Nicholas MOSLEY- Rules of the Game (Oswald & Cynthia Mosley Bio.) (1983)

sy Nicholas Mosley

SehRalesy,

Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley,
ao 1896-1933

Fhe dazzling, evocative story of aman
———— RD eR ie ta Cone
\ ™ ledthenation
: \ but whobroke the

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rules — in politics
and in love

Rules of the Game

Nicholas Mosley was born in 1923 and educated at
Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. He served in Italy
as an infantry officer during the Second World War,
since when he has been a professional writer.

He has published eleven novels of which the first
was Spaces of the Dark (1951); the others include
Accident (1964; filmed by Joseph Losey), Impossible
Object (1968), Natalie Natalia (1971) and, most
recently, three related books: Catastrophe Practice,
Imago Bird and Serpent. His other works include
Experience and Religion (1964), The Assassination of
Trotsky (1972) and Julian Grenfell: his life and the times of
his death, 1888-1915 (1976). His latest book, the sequel
to Rules of the Game, is Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald
Mosley, 1933-80 (1983).

Nicholas Mosley has been married twice, has four
sons and a daughter, and lives in London.

NICHOLAS MOSLEY

Rules of the Game

Sir Oswald and
Lady Cynthia Mosley
1896-1933

Fontana/Collins

First published in Great Britain by
Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1982
First issued in Fontana Paperbacks 1983

Copyright © Nicholas Mosley 1982

Reproduced, printed and bound in Great Britain by
Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd, Aylesbury, Bucks

CONDITIONS OF SALE

This book is sold subject to the condition

that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise,
be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated
without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of

binding or cover other than that in which it is

published and without a similar condition

including this condition being imposed
on the subsequent purchaser

CONAN HBWON

Contents

List of Illustrations
Foreword

Tom

Cimmie

Marriage and Politics

Love Letters

Politics and Society

Rebels

The Birmingham Proposals
Nursery World

The Legend

Rules of the Game: Philandering
Savehay Farm

Labour Politics

Rules of the Game: Ministerial Office
Entertainment

Resignation

Cimmie in Russia

The Mosley Manifesto

The Riddle of the Sphinx
The New Party

Politics as Farce

Steps to Fascism

The Greater Britain

The British Union of Fascists
Diana Guinness

The Death of Cimniue
Beyond the Game

Notes on sources and acknowledgements
Index

255

263
265

List of Illustrations

Between pages 86 and 87

Tom and Cimmie at their wedding

Nanny Hyslop

Irene and Cimmie canvassing

Letters between Cimmie and Tom
Savehay Farm

Independent Labour Party Summer School
House party at Savehay Farm

South of France, 1928

Antibes, 1929

Between pages 182 and 183
The family bathing

Cimmie’s victory at Stoke

Ramsay MacDonald at Savehay Farm
Tom fencing

Nicholas catching tiddlers

Aneurin Bevan at Savehay Farm

Tom with Harold Macmillan

Venice, 1932

Tom and Cimmie in Rome

Last picture of Cimmie and the children

Foreword

On May 11th 1979 a remark was reported in the New Statesman that my
father, Oswald Mosley, ‘must be the only Englishman today who is
beyond the pale’. This statement was made about a man of eighty-two
who had not been active in politics for fifteen years: who when he had
been active — a period of world-wide violence and crime — had been
convicted of no offence (he had been acquitted of one charge of assault
and one of riotous assembly) and whose policies had for the most part
been ignored and had come to nothing. The remark seemed ridiculous
but in one sense apt — as being representative of what undoubtedly were
many people’s feelings about him. The phrase ‘beyond the pale’ gives
an impression of something taboo: of a person not just whose attitudes
had once been strongly disagreed with (he had been leader of the British
Union of Fascists in the 1930s) but in contact with whom even now
there might be danger. The commentator in the New Statesman con-
tinued — ‘Nobody would flinch if you’d come back from Moscow and
said you’d lunched with Kim Philby’. This implied that the news that
someone had lunched with Oswald Mosley, in contrast to the news that
one had met a notorious traitor, might cause almost physical alarm.
My purpose in writing this book is not to provide a biography of my
father nor to give a comprehensive account of his politics: these tasks
have been done admirably by his biographer Robert Skidelsky. I have
tried to write a personal story of him and of my efforts to understand
him: his child had to make these efforts to make sense of himself. The
story might be of interest to others because in so far as it is true that there
was something akin to a taboo about my father, then an understanding
of this might give an insight into the nature of human beings and society.
My father was adored and hated, respected and feared, pitied and
reviled. But both those who abominated him from a distance and those

x Foreword

who were charmed by his presence (most people were) had the im-
pression of something awesome about him that could not quite be put
into words. It was as if he were a Greek tragic hero to whom disaster
had occurred (or which he had caused to occur) which had set him apart:
the power of the taboo in this tradition resides in the paradoxical
impression that the disaster both is, and is not, the person’s fault. The
history of the twentieth century has revolved around men who through
Overweening pride and force of circumstance have felt themselves set
apart: who have both ridden on, and felt themselves driven by, the
slavish adorations and hatreds that others have felt towards them.

It is difficult for an academic biographer or a political historian to
write about such paradoxes: it is their tradition to deal with what is seen
as a world of facts. It has been-the job of dramatists and novelists,
traditionally, to try to relate facts to what might be seen as patterns and
recurring predicaments of mind: to try to write of human experience
as if what human beings were was not separate from it.

I myself am by vocation a novelist. My father did not read novels:
he thought it was the task of an individual to try to order reasonably
the world of facts. But his relationship with me, his eldest son, was often
paradoxical. From my side at least there was loyalty and some hostility,
anger and bewilderment, nearly always love. Towards the end of his life
he cut me out of his will on the grounds that I was ‘not his sort of person’:
yet the very last time I saw him, ten days before his death, he announced
that he wanted me to inherit all his papers. I had told him that I hoped
to write this book. It was as if when death approached he did not retract
anything he felt about power (money, to him, was a form of power)
but he knew as part of him had always known that if anything was to
survive of what he had cared about it would be to do with efforts at
truth.

CHAPTER 1

Tom

My father Oswald Mosley was born on November 16th 1896; he was
in line to be the heir to a Staffordshire baronetcy and estate. His mother,
Maud Mosley, had three sons in quick succession and then she left her
husband — on account (this was the family legend) of his insatiable and
promiscuous sexual habits. Maud Mosley was a woman of piety and
rectitude; she moved to Shropshire to be near her own family. There,
without the sort of money she might have expected, she brought up her
three sons of whom her favourite was the eldest Oswald. She called
him her ‘man-child’: he became the man-about-the-house. He wrote
years later of how he had always been ‘passionately devoted’ to his
mother: how even as a child he had repaid her devotion to him by
‘gratuitous advice and virile assertion on every subject under the sun’.
Apart from members of her family there were no further male in-
fluences in her life, he said, ‘other than an occasional preacher of
exceptional gifts’.

The chief male influence in Oswald’s early life was his paternal
grandfather, also called Oswald: he too had quarrelled with his son and
did not see much of him. There was thus an alliance between the
grandfather and the grandson Oswald, and the latter’s childhood
alternated between his mother’s comparatively small house in Shrop-
shire and the stateliness of his grandfather’s house Rolleston Hall in
Staffordshire. Grandfather Oswald was an imposing, paternalistic figure
nicknamed John Bull: he too, like his son, lived apart from his wife.
Rolleston Hall was a Victorian mansion with a full complement of
grooms, gardeners, coachmen, indoor servants and so on. Life in both
Shropshire and Staffordshire revolved mainly around horses and dogs,
as it was apt to do in upper-class county families. There was hunting,
steeplechasing, shooting and fishing. It was held to be much easier in

2 Rules of the Game

those days, my father wrote later, to show emotions towards animals
than to human beings.

The exception to this in some ways seemed to be his father, the ne’er-
do-well, also called Oswald. This Oswald was a rake, a gambler; one
of his bets had been to do with a game of golf down Pall Mall; another
with shooting out all the street lights in Piccadilly with a pistol from
a hansom cab. He had for a time set himself up in an inn in a village
next to Rolleston in opposition to his father: there he had entertained
women: it was said he was trying to emulate one of his ancestors who
had been known as The Tutbury Tup (Tutbury was the name of the
village; ‘tup’ the local name for a ram). Another story was that the last
straw that drove his wife Maud to leave him was not just the sum of
his infidelities, but her finding a bundle of letters to his mistresses which
showed that he was saying just the same things to them, and even giving
them the same presents, as he was to her.

What grandfather Oswald objected to was not so much the fact of
his son’s relationships with women but that these should be flaunted
publicly. Grandfather Oswald was not averse to ‘recompense’ (his
grandson wrote) so long as it was conducted ‘with the utmost discretion
and dignity’. However there was a tradition amongst the three Oswalds
— grandfather, father and son — that their quarrels should be aired
publicly. Each father challenged his son to a boxing match in front of
assembled servants: grandfather Oswald once fought his son with one
of his (the grandfather’s) hands tied behind his back: the son was
knocked out. Years later this Oswald, the rake, challenged his son, my
father, to a match: he was again apparently on the point of being
knocked out when the bout ended. This Oswald (his son wrote) had on
the mantelpiece of his bachelor apartment a contemporary drawing
of an ample lady in a very tight skirt with a monocled dandy walking
behind her: it bore the caption ‘Life is just one damned thing after
another’.

My father used to claim that he had made a study of psychoanalysis
in later life and had decided that the violent complexities of his child-
hood had had no effect on him whatever. He would explain — the
healthy psyche can throw off an injury which in the weak becomes a
complex. But also — ‘It is possible to go even further, and to say that
additional strength can come from an early injury’. This assertion seems
somewhat to contradict the former: also, additional strength can take the
form of numbness or armour plating.

There was a story my father told in his autobiography of how his
mother had been hurled out of a pony-cart which was being driven

Tom 3

recklessly by his father just before the birth of one of his brothers: from
her diaries, however, it appears that the child about to be born was
himself.

His mother kept a daily diary from the time of her marriage for over
fifty years. When she died she left these to her youngest son; whom my
father persuaded to hand them over, and then he burned them — all
except those to do with the first four years of his life, and one ofa slightly
later date which survived half scorched. My father also tore out, and
preserved, the entry for the day of his mother’s birthday (January 2nd)
from each of the diaries that he burned. But what was it that he wanted
to eliminate by this auto-da-fé?

In his autobiography my father wrote movingly of his childhood: of
the orderliness, the hierarchical but somehow classless patterns of life in
his mother’s house and in the semi-feudal grandeur of the estate at
Rolleston. His grandfather ran a champion herd of shorthorn cattle: he
was a passionate advocate and producer of unadulterated wholemeal
bread. In the pursuance of good stockbreeding and correct land-
management everyone on the estate seemed to work willingly and to
accept his allotted place: there were few incitements and few oppor-
tunities to change. All his life my father retained a love of the English
countryside and of its seasonal pursuits. But there were also things in him
that seemed to rage against this tradition, and to demand change.

What he did not remember perhaps or indeed tried to cauterise
memories of in the burning of his mother’s diaries was that running
parallel to the orderliness of country life was also a tendency ferocious
and dismal which haunted people with too many servants and not
enough to do: there were the quarrels, the separations, the lawsuits, the
punch-ups; much of the emotions seemed to be taken out on horses as
things to spur on or be spurred by. But even in the pages that remain
of his mother’s diaries before he was four she tells of an instance of my
father being bullied by his father: ‘Had a miserable time W teasing Tom
and I trying to defend him; and finally W caught hold of my wrist
hurting it badly’. (W is for ‘Waldie’ — the name by which the middle
Oswald was known: and Tom is the name by which my father, the
youngest Oswald, was known and will be known here).

And then in the diary that survived the flames, Tom’s mother wrote
of a fortnight’s visit that he and his younger brother Ted had to pay to
their father: the year was 1909; Tom was twelve and Ted nine.

During their stay their father repeatedly urged them to kiss the
Parlourmaid (before her) and the Cook. He went into the children’s

4 Rules of the Game

bedroom with nothing on but a nightshirt and talked to the P.maid
who was there calling them. Told Tommy how he had a box at the
Gaiety each night for a month and took the actresses out to supper
and he would do the same... they would go to the Metropolitan and
sit in the front and yell the choruses. Had rats down from London
in a box (3 doz) and let the dogs worry them. No bath, hat on in
house, altogether low.

Compared to this, life in Tom’s mother’s house must indeed have
seemed lofty: nothing much seemed to happen to her other than tea-
parties, shopping, going to church, and bad weather. Tom in the
holidays hunted and went ferreting. But perhaps the very lack of
impositions of such a life — and freedom for the most part from his father
— gave him confidence. From his young boys’ school in Shropshire he
wrote to his mother in the only surviving letter of his childhood — ‘We
had a preliminary debate last night, and I made a speech which came
off tremendously’.

He was sent to a preparatory boarding school at the age of nine, and
to his public school, Winchester, at the age of twelve. He hated both
schools unashamedly and with an intensity that went on into old age.
He made few friends: he wrote in his autobiography — ‘the dreary waste
of public school existence was only relieved by learning and homo-
sexuality; at that time I had no capacity for the former and I never had
any taste for the latter’. His escape was into the gymnasium where he
became a boxer and a prize-winning fencer. He won the public schools
championships in both foil and sabre at the age of fifteen: both the
double victory and the early age were records. His mentors at
Winchester were his boxing and fencing instructors Sergeant Major
Adam and Sergeant Ryan: he wrote about these in later years with
something like love.

At home he had been able to go his own way: at school, he was forced
to be a subordinate member of a group. His dislike of this situation, and
his determination to be trapped within it for as short a time as possible,
seemed to stay with him for the rest of his life. He persuaded his family
to let him leave Winchester when he was just seventeen: he went to
Sandhurst to train to be a regular soldier.

At Sandhurst he had to submit to strict and almost brutal discipline
while on duty and on the parade ground; but there was toleration of
quite anarchic behaviour out of hours. What the cadets liked to do in
the evenings was to pile into cars (this was 1913) and go up to London
and there provoke fights with the chuckers-out at places like the Empire

Tom 5

Music Hall (might Tom have bumped into his father?): the point of
these expeditions were the fights, more than the pursuit of women.
Then when the cadets arrived back at the barracks somewhat battered
and drunk they would be helped to bed as if by nannies by the same
sergeants who, the next day, would revile them for any indecorum on
the parade ground. My father used to call this ‘the corinthian tradition’:
and it seemed to represent, as if in some echo from childhood, a
condition by which group-life might be possible for him. He described
how on his arrival at Sandhurst he had picked out to be his cronies ‘some
fifty to a hundred boys who seemed to me particularly objectionable’.
Team spirit was made palatable so long as there was at the back of it
the chance of swashbuckling, or revolt.

The gangs of toughs, however, were apt to fight amongst themselves.
In one dispute about a polo pony there were insults, threats of horse-
whippings, violence; and in the subsequent fracas my father, while
attempting to evade pursuers, fell from the ledge of an upstairs window
and injured his leg. The details of this story are confused: such goings-
on were common at Sandhurst: what is indubitable is that my father
accepted even if he did not originally provoke a fight, which for a
time he seemed to be winning, and then he ended up a victim.

By the time the war came in August 1914 he had recovered from his
injury and he was commissioned into a smart cavalry regiment, the 16th
Lancers. He spent some time in Ireland and then, because there did not
seem to be much chance of the cavalry being used in the war, he
volunteered to join the newly formed Royal Flying Corps who were in
need of observers. These did not need much training. Like many young
men at the time he was afraid that the war might be over by Christmas
and that he would have missed it. By Christmas he was in fact in France
flying in one of the flimsy aeroplanes that were used mainly for purposes
of observation. He and his pilot were shot at from the ground and they
could not retaliate; though pilots and observers occasionally shot
at enemy planes with rifles and pistols. There were not more than about
sixty men in the RFC actually flying at the time; this was war in an élitist
tradition even more than it might have been with the cavalry. In Tom’s
words he and his fellow airmen were ‘like men having dinner together
in a country-house-party knowing that some must soon leave for ever;
in the end, nearly all’. They were heroes: but, suspended in the air in
their flimsy machines, very much in the tradition of being in some sense
sacrificial. There was a song popular among the men of the RFC at the
time which was called The Dying Aviator, in which there was described,
with the lugubrious humour that the English traditionally make use of

6 Rules of the Game

in times of stress, how a crashed airman’s mutilated body had become
inextricably intermingled with parts of his machine.

One incident in the war which stayed in Tom’s mind came during the
second battle of Ypres in April 1915 when he had been detailed to take
a message by car from the RFC to some Canadians in the front line;
he had stayed drinking with the Canadians longer than had been
intended; he had to make his way back on foot. Then he saw, from the
vantage point of a hill, massed German infantry regiments moving with
parade-ground precision to the attack — to what might be either success
or annihilation by machine-gun fire. He seems to have been half
enthralled, half repelled, by this spectacle. He wondered about such
dedication: was it necessary for it to be involved with such prospects of
death?

In the spring of 1915 he went to train for his pilot’s certificate at
Shoreham in Sussex. He wrote in his autobiography ‘My flying was not
bad though I was weak on the mechanical side ... my argument was
that once in the air you could do nothing about it if anything went
wrong, and on the ground the machine was looked after by our friends
the mechanics and riggers’. This attitude was a forerunner of his attitudes
in later life — his belief that mundane day-to-day jobs could safely be
left to what he called ‘professionals’.

He got his pilot’s certificate. But soon after, when he was being
watched from the ground by his admiring mother who had: come
specially to see him, he decided to show off, did not notice that the wind
had changed, came in too fast to land; then — ‘the machine hit the ground
with a bang and was thrown high into the air’. Still flying, he realised
that the plane’s undercarriage was damaged: he had to circle and
make a pancake landing which involved stalling just above the ground.
He managed to do this, but from too great a height: the floor of the
cockpit was driven up against his legs. The leg which he had injured
a year ago was crushed again but this time more severely. Once more,
what had begun as an act of bravado had ended with his being a
victim.

His leg was patched up. Then he was called back to his cavalry
regiment who were now fighting as infantry and needed their officers.
During the winter of 1915-16 he was on and off in the trenches or
marching to and fro; much of the time he was in deep mud and water.
The bones of his leg had not properly healed: they became infected: he
was sent home, and there was talk of his leg having to be amputated.
He persuaded the surgeon to try to save it; and this the surgeon did,
replacing the infected parts with other bits of bone from the leg. Tom

Tom 7

finished his active service in the war with his right leg an inch and a half
shorter than the other.

There is something unfulfilled about Tom in the war: this is one of
the areas his mother’s diaries might have shed light on. He had
flown bravely in the RFC: but it is evident that when in the trenches
he was involved in no attack, and it seems unlikely that he had to
undergo a large-scale enemy attack or he would have mentioned this.
In his autobiography he tells as one of the highlights of his time in the
front line a story of how when an attack was expected his colonel came
round and told the junior officers that they would be recommended for
the Military Cross if they held their ground: then the attack did not
materialise. The way Tom told such a story (it would seem to have been
improper for a commanding officer to have held out the bait of an MC
to anyone for doing something so ordinary as resisting an attack)
suggests that he wanted to establish as much as possible that he had been
close to direct fighting. He certainly suffered under bombardments: he
endured the nerve-breaking business of tunnelling for the placing of
mines. But having set out with courage to be something of a hero, he
found that he was to survive the war through a series of misfortunes.

The war’s last two years he spent working in London in the Ministry
of Munitions and in the Foreign Office. He read a lot, and entered into
what used to be called London society. This was for him a time of
transformation. He himself described how before this he had been
intellectually dim: he had loved boxing, fencing, and horses. He had also
been much on his own and usually at odds with the people around him.
Now, having done his duty, and as a wounded soldier returned from
war, he made up for lost opportunities. He read ‘voraciously’ — about
history and politics; often, the speeches of famous politicians in history.
He wanted to train himself for what he wanted to become. He thought
of going to a university; but it seemed to him that other requirements
were more pressing.

The war had affected him deeply: he was appalled by human stupidity
— by what seemed to be the wilful waste of human life and resources.
He had also observed, and tried to emulate himself, a sort of dashingness
which seemed to surmount the waste: which might be a way to prevent
it, if only it could be harnessed to reason instead of to destruction. He
determined himself to try to do this.

It was during these years at the end of the war that he first got his
reputation as a seducer of women. Up till now he had wanted to be a
hero among men: but in London during 1917 and 1918 it would have
been difficult to avoid the challenges, and opportunities, provided by

8 Rules of the Game

women. Women like wounded soldiers — who can be mothered, as well
as admired. And Tom must have felt himself ready to try a new
form of conquest. He was taken up, at first, by somewhat older married
women: it was the convention of course in the society in which he
moved that young men should have affairs only with married women:
unmarried girls were to be worshipped from afar. Tom became a lover
of Margaret Montagu, who was a hostess in Leicestershire; of Catherine
D’Erlanger, of Maxine Elliott, who entertained on the outskirts
of London. Through the latter he met for the first time eminent
politicians — Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, F. E. Smith. His
successes with women gave him confidence with older men: confidence
with politicians of course added to his successes with women. It cannot
be known what sparked the whole process off: there was something
sudden about his reputation for brilliance and wit. When, years later,
people used to ask him how it was that someone like himself had
emerged from such a family background he would say — as if it were
a quotation and poking fun at himself — ‘when fire meets oil, then
springs the spark divine’ — fire being his father and oil his mother — and
then he would laugh; especially if this was said in the presence of his
mother.

The older men whom Tom liked at this time he admired for their
toughness, their cleverness: it is unlikely he much admired them for their
politics. They, having won the war, seemed to be not so much resting
on their laurels as selling off bits of them to bidders. There was little will
amongst older politicians to re-order the world with burning enthusiasm
and in the light of reason. The old political games went on in the old
way played by the ‘hard-faced men who had done well out of the war’.
The difference between Tom and other idealists of his generation was
that he, in addition to his idealism, felt that he had the skill to take on
the older generation at their own machinations.

The reputation for brilliance he had won in social and political salons
meant that he was soon approached by Conservative and Liberal whips
to see if he would stand for Parliament: both parties wanted young
candidates who might seem some leaven to the hard-faced lump. Tom
was asked if he would stand as a Conservative for the Stone division of
Staffordshire; also for the Harrow division of Middlesex. He chose the
latter, ostensibly on the grounds that he did not want to seem to be
taking advantage of family connections, but also because thus it would
be easier to maintain his social connections in London. He made it plain
he did not care about political party labels; he was going into Parliament
to represent the war generation — or himself.

Tom 9

The war ended on November 11th 1918; a general election was set
for December 14th. Tom’s election manifesto set the tone for much of
the rest of his political life. What he undertook to fight for were — high
wages, nationalisation of transport and of electricity, ex-soldiers to be
offered smallholdings, grants for housing and educational scholarships
to be provided by the state, fiscal protection for home industries and
trade with the colonies, prevention of immigration by undesirable
aliens, and the promotion by all possible means of the strength and
prestige of the British Empire. These were fine words: he was no
different from other politicans in not elucidating how they were to be
implemented.

Tom was officially the candidate of the coalition government: his
opponent, Mr Chamberlayne, a sixty-five-year-old solicitor, was stand-
ing as an Independent. Tom joked — ‘An Independent is someone on
whom no one can depend.’ Mr Chamberlayne attacked his opponent
for his youth, his wealth, and what he said was his inflated war record.
Tom won the argument about this (the dispute had been about the date
of his commission): and retaliated by saying he would not follow ‘into
the political gutter’ such ‘aborigines of the political world’. He was not
yet good at making set speeches; but he had from the beginning, a talent
for fighting back; for vituperation. He was duly elected the member for
Harrow with a majority of 10,000. He became the youngest MP. He
was just twenty two.

His successes had been sudden and startling but his talents were still
those of the individual fighter; on unaccustomed ground he could be
awkward and shy: he still had little aptitude for the business of working
in a group. One cause he did take up was the promotion of the
embryonic League of Nations. But a contemporary remembered him
in his early days in the House of Commons as being ‘a lonely, detached
figure wandering unhappily about the lobbies of the House, uncertain
of his mind. The war, he would say, had planted the seeds of doubt;
parties were changing, new political creeds running molten from the
crucible of old faiths; and he did not know which way to make his own.”

He had got into Parliament by his individual skills: it perhaps seemed
to him that he would not make his way far in Parliament unless he could
find some sort of status, some vantage-point, which would balance his
solitariness and haughtiness and enable him to work with other people
or from which to impose on them his personality. He needed to turn
people’s view of him from that of a somewhat louring if elegant lone-
wolf into someone more approachable. He needed, in fact, something
personal. He was very good looking. He was practised at love.

10 Rules of the Game

At the end of 1919 he went down to Plymouth to help Nancy Astor
in the by-election in which she was campaigning to become the first
woman MP. There he met a fellow helper, a girl whom he had come
across once or twice during the last year. She was Cynthia, second
daughter of Earl Curzon of Kedleston, the Foreign Secretary in Lloyd
George’s coalition government. He fell in love with Cynthia: he had not
fallen in love before. He asked her to marry him. At first she refused.
She had, it seemed, heard something of his reputation. He pursued her
with letters. He tried to make legible his strange, angular handwriting.

My mother Cynthia was always known as Cim or Cimmie, just as
my father was known as Tom.

Betton House
Market Drayton
Shropshire

Cim darling.

Do not forget dinner Tuesday 7 pm. Really that is only an excuse
to write to you — and I do so hate writing letters! I could write such
wonderful letters if I could only dictate them like a speech or a
newspaper article; but with a hand like this how can any sentiment
or expression be other than ridiculous. An authority on these matters
told me once that my writing could only mean genius or lunacy: in
my youthful arrogance I welcomed the former conclusion, but since
the present obsession I am driven to believe that the latter alternative
is true. Not very complimentary to you! but a consuming disease of
this intensity can be nothing short of lunacy. I remember Disraeli said
somewhere that it was better to doubt of the creed in which you have
been nurtured than of the personal powers on which you have staked
your life. I now so agree with him. I have always believed, and so
far found it to be true, that the will of men could conquer all emotion
or pain whether spiritual or physical and mould the world to be just
a reflection of its own personality. And now I have discovered an
emotion, or is it a disease of the mind, which is more powerful than
even the human spirit. What nonsense I write!

I have come down here after a strenuous League of Nations trip;
staying alone with my mother until Monday, return London mutatis
mutandis. A good meeting on Friday at Leamington. I became em-
broiled with some Roman Catholic priests— Canon Barry and others
— who are opposing the League. Sir Ernest Pollock’s ministerial
dismay at the prospects of a brawl between the clericals and myself

Tom II

in his constituency was very comic! However after a slightly acri-
monious debate we got a nearly unanimous resolution in the League’s
favour. They have now asked me to take over the League of Nations
campaign throughout the country as the chairman of Campaign
Committee at Headquarters. It entails several hours of work a day at
their London office in addition to everything else, but I think I must
do it as it is in the greatest of all causes, and really the more I am
smothered in work the better.

I have thought so much of things down here in the lull after the
storm. As you too have heard of these dead things from my short but
weary past — as it now appears to me — I wonder whether you set out
in some strange idea of avenging anything your sex has suffered from
me? If so I must congratulate you, for few mortals have attained so
complete a measure of success in even their most facile aspirations! I
do not believe it to be true; for — worst of all — I think you were not
even sufficiently interested for that! I would surrender the present
with the ages to come and those past, just once to make you cry as
I have made others cry; and then instead of leaving as I have always
left tears, to kiss those tears away. Whatever you feel for me whether
nothing or everything will never affect my love for you. I do want
to marry you and always shall: but until you also feel as I do, if indeed
you ever do, I am so happy just to be with you in a way I never
thought possible between men and women. I shall have been a whole
week on Tuesday without seeing you and I do want to be with you
so often and will not make love to you (yet awhile!)

Tom

CHAPTER 2

Cimmie

Cynthia or Cimmie Curzon was from a background odder than Tom’s,
and was thought by her friends to be herself unconventional.

Her father George Curzon was the eldest son of an aristocratic
Derbyshire family, the Scarsdales, who had been from time to time on
visiting terms with the Mosleys. George Curzon had emerged from an
upbringing by neglectful parents and a sadistic nanny, had flourished at
Eton and Balliol, had travelled across Persia on horseback, had been a
founder member of the social élite called The Souls, had entered Parlia-
ment at the age of twenty seven, and had seemed set for a remarkable
political career. His only hindrance was that as heir to a not very rich
estate and with his father Viscount Scarsdale still alive, he did not have
much money.

Cimmie’s mother was Mary Leiter, the daughter of Levi Zebidee
Leiter, a Chicago millionaire. It would seem from the names that the
Leiters were Jewish; but apparently in origins they were Mennonites,
a protestant sect originating in Holland. The Leiters had emigrated to
America in the eighteenth century. Levi Leiter made his fortune in
Chicago real estate in the 1860s: then, at the insistence of his wife, he
moved to Washington, in order that the family might exercise its
fortune at one of the centres of American social life. That the Leiters
successfully managed to do this was largely due to the charms of the
eldest daughter Mary. Before her eighteenth birthday she was being
hailed as the belle of innumerable balls, and was on socially intimate
terms with members of the political and literary intelligentsia. Having
‘conquered’ Washington and New York (girls in the 1880s were talked
about in those terms) she moved on, with her mother, to Paris and
London. There, in 1890, she met George Curzon.

George proposed marriage in 1893: Mary accepted: they professed

Cimmie 13

undying love. George said he wanted to keep the engagement secret in
order to consolidate his political career by travelling in India and
Afghanistan: they were with each other for only two days in the next
two years. When they were finally married in 1895 Levi Leiter settled
£,140,000 on his daughter and an additional income of £6,000 a year.
George had hoped for £9,000 but had ‘no doubt that we can perfectly
well get on with less’. There is a legend in the Leiter family that on the
eve of the wedding George asked for more money from Levi Leiter.
Whatever the truth of this, there seems to have been little liking
between the two families.

The couple settled in England in London and then at Reigate Priory
in Surrey. George was appointed Under Secretary of State at the
Foreign Office. Mary was unhappy; after the social successes of her
youth she now found herself often alone. George’s old friends seemed
to ignore her: perhaps she did not want to play the game by which
English upper-class married women made themselves sexually available.
George was much of the time in London.

George’s family was not much help. When visiting Kedleston, the
Scarsdale home in Derbyshire, Mary noted that George’s father was:

very fond of examining his tongue in a mirror. When he sits reading
or writing he makes the most fiendish grimaces. He sleeps with his
feet 2ft higher than his head with no blanket over him in the midst
of winter, he has 18 thermometers in his sitting room and the tables
are covered with magazines and railway almanacs of 1839.

A first child, Irene, was born in 1896. By the time my mother Cimmie
was born on August 23rd 1898 things were looking better. George had
just been appointed Viceroy of India at the extraordinarily young age
of thirty nine. Mary (she wrote to her mother) was about to fill ‘the
greatest place ever held by an American abroad’. There were interviews
with Queen Victoria: enormous expenditures on clothes and jewels. It
was accepted that Viceroys had to find huge sums out of their own
fortunes. Mary asked her father for more money. But all this happened
just at the time when Mary’s brother Joe Leiter, in Chicago, had
attempted to ‘corner the wheat market’, which meant borrowing huge
sums of money to buy up, literally, all the wheat in America with a view
to pushing the price up before selling. In the end he had been outwitted
by a rival who imported wheat from Canada across the frozen Great
Lakes by means of ice-breakers: so now Joe was in debt to the extent
of nine million dollars. There was a conflict of interests — and indeed

14 Rules of the Game

of styles — within the family, that came to a crisis now and lasted for
generations. Joe Leiter, Levi’s only son, was an outlandish character:
once when there was a strike at one of his coal mines he hired an
armoured train with machine guns on it to carry blackleg labour
through the pickets; in the last coach there were a gang of ladies.

Levi Leiter managed to raise two million dollars for his son, and
another million for his daughter. The Curzons departed in state for
India.

A nanny and a wet-nurse had been engaged for the new baby
Cimmie: George Curzon had insisted on interviewing the applicants
himself. The wet nurse was sick most of the way across the Bay of
Biscay.

Children have imprinted on them patterns they observe from their
parents: George and Mary’s relationship was enigmatic. They were
often professing their love; yet in fact they seem to have been curiously
removed from one another. The most telling description of George
Curzon has been given by Elinor Glyn, who became his mistress for
a number of years after Mary’s death. Much of this description might
also have applied to Tom at the time he met Cimmie.

He has always been loved by women, but he has never allowed any
individual woman to have the slightest influence on his life ... He
likes their society for entirely leisure moments ... He likes them in
the spirit in which other men like fine horses or good wine ... They
are on a different plane altogether.

He is the most passionate physical lover, but so fastidious that no
woman of the lower classes had ever been able to attract him. Since
his habit is never to study the real woman, but only to accept the
superficial presentation of herself which she wishes him to receive, he
is naturally attracted to Americans.

He never gives a woman a single command, and yet each one must
be perfectly conscious that she must obey his slightest inclinations. He
rules entirely: and when a woman belongs to him he seems to prefer
to give her even the raiment which touches her skin, and in every
tangible way show absolute possession, while in words avoiding all
suggestion of ownership, all ties, all obligations, upon either side. It
is extremely curious.

When the Curzons arrived in India they found themselves in a world
in which they were almost always on show, almost always surrounded
by obsequiousness, almost totally dependent on each other for com-

Cimmie 15

panionship. They were like royalty but even more solitary, not being
members of what are usually large royal families. Mary wrote to her
mother that she felt as if she were on a stage; she did not seem to mind
this, perhaps because in recent years she had been neglected. George, as
was his custom, threw himself into work: he became obsessed with
details: he did not delegate responsibility. Mary was still, except when
acting like a queen, very much on her own. She and George showed
their devotion to each other by writing passionate but hurried notes
from opposite ends of Government House. The children were in the
hands of nannies, nurserymaids, wet nurses. My aunt Irene remembered
of the time when she was three or four:

we used to drive in a landau with three nurses, two red-liveried men
on the box, and two standing up behind. When we were out in the
morning in our rickshaws there was an army of attendants including
the Viceroy’s policeman who usually carried one or two of our
broken dolls ...

According to my mother I wasa very hard child to handle, whereas
Cynthia was a saint. I was often naughty to ‘saintly Cim’: I kicked
her savagely one day and this ended in a fight. I recall my father
smacking me and locking me in the bathroom.

There is a mystery about the reign of the Curzons in India. They were
in most ways immensely successful: George Curzon pushed most of his
administrative reforms through: he embarked on a programme for the
restoration of historical monuments which makes him still (1982) the
best-loved viceroy in Indian memory. He was not always popular
amongst his compatriots: when two Indian servants were murdered by
some drunken gth Lancers and the regiment found itself unable to find
the culprits, he stopped the leave of the entire regiment, and for this was
booed by the fashionable crowd on Calcutta racecourse. But Mary was
always popular in her role of Vicereine; she backed up her husband and
made people warm towards him; and his practical achievements were
undeniable.

Then after seven years, half way through a second term of office
which against precedent had been given to him, George Curzon began
to antagonise everyone around him. He wrote letters home which
infuriated even his oldest friends in government; at work, he became
increasingly intransigent and appeared to be heading for some sort of
breakdown. The point at issue was an important technicality of army
administration — about how far the army should remain under the direct

16 Rules of the Game

orders of the Viceroy. George Curzon was probably correct in his
insistence that it should; but his methods of attacking head-on the
commander-in-chief, Kitchener, resulted in his own defeat. He resigned;
and came home to some sort of ostracism at the hands of his old friends.

Mary found herself in an odd position in all this: as was her custom
she manoeuvred ostensibly in support of her husband; but in doing so
she seems to have carried on a more or less serious social flirtation with
two of his arch enemies — Balfour, the Prime Minister in 1905, and
Kitchener himself. She herself became ill: she wrote ‘the bell will go,
and India will kill me as one of the humble inconsequent lives that go
into the foundations of all great works’: and it did become the legend
that the Indian climate killed her. But in fact she had flourished in
India; and she had been for the first time seriously ill when she was
on leave in England in 1904. George had then wanted her to remain in
England, but she had insisted on rejoining him in India, and there she
had again flourished while he had begun to crack up. Then after he had
resigned and they were back in England she took to her bed again; and
while she and George were once more writing love-notes to each other
from the opposite ends of a not-so-enormous house, half way through
1906 and without much explicit cause, she died. The newspapers called
it a heart-attack. She was only thirty four. In her last note delivered to
her husband by a footman she had apologised for her ‘devilish ills’ and
had said that she feared she was going out of her mind: George had
replied that ‘nothing else matters except to make my darling well again’;
but then he had gone ‘crying to bed’ without seeing her. As she was
dying he had sat beside her and had made notes of the tragedy. Then
he set about constructing an elaborate monument to her in the church
at Kedleston.

Cimmie was seven when her mother died. George Curzon and his
three young daughters (a third, Alexandra, had been born in 1904)
settled in their large and now somewhat lifeless houses at 1 Carlton
House Terrace in London, and Hackwood Park in Hampshire. These
houses were paid for largely by Leiter money which was now in trust
to the children — Levi Leiter had died in 1904 and this had been one of
the terms of his will — but George Curzon had the use of the income.

Life for the children continued to circulate around nannies, nursery-
maids, other servants, horses and dogs. They saw their father at week-
ends when they would help him with the tasks that he still insisted on
performing himself around the house — holding the ladder for him while
he hung pictures; carrying a basket of old bread with which he rubbed
out finger-marks on doors. He continued to interview the children’s

Cimmie 17

maids and governesses, questioning them during meals on obscure
historical subjects and then appearing appalled when they did not know
the answers. He would also turn this sort of teasing against himself:
many of the pompous sayings for which he later became notorious (‘I
didn’t know the lower classes had such white skins’ when he saw soldiers
bathing) were acted out partly as a parody of himself, by which it seems
he felt he might protect himself.

As time went on his old friends returned and there were Saturday to
Monday parties at Hackwood at which once again were played the
games of The Souls that were erudite and childish — charades, clumps;
paper-games in which it was required that one wrote verses in a certain
style, or composed witty telegrams from given initial letters. The
children were brought up on the edge of all this: there were the more
straightforward games they themselves played with their father: he
would describe a historical scene to them and they had to recognise what
it was; there was one particularly lugubrious game which consisted of
just writing down the names of all the famous people one could think
of beginning with a certain letter.

At the outbreak of war in 1914 Cimmie was nearly sixteen. The
Belgian Royal Family came to stay at Hackwood as refugees: Cimmie
corresponded with the young prince Leopold in a schoolroom code
fashionable at the time. She corresponded with young men at the front,
and during the next four years they replied to her in hundreds of letters
in the tiny, meticulously pencilled scrawls on lined or squared paper that
are the memorials of men hunched up in mud or dug-outs. These letters
are brave, flirtatious, cheerful, correct: they give off the smell as it were
of huge and terrible events and yet say almost nothing. Cimmie had
four or five correspondents who seem to have been servants at Hack-
wood or Carlton House Terrace: there is some sort of straightforward-
ness about their letters that is missing from the usual upper-class style:
‘I think it would take all my strength to bear another winter’: also — ‘I
have never been so happy as I have been during this war: I sometimes
think it may be because I at last find that I am of some use in the world.
If it were possible to make a wish and have that wish granted, I should
just wish for health and strength to continue the fight and to become
a billet for the last bullet fired, don’t you think that would be a glorious
end?’

These men sent her presents (‘It is a genuine Sennussi earings and
necklace presented to me by one of those ladies in return for a small
kindness I was able to render’) and she sent to them cigarettes, cakes,
clothes, a mouth-organ. Like most young girls (and indeed almost

18 Rules of the Game

everyone at the time) she found it difficult to get a hold in her mind
of what was going on: people wrote so passively and laconically about
horror: no one seemed much interested in stopping it. Cimmie kept a
diary on and off during the war: much of it was concerned with the
trivia of everyday life. She was still having trouble from the naggings
of her sister Irene; she was ashamed of not being more ‘constructive’
herself. She made her good resolutions: but she felt there was little use
in these unless there was:

a Big Solemn Comprehensive idea that holds you and me and all the
world together in one great grand universal scheme ... Religion is
the perpetual discovery of that Great Thing Out There ... Marriage
has got to be a religious marriage or else it is a splitting up of life;
religion and love are most of life, and all the power there is in it;
therefore they can’t afford to be harnessed in different directions ...
I love people loving me more than anything in the world. I am going
to try to make people love me more. No one knows how it hurts
when someone I adore doesn’t adore me. I must say very gratefully
it has never happened for long.

Cimmie went to a boarding school at Eastbourne in 1916. There she
became the centre of a rather tomboyish, dashing circle of girls. In the
winter of 1917-18 she worked as a clerk in the War Office: in 1918 she
was on a farm as a landgirl. She liked this because it gave her freedom
— far more than would have been allowed to a girl such as her before
the war, or indeed after it. Then she did a short welfare course at the
London School of Economics including social work in the East End. She
maintained her reputation for bemg somewhat wild, anarchic: a rebel
with a conscience.

In 1916 George Curzon had become a member of the War Cabinet:
also President of the Anti-Suffrage League. In 1917 he married again,
a Mrs Duggan, the widow of a South American millionaire. Cimmie’s
rebelliousness coincided with her father increasingly being seen as a
pillar of the conservative establishment. Cimmie found her relations
with him difficult; but she continued to respect much of what he stood
for in the way of dedication to duty and hard work. She wrote con-
cerning her confusions about all this to Elinor Glyn, her father’s ex-
mistress, who had earlier been to her some sort of mother-substitute.
Elinor Glyn had had to make her own way in the world: she had
been a romantic novelist, a business woman, and a courtesan. She
replied:

Cimmie 19

Get to the real meaning of things and the real values. True socialism
should be to help conditions so that every child has a chance till it
comes to fifteen say, and then sift the chaff from the corn. But
lawlessness can never accomplish this, only reason and self-control.
Therefore when you say you have ‘Bolshevick’ feelings examine
them. They are probably only the unrest of overstored energy
and the evolution of sex, which unconsciously works in every
normal and healthy human being. If I were you dear child I would
pull right up and examine where I was going and what I really
wanted to become. I fully understand that spirit you have and sym-
pathise with it, only it must be turned to fine ends, not disastrous
ones. Just think of the wonderful power you could have if you
wanted to! No hampering poverty or small position: you could be
a leader of splendid things if you liked. I would set myself a model
to rise to and nothing of personal weakness or foolish desires should
be allowed to stand in the way of it; make myself into the most
beautiful and cultivated and attractive young woman in England, so
that when the right man came along he would not have to blink at
certain aspects of me but would worship me as a queen; not take me
as a ‘jolly girl’ or ‘good old sport’ or because he could not obtain me
for his mistress in any other way, as is the attitude that most modern
young men approach their choices with. You should reign — not be
commiserated with as ‘Poor dear Cim, what a mess she has made of
it!’

There was something in Cimmie, evidently, that might accept being
taken as a ‘good old sport’: perhaps her tomboyishness covered a
vulnerability. Many of her boyfriends from childhood and to whom she
had written in the war had been killed; it was not unusual for people
to protect their feelings by an armour of gaiety. This was what young
men in the trenches had done. Cimmie wrote to Lady Desborough
whose Family Journal had just been published in praise of her two sons
Julian and Billy Grenfell who had been killed —- “Words cannot express
how I wish I had known those boys: always I have longed to be friends
with people like that: I feel I have missed something that perhaps I may
never find again.’

Tom Mosley remembered that one of the first times he saw
Cimmie was on armistice night when she was at the Ritz Hotel draped
in a Union Jack and singing patriotic songs: later that night (in her
sister Irene’s description) ‘she tore round Trafalgar Square with the
great crowd setting light to old cars and trucks to the horror of my

20 Rules of the Game

father’. Tom himself was filled with sadness at the memory of his
dead friends. However, a year later when he met Cimmie at Plymouth
what he loved about her perhaps was her exuberant energy. He
asked her to marry him. But when he wrote to her of his lunacy, his
sufferings, the phantasms attendant on his unrequited love, she did not
see, at first, what she might love in him. Perhaps she wished for a less
histrionic attack. To his letter quoted at the end of the last chapter she
replied:

Hackwood

Basingstoke
I was carried off tonight and didn’t have a chance of saying good-
night and thanking you for giving me dinner and wangling me
such a wonderfully good seat — so this is just to thank you now very
much indeed. I do think it splendid the League making you Chairman
of the Campaign Committee, I am glad and shall love to be roped
in if there is any mortal thing I could do. Also remember the clubs
in Hanwell, and that Phyllis and I are only awaiting further instruc-
tions.

And now Dear about your lunacy, don’t let it be a disease, don’t
let it obsess you, don’t please go on wanting to make me cry or
thinking me avengeful — I am really terribly compassionate, and
having to hurt you hurts me dreadfully though you mayn’t think it.
I am not so hard as you imagine or even I make out; I just, well, |
can’t love you as you love me. Don’t think Iam merely callous saying
that, it seems to me the only thing. I love being with you, I love
talking to you, I should adore to be the really glorious friends we
could be: please be satisfied with that, I know it’s a rotten poor return
for all you meant to give me, I am so intensely aware of all you would
like to give me, I know how you love me, I am wonder- even awe-
struck by it: but Tom, I can’t give you anything like that back.
Forgive me for saying that my dear ... only I would like to be of
comfort to you instead of a disease. But I send love and blessings and
again if only you could be devoted to me just as I am to you and not
any other way — Goodnight Tom dear. Cim (I am not a humbug and
don’t think I am asking the impossible).

Tom was not much abashed by this; there has to be a fight if one is to
be conqueror. He pursued her by letter to Switzerland, where she had
gone to ski.

Cimmie 21

105 Mount St
21/12/19 W.1I.
Cimmie darling,

I expect by now you are with the snow and sun and all beautiful
things forgetful of this land of mist and sorrows. I rather love it tho’,
despite its sadness, perhaps on account of it, especially down here in
my beloved Leicestershire where I should always be so happy with
horses and hounds if it was not for the other people! I have buried
myself for the weekend in the midst of that community which poor
Wilde in his arrogant days prescribed as ‘the unspeakable in pursuit
of the uneatable’. Middle-aged survivors of the ‘unseemly brawl’ [the
war] which interrupted their activities still carry on melancholy
intrigues with the strenuous married women of the Melton district.
The famous charms and antics of the latter now appear to me in a
more garish light even than of yore. I suppose everything in life 1s
comparative! ...

No politics or clamour for a little while. In detached moments such
as these the struggle seems rather distasteful, tho’ we revel in it while
the fight is on. The incentive of mere personal ambition, except as
a means of achieving our conceptions, seems more ludicrous than
usual, and the ideas behind it all stand alone as the force that drags
us back and will do so until the end.

The House starts again on February toth but I fear I shall be forced
to do a weeks speaking tour in the country about January 2oth. I
return tomorrow to hear L.G. evade the Irish issue and to compare
notes with fellow Bolsheviks. Next session promises embittered con-
troversies as of old...

Come back soon but not before you want to. I do hope you are
very happy out there and that life is wonderful. I am sure it always
will be for you because life only gives us but a reflection of ourselves.
I think this is the longest letter I have ever written in my ridiculous
handwriting. It may carry to you a little of the dull things and a little
of the joyous things that occupy me in this interval of existence if
nothing of the things to which I look beyond it.

Tom

So long as Tom talked of ‘the dull things’ Cimmie could reply in kind:
So dreadfully sorry not to have answered your letter before reaily

very very apologetic as I loved getting it and have meant to write and
say so for days but always there seems something to be done...

22 Rules of the Game

And so on. But then, a week or so later, Tom returned to the attack.

I do so want you to marry me you see as I tried to explain that last
wonderful night at the fancy party. I am tired of next session and all
its dull things and duller people and only want to love you — perhaps
this bores you — I cannot tell — it is for you to settle but please do so
quickly! My life has been such a hustle that I seem to have acquired
the habit and people in a hurry are usually unpleasant to others ...
Write and tell me what you feel about it all and I only pray that this
and every other decision in your life will bring you happiness which
is all that matters to me...

But then, Cimmie was immediately on the defensive again.

Darling child, don’t be tired about next Session, please, and don’t be
unhappy, but lam very very sorry, I don’t want to marry you. I hate
just putting it like that, it seems so horrid, but you said you were an
impatient person and I must let you know. Don’t think the idea of
you loving me bores me (as you say) you never would bore me and
I loved getting to know you and talking to you. But I am sad that
I should make you sad now whereas I only so much wanted to help
and make you happy. Please be happy and full of interest in your job
and let me know that my being unable to love you in the way you
want isn’t going to spoil things for you between us ...

‘Being unable to love you in the way you want’ probably included a
reluctance on Cimmie’s part to risk herself in the area in which she knew
Tom was renowned. She was safe so long as she remained in Switzer-
land. But when she was back in England, Tom seems to have brought
the style of his pursuit as it were down to earth. He arranged for Cimmie
to stay in Leicestershire and go hunting with him. After this he wrote:

Funny Baby, Please do not be cross or distressed with me for tonight’s
few moments or above all frightened ever of me, because I would
rather anything than ever hurt you for a single instant. I fear that side
of me is very vital and strong and indeed if it was not I should not
be much use in this life of struggle! But I do love you with all the
strength of the other side, which is the only side that matters and
which I have never given to any other woman.

My real love for you will always prevent the original wild animal
hurting or distressing you because in me the spirit always wins when

Cimmie 23

it is interested or affected. How crudely expressed: but you will
understand, and I am so anxious that you shall never be alarmed or
weary with me. I adored being with you in the places that I love —
and I adore you — all of me does!!

Tom

Cimmie was a practical, sensuous person and she seems to have adored
Tom and never to have ceased from adoring him once her sexuality
was aroused. Soon he was writing to her — from his bachelor apartment,
and in a note now torn down the middle but still as it were carefully
legible:

His own darling Cim ...

It occurred to me that Molyneux might possibly let me his flat for us

to go there in the day time while he is away. If you know him well

enough will you ask him, as this place is alright for Tom but not very

congenial for his one. He feels so lonely tonight! It is all wrong!
Bless her. X.

By March 26th 1920 they were engaged.

CHAPTER 3

Marriage and Politics

Tom and Cimmie were married on May 11th 1920 in the Chapel Royal,
St James’s. Cimmie had wanted a quiet wedding: the Chapel Royal, in
the words of a contemporary newspaper, was ‘so small that the guests
scarcely have room even to study one another’s gowns — but the
privilege of being married in this building is a highly prized favour’.
King George and Queen Mary were present, as were the Kirfg and
Queen of the Belgians, who had been flown across the channel in two
two-seater aeroplanes specially for the occasion. Outside the Chapel
there was such a crowd that it had to be held back by police. Cimmie’s
wedding dress had a design of green leaves in it, in defiance of a
superstition that green at a wedding was unlucky: there was also a
superstition that it was unlucky to be married in May. Cimmie herself
chose the music: during the handing-over of the ring the Liebestod from
Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde was played; though the organist, a news-
paper reported, did his best to make it inaudible. Another newspaper
commented that ‘Mr Oswald Mosley, the bridegroom, was in the happy
position of arousing little attention’. Photographs of him at the wedding
show him, almost without exception, like an actor acknowledging the
applause of a crowd. Cimmie’s younger sister wrote to her “You must
tell Tom for the sake of his political career to put on a less footling
expression when photographed’.

Before the wedding there had been one or two voices advising
Cimmie not to rush in too quickly. A war-time boyfriend wrote “There
is a reason for knowing your Tom very thoroughly, but this is best
discussed with a married woman’. But Tom himself, it seems, had
already discussed this sort of thing with Cimmie. Cimmie had won-
dered what her father would make of the engagement; in the event he
was relieved at her choice of Tom, since he knew of what were only

Marriage and Politics 25

half jokingly called her ‘bolshevick’ tendencies. He wrote to his wife
Grace ‘It turns out he is quite independent — he has practically severed
himself from his father who is a spendthrift ... He did not even know
that Cim was an heiress’. For the rest there were just hundreds of letters
saying how perfect everything was. Nancy Astor wrote “This is just a
line of real love and I do love Tom too. You will be just the kind of
wife he needs and wants. I feel he must have a great soul, or he would
never have asked you to share it.’ Elinor Glyn wrote to Cimmie ‘One
day you will rule England.’

They went for their honeymoon to Portofino, in Italy. There
Cimmie taught Tom how to swim; before, he had had a terror of
putting his head under water. (He wrote in his autobiography that he
considered this due to his having been nearly smothered at birth, which
was not in line with his view that early traumas had had no effect on
him). About the house where he and Cimmie stayed he wrote — ‘Both
Dante and Napoleon had slept in the mediaeval fortress; across the
lovely bay you could see at Spezia the tragic water wine-dark with
Shelley’s drowning; along the heights which linked Portofino with
Rapallo strode Nietzsche in the ecstasy of writing Zarathustra; Cimmie
and I followed the same route more prosaically riding donkeys’.

Cimmie’s two sisters Irene (sometimes called Nina) and Alexandra
(always called Baba) felt, in their different styles, an almost personal
involvement in the wedding and with the honeymoon couple. Irene,
aged twenty-four and unmarried, wrote immediately after Cimmie and
Tom had left the reception at Carlton House Terrace:

My 2 ‘tweets’ Tim and Tom

This is a tiny little breath of a lonely house left behind: thinking
of you so hard: my thoughts will fly to you both tonight with all the
prayers and wonder and sacredness that surround that little wedding-
ring — my sweet Cim. May all the stars twinkle and bless you tonight
and all the divine fresh green trees and flowers whisper spring —
spring — spring — with your two hearts.

Your Nina

And Baba, a schoolgirl of sixteen, wrote after she had heard from
Cimmie at Portofino:

My most pessus darling Tim,

Iam so so happy that it has turned out so wonderful as I have thought
about you such a lot and longed for it to be like a perfect dream. I
am just living for the time for you to come back ...

26 Rules of the Game

For Tom his honeymoon was the beginning of the twelve years of his
life during which, he wrote later, ‘the summits of private happiness were
balanced by the heights of public acclaim’. He not only loved Cimmie:
he had seen her as someone with whom in partnership he might set out
to alter the world. Cimmie had felt him as her child when she had been
reluctant to marry him: she now also felt him as her conqueror. And
she too had been brought up to think that in such a partnership she might
alter the world.

What is striking about Tom’s early years in Parliament is that he was
on the ‘liberal’ or progressive side in almost every issue of any impor-
tance. From the first he saw that the coalition government under Lloyd
George which had been elected to ‘make a land fit for heroes to live in’
had little intention of trying to do so: elderly men who had not been
in the war were making a country profitable to themselves. Tom saw
himself as the champion of the young versus the old: he became Presi-
dent of a body called The League of Youth and Social Progress: but even
this, he found, was in fact run by ‘a smooth and smug little Liberal ...
typical of the middle-aged politicians who in each generation exploit
youth.” He could use his talent for vituperation however as a speaker
on its platforms: in his inaugural address as chairman he declaimed —
‘Beware lest old age steal back and rob you of the reward ... lest the
old dead men with their old dead minds embalmed in the tombs of the
past creep back to dominate your new age, cleansed of their mistakes
in the blood of your generation.’ Such violence of phraseology got him
publicity: he was still not at this time an impressive speaker when
controlled.

His more serious efforts were to do with his championing of the new
League of Nations: he cared above all about means for preserving peace.
He had already been made Chairman of the Campaign Committee in
England to publicise the League: he made speeches up and down the
country. His mentor in this work was Lord Robert Cecil, the British
representative at the League; of whom Tom later wrote (probably his
highest recorded compliment about any living politician) ‘he was nearly
a great man and he was certainly a good man; possibly as great a man
as so good a man can be’. Together in Parliament they condemned the
British annexation of a former German island in the Pacific for the sake
of its phosphate deposits: Tom declared this represented ‘the worst days
of predatory imperialism’. He described General Dyer’s slaughter of
Indian civilians at Amritsar as an example of ‘Prussian frightfulness
inspired by racism’. When British troops were used against the Bol-
sheviks in Russia he protested — ‘It went to my heart to think of

Marriage and Politics 27

£ 100,000,000 being spent in Russia supporting a mere adventure while
the unemployed are trying to keep a family on 15s a week.” Then in 1923
when Mussolini’s troops occupied the Greek island of Corfu he called
for the League of Nations to impose sanctions against Italy. His whole
political life, he wrote later, was ‘predetermined by this almost religious
conviction — to prevent a recurrence of war’. He felt that this might be
done by the refusal by Britain to become involved in any aggression or
even adventures; and by Britain’s backing all internationally controlled
efforts to prevent aggression by others. About the means necessary to
do this he did have a different view from Robert Cecil: the latter had
an almost mystical trust in the triumph of human reason so long as
conflicts of opinion could be aired. Tom at this time had no illusions
that even if a majority of nations agreed on some solution to a conflict,
this might not have to be imposed on a minority by at least a show of
force. In later years he himself came to have an almost mystical belief
in his own powers of reasoning: but by then there were fewer illusions
about the efficacy of the use of force.

The issue however with which Tom became most notoriously em-
broiled during his early years in Parliament was that of Ireland. After
the 1918 election the Irish MPs elected to Westminster had unilaterally
declared Ireland to bea republic: the Irish Republican Army was formed
to gain independence from Britain by force. By 1920 the IRA were in
control of much of the country: Lloyd George chose not to fight back
openly — this might have alarmed public opinion — but rather to
organise, or allow to be organised, gangs of mercenaries who would
take on the IRA in their own style. These toughs became known as the
Black and Tans from the colour of their uniforms: they found them-
selves engaged in a prototype of modern guerrilla warfare in which there
were atrocities on both sides — especially the use of torture to extract
information. Tom, in Parliament, railed against the government both
for its responsibility for the Black and Tans and its denial of responsi-
bility: the government was.engaged in activities like ‘the pogroms of
the barbarous slav’: it had “denials on its lips and blood on its hands’.
He was booed and jeered by Conservative MPs: he replied that he was
‘unperturbed by the monosyllabic interjections of the otherwise inarti-
culate’. On November 3rd 1920 he left the Conservative benches and
sat with the Independents: he had lasted as even a nominal member of
the Tory establishment for less than two years.

The Irish nationalist leader T. P. O’Connor wrote later to Cimmie
— ‘I regard him as the man who really began the break-up of the Black
and Tan savagery’.

28 Rules of the Game

Tom had made his mark in Parliament as someone who would fight
for the rights of the oppressed and underprivileged: but he was in a
position of being able to object to government callousness and to
government duplicity because he himself was only a critic and he was
not in a position of power. He was outraged at the methods of the Black
and Tans not only because they were wicked (he approved of the
controlled use of force to prevent aggression elsewhere) but because they
were stupid: in the event, they aroused support for the IRA. But still,
what else was to be done? He suggested when not in a vituperative mood
that the Government should take personal responsibility for the fight
against the IRA by means of a properly organised Intelligence Service:
thus it ‘should’ be possible to round up the ‘murder gangs’ without
recourse to one’s own terrorism. But within the word ‘should’ there lies
all the difference between those who have power and those who do not.
Tom, in later life, when faced with a form of violence against himself,
felt it right to reply in some sort of kind — even to become involved in
inevitable duplicity.

Tom’s sitting on the opposition benches in the House of Commons
meant that he fell out with most of the old men who had earlier
befriended him. He seemed to relish attacking the men at the top: he
accused Winston Churchill, whom he saw as being responsible for the
attack on Russia, of ‘borrowing his principles from Prussia ... but my
complaint is that he is an ineffectual Prussian ... it is no good keeping
a private Napoleon if he is always defeated’. He said of the editor of the
Observer, James Garvin, that he was a ‘musical doormat which plays
“See The Conquering Hero Comes”’ whenever Mr Lloyd George wipes
his boots upon it.’

He became involved in attempts to form a Centre Party which
would stand against the corruption and inefficiency of Lloyd George’s
Coalition and might draw support from both Tory and Liberal
malcontents and even Labour. He wrote to Robert Cecil in April
1921 —

A real opportunity presents itself for a confederation of reasonable
men to advance with a definite proposal for the reorganisation of our
industrial system upon a durable basis and a concurrent revision of
the financial chaos . .. The trouble is we are so immersed in the detail
of everyday existence that we lose the a priori mind — the only
attribute in the world that matters ... One loses entirely the vision
splendid of politics within the four walls of the H of C. It was so much
easier in the past with such long intervals for dreams!

Marriage and Politics 29

Lord Cowdray, the industrialist, was approached, and gave an under-
taking that in certain circumstances he would provide money for a
Centre Party. Lord Grey, the Liberal Foreign Secretary at the outbreak
of war, was asked if he would emerge from his retirement and be its
leader. Cimmie and a dozen other wives of interested politicians wrote
to him —‘Wesee in your return to public life the best hope of an effective
rallying together ... of all the stable progressive elements in the
country’. But Tom found, as he found in later life repeatedly, that
however much men might like to talk about new alignments of forces
in the play-grounds of the political arena, their attitudes usually changed
when anything more than talk was proposed. Lord Grey replied:

Even if I were not under the disabilities of bad sight and of being in
the House of Lords I should feel that the possible results of my taking
an active part in public affairs are being greatly overestimated by my
friends. I do not believe that any remedy for the present discontent
is to be found in politics, but I will not enter upon a discussion of that
large question now ...

And then Robert Cecil himself, when Tom approached him to be leader
(‘I am convinced it lies within your power to change the whole course
of the history of the decade’) replied:

I think we should go on as heretofore saying as little as we can about
our personal position and continuing to hammer the Govt and set up
our alternative policy. Believe me it is facts that count in politics and
they seem more and more going against the Govt ... It is no use
chopping and changing, and until I see a very clear advantage in
moving again I think it would be better to stick where I am. I have
practically dropped the word ‘conservative’ ...

Years later Tom wrote of Robert Cecil that he ‘embodied the mature,
experienced and traditional wisdom of statesmanship not only in mind,
but in the physical presence of an age-old eagle whose hooded eyes
brooded on the follies of men while they still held the light of a further
and beneficent vision.’ Of Lord Grey he wrote — ‘I always found him
a singularly tedious and ineffective figure.’ He liked Robert Cecil and
he did not like Lord Grey. But whatever his personal predilections, he
was learning, for the first of many times, that if one wants to pursue ‘the
vision splendid of politics’, it is likely that one finds oneself at the head
of the field alone.

30 Rules of the Game

The fact that Tom was breaking away more and more from his
conservative and establishment background meant that he and Cimmie
found their relations increasingly strained with her father George
Curzon. Curzon had become Foreign Secretary in 1919; but such was
Lloyd George’s insistence on keeping most of the strings of foreign
policy in his own hands (Curzon took responsibility for Asian affairs)
that on the issues about which Tom at first was outspoken he and his
father-in-law seldom found it necessary to clash. However Curzon’s
tentative approval of Tom as a son-in-law became, over the Irish
question, tinged with alarm. His wife Grace wrote to him ‘What a fool
Tom Mosley is making of himself! If he goes on you should talk to him.’
But then when George Curzon tried to be fatherly to his daughter and
his son-in-law he ran into further difficulties. To one invitation to a very
grand dinner at Carlton House Terrace Tom’s secretary replied — ‘Dear
Lord Curzon, Mr Mosley asks me to say that he and the wife will be
glad to dine with you and the King and Queen on the 15th prox.’ Lord
Curzon replied to his daughter in his own handwriting in a letter which
began ‘In the first place your secretary should address me, if he must
address me at all, as My Lord ...” and continued with pages of detailed
instructions about correct modes of address and the answering of invita-
tions. Tom remarked that this information was ‘most useful’.

But the chief matter of contention between father and daughter and
son-in-law was about money. After Mary Curzon’s death in 1906 her
Leiter money was held in trust for her children. George Curzon was able
to get hold of the income from this on the grounds of his providing
suitable homes for the children; but then, under the terms of Levi Leiter’s
will, when the children came of age the income was supposed to go
direct to them. Irene, at twenty one, had demanded that she should have
her money: her father had protested. Cimmie, even after her marriage,
had for a time left part of her income with her father because it seemed
to her unfortunate that he still had comparatively little money of his
own to spare (his father Lord Scarsdale had died in 1916 but most of
the Scarsdale family money went into the upkeep of the estate at
Kedleston). But now, in 1921, Cimmie claimed the whole of her
income; probably because Tom had got into financial difficulties in
Harrow. When local newspapers had given up printing his speeches
about Ireland he had himself bought one of the papers in order to air
his views: later the paper had failed, and there were debts. George
Curzon protested about Cim’s proposal to claim her money: Cimmie
wrote him a letter in which (he reported to his wife) she called his
attitude ‘mean, petty, unwarrantable, unaccountable and incompre-

Marriage and Politics 31

hensible’. George Curzon replied that he was ‘unwilling to continue any
controversy on the matter’. Relations remained broken off. When in
1925 George Curzon was dying, he was still not on speaking terms with
his two elder daughters. Irene, when she went to make her peace with
him, was turned away at the door by a footman (she would tell this story
in later years with much distress: she professed an undying love and
respect for her father). There is no record of Cimmie having got as far
as the door.

Tom was also engaged in cutting himself off from his own past and
his family. His grandfather whom he had loved had died in 1915: his
father had nominally inherited the Rolleston estate, but his grandfather
had arranged that much of the money bypassed his son and went straight
to Tom. In 1919 Tom persuaded his father to put Rolleston up for sale
‘foreseeing the ruin of agriculture which politics were bringing, and
feeling that I could best serve the country in a political life at West-
minster’. Tom claimed that this was ‘a terrible uprooting causing me
much sorrow at the time’: but it was a deliberate decision to sell what
had been built up by past generations and with an eye to the future, for
the sake of Tom’s short-term political advantage. Rolleston was bought
by a developer and pulled down. By the time Tom died in 1980 there
were very few family heirlooms left from what had once been the
admittedly rather hollow magnificence of Rolleston.

Cimmie and Tom were acting instinctively, emotionally, in this
cutting-off from their pasts. Tom even sold his hunters and his polo
ponies: he wrote ‘politics had become for me the overriding interest and
required singlemindedness’. He wrote of Cimmie that she ‘reacted
strongly against the splendours of Conservatism so faithfully reflected
in her early surroundings, and this led her to seek close contact with the
mass of the people and to prefer simplicity in her own home’. But at
no stage of their life did this claim make much sense: it was not that from
now on they hob-nobbed single-mindedly with the working class, but
that they substituted one smart social set that they found boring for an
even smarter one that they did not. This was a time when they began
to go abroad for many of their social amusements to France and to Italy.

The social life by which Tom and Cimmie were taken up at this time
was what nowadays might be called international jet-set. Tom wrote
in his autobiography — ‘What was the purpose of it all, this going into
society? Apart from fun, which is always worthwhile so long as you
have the time, meeting people is clearly valuable, particularly people
with influence in divers spheres ... There was too the ‘‘open sesame”
into the world of culture, literature, music and art... It was a university

32 Rules of the Game

of charm, where a young man could encounter a refinement of sophisti-
cation whose acquisition could be some permanent passport in a varied
and variable world.’

Tom described the style of this ‘university of charm’. The hostesses
in the cities of Europe during the nineteen twenties were mostly
American: they had the money. In Paris there was Elsie de Wolfe, who
had ‘made a considerable fortune in New York as an interior decorator’.
On Sundays she usually had ‘twenty or thirty people of all nationalities
and professions to luncheon or dinner ... Miss de Wolfe’s conversation
was distinguished by immense vivacity rather than intellectual content
... When nearly ninety she was still doing what she called her morning
exercises which consisted of being flung about by two powerful men
of ballet dancer physique. Her gentler entourage included two well-
known characters of the period called Johnny and Tony who were
always at festive board and had a more delicate appreciation of haute
couture than of high politics.’ Then in Rome and Venice there was
Princess Jane di San Faustino, another American, who ‘regaled the
fashion world with the extremities of scandal floodlit by her unfailing
and eccentric humour’. She would sit at the beach at Venice and
‘unnerve’ newcomers with some ‘searing comment’ or her ‘basilisk
stare’. She would tell the story of her husband who, when he left her,
had ‘signalled the coachman to stop, teed up on the kerbstone as if for
a golfshot, and hit her as hard as he could over the head with his
umbrella’.

Compared to these, the leading London hostesses of the time — Lady
Cunard, Lady Colefax, Mrs Ronnie Greville — might indeed have
seemed rather tame.

Tom would explain that he saw social life as some sort of antidote,
or balance, to what might have otherwise become the grim and over-
riding obsessions of politics. What was required, he used to say, was a
‘Ganzheit’ (wholeness) for the attainment of ‘the complete man’. But
the style of people in Tom’s and Cimmie’s social world does not seem
to have been very different from that of politicians: there was more wit,
perhaps: but this was still the Proustian world of Paris or Venice in
which personal relationships, even love, were matters of intrigue,
conquest, possession, power; everyone was in the business of becoming
one up on everyone else. Certainly there seems to have been little in it
of music, literature, art: not much of that austere standing back by which
Proust transmuted what was tawdry into beauty.

What these salons were useful for, of course, was the business of men
picking up women. Tom had a phrase for this — ‘flushing the covers’

Marriage and Politics 33

— a reference to partridge or pheasant shooting, in which birds are put
up by beaters. There are different opinions about how long Tom was
faithful to Cimmie after their marriage: her sisters imagined possibly a
few years: Tom’s second wife, Diana, suggested a few months. He
would not have remained faithfui for long while moving in this café-
society world: what would have been the point? Talk of art and
literature was known as being a cover under which lurked the avail-
ability of young married women. Another form of camouflage was that
provided by the life of an MP. As one of the wits in Tom’s entourage
put it — What other job gives one such a valid excuse to be away from
home night after night till 1 am?

Tom had embarked on his social and political life as a conqueror: it
seems to have been agreed by both him and Cimmie that their marriage
should in some sense spur him on — she as well as he wanted him to do
‘great things’. But then what is this style of ‘greatness’? And what is the
style of a wife who has pledged herself to support her husband thus.
faithfully?

CHAPTER 4

Love Letters

Cimmie’s first child, a girl, was born on February 25th 1921. She was
christened Vivien Elisabeth. The nanny that came to look after her had
been Cimmie’s nurserymaid in India. Nanny Hyslop stayed with the
family in one capacity or another for over fifty years.

Cimmie and Tom had settled into a house in London — 8 Smith
Square ~ within easy reach of the Houses of Parliament. For weekends
and holidays they rented houses in the country or abroad. In the summer
of 1921 Nanny and Vivien were in Devon while Tom and Cimmie were
in Scotland: in 1922 they were on the Norfolk coast while Tom and
Cimmie were in Venice. In the winter of 1922-23 the family were
together in a house, Lou Mas, in the south of France, on Cap Ferrat near
Nice. Tom had to leave early to go home to speak in Parliament
about a crisis in Mesopotamia: Cimmie stayed behind with Nanny and
Vivien and her sister Baba who had come to stay. Cimmie was five
months pregnant again and had been told to rest. This was the first time
that Tom and Cimmie had been away from each other since their
marriage for more than two nights. During the ten days that they were
apart they each wrote to the other almost every day: Cimmie’s first letter
to Tom had been written even before he had left: Tom’s first letter to
Cimmie was written in the train so that he could post it at his first stop
at Cannes. The letters talk of their love; their dependence on each other.
Tom told the story much later to his second wife Diana that during this
time when Cimmie was pregnant he was having an affair with a mutual
friend with whom they had been in Venice the previous summer:
Cimmie had learned about this and it had caused her upset; also upset
(this was Tom’s theory) to the child. This might have happened after
the time of the letters. The child Cimmie was pregnant with, was myself.

I have cut some of the repetitions: but these letters show, as nothing

Love Letters 35

else can, the peculiarities of the relationship between Tom and Cimmie;
also something of the style of social life at the time.

Monday 12 February am. Lou Mas.
My beloved precious beloved
You haven’t gone yet but my heart is aching so I write now so as for
you to get a lett from me soon soon after you get back.
Be happy, be happy I do love you so frightfully I want you to miss
me but to be happy too. Will be back soon and till then kiss you every
morning every night, think of you every moment.
Bless you my precious I do love you so.
Kisses and love and love and kisses from

Your own Tim

Monday 12th February. Cannes
My own darling
I am so terribly unhappy at leaving you — nothing would have
made me go if I had realised what it meant and nothing will again.
Please, please do not be too sad and look after your wonderful darling
self for your T who adores you. I never understood before I left you
on the platform quite how much I loved you. You have brought all
the beauty and holiness and wonder with you that my life has ever
known or ever will know — something apart from — higher — and yet
wonderfully interwoven with my stormy existence — all that has
rendered it possible. Come back to me soon my beloved.
Tom.

Monday 12th February pm. Lou Mas.
My sweetheart, I hope I didn’t make you too unhappy when you
went off. It just suddenly seemed too awful and my heart nearly
broke. I don’t know really how I shall get through the next week.
I am so utterly dependent on you, you don’t know how my every
thought is of you, I really have no ‘me’ to speak of, only you you you:
a you to adore, a you to look after, a you I admire, a you that fills my
entire horizon. You have made such a difference to my life — filling
it completely — making it so happy, blissfully happy and content —
content in having found someone really big, really worthwhile, a
life and a person worthy of one’s whole endeavours and furthest
effort. 1 do hope I give you back a little of the ... [rest of the letter
missing].

36 Rules of the Game

Tuesday February 13th Calais.
My own darling,

Afraid missed Paris letter as train did not get there until 10 and went
on eleven — Tommy still in bed and by time he had dressed was going
on. Now only short let as feeling very sick — train rocking terribly
— if it is rough on channel disaster may ensue. Already his insistent
and plaintive cries of woe have evoked the compassion of fellow
voyagers. Truly so terribly wretched and depressed without my one
— such lonely little meals and sad feeling bring home to me every
moment how much you have become to me in all the little as well
as the big things in life. I nearly jumped off the train when she milked
out and would have done so if others had not been there to think was
too foolish. Shall be so mis without you but terribly realise how much
you mean. Please do not be too unhappy but go on loving your
adoring Tom and get well and strong to have a lovely time in a few
days when you get back.

Tom X for Mum _ x for baby.
Train very good for Odie [Nanny] and baby: she would be very
comfortable at other end of single compartment, they are much better
than double.

Tuesday February 13th Lou Mas.
Blessed heart of mine, I can’t tell you what your beloved letter has
just given to me such a joy, such a love and such aching tears —- Oh
Bill I do miss you so. Perhaps almost it’s a good thing you went away
tho’ you must not ever ever again — coz without you here I am
overwhelmed by how much you mean to me: but my sweet, I am
also sadly conscious of how little I let you know how infinitely much
you do mean.

Dear heart Iam so sorry for the way I harry and worry you — have
made too high a mountain out of the molehills of your faults and let
them so much exclude the sweet shining light of your love and
darlingness. No one has ever had a sweeter man an I do appreciate
everything, all you give me. I have been silly and overwrought and
Iam sure awfully difficult — no doubt thoughtless things you never
dreamt I'd notice or mind well I have minded and have been mis and
hurt and hopelessly grumpy. I have let you get the capacity to hurt
me more easily than the capacity to please — No — that is too far, but
anyway I have been a bit upside down tho’ never for one instant
loving you less. All the time the only great integral vital thing in the

Love Letters 37

whole world that matters to me is You, my loving You, You loving
me — it’s so wonderful and beautiful and from now on I am going
to make so much better use of it. Help me will you my sweet. I am
now feeling awfully well, awfully resolute, intensely sorry for my
shortcomings and failures — aching to be back with you to do any-
thing I can. I wish I could explain better. I feel we have a good bit
been box and cox — very often when you have been sweet and
charming to me, or when you have wanted gaiety from me, or when
you have wanted to talk serious matters with me, I have still been
grieving Over some row or trouble we’ve had and which you have
already completely forgotten. I have resented you forgetting what
seemed to me so easily — not realising that maybe I oughtn’t to have,
as it were, wallowed in being hurt. I have been too sensitive and have
lost elasticity in recovering.

I really have been abnormal about everything connected with you
— too proud too intricate too naked too introspective too violent. The
beauty the peace the greatness the real sympathy between us so far
and away miles and miles transcends the pettifogging puerile un-
necessary squabbles. Let’s have no more of them. You do your part
will you as sometimes my pet it is your own sweet fault. And I swear
I will do mine. I look forward so much to coming back to you and
the time to come, peaceful happy unclouded. I wonder however the
seven days will pass that are left here.

It is too bad, weather perfection and just when you have gone. I
am out of doors in the deck chair writing this on my knee — we go
Nice this afternoon shopping. It’s really broiling. Tomorrow we start
at 10 the Colefax expedition to go to St Paul and Grasse. Thurs I take
Baba to Cannes and leave her with the Coates - Lady Rock has just
written to Bab asking her and us to dine one night. We are going to
ring up and ask if she will give us lunch Thurs instead. Nothing more
so far except going with Connie to see her house. I have got all the
necessaries for our journey Tuesday.

My beloved one I think of your sweet woolly head and the corner
of your eye where I love to kiss — and how sweet you look in your
new smart shirts, in your chic black ‘smoking’. Dicks has just been
up. She had two very exciting new engagements, at least one dullish,
Mary Pease to a Mr Lubbock: the other thrilling to me, I wish you
were here to guess — about the only girl friend I have left — one you
like very much — can you guess —

Darling I wonder whether you will ever ever wade through all this.
Oh I am so lucky to be married to you my precious fellow — you are

38

Rules of the Game

so miles and away above and beyond all others — I am so privileged
to be sharing in that wonderful star of yours —
Never doubt yourself. Never doubt me for one second.
You will never fail you. I will never fail you.
How I long to touch you and hear your voice.
Infinite love and a kiss on your dear wicked mouth
from you own Tim

Tuesday night 11pm. Smithers [8 Smith Sq]
My own darling fellow,

Back in Turtle land after many adventures — Dined at the House
with M. Wood who has been made Liberal whip under Phillipps chief
whip in place of Hogge sacked for intruguing with L.G. — great
uproar in Lib circles. Oh he is so lonely in Sweet Smithers without
his one and does long for her return. I have become so accustomed
to having you with me that I am so lost and foolish without you in
addition to such ache in heart. My crossing was perfect and who
should be on the boat but old Bob [Cecil] with P. Baker [Philip Noel-
Baker] from Lausanne — great political talks — he asked me what I was
going to do and I replied with truth I did not know. Feéls a lost mut
[drawing of an animal like a sheep with the tail crossed out] tail should
not be there as he left it behind at Cap Ferrat. Please soon take up her
little crook.

I have talked to Whitly and expect to speak tomorrow or Monday
— terrible lot of requests for me to speak etc — not much for you, and
those Iam refusing. Bless you my own beautiful treasure. I do so miss
my wonder one and her baby. X for Mum x for baby. So tired and
lonely in bye [another drawing of an animal] Tiny mut in big
pen all alone. Does love her.

Wednesday Lou Mas.
My darling one I am so bitterly disappointed — no lett from you
today. I so badly wanted one on my return from Cannes. I felt so
dreadfully lonely and was so sure one would be waiting on the hall
table. Naughty puss you can’t have posted one in either Paris or Calais
or it surely would have been here by now. Write me all you can
belovedest -- it’s all I have of you to carry me on and altho’ I promise
you I am feeling very well and quite serene-ish still, I am a bit desolate.
Now all alone. I think and think of you and us 2 and have remem-
bered so many little funny sweet episodes in our life together that I

Love Letters 39

had quite forgotten for the while. Now Ill tell you about yesterday
and today.

Well yesterday Colefax and a nice little old man (55 to 60-ish)
called Johnson started off in one car Baba and I in another, and
went to St Paul (right behind Cagnes) where a large grey Rolls
Royce was already drawn up belonging to Kennard; he then joined
on to us we saw a church and town and then went on to Grasse
stopping on the road for a picnic lunch. Lovely lovely day, mag-
nificent scenery. At Grasse we went over the scent factory — Oh,
I never knew before how scent was made it’s revolting and interest-
ing. We emerged after $ an hour smelling like civet cats. Then we
went to see the Croisset villa (daughter just married Charles de
Noailles) its supposed to be wonderful. I have never contemplated
any such atrocity.

We came back a splendid road through divine little old towns and
gorgeous scenery. Had tea in Nice then home. Box left today for
Florence.

Now I am writing in bed and wondering how ever I shall get
through the days that remain. I am bored and longing to have you
here oh my sweetheart if only you could just walk in now and start
going to bed I could put my arms around your neck and kiss you.
I want to touch you so, and have you up against me. Blessed heart
I wonder if you acutely miss me as I do you, if you have an ache all
the time.

8 Smith Square. S.W.1
Wednesday
My own Darling,

He has just got the sweetest letter of all his life — thank you so much
— it nearly broke my heart when she milked out — do hope now a
little bet — only a week more today and five days only when you get
It.

Just been to the House — fine bout between Lady M.P. [Lady Astor]
and J. Jones [Labour member]. Opening rounds with references to
JJ.’s inveterate consumption of spirits, and counters re her making
money through illicit whisky selling. N.A. finally takes the count
with peach of a punch as follows — The Speaker: Millionaires are
useful people — N.A.: Hear hear! —J.J.: They have been some use to
you! The worst day we’ve had for weeks, fog and cold terrible. Tiny
T very depressed and longing for the return of his precious fellow.
All love in world for his beloved.

40 Rules of the Game

Thursday 15th February. Lou Mas.
My own sweetheart, it’s already 24 hours longer than I have ever been
away from you before. I do wish you hadn’t had to go but I am
longing to hear from you whether or not you really think you were
right in leaving: are you going to speak or take any part? I hope you
will be able to, but my sweet remember if you can’t be good be
careful: no nasty personal allusions to Pa.
Am dreadfully disappointed no lett all yesterday and none this
morning’s post. Now we are just off to Cannes where I leave Baba
after lunching with Rocks.
Hope so much there will be one waiting when I get back.
Will tell you about yesterday and today when I write tonight. Poor
Tinkie all alone at Lou Mas.
My belovedest I love you so.
Blessings from your own Tim

Friday 16th February. House of Commons.
My own darling,

Just got the let which she wrote prior to his departure — delayed
owing inadequate stamping & 6d to pay!! Rather glad he came back
— speech apparently immense success. Scores of fervent congratulations
and cheers. R. MacDonald came up and said he so wanted to talk to
me in his room. So look out for bolshie boy in red tie when you
return. Just a few quips at Marquis [Curzon] which were greatly
appreciated. Please not too cross — not too bad! Great hurry for post.
Elsa Maxwell in London. Very bored with everything except his
Tim. Only thing in world that matters to him.

My own darling. X.

Friday AM. Lou Mas.
My sweetheart pet, so happy and glad to have your lets at last. Was
wanting them so badly nearly burst all Wed: all Thurs no line: then
Fri morning 2 at once the Calais one and the Smithers. Precious one
they have make me so happy tho’ have made me ache ache ache for
you. I do miss you too terribly and wish with all my heart you had
jumped out of the train. She couldn’t help her milk out.
His letts are so sweet she does treasure them so. She’ll look after his
tail so carefully and bring it home. Poor lonely fellow in the big
bed. Darling one can’t help saying she is glad he is missing her, is glad
he finds a gap instead of her fussing around.
How nice for you meeting Bob, was he very Tory. Sidney Greville

Love Letters 4l

has just been up to say goodbye he leaves Maryland tomorrow for
Monte and goes home Wed. I am just going to Rosemary now to
see Dicks before she goes off to Genoa to join Con and to get Evelyn’s
address to write to her. Having lunch early going into Nice for ‘grand
shopping’. Joan coming to tea then lonely evening doing bills and
accounts.

This is just before I go to sleep. Have just read all your letts over again
my Billy boy you are too darling for words I am so lucky to have
such a sweet one for a husband. So many of the little things you write,
the little divine things, the drawings, every single sweet thought,
every touch, is treasured so passionately — by me. The little ‘you and
I’ touches, the ‘muts’, and the ‘tiny fellow in the big bye’: I am so
glad we are like we are and not just ordinary hus and wife. I do
appreciate you so — your tenderness and un-ordinariness about things
that matter so much to me.

Saturday 17th Febuary. White’s.

My own darling,
I expect this will be the last let you get before you jump on to the
Blue Train and are wafted away from flowers and sun to the dingy
little retreat where adoring Tomby awaits his beloved fellow. Just had
a lovely lunch all by himself and is settling down for a lonely weekend
— won't see a soul until Monday — poor lamb. Last night Oggie [Olga
Lynn] had a very amusing dinner party of about 20 — usual people
with additions of Maxine Elliott, Gladys Cooper type, wonderful
shouts: Viola Tree funnier than you would believe. A new stunt —
‘learning to skate’. Napier Alington and Lois did some dances and
everyone was at very zenith of form. Did so long to see his round-
eyed one honking out her pleasure or looking in pawky disapproval
like a shocked baby as occasion might arise. A new and enchanting
lyric has taken our more esoteric circles by storm — as follows, to the
tune of the Old Pink Lady Valse —

A wonderful bird is the pell-i-can

His beak holds as much as his belly can

Some say that he can pass

This beak right up his ass

But I’m damned if I see how the hell-he-can!
The evening was appropriately concluded by Mr W Rummel
rendering the ‘Entry of the Gods into Valhalla’ and the rest of his
concert programme in Nice. Such fun; but I did so want his pretty
one to enjoy it too. Oggie says we will have another when you come

42

Rules of the Game

back if you like. Tomby thinks he ought to be rather political for a
bit as things are developing. Has enjoyed this little bit of gaiety; as
having spoken, could do no more. Lots more multi-congratulations.
But he thought he was bad: what does she think?

Saturday evening. Lou Mas.
Belovedest, isn’t it thrilling this will be almost the last letter I will be
able to write to you. It won’t go till tomorrow Sunday and you will
get it the very day before I at long long last get back to you. I will
write just one more Monday for you to get Wed morning as really
I couldn’t bear to let a day go by without writing to you. I wonder
if you have been bored by my endless screeds — I have had to write
tho’ it has appeased a little my loneliness. I have loved sort of getting
into contact with you as it seems. Fancy I have written practically twice
a day every day since you left. I wonder if you got them all? Did you
get the one I wrote even before you had left? You cannot imagine
my Icneliness and want of you — I literally have felt all these days that
there has been ‘no spirit left in me’ no resilience, no capacity for
enjoyment; only aching void, the French word ‘lasse’. I don’t mean
physical health at all, as I really am feeling awfully well, awfully rested
and keen to get back, I know I am quite collected and serene and more
vital than I have been for months — it’s juss YOU YOU YOU I must
have —I must have. Quite honestly if you died (as I don’t contemplate
anything else on heaven or earth ever ever separating us) I should
never never be the same again. Something would go out of me for
ever — everything mortal and immortal that one human being can
give another I have given you — All the good and bad and little and
big — You are everything in life to me — I really mean it. The sort
of affection one gives parents children brothers sisters friends the
comrade element of life you have all of that, I rejoice utterly in you
as a perfect gay heart free companion. No Mum has ever passionately
loved a baby boy or a splendid grown up son as I do you. No brother
or sister have ever felt the complete accord I feel to you. No two men,
no 2 women, no child ever looked up to a parent as I do to you. And
then above and beyond all that I can’t write at all of what I feel about
you as my husband and lover. No words in the world could ever tell
you that, only if you could look with my eyes and heart how would
you know. Don’t think me stupid but I must tell you.
I wish I knew what you were doing tonight just so as to picture
and visualise you. I wonder apropos of what I said awhile back of your
meaning every thing and person in the world to me whether I am

Love Letters 43

too wrapped up in you (can one be) expect too much from you, ask
for nothing from any one else, only all the time things from you. Poor
you. And then when as is only human you sometimes can’t give, then
I think you are bored with me —I think you ought not to ask anything
from anyone in the world but me—I am afraid I am narrow and stupid
but the excuse is that I am dotty potty about you almost (I believe
this to be very nearly true) to insanity. I must steady myself. I think
this week has done a great deal towards steadying and will you help
when I get back to you — help by being not too moody, not too fierce,
not too getting into rages and finding fault. I really am looking
forward with the utmost confidence to a time of great peace and
enjoyment of each other and no worries, anyway in our real inner
lives.

My heart I love you so, trust you so, respect you so, and yet again
love and adore you so. Goodnight.

Saturday night. 8 Smith Square.
My own most beloved darling,
Just a very last line in hopes you may just get it before you go —
I have missed you so terribly — I do adore you more every day I live
and I realise so terribly through this parting how tragically dependent
Iam on you — My own treasure darling I long to see your wonderful
face again (kisses its pic every night) Only 4 more days and I shall on
Wednesday be waiting on the station for my adored wife.
X.

Sunday evening. Lou Mas.
My sweet one, I believe I have it in me to find fault with you this
evening — you are a worse correspondent than ever I had anticipated
or else the posts have been bad. Another 2 days without letters at ail.
I got one Tuesday, none on Wed, none Thurs, then 3 on Friday
almost too good, then none Sat, none Sun — I wonder how all mine
to you have arrived, have you received them every day? I hope so,
you ought to have. I have had so little to do, so many long hours
alone, I have had much more time at my disposal than you. I find
myself awfully bad about going out without you, I really have been
the week I have been alone alone here an absolute hermit, all my meals
alone, I have refused practically every invitation to go out and am
terrified and shy and woefully haughty and unselfconfident. Went to
lunch at Maryland today, arrived 20 minutes late because of our damn
fool clocks, found Princess Louise, Lady Londesburgh, Jack Wilson,

44

Rules of the Game

Muriel Ward, husband, Harry Stoner etc: got on pretty well with
Muriel found her easy and charming went up with them to Rosemary
this afternoon the same party as the other night with Eric Mackenzie
and Lady Maidstone extra.

lam very ill at ease with those sort of people they talked of nothing
but bridge and smoking how could I join in —I tried desperately hard
to be friendly and gay — I think I was all right ...

I wonder what it will feel like seeing you, having you, touching
you again. Your actually going away was so far worse than I had
anticipated I hope perhaps actually meeting may be better: though
it would be hard, my anticipation is so running riot ...

My last goodnight to you in writing, I wonder if you'll get this
before me — you ought to — I put my arms around you tight tight
and kiss your dear eyes and mouth I love and worship you and send
everything I can across the land and water, between every line is my
love for you, filling every corner of the envelope even as it fills every
corner of my life — I keep back just a tiny bit extra for Wed — no —
I needn’t as I shall have such a lot over and to spare all Monday Tues
and till Wed evening I shall be bursting.

My precious heart
Your fellow
Our baby has been so sweet and an unbelievable joy and comfort.

CHAPTER 5

Politics and Society

I was born on June 25th 1923; almost immediately I became very ill.
My mother did not feed me: it was not the custom at the time for upper
class mothers to feed their children: my nanny however told me later
my mother wanted to, but could not. A wet-nurse was hired — a Mrs
Green — and while my mother and father went off in August for their
summer holiday to Venice (it was also not the custom for such wives
to become socially unavailable to their husbands who it was thought
needed them more than babies) myself, my sister Vivien, Nanny, Stella
the nurserymaid, Mrs Green and Mrs Green’s own baby, all went off
to a rented house at Birchington, in Kent.

Nanny wrote every other day to my mother at the Excelsior Hotel
on the Lido at Venice and at the Palazzo Priuli in the town. She reported
on how I was getting on with Mrs Green. I was vomiting, I could not
swallow, I cried most of the time, and my motions (as Nanny called
them) had become, aptly, green. Doctors were called and recommended
that I be ‘put on’ first bismuth, then castor-oil and barley water, then
something called peptonised milk: but all this was only in preparation
for being ‘put back’ to Mrs Green. Nanny became alarmed (‘I am sure
the 3 oz he lost last week was all from his face’); on her own initiative
she took me up to London and got a specialist to see me in a sitting room
at the Grosvenor Hotel. The specialist recommended that I should be
fed with nothing but ‘sherry whey’. Nanny wrote ‘He has had nearly
a whole bottle of sherry this week, little tippler, he loves it’. Thus, it
seems, my life was saved. Later it was found that Mrs Green (this story
is not in the letters to my mother: it was told to me later by Nanny)
had all the time had a crate of gin bottles under the bed. Surprisingly
or otherwise, I am not yet (1982) an alcoholic.

Nanny continued to rescue the lives of myself, my sister and my

46 Rules of the Game

brother for many years. She was one of sixteen children of a working
class family (her father was a gardener) who, having helped her mother
to bring up her younger brothers and sisters, had gone out to work aged
fifteen as a nurserymaid to America; then had joined my mother and
her two sisters in India after Baba had been born. As the sisters grew
up and Nanny had had to leave, she had promised Cimmie that she
would come back to her when she, Cimmie, had children; she had done
so when Vivien was born. Nanny Hyslop represented everything stead-
fast, trustworthy, down-to-earth, in our childhood. The world of our
parents seemed to do with ambitions and passions like that of gods on
Mount Olympus.

My mother seems to have tried, in a way beyond what was usual at
the time and for her class, to be a ‘good’ mother: she was certainly seen
as such: but it would have been almost impossible for her to take much
of her allegiance away from Tom. Tom himself tried (for the sake of
‘Ganzheit’?) to be a good father: but it was his theory that the up-
bringing of children should be left to ‘professionals’: this was the same
sort of theory that had led him to believe that the maintenance of
aeroplanes should be left to professionals when he had crashed in 1915.
The conventions of the time were that upper-class children should visit
their mother in her bedroom after breakfast, and that they should go
down to be on show in the drawing room after tea; but for the rest of
the time their place was in the nursery, which was in relation to their
parents’ world as real life is to a stage.

Cimmie’s and Tom’s political life was in transition at this time: they
were moving from being members if only peripherally of the con-
servative establishment to something more adventurous and left-wing.
This was reflected in their choice of godparents for my christening in
the summer of 1923. One was Nancy Astor, the Conservative MP for
whom Tom and Cimmie had campaigned in 1919; others were Violet
Bonham Carter and Archibald Sinclair, both prominent Liberals. A
certain mystery however seems to have hung over my other godfather,
or godfathers. Prince George, the youngest son of King George and
Queen Mary, had been approached and had accepted; he had become
a friend of Cimmie’s in the south of France earlier in the year. But now
he was a friend of her younger sister Baba and there had been stories
about the possibility of their marriage. Prince George wrote to Cimmie
from Buckingham Palace ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking you not
to say anything about my being Godfather but there has been such
trouble already about Baba that they would be furious if there was
anything else seen in the papers’. So it seems that I had an additional

Politics and Society 47

godfather — Mr B. A. Campbell, General Secretary of the ‘Paddy’s
Goose Boys’ Club’ in Shadwell, East London. Mr Campbell wrote to
Cimmie ‘You know I would love to have the honour and privilege of
being godfather to your boy ... there is only one difficulty ... 1 only
have one suit — an ordinary working suit — and if I can attend in that
I will’. I myself never knew that Mr Campbell was my godfather until
I came across this letter in 1981.

Tom’s political disillusionment with his establishment friends came
to a head during the summer holiday of 1923 when he and Cimmie were
in Venice, I was with Mrs Green at Birchington, and Mussolini invaded
Corfu. Tom hoped that sanctions against Italy would be ordered by the
League of Nations: he left Venice for Geneva, where Robert Cecil was
the British representative. Robert Cecil too favoured sanctions: he went
to consult Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister (a Conservative govern-
ment had taken over from Lloyd George’s coalition government in
1922): Baldwin was taking the waters at Aix-les-Bains. Baldwin told
Robert Cecil that he should do whatever he thought fit: Robert Cecil
had hoped for firm orders. He returned to Geneva dejected. Tom was
repelled both by Baldwin’s inability to give orders and by Robert
Cecil’s need of them. He wrote ‘Will was not available, because in such
men it is only aroused by intense emotion’: they had remained passive
when ‘by an act of cold will fortified by the calm calculation they had
every prospect of victory and their opponent had none’. (He later
compared this attitude to the ‘white-hot emotion’ with which such men
had started what he saw as a profoundly risky war in 1939).

Tom advocated, in theory, the use of calm calculation as a prelude
to decisive action: but what he himself often used calculation for,
as do nearly all politicians, was skilful prevarication. In the general
election of 1922 he had stood again for Harrow, but now as an Indepen-
dent. The local Conservative Association had tried to pin him down
about his opinions before they decided to back him. However the
President of the Association reported:

We found it extraordinarily difficult to bring Mr Mosley to the point.
He could never be persuaded to give a direct answer to a direct
question, and developed an unrivalled skill in qualifying any written
or spoken statement he could be induced to make with some loophole
by which, if convenient, he could escape from the obvious meaning
of his words. This feature in his conduct became so marked both in
private discussions and meetings of the Executive that we were
gradually forced to the suspicion that Mr Mosley was merely tem-

48 Rules of the Game

porising with us and that he intended at his own time and in his own
way to throw over his Party in his constituency as he had already
thrown it over in the House of Commons.

But the reason for his prevarication, Tom stated, was:

I cannot enter Parliament unless I am free to take any action of
Opposition or association, irrespective of labels, that is compatible with
my principles and is conducive to their success. My first consideration
must always be the triumph of the causes for which I stand; and in
the present condition of politics, or in any situation that is likely to
arise in the near future, such freedom of action is necessary to that end.

One of the charges that could be laid against Tom perhaps throughout
his political career was that he claimed for himself the rights of
manipulation and prevarication that were part of the normal game of
politics, while he seemed genuinely outraged by the use of such methods
by others. This was a self-deception that created an impression of
honesty; though in the end, as with all self-deceptions, it worked to his
disadvantage.

The Harrow Conservative Association decided not to back him, and
to put up an official candidate against him. Tom, as an Independent,
appealed to the electorate:

The war destroyed the old party issues and with them the old parties.
The party system must, of course, return in the very near future, but
it will be a new Party system ... My intention not to wear a label
which at present, may be confused with past controversies, does not
mean that I adopt the empty independence of men who can agree
with no one. I am not a freelance incapable of such cooperation, and
am prepared to work immediately with men who hold similar
opinions in the face of the great new issues of our day.

At the election Tom had got in with a majority somewhat reduced but
still over 7,000. This was a personal triumph. His oratory, his dashing
style, his ability to arouse devotion irrespective of party loyalties — all
this had maddened his opponent who had, as before, been driven to
personal abuse; accusing Tom of treachery about Ireland and about
India. Tom, it was claimed, had incited Indian students to revolt
against British rule. Tom threatened a libel action; his opponent un-
reservedly withdrew. Tom wrote ‘I had very speedily in self-defence to

Politics and Society 49

develop a certain ferocity in debating methods ... or I would not have
survived’.

This independence meant that he was increasingly isolating himself
politically: but he must have known he was unlikely to be effective in
British politics if he remained without allegiance. Both the Liberal and
Labour parties were in need of young and energetic men: they were out
to catch him: it had been significant that neither had put up a candidate
against him in 1922. It seemed natural at first that he might turn to the
Liberals. As early as 1920 Margot Asquith, the wife of the Liberal
ex-Prime Minister, had written to Cimmie about how highly her
husband regarded Tom: now Violet Bonham Carter, Asquith’s
daughter, wrote:

Father came into my bedroom last night on his return from the House
to tell me that your Tom (may I call him Tom?) had made the most
brilliant speech he had almost ever heard: I have never seen him more
completely swept away.

Tom and Cimmie went to stay with the Asquiths at their country
house The Wharf: the Liberals began to talk of them as ‘one of us’. But
Tom was probably doing some of the ‘calm calculation’ that he ad-
vocated for men of action. At the 1922 election the Labour Party had
been the chief gainers with an increase in the number of MP’s from 63
to 142 (the Liberals had 117). When Baldwin called another general
election at the end of 1923, on the issue of protectionism versus free
trade, Labour became the strongest Party in the House of Commons
with 191 seats and the Liberals, although their fortunes had improved
at the expense of the Conservatives, were even further behind Labour
with 159. A Labour Government was formed. It seemed obvious that
if Tom was going to put an end to his isolation by joining a party — and
with an eye to being part of a government in the near future — it made
sense if one’s feelings were more for Labour than for Liberals.

Another impetus to join a party was the fact that in the 1923 election
his majority at Harrow was down to 4,600: his old conservative sup-
porters were leaving him. It had been, as, usual, a vituperative campaign.
His old friend F. E. Smith, now Lord Birkenhead, had come down to
speak for Tom’s official conservative opponent and had referred to Tom
as ‘the perfumed popinjay of scented boudoirs’. Tom took umbrage. He
did not mind, he said, the reference to boudoirs; but he seemed to think
that ‘popinjay’ was a slur on his performance there.

There is little record of Cimmie in politics during Tom’s years at

50 Rules of the Game

Harrow. At the time of her wedding she had received a letter from
Tom’s mother handing over to her the position of ‘political leading
lady’: she had made a speech of thanks to the constituency for their
wedding present after which a local newspaper reported that ‘her
victory was greater than her husband’s at the polls 18 months ago’: she
had helped, together with his mother, in Tom’s electioneering cam-
paigns. But she never seemed to have had much time for the Harrow
style of politics. Most of the first four years of her marriage was spent
in settling into the house in London, giving birth to two of her children,
and making the complicated arrangements for holidays, servants, dinner
parties, and so on, for Tom’s cosmopolitan entertainment. There is no
evidence that she ever indulged in the game of upper class married
women being available for love affairs: she was always available to use
her social charms for the advancement of Tom. But as Tom moved
closer to Labour her involvement became more political. As early as
May 1923 she was entertaining the Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald,
to lunch: she struck up some sort of flirtatious relationship with him.
Later that summer she invited him to join her and Tom on holiday. He
replied:

Thank you very much for your letter inviting me to stay with you
in Venice when I am passing through. Sidney Arnold is with me and
the two of us would I am sure be too big a handful for you. But in
any event let us have a feast together.

I hope the little person who I saw had come to smile on you both
gives you much happiness ...

When the first Labour government was formed in January 1924 with
Ramsay MacDonald as Prime Minister Tom made a strong speech in
Parliament abusing the Tory record (‘drift buoyed up by drivel’) and
wishing the Labour well (‘tonight the army of progress has struck its
tents and is on the move.’) It now seemed only a matter of time before
Tom joined the Labour Party. His Liberal friends were annoyed. On
January 19th Margot Asquith wrote:

Dear Tom, You and Cimmie are very dear to me. I am old and you
are young. I have watched politics closely since I was 15, having 3
great friends — Gladstone, Morley, and A. Balfour — 3 very different
men. Clear conviction and patience, courage and ambition and not
too much self-love with perfect self-control go to make leaders of
men. I have watched men of great ability — 1. Rosebery 2. Balfour,

Politics and Society 51

Winston and Birkenhead, all ruin themselves in turn. I am not
persuading you to be a Liberal and you can change from Tory to
Liberal or vice versa: I am writing to warn you to take long views.
Your future might be a great one in the Liberal Party; possibly,
Cim says, in the Labour Party. But I myself see little difference
between the extremes of left and right; I have never seen anything
more selfish, jealous and petty — apart from gross and pathetic
ignorance — than Labour; and every word you say of Tory is true.
Class consciousness devours both. I have not seen you lately but
before joining Thomas — a liar: Ramsay — a coward: I should think
twice.

Tom made a joke about this letter saying that Margot Asquith had
abused his best friends. But in fact it was his old acquaintances who were,
as usual, abusing him. The main criticism of the prospect that he might
join Labour was that he would be pandering cynically to a desire for
power: that he saw his own future brighter in the Labour Party in that
he wanted to be a ‘big fish in a little pond’. But these accusations made
little sense. Tom could have done as well as he wished in the Conserva-
tive Party if he had not been outraged about matters of principle; there
was little enough talent among young Conservatives for him to have
felt much danger of being outshone. And although there might be an
initial glamour about himself as an aristocrat joining Labour he was
clever enough to know that there would also be reactions and reper-
cussions. He felt drawn to Labour because of what he felt as the
sluggishness and corruption of the establishment parties: and in so far
as it was true that he could do something about this only as a member
of a group, then the Labour Party was the one most likely to act in the
way that he desired.

There is some truth, however, in the charge that he saw politics
largely in terms of what might be a platform for himself: he was always,
and he thought justifiably, something of a one man party band. Even
at this time (he was twenty seven) he was imagining that it was the
democratic tradition of a government being harried by an opposition
that prevented things being done: this was the ‘drift buoyed up by
drivel’. If words were to be turned into action, this would be through
unencumbered power being given, albeit democratically, to a single
group led by a single responsible man. He seldom prevaricated about
this. In every attitude he had taken (and was to take) in politics he stood
on some principle: and he said to other people in effect that they could
either follow him or not as they chose. This was something unusual in

$2 Rules of the Game

English politics - where the tradition has been to manipulate and
manoeuvre possibilities. The one charge it was difficult to bring against
Tom was that he manipulated what he saw as his principles for the sake
of success: if he had, he might have succeeded.

At the time when he was attracted to Labour and Labour was wooing
him his mother wrote to him:

I must pen a line to try and tell you how enormously I admire your
amazing courage and self-sacrifice of most things that appeal to men
of your age and up-bringing; and how I pray with all my heart that
your.dreams for the benefit of struggling humanity may come true,
and that I may live to see your present attitude justified by results and
the world appreciate that far from being a pushing self-seeking
politician you were in fact willing to be a martyr for your Religion
~— for it seems to me that is what your Politics are.

And oh darling how I wish with all my heart and soul I could
honourably back you up ... I do honestly believe that if the ‘Labour
Party’ meant what you and some of those in the party are striving
to make it every one of us would back you. But to my mind the
tragedy of it all is that the vast mass of your often very ignorant
supporters do not mean what you mean by Socialism ... It is an old
story — as old as the Bible. When the Jews found following Christ
meant the cross and not an earthly sovereignty and defeat of the
Romans they turned on him and crucified their Lord ...

Tom’s mother, a pious Christian, seems to have been the first person to
see — and almost to welcome — that there might be something self-
immolating in Tom’s heroic stands. In the meantime there was the
formal business of his application to join the Labour Party. To this, on
March 27th 1924, Ramsay MacDonald replied —

My dear Mosley,

Although I have welcomed you into the Party by word of mouth,
I would like to tell you in writing how pleased I am that you have
seen your way to join us and to express the hope that you will find
comfort in our ranks and a wide field in which you can show your
usefulness.

I am very sorry to observe in some newspapers that you are being
subjected to the kind of personal attack with which we are all very
familiar. I know it will not disturb you in the least, and I assure you

Politics and Society $3

it will only make your welcome all the more hearty so far as we are
concerned.
With kind regards
I am yours very sincerely,
J. Ramsay MacDonald

CHAPTER 6

Rebels

In the spring of 1924 a young German newspaperman, Egon Wert-
heimer, attended a meeting of the Labour Party in the Empire Hall in
south-east London. He wrote:

Suddenly there was a movement in the crowd and a young man with
the face of the ruling class of Great Britain but with the gait of a
Douglas Fairbanks thrust himself forward through the throng to the
platform followed by a lady in heavy, costly furs. There stood
Oswald Mosley, whose later ascent was to be one of the strangest
phenomena of the working class movement of the world ...

The new man spoke ... unforgettable was the impression, the
visual and oral impression, which the style of the speech made on me.
It was a hymn, an emotional appeal directed not to the intellect, but
to the Socialist idea, which obviously was still a subject of wonder to
the orator, a youthful experience. No speaker at a working class
meeting in Germany would have dared to have worked so un-
restrainedly on the feelings without running the risk of losing for ever
his standing in the party movement ...

But then came something unexpected; something that, by its
spontaneity, shook me; although it was a trifling thing and seemed
a matter of course to all those around me. From the audience there
came calls; they grew more urgent; and suddenly the elegant lady in
furs got up from her seat and said a few sympathetic words ... She
said that she had never before attended a workers’ meeting, and how
deeply the warmth of this reception touched her. She said this simply
and almost shyly, but yet like one who is accustomed to be acclaimed
and, without stagefright, to open a bazaar or a meeting for charitable
purposes. ‘Lady Cynthia Mosley’ whispered in my ear one of the

Rebels 55

armleted stewards who stood near me, excited; and later as though
thinking he had not sufficiently impressed me, he added ‘Lord
Curzon’s daughter’. His whole face beamed proudly. All around the
audience was still in uproar; as at a boxing match, or a fair.

Another commentator, John Scanlon, viewed this sort of scene with
some despair, and said that whatever Tom’s entry into the Labour Party
had done for him, it was a disaster for the Party.

Stories of his fabulous wealth had spread themselves all over the
country, and coupled with that was the fact that his wife was the
daughter of Lord Curzon. The press lost no point in this human story,
and those of us who had visions of a dignified working class steadily
gaining confidence in itself as the future owners of Britain had our
first shock of disillusionment. No sooner had Mr Mosley come into
the Party than there began the heartbreaking spectacle of Local
Labour Parties stumbling over themselves to secure him as their
candidate. At that time there was not a particle of evidence to show
that he understood one of the problems in their lives... It was truly
an amazing and saddening spectacle to see these working men, in-
heritors of a party formed by Keir Hardie in the belief that a dignified
Democracy could, and should, run its own party, literally prostrate
in their worship of the Golden Calf.

These two commentators were Marxists: Marxists are often amazed and
disappointed at the ways of the working class. The British Labour
Movement had been little influenced by international Marxism: its
loyalties had been given to trade unions; or beyond them to the nation.
Also in Britain, Tom used to say, there had always been an instinctive
and emotional sympathy between the aristocracy and the working class
who (in Lord Randolph Churchill’s phrase) were ‘united in the indis-
soluble bonds of a common immorality’. Together they showed
disrespect for the puritanism both of left-wing intellectuals and of the
bourgeoisie.

But then, in turn, it was natural that Labour intellectuals should
distrust Tom after having been tempted to be charmed by him. Beatrice
Webb wrote in her diary:

We have made the acquaintance of the most brilliant man in the
House of Commons — Oswald Mosley. ‘Here is the perfect politician
who is also the perfect gentleman’ I said to myself as he entered the

56 Rules of the Game

room... So much perfection argues rottenness somewhere . . . Is there
some weak spot which will be revealed in a time of stress — exactly
at the very time when you need support — by letting you or your cause
down or sweeping it out of the way?

This was the feeling also of such Labour Party stalwarts as Hugh Dalton
and Herbert Morrison, who had worked their way up diligently
through the ranks of the Party and resented Tom’s sudden jump half
way to the top. Almost immediately Tom had more than seventy
invitations from constituencies to stand as their candidate for Parlia-
ment.

Tom’s power was in his use of words: as a public speaker he could
go over the heads of the Labour hierarchy and appeal directly to
working class audiences. As soon as he had joined the party he was taken
on a speaking tour of the midlands and north: the editor of a Birming-
ham newspaper wrote — ‘His power over his audience was amazing; his
eloquence made even hardened pressmen gasp’. He had learned to speak
without notes (a trick he had learned, he wrote, by getting someone to
read to him a leading article from The Times and then speaking in reply
to it ‘taking each point seriatim in the order read’). He had an amazing
memory for figures. He liked to be challenged by hecklers, because he
felt confident in his powers of repartee. But above all what held his
audiences and almost physically lifted them were those mysterious
rhythms and cadences which a mob orator uses and which, combined
with primitively emotive words, play upon people’s minds like music.

This power that Tom had with words did not always, in the long run,
work to his advantage. There were times when his audience was being
lifted but he himself was being lulled into thinking the reaction more
substantial than it was. After the enthusiasm had worn off like the effects
of a drug an audience was apt to find itself feeling rather empty. (In
the same way Tom’s girlfriends, one of them once said, would feel
somewhat ashamed after having been seduced.)

Tom never understood the limitations of the power of words. He was
apt to think that once a case had been reasonably and passionately stated
the cause had been won: that if a difficult question had been parried or
skilfully avoided, it had somehow disappeared. He did not see that it was
often his very skill in the manipulation of words that made people
suspect he might not be quite serious: for what is serious about a person
who does such clever tricks with the difference between words and
things? People reacted sometimes as the Conservative Association had
reacted to him at Harrow: they admired his ability to spellbind, to bluff,

Rebels $7

to hit, to parry: but what had this got to do with what actually was
required?

While he was on his speaking tour he wrote to Cimmie from the
Durham and North Yorkshire Public House Trust Co:

His own darling Moo-Moo,

Does so miss her, but lucky she did not come as life is like the Great
War — billets — no sheets etc — everyone very kind but a tiresome tour,
lots of littie 500 meetings, not my form at all, same kind friends also
always accompanying, so have to improvise a different speech each
time. Longing to return to wiz land and hopes to do so Io p.m.
tomorrow Monday (great excitement). All love in world from
adoring

her fellow.

Cimmie herself had joined Tom as a member of the Labour Party. The
jibes which hitherto had been directed at Tom for his anti-Tory activi-
ties now also began to be directed at her. There were comments in the
newspapers about her money: if she and Tom were socialists why did
they not give the property away; why did they live in a house with
sixteen rooms; why did Cimmie appear on Labour platforms in jewels
and ‘costly furs’? To this she and Tom replied that it would not help
others in any serious way if they gave away their money and they could
be of more use to socialism by themselves using it to finance organisation
and propaganda. As for Cimmie’s ‘jewels’ — they had been, in the
instance quoted, she explained, bits of glass in a dress bought for a few
shillings in India. There was then a peculiar wrangle with the Press on
the subject of family titles. Tom was reported as having said he would
not use the ‘Sir’ of his baronetcy when his father died; Cimmie as having
remarked, rather irrelevantly, that she wanted to drop the ‘Lady’
Cynthia and be known as plain Mrs Mosley but that unfortunately there
was no legal way of doing this. Tom summed up: ‘In any case inside
the Labour movement my wife is always known as Comrade Mosley
and what she is called outside does not really matter.’ But the Labour
Party rank and file apparently did not want to let the matter rest: about
a meeting in London the Daily Mail reported:

a series of quarrels were in progress among the audience about
whether Mr Mosley is a duke, a knight, or a commoner. The Chair-
man attempted a compromise by describing him as ‘Comrade
Mosley’ but this found disfavour with a row of very young women

58 Rules of the Game

in front. Mr Mosley, caressing his miniature moustache with one
hand and gaily slapping his razor-like trouser-leg with the other,
beamed delightedly at the girls. One of them put his titular dignity
beyond all doubt by exclaiming — Oh! Valentino!

Tom had gone on his tour of the midlands and north partly in order
to choose a new constituency: he had decided that it would make no
sense to stand for Labour at Harrow. The constituency he settled on was
Ladywood, in central Birmingham: the sitting member was the con-
servative Neville Chamberlain. The Chamberlain family enjoyed
almost feudal political power in Birmingham: it would be an extra-
ordinary feat if Tom could even get near to dislodging him. Tom had
been offered a number of relatively safe seats, but he seemed to sense
that the initial euphoria in the Labour Party might, if he took too easy
advantage of it, turn against him; and thus it would be most sensible for
him to become involved in a serious fight.

The Labour Government of 1924 lasted less than a year. During the
run up to the general election in November it appeared that there was
such support for Tom in Ladywood that he might even win: then there
was the Zinoviev letter — a document published just before the election
purporting to come from the Communist International and encourag-
ing British Communists to infiltrate the Labour Party but in fact a Tory
forgery — and this had the effect of a number of hopeful Labour
candidates just losing. At Ladywood it appeared at the first count that
Tom had lost by seven; at the second count he had won by two; then
at the third he lost by seventy seven. It was said that a Tory official had
been seen ‘disappearing towards the lavatory with a pile of votes’; but
Tom discounted this, knowing that such stories were apt to crop up in
close-run elections.

He did not seem to mind, in fact, the prospect of being out of
Paliament for a while. This would give him time, he said, to sort out
and to formulate his ideas: and he could probably choose when he liked
a by-election by which he might be returned to Parliament.

Tom did in fact use the next two years to take stock of his position
and to prepare for the future. He was twenty eight: he had had an
extraordinarily crowded and successful career: but he had become
known primarily as a critic with a cutting tongue and without much
steadfastness or commitment to policy. It was essential, if he was to
continue to claim to act on principle rather than on expediency or
conventional party loyalties, that he should have a policy which would
give substance to his principles.

Rebels 59

During 1925 he and Cimmie went on a trip to India. The long
journey by boat gave Tom an opportunity to read. He took out with
him versions of the Vedas and the Upanishads (‘every aspect of Indian
religion had to be studied’); but the book that at this time made the most
profound impression on him was one he picked up by chance in a
bookshop in Port Said —Shaw’s The Perfect Wagnerite. In the book Shaw
takes the story of Wagner’s Ring and interprets it as a parable about the
collapse of capitalism and the emergence of a classless type of man to
lead the proletariat: but Shaw cuts his own parable off before the last
act of Siegfried and claims that from then on Wagner loses his grip on
his serious theme and resorts to the histrionics of grand opera. But the
point of the final dramas of the Ring is to illustrate how even the highest
human intentions can be wrecked by human frailty; that the hopes of
the most glorious leaders fail if frailty is not recognised. Tom, at this
time, seemed to accept Shaw’s truncated view of the allegory: drama
might properly end with the hero in control. During the second half
of his life, however, Tom wrote an essay which showed that he agreed
more with Wagner than with Shaw.

One of the highlights of Tom’s trip to India was a meeting with
Gandhi: the latter was acting as chairman of a stormy meeting between
Moslems and Hindus: Tom wrote — “Throughout the uproar Gandhi sat
on his chair on a dais, dissolved in helpless laughter, overwhelmed by
the comical absurdity of human nature.’ Tom seems to have loved India
(‘land of ineffable beauty and darkest sorrow’) but at the time he did
not seem to feel there was much in its paradoxes to be learned by him.
He saw that India was being ‘lost’ by the ‘bad manners’ of Englishmen:
but he did not easily think of politics in terms of what were and what
were not good manners.

Another of the books he read on the journey to and from India was
Keynes’s Tract on Monetary Reform. Before this, his interest in politics
had been mainly to do with matters of foreign or Irish policy — with
the business of keeping the peace. He had made one important speech
in 1921 on tariff reform; but for the most part he had felt no passionate
concern with economic affairs. But when he joined the Labour Party
he had seen, because he had been shown the manifestations of them, the
most terrible and urgent problems of post-war England — poverty and
unemployment. During his tour of the midlands he had been taken
round the slums of Liverpool: he had written — “The rehousing of the
working classes ought in itself to find work for the whole of the
unemployed for the next ten years.” This was typical, from now on, of
the style of his thinking: if there were both unemployment and poverty,

60 Rules of the Game

then surely, logically, it was the job of the government to use the
unemployed to get rid of the poverty: questions of how, and using what
money, should be secondary to the decision. But perhaps he did not have
the confidence to expand on such theories until he read Keynes.

Tom’s understanding of Keynes happened at a time when few English
politicians were paying attention to him and there had been little in
Tom’s background to have made it likely that he would be the one who
did. There were two strands of orthodox economic thinking at the time:
one was the liberal laissez-faire attitude which insisted that world trade
and the functioning of markets should be left to themselves: government
interference not only threatened individual liberties but actually made
economic conditions worse: this was a sort of ecological argument like
that about the dangers of trying to manipulate the balances of nature.
This made sense when the British, as pioneers of the Industrial Revolu-
tion, had been at the centre of the manipulation of world manufacture
and world trade: it made less sense now, when British exports of
machinery had resulted in a situation in which other countries, with
cheaper labour, were now manufacturing more cheaply goods which
had previously been almost a British monopoly. The second attitude
was that of protectionism, which sought to keep out of Britain the
products of other countries’ cheap labour by imposing tariffs on
imports. The trouble with this was that it required a market which
would continue to accept, without imposing retaliatory tariffs, British
manufactured goods which Britain needed to sell in order to be able to
buy raw materials. Such had been the imperialist policy of Joseph
Chamberlain and the Conservatives. But imperialist politics pre-
supposed that colonies should be kept as producers of raw materials and
buyers rather than producers of manufactured goods, and thus in a state
of subjection. This not only seemed immoral but, in the face of world
opinion and the threat of war, impractical. Thus British manufacturing
industries, with the lack of a clear policy, continued to lose ground.
There was poverty and unemployment.

Keynes’s Tract, published in 1923, suggested that the government, by
deliberately controlling and manipulating the supply of money, might
affect the economic life of the country in areas which previously had
been thought to be at the mercy of almost inexorable forces of nature.
Tom became interested both in this new attitude to money and in the
idea of government manipulation. In India he had been struck by the
self-defeating attitudes of what had been up to now a mixture of laissez-
faire and imperialism: he had seen the cotton mills where Indians worked
‘for five shillings a week often with modern machinery supplied by

Rebels 61

Lancashire for its own suicide: this was no monument either to the
humanity or to the intelligence of the British Raj’. By the time he came
back from India he had begun to work out his own theory — stimulated
by Keynes, but arising from his own powers of reasoning unconfused
by the complexities of academic training; also from his faith, now, that
there were few human problems that could not be solved by reasoning.

Tom’s economic theories became known as the Bitmingham Pro-
posals — after his candidature at Ladywood, he had made a political base
in Birmingham. The proposals were outlined in speeches that he made
to the Independent Labour Party Conference and Summer School in
April and August 1925: they were of such importance to Tom’s thinking
and indeed to his whole political career that they deserve a chapter to
themselves. Tom himself used to say in old age that he would like best
to be remembered for his economic thinking; and all his subsequent
economic thought — with its original vision and practical weaknesses —
was for the most part an elaboration and elucidation of the Birmingham
Proposals of 1925. Tom presented his theory in a pamphlet called
Revolution by Reason: and in the very title can be seen something of the
optimism and idealism of Tom’s ways of thinking.

In 1926 Tom and Cimmie travelled in America. They tried to keep
out of conventional smart society, though they were féted by William
Randolph Hearst and had a fine time as usual in esoteric café society.
There was a big lawsuit going on at the time between Cimmie’s Leiter
relations: an English branch of the family, the Suffolks (Mary Curzon’s
younger sister Daisy had married the Earl of Suffolk in 1904) were suing
an American branch, headed by Joe Leiter, who had become senior
trustee of the Leiter Estate and whom his sister Daisy Suffolk was
accusing of misappropriating funds. The Curzon branch of the family
were nominally backing the Suffolks but were trying to keep clear: in
Chicago, where the capitalist lawyers were at work, Cimmie and Tom
painstakingly ensured that they were entertained by the Socialist Party
of America. The chairman of this however telegraphed to them in rather
grandiose style: ‘It is a rare privilege to join with the good Comrades
in Chicago in giving a royal welcome to these notable and high-souled
comrades and making them feel they are at home in the hearts of their
comrades in the glorious international’.

Tom and Cimmie also went on a fishing trip with Franklin Roosevelt
on his yacht: they became friends: Tom thought Roosevelt ‘a com-
passionate man’ but with ‘scarcely an inkling of the turmoil of creative
thinking then beginning in America’. This creative thinking seemed to
Tom to give support to his proposals in Revolution by Reason: he noted

62 Rules of the Game

that ‘the Ford factory produced the cheapest article and paid the highest
wage in the world’: was not this evidence that ‘mass production for a
large and assured home market is the industrial key’? He did not notice,
or at least did not mention, that in Chicago for instance in 1926 there
was enormous corruption.

When Tom got back to England he found that there was a by-
election pending in Smethwick, a neighbouring constituency to Lady-
wood in Birmingham. Tom was asked almost automatically if he
would stand. He agreed. All the old skeletons were dug by the Tory
Press out of their class-obsessed cupboards: Tom and Cimmie were
supposed to drive up to Birmingham in a Rolls Royce and change into
an Austin Seven in the suburbs: Tom was accused of having bribed the
previous member of Parliament to retire (he was ill and died three
months later): there were cartoons of Tom as a jewish-looking money-
lender bribing the poor with bags of gold. Even Tom’s father, the
reprobate and by now somewhat alcoholic Sir Oswald, was unearthed
by the Daily Express and in an interview said that Tom had been ‘born
with a golden spoon in his mouth... lived on the fat of the land, and
had never done a day’s work in his life’. Tom replied that he had been
‘removed from the care of my father when I was five years of age by
a court of law and since that date my father knows nothing of my life’.
At the election meetings there was some violence: Tom’s conservative
Opponent was, ironically a coal miner: when he referred to Tom’s
aristocratic background he was shouted down by Tom’s followers
singing The Red Flag. When this was reported scathingly in the Tory
press a group of ‘socialist amazons’ tried to manhandle reporters in a
press box. One of Cimmie’s old school friends wrote to her from
Scarborough — ‘It isn’t true, is it, that you climbed up on a wall and
helped to shout down your opponent... My dear, I simply dare not
own up that I know you here!’

But an editor wrote — ‘If 1 were an elector of Smethwick the vicious
personal attacks that are being made on him [Tom]... would certainly
lead me to vote socialist’. And after Tom had got in, by a largely
increased Labour majority of 6,582, the Birmingham Post, his chief
opponent among the local papers, admitted that it had been unwise with
its abuse: ‘left to himself he would have fouled his own nest’.

Tom announced to the crowd outside the Town Hall — ‘You have
met and beaten the Press of reaction...My wonderful friends of
Smethwick, by your heroic battle against a whole world in arms I
believe you have introduced a new era for British Democracy.’

The Smethwick Labour party asked him whether, now the election

Rebels 63

was over, he and Cimmie would at last consent to appear in their Rolls
Royce for the victory parade. Tom had to explain that the car really
was part of a myth.

CHAPTER 7

The Birmingham Proposals

Tom’s Birmingham Proposals, which he regarded as central to his
political thinking, were an attempt to move beyond both laissez-faire
economics which allowed British manufacturing industries to be
undermined by the produce of cheap foreign labour, and imperialist-
protectionist economics which depended for success on colonial ex-
ploitation and the risk of war. Tom called his pamphlet Revolution by
Reason. ‘Revolution’ was necessary because of the urgency of the
problem: ‘time presses in the turmoil of war’s aftermath... crisis after
crisis sends capitalism staggering ever nearer to abysses of inconceivable
catastrophe to suffering millions’. A solution by ‘reason’ was possible
because men had not yet taken all peaceful steps available in the matter
of control.

With laissez-faire economics there was by definition little govern-
ment control. With imperialist-protectionist economics there was
still the threat of foreign retaliation and the country’s vulnerability
to it. Tom's 1925 proposals claimed that the problem could be faced
in the first place exclusively in terms of the home market — over which,
it might reasonably be thought, a government might have con-
trol.

The problems at home were poverty and unemployment. A cure for
these was available, it was suggested, once a connection was seen
between the two. The reason why there was industrial unemployment
was because there was no demand for manufactured goods: the reason
why there was no demand for manufactured goods was because there
was so much poverty that people could not afford them; the reason why
there was poverty was because there was unemployment. There was no
way out of this vicious but almost ridiculously simple circle so long as
laissez-faire dogma ordained that any government interference would

The Birmingham Proposals 65

only make things worse, and protectionism increased no one’s ability
to buy manufactured goods. What was required was that the govern-
ment should make life-giving injections into this otherwise moribund
circle — injections of money from State banks, so that the whole process
should be reversed.

The injections of money were to take the form of credit being made
available to the poorer sections of the community so that their new
purchasing power would stimulate a demand for goods. This demand
would in turn create employment in industries hitherto moribund, and
this increased demand for labour would mean that in a short time the
poorer sections of the community would be employed and earning their
own keep. The whole scheme seemed rather magical: you just touched
with a wand the viciously circular economic pumpkin as it were, and
the national economy turned into a golden coach. Tom perhaps felt
himself justified in having a certain contempt for people who seemed
not to have thought of it before.

The reason why people had not talked much of this sort of thing
before was of course a fear of inflation. If the government just pumped
more money into the economy then it was likely that the effect would
be simply that prices would rise and real purchasing power be lessened.
To counteract this Tom proposed that the availability of credit should
be commensurate with the production of goods: ‘new and greater
demand must of course be met by a new and greater supply of goods or
all the evils of inflation and price rise will result. Here our socialist
planning must enter in... the whole of Socialist strategy must be direc-
ted to preventing any attempt by Capitalism to avoid meeting the new
demand with a greater supply of goods and to play for a rise in prices’.

To safeguard against this, it was essential in the first place that the
money made available should get into the right hands: it should go,
simply, to the poor and not to the rich. ‘Money in the hands of the
workers means demand upon the great staple industries in which men
and machines are now idle’. In the hands of the rich ‘it concentrates in
sudden whim upon some unprepared industry or rare commodity:
prices soar and an unhealthy boom begins’: then the rich man’s fancy
changes, and there is collapse and unemployment. The traditional means
of making credit more easily available was to lower the rate at which
money could be borrowed from banks; but this ‘encourages the least
desirable kind of borrower...a rush of speculators follows in order to
borrow cheap money from the banks to buy and hold up commodities
in expectation of a rise in price... little of the new purchasing power
percolates through to the working class’.

66 Rules of the Game

In order that credit should be made available to the workers, banks
would have to be nationalised: also an Economic Council ‘vested with
statutory powers’ of supervision and direction would have to be set up.
This Economic Council would give directions about where credit
should be made available to consumers and where it should not: more-
over it would direct where and how credit should be made available to
the producers, the industries. This was the second essential factor in the
task of ensuring that the supply of money would not be greater than
the supply of goods and cause inflation.

The business of this Council will be to estimate the difference between
the actual and the potential production of the country and to plan the
stages by which that potential production can be evoked through the
instrument of working class demand. The constant care of the
Economic Council must be to ensure that demand does not outstrip
supply and thus cause a rise in price. It is evident that the new money
must be issued gradually and that industry must be given time to
respond to the new demand. If the whole working class were sud-
denly given a £1 rise in wages one Saturday night, an all-round rise
in prices would be inevitable... The Council would feel their way
gradually to the maximum production. Sometimes they might
enforce a wage rise of 3d or 6d a week. Sometimes they might cry
a halt until supply had time to catch demand.

The way in which it was suggested that credit would best be extended
both to the working class and to industry would be through a method
whereby credit was given to certain industries on condition that they
paid higher wages: thus money would be made available for both
workers and producers at the same time. “The Economic Council would
fix from time to time wages which individual firms or amalgamations
were to pay. The State Banks would then grant overdrafts for the
payment of these wages until the Economic Council directed that the
industry could shoulder its own wage bill by reason of its increased
prosperity, No additional overdraft for wage purposes would then be
granted.” In this way, increased production of goods would balance an
increase in money and inflation would be avoided. All this would not
affect the responsibility of the State for ‘the proper maintenance of
human existence’ at a more basic level: suitable sums would continue
to be paid to the unemployed through Labour Exchanges. But by the
manipulation of credit for wages and the production of goods it was
expected that the unemployed would quite rapidly be absorbed.

The Birmingham Proposals 67

This method of controlling credit to industries for the payment of
higher wages would also ensure:

1 Luxury trades need not receive the accommodation and could be
closed down as and when desired. The operatives could then be
maintained on unemployment pay while they were trained for
absorption in useful industry.

2 The extra profits arising from the new demand created for con-
sumers would be automatically absorbed by wages to whatever
extent was decided. The Economic Council would arrange the
gradual cessation of overdraft accommodation ... Special taxation to
deal with excess profits would thus be unnecessary.

3 Wages could be forced up in the highly skilled trades as their
production increased simultaneously with the rises in the less-skilled
and lower-paid occupations.

4 The firm grip of the Socialist State over the whole remaining field
of Capitalist activity would be finally established. All industry would
owe money to the State banks. The Constitutional Government
would wield the vast powers now exercised by private bankers.

One of the chief aims of the operation, in fact was to take away power,
and profit, from the hands of private financiers, and to give power to
government and profit to workers and producers. Even if there was a
small amount of inflation this would work to the detriment of financiers
who obtained their money through fixed rates of interest, and it would
be to the benefit of workers whose income was flexible. The whole
scheme was one of ‘summary socialism’: if it worked it might indeed
be some ‘revolution by reason’.

The area of weakness in all this and one that Tom did not explore
— as he had not yet explored the weaknesses of Shaw’s interpretation
of Wagner’s Ring — was the fact that the scheme depended on human
beings to make it workable. The Economic Council would have almost
dictatorial powers: it is the case with human beings who have great
powers unrestrained by traditional safeguards that they become corrupt
or at best inefficient: even more, schemes that depend for their health
on the near-miracle working of human beings usually carry with them
the seeds of an almost deliberate self-destruction — as if the imposition
of such responsibility sends people mad. Tom’s proposals for the over-
riding powers of an Economic Council were forerunners of what later
came to be his views about the necessity of a corporate Fascist state: it
was his belief, possibly rational in theory, that only by such powers

68 Rules of the Game

could something decisive be done about situations of crisis. Tom in fact
usually exaggerated the imminence of crises: but even in so far as he did
not, he mistook something about human nature: he believed that human
beings, when it had been clearly explained to them what were their vital
needs and necessities, would not only altruistically but selfishly become
honest and reasonable: they would sacrifice what might be short term
advantages for long term ends. What he never saw was that in politics
as in other forms of human activity human beings are for the most part
interested in some sort of struggle, in manoeuvrings for power, in risks
and even unpleasantnesses; and that these are often in direct opposition
to what might reasonably be seen as long-term ends. Tom always saw
himself as the perfectly reasonable man at the head of something like
the proposed Economic Council: about other people, he was torn
between imagining they were like how he imagined himself, and being
dismissive of them when he found that they were not. If he had had
talent for introspection or had allowed himself much practice at it, he
might have seen that within the area of his own short-term drives and
obsessions there were possibly seeds of self-destruction: he had a
gambler’s love of challenge and risk: the way he showed his contempt
for his fellow politicians, for instance, was unlikely to work for his long-
term ends. But his refusal to see that a consideration of what human
beings are actually like is a vital part in any scheme about what human
beings can actually do, is at the heart of the failures of this story.
Perhaps what allowed him to be so impervious to rumination about
human nature or himself was the tendency of his critics to be just the
same. It had been the tradition of economists to assume without
argument that human beings were reasonable: this was a rule of the
game: how else could they carry on as though their pronouncements
were scientific and not at any moment likely to become nonsensical? It
had been the tradition of left-wing politicians to make out that however
much capitalists and conservatives had been and always would be
corrupted by power, the revolutionary working class would not be:
how else could they go on playing the game of protesting that as
representatives of the working class they were incorruptibly driving for
power? But whereas most of these people for all their lack of facility
for introspection did seem to have some unspoken instinct, in England
at least, about what human beings were actually like — they usually in
fact withdrew before the probable consequences of their words had had
much effect —- Tom, by reason perhaps of his upbringing or nature, did
not: he had the aloofness and perhaps the arrogance to believe that
reasonable words, at least his own, might in fact mean what they

The Birmingham Proposals 69

implied. This was one reason why he could so often make rings round
his opponents by reasoning: he believed in it; while they, although they
said they did, ultimately did not. Yet what they felt instinctively, and
might have answered Tom by, was traditionally unspoken. They could
not say to him in effect — Look, in your reasoning you leave out of
account something about human nature: you leave out the fact that
human beings with part of themselves like turmoil and something to
grumble at and perhaps even failures to feel comfortable in: your
economic perfect blue-print will not work simply because people will
not want it to. They could not say this to him because this sort of
language was not in the area prescribed for politicians. But then they
could not argue with Tom because he could beat them by his un-
trammelled faith in reason. As a result they had to answer him by
ostracising him and hardly answering him at all. This had the effect on
Tom of making him think that his arguments were unanswerable: and
sO a new vicious circle was set up — that of Tom having contempt for
his opponents for their silence, and they, stung by this, having no reply
except a hatred that might indeed sometimes seem contemptible.

Tom might have learned something of the paradoxes of human
nature, it might have been thought, from his relationship with Cimmie:
but the convention was overwhelming that human beings might be one
sort of thing in their private lives, but were something guite different
and altogether more straightforward in politics. Every now and then
Tom did seem to have an inkling of where the demands he was making
on people by his proposals might lead were they ever put into effect —
of how there might be failure unless a demand for something more than
economic rationality was met. But then — what was a proper attitude
to the risk of failure? Towards the end of even such a staid document
as Revolution by Reason Tom dropped his tone of logic and entered into
the rhetoric which was his other special talent, and which he used to try
to persuade people when he felt the sands of reason running out; also,
perhaps, to cover doubts that he must sometimes have felt yawning
beneath himself. The style of the pamphlet suddenly changes: the
substance of the rhetoric — and this is characteristic of the perorations
of nearly all Tom’s speeches — is permeated by a concern that has nothing
to do with reason. The final tone of Revolution by Reason is a call for
sacrifice and a bid for glory:

We have reached a supreme crisis in the history of humanity. We
stand, indeed, at the cross roads of destiny. Once again in the lash of
great ordeal stings an historic race to action...

70

Rules of the Game

We must recapture the spirit of rapturous sacrifice. That immortal
spirit was evoked by war between men of many common interests
for purposes still obscure or frustrated. Why cannot a greater spirit
be summoned forth by the war of all mankind against poverty and
slavery? In our hands is the awakening trumpet of reality. Labour
alone holds the magic of sacrifice. Dissolved are all other creeds of
baser metal beneath ordeal by fire.

CHAPTER 8

Nursery World

My own consciousness as it emerged into this setting of strangely mixed
reason and rapture was such that very little remains in it of these early
years: I remember nothing of the country houses in which we stayed
during the summers before I was four: and of the London house in Smith
Square — where we lived on and off till I was eight — I remember a few
scenes but with myself as a spectator as it were looking down on myself
rather than as a participant. 8 Smith Square was a Queen Anne house
or more accurately two houses knocked into one: my father used to say
it was too small because the family were so much on top of each other:
literally on top were the day nursery and night nursery on the third
floor. In the night nursery the cots of my sister Vivien and myself were
side by side and at night we would tell each other fantastic stories about
children who had run away from their families and who lived in jungles
or on rafts. When Nanny came to bed we would try to lie awake and
watch her in half dark and through half closed eyes as she performed
her amazing trick of undressing and putting on her nightdress without
appearing at any moment to be wearing anything less than her full
complement of clothing. In the day nursery there were cupboards full
of toys all along one wall and life there seemed to be mainly a matter
of being ready to do battle with my sister about minuscule matters of
possession or prestige: however spoilt we were in our vast quantity of
toys, there was still the desire for what the other had got and the
possibility of a fight almost to death against dispossession. If my father
had wanted to learn about human nature, he might have come up more
often to the nursery.

From the square below — we were usually in London during winter
~ there would come from time to time strange noises that did seem to
emanate from some jungle: the sound of the muffin man with his bell,

72 Rules of the Game

who carried his tray on his head; the cries of the any-old-iron man with
his horse and cart who seemed to be calling for dead bodies. In the
evenings there was the lamplighter with his long pole with a star on the
end like the wand of a magician.

Each year there was a great festivity in the streets, which was boat-
race day. Two men would appear very early on opposite corners of the
square selling pale-blue and dark-blue rosettes. Huge crowds seemed to
gather and drift past. The part of the river where the race took place
was miles away, as indeed was anything to do with Oxford or Cam-
bridge from most of the people who liked so arbitrarily and passionately
to take sides. My sister and I, for no reason, were dedicated to Cam-
bridge.

Most mornings our normal routine was for Nanny, Vivien and
myself (at first in a pram) to go up Great Smith Street, past Parliament
Square, across Birdcage Walk, and into St James’s Park and then on to
Hyde Park if Nanny felt energetic. In St James’s Park we would feed
the ducks or the pelicans: we were dressed very smartly for this: I
remember buttons on boots and gaiters which were fastened with a sort
of torture-instrument with a hook. One of the points of being im-
maculate in the parks was so that Nanny should not lose prestige with
other nannies. Before she had come to us, Nanny had been for a time
with a branch of the Rothschild family: we met, and had to keep up
with, their children Rosemary and Eddie.

In the afternoons we would go down to our mother in the drawing
room when she and my father were there. I remember nothing of these
times. One of my sister’s few memories (she was at Smith Square on
and off till she was ten) is of our mother reading a story to us in the
drawing room and then having to break off and rush away to vote in
the House of Commons — a bell which had been installed in the house
having gone off like a burglar alarm.

Sometimes my mother and father would come up to the night
nursery to say goodnight before they went out to dinner. I have more
memories of my father than my mother at these times, perhaps because
he tried to be funny. Once he was going to dinner at Buckingham Palace
and he was wearing full evening dress with medals: he showed us how
he had pinned these medals on his behind. I remember thinking this
enormously funny.

My sister Vivien is two and a half years older than I. When I was born,
my mother reported that she was ‘very gentle and attentive’: Nanny
reported that she exclaimed ‘I'll bite him!’ A year later Nanny wrote
“Vivien gets so excited when he walks and usually yells so loudly that

Nursery World 73

it frightens him and down he flops’. By 1925 she was recording — ‘Nicko
tries so hard to turn cartwheels and somersaults like the clowns but
Vivien’s one ambition is to hold him high above her head with one
hand.’ My stepmother Diana used to say that my sister and me were like
the characters in the Peanuts cartoon, Charlie Brown and Lucy. We were
very close, and loved each other, and fought, and doubtless did much
to save each other’s lives.

Nanny’s letters to my mother were beautifully written in a clear
unadorned style. They began ‘Dearest Lady Cim’ and ended ‘Love from
Odie’ — which had been Cimmie’s nickname for Nanny when she
herself had been a child. Nanny was a brave, strongwilled woman
without a trace of subservience: she seemed to look on most of the
grown-up world as children. She accepted some conventions of the time
about upbringing which would now be thought idiosyncratic: she
would keep my sister and me for what seemed hours (and I think some-
times was) on our pots: we became adept at moving about the room
on them like hermit crabs: our word for shit became — in the light of
Nanny’s injunctions — ‘try-hard’. I have wondered what Freudians
would make of this conjunction of shit with ‘try-hard’. It was also about
this time that I apparently got an obsession about taking keys out of
doors and putting them down lavatories.

The time when I first seemed to become a participant rather than an
onlooker in my childhood scene was when my mother and father
bought a house near Denham, in Buckinghamshire, at the end of 1926:
this was to be our home for the next fourteen years. Denham was only
twenty miles from London but in those days it was in farming country:
the house when we bought it was called Savoy Farm but my mother
changed the name back to its more ancient form of Savehay Farm which
was more in keeping with what she liked in the way of rustic simplicity.
It was an Elizabethan farmhouse with six bedrooms and four reception
rooms and a huge garden surrounded by water. My mother and father
added a new wing at the back which contained four more guest rooms
and servants rooms and a servants’ hall. We moved into Savehay Farm
in the spring of 1927 and the best of my childhood seems to have been
nurtured by this house: I can remember details of every room in it: I
still sometimes dream that I have bought it back, and am living there.
I suppose it represents some Garden of Eden.

The river that ran past the end of one of the lawns of the garden was
the Colne, a tributary of the Thames. There was a punt and a large canoe
on the river and these could, with difficulty, be manoeuvred by my sister
and me along a sidestream that ran right round the house— over a waterfall

74 Rules of the Game

and under bridges — a notable adventure. There were two weirs on the
river, One at each end of our land (a hundred and twenty acres of
farmland which went with the house): across one weir there was a bridge
that led to an island thick with undergrowth like a jungle; across the
other a bridge led to a thatched cottage, empty, like something in a fairy
tale. During weekdays my father and mother were usually away: Nanny
miraculously (or because she had been brought up in a home of sixteen
children) did not take too much notice of what went on out of her sight:
my sister and I were thus allowed much freedom. We would devise
fantastic explorations and obstacle courses for ourselves: these were
known as ‘mucks’: from branch to branch of trees, along the tops of
walls, down over a water-wheel, up through high barn windows.
(There were huge high barns unused because of the state of farming at
the time in England). The bridge across the weir to the magic island
jungle had partly collapsed, but it could still be crossed with legs on
either side of the handrail: beyond the island there was a gigantic railway
viaduct and beyond this, like an ogre, someone called Sir Robert
Vansittart lived, who was an enemy of my father’s being something to
do with the Foreign Office. In the thatched cottage at the other end of
the river my sister and I were sometimes allowed to camp; like Hansel
and Gretel having been freed from their fairy tale.

What meant most to me about Savehay Farm I think was that for the
first time I was able to be alone: before this, I had had to go under
bedclothes and pretend to be in a one-man submarine before I felt alone.
At Savehay Farm there was space — also room to hide. I remember the
need for, and feeling of safety in, places to hide. There was a carved-
out hollow in a thicket of bamboos: a passage through brambles and
nettles: a disused tank in the rafters of a barn. In such places I could
crouch, and listen, and hear the cries of huntsmen and steps of predators
going past. The huntsmen and predators were only my good nanny and
sister — those denizens of my unconscious. But my main memories of
Savehay Farm have become to do with my own five senses: the hot
buzzing of flies above nettles; the high ribs of the viaduct from which
cold drips dropped down; the soddenness of weeds like bodies against
the grating of a weir; the acrid smell of old plaster coming off the walls
of the thatched cottage like dead skin.

Even when my parents were at Savehay Farm they often dallied in
other parts of the garden. There was a rose-garden where my father
sometimes walked: he would go to and fro, up and down; preparing
his speeches, I suppose, by which he might order the world. In summer
he would sometimes walk there naked: Nanny would warn us — Do not

Nursery World 75

go near! God walked thus, I suppose, in the Garden of Eden. So by seeing
my father, or God, naked, might one know the difference between good
and evil? I would creep along the passage on the first floor to where there
was a window that looked over the rose-garden: this was risky because
the window was in my father’s bedroom: but if he was in the rose-
garden he could not — or could he? — be in two places at once? However
then, after all — how white and gentle and vulnerable he looked! So
what was all the fuss about our not being allowed to see him in the rose-
garden?

My father was, it was true, sometimes frightening. He had a way of
suddenly switching from being the benign joker to someone with his
chin up, roaring, as if he were being strangled. He would usually roar
when he was not getting what he wanted — from servants, from my
mother. Once when he was trying to work in his study and a small dog
that belonged to my sister and myself was outside on the lawn barking,
he leaned out of his window with his shotgun and fired off both barrels
in the general direction of the dog. The dog stopped barking. My sister
and Nanny were somewhat outraged at this: but I remember thinking
— He would not have missed, would he, if he had been aiming at the
dog? And how more efficiently do you stop a dog barking?

Nanny would tell stories of my father’s terrible rudeness to servants:
but she would add — ‘He was only once rude to me.’ Then she would
wait, looking stern; and we children would understand that she had
perhaps just looked thus at my father. She also told a story about Mabel,
the parlourmaid, an equally formidable woman who was the friend of
May, the gentle housemaid. Once my father had been rude to Mabel
and then to her too he had never been rude again: she had answered him
back with a very rude word. We knew it was no good pressing Nanny
to tell us what was this word: it was something that grown-ups could
tell stories about, but not utter.

Life for the children revolved, as usual, around Nanny, Mabel and
May, and Andrée, my mother’s lady’s maid. Andrée had been with my
mother before she had married: she stayed with the family, as Nanny
did, after my mother’s death for more than twenty years. She was a
small determined Frenchwoman; indeed it is difficult to imagine my
father being rude to her. I think my father must have got his reputation
for rudeness from his relationships with manservants; which is probably
why they do not seem to have been permanent figures in my childhood.
There was for a time a Mr Cox, the butler, who hung about in a striped
apron in the pantry and was the guardian of a huge knife-sharpening
machine like a butter-churn, and another machine which curiously

76 Rules of the Game

could sharpen two pencils at once. I have no memories of any cook; they
too must have come and gone: my mother had no reputation for caring
about good cooking.

There were three staircases in the house — one at my father’s and
mother’s end, one in the middle between the day and the night nursery,
and one in the new wing between the guest rooms and the rooms of
the servants. The only person who had a room regularly at my mother’s
and father’s end of the house was my Aunty Baba; she was put in a rather
grand room with a seventeenth century fresco on the wall of men in
striped knickerbockers playing golf. Aunty Nina was always put at the
other end of the house. To the children, in the middle, it often seemed
as if we owned the house; it was we who remained, and the people
looking after us, when everyone else had gone.

My mother’s and father’s end of the house was somewhat secret;
taboo. You went along the passage, up three steps, were on the threshold
of mysteries. My mother’s bedroom was large and blue and airy and had
a mass of small glass ornaments on shelves: they were of animals and
birds and of a kind that would now probably be thought rather vulgar:
my mother collected these when she went abroad, especially in Venice.
My father’s bedroom was smaller and brown and looked out on to the
rose-garden: there was a scrubbed oak chest in it that was always locked.
Of even deeper mystery were my mother’s and father’s bathrooms —
there were two side by side across the passage. My mother’s bathroom
had the usual array of bottles and bowls and powders and creams; my
father’s had an enigmatic apparatus that hung on the back of the door
and looked like a gutted octopus. I knew it was no use asking Nanny
about this: the subject would be unmentionable like the word used by
Mabel the parlourmaid. I worked out later that it was an apparatus for
giving enemas.

When the children came down in the evenings at Savehay Farm we
went not to the formal drawing room which was used only when guests
were in the house, but to my mother’s sitting room which was known
as the Garden Room. This had low beams and a huge open fireplace and
glass walking sticks hanging on the walls: there my mother would read
to us. Once my father was persuaded to read poetry: he read Swinburne,
and I fell asleep, and when I woke was covered with confusion. I wanted
to ask — But might not such beautiful noises be supposed to send you
to sleep?

There were certain moments of the year when it was the tradition
that mothers and fathers should make special efforts with their children;
the most striking of these was Christmas. After the usual opening of the

Nursery World 77

stockings at Savehay Farm and the going to church with Nanny (my
mother and father never went to church) and after further presents and
the christmas lunch, we had our special ritual. My father would say that
he had to have a short sleep; we would exhort him not to, because after
lunch was the time when Father Christmas arrived and my father might
miss him. My father would promise that he would only have a nap, and
be there for Father Christmas. But then at about three o’clock we would
hear Father Christmas’s sleigh-bells outside — this was my mother and
Mabel the parlourmaid tinkling away in the garden — and we wanted
to wake up my father but it was held to be too late: we were rushed
out of the house by Nanny: Father Christmas was said to be already
arriving at the top of the chimney. Father Christmas was of course my
father, who in his study having dressed up in Father Christmas clothes
complete with realistic beard and mask was now climbing up the
Garden Room chimney on a stepladder held by May the housemaid
while we were hoping to see him coming down from the sky at the top.
We were again too late! Father Christmas was already on his way down
the chimney — we were rushed back into the house just in time to see
him emerge into the Garden Room down the steps held by May. All
this was expertly handled by my mother — or else we children were
rather thick. But my father was a very good actor: he spoke in a slow
exhausted voice: poor Father Christmas! with all the other children in
the world to get round to! one should not ask too many questions. And
of course he had to wear a mask, to protect his face from soot. Anyway
there was not much time: after we had got our presents from his sack
we were rushed out of the house to see if we could catch him coming
out of the roof: we just missed him again! but couldn’t we hear the sleigh
bells? And then after a suitable time of chasing bells around the garden
there was the business of running back to my father’s study and accusing
him of being, yet again, so greedy and lazy that he had to go to sleep
after lunch and miss Father Christmas! After a time I think I came to
believe that Father Christmas must come from Harrods. Neither my
sister nor I saw through my father’s act while he was doing it.
There was a further ritual on Christmas evening which my father
once more dominated and by which he charmed his children as indeed
he charmed women. Just as my mother, when he was being loving
towards her, was his mutton, his moo-moo; so were his children, as his
term of endearment, porkers. When we children were making too
much noise in his presence he would intone, as if it were some mystic
mantra — ‘What is it that makes more noise than one porker stuck under
a gate?’ — and we would groan, because we had heard the answer so

78 Rules of the Game

many times before: and then he would give the answer himself — “Two
porkers stuck under a gate!’ — and then he would laugh, with a strange
clicking sound behind his teeth. On Christmas evenings, then, we would
gather round the Christmas tree and we would all hold hands and my
father would begin one of his mantra chants and this would go faster
and faster as we went faster and faster round the tree until we all fell
down and my father’s chant would be just — Porker porker porker...

All this was rather magical for children: the gods descended, and
played, and put on a tremendous performance. But still, when the
excitement was over, what was the world from which the gods came
down? It did in fact seem that much of ordinary grown-up life consisted
of things like making remarks that did not require answers with a distant
look in one’s eye; uttering noises which had the effect of everyone’s
falling about roaring with laughter. My awareness of my mother’s and
father’s friends at Savehay Farm belongs to a slightly later time in this
story: but what I remember from an early age about the grown-up
world — not the world of Nanny and Mabel and May who stayed around
and got things done but the world of god-like figures who came and
went — was the way in which people did in fact seem to be making noises
that were more like a baying, a trumpeting, than the telling of anything:
noises just to let other people know that they were there, perhaps; or
to give warning; or possibly to attract new friends. These noises most
often came from behind closed doors: grown-ups did not seem to want
to perform their most esoteric rituals in front of children. But at
Savehay Farm I would creep down from time to time and would listen
outside the dining room door which was just at the bottom of the
nursery stairs; this was when my mother and father were having what
Nanny called a dinner. The uproar seemed to be talk: but what on earth
were they talking about; and who was listening? It was like the cries of
the any-old-iron man; the bell of the man selling muffins. It was the roar
of some jungle: not the nice quiet jungle across the broken bridge over
the river: it was as if there were a forest fire.

CHAPTER 9

The Legend

When Cimmie arrived back from America in 1926 she gave an inter-
view to an American newspaper in which she explained about what had
been thought from her youth to have been her ‘bolshevik’ views, and
why she had become a socialist.

If you are to understand my position, you must take into account all
the facts in my upbringing. You will understand that either I had to
give in absolutely to the past — to ignore all that was happening in
this country and the rest of the world — or to resist upon every issue.
I suppose my father and I were two very typical figures, and that the
same drama has been enacted in many homes; only I do not know
another man who was so splendidly, so utterly symbolic of the old
world, the pre-war world, as was my father. I should like to think
that | am as typical of the new world, the post-war world.

When George Curzon was dying in March 1925 and he was already not
on speaking terms with Cimmie owing to the quarrel over her money,
she and Tom had just returned from their trip round India. George
Curzon was told a story about how Tom, when in India, had been
present at an official dinner at which the King’s health had been drunk
and he, Tom, had refused to raise his glass. At first Curzon had not
believed this story; then, because he learned that so many other people
had heard it, he believed that it ‘must be true’. All this was related back
to Cimmie by a Curzon aunt. A few days later her father died.

The story of the wine-glass in India is typical not only of the sort of
stories that were told about Tom but of his own and other people’s
reactions to them. It is inconceivable that the incident in the story could
have been enacted by Tom deliberately: such a gesture would have

80 Rules of the Game

seemed to him just silly. But there were of course people who would
want to imagine such a story; and Tom did little to persuade them it
might not be true. The Curzon aunt who related the story to Cimmie
finished her letter with — ‘But why does Tom not take steps to deny
these stories?’ — and her question seems relevant to something that might
be true.

Members of the aristocracy in those days had put upon them some
of the fantasies that are now put on to pop-singers and film-stars: they
were the stuff of newspaper gossip: people queued up in streets to see
them. Cimmie had become a somewhat legendary figure at the time of
her marriage: there were other upper class girls like this: but there was
no one quite like Cinsmie after she had become Labour.

In the Labour Party Cimmie and Tom took upon themselves a new
form of adulation: it seemed part of the new legend perhaps that they
should also suffer calumny. Cimmie’s old friends took trouble to write
to her about things they had overheard at dinner parties or on the tops
of buses — ‘It’s enough to make ’er father get up out of ’is grave and
smash ’er, vulgar little beast’. But if she and Tom started to worry about
replying to such remarks, they might not be able to be able to maintain
their energy and dignity as pioneers. People who become legendary
must have something in them that wants to be like this: they must be
impervious to, thrive on even, something of calumny: part of their
strength, and their magic, is that they should seem to scorn herd-
reactions. This can be a danger, as well as a strength. Tom sometimes
went to great trouble legally to take action about libels against him: he
almost never, in the light of what people said about him, showed much
personal concern or modified his behaviour.

What Tom in his possibly for the most part unconscious heart seems
to have wanted to do 1s to create a legend: this was more fundamental
to him than that he should acquire power. Tom’s biographer, Robert
Skidelsky, has written about him that ‘he was a complete professional
in everything except the winning of power’. This was not just through
mischance: it is an aristocratic attitude that says — Take me or leave me;
I am as I am; either follow me or do not. It is this sort of attitude, also,
that creates legends. And there is a way perhaps, in which the world in
the long run is more affected by legends than by the manipulation of
power: legends alter the way people think: this is on a higher level (if
they are recorded) than that of power.

This would not have been worked out by Cimmie or Tom; there was
something of it inevitably in their natures. They both came from
backgrounds in which what mattered was more what you were than

The Legend 81

what you did: aristocrats are supposed to have star quality — they are
not simply actors. Both of them moreover seemed to have had some
need of the aura that surrounds legends: as if only by this could they live
up to the expectations they had found themselves landed with. They had
to have constant reassurance — as if to placate demons.

With Tom there was his compulsion to be so frequently running
after, and conquering, women: by this he got reassurance. He also used
his seductive powers politically. A Labour colleague remembers being
bowled over by Tom’s flattery; then seeing Tom’s eyes going past him
to a waiting crowd.

Tom was good at telling Cimmie how wonderful she was: his letters
contain almost endless protestations of love. He and Cimmie were
known to quarrel: he had a terrible temper: he sometimes abused her
publicly. Yet in all his letters to her there are hardly any words of
reproach. It is as if, so far as letters were concerned, what was important
to him was the use of gentle and reasoned words to retain her love: this
was more important to him than efforts to face facts or get at the truth.
He willed that he should retain her love by telling her so often how she
had his own.

My own most precious in the world, take care of her darling self and
be strong and well for his return and fun with him. My own beloved
— give a kiss to herself from her adoring Tom

With Cimmie, there had always been her recognition that she needed
protestations of love: she had written of this as a schoolgirl: her mother
had died when she was seven: her father, whom she admired, had fought
her: she had needed to put herself at the centre of a group of adored and
adoring friends. She would have accepted Tom’s protestations simply
because she required them.

I do think it’s been a good thing to be apart just for once, it may even
be a good thing some time again, but please not for a very very long
time. I so adore your letters, but I do so terribly miss you.

Then by joining the Labour Party, Cimmie opened herself to a whole
new form of adulation: she became like some star actress suddenly
offered a stage. She and Tom became the special favourites of Indepen-
dent Labour Party politicians from Glasgow — James Maxton, Pat
Dollan, John Wheatley. Tom was in great demand as an orator: he was
loved for his rhetoric, his style. Pat Dollan wrote to Cimmie ‘He has

82 Rules of the Game

leader qualities but he must be prepared to fight every inch. I like him
when he is combatant because his combatant temper is what we need’.
Glasgow politicians did not much like his pamphlet Revolution by
Reason, because its reasonable socialist proposals would interfere with
the freedom of Trade Union bargaining. But Cimmie began to be
almost as much in demand as Tom: this was due not to her power with
words, but simply to her ability to get herself loved. Pat Dollan wrote
after an Independent Labour Party summer school — ‘Yourself ‘were one
of the best of sports and everybody was pleased with you for your fun,
fellowship, adventure and readiness to help. There is big work for you
to do for the ILP and Socialism, and you can do it.’

The Independent Labour Party had been formed at the end of the
nineteenth century to keep pure the creed of socialism at a time when
many groups which called themselves Labour had not been sure about
what alliances might be made. It still in the 1920's saw itself'as the power-
house of true socialism. It held its summer schools at Easton Lodge, a
house belonging to Lady Warwick; where, in Tom’s words ‘very
serious discussions’ were rounded off in the evenings by ‘charades, songs
and dances’; also ‘elements of the modern love-in’.

During 1925 Cimmie received many offers herself to stand for
Parliament: she accepted one to become the Labour candidate for Stoke-
on-Trent. This was not far, but perhaps, far enough, from Tom’s
constituency at Smethwick.

In London Cimmie had for some time been giving dinner-parties for
Labour politicians - Ramsay MacDonald, Arthur Henderson, J. H.
Thomas. James Maxton refused — ‘I make a point of steering clear of
all social functions.’ Ramsay MacDonald continued his rather flowery
flirtation with Cimmie — “That disgruntled left-winger, Providence, has
given me a nasty knock since we whispered “‘Easter’’ to each other and
Tom made the scandalous proposal that I should take you to Corsica
whilst he went to the ILP conference’. But then — ‘I shall do what you
like on Tuesday, dine in or out, go to a solemn or gay play (the latter
preferred)’. Cimmie sent him a Christmas present for which he thanked
her:

One corner of my books shelves says to the other ‘I was given by so-
and-so’ and looks most self-satisfied. Another answers ‘Poof! do you
know what Lady Cynthia gave me?’ and puts its nose in the air.

Cimmie became something of a guardian angel to men who were now
working with Tom and who might have been somewhat in awe of him

The Legend 83

but who found Cimmie approachable. Foremost amongst these was
Allan Young, the son of a railway worker in Glasgow, who came to
Birmingham as Labour agent for Tom and later became his full-time
political secretary in London. He wrote to Cimmie after a weekend in
the country in 1926 —

My thanks for a jolly weekend are delayed but sincere. I blush
occasionally in fear that my crude behaviour may have irritated you
but you will be kind and tolerant I am sure. After all I was ‘born to
the thong and the rod’ and my body and mind are perhaps not yet
attuned to sweeter things ...

Then later, when he had been with Tom and Cimmie abroad —

You gave me beauty — pictures that will live for ever: space — in the
sense that I was separated from the vortex of petty problems: privacy
— in the sense that your fine culture (which is feeling) enables you to
refrain from interference. I shall dream no more of France and Italy
—I shall enjoy their beauty because I have absorbed it. The sun will
stay with me now, and the added width and scope of my life and
imagination will enable me to appreciate to the fullest the sweetness
and generosity of your friendship.

Another of Tom’s Birmingham colleagues that Cimmie took under her
wing was John Strachey, five years younger than Tom, son of St Loe
Strachey the editor of the Spectator and cousin of Lytton Strachey. He
had joined the Labour Party before he had met Tom; then Tom helped
him to get a constituency at Aston in Birmingham. John Strachey was
unlike most of the people who worked in politics with Tom and
Cimmie at this time in that he was upper or upper-middle class: he had
been to Eton and Oxford. He hero-worshipped Tom. He was some sort
of cavalier to Cimmie.

During the summer of 1925 he had spent much time with them and
he was their guest in Venice in August. He and Tom there worked
together on Revolution by Reason; later John Strachey wrote a book with
the same title as Tom’s pamphlet. Bob Boothby was also a guest of
Tom’s and Cimmie’s in Venice that summer: he wrote years later —
‘Every morning Tom Mosley and John Strachey discuss Revolution by
Reason... This was the period when Mosley saw himself'as Byron rather
than Mussolini ... He was certainly a powerful swimmer and used to
disappear at intervals into the lagoon to commune with himself.’ When

84 Rules of the Game

Strachey’s book was finished he dedicated it to “O.M. who may one day
do the things of which we dream.’

John Strachey was by far the closest of Tom’s Labour associates: he
was an intellectual: he was the only friend who without much difficulty
straddled, as Tom and Cimmie apparently so effortlessly did, the world
of Birmingham socialist politics and international high-life in Venice.
In 1925 he wrote a thank-you letter to Cimmie:

Dear, dear Cim

(I can’t rise to Bob’s beginning).

When one has stayed with someone off and on for about six
months there is something rather comically inadequate about writing
a Collins. Stull I do want, somehow or other, to thank you for Venice.
I quite literally can’t tell you how much I enjoyed it. But almost more
than that it has somehow meant a most tremendous lot to me. In some
obscure way I feel quite different to before I went — altogether more
capable of coping with life. Of course it is largely that one feels so
marvellously well — with deep reserves of sun-energy in one.

And I do terribly want to tell you how grateful Iam to you. [know
very well my many imperfections and shortcomings as a guest, so I
realise how nice of you it has been to bear with me so many months.
But Venice was marvellous. I ran through, in that month, as many
kinds of emotions and experiences as would last in England for a year.
It somehow enlarged and liberated one. (Bob felt it — as he showed
in that never sufficiently admired letter of his!) A little more and we
shall, as he put it, strike the big notes again.

Iam talking nonsense —I only mean that when we were all together
we sometimes seemed able to strike points, moments, sparks, of
enjoyment, of fun, which set the place on fire.

A more incoherent letter than usual. But please, please, take it as
a symbol, a token, of something felt very deeply, even though not
expressed at all. You were, you are, the centre round which we all
radiated. Thank you.

John

Bob Boothby was a young conservative MP. He disagreed with Tom
politically: but he believed, and continued to do so during a friendship
which lasted for the whole of Tom’s life, that there were more impor-
tant things in life (and indeed in politics) than political agreement. The
letter he wrote to Cimmie and which John Strachey mentions in his
letter, was:

The Legend 85

Darling Lady Cynthia,

(I humbly apologise — all other words are hopelessly inadequate).

How can I thank you as you ought to be thanked? An impossible
task! I enjoyed — rapturously — every moment. No, there was one —
at Faustino’s entertainment — when I had drunk too little and too
much — that which produces the ‘grumpy’ stage — and I was a credit
neither to you nor to myself: but I withdrew once more to ‘commune
alone with the sea’ ...

I can truthfully say that never in my life have I experienced such
sustained enjoyment at so high a pitch. It was MARVELLOUS (one
] or two? one I think). I thank you rooo times ... If and when I do
return I am going to ask you to let me spray myself with your palm
oil and sit, at intervals, within hail of your ‘cabano’ and throw a medi-
cine ball at you and give you dinner at the Luna — if you will. I did a
crazy thing the night I left — took the fastest motor boat in Venice
and flew to the Lido and looked at the moon, which was farcical, and
lay on the sands and got bitten by sand-fleas, and vastly overpaid the
motor-boat man, and came back god knows when in a ‘vapore’ and
the slowest gondola in Venice. But it was exquisite and I loved it.

I think your husband (damned Socialist though he is By God) will
be Prime Minister for a very very long time, because he has the Divine
Spark which is almost lost nowdays, and getting less and less. They
had it once — all of them. I’ve just been reading here a life of Chopin:
a medium composer maybe, but a tremendous man. Broken by his
own powers of emotional feeling — a hitch in some paltry love affair
enough to send him to bed in a decline for months — what reduces
us to inane guffaws reduced them to a temperature of 104, consump-
tion, and death. The result being that they produced creative geniuses
by the dozen — and what do we produce? The Lido beach. It’s a little
disheartening.

I’m so sorry about this outburst but I learnt with you what some
have tried in vain to teach me — that the only possible thing to do is
to steep oneself in the XVII]th and early XIXth centuries and try to
understand (if not try to catch a touch of) the spirit that moved them.
For this — for the gondola, for the palatial drawing room, the food,
the champagne, the fun both in and out of the water (bar that
appalling boat that sank, and a dive I can never quite forget) the
arguments (not least the one about Torcello) and the staggering
hospitality in every direction — 1 thank you ...

Yours ever most gratefully and sincerely
Bob Boothby

86 Rules of the Game

PS. I am conscious of having been, on the whole, not a success. But
I think I have one conquest to my credit. Mabel (that Great Woman)
said ‘Goodbye Old Man’ — and I thought her voice broke.

There were many people who at this time wrote to Cimmie similar (if
not so good) letters: they tell of her gaiety; of her ability to give enjoy-
ment; of how under her attention people seemed to expand and feel
transformed. This ability to produce warmth and wit in personal life
seemed as important to her as was the ability to produce enthusiasm in the
world of politics: it seemed important to Tom too, who got pleasure
from social life far beyond the taking up of opportunities for flirtation
and conquest. Before he had met Cimmice he had of course shone in this
area, but perhaps without much ease: throughout his married life Tom
depended for naturalness in social relationships largely on his wives. But
in 1925 it would have been the problem for both him and Cimmie to
try to relate — if they wanted to — the world of Venice and the South
of France to that of the Birmingham and Clydeside politicians.

Sometimes Cimmie was warned of such a difficulty by more a serious
voice than those of newspapers which continued to ask simply — How
could anyone be a socialist and go to Venice and have fun? Tom’s and
Cimmie’s answer to this sort of question continued sensibly to be — their
money could be put to better socialist uses by themselves than if it was
given away: also class barriers are genuine, and they can better be dealt
with by suitably crossing them rather than by pretending they don’t
exist. But the trouble with this type of answer was that it had tradition-
ally been held by socialists that it was just the possession of unearned
money that was the evil in capitalist societies and not the uses to which
it was put. (Lenin had remarked that a ‘good’ capitalist was worse than
a bad one because he delayed the revolution.) A Marxist acquaintance
wrote to Cimmie to ask — had she faced the serious dangers inherent in
what she was trying to do?

You an aristocrat and I a petty bourgeois are equally unreliable in the
world situation of today because however good our principles, honest
our intentions, and steadfast our will, we cannot be relied on to crush
in our own characters those inborn tendencies which carry us back
to our own sets in any crisis— we may be faithful when the time comes,
but we cannot be sure of it until the time. The declassed aristocrat and
the declassed artist are individual tragedies which simply don’t matter
when civilisation is at stake. Within our private lives we may have
compensations ...

Tom and Cimmie at their wedding in 1920

Nanny Hyslop, at Vivien’s
christening in 1921

went

5 Se
I

pe snk Oe beer ak LAM, ‘ ete

i

ROLL “ ’ f han FASE A ome

Dh « ‘we
4 Bee ¢ Pee “4 A Re A OD eee 7

it ‘4 2 Se co HAR
ow. LO edge Fakta eater t

4 a 7
oe ae ngs
ree iene

a A

hau
ain he

an i Dy
FPA A, WR ig E ter of Pick, t
: a om in

no
> ae pm
ti ede Sa ei | oa BY Pa eae 4 oh hae ietety At
hed 8 4
Ras obi se no “SLi leat, Mea “4
DALAL £4 ae |:
a ¢ 4+ AA, CLO tug
Bee he ses pice
Serie: wf <) og ee Fh)
. det ie eA, — =
‘ aa tet - 1. ee?
piste & ee ee . i K
ae a a ae tot ~ hak
by se . ey f trict Ry #3 v 7
aie oe Se (AAA & -
s
tata: PEERED ie: b as Pi th, or ae ain aie a A,
‘ ; j
a i } Ao “
CRA Ae Ban. hd he Crag O-

¢ A8 MAAR iy a ae BA Lo ett,

ko ve:
(ie Ae a G pueek nds cena paved

4 i) esi i he 4 ti f ve irhay ~ ae a
; x i= ) Pe Fa 4
AR AES 8 MER HAA v 6

y ‘at > A

Hae Ut Ae
& i: ff ae
BAA Chine Nth

f, At.» o Af
Bal afta “SAAL a sei Y

(aks. Lape do

te
pul,

yh, ~ Me A ¢
blac Lad

Irene and Cimmie canvassing in Harrow

hf fA ber 2
D2 hl “ff~

ay fale Ge
whi
oy TF oe)

~ AV

g ae
tn “ Aftad : “LM 7 Ax

Letters from Cimmie to Tom, 1923 (left), and from Tom to Cimmie, 1925

Savehay Farm

~ - ies (

Independent Labour Party Summer School, 1926:
Fenner Brockway (centre) with John Strachey and Tom

On the loggia at Savehay Farm, 1927: Ding Erroll, Tom, Nicholas,
Cecil Beaton, Ivan Hay, Dick Wyndham, William Walton, Georgia
Sitwell, Cimmie, Vivien, Sacheverell Sitwell

of France, 1928: Tom, Bob Boothby, Mrs Shaw, John

South
Strachey, Eileen Orde, George Bernard Shaw, Cimmie

Antibes, 1929: Paul Casa Maury, Fruity Metcalfe, Baba Metcalfe,
Tom, Rudolph Messel

The Legend 87

Cimmie was never a Marxist: nor was Tom: the difference between
their sort of socialism and communism was that they believed openly
(communists might put their trust secretly) in the role of heroic leaders.
But then there was still the business of having to explain to people —
those whom they wished to vote for them for instance ~ how the
‘compensations’ of their private lives did not interfere with their
commitment to the cause of the working class. B. A. Campbell (my
putative godfather) wrote to Birmingham newspapers a sort of testi-
monial for Tom and Cimmie, after there had been renewed attacks on
their private life:

I happen to have had the intimate friendship of Mr Mosley and Lady
Cynthia for many years, the last sixteen of which have been spent
living in the heart of East London engaged in all forms of social work.
Amongst many who have helped me in this work, not merely by
giving money but by giving service, which those of us who share the
lives of the people have learned to value far more than money, have
been those two friends ... I may mention that, as far as they are
concerned, the accusation of ‘living in large country houses with
motor cars and luxurious expenditure and making no kind of personal
sacrifice for the poor’ is not applicable. At present their town house
is a very modest sized one (and by a curious coincidence condemned
by the London County Council) ...

This sort of defence made sense on the level of words: it was what Tom
and Cimmie themselves were good at. But the problem remained —
What is the effect of such justification on reality?

There ts a letter from Nancy Astor to Cimmie of this time in which
she says — “Tell Tom not to allow on a platform what he is not willing
to do himself.’ There had for some time been the feeling amongst Tom’s
old friends that his very skill with words might result in cutting-off from
reality. It seemed that some testing would occur now he was with
Labour.

But if Tom and even Cimmie were allowing themselves to be set up
as people slightly above the normal run of things — as legendary — then
how was it that they were to be tested? Tom made no pretence about
the fact that he believed that it was his right, almost duty, to ask to be
judged on a rather superhuman level. And Cimmie, in her capacity of
being someone who liked to be adored, sometimes found herself for
good or ill, stranded on this sort of level too.

88 Rules of the Game

Allan Young wrote to her:

My wish for you is that you should be surrounded by friends who
do not irritate, who do not criticise, who are never exacting, but who
interest you and help you to express your real self...

It is a great joy to me that in the circle in which I have met you
you help me to understand the meaninglessness of material things.
You make life less lonely because of your capacity to ‘feel’. Ideas and
actions are the playgrounds of life — but to feel is to live greatly.

CHAPTER 10

Rules of the Game: Philandering

When Tom re-entered Parliament in January 1927 as Labour member
for Smethwick he had for the first time both a policy and what must
have seemed a suitable political base from which to launch it.

He was not popular in Parliament. He had first been Conservative,
then an Independent, now he was Labour. He could say with justifica-
tion that he had put his principles before party loyalties; that he had been
right to explore different territories: but this was objectionable to those
who felt strongly about party loyalties not only because they might
distrust his motives but because they might feel guilty about their own
— they might themselves feel more strongly about loyalties, that is, than
about principles, because their livelihoods depended on their so doing
while Tom’s and Cimmie’s did not.

There was also still Tom’s arrogance, his air of disdain, his cutting
tongue. Looking around in Parliament at the chosen representatives of
society around him, he would remark ‘A dead fish rots from the head
down’. When people heckled him he referred to their ‘zoological noises
striving to attain the heights of human speech’. The Conservative Party
was ‘sublime mediocrity at the head of inveterate prejudice’: Baldwin,
its leader, was someone who ‘may not be a good companion for a tiger
hunt, even for a pig hunt; but every time he runs away he proves afresh
the honesty of his convictions’. This was good stuff for the legend: it
was of not much help in fostering the personal bonhomie which, apart
from the battle, is necessary if there is to be any exercise of power
according to the rules of a game.

To most MPs Parliament was a place where issues were raised,
passions aired, votes taken: then after these activities had done their job
as a safety-valve as it were, the machinery of government could be left
to go on its way. Tom never saw Parliament like this: he imagined it

90 Rules of the Game

as a sort of officers’ discussion-group before orders should be given for
an attack. This was due to an ingrained habit partly of seeing con-
temporary circumstances as always on the edge of a crisis — ‘Pleasant
sleepy people are all very well in pleasant sleepy times, but we live in
a dynamic age of great and dangerous events’ — partly of assuming that
the right methods of dealing with a crisis were those of war. In 1927
there was a certain justification for this attitude. He left his audiences in
no doubt about how he saw the enemies at the gates.

Unemployment, wages, rents, suffering, squalor and starvation, the
struggle for existence in our streets; the threat of world catastrophe
in another war; these are the realities of our present age. These are
the problems which require every exertion of the best brains of our
time for a vast constructive effort. These are the problems which
should unite the nation in a white heat of crusading zeal for their
solution. But these are precisely the problems which send Parliament
to sleep. When not realities but words are to be discussed, Parliament
wakes up. Then we are back in the comfortable pre-war world of
make-believe: politics are safe again; hairs are to be split, not facts to
be faced. Hush! do not awaken the dreamers! Facts will waken them
in time with a vengeance.

In order to find an audience that would listen to what he had to say in
the style which he felt suitable to say it in he went increasingly outside
Parliament; he continued to address mass meetings in the midlands and
in the north. He had already made his mark as a champion of the miners
at the time of the General Strike in 1926: before it, he had in theory
opposed the idea of a strike — he had thought both that it would not
succeed and that if it did it would have meant revolution by violence.
But when the strike was on he had backed it by organising, and paying
for, the publication of a strike bulletin in Birmingham, and had given
a considerable donation (£500) to the miners when their own strike
dragged on into the autumn. From 1927 onwards he was a regular and
popular speaker at the annual Durham Miners’ Gala: he became a
political and personal friend of the miners’ leader Arthur Cook: he
learned from him some of the rhythmical, hypnotic techniques of mob
oratory. Beatrice Webb described Arthur Cook as being ‘a mediumistic,
magnetic sort of creature ... an inspired idiot, drunk with his own
words, dominated by his own slogans’. Tom said that he had ‘one of
the coolest and best heads among the Labour leaders’. With the help of
Arthur Cook and his union Tom was elected to the National Adminis-

Rules of the Game: Philandering gI

trative Council of the Independent Labour party; then to the National
Executive Council of the Labour Party itself. In Birmingham, where he
seemed personally to be winning the city from the grip of the con-
servative Chamberlain family, Tom’s legendary qualities were taking
a bizarre hold: newspapers reported that children went through the
streets singing ‘Oswald is merciful! Oswald will save us!’ There were
cartoons of him in top hat and tails like a conjuror; then as an anarchist
with a cloth cap and huge boots and a small man behind him with a
bomb. Tom’s characteristic reply to this sort of thing was just to
complain that the cartoonist had not given him enough hair. There were
also, inevitably, the cartoons about money: a money-bag labelled
‘advantages of high birth and wealth’ was being put away by Tom for
the time being in a cloak room. But in fact of course Tom had no
intention of hiding his money: he used some of it to buy an interest in
one of the papers that was pursuing him — the Birmingham Town Crier.

In 1928 Tom’s father died. He had lived apart from his wife and
children for nearly thirty years. Recently there had been some
rapprochement: his grandchildren (myself and Vivien, with Nanny and
Granny) had been to visit him in 1924: there is a photograph of a rather
young-looking middle-aged man like a professional cricketer holding
me up like a trophy. Tom’s mother had written to Tom — ‘I’m trying
hard to forget things that have made my life bitter for twenty five years.’
But then there had been the Smethwick bye-election in 1926 and his
father’s story about Tom having been born with a golden spoon in his
mouth, and Tom had again become bitter. When the news reached him
that his father was dying Tom was in the South of France; he was in
the middle of one of his long, hot summers; he declined to move in
response to a telegram from his brother Ted. Ted, who was with their
father who was himself in France, wrote ‘I am disgusted to find that on
the one occasion I have asked you to help me you have let me down
... I can assure you I should not have asked you to come here if I
considered that your presence would disturb my father at this time.’

Tom went to the funeral: there is a photograph of him and his mother
and his brothers at the graveside. In the South of France, just before he
left, remember Nanny telling Vivien and me that our grandfather had
died, and so our father was now a baronet. I watched out of the window
(so many childhood memories are of myself looking down at grown-
ups out of windows) and saw my father on the terrace walking up and
down, up and down; wondering, perhaps, about how both to be, and
appear not to be, a baronet.

Tom was not mentioned in his father’s will: it seemed to be becoming

92 Rules of the Game

a habit in the Mosley family that eldest sons should not be mentioned
in their fathers’ wills. But much of the family money had gone anyway
to Tom from his grandfather over his father’s head. His father left what
money he had to his ‘housekeeper Mary Elisabeth Hipkiss’ who had
‘served me faithfully and looked after me in various illnesses for over
sixteen years’.

The question of family money is of interest because there was so much
about it in the papers at the time that it seemed to have gone, like so
many things about Tom, into legend. The rumours were that he was
a multi-millionaire. It is difficult to give exact figures when so many
family assets were in settlements, trusts, and property whose capital
value could not be realised: but it seems that Tom, when his father died,
came into control of an estate of about £250,000: before this he had had
a yearly income from trustees of £8—10,000. Much of the estate
however was in the form of land in Manchester which the Mosley
family had once owned but which in the last century had been made
over to leaseholders on 999~year leases — one less 9, my father used to
say, and the family would indeed be multi-millionaires. But the income
from this land was fixed: so that with inflation and the threat of further
inflation it was difficult to find a buyer for the leases. Thus Tom was
rich but not extravagantly so: and not nearly so rich as legend suggested.
There was also, of course, Cimmie’s income from the Leiter Trust —
about £8 or 9,000 a year — but here there was no chance of the capital
being touched.

Tom had found the dubieties of his financial position useful during
the Smethwick by-election of 1926 when he had been able to say ‘Iown
no lands and neither does my family: I doubt if there are half a dozen
acres in the family.’ This was after Rolleston had been sold, and just
before Tom bought his 120 acres at Denham. But it is doubtful if the
electors of Smethwick would have been put off even if Tom had not
been able to play down the stories of his wealth. Such concerns were
those of the newspapers: there was still little evidence of envy amongst
the working class.

John Scanlon wrote in The Decline and Fall of the Labour Party with
reference to workers’ further reactions to Tom and Cimmie:

Instead of believing that salvation for the working class would come
from the working class, they still had the superstitious notion preva-
lent in all simple minds that salvation would come from above ...
Heaven to them was a place where only rich people congregated and
where was an abundance of rich food, rich drink and rich raiment.

Rules of the Game: Philandering 93

To most of them it was quite unattainable, and therefore when
anyone chose to leave this perpetual nightclub in order to mix with
the workers, their love and admiration knew no bounds.

The ‘perpetual night-club’ world which Tom and Cimmie were sup-
posed to frequent and occasionally come down from for the delectation
of the workers — this was a fancy that had some slight relevance to facts.
But Tom and Cimmie had gone to great lengths to break out of the
conventional upper-class night-club world; and it was more that they
themselves descended to it only from time to time for their own delight.
Upper-class London ‘society’ at this time consisted of about six hundred
people (Tom used to say) who all knew each other and knew much of
what was going on between each other but who kept this secret from
the outside world: the rules of the game were like those which require
honour amongst gangsters, that one should not talk. A view of this
world, which is indeed like that of some hellish underworld, is provided
by Cimmie’s older sister Irene who kept a daily diary from 1926: in this
she also provides contemporary glimpses of Tom and Cimmie. Irene
had inherited the same income from the Leiter Estate as Cimmie had:
on the death of her father in 1925 she had become a peeress in her own
right — Baroness Ravensdale. (George Curzon had managed to have this
subsidiary title created for himself in 1911 when it seemed certain he
would have only daughters and no son: the title could pass for one
generation through the female line but then had to revert to male
inheritance — to the annoyance of my sister). Irene Ravensdale never
married: she was rich, titled, and unencumbered by ties: in later life she
did much good work with charities and with East End clubs in London,
but mostly during these early years she did what she liked. The life that
she lived was the sort of life that Cimmie and Tom might have led if
they had not chosen to be socialist politicians.

Each winter she would go to Melton Mowbray for the hunting; there
she kept a house with four or five servants, several horses, and a groom.
She would hunt four or five days a week — with the Quorn, the
Cottesmore or the Belvoir. Having exhausted herself and two or three
horses during the day she would spend the evenings almost invariably
playing poker or bridge — at which she lost also almost invariably.
(Entries in her diary end with a phrase such as ‘Lost £15 as usual’ with
the frequency of Pepys’s ‘And so to bed.’) Often at night there were
parties at which people quarrelled, tried to swap husbands and wives,
and got drunk. When there was no hunting Irene would stay in bed till
lunch time: much of the time she felt ill. She had lovers; but did not

94 Rules of the Game

find anyone for whom she would give up her freedom or who would
take it on. When the hunting season was over she came with her servants
to her London house for the summer season of parties and balls: there
were special occasions like Derby Day, Ascot, the Eton and Harrow
match; there were the Opera and gala matinees and tableaus; the night-
clubs The Gargoyle and The Embassy. In the autumn she would travel,
sometimes round the world — like a mythical figure in the expiation of
some guilt. From time to time she drank too much, and she did a cure.
She had hundreds of friends whom she loved and who said they loved
her, but she was for the most part lonely. She was a good, warm hearted
woman with nothing at this time to commit herself to.

Her relations with Cimmie and Tom were enigmatic. Cimmie had
been her loved yet envied little sister when they were young: Cimmie
had complained of her domineering ways. Then when Cimmie married
and had children Irene seemed to claim a corner of these experiences.
(When Vivien had been born she had written ‘It is all so sacred,
wonderful; it will remain in my mind as one of the great lovely
mysteries’.) Tom told a story of how she had been to bed with him
during some romp at Melton Mowbray; yet she was heavily censorious
of Tom’s extra-marital relationships and especially of causing Cimmie
pain. She took no interest in Tom’s and Cimmie’s politics except for a
week in 1929 when she went to canvass for Cimmie during her cam-
paign at Stoke-on-Trent. In her diaries in their early days at least Tom
appears as a rather fragile figure: Cimmie is still the envied sister. But
it is likely that Irene saw and noted in her diaries mostly what she wanted
to see.

Just after Tom’s Labour victory in the 1926 election she was staying
for Christmas with Nancy Astor at Cliveden — a powerhouse of con-
servatism. Irene observed:

Cim and Tom came down to dinner and everyone was very decent
to them tho’ Geoffrey Dawson and Bob Brand hate him. They were
both very pathetic — Tom even looking lonely and lost for once, tho’
she was utterly at her ease. After dinner we played charades. Nancy
Astor was inimitable as a rich Jew and a fat girl with that bulging
mask, and Bobby as a tango teacher.

Another entry in another diary of this time seems to corroborate this
unexpected view of Tom and Cimmie. Zita Jungman, who later became
one of Cimmie’s greatest friends, first met the Mosleys in August 1927
when she was taken by Bob Boothby to a picnic on the islands off the

Rules of the Game: Philandering 95

coast of Cannes. She had not expected, from what she had heard, to like
Tom; but in the event she found him gentle and attentive and it was
Cimmie who was — ‘pretty, rather fat, strong, and ruthlessly direct’.

That Tom appeared vulnerable at this time does not in fact conflict
with the other view of him as the dashing, debonair buccaneer. News-
paper reports of him talked of his ‘distinguished bearing, singularly
handsome face, much charm of manner’; but also that — ‘shyness still
hides the reckless spirit which is shown by his political career’. Part of
his charm and ability to get away with things was that at this time he
could appear to be both savagely dominating and yet open to being hurt:
like this he had something of the attractiveness of a child. Both in politics
and in private life people looked up to him and sometimes wanted to
protect him: this is perhaps a characteristic of people who succeed in
leadership. It was only later that Tom seemed to be the potentially all-
powerful figure whom people thought might do everything himself.

Certainly in front of Cimmie there was something of the child still
in him that liked to show off, to be given approbation, as well as to be
looked up to. In 1927 Tom and Cimmie began to see more of her
younger sister, Baba, who in 1925 had married Major Edward ‘Fruity’
Metcalfe — who was known as the Prince of Wales’s best friend. Tom
liked to tease Baba: to be boyish in front of both her and Cimmie. He
wrote to Cimmie:

Today lunched with Fruity and Baba — showed them the new
Bentley. Babs very envious and says we now ‘stink of money’.
Bentley is marvellous, but I break into a sweat when I think of the
mutton at the wheel. With this light body acceleration is terrific —
much more than Merc — you are up to anything in a few yards — must
be careful. Body very good but a trifle flash. Silver wheels and red
seats!

He liked showing off to Cimmie too, about his harmless social con-
quests. Once when Cimmie was in Stoke-on-Trent and Tom was in
London he was asked to dinner by Sylvia, the wife of his brother Ted.
He wrote:

Wednesday night dined with Sylvia. She elected to appear for the
occasion in a bright scarlet costume — everything blazing red from
her lips to the heels of her shoes. Afterwards she desired to go to the
Embassy Club. I advanced rather diffidently across the floor behind
this “People’s Banner’ but nevertheless our entry appeared to cause a

96 Rules of the Game

certain sensation. Even the granite features of Lord Blandford as-
sumed a momentary mobility.

About Tom’s more serious flirtations it is difficult to tell just what, at
this time, Cimmie thought. It was a convention of the world in which
she moved and had been brought up that husbands were expected to
take some interest in other people’s wives: their own wives seemed to
have evolved a state of mind by which they both did and did not notice
what was going on. There were rules-of-the-game about what was
acceptable; and so long as Tom kept to these — the purpose of which
was to ensure that the whole business remained somewhat childlike —
then Cimmie could perhaps treat him as her naughty boy. For a time
Tom did seem to stick to the rules. He would go over to Paris, which
was a different world; there he had a mistress called Maria. (When he
came across her later in America and sent her flowers and asked when
he could see her she replied “Darling friend, I prefer not to see you at
all and have very good reasons for that.’) Perhaps the reason then was
that Tom was by this time pursuing Blanche Barrymore, the wife of
John Barrymore, the actor: she herself was an actress who used, Tom
remarked in his autobiography, to act Hamlet in competition with her
husband. Perhaps this pursuit was stagey enough to come within the
rules of the game. Also in a manner stagey but not, one would have
thought, within any recognisable rules, was his brief affair with his step-
mother-in-law, Grace Curzon; with whom, at St Moritz, while Cimmie
skied (Tom could not ski because of his injured leg) he would drive
around in a horse-drawn sledge. Tom would usually go after the women
who would be the biggest challenge to him by possessing the greatest
prestige. He never, like his father-in-law George Curzon, saw the point
of pursuing anyone who might not be passed off as upper-class.
Thus when he became Labour and a whole new game might have
opened up because this was the time when to be left-wing and intellec-
tual was to be an advocate of easy free love — Tom did not take very
enthusiastic advantage of this situation. He had a brief walk-out with
one of the wives at the ILP summer school: but soon after this he coined
a witty slogan — Vote Labour: sleep Tory — and reverted to type. He
became involved with the wife of a Conservative MP who managed to
get hold of a photograph of Tom without any clothes on (this was
Tom’s own story): the photograph was passed round the Tory benches
while Tom from the Labour front bench was making a speech: Tom,
made aware of what was going on by the resulting laughter, considered
that this was outside the rules of any game and threatened a fight.

Rules of the Game: Philandering 97

For almost the first ten years of her marriage it does not seem from
her letters that Cimmie kicked up much of a fuss about all this: she felt
that, the rules being what they were, Tom would always return to her:
she seemed essential to him, politically and personally. It was essential
politically that there should be no public scandal: but it was personally
that he still seemed dependent on her in spite of what he admitted were
his ‘tiresome ways’. He would assure her of this dependence in his
adoring, child-like letters full of baby-talk and drawings of animals: he
would call her ‘My own blessed Moo Moo’: ‘My own darling baby
bleater’: ‘His own darling soft-nosed wog-tail’. He would sign himself
by his own baby-names ~ porker, mutton: he would dash off his
drawings of animals in his wild primitive hand. All this —itself a game
— was to show that the other game — that of affairs and flirtations — was
the lesser: it could not stand up to the heartfelt, caring, genuine depen-
dence of .children-husbands on their mother-wives.

Own Beloved,

Promise be happy. Don’t work too hard. Rest and be strong for
lots of fun Friday. Does love her so. If he didn’t he wouldn’t be
tiresome. Life impossible without her.

Or:

Wishes he could make his mutt [drawing of animal] less of a goat
[drawing of animal with horns] loves her so.

And Cimmie would reply:

My belovedest,

It was so wick of me to have wasted that whole long day when
I had you and now when you aren’t here my heart aches for you. I
will really try and be bet, not maddening or cross, but do believe
nearly all my stupidity comes from excess of love which makes
me often overwrought, not anything else. I so frightfully love you
and do above everything in the world want to be a perfect wife to
you...
Oh my Bill I do so adore you, my lovely one, so beautiful and so
brave, such a clever one and so tender and beloved. Such a hero and
yet such a baby boy. Your own Moo moo.

Cimmie and Tom were now approaching the zenith of their political

98 Rules of the Game

and social careers. Their progress in the Labour Party was still trium-
phant: the Tory press campaign against them was wearing off. Tom was
even being asked to write articles by Lord Beaverbrook. People were
beginning to speak of him as a future Prime Minister. The house at
Denham was filling at weekends with people from the more exotic and
enlightened fringes of the ‘perpetual night-club world’: also with
writers and musicians and painters and designers — Sacheverell Sitwell,
William Walton, Cecil Beaton, Oliver Messel. These mixed in with the
old political friends — John Strachey, Bob Boothby. All these people felt
perhaps closest to Cimmie; but Tom was the attraction. However much
people felt him somewhat removed, awkward, they caught the glow
of his company. This sort of social life at Denham was interspersed with
visits from constituency socialists or representatives from the Durham
Miners Gala. Cimmie had her ‘ups and downs’: she wrote that her curse
was to be ‘either so frightfully hap or so frightfully mis’. Tom came and
went like (as a French journalist put it) ‘the young Alcibiades... driving
too fast in a big car, trailing after him many entangled hearts, many
sarcasms, and a few confidences’. And somewhere in the middle of all
this were the children telling themselves stories about how to get
somewhere on a raft.

CHAPTER 11

Savehay Farm

Into the peaceful mundane world at Savehay Farm which consisted of
myself and Vivien, Nanny, Mabel and May, and Mr Streeter the
gardener in his cottage beyond the woodshed, there would erupt from
time to time, like Vikings in their long-boats from the east, invaders,
who were my mother’s and father’s weekend guests. Then there would
be the business, for myself at least, of being always ready, like some
villager, to hide. Savehay Farm was a good house within and around
which to observe without being observed: there were the nooks and
crannies I had discovered in my explorations with my sister Vivien:
there were vantage points from which one could look down, as J liked
to look down, upon the behaviour of these sophisticated hordes. There
was a way out from the first floor nursery across a sort of roof-patio
and then in through another door to a gallery above a loggia. Within
this loggia some of the more esoteric rites of the grown-up world took
place — the conversation, the badinage, the drinking, the horseplay — and
even if a watcher were on the point of being caught, there was a further
escape-route at the far end of the gallery which went across a cluttered
loft with a ceiling too low to allow for easy pursuit and down into a
mysterious area known as the End Room where were stored huge
trunks containing bric-a-brac from the time when my mother had been
a child in India: and this refuge was almost impregnable, because the key
of the door from the outside had nearly always been lost.

Once or twice a year there were seasonal invasions of a type different
from usual: enormous trestle tables would be set up on the lawn: tea-
urns and trays of sandwiches would be carried from vans: then masses
of people wearing thick dark suits and with hats would emerge from
buses and would stand about looking cheerful like people do when they
think they might be photographed. These were Labour party workers

100 Rules of the Game

from Smethwick or Stoke: the occasion was known as The Garden
Party. This festivity was especially terrifying for children because the
impression had been given that it was more than an arbitrary duty for
them to appear — it was a moral and political duty — something that
might be of importance in their parents’ careers. So there we were, my
sister and I, amongst the tea and buns and smiling faces like victims
being led to sacrificial altars.

At another time of year there would be tents like those of Red Indians
suddenly in the field across the river: large boys in long khaki shorts
would appear carrying pots and pans: in the evenings they would sit
round a camp fire and sing songs. These were the denizens of Mr B. A.
Campbell’s Paddy’s Goose Boys’ Club, on their annual holiday outing.
With regard to them, too, there seemed to be some sort of moral
obligation to go and visit: grown-ups even suggested that one might
cheerfully join in their sad songs.

But for the most part the weekend invaders were as unlike constitu-
ency party workers or members of the Paddy’s Goose club as could be
imagined. On Saturday mornings in the summer garden-beds of wood
and webbing would be set out in front of the loggia: mattresses and
coloured cushions would be arranged; there would be a portable
gramophone and perhaps an umbrella; it was as if a stage-set were being
prepared for some ballet. Then in twos and threes from the house where
they had arrived the night before when the children had been in bed
or from the place where cars were parked by Mr Streeter’s cottage there
would emerge the people who were my mother’s and father’s special
friends: the men perhaps in white trousers and dark blue jackets: the
women in short skirts with waists falling down towards their knees.
They would gather round the beds in front of the loggia: they would
laugh, talk, recline; they would sway in front of each other like reeds.
But what on earth were they doing? And what were they saying? All this
was observed with eyes through some slit-hole at the bottom of a
window; on hands and knees in the gallery above the loggia. These
representatives of the grown-up world always seemed to be acting: they
would gesture, jerk their hands in their pockets, fiddle with pearls; but
who were they acting to; and what was it for? A man might go down
on one knee, a hand on his heart, as if making some passionate declara-
tion: a woman would lean back, kick her legs in the air; but was this
in acceptance or disdain? There would be lunges, shrieks, and cumber-
some runnings-after. Someone would be caught, and carried, and
dumped on a bed: but were all these struggles yes or no? Of course, it
was all a game. But did anyone win? And was it fun?

Savehay Farm IOI

The portable gramophone would be wound up with a handle and
play tunes like Just A Gigolo or You’re Driving Me Crazy: people might
dance a little in a desultory, am-I-or-am-I-not-being-watched way.
They would do this as if in front of cameras: often, in fact, there was
a camera — my mother had a primitive box-like cine-Kodak that you
held at. your waist and looked down into: she was one of the first people
to make home movies fashionable. In front of the camera people of
course were expected to perform: they would do the Charleston flicking
their legs sideways and back; they would put their arms round each
other’s waists and trip to and fro like Sugar Plum Fairies. They did not
seem to be involved so much in dancing as in the business of trying to
find out what to do about being watched. A few games would begin:
two men would get down on their backs on the lawn; they would face
one another and each would put a leg up and hook it round the leg of
the other; the object was to force the other person over on to the back
of his head. The women would hop about like birds round carrion. Then
there was a game in which two people were blindfolded and lay on the
lawn and held hands and whacked at each other with rolled-up news-
papers: this was called, for some reason, Are You There Moriarty? When
all this had gone on for some time the women would drift back to the
beds and perhaps file their nails and croon snatches to the gramophone.

There were more formal games. Half way down the drive there were
two tennis courts side by side: 1 do not remember anyone playing much
serious tennis. The point seemed to be the badinage, usually in mixed
doubles. My aunt Irene had a very slow underarm service that her
opponents could deal with as they liked, depending on what they felt
about my Aunt Irene. When my father served he would flash his eyes
at the same time as he flashed his racket and he seemed to be trying to
hit his partner on the back of the neck.

There was even a realistic duelling game that the men played on the
lawn: they would dress up in fencing jackets and masks; they would
march away from each other back to back carrying pistols; then would
turn and fire with bullets of uninjurious wax. The women would watch
this as if rather at a loss: traditionally, had not women liked men fighting
over them with some danger of death?

There was a thing called a pogo-stick with a spring on the bottom on
which you jumped up and down like a kangaroo. One day Dick
Wyndham slipped and broke his jaw: there was a queer funeral cortege
down to the river — to throw in not Dick Wyndham, but the pogo-
stick.

In the river there was swimming from a wooden landing-stage or

102 Rules of the Game

diving-board in an area that was supposed to have been cleared of weeds
by Mr Streeter in the punt. We children were allowed to bathe here as
soon as we could swim. There were stories of how weeds stretched up
like tentacles and dragged you down.

We would fish with nets for tiddlers in the river. Sometimes the
movements of grown-ups seemed to be curiously like those of fish; they
would seem all to be facing one way; then they would suddenly dash
off and face in another.

One summer at Savehay Farm the play-acting did seem to have some
practical or rather aesthetic point: my mother and father set out to make,
with their box-like camera, a film with a story. What the story was is
obscure since only one uncut reel of it survived: the rest was tidied and
burned by a house-maid in the South of France who thought that the
bits and pieces in the process of being cut and stuck together were
rubbish. From the one reel it seems that my mother was a dairy maid
who was being pursued by both John Strachey and Dick Wyndham —
the former was some sort of rustic, and the latter a dashing man who
turned up in the Bentley. These two had a terrible fight on the big bridge
over the river: first John Strachey got hurled into the water; then he
climbed out and ran back on to the bridge and hurled Dick Wyndham
into the water; this scene seemed to be repeated, over and over. Then
there was a brothel scene in which Cecil Beaton was the Madame made
up to look like Margot Asquith: one of the girls in her charge was, again,
my mother. Dick Wyndham returned in the Bentley and there was
another struggle — with revealing close-ups of legs and thighs. Towards
the end of all this Cecil Beaton went off to drown himself in the river;
but it was his wig that kept on coming off and floating away like
Ophelia. There was an odd blind boy, very beautiful, played by Stephen
Tennant; who sat and made daisy chains by the river.

All this was scripted, directed, and filmed by my father. It was shot
in a rather German-expressionist style, with reflections in water of
poplar trees and clouds moving.

One of the more bizarre activities that grown-ups liked to indulge
in at weekends was to play practical jokes on one another. In the
downstairs lavatory there was a box which held the paper and when you
pulled a snake jumped out: Olga Lynn had hysterics, and the door of
the lavatory had to be broken down. Then there was a story of how
my father once arranged to have soap on toast served to his dinner
guests as a savoury: Oliver Messel was warned by Mabel the parlour
maid, and went behind a screen with a pack of cards which he let fall
to the floor thus making a sound as if he were being sick. Nanny used

Savehay Farm 103

to recount to us these stories: it seemed to be accepted that they were
about just the sort of things that grown-ups did.

Nanny, in fact, had her own fund of such stories, which we children
asked her to recount to us over and over again. When she had been a
nurserymaid in the employment of George Curzon she had stayed in
the house of his father, Lord Scarsdale, where there was a butler who
tyrannised over the other servants. One day Nanny, and her great friend
Sarah the still-room maid, put some sherbet in the butler’s pot, so that
when he peed at night it foamed: he, too, was supposed to have had some
sort of fit. Then there was Lord Scarsdale himself who was known to
be mean about food: one night Nanny and her friend were having a
midnight snack when they heard a scuffling outside their bedroom door
and they opened it and found Lord Scarsdale on his hands and knees
trying to see underneath. The impression from all these stories was that,
of course, the grown-up world was mad: why else, indeed, did they have
to have people like nannies to tell us stories about them?

In the evenings after guests had gone my sister and I would come
down to the Garden Room where there were the glass walking sticks
on the walls and we would pick up bits of family life after the invasion.
My mother would read to us or at a slightly later date would play with
us one of the upper-middle-brow games that she had played as a child
with her father. There was the game called ‘I see’ in which a famous
historical scene was described and the children had to guess (or rather
to know) what it was — Julius Caesar on his way to the Senate: Napoleon
on St Helena. Sometimes my mother would rope in my father to
describe a scene; but after a time he would get bored, and begin — I see
a tall dark handsome man — and we would all start groaning, because
we knew he was describing himself. Similarly if my father was ever
prevailed on to play the enervating game of compiling lists of famous
men beginning with a certain letter he would with mysterious quickness
finish his list and wait till the end of the allotted time and then when
invited to read out his list would announce just — whatever the letter
— Mosley! And so there would be more groans: and my father’s strange
clicking laugh. I continued to think this sort of thing very funny. This
was the pattern of my father with his children: he would become the
joker: he would be no longer distant, removed: what better could he
do?

Then there were more of the strange mantras, or slogans, that he used
to declaim in response to what he might feel were unnatural demands
on him. On the comparatively rare occasions on which all the family
were having a meal together and Vivien and I were being obstreperous

104 Rules of the Game

and he was appealed to to keep order, he would intone, with the far-
away look in his eye:

Let us see if Nicky can

Be a little gentleman

Let us see if Viv is able

To behave herself at table —

Or if there was some dispute about plans — between our two aunts, for
example, who kept up a rivalry sometimes about who should do what
with which of the children — he would murmur just:

Whoever would you rather be —
Aunty Baa or Aunty Nee —

and then would drift off, laughing again, leaving myself at least thinking
that something magical had happened. I did not know why: I think it
was something to do with grown-ups being able to laugh at their own
pretensions.

There were the other sayings my father would use to discourage
earnest personal speculation. When the question came up, as it often did,
about the oddity of his emergence from his background, he would
declaim, as alternatives to the ‘when fire meets oil then springs the spark
divine’ remark quoted earlier:

The Lily, its roots dug deep in the dung of the
earth, yet rears its glorious head to heaven —

Nurtured as I was in the rough usages of camp and field —
Or —

Staffordshire born and Staffordshire bred
Fat in the bottom and fat in the head —

all these being said as throwaway lines, real or made-up quotations, self-
mockery to do away with boredom or embarrassment. Then there was
a line that he would intone as he entered the sea to swim in the
Mediterranean — And bluer the sea-blue stream of the bay — which
meant that he was peeing.

Savehay Farm 105

My father was an arch-manipulator of words: it seemed that at these
moments he was mocking the pretensions of words. But there were also
his rages.

He never directed any violence against us children — except perhaps
once, when Vivien and I had been having a fight in the rose-garden and
Vivien, accidentally, had kicked me in the balls and I had flopped about
like a footballer in the penalty area. My father hauled Vivien up to his
room and smacked her. He examined me solicitously. But this incident
stands out for its rarity.

The scarcity of memories about my mother has resulted in those
scenes that do remain being lit portentously. There was a day in London
when my mother and father and Vivien and I were walking along the
Mall (this is by far the clearest memory I have of my mother and father
in relation to each other): we were turning up by St James’s Palace and
my mother was asking me why I did not like the child of one of her
friends whom she had hoped I would like; I was saying I did not know
why: (I cannot remember now how much in fact I did not know or how
much I was declining to pass on childhood secrets). My mother was
saying that of course I must know — that if one had feelings about not
liking someone one must be able to describe them — and I was beginning
to feel miserable: 1 was thinking — surely, feelings are sometimes too
complicated to be put just into words? My father was walking ahead
with my sister Vivien: my mother called out to him — Was it not correct,
would he not say, that if one had feelings then these could be put into
words? I remember my father turning, at the bottom of St James’s
Street, and saying no, surely, there were some feelings that could not
well be put into words. I think I felt some sort of liberation.

But it was about this time, when I was about seven, that I began quite
badly to stammer. My mother had recorded in notes that she made
about our early childhood — ‘Vivien was inclined to be a bit bossy and
Nic was led a good deal of a dance always having to play second string,
he was much more highly strung than her, and occasionally used to have
stammering fits.’ But my own consciousness that I stammered came
later when both my mother and my nanny in the night nursery — this
scene again is portentously etched — were standing over me and telling
me earnestly that I must try to speak carefully: up to that time I had not
realised that I did not. There is a lesson to be learned by parents here:
if your child stammers, do not remark on this when he or she is young:
the stammer may naturally go: but if you remark on it, the child has
to struggle and the stammer may get dug in.

There are psychological theories about stammering that have seemed

106 Rules of the Game

to me to make sense. One is that it is a sort of protection against the
verbal aggression of others (it is difficult to be rude or sarcastic towards
a stammerer): another and deeper theory is that it is a protection against
the stammerer’s Own potential aggressiveness towards others — an
aggressiveness which, without the stammer, would be alarming. But it
has seemed to me also that stammering on some level is simply a protest
against a too easy flow of words; against one’s own and other people’s
terrible tendency to bury living things under a verbal lava-flow.

In the notes that my mother made in her photograph book of our
childhood were sayings attributed to me at an early age: one was ‘Isn’t
it lucky that Mummy didn’t marry Mr Strachey?’ Another — ‘I think
we are really dead, and we think all this is a dream.’

In my mother’s Garden Room, when she was away, there were
certain explorations to be made amongst the piles of glossy magazines
that lay on a table behind the sofa. Some of these magazines had been
sent from Russia; some from Paris. In the former there were pictures
of enormous industrial complexes with pipes and cones and spheres:
these seemed like very advanced children’s toys. In the magazines from
Paris there were reproductions of modern paintings and drawings which
took one out of the world of toys towards some secret that might lie
at the back of the grown-up world. There were women with no clothes
on lying on their backs with their knees in the air— Egon Schiele perhaps.
But why was this so strange? And apparently for grown-ups as well as
for children?

At the not-often-used end of the house on the ground floor beneath
my mother’s and father’s bedroom there was a panelled hall with
portraits of Mosley ancestors on the walls: these were almost the only
relics (apart from library books) that had been saved from my father’s
abandonment of Rolleston. Each year after the Christmas Tree had been
cleared away (here we had circled to the incantation of porker, porker)
for the rest of the winter I was allowed to make this room my own.
Here I would set about building or rebuilding — the Mosley ancestors
looking primly or benignly down — a whole model village, a landscape,
an estate: the basis of this was a beautifully made set of toys called The
Belgian Village (given to us children, I think, by my mother’s childhood
friend the Queen of the Belgians). This consisted of houses, gardens,
churches, shops, inns; it could be set out on the floor of the empty hall
and extended into parkland, farmyards, animals, railways, cars, buses —
these taken from my other sets of toys. Thus a whole new world could
be created; which unlike much of the real world was orderly, aesthetic
and exact. I would work at this painstakingly through much of the

Savehay Farm 107

winter holidays: the task, and the result, seemed to be of mysterious
significance. I knew it would be cleared away by Nanny and May the
housemaid in the spring: but it could always be taken out of its boxes
again and made the same and yet slightly different: and perhaps it was
this ordering of something beautiful that seemed to make life worth
while.

CHAPTER 12

Labour Politics

In 1927 Cimmie, in the train to Dover wrote to Tom, who was at 8
Smith Square:

Sweetie old boy, be a happy one and be a good one — miss his Mum
a good deal but don’t get plooey. Get Mabel to fix up people to come
and see you. Try and make the Docs start doing something in the way
of treatment. Anyway suggest a tonic to keep your strength up.

Why not also have the spermy doc to see you as well, his add is
on envelope on dressing table, name of Kenneth Walker. Talk to
Kirkwood about the French specialist from Bagnolles and get Mabel
to ring Eva up and find out when he is coming over.

Darling fellow let’s have loveliest happiest time yr 31st year.
I will do all I can. As well as our work-y good times let’s have fun-
y good times. Let’s really try and achieve the ideal modus vivendi!
I do so love you and as well as that I’m frightfully fond of you for yr
sake too. Feels like a Mum as well as a Mistress (can one be the Whore
as well as the Bore or vice versa?)

I do think we are trying to give better chances and more happiness
to people in general and ought to give just our 2 selves a really good
chance too — a chance to be a better happier couple than any other
— it would help in the long run and I am quite sure we have a duty
to ourselves as much as to everyone else. A Frenchman opp has just
blown his nose and released by flourishing his hanky such an odious
cloying scent I feel sick. H. G. Wells on the train, can’t make up my
mind whether to speak to him or not.

Let’s arrange a party soon after I’m back (if you’re well) and go
to Greta Garbo.

Love and kisses my belovedest.

Labour Politics 109

Don’t leave this about it is stilted and restrained as it is just for that
very fear.

Loves him Loves him Loves him Loves him.

Does think him a bloody marvel, really, and as the train rushes her
farther and farther away is inclined to reconsider her opinion that he
is evil and wick (doubtful tho’) and thinks — Oh Hell, I don’t know
what I think.

But I do know you are often a pet and adorable and are quite
without rival in public life and that all the time I love you except
when I hate you so much it must come quite near to love and be
mixed up with it. God bless your schemes and plans. Don’t get fed
up with the silly old Labs yet awhile. Give Jimmy my love and fix
up some NAC fun for me. Play your new grammy and think
lovingly and kindly of your Simple Sincere Suburban Sim!!

It seems that at the time Tom was quite often ill or on the edge of being
ill: or he was something of a hypochondriac; he liked to put his trust
in glamorous doctors whether or not there was very much for them to
cure. But he had genuine recurring trouble with his injured leg. Cimmie
wrote to him from Stoke-on-Trent — ‘My poor sweetie old fellow Iam
miserable at your being phlebitic it really does seem that yr troubles are
unending and cumulative (is that the right word?) always piling up —
oh I am just longing for Tues when we can settle peacefully down to
being normal decently idle creatures.’ Ramsay MacDonald wrote to
Cimmie regretting ‘that Tom’s illness is to drag’, but making a date with
her to go to the theatre.

In October 1928 Tom and Cimmie went on a motor trip with
Ramsay MacDonald to Vienna, Prague and Berlin. In Berlin Mac-
Donald addressed the Reichstag and made a passionate plea for dis-
armament: the press seemed more interested in Cimmie’s clothes. ‘Lady
Cynthia, the famous champion of the proletariat, was in an evening
frock of grey tissue with a rich grey cloak ... slowly, and with an air
which a great actress might envy, she went to the place assigned to her
followed by her husband and Mr Ramsay MacDonald ... a shawl of
snowy white ermine fell from her gracious shoulders.’

While in Berlin Tom and Cimmie were taken round the night clubs
by Harold Nicolson who was Counsellor at the British Embassy. Tom
wrote about this in his autobiography — “Cimmie and I had never seen
anything like it ... the sexes had simply changed clothes, make-up and
habits of nature . . . scenes of decadence and depravity suggested a nation
sunk so deep that it could never rise again. Yet within two or three years

110 Rules of the Game

men in brown shirts were goose-stepping down these same streets round
the Kurfurstendamm’. Tom does not seem in this description to have
been being ironic.

Ramsay MacDonald did not go with them on the tour of the night
clubs: his own raffish behaviour on this trip was to do with becoming
involved again with an Austrian lady who had previously been his
mistress. Tom too became involved in this affair. In a passage which he
dictated for his autobiography but then left out he told the story of this
odd incident and its aftermath.

In Vienna we met a woman who as a type seemed to me something
of an old Viennese tart: faded blonde, very sophisticated, very
agreeable. And being young people, and never thinking that people
much older than ourselves could have love affairs, Cimmie and |
thought nothing of it. In Vienna the old pair used to go and look at
museums.

A month or two later MacDonald suggested that we all go down
to Fowey in Cornwall, and named the party which he wanted to take
—a gay party and altogether different from MacDonald’s colleagues.
Just before we went he said to me ‘My little Austrian friend whom
we met in Vienna is in England. It would be such fun if she could
come. Will you explain it to the others?’ So we said all right. He used
to read poetry to her, and they wandered off together making a
strange couple.

Then we went into the election. We fought it and we won, and
I found myself sitting in the Treasury as Chancellor of the Duchy.
Then one day I was informed that a Mrs so-and-so wanted to speak
to me. I said ‘I’m delighted to hear you’re in London but we’re all
very busy’. She said ‘I’m living in a flat in Horseferry Road,’ — at that
time almost a slum area — I’ve got serious news for you. The Govern-
ment may fall. I must tell you’.

So I went round and there was this old girl. She said ‘I rang you
up, you’re very young, but you’re the only man in this govern-
ment who knows anything of the world at all. So I had better tell
you’.

She went on ‘T’ll come straight to the point. I was once a very rich
woman. The Prime Minister, when I used to meet him in Switzer-
land, was a very poor man and I helped him a lot in those days. Now
he’s got the whole Treasury of Great Britain behind him.’

So I said “Dear Lady, you can’t have the Prime Minister putting
his hand in the public Treasury to support his lady friends.’

Labour Politics 11I

Then she got very nasty. She said ‘I went to Downing Street, I was
admitted, and I told him I had to get some money. He saw me in the
Cabinet Room and became completely hysterical and began to bang
his head against the wall. Isobel came in in the middle of this per-
formance. Then he took me by the shoulders and pushed me out in
front of all the porters in Downing Street.’

I always remember how her story ended — ‘I fall down, I break my
lorgnettes, my eyes they are blinded with tears. The policeman, he
pick me up and put me in a taxi’.

So I told her it was terribly shocking, the Prime Minister was tired
and overworked.

She replied ‘I’ve got letters from him. You know, he’s a very
innocent man and he wrote to me letters which were pornographic.
They were written from Lossiemouth in his own handwriting but
he’s cut off Lossiemouth with a pair of scissors.’

I said to her ‘Now look, no newspaper will publish them here, and
if you try to blackmail the Prime Minister he will be Mr X in court
and you’ll go down for Io or 20 years.’

She knew a trick worth two of that. “You may be able to stop me
here, but I shall go to the Quai d’Orsay and the whole thing will blaze
in the French press.’

So then I pulled a real bluff, because you can imagine in a Labour
government anything of that kind would wreak havoc. But with
her being a central European I thought she might fall for it. I said
to her ‘Do you really think a British Government is going to be
brought down by one lonely woman? You have no friends, you
have no helpers at all. You’ve got to go by train to Dover and on
the channel boat to Paris. Do you think you are ever going to get to
France?’

It worked. She was in floods of tears. She said “Please, I want to
leave, please don’t!’ I said ‘Of course not, we’re friends, everything
will be gentle. Take the advice of a good friend, don’t go near the
Quai d’Orsay, very, very, dangerous. Go back to Vienna as fast as
you can get.’

As Tom told the story, there were further repercussions. Years later,
when he had founded the British Union of Fascists, he was approached
by a man who wanted to join him who had previously been a secret
service agent: this man told Tom that the flat in Horseferry Road had
in fact been bugged so that the incident, and Tom’s part in it, was known
to the security people. And the story, the man said, had continued — the

112 Rules of the Game

Austrian lady had indeed returned to Vienna but then had reappeared
in 1931 or 1932 and ‘Jimmy Thomas was sent with £3,000 of Abe
Bailey’s money to buy the letters ... he went to Paris, met her there,
came back without the three thousand and without the letters.’

Then many years later, Tom related, Charles Mendl, who had been
at the British Embassy in Paris, told Tom that he had once seen the
allegedly pornographic letters and that all he remembered of them was
a poem which contained the line —

Porcupine through hairy bowers shall climb to paradise.

Back in 1928 — it seemed that Tom and Cimmie were in various ways
trying to make themselves useful to Ramsay MacDonald. He came
down to Savehay Farm to work: he was photographed writing a draft
of his election manifesto in the loggia. There was even talk that in a
future Labour government Tom might be made Foreign Secretary. But
Ramsay MacDonald’s way of going round with the rich and fashionable
had led to hostile comment within the Labour Party: Beatrice Webb
wrote sourly of MacDonald’s liking for ‘the Mosleys, De la Warrs, and
other lithe and beauteous forms — leaders of fashion or ladies of the stage
attended by 6ft tall and well groomed men’. And it might even have
been true, as Harold Nicolson wrote later, that ‘Cimmie Mosley’s hold
on Ramsay is one of the things that makes it difficult for Tom to be
specially favoured.’ Also Ramsay MacDonald might have sensed a
growing hostility to himself in Tom at this time: it was their Berlin trip,
Tom wrote later, that first opened his eyes to ‘the deep eleinent of
hysteria’ in Ramsay MacDonald’s nature: such men might be ‘figures
of infinite worthiness, the models of public virtue and private decorum’:
but because they were ‘products of the Puritan tradition’ they were
‘entirely different animals in all things, great and small, to the masters
of action whom history has revealed to our judgement’. This feeling
arose, he would explain, not of course as a result of the discovery that
Ramsay MacDonald had a mistress but because of his failure to deal with
the situation with dispatch. But Tom made his own odd calculations in
this area: and in the coming three or four years he might at times have
reflected back on himself the comment he made on Ramsay MacDonald
— ‘It seems to me that men in high office ought to live like athletes ...
statesmen are poor fish if even for the few years at the height of their
responsibilities they cannot be serious’.

There was some confusion at the heart of the Labour Party about
what should be a proper attitude to puritanism. One strand of Labour

Labour Politics 113

thinking, represented by the ILP, was dedicated to socialism as if to
some kind of puritan religion: this was in the tradition of Marx, Lenin,
Trotsky: socialists had to keep clear of even social contacts with
establishment ways of living for fear of almost moral contamination.
But this had never been the attitude of the majority of Labour
parliamentarians: for them, just as socialism would evolve out of
capitalism without a revolution, so new social attitudes might be
grafted without too much trouble on to the old. It was Tom, ulti-
mately, who became distrusted by both sides in the confusion — by the
puritans for being too much of a rake, and by the compromisers for
being too much of a rebel.

From the evidence of Cimmie’s 1927 letter there was a danger even
then of Tom’s becoming disillusioned with Labour: neither the puritans
nor the moderates seemed to be much interested in getting things done.
The former declaimed passionately about theory without much interest
in what was possible: the latter, with their eye on the possible, held to
no theory to spur them on. Tom did what he could from his position
of not being quite in step with anyone to suggest what might be
done.

In 1927 he was made a member of a sub-committee of the Labour
Party National Executive to prepare a draft programme for the general
election which would come at the latest in 1929. He wrote a personal
letter to Ramsay MacDonald in which he expanded on the Birmingham
Proposals of two years earlier; in particular he advocated the setting-up
of an Economic Council with far-reaching powers to interfere in the
economy. MacDonald was sympathetic to some of the ideas about ways
in which credit might be provided to stimulate employment: what he
objected to (and what most of Tom’s critics must have objected to
although for the reasons suggested it seemed they could not say this)
were the methods that Tom proposed were necessary if the policy was
to be put into effect. Tom claimed that there had to be dynamism with
authority from the top: MacDonald wrote in his diary ‘quiet cautious
leadership is what I think is wanted’. But it was under just such cautious
leadership that the economy had for years been failing.

The Labour Party programme that was prepared for the 1929 election
under the title of Labour and the Nation was in fact largely written by
MacDonald; it was a compendium of pious hopes that socialism would
benefit all sections of the community without much mention of how
this miracle might occur. But it served the Labour Party well at the time
of the election.

The reason why the men whom the Labour Party and indeed the

114 Rules of the Game

country trusted found themselves more and more tending to ignore
Tom seems to have been not just that his proposals for political action
alarmed them, but also because there was something in his personal style
that they felt might justify this alarm. It was about this area that it was
difficult to talk — it was the political tradition that politics should be
talked about in terms of politics, and questions of what human beings
were should be kept to another context. But Tom as a person was such
an obvious oddity on the political scene that personal pronouncements
by political commentators kept on mysteriously breaking in: there had
been Beatrice Webb’s view of Tom — that ‘with such perfection there
must be some rottenness somewhere’. Ellen Wilkinson wrote ‘The
trouble with Oswald Mosley is that he is too good looking ... he is not
that kind of nice hero who rescues the girl at the point of torture but
the one who hisses ‘‘at last we meet!’’” The suggestion seemed to be that,
with so many talents, the temptation to be out for oneself must be
overwhelming. But there were many confusions here: what might have
been a serious point about an ambivalence in Tom’s moral attitudes
became lost in what seemed to be fear or envy of his energy and even
his sexual drives. There might have been serious points to be made about
these too: but not in the traditional context of judging who was to be
listened to on the National Executive.

During the summer of 1928 Tom and Cimmie were visited by her
sister Irene at Denham and in the South of France. There was an evening
at Savehay Farm in May when, having listened on the wireless to
Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, Cimmie ‘gave us a long socialist dissertation
and was so earnest and heart-whole one could not argue with her’. Then
a weekend or two later Cecil Beaton and Stephen Tennant came down:
they dressed up in Mary Curzon’s old clothes and — ‘did the most
fantastic dances as passed description for effeteness tho’ brilliance was in
every line’. Tom seems to have been a bit aloof from all this. Cimmie,
Irene reported, ‘seemed on the edge of a breakdown’. Then in August
at Antibes there was a hugely successful birthday party for Cimmie to
which there came ‘the whole world and his wife’: a few days later — ‘I
talked for the first time in my life for 2 hours to Cim over the misery
of her present life and Tom’s insulting behaviour to her: it killed me to
hear of her rending loyalty to him saying he had never been unfaithful
she only wished he would not make a fool of her in public.’ Cimmie
herself however seems to have been a ringleader in the party-going
activity: certainly she never seems to have tried to get Tom away from
the areas in which he could so easily hurt her.

It was Cimmie’s very devotion to Tom, probably, that allowed him

Labour Politics 115

to feel free and confident in this world: people from time to time
encouraged Cimmice herself to flirt; even to take lovers: she used to say
she did not want to. No one advised her to get out. On the evidence
of her own letters there was something self-destructive, almost pro-
vocative, about her obsession with Tom; she would say this herself —
that her possessiveness was making her nagging and sending her ‘mad’
without reference to whether Tom was going after anyone else or not.
So, by behaving as he did, what had Tom got to lose? And by his
endearments it seemed he could always mollify her. And at this time
Cimmie did probably believe that Tom’s flirtations could for the most
part be explained in terms of the social game which was to do not with
love but conquest; that apart from doing what was natural to him, what
Tom was looking for was prestige. And she could try to convince herself
that it was not unreasonable to want prestige.

Tom tried to justify his behaviour on the grounds that it was to do
with ‘wholeness’, with health, with a necessary refusal to deny what was
his nature: such behaviour balanced, and gave him energy for, the
rigours of his life in politics. But in fact he seemed quite often to be ill.
Cimmie wrote that she wished they could settle down for a time and
live like ordinary people: but she did not arrange a time, even a holiday,
in which this might be possible. She herself could not pretend that she
flourished at the social game: but she, as much as he, seemed trapped
by it.

A pattern was emerging of Tom as the swashbuckling, vituperative
rebel in public life who in private life became also something of a
naughty boy; who, having shown off, could return to its mother for
forgiveness. (Tom’s mother wrote to him at this time — ‘It seems almost
incredible to me to realise ‘““The Honourable Gentleman” is my very
beloved fat obstinate baby of so little while ago, and yet you haven't
changed much.’) Cimmie was now becoming seen as the angelic martyr
mother: but she knew that there was something daemonic in her own
attitudes to Tom: she both wanted and did not want him to be as he
was: she saw him as both saint and devil. She did not, from the evidence
of her letters, seem to be all that much interested now in his day-to-day
politics: what he liked to do was to bring her news of them and she liked
accepting this: it was as if he were saying to her — Look, what a good
boy am I! People who want to be heroes perhaps also have to be
somewhat like children: Freud said that anyone who has been the un-
disputed favourite of his mother keeps for life the feelings of a con-
queror. With Tom there had been pushed out the image of the father
— which inculcates the faculty for being discriminatory; self-critical.

116 Rules of the Game

Thus the would-be hero has no recognition of the dark side of himself:
he sees the devil only in others. In himself, he feels a power that can be
used. And so he goes out to do battle with a make-believe confidence
and with make-believe attitudes to the world: he cannot distinguish
between reality and what is imposed by childhood patterns. In this he
is cheered on by his mother — or by the mother-figure he has chosen and
who accepts him. All Tom’s baby-talk with Cimmie — the porkers, the
mutts, the moo-moos-— seem to have been tapping some childhood well;
he needed perhaps to draw strength from this before going out to fight
— with his words, his tongue — the terrible dragons. But heroes continue
not to see the dragons that are in themselves.

My own beloved moonbeam one

Adored his weekend so with all his blessed fellows — big, tiny and
very tiny [drawing of three trees]. Hated going back so to this
turmoil.
Last night a thrilling discussion, but not for paper!
All love in world my own socialist one. Tom

Tom went on a speaking tour of the country as a run-up to the general
election: Cimmie involved herself with her constituency at Stoke. They
each wrote solicitously about their own and the other’s health. Tom —
‘Good meeting here but my voice going badly at the end — three
meetings and long motor drives in a night — will return I hope to find
his sweet sausage lying down.’ Cimmie — ‘Stayed in bed all day and only
had 4 cups of milk and a compote of apples ... You were quite night
when you said things went wrong when I thought of myself — 1 will
try not to!’ They were both driving themselves hard. They must have
felt this necessary, if they were to take on the world seeing themselves
and others as heroes or demons.

At the end of 1928 —in reply to a letter from Cimmie reiterating her
sorrow at not always being able to live up to the high hopes she had
for both of them and pleading for further ‘special efforts’ — Tom wrote:

My own darling Moo-moo,

Yes let us be happy when you come back — life and especially youth
is so short. In our life it is so difficult to preserve the steel that
withstands great strain with the sweet gentle things that make life
happy — so hard to meet an age of turmoil and yet to be fit inhabitants
of the world we wish to create. Yet to excel in the fulness of life the
great incompatibles must be combined. Let us make together that

Labour Politics 117

great attempt on which so far all have failed — the attempt to reconcile
the epic life with gentle sensitive things. I would inscribe my name
on the page of my epoch in letters of flame and of rose — success would
be the first shadow of the superman on earth — it will probably fail,
but better the empyrean flight and disaster than earthbound crawlings
— let us live always with the epic sense. Tom.

But even Tom could not quite let things rest on such a note of hyperbole,
and added:

This really means he thinks her the only one in the world for him —
is sorry he has been a bit overwrought lately and is feeling a bit up
in the air tonight — loves her so very much and does so passionately
want her to be happy — sorry he is such a difficult one — she is a bit
diff too sometimes but that is his fault for putting her in such a
dogfight. Don’t mind any little things my sweet one — though he will
try and be better.

But it was the little things to which they were vulnerable — those
dwarves that come up from the underworld and penetrate heroes’
armour. In May 1929, just before the general election, Irene was at
Denham with her eye again ready to perceive chinks in armour —

A most tragic and painful row took place between Cim and Tom at
dinner over the cars for the election and he was vilely rude to her and
I tried to argue to both long into the night but they both seem to be
at deadlock. I wish at times he could disappear off the face of the earth
as he only brings her endless agony. And to make it worse, she
thought of all things she was in for a baby.

Cimmie was in fact pregnant. Irene went to help her in her campaign
at Stoke. The election there had aroused enormous interest because
Cimmie as a rich socialist had drawn on herself all the publicity and
abuse that Tom usually attracted, and there was the added appeal of her
being a good-looking woman. The old stories about wealth and duphi-
city were trotted out: Cimmie was supposed to have a penniless brother
in America whom the heartless family allowed to live in a workhouse:
Tom and Cimmie ran factories where they paid their workers eighteen
shillings a week. Irene heard a woman telling such stories on a bus, and
remonstrated: the woman called Irene ‘a bit of scum’. At a meeting of
Cimmie’s conservative opponent, Colonel Ward, a group of Cimmie’s

118 Rules of the Game

supporters challenged him about the spreading of such stories: in the
resulting confusion Irene:

had to yell that I was her sister and knew more about the Leiter
fortunes than Colonel Ward and my grandfather did not corner
wheat. The chairwoman yelled for the police. Ward was white as a
sheet. I left the room taking 3 of the clapping and shrieking women
with me and I was cheered all the way down the streets.

Irene and her band of maenads in fact so alarmed Colonel Ward that
he announced that as a result of ‘organised hooliganism’ he had decided
to cancel his further meetings on the grounds that ‘the socialists have
determined to put an end to free speech in this country’.

At her eve-of-poll meeting Cimmie herself received:

the wildest reception ... We went on to Fenton Town Hall Square
where she had another thundering welcome save for a small group
of hysterical booers one of whom, a woman, tried to tear everything
off Cim. To get away we had to have barriers of strong young men
to prevent us from being torn to shreds by the yelling crowd.

Cimmie got a 7,850 majority over Colonel Ward — his majority at the
last election had been 4,500. She doubled the Labour vote from 13,000
to 26,000: she recorded one of the biggest swings to Labour in the
country. Later that day she was again ‘nearly torn to ribbons’ when she
met Ramsay MacDonald in London: she was rescued ‘shaking with
emotion’. Four days later, on June 6th, she had a miscarriage.

At his own eve-of-poll meeting at Smethwick Tom had joked with
his audience — ‘I have got the wind up. I am afraid my wife will get a
bigger majority than me.’ She did. Tom’s majority was 7,340.

After Cimmie had had her miscarriage Irene reported — ‘Poor old
Tom was pretty hard hit.’ But Irene herself seems to have caught
something of the fever cf heroic politics. With Cimmie and Tom both
now in Parliament and with Tom obviously set to enjoy his first taste
of practical, ministerial power, she wrote to Cimmie:

I don’t want you to think it was all the election, because I think Bonny
found your inside unsatisfactory and you might have had a real
tragedy later whereas now if you rest peacefully for 10 days or more
and let it get pitched right again then you stand a far better chance
of having a real strong baby and being yourself strong too to carry

Labour Politics 119

it. | don’t want you to feel the bitterness of this too much, my very
dear one. Great things have come to you and Tom in parliament.
things — this is indeed a heartbreak in the midst of it — but have faith
it was for the best.

CHAPTER 13

Rules of the Game:
Ministerial Office

In the General Election of May 1929 Labour won 287 seats, the Con-
servatives 261, and the Liberals $9. Ramsay MacDonald formed a
Labour Government with Liberal backing. The rumours that Tom
might be made Foreign Secretary did not materialise. There were too
many party stalwarts who had to be satisfied; and in any case Tom’s
reputation, both political and personal, was probably thought not yet
to be sufficiently secure. He was made Chancellor of the Duchy of
Lancaster with special responsibility for unemployment — a ministerial
post outside the cabinet. His boss within the cabinet was J. H. Thomas,
the Lord Privy Seal, ex-secretary of the railwaymen’s union.

Tom entered his one year of ministerial power with an enormous task
placed somewhat nebulously above his shoulders but with no effective
administrative apparatus by which to handle it. He was given a room
in the Treasury, and as his private secretary a Treasury official who had
been an assistant to Keynes: he personally employed Allan Young, his
agent from Birmingham, as his political secretary. But even in govern-
ment he seemed fated to be very much a lone voice. Winston Churchill
described him as being ‘a sort of ginger assistant to the Lord Privy Seal;
and more ginger than assistant I have no doubt’.

J. H. Thomas was a flamboyant character, a ‘card’, the inspirer of
innumerable comic stories. When he arrived in his minister’s office in
1929 he was said to have remarked ‘What a bloody awful ’ole more
privy than seal.’ Lord Birkenhead found him with a hangover one
morning complaining ‘I’ve an ’ell of an ‘ead’: Lord Birkenhead said
‘Why not take a couple of aspirates.’ Once at a railwaymen’s meeting
a heckler called out ‘Jimmy you’re selling us!’ and Thomas replied ‘I’m
trying but I can’t find a buyer!’ Tom remarked in his autobiography that
it was difficult personally to dislike a man who could make a remark

Rules of the Game: Ministerial Office 21

like that. But it was also difficult to work at the huge and largely
uncharted problem of unemployment with someone whose talents,
however endearing, had been for negotiating, bargaining, disarming
people, making them laugh. He had never shown much interest in
transforming society.

The other members of the government put on to deal with un-
employment were George Lansbury, First Commissioner of Works, a
70-year old party stalwart with (in Beatrice Webb’s words) ‘certainly
no capacity for solving intellectual problems’; and Tom Johnston,
Under Secretary of State for Scotland, a man of intelligence but carrying
lictle weight. These four — Thomas, Mosley, Lansbury and Johnston —
were supposed to work together; but there was no timetable nor
structure by which they regularly met, and they had no control over
machinery for implementing their decisions if they did. After some
months, Tom Johnston wrote that he was uncertain even whether or
not he was in fact on the ‘Unemployment Committee’. The only
discernible difference in administrative machinery from that used by the
previous government was that whereas before responsibility for pro-
viding both work and benefits for the unemployed had resided with the
Ministry of Labour, now the responsibility for providing work had been
taken away and given to J. H. Thomas and his staff in the Treasury —
consisting of four civil servants seconded from the Inland Revenue, the
Board of Trade, and the War Office — and the responsibility for
implementing any recommendations remained invested with the Board
of Trade. So that what in words had seemed to be a step in the direction
of setting up an economic supreme council with executive powers such
as Tom had always advocated, in fact turned out to be a bureaucratic
proliferation of functions which made effective action more difficult
than ever.

This perhaps in some ways suited J. H. Thomas. His biographer
wrote of him that at this time ‘the projects that seethed in his mind
ranged from a bridge over the Zambesi river to a traffic circus at the
Elephant and Castle: he saw civil servants, businessmen, local govern-
ment authorities, trades unionists, engineers, scientists, post office
officials, railway directors’. He was the chairman of an unending succes-
sion of committees, thrashing out the feasibility of railway schemes,
harbour schemes, road schemes; for drainage, forestry, electricity and
slum-clearance. But after all the talk, nothing much happened. Nothing
much in fact could happen unless the government provided money; and
J. H. Thomas and the other members of the Cabinet knew that it was
unlikely that money would be forthcoming. Thomas agreed with

122 Rules of the Game

Snowden, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, that above all there should
be no departure from strict free-trade principles: no subsidies to
industry; no danger of inflation. But then, what on earth did a govern-
ment think it could do about unemployment if it had no money with
which to employ people? All the talk, all the committees, began to seem
as if they were just noises to cover up the silences of nothing being done;
while the government waited helplessly for world trade to pick up on
its own.

Tom for a time tried to work loyally with Thomas. Just before his
first speech in Parliament for the government front bench on 4th July
Thomas told him to announce that between 75 and 100 million pounds
would be spent on the electrification of Liverpool Street Station. Tom
announced these figures: later in the debate Thomas reassured members
anxious about the fact that money might at last be poured out that of
course his colleague must have been referring to ‘the total amount of
all possible electrification schemes under consideration’. Tom wrote
later — ‘It was the only time in my life I ever gave to the House of
Commons a fact or a figure which was not valid.’ To Thomas, all this
was part of the game of making noises that might reassure people in one
way, knowing that noises could be taken back and used to reassure
people in another.

Tom liked to tell a story of how he was going in to a committee room
with Thomas one day and he noticed how Thomas was holding an
object under his coat-tails. The committee was on the subject of Post
Office expenditure; in particular on the cost of anew box for telephones
that was to be put on the walls of houses. Thomas had been told by his
civil servants that the wooden box they recommended would cost
fifteen shillings: in the committee, Thomas produced from beneath his
coat with a flourish a tin box and announced — ‘Four bob!’ The civil
servants explained that the wooden box itself cost three shillings: it was
what was inside it that cost the other twelve.

During July Tom did manage to pilot through the House of Com-
mons a Colonial Development Bill which contained provisions about
safeguarding native labour. A newspaper commented — ‘His name will
live as the minister responsible for the first Act laying down important
principles to protect native labour from exploitation.’

He also — working in his ‘semi-dungeon high up in the Treasury’
(Lansbury’s phrase) — produced his own plan for creating vacancies for
young people in industry by offering those over sixty-five better
pensions if they retired — increasing the payment to married couples
from 10s to 30s a week. The Treasury said that the cost of this was

Rules of the Game: Ministerial Office 123

prohibitive. Tom then suggested that pensions could be offered to those
employed in certain depressed industries — coal mining, iron and steel,
ship building. While the Treasury was working out ways in which to
discourage this, Tom went off on his summer holidays.

Just before he left, at the Durham miner’s Gala at the end of July, he
declared — ‘I would rather see the Labour Government go down in
defeat than shrink from great issues, because from such defeats men rise
again with strength redoubled.’

During August 1929 — two months after the Labour Government had
taken office with their urgent and primary commitment that of dealing
with unemployment — all the four responsible ministers were out of
England. Thomas was in Canada, Lansbury and Johnston were on
holiday in Scotland. Tom’s life in the South of France will be described
in the next chapter.

During the summer of 1929 the unemployment figure was just over
a million: it had been much the same for six years. Unemployment was
held to be a great evil both because it was not seen how the dole could
reasonably be raised above a level of barest subsistence, and because
wasted potential productivity seemed to be an affront to accepted ideas
about progress. On his return from holiday Tom returned to the attack
about pensions: ‘a man of sixty who has worked all his life will not suffer
much demoralisation from living in idleness but a man of 20 may suffer
irreparable harm’. He worked out his scheme in even greater detail: all
insured workers who reached the age of sixty by a certain date were to
be offered a pension of £1 a week for a single man and 30s a week for
a married man on condition that they retired from work within six
months: the cost of the scheme could be spread over fifteen years. By
this, Tom estimated, ‘at one stroke we reduce by one third the wholly
unemployed’. The scheme was put to the cabinet: the cabinet appointed
a sub-committee: the Treasury told the sub-committee that the cost
(£22 million) was still prohibitive because they were traditionally
committed to annual budgeting and could not think in terms of fifteen
years. They put up the further argument — how could it be proved, until
it happened, that the young would in such a scheme be absorbed into
industry? Tom replied — How could anything, in fact, be proved until
it happened? The Treasury’s argument was for never doing anything.

Tom started a new line of attack by proposing a national programme
for building roads. At the moment there were less than 4,000 men
throughout the country employed in road-building: the business was
entirely in the hands of local authorities. Tom planned an additional
national scheme in which high wages would be offered to those in areas

124 Rules of the Game

of the worst unemployment to build trunk roads and motorways. This
scheme was received with ridicule. Did Tom not see, his critics said, that
local governments would simply shelve their own schemes in the hope
that the Labour Government would take over their costs? And how
would a national organisation fare any better in the lengthy business of
going through the formalities of acquiring land and so on than local
authorities were already faring? And in any case, how could it be
proved, again, that the building of roads would be of long-term assist-
ance to the national economy? But above all — would not providing
money for roads involve withdrawing money which might have been
used by industries engaged in the export trade: and the encouragement
of this, in the Treasury’s view, was still the only hope of the country’s
recovery.

To this Tom replied that it had been the blind faith in the export trade
that had led the country to its present moribund predicament: with
every country giving priority to exports in a free-trade world, only
those would get along which produced the cheapest goods by paying
the lowest wages. In fact the Treasury itself had very little to suggest
as a cure for unemployment except a reduction in wages — but then other
countries could reduce wages more. Tom referred back to his Birming-
ham proposals of 1925 in which he had advocated that a closed economic
area should be created in which a strong central government should have
control over investment in industry, the buying of raw materials, and
the manipulation of wages and prices. In the face of questions about how
a central organisation would effectively control myriad local interests
and organisations Tom simply asserted that of course if it was to be
effective it would have to be given powers to do just this: that if it was
not, then of course this implied that effective action was not wanted.
But it was in the face of this sort of argument of Tom’s that people found
It easiest not to answer him at all: there was no accepted political
language by which it might be stated that in certain circumstances, in
the face of the danger of greater evils, it might be better perhaps even
in such a grave area as that of unemployment if in fact things only got
talked about and not much was done.

In the middle of all this argument, or silence, there was the Wall Street
crash of October 1929 when the bottom as it were, seemed to fall out
of capitalists’ lives in skyscrapers. Tom’s prophecies seemed to be being
fulfilled — there was indeed something suicidal about a world in which
it was imagined that progress could be maintained by everyone com-
peting against others to produce ever cheaper goods. J. H. Thomas had
returned from Canada where ostensibly he had been to try to stimulate

Rules of the Game: Ministerial Office 125

trade: it became evident that he had stimulated little but an anxiety about
himself. By December he was reported by Beatrice Webb to be
‘completely rattled and in such a state of panic that he is bordering on
lunacy: Henderson reported that the PM feared suicidal mania’. Arthur
Henderson suggested that Thomas ‘must be sent away for a rest and
Oswald Mosley installed under the Council to carry out agreed plans’.
But the trouble was there were no agreed plans; and within the existing
organisation there was no hope of carrying them out even if there were.

Tom had been ona speaking tour of the country trying to get support
for his own plans: ‘Every citizen should enrol himself in the great
national army that is fighting unemployment.’ But what, apart from
building roads, was this army actually to do? Tom poured out schemes
that were sometimes as bizarre as J. H. Thomas’s: he admitted they were
‘some hopeful, and some a little fantastic’. He wrote to the Air Minister
suggesting — what about 4 roof over Victoria Station, to make a mid-
city aerodrome?

MacDonald himself had for most of this time been occupied with
Foreign Affairs: he had been in America successfully discussing naval
disarmament. For the first six months of the Labour government he
remained popular: he was the sort of Prime Minister that people liked:
he was handsome, had a fine speaking voice, and he uttered noises of
reassurance. In December 1929 he and Philip Snowden, the Chancellor
of the Exchequer, were made freemen of the City of London: Beatrice
Webb reported that during his speech to the assembled financiers at the
banquet at the Mansion House ‘his handsome features literally glowed

. which enhanced his beauty — just as a young girl’s beauty glows
under the ardent eyes of her lover’. In contrast, there sat ‘Jimmy Thomas
in the front row gazing at the ceremony, his ugly and rather mean face
made meaner and uglier by an altogether exaggerated sense of personal
failure’.

It seemed that Thomas was to be the scapegoat for the government’s
failure to deal with unemployment. But no government since the war
had managed to deal with unemployment; and Tom, whatever he felt
about Thomas, was not interested in questions of who was to be
scapegoat. He went to see MacDonald in December and told him that
he, Tom, was preparing a memorandum in which there would be put
together all his proposals during the last six months. He would then ask
MacDonald to put this before the Cabinet.

MacDonald went to his home at Lossiemouth, in Scotland, for the
Christmas holidays. From there on December 30th he wrote in his own
handwriting a letter to Tom.

126 Rules of the Game

My dear Mosley,

I had no chance of renewing our conversation about unemploy-
ment but I have thought much of what you said. Indeed for months
I have been concerned with the state of things.

1 Iam troubled about the lack of cooperation amongst the Junta
to which the problem has been handed over. I was hoping that you
would have all pulled together and hammered out from your
diversity of view some agreed policy. I must admit the facts. That has
not happened, and into whys and wherefores the crowded state of my
own work has prevented me from going. I thought I could safely
leave it to you all and took on things which I should not have done
had I thought that you would not have all pulled together ...

2 The Economic Advisory Committee will be set up soon but
there are various things to be provided for which at the last minute
have caused delay. I am dealing with them here. That would be
helpful but of course its fruits would not ripen in a month.

3 Iam disturbed that the main features of our work hitherto has
been to give further allowances for distress ... On outsiders it is
having a depressing effect and is certainly lowering production. I have
seen a good many old supporters and have had rather voluminous
letters from others. The general tone is one of warning against those
who are sponging and clamouring.

4 Ihave been looking into the pensions at 60 to relieve the labour
market and I am quite certain it will not do that to any appreciable
extent ... When one thinks this idea down to its essence, it is that
we are overpopulated: that that old ruffian Malthus is right. The
condition of the derelict areas is of the same class of problem. The
whole thing must really be tackled in a way other than money
aids ...

5 AsIsee the problem (dimly) we must hang on to what we are
doing but weed out the spongers all round ... At the same time we
should tackle the problem systematically. For instance the Depart-
ment should present to the Treasury its views upon the financial and
taxation policy — the Economic Advisory will soon do this I hope —
for a situation has to be handled and not merely theories applied. We
ought also to have really sound information as to expenditure upon
unemployment, if for no other reason than to assure ourselves and
enable us to defend ourselves against the attack which will soon be
launched upon us.

But I must stop. My guardians here demand my presence for a
walk. Only now am I feeling the work of past months in consequence

Rules of the Game: Ministerial Office 127

of which I can tell C [Cimmie] a most bloodcurdling adventure in
dreamland — a real good horror.
Unto you both much affection.
Yrs. JRM

Tom was already preparing his memorandum. He worked on it
through the Christmas holidays: he showed a draft to Keynes in the
middle of January. Keynes remarked that it was ‘a very able document
and illuminating’. Tom sent a copy to MacDonald on 23rd January.

What became known as the Mosley Memorandum is a 15-page
document in which Tom reiterated his proposals of the previous four
years and put them into a form which, if the Cabinet still ignored them,
he could use to appeal over the Cabinet’s head first to the Parliamentary
Labour Party and then to the country. The style of the memorandum
is conciliatory and even tentative: it is emphasised that the aim is not
to suggest clear-cut answers, but to set out unavoidably the serious
questions which had to be discussed with a view to finding answers.

The second and third sections of the memorandum deal with long-
term and short-term plans for providing work. It is pointed out that
there is a certain conflict of interest here: long-term plans rely on the
rationalisation of industry — on the bringing of industry up to date in
both matters of technology and uses of manpower — and this may
actually increase short-term unemployment. Thus it is all the more
necessary that short-term employment should be treated as an urgent
and separate issue.

To deal with short-term employment the memorandum concentrates
on road construction. There are proposals concerning the technicalities
by which movement and employment of labour should be handled
sensibly by cooperation between national and local authorities. The
whole short term scheme could be financed by ‘a loan based upon the
revenue from the Road Fund’. The cost to the taxpayer should be little
more than the equivalent of ‘a sixpenny tax on unearned income’. Such
moderate expenditure, Tom suggested, would hardly cause such in-
flation as would involve a ‘flight from the pound’. Then, discussion on
long-term plans could begin.

But the success of the whole scheme depended on the proper working
of the administrative machinery by which it would be operated: and it
was just this area — that dealt with by the first and by far the most
important section of the memorandum — that Tom’s critics found it
difficult not just not to reject, but even to talk about.

It was suggested that at the head of the Executive Committee to be

128 Rules of the Game

set up should be the Prime Minister himself and under him, as if in a
war-time inner Cabinet, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and five or
six other ministers of relevant departments. Under this Executive
Committee, which would meet once a week, there would be standing
committees to implement its decisions headed by the relevant ministers.
As part of a permanent executive machinery there would be a secretariat
of twelve top civil servants who would also provide the information for
the committees on which they themselves would serve. There would
also be a research committee of economists and an advisory committee
of financiers and businessmen to work with the committees of politi-
cians. Finally, there would be attached to this apparatus an Industrial
Bank, which would provide credit for the rationalisation schemes,
higher wages and industrial development, as ordered by the Executive
Committee or the Standing Committees. The aim of the whole was,
simply, that authoritative action should be made possible. ‘An attack
upon the economic problem can only be effective under the auspices of
the Prime Minister himself who should be armed with an adequate staff
for such a purpose. He alone possesses the power to secure coordination
and the authority to enforce action when decisions are taken.’

But it was just this suggestion that produced the silence amongst
Tom’s critics. Everyone in government circles knew that the organisa-
tion under J. H. Thomas was not working: Thomas himself was break-
ing down: his lieutenants on their own were powerless: even what
committees there were were seldom meeting. And unemployment was
growing. But it seemed to be the case that in this situation most people
in positions of authority continued to think that they should make noises
of lamentation — and do little else. Their fear, of course, was that if Tom’s
proposals were put into effect, there would be danger of some sort of
dictatorship — with its attendant corruptions. But if such methods
seemed to be the only way to cure unemployment, how could they say
they were not interested? It was the tradition that politicians were
supposed to say they wanted to get things done.

Tom sent his memorandum to Ramsay MacDonald on January
23rd 1930. Shortly before this, he had mentioned to J. H. Thomas that
he was formulating some opinions about unemployment which he
would like Thomas to see in due course. Ramsay MacDonald tele-
phoned to Thomas early in February to ask if he knew of the Memo-
randum. Thomas said he did not. Then there ensued the sort of game
by which politicians effectively evade talking about things that matter,
by getting in a state about things that do not.

Thomas wrote to MacDonald complaining that Tom had improperly

Rules of the Game: Ministerial Office 129

gone over his, Thomas’s, head; and so he, with much regret, had no
alternative but to offer MacDonald his resignation. MacDonald wrote
to Thomas saying that he quite understood his, Thomas’s, hurt feelings;
but he had no alternative but to refuse his resignation out of consider-
ations of national interest (“we must endure however hard the road may
be’). MacDonald also wrote to Tom saying how very surprised he,
MacDonald, was about Tom’s behaviour which had been quite properly
resented by his boss, Thomas (‘I need not explain why that should be
so’). But the best thing of course, all round, MacDonald suggested,
would be to patch the whole matter up and say no more about it. In
the middle of all this John Strachey, who was now Tom’s Parliamentary
Private Secretary, left a copy of the Memorandum lying around in his
house when journalists were present and its contexts were ‘leaked’ to the
press — whether by design or accident, of course, people could hint
darkly. This gave Thomas further opportunities to demonstrate hurt
feelings. With all this posturing going on the memorandum itself could
be, and quietly was, put on the shelf — to be considered in due course
by a Cabinet sub-committee consisting of Snowden, Greenwood,
Margaret Bondfield, and Tom Shaw — who were all known to be hostile
to Tom’s ideas. This committee then could, and did, push it even
further to the back of the shelf by sending it to the Treasury for a
thorough examination. There it would lie, as if in some morgue.

In all the business about the Mosley memorandum — concerning both
the contents and the reactions of people to it — there was a confusion,
barely conscious, not just about the nature of the political game, but
about the nature of language and even about human nature itself. Tom
had been brought up outside a political tradition: he believed that,
politically, words should mean roughly what they said. He had become
a socialist because he thought it vital, amongst other things, that the
unemployment problem should be solved: that the socialists, when they
got power, should try to fulfil their election pledges and give priority
to doing this. But then, when they achieved power largely through
holding out hopes by their promises, they seemed to be doing nothing
serious about the problem at all. Tom was outraged by this. He thought
— If you say you want to solve the unemployment problem then you
set up machinery by which the unemployment problem can be solved;
if you do not, then this means that you do not want to solve the
unemployment problem. You should then admit this: any other attitude
is cheating.

Those who had been in the Labour Party or indeed in any political
tradition for a long time knew that in some sense all this had to be a

130 Rules of the Game

game: you had good intentions: you honestly professed them in your
manifestos: you hoped by this to get power: none of this was cheating.
But when you did get power of course there were often realities which
were stronger than the good intentions you had had: you were forced
to adapt yourself to realities not because you were betraying your good
intentions, but because if you did not you might be betraying other
good principles more severely. There was often a choice of evils: you
had sometimes, possibly, to do almost nothing. But you could not quite
say this. Political language had to be about will, and dynamism, or there
would never be hope of improvement.

At the back of this there was a question of how one might see human
nature. Tom thought, or believed (or wanted to believe: the words are
difficult) that human beings are rational: that if human beings are
rational then words should properly mean roughly what they say. There
seemed to him no sense in the idea that sometimes a game with words
might properly by played in which the point was that they are not quite
believed: but such words are none the less valid because this non-belief
is recognised by the participants from a higher point of view. In certain
areas human beings play games because the demands on them are too
paradoxical to make sense if they do not: in the area for instance to do
with the necessary exercise of power and the salutary limitation of
power it is not in the simplicities of words that there is truth; but in the
recognition that there is something that can be honoured beyond words’
limitations.

Tom’s critics in the Party, however much they said they believed in
the rational processes of socialism, yet believed in their bones, most of
them (they had been brought up with less opportunities for self-
deception than Tom) that human affairs were for the most part irrational
and there had to be safeguards against the dangerously over-rationalising
tendencies of human beings and of words. When Tom made his pro-
posals for strong central governmental machinery they could not attack
him directly because, as socialists, this ts what they had always been
advocating; how else could they have got as far as they had with
evolutionary or revolutionary change? But it was by instinct that they
feared the exaggerated implementation of government control: there is
nothing more irrational, they knew, than human beings who have been
given total power — even to act in such a way as they think is wholly
rational. But still, they could not quite say this, or how would they ask
for, or be given, any power at all? Both they, and the people who voted
for them, had to pretend they could be trusted with power: and it was
still in fact by dealing in limited power that people could strive and hope

Rules of the Game: Ministerial Office 131

bit by bit for reasonable change. But all this only made sense if it was
held together by rules of an instinctively accepted political game — rules
that were known, but not stated, on a supra-rational level. So what did
such people do when someone came along with rational arguments that
did not take into account styles or levels of understanding — who did
not see from some metaphysical level what had to be, and what was not,
a game? It was safest, presumably, to ignore such a person, if he could
not properly be spoken to. One of the rules of the game was that you
could not exactly explain what was and what was not a game: if you
did, then the someone who did not accept that there was a game could
simply make you seem a hypocrite.

Tom might have understood some of the complexities of games-
playing if he had pondered more about himself. Of course, he himself
played games: his letters to Cimmie were genuine games: how better
could he write to her? It was on his perceiving something like this that
there might have been truth. He seemed to have to insist that other
people were not playing games: it is difficult to imagine how, in his
private life, he succeeded in thinking this of himself.

CHAPTER 14

Entertainment

Cimmie had her miscarriage early in June. She took her seat in the House
of Commons at the end of the month. In August the family went for
their usual summer holiday to Antibes.

Cimmie’s sister Irene joined them there. She recorded in her cloudy,
anarchic style what life in the South of France was like. Tom and
Cimmie and the children were staying at the Eden Roc hotel. the other
dramatis personae in Irene’s account were in the hotel or in villas round
about. The chief attraction of the long hot summer was the film star
John Gilbert, who had recently been acting with Greta Garbo, and was
with his wife Ina Claire. In supporting roles in Irene’s story were — Baba
and Fruity Metcalfe, Cimmie’s younger sister and her husband; Bobby
and Paula Casa Maury (the latter Tom was currently pursuing); John
Strachey and his recently married wife Esther; Dick Wyndham, a
painter and Cimmie’s confidante; Babe Barnato, a racing motorist;
Rupert Belville, a banker; and Americans Ben Finney and Dudley
Malone. Irene had been enraged by overhearing Tom at a dinner party
speculating in whispers to Paula Casa Maury about which of the three
Curzon sisters would succeed in the contest to attract John Gilbert — ‘the
heavyweight, the lightweight or the middle’ (Irene, Baba or Cimmie.)
The evening had ended in uproar, with Tom accusing Cimmie of being
drunk. The next day:

Tom was so foul to Cim when she asked him about her birthday plans
saying he did not care and was fed up with all of us I lost my temper
and called him a cad. So we left him and went with the children to
the beach. The weather was too vile for Ben Finney’s party by boat
to Monte Carlo so a lot of us joined up. Bowls and bowls of punch
were made as we flopped about on mattresses in the drawing room

Entertainment 133

— Dick, Cim and I were sober adjuncts to a very stewed party. Ben
suddenly brought in ‘Miss America’ who had won the world’s beauty
competition — utterly out of it and left crying in about an hour. It
was discussed and discussed what we should do for hours till it
resorted to more punch and sandwiches — and a marvellous dish of
Ben’s, chili and rice and meat. Ina was thoroughly drunk and gay and
sweet Fruity was well over the odds with Baba very annoyed. He
disappeared and made up hike John Gilbert and came in with Gilbert
and Cim and proceeded to circle all the ladies as the great lover and
was very funny. The fun was entirely ruined at 10 pm by Maurice
and Miss Stephenson both dead drunk being pressed together asleep
and she gently fondling his hair and we all left the room in disgust
and found bed the only solution. Tom emerged when we got back
in haughty solitude having been away alone in a huff.

Went to the beach with the children. Cim came very late and I felt
from her face and eyes Tom had been tiresome again. Poor Fruity
was carried off having nearly cut his foot in 2 with glass from a bottle
on the Cannes beach. Fearful arguments with Ben and everyone as
to whether we should have his boat party. Ben Finney’s dog did the
most lovely dives for us and simply loved it.

August 23rd. Cim’s birthday.

Gave Cim a black bag for the House of Commons. She got some
lovely ‘presies’ and Tom came up to scratch with a lovely modern
Metropolis Cocktail Set and Lamp. Had a family bathe with the
children on the Roc, and a family lunch with the children and Baba.
Joined up with Babe Barnato’s big party at the next table ... tore
across the ocean in Barnato’s speed boat ... played vile tennis with
Barnato and 2 tiresome men with 4 dirty tennis balls getting lost the
whole time. Had a swim and gave Cim another bag, an exquisite one,
before dinner. She gave the most perfect party down on the rocks:
lovely lit tables all round, huge cinema lights making wonderful
effects on everything, a marvellous band that did turns walking about
and sitting out on the diving boards. Dudley Malone made a speech
to Cim after a bad effort by Finney. Diving races went on with Babe
Barnato, Rupert Belville and John Gilbert. I had Gilbert and Finney
for dinner and had an absorbing talk with Gilbert on his view of
women — his women — and he told me he was going off alone as
things were screw-eyed with him and Ina. The whole trouble is he
needs an alsatian dog like Ben’s for a wife — absolute obedience. Went
to the Beouf about 1.30. Tom deliberately took Ina to see Fruity and

134 Rules of the Game

left her there. Gilbert, losing her, went mad, tore back to the hotel
thinking she was left behind, came back to find her dancing and
savagely dragged her into the street where Cim and Dudley witnessed
a fearful scene. A bit later Bobby found him walking into the sea and
drove him round Cannes to steady him. Then he came back and Baba
and Cim had hour after hour battling and appeasing Ina and him. It
was the most fantastic evening I have ever witnessed. Dudley finally
took Ina to his villa for the night and exhausted with waiting on other
people’s rows Knottman drove me home at 5 am. No one knew what
happened to Gilbert. I saw him vanish down the road with Baba
before I left. Rupert Belville had got very drunk at dinner and said
filthy things about the rich socialists — about Esther and John and Cim
and Tom — which Esther overheard, and she got up and left the table.

The next day Tom left by train for London — to get back to work on
his plans for the unemployed. John Gilbert, it was discovered, had also
left at dawn by taxi for Paris. He had told the driver — “Don’t have an
accident: my face is my fortune.’ Irene stayed on for a few more days
with Cimmie and the children: she had a talk with Nanny about how
they thought Cimmie was becoming ‘awfully callous’. Cimmie wrote
a letter to Tom — ‘It has been incredibly quiet since you left ... John
G returned late that night after getting to Lyons in his taxi before
coming to ... Dick 1s getting well away with his countess, and has
already had a flog.’

Cimmie returned to London. Tom was working in his semi-dungeon
in the Treasury. They both made efforts that autumn to sort out their
own problems — or at least to view them rationally. Tom was becoming
more impatient and scathing with Cimmie publicly. Cimmie wrote for
advice to Dick Wyndham, who had stayed on in the South of France
to paint. He replied:

Darling Cimmie, Your letter did rather upset me, and I wish I could
give you some advice that would make your life happier. There seems
no solution because you have had the misfortune to have been born
a naturally happy person. This sounds like a paradox, but it isn’t.
Nearly all intelligent people are born naturally miserable. I am sure
that Tom is just as unhappy and probably more so than you. And if
you take all our friends — for instance Sachie, Hutchy, William — if
you could see their real thoughts, how dismally sad you would find
them! their quite unexpected hopes, regrets, and longings. And even
I, who am supposed to lead such an ideal life with my painting,

Entertainment 135

freedom and money, live, in reality, a life of acute misery, worry and
loneliness relieved occasionally by moments of great exaltation; but
these happen far too seldom to make life worth while. I suppose only
the human sheep are able to lead a continuously happy life; they have
their ‘dope’ — religion, the Empire, their hire-purchase furniture;
other sheep to look down upon; their aspidistra; and finally a respec-
table funeral and a very white marble or speckled grey granite
tombstone. They have no moments of exaltation: they don’t want
them. But your natural happiness refuses to admit such an unpleasant
state of affairs. You feel that having been born in a world filled with
so many beautiful things one should be allowed to enjoy it without
hindrance and help others to enjoy it. How right you are! But just
because you are filled with such capabilities of enjoyment you are
constantly being disillusioned and hurt. You are still like a child who
sees an infinite source of fun in every object around him only to find
that they are all protected by those words — ‘you mustn’t touch’.

On reading through this rigmarole I find it hasn’t got us very far.
The only logical solution seems to be that you must damp your
natural happiness in order to be immune from the misery of a
miserable world; and that is a remedy I would hate to advise. It comes
under the heading of innoculation of which I disapprove.

The only thing I can suggest is to make a list of the things that don’t
matter so much — such as the mastif,* and even an occasional flit to
Paris: they are annoying, but no more so than an occasional attack
of flu. Then make a list of all the things you do really mind about
like hell. Make up your mind never to say a word about the less
important things for fear that in time you might find yourself per-
petually nagging. Not only don’t mention them, don’t think about
them, don’t mind them. About the things that matter make a real definite
stand — raise hell, throw things, do and say anything you like. But you
must make your two lists and stick to them.

You will probably say that it is just the mounting up of the
relatively small things that is so unbearable — I know — but if you start
by disregarding them they won’t mount up, they will never have
been born.

I shall be leaving here in a few days now, all my four paintings
having come to a bad end; so we soon will be able to have a ‘crack’.**
I shall devote some of the time to extracting the name of the ‘old
friend’ who has fallen in love with you ...

* Tom had recently bought a large dog.
** talk.

136 Rules of the Game

This letter was posted on October 20th 1929. On October 21st Tom
posted his own long letter to Cimmie. He had come to Denham to rest.
Cimmie was in her constituency.

Savehay Farm
Denham
Bucks
Meanderings of a sick mutt.
My darling fellow,
Lying in bed with this wretched cold I have thought so much of our
relationship and my mind moves to these conclusions — write and tell
me if you agree.

(1) The thing that matters most is our love and alliance in all
things. That should be our absolutely fixed and unchanging relation
— a basis of life in which we both have complete confidence — sure
that never in any crisis or misfortune will it fail us.

(2) Thenext most important thing is the individual happiness and
development of each of us — without that, many of the gifts and
powers we have to give to the world must be damaged and reduced:
without happiness and a sense of all-pervading freedom and power
we cannot be complete people. Yet none but complete people can
succeed in the stupendous task that we have set ourselves

Our problem is how to reconcile and to blend into a perfect life
these 2 premises of our existence: (1) our marriage and alliance in all
things (2) our individual happiness and freedom which are essentials
of the full personality.

To achieve this we must put away all small things. We really deny
ourselves (2) because our confidence in (1) is not enough.

Each of us is afraid that the small incidents of (2) may destroy (1):
each of us consequently is inclined to snatch small bits of (2) for
himself or herself while striving to thwart rather than to assist the
other. That situation is acommonplace in the marriage of all remark-
able people — it is small, contemptible and atavistic — in our case it
should be entirely lacking because (1) is so much stronger than in
almost any other example of which one can think. We have not only
love, a great companionship, children, home, etc — we have also a
tremendous alliance in public life which has bound us together against
the whole squalor of things as they are in face of a storm of hatred
and mean lying abuse which no other couple has ever had to face.
That is a great alliance which should be far above every factor in the
sphere of (2). Yet I believe it is really our unexpressed fear that (2)

Entertainment 137

will affect (1) that leads to trouble in sphere of (2). From my side such
apprehension might perhaps reasonably be stronger as you are so
much younger and less sophisticated in sphere (2) than me — 1 know
I should not be affected by it — you might be — yet even here I might
be more reasonable to you in sphere (2) if I did not feel that in past
and even present you had there severely restricted me. Such a feeling
of course must arise on both sides and has created a vicious circle.

The way out I feel is this —- we should not only acquiesce in (2)
for each of us — we should be as much partners there as we are in (1).
We should have such confidence in the permanence and inviolability
of (1) (our marriage and alliance in all great things) that we should
not only be unafraid of (2) (personal freedom and happiness) affecting
(1), but we should actively promote complete confidence in each of
us developing in sphere (2) with the assistance of the other — we should
have no feeling of fear and regret of any kind if one of us enjoyed
things apart from the other — we should realise that the complete
development of each individual contributed to the success and great~-
ness of the whole alliance.

We must of course do all things in the light of our position and
mission in the world — we must never disarm before the enemy — only
before each other. That is what I mean by “Tenue’.

We are in a sense conspirators together against things as they are
and conspirators cannot take the enemy into their confidence. To lead
what we believe to be a moral life in our immoral society some
concealment and even subterfuge is necessary if we are to retain our
power to change that society for the great end we seek. Together we
can retain our greatest power in public life to change the miseries of
present society to live a full and human life.

We already have a great comfort in (1). Let us also have a great
comfort in (2).

Let us have such confidence in the permanence and the superiority
of our marriage and love over everything else in life that we can be
partners in promoting the freedom and happiness of each of us as well.
I believe it is possible — it means an end of all small things — of all small
jealousies and fears — it means the triumph of the modern mind. I
believe we are capable of it. Let us try to have a great compact — a
great alliance in all things. (This reads like a very muddled and badly
delivered political speech but it means he loves her very much and
wants both of them to be happy fellows).

It was perhaps a saving grace of Tom’s that he could write a bracket such

138 Rules of the Game

as at the end of this letter — at moments he could laugh at himself even
when he was being carried away by one of his more extreme flights of
self-justifying rationalisation and rhetoric. But, between the rhetoric
and the laughter there was not much sign of guilt. The same evening
that he posted this letter he played one of his more extravagant practical
jokes upon his sister-in-law Irene. She was giving a large after-dinner
party in her house at which her guests included Lord Beaverbrook, Ivor
Novello, Beatrice Lillie and Arthur Rubinstein. Then (Irene recorded)
— ‘Some brute (a joke we presumed) rang me up as from Scotland Yard
and tried to infer some of my party were thieves and were wanted’. The
voice instructed her to keep all her guests with their hands up facing the
wall until further notice. Irene paid no attention. When later she dis-
covered the joker was Tom, she refused to speak to him or Cimmie for
a week.

Cimmie received Tom’s long letter when she was in Stoke: she
travelled down to London and handed her reply to Tom.

Darling Darling Darling Darling. I am so glad you wrote that letter
— I agree with every word of it and will try — all the things you said
are true. Now taking your two premises — it always has been because
I have never been quite sure of (1) that I have been tricky about (2).
You started off with (2)s so very soon after marriage before I had
ever got confidence either in myself or you while you were my whole
horizon literally in every way. I have never been persuaded you really
really appreciated me, you were always finding fault, and liking
people so utterly different to me, it made me apprehensive and always
on the defensive.

I must say I do not agree that you should be more apprehensive
of me than I of you. I have only been driven to my small successes
in sheer self-defence. In fact till very recently I have had none — and
that alongside of your varied assortment has been very bad for me.
I always felt you had so much more success (not generally speaking,
I know I am all right as a general success, but I mean a ‘particular’
success) and that gave me an inferiority complex. You don’t know
the agonies I have gone through time after time when you have got
off with lovely ladies and I have been left; it has very often nearly
driven me dippy. I am sure you will never realise how even a success
with nonentities like Mario Pansa, Ridal or Rochefoucauld restores
my confidence, and you take it away again by sneering at the
‘quality’ of my fellows. You see while we are about it I had better
be quite frank: I have always felt that you won on the swings and

Entertainment 139

roundabouts; that if it came to complete freedom inside category
(2) you would profit by it much more than me; you would have
more successes greater fun — have your cake (i.e. Mum) and eat
it!! While I, well, I would have no cake at all — no fun on swings
or roundabouts. I think maybe I am wrong but you must remem-
ber nothing really matters one toss to me except you and the
children. I am terribly frightened on my own, and a good deal
bewildered.

My success with Gilbert and the Frenchies last week was balm and
oil to my ‘tortured spirit’ but believe me does not go very far. 1am
sure my whole trouble is I am small enough to feel that under such
arrangement you would get much more than me and that stops me
risking it. You have it in your power to hurt me so dreadfully — you
have hurt me so dreadfully —

If only my confidence in (1) could be assured but I so often feel
we only stick together because of our public position and not because
we really do love and value each other. Now if we could have a
perfect (1) all else follows. I will try. But do you see my point: if only
I had more confidence, less of an inferiority complex; and you the
one person in the world who could help most always finding fault,
always criticising, always belittling me, making it worse; any efforts
I do make on my own mocked and derided.

I retaliate in the obvious silly way — it is a vicious circle as you say.
How are we to get out of it: if you were kinder to me, more
considerate, I know I would ‘respond to treatment’: but in order for
me to be nicer to you you must be nicer to me: I am not capable of
the martyr-like effort, it may be very small and petty but I am not
going to make an effort alone.

Oh dear even writing those few lines I feel resentment rising in me,
and that I must not allow. But I think even you will allow making
a success of living with you is hellish difficult if one also strives to keep
one’s own individuality and end up. I do hope this won’t appear as
a very one-sided sort of letter as yours was so fair — forgive me if it
is — I think this a very good moment to really have a grand try at (1)
and (2) and let us become experts at avoiding all minor exasperations;
they cause endless bother and with skill can be avoided.

Remember this, I do adore you, unless in a mood (generally
engendered by you) when I could kill you. I would die for you. You
and the children are always the only things that really matter. I am
not a bad sort of person neither are you. We both want to be happy
— well here’s to it. And bless you my love. Be my sweet Tommy I

140 Rules of the Game

fell in love with. Help Mum to be the grandest sort of person she can
be. Kisses and devotion. Timmy

This is not nearly a nice enough letter. I did Jove yours and do thank
you for it and am glad you wrote it and do love you.

Is your cold better?

I hope so.

In this letter Cimmie seems to have faced truly something of the
predicament she was in with Tom: Tom had more energy, a more
daemonic quality than she: he had the power to use words apparently
rationally to justify his drives and ambitions: he could claim his own
freedom and feel safe in it, because he could make impossible her own.
Cimmie was a good woman; she loved Tom; she felt she could not
challenge the whole process of their lives without losing him; but then,
she did not seem to want to challenge this for herself. When he hurt her,
she cried out; she tried to answer him back in kind; she did not turn away
from him. Tom did not see that part of his energy and his success might
depend on his having someone who adored him and whom he could
manipulate: whom he could, when his own supremacy was threatened,
mock and deride; and then win back with his endearments. Tom tried
to sort out his problems with Cimmie in terms of reason: he thought
—as he did about politics — that human problems could and should be
solved by the presentation of a case so rational that it was unanswerable.
It is not clear how often he had glimpses into his manipulations: even
his laughter was something of a protection: soon with Cimmie, as in
politics, the grandiose words would take over again — the ‘mission to
the world’: the ‘stupendous task’. But how did he and Cimmie imagine
that with their quarrelling, their baby-talk, they were achieving ‘the
triumph of the modern mind’? This mind was to be controlled by will:
but how was there to be any reality of will if there were no observations
of the nature of the self that was wielding it?

Cimmie’s innocence (as Dick Wyndham had said) was to believe not
in the efficacy of manipulation, as Tom did, but just that life could be
made beautiful by efforts at honesty and truth. She believed this with
regard to Tom: she believed it with regard to her politics. She had
almost as little sense as Tom had of the irony of the contrasts between
private and public life.

Soon after she got back from the summer holiday she made her
maiden speech in the House of Commons. It was on the occasion of the
second reading of the Widows’, Orphans’, and Old Age Contributory
Pensions Bill, which aimed at providing pensions for the first time for

Entertainment 141

half a million widows. Cimmie said she welcomed the bill because it
‘definitely takes us along the road towards the abolition of poverty and
destitution’: it was ‘an approach towards the full acceptance of the
fundamental truth that economic insecurity is socially created and
should be provided for by the social services until it can be abolished
by socialism’. To the opposition’s suggestion that a working man or
working woman might possibly be a better citizen if they were not too
much looked after by the state she replied:

I have noticed a word that has been greatly in use since this measure
was brought in and that is the word “demoralisation’ — demoralisation
of getting something for nothing. That is ground on which Iam very
much at home. All my life I have got something for nothing. Why?
Have I earned it? Have I deserved it? Not a bit. I have just got it
through luck. Of course some people might say I showed great
intelligence in the choice of my parents, but I put it all down to luck.
And not only I, but if I may be allowed to say so, a great many people
on the opposite side of the House are in that same position — they also
have always got something for nothing. Now the question is: are we
demoralised? I could not answer that question for anyone but myself
— but, looking at members opposite, may I be allowed to say they
don’t look too demoralised physically, though their mental and
physical condition is beyond me to determine. I stoutly deny however
that I am demoralised —

Cimmie got many congratulations for her speech — one from the Prime
Minister (‘excellent matter and excellent style’); one from Bob Boothby
(‘It was so good, my dear, that if I said all I want to you you wouldn't
believe it’); one from an anonymous ‘Mother of Ten’ — ‘You are
splendid, you are magnificent ... those who as you say have all their
lives had something for nothing cannot imagine what it is like to be all
one’s life giving all and getting nothing — their health and strength, their
love and sacrifice, their leisure their pleasure, yes even life itself — that
is the fate of the working class mother’.

Neither Cimmie nor Tom by instinct or by upbringing were
equipped to do what in fact most people do whatever their idealism or
protestations — which is to try their best in whatever areas are available
to them, and about the rest not too much to worry. This was just what
Tom and Cimmie objected to about people like J. H. Thomas and
Ramsay MacDonald — who talked of stupendous tasks and then did
nothing. Tom and Cimmie were too proud: they had had too many

142 Rules of the Game

expectations pinned on to them: they could not be satisfied, as so many
Labour people seemed to be satisfied, by having simply ‘arrived’. They
had the curse — whether of a good or a bad angel — to want to alter the
world.

Humdrum politicians have almost necessarily to feel that idealism is
dangerous: they feel it upsetting their day-to-day plans. Their jobs in
administration, it seems, are properly to do with preventing anything
disastrous being done by idealists. Tom, an idealist, was correct in
thinking that such people were out to thwart him. It was perhaps their
tragedy, as well as his, that at this time some idealism was probably
necessary if there was not to be a drift towards chaos or war. It was the
curse of the humdrum politicians that they had no use for the talents
of someone like Tom: it was the curse of Tom to treat what he saw as
their lethargy only with contempt. Few people at the time seemed
capable of seeing a pattern into which they themselves and others of a
different temperament might fit if all this was observed as it were from
a higher viewpoint. Tom, certainly, did not see how his energy might
be effective if he submitted it to the restraints of its being for a while
thwarted. Everyone was accustomed to think in terms of antagonism
—1in one sort of view, or characteristic, not embracing but cancelling out
another.

In war Tom had had little experience of the terrible helplessness of
people even with good intentions when in authority: he for the most
part had been war’s victim. But it is people who have had actual
experience of responsibility for life and death who have often learned
that there is little good that can be done except in ways of steadfastness,
and hope, and painstaking bit-by-bit efforts. And it is those who rage
against the fact that there are victims, who want to alter the world; and
sO are apt to make victims of the people round them.

CHAPTER 15

Resignation

On May 9th 1930 the Cabinet sub-committee headed by Snowden, the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, recommended that the Mosley Memo-
randum be rejected. Their reasons were — the Prime Minister could not
take on the added burden of direct responsibility for employment; the
proposed Executive Committee would undermine the tradition of the
individual responsibilities of ministers; the road-building scheme
ignored the rights of individuals and local authorities; the memo-
randum as a whole paid no attention to the one programme for recovery
that in the long run would work — the encouragement of exports.
Whatever might be useful in the scheme would have to be done at the
expense of other things that might be useful: so it was best to play safe,
and carry on just hoping that world trade would get better. What the
Labour Cabinet objected to in fact was that the Memorandum was too
socialistic: the arguments they put up against it were those of con-
servatism. But these were the arguments which, as Tom and other
socialists had pointed out before the election, were resulting in society’s
breakdown. It seemed that socialists did not want to govern: they
wanted to continue in the role to which they had become accustomed
— that of being in opposition to any exercise of power.

The Cabinet set up another committee to consider the report of the
Snowden committee — and to confer with Tom, Lansbury and
Johnston. Discussions went on for ten days. The point at issue now was
mainly about how to initiate some sort of road-building scheme: did
you just raise money and get on with the job (Tom): or did you do
nothing about money till you had worked out detailed plans with local
authorities, (J. H. Thomas and Herbert Morrison, the Minister of
Transport) — and then wait for the Treasury almost certainly to say
that there was no money anyway. Tom was accused of wanting to

144 Rules of the Game

‘Russianise’ the government: Herbert Morrison said that he spoke ‘like
a landlord addressing his peasantry’. The issue was becoming simply
between someone who wanted to give priority to getting something
done over the probable cost, and the others who did not.

On May 19th Tom and Cimmie dined with Sidney and Beatrice
Webb. Tom said that he intended to resign his ministerial post: what
he found impossible was not so much the disagreement, but the fact that
under Ramsay MacDonald there was no desire for serious practical talk
at all. Meetings between ministers, he said, were more comic than
anything in Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart. Beatrice Webb noted that
the Mosleys seemed ‘sincere and assiduous in their public aims’.

Tom felt, correctly, that during the year he had been in office his
energies had been used as a safety valve but there had never been a serious
intention to get anything he recommended done. He had been quite
cynically put in a position where his energy could be expended and his
ideas ignored. He either had to resign, or to resign himself to the sort
of game that during all his years in Parliament he had abominated.

On May 18th Bob Boothby, a conservative, had written to him:

My dear Tom,

From France I have been contemplating the state of politics with a
jaundiced but more or less unbiased mind: and I beg of you not to
resign. I cannot see that you would achieve anything: and you might
well do yourself irreparable damage. It is a God’s mercy that the
existence of your memorandum is known to the public.

That was essential; but for the moment it is surely enough. I care
about your political future far more than about any other single factor
in public affairs, because I know that you are the ONLY one of my
generation — of the post-war school of thought — who is capable of
translating into action any of the ideas in which I genuinely believe.
Consequently I can conceive of no greater tragedy than that you
should take a step which might wreck your chances, or at any rate
postpone the opportunity of carrying through constructive work.

If you stay where you are that opportunity is bound to come soon.
Go, and where are you?

The example of Randolph Churchill is significant and appalling.
You deliver yourself into the hands of every enemy, and they are not
a few. Your own front bench will heave a sigh of relief, consign you
to the Mountain, and take no more risks.

They will point to their own life-long services in the Labour cause,
and contrast them with yours. They will regret that they are ap-

Resignation 145

parently unable to proceed at a pace sufficient to satisfy the desires
and ambitions of a wealthy young ‘aristocrat’ in a hurry.

Picture the parliamentary scene. You will make your case against
the government — a formidable one — but nine-tenths of the audience
will be hostile. Snowden will reply with all the venom at his com-
mand (I am sure his recent outburst against me was an oblique thrust
at you.) He will quote from your speeches at Harrow ten years ago.
All the pent-up fury which you have deliberately, and I think quite
rightly, roused in so many breasts will simultaneously be released.

The Tories will cheer vociferously and savagely.

Your own orthodox back-benchers will be against you because
they will feel that you have delivered a fierce blow at the Government
which may well involve their defeat at the next election ...

The cumulative effect of so many hostile forces would overwhelm
Napoleon himself.

I don’t see how you could hope to stand up against them.

You can’t return to us.

And however impelled you may feel to work once more with the
‘gentry’, you would be wretched if you did. I know to my cost the
limitations of the existing young conservatives. They are charming
and sympathetic and intelligent at dinner.

But there is not one of them who has either the character or the
courage to do anything big...

What is the alternative?

Surely to remain within the official fold and by making yourself
increasingly oppressive and uncomfortable to what Ellen Wilkinson
so aptly describes as ‘The Bright Old Things’ consolidate and
strengthen your power. The forces economic and political now at
work must assist you.

With every increase in the unemployment figures the position
which you are known to have taken up becomes more impregnable and
easier to justify ... Why should you not work with, and ultimately
direct, a moderate Government of the Left?

You occupy a key position at the moment. For God’s sake don’t
chuck it away. Incidentally, if you have a moment to spare, you
might modify the divorce laws.

My own difficulties do not diminish with the passage of time and
the march of events ...

Good luck to you.

Don’t think of answering this.

Yrs ever

Bob

146 Rules of the Game

But this letter, with its admirable advice, was about how to play the
political game: it was about techniques of how to win by appearing for
a time to be steadfast in losing. Tom did not want this: the people
with whom he had been playing the game had been making such a
nonsense of it for so long that he wanted to give it up altogether. His
revulsion was personal rather than political. But then, as Bob Boothby
had asked, did he really think he could take on the whole accepted
political machinery single-handed? If he would not play according to
the rules, did he think he could alter the whole tradition of games
playing?

On the afternoon of May 19th Tom had been to see Ramsay Mac-
Donald and had told him he thought he should resign: MacDonald had
asked him to reconsider. He found Tom (he wrote in his diary) ‘on the
verge of being offensively vain in himself’. Johnston pleaded with
members of the Cabinet that there was still time to use Tom’s talents
which had been ‘trampled on and ignored’. But people wanted to ignore
Tom’s talents.

On May 20th he handed his letter of resignation to MacDonald. In
it he reiterated that his Memorandum ‘was not advanced in any dog-
matic spirit’ but that he found it ‘inconsistent with honour’ to remain
a member of a government that would not even seriously discuss its
election pledges. The letter was written in a tone, MacDonald said, of
“graceless pompousness’. MacDonald added (these comments are in his
diary) “Test of a man’s personality is his behaviour in disagreement: in
every test he failed.” Most of the newspapers the next day however
praised Tom for his courage. The Daily Herald added a warning — “What
Mosley needs is a break in his success: he has been a wonder child for
too long.’

On May 22nd there was a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party
to which Tom, now out of office, could present his proposals over the
heads of the Cabinet. G. R. Strauss, a young MP personally un-
sympathetic to Tom, recorded that Tom’s speech to the Parliamentary
Party was a ‘magnificent piece of rhetoric’ and that most MPs were
obviously of the opinion that the Memorandum ‘should be carefully
considered’. J. R. Thomas in a ‘lachrymose and emotional vein’,
announced that it was ‘the most humiliating day of his life’: but then
Arthur Henderson, an experienced tactician in the party game, played
one of the traditional moves: he appealed to Tom ‘in very moving
language to take the noble line’ of withdrawing his censure motion
against the government to allow further talks to take place — for the sake
of party unity. John Strachey whispered to Tom that he should refuse

Resignation 147

— ‘What people want is action’. Tom did refuse. In the words of G. R.
Strauss — ‘instantly all the support and sympathy he had received
deserted him’. A junior minister remarked ‘Pity he didn’t withdraw, he
would have done himself a lot of good’: whereupon Cimmie, over-
hearing this, said ‘He didn’t care for his own good, but only for his
party!’ Tom lost the vote by 29 to 210. His failure to withdraw was seen
as a grave tactical blunder. But it made sense in the light of his deter-
mination not to go on playing the parliamentary game: and it added to
his already somewhat legendary reputation for courage.

And there were, in fact, outside his own party, people who saw
precisely that the real battle was not between this or that party but about
whether one should, or should not, continue to play political games. On
May 27th Harold Macmillan, a young conservative temporarily out of
Parliament, had a letter printed in The Times in which he said:

Faced with a startling and even spectacular calamity [the doubling of
unemployment figures since Labour took office] Sir Oswald seems to
haveconceivedanovel, andnodoubtaccording totheaccepted political
standards of what are called ‘responsible statesmen’, incredibly naive
idea. He drew up, and actually went so far as to present to his chief, a
memorandum which suggested an attempt should be madetocarry out
at least some, if not all, of the pledges and promises by the exploitation
of which the Socialist Party obtained power ...

Is it to be the accepted rule in our politics that a political programme
is to be discarded as soon as it has served its electoral purpose? Are we
to accept the cynical view that a statesman is to be applauded in inverse
ratio to the extent to which he carries out in office what he has promised
in opposition? Must a programme always sink to the level of a fraud-
ulent prospectus? Is a course of action, which in business affairs would
end in the Old Bailey, in affairs of state to lead to Downing St and
Westminster Abbey? ...

I suspect that this is the real way that the game ought to be played.
Only, if the rules are to be permanently enforced, perhaps a good many
of us will feel it hardly worth while bothering to play at all. Sir Oswald
Mosley thinks that the rules should be altered. Ihopesome of my friends
will have the courage to support and applaud his protest.

The next day R. A. Butler, conservative MP in his first parliament, had
(with three other signatories) a letter in The Times which said:

We have read with interest and some surprise Mr Harold Macmillan’s

148 Rules of the Game

letter published in your issue of today. When a player starts com-
plaining that it is ‘hardly worth while bothering to play’ the game
at all, it is surely the player, and not the game, which is at fault. It
is usually advisable for the player to seek a new field for his recreation
and a pastime more suitable to his talents.

On 28th May Tom made his speech in Parliament to justify his resigna-
tion: this was his statement of belief that politics should be more than
a ‘recreation’ or a ‘pastime’. He reiterated the points of the Mosley
Memorandum ~— an effective machinery of government had to be set
up to deal with the unemployment crisis; it was to the home market that
people had to turn for the solution to trading problems; after a short-
term programme of road building power had to be given to an
Executive Committee to control imports, prices, wages, and finance for
industry. He spoke without looking at his notes; there was a dazzling
display of figures; in a passionate peroration he begged that the country
should not be allowed to ‘sink to the level of Spain’ and exhorted
Parliament to give a lead. The message of the speech was epitomised in
a sentence half way through — ‘the first duty of the government is, after
all, to govern’.

When Tom sat down he was cheered. It had been a magnificent
performance. The papers the next day were unanimous — ‘A tremendous
personal triumph’: ‘one of the most notable parliamentary achievements
of modern times’: ‘the triumph of an artist who has made his genius
perfect by long hours of practice and devotion to his art’. But then, with
all these curtain-calls as it were — might it not be possible that after all
Tom had made a successful move in terms of the game?

He was taking his stand on being the ‘honest man’ of politics; in the
long run such an ‘honest man’ might have the best chance of winning
the highest honours. Tom of course felt this: other people after his
resignation began to feel it: Beatrice Webb wrote — ‘Has MacDonald
found his superseder in Oswald Mosley? MacDonald owes his pre-
eminence largely to the fact that he is the only artist, the only aristocrat
by temperament and talent in a party of plebeians and plain men... But
Mosley has all this with the élan of youth, wealth and social position
added to them.’ She added however in her usual warning style —
“Whether Mosley has Mac’s toughness of texture — whether he will not
break down in health or in character — I have doubts.’

But one of the manoeuvres by which people who stick to the rules
of the game instinctively try to outwit those who do not, is by giving
them extravagant applause just when there is no particular danger to the

Resignation 149

status quo: like this the rebels get carried away and overreach them-
selves. And would-be heroes anyway have primitive instincts ready to
be tapped by applause. After his resignation speech Tom’s mother had
written to him:

My darling Tom,

So many judges and abler folk must have congratulated you on
your masterly performance of last night my congratulations are
almost absurd. But oh! my dear lad, I can never tell you what it meant
to your old mother. I was so full of pride and joy in my man-child
it almost choked me. It was wonderful. People of all shades and
opinions were thrilled and staggered by ‘the finest speech heard in the
House for 20 years’ ...

Tom had said “The first duty of a government is to govern’: but then,
what was he doing resigning from government and putting on magnifi-
cent performances? Was he really now going to trust just his own
rationality and rhetoric — and other people’s rationality in being carried
away by his rhetoric — in order to govern? Might this not be the mark
of someone with such overweening confidence in himself that it would
seem to have sprung from fantasies?

But if he was ever to have a chance of exercising practical power,
Tom knew he had to form new loyalties. This was not going to be easy
from the ranks of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Jennie Lee, a young
Labour MP and one not unsympathetic to Tom at this time, wrote of
her own reactions to her colleagues:

What I was totally unprepared for was the behaviour of the solid rows
of decent, well-intentioned unpretentious Labour back benchers. In
the long run it was they who did the most deadly damage. Again and
again an effort was made to rouse them from their inertia. On every
occasion they reacted like a load of damp cement. They would see
nothing, do nothing, hear nothing, that had not first been given the
seal of MacDonald's approval.

When Tom resigned, the only back benchers who he was certain would
be loyal to him were Cimmie and John Strachey. He soon got four other
young labour MPs to commit themselves to some sort of an alliance —
W. J. Brown, Oliver Baldwin, Robert Forgan and Aneurin Bevan. He
also got young MPs from the other parties interested in talking about
alliance — from the Conservatives Harold Macmillan, Bob Boothby,

150 Rules of the Game

Oliver Stanley, Walter Elliott, Henry Mond; from the Liberals Archi-
bald Sinclair and Leslie Hore-Belisha. During the summer the un-
employment figures rose to over two million: the battle more than ever
seemed to Tom to be not between this party and that, but between
anyone who seemed interested in getting something done and those
who did not. Tom himself saw it in many respects still as a battle of the
young against the old. In June he wrote an article in the Sunday Express
in which he claimed that the young man of today was:

a hard, realistic type, hammered into existence on the anvil of great
ordeal: in mind and spirit he is much further away from the pre-war
man than he is from an ancient Roman or from any other product
of ages which were dynamic like his own. For this age is dynamic and
the pre-war age was static. The men of the pre-war age are much
‘nicer’ people than we are, just as their age was much more pleasant
than the present time. The practical question is whether their ideas
for the solution of the problems of our age are better than the ideas
of those whom that age has produced.

This was the language of some sort of heroism — of preparation for
future battle; of appeal to the glories of the past. It was this that attracted
would-be knights to Tom’s banner. ‘In those days Mosley’s drawing
room was an exciting place’ Hugh Massingham, a journalist, wrote: ‘the
gay Bob Boothby flitted in and out: there was John Strachey who could
be relied on to give the talk a Marxist twist: C. E. M. Joad, a philosopher
of sorts, could be discovered cowering in a corner occasionally letting
out a squeak of protest whenever the necessity of violence was men-
tioned which it usually was’. Harold Nicolson, himself'a member of the
group, wrote — “They talk about the decay of democracy and of
parliamentarianism. They discuss whether it would be well to have a
fascist coup. They are most disrespectful of their various party leaders.’

Two politicians from the older generation were naturally attracted
to such ebullience — Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. They
occasionally joined in discussions. There were also the press lords
Beaverbrook and Rothermere in the background; who by their
vocation were interested in matters sensational or dynamic. Beaver-
brook wrote to Tom, ‘I am ready at any moment to make overtures
in your direction in public if you wish me to do so’. Churchill made
a speech at Oxford in which he echoed Tom’s proposal that an Executive
Committee should be set up ‘free altogether from party exigencies and
composed of persons possessing special qualifications in economic

Resignation ISI

matters’. One reason why Churchill, Beaverbrook and Rothermere
were interested in Tom was the fact that in his economic thinking he
was coming to the conclusion that the closed economic area over which
the government should have tight control should be expanded from the
home market to include the Empire and Commonwealth. With all this
talk and intrigue going on it could not have worried Tom much that
the ‘damp cement’ of Labour was not following him. Beatrice Webb
wrote ‘He will be a great success at public meetings; but will he get
round the Arthur Hendersons, the Herbert Morrisons, the Alexanders,
the Citrines and the Bevins ... the natural leaders of the proletariat?’
Tom and even Cimmie were even demonstrably not worrying: they
went out a lot during that summer to parties: Tom seems to have felt
liberated by the fact that he had staked everything like a gambler on
forming his own group.

Bob Boothby wrote to him another of his long, marvellous letters
setting out his opinions on gambling and the sort of odds a gambler has
to face because there are rules even for adventurers.

My dear Tom,
If ever I signed on the dotted line I would play to the end — and
beyond.

I think you know that.

But in the meantime | don’t think the game 1s practical politics, and
for the following reasons.

(1) Our chaps won’t play, and it’s no use your deluding yourself
that they will. You saw Oliver [Stanley]’s reactions last night.

Of the whole lot Walter and I would be most useful, because we
havea territorial base and between us we could shake up Scotland. But
Walter has spent the last twelve months consolidating his position in the
Conservative party: he has won for himselfa good deal of rank-and-
file support: he won't give it up unless he’s sure he’s going to win. And
he doesn’t think this will win.

As for Oliver, his influence could, and almost certainly would, be
countered by Edward Stanley. And so far as the Conservatives are
concerned, Harold would be a definite liability. | know you think I’m
prejudiced against him. I’m not. But even on the assumption he decided
to play (a large one) how many votes can he sway.

Not one.

Who 1s left?

George Lloyd, generally regarded as the ‘Super Diehard’ and rightly
or wrongly regarded in many quarters as a shit. And this brings me to

152 Rules of the Game

the second point about our chaps, which is that they simply aren’t
good enough for the job (I include myself with becoming modesty).

(2) Now what about your side? I agree you can sway more votes
than any other contemporary politician.

But I don’t believe, at present, that you can bring over any sub-
stantial section of organised Trades Unionism. And as for the
Parliamentary Party, do you really think you can send Aneurin Bevan
to the Admiralty to lay down more cruisers, and John Strachey to
spank the blacks? I confess I doubt it. Who else is there? The mug-
wumps who comprise 95% of your party will be solidly arrayed
against you. The intelligentsia of the Dalton—Baker school will be
actively and venomously hostile.

(3) Wecome now to the main source of strength — Beaverbrook,
with the dubious support of Rothermere.

Beaverbrook’s qualities are sufficiently obvious. I don’t know him
as well as you do. But I have long since come to the conclusion that
he would be very nearly impossible to work with. And, as Oliver
pointed out, he is in the impregnable position (which we are not and
never can be) of being able to double cross and let down the side at
a moment’s notice without loss of power or even prestige.

If he were to do that we should be marooned, and ultimately sunk
politically.

One other point.

What is going to be the reaction of the great British public to
a Beaverbrook- Mosley -Rothermere-Lloyd- Macmillan -Stanley-
Boothby combination?

I don’t know. But they might conceivably say ‘By God, now all the
shits have climbed into the same basket, so we know where we are.’
Would they be so far out? ...

(5) Lastly, don’t underestimate the power of the political
machines. I believe that in the long run it far exceeds that of the
press ...

On this assumption, the only game worth playing 1s to try and
collar one or other of the machines, and not ruin yourself by beating
against them with a tool which will almost certainly break in your
hand.

To all this I make one qualification and one only.

If there is a really serious economic crisis this winter, there may be
a widespread demand for a national government, new men, and new
measures.

It must come from the country and be interpreted by the press. If

Resignation 1§3

it does come, then the situation will be fundamentally changed, and
a game of a kind we cannot yet envisage may open out...

Well my dear Tom, I’ve been very frank. I always will be with you,
and I hope you don’t mind. I happen to think you can do more for
us than anyone else now alive — a view I’ve held, and from which I’ve
never deviated, for six years.

Only for God’s sake remember that this country is old, obsolete
and tradition-ridden; and no one, not even you, can break all the rules
at once. And do take care of the company you keep. Real shits are
sO apt to trip you up when you aren’t looking. And flat-catchers who
want to be hauled along are only an encumbrance.

No answer.
Yours ever

Bob

CHAPTER 16

Cimmie in Russia

At the beginning of 1930 Cimmie wrote in her usual style to Tom:

Sweetie fellow, this is just a line to tell him on New Years’ Day of
all the wishes wished thoughts thought and resolutions resolved by
her on New Year’s Eve. Does hope 1930 will be a happy one for them
both. Does hope he will go on loving her. Sure she will love him. Will
try try to do everything she can to make it a success.

Success politically. Success fun and good times.

Success them 2 together ...

Cimmie was busy in local and national politics during 1930. She opened
nursery schools and art exhibitions in Stoke; spoke at a Labour Party
May Day rally at Alexandra Palace in North London; spoke in Parlia-
ment in favour of the Rural Amenities Bill which gave greater govern-
mental powers to safeguard the environment, and in favour of the Bill
which ratified the provisions of the Court of International Justice at The
Hague. Her speaking voice, a reporter said, was ‘like that of Cordelia
— soft, gentle and low: “‘an excellent thing in a woman’’.’ She wrote an
article in the Sunday Express which considered whether or not rich
socialists should spend money on their children’s education (her sister
Irene called this ‘shattering bilge’): she gave an interview on the radio on
the subject of Social Conventions. In this she was eloquently in favour
of breaking conventions: ‘I want to bring out the frightful danger latent
in all conventions, of their proving an obstacle to living thought and
self-expression, because that for me is the most precious thing in life —
lose that and you lose everything.’ She got quite a few letters in response
to this broadcast — one from a 17-year-old girl who wanted to be a dirt-
track rider and asked Cimmie for the loan of £50 to set her up.

Cimmie in Russia 1$5

She backed Tom publicly in his struggles with J. H. Thomas: pri-
vately, in spite of her resolutions and perhaps because Tom was be-
coming increasingly under strain, their quarrels — and her own part in
them — seemed to get worse. In April Irene was recording in her diary
— “That naughty Cim kept having awful gibes at Tom so unnecessarily
as he was quite peaceful.’ Then in July — ‘Cim and Tom had a couple
of sparring matches Tom as usual scoririg in getting a raging rise out
of Cim.’ And later — after a dinner party in Irene’s house with Cim and
Tom and Sacheverell and Georgia Sitwell — Irene found ‘Cim and Tom
having a row about some stupid bill and he dashed off in the car in a
rage and poor dazed Cim still could not see how it had all arisen’.

Two days before this myself, aged seven, had been taken to a nursing
home for an operation for appendicitis. On the night of their row
Cimmie stayed on in Irene’s house and wrote to Tom:

3 Deanery St W.1.
I don’t know what you felt like when you got home but I know I
have seldom felt worse, it is now 3 o’clock-ish and I am still sitting
on my bed not having closed an eye — I cannot make out what it is
all about, I am entirely bewildered, I just don’t understand — why have
you been so horrid to me, not only tonight but ever since I got up
from chickenpox. As the sound of my voice and my presence (and
you've seen so little of me) seems to drive you demented I resort to
poor Irene’s method of putting pen to paper ... You leave me alone
in London for weekend to look aftet Nicky and go away with
another woman for weekend. You never see Nicky from before his
op Sat am till Mon evening ...

The woman whom Tom went away with might have been Georgia
Sitwell, with whom Tom was carrying on about this time: there is a
letter from her to Tom consisting of just one enormous O covering most
of the page which seems to have been some symbol of sexuality. (It was
Georgia Sitwell who said to Tom’s second wife, Diana, later in life —
‘Of course we all went to bed with him but afterwards we were rather
ashamed’). One of the points of conflict now between Tom and Cimmie
concerned a flat that Tom had got at 22 Ebury Street, about a mile from
the family home in Smith Square. Ostensibly Tom had rented this flat
in order that he should have peace to do his work as a government
minister: but the flat consisted of one huge and very elegant room like
a stageset for a bachelor’s apartment; the bed was in an alcove at the
back across which curtains could be drawn and (one of the occupants

156 Rules of the Game

remembers) at the press of a switch warm air be wafted in. Cimmie had
felt that the style of this was not aimed at entertaining Ramsay Mac-~
Donald or J. H. Thomas.

Cimmie’s letter to Tom, written from Irene’s house, continued —

I feel very lonely and unutterably depressed and so puzzled and tired
it is difficult to think or even see much ... I know you'll make out
it’s all my fault ... I could not think why it went on and then you
driving off after what you said. Why did you?

Tom was apparently clever at making out things were another person’s
fault: also probably at using rows as a means of being able to get away
~— and do what he wanted. And then, the next morning, he could think
about making things up again. He wrote to Cimmie:

Darling Fellow,

Terribly sorry if I upset you, but you did drive me almost demented
~ and he too was upset all right! It is that aggressive student talking
about little things which (1) do not matter (2) could be settled in two
minutes quiet talk — do be your own sweet self — a charming woman
— and not a lawyer attacking a hostile witness. We are all rather on
edge after a very tiring session and many worries — do try to make
the little things of life easy and not more difficult. I do love you so
and was so looking forward to seeing you again and longing to get
off to the South of France with you away from all this turmoil — you
can be the sweetest most feminine one in all the world, or you can
be a real old nagging harridan which you were last night (but I do
understand you too are on edge a little after Nick) ... I believe you
are lunching out but we will dine together and IJ will ring you up at
Nina’s 7 pm if you are not in the H of C. So much love. Tom

It was true all this was happening at a time when Tom was increasingly
under strain in public life: he knew he might not be able to get back
into conventional party politics: he had chosen his role of gambler. He
probably felt it consistent that he should gamble on getting everything
that he wanted in private life too. He would have the power to ration-
alise to himself that it was not his fault if this sort of thing caused Cimmie
pain: he did his best to leave her free to do as she wanted. He would
probably not consciously have seen that one of the reasons why he had
strength as a gambler was because she, having suffered, was still there
for him to come back to.

Cimmie in Russia 1$7

People close to Cimmie and Tom were trying to ‘get her to see she
ought to stand up to him and give him a fright’ (Irene): this presumably
meant threaten to leave him. But Cimmie could not do this. It remained
a mystery however about Tom and Cimmie why she as much as he
insisted on their having ‘fun’ in places like Antibes and Venice — where
one of the rules of the social game was simply that husbands should try
to get off with other people’s wives. But now at the end of the summer
of 1930, they did plan, for a while, to go their separate ways. After the
usual two or three weeks at Antibes (I myself, after my operation, had
followed the main party with Nanny in a bath chair or being carried
by porters) Cimmie went off on a trip to Turkey and Russia accom-
panied by her friend Zita James. Tom went with her as far as Venice,
then returned to the South of France.

Cimmie’s trip to Russia is of interest because it seems to have been
her effort to gain some independence from Tom: for a time she seemed
to be succeeding. Zita was one of two sisters (Zita and Theresa Jungman)
who were in the social worlds of London and Venice and the South of
France: she had recently married: she too was travelling apart from her
husband. She kept a diary, which provides glimpses of Cimmie in her
efforts to be herself apart from Tom. Cimmie and Zita met in Athens,
where —

We went out to see the Acropolis at sunset. Of course it didn’t come
off again and Cimmie was bitterly mocking — I was rather annoying
and kept giving details about blank bits of stone that I'd heard the
guide saying days before. I felt rather like a governess but couldn’t
stop myself. I was annoyed that the sunset was so bad. In the mean-
time Cimmie had left a message for a Greek young man she knew
about, and later as we were lying on our beds in the hotel shouting
from one room to another a card came up to say he was waiting below
so we hurried and Cimmie went on down. I found her drinking a
cocktail with a very good looking Greek and a very American
American called Francis Peabody Krane. After a good deal of gay talk
and familiar badinage we finally decided to go in Peabody’s car to
a native restaurant on a hill far away.

They went on the American’s yacht, they swam, they had picnics: ‘after
a huge meal Cimmie and Kartali (the Greek) went and lay down on the
moonlit horizon and talked in whispers to each other while Peabody
went miles to fetch me a cushion’. They went to see the church at

158 Rules of the Game

Daphne; they did not think much of the museum at Athens. They
travelled on by boat to Istanbul, where Cimmie wrote to Tom:

Hotel M. Tokatlian. Istanbul. Sept sth 1930
Darling Sweetie, you will never guess what I did yesterday. I think
something very exciting, but in order to get you all expectant I won’t
tell you yet. We had hardly arrived before a very insignificant young
man called round from the Embassy to say Sir George Clerk [the
ambassador] was away in Ankara but he was to put a car at our
disposal so we arranged to have it for the next day ... We sight-saw,
but really there is nothing much: Mosques awfully ugly and Sophia
definitely disapointing. Afterwards heavenly time in lagoon and then
a row in caique up to Eyouli and a moonlight picnic in the
cemetery and coffee in the cafe where Pierre Loti used to sit. Yester-
day morning more sightseeing; lunch at Embassy where we made a
great hit with Sir George who is taking us out all day on his yacht
today — and then we did the exciting thing. They all said at the
Embassy we would never pull it off.

But we did!

We went and saw Trotsky!!

You know he lives on a small island called Prinkipo about hour
and 4 away from here by boat. He is allowed nowhere else in the
world. So I thought — We'll go off to Prinkipo and try! Wrote a
lovely note and set off. Deposited outside iron gate at top of hill,
long straggling walk down between vegetables to a fountain small
pond court and square peeling white house. By this time a sec: had
popped out to ask us our business — he said it was quite impossible —
never done. I said well anyway could he not take my letter. No.
Well could he not read it himself -— which he did. He then re-
considered and said he would go and see. In a few moments he was
back and said the great man would receive us. So up we went
through an absolutely bare hall absolutely bare staircase another
absolutely bare room except for thousands of newspapers knocked
on a door and there we were. Magnificent head, masses and swirls
of the most beautifully cared-for grey hair, the softest most soigné
rather sallow skin, huge eyes behind prince nez, large thick fleshy
mouth, moustache and imperial, immaculate snowy white suit and
beautiful hands — nails polished and shining. He was courteous and
charming and talked for about 4 an hour, absolutely scathing about
English Labs. Very funny. And Clynes and Duchess of York got it
very hot.

Cimmie in Russia 1$9

Cimmie’s description of her visit to Trotsky ends here abruptly. Her
long letter then continues, for pages, to talk about her relationship with
Tom. Other accounts of the visit to Trotsky are of interest however both
on account of the incident itself (Trotsky had been outlawed from
Russia the year before and had few contacts with the outside world) and
because they confirm the impression that to Cimmie the visit was at least
in part some dare-devil act which she could present as a trophy to Tom.

Zita had written in her diary about lunch at the Embassy the previous
day:

We could see the secretaries and wives sniggering as we told rather
exaggerated stories of what up to now we had done, they thought
us a little mad, so we piled it on and said the most startling things.
Cimmie capped the lot by declaring that she was going that afternoon
to see Trotsky. At this suggestion the whole table went off into a
guffaw, several bets were placed against us achieving our object, and
everyone winked slyly round the table and patronised our idiocy ...
We went back to the hotel where Cimmie composed a letter begin-
ning ‘Dear Comrade Trotsky’ and ending ‘Yours fraternally’. She
took his book of memoirs under her arm and off we started for the
ferry boat.

Trotsky recorded his own account of the visit in his published diary for
1935. He had made a reference to Tom as ‘the aristocratic coxcomb
who joined the Labour party as a short cut to a career’; and then
reminisced:

In September 1930 ... Cynthia Mosley, the wife of the adventurer
and daughter of the notorious Lord Curzon, visited me at Prinkipo.
At that stage her husband was still attacking MacDonald ‘from the
left’. After some hesitation I agreed to a meeting which, however,
proved banal in the extreme. The ‘Lady’ arrived with a female
travelling companion, referred contemptuously to MacDonald, and
spoke of her sympathies towards Soviet Russia. But the enclosed
letter from her is an adequate specimen of her attitude at that time.
About three years later the young woman suddenly died. 1 don’t
know if she lived long enough to cross over into the fascist camp.

But the letter which Cimmie wrote to Trotsky and which Trotsky
printed in his diary showed something of her genuine enthusiasm and
courage.

160 Rules of the Game

Dear Comrade Trotsky,

I would like above all things to see you for a few moments. There
isno good reason why you should see me as (1) I belong to the Labour
Party in England who were so ridiculous and refused to allow you
in but also I belong to the ILP and we did try our very best to make
them change their minds; and (2) Iam daughter of Lord Curzon who
was Minister of Foreign Affairs in London when you were in Russia!

On the other hand I am an ardent Socialist. 1am a member of the
House of Commons. I think less than nothing of the present govern-
ment. I have just finished reading your life which inspired me as no
other book has done for ages. I am a great admirer of yours. These
days when great men seem so very few and far between it would be
a great privilege to meet one of the enduring figures of our age and
I do hope with all my heart you will grant me that privilege. I need
hardly say I come as a private person, not a journalist nor anything
but myself —I am on my way to Russia —I leave for Batoum — Tiflis
— Rostov — Kharkov and Moscow by boat Monday. I have come to
Principo this afternoon especially to try to see you, but if it were not
convenient I could come out again any day till Monday. I do hope
however you could allow me a few moments this afternoon.

Yours fraternally
Cynthia Mosley

A few days after her exploit with Trotsky, Cimmie performed another
feat which seemed aimed at demonstrating her energy and independence
and reporting this to Tom. She swam across the straits of the Bosphorus
from Asia to Europe —a distance of about a mile. Zita, who accompanied
her by boat, reported — ‘When she got about half way across it became
more difficult as the current was so strong ... large steamers began to
pass and their huge wash became very tiring. I kept screaming ‘‘Look
out!”’ and Cimmie began to get a little cross. However after one or two
desperate moments the heroic deed was accomplished.’

Cimmie went back to her hotel to write immediately of this new deed
to Tom. But there she found a telegram from him of which the words,
it would seem, did not contain much beyond the usual reassuring and
encouraging noises he used to make to her. But it made Cimmie write:

Sunday 7th Hotel M. Tokatlian
Oh Billo, just to show you what an ass Iam your wire has just come
and I feel suicidal. Why. It came from Le Lavandou, what on earth

Cimmie in Russia 16I

are you doing there unless you have popped off with Paula? I have
always longed to go to Le Lavandou, you never would — why now
— only to hide. Darling darling you would have been better never to
wire me or else to explain why you were there, it has just spoilt
everything for me. Even when I am hundreds of miles away your
shadow falls on me. How can I ever dare to have holidays away from
you — and yet it may be nothing, you may be there with a large party.
Then why not all sign the gram. No doubt you'll explain it away.
But as the song says — ‘How am I to know?’ How fed up I am with
love. I suppose I ought not to mind but I do so damnably I don’t know
what to do. Can hardly bear to face dinner and all the rest. Can’t wire
you as have no address.

Hell Hell Hell. If it’s true, I think you and Paula unspeakable cads.
If it’s not true, then I do apologise, but wish you had not caused the
unnecessary anguish — you might have said why you were there —
I suppose you thought they wouldn’t put where the tel: came
from.

So you see all my talk about self sufficiency serenity peace etc —
Balls Balls Balls
— goes in I second at the bare hint of an idea from you.

Ought (1) to trust you not to do such a thing, or —

(2) not to mind if you did.
The first impossible, as I fear I have never really in my heart of hearts
trusted you in that way. The second however much as I try I cannot
help such a flame of misery jealousy resentment I can’t cope.

Please forgive me if it is all nothing, perhaps I shouldn't even write
and keep all my doubts to myself; but somehow I can’t do that, it
seems clearer to get it off my chest. And darling when I came in I
was so gay and full of myself and elated and just sitting down to write
you that I had just swum the Bosphorus from Asia to Europe against
a strong current in 40 minutes — thought you'd be thrilled —I thought
it so terribly in the Grand Style and Byronic and even rather
Mosley — and now — those stupid names of tunes — they are so
apposite —

What is this thing called love
How am I to know?

I don’t, either.

I will wire an address from Batoum for you to write. Don’t be
angry if I am all wrong it’s because I love you so awfully. Even if I
am not wrong I suppose you'll pretend I am. What a farce it all is.

I wish you were here with me.

162 Rules of the Game

We are off to Russia tomorrow.
Pll try to forget about all this. Poor Tom
Poor Tim
My sweetie one.
Blessings.
Mum

Cimmie never spoke to Zita about any of this. The next day they got
on an Italian boat bound for Batum, in Russia, at the eastern end of the
Black Sea. They ‘settled down into a sort of routine ... we both adored
reading and hardly spoke to each other: we invented games and ate
rather a lot in view of the future’ (Zita). They had a vague certainty that
in Russia “we should be starved and imprisoned and probably shot and
at any rate never come out of the country the same as we went into it.
The Captain was horrified at the idea of our going to Russia and said
we ought to be at home with our husbands.’

While she was on the boat Cimmie probably dwelt on the things
that seemed never to be far from her mind about Tom. The letter she
had written to him directly after her visit to Trotsky had continued, after
she had told him the news of her exploit:

About our life. I will try, but also remember I do try all the time, it’s
when I am so tired of trying I get so difficult. I never seem to be able
to let up trying. As to not having complexes about you oh how
difficult — only because I care for you so much — that is what makes
it difficult; and all the side of me you hate, the hard defiant knock-
me-down, curiously enough is created by you — an attempt by me
to clap on some pieces of armour — a sort of sanctuary inside where
I was inviolate and you could not get at me — I might behave
outwardly more sensibly but up to now I have not been able to
preserve one solitary atom or portion of me that you could not get
at and hurt almost beyond endurance ...

I fear so awfully all my efforts to adjust myself to you so as not
to be hurt result in the very symptoms that make you hurt me more
—If I appear to ‘don’t care’ by being ‘don’t care’, you just get fiercer
and fiercer and destroy me more and more: and to just submit to
being hurt without putting up some show seems to me almost
unendurable. So far I have only achieved not being hurt by you (and
rarely enough at that) by thinking you a cad and a swine — by
despising your methods — oh dear how difficult it all is! — as quite
beyond question you matter more to me than anything in the world.

Cimmie in Russia 163

With the children when you are sweet to me I could die of joy. But
as you Say: in term-time you have to work so very hard — with other
people: in hols you play hard — with other people. Where does Mum
come in?

It’s all very well to talk of the great life we could build up together
but we never are together — and don’t go off and say we are more
together than any other married couple as that is bosh — in the sense
I mean together we are very little. This may seem an ungenerous
answer to you but these letters are no good unless they face facts —
after all we have written them before, and the real life we can have
— and I agree with you we can have it — must and can only come if
we really take trouble about it. You must take some trouble about
me. You will say I must about you — my answer is I never seem to
cease bothering about you, tho’ you may find that hard to believe...

Always remember I adore YOU — tho’ loathing the thing that
masquerades as you every so often and is cruel and unkind and often
despicable ... It’s the same about me, the real ME is a dear, but the
horrid student creature that I become is awful — but I only become
it to fight the masquerading you. Let’s both be YOU and ME. I swear
Pil try.

But you MUST. I can’t do it alone.

There is no way of knowing the words by which Tom ‘destroyed’
Cimmie more and more, since this was always done face to face with
his cutting tongue and not by letter. In later life, when Tom wanted to
be rude to people he was just rude; with his chin up, barking at people
to ‘get out’, or stabbing at them with his heavy, relentless sarcasm. But
Cimmnie in her letter did seem able for the first time to stand back and
see that a proper way of describing what was happening to her and Tom
might be that there was in each of them something that took them over
and made them helpless in their efforts to deal with themselves or each
other by will. There was something in Tom that needed to protect
himself by having her enslaved: there was something in her that, in pain,
still could not escape from enslavement. Tom could not stand back from
himself enough to talk to Cimmie in these terms; he was too successful
with his manipulations.

Cimmie and Zita landed at Batum; they travelled by train and bus
into the Caucasus; they got a boat from Batum to Yalta and from there
went by train to Kharkov and Kiev. Their impressions of Russia were
much the same as impressions of tourists have been for fifty years: they
noted the delays, the inefficiency, the subjects that could not be talked

164 Rules of the Game

about; at the same time there was ‘that queer intangible new spirit,
everyone equal, no classes’ (Cimmie in a letter to Tom). Also — ‘all the
nonsense talked about only wearing old clothes so as not to be con-
spicuous, typhoid, the frightful food shortages, no soap — bunk from
beginning to end’. From the Caucasus, Zita had written of “The Children
of the Night — the children who, directly after the revolution, without
parents or guardians, infested the whole of Russia especially the south:
they were the essence of vice, disease, crime and terror: there are
supposed to be few left now, but this little band had the most terrifying
faces I have ever imagined’. Cimmie on the coast of the Black Sea had
admired the ‘thrilling modern white blocks of sanatoria’. They both
were rather impressed by the public nude bathing of both sexes. And
they wondered why Stalin had thought it profitable to get rid of so
many intellectuals.

In Kharkov they discovered from the Intourist office that Cimmie’s
sister Irene, in the company of John Strachey, had passed through the
day before on their way down from Moscow. This rather dampened
their feeling of being pioneers. They went on to Moscow where they
found in a ‘spotlessly clean hotel which ‘looked almost normal’ other
Labour MPs, including G. R. Strauss and Jennie Lee. Cimmie found
also a letter from Tom, in answer to the one she had posted in Istanbul.

Darling Baby Mutton, 22 b Ebury Street. S.W.1.
What a mutt she is! What a let to write him — What an upset to
give herself — and him because he felt she was upset! Toured the coast
from Cannes to Toulon — alone or with parties — got Daisy’s speedboat
Fish (without owner included let me hasten to add) (and further only
300 francs a day) and had glorious time — shot to and fro just the king
of every beach [drawing of pig or sheep] — met many people knew
at various spots but much Byronic solitude (which is growing on him
a lot in her absence — great feature!) St Maxim’s and more especially
St Tropez proved enormous fun on revisits. Marvellous man with
concertina and all Cannes dancing in Marie Antoinette humours at
your little restaurant. Found ever so many small cheap but charming
places with lovely sand beaches for the children (needless to say the
real object of his pilgrimage!) Thinks he hears a porker sizzling.
Silly fellow, if he had been on such an expedition would he have
telegraphed you from the rendez-vous? He may be wicked but he is
not such a mutt as that. That place was lovely but I think better still
Cavalaire which is nearer to St Tropez and has the same sand beach.
Of course would never do it before, as had never had his fill of rest,

Cimmie in Russia 165

immobility and fun — a few days after return to Cannes however had
more than enough — very hectic and most of nice people went —
further in-solitude-Byron feature plus a speedboat.

What a clever mutt to swim the Hellespont — big and proud Byron
mutton! [drawing of sheep swimming]. Sorry, good resolution,
never make jokes. Kiss nose. Or pat bottom [drawing of a bottom
with a caption ‘verboten’}. And he is lapsing already (but he loves her
so much). Thought her letter did not go very far to meet his sweet
and sympathetic gestures. So glad however she is having a lovely time
and do hope it will last to the end.

Just been alone to see a flying film The Dawn Patrol — vest yet —
overdrawn in personal things but wonderful flying pictures — very
reminiscent — moved and depressed. Seen only serious people in
London and been mostly alone — rang up no one of friends — but
expect have little tiny bit of various fun in Paris — where he wishes
his Mutt was because he misses and loves her so. Resolved to be the
perfect husband. She is not to be such a Porker and roarer because
she can be sweetest one in world whom he loves. [Drawing of rather
wild-looking sheep or pig with the caption “The Corsair between
Cannes and Toulon!!!!’]

In Moscow Cimmie and Zita were taken to some show-piece prison in
the company of other political tourists. Zita reported — “The Head of
the Reformatory was more than charming and seemed to be an angel
of goodness with an immense paternal love and kindness for all his
prisoners ... he explained Russia’s theories about prison and punish-
ment. He said that their idea was that crime was due almost entirely to
environment, and that therefore all they needed was to remove the
criminal and place him in another position.” However she did add
‘Really I suppose they were completely under control.’

Cimmie, worrying about Tom, must have wondered, having re-
ceived his letter, about the ways in which politicians use words with little
regard for truth. But then, with politicians, what does one do for truth?
There was no way of Cimmie knowing with whom, if anyone, Tom
had been in the South of France: he had almost certainly been with
someone. But then, there were his usual protestations of love. Cimmie
seemed to be stuck — as perhaps some Russians might have been feeling
stuck — with this endless, vaguely persuasive, duplicity of words.
Cimmie had written to Tom from Kharkov — “Oh I wonder when I will
become any better about you: you have me tied up in one of those knots
well nigh impossible to undo.’

166 Rules of the Game

Back in London Tom was preparing for the Labour Party Con-
ference; which was to be his last conventional platform of appeal to
people to listen to the logic of his words.

CHAPTER 17

The Mosley Manifesto

In one of his letters of the summer Bob Boothby had set out what he
believed to be the alternatives facing Tom — ‘(1) Staying where you are,
consolidating and strengthening your hold on the Labour movement in
the country and persuading the workers that they will not always be
betrayed; or (2) making another speech or two along recent lines and
crossing the floor in the autumn. You would be amazed at the welcome
you would get.’ He had added — “The former is the long term policy
and involves a further bleak period in the wilderness: (2) assures power
at an early date, but power limited by the Tory machine, and the
knowledge that you can’t change again.’

Bob Boothby believed that the Labour government was coming to
an end because of its failure to deal with unemployment; that the Tories
would soon get in with a huge majority. Liberals would be of no
account. “IT'wo machines, and two only, right and left, will wield
political power in this country in the years that lie ahead.’ He assured
Tom that, if he stayed within the fold of either of the party machines,
‘T have not the slightest doubt that you would win through in the end’.

Tom’s chance to get a hold on the Labour Party machine occurred
at the party conference at Llandudno in October 1930. During the
summer his prestige amongst party workers does not seem to have
weakened: his stand appearing as the ‘honest man’ was bearing fruit. He
had had copies of his Memorandum printed and sent to local Labour
parties with the request that they should consider it and give their
Opinions on it at the Party Conference: this of course did not make him
popular with party leaders. Professional Labour politicians have the
gang-solidarity of people accustomed to fight as underdogs; they are
particularly susceptible to feelings of betrayal.

At the conference Ramsay MacDonald ‘made a wonderful speech: he

168 Rules of the Game

said nothing whatever, but he said it so eloquently that the delegates
were deeply moved’ (John Scanlon). Then Tom spoke: he could match
MacDonald for eloquence: he also had a policy which delegates could
think they might fight for — or die for. In his peroration Tom told those
who might follow him — ‘at best they would have their majority; at
worst they would go down fighting for the things they believed in: they
would not die like an old woman in bed: they would die like men on
the field — a better fate and, in politics, one with a more certain hope
of resurrection.’

A journalist in the Sunday Graphic wrote — “There was stillness save
for Mosley’s voice gathering in power. Boldly, challengingly, he gave
his own plan to restore stability ... The throng was hypnotised by the
man, by his audacity, as bang! bang! bang! he thundered directions. The
thing that got hold of the conference was that here was a man with a
straight-cut policy. It leapt at him.’

Fenner Brockway reported that Tom got ‘the greatest ovation he had
ever heard at a party conference’. Tom was compared by one com-
mentator to Hitler; by another to Moses. There was a vote taken on a
resolution that the Memorandum should be submitted again for con-
sideration by the National Executive Committee. Tom’s supporters lost
the vote by the narrow margin of 1,046,000 to 1,251,000 — the miners
having at the last minute transferred their block vote away from Tom
against the advice of their leader A. J. Cook. (There was a story that
Cook himself had got held up in a taxi or he might have swayed the
vote: there seems no hard evidence for this). But it did not seem to
people in the hall that the vote much mattered anyway. The vote had
been to do with a technical matter of loyalties: in emotion, party
workers were overwhelmingly behind Tom. He was elected to the
National Executive of the party: J. H. Thomas lost his seat on it. John
Scanlon wrote:

In the Press and the Labour Movement itself the discussion now
centred round the question of how long it would be before Sir
Oswald became the party leader. Even without a crash in the Party’s
fortunes it was easy to see that changes must come soon. The con-
trollers of the Labour Party, mostly old men, could not stay the
inexorable march of time any more than ordinary mortals. No other
leader was in sight. Mr Wheatley was gone. Mr Maxton had none
of the pushful qualities which carry a man to leadership in Labour
politics, and nobody in the trade unions showed the slightest sign of
being able to take charge. Therefore every prophet fixed on Sir

The Mosley Manifesto 169

Oswald as the next party leader. Even Socialists, who had no par-
ticular love for Sir Oswald, were saying nothing could stop it. All
the prophets, however, had overlooked the one man who could stop
it — Sir Oswald himself.

Tom himself used to say he might soon have become de facto party
leader under the nominal leadership of Arthur Henderson. But in order
to do this he would have had to work in with the party machine; to
humour it, tinker with it, play the political game. His refusal to do this
was made partly on an intellectual assessment — he believed that it was
the mechanisms of bureaucratic party politics that prevented anything
decisive being done — but it was also an emotional decision: he had no
natural taste, nor aptitude, for the painstaking and boring manoeuvr-
ings of committees. What he liked, and was good at, was the manipula-
tion of crowds by his oratory and of individuals by his reasoning and
charm. After the Llandudno conference it was these talents that he
wanted to exercise: he probably had little clear idea, at first, of where
the results might lead.

He was perfecting his style as a mob orator — that strange music by
which crowds are swayed like snakes. He would declaim — ‘We are a
party with our eyes on the stars, but let us also remember that our feet
are planted firmly in the earth, on muddy soil, where men are suffering
and looking at us with eyes of questioning and anguish saying “Lift us
up from the mud! give us practical remedies here and now!”’’ For
practical remedies he was returning with renewed vigour to the matter
of trying to form political alliances in London. In his thinking he was
putting more and more emphasis on a policy of protecting and control-
ling trade with empire countries: this was indeed ensuring the interest
of the Tories: Stanley Baldwin remarked that Tom was ‘now producing
ideas which I remember giving voice to in 1903’. But Tom’s feelings
did not change that if ever he was to do anything decisive in politics he
would have to lead an alliance of his own. And in fact there seemed to
be more potential rebels in the Labour than in the Conservative Party.

In December 1930 a short four-page Manifesto appeared entitled A
National Policy for National Emergency. It was signed by seventeen Labour
MP’s: amongst them Aneurin Bevan, John Strachey, W. J. Brown, and
the two Mosleys — and A. J. Cook, the miners’ leader. It became known
as The Mosley Manifesto (as distinct from the Mosley Memorandum of
earlier in the year): it was obviously dedicated to Tom’s ideas, though
it was written mainly by Strachey and Brown and Bevan. It’s main
recommendation was that ‘an Emergency Cabinet of not more than five

170 Rules of the Game

ministers without portfolios’ should be set up and ‘invested with power
to carry through the emergency policy’. The emergency was that the
unemployed had now increased to two and a half million: the policy
was that ‘we should aim at building within the Commonwealth a
civilisation high enough to absorb the production of modern machinery
which for the purpose must be insulated from wrecking forces in the
rest of the world’. This policy was necessary, it was claimed, because
there was no other way that either conservatism or socialism would not
be at the mercy of the whims of what Tom later called ‘international
finance’. Nearly all the signatories were young labour MP’s in their first
Parliament: they had not had time to feel themselves dependent on
Parliamentary institutions. It was difficult for older MPs to be sym-
pathetic towards the Manifesto because it was contemptuous of existing
institutions. Also for orthodox conservatives it was too socialistic and
for orthodox socialists too imperialistic. The manifesto got much
publicity: but discussion was apt to descend to the level of jokes about
who would be the five ‘dictators’. All this confirmed Tom in his belief
that if anything was to be done he would have to lead some new political
alignment.

All this was according to reason: there remained the practical politics.
Tom saw that if he was to make anything of his ‘New Labour Group’
(as those who agreed with the Manifesto had come to be called) then
he would have to equip it with a specific organisation and with funds:
this would require publicity: at the same time too much publicity might
alarm people, before the funds and embryonic organisation were there.
Tom was on a political tight-rope. Allan Young, Tom’s political sec-
retary, wrote to Cimmie — ‘I am more content now to accept Tom’s
leadership than ever before. He is made for the job that has to be done
... He has displayed all the qualities of intellectual courage and ability,
combined with the caution great actions demand.’

Tom had for some time been making soundings about whether it
might be possible to gain backing for his proposals from industrialists
or from financiers in the City — and for any organisation committed to
putting the proposals into effect. He had had one or two meetings with
William Morris, later Lord Nuffield, who had become interested in the
Mosley Manifesto. In January 1931 Morris sent for Tom and handed him
a cheque for £50,000 with the remark ‘Don’t think, my boy, that
money like this grows on gooseberry bushes.’ This was a fateful moment
for Tom. He thought that other money would follow. He felt that it not
only made possible, but was a portent for now putting into effect, his
plans for starting his own movement.

The Mosley Manifesto 171

Bob Boothby uttered his last precise cry of warning and lament.

Jan 30th 1931 Carlton Club
Pall Mall SW1
Dear Tom,
... Since you wrote and told me that you proposed to play your hand
in your own way I never sought to enquire what you were doing.
But I imagined you were devoting yourself to the task of building
up and consolidating your position in the Labour movement.

If it be true that you are trying to raise money in the City then I
feel I must say once more — and for the last time — that I believe this
to be madness from your own point of view; and leave it at that.

I became uneasy from the first moment the word ‘cash’ was
mentioned, because I never thought it could be raised except under
more or less false pretences: and I don’t believe that money, even in
large quantities, can ever start a new political movement in this
country (witness the fate of L.G., the Empire Crusade, and your own
effort years ago with Cowdray).

You will remember that I left the dinner party given by Col. Portal
at the Garrick Club because I so heartily disapproved of it.

You are, of course, right to pursue the course you think best.

But I too am entitled to my opinions which in this case are very
decided.

Last night I turned up some notes that I made of the letters which
I wrote to you during the course of last year.

I find that you have persistently disregarded every single piece of
advice or suggestion that I have ever ventured to offer.

And so, my dear Tom, I cannot feel that you will greatly miss the
benefit of a judgement which you obviously do not value highly.
What I most sincerely hope is that neither you nor Cimmie will allow
our political differences to interfere with a friendship which I think
we all do value a good deal and which has survived sterner tests than
this.

Yours ever

Bob

Events now happened fast. 1931 was the year which Arnold Toynbee
called ‘annus terribilis’ in which ‘men and women all over the world
were seriously contemplating and seriously discussing the possibility
that the Western system of society might break down and cease to
work’. In January there were five million unemployed in Germany,

172 Rules of the Game

between six and seven million in the USA, and two and a half million
in Great Britain. Old political alignments were in any event cracking
up. It so happened that the height of Tom’s reputation and belief in
himself as an almost magically potent political figure coincided exactly
with the moment of twentieth-century history at which it was felt that
in the face of almost certain chaos new and indeed almost magical
leadership was called for. For once, Tom’s natural impatience seemed
undeniably suited to events. On February 4th Cimmie told Harold
Nicolson that “Tom is about to form a New Party’. On 2oth February
six members of the ‘New Labour Group’ who had signed the Mosley
Manifesto decided to resign from the labour Party: these were Tom and
Cimmie, John Strachey, W. J. Brown, Oliver Baldwin and Robert
Forgan. This was the decisive moment in Tom’s political life. All his
political manoeuvrings up till now had been, however arrogantly or
recklessly, still within the terms of some recognised political game: even
his resignation from the government, his narrow defeat at the Party
Conference, had in fact seemed to enhance his prestige. But if he
resigned from the Labour Party itself (he had already resigned from the
Conservatives) and formed his own party, he would be putting himself
outside any known game.

It was agreed that the six MPs who were to resign should do so on
different days to ensure the maximum publicity. Strachey and Baldwin
resigned; and then Cimmie, on March 3rd. Ramsay MacDonald replied
to her letter:

sth March 1931 10 Downing Street.
Whitehall.
My dear Lady Cynthia,

I have to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 3rd instant,
resigning your membership of the Labour Party. Had it not been
announced days ago in the newspapers, I should have been surprised,
but I am interested to be put in possession of your considered reasons
for the step which you have taken. Needless to say I am very sorry.

When you came in a year or two ago we gave you a very hearty
welcome and assumed that you knew what was the policy of the
predominant Socialist Party in this country, and that, with that
knowledge, you asked us to accept you as a candidate and to go to
your constituency and assist you in your fight. You are disappointed
with us; you have been mistaken in your choice of political com-
panions, and you are re-selecting them so as to surround yourself with
a sturdier, more courageous and more intelligent Socialism for your

The Mosley Manifesto 173

encouragement and strength. You remain true, while all the rest of
us are false. Whoever examines manifestos and schemes and rejects
them, partly because they are not the sort of Socialism that any
Socialist has ever devised, or because they amount to nothing but
words, is regarded by you as inept or incompetent. We must just
tolerate your censure and even contempt; and, in the spare moments
we have, cast occasional glances at you pursuing your heroic role with
exemplary rectitude and stiff straightness to a disastrous futility and
an empty sound. We have experienced so much of this in the building
up of the Party that we must not become too cynical when the
experience is repeated in the new phase of its existence. Perhaps before
the end, roads may cross again and we shall wonder why we ever
diverged.
Yours very sincerely,
J. Ramsay MacDonald

P.S. This is not an official reply, as am waiting for all the resignations
to be in before I decide whether to publish anything, so I mark it as
a purely personal communication which is not to be published.

Cimmie also received a letter from the chairman of her constituency
committee, who told her — ‘Whilst I have always felt you were sincere
in your desire to improve the lot of the people, I think your secession
from the Labour Party is a bad let-down for all those who worked so
wholeheartedly for you in your contest.’

Tom, in the middle of all this, suddenly became ill: he retired to bed
in his flat in Ebury Street with pleurisy and double pneumonia. W. J.
Brown was also stricken: just before it was his turn to resign, the trades-
union that employed him, the Civil Service Clerical Association,
threatened to sack him; he got cold feet. Tom got himself driven to
Brown’s house in an ambulance and was carried in on a stretcher. There,
Tom wrote later of Brown — ‘his face seemed to be pulled down on one
side like a man suffering a stroke and he burst into tears ... The very
few men in whom previously I had observed this phenomenon had
likewise usually rather emphasised their determination and courage
before they found themselves averse to getting out of a trench when the
time came.” Tom had himself carried back to his ambulance. He himself
never resigned from the Labour Party: on March roth when the news
of the New Party had become official, he was expelled for ‘gross
disloyalty’.

Tom’s illness lasted four weeks. He lay in bed in his flat in Ebury
Street — where the warm air at the press of a switch might waft over

174 Rules of the Game

him — and he ruminated, presumably, on what he had done. He had in
his mind accused W. J. Brown of cowardice: he himself had seemed
brave to a point of recklessness. But still, it was now Cimmie and John
Strachey who were left to launch the New Party in the planned pro-
gramme of speeches round the country. Tom had had faith in his role
as hero: but there was evidence, as there had been before, that accidents
happen to heroes at decisive moments of their histories; that it is more
than will-power that decides who, and in what in what way, in fact gets
out of a trench when the time comes.

CHAPTER 18

The Riddle of the Sphinx

The word ‘hero’ may seem ambiguous in relation to Tom. In common
use it refers to someone of slightly superhuman qualities: it also has the
suggestion of tragedy or death, or of someone who never quite grows
up.

Tom had probably not set out to put himself beyond the rules of the
political game, but there seems to have been something in him that
would inevitably have done this. Heroes are fought or followed because
of an air of inevitability about them: they achieve what is set out for
them not by will, but by becoming legendary.

The next two years were the central ones in Tom’s life and the last
in Cimmie’s. Tom did almost seem to be (as other ‘heroes’ have said of
themselves) sleepwalking. He is remembered at this time as someone
whom people ‘fawned on’: he continued to be attacked with violence:
he also was increasingly ignored. People did not seem quite to know
what attitude to take to him. It was as if a guerrilla fighter had appeared
on a football field.

At the end of his life Tom was like Oedipus at Colonus — “beyond
the pale’ in the sense of his seeming to have broken some fundamental
rule which had rendered him taboo. The taboo was not on account of
his having made a mistake or chosen evil: it was the penalty for some
falseness attendant on possible success. Oedipus, in the myth, becomes
an outcast not just because he has murdered his father and married his
mother: he has assumed a false mantle of omnipotence, having solved
the riddle of the Sphinx.

In the legend, after having unknowingly killed his father on the road
to Thebes, Oedipus is challenged by the mythical monster the Sphinx.
The Sphinx is part woman and part lion and part bird: she is that which
devours people who travel hopefully: she is laying siege to the city of

176 Rules of the Game

Thebes, whose citizens are starving. The Sphinx will not let anyone pass
unless they answer a riddle. The riddle is childish: it seems that anyone
might answer it, but they do not.

The riddle is — What has four legs in the morning, two in the
afternoon, and three in the evening. Oedipus answers the riddle — a man.
Whereupon the Sphinx, instead of devouring him, throws herself over
a cliff. Oedipus goes on his way and becomes the saviour of the city of
Thebes.

What Oedipus saw in the solving of the riddle was that the Sphinx
was playing a game with words: in two instances the word ‘legs’ is a
metaphor; in one it is not: the words referring to time are all metaphors.
The riddle was a riddle because in it metaphors and direct reference are
mixed. To solve it, someone had to have the power to discriminate
between the two.

- The people who had not been able to solve the riddle had not been
accustomed to see what is a metaphor and what is not: they used words
in such a way that they did not question how they used them. So they
were trapped by words: they could not break out. And Thebes was
starving.

Oedipus had the power of discrimination: he could stand back frcem
words: he could see some words are metaphors and others are not. He
lifted the curse from the city of Thebes. But he was left with a false
impression of omnipotence.

In the myth, he was crowned King of Thebes: he married Queen
Jocasta. But then another curse came down — perhaps even worse than
the first. There was a plague attendant on the city being ruled by
someone who seemed to have magical powers; who had also, although
unwittingly, and although people did not see this at the time, murdered
his father and married his mother. Oedipus had solved the riddle of the
Sphinx: what he had not solved — in fact what he had landed himself
with — was the problem of someone who, when he has power over
words, thinks he has power over himself and over reality.

Oedipus learned that he had overreached himself: he had solved a
riddle about what were and were not games: he had thought that thus
he could control reality. But in fact he had become trapped uncon-
sciously at a deeper level: people cannot get away, ultimately, from the
power of the rules of games. He had murdered his father and married
his mother: this was a curse within himself; he might have had the wit
to see it, if he had not been so carried away by his feelings of omni-
potence.

A power to see what is games-playing and what is not is only a first

The Riddle of the Sphinx 177

step in coming to terms with reality. There is the further step, perhaps
made possible by the first, which is to do not with the illusion that one
is above the rules of games but with seeing the new patterns and even
rules that are opened up by the fact that one can see patterns.

There are superficial parallels between the stories of Oedipus and of
Tom: these are not the most interesting. Tom was the son of a bullying
father whom he hardly saw and by whom he was rejected and of an
adored and adoring mother who called him her ‘man-child’. All this
indeed when he was a child might have given him feelings of omni-
potence: he could play upon his mother who seemed to be his world;
there was no father to instil in him knowledge of limits imposed by
morals and tradition. With such a background, a child might well have
contempt for the rules of games.

What is of deeper interest is the way in which Tom seems to have
come mythically towards his city of Thebes in which people were
starving. In England, the plague was unemployment: there was some
riddle that could not be solved not because a solution was too difficult,
but because it was outside the usual terms of people’s minds. Of course
unemployment could be solved: a leader could say — You will be
employed in this way or that or you will be shot. Most people did not
think of this solution because it did not seem relevant: it might work,
but they assumed it would be worse than the curse. But they could not
quite say this, because it would seem they were not interested in solving
unemployment — which they were. And so they said nothing. And they
were devoured. And the city starved. The riddle was not solved not
because it was too difficult, but because it was too undesirably easy. But
what was also unpalatable was the fact that in that case perhaps the only
solution was that there was no solution — one had to learn how to live
with the curse.

Tom came along with his impressions of omnipotence and said — Of
course you cannot solve the riddle if you stick to your customary
attitudes of mind; but outside these, the solution is quite simple. The fact
that you do not want to consider it means that not solving the riddle
is in fact your game: you talk and do nothing about it. If you did, your
game would be over: but this is your plague. If you want to cure
unemployment then you have to pay the price: if you do not want to
pay the price then you do not want to cure unemployment. This is a
matter of logic: words refer to reality. If you really want to cure
unemployment, then follow me. But you must step out of the rules of
the game.

But then, Tom was trapped by the forces of a game on a deeper level,

178 Rules of the Game

of which he was unconscious. He felt that he could order the world as
he ordered words. But he could not step back from himself; as he had
stepped back from words, and see what was the nature of human beings
—in what ways they might need games-playing, even if there were ways
they might not. He could not do this because he could not see what were
needs, and helplessnesses, as opposed to powers, within himself.

Oedipus is forced to see that however clever he has been with his
power and with his words, he has not been clever with himself — he has
not been clever enough to see the riddles that he has been landed with
by his own nature and his own history — not to solve them, because
perhaps they are insoluble — but just to see them and learn to live with
them. He has simply been clever enough, in fact, to think he can ignore
all this; and so his power turns to ashes. At the illuminating crisis of his
life he blinds himself; as if in some recognition of his failure to see. This
does not mean that he is not a legendary hero. People are legends just
because they can give light to others: they can still alter the way people
think.

Tom, as he lay on his bed in Ebury Street plagued with fever, must
have had some archetypal dreams and visions about all this. He had seen
how much of what politicians said was rubbish: how everyone knew
it was rubbish but carried on as if they did not know this: thus they
suffered from plague. If you pointed this out to them their minds seemed
to go blank: it was as if they were at home in the plague. Tom thought
he could free them by discrimination, by reason; but then what was he
freeing them into? On some level Tom must have known (or when
people faced him with this did his mind go blank?) that you cannot have
politics without paradoxes, riddles: there are always enigmas about
authority and freedom: this is just what the business of power is like.
It cannot be helped if it is like a plague from time to time: if you think
you can do away with paradoxes, you bring down a worse curse. In the
activities of power you are dealing with other people: if other people
are to be respected then there have to be rules of games: if there are not,
then other people are not respected. If you do want to respect people
the highest emphasis cannot be on ‘losing’ or ‘winning’: losing is a lesser
disaster than that of destroying the game. You only want to destroy the
game if your feelings of omnipotence give you contempt for other
people.

Tom claimed that he was involved in no game: that he could order
reality. With this confidence he both did and did not deceive other
people: he made them feel at moments it might be true. A more
interesting question is, how much he deceived himself.

The Riddle of the Sphinx 179

In his relationship with Cimmie he had always been ruthless with
words: he used them without much relevance to what they might mean.
He manipulated tenderness in order to keep her: he used rages in order
to get away. But also, the tenderness and the rages happened naturally:
his manipulations were efforts to make the best of what was there. All
this involved some ability to stand back from the forces that were
driving him: if he could use them, he was not quite at their mercy. What
he lacked perhaps was an ability consciously to see himself doing this
~ and to see where his ability to manipulate might lead him. In fact, he
was involved in some circle in that the more he succeeded the more he
failed — his endearments placated Cimmie but made her not trust him:
in the end he did not keep her and was desolate when he failed. He might
have learned something of all this if he had not himself been so involved
in the game of saying that in public life he was not games-playing.

Once or twice during the next two years Tom does seem to have
thought about giving up politics — at least for a time. He said he wanted
to relax; to think. If he had, what he might have learned was that the
most successful way of dealing with riddles and paradoxes is perhaps to
enjoy them; to savour them; not to dream that they are not there or can
be eliminated. Then, perhaps, one can accept what is possible and what
is not. Tom had an instinct about this in his private life: but people are
victims of their talents — and circumstances. In public life he had
enormous talent for histrionics; and this was a time when people were
seizing on people like Tom and offering them power — or at least
acclaim. It was in public life that he became a victim.

Cimmie was the one person who might have influenced him in all
this — to learn something about himself. But Cimmie, in spite of
glimpses every now and then of their both being taken over by forces
stronger than themselves, herself was trapped by circumstances and her
nature — not so much by the usual traps of class or money, as by the
additional facets of her background which had made her believe that she
was someone exceptional and thus too proud to believe for long in forces
stronger than herself. Cimmie had realised she was apt to see Tom as
a saint or a devil: a hero or a baby: that so long as she saw him thus he
could make use of her: perhaps she wanted to be so used. But neither
Tom nor Cimmie seemed to want to learn to treat the other as an
ordinary human being. With Tom there was the baby-talk: with
Cimmie the appreciation of this because thus she might feel he was her
baby. If she challenged him he might become raging and dash off: but
then in need, he might return to her. In a marriage a husband and wife
either hold a mirror up to each other so that they can see themselves (this

180 Rules of the Game

is rare) or each provide food for the other’s fantasies. Tom perhaps felt
safe through his power to hurt Cimmie: Cimmie in turn could say,
almost cheerfully, ‘I could die for you’ or ‘I could kill you’. She
sometimes saw the irony of this and could say — ‘What a farce!’ But for
all her life-giving qualities she had less and less enjoyment from the farce.
She did not so often see things as she said she wanted to see them — as
‘fun’.

Tom, with part of him, always did manage to see things as ‘fun’: he
had an enormous zest for life; a talent for enjoyment. This is what made
him personally, in spite of the distaste often engendered by his politics,
sO attractive to people — and a survivor. People loved to be with him:
it was on this level that his life succeeded: he did become a happy old
man; a legend. He could not of course easily accept this as his fate: part
of his legend was, that politics were the whole of life to him. In some
way it was probably his zest for life — even his sexual drives — that helped
to render him politically ineffectual: politics are a boring game, re-
quiring that other people should feel safe in one’s presence. Tom, with
the cutting-edge of his personality, seemed often to be almost know-
ingly self-destructive. But then — might he not in truth have wanted to
become a legend — thus embracing the paradoxes he said he wanted to
deny?

When Tom talked about wholeness or ‘Ganzheit’ this was for him
not a matter of conscious integration but of balancing bits of his life at
opposite ends of a pole as it were, while he stayed on a tightrope. Much
of his contempt, his vituperation, was channelled into his politics: here
he had no patience, no forbearance: he loved a fight. But then in private
life there was room for open-mindedness, wit, laughing at himself,
hilarity. People used to feel what marvellous company he was. He also,
of course — again perhaps because of his sexual drives — hurt them.

One of his favourite quotations were the lines from Goethe’s Faust
where Faust makes his bargain with the devil — if the devil can show
him a moment of such delight that he, Faust, will cry out for time to
stop, then he, the devil, can claim Faust for his own. Tom would roll
out this quotation at the dinner table like someone making a strike at
skittles. He loved the sound of this; though he felt perhaps that he himself
would be too hard-headed to utter Faust’s cry: he might have hoped
both to get the moment, and to trick the devil.

Cimmie did not want trickery: did not want balancing acts: she
wanted wholeness in the sense of being all-of-a-piece and without guile.
At least, she thought this was what she wanted. She made resolutions:
she struggled: but then, when the resolutions failed, she did not learn:

The Riddle of the Sphinx 181

she just made them, and the same mistakes, again. This wore away her
faith in Tom: but why did she have this faith? From the first, she seems
to have known what he was like. It was just his complexity, perhaps,
that she had come to feel might contain her; that would give her
simplicity something grand that she might attach herself to. She had
written as a schoolgirl of her feeling of the necessity of a ‘Big Solemn
Comprehensive Idea’. And perhaps Tom had needed her simplicity to
give him a thread through the maze of life. But then, he also now used
her like some of his skittles to be knocked down. And then he could
come for forgiveness and be comforted again. And she would feel
reassured. This was their game. By staying in it, Cimmie in some sense
colluded. But she got tired. Perhaps it is always a matter of luck how
people do, or do not, get out.

In politics, Tom went on thinking that if you put a rational case to
people you had done your job: they either followed or they did not.
There was a real sense in which Tom was not interested in power — ‘he
was a complete professional in everything except the winning of power’
(Robert Skidelsky). It was this that rendered him powerless, but also
established the legend: in the circumstances this was actually a virtue.
Beatrice Webb wrote of him ‘He lacks genuine fanaticism: I doubt
whether he has the tenacity of a Hitler’. At a slightly later date than the
time to do with this book Tom wrote a letter to Lord Beaverbrook in
which he himself said, in effect, that Britain was fortunate in having a
fascist leader such as himself because another leader might have been
more ruthlessly and successfully interested in power. Tom was capable
of such irony: though not often, it is true, in politics. Trotsky, in his
diary-entry about Cimmie, had called Tom a coxcomb; but there 1s
something in Trotsky’s history and character that is similar to Tom’s:
both men turned away, at crucial moments, from their chance to
exercise power; they did this because they had some instinct about their
ideals — or about their legends. Trotsky in his autobiography said the
reason why he did not make a serious bid for power in Russia after
Lenin’s death was because he could not face the boring and squalid day-
to-day procedures necessary for power: he too became ill (he got cold
feet, literally, while duck shooting).

If Tom could not laugh at himself in public it was because he had put
himself up on a stage and you cannot laugh at yourself on a stage or you
destroy the illusion. Laughter is a sort of safety-valve which stops energy
running away with itself: there is inevitably something self-destructive
about people who cannot laugh. But legends are often to do with people
who risk being self-destructive. Tom had a chance of power at a time

182 Rules of the Game

when ideas and policies such as his were succeeding extravagantly in
other parts of the world: these policies, and ideas, destroyed themselves
at an enormous cost of human suffering. Tom never got off the ground
as it were in the matter of causing much political human suffering: he
had the private wit to see that his destructiveness remained largely
symbolic.

Cimmie, like Tom, imagined she wanted outward life to be orderly:
she did not have his sense of curiosity when it was not. She felt
passionately: but she feared a lack within her: she blamed it on her
relationship with Tom. She said that she could not change unless he
changed: but it was not he who felt there had to be change to survive.

Neither Cimmie nor Tom had religion: Tom had faith in himself:
Cimmie had faith in Tom. Then when she lost it, she seemed to have
nothing. They both, in the way they saw things, thought that life should
respond to their will: they both saw death as some sort of let-out. But
Tom, knowing the complexities of things, was using a metaphor when
he talked about ‘going down fighting’. Cimmie did not see life as a
metaphor: perhaps, if she could not find faith in herself, she felt death
as a condition in which humans might at last be all all-of-a-piece.

%
&

The family bathing at Savehay Farm

Cimmie’s victory at Stoke, 1929 Ramsay MacDonald writing the
Labour Party manifesto in the
loggia at Savehay Farm, 1929

Tom fencing Nicholas catching tiddlers

At Savehay Farm, 1930: Nicholas, Vivien, W.E.D. Allen and
child, WJ. Brown, Countess Karoli, Aneurin Bevan; (right) Tom
with Harold Macmillan

*

Venice, 1932: Cimmie, Tom Mitford, Doris
Castlerosse, Diana Guinness, Tom

ae ze -

Last picture of Cimmie with her children; in the Rose Garden, May 1933

CHAPTER 19

The New Party

The New Party, which Tom started in March 1931, lasted for less than
a year. It did not attract the number of people Tom had hoped for,
and it failed dramatically and almost ridiculously: but the people most
concerned did not seem to mind its failure, they appeared to see it as
some sort of clearing-ground from which they could move on.

While Tom lay ill with pleurisy it was left to Cimmie and John
Strachey and Oliver Baldwin (who in fact called himself an Indepen-
dent) to launch the New Party: they undertook the speaking tour round
the country which had been arranged for Tom. The Manchester Guardian
commented ‘Lady Cynthia contributes intensity, Mr Strachey states the
case, and Mr Oliver Baldwin provides comic relief’. The ‘case’ was that
set out in the Mosley Manifesto of a few months earlier: it was elaborated
in yet another pamphlet under the signatures of Allan Young, John
Strachey, W.J. Brown and Aneurin Bevan. The latter allowed his name
to remain on the pamphlet although he had not resigned from the
Labour Party. The pamphlet, entitled ‘A National Policy’, went into
greater detail about the administrative machinery it advocated for
putting its policy (or indeed any policy) into effect.

In general Parliament must be relieved of detail. Its essential function
must be to place in power an Executive Government of the character
to be decided upon by the nation at the last election; to maintain it
in power until and unless it commits some action which in the opinion
of Parliament is deserving of censure; in that event to turn it out by
way of direct Vote of Censure and appeal to the Electorate...

It is essential that a small inner Cabinet Committee consisting of
five or six men should be formed... This proposal has been described
as an attempt to set up five Dictators. No accusation could be more

184 Rules of the Game

inept. There is nothing either more or less democratic about entrust-
ing the ultimate responsibility for the decision of the Government to
a Cabinet of five men who are free from all other work than entrust-
ing them as at present to a Cabinet of twenty men who are too busy
to give real consideration to their most vitally important decisions...

Broadly we say to the Electorate: Choose whatever Government
you like. But when you have chosen it, for heavens sake let it get on
with the job without being frustrated and baffled at every turn by
a legislative and administrative procedure designed for the express
purpose of preventing things being done...

Cimmie and John Strachey and Oliver Baldwin delivered this message
round the country: they attracted audiences of several thousands: but
they found that they were increasingly heckled, and that sometimes
their meetings were broken up by what appeared to be organised gangs
of Labour militants and Communists. The communist paper The Daily
Worker was in fact already referring to the New Party as ‘fascist’: the
militants were behaving with the special fury of people who feel they
have been betrayed by their old heroes. But the New Party, if it was
to get anywhere, depended on public meetings: it had little time to build
up an organisation that would be accepted to deal with the crisis.

Tom lay in bed with a temperature of a hundred and five. He wrote
to Harold Nicolson “The illness has been a strange blow of fate — the
first serious collapse of my life, and what a moment!’ At the end of
March he went with Cimmie to recuperate at Lord Beaverbrook’s villa
in the South of France. Also with them was his sister-in-law Baba, who
herself had been seriously ill after the birth of twins and had been
recuperating with Tom and Cimmie at Savehay Farm.

Up till now Tom had had the naive and presumably Marxist idea that
an appeal to reason could always if necessary be made over the heads
of a stupid Cabinet, a cowardly Parliamentary Labour Party and even
a hysterical Party Conference, to an enlightened proletariat who in some
way would be a fair judge. Marxists had to think this because if they
did not — knowing as they did their non-proletarian colleagues — what
hope was there for reason? But now if this belief was to go or be
rendered ineffectual — if really it was members of the proletariat who
were shouting down or allowing to be shouted down the reasonable
exposition of New Party policy — what was there left?

Tom had, perhaps, been preparing for something like this. He had
for long been perfecting his techniques as a mob orator: he seems
consciously to have faced questions about the limitations of rationality

The New Party 185

and the fact that the exercise of power is perhaps always to do with
manipulations of emotion. Rationality puts a burden on people by
asking them to think for themselves; it is apt to make them feel in-
adequate. The manipulation of emotion achieves some sort of power by
making people feel that they belong.

It was remarked that Tom was different when he emerged from his
sick bed: he was less patient; it was as if he had personally come to terms
with having stepped outside the rules of games. The first big test of the
New Party was to be at a by-election at Ashton-under-Lyne in Lanca-
shire on April 30th 1930. Allan Young was standing as the New Party
candidate. Tom had played no part in the run-up to the election: the
brunt of the day-to-day electioneering had been borne by Cimmnie. Jack
Jones, a left-wing orator hired by the New Party at five pounds a week,
wrote of Cimmie at the time:

Cynthia Mosley was both able and willing. With me she must have
addressed at least a score of very big outdoor crowds during the
campaign, and also scores of ‘in our street’ talks to women. Whilst
others in the first flight were looking important in the presence of
reporters, or talking about the holding of the floating Liberal vote,
the cornering of the Catholic vote, and preparing their speeches for
the well-stewarded big meetings indoors each evening, Cynthia
Mosley was out getting the few votes that were got.

Tom appeared on the scene six days before the election. His presence
had an electrifying effect. He addressed an indoor meeting of six or seven
thousand. Harold Nicolson reported:

Tom then gets up to make his speech and profits enormously by a
few interruptions from Labour supporters. He challenges Arthur
Henderson to meet him tomorrow in open debate and this stirs the
audience to enthusiasm and excitement. Having thus broken the ice,
he launches on an emotional oration on the lines that England is not
yet dead and that it is for the New Party to save her. He is certainly
an impassioned revivalist speaker, striding up and down the rather
frail platform with great panther steps and gesticulating with a
pointing, and occasionally a stabbing, index; with the result that there
was a real enthusiasm towards the end and one had the feeling that
90% of the audience were certainly convinced at the moment.

Harold Nicolson was a newcomer to politics. He had just resigned from

186 Rules of the Game

the diplomatic service and was working as a journalist on the Evening
Standard. He had been attracted to the New Party, he said, out of ‘(1)
Personal affection and belief in Tom: (2) A conviction that a serious crisis
was impending and that our economic and parliamentary system must
be transformed if collapse were to be avoided.’ He got carried along by
the sense that Tom engendered of being in touch with great events; also
by the sense of fun.

Another leading figure in the New Party was Peter Howard, captain
of the England Rugby Football team. Harold Nicolson wrote to
Cimmie ‘Peter Howard I have a feeling is bowled over by your charms
— but so are we all’. Peter Howard had organised a group of young men
from Oxford to protect New Party meetings: these were referred to in
the press as ‘Mosley’s Biff Boys’ or ‘strapping young men in plus fours’.
The emphasis of the New Party was on youth: a journalist wrote of the
party headquarters at Ashton-under-Lyne — ‘Young men with fine
foreheads and an expression of faith dash from room to room carrying
proof-sheets and manifestos: I have seldom seen so many young people
so excited and so pleased’.

When the election results were announced the Conservatives had got
12,420 votes, Labour 11,005, and Allan Young of the New Party 4,472
— just saving his deposit. This result was not discreditable to a party only
two months old but it was not as good as Tom had hoped: he found,
as he was so often to find later, that the enthusiasm he engendered as
a one-man-band did not effectively last until his audience went to the
poll. But it had lasted long enough, Labour supporters imagined, for the
intervention of the New Party to have ensured that the Conservatives
won what had previously been held to be a safe Labour seat. In fact, the
New Party’s intervention had probably somewhat lessened what was a
general swing against Labour throughout the country. But political
crowds want scapegoats, not analysis.

The crowd of Labour militants outside the Town Hall shouted for
vengeance. Tom, standing on the steps, turned to John Strachey and said
‘That is the crowd that has prevented anyone doing anything in England
since the war’. John Strachey commented — ‘At that moment British
Fascism was born: at that moment of passion, and of some personal
danger, Mosley found himself almost symbolically aligned against the
workers.’ Tom himself commented later that what he had meant was
that ‘dedicated agents and warriors of communism always play on the
anarchy inherent on the Left of Labour to secure confusion, disillusion
and ultimately the violence which is essential to their long term plan’.

In the Town Hall, Tom arranged for Cimmie to be smuggled out

The New Party 187

of a back door; then, in the face of the crowd which in Jack Jones’s words
‘had all the appearances of an American lynching crowd’, Tom — ‘white
with rage, not fear’ — led his small party through the mob ‘howling at
him and calling him names’. He ‘smiled contemptuously’ at them. Jack
Jones added — ‘An exciting experience it was.’ Tom, to Jack Jones’s
apparent surprise, seemed ‘almost cheerful’.

Through the summer discussions went on amongst the New Party
leaders — there was an Executive Committee that met almost daily in
offices in Great George Street — not so much about policy, as about what
was to be done about the difficulty of getting the policy heard. Labour
militants did not deny the attacks were organised: the hostility was not
discouraged by Tom’s old parliamentary colleagues: A. V. Alexander
referred to the ‘traitorous Mosley’; Emmanuel Shinwell to ‘Brutus ...
responsible for “‘the stiletto in the back’’.’ Young men who had come
fresh into the New Party wanted to build up a Youth Movement into
a force that would be trained to defend the speakers against physical
attack: John Strachey and others continued to be alarmed at this. They
agreed that it was right that meetings should be protected from
organised disruption, but they feared that a group of young men trained
in judo and boxing for this purpose would grow into a proto-fascist
defence force. Also they seemed to feel that demonstrations by workers,
however suspect, were in some way sacrosanct. But it was difficult to
see how one could have the protection without the discipline. The
activists seemed to have logic on their side: the intellectuals an instinct.

Everything depended of course on what sort of balance was struck
between the two; or rather what sort of skill Tom had in appearing to
control or to embrace the two. He announced that in the light of the
violence directed against Cimmie during her speaking tour earlier in the
year a body of young men would indeed be trained; but they would
‘rely on the good old English fist.’

During summer there were weekends at which the intellectuals
exercised their conundrums. In Hampstead, John Strachey, Harold
Nicolson and Cyril Joad debated - What happens to the New Party,
which is dedicated to dealing with a crisis, if the crisis does not come?
Harold Nicolson suggested that the party should continue with a pro-
gramme advocating ‘Sacrifice, Discipline, Service, Courage and Energy
of Thought’. Cyril Joad asked — ‘But how can we put over such a
programme?’ At Savehay Farm there was a congress at which John
Strachey delivered his ‘good old Marxian speech’ (Jack Jones); Tom
spoke ‘soulfully of the Corporate State of the future’ and ‘a young man
called Winckworth called for a revival of the Attic Spirit? which would

188 Rules of the Game

involve the New Party in attracting people with ‘the heads of thinkers
on the bodies of athletes’. Cyril Joad riposted ‘Be careful you don’t
attract people with the heads of athletes on the bodies of thinkers’. Tom
appreciated the wit: but he would have wished, as usual, to cut through
the riddles. During the Congress at Savehay Farm, Harold Nicolson
recorded — “The Youth Movement swam’.

In a speech at the Cannon Street Hotel, in London, on June 30th 1931,
Tom announced that his movement was trying to create ‘a new political
psychology, a conception of national renaissance, of new mankind and
of vigour’. John Strachey and Allan Young were in the audience: they
decided to make a positive show of their alarm. The next day Strachey
addressed a meeting of the Youth Movement and spoke against the idea
of any disciplined use of violence to counteract violence: a version of
his statement appeared in the Daily Herald. At the next meeting of the
New Party Executive Tom (according to Harold Nicolson) ‘reprimands
Strachey in terms which, if addressed to me, would have caused the most
acute embarrassment’. But Harold Nicolson went on — ‘I do not deny
that I was impressed by the force of discipline in Tom’s speech. It is quite
evident that he will allow no independence to any member of the party
and that he claims an almost autocratic position. I do not myself object
to this, since if we are to be the thin end of the wedge we must have
an extremely sharp point and no splinters. I wonder, however, how long
other members of the Council will tolerate such domination.’ And later
~— ‘I think that Tom at the bottom of his heart really wants a fascist
movement’.

One of the hopes that Tom was playing with at this time was that
he, and some of his party, might be able to join Churchill and Lloyd
George in making up a ‘National Opposition’ if, in the face of the
continuing economic crisis, a National Government was formed by
MacDonald and Baldwin. Tom drove to Archibald Sinclair’s house to
have talks with Lloyd George: on the way he told Harold Nicolson that
he thought that Allan Young and John Strachey would be soon leaving
the New Party: he said this with little regret. He called them the
‘pathological element’ — apparently because of their timidity in the face
of violence. (Tom used to tease John Strachey by telling him he was
‘governed by Marx from the waist up and Freud from the waist down.’)
Nothing much came of the talks with Lloyd George. Everyone on the
fringes of power seemed to be trying to charm everyone else, and to be
waiting to see what would happen. Perhaps no one, in the face of the
frightening prospects of 1931, really wanted power.

John Strachey then produced a memorandum in which he advocated

The New Party 189

making ‘a progressive break with that group of powers of which France
and the USA are leaders’ and entering into ‘close economic relations
with the Russian government’. This was a direct challenge to Tom, to
test his left-wing or right-wing commitment. There was also a dispute
in the New Party Executive about unemployment benefit: it seemed to
John Strachey and Allan Young that Tom was not taking a strong
enough stand against proposed government cuts. Tom made con-
cessions here: but he rejected Strachey’s pro-Russian proposals since
they ‘contradicted directly the whole basis of the policy we have long
agreed together’. Then John Strachey and Allan Young resigned.

They prepared a joint letter to be made public: but each wrote
privately to Tom.

July 22nd 1931 7 North Street.
Westminster.
Dear Tom,

I think you will agree that the differences between us which have
become apparent during recent meetings are too serious to be left
where they are. In fact they are really so wide as to make argument
impossible. It is quite clear to me that your whole outlook is be-
coming more and more Conservative: already you regard any other
outlook as ‘pathological’.

In these circumstances further collaboration between us would be
nothing but a handicap to both of us. So I send you my resignation
from the New Party and its Council.

I intend making this resignation public tomorrow unless you want
to talk about it first. If you do ring me up tomorrow morning at
North St (Vic 3681) But I don’t see what purpose will be served by
such a talk — and frankly I dread it. One can’t have worked as closely
with and for anyone as I have tried to work with and for you ever
since I came into politics, and not feel pretty smashed up by such a
separation.

We have obviously quite different conceptions of what the New
Party ought to be and of how it could succeed. Naturally it seems to
me that it is you who have changed. No doubt you feel that it is I who
have changed. What more is there to say? — except for me to thank
you very genuinely for all the kindness and I believe affection you
have shown me.

Yours
John

190 Rules of the Game

22nd July 1931 as from — 10 Brookland Rise
N.W. 11

Dear Tom,

... Since your illness and the Ashton bye-election there has been
a change in your whole attitude of mind which has disturbed me
more than I can say. Your semi-public and private statements with
regard to the Youth Movement, India, Unemployment Insurance,
Russia, and the general function and purpose of the New Party has
made me ashamed of my own association with it. Our difficulties in
launching the party were due to the doubts and suspicions of our
friends that you would succumb to the pressure and attraction of
right-wing views. I contested this strongly at the time — placing
reliance on your strength and judgement. Your attitude in the last two
months seems to have proved me wrong and the critics right. From
the beginning I have been aware of the dangers implicit in a move-
ment such as ours. These dangers could only have been avoided by
a leadership above suspicion as far as working~class interests were
concerned. You have not given us that leadership but rather have
provided grounds for the suspicion that the party would become
Hitlerist, Fascist, and ultimately anti-working class. I cannot be
associated with a party which is even open to that suspicion, and I now
tender you my resignation.

I will always remember with gratitude your kindness to me. But
I must pursue the course which my conscience and intelligence
dictates.

Yours,
Allan Young

Tom got in touch with Harold Nicolson who was working at the
Evening Standard and asked him to go round to see John Strachey and
Allan Young and to try to get them at least to postpone the public
announcement of their resignation which was to be made at six o’clock
that evening. Harold Nicolson did not manage to get in touch with
them till 5.30 — they were apparently in hiding — then he found them
in John Strachey’s house, where:

Allan Young descends to the dining room looking pale and on the
verge of a nervous breakdown. I say that Tom suggests that they
should not openly resign at the moment but ‘suspend’ their resigna-
tion till 1st December by which date they will be able to see whether
their suspicions of our fascism are in fact justified. Allan might have

The New Party I9I

accepted this, but at that moment John Strachey enters. Tremulous
and uncouth he sits down and I repeat my piece. He says that it would
be impossible for him to retain his name on a Party while taking no
part in that Party’s affairs ... He then begins, quivering with emotion,
to indicate some of the directions in which Tom has of late abandoned
the sacred cause of the workers. He says that ever since his illness he
has been a different man. His faith has left him. He is acquiring a Tory
mind. It is a reversion to type. He considers socialism a ‘pathological
condition’. John much dislikes being pathological. His great hirsute
hands twitch neurotically as he explained to us, with trembling voice,
how unpathological he really is.

Harold Nicolson failed to get them to withdraw or to postpone their
resignations. He commented — ‘Undoubtedly the defection of John and
his statement that we were turning fascist will do enormous electoral
harm to the party. Politically however it will place Tom in a position
where with greater ease he can adhere to Lloyd George and Winston.’

Tom, however, was now only going through the motions of playing
at party politics; he was dreaming more and more of the time when he,
as an effective leader, might be in direct relationship to the masses which
he was sure was the only way of getting anything done. Harold
Nicolson recorded — “Tom conceives of great mass meetings with loud
speakers — 50,000 people at a time’. For the organisation of them, the
Youth Movement would of course be vitally important. Tom drafted
a farewell note to Allan Young: ‘I want just to tell you how sorry I am
our association has ended. It has meant more to me than most things
in my life. As we go on the sorrow of things deepens’.

Harold Nicolson told Cyril Joad that he was staying on in the New
Party because ‘I felt it was the only party which gave to intelligence a
position above possessions or the thoughts of Karl Marx’. Cyril Joad said
he was leaving the party because it was about to ‘subordinate intelligence
to muscular bands of young men’.

At the end of July the government received the report of a committee
it had set up to advise on the economic situation: the main recom-
mendation was that unemployment benefit, already pitiful, should be
cut by twenty per cent. The New Party held a rally at Renishaw Park,
in Yorkshire, the home of the Sitwells, at which 40,000 people were
present. Tom declared ‘We invite you to something new, something
dangerous’. Then politicians went on holiday.

Tom and Cimmie went, as usual, to the South of France. They left
Harold Nicolson virtually in charge of the office at home. He was

192 Rules of the Game

making preparations for the New Party weekly newspaper, Action,
which was to be launched in the autumn and of which he was to be
editor. The New Party had based its appeal on being the party that
would be ready to deal with the crisis when it came: everyone agreed
it was coming and it would be the worst economic crisis for a hundred
years. Tom was all his life contemptuous of people who ‘even for the
few years at the height of their responsibilities cannot be serious’. But
the trouble was that however accurate had been his forecast of the crisis,
he had succeeded in putting himself in a position in which he had no
responsibility for dealing with it. Harold Nicolson wrote to him:

I recognise that people may say that at the gravest crisis in present
political history you prefer to remain upon the Mediterranean. On
the other hand, I do not see what you would do were you here at
this moment; and I feel that it is more dignified to be absent and aloof
than to be present and not consulted.

CHAPTER 20

Politics as Farce

The extraordinary position that Tom had got himself into — that of
preparing for a crisis by finding himself able to do nothing about it when
it came — was the result of two major assumptions: the first, that the old
parties would disintegrate in the face of the crisis so that it would be
better not to be tainted by their failures of responsibility; the second, that
he himself would be in charge of a party so patently free of the farcical
aspects of the old parties that people would soon turn to him and give
him responsibility.

The nature of the crisis had seemed to him to be simple: if the welfare
of every country in the world depended on its selling more than it
bought on an open world market, then in fact only those countries
would succeed which could sell the cheapest goods by paying the lowest
wages. It was out of the question for British workers to accept ever
lower wages: so there would be crisis. This might take the form of
bankruptcy or even of war — by which other countries’ economic
competitiveness might be broken. But for this sort of crisis too the old
parties were not equipped to deal: and in any case, any party led by Tom
would be dedicated to preventing war.

The success of a party run by Tom in dealing with a crisis would hinge
on a body of dedicated men who would run, without the supervision
of Parliament, the ‘closed’ economic area of Great Britain-and-Empire
by means of statutory powers to control wages and prices, industrial
investment, a floating exchange rate and the bulk buying of raw
materials. Everything would depend on the efficient, incorruptible
nature of these ‘new’ men: without such characteristics they would just
have more power to make more muddles and to act more deviously than
the old. Tom for some time had recognised this: in his Sunday Express
article of 1930 he had suggested that no political programme such as his

194 Rules of the Game

could work without men of ‘a hard, realistic type, hammered into
existence on the anvil of great ordeal’. Now, a year later, the ordeal was
here.

Half way through August an Austrian bank went bankrupt; foreign
depositors called in their money from London; there was what is called
‘a run on the pound’; gold reserves (Britain was still on the gold
standard) were depleted; it was believed — this was contemporary
economic dogma — that international ‘confidence’ could only be
restored if there were cuts in public spending at home. This in effect
meant the immediate implementation of the recommendations of the
report which had advocated the cutting of unemployment benefit. A
large proportion of the Labour Cabinet would not agree to this: they
had however no practical alternative suggestions. Ramsay MacDonald
suggested to the King that a National Government might be formed
consisting of members of all parties: this would obviate everyone’s
tendency to wish to pass responsibility on to others. Also it might
prevent Britain being forced off the gold standard; which eventuality
would be, according to dogma again, a disaster. The King agreed. A
general election could follow later.

The formation of a National Government under MacDonald cut
from under the New Party much of the ground on which its appeal had
been based — that of aiming to put in control of the country men who
were above the customary game of party politics and in theory at least
dedicated to the business of getting a job done. The only serious appeal
that the New Party might now have against the National Government
would be if it could be seen to be composed of the type of people more
likely to do a job well.

Harold Nicolson had been to Manchester to interview prospective
New Party candidates. He recorded in his diary:

They vary from an old lunatic called Holden to a boy of 21 called
Branstead who scarcely knows what the House of Commons is. Only
one of the many we interview — a wild-eyed nymphomaniac called
Miss is at all a possible candidate ...The party has quite clearly
not as yet attracted the better class of manual worker.

Slightly later Harold Nicolson reported to Tom in the South of France.
His letter is dated August 13th — three days after Ramsay MacDonald
had been recalled to London to face the ‘run on the pound’ and ten days
before the public announcement of the formation of the National
Government. Of the people mentioned in Harold Nicolson’s letter

Politics as Farce 195

Sellick Davies was the New Party Treasurer, F. K. Box was the Chief
Party Agent, and Dr Robert Forgan was, together with Tom and
Cimmie and a recruit from the Conservatives W. E. D. Allen, one of
the four remaining New Party MPs.

4 King’s Bench Walk.
August 14th 1931 Temple W.C.2.
My dear Tom,

This is going to be a long letter and illegible in parts. It will also,
at least at first, be a painful letter. The reason why it will be illegible
is that Iam using the typewriter of Mr Hamlyn, the Genera Manager
of Action. To which I am not attuned. The reason why it will be
painful is Sellick Davies. I begin with the bloody part. The rest will
be cheery enough.

First the iniquities (so I am assured) of Sellick. Box rang me up
today in a state of perturbation. Box was perturbed. It seems that he
had received a request from Sellick who is now with the admirable
Forgan at Berneval sur mer (that obscure Dieppoise resort where the
unfortunate Mr Wilde retired after endurances of Reading Gaol).
Sellick asked for £25 from the till. Box sent for the books. The books
disclosed that Sellick had been withdrawing from from the said till
sums which even to me appeared excessive. And for these sums he
had provided vouchers which, although proof of his hospitable
instincts, were by no means proof of his capacity as Treasurer. Box
was shocked. So also, to a lesser degree, was I. 1 managed to convince
Box that a chartered accountant such as Sellick was could scarcelz
behave in such a manner unless there was some explanation. We must
go careful like. Box was all for calling in other and less Welsh
accountants at once. I urged him to consult you. And by this post you
will receive a letter which will cause you much distress.

Anyhow we have refused to advance Sellick money for his amuse-
ments at the Dieppe Casino. And have done so in a manner which
will cause him a certain uneasiness if guilty but no acute displeasure
if innocent. The sums involved are not enormous. I think he has been
a muddle head. But the fact remains that he is not competent to
control our finances, and that som more chartered and less Welsh
accountant will have to take his place.

This is unpleasant not only because we cannot face more resigna-
tions but also because Sellick has his points. Financial sensibility is
obviously a rare quality and one possessed only by those who know
nothing of finance...

196 Rules of the Game

So much for the bloody part. Now for other more cheering news.
(1) The party. I find that the present crisis has enormously increased
your prestige. People who treated us as a painful joke five weeks ago
are now regarding us with a wild surmise. Men like Keynes are saying
you were right all along. I find that “West End Clubmen’ (it is not
for nothing that I spent eighteen months at the Evening Standard) have
adopted quite a different angle towards your movement. People like
Middleton Murray in this month’s Adelphi speak openly in your
favour. H. G. Wells today spoke with serious interest about the
policy, and Leonard Woolf has written to me asking for full infor-
mation and pamphlets. These may be straws — but they are straws in
an important wind... (4) Action: otherwise the paper which fills all
mz thoughts and most of my time. I shall not bother you with details.
It is going ahead like a speed-boat. I have engaged the staff and feel
they are good. Mr Hamlyn the Manager is a Jew. Mr Joseph the
assistant editor may also be a Jew but his point is that he will corrct
my tendency to quote Aristotle. A clever young man...

(the bore about this typewriter is that when I want to say ‘Y’ it sazs
‘z’. The result is ungainly. ‘Bz’ is not a pretty rendering of the word
‘by’).

One more point. Would you wish to start off the paper with an
article by yourself? ‘HAVE I FIZZLED OUT?’ seems the right note.
It is not essential, but I think we should face that question and I think
you can do it best. My God, Tom, if that paper is a dud then I am
a dud. It WON'T BE A DUD...

I think that for once events have moved to help you. Of course the
Socialists have cornered Baldwin and are taking your programme leaf
by leaf like an artichoke. But that merely increases your opportunity.
I find that many people are saying that you will be tempted to join
any coalition that is formed. I hope you will if you consider it right
to do so and if you are assured of the necessary authority. People
always accuse you of being out for yourself. I reply “Yes, thank God3
(it is very rude to write God} one ought to write God just like that)
—I reply ‘Yes, thank God, he is one of those people who feel a we
should all feel — ‘l’etat c’est moir’ I mean ‘moi’.

Tom — it is fun being with you since you understand where my
nonsense begins and where my my sense begins.

But really everying is gling very well, and if we keep faith in ur
own intelligence nothing can to wrong

Yours ever
Harold.

Politics as Farce 197

P.S. Did you get my memorandum on Foreign Policy? I sent it by
registered post but have just discovered that I wrote Villa Uzes or
rods to that effect beine memerised by the memory of little bo-peep
alis Miss Gordon alias Duchesse D’Uzes. But I hope it turned up all
right.

To this letter, surely unique in the annals of letters from editors to
newspaper proprietors, Tom, from Antibes, replied — ‘It 1s a joy to have
you on the job: do not kill yourself’.

The centre of attraction at Antibes this year (apart from Tom and
Cimmie themselves: it was true that they appeared ever more glamorous
politicians the further they got from the drab corridors of power) was
Michael Arlen, the author of The Green Hat, whom Tom, according to
Irene, so inspired with New Party propaganda over dinner at Monte
Carlo that he, Michael Arlen, considered becoming a party member.
Life at Antibes went its usual way: Tom was pursuing someone called
Lotsie: I, aged eight, was bitten on the head by a pet monkey: people
‘massed again, booted and spurred, and in a relay of cars departed to the
dirty pictures at Nice and on to Monte’ (Irene).

The history of the New Party is crucial to an understanding of Tom:
he stayed in the South of France because he had announced that party
politics were absurd: he was acting logically according to his convic-
tions. Even if he had had anything to do with the crisis he would have
felt it better to wait, probably, until people turned to him; only then
would he feel he had a mandate to put what was required into effect.
And was it not the case, as people told him, that his legendary prestige
was increasing so long as he remained aloof? But the question remained
~ what use, in the end, could he make of this prestige?

The affairs of the New Party went their own bizarre way. Dr Robert
Forgan wrote from Berneval-sur-Mer:

Dear Tom,

Recent public events in England have more than justified the cry
of ‘crisis’ that we raised so long before anyone else... unfortunately
I have a crisis of my own. Ever since — imprudently or at least
improvidently — I entered Parliament two years ago (and gave up
moderately lucrative medical work) I have been in financial dif-
ficulties ... | took to borrowing at ruinous rates of interest until now
I find myself in such a mess that I must get the ground cleared
somehow ...Just at the moment the New Party can ill afford to lose
another Member of Parliament...

198 Rules of the Game

There followed the request for a loan of £500. The letter ended
somewhat disarmingly — ‘Superintending the earth is, for me, far more
interesting than keeping one’s affairs in order!’

Tom arrived back from Antibes on 26 August, two days after the
formation of the National Government. Harold Nicolson met him at
Dover, and found him cheerful. Tom said that of course he would be
pressing on with New Party plans: he hoped to get six members into
the House of Commons so long as a general election did not come before
February. But he recognized that it was possible the New Party might
fail completely, in which case he would retire from public life for ten
years. He explained — ‘I have never led a civilised life at all since I entered
politics as a boy. I can well afford to wait ten years, to study economics,
and even then when I return I shall be no older than Bonar Law was
when he first entered politics’.

In later life Tom used to say that he sometimes wished he had taken
this advice to himself more literally: he knew that he was no longer
interested in conventional manoeuvrings for power; he was interested
in the presentation of the embodiment of an idea. For this, it was not
clear how much there was urgency: what was important was the effort
to formulate and give substance to the idea.

For the next four months the New Party end-game was played out
to what must have been the bewilderment of a dwindling band of
spectators. The first number of Action, edited by Harold Nicolson,
came out on October 8th: it was a tabloid-sized paper of 32 pages and
cost 2d. The tone was set by the first editorial: ‘We have adopted certain
watchwords — the first is truth: the second courage: the third intelli-
gence: the fourth vigour.’ Tom on the front page wrote “We must create
a movement which grips and transforms every phase and aspect of
national life.’ On the inside pages there was an article by Dr Forgan on
old age (“The Commonest Disease in the Wide World’) a science article
by Gerald Heard (‘From Faraday to Kapitza — Great Cambridge
Dynamo’) a gardening page by Vita Sackville West ((How To Plant
And Design Beds’) and book reviews of The Waves and Sanctuary by
Harold Nicolson. The next few numbers contained ‘Did the Werewolf
Exist?’ by Gerald Heard and ‘Vagabond Camp — Tales of Great
Journeys’ by Eric Muspratt. Tom continued to emphasise the need to
‘imbue the nation with a new idea and a new faith’ and to insist that
a ‘virile group’ should be returned to the House of Commons. The
editor however announced as the general election approached — ‘If, as
is far more likely, the New Party has done extremely badly . . . the note
will be one of quiet manliness; of resigned British pluck’.

Politics as Farce 199

Tom himself carried on powerfully as his one-man-band. On Sep-
tember 8th he made his last major speech in Parliament: he attacked
Labour for having followed conservative policies of deflation: he ad-
vocated following Keynes’s advice to borrow money to finance work
for the unemployed: he perorated ‘the way out is not the way of the
monk but the way of the athlete...the simple question before the
house...is whether Great Britain is to meet its crisis lying down or
standing up.’ On September 20th he was addressing a meeting of an
estimated 20,000 people at Glasgow: he referred to the Labour Party as
‘a Salvation Army that took to its heels on the day of Judgement’: he
was attacked by a communist group with razors. His bodyguard,
including Peter Howard and the ex-welter-weight boxing champion
Kid Lewis, fought off the attack, but a stone hit Tom on the head. (Tom
used to tell the story how he had asked Kid Lewis why he had not
punched more ruthlessly, and Kid Lewis had said he was afraid of killing
someone). Tom’s speech however had been heard through the use of
loudspeakers: the meeting, Peter Howard reported, was ‘really rather
a success’. Afterwards Harold Nicolson noted — “Tom says this forces
us to be fascist and that we no longer need hesitate to create our trained
and disciplined force. We discuss their uniforms: I suggest grey flannel
trousers and shirts.” He also suggested the emblem of a marigold in the
buttonhole.

Tom agreed with Harold Nicolson that it was important that the
Youth Movement should not appear too military: on the other hand —
‘the working class have practically no sense of being ridiculous in the
way that we have, and their very drab lives gives them a thirst for colour
and for drama’.

On the whole, however, I think that Peter Howard is just the man
to hold the right balance. He must see that Mr Kid Lewis is invariably
accompanied on his tours by Mr Sacheverell Sitwell — in a Siamese
connection they might well form the symbol of our Youth Move-
ment!

Through Harold Nicolson and Action Tom was in touch with the
Sitwells, the Leonard Woolfs, with other writers and artists: he was also
through the Youth Movement in touch with a growing band of toughs.
But the true Siamese connection existed within himself. After a wildly
enthusiastic and peaceful meeting at the Free Trade Hall the Manchester
Guardian reported —

200 Rules of the Game

In his 35th year Oswald Mosley is already thickly encrusted with
legend. His disposition and his face are those of a raider, a corsair...
We speak metaphorically; but who could doubt... that here was one
of those root-and-branch men who have been thrown up from time
to time in the religious, political and business story of England.

Then after a meeting at the Rag Market at Birmingham, the Birmingham
Post reported that it was the presence of the Youth Movement that
‘immediately set up a militant feeling in the few who were out for
trouble’ with the result that there was such a fight that Tom and his
bodyguard were afterwards charged with assault. They were acquitted:
the magistrate agreeing with Tom’s counsel’s opinion about the un-
likelihood of a speaker hiring a large hall for the purpose of beating up
his own audience. Also prosecution witnesses were made to look
ridiculous by saying that Tom’s ‘provocative attitude’ was due to the
‘smile on his face’. But the two sides of the legend were becoming
established in people’s minds — that of the hero and the thug.

The general election took place on October 27th. Six months ago the
New Party had talked about putting up four hundred candidates: in the
event it put up twenty four. All but two lost their deposits. Tom saved
his, but came bottom of the poll with 10,834 votes at Cimmie’s old
constituency of Stoke. Harold Nicolson lost his deposit standing for the
Combined Universities: Kid Lewis polled 154 votes at Whitechapel.
Cimmie herself had not stood: she was said to be suffering from ‘over-
strain’: she was also pregnant.

The New Party had been in a hopeless position in terms of practical
politics at the election. It had campaigned on a programme of ‘mobil-
ising national forces to revive trade; linking up with the Dominions to
help the export trade; scientific protection of the home market and a
General Powers Bill to give the government powers of rapid action.’
All these points with the exception of the last had been covered by the
manifestos of the National Government; and there had been promises
of decisive action of course too. The New Party could not even cam-
paign as the party of opposition, because the Labour Party had broken
away from Ramsay MacDonald and was itself in opposition to the
MacDonald-Conservative-Liberal government. The New Party had
nothing of substance to say to the electorate except that it had been the
party which had foretold the crisis and that it was unlikely that the crisis
would be solved by the people who had failed to prevent it.

Tom believed that the government of ‘the old men who have laid
waste the power and the glory of our land’ would collapse within a short

Politics as Farce 201

time and that then politicians would be faced by more strenuous
problems than those of collecting votes. This conviction was not un-
reasonable. Shortly before, there had been the naval mutiny at Inver-
gordon when sailors, faced with the proposal to cut their pay by ten per
cent, had refused to turn out for duty. Already the Government had had
to take Britain off the gold standard — which action it had ostensibly
come into existence to prevent. People other than Tom felt that ordi-
nary structures of society were cracking up; that battles for power would
soon have to be won not at elections, but in the streets.

Against this background Action continued on its haphazard way.
After the debacle of the election (there were no details printed in it of
the election results) the editor wrote ‘Are we downhearted? Yes we are!’
and Gerald Heard’s science article was on ‘Will Eels Show Us Where
Lost Continents Lay?’ However in the next number there was a new
feature by Peter Cheyney, the crime writer, whom Harold Nicolson
had described in his diary as ‘a Jew fascist — a most voluble, violent and
unpleasant type’. This feature was entitled “Cutting out the Bunk in
Great Britain’ and it referred to the ‘Nupa Youth Movement’ and the
‘Nupa Shock Movement’ — ‘Nupa’ being toughened-up jargon for
‘New Party’. Peter Cheyney wrote:

In both these movements he [the young man of today] will learn
realism as opposed to bunk, vibrant nationalism as opposed to sloppy
internationalism, disciplineas opposed tothe post-warideal ofsloth, and
a comradeship unknown to the Red ‘comrades’ of the sickly sickle...
You will meet Nupa. It will find you in its own way. Its programme
...almsat the establishment of a country-wide system of Nupa-Shock-
Propaganda Controls by June 1933 and the completely organised
Political-Shock-Youth Movement by June 1935.

Harold Nicolson’s friends wrote amongst themselves in horror at this
style (Raymond Mortimer to Edward Sackville West: ‘When I walk in
the streets and see posters — Action edited by Harold Nicolson — The
Prime Minister Needs Kicking by Oswald Mosley — I desire to vomit’).
But Raymond Mortimer himself still wrote an article for Action (“The
Reasons Why I Prefer The Present’); and so did Osbert Sitwell, Peter
Quennell, Christopher Isherwood, and Alan Pryce-Jones (“The
World Is Neither Large Nor Remarkable’). The circulation had
dropped from an initial 160,000 to 50,000 at the time of the election:
by December it was under 20,000 and was losing £340 a week. There
did not seem to be much point in its going on.

202 Rules of the Game

The last number appeared on December 3 1st. Harold Nicolson wrote
— ‘We recognise with cold calm that our failure is for the moment
complete... we were too highbrow for the general public and too
popular for the highbrow... The first number was a dud. We were
thereafter not quick enough to reduce our printing order... (People)
accused the paper of lacking punch. Perhaps they were right. Yet it is
difficult to punch fairly.’

Tom on the front page wrote:

We were never fools enough to delude ourselves into the belief that
we could build a new political party of a normal character in normal
conditions. We shall be a movement born of crisis and ordeal or we
shall be nothing. If that crisis does not mature we shall be nothing,
for the country for perfectly good reasons will not require us... In
that case we can all retire more happily to more congenial occupa-
tions, satisfied that at least we have done our best to meet a menace
which might have overwhelmed this country but which fortunately
did not mature.

However at the end — and printed in italics as if it were being pointed
out to his readers that they were being involved in some sort of change
of gear — Tom launched into one of his perorations. Under the headline
“We Are Pierced and Broken — We Advance’, he wrote:

Better the great adventure, better the great attempt for England’s
sake, better defeat, disaster, better far the end of that trivial thing
called a Political Career than stifling in a uniform of Blue and Gold,
strutting and posturing on the stage of Littie England, amid the
scenery of decadence, until history, in turning over an heroic page of
the human story, writes of us the contemptuous postscript: “These
were the men to whom was entrusted the Empire of Great Britain,
and whose idleness, ignorance and cowardice left it a Spain.’ We shall
win; or at least we shall return upon our shields.

Tom’s perorations were demonstrations of the style of his heart, of his
dedication, in a more profound way perhaps than was his logic. The
style was that of one who gets glory from battle: it had none of the
vulgarity of Peter Cheyney’s call for a Nupa Political-Shock-Youth-
Movement; but the chords it touched were inevitably, if tragically,
sometimes the same.

During the autumn in spite of (or because of) Tom’s increasingly

Politics as Farce 203

apparent failure with the New Party there had been continuing moves
to try to get him back into the conventional political fold. For a time
the New Party MPs had sat on the Conservative benches. Then
Randolph Churchill had come to see Tom on a mission from his father
Winston to ask him whether he would still consider joining a band of
‘Tory toughs’ in opposition to the National Government. Tom had
asked Randolph why Winston wanted him: Randolph had replied
‘Because without you he will not be able to get hold of the young men.’
(Harold Nicolson, who recorded this story, added “Tom is very pleased
with that’). Tom also had had talks with Neville Chamberlain to see
whether the New Party could make some electoral deal with the
National Government. But it was still obvious that Tom wanted
seriously to be involved with none of these moves. Harold Nicolson
wrote ‘He says that it would be impossible for him to enter the
‘“‘machine”’ of one of the older parties: that by so doing he would again
have to place himself in a strait waistcoat: that he has no desire for power
on those terms’. But by the end of the year the New Party had virtually
ceased to exist: the office in Great George Street was closed down. One
of the last manifestations of the party was, typically, the completion of
a propaganda film exhorting people to join it. In the film there were
shots of MPs asleep and then crowds rushing forwards shouting
‘England wants Action!’ The film was banned in cinemas on the grounds
that it might bring Parliament into disrepute.

With part of himself Tom might well have been happy, as he had said
he would be, to ‘retire to more congenial occupations’ while the crisis
did not come to a head in the way he had expected it to. He and Cimmie
were seen at a great many parties and night clubs that winter: he created
excitement and interest wherever he went. He had the style of the
temporarily defeated but still potentially justified hero. At the very end
of 1931, after cataloguing the disasters of the year and of his association
with Tom, Harold Nicolson could still write — ‘yet in spite of all this,
what fun life is!’

Out of all Tom’s political involvement for the past thirteen years
there remained only one practical manifestation — the embryonic
NUPA Youth Movement. This with its ‘Rugger, Cricket, Boxing,
Fencing and Billiards’ and ‘Talks By Famous People Every Tuesday’ at
122a King’s Road, was the embodiment of that other part of Tom
which, whatever the circumstances, would always be concerned with
returning, Or not, upon its shield.

CHAPTER 21

Steps to Fascism

Cimmie’s practical involvement in politics virtually ceased after her
efforts to launch the New Party during the spring and summer of 1931.
After this she seems to have lost heart. She had written an article in the
Daily Sketch in May — “There is something in the very air of the House
[of Commons], something indefinable, which daunts me. I think it is
the thought that it does not really matter what you say, that it will have
no effect on anyone at all, and that you might as well not say it.’ In a
letter to Tom she had written of ‘the horrible dreary list of engagements
and meetings at Stoke which seem 10 times worse as J am so absolutely
wretched and miserable.’ Almost her last public speech was at a
Women’s Peace Conference in June: she said “There is only one way that
people could stop war — by refusing to fight’. Harold Nicolson remarked
‘Poor Cimmie cannot understand his [Tom’s] repudiation of all the
things he has taught her to say previously. She was not made for politics.
She was made for society and the home.’

At the time of the split in the New Party John Strachey had written
to Cimmie — ‘To think of the inevitable separation from you is to me
by far the worst part’. Some months later Allan Young wrote ‘I want
to meet you, and talk, and touch you, and feel everything is all right
again’. She seemed to play a rather distant motherly role to people in
the New Party. But in private life, too, there seemed to be something
in her that was beginning to give up.

At Antibes in 1931 two days after Tom’s return to England, Irene
recorded — ‘Cim drove herself home at 5.30 am and to my horror fell
asleep at the wheel and hit the rocks on the hairpin bend mercifully not
on the sea side’. In England, Harold Nicolson noted about Tom and
Cimmie — ‘They bicker as usual... she nags at him... but they are really
fond of each other in spite of their infidelities’.

Steps to Fascism 205

Cimmie wrote to Tom — ‘I won’t repeat any of the things I have said
scores and scores of times — please remember them yourself — and I on my
part will do everything I can try and think of your point of view ... lam
tired of talking. All I want is something doing, something happening.’

This was about Tom’s private affairs. In public life, what Cimmie was
at the moment objecting to was Tom’s involvement with fascism. In
December Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, approached
Tom and said that he was prepared to put the Harmsworth press at
Tom’s disposal if he, Tom, succeeded in organising a disciplined move-
ment from the remnants of the New Party. Harold Nicolson recorded
~— ‘Cimmie, who is profoundly working-class at heart, does not at all
like this Harmsworth connection. Tom pretends he was only pulling her
leg. Cimmie wants to put a notice in the Times to the effect that she
disassociates herself from Tom’s fascist tendencies. We pass it off as a
joke.” Also — when Tom and Harold Nicolson were talking of the
approaches made by Winston Churchill and Harold Nicolson had
suggested that Tom was “destined to lead the Tory Party’ - Cimmie ‘who
is violently anti-Tory, screams loudly’.

Cimmie was by this time five months pregnant. She had not stood
again for Stoke in the general election partly out of disenchantment with
politics but mainly out of fear of another miscarriage. She was not well:
she was having trouble with her kidneys. But she went out a lot with
Tom to parties during that autumn. They were both now out of
Parliament, and there was not much else for them to do. In this area,
she could still try to keep up with Tom.

She talked to Harold Nicolson about Tom — ‘about his incurable
boyishness and joie de vivre. She welcomes his fencing as it serves as a
safety valve for his physical energy. That in fact is what is wrong with
Tom: his energy is more physical than mental.’

Cimmie also told Harold Nicolson that as a result of the Leiter Estate
lawsuit which had gone against the Curzon and Suffolk branches of the
family in America, and the huge expenses incurred by the New Party,
she and Tom were now ‘broke’. “Tom has lost all his money and there
are huge overdrafts’: they had to live now ‘at a rate of £1,000 a year.’
During 1932 both Savehay Farm and the house at Smith Square were
let; Cimmie and the children went to live in a mews flat behind Tom’s
flac at Ebury Street, which had previously been occupied by their
chauffeur. Reports of their losses, however, were exaggerated.

Tom had taken up fencing again: this was indeed a means of exercis-
ing his exuberant energy. It was also probably an excuse, now the House
of Commons was not available to him, to be away from home at all

206 Rules of the Game

hours practising. At fencing he very quickly again became amazingly
good. In 1932, at the age of thirty five, and with his injured leg, he was
runner-up in the British épée championships. While in training for this
he wrote to Cimmie:

Tiger Boy! Clever lad!

Army List team turned out with Epée won 2 matches drew one
double hit. They asked fight foil after not having one in hand for six
months. Among those he defeated spts to 2 Army champion and 4th
in last world’s championship.

Won 2 matches with foil and lost one.

Result 6 matches — won 4 lost 1 drew 1.

Proud Porker. [drawing of a pig with its tail up]

Hope after her meeting not [drawing of a downcast sheep].

Cimmie seemed to become more at ease with Tom as she advanced with
her pregnancy. She had been told to rest, and she stayed at home, or
sometimes went with Tom to parties. There was a fashionable craze that
winter for watching all-in wrestling at the Gargoyle Club. She did not
involve herself in Tom’s preparations for fascism.

Harold Nicolson spelt out to Tom the dangers of fascism with a calm,
warning voice like that of Bob Boothby the year before.

I beg Tom not to get mixed up with the fascist crowd. I say that
fascism is not suitable to England. In Italy there was a long history
of secret societies. In Germany there was a long tradition of mili-
tarism. Neither had a sense of humour. In England anything on these
lines 1s doomed to failure and ridicule.

He answers that he will concentrate on clubs and cells within clubs;
that anew movement cannot be made within the frame of a political
party. I beg him to examine himself carefully and to make certain that
his feelings are in no sense governed by anger, disappointment or a
desire to get back on those who have let him down. I admit that
disasters such as he has experienced in last year are sufficient to upset
the strongest character, but I contend that the strength of his own
character is to be tested by the patience and balance with which he
takes the present eclipse. He says he feels no resentment: that he had
expected that the effect of his defeat would be to throw him into a
life of pleasure: on the contrary, he feels now bored with night clubs
and more interested than ever in serious things. I say that he must now
obtain a reputation for seriousness at any cost.

Steps to Fascism 207

Before 1931 Tom does not seem to have thought much about fascism:
he had been outspoken against Mussolini at the time of the invasion of
Corfu: he had been in the neighbourhood of an English yacht in Venice
which had been blown up by some ‘festive young blackshirts’. But by
1932 Mussolini was emerging not only as someone who was giving the
word ‘fascism’ a recognisable meaning, but as the leader of a nationalist
revival about some aspects of which it was difficult for even the most
sceptical politicians not to be admiring.

In the last number of Action it had been announced that Tom and
other members of the New Party were going to visit Italy and Germany
and ‘probably at a later date Russia’ to ‘study the modern movement
in all countries’. By modern movement was meant — ‘new political
forces born of crisis, conducted by youth and inspired by completely
new ideas of economic and political organisation’. In January 1932 Tom
set off for Rome: he left Cimmie behind staying with friends in the
country and guarding her pregnancy. On his way he stopped off in Paris
where he ‘spent reveillon at the Fabre-Luces’ and was ‘kept up doing jeux
de société ll 8 am.’ (Harold Nicolson). Concerning this, Tom wrote to
Cimmie:

Last night was just her party: wished she was trumpeting her instruc-
tion for the games and attendant swains... Much dancing in the dark:
young Tommy coyly against the wall of course. Then a lovely romp
at supper with little puff balls iced in champagne buckets and thrust
down ladies’ backs (in his mind’s ear he could hear her bellows
indignant if she had suffered!) Perhaps he better confess that he
invented this game, which went with a real swing!

In Rome he was joined by Harold Nicolson and Christopher Hobhouse,
a young recruit to the New Party. Tom and Cimmie continued to
correspond while he was in Rome. In the background to their letters
is the struggle between Tom’s interest in fascism (what he called ‘fascio’)
and Cimmie’s continuing wariness about it (what he called ‘fatio’). In
the foreground is what Cimmie had called his increasing ‘boyishness’.

January 6th 1932.
Darling Baby Squasher,

Completed 2 days in Rome and what days — yesterday dark and
gloomy — today radiant sunshine — lay nudo in his room — flooding
in — real sun bath — so wished she was here — nose squashed sideways
— turtle on a rock — feel much better after sun.

208 Rules of the Game

Royally received and ushered into palatial apartments — thought at
first was spontaneous tribute by regime to the British hopeful — learnt
later that Quag [Quaglino] of London had written to Quag in Rome
saying tiny T was a swell guy who always paid up — rather dashed.

In things that would interest you (roar!!) saw Jane [Princess Jane
di San Faustino] last night — same as ever — same people — in same
positions — backgammon substituted for bridge . . . Jane addressed me
as ‘beautiful boy’ which delighted me (a great Italian doctor next to
me at lunch refused to believe I had been in the war and said I could
not be more than 25) perfect country! Lunch tomorrow with Jane and
a Hesse Prince who was there last night — said he was on Hitler’s
staff...

Saw today the newly appointed secretary of the Party — they are
arranging for us a resumé of the whole story and methods (trumpet
crash!) Poor Tomby is so nervous — everywhere he goes hands go up;
but as his tiny paw creeps upward in return he hears in his mind’s ear
[drawing of an ear] an indignant trumpet which pulls it down again
— roar roar. I am seeing everyone and very interested — no panache
or mum-indignant — but quiet interest. They all know about us.
Except in Jane’s drawing room, where I was asked if I was still
Bolshevik!!

Thursday we go to the Pontine marshes to see the great reclamation
scheme. When I asked why they did not publish their doings like the
Russians they said “We are more interested in achievement than in
propaganda.’ One for squashland. Another on the squasher — The
Russians last year took 100 to 150,000 children to holiday camps —
the Fascists 250,000. Roads rebuilt, land reclaimed, systems of child
welfare and youth training — wa wa wa — (piling it on a bit, but a
good show!!)

When Fatio and Fascio resume the stout debate he will be better
armed. The most interesting thing is the new psychology — “Opposi-
tion? we do not understand! we believe in “‘solidarita!”’ Political career
is then not only career in one’s profession’ etc. There are some
trumpety reasons, but on the whole with stout prejudice she would
yet be interested.

I am thinking of slipping up to Milan for fencing for a day or 2
and then back when Nach returns — unfortunately he goes tonight
~ I watched him training the Olympic foilists and sabreurs tonight
— he is marvellous — I fight with them tomorrow — the épéeists are
all at Milan. If I come back here to work with Nach I will go straight
to Berlin on 21st via Munich (another little interruption trumpet

Steps to Fascism 209

trumpet suspicious eye). We really learning a tremendous amount,
and will be equipped more on return. [drawing of an outraged bird
or turtle].

After Cimmie had got Tom’s letter about the Fabre-Luces’ party in
Paris, she had written:

Darling old boy you are a scream —

I do wonder how Rome is going. Longing to hear that. Remem-
ber Fatio a bit, and not too Fascio. And do find out about ‘the
workers’ and their conditions and what about wives and children.

Precious mutty you are the only one in the world for me. Bless you
and bless you and love and love and love and happiness in abundance
and fun and for old Mummy that soon too...

On 8th January Tom wrote from Rome:

Sweet Fatio [drawing of figure with arm raised in the fascist salute]
Such a fascinating day. Started early to see great reclamation scheme
in Pontine marshes where first time since days of Rome the Pontine
waters rush to the sea (Hola Fatio!) escorted by Gelasio Gaetani
younger brother of Sermoneta — qualified and worked in America as
mining engineer — best type of aristo Fascist — great charmer — would
undoubtedly be listed — accompanied by old McClure, G. Jebb,
Murray of Embassy, Harold and Hobhouse — had lunch at one of
Gaetani’s houses — ruined town of Ninpha reclaimed after 5 centuries
— 13th century castle of honey-coloured stone where a pope was
crowned — complete ruined city of the middle ages — limpid stream
with olb trout of type imported by Romans from Africa — lunch in
castle — wonderful cakes and honey — saw reclamation scheme —
fascinating country — buffaloes imported by Hannibal [drawing of a
buffalo]: if they had been a little more bellowsome, would have made
him quite homesick.

Gaetanis originally owned nearly all land from Rome to Naples
and 200 castles - now going in with State in great consortium — the
powers of the State are enormous — corporative system interferes
immediately with inefficient ownership and management. Every-
where en route Dopolavoro, the state assisted club houses of the
workers after work (come on fatio, just a sideline that).

Harold who was originally a little shaken by ‘Solidarita’ is visibly

210 Rules of the Game

more and more impressed by constructive elements. Young Tom of
course maintains a balanced view —

Hurried back just in time for an interview with Mussolini — who
was charming and asked a lot of very good questions. He speaks
English well. Tomorrow interview minister of Corporatives and later
in day fence with crack Italians of Olympic sabre team. Yesterday
fought one of the Olympic épéeists and was not at all overwhelmed.
May go up to Milan for a day or two as the Olympic épée team train
there.

Yesterday lunched with Jane and Prince Philip of Hesse (married
Princess Matilda of Italy) was intelligent and is a great Hitler man...

Rome very dead — backgammon and gambling — nothing else —
we have no frivolity — work and read the whole time — all very
interesting — WISHES HIS SQUASH WAS HERE -...They all
miss her and send love and happy sniffs XX XX.

Cimmie wrote from Sussex:

Darling Mutty boy,

You really are sweet the lovely letts you write me and I can promise
you I simply adore them and look forward to them ever so. The first
Rome one arrived this morning and cheered me up no end as I was
feeling low-ish — very sick and faint — slightly coldy — and these cursed
signs again...

I had a long letter from Peter [Howard] from Birmingham and he
said there was a good nucleus of keen serious young men to form a
Youth Section...

Do stay as long as you want my sweet, I am quite hap-chap and
will have lots of people to see me in London and still one or 2 country
visits | can arrange...

Not on the warpath, loving him velly much, full of resolutions
which she does hope will stand his return!! and weather 1932 triumph-
antly...

One of the joys of getting Tom’s letters, Cimmie added, was that
although he took immense pains to write clearly she had to ‘read each
page again and again before I get it all quite clear and even then there
are some words I never get at all!’ She did not think ‘old Fascio’
[Mussolini] sounded too bad: but she still worried about the
“WORKERS’. Tom said — ‘All the great men here look like under-

Steps to Fascism 211

graduates — they are so young and mostly listable’. ‘Listable’ meant they
might go on Cimmie’s ‘list’ of attractive men.

Christopher Hobhouse had come to Rome from Munich where he
had talked with Nazis: this was a year before Hitler came to power.
Hobhouse reported “The Nazis think that we of the New Party have
tried to do things too much on the grand: we should have begun in the
alleys, not in Gordon Square.’ Also — “They think the fact that Tom is
not a working class man will be a disadvantage to us.’ Christopher
Hobhouse said he saw the NUPA Youth Movement turning into
something like the Nazi SS.

Argument went on in the Hotel Excelsior. Harold Nicolson insisted
‘the party should be constitutional and Tom should enter Parliament’.
He read fascist propaganda pamphlets: ‘I agree that with this system you
can attain a certain degree of energy and efficiency not reached in our
own island. And yet, and yet...’

He and Tom went to dine in ‘a lovely flat with a view one way to
the Villa Medici and the other way all over Rome’ Harold Nicolson
wrote in his diary:

Signora Sarfatti is there. She is the friend of Mussolini’s whom we
met at the Embassy yesterday. A blonde questing woman, the
daughter of a Venetian Jew who married a Jew in Milan. It was there
that she helped Mussolini on the Popolo d’ Italia right back in 1914. She
is at present his confidante and must be used by him to bring the gossip
of Rome to the Villa Torlonia. She says Mussolini is the greatest
worker ever known: he rides in the morning, then a little fencing,
then work, and then after dinner he plays the violin to himself. Tom
asks how much sleep he gets. She answers ‘Always nine hours’. I can
see Tom doing sums in his head and concluding that on such a time-
table Musso cannot be hard-worked at all.

When Tom returned to England the New Party was formally dis-
banded and his association with Harold Nicolson came to an end.
Harold Nicolson wrote ‘He is prepared to run the risk of further
failure, ridicule and assault, rather than to allow the active forces in this
country to fall into other hands.’ Also — ‘If Tom would follow my
example — retire into private life for a bit and then emerge fortified and
purged — he will still be Prime Minister of England. But if he gets
entangled with the boys’ brigade he will be edged gradually into
becoming a revolutionary, and into that waste land I cannot follow
him.’ Harold Nicolson, but not Tom, had been to Berlin after they had

212 Rules of the Game

left Rome: he had recorded — ‘Hitlerism, as a doctrine, is a doctrine of
despair.’

This was the last time that Tom was talked about as a probable future
Prime Minister. His ‘last-chances’ in conventional politics had been as
numerous as the farewell performances of the most magnificent prima
donna: but now this style of things was over. Tom knew he would have
to start from the beginning again; building up from cells; parading in
the streets. He wanted to do this because old forms of growth seemed
degrading to him.

Mussolini sent him two messages from Italy: one was ‘not to try the
military stunt in England’; the other was to go ahead and call himself
fascist. These injunctions seemed somewhat contradictory.

Fascism is a form of activity where what is usually contained in games
becomes reality; where what is logic is forced into flesh; where rules are
broken and are not replaced. It is a state of mind that does not see that
words are different from things; that suggests that what in abstract
argument might be desirable can be put into effect with people. Fascism
denies that there is anything above decision and justification for decision
that can judge their worth; it is a style by which activity seems to be
a justification for itself. The drive is towards order: but in so far as there
is glimpsed almost from the beginning the fact that orderliness may not
be achieved, there are the safeguards of the rhetoric of returning upon
one’s shield. If the drive to orderliness is towards death, it is still the drive
that matters.

There has for the most part evolved in human beings a feeling that
however much words are used in justification for drives there is always
something slightly different, and more important, at stake: this is a more
subtle feeling than that of transcendence: it is a feeling of oneself being
part of a whole; of the whole being something other than the sum of
the parts of the whole; it is a feeling for the significance of something
aesthetic. Fascism denies this sort of aestheticism; it feels no governing
shape of the whole. Fascism is an immanence, a sorting out, a tidying-
up; the elimination of some things for the ostensible sake of others. Of
course, the whole structure may fall down. The point of aestheticism
is that it tells what will not fall down: the shape of the whole is more
important than the expansion of some of the parts. With fascism, the
feeling of ‘greatness’ is an end in itself.

Tom knew that by embracing fascism he was making some move like
a gambler staking all his fortune on one number at roulette: that whether
he won or lost, he would never get back to the ordinary political game.
The luck he required was that the sort of crisis he had envisaged would

Steps to Fascism 213

turn up: but in his acceptance of this he did not behave like a fascist, for
he made few moves to try to bend the rules of the game. He took on
all the trappings of fascism; he waited for the number, or the crisis, to
turn up; but he did not, curiously, try to fix, as it were, the wheel. In
this respect he was politically self-defeating; but he stayed alive.

The story of Tom’s fascism is the story of another book. He was seen
by orthodox fascists as a rather unsatisfactory fascist: it was to non-
fascists that he sometimes seemed almost the most outlandish fascist of
all. For how could someone get all dressed up for fascism and then not
quite play the ruthless fascist game? Did not this put someone almost
beyond belief?

Fascism is to do with ferment, with war, with the challenge of great
events. But Tom was a fascist dedicated to stopping war. When he first
became a fascist the established fascists called him a ‘kosher fascist’. What
was frightening about him was that he seemed to be playing some super-
game with himself. He seemed to care not about becoming violent nor
even ultimately victorious; but about seeing which way a legend might
develop.

By the summer of 1932 few people in England were still thinking in
terms of the immediate crack-up of the western world. The crisis had
come and not of course gone, but was not so much talked about.
Newspapers do not bother to report the end of a crisis. It suddenly is
boring.

In Tom’s private life too things suddenly seemed to be orderly.
Cimmie had been ill, but was now ready to have her baby. On April
25th it was born by Caesarian operation — a boy, to be called Michael.
Tom was being attentive to Cimmie: on the 11th May, their twelfth
wedding anniversary, she wrote to him her most optimistic letter for
some time.

My darling darling — Have a happy time —

I only want to send you a line at the end of such a happy anniversary
to say how much I want the next year to be a happy one for us 2 as
private people and a successful one for you publicly. How I long for
it to be better than beastly 1931 and how much I want above all else
for loveliness and understanding and sympathy to be with us and
between us...

But some time earlier that spring, in his stalk like some knight-errant
through the coverts of dinner parties and balls, Tom had come across,
as if indeed she were a legendary maiden, a young married girl cailed

214 Rules of the Game

Diana Guinness. Their hostess had told them they would get on well
together: they did not in fact get on too well at first: (Diana was apt
to say at this time ‘I’m just an old fashioned liberal’). But then, Diana
was a great prize — at the age of twenty-one she had already gained a
reputation for intelligence and beauty not only in the fashionable world
but in the literary and artistic worlds of London and Paris — and it would
not have seemed to Tom, since Diana appeared unique, that it mattered
very much if they did not get on well at first.

CHAPTER 22

The Greater Britain

People suggested in later life that Diana might have influenced Tom in
his turning to fascism; but there is no evidence for this: Tom was
virtually committed to fascism before he met Diana: Diana at twenty-
one had not come across fascism and would have had little power to
influence Tom if she had. What she did give him however was a chance
to exercise his need and talent for risk and conquest: and so perhaps just
by her arrival on the scene she created something of the atmosphere as
it were of fascism.

Tom’s pursuit of Diana was contemporaneous with his work on his
book The Greater Britain which was to be his public statement about
British fascism. The story of himself and Diana ran parallel to what he
was trying to do in politics: he was trying to become responsibly
committed both to Cimmie and to Diana: he was trying to start a fascist
street-movement that would be respectable. It was not his ruthlessness
or singlemindedness that made him at this time seem to be doing things
that were taboo: it was the way in which he seemed to be both breaking
the rules of games and at the same time trying to demonstrate he was
keeping them. This seemed to involve a confusion of rules as it were
on a higher level.

Diana was the third daughter of Lord and Lady Redesdale: she was
a Mitford: the Mitfords were not then the legendary figures they have
now become (1982). But Diana was in fact at twenty-one already
something of a legend — with her beauty, her cleverness, her ability to
seem both conventional and unconventional at the same time. When she
was eighteen she had married Bryan Guinness, the eldest son of Walter
Guinness, soon to become Lord Moyne. She had gone from her eccen-
tric but somewhat restricted schoolroom straight into a world of free-
dom and riches: all this has become part of the Mitford legend chronicled

216 Rules of the Game

by sister Nancy, her sister Jessica, by Diana herself. It was conventional
of course in the world in which both she and Tom moved for married
men to take out young married girls to lunch and even to dinner; it was
conventional (though this was not spelt out) for them to have affairs.
But the smooth running of all this — as in the world of conventional
politics — depended on the participants observing rules — not even really
questioning them. The rules of the social game were to do with there
being no public scandal. There was little chance of scandal (newspapers
kept to the rules in those days and people within the game did not talk)
unless there was a question of divorce. This was the equivalent of, in
politics, gangs taking to the streets.

At first in his pursuit of Diana Tom appeared to be doing no more
than what he had been doing for years: he took her out; he talked; they
went to his flat in Ebury Street. Then in June 1931 the Guinnesses gave
a party in their house at 96 Cheyne Walk to celebrate Diana’s twenty-
second birthday. Diana recorded in her autobiography:

A few things about this party dwell in my memory: myself managing
to propel Augustus John, rather the worse for wear, out of the house
and into a taxi: Winston Churchill inveighing against a large picture
by Stanley Spencer of Cookham War Memorial which hung on the
staircase and Eddie Marsh defending it against his onslaught. I wore
a pale grey dress of chiffon and tulle and all the diamonds I could lay
my hands on. We danced until day broke, a pink and orange sunrise
which gilded the river.

What also happened at this party was that Tom made some formal
proposal to Diana that their relationship should be of a more committed
kind than could normally be covered by the terms of the game. He told
her that he did not intend to leave Cimmie: but he was in love with her,
Diana. Diana said she was in love too. She also said she wanted to be
committed to him because he had convinced her about the importance
of his ideas for altering the world. What would be the precise nature
of the commitment could be worked out through the rest of the
summer.

There is a home movie in existence of this time taken by Cimmie at
the christening-party of Dick Wyndham’s daughter Ingrid to whom
Tom was godfather. There are the usual shots of people posturing, or
performing, in front of a camera — Tom coming down a staircase and
pausing with a hand on his heart; Dick Wyndham shaking a bottle of
champagne so violently that it foams like a fire extinguisher. Then the

The Greater Britain 217

camera moves to, and rests on, Diana: she is smiling and quite still; like
some statue come across in a jungle.

There had always been something awkward, enthusiastic, school-
girlish about Cimmie. She had grown rather fat and heavy: she seemed
not to take much trouble now about her clothes or her appearance.
People remember her at this time still with the exuberance that could
light people up when she came into a room. But she was perhaps no
longer elegant.

Diana wrote of this time that her life had seemed ‘absolutely useless
and empty’ before she met Tom. Her great friends Lytton Strachey and
Dora Carrington had just died. She had enjoyed her brief reign as one
of the princesses of the smart social world: she had had two children,
Jonathan and Desmond, within two years. But she wanted something
more. When Tom came along he was not only ‘handsome, generous,
intelligent and full of a wondrous gaiety’ but also ‘completely sure of
himself and his ideas: he knew what to do to solve the economic disaster
we were living through’.

Tom and Diana made plans about what they should do in the summer
holidays. Diana was going to motor down through France with friends;
Tom and Cimmie were due to go this year to Venice. Cimmie was still
not well enough to travel by car: it was agreed that Tom should drive,
and Cimmie should follow by train with the children. Tom made a plan
with Diana to run into her as if by chance at Arles or Avignon.

Cimmie does not seem to have realised yet that there was anything
out of the ordinary about Diana. Tom had always gone after the socially
most glamorous women: two years ago he had seriously upset her with
Paula Casa Maury. But she had learned to believe he would always come
back to her; probably to trust that what he said about the triviality of
his affairs was true. Also now he was being particularly attentive to her.
As late as August 3rd Cimmie was telling Irene that Tom ‘had been
exquisite to her since the baby and she had not been so happy for years’.
But it is an ironic fact that when people are in love they are apt to make
happy for a time the other people around them.

At Avignon Diana became ill suddenly with diphtheria and had to go
to bed in a hotel. A doctor from the Institut Pasteur came and gave her
‘enormous injections’. She was frightened lest a letter from Tom might
arrive at the hotel desk and have to be opened. She got her friends
Barbara Hutchinson and Victor Rothschild enrolled in the plot and a
message was got through to Tom. New arrangements were made that
they should all meet in Venice when Diana got well. Tom got Diana’s
message in Arles. He drove to Cannes, where he wrote to Cimmie:

218 Rules of the Game

His own darling soft-nosed wog-tail

... Rather slacked up last two days. From Lyons Thursday went to
Valence — tremendous lunch — bottle of beautiful Rosé — afterwards
began to write you very witty letter but remembering both you and
Lady D W [Lady de la Warre with whom Cimmie was staying in
England] were a little literal minded tore it up, in case produced as
evidence of insanity. Waddled on via Avignon to Arles — “Tomby
you stand where Caesar stood: twenty centuries gaze down on you
and acclaim you’. [drawing of man doing fascist salute and saying
‘wee wee’.]...Got to Cannes 6 pm... quickly landed by Lotsy and
a merry thing who pressed him to come to a grand gala at Monte
Carlo: he refused and had vegetable soup alone in room. Since striking
attitudes on moonlit balcony alternating between Missolonghi and St
Helena — very spacious apartment — asked very diffidently price —
they said loftily they would make him a special arrangement — must
be distinction of his appearance — always given much better rooms
when she isn’t there (I feel my indignation rising within me, better
stop). THIS IS ALL A JOKE. Lots of love my sweet fellow misses
her so much. Love to all [drawing of four pigs of decreasing size].

From England Cimmie replied —

My sweet darling heart. Does wish you hadn't torn up that witty lett,
not soooo literal minded as all that, still absolutely loved the one she
did get. I am sitting in the sun and the gram is playing ‘Goodnight
Sweetheart’ which reminds me irresistibly of Lotsy and last year oh
dear oh dear I wonder if she’s keeping you up all night, still really
I don’t think I mind, as I do love you so and am pretty happy and
serene about you loving me at the moment, it makes me more happy
than anything in the world...

You know, given good weather England now is a knockout — the
lushness, the quiet, the colour...I’m not sure we shouldn’t try a
summer or just a fortnight in Aug at Savehay once. There is some-
thing southern climates utterly lack; it’s much softer and the birds
sing. I really don’t envy the hurry and bustle of the Croisette one bit
and even the Excelsior seems garish and ugly when I think of it. I'd
like to have you and the children in a quiet place where it’s green and
peaceful sometime...

Darling Darling Darling You are my heart’s delight...1 don’t
know why I love you like I do, I don’t know why but I do. I do I
do I do I do I do I do I do.

The Greater Britain 219

Love and kisses from the Porkers united and loving Wog Tail. I
really am looking forward to Venice terribly. Let’s have a beautiful
time. ‘I want to be featured by you’ — words for new song by one
of Tomki’s girls!

A week or two later, on the Lido at Venice, where Tom and Cimmie
were staying, and the Guinnesses, and many of their mutual friends, for
the first time what Tom and Diana felt about each other became
apparent. They would go sightseeing in a group round the town; then
they would disappear round corners, down alleyways, and would not
be seen between lunch and dinner. Diana in her autobiography remem-
bered this summer as one in which ‘our countrymen were not on their
best behaviour: at one party, a picnic on Torcello, there was a fight’:
at another Randolph Churchill called Brendan Bracken ‘my brother’
and there would have been another fight if Randolph Churchill had not
‘snatched off’ Brendan Bracken’s spectacles and thrown them into the
sea. Bob Boothby remembered a dinner party on the Lido at which all
dramatis personae were present: Tom leaned across the table and said
‘Bob, I shall need your room tonight before midnight and 4 am’. Bob
Boothby, said ‘But Tom, where shall I sleep?’ Tom said ‘On the beach’.
Bob Boothby, recalling this story fifty years later, added with a great
smile — ‘And I did!’

Cimmie’s children did not notice anything very unusual going on:
were not grown-ups always jumping about and exclaiming and
shouting? During this holiday Vivien and I were nominally under the
care of Cimmie’s lady’s maid, Andrée: Nanny had stayed behind with
Michael. An incident that stuck in our minds was when Randolph
Churchill, on the beach, referred to us as ‘the brats’: nothing else seems
to have pierced us so much during a fortnight in Venice.

During the summer, and concurrent with his pursuit of Diana, Tom
had been engaged in writing The Greater Britain — a 40,000 word book
in which he sorted out for himself, and presented to the public, his ideas
about the nature of British fascism. In the second half of the book there
were recommendations for Britain’s economic recovery which were
not different from those which he had put forward in his New Party
and Labour days — the necessity for centrally controlled economic
planning within a protected home-and-imperial market. But the impor-
tant part of the book was its first forty pages, in which Tom outlined
what he saw as the attitude and spirit of fascism.

The argument of The Greater Britain was that the crisis facing the
world was of a more fundamental kind than that talked about in the

220 Rules of the Game

terms of the current economic breakdown. The inventions of science
and the products of modern technology had created a new type of world
during the last hundred years: yet the political institutions to deal with
it had scarcely changed at all. The machinery of life was once such that
it could be handled by a leisurely system of balances: now complexities
and pressures and the possibilities of destruction were so great, that
mankind had to fashion stronger and tighter methods of control or else
there would be catastrophe.

The problem was how to organise for this control while allowing for
freedom: ‘to harmonise individual initiative with the wider interest of
the nation.’ There was not much difficulty in doing this with words.
The word ‘fascist’, Tom said, implied ‘a high conception of citizenship’:
it ‘recognises the necessity for the authoritative state’ in which ‘there is
no room for interests which are not the State’s interests’. But somehow
at the same time ‘wise laws’ would allow human activity ‘full play’. The
desire of men ‘to work for themselves’ would be guided into ‘channels
which serve the nations ends’.

In practical terms — ‘Government must have power to legislate by Order
subject to the power of Parliament to dismiss it by vote of censure (the italics
are in the original). Fascism ‘seeks to achieve its aim legally and consti-
tutionally by methods of law and order, but in objective it is revolutionary
or it is nothing’. So long as the power of an elected Parliament to dismiss
a Government was retained, then ‘the charge of Dictatorship has no
reality’.

The naiveties of The Greater Britain were deliberate: the paradoxes
concerning the use and abuse of power were commonplace: it was from
their recognition that had grown the delicate system of democratic
checks and balances. But it was specifically these that fascism was now
claiming were dangerously out of date: fascism stated the paradoxes, and
then ignored them. It said that there just will be freedom for individual
energies within complete state control. It was using words in such a way
that the things they referred to seemed equally malleable — and thus
almost meaningless.

Fascism ‘combines the dynamic urge to change and progress with the
authority, the discipline and the order without which nothing great can
be achieved’. The word which cuts through the paradoxes is ‘greatness’:
it is in following this device held aloft like a sword that questions of
individual freedom, of state authority fall away. ‘Our hope is centred
in vital and determined youth, dedicated to the resurrection of a nation’s
greatness and shrinking from no effort and from no sacrifice to secure
that mighty end.’ ‘In every town and village, in every institution of daily

The Greater Britain 221

life, the will of the organised and determined minority must be strug-
gling for sustained effort.’ Every now and then it is as if Tom remem-
bered he must recognise he was dealing with paradoxes: ‘Voluntary
discipline is the essence of the Modern Movement’: ‘the beginning of
liberty is the end of economic chaos’: even — ‘in a superficial paradox,
it will be necessary for a modern movement which does not believe in
Parliament as at present constituted to seek to capture Parliament’. But
then the tone of voice goes back to that of the warrior who has broken
through; who when he finds one side of a paradox being obstructive,
throws it away.

Into the measured prose of The Greater Britain there comes from time
to time — like fighting breaking out in the hall of a political meeting —
the rhetoric of contempt. The favourite words of scorn are ‘children’
and ‘old women’. Politicians of the old parties are ‘like children in the
dark ... [they] put their heads under the bedclothes rather than get up
like men and grapple with the danger’. Orthodox economics are the
remedy of the ‘eternal old woman’. One of the most scathing words is
‘Spain’ — ‘alive in a sense, but dead to all sense of greatness and to her
mission in the world’. (This is odd in the light of the fact that it was Spain
that was shortly to provide the one and only relatively successful fascist
government.) Another contemptuous phrase for conventional politi-
cians was ‘united muttons’ — odd, again, in the light of the fact that
‘mutton’ was one of his favourite words for Cimmie.

As well as the words there were the promises of activities to do with
contempt. ‘So soon as anybody, whether an individual or an organised
interest, steps outside those limits [of the national interest] so that his
activity becomes sectional and anti-social, the mechanism of the
Corporate system descends upon him ... The State has no room for the
drone and the decadent, who use their leisure to destroy their capacity
for public usefulness. In our morality it is necessary to “‘live like
athletes’’.’

In the last pages of the book, which return to the themes of the
beginning in the style of one of Tom’s perorations, his struggle to try
to appear once more reasonably to embrace paradoxes results in his
language becoming almost openly without content: ‘We appeal to our
countrymen to take action while there is still time and to carry the
changes which are necessary by the legal and constitutional methods
which are available. If on the other hand every appeal to reason is futile
in the future, as it has been in the immediate past, and the Empire is
allowed to drift until collapse and anarchy supervene, we shall not shrink
from that final conclusion, and will organise to stand between the State

222 Rules of the Game

and ruin ... In no case shall we resort to violence against the forces of
the crown but only against the forces of anarchy if and when the
machinery of state has been allowed to drift into powerlessness.’

What would have given such a statement meaning was, of course, a
consideration of who was to be the arbiter of when such a moment of
decision had come, and what would be the extent of the moves to deal
with the crisis. It was Tom’s total ignoring of such questions (or the
assumption that of course the arbiter of everything would be himself)
that rendered the reasonableness of much of his argument irrelevant.

In the eyes of most people in 1932 the worst of the economic crisis
had already gone; it was only Tom, and his incipient band of dedicated
followers, who were insisting that it was still coming. But whoever
might, or might not, be proved right by history, to ignore questions
about how the crisis would be judged was not just to trivialise the
discussion but to make the whole form of it suspect. Tom made no secret
of the fact that his whole movement was a preparation for (and in fact
depended on) crisis: ‘in a crisis the British are at their best: when the
necessity for action is not clear they are at their worst ... a complete
breakdown would be a stronger incentive to action than the movement,
however cumbrous, of a crippled machine.’ After breakdown it might
be true that ‘in the highly technical struggle for the modern state in crisis
only the technical organisations of Fascism or Communism have ever
prevailed, or, in the nature of things, can prevail’. But then, people
might reasonably ask — might not Tom, with his ‘organised and deter-
mined minority’, if the crisis he insisted he foresaw did not in a time that
suited him materialise, be tempted reasonably (since it would come
anyway) to spur on the crisis himself? The irony of Tom’s political
career was that he deliberately put himself into a position in which
reasonable men could hardly fail to ask such a question and be alarmed
at the lack of a coherent answer: while Tom himself, without giving the
question any publicity or apparently even much thought, probably gave
to himself an answer that reasonable men might not have had all that
much cause to fear.

What Tom did publicly go on stressing was ‘the ferocity of struggle
and danger’ and the fact that the inevitable catastrophe would only be
able to be dealt with by ‘new men who come from nowhere’. It was
only after these ferocious men had sorted out the crisis that once more
(this was one of the paradoxes Tom most naively cut through and just
left) ‘rational discussion of the world’s economic problems would super-
vene’.

Throughout The Greater Britain there is not one reference to Jews. In

The Greater Britain 223

Hitler’s Mein Kampf, written ten years previously, it is explicit that Jews
are the enemy. In The Greater Britain the enemy is decadence. This
decadence is in society; in oneself.

There is a curious impression as one reads The Greater Britain that the
problems it presents are philosophical and psychological and have not
much to do with practical politics. In politics anyone can have high-
sounding ideals: anyone can slice with words through paradoxes about
authority and freedom. Practicalities depend on responses to events:
upon the style in which is discovered what is not possible and is practised
what is. The appeal of fascism was to a ‘greatness’ that would march
through human affairs like a column of ants: but this has not much to
do with what human beings are actually like; it is to do with a longing
of the psyche. Once the idea of ‘greatness’ is projected outside as a way
of cutting through paradoxes then there is in fact no control of them
but rather a helplessness — a runaway situation towards death. There is
no ‘greater’ challenge that a man can pit himself against than one with
the likelihood of death: this is a way in which life can in fact be cut
through.

A way in which it might conceivably have struck Tom and those
closest to him that what was being talked were paradoxes concerning
themselves was Tom’s curious insistence on the need to eschew and even
destroy everything ‘decadent’ and to ‘live like athletes’. For years Tom
and Cimmie had enjoyed during their leisure moments the company of
people who in any normal understanding of words ‘use their leisure
moments to destroy their capacity for public usefulness’. Tom had
perhaps reasonably justified himself in this — on the grounds that it was
necessary for personal equilibrium that portentous human attitudes
should be balanced by some such relaxations at the other end of the scale.
But then why did not he, or those closest to him, see that such balances
or at least tolerances might be necessary for the equilibrium of society
— and that there was a likelihood of disaster if they were treated with
contempt? Diana might have seen this: before she had met Tom she had
been involved in some of the more bizarre incidents of the ‘decadent’
age: she and her brother had put on an exhibition of paintings by Brian
Howard said to be by a German artist called ‘Bruno Hat’ and critics had
enjoyed the joke: Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies was dedicated to Bryan
and Diana Guinness. Throughout her life Diana has always seemed
personally to embody a balance between the passionately serious and
an enjoyment of the absurd. But she, at the time, seemed to insist on
some simple commitment: it seemed not to be fashionable anywhere
to think about balances in politics.

224 Rules of the Game

The result of this sort of failure — to see that all life depends on
balances; that a definition of life is in fact that which has feed-back and
response; that the simplicity, the drive to the doing away of balances,
results in a runaway situation towards death — the result of this sort of
failure is that it can affect the mind and heart as well as the outside world.
Cimmie was the person who now suffered; who perhaps wanted at last
to get out of the whole arena; who had her dreams of being with Tom
and the children ‘in a quiet place where it’s green and peaceful some-
time’. She was not getting well after the birth of her baby Michael; she
was still suffering from her kidney disease and she had pains in her back.
Then there had been the holiday in Venice when she had discovered the
seriousness of the threat of Diana and had cried much of the time. In
September she went to a spa called Contrexeville in eastern France. She
was trying to get her health back. She took with her her two older
children.

CHAPTER 23

The British Union of Fascists

Contrexeville is a place I remember quite well, perhaps because it was
one of the few times Vivien and I were on our own with our mother
— in the sense of there being no other grown-ups around by whom her
attention would inevitably be taken away. In practical matters (we were
aged eleven and nine) we were still ‘looked after’ by our mother’s lady’s
maid Andrée. We were in a big hotel called Hotel des Etablissements,
which was next door to a building called the Pump Room, where
people drank water out of little metal mugs. After doing this they would
walk about, or sit down, until it was time to go back to the hotel or
to have another drink of water. There was a park where children went
round and round on paths between flowerbeds on bicycles. Our mother
would sit in a wicker chair with a writing pad on her knee and write
to Tom, who was in London.

My dear darling,

I wonder what your plans are. I am afraid this place would bore
you unbelievably, it is juss BOREDOM personified — bourgeouis
dreary self-satisfied — mediocre hotel, fairly good cooking, hideous
revolting people, nothing to do. I drink a glass of water from 8 am
every 25 mins for 2 hours, then am massaged for an hour, then go
across the way and have Diatherm treatment then ionisation — then
am finished except for more and more water and a diet.

In the pm we go out in the car — lovely country road. Today went
to Domremy where Joan of Arc was born. I have no breakfast, no
tea, lunch at 12.15, dinner 7.30. It is now 9, and after this letter I shall
go to bed. There is a Casino but I have not been in, and a Cinny.
I hope it really will do me good, and I will come home well and
hearty ...

226 Rules of the Game

Cimmie in these letters makes few references to her children. She makes
no direct reference to what Tom might be doing in London. It was as
if she were going more and more into her private world in which
nothing much mattered except the dream in which she and Tom would
somehow, some day, be all right together. It was this that signified to
her the recovery from her illness.

I really feel we will have a good winter — you building up your
organisation, coping with the sales of your book, having a happy time
with your family — and some stolen moments with lovely sillies but
not too many — mum seeing to household, coping with children,
getting together nice intelligent Circle, arranging fun — does it seem
a nice proposition. I hope so.

Children find it difficult to be aware of their parents’ sicknesses: parents
are like the natural course of events: what happens when a course of
events gets out of joint? I remember getting on badly with my sister at
this time: we had ferocious fights: after one which went up and down
the corridors of the huge hotel like one of our father’s street-fights my
mother came out of her room and admonished both of us equally. I was
outraged at this: I thought I was in the right: but anyway, where was
justice in a world that did not even enquire into rights? I rushed into
our bedroom and locked myself in the lavatory. I thought I would stay
there until I died; then the grown-ups would be sorry. My mother and
sister did come to the door from time to time and ask me to come out:
they even pushed food under the door for me: I pushed this back. It
seemed that I was in there for a vast stretch of time: I suppose in fact
it was no more than most of a day. I became aware after a time that
although I seemed to be winning there was in fact no such thing as
winning: I would lose face if I came out but if I stayed in I would die:
this might be some sort of victory, but I would not be there to see it.
This perhaps is a common romantic predicament. Eventually I emerged
tentatively at night and my mother appeared at the bedroom door and
held out her arms to me and I ran into them and cried. I remember this
well: it is almost the only time I remember my mother holding me.
Tom wrote to Cimmie from London:

His own darling soft-nosed wog-tail
Glad to hear that Flexyville is not so bad — working very hard —
organising sale of book and many statements on current politics etc.

The British Union of Fascists 227

Fencing every night and morning at RAC — seeing no one — practi-
cally! Might turn up at Flexyville at any time but do not wait as in
a great turmoil. Rather enjoying it all. Directly I am satisfied
organisation can run without me will go off on another trip. Forgot
to tell you — an idea that B. Bracken (listen CM) and I should meet
Winston and Lindemann on Como. Lots of love and happy squashes.
[drawing of a gondola; then of a pig with its nose against a wheel].
Back at the grindstone — far, far away from Venice pleasure and
temptations.

One of the expeditions that Cimmie took the children on was to the
trenches and dug-outs of the first world war which had been preserved
near Verdun. We were taken round the sand-bagged passages like
sewers and the holes in the ground like those of rats: these were the
memorials of man’s urges to get rid of himself. We were aware that our
father had been somewhere near here some sixteen years ago: that he
cared passionately that there should be no more war. He was in London,
we understood, doing something about an organisation which would
prevent war; which would appeal to reason over the heads of mad
politicians.

At times Cimmie seemed to be dealing with her own predicaments
quite well. She wrote:

Bless you my darling right deep down I have confidence, my most
secret soul knows we are all right, I love you and you love me till
Death do us part; but various surface selves need encouraging now
and then, need a little bolstering up, want a little public demon-
stration, want to show off a bit, and it is that part that gets hurt and
upset. All the sweetness in the world isn’t quite the same as a demon-
stration of affection and choice in public and my bowels yearn for
the latter as well as appreciating the former.

Shan’t expect you here more than 1 or at most 2 nights, would love
that, but at pinch would understand none at all. Remember always
how I love you.

But then again — as if she were indeed under some attack in war, or
plagued by the illness she had come to Contrexeville to cure — the other
part of her would come out on top.

My heart is not yet quite right about you, it hurts when I think of
you, it misses you dreadfully, and is as jealous as hell. All the time I

228 Rules of the Game

try to reason with it, with my head. Theories could hardly be
improved on: practice not so good I fear. Still, Tom, doing some
thinking and philosophising — how much it will stand any strain of
events remains to be seen ... I hug you. I love you. What am I? I
forget. Is it your soft-nosed squash-tail?

There are medical reports on what was wrong with Cimmie at the time
it was decided she should go to Contrexeville: they were written in July
1932, just before the summer holiday in Venice.

Very briefly the history is that she had spinal curvature from child-
hood and in recent years this has been getting worse. Has had six
attacks of lumbago in her life. For the past two years she has been stiff
in the back.

In September last she fell out of a wagon loft and soon after had
acute pyelitis with high temperature etc. The exact date of onset of
the increase in the back is indefinite, but the pain definitely became
worse at her last pregnancy, so that she even had to have morphia to
relieve it. She was in bed three months in all. She was better after the
child was born but the pain increased again as soon as she got up and
she is now unable to take any form of active exercise ... Sneezing is
agony. For history of kidney infection see (enclosed) note.

Lady Cynthia Mosley has a bacillus coli infection of her urinary
tract which appears to date from Sept 1931 ... On several occasions
the question of terminating the pregnancy arose. Since the Caesarian
section the kidney has settled down; the urine still contains colon

bacilli...

It was to get rid of these, ostensibly, that she had come to Contrexeville.
After a fortnight a report read ‘Colon bacilli nearly disappeared’.

Tom announced his intention of coming out. ‘Here is the plan of
squash world — say if it is not porker — he will cross Saturday roth, stay
night in Paris, and come on to Flexyville next day. Porkers united!’
There is a photograph of Tom at Contrexeville standing by his Bentley,
and looking rather sad.

In London, he had been seeing to the publication of The Greater
Britain which was to be put out by his own publishing company and
was to coincide with the launching of the British Union of Fascists in
October. Representatives were sent out all over the country with the
book: this was to provide information for the cells of the ‘organised and
determined minority’.

The British Union of Fascists 229

The story of the British Union of Fascists will be told in another
book: but the beginnings of it belong here, because they overlap with
the story of Cimmie’s life and death. Harold Nicolson had recorded
in April that Tom did not want ‘to allow the active forces of this
country to fall into other hands’: it was because of this he was pre-
pared to ‘run the risk of further failure, ridicule and assault’. By ‘active
forces’ was meant, presumably, the fascist-type bodies already in
existence.

The two main home-grown fascist groups were — The British Fascists,
founded by Miss Lintorn-Orman who (it was often explained) was the
grand-daughter of a Field Marshal, and to whom in 1923 the idea of
saving the country from communism had come while she was weeding
her kitchen garden: and the Imperial Fascist League, founded by Arnold
Leese, who had been a vet specialising in the diseases of camels and
whose anti-semitism had arisen (so the story went) from his objection
to kosher methods of slaughtering animals. Throughout the nineteen-
twenties there had been numerous schisms and splinter-groups from
these bodies: for a time Brigadier Blakeney, previously an admini-
strator of the Egyptian State Railways, took over the British Fascists;
then he joined Arnold Leese, and both of them disassociated themselves
from Italian fascism on the grounds that it was too favourable to Jews.
There were splinter-groups called The British Empire Fascists, The
Fascist League, The Fascist Movement, The National Fascisti, and the
British National Fascists: it seemed that the number of bodies was
limited only by the availability of names. None of the groups had much
of a policy: they felt they existed to protect old fashioned virtues to do
with patriotism and law and order against the world-wide conspiracies
of people like Communists and Jews. They marched to and fro, and
cared about uniforms and flags and badges.

When Tom came along and proposed a merger of all these groups
into the British Union of Fascists he was objected to violently by Arnold
Leese on the grounds that he was being manipulated by Jews — to divert
attention from Leese’s true anti-semitism. And in fact in March 1933 the
Jewish Chronicle declared — “The Mosley Fascists themselves are our best
supporters in the fight against The Imperial Fascists League.’ It was the
latter who called the British Union Kosher Fascists; and claimed that
Cimmie was Jewish. In a fight between Mosley fascists and Leese’s
Imperial Fascist Guard in 1933 Leese was beaten up and General
Blakeney got a black eye: this was the only fight, Tom said later, in
which his stewards got out of control. At the time he was soon claiming
that the only fascists left outside his organisation were ‘three old ladies

230 Rules of the Game

and a couple of office boys’. But then — what kind of people were the
fascists within his organisation?

It is easy to write slightly mockingly about early fascists: such an
attitude is in reaction to Tom’s own idealistic claim that he was dis-
covering a ‘new’ type of man. They were mostly sincere idealists. The
British Union of Fascists officially came into existence on October Ist
1932 when there was a flag-unfurling ceremony in the old New Party
offices in Great George Street. Tom said ‘We ask those who join us...
to be prepared to sacrifice all, but to do so for no small and unworthy
ends. We ask them to dedicate their lives to building in the country a
movement of the modern age ... In return we can only offer them the
deep belief that they are fighting that a great land may live.’ But the
question of interest, as usual, was how successful Tom would be in
putting his fine sentiments into effect.

The first public meeting of the BUF was on October 15th in Trafalgar
Square. There was not much of a crowd. Photographs show Tom
making his speech on the plinth at the bottom of the column: he is
wearing a dark suit and tie and a white shirt: eight men with black shirts
and grey flannel trousers are around him. Newspapers reported that
Cimmie and her two older children were there. I have no memory of
this.

A week or so later there was an indoor meeting in the Memorial Hall
at Farringdon Street in the City. Here Tom, answering rather ob-
streperous questions from a group in the gallery, referred to ‘three
warriors of class war all from Jerusalem’. Fighting broke out: two of the
questioners were ejected. Afterwards Tom was reported by The Times
as saying ‘Fascist hostility to Jews was directed against those who
financed communists or who were pursuing an anti-British policy.’ This
was the first public reference by Tom as a fascist to Jews.

After the meeting there were further scuffles in the street. The scene
was the prototype of what was to become an archetypal pattern of fascist
and anti-fascist behaviour. The Times reported:

Sir Oswald marched in the midst of about 60 or 70 of his supporters
along Fleet Street, the Strand, and Whitehall, to the headquarters of
the British Union of Fascists at 1, Great George St, S.W. Of this party,
all young men, many wore either grey or black shirts, without
jackets, and nearly all were hatless. They roared patriotic songs and
the rallying cries of their organisation in turn, and behind them
walked a smaller party of men and women roaring revolutionary
songs and slogans.

The British Union of Fascists 231

The sort of slogans that the fascists and anti-fascists used to sling to and
fro at each other like tennis-balls were:

Two, four, six, eight,
Whom do we appreciate?
M.O.S.L.E.Y. — Mosley!

and:

Hitler and Mosley, what are they for?
Thuggery, buggery, hunger and war!

As a result of Tom’s reference to Jerusalem in his Farringdon Street
speech (Irene recorded in her diary) Israel Sieff, a prominent Jewish
businessman, withdrew a tentative offer of support for Tom.

The British Union of Fascists was not in its origins a working class
movement; it was composed mainly of lower-middle-class men who
resented the inequalities and lack of opportunities under capitalism; they
also feared the prospect of repression of individualism under socialism.
They were mostly young: those who were not, looked back to a spirit
of youthfulness such as they had found in the war. They joined the
movement not so much because they cared about any policy but because
they wanted order; and they felt the disorderly paradoxes of life might
be solved if they handed responsibilities to a leader whose words seemed
to cut through difficulties like a knife.

In the first edition of The Greater Britain (5,000 copies had sold out
quickly) Tom had written ‘Leadership may be individual or, preferably
in the case of the British character, a team’. In the second edition the
sentences were added ‘But undoutedly single leadership in practice
proves the more efficient instrument. The Leader must be prepared to
shoulder absolute responsibility.’ This was undoubtedly what he found
his followers wanted. A black shirt uniform for the BUF was designed
which was copied from Tom’s fencing jacket: Tom was reported as
saying that the shirt was ‘the outward and visible sign of an inward and
spiritual grace’. A uniform was useful for control if there was to be
fighting at meetings: also it did seem to be some sacrament (did Tom
realise the significance of his words?) by which his followers might feel
they were absolved from responsibility themselves.

Tom’s activities in the streets brought forth comments from friends
and associates in his other world. Harold Nicolson wrote that he was
saddened by the thought of ‘young Bermondsey boys with gummikniippel

232 Rules of the Game

(rubber truncheons). Irene complained — ‘I wish everyone would not
come in and say Tom was a musical comedy fool with his blackshirt
group’. Both Irene and Baba had been at the Farringdon Street meeting:
afterwards they discussed it with ‘rather broken hearts’.

Baba said his speech had been so fine, why descend to the Jerusalem
inanity, and really the little man in the balcony was quite inoffensive.
She waited for Tom for hours at Smith Square and finally he
swaggered in like a silly schoolboy only proud of some silly scuffles
and rows whilst marching home and glorying over his menials
throwing two lads down the stairs at Farringdon Street and possibly
injuring them and all this swagger and vanity to Mrs Bryan Guinness
and Doris Castelrosse — muck muck muck. When he is such a
magnificent orator, and if he had vision, he could have carried the
entire hall with him without descending to these blackshirt rows he
seems to revel in, and none of his friends will tell him what a ludicrous
figure he makes of himself.

But on the path that Tom had chosen for himself it was not ludicrous
that he should chuck hecklers out of his meetings, nor that he should
not be too concerned if there were scrimmages on his marches. He had
a policy that he wanted to be heard: it was a fact that in his pre-fascist
days people had defeated him by ignoring him. He believed that his
economic policies might save the country: if he was to make himself
heard, not only had he to ensure that he was not shouted down but he
needed publicity. The sort of public image he wanted to project was that
of someone who would guard law and order in the face of those who
were out to cause disruption. Logically, all this made sense. And in Italy,
fascists had in fact got power by presenting a tough, theatrical image.
There was still the question of tactics — if all this in political terms was
not to be turned against him.

Cimmie, now back in Smith Square, made designs for a fascist flag;
she discussed with Tom the prospect of turning Sousa’s ‘Stars and
Stripes’ into a fascist anthem with words by Osbert Sitwell. (William
Walton was later asked if he would write music). Cimmie went to
Tom’s meetings, but she did not appear on platforms nor take part in
the marches. It was as if she still could not quite make up her mind about
what was happening.

Diana, for all her seriousness and sophistication, might have found it
easier to accept in the BUF what Irene called ‘the musical comedy
element’: there was something in all Mitfords, as was later said about

The British Union of Fascists 233

Diana’s sister Nancy, that saw the world as something of a ‘tease’, and
that they might tease.

In his private life Tom seems to have been managing his juggling act
quite well; he was keeping all his plates, or whatever, fairly har-
moniously up in the air at the same time. On October 8th, a week before
the BUF’s inaugural meeting in Trafalgar Square, Cimmie, in a plane
between Paris and London, wrote to Tom, who was staying (according
to the address on the envelope) with the Guinnesses at their home at
Biddesden, in Hampshire.

Just want to send him love. Don’t know yet of course whether she
is to go on [this refers probably to the Trafalgar Square meeting] but
if so will do best gladly and proudly for him: if not will come home
determined to really try and both be happy and help meet to him.
Bless your heart, if I do try and see your point of view, please be
sweetie and see my p. of v. Be kind. Moo moo.

But Tom, involved in his public life with ‘the ferocity of struggle and
of danger’, would not have had time for much kindness. The style of
the task he had set himself was that you had to fight to stay alive: you
attracted people to you by your ability to show off ruthlessly and win.
A month after the Farringdon Street meeting newspapers reported one
at St Pancras where ‘some of the fascists had the shirts torn from their
backs and received razor slashes’: the battle with left-wing militants was
once more under way. Each side said that they were fighting for what
they believed in: but what they believed in was the struggle against the
other: this was the nature of their power, and the chance of their
extending it. Fascists and communists needed one another as enemies:
if each did not have the other, then indeed they were ludicrous because
they were punching at empty air. No one was talking much about
Tom's economic proposals now: but then, not many people had wanted
to talk about them before.

At the time of the launching of the New Party a year and a half ago
it had been Tom who had become ill: he had perhaps glimpsed the nature
of the path from which he would not be able to turn back. He was now
on that path: he had gambled on gaining political power on his own
terms, or nothing. In private life he was gambling too against almost
impossible odds — for the perfect arrangement by which he could have
Cimmie as wife and Diana as mistress and everyone be happy as he
himself strode in and out of protecting rings of fire.

CHAPTER 24

Diana Guinness

In the autumn of 1932, when I was nine, I was sent to boarding school.
My mother had taken trouble to find a suitable school: the one chosen
was Abinger Hill, near Dorking in Surrey. It was known as being
‘progressive’: the sort of school rich socialists or ex-socialists might send
their children to. What was progressive about it was that boys were
allowed to do a lot of their work in their own time and in their own
way, and a good deal of freedom was allowed to them in the surround-
ing countryside.

My father used to say he was haunted up to the end of his life by
memories of how he had hated boarding schools; he was bitter against
his mother for sending him away.

I look back on Abinger Hill with some gratitude. There were the
usual squalors and miseries, but it gave a child a chance to learn, and to
make, what adjustments were possible; and thus it did what all schools
should do, which is to teach a child what are the terms of the grown-
up world by which later he might feel free. What I remember about
my first year at Abinger Hill was the way in which life on the mundane
level seemed to be dominated by schoolboy gangs: the masters floated
almost in another dimension like gods. It was comparatively easy to
learn to come to terms with the gods: apart from a few compulsory
lessons the work that boys did could be arranged by the boys themselves:
when they had done a piece of work they were supposed to present it
to a master who would judge it and then according to its quantity and
quality would mark up a line on a graph in this or that coloured pencil.
Each boy carried his graph around with him as the frontispiece of a
loose-leaf notebook. It struck me almost at once that the most sensible
way of dealing with this situation would be to lay in a store of pencils
oneself — particularly those of the colours denoting ‘good’ or even

Diana Guinness 235

‘excellent’ — and to mark up, from time to time, one’s own graph; thus
doing away with the need for a lot of boring work and leaving time
free for reading interesting things like The Modern Boy and The Wizard
in the lavatory. (How much of childhood seems to have been spent
locked for safety in lavatories!) When the time came for end-of-term
examinations one could always mug up quickly all the work one was
supposed to have done, and this was the only way work could be made
interesting anyway; because it would be for a purpose and in response
to a challenge.

The problem of the older-boy gangs of bullies was much more
difficult. When I arrived at the school there was a ritual known (I have
changed the name) as ‘Brown’s Daily Blub’. Brown was I suppose a
rather unprepossessing boy, and each day after breakfast a column
would form and would follow Brown through the passages and round
the changing rooms chanting, as if it were one of the political slogans
used at my father’s marches, ‘Brown’s Daily Blub!’: until, in the course
of time, it became a self-validating statement in that Brown did, in fact,
blub; after which the column would disperse. I remember being amazed
at this: at first because I could not see the point of it; then because I could
not understand the odd pleasures of joining in.

Even more alarming rituals were apt to take place in the woods on
Sunday afternoons. One Sunday shortly after I had arrived the new boys
were rounded up by the senior boys and were marched off into the
woods and there we were split into two groups and one group was
ordered to dig the graves of the other group and to bury them up to
their necks. If anyone in the digging group demurred, it was explained,
he would be put into the other group — or worse. This was indeed a sort
of predicament about to become common in the grown-up world. I
was, by luck, in the digging group. We dug rather shallow graves. Then
one or two of the other group were told to lie in the graves and we were
told to pee on them. I remember there was a bit of a remonstrance about
this: I don’t remember, perhaps mercifully, exactly the outcome. What
I do remember is that some days later the whole school was assembled
and the headmaster announced that it had come to his notice via a letter
written by one of the new boys to his mother that certain of the new
boys had been out in the woods burying others up to their necks and
then — but the sequel was not mentionable. And so — for this, certain
new boys were going to be beaten if not expelled. Nothing was said
about any older boys. What I remember about all this was a feeling of
the inexorability of it: there was nothing one could do: this was what
life was like. Older boys took you into the woods and told you to do

236 Rules of the Game

these things: of course it was against the rules to tell about the older boys:
even the boy who had written to his mother had not told about them.
He had broken a rule by writing to his mother; but then, at least he had
been buried up to his neck. And so myself, and other boys, were beaten.
One had to learn about the ways people behaved.

Boarding school was a place in which one learned that the world
away from home was cold and damp and smelt of ink and herrings; in
which one had to be cunning in order to survive; one of the ways of
being cunning was to accept somewhat arbitrary injustices but if one did
this there were magical moments of laughter at the awful ways of bullies
and of gods. I do not know what the masters made of all this: perhaps,
like wise gods, they thought it best to pretend not to know what was
really going on and to let their children learn in their own ways. But
at boarding school one learned one could not fight the system; the
danger of this was, one might believe it of later life.

One of the agonising matters for boarding-school children is the
appearance or almost existence of their parents: parents are required to
be conventionally prosperous yet completely unremarkable. My first
term at Abinger Hill coincided with my father’s launching of The
British Union of Fascists: this was such a profound embarrassment that
it placed me as it were beyond usual categories of alarm. I was nick-
named by a friendly master ‘Baby Blackshirt’: I had to make some virtue
of this, or die. This was not impossible. I had loyalty and admiration
towards my father: were not he and my mother outstanding after all:
how lucky to be the son of someone so unique as a rich titled ex-socialist
fascist! And how boring to be a child of unremarkable, conventionally
prosperous parents! Somewhere floating around in the background, I
suppose, was the gratefully accepted respectability conferred by the
memory of grandfather Curzon. I built up a good deal of armour about
all this: but was still vulnerable as it were to torpedoes below the
consciousness line. My stammer, not bad when talking to friends, in any
sort of school activity got worse.

A week or so after the incident of gravedigging in the woods I wrote
home — ‘Darling Mummy and Daddy, I am very happy here. Thank
you very much for all your letters. I am not at all homesick. Yesterday
7 of us went blackberrying but we did not get much. We have very nice
meals. Love from Nick.

Neither Tom nor Cimmie had much talent for noticing what life in
fact was like around them: their talent was for ideas, for resolutions, for
insisting that life should be what it ought to be; for making passionate
gestures when it was not. Tom’s very determination that a new type of

Diana Guinness 237

society had to be built by a new type of man prevented him from
looking and seeing what men actually were: Cimmie’s faith that in the
end she and Tom would be all right stopped her perhaps observing
cunningly how to make them so. She endured: she complained. Tom
was cunning: but there was danger of catastrophe in his use of cunning
for his own ends.

After the somewhat public imbroglio about his private life at Venice
Tom seems to have managed in his usual way to placate Cimmie while
he continued with his amazing juggling act. But sometimes things went
wrong; manipulations flew out of control.

Darling Tom, As I don’t want to spare any time we may have
together by nags and reproaches I write to explain about Sunday. If
only you would be frank with me, that is what I beg. If when you
refused Mereworth you had said it was because you thought you
would like to take Diana out for the day Sunday I would have known
where I was. I started by thinking it odd but as you said nothing about
another plan I began to think it must be that you wanted to stay at
home and just be with us and I was so pleased. Then you tell me about
Sunday as if it was vague and only planned last night — and then I
realise the whole thing was arranged before and you had been putting
off telling me and letting me go on thinking we were going to have
a lovely Sunday together and then jump it on me after the party last
night. Even then you first say “Go a drive for an hour or two’ and
I get adjusted to that; then this morning it’s lunch and I rearrange my
point of view but you say anyway back for evening; then you ring
up and say whole bally day and night — well it’s pure funking, why
not tell me days ago, why not be truthful and honest. That is honestly
and truly what I want — beloved Tom do believe that — but the feeling
that you are not telling me, that you do things behind my back, that
you are only sweet to me when you want to get away with some-
thing, gives me such a feeling of insecurity and anxiety and worry
Iam more nervy and upset than I ought or need to be.

The book I am reading says this: ‘If John were extra sweet to you
then he had something to hide’ — very Tomki.

Oh darling darling don’t let it be like that, I will truly understand
if you give me a chance, but I am so kept in the dark. That bloody
damnable cursed Ebury — how often does she come there? Do you
think that I just forget all about her between the Fortnum and Mason
party and last night? I schooled myself the whole week never to even
mention her in case [ should nag or say something I should regret.

238 Rules of the Game

And then I have the horrid feeling this morning you’ve let me down
— don’t do that my angel please, I’m complicated because I feel
insecure and afraid. Don’t be secretive and hidey —I love you so much
I’d cope if you were open with me. Mutton

But human beings do not on the whole succeed in coping openly with
this sort of situation: openness succeeds with simplicity: when com-
plexity is at stake what is demanded is self-sufficiency, or some style.
Cimmie wrote to a woman friend (Mary Pearson) to ask for advice. She
got the reply:

It is natural and essential to mind unfaithfulness. It should always be
done a la Victorian without the knowledge of the other party. We
place an intolerable and mad psychological strain on ourselves with
all this so-called frankness. If Tom wishes to have affairs he is welcome
— but you shouldn’t know ... It’s ‘contrary to nature’ as the old
women used to say ...

This was the old aristocratic attitude. But it was just this that Cimmie
had spent her life trying to break away from. And she did not seem to
have the resources, now, to re-build a life on her own.

During the autumn Tom went again to Rome for a fascist anniver-
sary: he wanted to keep the visit secret. From Rome he wrote the last
letters that are in existence from him to Cimmie: after this, when he was
not with her, he seemed to think it better to keep quiet.

His own darling fellow

What a roarer — no harm in a few pictures!

Rome very interesting. Celebration and illuminations — the reception

of M tremendous — a great tribute to the system — very interesting

accounts of the 10 years work in the papers which I will bring home.

Have not seen any friends yet but have heard from some of them.
[series of squiggles as if ending the letter]

Was rather cross, but opened this again to say he loves her very much

~ not to be a goat because he adores her and she is his own sweet one

he loves. Darling fellow, they could have such a lovely life together

if his little frolicsome ways did not upset her. She does mean so much

to him and he does so appreciate her. She is such a great fellow. He

loves her so. [drawing of a piglet] X

Enclosed in this letter were two advertisements cut out of newspapers.

Diana Guinness 239

The first was headlined The Wolsey People Have Got At Poor Matilda and
went on ‘No self-respecting sheep is safe. Let it once be observed that
her fleece is really first rate, and away it may go at any moment to the
Wolsey mills ...’ Above this Tom had drawn two illustrations — one
of a sheep with its wool on beside which he had written ‘But he prefers
—’: and the other of a shorn sheep beside which Tom had written ‘Sad
effects of getting in a stew about nothing.’

The other advertisement was of a charging rhinoceros with the
headline Nature In The Raw Is Seldom Mild: and beside which Tom had
written ‘Fatty finding out after a few peeps.’ (It is not known what were
the ‘pictures’ referred to at the beginning of the letter).

Tom's second letter to Cimmie from Rome was:

His own darling fellow [drawing of piglet]

Has a really great regret did not bring her with him. Suppose could not
have foreseen. But does really regret it awfully. Might have had a
lovely honey squash. Seeing some of friends tomorrow — may have
to wait longer for others — everyone so terribly busy over anni-
versary ...

One great regret I did not bring her — how one wastes life and yet
so difficult to foresee — should really have settled definitely stay a week
— always see you amid such turmoil of work or if a holiday of other
things. Would have liked this to be a sweetly sweetly lovely time —
misses her so much wiffling and sniffing about! Really loves her very
much indeed, sure she is the one for him, glad she still loves him, sorry
he is such a Porker. Feeling very calm and rested now, my life is so
strenuous and hectic, I must recapture a little calm. Very ill and
wretched on arrival — caught chill on boat — but all gone now. First
lovely sunshine. I hope anyhow return before end of week but will
wire you. Would be ever so happy if she were here. As it is rather
sad and down. But hopes see her soon. Loves my darling fellow.
Think sweetly of him who loves her!

[huge drawing of a piglet]

Tom meant this when he wrote it: no one who knew him ever denied
that he meant it when he said he loved Cimmie: what people questioned
was how he could both mean this and behave as he did. This was the
peculiarity about Tom — how he did not seem restricted by other
people’s inability to hold opposites at the same time; and he did not feel
guilt. It is probable that he had stopped feeling sexually attracted to
Cimmie: she had often been ill in the last two years and had grown

240 Rules of the Game

heavy. But even if he had continued to be sexually attracted to her he
had shown often enough he could be involved in this way with more
than one person at once. What was happening now was that he loved
two people at once.

That Tom felt little guilt can be seen by the calmness with which he
justified himself all round: to Cimmie he referred to Diana as part of
his ‘little frolicsome ways’: he would not have told Diana of the re-
assuring things he said to Cimmie. This was, in the circumstances,
reasonable. But Diana would not have known how Cimmie suffered.
What other people could not forgive Tom for was his lack of guilt.

Cimmie was helpless because she was lulled by his sweet reasonable-
ness, by what seemed his simplicity, by his baby-drawings hung out like
bait on the end of a line. Then when she found he also loved someone
else the bottom fell out of her life. She did not have the capacity — as
many people do not have — to accept the terrible complexities of love;
that in such areas things can both be and not be at the same time.

What was destructive about Tom was that in spite of his manifest
complexities he still, in the matter of words, insisted on doing his simple
baby-talk with Cimmie: he hardly ever helped her to attain her own
complexities of mind. He had probably learned that this was the best
way of preventing her protesting too strongly about his ‘frolicsome
ways’: but in so doing he was allowing some outrage to fester inside her.

Cimmie kept on trying to make her calm, serious decisions about
learning to accept Diana as she had accepted other women in Tom’s life.
She kept on being defeated because the extent seemed never ending of
what she had to accept.

At the end of 1932 Tom and Cimmie rented a house at Yarlington,
in Somerset — Savehay Farm was still let. There we had a family
Christmas with Cimmie’s sister Irene and her sister Baba with her three
children: for some reason Uncle Fruity Metcalfe was Father Christmas
this year and the children at last all guessed who he was because of his
unmistakable Irish brogue. Tom and Cimmie planned a New Year’s
fancy-dress party with many of their old friends. Irene reported ‘a lot
of talk about how to conceal it from those foul gossip writers who had
already written it up and asked to come down and photograph the
guests’. Friends who lived in the neighbourhood such as Cecil Beaton
were to bring their house parties. The last time that Tom had been
pursued by newspapers had been after the razor attack on him at St
Pancras. It was odd that he should have wanted to give such a party now
—~ when he was in the business of building up the image of the hard, ‘new’
man. But then — might not in fact a ‘new’ man be someone who took

Diana Guinness 241

pride in being all things to all people? Among Tom and Cimmie’s own
house party guests was Diana Guinness.

The party was rather wild—Tom got over-excited and threw an éclair
which hit Syrie Maugham on the head. She had hysterics: the news-
papers duly reported the scene. The Daily Worker commented — “The
above picture of fascists at play should remove once and for all any
lingering doubt as to the superman nature of Mosleyini self-cast for the
role of the future dictator of Britain.’ This was a subtle conclusion to
be drawn from the evidence of a thrown éclair: it does not always suit
Marxists to link fascism to images of effeteness. But it was probably true
that Tom was at the height of his superhuman feelings just then —
thinking he might get away with everything.

Some time before the new year it had been agreed between Tom and
Diana that she would leave her home and set up house on her own so
that she and Tom could see each other more easily. People’s jealousies
were making it difficult to abide by any rules of the game. And in fact
Diana anyway wanted to ‘nail her colours to the mast’; to ‘throw in her
lot’ with Tom (the phrases are hers): it was one of her characteristics,
as it was one of Tom’s, that when emotions and beliefs became serious
she would want to throw over the boards of games. Tom himself
probably wanted publicly to be seen to carry off some great prize: this
would be a compensation for other disappointments. But above all,
Tom and Diana were involved in a grand passion: they thought they
were made for each other, and continued to think this for fifty years.

Diana’s sister Nancy Mitford wrote to her in November — ‘You
know, I feel convinced that you won’t be able to take this step ...
everybody that you know will band together and somehow stop you
... | believe you have a much worse time in store than you imagine.’
However — ‘Whatever happens I shall always be on your side.’

In January Diana moved with her two small children and a nanny into
2 Eaton Square — a house made available to her rent free by the
Grosvenor Estate on condition that she repaired it and redecorated it —
she was even given a grant for this purpose. This does not seem to have
been done as a special favour to Diana: with economic conditions such
as they were in January 1933 (the unemployed had reached nearly three
million) it was just that it was difficult to find suitable tenants for empty
houses in Eaton Square.

Diana’s friends continued to predict nothing but disaster for her in
her relationship with Tom. Her three younger sisters were forbidden
to visit her house. The taboo that she had broken was to have set herself
up openly as Tom’s mistress: Tom had broken the taboo of accepting

242 Rules of the Game

this while remaining openly married to Cimmie. Tom seemed to be
claiming simply that he had the right to have two wives — a state of
affairs traditionally indeed held to be taboo. Moreover one of the wives
had been for years a favourite of society because of her enthusiasm and
charm, and the other was the currently most sought-after young beauty
of the tribe. Tom could not have been surprised that there were strong
feelings against them.
Irene recorded in her diary:

My heart was in my boots over the hell incarnate beloved Cim is
going through over Diana Guinness bitching her life wanting to bolt
with Tom and marry him and the whole of London getting at me
and Baba with the story he had gone with her and needless to say
every Redesdale up in arms and Walter Guinness only wanting to
‘crash’ him and this blithering cow-faced fool insanely ditheringly
recklessly trying to ruin Cim’s life for her 19-year-old crush on that
vain insensate ass Tom.

In fact Lord Redesdale and Walter Guinness (Diana’s father-in-law) did
try to scare Tom off: they went in a deputation together to his flat in
Ebury Street. Tom was with Randolph Churchill before they arrived;
he said “Those two old men are coming to see me’: Randolph Churchill
said ‘What are you going to do?’ Tom said ‘I suppose wear a balls’
protector’.

It was not true that Diana expected to marry Tom: he had made it
clear that he would not break his marriage to Cimmie: he had made this
clear to Cimmie herself. It was just that ‘the whole of London’ (Irene’s
phrase) could not believe that Diana would have left her husband on
those terms. But this was, of course, one of the great attractions of Diana:
that she would stake her life, as Tom was doing, on something she
believed in but which was unlikely to go all her own way. In fact she
expected to see Tom only ‘when he could spare time from his all all-
absorbing political work and the family to which he was devoted’ (this
was Diana’s description in her autobiography). And Tom’s engagement
diary for 1933 does bear out that this is roughly what happened: he
would see Diana for lunch or dinner two or three times a week; he
would also enter his dates for lunch or dinner with Cimmie. He also
entered the dates he had with Cimmie’s sister Baba. Sometimes he
would see all three on the same day — ‘January 6th: Lunch Cim; Baba
4.15; Dine D.’

Cimmie, in her few remaining letters, seems to have alternated

Diana Guinness 243

between faith that in the end Tom would be left more hers than anyone
else’s as had happened before — ‘My darling one, my own sweet love,
just a line to say Iam happy and all is well and I am looking forward
to all being back at Smith Square’: and the old schoolgirlish rage which,
God knows, Tom could hardly now think he could placate with baby-
talk. ‘What an idiot you are, really, Tom, going through the fencing
prints to stick up in Ebury this p.m. ...’ (this is the only letter from
Cimmie that seems to have been censored: the page is torn off below
this point.) But then Cimmie would be making her resolutions and
requests again (Tom in letters was now silent); and in one case Cimmie
wrote as if she were forming an inscription on a tombstone:

I herby make a
Solemn Vow &
Covenant
not to again what you call nag
I will really
TRY & TRY & TRY
& can only ask in return a certain measure
of kindness and decency as to Provocation
Herby sealed and signed the 26th March
by
Cynthia Mosley
Do let’s start off by having a lovely happy day
today so sunny and birds twittering. Help me
my darling.

CHAPTER 25

The Death of Cimmie

It became fashionable in later life for people to say that my father was
responsible for my mother’s death. I remember the scene when this was
first suggested to me: I was in the nightnursery at Savehay Farm: | was
twelve or thirteen: I had been trying to get Nanny to explain why she
would never speak to my father’s friend Mrs Guinness who was staying
in the house. Nanny said — Well, if it had not been for — whatever it
was — she did not think my mother would have died. Nanny had her
back to me by the washbasin: there were blue and white striped curtains
in front of a cupboard. I remember thinking even then — But you can’t
say something like that is a cause of why people die: I mean, there is that
sort of thing, isn’t there, and people don’t die? I suppose I was quite a
clever little boy. I had also, for years, thought that much of the grown-
up world was mad: that they liked not liking one another. It seemed
to me the most striking thing about this bit of news was that it showed
how people must hate my father: I was glad that he seemed so im-
pervious to this. And anyway — if people thought that my mother had
died because of whatever my father was up to with Mrs Guinness, what
about her children, did people think she had cared more about that sort
of thing than about them?

Tom was a fool, I suppose, to imagine he could go on juggling with
people as if they had no hearts to fall and break: he could not have fore-
seen such a bitter nemesis. Many people get into the same sort of situa-
tion as Tom and Cimmie and Diana: not many, in fact, die. Cimmie
became ill; she had an operation: there could be conjectures about what
weaknesses were in her to make her not equipped to get well. But weak-
nesses are not a cause of death. If Cimmie had not died, Diana did not
believe that Tom would ever have left her. In time she, Diana, might have
got tired and left. Or Cimmie and she might eventually have made friends.

The Death of Cimmie 245

The reason why people felt so bitter about Tom was not rational but
symbolic: if Tom had put himself outside the rules of the social game
it was inevitable that he should be blamed for any nemesis. He himself
was always curiously unaware of such bitterness: for the most part he
thought life so wonderful himself, that he could not believe others might
need bitterness.

It was suggested also that Cimmie had been losing heart because
of Tom’s fascism: but here again there is little evidence. She liked
Mussolini: she called him ‘that big booming man’: she would have been
content, probably, to wait and see what would happen to Tom’s politics.
It is true that she seemed to have become increasingly distrustful of
Tom’s power with words — his belief that he could manipulate people,
and the world, just by his skill with words — but she might have learned
to live with her distrust. There was however some joint inability with
her and Tom to face the reality of the forces of darkness or helplessness
within themselves; and thus in the other, and in the outside world.
Cimmie perhaps began to lose heart because she could not get away
from her innocence: if she began to, she did not know where she was:
‘What am I? I forget: am I your squash-nosed wog tail?’

Tom wanted to alter the world; it is such wilful dreamers who
do sometimes alter the world: but the whole perilous edifice of fascism
was some demonstration of how things are not, rather than how they
are. Before the demonstration people did not know this: they believed
that human society and even human nature could be altered by reason
and will: that if it could not, than at least people might die splendidly
in the attempt. One demonstration of fascism was of the style in which
people do in fact die in this attempt. Tom was an odd exponent of
fascism because in spite of his talk about returning on his shield he did
not in fact do so: there was always a part of him that was not taken in
by his own romantic rhetoric. This did not prevent his being taken, by
others, symbolically to be responsible for deaths.

In January 1933 Hitler came to power in Germany. There was an
immediate outcrop of public brutality in which people who it was
thought would not fit into the regime were sorted out as if they were
dirt. Other people might have learned from this, then, if they had wanted
to. Once the power of the party in Germany had been thus established
public violence for a time calmed down. Perhaps it had been too sudden,
and too arbitrary, for people to have been able to take in what it meant.

Harold Nicolson in his diary never suggests anything except that
Cimmie was opposed to fascism (he wrote to her jokingly about his
godson Michael ‘Does Mikki have a swastika on his crib? that would

246 Rules of the Game

be the worst crib of all’). But Tom maintained she had come round to
the idea before she died: she was certainly accepted as Tom’s wife as part
of the early fascist scene. There is a letter to her of January 1933 from
the Battersea Branch of the BUF beginning ‘Hail! Lady Cynthia’ and
asking for the loan of furniture and crockery to help set up the Area
Office. But then at the same time came a letter from Russia from one
of her friends of two years ago — ‘Have you studied Marx yet? You
would find it a tremendous help in clearing up doubts which continue
to arise.’

In February there was a debate at the Friend’s House in Euston Road
in which Tom and James Maxton of the Independent Labour Party
argued against each other with Lloyd George as chairman. There was
a large audience containing many of Tom’s and Cimmie’s social friends.
Fascism was still on the edge of being respectable. It was thought that
Tom won the argument; but then, when people went away, there was
still the question of what the winning of an argument meant.

In the middle of April Cimmie at last went to Rome with Tom, to
take part in the celebrations around an International Fascist Exhibition.
Starace, the Secretary of the Italian Fascist Party, presented a banner to
the British Union of Fascists delegation: the banner was black with a
Union Jack in the top corner and in the centre the fasces symbol (a
bundle of bound sticks and an axe) around which were the words — The
British Union of Fascists For King-Empire and International Justice. It was
intended that the British delegation should be given the honour of
sharing with Mussolini the saluting platform at a march past of contin-
gents from all over Italy; but at the last moment it rained, and Mussolini
retired to a covered balcony some distance away. Tom and his seven
men stood to attention in front of the platform holding their banner
while behind them in a stand — there are photographs of this - Cimmie
looked down on them as if from a great height, rather bewildered and
amused. She wore a raincoat and a sort of schoolmistress’s brown felt
hat. The other occasion during this trip to Rome of which a photograph
has survived was of an official visit to the Roman Royal Academy. Tom
and Cimmie are surrounded by frock-coated dignitaries and they both
look absurdly young. Tom was thirty six. Cimmie was thirty four.

While she was in Rome Cimmie received a letter from a young
admirer she had met at the Embassy:

... Unemployment being the big problem and the British Fascist’s
opportunity, surely the job is to strike the English imagination. What
about voluntary labour battalions? J don’t know anything about the

The Death of Cimmie 247

finance and organisation side, but it seems to me that if the fascists
were to form battalions of unemployed (all classes) headed by deter-
mined young men who would march on the places where a job needs
doing — building sports’ grounds, clearing slums — and work scientifi-
cally and like hell, they’d capture the imagination of the public by
a manifestation of ENERGY ...

I’m not going to chop words — the English are afraid Mosley is out
for himself: they don’t see that belief in oneself and belief in oneself
as an instrument are different things. When they see a man who has
actually got hold so to speak of a spade and is digging away with his
pals it'll change the attitude a lot ... Mosley probably talks excellent
sense on unemployment, but so many people are talking: let him form
these labour battalions and choose definite and if possible spectacular
jobs which can be done in record time ... It’s the man who does
something that is going to capture the imagination ...

No physical offensive. Defensive and if necessary passive in suffer-
ing. An example of doing in the physical sense and enduring in the
spiritual.

This was the sort of good advice that Tom took at no time in his life:
to him politics were a matter of oration, of argument: the matter of
doing, though he talked about it so much, seldom seemed to get past
the stage of making sure that his words could be heard. He was from
now on never in a position of power from which he could put his words
into direct effect: he did not see the strength of an action as a symbol.
He never recognised for instance the harm that the activities, however
logically justifiable, of the stewards at his meetings were doing him: he
would not have seen the good that the rather absurd but symbolic use
of voluntary labour battalions might do him. It would certainly have
been some sort of anathema to him to have had to consider the idea of
victory through suffering.

When Tom and Cimmie got home from Rome at the end of April
Tom continued to visit Diana at 2 Eaton Square: Cimmie continued
to fail to keep for long her ‘solemn vow and covenant’ not to show how
much she suffered. She was encouraged by friends to have an affair of
her own: she said she did not want to. Tom himself (so he told the story)
encouraged her to have an affair: the lover he suggested for her was Dick
Wyndham.

There is a story of this time that once when Tom was talking to Diana
she asked him why Cimmie was so upset about her, Diana, when he had
been involved with so many other women; Tom replied that Cimmie

248 Rules of the Game

had probably not known about most of the other women. Then the
thought struck him (after all, rationally) — might it not help Cimmie
to know about the other women because then it would help to take her
mind off Diana? So he went home and told Cimmie a list of his women:
and Cimmie said ‘But they are all my best friends!’

The follow-up to this story was told by Bob Boothby. He and Tom
were both at the same dinner party that night and Tom asked him, as
one of Cimmie’s greatest friends, if he would go to Smith Square after
dinner and comfort her, because she was upset. Bob Boothby said “What
have you done to her now, Tom?’ and Tom said ‘I’ve told her all the
women I’ve been to bed with since we’ve been married.’ Bob Boothby
said ‘All, Tom?’ and Tom said ‘Well, all except her stepmother and her
sister.

In the spring holidays my sister and I were home from school and we
were back again at Savehay Farm. My mother, for something to do,
began to clear a two-acre wood at the end of the garden on the banks
of the river. I helped her with this work: we dragged brushwood and
fallen logs, and made bonfires. We did not often talk. Perhaps this was
my mother’s attempt to be ‘doing in the physical sense and enduring
in the spiritual’. I liked the work: it seemed more sensible than most
things I had been part of in the grown-up world.

In early May there was school again and my mother drove me there
in my father’s dashing Bentley. After she had said goodbye and was
going back past the rhododendrons she turned to wave — in her brown
felt hat like the cup of an acorn — that figure which I suppose meant
much of the world to me. I went off into the world of changing-rooms
where boys were lethargically bashing one another up. Cimmie went
to spend the weekend with Tom at Savehay Farm. At least, they had
intended to spend the weekend together; but they had a terrible row on
Sunday night —so Nanny later told Irene — and Tom walked out. Nanny
heard Cimmie crying during the night.

On the morning of Monday 8th Cimmie wrote her last letter to Tom.

Darling heart, I want to apologise for last night but I was feeling
already pretty rotten and that made me I suppose silly. Anyhow I had
a star bad night of feeling wretched and this morning was all in with
sickness and crashing back and tummy ache I can’t think what it is.
The Dr says my ‘wee’ shows slight recrudescence of coli bacilli but
he thinks it must be a chill. No temp, so it’s nothing to worry about,
but it’s just as painful and ill-making a feeling as if I were 106. Enough
of myself.

The Death of Cimmie 249

My darling precious if you can remember that it’s a sort of crazed
for-the-moment-off-her-balance and all-her-good-resolutions-gone
Cim who ‘nags’ and just be kind to it— not fight back — I always regret
so bitterly after, I could kill myself. I wouldn’t have married anyone
else for the world, I am ever so proud of being your wife, I do love
and adore you so — that’s the trouble — as much as 13 years ago and
in a way more frightenedly as then I had confidence and was happy
and now I cannot figure anything quite out any more. But I love you,
love you, love you, want to look after you, help you, be with you:
be a joy and assistance — an ‘ever present help in trouble’ instead of
which half the time I am the exact opposite. I am feeling too done
in to cope more now. Don’t, I beg of you, say unkind things to me,
and however much I drive you to it don’t compare me unfavourably
with the other one. You have no idea how desperately I mind and
I am trying and fighting every min: of the day. I never have a ‘let-
off’ to speak of.

My beloved darling darling Tom I love you so wholly as a wife
and a mum, but also I want you as a lover and sweet companion and
want to be ‘gay bird’ with you as well as ‘stress and strain of public
life’. I want the sun and the stars and the moon and they are all called
Tomki. I still thought I had them right up to last Xmas in spite of
everything. Perhaps I still have, who knows.

I wonder how the ancients acquired wisdom.
How tired you'll be with this my mutti-one.
Lotsie is coming for this weekend and I am getting ahead with the
party.
Let’s have a radiant day Thurs: without one cloud.
XOKOXKOXOXKO
~ISY oR ON
that is a hug and these are loving thoughts

IATL

Thursday May 11th was the thirteenth anniversary of Tom’s and
Cimmie’s wedding. On the evening of May 8th, the day on which she
had written the above letter, Cimmie was rushed to a nursing home in
London with acute appendicitis; the appendix had perforated; she was
operated on that night. There was a danger of peritonitis. (This was
before the days of penicillin). For a few days the danger did not seem
too great. Then it did.

The story of Cimmie’s death is taken from Irene’s diary. Irene was
not an impartial witness; she wrote in her usual emotional, anarchic

250 Rules of the Game

style. But this was the sort of style that must have surrounded Cimmie
from childhood; that she had hoped to get away from in marrying Tom.
It is perhaps not inappropriate that Cimmie’s death should be recorded
in a manner in which it might seem that childhood was reclaiming her.

Irene was abroad in Switzerland when Cimmie became ill: she had
just become engaged to be married at the age of thirty seven. She wrote
a letter to Cimmie telling her of her engagement; and saying that she
longed for her, Cimmie, to come to the wedding which was to be
quietly in Switzerland but she did not want her other sister Baba to
come; so could Cimmie please not tell Baba.

Irene learned of Cimmie’s illness when she read about it in the
Continental Daily Mail of May 11th. She sent a telegram to Tom, who
replied that there was no need for her to come home as all was well.
Then three days latter — ‘A wire from Tom bombshelled me with utter
horror: it said that Cim very seriously ill ... peritonitis has set in.’ Irene
and her fiancé, Miles Graham, caught an aeroplane from Zurich and
arrived in London on May 15th. They were met at the airport by Baba,
but were too late to see Cimmie that day. The next day Cimmie was
worse — she was having saline injections because she was too weak for
blood transfusions. Irene went to the nursing home but she still did not
get into Cimmie’s room: ‘Baba held the fort and sat outside Cim’s door’.
Then — ‘Tom came in and said I must decide whether or not to see my
Cim: it might kill her, and whilst there was life there was hope: and was
it not better to remember her always as lovely, not now, ill and drawn.’
And so — ‘I refrained from going into that tragic bedroom.’ Irene waited
outside with Tom’s mother, ‘Ma’. She spoke to the doctors about
Cimmie.

Oh that afternoon of horror! Dr Kirkwood then divulged — she had
never fought from the start, and her gaiety on the second day was
a bad sign: both mentally and physically she had never lifted a finger
to live. Ma, Andrée and I crouched outside that door whilst my angel
breathed out her last few hours. Poor Tom came out once or twice
and said he could get nothing through to her: if only the doctor had
warned him she was going he has so much to tell her, and now he
was trying to get through to her how magnificent her life had been
in its splendour and fulfillment. She had said to him that morning ‘I
am going, goodbye, my Buffy’ — what she always said when he
walked away through the garden at Denham. Baba sat in broken
solitude in the bathroom and try as I would to hold on to her hand
she turned away from every advance. Ma told me alas! alas! Cim had

The Death of Cimmie 251

got her to read my last letter to her and so of course she read — ‘I only
want you not Baba at my wedding’!

My precious got weaker and weaker and oh! her stertorous
breathing in the last 4 hour was torture to hear through the crack in
the door where I could just see the mirror: Tom murmuring to her
his last words of love. I shall never never forget the pure ruthlessness
of the pretty young nurse attendant on her all day: she stood outside
that door going in and out and never even shed a tear though another
little nurse by me was weeping sadly. I knew my love’s spirit had fled
by the sudden quiet and I saw Tom laying her beloved hands out.
Baba went in and I ran to tell the men to get on to poor Nanny. I
made plans for her to tell Viv and go at once and fetch Nick and |
would be at Denham by the time they got back from Abinger. Tom
came out after a bit, he hugged Baba pathetically, and thanked her
for being there, and if I had not kissed him on the stairs he would have
passed me by. But I saw so clearly Baba had been in the picture, I came
in late, I could only stand and wait till needed. 1 went round to Dr
Kirkwood’s and waited there whilst he went to get luggage for
Denham. Dr Kirkie said he had purposely written up all the slush of
Tom’s love at Cim’s bedside because of so much Guinness scandal talk
going about. I then sobbed and sobbed on the floor till Miles came
back for me. I would not be able to get into my house because I had
lent it to Elsie Fenwick for a debutante cocktail party party for Una!!
Miles took me in his car to Denham. Oh! how the beauty of the place
hurt me ... Her bedroom I went to pray in to help her children for
always. But oh! she was everywhere — everywhere — and yet gone:
the place was crying out for her. I met the children about 8.30 and
took them up to their suppers. Nanny had told them and they had
cried all the way back. I chattered over their ovaltines and God
sustained me not to break down; and Micky Mouse awake in his bed
got over sweet Nick getting into his. I then knelt by sweet Viv and
explained to her Mummy was tired and would have been an invalid
and God had given her perfect rest by taking her away but she was
always so near us and around us. | then lay on the bed and the
housemaid sustained me with sal volatile. Tom then appeared alone
to walk hopelessly in the garden. Miles did such a good thing, he got
the revolver out of Tom’s room as I told him I felt Tom might do
something dreadful. Ma then phoned would Tom go back as Cim
was looking so lovely.

At Abinger Hill, in my dormitory, I remember the headmaster coming

252 Rules of the Game

in and saying Nanny was downstairs and would I go to her; and I was
so pleased, so pleased; I had been back at school for about a week; I had
been told my mother was ill, but children do not quite believe their
parents’ illnesses. (I had written to her two days before. ‘How are you
feeling? And is your tummy still aching?’) | ran down to the head-
master’s drawing-room and there was Nanny on the sofa and she told
me my mother was dead and there was the feeling of the bottom falling
out of the world, space and time going, and a terrible fear that this might
not be bearable. I cried. Perhaps it is true that I remember so little about
my mother because of what was not bearable.

I do not remember my Aunt Irene at Denham when we got back:
my Aunt Irene was very good to us, but I suppose children have an
instinct about what is required when things are falling. Nanny and my
sister Vivien and I sat in a little heap by the nursery fire. Then our father
came in and held out his arms to us. I don’t think he could have done
better.

Nanny told Irene about the last weekend at Savehay Farm before
Cimmie went to the nursing home: it was presumed that Tom had gone
to Diana when he had walked out on Saturday night. Irene wrote — ‘Oh
God what a terrible doom for Tom! and to think that Cim is gone
and that Guinness is free and alive and oh! where is any balance or
justice!”

Diana remembered the day when Cimmie died as being one of the
worst of her life: many of her friends realised this, and wrote to her, and
sent her flowers. Tom came round to see her briefly that night: he said
that they would not be able to see each other for some time. She
wondered if she would ever see him again. But he told her — It will be
all right.

The ‘slush’ that Dr Kirkwood said he had ‘written up’ about Tom
because of the ‘Guinness scandal’ came out in the papers the next day.
The Daily Telegraph reported the doctor saying about Tom:

Through the days and nights he never left her. He kept a ceaseless
vigil by her side, and his devotion to his dying wife was the one bright
spot in a losing fight. There was something perfect and beautiful
about it ... how Sir Oswald stood the anxious strain I do not know
... Before Lady Cynthia lost consciousness it was wonderful to see
them whisper encouragement to each other. She must have meant far
more to her husband than the world knows. It may seem a rather
strange thing to say, but they had a very beautiful time together
during their last few days.

The Death of Cimmie 253

This was not the feeling amongst those who had once been Cimmie’s
and Tom’s friends. Irene recorded that Nancy Astor was ‘defiant and
adamant in her opinion of Tom ... all this theatrical grief would pass
like a mirage ... it was unbelievable the hatred against him and Cim’s
death in the House of Commons.’ Irene herself ‘tried to see it was best
she had gone to suffer no more at Tom’s hands’. Baba however ex-
plained (in Irene’s words) ‘Cim would rather have lived for her children
and all the hell he put her through for one of the short elysian heights
he and she definitely attained now and again.’

It was planned that Tom would build a tomb in a memorial garden
for Cimmie in the wood by the river at Savehay Farm which she and
her children had been clearing during the easter holidays. Until this was
ready the coffin would lie in the chapel of the Astors’ house at Cliveden
a few miles away. There was a funeral service around the coffin at Smith
Square for just Tom and his mother and Irene and Baba: at the same
time there was a memorial service at St Margaret’s Westminster for her
friends. These had been told that Cimmie had wished that no one should
wear mourning; so almost the only people who turned up in black were
members of the BUF in their new shirts. Tom had asked that the
organist should play the Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde, which had
been played at their wedding thirteen years ago. The children were not
taken to either of these ceremonies: it was thought that ‘the sight of the
coffin might shock them and mummy locked inside it’. Irene recorded
that we were kept at Savehay Farm doing basket-work with her sec-
retary: but I remember going out with my fishing net to the river and
wondering about the damned grown-up world that did not teach you
to know when your mother was dying and made it so difficult to say
good-bye when she was dead.

After the service in Smith Square, in a room full of flowers, Tom sat
for hours ‘gazing and gazing at her coffin’. No one close to Tom at this
time thought his grief was not genuine. Baba was called round to Ebury
Street by a mutual friend that night because he was ‘frightened for
Tom’.

Tom made up bunches of flowers, and photographs, and messages,
to lie on Cimmie’s coffin while it remained at Cliveden. The messages
were written on tiny bits of paper like confetti. After Tom’s death I
found them in an envelope with Tom’s writing on it — Not to be touched.
On these scraps that are like petals fallen from trees there is written —
My love’s last present to me on the anniversary of our wedding last
Thursday May 11th— Tiny Pres for my darling love I love you so always
and for ever — Happy kippers my own darling one with love for ever

254 Rules of the Game

misses her so— Come over Denham my darling where you are with me
always and I love you for ever. And at the bottom of each note there
is one of the tiny drawings in Tom’s wild, child-like hand that were the
talismans of his and Cimmie’s life together — the sheep, the turtle, the

piglet.

CHAPTER 26

Beyond the Game

Whatever was destructive about Tom’s and Cimmie’s life together was
the result of their trying for too much, nota failure to do enough. Tom
had the crazy belief that he could get away with almost anything —
adoring wife, passionate mistress, goodness knows what else — keep
everyone happy when he wanted them to be happy and avoid them
when he wanted to get away. He wanted to create and run a revolu-
tionary political movement that when he chose might seem con-
ventional: that would both break and not break the rules. He evolved
some sort of philosophy about all this — in later life he tried to write it
— it sprang from a genuine conviction that old forms of life, social and
personal, were dying, and that some new type of society and of human
being had to emerge if there was to be hope for humanity. He took his
pessimism about the old world from Spengler and his optimism about
what might be new from Nietzsche: but he thought he could ‘go beyond’
Spengler and he misread Nietzsche (or did not read him enough): he
imagined that Nietzsche was talking about politics when he was talking
about states of mind. Nietzsche had found that to talk about a new type
of man required a new style of language: this language was often ironic:
it half mocked the so desperately serious things it was trying to say.
Nietzsche thought that some such style was necessary if one was to face
truth about human affairs and not get carried away or overwhelmed by
the vision. This style, possibly might be the mark of a new type of man.
But there would still be rules, on a higher level, of a new type of game.

Tom with part of himself picked up this style: he was unusually witty:
he was sometimes humorous about himself. But then some sort of
curtain would go up and he became like a ham actor on a stage; he
became roaring, runaway, all-of-a-piece, savage; he was like a bus with
no brakes going down a hill. It was always a bit of a mystery why he

256 Rules of the Game

let himself go like this. Rudeness was perhaps some sort of relief when
the pain of looking at the truth of things became too much.

The image that Tom built up for himself was that of Faust: of
someone always striving, always searching, because that was what a
human being was for. This was his justification for his arrogance and
his energy: it was not just for himself, but was part of a training by which
‘great’ things could be achieved. But the only justification for this
justification is that he should have been ready to face, to examine,
everything: he should not have picked what results of his experiments
he should pay attention to and what he would not. When he went
roaring off on his hobby horses it was as if he were turning his back on
pursuers. Protection is an activity natural to politicians: it has nothing
to do with Faust.

Cimmie could not free herself from Tom whatever he did or did not
do to her: this had given him security to go roaring off. The more he
went his own way the more Cimmie heroically put up with it: by
increasing his confidence, she increased her pain. This circle went on
running away with itself until, suddenly, there was a death. It is difficult
to see, perhaps, another outcome. Cimmie does not seem to have been
able seriously to consider the possibility of her leaving him: until she
could do this Tom would always have been able to hurt her. And so
she would nag at him, and so he would have an excuse to get away from
her: and so it would go on; but it was to herself the nagging caused too
much pain.

After Cimmie’s death Tom’s great grief was genuine; but he used his
grief, as he had once used her love of him, to spur himself on. Tragedy
was not something that might make him change his ways. He built his
memorial to her in the garden at Savehay Farm: he told Harold Nicolson
that he ‘now regards his [fascist] movement as a memorial to Cimmie
and is prepared willingly to die for it’. There was nothing in fascism that
could not assimilate images of death.

Another memorial was planned for Cimmie: there was to be a
children’s Day Nursery in south London named after her, and sub-
scribed to by her friends. This was organised by Irene and Baba. An
appeal went out over the signatures of Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley
Baldwin, George Lansbury and Lloyd George.

Tom became involved in attempts to ‘get through’ to Cimmie by
spiritualist mediums: these were organised by one of his mother’s sisters.
There was one quite striking result when a medium came up with the
word engraved on the inside of Cimmie’s wedding ring which was
thought to be known only by Cimmie and Tom. Most of the messages

Beyond the Game 257

that came through however were, as usual, strangely impersonal;
though they did often have a peculiarly political content — “Tom pursues
a good course by going to Manchester: he should try to fight Salford
and a better spirit will prevail’. One such message, passed on in a letter
from his aunt to Tom, had even a weirdly prophetic ring: ‘I feel he will
never be able now to manage to move near another new policy while
he gives stiffs all the more important posts’. The medium was asked
twice if ‘stiffs’ was the right word: the reply each time was ‘Yes’.

Tom took up again the reins of his fascist movement: his mother ‘Ma’
emerged from the shadows and became leader of the woman’s section
of the British Union of Fascists. She announced “When my son married
Lady Cynthia, she took her place by his side. Now she is dead there must
be someone to help him in his work and I am going to do my best to
fill the gap.’ In July Tom and his mother led a big fascist march round
London which began, whether by chance or design, close to Diana’s
house in Eaton Square. Irene reported:

Saw Tom amassing his fascists in Eaton Square and Ma the women:
then from Colin Davidson’s window in Grosvenor Place we watched
the March Past along with Zita, Beatrice Guinness, Patrick Hepburn,
and Hitler’s jester lover ‘bugger’ Hanfstaengl — a magnificant type of
man who plays the piano beautifully, is anxious and oily and utterly
evasive on any real question. At first with Colin and Zita and then
alone I followed on foot, car and taxi Tom’s march all round London
to see no harm came to him: it was a splendid show and no trouble
and I greeted him when he came back to H.Q. and he made a short
speech from the top of a car.

Tom’s ex-sisters-in-law were being very solicitous about him at this
time: they stopped talking about his ‘musical comedy’ blackshirts. With
Cimmie dead, they were trying to comfort him: they saw that he was
doing his best to be a good father to his children. ‘Nanny said Tom was
very sad yesterday and his sweetness with the children hour after hour
Sunday was wonderful.’ But above all what Baba and Irene and ‘Ma’
seemed to be getting together about was a determination to try to
prevent him seeing Diana.

Baba and I were scared stiff when we learned Tom had gone up for
dinner Sunday night and was back by 1 a.m. and was doing the same
tonight. Who could it be but Diana Guinness. Baba and I, I know,
were both sick with terror.

258 Rules of the Game

The reason ostensibly given for this attitude was that any further
association between Tom and Diana would in some way be hurtful to
Cimmie: Baba ‘could not make him see the cruelty of it to Cim first
and foremost’. But even Irene, with her haphazardness of mind and
style, must have found it difficult to continue to convince herself that
hers and Baba’s feelings were as grandiose as this. A plan was made that
later on in the summer, while Irene took the older children on a holiday,
Baba should go on a motoring trip in France with Tom to give him
further comfort — having ‘asked for a fortnight’s leave’ from her
husband Fruity. Irene consulted Tom about this: ‘I definitely sensed he
wanted Baba alone or no one, and I saw his point about this’. Fruity,
however, seems to have seen a less blinkered point: to Irene he ‘muttered
about all this Tom hysteria and Baba’s sacrifice to him watching and
guarding him — he saw it as all bunk and false’ — here Fruity even got
out a bit of resentful rage — when Tom had killed sweet Cim in cruelty
and mental torture’. People were becoming involved in the sort of
manipulations, conscious or unconscious, that they blamed Tom so
bitterly for.

In early May Diana had asked for a divorce: this had been agreed:
moreover it had been arranged that her husband would, according to
the gentlemanly conventions of the time, appear to be the guilty party
so that Diana need not be accused.

Tom went to see Diana again in June: Eaton Square was only three
minutes walk from Ebury Street. He came after dark. He said — referring
to her proceedings for divorce — ‘Have you jumped your little hurdle
yet?’ Diana replied ‘It’s my whole life!’ They had a terrible row; and
Tom went away.

Irene and Baba and Ma were all on the telephone about this.

When Baba rang him up he had gone to London — there could only
be one — and we were scared stiff. I had a talk with Ma over the phone
and she told me she was worried — that the horror had sent for Tom
after her divorce coming up ... It puts Baba in a fearful fix about
motoring in France with Tom as if he is seeing Diana none of us could
have the heart to deal with him: the idea is utterly unthinkable. Zita
could give us no gossip on her; she had seen her at 2 dinners doing
the grim-wan-dead-white-face line ...

But Tom, as was his way, seems to have used the row with Diana
to give his ex-sister-in-law and his mother the assurances they re-
quired:

Beyond the Game 259

He had asked Ma to tell Baba and me he never contemplated meeting
Diana after his trip with Baba. Ma had told him what gossip she had
heard about the girl saying she was going to get him now and that
those who knew her said she was the most determined minx and that
she talked to everyone. Tom refused to believe the tales and said she
was dignified and sweet and would never gabble. Ma cried and said
Tom was so marvellous to his children and that perhaps Cim had died
to save his soul: I wondered!

Tom’s assurance to Diana — they soon made up their quarrel — was that
it would be useful to themselves if it became known that he was seeing
a lot of Baba: during the long period before Diana’s divorce became final
he and Diana had to be careful about their being seen together and so
a ‘cover’ would be useful: these were the days when any hint of adultery
on the part of the petitioner or so-called ‘not-guilty’ party could, if it
was brought to the attention of an official called the King’s Proctor,
render a divorce invalid.

Tom told Baba (Irene reported) that he had to see Diana occasionally
because he could not ‘shirk his obligations’. All this intrigue was rep-
resentative of something which had presumably always been going on
but which Cimmie by her good nature had rendered almost innocent.
This was now the conscious style of life around Tom: the permuta-
tions of passion and deception and self-deception seemed endless:

When I saw Baba later although she could not tell me details as she
has been sworn to secrecy by Tom I knew he had killed something
in her after all these months of devotion and sacrifice to him as she
could not reconcile and told him so this frenzied love for Cim trying
now to get mediums and the horror of seeing Diana on and off —
dining with her as he says platonically — and she still could not make
him see the cruelty of it to Cim ... I knew she felt she could hardly
start on the motor trip now if at all ...

Baba had had lunch with Tom and had fairly let fly about Diana
whom she loathes and she tried to make Tom see that if he went on
like this he would be utterly killed and his future smashed as people
would not stand for it but he seemed more smashed over having hurt
Baba and was asking her to tell him what to do — anything to restore
that confidence ...

I cannot get over Tom’s consideration towards Babs... 1 pray this
obsession with her will utterly oust Diana Guinness ...

260 Rules of the Game

What was happening, of course, was that Tom was once more
managing to do his juggling act of keeping people and passions in the
air at the same time. There was even a curious incursion from his private
world into his public world, which people apart from Tom seemed to
view with the deepest suspicion:

Ma was harrassed by Unity Mitford now joining the Fascist cause,
and she was sure she was doing it to spy on Tom in the office as she
had asked such curious questions of Lady Makgill ... This wretch is
wanting to sell blackshirts and walk in parades and attend all meetings
— for what reason?

Tom and Baba went off on their motoring trip through France: Irene
and Vivien and Nicholas and Andrée, Cimmie’s ex-lady’s-maid, set out
on a cruise to the Canary Isles: Nanny and Michael went to the Isle of
Wight. Diana and her sister Unity went on a journey to Germany which,
Diana said later, changed Unity’s life. In Munich they met Putzi
Hanfstaengl — he whom Irene had just previously described (in words
not literally but perhaps metaphorically apt) as ‘Hitler’s jester lover
bugger’. Putzi Hanfstaeng] — ‘a huge man with an exaggerated manner’
(Diana’s description) — took them to the Nuremberg Parteitag, the first
huge Nazi rally after Hitler had come to power. Diana wrote — ‘A
feeling of excited triumph was in the air, and when Hitler appeared an
almost electric shock passed through the multitude.’

This is the moment to end this book; with the characters abroad and
getting ready for their new parts and re-alignments. The story of the
next thirteen years is the story of Tom’s fascism; of his attempt to
prevent war; of his new and extraordinary private juggling acts; of the
passions and duplicities surrounding these but also of the bright, violent
feeling that followed my father wherever he went; as he made stands
about crucial events; as he occasionally dallied on the Mediterranean; as
he marched his blackshirt army against the blank wall of war. His
children had to learn to come to terms with all this: not only with a
world in which their mother had died and people suggested their father
had killed her (and their father told them how wonderful his marriage
had been) but with a world in which now their father was apt to march
down Oxford Street at the head of people who if you looked at them
in one way were magnificent and if you looked at them in another were
like soldiers from Selfridge’s toy shop. Also — why was the world going
towards war? And why were people so angry at my father for trying
to stop this? As an adolescent, one built up one’s own defence works;

Beyond the Game 261

came up against one’s own brick walls. There were not so many refuges
now in the hidey-holes of childhood. Some sort of acceptance, or
technique, had to be worked out in the mind.

Tom’s energy seemed to carry him over difficulties like someone on
a flying carpet. He went on perfecting his marvellous powers with
words: he lifted people off their chairs with them. Part of his appeal as
a fascist was that he seemed to be a single, lonely figure taking on all
the challenges of the world. But then, he was too powerful for people
to think they might really help him. He did perform some service by
getting what he had called the extremist forces of the country in his
hands: violence in England, unlike that on the continent, was for the
most part symbolic.

His children learned something from Tom about how to trust them-
selves: but how might they explain this? Part of what they learned was
that the power of words was both wonderful and terrible.

There is a photograph of myself and my sister Vivien and my Aunty
Irene at this time: we are on our cruise ship between the Canary Isles
and Southampton: we are at one of those fancy dress balls so beloved
by people with nothing to do. Aunty is dressed in what she referred to
in her diary as her ‘white lace veil as a mantilla’. Vivien is in ‘her
mummy’s turkish harem dress’. Nicky is just ‘in his burnous’. We do
seem to be involved in some journey through purgatory: I at least am
dressed for the part. When we got back from our cruise we went to join
Nanny and Micky in the Isle of Wight: then Daddy and Aunty Baba
came down and told us of their wonderful motoring trip through
France: and everything was much as before, except that “Tom was
getting up and handing the vegetables round’ and it was now Tom and
Viv who ‘went bang bang at each other with the coltish smacking and
chaffing which I hate’ (Irene). But what about Uncle Fruity? This
however was the sort of question one did not ask grown-ups: they were
apt to shoot at each other hurt glances, like that time for instance when
I had told Nanny an amusing limerick I had picked up at school. It was
better, I had learned, if one wanted to find out about life, to wait to talk
with people of one’s own age; who seemed to have the gift to laugh and
be serious and be curious without deluding themselves or dying because
they were hurt.

Notes on sources and acknowledgements

Material for this book was for the most part provided by my father’s papers
which, after his death, were put at my disposal without reserve by my step-
mother Diana Mosley; to her I have the greatest gratitude.

Secondly my thanks are to Robert Skidelsky, whose biography of my father
(Oswald Mosley: Macmillan, 1975) deals with his politics with the most ad-
mirable judgement and comprehensiveness.

I am grateful to Lord Boothby for permission to quote at length from the
three letters he wrote to my father in the early thirties: also the letter he wrote
to my mother in 1925.

I am grateful to Zita James for permission to quote from her unpublished
diary of 1930.

The diaries of my aunt Irene Ravensdale, from which I quote, are in my
possession.

Of published works, apart from Robert Skidelsky’s biography, I owe most
to my father’s autobiography (My Life: Nelson 1968) and to Harold Nicolson’s
Diaries and Letters 1930-39 (Collins, 1966). I was also helped by being allowed
to read Harold Nicolson’s unpublished diaries in Balliol College Library.

I owe much to The Fascists in Britain by Colin Cross (Barrie and Rockliff,
1961); John Strachey by Hugh Thomas (Methuen, 1973) and A Life of Contrasts
by Diana Mosley (Hamish Hamilton, 1977).

I have quoted from the following books: Portrait of the Labour Party by Egon
Wertheimer (Putnam, 1936); Decline and Fall of the Labour Party by John
Scanlon (Peter Davis, 1932); Volumes I and II of the Diaries of Beatrice Webb
(1952 and 1956); I Fight to Live by Robert Boothby (Gollancz, 1947); Tomorrow
is a New Day by Jennie Lee (Penguin, 1947); Unfinished Journey by Jack Jones
(Hamish Hamilton, 1938); J. H. Thomas: a Life For Unity by Gregory Blaxland
(Muller, 1964): Diary in Exile, 1935 by Leon Trotsky (Harvard University Press,
1976); Diaries and Letters: 1930-39 by Harold Nicolson (Collins, 1966); A Life
of Contrasts by Diana Mosley (Hamish Hamilton, 1977); In Many Rythms by
Baroness Ravensdale (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953).

For my chapter on The Riddle of the Sphinx 1 am indebted to Charles
Hampden-Turner’s admirable Maps of the Mind (Mitchell Beazeley, 1981).

Last, but not least, I am grateful to my sister Vivien (who has allowed me
to use some of her photographs) and to my brother Michael, both of whom
have generously assisted with what is to them the unearthing of old stories.

N.M.

Index

Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley are referred to here as Tom and Cimmie. (For

these nicknames, see pp. 3, 10.)

Abinger Hill School, 234-6

Action (New Party newspaper), 192, 196,
198, 201-2, 207

Albert, King, of Belgium, 17, 24

Alexander, A. V., 187

Alington, Napier (Lord Alington), 41

Allen, W. E. D., 195

America, Tom and Cimmie in, 61-2

Andrée (Cimmie’s lady’s maid), 75, 219,
225, 260

Arlen, Michael, 197

Arnold, Sidney, 50

Ashton-under-Lyne, by-election at (1930),
185-7

Asquith, H. H., 49

Asquith, Margot, 49, 50-1

Aston, Birmingham, John Strachey and,
83

Astor, Nancy (1879-1964), 10, 25, 39, 46,
87, 94, 253

Athens, Cimmie’s visit to, 157

Baldwin, Oliver, 149, 172, 183, 184

Baldwin, Stanley (1867-1947), 47, 49, 89,
169, 188, 256

Balfour, A. J. (1848~-1930), 16, 50-1

Barnato, Babe, 132, 133

Barrymore, Blanche, 96

Beaton, Cecil, 98, 102, 114, 240

Beaverbrook, William Maxwell Aitken,

1st Baron (1879-1964), 98, 138, 150-1,
152, 181, 184
Belgium, royal family of, 17, 24, 106
Belville, Rupert, 132, 133, 134
Berlin, 109-10
Bevan, Aneurin, 149, 169, 183
Birchington, Kent, rented house at, 45
Birkenhead, F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of
(1872-1930), 8, 49, §1, 120
Birmingham, 58, 90, 91, 200; see also
Aston; Smethwick
Birmingham Post, 62, 200
Birmingham proposals, 61, 64-70, 113,
124
Birmingham Town Crier, 91
Black and Tans, 27, 28
Blakeney, Brigadier, 229
Bondfield, Margaret, 129
Bonham Carter, Violet, 46, 49
Boothby, Sir Robert (later
Boothby; born 1900)
with Tom and Cimmie, 83—4, 94-5, 98
relations with Tom, 84, 149-50, 150,
219, 248
relations with Cimmie, 84, 84-6, 141
on Tom’s prospects, 85
advice to Tom, 144-6, 151-3, 167, 171
Bosphorus (Hellespont), swum by Cim-
mie, 160, I61, 165
Box, F. K., 195

Baron

266

Bracken, Brendan, 219, 227

Brand, Robert (later Lord Brand), 94
British Union of Fascists, see under fascism
Brockway, Fenner, 168

Brown, W. J., 149, 169, 172, 173, 183
Butler, R. A. (later Lord Butler), 147-8

Campbell, B. A., 47, 87, 100

Carlton House Terrace, Curzon residence
at No. 1, 16

Carrington, Dora, 217

Casa Maury, Bobby, 132

Casa Maury, Paula, 132, 161, 217

Cecil, Lord Robert, 26, 27, 28, 29, 38,
47

Centre Party, projected, 28-9; ‘alliance’,
149-53; see also New Labour Group

Chamberlain, Joseph, 60

Chamberlain, Neville, 58, 203

Chamberlayne, A. R., 9

Chapel Royal, St James’s, 24

Cheyney, Peter, 201

Chicago, 61, 62

Churchill, Lord Randolph (1849-1895;
father of Sir Winston), $5, 144

Churchill, Randolph (1911-1968; son of
Sir Winston), 203, 219, 242

Churchill, Sir Winston (1874-1965), 8, 28,
§1, 120, 1§0-1, 188, 203, 216, 227

City of London, 125, 170-1

Claire, Ina, 132, 133-4

Clerk, Sir George, 158

Cliveden, 94, 253

Clynes, J. R., 158

Colonial Development Bill, 122

colonies, 60, 64

communists, Communism, 87, 194; see also
Marxism; socialism

Conservative Party
Tom approached by, 8
Tom leaves benches in Commons, 27
Tom opposed by, at Harrow, 47-8, 49
scorned by Tom, 50, 89
in 1929 election, 120

Contrexeville, Cimmie’s visit to, 224, 225

Cook, Arthur J., 90-1, 168, 169

Corfu, invaded by Italy, 27, 47

Cowdray, Lord, 29

Index

Curzon, Lady Alexandra Naldera (“Baba’,
Cimmie’s younger sister; born 1904)
birth, 16
and Cimmie’s wedding, 24, 25
with Cimmie in south of France, 34, 37,
39, 40
and Prince George, 46
at Savehay Farm, 76, 104
marriage, 95
in south of France with Cimmie and
Tom, 132-4, 184
and Tom's fascism, 232
Christmas with Cimmie and Tom, 240
and Cimmie’s death, 250-1, 253
and memorial to Cimmie, 256
motoring trip with Tom, 258-60, 261
Curzon, Lady Cynthia, see Mosley, Lady
Cynthia
Curzon, Grace (Marchioness Curzon of
Kedleston, formerly Mrs Duggan; died
1968), 18, 30, 96
Curzon, Lady Irene (‘Nina’, Cimmie’s
elder sister, later Baroness Ravens-
dale; 1896-1966)
birth, 13
in India, 15
relations with Cimmie, 15, 18, 94, 117—
119, 184
accounts of Cimmie and Tom, 19-20,
93, 94, 117, 118, 132-4, 155, 157,
197, 204, 231, 232, 242, 249-$I, 253,
257-60
and Cimmie’s wedding, 25
and her father’s death, 31
at Savehay Farm, 76, 101, 104, 114,
117
becomes Baroness Ravensdale, 93
her way of life, 93-4
and politics, 94, 117-18
to Moscow with John Strachey, 164
Christmas with Tom and Cimmie, 240
and Diana Guinness, 242, 257-60
and Cimmie’s death, 249-51, 252, 253
her engagement, 250, 250-1
and memorial to Cimmie, 256
cruise to Canary Islands, 260, 261
Curzon, Mary (née Leiter; Cimmie’s
mother; 1898-1933), 12-16, 30

Index

Curzon of Kedleston, George Nathaniel,
Earl Curzon of Kedleston (later Mar-
quess Curzon of Kedleston; Cimmie’s
father; 1859-1925), 10, 12, 12-17, 18,
24—-$, 30—I, 40, 79, 93

Curzon family, 205

Daily Express, 62

Daily Herald, 146

Daily Mail, 57-8

Daily Sketch, 204

Daily Telegraph, 252

Daily Worker, 184, 241

Dalton, Hugh, 56

Davies, Sellick, 195

Dawson, Geoffrey, 94

D’Erlanger, Catherine, 8

De la Warre, Lady, 218

De Wolfe, Elsie, 32

Denham, 73, 98; see also Savehay Farm

Desborough, Lady, 19

Disraeli, Benjamin, 10

Dollan, Pat, 81-2

Duggan, Mrs, see Curzon, Grace, Mar-
chioness Curzon of Kedleston

Durham Miners’ Gala, 90

Easton Lodge, ILP summer schools at, 82

Ebury St, Tom's flat at No. 22, 155-6

economic affairs, crises, 59-61, 64-71,
191-2, 193-4, 219-20, 222; see also
Birmingham proposals; Mosley Mani-
festo; pensions; road building; un-
employment; working class

Economic Council, projected, 66-8, 113

Eden Roc hotel, Antibes, 132

Elizabeth, Queen, of Belgium, 17, 24, 106

Elliott, Maxine, 8, 41

Elliott, Walter, 150, 151

Empire, Commonwealth, 151, 169

exports, 60, 124, 143

fascism
foreshadowed, 67-8, 150
an ironical comment by Tom, 181
New Party and, Youth Movement
(Nupa Youth Movement), 184, 186,

267

187-8, 190, I9I, 199, 200, 201, 203,
211
birth of British fascism, 186
Tom’s growing involvement with, 205,
206-13, 215
Cimmie and, 205, 207, 209, 210, 230,
232, 245-7, 256
in Italy, 207-11, 238, 246-7
nature of, 212-13, 245
Diana and, 215, 232-3
The Greater Britain, 215, 219-23, 228,
231
British Union of Fascists, 228-33, 236,
246, 253, 257
various fascist groups, 229
black shirt uniform, 231
subsequent history of, 260
Finney, Ben, 132—3
First World War, s—9, 17-20, 227
Forgan, Dr Robert, 149, 172, 195, 197-8,
198
Freud, Sigmund, 115

Gaetani, Gelasio, 209
Gandhi, Mahatma, 59
Gargoyle Club, 206
Garvin, John L., 28
general elections
1918, 9
1922, 47-9
1923, 49
1924, §8
1929, 113, 116, 117-18, 120
1931, 200-1
General Strike (1926), 90
George V, King, 24
George, Prince (later Duke of Kent), 46,
95
Gilbert, John, 132, 133-4
Gladstone, William Ewart, 50
Glyn, Eleanor, 14, 18-19, 25
gold standard, 194, 201
Graham, Miles, 250, 251
Greater Britain, The (Mosley), see under
fascism
Greenwood, Arthur, 129
Grenfell, Julian and Billy, 19
Grey, Lord, 29

268

Guinness, Bryan Walter (2nd Baron
Moyne; Diana’s first husband; born
190$), 215, 223, 258

Guinness, Desmond (Diana's son), 217

Guinness, Diana (née Mitford; born

1910)

meets Tom, 213-14

and fascism, 215, 232-3

family, 215

first marriage, 215

courted by Tom, 215-17, 219, 237-8,
240

two children, 217

embodies balance between serious and
absurd, 223

sets up house in Eaton Square, 241-2

and Cimmie’s death, 244, 252

relations with Tom, 257-60

her divorce, 258, 259

to Germany with Unity, 260

mentioned, 34, 73, 155

Guinness, Jonathan (Diana’s son), 217

Guinness, Walter Edward (ist Baron
Moyne; 1880-1944), 215, 242

Hackwood Park, 16, 17

Hamlyn, Mr (Action Manager), 196

Hanfstaengl, Putzi, 257, 260

Harrow, Tom’s constituency, 8-9, 30, 47—
48, 49-50

Heard, Gerald, 198, 201

Hearst, William Randolph, 61

Henderson, Arthur, 82, 125, 146, 169

Hepburn, Patrick, 257

Hitler, Adolf, 223, 245, 260

Hobhouse, Christopher, 207, 209, 211

Hore-Belisha, Leslie, 150

House of Commons, see Parliament

Howard, Brian, 223

Howard, Peter, 186, 199, 210

human nature, 67-9, 130; see also power

Hutchinson, Barbara, 217

Hyslop, Nanny, 34, 45-6, 71-8 passim, 91,
99, 102-3, 219, 244, 252, 260, 261

idealism, and practical politics, 141-2; see
also power

Index

Independent Labour Party (ILP), 61, 81-
82, 91, 113

India, 13-16, 26; Tom and Cimmie in, $9,
60-1, 79

inflation, 65, 66

International Court of Justice, The Hague,
154

Invergordon mutiny, 201

IRA, 27, 28

Ireland, 21, 27-8

Isherwood, Christopher, 201

Italy, see Mussolini

James, Zita (née Jungman), 94-5, 157, 159,
160, 162, 163-4, 165, 257

Jane di San Faustino, Princess, 32, 208, 210

Jebb, Gladwyn, 209

Jews, 222-3, 229, 230

Joad, C. E. M., 150, 187-8, 191

John, Augustus, 216

Johnston, Tom, 121, 123, 143, 146

Jones, J., 39

Jones, Jack, 185, 187

Jungman, Theresa, 157

Jungman, Zita, see James, Zita

Kedleston, 13, 16, 30

Keynes, Maynard, §9-60, 127, 196
Kirkwood, Dr, 250, 251, 252
Kitchener, Lord, 16

Krane, Francis Peabody, 157

Labour Party

Tom joins, 49-53

strongest party (1923), 49

Tom and Cimmie popular in, $4—-6, §7—
§8, 80, 81-3

Tom on National Executive Council,
gI

party workers at Savehay Farm, 99-100

puritanism in, 112-13

Tom's growing disillusionment, 112—-
[14

in 1929 general election, 113, 120

Tom and PLP, 146-7, 149

Tom at Llandudno Conference, 166,
167-9

Cimmie’s resignation from, 172-3

Index

Labour Party — cont.
Tom expelled from, 173
opposes National Government, 200

Ladywood, Birmingham, Tom defeated
at, $8

laissez-faire, 60, 64-5

Lancers, 16th, 5, 6

Lansbury, George, 121, 122, 123, 143,
256

League of Nations, 9, 10-11, 20, 26-7

League of Youth and Social Progress,
26

Lee, Jenny, 149, 164

Leese, Arnold, 229

legends, power of, 80-1, 178

Leiter, Joe, 13-14, 61

Leiter, Levi Zebidee, 12, 13, 13-14, 16, 30

Leiter, Marguerite ‘Daisy’, later Countess
of Suffolk, 16

Leiter, Mary, see Curzon, Mary

Leiter family, 12-13, 13-14, 61, 205

Leiter Trust/Estate, 16, 61, 92, 93, 205

Lenin, 86

Leopold, Prince, of Belgium, 17

Lewis, Kid, 199, 200

Liberal Party, 8, 49, 50-1, 120

Lillie, Beatrice, 138

Lindemann, F. A. (later Lord Cherwell),
227

Llandudno, Labour Party Conference at,
166, 167-9

Lloyd George, David (1863-1945)
Tom meets, 8
and Ireland, 21, 27
his coalition government, 26, 28, 47
and foreign policy, 30
and Tom’s projected alliance, 150
and projected ‘National Opposition’,

188

and memorial to Cimmie, 256
mentioned, 246

Lloyd, George, 151

London School of Economics, Cimmie at,
18

Lou Mas, Cap Ferrat, family visit to, 34

Lynn, Olga, 41, 102

Mabel (parlourmaid), 75, 77, 99, 102

269

MacDonald, James Ramsay (1866-1937)
relations with Tom, 40, §2—3, 112, 113,
120, 125-7, 128-9, 146
relations with Cimmie, $0, 82, 112, 127,
141, 172-3, 256
Margot Asquith on, §I
to Berlin with Tom and Cimmie, 109—-
110
his mistress, 110-12
forms Labour Government (1929), 120
appearance and manner, 125, 148
Beatrice Webb on, 148
eloquence at Llandudno, 167-8
forms National Government, 188, 194,
200
Macmillan, Harold, 147-8, 149, 151
Malone, Dudley, 132, 133, 134
Manchester Guardian, 183, 199-200
Marsh, Sir Edward Howard, 216
Marxism, Marxists, $5, 86-7, 184; see also
communists; socialism
Mary, Queen, 24
Massingham, Hugh, 150
Maxton, James, 81, 82, 168, 246
Maugham, Syrie, 241
Maxwell, Elsa, 40
May (housemaid), 75, 77, 99
Melton Mowbray, Irene’s visits to, 93
Memorial Hall, Farringdon St, BUF
meeting in (1932), 230, 232
Mendl, Charles, 112
Messel, Oliver, 98, 102
Metcalfe, Lady Alexandra ‘Baba’, see
Curzon, Lady Alexandra
Metcalfe, Major Edward ‘Fruity’, 95, 132,
133, 240, 258, 261
Mitford, Diana, see Guinness, Diana
Mitford, Jessica, 216
Mitford, Nancy, 216, 233, 24!
Mitford, Unity, 260
Mitford family, 215-16, 232-3
Mond, Henry, 150
Montagu, Margaret, 8
Morley, John, Viscount (1838-1923), 50
Morris, William Richard (later Lord Nuf-
field), 170
Morrison, Herbert (later Baron Morrison
of Lambeth; 1888-1965), 56, 143-4

270

Mortimer, Raymond, 201
Mosley, Lady Cynthia (‘Cimmie’; 1898—

1933) courted by Tom, 10-11, 20-3

family, 12-14

birth, 13

upbringing, 14-15, 16-17

relations with Irene, 15, 18, 25, 94, 117—
119, 154

and First World War, 17-18, 19

her view of marriage, 18, 33

relations with her father, 18, 30-1,
79

advice from Eleanor Glyn, 18-19

letters to Tom, 20, 21, 22, 34-44, 97,
108-9, 134, 138-40, 154, 155, 156,
1§8-9, 160-2, 162-3, 209, 210, 213,
218-19, 225, 226, 227, 227-8, 233,
237-8, 242-3, 248-9

engaged to Tom, 23

marriage, 24-5

honeymoon at Portofino, 25-6

helps Tom with projected Centre
Party, 29

her income, 30, 92

social life, 31-3, 86, 93, 114-15, 157,
203

first child (Vivien Mosley, q.v.), 34

house in Smith Square, 34

at Lou Mas, 34-44

second child (Nicholas Mosley, q.v.),
45

as mother, 46, 72, 76, 103, 106, 226

political move to left, 46, 49-50

relations with MacDonald, see under
MacDonald

Labour attitudes to, 54-5, $7, 80-3,
86-8, 92-3, 97-8

her socialism, $7, 79, 86-7, 154, 172-3

to India, 59

to America, 61

house at Denham (Savehay Farm, q.v.),
73, 76

relations with Tom, 33, 34, 81, 96-7,
114—1§, 116-17, 132-40, 1§§-7, 160—
163, 179-80, 180-1, 182, 204-5, 206,
216-19, 224, 227-8, 236-40, 242-3,
247-9, 255-7

Labour candidate/member for Stoke,

Index

82, 11§, I17—-19, 1§4
and John Strachey, 83-4, 204
and Robert Boothby, 83, 84-6
her personality, manner, 86, 94-5, 217
home movies, 101, 102
to Berlin with Tom and MacDonald,
109
at Antibes, 132-4
maiden speech in Commons, 140-1
on Tom’s censure motion, 147
and Tom's projected alliance, 147,
15!
political activities, 154-5
advocates breaking of conventions, 154
to Turkey and Russia, 157-65
swims Bosphorus (Hellespont), 160,
161, 165
and New Party, 172, 174, 183, 184,
185, 186-7, 187
resigns from Labour Party, 172-3
death, 182, 244-5, 249-54, 256
in south of France, 191, 197
does not stand in 1931 election, 200, 205
loses interest in politics, 204
and fascism, 205, 207, 209, 210, 230,
232, 245-7, 256
unwell, 205, 224, 228, 248, 249
financial troubles, 205
third child (Michael Mosley, q.v.), 213
at Contrexeville, 224, 225-8
memorials, 253, 254
Mosley, Edward (‘Ted’, Tom's brother),
I, 3-4, OT, 95
Mosley, John (Tom’s brother), 1
Mosley, Katherine Maud (Tom's mother;
1874-1950), 1-3, 8, $0, 52, 91, IIS,
149, 177, 250-1, 257-60
Mosley, Michael (born 1932), 213, 245-6,
260, 261
Mosley, Nicholas (later Baron Ravens-
dale; born 1923), 45-7, 71-8, 91, 98,
99-107, 155, 157, 197, 219, 224, 225,
226, 227, 230, 234-6, 248, 2§1-2, 253,
260, 261
Mosley, Oswald (Tom's grandfather;
1848-1915), I-3, 31
Mosley, Oswald (Tom's father; 1873—
1928), 1-4, 31, 62, 91-2, 177

Index

Mosley, Sir Oswald (“Tom’; 1896-1980)

birth, 1

family and upbringing, 1-4

schooling, 4, 234

as fencer, 4, 205-6

at Sandhurst, 4-5

leg injury, 5, 6-7

and First World War, 5-8, 19-20

enters society, 7

reads voraciously, 7

and women, 7-8, 14, 32-3, $56, 81,
96-7, 114-15, 132, 1§§-6, 160-1,
247-8

on his origins, 8, 104

Conservative parliamentary candidate
at Harrow (1918), 8-9

his election manifesto, 9

in Parliament, 9

falls in love with Cimmie, 10

courts Cimmie, 10-11, 20-3

letters to Cimmie, 10-11, 21, 22-3,
34-44, $7, 81, 95-6, 97, 116-17, 136-
138, 156, 164-5, 218, 226-7, 228, 238,
239

engaged to Cimmie, 23

marriage, 24~—5

in photographs, 24

honeymoon at Portofino, 25-6

his marriage, relations with Cimmie,
see under Mosley, Lady Cynthia

his liberal views in Parliament, 26-8

attacks Churchill and others, 28

and projected Centre Party, 28-9

relations with Curzon, 30-1

financial difficulties at Harrow, 30

cuts away from his past, 31

in social set, 31-3

advocates wholeness, 32, 115, 180

house in Smith Square, 34

speech in Commons, 38, 40

holiday in Venice, 45

his views on children, 46

disillusioned with establishment, 46-7

stands as Independent at Harrow
(1922), 47-9

and Liberal Party, 49, 50-1

reduced majority in 1923 election, 49

joins Labour Party, 50-3

271

his uncompromising approach to poli-
tics, $I—2

Labour Party attitudes to, 54-6, §7—8,
80, 87, 92-3, 113-14

‘most brilliant man in the House of
Commons’, $5

skill with words, oratory, 56-7, 69-70,
81, 105, 169, 184-5

defeated at Ladywood (1924), §8

to India, $9

and economic issues, 59-61, 64-7, I9T,
193-4, 219-20, 222 (see also Birming-
ham proposals; Mosley Manifesto;
unemployment)

to America, 61-2

wins bye-election at Smethwick (1926),
62-3

his reliance on reason, 68-9, 130-1,
140

with his children, 72, 76-8, 103-4

improbable stories told about him, 79-
80

as legendary figure, hero, Leader, 80-1,
87, 174, 175, 180, 231

not interested in power, 80-1, 181-2

and John Strachey, 83-4

and Robert Boothby, 83, 84-5, 144-5,
1§1-3, 167, I7I

and social life, 86, 93

not a Marxist, 87

his view of Parliament, 89-90

addresses mass meetings, 90

and miners, 90

office in ILP and Labour Party, 90-1

his father’s death, 91-2

his wealth, 92

relations with Irene, 94, 138

zenith of his political career, 97-8

weekend guests at Savehay Farm, 99-
103

amateur film-maker, 102

illness, 109, 173-4, 184-5

to Berlin with MacDonald, 109-10

and MacDonald’s mistress, 110-12

relations with MacDonald, 112

his private and public personalities,
115-16

returned for Smethwick (1929), 118

272

Mosley, Sir Oswald — cont.
becomes Chancellor of Duchy of
Lancaster, 120
attempts to deal with unemployment
(q.v.), 120-9, 132, 143-4
Colonial Development Bill, 122
and pensions, 122-3, 123, 126.
produces Mosley Memorandum (q.v.),
127
on holiday in Antibes, 132-4
his idealism, 141-2
resignation from Cabinet, 144-9
and PLP, his censure motion, 146—7
projected parliamentary alliance, 149-
1$3
his flat in Ebury St, 155-6
to south of France, 157
Trotsky’s opinion of, 159
at Llandudno Conference, 166, 167—9
and new alliance, the New Labour
Group, 169-74
decisive moment in his political life,
172
expelled from Labour Party, 173
games playing and human _ nature,
177-8
his zest for life, 180
his destructiveness symbolic, 182, 261
the New Party, 183-92, 193-203, 211
birth of fascism (q.v.)
plans for a ‘National Opposition’, 188,
203
last major speech in Parliament, 199
defeated at Stoke (1931), 200
financial troubles, 205
and Mussolini, 207-11, 246
and Diana, 213-14, 215, 217-18, 219,
233, 240-2, 244, 247-8, 257-60
and death of Cimmie, 244-54, 256
debate with Maxton, 246
and spiritualism, 257-8
Mosley, Sylvia, 95-6
Mosley, Vivien Elisabeth (later Mrs
Forbes-Adam; born 1921), 34, 45, 71-8
passim, 91, 94, 98, 99, 103-4, 105, 219,
224, 225, 226, 227, 230, 248, 251, 252,
253, 260, 261
Mosley Manifesto, 169-70, 183

Index

Mosley Memorandum, 127-9, 143, 144,
146, 148, 167, 168

Moyne, Lord, see Guinness, Bryan
Walter, and Guinness, Walter Edward

Murray, Middleton, 196

Muspratt, Eric, 198

Mussolini, Benito (1883-1945), 27, 47,
207, 210, 211, 212, 245, 246

‘Nanny’, see Hyslop
National Government, 194, 198, 200, 203
National Policy, A, 169, 183-4
Nazis, 211; see also Hitler
New Labour Group, 169-74
New Party, 183-92, 193-203, 204, 207,
211
Nicolson, Sir Harold George (1886-1968)
shows Tom and Cimmie round Berlin,
109
on Cimmie and MacDonald, 112
and Tom’s projected parliamentary
alliance, 150
and New Party, 185-212 passim
a journalist, 186
loses deposit in 1931 election, 200
on Peter Cheyney, 201
on Cimmie’s proper role, 204
on Tom and Cimmie, 204, 205
on dangers of fascism, 206, 211, 211-

212

in Rome with Tom, 207, 209-10,
2I!I

mentioned, 172, 184, 229, 231-2, 245-
246, 256

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 255
Noel-Baker, Philip, 38

Novello, Ivor, 138

Nuffield, Lord, see Morris, William
Nupa Youth Movement, see under fascism

O'Connor, T. P., 27
Oedipus, 175-8
Orman, Miss Lintorn, 229

Paddy's Goose Boys’ Club, 47, 100

Parliament, House of Commons, 89-90,
204

Pearson, Mary, 238

Index

pensions, 122-3, 123, 126, 140-1

Philip of Hesse, Prince, 210

Pollock, Sir Ernest, 10-11

Pontine marshes, reclamation of, 208,
209

Portal, Colonel, 171

Portofino, Tom and Cimmie at, 25

poverty, 59-60, 64-5

power, excessive, dictatorship, 67-8, 124,
128, 130-1, 178, 183-4, 220; see also
fascism; idealism

protectionism, 60, 64-5

Proust, Marcel, 32

Pryce-Jones, Alan, 201

puritanism, 112-13

Quennell, Peter, 201

railways, 122

Ravensdale, Baron, see Mosley, Nicholas

Ravensdale, Baroness, see Curzon, Irene

Redesdale, Lord (1878-1958), 215, 242

Reigate Priory, Curzon residence at, 13

Renishaw Park, Yorkshire, 191

Revolution by Reason (Mosley), 61, 64, 69-
70, 82, 83

road building, 123-4, 127, 143-4

Rolleston Hall, Staffs, 1, 3, 31

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 61

Rosebery, sth Earl of, 50-1

Rothermere, Lord, 150-1, 152, 205

Rothschild, Rosemary and Eddie, 72

Rothschild, Victor, 217

Royal Flying Corps, 5-6, 7

Rubinstein, Artur, 138

Rural Amenities Bill, 154

Russia, 26-7, 189; Cimmie’s visit to, 157,
162, 163-4, 165

Sackville-West, Vita, 198

Sandhurst, 4-5

Sarfatti, Margherita, 211

Savehay Farm, 73-8, 99-107, 205, 248

Scanlon, John, 55, 92-3, 168, 168-9

Scarsdale, Rev. Alfred Nathaniel Holden
Curzon, 4th Baron (George Curzon’'s
father; 1831-1916), 12, 13, 30, 103

Scarsdale family, 12

273

Shaw, George Bernard, 59, 144
Shaw, Tom, 129
Shinwell, Emanuel, 187
Sieff, Israel, 231
Sinclair, Sir Archibald, 46, 150, 188
Sitwell, Georgia, 155
Sitwell, Osbert, 191, 201, 232
Sitwell, Sacheverell, 98, 155, 199
Skidelsky, Robert, 80, 181
Smethwick, Tom’s constituency, 62-3,
QI, 92, 100, 118
Smith, F. E., see Birkenhead
Smith Square, Tom and Cimmie’s home
at No. 8, 34, 71-2, 205
Snowden, Philip, 122, 125, 129, 143, 145
socialism
Tom and Cimmie and, $7, 65, 67, 79,
86-7, 154, 172-3
Labour attitudes to, 113, 172-3
see also Marxism
Socialist Party of America, 61
Souls, The, 12, 17
Spencer, Stanley, 216
Spengler, Oswald, 255
spiritualism, 256-7
stammering, 105-6
Stanley, Edward, 151
Stanley, Oliver, 150, 151
Starace, Achille, 246
Stella (nurserymaid), 45
Stoke-on-Trent
Cimmie’s constituency, 82, 94, 100,
116, 117-18, 154, 204
Tom defeated at (1931), 200
Strachey, Esther, 132, 134
Strachey, John (1901-1963), 83
relations with Tom, 83-4, 129, 146-7,
149, 150
relations with Cimmie, 83, 84, 204
at Savehay Farm, 98, 102
at Antibes, 132, 134
visits Moscow, 164
and Mosley Manifesto, New Labour
Group, 169-70, 172
resigns from Labour Party, 172
and New Party, 174, 183-4, 186, 187—
191, 204
Nicolson on, 191

274

Strachey, Lytton, 217

Strauss, G. R., 146, 147, 164
Streeter, Mr (gardener), 99, 102
Suffolk family, 61, 205

Sunday Express, 150, 154, 193-4
Sunday Graphic, 168

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 76

tariff reform, 59

Tennant, Stephen, 102, 114

Thomas, J. H. (1874-1949), 51, 82, 112,
120-2, 123, 124-5, 125, 128-0, 143, 146,
168

Times, The, 147-8, 230

Toynbee, Arnold, 171

Trafalgar Square, BUF meeting in (1932),
230

Tree, Viola, 41

Trotsky, Leon, 158-60, 181

Turkey, Istanbul, Cimmie’s visit to, 157,
158-62

unemployment

Tom’s policies for, 9-60, 64~7, 177

Tom and, in Labour Government of
1929, 120-9, 143, 145, 147, 148

numbers of unemployed, 123, 147, 150,
171-2, 241

Mosley Manifesto and, 170

cuts in benefit proposed, 189, 191, 194

a fascist approach to, 246-7

Vansittart, Sir Robert, 74
Verdun, 227

Index

Wagner, Richard, 59
Wall Street crash, 124
Walton, William, 98, 232
Ward, Colonel John, 117-18
Warwick, Lady, 82
Waugh, Evelyn, 223
Webb, Beatrice (1858-1943), 55-6, 90,
112, 114, 121, 125, 144, 148, 151, 181
Webb, Sidney, 144
Wells, H. G., 108, 196
Wertheimer, Egon, $4—5
Wheatley, John, 81
widows, pensions for, 140-1
Wilkinson, Ellen, 114, 145
Winchester College, 4
Woolf, Leonard, 196
working class, workers
aristocrats and, $4—5, 92-3
not Marxist, $5
purchasing power for, advocated by
Tom, 65-6
Tom’s attitude to, 186-7, 190, 191, 199
Wyndham, Richard (‘Dick’), 101, 102,
132, 134-6, 216, 247
Wyndhan,, Ingrid, .216

Yarlington, Somerset, rented house at,
240

York, Duchess of, 158

Young, Allan, 83, 88, 120, 170, 183, 185,
186, 188, 189, 190-1, 204

Youth Movement, see under fascism

Zinoviev letter, 58

Sir Oswald Mosley — aristocrat, socialist, social lion —became,

after 1932 when he founded the British Union of Fascists, one of
the most hated men in England. This personal story by the eldest
son of Sir Oswald (Tom) and his first wife Cimmie sheds light on

the nature of an extraordinary man and an unconventional
marriage. In sharing his efforts to understand his parents,

Nicholas Mosley provides insights on how personalities are

shaped, and on how asociety which can propagate a public
figure such as Mosley can also make his memory taboo.

‘There is no doubt that he has achieved something dazzling —
a book which is immensely clever and interesting on many
different levels ... The pace is fast, the characters are vivid, his
mother’s death unbearably sad. Much of this effect is created by
his skill as a novelist; but Oswald and Cynthia Mosley live up to
the demands of art’ ROBERT SKIDELSKY, TLS

‘He has the true creator's gift of
being able torecapturethe _,
child’s-eye view’ =
ANTHONY STORR,
SUNDAY TIMES

ita

‘Itis indeeda
remarkable feat fora
son to write frankly
about his parents,
especially about
such afather as Tom
Mosley’ A.J.P. TAYLOR,
OBSERVER

ISBN 0-O00-b3bb44-4
90000

9 "780006°366447

BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY