Scotland’s NAZI ISLAND
As a lavish new BBC drama turns the spotlight on the life and loves of the outrageous Mitfords, how their misfit sister fell in love with Hitler, bungled a suicide attempt with his pearl-handled revolver – then fled the Third Reich to her fascist hideaway off Mull...
INCh Kenneth, nestling off the western coast of Mull, is one of our tiniest, wildest islands. on its rugged land there is a tall Baronial-style house, its walls painted white, while the islet’s only full-time occupants, a flock of sheep, graze peacefully on the scrub, their gentle bleats silenced by the sound of crashing waves.
Yet it was here, on this remote, solitary spot in the dying days of the Second World War, that a member of one of Britain’s most controversial families hung a swastika from the flag pole and even – it is rumoured – sent signals to german U-boats with a bicycle lamp.
the story of how a Nazi-loving Mitford sister came to live out her final days on a remote Scottish island is one as curious as it is obscure. While tales of the Mitford sisters and their exploits are ten a penny – most recently in the Pursuit of Love, a lavish BBC adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s novel which loosely follows the early lives of the siblings – the life and death of Unity Mitford, arguably the family’s darkest chapter, has received scant attention. It is, perhaps, unsurprising. Not only was Unity a devoted member of the Nazi party who consorted with Joseph goebbels and hermann goring, she was also a close friend of hitler, and possibly even his lover.
While her sister Diana’s links to fascism have been well documented – she married oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists and spent time in prison during the war – Unity’s story has been airbrushed out of Mitford history as lightly as one of her sister Nancy’s witty aphorisms.
For almost 30 years, Inch Kenneth was a beloved home from home for the Mitford sisters and their parents, its rugged shores about as far away as a young debutante could get from the whirl of upper crust London society.
BoUght by the Mitfords’ father, Lord Redesdale, in 1939 from Sir harold Boulton, author of the lyrics to the Skye Boat Song, it was a place where signs had to be hung outdoors on a special post to summon the boatman, and days were passed milking goats and watching the stormy waves of the North Atlantic.
Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, the youngest of the sisters, said in a documentary shortly before her death in 2014: ‘there is something thrilling about a unique house in a unique setting on this island which is all yours and there is no one to say, “Don’t do this, don’t do that”.
‘there was a sort of fairyland side to it and a sort of giant’s horror side to it as well. It’s the best and worst place, but when you first see it and the sun’s on it you are just stopped in your tracks.’
her sister Nancy was more circumspect, writing in a letter in 1958: ‘Beautiful here, but dull.’
But for all its charms, the fact that Unity, the fourth of the six ‘mad, mad Mitford sisters’, would end up seeing out her days on this tiny hebridean island, could surely not have been part of the family plan.
Unity moved to germany in 1934, at the age of 20, after attending the Nuremberg rallies with her sister Diana the previous year as part of a delegation of the British Union of Fascists.
growing up in the family home near oxford, plain and dumpy Unity had neither Diana’s beauty, nor Nancy’s intelligence. But from the day she witnessed the flag-waving at Nuremberg and heard hitler address the crowds, she had Nazism.
‘I think the desire to shock was very important, it was the way that she made herself special,’ Jan Dalley, Diana’s biographer, says of Unity.
‘When she discovered Nazism and discovered that it was a fantastic opportunity to shock everybody in England she’d discovered the best tease of all.’
once in Munich, Unity moved into an apartment where she kept two white pet rats and a great Dane, and became a popular part of the Nazi party ‘set’. Well connected thanks to Mosley, her brother-in-law, Unity received invites to soirees hosted by hitler at his home, and attended the 1936 olympics with goebbels.
She breathlessly recounted to a friend that ‘the greatest moment in my life was sitting at hitler’s feet and having him stroke my hair’. Believing him to be ‘the greatest man of all time’ – hitler, for his part, was said to be taken with Unity’s aristocratic background as well as the fact that her middle name was ‘Valkyrie’ and her grandfather had been a friend of Richard Wagner, his favourite composer – Unity set about trying to make the Fuhrer fall in love with her.
She would spend hours at his favourite café in the hopes of running in to him and hitler, flattered, would play her off against his lover, Eva Braun, describing the young Englishwoman as ‘a perfect specimen of Aryan womanhood’.
She appeared with him on the balcony in 1938 when he announced the Anschluss, was arrested in Prague for distributing Nazi material and, distressed at the idea of conflict between the two countries she loved, would argue with hitler to make a deal with Britain rather than go to war.
Whether they were actually lovers is unclear. hitler was ultimately devoted to Braun, but may have found Unity a useful tool for keeping her under control.
While Unity hinted their friendship went further – one British newspaper even went so far as to report, wrongly, that they were engaged to be married – it is unknown if the relationship was ever consummated.
Either way, Unity was clearly in love with him and, on the day that war was declared in 1939, she made a catastrophic decision that would change the rest of her life.
Distraught at the news, she walked into the English garden park in Munich, placed a pearl-handled revolver – given to her by hitler for protection – to her temple, and shot herself in the head. that she survived is a miracle. She was stabilised after being rushed to hospital in Munich and hitler visited regularly, paying her hospital bills.
While Unity was in a Munich park attempting to take her own life, much of the Mitford family – including the girls’ mother Sydney, father David, and Nancy – were at Inch Kenneth, fearful of being too close to London in the event of bombing raids.
ThERE was scant news of Unity, and it would be weeks before they received word that she was recovering in hospital in germany. In January 1940 she was finally brought back to Britain to convalesce, a trip arranged and again paid for by hitler. But despite her supposed recovery, Unity was not the same woman who had left Britain five years earlier. ‘the wound changed Unity’s character,’ said the Duchess
of Devonshire, who likened her condition to that of someone who had suffered a stroke. ‘She was just about recognisable as the person we knew, but the person we knew wasn’t there any more.
‘My sister was incontinent; my mother washed her sheets every night and hung them out to dry.’
As the war dragged on, the family decided that the safest place for Unity to continue her convalescence would be on Inch Kenneth.
There she could live life away from the prying eyes of a scandalised and increasingly suspicious London society, who could scarcely believe one of their own could have betrayed them so terribly by consorting with the enemy.
Once there, Unity set about turning the island into what could have been the only Nazi outpost in Britain. She hung a swastika from the flagpole and was rarely seen without her Nazi armband.
On the gramophone she would play records of Nazi marching bands at full volume, and with her health improving, read reams of Right-wing literature, including her treasured copy of Mein Kampf, which was signed by Hitler.
Even now, rumours persist that Unity was working for the Nazis while on Inch Kenneth, signalling to German U-boats late at night with a bicycle lamp.
AMORE likely scenario is that she was wistfully blaring her light into the dark in the hope that one of the U-boats would pick her up and spirit her back to her beloved Fuhrer.
This might explain the other persistent rumour: that Royal Navy boats were positioned around Inch Kenneth, just in case her German friends ever turned up.
While the British Government certainly regarded her with great suspicion – one of the reasons the family took her to Inch Kenneth in the first place – the locals, for the most part, were bemused by Unity’s antics.
Rowed over to Mull twice a week, she attended the occasional dance and became a familiar face.
Neil MacGillivray, who worked as the Inch Kenneth boatman during the time the Mitfords were there and who died in 2009, once recalled an encounter with her.
‘I took Unity to a little dance in the school house at Gribun [on the mainland of Mull],’ he said. ‘She was a big strapping woman. She says to me, “I think you Scottish people are frightfully lucky being able to wear the kilt and dance”.
‘She was just made welcome among the local people. There was no animosity towards her at all.’
As time went on, Unity’s wound accentuated her eccentricities.
Sometimes she would pretend she was a clergyman and could be seen conducting her own funeral in the ruins of Inch Kenneth’s ancient chapel. She once caused outrage by making a cake using four or five dozen eggs and no flour – a no-no during the time of rationing.
Even after the end of the war she could never accept Hitler had been responsible for the Holocaust.
In her eyes, he could do no wrong and she never fully understood – or even tried to understand – the horrors he had inflicted.
As Britain returned to a new post-war normality, Unity’s health declined. By 1948 she was seriously ill and spent days in bed, her walls plastered with images of Hitler.
Doctors in Germany had been unable to remove the bullet lodged in her brain. She suffered cerebral swelling around the wound and developed meningitis. She was moved to a hospital in Oban and died there on May 28, 1948.
Her mother, who had stayed with her on the island, decided to make her home on Inch Kenneth and lived there for 15 years, running a smallholding and tending to a flock of goats. She died there in 1963 and the island was sold to artist Yvonne Barlow, granddaughter of Sir Charles Darwin, who used it as a holiday home and kept it very much as it had been in Unity’s day. When she died in 2017 she passed it on to her children.
SPEAKING in 2011, Barlow said: ‘Jessica [Unity’s sister] sold it to us lock, stock and barrel. She took a few personal items but left all the furniture and various things.’
Unity’s gramophone still sits in the drawing room, along with her collection of marching songs. While her books remain in the library, there is one tome conspicuous by its absence. ‘Funnily enough there was no copy of Mein Kampf,’ said Barlow. ‘I suspected it may have been removed or destroyed.’
For a family full of secrets, it remains one final mystery.