Decca, p.16
Decca, page 16
23. Community organizer Saul Alinsky, who helped organize the pioneering multi-ethnic Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council to encourage social and industrial reform in Chicago’s depressed stockyards neighborhood.
24. In later letters he’s called Mr. Bernard.
25. A reference to Decca’s pregnancy.
26. Presumably “paying guest.” which will be v. agreeable…
27. After going to work for her father’s newspaper in 1939, Katharine (Kay) Meyer met lawyer Philip Graham, then a clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court, whom she married in June 1940. Katharine Graham was later to become prominent as the publisher of the Washington Post, following the 1963 suicide of her husband, who preceded her as publisher.
28. In another letter, Decca quoted Weinberger as saying, “Say, since Mrs Romilly has been around I find I ee-nunciate more co-rectly. After I left school I was always very careful with my grammar & pro-nunciation & at the end of that time I got to talking correctly almost naturally; but since going back down home I sort of forgot it.”
29. Apparently a Decca-ism for “scooting.”
30. Felicity Bailey Rumbold was the wife of Sir Anthony Rumbold, second secretary at the British Embassy in Washington. She was a first cousin of Decca’s first cousins, the Baileys, on her mother’s side of the family.
31. Decca had recently returned from a visit with her husband.
32. Esmond Romilly had recently been transferred for several weeks of guard duty to Camp Borden in Ontario, which he described as “all armyish and tenty and hutty and parady,” though he was allowed briefly to work the dual controls of a plane during a practice flight. Overall, he said, he spent most of his time in “an endless succession of polishing, sweeping up, parading, waiting around, falling in on marches, right dressing, carrying kit somewhere else, answering roll calls, being assembled in alphabetical groups, waiting to see what’s next, being formed in new groups, drilling in the sun, preparing barracks for inspection, and folding sheets and blankets ‘Camp Borden style,’ as opposed to the ‘Manning Depot’ style.”
33. The Durrs’ oldest daughter.
34. Although they were generally known as the Mitfords, the family name was formally “Freeman-Mitford.”
35. Alfred Landon, the Republican presidential nominee.
36. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation, where Clifford Durr was legal counsel, was initially charged with rescuing banks threatened by the Depression and making emergency loans to faltering railroads and life insurance companies. Under President Franklin Roosevelt, its mandate was broadened considerably, and its loans helped revive many sectors of the economy. It played a major role in financing the World War II military buildup.
37. Esmond Romilly had been informed that an ear condition automatically disqualified him for air-crew status, although his hearing apparently wasn’t affected. He applied for an immediate discharge, hoping to return to England and enlist in the Royal Air Force (with his uncle Winston Churchill’s assistance, if necessary), but getting discharged proved to be a time-consuming bureaucratic process. He performed various menial duties including fire piquet, or fire warden, until his discharge was granted on November 22. Within days of the discharge, he got himself reinstated in an air-observer course with the help of a Canadian member of Parliament who had good connections in the air marshal’s office.
38. Romilly had left the couple’s car on a side street somewhere in Montreal, where it had apparently been carted off in the night by trash collectors.
39. The New Republic’s Washington correspondent.
40. The future First Lady of the United States. Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson often spent time at the Durrs’ home. According to Decca, the Durrs called them “Ki-i-ssin’ cou-ousins.” Once, Decca wrote, when she told her mother that Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson had come to tea, Lady Redesdale wrote back, “Who is Lady Bird? I looked her up in the Peerage, but could find no trace.”
41. In Newsweek magazine.
42. Esmond Romilly had spent the Christmas holiday with Decca in Alexandria. Years later, Virginia Durr recalled that interlude in an interview for documentary filmmakers: “I’ve never seen anybody enjoy Christmas as much as he did.” She said Esmond Romilly purchased dozens of tree ornaments and many presents and took them all out to fine restaurants, making “a great event” out of everything. He was very devoted and attentive to his pregnant wife, making her take walks, a couple of miles a day, “which she hated to do,” Durr reported.
43. Although it’s not clear precisely who the hostess was for Decca’s lunch, records show there was a family in Alexandria in those years with the surname Brown-Sermon.….
44. Jerry Voorhis was a young, popular liberal Democratic member of Congress from California who would serve five terms before his defeat in 1946 following a now-notorious Red-baiting campaign waged by Richard Nixon. He and his wife, Louise, lived across the street from the Durrs. Virginia Durr recalled in her autobiography that Esmond Romilly and Voorhis, a staunch anti-Communist, had had a “great debate on Spain one night at our house before the war. Jerry had been terribly upset that Spain had let the Communists in.” For Decca’s accounts of encounters with Voorhis years later, see letter of May 1, 1964, to Ernest Morgan.
45. Bill Livingston was a good friend of Clifford Durr as well as his colleague at the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Livingston’s sister, Louise, was married to Congressman Jerry Voorhis. Livingston’s wife, Mary, was a friend of Virginia Durr’s. Decca joined the Livingston car pool into Washington, which also included Clifford Durr, economist John Kenneth Galbraith (at the time deputy administrator of the Office of Price Administration, where Decca later worked), and other New Deal insiders.
46. Lois Eliot.
47. The bill, passed by Congress on March ii, gave President Franklin Roosevelt the authority to sell, transfer, lend, or lease ships and other war supplies to Great Britain and its allies in the battle against Nazi Germany. The bill, proposed by Roosevelt in response to an appeal from Winston Churchill, allowed the United States to aid the war effort while maintaining ostensible neutrality.
48. Lucy was the middle of the three daughters the Durrs had at that time, and Baby Sister was the nickname of the youngest, Virginia II, also known as Tilla (which Decca said was short for Baby Sister).
49. Mairi Foreman, whose name Decca usually misspelled. She was a painter and cultural figure and the wife of Clark Foreman, a white civil rights activist from Georgia and old friend and political ally of Virginia Durr. Clark Foreman was an Interior Department official charged with improving the economic status of blacks.
50. The origin of the term is unclear, but Decca uses this word in her letters as a synonym for “hospital.”.
51. Marney Abbott and her husband, Henry, were friends of the Durrs.
52. Recounting the scene in a letter years later, Decca said that the nurses in her “charity ward” had suddenly become deferential when the photographers arrived. She added, “One of the stupider fellow-mothers was heard by me to say, ‘Why are they taking pictures? Was her baby born with teeth?’ (To put YOU in the picture, photos of babies born with teeth were a reg. feature in the papers those days.)”
53. Years later Decca still marveled as she recalled the “huge hampers” of food arriving from the Meyers. She said she had shared the food with her roommates.
54. Decca later recalled, “On the following Monday, we had chicken soup in which I found a giblet. So I tied a bit of string round it, & called for the nurse. ‘Nurse,’ said I, ‘yesterday we had giblets for lunch & I tied a bit of string round mine. I now see that you SCRAPED OUR PLATES & put it all into this disgusting soup.’ Amazingly, she half-way believed it. So you can see a bit of fun was had.”
55. Presumably the joke was that the baby was to be named for Eugene Meyer and the Roma, the bar in Miami where the Romillys were able to buy in with the help of a loan from Meyer.
56. Mary was the Durr family cook and Mrs. Daniels their laundress, who often looked after the children and performed other household functions.
57. Decca spelled the name Willson in some letters and Wilson in others.
58. Decca described in A Fine Old Conflict that the name was inspired by her reading “In Place of Splendour, the stirring autobiography of Constancia de la Mora, daughter of a Spanish grandee who fled her highborn family to cast her lot with the Republican army during the civil war.” She also mentioned the belated arrival of Esmond’s letter of disapproval.
59. In 1939, Decca’s friend Joan White stayed with Nancy Mitford for a week, after which Decca received a letter from her sister saying that White was the first American she’d ever met and “if they are all like that you must be mad to stay there & like all mad people convinced you are sane.” Nancy’s impression of White—and all Americans—was to become a recurrent theme in their correspondence.
60. Lord Andrew Cavendish.
61. Decca recalled in her memoir Daughters and Rebels how, as a child, “Debo stated confidently
62. Decca was referring to the £1,000 libel judgment her sister Deborah won after the Daily Express got its mitford sisters mixed up, blaring in its front-page scoop on March 1, 1937, that ”the Hon. Deborah Vivien Freeman-Mitford…is believed to have gone to Spain in an attempt to marry her eighteen-year-old cousin, Esmond Romilly, nephew of Mr. Churchill.” Decca wrote years later that Esmond Romilly “never quite got over the unfairness” of the libel award, saying, “You did all the work, and Debo got £1000 out of it!”
63. Virginia Durr’s name for her sister, Josephine, wife of Justice Black. Not to be confused with Baby Sister, the nickname of Durr’s daughter.
64. Lord Halifax had been foreign secretary under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and supported his policy of appeasing Adolf Hitler. He stayed on in that position under Winston Churchill until December 1940, at which point he was appointed ambassador to the United States.
65. Decca, with Constancia in tow, had traveled to Canada for a visit and decided to stay for a while in a rented apartment near Esmond’s base, the No. 1 Bombing and Gunnery School at RCAF Station Jarvis in Ontario.
66. Deborah Mitford married Lord Andrew Cavendish ten days after this letter was written
67. On Lord Redesdale’s gold claim in northern Ontario.
68. Pioneering aviator and vocal isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh, a leader of the America First Committee and supporter of a U.S. neutrality pact with Hitler
69. Industrialist William Knudsen held several national defense and production management positions during the early 1940s
70. Edward Stettinius, also an industrialist and later secretary of state under Roosevelt, in 1941 served as chairman of the Priorities Board and director of the Office of Production Management and Lend-Lease administrator
71. Decca had remained for a few days with the Rodman on Martha’s Vineyard after Romilly left for Hali fax and then England.
72. Esmond Romilly’s telegram of June 25 notified Decca that he had arrived safely in Halifax
73. Constancia had stayed home with the Durrs during her parents’ farewell holiday on Martha’s Vineyard.….
74. Years later Decca wrote that she was pregnant with “a much-longed for baby, planned as a friend & companion for Dink, conceived just before Esmond went overseas.”
75. The date Germany invaded Russia
76. Decca was driving with her acquaintances the Mainwarings on a trip “probing the full horror & fascination of the South,” as she put it
77. The Highlander Folk School in rural Tennessee—now known as the Highlander Research and Education Center. The center’s founding mission was to educate “rural and industrial leaders for a new social order,” with a primary emphasis on working with grassroots leaders to build a progressive labor movement
78. The Tennessee Valley Authority was a showcase New Deal agency to provide flood control, conservation, navigability, electrification, and development in a depressed multistate rural region
79. Decca wrote years later that “it all happened in a gas station lavatory.” She was not fond of the people she was traveling with, “so I never said a word to them about it.”
80. Decca had written Esmond Romilly to say that she would like to “scram to England” but was planning “to buckle down” in Washington if he didn’t want her to go. On August 17, he replied in a telegram, “Please don’t think of coming over for present as my own plans uncertain. Go ahead with other things instead.” He later reconsidered that decision.
81. “Terrific” was apparently used here in the original sense: terrible.
82. The American freighter was sunk by a German submarine off Brazil on May 21, 1941—the first American ship sunk by a U-boat. The passengers and crew were rescued. President Roosevelt called it “an act of piracy” and declared a state of “unlimited national emergency.”
83. The huge transatlantic British ocean liner was sunk by a torpedo fired from a German U-boat south of Ireland on May 7, 1915, with a loss of nearly 1,200 lives. Despite an international outcry and calls in the United States for war, President Woodrow Wilson responded with a letter of protest, a reassertion of American neutrality, and a call for reparations. Nevertheless, the incident helped pave the way for U.S. entry into World War I two years later.
84. Nickname for their sister Diana Mosley, who had by this time been imprisoned in England for more than a year. Before she was interned, her sister Nancy said she had told a government official that “I regard her as an extremely dangerous person.” That comment and the publication in 1935 of Wigs on the Green, Nancy’s novel satirizing the homegrown fascism of her sister Unity and brother-in-law Oswald Mosley, would certainly help to explain the “off speakers” status that Decca noted here. In fact, Nancy appears to have resumed writing to Diana in January 1941 and later visited her in prison.
85. Romilly was spending time with some of the couple’s old friends, including Philip Toynbee
86. Esmond Romilly’s mother, Nellie. For an explanation of Decca’s use of this term, see October 13, 1981, letter to Kevin Ingram. know Romilly’s mother, Nellie. For an explanation of Decca’s use of this term, see October 13, 1981, letter to Kevin Ingram.
87. In his “fireside chat” on the day this letter was written, Roosevelt condemned German submarine attacks on American merchant ships and ordered use of American warships to protect them. He justified his orders by saying, “When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck to crush him.” A few months earlier, in a June broadcast after Hitler violated the nonaggression treaty and invaded Russia, Churchill had called the Nazi leader “this bloodthirsty guttersnipe,” a phrase Decca played with here.
88. Roger Roughton had been a friend of Esmond Romilly since their days of public school rebellion. It was to his large London house on Rotherhithe Street that Decca and Esmond Romilly had moved when they returned to London from France.
89. Romilly had wired his wife to say he now thought it might be a good thing for her to join him in England in the next few months “if you can still come” and wanted to do so, although he wasn’t certain yet of the conditions near his base or her access to him. Decca, “terrifically excited,” vowed to get the most she could out of stenography school in the next few weeks while exploring transportation opportunities to Britain and child-care arrangements for Constancia in Washington in case it wasn’t advisable to bring the baby to the war zone
90. Senator Claude Pepper of Florida was a friend of the Durrs and another Alabama native. Virginia Durr credited him with being “a great champion of the anti-poll tax bill.” For more on the Peppers’ interest in taking care of Constancia, see letter of March 7, 1984, to Polly Toynbee
91. Thurmond Arnold at the time was head of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. He and his wife were part of the Durrs’ Seminary Hill set. Arnold later became a partner in a powerful Washington law firm
92. The Alabama senator was also in the Durrs’ circle of New Deal Southerners.
93. The Popular Front, the Communist coalition with antifascist forces around the world, including, in the United States, labor unions and New Dealers, collapsed with the signing of the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact in 1939 that was subsequently violated by Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union.
94. Esmond Romilly’s telegram inquired about whether Decca had made any plans yet for traveling to England.
95. This letter was in the form of a Western Union Cablegram.
96. The afternoon after sending this wire, Decca received a telegram from the chief of the Air Staff in Ottawa: REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT ADVICE RECEIVED FROM ROYAL CANADIAN AIR FORCE CASUALTIES OFFICER OVERSEAS YOUR HUSBAND PILOT OFFICER ESMOND MARK DAVID ROMILLY CAN J FIVE SIX SEVEN SEVEN MISSING ON ACTIVE SERVICE NOVEMBER THIRTIETH STOP LETTER FOLLOWS. The news arrived in Alexandria the day before Decca was to leave with Constancia for New York, where she planned to spend two nights with the Durrs—who had gone there for a speech by Clifford Durr—and then sail to Britain on December 5. A neighbor phoned the Durrs in New York, and they rushed home to console Decca.
97. More than two weeks before writing this letter, Decca received a letter from the Washington office of the Royal Air Force Delegation of the British Air Commission describing the circumstances of the disappearance of Esmond Romilly’s plane and the fruitless search for survivors. The letter, based on an investigation requested by Winston Churchill during his December 1941 visit to Washington—during which he met with Decca—gave no reason for the optimism Decca expressed here. There was no indication that Esmond Romilly might have been taken prisoner, as Churchill also informed her in December. The letter reported that his plane had last been heard from over the North Sea on the evening of November 30, when distress signals were received indicating “mechanical trouble” and not enemy fire, weather problems, or low fuel. The letter described a five-hour search by three Air Sea Rescue Service planes, beginning the next morning, with no sighting of the plane’s wreckage or its dinghy. Fog prevented searches the following two days, after which the search was abandoned.
