- My name's Dan Snow and I wanna tell you about History Hit TV. It's like the Netflix for history. Hundreds of exclusive
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TV, and use the code Timeline. You get a special introductory offer. Go and check it out. In the meantime, enjoy this video. (dramatic music) (intense music) - [Narrator] Europe at the
beginning of the 20th century was a seething mass of tensions. Advances in technologies brought about unimaginable destruction. Old regimes were clinging onto power and new ones were eager
to establish themselves. Many of the citizens of
Europe were forced to decide which moral compass they wished to adopt. Families became fractured, and none embodied this split
more than the Mitford sisters. (dramatic music) - I think the fact there were six of them, and that they were mainly home-schooled, meant that they could spark
off each other in a way that was in some ways very productive and other ways quite damaging. - Until really very late in life, Diana thought of Winston Churchill as a dreadful war criminal
who was worse than Hitler. - In grammar school, when the
subject of communism came up and the horrors of it,
I would raise my hand and try to give the
other side of the story, and it didn't work out so well. (dramatic music) - [Narrator] Jessica the
communist and Diana the fascist were separated by only a few years in age, but were poles apart in ideology. - For Jessica, who had
romanticized Diana so much, there was a wide gap between the Diana who Jessica had looked up to
and the Diana who now existed. - They had a zest for
publicity, at any cost. Diana would have been perfectly capable, if she'd been a normal, sensible person, of living quietly in Paris and not always picking quarrels
with Jessica in public. And she, likewise, wanted to go on attacking her sister as an old Nazi. So, they both enjoyed the publicity. - It was what they were like. The rivalries and the interplay of it was just, almost infinite. - It started out as this rivalry. I'm a Red, you're a Nazi,
but it wasn't serious, and when it became serious,
it became horrible. (dramatic music) - [Narrator] Like so
many others of their era, their personal and political lives became so entwined that
they ultimately shattered the once-strong and loving
bonds of sisterhood. (dramatic music) (explorative music) The Mitford sisters were
perhaps the most famous siblings of 20th-century Britain. Nancy, Pamela, and Diana,
Unity, Jessica, and Deborah. Born between 1904 and 1920, the six aristocratic women were
witty, eccentric, beautiful, and ever-controversial. But they were far from
a pack of duplicates. Fiercely competitive,
each sister sought out her own distinct identity, and clashed with the other
siblings as a result. - They were born into
this rather remote house in the Oxfordshire countryside, and, in a way, I think that's
the clue to the whole story, because they didn't, properly speaking, have any friends, they had one another. And life was a nursery game,
even for the older ones, but certainly for the younger ones. - All of them were born either before, during or after the First World War. So, they were born into a world that was just about to change massively. - Those six very competitive,
rivalrous, bright sisters, all sort of flashing off each other. Semi-feral and, in another
way, very protected, because they'd never crossed
the road alone, you know, until they were 16 or something,
or probably not even then. It was an odd, unrepeatable mixture. - They had no proper friends
and no entertainment. So, all family entertainment
in these English country houses were in the family, and
you showed off like mad, and you did charades, and you
did silly acts and tricks. They carried that into public life. (gentle music) - [Narrator] The family did
not possess vast wealth. The Mitford's father, Lord Redesdale, was an energetic and
theatrical personality, but had little financial sense. His money troubles
repeatedly forced the family to sell off land and other property. They eventually settled in
the village of Swinbrook, Oxfordshire, in a house
Redesdale built himself. There, a new dynamic developed among the later Mitford children, Jessica, Unity, and Deborah. They made up their own languages,
formed secret societies, and played silly pranks. But for Jessica, the glamorous
Diana was always her idol. - I don't think it's
possible she looked at Diana other than with huge
admiration to start with. - I think Diana had a huge
effect upon everybody pretty much who ever met her, which includes me. I met her not long before she died, and I've thought about her
probably every week since. She could have charmed Karl Marx, I think, even though her politics were
somewhat to the right of his, and she was very warm, and very funny. - Jessica hero-worshiped her, partly because she was the most beautiful and partly because she was the cleverest and she was very widely
read in European literature. - Jessica said she was like
the perfect older sister. She had this marvelous
sort of moon-goddess look, this incredibly dynamic
serenity about her. She had every gift a woman could have. - I think any young girl in
that situation would look up to her older sister, it
would be difficult not to. I mean, her older sister was
living this life of glamor, of freedom, it seemed very
perfect and very romantic to her. (dramatic music) - [Narrator] Both Diana and Jessica were fiercely intelligent, but
neither girl attended school. Instead, they were given free rein of the family's extensive library and a governess was employed
to educate them at home. - They were educated in
quite a piecemeal manner. Sometimes they had governesses,
sometimes they didn't, sometimes they were just
allowed to roam free. - They weren't taught properly. It was considered common
to send girls to school, and anyway they were very wild. - They were incredibly intelligent girls, so being home-schooled influenced them according to their personalities,
really, one might say. It wasn't quite as defining
an element as, I think, we, with our possibly more
conventional view of schooling, sort of, now view it. (dramatic music) - [Narrator] This informal education was an early battleground for Jessica. She wanted to go to school
like other children, but it was forbidden by her stern mother. This desire to go against family tradition was a pointer to greater
rebellions to come. And she was not the only sister chafing against parental expectations. By 1928, Diana was 18 and bored. She longed to leave the
drudgery of life at home. Already a renowned society beauty, she knew the power she
could wield over men. This would be her escape route. Bryan Guinness met Diana
at a summer ball in 1928. He was far from the first
to fall in love with her, but Guinness was tall,
handsome, intelligent, and, as heir to the brewery
giant that bore his family name, enormously wealthy. - She was 18 and she married him and he adored her, and all
his friends adored her. - She fell in love with
Bryan Guinness because he was a bit like the hero of
one of Tolstoy's novels. He saw himself as being
like Levin in Anna Karenina. The sort of gentleman farmer
who lived in the country, wrote poems, mixed with literary people. Their best friends were Lytton Strachey and the Bloomsbury Set. - She believed she was in love
with him after she met him, but she married him very young. She'd not really seen much of the world. - [Narrator] Despite
the initial resistance of Diana's parents, who
thought her too young, the couple's engagement
was soon announced. They were married in St
Margaret's, Westminster, on the 29th of January, 1929. The couple soon became a fixture
of the London social scene, and the bright young
things of the day flocked to the newlyweds' elegant
home near Buckingham Palace. Jessica marveled at her
older sister's life. Diana had the looks, the wealth, and soon the happy young children too, but it was, if anything, too perfect. (dramatic music) - She very quickly found him boring. His diaries are unintentionally
a comic masterpiece, because he would say, "Had
dinner, Lytton Strachey, Winston Churchill dropped
in for drinks afterwards. We also met Jean-Paul Sartre." He would put, "A bit boring," at the end. So, he had no interest
at all in this stream of supposedly amusing people
who are coming to see them. - She had this very
austere brain, and I think, although it was very nice
being written about in Tatler, you know, "Mrs. Guinness wore trousers. Let's all wear trousers
like Mrs. Guinness," you know, all that nonsense. I think she was kind of bored, actually. - When she married him, she
came into this glittering world of London, of parties, of Evelyn Waugh, of this kind of Vile Bodies,
Bright Young Things world. And she realized that
the world was much bigger than she had previously believed it to be. - She had this marvelous dog,
this fantastic wolfhound, and she used to feed him
raw meat from her hands. And that almost felt like a symbol of what was really something
more earthy than she wanted. And then, of course, she met Mosley. (audience applauding)
(audience cheering) - [Narrator] It was at
a lunch in February 1932 that Diana met Sir Oswald Mosley. Mosley had once been the youngest MP in the House of Commons, but by 1932, he had abandoned
first the Conservatives and then the Labour Party,
to strike out as leader of his own political organization. Inspired by the Italian
dictator Mussolini, Mosley christened his new party the British Union of Fascists. Diana was soon intoxicated by him. Her future, that of her sister Jessica, and the whole Mitford family
would be changed forever. (somber music) Born into privilege,
Diana and Jessica Mitford had grown up in the
aristocratic world of the 1920s. To the young Jessica, it
must have seemed that Diana had struck gold when she
married Bryan Guinness in 1929. But this gilded life bored Diana, and in 1932, she began an
affair with Oswald Mosley. (dramatic music) - Oswald Mosley had been the rising hope of the Labour Party, Chancellor
of the Duchy of Lancaster in Ramsay MacDonald's cabinet. And he'd been a war hero, and he really believed in
socialism as the answer for the dreadful poverty
and social problems which faced Britain after
the First World War. Obviously, he was a sort
of power maniac as well, and one could say a very
unpleasant individual. But I think his political ideas were perfectly genuine and idealistic. - I think the thing about
Mosley was he was sexy. Not to us, but she
definitely thought he was. He got through society women
like nobody's business. - He was a fantastic womanizer
and she was very beautiful, and she was extremely
bored by her marriage. (ominous music) - [Narrator] Diana, still only 22, was entranced by Mosley
from their first meeting. He was handsome and charismatic, with a forceful personality. Quite different to Diana's
gentle, poetic husband Bryan. Within months, she
would ask for a divorce. At the beginning of 1933, she
left the luxurious family home she had built with the Guinness heir and moved into a rundown flat
near Mosley in Belgravia. - She said to me, "I became very poor." This meant a slightly
smaller house in Belgravia. But she did, relatively,
she gave up everything. She gave up a lovely
husband, really lovely man, and she gave up her social position, she gave up an idyll, really. - Diana said if you were
married to a Guinness, and then stopped being
married to a Guinness, you always feel poor, however rich you are compared with the rest of the world. - She said that she knew that
the only way that it would end between them would be
with one of them dying. - She was literally swept off
her feet by Oswald Mosley. And they had this passionate
affair, which caused great scandal and grief
to everybody around them. She was determined to marry him. He was the one man in
her life, as it were. - She used to go to
these terrible rallies, the infamous one at Olympia in 1934. She would just sit there. They'd have had a dinner party
before, probably, you know, asparagus and souffles and things, and then she'd go and
sit among these maniacs, hurling chairs and
knuckle dusters and stuff. She must have, in some
unfathomable way, liked it. - If you look at the upper class and the upper middle class
in Britain at the time, their natural sympathy, so
horrified were they by communism, was to side with the
fascists, if necessary. There was enormous unemployment. And when you saw the rise of Hitler, who appeared to have eliminated
unemployment in 18 months, it was very hard not to
think, here was a man who was capable of bringing to pass what Keynes had written about
in his economic textbooks. (dramatic music) - [Narrator] The affair with
Mosley did more than just stun the rest of the Mitford family, it also created a model for
Diana's sisters to follow. Jessica too was attracted
to strong personalities, and she would soon make her own escape from the stifling world
of the aristocracy. Unlike Diana, however,
it was left-wing politics that Jessica embraced. - As a young girl, her thinking about the state of the nation was
incredibly similar to Diana's. She was exercised by the
terrible unemployment. She thought Britain was going
to hell and nobody cared. All the same things that Diana had said, but it took her in the other direction. (explosions booming) - The whole development of
what was going in Spain, Germany, Italy, you couldn't
sit back and be indifferent to it if you were a person of any sensitivity or intelligence. - The 20th century was defined
by these polarizing forces of communism on the one
side, fascism on the other, and the sisters would become
very subject to these forces. - I think there are
moments in political life, the English Civil War is one such, where one side of the family might be supporting Oliver
Cromwell and the other the King. I think it's quite often the case that families divide in
this way, and that people who are engaged intellectually
in their own times are bound to feel strongly. - She was completely sincere, but at the same time, there
is this element of posturing, because whatever they did,
they were still who they were. Even when they got themselves into these terrible situations, they were still who they were, had this absolute confidence
of the upper class. - [Narrator] Jessica's
childhood idolization of Diana gave way to bitter opposition. She became an angry, rebellious teenager, defining herself against
the extreme associations of not only Diana but
also her sister Unity. Jessica and Unity had been
mischievous co-conspirators in childhood, as close as sisters can be. But in the 1930s, as Jessica
explored socialist politics, Unity became obsessed with the Nazis. Their shared room at home was
soon decked half in swastikas and half in communist banners. - It started out as this rivalry. I'm a Red, you're a Nazi,
but it wasn't serious, and when it became serious, it became horrible for my mother. - Unity got in very deeply. She got in far too deep. - Unity was out there, she had her flat, she was learning German. She kept going to a restaurant
where Hitler had his lunch, and she just sat there waiting for him to call her over to the table, and she's like this
breathless teenage crush. (Hitler speaking in German) - Heil, heil, Fuhrer! - The way she describes it, the Mitford idiom makes it so sinister. All this blissful Fuhrer. "Oh, the Fuhrer was in a rage today, oh, it was so exciting." I mean, is this for real? (dramatic music) - [Narrator] With her
extraordinary Mitford confidence, Unity charmed the dictator. She was invited to join him and other top Nazis at social occasions. Diana was soon accompanying her. The pair attended Nuremberg rallies and watched the Berlin
Olympic Games in 1936 as honored guests. - Unity was still going back to Munich at the end of the '30s. Going to watch the Wagner at Bayreuth, she was in Austria when it was annexed. It wasn't a sexual
relationship with Hitler, but she was his close
companion, no question. He liked her. And Diana was there too. - They became quite
close friends with him. They were quite deeply ingrained
with the inner Nazi Party. - Diana, who was a sophisticate, she liked mingling with
the Nazi High Command, she liked mingling with powerful
men, like some women do. She wasn't repelled by their politics. (dramatic music) - [Narrator] Diana's visits
were not just social calls. The British Union of Fascists were in severe financial difficulty, so Diana used her
connections with senior Nazis to secure vital support. It is perhaps no surprise,
then, that Germany was where Diana and Mosley finally married. The ceremony took place on
the 6th of October, 1936, at the house of Joseph Goebbels. In attendance was Adolf Hitler, whose wedding present was a
signed photograph of himself. While Diana was celebrating her wedding alongside the most powerful men in Europe, her younger sister Jessica
was also finding romance. The object of her
affection was a young man named Esmond Romilly. Romilly was Jessica's second cousin. He had been a public-school revolutionary, whose beliefs had taken him from boyhood rebellion to
the battlefields of Spain. (dramatic music)
(explosions booming) - The Spanish War was coming. It was clear which side
she was going to be on. She would be anti-Franco. Long before Romilly came on the scene. - He fought on the side
of the revolutionaries in the Spanish Civil War. They were quite idealistic. - He kind of put his
money where his mouth was in that sense, and he
wrote a book about it. This was all before he was 20. And so, obviously, to Jessica, he was an incredibly romantic figure. She was fired up by the
cause that he embodied, and the two together was dynamite. (dramatic music) - [Narrator] On their first meeting, they were immediately
captivated by one another. Jessica asked him to take
her back with him to Spain. He agreed. They quickly hatched a plan to run away. (gentle music) In the spring of 1937, the
Mitford family was in crisis. They were already a fixture
in the tabloid press, thanks to the exploits of Diana and the Hitler-obsessed Unity, now the newspapers had a fresh scandal. The second youngest Mitford sister, Jessica, had vanished from London in the company of Esmond Romilly, a charismatic young revolutionary who shared her left-wing ideals. For two weeks, neither friends nor family had any clue where she was,
or even if she was alive. - It was scandalous to a degree,
but by that point, I mean, the Mitfords had had
quite a lot of scandal. It's kind of almost what was expected, and Jessica had been saving
up a kitty to run away since she was 12 years old. It was treated as rather
a joke by the family. But she was very determined that she was going to
run away and she did. - She was very bored by being a debutante, one has a certain sympathy, but
what she did was also cruel. She pretended to her parents that she was going on a
holiday with some friends. They were terribly excited, they thought it would cheer her up. They took her to Victoria station, they gave her 10 pounds spending money, and waved her away, and her
father never saw her again. And in his later life, Unity said to him, "Who would you like
walking through the door?" He said "Decca." He never
really got over that. (dramatic music) - [Narrator] By the time the
Mitfords discovered the truth, the young couple were far from England. They made their way to Bilbao. There, Romilly began work as a journalist reporting on the civil
war still raging in Spain between government forces and those of the fascist General Franco. - Lots of people tried to bring them back. They said to the UK Ambassador to Spain, you have to find Jessica
Mitford and bring them back. And he sent a message back saying, "Found Jessica Mitford, bringing
her back is impossible." - Churchill was involved,
everyone was involved. This is the thing, they
were still who they were. You know, everyone was worried about her. If they'd just been two
of the kind of people they purported to want to be, i.e., ignored working classes,
they would never have had the attention and the care that they had. (somber music) Finally, the efforts of the
British consulate in Bilbao did convince them to leave, but Jessica and Romilly
refused to go any further than southern France. By now, Jessica was pregnant, and the priority for the Mitfords changed. She had to marry before the baby was born. So it was, on the 18th of May 1937, that Jessica and Romilly wed in Bayonne in the south of France. They finally felt able
to come back to England, but they did not return to the comfortable lives
they had enjoyed before. Instead, they settled in Rotherhithe, a working-class area of London. There, a few months later,
Jessica gave birth to a daughter. In 1938, a measles epidemic swept through that part of London. Jessica had never contracted the illness, her sheltered upbringing
had protected her from it. Tragically, this meant she could not pass on immunity to her baby daughter. The little girl died,
aged just five months. (somber music) - Just, her grief was very private, and she doesn't want to
have a display of it. Her outlook is very healthy in my opinion. - The funeral, none of the
family were allowed to go. They were living according to principles, because if they'd been working class, their baby could have died just the same and nobody
would have helped them. But what were they achieving?
What were they proving? It is very like when Diana
went to live in Eaton Square and waited for Mosley to come
round and deign to see her. They took up these
positions, with these men, and they carried them
through, no matter what. What they really thought,
no one would ever know, because they weren't those kinds of women. But she paid a terrible price, Jessica. (dramatic music) - [Narrator] In their grief, Jessica and Romilly
fled England once again. This time, they headed for America. The Europe Jessica left
behind was heading for war. This was Diana's nightmare. As late as July 1939, she was in Germany, assuring Hitler she and
Mosley would continue to campaign for peace as
long as that was possible. The prospect of war was even more alarming to Diana's Hitler-obsessed sister Unity. She could not bear the idea of conflict between the two countries she loved. So, after Germany's invasion of Poland made war with Britain inevitable, she went to the park
in the center of Munich and shot herself in the head. (somber music) - She didn't manage to kill herself. The bullet lodged in her brain
and they couldn't remove it. Her parents went through this thing again of not knowing where she was,
not knowing what had happened. Eventually, she was
transported back to England, but a very diminished person. - That was the tragedy for my mother. They were just such tight friends, and then when Unity became a fascist, it was like, "My best friend
just became a fascist. How horrible, but I still love her." - She was very mentally fragile. She shot herself. There were many things that
showed her mental fragility. - [Narrator] In January,
1940, the recovering Unity was finally sent back to
England, via neutral Switzerland. She had little understanding
of what had happened to her, or why the British
people now hated her so. The bullet lodged in her brain had reduced Unity to a state
of permanent childhood. But she was not the only Mitford sister despised by the public. Diana, wife to the leader of
the British Union of Fascists, was viewed with open suspicion. Many feared a German invasion
would see her husband installed as Britain's puppet ruler. - He was adamantly patriotic
and said, I don't want this war but I will always fight for my country. Nevertheless, under wartime regulations, he was arrested and sent to jail, and in June of 1940,
Diana was also arrested. - They were never charged because
they were remand prisoners under this regulation called 18B, which suspended habeas corpus
for the duration of the war. They could wear their own clothes but they were both taken
off to prisons in London. They were separate for three years, and in the last year
together at Holloway Prison. - She was kept in until November, 1943. No trial, so therefore no knowledge of how long she would be in there for. I mean, this was wartime internment. Nevertheless, she was
kept in far, far longer than any other fascist
women who had children. She was made an example
of. Absolutely no question. - That created this tremendous bond, that here were these
two people who had been, as she considered, unjustly imprisoned, and so it was the Mosleys
contra mundum after that. (ominous music) - [Narrator] Conditions in
prison were terrible for Diana, but the experience bonded her even more tightly to her husband. Reviled by the rest of the world, perhaps for the first time, Diana had the womanizing Sir Oswald
entirely to herself. In America, Jessica fully supported her sister's incarceration. Her one-time adoration of
Diana had by now transformed into an equally strong hatred. - I think there was a wide gap between the Diana who
Jessica had looked up to and the Diana who now existed. - Really, Unity should have taken the brunt of Jessica's fullest rage, but in some way, she blamed Diana for sort of sending Unity down
that path in the first place. Diana was in Holloway
but she was still Diana, she was still gorgeous,
she was still compelling. So, she took the full
force of Jessica's rage, and Jessica sort of seemed to blame her kind of single-handedly for the war, which was insane but maybe understandable. - Unity was very vulnerable,
and I think the family believed that she needed to be looked after. Perhaps her illness
diminished her responsibility to an extent, while Diana
was totally compos mentis and went along with it anyway. (dramatic music) - [Narrator] Jessica's only
contact with her family was now through letters. She would soon become even more isolated. In 1940, her husband Romilly
joined the Canadian Air Force and volunteered to fight in Europe. He went missing in action on
the 30th of November 1941. He was 23. Romilly's death only sharpened
Jessica's loathing of Diana, the older sister who
represented everything her young husband had died fighting. (gentle music) Diana Mitford and her
husband, Sir Oswald Mosley, were released from Holloway
Prison in November 1943. Their incarceration
without trial or charge had divided the country. Many were firmly opposed to their release. Among the angry protestors
were Diana's sisters, Jessica and Nancy. - They definitely believed they should have kept Diana in prison. Later evidence of things Diana said in support of fascism
definitely bear that out. - Nancy went back to the
Home Office and said, "I'm not sure about this, I'm not sure you should
be letting them out." - The British ambassador in
Paris, Gladwyn Jebb, told Diana, "Do you realize the reason
you got sent to prison during the war was that
Nancy had shopped you?" She'd been to Churchill and said, "I think Diana is a national-security risk and you should lock her up." And Diana was absolutely appalled
but she kept it a secret. - Nancy had the face to say, "Jessica, you really shouldn't
have done that, darling." Nancy was, you know, she was a snake. But Jessica was open about
it, full-on about it, and what she then did, she wrote
an open letter to Churchill saying, "This is a slap in the face for anti-fascists and I'm appalled." She simply was iron about this. - [Narrator] By this stage, the sisters had not spoken in years. The end of the war in 1945
brought no reconciliation, and even their common grief at the death of their beloved sister, Unity, in May, 1948, did not heal the rift. Jessica remained in America. There, she forged a new
life with left-wing activist and lawyer, Robert Treuhaft. - He, after the war, became
a human-rights lawyer. He was Jewish, which she
probably quite liked that fact, given her family history. And he had to write to his mother saying, "Don't worry, she's not like her sisters." - He laughed at the whole Mitford thing, he loved it, he just thought it was funny. - It was a glorious time to
be alive in the United States, because the civil-rights
movement was getting going and she threw herself
completely behind that. The good old cause, as she called it, the sort of left-wing cause
continued to occupy her, whether she was campaigning for
civil rights of Black people or whether she was anti the Vietnam War, there was plenty to campaign
about and march about. (bright music) - That was everything. There was them going off
to meetings, that was them, you know, living in
integrated neighborhoods. That was my father, with his
Harvard law degree, making so little money that he
wrote a letter of apology to the alumni, saying he's really sorry that he's brought the
average down quite a bit, because everybody else
was making 100,000 a year and he was making 10 or 20,000
defending Black defendants. This is what the
Communist Party was doing, fighting against police
brutality against Blacks and against police brutality
against communists. - Her politics mellowed to
being a Democrat, really, but she took up the causes of her husband. She became active in civil rights, then she became a campaigning
journalist and writer. (dramatic music) - [Narrator] Her left-wing
politics drew unwanted attention. It was the era of McCarthyism in America. Public paranoia about Reds was growing. In this climate, Jessica's
unrestrained communism led the FBI to put her under surveillance. (ominous music) - There was a file on her. She was a serious sort of
potential enemy of the state. Rather, oddly, as Mosley was in Britain, when he and Diana were released. But he was viewed with the
same sort of suspicion, rightfully so. It was almost a similar situation
to Jessica's in America. - It was assumed we
were bugged by the FBI, but it was also assumed that it was kind of stupid and funny. We weren't terrorized by it like many other people were, you know. (people yelling) - [Narrator] Diana and her
husband were still pariahs on account of their fascist beliefs. Unable to stand it any longer,
the couple moved to France. Diana and Jessica would meet
only once again in their lives, in 1973, when the siblings
gathered to say goodbye to their older sister, the
novelist Nancy Mitford. (dramatic music) - She had cancer. They
didn't diagnose it for years. Hodgkin's lymphoma. She
went through absolute hell. - Horribly painful. Endless operations and it
was all pretty gruesome, and it went on for months. - Jessica did come over
from America to see her, and that was when saw Diana. - Jessica and Diana
were completely at one. They weren't just being polite, they felt absolute harmony together. I sometimes think it's a
bit like the football match in the trenches between the
British and the Germans. Getting on perfectly well,
and then on Boxing Day, they went back to bombarding one another. And similarly, as soon
as Jessica went back to the United States, she continued to hurl insults
across the Atlantic to Diana, and Diana was constantly accusing Jessica of being spiteful or of lying. "Spiteful" was just a word for non-fascist in Diana's vocabulary. - [Narrator] All the sisters
were great letter writers, exchanging hundreds with each
other throughout their lives. Nancy was always the author of the family, and her early novels, The Pursuit of Love and
Love in a Cold Climate, were thinly veiled autobiographies. But in 1960, Jessica went one step further and published her own
memoirs, Hons and Rebels. - It's a very good book and
she was a very good writer, but it's a little bit naughty in a way, because she did have her cake and eat it. The family hated the book. Everybody knows how unreliable all the Mitfords' accounts
are of the childhood. When Hons and Rebels came out, the other sisters all said, oh, well, you've made it all up, darling. - All the stuff that Nancy had
put in The Pursuit of Love, she kind of used all that and
got the mileage out of it, and then said, oh, but
aren't they all frightful? "I'm not like that. I'm absolutely lovely, because I'm left-wing and I don't have really much to do with these awful people. Nevertheless, I'm going to tell you about them because
they're quite good copy." - Nancy wrote, but because
she fictionalized them, it was seen as okay. But once Jessica wrote something and actually wrote it about the family, using their real names, then this was seen as a huge betrayal. - Diana was incandescent. She wrote a letter to the TLS saying, "You'd think we were all
morons from this book. Actually, we had access to
this wonderful library." Which they did, because both
her grandfathers were MPs, they were cultured men. They didn't grow up quite
like the raging ruffians that Jessica would have had one believe. (dramatic music) - [Narrator] Three years
after Hons and Rebels, Jessica achieved still greater success with The American Way of Death, an expose of the shady
and exploitative practices of the funeral business
in the United States. Diana was also a gifted writer. She became a columnist,
writing for Tatler Magazine and the Evening Standard
newspaper for many years. Throughout, she remained devoted to her husband, Sir Oswald
Mosley, until he died in 1980. She never renounced her politics or regretted her friendship with Hitler. (dramatic music) - I am sympathetic to the idea that one can fall for a big idea and then not realize
how deep one has got in. I think that's what happened to her. She was a perfectly decent human being. Unquestionably the most
tragic person I've ever known because she realized she'd
embraced a whole lot of ideas which were repellent, which were awful. She wasn't a fool, but I
think she found it hard to confront her earlier self. - From my point of view,
that's not forgivable. I mean, if she held her
hands up later in life, at any stage in her life, and said, "I am so sorry I believed that, I am so sorry I followed him," then that would have been forgivable. - What I think was always
interesting with her, because of this sort of
doubled-edged approach to life, on the one hand, the reasonable,
kind, sweet, clever Diana realized that it was deplorable what she had done as a young woman, on the other, she would
never quite admit it. In old age, she used to
say, "What we were all struggling for and fighting
was what we've now achieved, which is a united, peaceful
Europe with Germany at the top." (dramatic music) - [Narrator] Jessica too never abandoned her faith in communism. She continued to live in America until she died from lung cancer in 1996, a wealthy woman after her writing success. She was 78. The once-adored but later-reviled Diana outlived Jessica by seven years. She died in 2003, shortly
after her 93rd birthday. Throughout their lives and
since, they have been the subject of tabloid speculation,
of thinly veiled fictions, and of countless biographies, yet the allure of these
Mitford sisters endures. (dramatic music) - People at my school knew about it, and so Mitford became
sort of a thing suddenly. But I kind of ignored it. I don't know what's in
this weird British mind that causes them to be so
fascinated by my aunts. (dramatic music) - It's a really complicated
legacy, isn't it? It's very light and dark. There's froth and there's this darkness. There's this tragedy. They're this beautiful family and it is sort of like
a Nancy Mitford novel. You know, you have this
kind of very comic setting, these very relatable,
lovely, comic people, and then suddenly they do
something massively inappropriate. - We like reading about people who are so-called larger than life. The Mitfords, I'm afraid,
were all like that. They longed to be in the papers. If it meant having a
reputation for being a Nazi, so much the worse or better,
but they didn't care. (dramatic music) - We're completely hung up
about class in this country. If it's served up to us in the right way, what we profess to want to
destroy will still entice us. It leaves aside the huge moral
questions that they bring up. They're so familiar to
us we almost make them less interesting than they should be. - People like my mum because she's a Red and she never did change, and people hate Diana for the same reason. (dramatic music) - [Narrator] They were extraordinary women living in extraordinary times, but their appeal rests not
on their achievements alone, nor on the monumental
events they witnessed. For the lives of Diana and Jessica were shaped most by experiences
more familiar to us all, the trials and joys of
family, of love, of grief, and of sisterhood. (dramatic music) (gentle music)
