a child, she had to put the telephone down and run to her room because she could not stop crying. By January 13 she could postpone Winks's end no longer. Irene's diary entry that day reads: “My love lay with his paws and head dozing on my lap and he looked up at me and pressed his wet nose up against me and I kissed him and kissed him goodbye in Audley Street.” Thoughtfully, Nevile took her out to lunch at the Dorchester but neither this nor knowing that Winks was going to his final rest unsuspectingly in his own basket was any comfort.

Nevile's quiet but persistent pursuit of Irene continued. He was eminently suitable: good-looking, tall and slim, with fine features. He was head of the mission in Belgrade,
*
from which he was home on leave, and no doubt he was another who thought Irene was cut out to be the wife of a future ambassador. The problem was that she found him boring (“How minds like Tom's, Grandi's, Stokowski's, Israel's ruin one for slower ones”). Eventually, one day, she lashed out at him and told him how his slowness maddened her. He replied by calling her selfish, to which she responded tartly: “Why not?”

Nevile stood her angry denunciations quietly. “He ended by saying that although he would want to murder me ten times a day he still would want to live with me—it certainly would be stimulating. Oh dear! oh dear!” Fortunately, the drama with Nevile, and discussing it later with her niece Viv, distracted her a little from the loneliness of her bedroom without the comforting presence of Winks in his basket.

Once again, Irene decided that the only way forward was a cruise. This time it would last for three months—time to make up her mind about Nevile and get over Winks. The faithful Nevile went down in the train with her to Southampton (“In those last moments his company was charming”) and on January 17 she set off on the
Stella Polaris
first for the Americas and then the Far East.

In Colombo a letter arrived from Baba to tell her that “Tom was livid that she [Baba] went to Ireland for Easter and deliberately asked Diana Guinness to Denham. Ugh!” Clearly, the danger from the dreaded Diana was not yet over. She also heard that her theater had gone broke and had had to be closed for three months and, finally, Nevile Henderson wrote to say that he was coming to think she would not make him a good wife—a ploy that fell completely flat with Irene.

The
Stella Polaris
returned by way of Suez before finally docking at Monte Carlo, from where Irene went by train to Paris. While she was there, on April 21, 1934, Tom held a huge fascist meeting at the Albert Hall. It was in every way a triumph; even those whose political views nowhere coincided with Tom's acknowledged his brilliance, as this entry from the diary of the MP Robert Bernays makes clear:

It was horribly impressive—the banners, the processional, the atmosphere of virility and enthusiasm and the cheers that greeted Mosley's ridicule of the democratic system. He has perfect foils in Ramsay and Baldwin. His imitation of Ramsay at the Disarmament Conference and his description of Baldwin as the perfect representative of Britain asleep, with the Blackshirts as the incarnation of Britain awake, was perfectly done. He spoke for one hour and 45 minutes and the audience was riveted to him. It was nothing more than extreme Toryism, the curbing of the power of democracy through the so-called reform of Parliament, the strong hand in India, parity in the air, extreme economic nationalism, etc. But it was put across in a way that I have never heard Toryism put across before. It was political argument of a very high order, dignified, restrained, and expressed in superb language. The audience consisted of young toughs from the shops and the banks and that type of ageing ex-serviceman who has pathetically retained his military rank from the war. It was the people of England who, in Chesterton's poem, have not yet spoken. God help England if they ever do, for they are a mass of prejudice, ignorance, intolerance and cruelty.

Two days later, Irene was back in London, where she plunged with hardly a breath back into her social life, going the following night to Lady Portarlington's party, where she came upon her friend Sir Charles Mendl. He had heard that Nevile Henderson was pursuing her and immediately began to pay him glowing tributes, which Irene received coldly. There too was her former fiancé, Miles Graham, “who never left me and who was delightful and highly flirtatious”—
altogether an evening to restore her confidence.

She went down to Denham straight away, with presents for her nephews and niece, and lunched in the nursery where little Micky so enchanted her that she wished his mother could have seen him. The only discordant note was the relationship between Baba and Tom; after three months away she saw it with a fresh, more objective eye. She discussed it with Nanny—treated as a family friend and confidante rather than a servant—who was infuriated by Baba's behavior and who told her that the Metcalfe children would be arriving for the summer holidays.

The days followed one another. Irene played poker with the older children and spent all the time she could in the nursery. Tom and Baba walked and embraced on the lawns in the May sunshine, talking softly together. Baba, thought Irene, appeared quite besotted.

The problem was that Baba had become generally bored with the pattern of her life. She was not, like Irene, a person who naturally adored children, and the customary upper-class practice of putting them in the charge of a nanny suited her very well. She enjoyed clothes, the business of making herself look beautiful and the tributes it elicited. Like others in her set, she did a little charity work, largely for the new Save the Children Fund.

This “set” was that of the Prince of Wales, with its regular outings to the same places with the same group of people. Though she enjoyed golf, she did not share Fruity's other sporting interests and in any case the great bond of hunting, which had tied him so closely to the prince and caused him to give up his career in the Indian army, had been snapped—and Fruity without a purpose in life was very different from Fruity excelling at the job he loved.

The Metcalfes argued constantly about the sameness of their life and Baba's relationship with Tom Mosley, whose meetings she attended as regularly as she could (earning herself the nickname Baba Blackshirt from the diarist Chips Channon). The years of semi-sexual teasing had fed the passion she now felt for her brother-in-law; hypnotized by his physicality, his sexual expertise and the charm he could bring into play at will, Baba was hopelessly in love. Thus the advent of a powerful newcomer on the Metcalfes' social landscape went almost unremarked. When Thelma Furness had left on a trip to America in January 1934 she had asked her friend and fellow American, Wallis Simpson, to help entertain the prince. By the time Thelma returned in March, Wallis was in an impregnable position, though it took the prince's circle many months to realize the extent of her influence.

For Baba and Fruity, she merely replaced Freda Dudley Ward and Thelma Furness as dancing partners for the prince on the regular Thursday evenings at the embassy. Neither of them knew that Freda's dismissal after seventeen years of close affection and, on the prince's side, devotion, was as cruel as it was unexpected: one day when she telephoned the prince she was told by the weeping operator: “Madam, I have something so terrible to tell you I do not know how to say it. I have orders not to put you through.” If they had heard of this, they might have wondered how secure their own position was in the prince's life—and whether the job that he had promised Fruity on his eventual accession would materialize.

Sympathetic as Irene was to Baba's dissatisfaction with her life, she put the interest of her late sister's children first. More and more, she was becoming their surrogate mother rather than a devoted aunt. When Baba wanted her to entertain Fruity one night so that she herself could go out to dinner with Tom, Irene firmly refused, saying that it was near the anniversary of their sister's illness and death, and she was determined to go to Denham to support Viv through this sad time.

Tom won back a few good points by turning up—with Baba—at the nursing home where Micky was to have his tonsils out. The four of them sat in the waiting room with Nanny, who was struggling to hold back her tears during her precious baby's operation. “The beloved one went in so gallantly, giving the nurses the fascist salute,” wrote Irene that night. The operation was a complete success.

Baba's obsession with Tom had made her careless of her reputation. When she slipped away from one of Irene's dinner parties to go down and see him at Denham, Irene feared that such conduct would make people talk—if they were not already doing so. “I think it unnecessarily provocative and stupid on her part,” she wrote. Georgia Sitwell, one of Cim's closest friends and Tom's former mistress, was already aware of the situation and seized the opportunity to stir the pot. “Went to see Baba, made mischief, deliberately, with her about Diana Guinness,” runs her diary entry for March 1, 1934. Tom and Baba seemed to be becoming a couple, with Baba adopting Tom's views and both subtly patronizing Irene as not really understanding what fascism stood for.

On June 7 both sisters went to Tom's great meeting at Olympia. The BUF was now at the height of its popularity, with somewhere between thirty thousand and forty thousand members, many of them tough young men drawn to it by its aura of aggression. These trained at Blackshirt House, practicing judo, marching, drill and boxing, and, when needed, were taken to meetings in large vans with protective plating at the sides and wire mesh at the windows. Although the earlier meeting at the Albert Hall had passed off peacefully, trouble was expected on this occasion. The fascists' great claim was that they stood for law and order, while the communists were determined to expose them as thugs and bully boys.

The meeting started half an hour late, as those who tried to enter the hall were obstructed, but the fascist band played on brightly—Blackshirt songs to the music of the Giovinezza and the Horst Wessel Song. A new one had recently been added, called simply “Mosley!” It began:

 

Mosley, Leader of thousands!

Hope of our manhood, we proudly hail thee!

Raise we the song of allegiance

For we are sworn and shall not fail thee.

 

The BUF's use of banners, spotlights, music and uniforms was reminiscent of a Nuremberg rally in miniature. First, down the center aisle of the huge auditorium, packed with around fifteen thousand people, came Blackshirts carrying the banners of the various London districts, with their names in brass on top. After a sufficient pause to build up expectations came Tom, all in black—boots, breeches, shirt—his arm raised in the fascist salute with four of his lieutenants just behind him. With spotlights focused on him he mounted the platform and stood with the banners grouped below and his uniformed bodyguards to each side as thunderous roars of “Hail Mosley!” swept the hall. “I felt that Cim must be there,” wrote Irene, “and seeing all that she would be glad.”

Trouble came quickly, with constant heckling interruptions from communist opponents followed by, in Irene's phrase, “screaming, surging evictions,” with hand-to-hand fighting and weapons ranging from chair legs to spiked instruments and stockings filled with broken glass used as flails. “Very unpleasant,” wrote Georgia Sitwell, there with Baba and Irene, “terrifying crowd of roughs, dozens of fights, casualties, broken heads and glass. Left in middle feeling ill.”

Two days later the Blackshirts camped at Denham in one of the big barns at the side of the drive. Irene, who had driven down largely to see Micky, left quickly and drove over to Cliveden, but she could not escape discussion of her brother-in-law. Nancy Astor brought up the subject of Tom and his philandering yet again as they listened to him on the nine o'clock news. He was followed by Gerald Barry condemning the brutal bullying of the Blackshirt stewards, which he said was worse than during the Irish Troubles, and Brendan Bracken told Baba, when she eventually appeared indoors after hours spent walking the terrace with Grandi, that the Conservatives were so frightened of the BUF that they might rush a bill through forbidding the wearing of black shirts.

The rest of the house party also roundly condemned the Blackshirts' behavior. Irene, apart from Baba the only one who had actually attended the meeting, felt indignant: she believed it was the communists rather than the fascists who had initiated the rioting and disturbances. Soon afterward Baba left, to return to Fruity's bedside—he had pneumonia, a serious illness then. “I wish he would either die or recover,” said Nancy characteristically, “and not spoil Baba's happiness.”

On June 14, 1934, Cimmie's will was published. She had left property valued for probate at £20,951, with the whole of her residuary estate to be held in trust for her children and her jewelry, personal ornaments and watches to go to Viv as soon as she was eighteen. She left Savehay Farm to Tom, who was appointed executor along with the public trustee; with this official's agreement, the children's Leiter Trust money could be used for the upkeep of the family home.