Sources, Footnotes, & Further Reading/Watching
There’s so much I left out of this story; 2 husbands, 15 children, several affairs, a couple of major scandals, and hundreds of anecdotes that were funny/interesting but not vital to the overall plot. If you know the story of the Mitford’s already then you know I haven’t really done it justice - they deserve a 10-part Netflix series. Here’s a few of my favourite stories that didn’t make it in (mostly about Decca):

When out one day as children, David (father) saw a horse he liked and decided to buy it there and then. Unfortunately horses were not (and still not) allowed on passenger trains, but David insisted and the entire family (with horse) took the train back to Oxford anyway. Over the next few weeks this story circulated with shock and horror through the English upper-class - it was unthinkable that a family like the Mitford’s had been made to travel in 3rd class!

While Decca was in Spain, Esmond got a job with Reuters translating radio messages from both the Nationalist and Republican sides, these would then be sent to newspapers around the world for publication. The slight problem was that neither Esmond or Decca knew Spanish. He found a local to translate the Republican side but they refused to translate the Nationalist broadcasts. Decca and Esmond really needed the money, so they just made them up.

When Churchill visited the USA he initially sent two secret service men to collect Decca and bring her to a church where they would sing hymns with Roosevelt. The two men turned up at the house of her friend Virginia Durr, Virginia’s response was, “It’ll take more than the secret service, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and the President of the United States to get our Decca into a church.” Decca visited Churchill in the White House the following morning (20:55), afterwards he gave her $500 to help raise the baby (about $8000 today), but Decca regarded it as blood money and gave it to the Communist Party.

Martin Luther King was the only person actually able to get Decca into a church, she once went to hear him speak in Alabama. However they were surrounded by the KKK and trapped in a church overnight while a 1500 strong mob through tear gas in through the windows and torched her car. Here’s the article she wrote for Esquire about the experience https://bit.ly/2QLHX2D

When Tom died Decca inherited a sixth of his assets, to ‘repay the damage done by her family’ she donated this to the communist party. In response David cut her out of his will, for fear she’d do the same again (which she admitted she probably would have done.) Decca later got a job in the communist party, though she had lie on the application about her father’s occupation, “Lord and Peer of the Realm hardly seemed appropriate.” For another job that needed a degree she said she was a graduate of The Sorbonne - Paris was under Nazi occupation at the time and she figured nobody would bother checking.

For those who wish to fall further down the Mitford rabbit hole or just hear the sisters talk themselves, here’s a playlist of interviews they did https://bit.ly/2DgvZGk

Footnotes
The Mitfords loved nicknames and hardly ever called each other by their real names. To make the video easier to follow I deliberately didn’t use them and edited the quotes accordingly. (Decca and Debo are the exceptions as they were widely used by everyone.) This how I kept track while writing https://bit.ly/2saQfqp

Most of the quotes in the video are taken verbatim from either “The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family” by Mary S. Lovell or “The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters” by Charlotte Mosley, however a few were changed to help the story along, be less confusing, or shorter. A few examples: In David’s opening speech (00:03), he did say “I’m normal my wife is normal, but my daughters are each more foolish than the other” but he didn’t give a summary of what each of them were doing at the time. When Unity meets Hitler (09:20) her speech then has been significantly shortened, it’s taken from a mix of several long letters to various family members. At (13:42) it was actually a nanny that supposedly said “Good gracious, she didn’t take any clothes to fight in”, but I changed it to Sydney to avoid having to introduce another character.

(00:40) They grew up in several houses, moving around quite a lot. The house in the video is Asthall Manor. Decca and Debo described the family’s financial decline with the chant “From Batsford Mansion, to Asthall Manor, to Swinbrook House, to Old Mill Cottage”.
(01:09) All the sisters were quite obsessed with Emilia Earhart. Following in her footsteps, Pam was one of the first people to fly trans-Atlantic.
(01:25) Their accent was legendary. Painfully posh to the point where even other aristocrats thought it sounded ridiculous. For example they would put the letter ‘r’ in words like ‘lost’ and ‘gone’, “I’ve lorst my chauffeur, where has he gorne?” We didn’t even attempt to replicate it for the video as it would have sounded absurd.
(02:04) Her relationship with Paul Helleu was deeply questionable. According to Diana’s diary nothing ever happened, but it was widely accepted that Helleu was obsessed with her and Diana enjoyed the attention in turn. There was an age gap of 51 years.
(02:16) Unity’s snake ‘Enid’ crops up in a lot of family stories. Decca claims she once scared the Nanny by wrapping it around the lavatory chain, the Nanny fainted when she went to flush and had to be rescued from the toilet with a crowbar. (The other sisters refute this story.)
(02:42) A quote by Decca cut from the video here, “Oliver Twist was so lucky to live in such a fascinating orphanage.”
(04:05) Evelyn Waugh wrote the novel Vile Bodies (https://amzn.to/37Cni72) about the Bright Young Things, turned into a film by Stephen Fry (https://imdb.to/2qHlfOo). Waugh was very close friends with Nancy and in love with Diana, he eventually married someone also called Evelyn.
(06:30) Divorce was then impossible without giving a public cause. To save Diana from becoming a social outcast Bryan lied saying it was him who had had an affair.
(08:43) Unity’s middle name was Valkyrie and she went by Unity Valkyrie while in Munich. She was also conceived in the Canadian town of Swastika, Ontario. She would tell everyone she could this fact.
(10:08) Unity was pretty loose-lipped with Hitler and at one point was a major security concern for the British intelligence agencies. As much as the Germans thought she was a spy, so did the British. She once told Hitler how many anti-aircraft guns London had.
(11:50) It was actually Nancy’s husband Peter Rodd who declined on behalf of them. I didn’t mention Peter in the video as I felt there was already too much focus on ‘The Husbands’. Nancy and Peter’s marriage was not a happy one and they had little to do with each other anyway.  
(14:50) Decca and Esmond got married in the British consulate, described in the papers as “The wedding not even the destroyer could stop.’ Sydney although opposed to marriage did come over to attend.
(15:18) Before going to America, Decca and Esmond lived in Rotherhithe, a very poor part of London. They had a baby here (Julia). When a measles outbreak hit, Decca went to the clinic for Julia’s inoculation but was told she would already be immune via Decca’s breast milk. The nurse had assumed Decca had grown up in Rotherhithe, any mother living by the docks of London will have at some point had measles herself. Decca had grown up in the countryside though, mother and child both caught the disease. It nearly killed Decca, and Julia died aged 4 months.
(16:01) Hitler never did help her furnish the apartment, but then again, 1939 was a busy year for him.
(18:37) Nancy also spent some of the war volunteering on the French/Spanish border, helping women and children refugees.
(19:30) The prison had many wives of BUF members and Diana became sort of a leader figure. A fellow inmate, a German Jew who had escaped a concentration camp claimed Holloway was dirtier than Dachau.  
(20:24) Esmond was in the airforce and never actually fought in the trenches.
(22:19) Tom was in Burma (Myanmar) when he died. He’d been promoted to an office job but insisted on being allowed to fight.
(22:45) Unity and Sydney were actually on the family’s Scottish island Inch Kenneth when she became ill. It took a long time to make the crossing back to the mainline where she could be taken to hospital. The only communication with the mainline was via morse code with a lamp.
(23:54) Palewski wouldn’t marry Nancy because she was a divorcee. Palewski eventually married someone else, also a divorcee. This destroyed Nancy and she never really recovered from it.
(25:47) The picture on the right here is of Decca and Esmond running a bar in Florida. They meant to go to New Orleans but took a wrong turning and stayed there for a couple of years. The irony of two communists running a bar in Florida was not lost on them.
(26:42) I wish I could have included Decca’s second husband Bob Treuhaft in the video, he was a huge part of her life and a remarkable individual in his own right. He was a lawyer who worked on many of the cases and issues Decca fought for. A lot of her books were co-written with him and together they made a formidable lawyer-activist power couple.

I've hit the character limit for a YouTube comment, Sources and Further Reading are in the reply.

The roaring twenties was not the response to the great depression. The  Depression started in 1929 which is the end of the twenties. The Roaring Twenties was the response to WWI

This is why i love youtube. I would have never known or shown any interest towards this kind of knowledge unless i would have been pushed towards it. Now after half an hour, i can say that i am wiser, know more and shook by the fact that you can never be taught enough and school doesnt teach you even 10% of the world you should know.

Well, that was indeed a weird family.

This video is really good. It's kinda sad that it only got 5000 views. It must have taken atleast a month of work i guess. And you even got 3 subtitles?

One of the most underrated videos on youtube.

Just a point of note, but in England the term 'home-schooled' is a term that has become popular during coronavirus, but is not the traditional term. Children from upper class and rich families were taught at home by a governess, (and not nannies).

Jessica wrote "The American Way of Death"exposing the American funeral industry.I wonder if Waugh"s "The Loved One"owed anything to that book or vice versa?

I love the mitford family. There should definately be an epic film or series about their lives. I have a bookcase full of books on them and I've put flowers on their graves. Obsessed? Just a bit.

This was awesome

I am deep diving into Nancy Mitford "Pursuit of Love" and "Love in a Cold Climate" as I enjoy the language, the humour and direct reference to the history. But, I had no idea that there is something so much more grandiose as life experience behind it. Thank you so much for the story and visual delight.

this would make a great movie, hella confusing though

Very well done. I've read a lot about the Mitfords and you have some information in here that I've never heard before or read anywhere. If I understood you to say that JFK was at Chatsworth during the Cuban Missile Crisis, that is not true. He was at the White House. Andrew and Debo were in D.C. to attend a Museum opening because they loaned drawings to it from the Chatsworth art collection. The opening coincided with Crisis Week, but JFK found time to visit with them. The Duchess writes about this in her memoir, "Wait For Me!" JFK went once to Chatsworth in 1963, to visit his sister's grave.

I didn’t even know this channel existed and I’m subscribed

Small correction: For many years, Pamela lived in Switzerland with Giuditta Tommasi, saying that she wouldn't return to England until the last of her Dachshunds died. This happened in 1972, and she took up residence in Caudle Green, Gloucestershire, but Giuditta did not come with her; she stayed in Switzerland until her death in 1994, apparently without any rancorous disagreement. The video says that they stayed together for life, and this is often repeated on other internet sources, but is not correct. (Source - 'The Other Mitford - Pamela's Story' by Diana Alexander, page 127)

The twenties roared because of economic boom and post WW1 mood. They weren't  the antidote to the depression which ended the boom of the twenties.

This was really well done! Hope you’re proud.  Really enjoyed this and never would have learned about it

I love this video. I love the simple artwork, the subject and the narration. I read a book when I was little about the Mitford sisters, and it was a treat to revisit them through this video!

This is a fantastic video. The esthetic is compelling; the pace of the story is head spinning; and to top it all off- It’s factually accurate! RESPECT! 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼

David met Hitler on a number of occasions. I'm not casting dispersions but it's an acknowlaged fact.

Some slight errors of fact in here. But the most important thing it’s important to remember is that there were 16 years between Nancy & Debo. They didn’t all grow up together.