Ep 6 - Memories of the Mitford Sisters ft. Ben Treuhaft

so they've been called the most famous british siblings of the 20th century from the late 1920s to the 1960s the aristocratic mitford sisters crossed paths with most of the century's most iconic names more than anything they were known for the extreme political divisions between at least three of them unity metford like much of the english elite became a fanatical nazi sympathizer travelled to germany and became one of the closest acolytes of adolf hitler she attempted suicide at the outbreak of world war ii and died in 1948. diana left her immensely wealthy husband brian guinness for oswald moseley the leader of the british union of fascists who she married at the home of joseph goebbels with hitler as the guest of honor and they were imprisoned throughout much of the war the family outlier however was jessica who eloped to republican spain with churchill's nephew later her husband and became a devoted communist she later moved to california remarried and became a target of the mccarthy era witch hunts she spent the rest of her life as an investigative journalist was never reconciled with diana and died in 1996 at the age of 78. one of the few people still able to shed light on the lives of this extraordinary family is her son ben truhaft who i'm very pleased to say joins me from the uk i'm not sure if you're in edinburgh or coventry um at the moment edinburgh edinburgh well um as i said i'd start with kind of the most sensational aspect of the story so obviously she's much less well-known than ava brown but for a time unity metford was thought of as being a potential future mrs hitler so growing up and perhaps even now how did you process the possibility or the thought that had things been slightly different adolf hitler might conceivably have been your uncle it didn't really cross my mind um as was as did the fact um conjecture that they had a love child somewhere um i think some of the tabloids were saying that at the time um but beyond that conjecture and you know the bits that my mom wrote about uh her sister her favorite sister by the way um in her books i i don't know anything about unity i've never there's a book about her but i haven't read it by uh price jones um uh which uh i should have read before this interview either i would have given you more so was she kind of swept under the rug as it were you couldn't sweep unity under the rug she was in terms of your family life though which she never no yeah she never came up she came up a lot um because and as as in my mom's first uh autobiography autobiographical book says um uh they were very thick you know they were they were best mates all through childhood and um when unity went crazy and became a nazi and a jew hater is in in her own words um you know it crushed my my mother she was very sad about it and um but she didn't avoid the topic the person that she avoided was diana diana um unlike the other sisters who we all met you know my sister and i um diana was like off limits to us she [Music] yeah she has like famously put down um diana's invitations for um us to go visit her my sister did have to visit uh meet with diana at nancy mitford's death at her and her funeral and um it was decided that uh um that think you really should go and um i can't remember you should interview my sister she knows a lot more about me about these things that i but uh she um had some kind of very dire interactions with with uh diana at that point but she was on her orders to be by my mother to be on best behavior and not to disrupt the thing you know not to punch her or anything so she i don't think she did yeah um so which of them would you say you had the most contact with growing up you've said obviously not diana um um deborah debbo okay the yeah devil and um um [Music] i've i saw her many times briefly over the years i showed up at chatsworth in a uh like a very disreputable sports car with no no top in the rain um and [Music] the the butler let me write in and asked and said that i might be more comfortable in lord harkington's um morning suit for breakfast you know i had like they they took my my torn jeans and t-shirts and stuff and they pressed them and they laid them aside and they gave me a proper suit to wear and that was that was like you aren't familiar with deborah she is the late duchess of devonshire um so one of you know the top cream of english aristocracy with apparently quite close ties to the royal family so that must have been a very i would have liked to have been a fly on the wall to um to watch those interactions what was she like to interact with she was universally it um admired and loved everybody loved her um my mother and her she and my mother had um squabbles over the years but because you know they came from completely different classes or you know my mom being a class traitor married to his jewish classes right married to a jewish lawyer which scandalized debo and her in that family and that was a source of friction but they always got back together again and my father ended up being a very good friend of devos um and let's see the last time that i saw her she was kind of in the throes of dementia well besides i went to her funeral but this was a few years ago and at that time i had joined this a scottish church you know i'm like a jewish atheist but i joined the scottish church because it seemed kind of lovely this thing uh um in in edinburgh where i was living at the time it was basically as a church where i was the youngest member at 70 or something and um they were very radical and they were constantly going to palestine and getting [Music] and doing fundraising and stuff so i i decided to go to devos church while i was in england um visiting her and she has her own church you know on chatsworth grounds and her own vicar and her own row of seats in the front so i shambled up to the front and sat down um and uh it was scandalizing the entire uh congregation um and uh see i think right i probably did have shoes but i might not have and um uh but i found the church of england was not like the scottish presbyterians the ones that i knew anyway i found it kind of boring so i left it pretty quickly so she was quite famous for being completely apolitical so that like whatever political differences jessica or or you had with her clearly doesn't sound like there were very many well and also she's very very funny about being she is a tory you know she was a tory i mean through and through but she was very funny about it so um she was completely forgiven by everybody that on the left because she was hilarious she's a very good writer she wrote about all this stuff well speaking of writers um the most famous of the family is probably nancy metford um who's i keep getting them confused um but one of them the pursuit of love has just been remade as an amazon show um i haven't watched it but i wonder if maybe if referring to the book if not the show how much of that is a true reflection of how your mother and your aunts were brought up you know i watched the first bit of it because i i like that uh the star of it this woman uh deb oh i can't remember her name uh anyway um but i didn't like it too much so i haven't watched it really uh didn't like the the first bit it might get better it had a hugely great reviews um but you know i imagine it went over the same stuff that you're talking about and it did i'm sure it was accurate because there's so much of it is written down you know because there's the big medford industry as you as you must have known know by now um the you know if you write a book about the medfords you're guaranteed a payday in in in the uk so um i mean i'd be i'd be extremely interested to ask you about diana but it sounds like you wouldn't have much to say about her um is that true i don't know about diana but did you want to meet her earlier in life when you're forbidden no no i was brainwashed i was brainwashed against her by my red mother don't go near that awful woman and then later i i heard that she was the most beautiful of all the midford sisters but i look back at the pictures and i don't agree um i mean my mother and debo are pretty nice um too and um uh and by the way um the one sister that nobody talks about much is pam pam yeah yeah um and uh um i think i did meet pam very briefly one time but seeing uh learning a little bit more about her and seeing her on a uh [Music] on there's the thing called the mitfridge society and i was roped into going to one of their dues at a at a um at one of these stately homes it's called the national trust house in acne and um in london and they they had um they had the hans cupboard they had um they had a room where there was uh swastikas and hammer and sickles cut into the glass by diamond rings and they had a video room um and in the video room i saw and everybody dressed in the period you know and it was really a nice event and in the video room i saw pam at length for the first time and she's hilarious she's just i think she was could have been the funniest one of all of them what year was this well this hackney thing um it must have been 2014. it's the midfield okay you went okay so you weren't meeting her in person no i know i just saw her the video of her for the first time i i saw her at length you know okay i like her i mean of course yeah when you say that you met her briefly when when was that well i must have been about 11 years old or something and my mom was writing um her autobiography and and she was visiting england and france and she took me along i think that was when it was and did you meet nancy um yeah nancy i met a few times yes um nancy nancy um is very dear to my heart because when i met her she gave me what's known as a tip which is five pounds to go to battersea park or something with so um i was also 11 i think at that time and then i i don't think i met her much more but we spent some time with her in uh her house in paris yeah so it wasn't battersea park she gave me a tip some money to spend in paris anyway so yeah what were you saying you say that you were brainwashed by your mother against diana i'm interested like i mean was she not that bad or no i think she was worse if anything but my my mother was desperately angry with her because of um her anti-semitism basically um and her unrepentant love for the you know this fascist thug that she married and um so she basically i don't know if my mother hated too many people she she liked to lampoon people but she actively hated diana and that kind of rubbed off on me so she was possibly worse than she was made out i couldn't imagine i i just see pictures of her i listened to her talking on videos and she seems just really vile um as i say i would have been brainwashed against her so who knows you know she might be perfectly nice but i don't think so well i mean you mentioned these videos like they're easily searchable on youtube and i mean i can say like the first time she comes across as an incredibly charming person but at the same time like it's very noticeable how she dodges questions like i'm trying to think of specific examples like why did you find hitler such an interesting like what what about him made you like him and she's just like oh he was just a fascinating sort of man you know he was completely different from anyone else or um i'm trying to think of the other example just these non-answers that kind of suggest that you know she was really holding back what she actually thought because she knew that it wasn't it wouldn't be socially acceptable i think she probably also denied that the black shirt for anti-semites which is laughable and you know i'm sure she thought jews were perfectly sweet things but um i don't i don't think she would tell the truth about that so do you have a theory about why jessica rebelled so much against her family because that was presumably a very difficult thing for someone in her position of her class particularly to do no i don't know i i i mean maybe it's just that she got politics so early in life you know and she realized that um she has what we call now white privilege but she had a lot more than that and she she um felt that uh she didn't like to be in that i don't know i think she got politics very early like probably under the age of 13 i think and um i don't know i mean i i can't think of any other reason why she would have left you know because she just hated the environment of the upper classes and she wanted to be with she wanted to find out what people were like you know in the world and she did so did she have obviously unity and diana had their interactions with one side of the political spectrum what kind of interactions if any did jessica have with the other side if at all were the reds the communists the communist party well she was um a devoted communist you know and uh she she and esmond her the husband that was killed in the war um were i don't know if they had planned to join the communist party but they were reds through and through and they were um partisans in the spanish civil war um and when uh let's see then they they moved to america and at that point i think they were just kind of like struggling to get along to to work and to make some kind of a life there um but of course in the back of their mind was the war that was coming and the war that eventually killed esmen and um so i don't know i i i know that they met a bunch of left-wing americans and they stayed with them in the south in the middle of um you know while the other southerners were busy kind of lynching their fellow men um these people were progressives in the south they weren't communists um and then um when so when when esman was killed and then later deca met bob my father um they they both wanted to join the communist party and i think it was a pretty popular cause among their fellows in washington dc which is where they were both working and when they moved to california that's the first thing they did was join the communist party and get my mother got deeply deeply involved in it that is raising money and um doing campaigns for anti-racist campaigns and stuff so um uh of course the the right wing and and the american mainstream at that's this point was terribly anti-communist and um um you know portrayed these people like my mom uh as being dupes of the kremlin and um uh taking moscow gold but it actually wasn't like that you know it was more like they were um working against police brutality in oakland california and there was plenty of that to work on and my father was defending black poor black defendants and stuff and uh that was their their brand of communism and you know they and they studied marx and they they they went to party meetings eventually i think my mom was i don't think she was kicked out for making jokes but uh she eventually did leave they did they did leave in sometime in the in in the 50s and inevitably they became well you all by the sounds of it got caught up in the mccarthy witch hunts can you describe what that was like yeah because i have a tape of my father somehow kept this tape uh it was a real surreal i had it transformed transcribed onto uh dvd he had the tape of of himself answering questions of the uh the california un-american activities committee in 1951 and he was dragged in uh because he was defending a lot of communists at that time and um they got to ask him one question and they the question was are you represented by council and then he says well because of your committee's um [Music] he's so much more articulate than me but anyway he said basically because of the uh uh the climate of of fear and hostility and danger that your committee has has made its living uh provoking uh no you know and so he answered this question he didn't just say no he said no at the end of an hour of explaining what the committee was doing to the public and to the lawyers and the lawyers he was he'd um contacted will you raise your right answer you solemnly swear in the testimony you're about to give before this supplement to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the peace to help you back please what is your name please sir my name is robert e truhaft t-r-e-u-h-a-f-t are you accompanied by council are you accompanied by council just a moment please lawyers have this problem [Music] what did you say i say lawyers have this problem i sort of think it would be a problem heard several immediately appreciated no audible comment of course the testimony mr taverner i am obliged to appear as a witness before this committee uh will you answer the question please sir i am answering the questions uh mr off will you please answer the question sir following which you will be given every opportunity to explain your reasons i am answering the question i failed to hear an answer to the question uh i heard you begin to explain that you were appearing before the committee which is quite an obvious fact uh uh i was asked whether i had counsel that's correct will you i am answering that question his answer is may i be permitted to answer the question i wish you would answer the question i am obliged to appear before this committee without the assistance of counsel mr taverner because of the fact that the repressive activities of this committee have made it impossible for me to secure the assistance of attorneys of my choice this is a serious charge for a lawyer to make i'm compelled however to make it because the state of affairs that i have found to exist in this regard is truly shocking a month ago i received a subpoena calling for my appearance before this committee my law partner and i have been for many years and are now general counsel for the east bay division of warehouse union local 6 ilw a labor organization which is one of the principal targets under attack by this committee this fact i am sure was well known to the committee's investigators and i cannot doubt the suspicion that my representation of this union had something to do with the fact that my law partner and i are the only east bay lawyer subpoenaed before the committee at these hearings so far as i know so this hour ends with the courtroom being cleared because everybody's standing and cheering uh it was he was brilliant you know in this thing they only got to answer one question ask him one question and by the end they were so flustered they forgot to tell him to come back and produce you know evidence and things like that he was off he was scot-free after that and what do you remember of the you know the degree of intrusion into your lives at that time well you know we were or were you not aware of it really you know we were we were because you know in school you were you you shouldn't really go around saying you were a communist i think we did anyway just to annoy the teachers um what kind of i don't know if advice is maybe the right word but maybe wisdom that you could give or that you think your parents might give to people experiencing similar things today well in in our family um we laughed a lot of it off and we were lucky enough to be able to because a lot of people can't laugh it off and their their lives were you know they lost their livelihoods basically during that stuff my father i suppose got extra work although it was unpaid um defending the the folks but in in primary school um my friend alan and i used to go around and like we were we would approach people and ask them if they were capitalists or communists and um like deal with them one way or the other i don't think we we hurt anybody but we tried to intimidate them but it didn't work at all i think you know i mean when it wasn't being vicious it was absurd and so i think there's a lot of um fun made of the mccarthyise in our family anyway do you think that was the experience for most people or were you the lucky few well i think that we were the few the you know most people had it it was a really scary time apparently and you know people had to go underground they had to or they thought they had to go underground and they did and they um missed out on you know their family for i think some of them for years so how did decker's politics evolve in her later years i'm thinking particularly how she reacted to the end of the cold war and the end of the soviet union how did she interpret those changes well by the time of the end of the soviet union um deca and her friends were already done with with the soviet communism i mean um and then so let's see so i mean 1990 in 1980 and 1990 yeah so deck was only alive for um a few years after the end of the soviet union but i mean they very much defended cuba for example um um and cuba itself it was estranged from the soviet union um so she'd become like an anti-soviet communist no not at all but she understood the um uh oh see what am i even qualified to answer about on her behalf what she would have thought i don't think i am your impression of how what she thought i mean during the during the uh 50s and 60s or early 60s um that the she was accused of being um of taking moscow gold and being a stalinist um and she never was she never you know of course they didn't make any money off of this um and uh um and they they witnessed you know the thing things like the ethel rosenberg being executed um and she she witnessed the horrors of the anti-soviet uh movement and the tendency of the u.s so i think she was uh just observing it all i don't find her pro or anti she was anti-american reaction to the soviet union that's for sure because you mentioned that she and your father left the communist party sometime in like the late 50s i was wondering if maybe that was a reaction because by then presumably details about life under stalin was coming out and he was you know to a lot of people he would have been quite thoroughly discredited i wonder if that was maybe uncle joe was discredited that's true but um uh truthfully i don't really know um that that is covered so well in her book um uh what is it called uh tons of nibbles or something well the next one uh the fine old conflict with final conflict is that the name is the take off on it's the fine oh conflict and uh she called it the fine old conflict and uh she she details what happened at the end of the final conflict when she quit the communist party but i can't remember exactly how that went down i know she was accused of leaving it too late um so you know she must be a horrible stalinist but um and she's also accused of being blind to some of the they went to hungary and that she this is in her letters and and her book um final conflict she went to hungary uh in like 1956 or something at the in the eve of the soviet invasion and she didn't notice that anything was wrong she thought it was like the socialist paradise but apparently like you know it was horrible there so she was sort of vague in that in that sense you know so she did miss that um but she didn't miss much usually so i don't really know what happened uh after that but it was shortly after that they did leave did she feel similarly about china i don't know what she felt about china okay about communist communism in china i don't know if she bob and bob went to cuba uh a few times with other lawyers i don't think he ever went to uh china but he went to north korea with a bunch of left-wing lawyers and he found that a really weird place of course yeah like bad weird it gave he had a negative view of it you know of course you know i i can't remember exactly what his i hope he wrote something about it i i wish he had written more because he had a lot of good uh insight political insight about stuff but yeah he um he was um amused and horrified at the same time uh about his trip to north korea he also went to uh portugal during the i guess at salazar during that regime and i think he was jailed for a minute there um also with left-wing lawyers you know so um he was they were just very curious about it that's what made my mom a good writer i think uh and you know he of course he helped write those books he was very very involved in them he did a lot of the writing and the editing of of them so um you know their tendency to be curious about things for example about um life in the southern u.s you know what we a lot of people would dismiss as a bunch of crackers or something you know people from berkeley but um uh she actually went into and lived with folks down there and um went on lots of uh what went on um like trips in support of people that were being wrongly accused of stuff down there um and and her whole take on on the usa i mean this english aristocrat ended up in america well why why did she stay in america because she actually loved the americans and their their um she found them endlessly fascinating and interesting and weird the deck was famously um much more comfortable in the us than she was in stuffy old england you know so how much would you say that the that you and your sister i'm not sure if you have other siblings but how much have you carried on the politics of your parents and decker in particular my sister is like uh like don't know how to describe it but she's she was part of the movement that fixed the whole us civil rights problem in the south she um went down to you left uh university early just short of her degree um because it was a stuffy uh like ivy league place that she she realized that she really didn't belong in and she instead went down to help organize uh the um um like she she went to work with student nonviolent coordinating committee um and ended up marrying the director of it um jim foreman um and having um uh i don't think i mean i think she stayed out of jail but she and but she she raised a lot of money for for the cause in new york and um uh which she's doing today till uh still about um she she's part of a group called the janine freedom theater and they they're in in palestine um in a place that was you know destroyed by israeli tanks uh a decade ago and they're building out of the rubble um a theater where girls and boys can can um learn acting together and sort of put down their guns and take up acting the director of that um a fellow named giuliano was murdered by somebody that didn't like his sense of humor we don't know if it was the arabs or the israelis because you know he was it could have been either one because he was challenging the israelis he's an israeli jew by the way um is he jewish yeah um and uh um and and you know the he was the girls and boys were in this acting together and the the hardcore islamists didn't like that so we don't know who killed them that he was shot down near the theater but these are um things that think he's been doing he's she's never stopped she worked for national healthcare when she was a nurse at um until she retired at bellevue hospital in new york um and she's constantly on the picket line i'm a lot less on the picket line um because i'm a humble piano tuner i don't really have a say you know in these things but i do go out from time to time and i did organize this tease on the clinton administration called send a piano to havana where we sent 250 pianos to cuba in spite of the u.s embargo and we had a program there for uh over 10 years but that's the only big activist thing i've ever done um that was something i neglected to ask about how your mother felt about the arab israeli conflict she was on the right side of that one she didn't you know i mean i guess she would call herself i guess they would call my father a self-hating jew he's jewish you know and um uh but uh he was um anti-zionist completely into his zionists yeah of course and they're atheists too both of them um uh and i can't remember what all she did but she was an anti-zionist for sure so how much do you see sort of the the historical cycle repeating itself do you think that the the same that we are essentially to some degree reliving what your mother and aunts experienced in the 20s and 30s and 40s you mean you're asking me if i've studied the marxist dialectic of materialism and what we're destined to no i have not um and i don't really have a clue that's one reason i miss my father so much because he's on top of that stuff he'll know where we are in the cycle you know now i i just take it day by day you know um living under boris johnson and uh until recently donald trump um it's been really strange lately you know but i don't know about the cycles of history i would have liked to have read or heard what um deca would have said about either of those two is there anything that you can remember that maybe might not be publicly well known that you're a member of any of them including your mother i don't think we have too many dark secrets that's the thing um because it's all in the letters and the biographies or just amusing anecdotes um well um you know when when deca died she was working on um her the revision of the um her best seller you know the american way of death she was working on that um she was updating it 30 years after it became like the the new york times number one bestseller for the year 1963 or something and then and it laid waste to the funeral industry industry in the us and so she was updating it and she found out all kinds of things that really hadn't improved since since that book came out for example um there's a the service corporation of america has um sdi no service corporation something incorporated sci whatever it is um has bought up all the funeral homes in the u.s and in the in england by the way they all like all these like small um cooperative looking or not you know like single owner um uh undertakers are not anymore most many of them were brought up by sci and she was investigating this their headquarters were in um texas in houston and um she's she had a long long conversation they invited her to come and speak um to come and meet with the head of the corporation and um she was all ready to go and then they changed their mind they said no we decided we don't want to meet you and we're just very smart of them but anyway it annoyed the hell out of her and um so this went back and forth and people were threatening lawsuits and stuff and then um [Music] i it was everything was by fax in those days so i got a hold of one of the letters she faxed to me um from them and um uh and my fax machine kept on having these things you know like i have to get up and go look at the damn facts so this one was um from them and i i altered it i altered it to say uh from uh um their their lawyers were called macd mcdade and fogler and um i changed it to say mcdead and fooler but she didn't notice that and um i said dear ms midford um you know we know that we're having a lot of trouble getting together on this trip of yours but what we want basically is for you to like us and if you'd only say that you like us then you will you can come you know anytime you want or something like that i wrote this kind of smarmy letter written by an undertaker and she completely took it took it in you know she thought it was she was on her way to houston and um that was that was she she found that a particularly cruel truth tease i was sorry i did that well it sounds like you were carrying on the family tradition yeah yeah i tried to learn to tease as well as she did that's true were there any like particular ones that you remember that she maybe played on you as a child or on other people was she was horrible we went to uh mexico and you know dinky was like 13 at the uh or like 17 you know and i was like 10. and we were in there in a and you know 17 year old girls are easily mortified and my mother took advantage of that and um we were sitting in in a dimly lit restaurant and um waiting for the food and there was a parrot in the place you know and my mother i can't do this but she went and then people were looking and they didn't know exactly where it was coming from so she did it again dinky was like slinking you down in her chair and and um and then like i said several people noticed that and then she was pretending it wasn't her and thinking maybe the people were thinking it was dinky that's the kind of thing she did or if you were getting on the bus with a handful of change and you were bob in this 50s um she would hit the change out of your hand and you'd have to go scrambling for it i mean it's a very cruel person in that way so how do you feel about what you've described as the mitford industry that's grown up i've avoided it entirely i haven't read most of the books um and um you know you know dinky is quite close to was close to debo um and i was i was in a kind of i mean i i saw her from time to time but thank you sorry i think every year and she keeps up with the english cousins and things the mosleys um um who are not as bad as max mosley at all i mean sorry they're not as bad as sir oswald mosley for example max mosley was a pal of ours this formula formula one guy that was that tried to disgrace him uh as being like a nazi fetishist or something like that a few years ago and we defended him on that but dinky uh but i don't know these folks very very well i don't go to england all that well now i live there but i don't see them yeah that would be something i'd i'm i'd be interested to ask her because max died i noticed relatively recently so do you think he perhaps changed in his later life from being supportive of from being supportive of his father's politics i mean i don't know how supportive he was um but i i mean the um my my guru here on like um british politics named tony greenstein he's a anti-zionist who's constantly being attacked and arrested and stuff like that but he has a very brilliant blog and and in it once he he mentioned um um max mosley as being a thug of some kind and i wrote i said i don't think he really is um um and that tony wrote back with some example of where he max had shown um you know anti-democratic tendencies i think he is probably just too rich to be one of the people i i don't know but um he didn't seem that objectionable to me i i i don't think he he had to make a huge change i think he was just an upper-class fellow that um just suffered from that i think i don't think the big fascist or anything but it seems that diana was unrepentant to the end yeah that's apparently and i think max defended diana maybe that was the thing that uh that tony didn't like i i don't remember yeah you know she she she was um just horrible when you see her interviewed about those and questioned about that i think you mentioned she um was good at evading those questions yeah and really turning on the charm um she seemed to be very skilled at that but one of the um i'm pretty sure she would have made this excuse and i think others have as well particularly in regards to her and unity that oh well back then this was before people knew what a monster hitler actually was and i mean i would have thought if you were if you had him as a guest of honor at your wedding and that wedding was at the house of joseph goebbels like it seems quite unlikely that you could be unaware of what he was actually like and what he stood for i mean deca certainly knew and you know i think that was the occasion she was gonna nip along with the partygoers with a gun and off hitler but she didn't get around to doing that but she easily could have done by the sounds of it she just preferred not to be a martyr i don't know how what i mean she has a lot of ideas you know like the one where she was going to sell the island that she inherited to the russians for a missile base and uh off the coast of the like the inner hebrides and those are mostly just um fantasies that she like to live out but i think she did um slightly regret not killing hitler when she could have had the chance but um [Music] i know that would have been the end of her that would might have not been the end of nazism though who knows i don't know yeah probably not but it's just yeah it's astonishing to think of you know that that was even potentially an option for her like the access that she could easily have had you so do you have an idea of what um like unity for example do you think she was kind of just acting out wanting to be like her bigger sister or do you think like there was something actually wrong with her i don't know i don't know i don't know the her um well i don't know what what led her to be such a weird person i don't know and just know that she was my mother's favorite and then um i get i got what's it called um you know carried away by the fame of of of hitler and and uh his like pro-aryan policies that would have been good for her i i don't know why this happened a lot of people were carried away by hitler she has had a chance to meet him by stalking him at the restaurant such a yeah fascinating subject that you know i'm really glad that we were able to hear your thoughts and your recollections on so thank you very much again you know sam you should join the medford society there's this person called um uh lindsey spence like like a really glamorous woman um who um who's all about the medfords and other weird people you know and but she has the midford society if you can locate her uh uh lindsay spence you should and just sort of follow her a bit or i'm sure she writes a lot of stuff that you would be interested in i think i might have messaged her to try and find some photos that i can use so maybe that is her i'm not sure but she's going to organize that amazing thing at the in the in the house in hackney with the mitt ridge thing along with the medford quiz and the hans cupboard and the video room it was just in the uh everybody was photographed in fancy dress it was really quite good i thought it was going to be boring i only went because um somebody from australia said she was going to meet me there a biographer of deca who i don't think ever actually wrote the biography and then she never actually showed up so i was there by myself but i enjoyed myself quite a bit is that all due to lindsay spence well it seems unlikely that the legend around your mother and her sisters is um i don't think it's going to go away any time soon so maybe if there's another big event in the future um perhaps i'll meet you there i don't know yeah yeah i'll see you at the at the midford society excellent see you there all right see you later sam [Music] you

Channel: knownsunknown

Views: 31,927

Keywords: Mitford Sisters, Mitfords, Jessica Mitford, Diana Mitford, Unity Mitford, Nancy Mitford, Deborah Mitford, Pamela Mitford, Decca, Debbo, Pursuit of Love, Adolf Hitler, Oswald Mosley

Id: MSpvo87Osss

Length: 55min 50sec (3350 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 02 2021