EFFORTPOST The Mitfords- Bongland's most Dramapilled Family (Part 1 of an effortpost)

"Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Hitler-lover; Nancy the Novelist; Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur"

-The Times

History

The Mitfords were an aristocratic family from Northumberland in the far north of In-Gurr-Land, right on the border with Haggis-stan. Their ancestors had been 'border reivers' which is a fancy way to say cattle rustlers who were occasionaly paid money to fight in the wars between the two nations- they were the kind of soldiers you paid when you wanted whole farms and whole farmer's families to conveniently disappear. Other prominent reiver families were the Armstrongs, the Nixons, the Bells and the Elliots. An alarming number of Burgers with those surnames are descended from the reivers as many of them were forced to flee Bongland when Scotland and England merged and they suddenly found themselves criminals on both sides of the border.

The Mitfords had managed to get themselves a peerage tho- the Barony of Redesdale- so they were legit and no-one could touch them. Here is their family crest...

Those are supposed to be moles. I thought they were duck-billed platypuses but moles are still a bit weird.

Many members of the family served as something called 'High Sherrif of Northumberland' but, far away from Sherwood Forest, their exploits against Ye Merrie Men of Yore are not recorded.

Daddy Mitford and his Daughters

Skip forward several centuries to the early 20th Century

David Freeman-Mitford, Baron of Resedale and the Lady Sydney...

...have one son, Tom, and six daughters who were- oldest first- Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah. They were, in the jargon of the time, 'debs' of some note at their coming of age- that is debutants. Debutants were young girls 'coming out' into society- needless to say, coming out meant something very different back then. This was often accompanied by a big party where young eligible men of the right breeding were invited to gawk at them. If this sounds like a meat market you would be right, but the Mitford girls were very sought-after marriage-material. They were rich, from a storied came-over-with-the conqueror Anglo-Norman heritage, and some of them (Diana particularly) were considered good-looking. In roaring 20s London they were the talk of the town and that was before they even did any of the fricked-up things they would later do. Many of them had strident views on politics and, going into the thirties, some of them would go on to create international scandals which would echo down the ages. We will start with poor old Tom who had to cope with a young life of everyone he knew wanting to frick his sisters- this might explain how he turned out.

Tom

Tom had his bussy blasted at Eton, like many Bongs of his class. His famous butt-buddies included his sister Nancy's future fiancée and the cousin of Winnie the Pooh creator A. A. Milne.

He once pretended to be an artist called Bruno Hat and took part in an art hoax which will seem very familiar as variations of it keep getting repeated to this day.

He later straightened out somewhat and banged some foids. One of whom wrote about him in a book (as we will see, foids producing mediocre literature is not a new thing) where she described him as "the handsomest man she'd ever met" and, less flatteringly, a "minature version of his father".

When war broke out in 1939 he joined up and was eventually sent to North Africa. There was some concern about sending him, you see, because of his professed Nazi sympathies- and the actions of some of his sisters, but we'll get to that.

When the war with Japan began in 1942 he was happy to be reassigned to Burma to have a crack at The Nip. He died about four months before the WHOLLY JUSTIFIED ATOMIC STRIKES ON HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI, when a bunch of half-starved Japanese soldiers decided to commit suicide-by-Bong and charged his position.

Over 50 Sunrise-Islanders were killed and Tom was the only Bong casualty. He was found beneath the body of a Jap soldier he had apparently killed before succumbing himself to a bullet wound in his neck.

Diana

We'll tackle Diana next because her story intertwines with many of her sisters. When they were young, her younger sister Jessica was her best friend and the two were inseparable. This will become very ironic later.

Remember what I said about 'coming out'? Well Diana made a mini-scandal by engaging and eloping with a son of the Guiness beer family when she was 17.

This is the couple in Sicily. Daddy was not pleased that his daughter had had her guts pushed in by an Irishman but, as Diana was now spoiled goods, he had no choice but to agree to the wedding. Especially when he found out how much money this beer-peddling Irishman had.

They had two sons but the marriage was headed for the rocks. Little known to the boozy Potato-neighbor, his wife was being watched by eyes other than his... cold, blue eyes which watched and waited and drew their plans against him...

Nah, actually Oswald Mosely didn't have to plan against Guiness because he had been banging his wife pretty much throughout their marriage. Mosely was pretty set-up on Diana but he was married to the great-granddaughter of Lord Curzon, the first Viceroy of India, and it would be awkward for him to divorce as his in-laws had got him his peerage. His wife was also the one who got him started in politics and had previously served with him as a Labour Party MP.

In case you've never seen Peaky Blinders, Oswald Mosely was the leader of the British Union of Fascists which was founded out of the ruins of his previous organisation The New Party which was built out of the ruins of the organisation he had stolen from Rotha Lintorn-Orman, a female WW1 ambulance driver who had repeatedly ran out into No Man's Land, to rescue wounded Bongs. Before you say, 'ah, relying on the Krauts not shooting a foid right?' this is what she looked like in 1916:

She actually deserves her own effortpost because she was pretty remarkable. Died aged 40 of booze, s*x (with both men and women) and drugs (opium being a favorite). Chaddette Chuddette manifest.

Anyway, in 1933 Lady Mosely died suddenly of peritonitis. Before you jump to any conclusions, Oswald was heartbroken and even Diana could not console him. Fortunately, his wife's younger sister could, and Ossie fricked the pain away with a younger, tighter version of his dead wife.

Then he married Diana straight after she finally divorced that dreadful Irishman.

_{Diana did not look happy with the outfit her husband asked her to wear that day}

Diana's marriage to Mosely strained her relationship with most of her family. Her parents considered the two to be 'living in sin'. Jessica couldn't get over Mosely's politics and learned to hate her sister for them too. Nancy despised Mosely too but learned to get along with him for the sake of her relationship with Diana- Nancy would never make a good Redditor. She did eventually ruin things by writing about Mosely in her book Wigs on the Green and she and Diana stopped speaking until after the war. The rest of the family got along very well with Ossie- history does not record if Tom tried to get his bussy blasted the fascist leader.

In 1934 Diana's sister Unity took her to Nazi Germany. After they attended a rally- just for funsies, you know- Unity asked Diana if she'd like to meet 'her new friend Adolf'. Diana would return with her husband the following year. Unbeknown to them, they were being watched by other eyes... cold, blue eyes which watched and waited and drew their plans against them...

Well, not Winston Churchill actually- Churchill had behaved far too Chuddy during the Great Depression- wanting to turn the army loose on protesting miners, that kind of thing- so Stanley Baldwin kicked him out the government. But MI5 and MI6 both had their eyes on the Moselys.

Diana and Oswald were married in 1936 at the home of Josef Goebbels. Diana had never expressed any antisemitic sentiment and the BUF had largely avoided ragging on the hebes until after their visits to Nazi Germany. Clearly Hitler must've had an impression on them because they came back determined to act like an American college student in 2024. The resulting carnage when BUF blackshirts attacked a Jewish part of London was known as "The Battle of Cable Street" and was a massive PR disaster for all things Chud in Bongland. Rising fear of Hitler and the danger of him igniting a new war meant that the Moselys' trips to the Third Reich looked increasingly bad. Mosely tried to rebrand his party as the 'British Union', dropping the F-word, but when war finally broke out, Churchill's new coalition government decided that Ossie and Diana should probably spend the war under lock and key. An MI5 document from the time described Diana:

"Diana Mosley, wife of Sir Oswald Mosley, is reported on the 'best authority', that of her family and intimate circle, to be a public danger at the present time. Is said to be far cleverer and more dangerous than her husband and will stick at nothing to achieve her ambitions. She is wildly ambitious."

When the filth came to arrest her she stuffed a signed photo of Hitler under her newborn son Max's cot. Max, btw, would become the chief executive of Formula 1 motor racing in later life and successfully sued the News of the World for this headline:

Not because it wasn't true he was into bondage and hookers but because it "wasn't in the public interest" to know he was into bondage and hookers.

Anyway... initially the Moselys were held separately but Churchill would personally allow them to stay together after 1941 in Holloway prison. They were moved to house arrest in 1943 and released in 1945 although they were denied passports until 1949. Mosely was not stripped of his knighthood.

Evelyn Waugh, a friend of Tom (buttsecks not confirmed but heavily implied), said Diana wore a diamond swastika upon her release from prison.

Post war Ossie tried to revive the Union but failed. The couple moved to France for a while where they were neighbors of the Duke and Dutchess of Windsor...

Yeah, them. Here's charming old Uncle Edward & Auntie Wallis with their neices Elizabeth and Margaret...

Oswald continued to frick around throughout his marriage to Diana. She said of this; "I think if you're going to mind infidelity, you better call it a day as far as marriage goes. Because who has ever remained faithful?"

He died in 1980. She died in 2002. Of Hitler and the holocaust here are some of her remarks:

"I didn't love Hitler any more than I did Winston [Churchill]. I can't regret it, it was so interesting."

"Well, of course, horror. Utter horror. Exactly the same probably as your reactions." However, when asked about having revulsion against Hitler for this, she said that "I had a complete revulsion against the people who did it but I could never efface from my memory the man I had actually experienced before the war. A very complicated feeling. I can't really relate those two things to each other. I know I'm not supposed to say that but I just have to."

And a couple of stories about her and God's Chosen People:

The journ*list Paul Callan remembered mentioning that he was Jewish while interviewing her husband in Diana's presence. According to Callan, "I mentioned, just in the course of conversation, that I was Jewish—at which Lady Mosley went ashen, snapped a crimson nail and left the room ... No explanation was given but she would later write to a friend: 'A nice, polite reporter came to interview Tom [as Mosley was known] but he turned out to be Jewish and was sitting there at our table. They are a very clever race and come in all shapes and sizes.'"Diana offered to entertain her teenage half-Jewish nephew, Benjamin Treuhaft, on a trip to France. The offer was refused by Benjamin's mother, Jessica, who remained estranged from Diana over the latter's political past.

"Maybe instead they [European Jews] could have gone somewhere like Uganda: very empty and a lovely climate"

Jessica

Everyone called Jessica 'Decca' and I'm doing the same cos it's easier to type. The way some people around here act, you'd think people like Decca were invented by social media but that's not true. Long before reddit, twitter and all these other 'spaces', Decca hated her parents (because they were fascists), hated her country (because it was fascist), hated the media (because it was fascist) but didn't hate her sister Diana until she married an actual fascist. Some would say that points to Diana being far more influenced by her husband and her pal Adolf than any ideas in her own horsey-nosed blonde head but that doesn't really scan with her later life.

Wikipedia insists that Decca rejected her father's wealth and status but, of course, that was only true after she copied her sister and ran off with a wallet... I meant man- her cousin actually. They ran off to join the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell's wife apparently hated Decca after the latter enthusiastically supported the Red Terror, where the Soviet-aligned Brigades purged the Marxist-Anarchist Brigades to which the Orwells were members. I recommend Orwell's book Homage to Catalonia if you want the full story on that shit-show.

So, a privileged foid with daddy-issues and very left-wing politics who turns authoritarian at the drop of a hat...

Burgerland was the obvious destination for such a lady.

Her Cousin-Husband dead in the war (officially MIA but I think we can now- in 2024- confidently say he died), she would marry Jewish American civil rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft with whom she joined the Communist Party of America. She had literally been in the country for less than six months. Incredible people complain about modern immigrants. In their defence, they both left the party in 1958 after the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

Along with her husband, and a bunch of other leftie celebrities, she campaigned against the r*pe conviction of Willie MacGee

_{wearing t-shirts over your suit was the 40s equivalent of taking the knee}

In the 50s, Decca and her husband refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee and she wrote a book pooping on her new homeland:

And a book pooping on her family:

She wrote other things and her letters are published. It's all exactly what you'd expect. Wikipedia insists they're 'classics'. Remember that MI5 document talking about 'best authorities' on Diana's character? Yeah, that was almost certainly Decca. Her last meeting with Diana was around the deathbed of their sister Nancy. Of Decca, Diana said this:

"I quite honestly don't mind what Decca says or thinks. She means absolutely nothing to me at all. Not because she's a Communist but simply because she's a rather boring person, really."

She was also a shitty mother surprise, surprise.

Decca died in California, like all good communists.

This has turned into a bigger thing than I thought. If enough people show an interest, I will write up on the final four Mitford girls- Debo the Dutchess, Pamela the (alleged) lesbian chicken farmer, Nancy the 'Woman' and Unity...

Yeah, Unity is really something else.