Esmond Romilly

Esmond Marcus David Romilly (10 June 1918 – 30 November 1941) was a British socialist, anti-fascist, and journalist, who was in turn a schoolboy rebel, a veteran with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and, following the outbreak of the Second World War, an observer with the Royal Canadian Air Force. He is perhaps best remembered for his teenage elopement with his second cousin Jessica Mitford, the second youngest of the Mitford sisters.

Born into an aristocratic family – he was a nephew of Clementine Churchill – he emerged in the 1930s as a precocious rebel against his background, openly espousing communist views at the age of fifteen. He ran away from Wellington College, and campaigned vociferously against the British public school system, by publishing a critical left wing magazine, Out of Bounds: Public Schools' Journal Against Fascism, Militarism, and Reaction, and (jointly with his brother) a memoir analysing his school experiences. At the age of eighteen, he joined the International Brigades and fought on the Madrid front during the Spanish Civil War, of which he wrote and published a vivid account.

Before departing for Spain, Romilly had largely abandoned communism (he never formally joined the party) in favour of democratic socialism. Unable to settle in London, he and his wife relocated to America in 1939. When the Second World War broke out Romilly enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and began training as a pilot, but was discharged on medical grounds. He re-enlisted and retrained as an observer. Posted back to England, he lost his life when his plane failed to return from a bombing raid in November 1941.

Family

Esmond Romilly's maternal grandfather was Sir Henry Montague Hozier (1838–1907), a professional soldier and city financier who was knighted in 1903. In 1878 he had married Lady Blanche Ogilvy (1852–1925), eldest daughter of the 10th Earl of Airlie. Four children were produced during the marriage: Katherine, born 1883, Clementine born in 1885, and twins Nellie and William born in 1888. However, the marriage was unhappy and marked by infidelities on both sides, to the extent that the precise parentage of the four children has long been doubted. Hozier appeared to have accepted that the elder daughters were probably his, but largely ignored the twins who, when the marriage ended in 1891, remained with their mother while Hozier initially took responsibility for the older girls before disappearing from the family scene altogether. The question of the twins' paternity remained unresolved. One suggested candidate was the writer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt; was from a distinguished legal family of Huguenot origin with a long tradition of public service. The couple married in December 1915; their elder son Giles Samuel Bertram Romilly was born on 19 September 1916. The second son, Esmond, followed on 10 June 1918.

Early life

thumb|Pimlico Road. No. 15 can be seen in the background, just past the public house

Esmond was born at No. 15 Pimlico Road, in a busy part of London close to Victoria Station. It was a comfortable upper-middle class lifestyle in which Nellie, rather than Colonel Romilly was the principal influence. |group= n Esmond was again forced to apologise, this time under direct threat of expulsion, and to provide an undertaking that nothing similar would occur in the future.

Although often at odds with each other, the Romilly brothers were capable of working together. In January 1934, after Esmond had addressed a meeting of the Federation of Student Societies (a university-based Marxist organisation that co-ordinated left-wing student activities), the brothers decided to launch a new magazine, Out of Bounds ("Against Reaction in Public Schools"). Archer agreed to pay him a wage of £1 a week to help in the shop; on these sparse resources Romilly set about preparing the first issue of Out of Bounds.

The first issue was published on 25 March 1934. Romilly had been assiduous in developing a distribution network "in every cloister and dormitory he could reach", and had acquired a wide selection of contributions, so that the magazine ran to 35 pages. His own contributions included a fiery editorial, an article on the arms race and a rebuttal of a defence of fascism supplied from Oundle School. There were poems, some literary criticism, a letters page, an article on conditions in girls' schools, and some humorous send-ups of public school life. Despite the relatively moderate overall tone, the Daily Mail denounced the magazine as a "Reds' New Attack" and quoted from the editorial: "We shall infuriate every schoolmaster over 30 (and some under) throughout England".

On 14 April the organisation of Out of Bounds was formalised when a meeting of some 16 delegates from a range of schools appointed a permanent editorial board under Romilly's chairmanship. Next day this board marched to Hyde Park, as part of a demonstration against the National Government's budget policy, under a banner denouncing the "National Government of Hunger, Fascism and War". This was duly reported in the press, ever eager to record the doings of Mr Churchill's nephew. On 7 June, in the company of his new acolyte Philip Toynbee from Rugby School, Romilly attended a large Blackshirts rally at London's Olympia, from which they were roughly ejected, Toynbee sustaining mild injuries. By this time, Romilly was becoming disenchanted with the Parton Street ambience, and was seeking a rapprochement with his family from whom he had been estranged since his flight from Wellington. In this mood he agreed to return to school, not to Wellington but to the progressive, coeducational school Bedales. He continued his work with Out of Bounds, the second edition of which appeared on 2 July. Romilly began at Bedales on 9 June and spent the remainder of the summer term there. In his letters home he professed to like the school, but the feeling was not reciprocated towards him. "This is a boy who can contribute nothing to this school and to whom this school can contribute nothing", was the headmaster's bleak assessment when Romilly departed from the school at the end of July.

Romilly spent the summer and autumn months quietly, in London, subsisting on a small allowance from his father. He had largely lost interest in the magazine, although he continued to contribute; the third issue appeared in November without creating a stir, much of it consisting of what Ingram calls tame repetition. He began a new project, with his brother Giles, in the form of a book in which the pair recounted and analysed their experiences of school. Much of the 1934–35 winter was spent by Romilly in writing his part of the combined work, which Hamish Hamilton agreed to publish. This period of responsible endeavour was interrupted in late December 1934 by a drunken incident which resulted in Romilly's arrest and detention in a remand home for several weeks, from which he was eventually released on a year's probation.

The book Out of Bounds: The Education of Giles Romilly and Esmond Romilly was published in June 1935, to a generally favourable reception, and sold well enough to run to a second edition. Raymond Mortimer in the New Statesman found the book "candid and surprisingly fair"; even the Daily Mail conceded that the young authors had literary ability. The Observers books critic remarked that the book might tell the true story, rather than the exaggerated accounts evident from the magazine – which the brothers opportunistically brought out in a fourth and final edition to coincide with the book's publication. The centrepiece of this last issue was a frank article on masturbation, supposedly contributed by a doctor.

Interlude

Romilly used his share of the publisher's advance to open a public schools news agency, "Educational News and Features", but the venture soon collapsed. He then took a job selling silk stockings. His political convictions had meanwhile softened, and he joined the Labour Party. By December 1935 he was selling advertising space on commission, and in March 1936 he took a full-time job as advertising manager of World Film News.

Spain

The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936. By October, Romilly was ready to join the fight. He gave his employers a week's notice and, on 19 October 1936, took the boat train to Dieppe. Here he acquired a bicycle and set out for Marseille. The journey through France took him ten days during which he managed to lose both his passport and his money. He arrived in Marseille penniless but found a charity willing to support him while he looked for a ship to take him to Spain. After five days, he obtained a passage to Valencia on SS Mar Caspio.

From Valencia, Romilly and other volunteers were entrained to Albacete, the gathering point where the International Brigades were being organised. For his first few days at the base, Romilly was aligned with a group of Russian emigrés, but within a few days, further shipments from the Maro Caspio had brought a number of English volunteers to the camp. Romilly became part of the group under the leadership of Lorrimer Birch, a Cambridge-educated scientist who, in Romilly's later assessment showed true qualities of leadership and organisation: "a communist first of all, but determined that his communism shouldn't interfere with his fairness of judgement".

thumb|The Faculty of Medicine at the University of Madrid

On 6 November, news reached Albacete that the rebel Nationalist forces had begun their assault on Madrid. Some accounts implied that the capital was on the verge of falling to the rebels. The English group were attached to the Thaelmann Battalion of the XII Brigade, which on 10 November moved to Chinchón, about 50 kilometres south-east of the capital. Two days later Romilly's unit was sent to defend the Madrid-Valencia highway near Vaciamadrid, close to the outskirts of the city. During the next few days Romilly had his first experience under fire in an abortive attack on a supposed rebel-held fortress at Cerro de los Angeles. The action was inconclusive, and on 15 November, the unit returned to Chinchón.

After a brief rest, the XII Brigade was ordered to the University City of Madrid, the city's university campus, which had fallen into rebel hands. For most of the next few weeks, Romilly and the English group were involved in heavy fighting on the edges of the campus, much of it concentrated around a farm complex known as the White House. The buildings passed several times between Republican and Nationalist forces. During a brief rest period in Chinchón, the group was visited by English journalists, who reported Romilly's presence, his family's first news of his whereabouts since his departure in October.

In mid-December, Romilly's unit was sent to Boadilla del Monte, where a strong rebel offensive was under way. In the ensuing battle, nearly all of Romilly's British companions, including Birch, were killed. Romilly survived the fighting, but contracted dysentery and was invalided back to England early in January 1937.

Elopement

At the end of January 1937, while he was recuperating from his Spanish experiences at the home of his distant cousin Dorothy Allhusen (widow of the Conservative MP Augustus Henry Eden Allhusen), Romilly met his second cousin Jessica Mitford. According to Mary Lovell's account, Esmond had learned from his brother Giles that Jessica was interested in going to Spain and suggested to Dorothy that the "pink" Mitford sister would be a suitable house guest. She was the second-youngest of the renowned Mitford sisters, daughters of the 2nd Baron Redesdale. Despite the family relationship, the two had not previously met, but according to Mitford's own account, "I had been in love with Esmond for years, ever since I first heard of him". She was herself a rebel against the restrictions of her upbringing and family life and hoped that Romilly would help her get to Spain. The two found an instant rapport and began immediately to make plans. Romilly had acquired a press card and a contract from the News Chronicle to report on the war and had thus obtained a visa. The plan was that Mitford would travel as his secretary. Mitford had for years accumulated her small savings in what she called her "Running-away account", which now stood at around £50 (). That, Romilly announced, would make things much easier.

thumb|left|The Civic Hall, Bayonne

As a cover story to explain her departure, Mitford invented an invitation to visit friends in Austria. The pair departed from England on 8 February. They reached Bayonne, on the French-Spanish border, and after a tense wait for Mitford's visa, they took a cargo boat to Bilbao.

By then, their families had discovered the subterfuge and were aware of the fugitive couple's whereabouts and of their intention to marry. The families, bitterly opposed to the union, hoped to avoid press attention, but Romilly opportunistically exploited press interest by selling his story through an intermediary. Headlines appeared in the Daily Express on 1 March 1937 announcing, "Peer's Daughter Elopes to Spain".

Esmond Romilly

Family

Early life

Interlude

Spain

Elopement

See also

Notes

References

Sources

External links