Jessica Lucy "Decca" Treuhaft (néeFreeman-Mitford, later Romilly; 11 September 1917 – 23 July 1996) was an English author, one of the six aristocratic
Mitford sisters noted for their sharply conflicting politics.
Born at
Asthall Manor, Oxfordshire,[4] the sixth of seven children, Jessica Mitford was the daughter of
David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, and his wife Sydney (daughter of politician and publisher
Thomas Bowles). She grew up in a series of her father's country houses. She had little formal education. Her sisters
Unity and
Diana were well-known
Fascists.
Jessica (known as "Decca" to family and friends) later described her conservative father as "one of nature's
fascists", renounced her privileged background while still a teenager, and became an adherent of
communism.[5] Mitford said that her parents had "appeased Hitler and Nazism. ... He had crushed the
trade unions, he had crushed the
Communist Party and he had crushed the
Jews ... and don't forget there's a huge strain of anti-Semitism that runs through that class in England."[6] She was known as the "
redsheep" of the family.[1]
The Mitford family 1928; Front row, L to R, mother (Sydney Bowles), Unity, Jessica and Deborah, father (David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale); middle row, Diana and Pamela; back row, Nancy and Tom.
At the age of 19, Mitford fell in love with her second cousin,
Esmond Romilly, who was recuperating from
dysentery caught while defending
Madrid with the
International Brigades during the
Spanish Civil War. Romilly was a nephew (by marriage) of
Winston Churchill.[7] The cousins eloped to Spain, where Romilly picked up work as a reporter for the News Chronicle. After some legal difficulties caused by their relatives' opposition, they
married. They moved to London and lived in the
East End, then mostly a poor industrial area. Mitford
gave birth at home to a daughter, Julia Decca Romilly, on 20 December 1937. The baby died in a
measles epidemic the following May. Jessica Mitford rarely spoke of Julia in later life, and she is not referred to by name in Mitford's 1960 autobiography, Hons and Rebels.[5]
In 1939, Romilly and Mitford emigrated to the United States. They travelled around, working odd jobs.[5] At the outset of World War II, Romilly enlisted in the
Royal Canadian Air Force; Mitford was living in Washington D.C., and considered joining him once he was posted to England. While living in D.C, with contemporaries
Virginia Foster Durr and
Clifford Durr, she gave birth to another daughter, Constancia Romilly ("the Donk" or "Dinky") on 9 February 1941.[8] Her husband went
missing in action on 30 November 1941, on his way back from a bombing raid over
Nazi Germany.
There, the couple had two sons; Nicholas, born in 1944 (who was killed in 1955 when hit by a bus), and Benjamin, born in 1947.[4] Mitford approached her motherhood in a spirit of "benign neglect", described by her children as "matter-of-fact" and "not touchy-feely".[12] She became closer to her own mother by letter over the decades, but remained estranged from her sister Diana for the rest of her life.
Career and politics
Communism and left-wing politics
Mitford and Treuhaft became active members of the
Communist Party in 1943. Mitford spent much of the early 1950s working as executive secretary of the local
Civil Rights Congress chapter. Through this and her husband's legal practice, she was involved in a number of civil rights campaigns, notably the failed attempt to stop the execution of
Willie McGee, an African American convicted of raping a white woman. In 1953, as Communist Party members at the height of
McCarthyism and the '
Red Scare', they were summoned to testify in front of the
House Un-American Activities Committee. Both refused to name radical groups and friends or testify about their participation in Communist organisations, and were dismissed as 'unresponsive'.[13][6]
In 1956, Mitford published a pamphlet, "Lifeitselfmanship or How to Become a Precisely-Because Man". In response to Noblesse Oblige, the book her sister
Nancy co-wrote and edited on the class distinctions in
British English, popularizing the phrases "
U and non-U English" (upper class and non-upper class), Jessica described L and non-L (Left and non-Left) English, mocking the clichés used by her comrades in the all-out
class struggle.[14][15] (The title alludes to
Stephen Potter's satirical series of books that included Lifemanship.)
Mitford and Treuhaft resigned from the American Communist Party in 1958, because they had come to the conclusion they could pursue their ideals more effectively outside the party.[16] Mitford felt the party had become "rather useless".[17]
In 1960, Mitford published her first book Hons and Rebels (US title: Daughters and Rebels), a memoir covering her youth in the Mitford household.
Investigative journalism
In May 1961, Mitford travelled to
Montgomery, Alabama, while working on an article about
Southern attitudes for Esquire. While there, she and a friend went to meet the arrival of a group of
Freedom Riders and became caught up in a riot when a mob, led by the
Ku Klux Klan, attacked the civil rights activists. After the riot, Mitford proceeded to a rally led by
Martin Luther King Jr. The church at which this was held was also attacked by the Klan, and Mitford and the group spent the night barricaded inside until the siege was ended by the arrival of
Alabama National Guard troops.
Through his work with unions and death benefits, Treuhaft became interested in the funeral industry and persuaded Mitford to write an investigative article on the subject. Though the article, "
Saint Peter Don't You Call Me", published in Frontier magazine, was not widely disseminated, it caught considerable attention when Mitford appeared on a local television broadcast with two industry representatives. Convinced of public interest, she wrote The American Way of Death, which was published in 1963. In the book, Mitford harshly criticized the industry for using unscrupulous business practices to take advantage of grieving families. The book became a major best-seller and led to Congressional hearings on the funeral industry. The book was one of the inspirations for filmmaker
Tony Richardson's 1965 film The Loved One, which was based on
Evelyn Waugh's short satirical 1948
novel of the same name,[18] subtitled "An Anglo-American Tragedy".
Mitford was a distinguished professor for the one semester in 1973 at
San Jose State University, where she taught a course called "The American Way" that covered the
Watergate scandal and the
McCarthy era. Because of disagreements with the dean over her taking a
loyalty oath and submitting to fingerprinting, the campus was thrown into protests and she was forced to go to court to remain able to teach.[19]
Books and music
Mitford's second memoir, A Fine Old Conflict (1977), comically describes her experiences joining and eventually leaving the Communist Party USA. Mitford titled the book after what, in her youth, she
thought were the lyrics to the Communist anthem, "
The Internationale", which actually are "'Tis the final conflict". Mitford recounts how she was invited to join the Communist Party by her co-worker Dobby, to whom she responded, "We thought you'd never ask!" She bristled against the conservative structure in the CP, at one point upsetting the women's caucus by printing a poster with "Girls! Girls! Girls!" to draw people to an event. She mercilessly teased an elder Communist about what she perceived as his paranoia when he wrote out the name of a town where she could get chickens donated from "loyal party members" for a fund raiser. When he wrote
Petaluma on a scrap of paper to avoid being overheard by possible bugs, she asked in jest how the chickens should be prepared, and wrote, "Fried or broiled".
In addition to writing and activism, Mitford tried her hand at music as singer for "Decca and the Dectones", a
cowbell and
kazoo orchestra. She performed at numerous benefits and opened for
Cyndi Lauper on the roof of the
Virgin Records store in
San Francisco. She recorded two short albums: one[20] contains her rendition of "
Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and "
Grace Darling",[21] and the other, two duets with friend and poet
Maya Angelou.[22] Her last work was an update entitled The American Way of Death Revisited.
Death
Mitford died of
lung cancer in 1996, aged 78. She died in
Oakland, California, where she also spent most of her life.[10] In keeping with her wishes, she had an inexpensive funeral, costing $533.31 – she was cremated without a ceremony, her ashes scattered at sea.[1][23] At the time of her death, the San Francisco ChroniclecolumnistHerb Caen wrote "In this strangely flat era of 'diversity,' she was the rarest of birds, an exotic creature who rose each morning to become the sun around whom thousands of lives revolved."[24]
Her widower, Robert Treuhaft, survived her by five years.
Her younger son, Ben Treuhaft, is a piano tuner based in
Coventry, UK.[25]
Legacy and influence
John Pilger, who had interviewed Mitford in 1983 for his series Outsiders, said she "combined a finely honed social conscience and a wonderful gallows humor. She inverted stereotypes. I liked her enormously".[6]
The author
Christopher Hitchens expressed his admiration for Jessica Mitford and praised Hons and Rebels.[26]
My most influential writer, without a doubt, is Jessica Mitford. When my grand-aunt gave me Hons and Rebels when I was 14, she instantly became my heroine. She ran away from home to fight in the
Spanish Civil War, taking with her a camera that she had charged to her father's account. I wished I'd had the nerve to do something like that. I love the way she never outgrew some of her adolescent traits, remaining true to her politics — she was a self-taught socialist — throughout her life. I think I've read everything she wrote. I even called my daughter Jessica Rowling Arantes after her.[27]
Extracts from Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford were dramatized for Book of the Week,
BBC Radio 4, five 15-minute programs broadcast in November 2006. The readers were
Rosamund Pike and
Tom Chadbon; the producer was Chris Wallis.