Difficult grandmothers
Guinness’s mother, the French beauty Suzanne Lisny, died in 2005 and remained a mystery to her daughter: after all, Daphne left her family at the age of 11 for a boarding school, and at 19 she got married. She had a much closer relationship with her grandmother Diana. Politics was never discussed in the family, so Guinness had no idea for a long time that her grandmother’s second husband, Oswald Mosley, headed the British Union of Fascists. When Mosley died in 1980, it was reported on BBC news. At the boarding school Guinness allowed to watch TV. Seeing a familiar face, she screamed that it was her relative. And only then did I hear what the announcer was talking about. “After that, I was persona non grata for the rest of my school days,” she told The Daily Telegraph. – About my grandmother, I think that she fell in love and if she renounced, she would consider it a betrayal. But the more time passed since Mosley’s death, the more liberal she became.
Diana is the cousin of Winston Churchill, one of the infamous Mitford sisters. At 18, she married Brian Guinness and bore him two sons. A family friend, writer Evelyn Waugh, dedicated the novel Vile Flesh to the couple, which they considered an honor. But at 22, Diana met Mosley and at 26, in 1936, she married him in the Goebbels house. Adolf Hitler attended their wedding. In 1940, the couple were arrested and spent three years in prison. After the war they moved to France. Diana died in 2003 at the age of 93.
And her sister Unity, who was in love with the Fuhrer, introduced her to Hitler. When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, Unity was in Germany. She went to the park and shot herself in the temple with a pistol. She remained alive, Hitler visited her in the hospital and, after recovery, sent her to England. But due to the consequences of being wounded, Unity died nine years later.
Another sister of Diana’s grandmother, Jessica, secretly married the socialist Edmond Romilly in her youth and fled with him to the Spanish Civil War. Romilly died in World War II, and Jessica became the wife of the American communist Robert Troyhaft.
Another sister, Pamela, after a short marriage to millionaire Dirk Jackson, began to live with the Italian athlete Giuditta Tommasi in a village where she raised chickens. And sister Nancy became a famous writer and lived in France with her lover Gaston Palevsky, an associate of General de Gaulle. Another sister married the Duke of Devonshire and became an activist in the Social Democratic Party of Great Britain with him.