However, he failed the entrance examination to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and was instead sent to Ceylon to work for a tea planter.

His daughter Unity Mitford stated that she was conceived in Swastika and shared this fact with Hitler upon becoming one of his British confidants.

He was commissioned as a lieutenant and served as a logistics officer in Flanders, being mentioned in despatches for his bravery at the Second Battle of Ypres (although there is no available record of this),[12] where his elder brother Clement was killed.

After his father's death in August 1916, being now Lord Redesdale, he was briefly appointed Provost Marshal for Oxfordshire, with responsibility for ensuring the enlistment of new recruits.

This, plus his increasing disappointment that all his later children were girls, led to the deterioration of his temperament which became legendary through his daughters' portrayals of his frequent and terrible rages.

In the 1930s, however, his wife developed a strong sympathy for fascism, and he favoured Neville Chamberlain's appeasement approach towards Nazi Germany.

The father of his wife Sydney, Thomas Gibson Bowles had been one of the strongest parliamentary supporters of the Royal Navy while he was an MP, and her maternal uncle William Evans-Gordon was a retired British Indian Army officer who was opposed to uncontrolled immigration into Britain, was allied to the British Brothers' League, and helped to enact the Aliens Act 1905.

Redesdale was an instinctive xenophobe, and came back from the First World War with a dislike of the French and a deep hatred of the Germans.

As "Uncle Matthew", who was modelled on Redesdale,[15] put it in his daughter Nancy's 1945 novel The Pursuit of Love: "Frogs are slightly better than Huns or Wops, but abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends.

He was initially scornful of the enthusiasm shown by his daughters Diana (wife of British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley) and Unity for Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler.

Unity, who was in love with Hitler, attempted suicide in Munich on 3 September 1939 (the day Britain declared war on Germany), and suffered severe brain-damage.

Jessica's husband, Esmond Romilly, was lost with this aircraft over the North Sea during a raid on Germany in 1941; this deepened her bitterness towards the "fascist branch" of the family.

Redesdale and his wife had one son and six daughters, who all used the surname Mitford rather than Freeman-Mitford: For Nancy's birth certificate, her father stated his occupation as: "Honourable.

"[22] In 1945, his son Tom was killed in action in Burma, a blow from which Lord Redesdale, already depressed by the break-up of his marriage, never recovered.

Later he moved to Redesdale Cottage, near Otterburn, Northumberland, his family's ancestral property and lived there as a virtual recluse.

[26] Nevertheless, both daughters' accounts make it clear that between rages, Redesdale was an indulgent father who loved riding and hunting with his children.