The House | “Gripping”: Baroness Bryan reviews ‘Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford’

The Mitford sisters, 1935: (l-r) Jessica, Nancy, Diana, Unity and Pamela | Image by: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy

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There were six Mitford sisters. Nancy achieved fame as a chronicler of the upper classes. Pamela lived for many years in Switzerland with her female partner. Diana married the most notorious British fascist, Oswald Mosley, and served time with him in prison. Unity was a dear friend of Adolf Hitler and tried to kill herself in despair as the war swung towards the allies. Deborah married into one of England’s most influential families, becoming Duchess of Devonshire. It was, however, Jessica – the subject of this book – who had the most adventurous life of them all.

It is said of the Mitford family that you couldn’t have made them up. They were beyond fiction. Carla Kaplan gives a real sense of this and helps the reader follow the confusions of the various names they used, both in their own secret language and in their dealings with others. Throughout the book, Jessica is Decca.

Out of the six, it was Decca who caused the most dismay. First by running away with her second cousin Esmond Romilly to fight in the Spanish civil war, returning to live in the Rotherhithe docks in London; and then going to the USA and becoming an active member of the Communist Party. Her antisemitic family could tolerate almost anything but her second marriage to a Jewish fellow-communist caused the greatest rift.

She had hoped her first marriage would be “terrific fun”. She and Esmond went to the USA with several letters of introduction and cadged off these acquaintances – borrowing their homes, their clothes and giving nothing back but delightful company.

Her closest friend in the US was probably Maya Angelou

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Their short married life had two tragedies: the death of their daughter due to measles, and the death of Esmond, who went missing-in-action in the Second World War after enlisting in the Canadian Royal Air Force. When Winston Churchill came to Washington to meet president Roosevelt, he sent for Decca so he could commiserate on her loss: she was a distant cousin and Esmond was his nephew. At the time she had no money and was struggling to keep herself and their second daughter, but was entertained at the White House. This was typical of the contradiction between her two worlds.

Decca had existed on the goodwill of her friends, but once America entered the war, she was able to find work in one of the wartime regulators – the Office of Price Administration – where she became an expert in exposing bad practice. She was an active trade unionist and member of the Communist Party. She moved to San Francisco where she married civil rights lawyer Bob Treuhaft and started the second part of her adventurous life.

After the awful death of their young son, she got to see the hideous side of the “death industry” in the US. Writing The American Way of Death allowed her to vent her anger about the way funeral homes used unscrupulous practices to take advantage of grieving families. This began her career as a “muckraking” writer. She and Bob survived the McCarthy period and stayed active in the Communist Party and campaigns for civil rights.

The list of Decca’s friends in both the UK and the USA reads like a Who’s Who of the best-known names in politics and culture. Her closest friend in the US was probably Maya Angelou. The two would sing a duet of her favourite song, Right Said Fred.

The biography is over 400 pages but with an additional 150 pages of acknowledgements, notes, bibliography, an index and many pages of delightful photographs, it is a weighty tome. But it is well worth the effort as Kaplan manages to immediately engage the reader in this gripping life story.

Baroness Bryan is a former Labour peer

Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford

By: Carla Kaplan

Publisher: Hurst & Co