Hitler’s Valkyrie: Unity Mitford at 100

On 8 August 1914, four days after the declaration of war, Unity Valkyrie Mitford was born, the fifth child and fourth daughter of David and Sydney Freeman-Mitford, who admired the actress Unity Moore. Grandfather Redesdale suggested Valkyrie, after his friend Wagner’s Norse war-maidens. The fact that Unity Valkyrie had been conceived in the town of Swastika, Ontario, where her father was prospecting for gold, made it all the more portentous.

A few weeks after her birth, Unity and her mother (‘Muv’) joined ‘Farve’, who was with his regiment in Newcastle. His quarters were so cramped that Unity was laid to sleep in a drawer. But this was nothing to the hot-house atmosphere of life in rural Oxfordshire, where the family went to live after the deaths of David’s elder brother in 1915, and his father in 1916, when he became the 2nd Lord Redesdale. Two more, equally spirited daughters were born by 1920 — Jessica, then Deborah, joining Nancy, Pamela, Tom, Diana and Unity.