Intelligence

Ireland: Interview: Ciaran Byre meets Desmond Guinness

Why the governess spied on my mother



DESMOND Guinness’s blue eyes flicker with pride every time he talks about his mother Diana Mitford, a Hitler apologist who married the facist leader Oswald Mosley.
When I arrive at Leixlip Castle, ten miles west of Dublin, the farmer and conservationist is in something of a flap. In the corner of his cluttered but cosy study, framed by paintings of horses and old country houses, is a plastic bag bulging with papers which have just arrived from London.

Inside are almost 100 photocopied pages of newly-declassified MI5 files outlining details of surveillance operations on his mother which began five years before she was jailed in 1940. Guinness seems nervous at their contents.

It is now three months since her death in Paris at the age of 93. Her silver-haired son is preparing to write his memoirs, in which he hopes to portray a gentler side to her deeply controversial life.

What really shocked him last week was the revelation that his beloved former governess, whom he fondly called Growler, was an agent paid to spy on his mother. He never knew.

With some bitterness he says: “My grandfather apparently got her to spy on my mother. My governess! I don’t know whether she was paid anything or if she was too proud to take money because I think she was kind of fond of us.

“But it is a terrible thing when one is 72 to realise that this charming old lady was probably on the take. She wrote to me some years ago and I was very fond of her.

“She gave me such a great grounding. She adored my mother, well seemed to. Luckily my mother died before she knew about all this. She would have been heartbroken, for two reasons — that the governess would do that, and that her former father-in-law would pay her to spy.”

So while she gave baths to Desmond and his brother Jonathan, read bedtime stories and tutored them at home, Growler was all the while keeping a note on her employer’s activities.

One MI5 memo based on the governess’s observations shows how close Desmond came to meeting Hitler himself. It says Diana had planned to take her sons to see the Fuhrer in August 1939. The meeting was cancelled because of the imminence of war.

In a letter to the boys’ grandfather the governess wrote: “The children would have known how to greet the Fuhrer for they had been taught to give the Nazi salute and to say Heil Hitler.” Guinness says he remembers nothing of these lessons.

The governess later told MI5 that her mistress had received a number of “instructions” to visit Berlin, which she described as her “calls”. “There is little doubt that she acted as a courier between her husband and the Nazi government,” the MI5 file says of Guinness’s mother.

Regarded as the most beautiful of the famous Mitford sisters, Diana married into the Guinness brewing dynasty. After five years, she divorced Bryan Guinness and took up with Oswald Mosley, the father of British facism.

They were married in 1936 in the Berlin home of Joseph Goebbels, with Hitler as a special guest. Desmond was just five years old. Because of her husband’s politics, Diana Mosley was interned as a public danger in 1940 in London’s Holloway prison.

Guinness still remembers visiting Diana in jail as a ten-year-old. She died 50 years later still refusing to recant her belief that Hitler was a man to be admired.

Despite her infamy and her generally unpalatable political views, Guinness won’t say a bad word against her. But of course he must acknowledge the hostility directed against his deeply unpopular mother and stepfather after the war ended.

“Yes, of course. After the war ended and it became clear how many people had lost their lives in the Holocaust, it was quite understandable that people would not particularly want to continue to be friends with people who were seen as anti-British,” he says.

“But she was a remarkable lady and a marvellous mother. She was very beautiful, very funny. The books on her bring out all but her humour. She was very jolly and made everyone around her very happy.”

He tells the story of how he asked his mother for permission to use a stunning, some would say very sexual, portrait of her by William Acton on the cover of her biography called, with understatement, A Life of Contrasts.

“My dear Desmond,” she replied in her perfect cut-glass accent. “Just the head. Don’t use the bosoms, that is just porn.”

Resigned to her muddied reputation, Guinness’s loyalty is based on what only he can know as her son. Soon he will begin sorting through the boxes of journals and letters which he says will paint a much more rounded and personal picture of her life and views.

“For my memoirs I have so much to go through. I have to get down to get sorting through it. It would be a great pity not to make use of it. I will write about my parents but I have been thinking about what I can say,” he says.

“I have a lot of letters she wrote from Holloway prison which have never been seen. The first time I saw her there, there was a wardress in the room. Then my brother and I were allowed to spent the whole day there and sometimes in the prison garden.”

Diana was one of the six extra- ordinarily-beautiful daughters of Lord Redesdale who famously said he didn’t know which one was more foolish.

Diana’s sister Unity was smitten by Hitler and shot herself in the head when war broke out. Pamela, according to MI5 agents, was “fanatically anti-Semitist, anti-democratic and defeatist”. Nancy fell out with her sisters after satirising their love of Hitler in the novel Wigs on the Green.

Another sister, Jessica, was a communist. The sixth, Deborah, now Duchess of Devonshire, and her brother, Tom, who was killed in Burma in 1945, were described by MI5 as “apolitical”.

Thanks to the unexpected release of the MI5 files, a slightly shell-shocked Desmond now knows that his mother’s internment came after an intervention from his own grandfather, the government minister Lord Moyne.

The files reveal that Lord Moyne wrote to the Home Defence (Security) Executive in June 1940, warning of her “extremely dangerous character” and claiming that her journeys to Germany were to secure funding for the fascist Blackshirts.

His aunt Nancy provided the information MI5 needed to keep Diana behind bars. Nancy told MI5 officers that her younger sister was “far cleverer and more dangerous than her husband.” She added that her sister sincerely desired “the downfall of England and democracy generally and should not be released”.

In case anyone missed the point, she added: “She will stick at nothing to achieve her ambitions, is wildly ambitious, a ruthless and shrewd egotist, a devoted Fascist and admirer of Hitler”.

None of this seems to bother Guinness too much. He says he got on well with Nancy and found her extremely good company in later years.

Guinness, who studied French and Italian at Oxford, claims to be apolitical. He came to live in Ireland after his national service ended, partly because his father lived in Dublin for half the year while his mother lived with Mosley in Clonfert Palace, Co Galway. They later moved to Fermoy in Co Cork and then France.

“I’m sure it was because she was shunned by people in England that she chose Ireland. They were perfectly happy but they didn’t know anybody apart from their immediate neighbours. They lived in the middle of nowhere and didn’t even have a telephone.”

Guinness occupies Leixlip Castle, the beautiful landmark that has dominated the local landscape in some form since 1172 when Adam de Hereford, a a follower of the Norman invader Strongbow, built it at the confluence of the Liffey and Rye.

He lives there with his second wife Penny. He divorced his first wife, Mariga, in 1980 and she died in 1989. He regularly receives famous friends such as Mick Jagger. His granddaughter, the model Jasmine Guinness, often stays with her two-year-old son Elwood. His son Patrick, a historian, and daughter, Marina, live nearby in Co Kildare.

It has been his home since 1958 when, at the age of 27, he paid £15,500, a third of his then fortune, for the property and adjoining 180 acre farm. He says: “I first saw it in 1955 when I was still living in my father’s house near the Phoenix Park.

“He had seen an advertisement for it and got on to me and said ‘Really dear boy, it’s about time’. We had the farm but I spent my time driving around campaigning for the heritage.

“It was a small sleepy village when we moved here. Just 600 people. Now there are almost 20,000. There was nothing in the way of a restaurant or bank. The farm wages came in registered post in cash from Dublin.”

In between listening to Lyric FM and the odd trip to the opera, Guinness is at his most comfortable following his passions for conservation. He founded the Irish Georgian Society in 1958 with Mariga to help preserve Ireland’s rapidly disappearing architectural heritage. He has a role in providing social housing in Dublin as a member of the Iveagh Trust.

His latest battle involves trying to prevent Kildare County Council allowing the construction of a housing estate on open land surrounding the Wonderful Barn, a folly built in 1793.

The barn, conical in shape and with a helter-skelter stone staircase on the outside, was built as part of the Castletown House estate and was widely admired by connoisseurs of 18th-century European architecture.

The 90-acre site, close to the M4 motorway, was first proposed for rezoning in the mid-1990s and was finally zoned for housing when the county council adopted a local area plan for Leixlip in March 2002.

On the way out through the great hall of the castle, it is the ghostly images of the Mitfords, and not figures from Leixlip’s bloody history, who hover in the shadows of this great building, which is open to the public.

Six original portraits of the girls by the artist William Acton hang on a wall in a dining room, their English beauty frozen in time. Almost 70 years after they sat for Acton, the Mitfords are still turning heads.

Including Guinness’s, who for what must be the millionth time, looks at his mother’s perfect image and says: “Have you ever seen someone so beautiful?”

November 23, 2003 at 12:48 AM in Ireland | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home