Jonathan Guinness > Quotes

“But there was more to Hitler’s charm than this. Incredible as it may sound, he excited protective, almost motherly instincts by a sort of helpless look, and this at the height of his power. Diana says that ‘what one might call the chivalrous attitude towards Hitler’ seemed particularly marked in Goering. There is one place where, to this day, one can get a feeling of this aspect of Hitler’s appeal – in Leni Riefenstahl’s film about the 1934 Parteitag, Triumph of the Will. There is a moment when Hitler gets out of his aircraft and looks around him for the welcoming party; he seems, for that moment, helpless and vulnerable, the Little Man. That apparent vulnerability can exercise mass attractiveness is, of course, well known. In the case of Hitler, who was also possessed of strong dominance and almost hypnotic powers of persuasion, this faculty helped him by, as it were, disarming those he confronted before they were overwhelmed. There are several passages in the correspondence between Diana and Unity in which they refer to Hitler as looking ‘sweet’ or ‘beloved’. This was the effect he had on them. This lovable man was then in due course to have enormous numbers of innocent people slaughtered. Life would be simpler if someone capable of ordering mass murder could never show an attractive side.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“But in general Eton was made for Bertie and he for it. He ended his time second in sixth form, captain of his house, and a member of Pop. He enjoyed the school work and was good at it; the linguistic facility that was to enable him to master even the most alien of modern languages worked just as well with Latin and Greek, and was to be in turn splendidly developed by his detailed knowledge of them. He also liked games, especially rowing, though these were not yet the object of such a cult as they later became.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“In the summer of 1921 he went on holiday to Algeciras, in Spain near Gibraltar, where he quite unexpectedly and peacefully died. The British admiral in command at Gibraltar sent his own barge to convey Thomas’s body along the coast to the Rock, and attended his funeral there in full dress uniform. When George Bowles thanked the admiral for these attentions he received the reply: ‘When a distinguished Englishman dies it is the least I can do.’ To the Navy, Thomas was one of its own.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“But it is as individuals that he respects people, workers included; he is deeply distrustful of human beings in groups. Not for him Hegel’s ‘idea’ or Marx’s class-consciousness which are supposed to inspire men in the mass to achieve progress. On the contrary, he holds that membership of a group causes people to behave worse than as individuals.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“Kate, born in 1842, came after Lyulph. She married Viscount Amberley, son of the Earl Russell who had been Lord John Russell, and died at the age of thirty-two, shortly followed by her husband. She was a freethinker and an ardent feminist, making speeches for women’s suffrage a generation before it became fashionable. The couple left two sons to be brought up by their grandmother. The younger of these was Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, mathematician, socialist, nuclear disarmer and accomplished intellectual tease; perhaps, as regards pure intelligence, the brightest man ever to have inherited an English peerage.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“What he said can be applied to all seven Mitfords. Decca’s sense of sin was every bit as deficient as Diana’s. Unity had nothing of the sort until she was brain damaged; there was not much sign of it in Nancy either. Pam and Debo were too concerned with practicalities to bother with it; Tom, who was an admirer of Kant but not particularly religious, would have known all about sin but seen it rather as a philosophical problem than as cause for a dark night of the soul.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“She wrote to Diana on 18 July 1938: You remember my little friend from Vienna who you said was like an Indian, and his pretty blonde fiancée who asked the Führer for an autograph in the Osteria. Well, yesterday she telephoned and said could she come and see me for five minutes, but her fiancé mustn’t know anything about it. So, this morning she came … Heinz, her fiancé, was a member of the SS in Vienna – I believe since 1932. He was a tremendously enthusiastic Nazi, and really risked everything for the cause during the Schuschnigg regime. Well, it seems that just after the Machtübernahme [in the context she obviously means the Anschluss with Austria] his father, also a member of the Partei, who had brought him up to be very national-denkend [nationalistically minded], told him that both his (Heinz’s) mother’s parents were Jewish. Of course, poor Heinz was completely erledigt [shattered] when he heard it and wanted to shoot himself at once, which it seems to me would have been the best way out. Though, officially, he doesn’t count as a Jew as both the grandparents were baptized. But for Heinz, being a real Nazi ‘aus Uberzeugung’ [through conviction], that naturally made no difference. His father made him promise not to do anything until they had a reply to their Ersuch [request] to the Führer, but so far there has been no reply, and in the meanwhile, of course, he is having what is practically a nervous breakdown. Well, it seems that there are several half-Jews who have … been allowed to remain in the Party on account of special Verdienste [services]. So they hope that he also will, though of course this will anyhow, from his point of view, have ruined his life.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“Teasing was a habit among the Mitfords, starting when they were children but continuing all their lives. Some people attribute it to the rough and tumble of the large family. Not all large families develop it to this degree, but the Mitfords were descended from Thomas Bowles, and Bertie Mitford married into that great family of teases, the Stanleys.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“It was the Japanese samurai that impressed the author, with their customs of blood feud and ritual suicide for the sake of honour, not the smooth class of landowning scholars who provided China with its mandarin administrators. Bertie warmed to a fighting feudalism.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“The Treaty of Versailles was the starting point of the period, forming the basic condition of international politics for twenty years. The treaty was presented to world opinion as being based on moral principles and as fair. The main principle was that of self-determination. Austria was broken up, Poland recreated and Italy enlarged in obedience to this; the fact that this arrangement left a good many German speakers as members of minorities under foreign rule, there and elsewhere, seemed to imply that self-determination was for everyone except Germans. In this and other ways, the treaty’s fairness seemed to many people to be more a matter of theory than of practice.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“The other language, Honnish, was easier; it was the language of Decca and Debo. Hon meant hen, and the language was based on Oxfordshire country speech.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“Tom was impressed by the performance of Nazism, and deeply so by Hitler personally, but never embraced the creed wholeheartedly because he could not swallow the race theories. He had too many good friends who were Jews, and professional clients as well; his knowledge of German would sometimes enable him to understand the gist of what his East End Jewish clients were saying when they spoke Yiddish among themselves. He had, that is, a more personal contact with Jews than did his sisters; he knew better what they were really like.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“Birkett asked if Diana agreed with the Nazi policy on Jews, and she replied: ‘Up to a point I do. I am not fond of Jews.’ Had she heard of atrocities committed against Jews? ‘I saw the book called the Brown Book of the Hitler Terror, but I did not pay much attention to it.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“On one occasion she replies to a young man’s letter ‘asking him not to write again as Tap wouldn’t like it, and perhaps it isn’t quite fair to do a thing I know Tap wouldn’t approve of. In fact it isn’t at all fair. So I have stopped it. But I didn’t the least want to, as I enjoy getting letters from people I like.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“Derek loved dogs as much as he loved horses. If one can identify the link between him and Pam it was this, for she, Debo and Unity have always been the dog lovers of the family. ‘One can no more imagine Pam or Debo without a dog than Nancy or Tom with one,’ Diana told us in a recent letter, though Nancy did for a time have a bulldog called Millie, and Tom once had a poodle which was the gift of a girlfriend.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“She pokes fun at aristocrats for opening their houses to the public, something at which ‘the lowest peasant of the Danube’ would stick; forgetting that opening a stately home can equally be presented as a modern version of an old aristocratic function, that of display. She concludes that the English lord will probably survive, partly by pretending to be poorer than he is. ‘He must, of course, be careful not to overdo the protective colouring. An aristocracy cannot survive as a secret society.’ (Our italics.) This contradicts Professor Ross, for if an aristocracy is defined as such solely by its use of language, then anyone can become a member simply by using language in the same way. So it depends for its exclusiveness on people not knowing the code; on secrecy. Professor Ross in fact assumes that the aristocracy has become a secret society, while Nancy is telling it not to do so.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“One would love to know more about Thomas’s visits to Ramsgate. He presumably met his older half-sister, married but childless, and his much younger half-brother, as well as his nephew and niece. Julia Budworth suggests that he also took his friend, the French artist Tissot, of whom a number of pictures of Ramsgate survive; why else would Tissot have gone to Ramsgate? In that case Tissot very likely met Susannah. If so he did not, alas, paint her picture.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“When they were young, someone described the seven as always being in shrieks or floods: shrieks of laughter, that is, or floods of tears.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“By an odd coincidence, Nancy had chosen 28 May for the death of Linda Radlett,”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“Unity was born on 8 August 1914, just after war was declared. Nancy remembers the soldiers marching to the war past Bertie’s house where the family was staying over the time of Unity’s birth; their drab khaki was very different from the sumptuous ceremonial uniforms at the old King’s funeral procession watched from the same window four years earlier. The new baby was christened Unity Valkyrie. Each name celebrated the start of the war in its way; Unity expressed Sydney’s vain hope that it would be short, and Valkyrie, war-maiden, was, as we have seen, at Bertie’s suggestion.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“But even within the Air Force Derek had no time for those who did not fly: the ‘penguins’, as they were called, recognizable as such because they had no wings on their uniform. Pam caught this from Derek. ‘Do you know what I saw the other day?’ she once said to Derek in Jonathan’s hearing. ‘An Air Commodore penguin!’ Her eyes were round with amazement as she said this, and her Mitford emphasis could not have been stronger if the man had had two heads.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“The attraction was mutual, but it concealed a core of misunderstanding. Bryan saw in Diana a fresh, unspoilt girl, excellently educated, bright without at that stage seeming too sharp, and stunningly beautiful. The surface pleasantness of society already palled on him; he spotted the cynicism underneath. One of his poems, ‘The Party’, starts: ‘Here friendship founders in a sea of friends,/And harsh-lipp’d bubbly cannot make amends.’ Diana seemed not to belong to this morally empty world; she was a country girl. If her vision of their future approximated to scenes from Aldous Huxley, his derived from Tolstoy. He was a Levin seeking his Kitty; though he was, of course, himself conscious of no such consideration, but simply fell in love.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“She was particularly flattered when an old foreigner who was an occasional customer came in and seized her hand in both of his, saying in a strong Central European accent: ‘Miss Mitford, I had to tell you; Uncle Matthew, he is my father.’ So this creation of hers, apparently so rooted in a particular class and country, had achieved the status of an archetype. Evelyn Waugh agreed: Uncle Matthew, he said, was everyone’s father.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“What happened in Decca’s special case when the atmosphere changed in this way? She had left her family and country and she detested her class, but it was easier to take herself out of the upper class than the upper class out of her. Hilaire Belloc had noticed that aristocrats ‘talk of their affairs in loud and strident voices’; Decca was always to retain something of this attitude. In the meantime, she was well-educated and had a natural feeling for words. In addition she possessed a sharp sense of the ridiculous.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“This slacking, especially in someone obviously rather strong, made him fall foul of the games-playing stars of Radley; they in turn did not appeal to him as they strutted about in their coloured caps and scarves. This type of boy hero dominated the public schools between 1880 and 1940, encouraged by the philistine majority among the masters; its dominance gradually died out after the Second World War. Harold Nicolson satirized the type in his character J. D. Marstock in Some People. We are certain that David’s memory of these dismal young magnates was the real reason why he did not want to send his daughters to boarding school. Eton was in his eyes tolerable; Bertie had loved it and Clement enjoyed it, so his only son Tom must certainly go there. But he felt that a girls’ public school would be more like Radley, and Radley in caricature at that. He is supposed to have said that hockey would give a girl bad legs, and perhaps he did say it. If so, it was not a sign of ignorance or eccentricity. The underlying thought was rather that no daughter of his should suffer under, or herself become, a female Marstock.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“In 1891, Dodgson gave Sydney, then eleven years old, a copy of Alice’s Adventures Underground, the first version of Alice in Wonderland. Stuck in the front is a tiny envelope containing a very Carrollian letter beginning as follows: My dear Sydney, I am so sorry, and so ashamed! Do you know, I didn’t even know of your existence? And it was such a surprise to hear that you had sent me your love! It felt just as if Nobody had suddenly come into the room, and had given me a kiss! (That’s a thing that happens to me, most days, just now.) If only I had known you were existing, I should have sent you heaps of love, long ago. And, now I come to think of it, I ought to have sent you the love, without being so particular about whether you existed or not. In some ways, you know, people that don’t exist, are much nicer than those that do …”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“Certainly the view in the Mitford family was that Biddesden was all that Swinbrook was not. David was one of the few people not to like it; he felt creepy there, only entering the house with reluctance and preferring to stay outside in the car. General Webb is indeed supposed to haunt the house when his equestrian picture is removed, but it was firmly in place at the time, so David’s malaise remains unexplained.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“On the other hand, the injunction to rinse the children after their bath was never, to Sydney’s recollection, obeyed. It is of a piece with Thomas’s passion for cleanliness, and distrust of mere superficial washing, which made him take Turkish baths every week, when he could. He thought, as Dorothy recalled in her first Times article, that in a conventional bath ‘you soaked the dirt off yourself and then sponged it on again’.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“Queen Victoria, through her secretary Sir Henry Ponsonby, said: ‘Her Majesty considers you have done your duty at your Office not only to her entire satisfaction, but also in a manner which has proved to be of great benefit to the public.’ This also, surely, is above and beyond the requirements of mere politeness. The fact is that Bertie had been the right man in the right place, and had done an excellent job.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford

“At his preparatory school Esmond had been a romantic right-winger, a Jacobite; according to Robert Skidelsky, he was at one time a supporter of Mosley. His elder brother Giles was at the time already a Communist, and this amused their uncle, Winston Churchill, who called them the Red Rose and the White Rose. At Wellington Esmond soon changed his views and joined his brother on the left.”
― Jonathan Guinness, The House of Mitford