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; another was Blanche's brother-in-law, Lord Redesdale, grandfather of the future Mitford sisters.
Nellie Hozier grew up in the family's various homes in Seaford on the English south coast, in Dieppe in France, and finally in Berkhamsted where she attended the Girls' High School with her elder sister Clementine. In September 1908, she acted as a bridesmaid at Clementine's wedding to Winston Churchill. At the beginning of the First World War in August 1914, Nellie volunteered as a nursing auxiliary in Belgium and was briefly a prisoner of war before repatriation at the end of the year. Back in England, she met an officer in the Scots Guards, Lieutenant-Colonel Bertram Henry Samuel Romilly, who had been seriously wounded while fighting in France. Romilly, the great-grandson of the legal reformer Sir Samuel Romilly, 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
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. Esmond followed his elder brother to school, first at Gibbs's Day School in nearby Sloane Street and then, from 1927, as a boarder at Newlands Preparatory School at Seaford. Holidays were divided between the family's property in Dieppe and the Churchill cousins' home at Chartwell, and the Romilly estates at Huntington Park in Herefordshire.
Just before his ninth birthday, Esmond began at Newlands in May 1927. It was a small school, with some forty-odd boys; Giles's later account, in which he disguises the school as "Seacliffe" and alters the names of the main personnel, depicts an easygoing and undemanding establishment run by an elderly and by now largely ineffective headmaster. Matters changed when in 1930 the headmaster and others of the old guard finally retired and were replaced by more vigorous and purposeful successors. By his own account, Esmond's academic prowess placed him at the top of the school, although in terms of behaviour he was one of the very worst. Nevertheless, by the time he left Newlands in 1932 he had managed to register a number of personal successes: Head Boy, Patrol Leader of the Otters, captain of cricket and Rugby football, winner of cups for boxing and tennis, and a prize for History.
Wellington
The choice of Wellington as a public school was evidently the boys' own. Giles has revealed that he and Esmond had been entered for Eton College at an early age, and were expected to go there. However, when the time came Giles pleaded to be allowed to go to Wellington instead: "[It] was associated with soldiers and we were both very military". Their wishes were granted; Giles began at Wellington in January 1930, and Esmond followed in September 1931.
Reluctant conformist Wellington College had been founded by national subscription as a memorial to the first Duke, who had died in 1852. It had opened in 1859, primarily as a military orphanage for the sons of deceased officers, but by the 1920s had evolved into a public school of a highly reactionary character. T. C. Worsley, who taught there in the early 1930s, described it as "philistine to a degree almost unimaginable in a great school", and "[I]n every possible way ... thirty, forty, fifty years behind the times". Its style was of absolute conformity, based on what Kevin Ingram, Esmond's biographer, calls a "doctrine of suppression"; a tight curriculum that accounted for every moment of the boys' time, and a "dormitory" system that placed boys in small exclusive units that kept them apart from the rest of the school in every activity outside the classroom. Esmond would later write of his "hatred" at seeing "the same faces opposite one every day ... always there was the same monotonous conversation".
In her biographical study, Meredith Whitford describes the adolescent Esmond as "conceited, bumptious, argumentative, spoilt, ambitious for authority, a grubby, unhandy child, extroverted and lazy and too intelligent for his surroundings". However, there is little evidence of rebellion on Esmond's part during his first two years at Wellington. In general, he wrote, his politics were of the Daily Express variety. He describes himself since his Newlands days as a romantic Tory, a Jacobite (supporter of the Stuart claim to the British throne), and after meeting Sir Oswald Mosley in October 1931 was briefly attracted to the latter's New Party – he recalls distributing some New Party literature among his fellow-Wellingtonians. Esmond also records a violent quarrel that arose over his decorating his bed with a tartan rug as an ostentatious display of his Jacobitism, but such incidents were rare. In the main he had, according to Whitworth, succumbed to conformity, "abandon[ing] the romantic calls of the past for the strident demands of the present". At the end of his first year, he was awarded a prize – "Middle School Recitation, Third Block" – which he received on Speech Day from the hands of the Duke of Connaught.
Rebel When, in the summer of 1932, Giles announced his conversion to Bolshevism, Esmond records his family's shocked reaction (and "Uncle Winston"'s considerable amusement), but at the time, he took no specific steps to embrace communism as a personal creed. That followed some nine months later, during the 1933 Easter holidays spent as usual in Dieppe. Before leaving for France, Esmond had acquired a copy of the Daily Worker, and had arranged for further copies to be delivered to Dieppe. Through this clandestine reading, Esmond made contact with groups of communists in London, and arranged to meet them on his return to England. The meetings duly took place, and Esmond was impressed by them, although his ideas were far from clearly formed: "When I went back to Wellington for the summer term, I took with me an odd collection of ideas". Among other things, like others at the time he tended to confuse communism with pacifism. However, he was determined to convert "at least 20 Wellingtonians" to the new creed.
During the following months Esmond engaged in various acts of somewhat incoherent rebellion. He joined a "peace correspondence" group, until it was clear that his young, female correspondent was more interested in a sexual than a political relationship. His first concrete act against the Wellington establishment came on his 15th birthday, 10 June 1933, when he refused to sign up for the Officers Training Corps, an action which to his disappointment incurred only mild disapproval and which, after consultation with his parents was allowed to stand. He had written a fiery letter to a left-wing student magazine, the Student Vanguard, in which he asserted that "Every boy is compelled to join the Corps at the age of fifteen and must stay there until he leaves", a patently untrue statement for which he was required to provide a written apology.
Towards the end of the 1933 summer term, Esmond took advantage of a school holiday to visit the Parton Street bookshop in West London, where he had arranged to meet one of his communist correspondents. The Parton Street premises, part bookshop, part circulating library, partly a centre for radical intellectuals and poets, was run on a philanthropic basis by David Archer, a Cambridge graduate and former Wellingtonian with whom Esmond struck an immediate rapport. Among the habitués were the poets John Cornford, Stephen Spender and David Gascoyne, the budding actor Alec Guinness, and the soldier-diplomat and writer T. E. Lawrence. The Parton Street Press was Dylan Thomas's first publisher. Whatever the outcome of the arranged meeting, Esmond had, as Ingram remarks, found a new spiritual home in which to revive his flagging spirits. His mood was further improved at the start of the summer vacation when he attended a communist demonstration at Deptford.
Returning to Wellington for the 1933 autumn term, Esmond became the leader of a small group of followers, none of whom he found particularly inspiring. On 15 October, at the Wellington Debating Society, he proposed the motion that "In the opinion of this house the political freedom of women is a sign of a civilized society". Giles led for the opposition, and the motion was defeated by 29 votes to 9. A month later he was involved in perhaps his most direct act of rebellion against the College ethos, when in advance of the Armistice Day commemorations he distributed a consignment of badges from the Anti-War Movement, to be worn in addition to the venerated poppy. From the same organisation he acquired anti-war leaflets which he and a confederate inserted into the hymn-books from which the hymn O Valiant Hearts would be sung at the Armistice service. 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.