Nicholas Mosley, 3rd Baron Ravensdale, MC, FRSL (25 June 1923 – 28 February 2017), was a British peer, novelist and biographer, including that of his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists.[1]
Life
Grave of Nicholas Mosley, Lord Ravensdale, in Highgate Cemetery, north London
As a young boy, Mosley began to stammer, and he attended weekly sessions with the speech therapist Lionel Logue to help him manage it.[2][1] He later recalled that his father said he never really noticed this stammer, but still, he may, as a result of it, have been less aggressive when speaking to him than towards other people.[3] Mosley was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1940, his father was interned because of his campaigning against the war with Germany. The younger Mosley was soon commissioned into the Rifle Brigade and saw active service in Italy, winning the Military Cross in 1945.[4][1]
Following the war he studied philosophy at Oxford for a short time before marrying, taking to farming in north Wales before ultimately concentrating on his writing, primarily as a novelist but also producing several biographies.[1]
In 1966, Mosley succeeded his aunt Irene Curzon, 2nd Baroness Ravensdale, his mother's elder sister, as Baron Ravensdale, thus gaining a seat in the House of Lords; he did not use the title.[1] On the death of his father, on 3 December 1980, he also succeeded to the Mosley baronetcy of Ancoats. In 1983, two years after his father's death, Mosley published Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley and Family 1933–1980 in which he proved to be a harsh critic of his father.[1] He called into question his father's motives and understanding of politics. The book contributed to the Channel 4 television programme Mosley (1998), based on Oswald Mosley's life. At the end of the serial, Nicholas is portrayed meeting his father in prison to ask him about his national allegiance.
Mosley died on 28 February 2017 and is buried in the western side of Highgate Cemetery.
Personal life
Mosley married twice and was the father of five children. On 14 November 1947, he married firstly Rosemary Laura Salmond (divorced 1974, died 1991), daughter of Sir John Maitland Salmond and the Honourable Monica Margaret Grenfell,[6] and they had four children:
Quarterly 1st and 4th, sable a chevron between three Pickaxes argent (Mosley); 2nd and 3rd, argent on a bend sable three Popinjays or collared gules (Curzon)
Supporters
Dexter: a Raven proper; Sinister: a Popinjay proper collared gules
Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley 1896–1933 (1982)[7] vol. 1
Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley and Family 1933–1980 (1983)[8] vol. 2
Experience and Religion: A Lay Essay in Theology (1965; first published in 1965 by Hodder & Stoughton)
The Uses of Slime Mould: Essays of Four Decades (2004)
Other
Efforts at Truth (1994) autobiography
Time at War (2006) memoir
Paradoxes of Peace, or the Presence of Infinity (2009)
Further reading
Rahbaran, Shiva (2010). Nicholas Mosley's Life and Art: A Biography in Six Interviews. London: Dalkey Archive Press.
Rahbaran, Shiva (2007). Paradox of Freedom: a study of Nicholas Mosley's intellectual development in his novels and other writings. London: Dalkey Archive Press.
O'Brien, John (1982). "It's like a story. Nicholas Mosley's impossible object". Review of Contemporary Fiction.
Banks, John (1982). "Slight-of-Language". Review of Contemporary Fiction.
^Mosley, Nicholas (1982). Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley, 1896-1933 (First ed.). Glasgow: Wm Collins & Sons & Co. ISBN0436288494.
^Mosley, Nicholas (1983). Beyond the Pale - Sir Oswald Mosley 1933-1980 [Volume Two of the Mosley Biography] (First ed.). London: Secker & Warburg. ISBN0436288524.
