Read Online The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell - Free Book Online

 

     
1. Sydney and Dorothy (‘Weenie’) Bowles in their ubiquitous sailorsuits, c. 1892.
     

     
2. Sydney the newlywed, Cowes, Isle of Wight, 1904.
     

     
3. David and Sydney with three-year-old Nancy, c. 1907. (Nancy used this image on the cover of her book The Water Beetle .)
     

     
4. David Mitford worked his mine in Swastika, Canada, for years but never struck gold. September 1913.
     
5. The Mitford family in 1912: Nancy, David, Tom, Diana, Sydney and Pam. Note the bloodhound with which David ‘hunted’ the children.
     

     
6. Batsford House, which David inherited in 1916.
     

     
7. The library at Batsford. A grand house but the Redesdales could not afford to keep it.
     

     
8. Seaside holidays at Hastings. Left to right: Diana, Tom and Pam.
     

     
9. Diana, Nancy, Pam and Tom with the chickens whose eggs paid for the governess.
     

     
10. Nancy aged nine.
     

     
11. Nanny ‘Blor’, much loved by all the Mitfords.
     

     
12. Unity and Decca (seated), 1922.
     

     
13. Decca aged four.
     

     
14. Unity aged seven
     

     
15. Tom at Eton
     

     
16. Nancy (before she cut her hair) and Debo, 1923. There were sixteen years between Nancy and her youngest sister and Sydney asked her to be Debo’s godmother.
     

     
17. Annual family photo call at Asthall in 1922. ‘When one looks back at that time, it seems to have been all summers,’ Sydney wrote.
     

     
18. Debo skating at St Moritz. She was invited to join the British junior team, but Sydney would not allow it.
     

     
19. Nineteen-year-old Diana’s marriage to Bryan Guinness on 30 January 1929, at St Margaret’s, Westminster, was the ‘society wedding of the year’.
     

     
20. Diana and Bryan on honeymoon in Sicily.
     

     
21. Diana in fancy dress, photographed by Cecil Beaton in 1932 – the year she met Oswald Mosley. Her silver foil wig was made for her by theatre costume designer Oliver Messel.
     

     
22. Nancy by Cecil Beaton, 1932.
     

     
23. Oswald Mosley with Swedish fencing partner, c. 1932.
     

     
24. Unity, Diana and Nancy attending the wedding of a cousin in 1932.
     

     
25. Family photo call, Swinbrook House, 1934.
     

     
26. Nancy’s marriage to Peter Rodd in 1933.
     

     
27. Diana on Mosley’s motorboat during their Mediterranean holiday in 1935.
     

     
28. Mosley driving his boat.
     

     
29. Julius Streicher presents Unity with a flower.
     

     
30. Unity at Hesselberg, 1935.
     

     
31. Unity on the front cover of a magazine in 1937. It was widely rumoured that she might marry Hitler.
     

     
32. Tom at the Parteitag in 1937. Although in sympathy with Fascist political ideology, he was opposed to Nazi anti-Semitism.
     

     
33. Unity and Diana, posing at the request of writer Ward Price. He wanted pictures for his book, I Knew these Dictators.
     

     
34. Unity with Hitler. One of a series of pictures she and Diana had taken with the Führer.
     

     
35. Sir Oswald Mosley takes salute of his BUF ranks, October 1935.
     

     
36. Decca with Unity’s storm-trooper ‘boyfriend’, Erich Widemann, in Munich, September 1934. Curiously, she made no mention of this trip in her memoirs.
     

     
37. Decca, the reluctant debutante, 1935.
     

     
38. The elopers. Decca and Esmond at the Hôtel des Basques on the day of their wedding in May 1937.
     

     
39. Esmond and Decca at Rotherhithe, 1937.
     

     
40. Esmond and Decca running their bar in Miami.
     

     
41. Diana in April 1939, aged twenty-nine, at the height of her beauty.
     

     
42. Diana and Mosley, taken the evening before his arrest in 1940.
     

     
43. Pam, the ‘most rural’ Mitford, according to John Betjeman.
     

     
44. Pam’s marriage to Derek Jackson. (Front row) Sydney, Derek, Pam, David. (Second row) Diana Mosley, Stella Jackson, Nancy Rodd, Aunt Weenie (Dorothy Bailey), Tom Mitford.
     

     
45. Debo aged seventeen.
     

     
46. David, still prospecting his gold claim in the mid-thirties.
     

     
47. Debo and