Redesdale recanted
From Philip Hensher
Sir: What Paul Levy originally said about Lord Redesdale, in his explanatory notes to Lytton Strachey’s letters, was: ‘He was seriously unhinged and, when a series of bad investments in the 1920s crippled him financially, he joined a number of antiSemitic and right-wing organisations’ (Letters, 26 March). I don’t understand these claims, and I don’t think Mr Levy’s subsequent contention that Lord Redesdale ‘joined the Anglo-German Fellowship, and attended the Nuremberg rally of 1938’ justifies them at all. If he did join the Anglo-German Fellowship, his commitment must have been very brief indeed. In 1934 he wrote to his daughter Diana, after she had attended another Nuremberg rally, ‘I suppose you know without being told how absolutely horri fied Muv and I were to think of you and Bobo [Unity Mitford] accepting any form of hospitality from people we regard as a murderous gang of pests.’ In 1935, when Unity gave an overtly anti-Semitic speech in Hesselberg, the Redesdales cancelled a planned trip to Munich and ordered her home immediately.
The episode in 1938 was a very brief one; before the outbreak of war he was again denouncing the Nazis, and in September 1939 gave an interview to the Daily Mirror in which he, in his daughter Nancy’s words, ‘recanted like Latimer’ and said he had been wrong about Hitler. Indeed, his wife’s continuing support for Hitler led to their effective separation. The impression that Mr Levy gives, that Lord Redesdale was a continuous and active anti-Semite from the 1920s onwards, is quite false. He was quite accurate in writing, in the Times on 9 March 1940, ‘I am not, never have been, and am not likely to become a Fascist.’ Philip Hensher London SW8
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