As the Hereford VBCW sustains a sudden spasm of Spodemania, news that the Ludlow Peace & Reconciliation Institute has been suffering from a similar psychological condition - a long term bout of "Mitfordmania", with a variety of (relatively) recent blogposts on the notorious sisters:
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Diana Mitford (subsequently Guinness subsequently Mosley)
dressed as the Goddess Venus. Mistress and thereafter wife of
"The Leader" himself. |
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| Diana as the Goddess Venus - "colourised". |
These photographs, of Diana as Venus, were taken by a remarkable lady photographer of the 1930s, "Madame Yevonde" (aka
Yevonde Middleton), either at a party in Claridges in 1935, or at a subsequent studio sitting in the same year for Madame Yevonde's "Goddess" series i.e. English society ladies dressed as Classical Goddesses.
The Ludlow Peace & Reconciliation Institute's blogposts (so far) -
Whew ! Next up (sometime soon), the Stalin-loving "Red Sheep" of the Mitford Sisters, Jessica. And it surely can't be long before some 28mm "Mitford Sisters" appear in the Hereford VBCW itself.......
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After marriage but before "the Leader" - Diana seems to have
enjoyed dressing up - and displaying a rather arch sense of humour.
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Add Edit: The late great Christopher Hitchens, while reviewing Jan Dalley's "Diana Mosley : A Biography" for the London Review of Books back in 1999, caught something of the causes of Diana Mitford's enduring notoriety:
"...We are confronted, here, with the worst and not the least bright of the Bright Young Things: with a vile mind and a gorgeous carapace, and with a maddening class confidence allied to a tiny, repetitive tic of fanaticism. It is easy to see how Diana Mitford/Guiness/Mosley attracted the obvious cliches about the huntress and the nymph. Anyone with her first name, and a pleasing profile to boot, can earn such leaden gallantries.....She kept a circle of gay male friends, from Gerald Berners to Cecil Beaton, at a time when homosexuals were being whacked to a pulp in German and Italian prisons. When occasion demanded, she could speak with conviction about the 'old gang' of politicians, and about the woes of the unemployed. But something else made her different from dozens of other women and men of her class, who didn't share her Bloomsbury connections but did echo her enthusiasm for the New Order and the New Germany. Just this: she kept it up longer than most of them did and in more arduous conditions....it isn't quite accurate to say, as Dalley rather awkwardly phrases it, that "in her personal story there is an almost eerie absence of the horrors that underlie all our thinking about fascism, Nazism and the Second World War". Sir Oswald, for example, always tried very strenuously to distance himself from the horrors after 1945 and, though he was unconvincing in his rewriting, at least made the attempt. His widow has never even bothered to feign that effort, and is sometimes too languid and spiteful to conceal her prejudices even now. The subject clearly fatigues and irritates her. A part of her, like the ghastly girl in Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square, was and is secretly gleeful about fascism. Dalley describes as "unusual" her attendance at a Hyde Park rally in 1935, where she threw up her right hand in a Nazi salute while Clement Attlee was addressing a mild-as-milk protest against Hitler's early barbarities. It is improbable that she just stumbled on such an opportunity, or simply found herself taking it. That's on a par with her claim that Adolf Hitler was chief guest at her wedding because he lived so handily nearby and chanced to drop in. The illicit thrill of evil is the point - a thrill indulged by someone whose own circumstances and life chances gave no evident cause for complaint."
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| Diana Mosley by Jan Dalley |
