David Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale

The Right Honourable The Lord Redesdale
Redesdale in 1933
Personal details
Born	David Bertram Ogilvy Mitford (1878-03-13)13 March 1878 Chelsea, London, England
Died	17 March 1958(1958-03-17) (aged 80) Otterburn, Northumberland, England
Spouse	Sydney Bowles ​ (m. 1904)​
Children	Captain
Battles/wars	Second Boer War World War I  • Second Battle of Ypres

David Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale,

Ancestry and early life

The Mitfords are a family of the landed gentry, originally from Northumberland, whose history dates back to the 14th century. Redesdale's great-great-grandfather was the historian William Mitford. Redesdale was the second son of (Algernon) Bertram Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale, and Lady Clementine Gertrude Helen Ogilvy, daughter of David Ogilvy, 10th Earl of Airlie. His father was a diplomat, politician and author, with large inherited estates in Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, and Northumberland. He was raised to the peerage in 1902, and so his son became known as the Hon. David Mitford, as the family commonly used the surname 'Mitford' by itself, and not the full 'Freeman-Mitford'.^[2]

Mitford's legendary eccentricity was evident from an early age. As a child, he was prone to sudden fits of rage.^[3] He was totally uninterested in reading and education and wished only to spend his time riding. He later liked to boast that he had read only one book in his life, Jack London's novel White Fang, on the grounds that he had enjoyed it so much he had vowed never to read another.^[4] However, he read most of his daughters' books.

His lack of academic aptitude meant that he was not sent to Eton, with his older brother, but rather to Radley, with the intention that he should enter the army. However, he failed the entrance examination to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and was instead sent to Ceylon to work for a tea planter.^[5]

Work and war

In early 1900, he returned to England from Ceylon, and on 23 May 1900 he joined the Northumberland Fusiliers as a second lieutenant.^[6] His battalion served in the Second Boer War in South Africa, where Mitford soon joined in the fighting, in which he served with distinction and was wounded three times, losing one lung. He was briefly taken prisoner by the Boers in June 1900 but escaped. In May 1901 he was appointed aide-de-camp to Lord Methuen, a senior commander during the war, and on 10 August 1901 he was promoted to lieutenant.^[6] He was seconded to serve with the 40th (Oxfordshire) Company of the Imperial Yeomanry,^[7] and returned to the United Kingdom in April 1902.^[8] After his return, he was back as a regular lieutenant in his regiment in July 1902,^[9] but resigned from the army three months later, in October 1902.^[10]

In February 1904, Mitford married Sydney Bowles (1880–1963), whom he had first met ten years previously, when he was 16 and she was 14. She was the daughter of

On the outbreak of the

where his elder brother Clement was killed. With only one lung and by now a captain he was invalided out of active service in 1916.

After his father's death in August 1916, being now Lord Redesdale, he was briefly appointed

As Lord Redesdale, he was often silent in the House of Lords, but joined the House of Lords Select Committee on Peerages in Abeyance in 1925.

Although Redesdale was now a large landowner, he was not a wealthy man: the estates were poorly developed and rents were low. With seven children to feed and five servants to pay, he could not maintain the expense of his large home at Batsford in the Cotswolds. He bought and extended Asthall Manor and then moved to nearby Swinbrook. Here he indulged his passion for building by building a new large house, named after the village, which appears as the family home in the books of his daughters Nancy and Jessica. The expense of these moves nearly ruined Redesdale, who was a poor manager of money. This, plus his increasing disappointment that all his later children were girls, led to the deterioration of his temperament which became legendary through his daughters' portrayals of his frequent and terrible rages.

Political views and family splits

As a

- but not as left-wing as Jessica.

The father of his wife Sydney, Thomas Gibson Bowles had been one of the strongest parliamentary supporters of the Royal Navy while he was an MP, and her maternal uncle William Evans-Gordon, MP, was a retired British Indian Army officer who was opposed to uncontrolled immigration into Britain, was allied to the British Brothers' League, and helped to enact the Aliens Act 1905.

Redesdale was an instinctive xenophobe, and came back from the First World War with a dislike of the French and a deep hatred of the Germans. As "Uncle Matthew", who was modelled on Redesdale,^[14] put it in his daughter Nancy's 1945 novel The Pursuit of Love: "Frogs are slightly better than Huns or Wops, but abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends."^[15] He was widely quoted as saying, "Abroad is bloody."

He was initially scornful of the enthusiasm shown by his daughters Diana (wife of

The outbreak of the

, was lost with this aircraft over the North Sea during a raid on Germany in 1941; this deepened her bitterness towards the "fascist branch" of the family. Jessica never spoke to her father again, although she was reconciled with her mother in the 1950s. Jessica did not speak to Diana again until 1973, although they remained permanently estranged because of their continuing strong political differences.

Children

Redesdale and his wife had one son and

, who all used the surname Mitford rather than Freeman-Mitford:

• Hon. Nancy Mitford (1904–1973), who married the Hon. Peter Rodd. They divorced in 1957.
• Hon.
  Derek Jackson, a physicist and the son of Sir Charles Jackson
  .
• Hon. Major Thomas David Mitford (1909–1945), who was killed in action in Burma.
• Hon.
  Sir Oswald Mosley
  in 1936.
• Hon. Unity Valkyrie Mitford (1914–1948), who befriended Adolf Hitler before the war.
• Hon.
  anti-fascist, in 1937. After his death in 1941, she married Robert Treuhaft, an American lawyer
  , in 1943.
• Hon.
  Deborah Vivien Mitford (1920–2014), who married The 11th Duke of Devonshire, the younger son and eventual heir of The 10th Duke of Devonshire
  , in 1941.

For Nancy's birth certificate, her father stated his occupation as: "Honourable."^[18]

Later life

In 1945, Tom Mitford was killed in action in

, a blow from which Lord Redesdale, already depressed by the break-up of his marriage, never recovered. According to Nancy Mitford's biographer: "Although she [Nancy] was deeply grieved by his death, it did not mean for her, as it did for her parents, that all pleasure in life was over."

Redesdale retreated to Inch Kenneth, an island in the Inner Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland, which he had purchased in 1938. Later he moved to Redesdale Cottage, near Otterburn, Northumberland, his family's ancestral property and lived there as a virtual recluse.^[19]

By 1950, when Nancy visited him, he was "frail and old". He died in Northumberland in 1958, and was buried in the graveyard of St Mary's Church in Swinbrook, Oxfordshire, where four of his daughters (Nancy, Diana, Unity and Pamela) are also buried.^[20]

His title passed to his brother Bertram Freeman-Mitford, 3rd Baron Redesdale.

In fiction as "Uncle Matthew"

Redesdale is the model for Uncle Matthew, Lord Alconleigh of Alconleigh, in Nancy's novels

Nevertheless, both daughters' accounts make it clear that between rages, Redesdale was an indulgent father who loved riding and hunting with his children.

Uncle Matthew was played by Michael Aldridge in the 1980 Thames Television series Love in a Cold Climate.^[23] He was played by Alan Bates in the BBC production of Love in a Cold Climate.^[24]

References

1. ^ Jonathan Guinness and Catherine Guinness: The House of Mitford: Portrait of a Family; Viking (1984).
2. ^ Biographical information from Selina Hastings, Nancy Mitford (Hamish Hamilton 1985), chapter 1.
3. ISBN 978-0-7607-8312-2
   .
4. ISBN 978-0-374-20768-7
   .
5. ISBN 978-1-134-27946-3
   .
6. ^ ^{a b} Hart′s Army list, 1902
7. ^ "40th Company, 10th Battalion". Angloboerwar.com. Retrieved 6 March 2014.
8. ^ "The War – Invalids and others returning home". The Times. No. 36755. London. 30 April 1902. p. 10.
9. ^ "No. 27475". The London Gazette. 19 September 1902. p. 6022.
10. ^ "No. 27480". The London Gazette. 7 October 1902. p. 6346.
11. ^ Hopper, Tristan (31 January 2017). "The Nazi from Swastika, Ont.: How Canada's most unusually named town spawned a notorious Hitler fangirl". National Post.
12. ^ PRO Kew; file WO 372/14/42889 (Does not exist)
13. ^ National Archives, Kew, file AIR 76/419; name misspelt as "Redesdale, David Bertram Ogilvy Freeman Wilfred".
14. ^ ^{a b} "A touch of class, by Maggie Brown". The Guardian. 26 January 2001. Retrieved 11 November 2017.
15. ^ Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love, 113.
16. ^ "British Foreign Policy". Parliamentary Debates (Hansard). 29 March 1938. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
17. ^ Selina Hastings, Nancy Mitford, 119.
18. ^ Independent article by Calkin J, 2010; accessed 25 September 2014
19. ISBN 978-1-903933-34-3
    .
20. ISBN 978-0-947893-35-4
    .
21. ^ Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love, 28
22. ^ "'The Pursuit of Love' – Nancy Mitford – Fun Facts, Questions, Answers, Information". Funtrivia.com. Archived from the original on 12 January 2015. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
23. ^ "Photographic press agency and picture library". Rex Features. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
24. ^ "Love in a Cold Climate (TV Mini Series 2001– - IMDb". IMDb.

External links

• Portraits of David Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale at the National Portrait Gallery, London

Peerage of the United Kingdom
Preceded by Algernon Freeman-Mitford	Baron Redesdale 2nd creation 1916–1958	Succeeded by Bertram Freeman-Mitford