Jessica Mitford Finds Her Voice

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1937.

The Royal Navy destroyer HMS Echo was moored in the port of Bilbao in northern Spain.

In a small office nearby, a dark-haired British woman smiled sweetly at the authorities who'd detained her.

She hadn't spoken or moved for hours.

She was a fighter, for sure.

She had style.

She had chutzpah.

She had guts.

The woman was reporting on the Spanish Civil War.

The ship was there to collect her, but she wouldn't budge.

Sitting next to her was a journalist.

He was also her fiancée.

He too refused to cooperate.

It is an absolute

chaos.

You've got people in high places sort of rushing around thinking, oh my goodness.

You've got the press badgering night and day, and these two young, excitable people at the centre of it all, desperately trying to preserve what they had.

And these weren't just two elopers.

These were two highly well-connected elopers.

The man was Esmond Romilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill.

The woman was Jessica Mitford.

Her aristocratic family were beside themselves.

They tried everything to get her home.

I don't think they quite realized what they were dealing with.

Instead of thinking they were panic-stricken and terrified and reacting out of those emotions, she regarded it as fascist resistance.

The authorities threatened to take her passport.

They said if Romilly married Mitford without permission, they'd throw him in prison.

Jessica Mitford didn't care.

She wouldn't get on that ship.

She says, they tried to tempt me.

I was so hungry.

And they tried to tempt me by describing this hot meal of unparalleled deliciousness.

But she held firm.

The British ambassador knew he didn't have much time.

The foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, had been clear.

Persuade her to return.

The ambassador used the last trick up his sleeve.

The engines of the destroyer started up.

The crew on board waved over.

It was quite clever what they did.

They were on there with 180 refugees and they said, we won't be able to evacuate the refugees if you don't comply.

Jessica Mitford had to make a decision and fast.

For BBC Radio 4, this is history's heroes.

People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone.

I'm Alex von Tunselmann.

I'm a historian, and today's episode is about Jessica Mitford.

Brought up in a privileged and highly eccentric family family full of fascinating and notorious women, she nonetheless developed a strong social conscience, fighting for fairness, equality and civil rights.

I mean, it's all a bit Henry VIII's six wives.

You have Nancy the writer, Pamela the countrywoman, Diana the Fascist, Unity the Nazi, Jessica the Communist, and Deborah the Duchess.

And it really is as extraordinary as that sounds.

Laura Thompson is a a biographer of the Mitford sisters.

There were six of them, along with one brother, Tom, all born to Baron and Baroness Reidsdale between 1904 and 1920.

They were witty, clever, and good-looking, and became aristocratic celebrities in the first half of the 20th century.

They were famous for their wildly divergent politics.

Diana had an affair with the leader of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Moseley, and left her husband to marry him.

During the Second World War, she was imprisoned for a while because MI5 considered her a public danger.

Unity developed an obsession with Adolf Hitler.

She stalked him for months until he finally accepted her attentions, then played her off against his girlfriend, Ava Braun.

When Britain declared war on Germany, Unity shot herself in the head.

She survived, but the bullet remained lodged in her brain and caused terrible damage.

The eldest sister, Nancy, was on the other side of the political spectrum and embraced moderate socialist politics.

She wrote best-selling novels that remain some of the wittiest of the age, including The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate.

They're a kind of unrepeatable phenomenon.

It's almost like a social experiment.

The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the execution of the Tsar and his family sent a wave of shock through Europe's monarchies and upper classes.

They feared communism might spread and come for them next.

When far-right demagogues Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler began to rise in Europe, some aristocrats supported them because they were anti-communist.

Jessica's father, who she called one of nature's fascists, applauded Hitler for crushing trade unions.

It was a time of extremes.

A time when the world is about to catch fire.

This great chessboard of fascism, Nazism, communism.

Though two of her sisters were drawn to fascism, Jessica became a communist at a young age.

When she was 12, she shared a bedroom with her older sister Unity, the Nazi.

They had to draw a line down the middle of it.

And half of that was swastikas.

swastikas.

And the other half was hammers and sickles.

I love Lenin.

She said you can see on the window where I'd carved a hammer and sickle into the glass with a diamond ring.

In the family library, Jessica lost herself in the pages of the socialist press.

And she longed to go to school in a way that only someone who's never really gone to school could long to go.

The Wall Street crash triggered a global economic depression.

When Jessica travelled from the family home in the Cotswolds to London, she saw the devastation this wrought.

There were people on hunger marches, and there was mass unemployment, and there was a depression.

Jessica knew she hadn't earned the privilege she'd been born into.

She needed to get out.

Secretly, she opened a running-away fund at Drummond's Bank.

1937.

Jessica Mitford was 19 years old and at yet another country house weekend party.

These social engagements usually bored her out of her mind.

To grow up and to find that you're expected to put on a white dress and find Lord Wright at a succession of balls must be quite peculiar.

Her thoughts drifted to a man she'd recently read about in the press.

Esmond Romilly.

This young guy who's left his public school, who's started an anti-fascist magazine, who was sent to a remand home because his parents couldn't handle him, who runs away to the Spanish Civil War and actually fights in a battle.

It's an incredibly romantic proposition.

And she says I was in love with him before I met him.

She walked into dinner and there he was.

Romilly had fallen ill while fighting against General Franco's nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, the great anti-fascist cause of the time.

You feel the thunderclap the way she describes it and the fact that he had gone to Spain with the International Brigade and she said to him, will you take me to Spain?

And he says, yes, but don't let's talk about it now.

She wanted to go and help the Communist Party out there, the Republican cause.

They came up with a plan to elope using Mitford's running away fund.

She told her family she was visiting friends in Austria.

She posed as Romilly's secretary to travel on his press visa.

When her family found out the truth, they were furious.

They didn't want her in Spain, and they didn't want her to marry Romilly.

They lent on the British government.

That's when the Foreign Secretary sent a destroyer to get her back.

With the fate of those refugees on her conscience, Mitford reluctantly agreed to board the destroyer.

She and Romilly were taken to France, where her sister, Nancy, was waiting to persuade her out of marrying him.

But there was no persuading Jessica Mitford of anything.

That cutting off, that physical cutting off, did set the tone for the rest of her life.

She did the thing that a lot of young people simply think about.

And she set her face against her parents, and she took on Esmond's absolute obduracy.

Eventually, the newly married Romillies returned to London.

They moved to the working-class neighbourhood of Rotherhive.

It really was poverty.

And she'd never done housework or anything like that.

She didn't have a clue what she was doing.

They had a baby, Julia.

Romilly did not take to the Mitford sisters, apart from the one he'd married.

All the family sent presents, and Diana sent a dress, and she wrote to her saying, please don't ever send anything else for this baby, because Esmond really doesn't like it.

At this time, though, there was a measles epidemic.

And the baby caught it.

And Julia died aged four months.

Romilly and Mitford were devastated.

They moved to Corsica, back to London, then to New York.

They had another daughter, Constancia.

After the Second World War broke out, Romilly volunteered to serve with the Royal Canadian Air Force.

He was stationed in England.

In November 1941, during a raid on Hamburg, his plane disappeared over the North Sea.

Neither Esmond Romilly nor any of his crew was ever found.

Aged 24, Mitford was a widow and a single mother.

She threw herself into the war effort.

She found a job.

She taught herself to type.

She was a great winger of things.

And she'd carried off because she had this amazing Mitford charm, charisma, confidence, all those things.

She started work at the Office of Price Administration, which was sort of in charge of rationing and making sure people weren't profiteering during the war.

A year after her husband was killed, she met someone new.

Robert Truehaft, who was an impressive man.

He was a lawyer who would take on unfashionable causes, anything to do with the civil rights issues, which not everyone would touch.

And he was Jewish, the kind of figure that, in his impressive way, took us still further, really, from how she'd been brought up.

The pair started dating, but Mitford was overwhelmed by her feelings.

She transferred from New York to the California office.

Truhaft didn't give up.

He said he was serious about her and followed her to California.

She decided to take a risk and start a new life with him.

Soon, they were married.

They joined the Communist Party and had two sons, Nicholas and Benjamin.

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1951, Jackson, Mississippi.

Jessica Midford, Executive Secretary of the East Bay Branch of the Oakland Civil Rights Congress, went from door to door with three other women.

The American South was racially segregated and tense.

There's people running around in their white hoods and talk of lynching is fairly commonplace.

Mitford thought of her husband, Truehaft, and his legal work.

One of his firm's latest cases was that of a black truck driver, Willie McGee, who in 1945 in Mississippi was accused of raping a white woman who, according to Jessica, with whom he was having a consensual relationship.

But it was broken off and this man Willie McGee he was tried three times and in Mississippi at this time rape was a capital crime in the past four decades 51 black men had been executed for rape no white men had been executed for rape Mitford and her companions hoped to get his conviction overturned They called it the white women's delegation.

And they marched on Jackson and they went around getting as much support as they possibly could, which wasn't really that much because people didn't want to come out to claim on behalf of this man.

She was fired up with the appalling injustice powered by this rage.

She wrote about the case for a progressive newspaper, The People's World.

Her reporting made an impact.

There was a lot of pressure on President Truman not to go on with this.

But the state of Mississippi sent Willie McGee to the electorate chair.

Mainstream media in America said this case was used by the Communist Party to undermine America.

They used this man for their own ends.

But Jessica was impervious to that sort of thing.

She just saw the righteousness of the cause.

Mitford was subpoenaed by the California State Committee on Un-American Activities for her political activism, but she refused to answer questions.

She just pleaded the Fifth Amendment throughout.

And of course, it was quite handy being married to a lawyer.

The United States was in the grip of McCarthyism, an anti-communist crusade spearheaded by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The senator described Truhaft as one of America's most subversive lawyers.

They lived almost a hunted existence in a way.

For a while they couldn't get passports.

Well there was a period in the 50s when things were getting rather rum and Bob and Deck told us, look, if this couple come in the middle of the night and say that you're to come with them and go and sleep in their house for the rest of the night, just go.

Don't ask any questions.

Constancia Romilly is the daughter of Jessica Mitford and Esmond Romilly, but was brought up by her stepfather, Robert Truhaft.

She called her parents Bob and Decca.

Decca was my mother's nickname, often shortened to Deck.

I mean, that was her family childhood nickname that she carried into adulthood.

Growing up, watching my parents together and as parents of us, and working, the whole Mitford thing wasn't a part of my upbringing.

Her mother continued to work with the East Bay Civil Rights Congress.

We were never told at the time that they were members of the Communist Party.

We considered them to be the true patriots.

The Communists were always depicted as villains, so we could never imagine that our parents would be the villains.

My mother was recruiting members in black churches.

She used to take us on Sunday to various black churches in West Oakland.

Many of my friends can't understand why I know all the Christian songs, even though we were raised as atheists.

It was an unusual childhood.

We didn't go to sports events.

We didn't go to concerts, cultural events.

We went with the other comrades on picnics.

There really wasn't a division in our household between

play and work.

Whenever her father took on a legal case, it consumed their lives.

The whole household overwhelmed with that people are in there designing posters, developing strategies, planning trips to go and visit the courthouse or the prison.

It's like a full force mobilization.

If my dad had an important case, a police brutality case, my mother was in there working on publicity.

She was the one writing press releases on the phone.

You know,

she tried to get rid of her English accent.

She tried to smooth it out.

But of course, she always had that sort of plummy voice.

Americans are very enamored of that sort of English sound.

So she could call people and people would respond to her.

But her mother could still be playful.

Riding on the subway in New York, she would sit there and she would go, ah!

She could make this sound.

It was sort of a cross between a hyena and a parrot or something.

She would make this sound.

And I would say, Mom, stop it, stop it.

And she would be sitting there perfectly like nothing had happened.

And she would torture me with this.

In 1955, Constancia's brother Nikki was on his bicycle in Oakland, California, doing his after-school paper round.

He was on the way home.

He was exiting from a small street onto a major street and one will never know what happened but he went into the street and a bus, a city bus hit him

and he died.

He was just 10 years old.

It was horrible.

Some of the neighborhood children came running up to the house screaming, Nikki's been hit, Nikki's been hit.

That whole period is a kind of a blur.

I remember the funeral.

I remember the headline in the paper.

For the second time, Jessica Mitford had to face the death of one of her children.

She just banished.

The whole concept of Nikki was gone.

All the pictures were taken away.

Nikki was not a subject of conversation.

My mother experienced many, many traumas in her life.

Her way of dealing with it was to banish it.

She threw herself into her work.

Soviet communism had always been criticized for its excesses.

But when Joseph Stalin lived, information was tightly controlled.

Some communist sympathizers assumed that any reporting which indicated all was not well in the Soviet Union must be anti-communist propaganda.

After Stalin died, that changed.

In In 1956, the new leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced Stalin.

Later that year, rebels in Hungary rose up against Soviet control.

The world watched with horror as the Red Army rolled tanks into Budapest, shooting protesters.

Though Jessica Mitford denied knowledge of these horrors, her politics realigned.

She left the Communist Party in 1958 and she became, I suppose, what we would call like a liberal left and espoused these causes that we admire so much, like the civil rights movement.

You do feel a mellowing.

She wrote about her childhood in her memoir, Ons and Rebels.

But she seemed to have severed her connections to that old life and was bringing up her two surviving children in a very different world.

I was in college when the sit-ins occurred in 1960 in North Carolina and the minute that started,

I just knew that's what I was supposed to be doing, was working for equity and justice for Black Americans.

That's how I was raised.

While she was reflecting on her previous life, Mitford typed up her old love letters from Constancia's father, Esmond Romilly.

And all these memories just started to come at her in waves.

Research and writing provided an outlet for Mitford's emotions, but she knew she could use her talent and her fame for more than that.

And this is when she really flowers with her curiosity and her confidence and her bravery.

1963.

Jessica Mitford held a copy of her newly published book, The American Way of Death.

It was an investigative expose of the American funeral service, revealing how funeral directors exploited bereaved people's grief to charge them far too much for unnecessary services.

The idea for the book came from her husband.

And he had observed this mysterious coincidence that every time a member of one of his client families died, the bill from the funeral parlor would be exactly the same as the union benefit provided for.

Mitford was appalled by how the funeral industry pressed unnecessary additions onto grieving families.

In some cases, this amounted to full cosmetic surgeries on corpses, including fillers and teeth whitening, to make the deceased appear more youthful and attractive in their open caskets.

Mitford felt the industry exploited the idea that people had to spend a lot of money money to prove how much they loved their relatives.

You were almost guilt-tripped if you didn't prepare your loved one for eternity by getting them sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged, and neatly dressed.

Since Ons and Rebels, Mitford had wanted to write another book, but her publishers were nervous.

The subject matter couldn't be more different from the antics of an upper-class family in an English country house.

They were squeamish about her vivid descriptions of cosmetic treatments of corpses.

She declined to cut any of it and instead found another publisher.

Mitford had experienced a lot of death in her life.

Now she was furious to learn how grieving families were cajoled into spending fortunes on death merchandise such as commemorative ashtrays, on luxury coffins, on whole ranges of special clothes designed for burial.

There was a brand of bra

designed for post-mortem form restoration.

Midford didn't expect to sell many copies, but she cared deeply about the subject.

Her publishers, though, had confidence in the book.

They said, oh, we'll do a print run of, well, 20,000.

And it sold out within a day.

And it was just a phenomenon.

It hit the New York Times bestsellers list.

She made well over $100,000 from it.

The book made a tremendous impact.

There were congressional hearings.

And Robert Kennedy wrote to her to say, I had your book in mind when I had to organise the funeral for my brother, JFK.

And it's one of David Bowie's favourite books.

And people wrote things like, oh, Jessica Mitford is having a greater effect upon American culture than the Beatles.

The humour is so bleak and mordant, and that's quite Mitford, because of the strange relationship we have with reading about death, the sort of fascination, plus other chillier sensations.

There was a fierce backlash from the funeral industry, but the angrier people got, the more she pushed.

She really caused ripples, but she quite liked that.

You wonder psychologically for her,

because of so much loss in her life.

You do wonder what she was channeling into that book.

It's like looking death in the face and saying, okay, here we go.

I'm really going to take you on.

The book helped drive real social change.

Cheaper cremations became more popular as an alternative to burials.

Consumer rights groups took up the cause.

Eventually, government regulation followed.

The book influenced the Federal Trade Commission to introduce a funeral rule in 1984, mandating clear disclosure of prices and ensuring consumers should not be pressured.

Mitford kept fighting for social causes.

She wrote very openly about abortion.

She wrote about prisons and showed no fear.

To tell the truth is heroic.

Very few people do.

She quite liked trouble and she loved reading her reviews and she loved giving speeches.

She was very good at being a public figure.

In her old age, Jessica Mitford sang novelty pop music with her band Decker and the Decktones, opening for Cindy Lauper

and recording a cover version of the popular song Right Said Fred with her friend Maya Angelou.

When she died at the age of 78, she chose a funeral in line with her principles, a cheap cremation with no ceremony.

She was who she was, but that isn't her fault.

And the fact that she used it, and that she sometimes had it both ways, she used being a Mitford in order to attack being a Mitford.

She used her privilege in order to be able to attack being privileged.

She didn't sit in a rocking chair, what we used to call rocking chair revolutionaries.

She didn't sit around pontificating about a theory.

She went out and did something rather than indulge in personal wealth or comfort.

Next time on History's Heroes.

In the Industrial Revolution, a worker takes on the factory system and demands an end to brutal conditions.

William Dodd fights the factories.

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