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.

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.

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.

One suggested candidate was the writer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt;[2] another was Blanche's brother-in-law, Lord Redesdale, grandfather of the future Mitford sisters.

[3] 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.

[6] 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.

[13] 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.

[15] 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.

[24] 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".

[27] Esmond also records a violent quarrel that arose over his decorating his bed with a tartan rug as an ostentatious display of his Jacobitism,[28] but such incidents were rare.

[25] 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.

[29] 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.

[33] 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.

[35][36] 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.

[37][38] 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.

[43] 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.

[2] The fugitive Romilly found his way to Parton Street and set up his headquarters there, amid considerable press interest and speculation: "Mr Churchill's Nephew Vanishes" was a typical headline.

Romilly had been assiduous in developing a distribution network "in every cloister and dormitory he could reach",[38] and had acquired a wide selection of contributions, so that the magazine ran to 35 pages.

[54] 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.

[65] 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.

[68] 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.

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.

[88] 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.

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.

[2][n 7] At the same time, the Redesdale family used all their connections to try to bring Jessica home, including the connivance of the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and the use of a naval warship to dispatch the eldest Mitford sister, Nancy, to Bayonne.

The ground floor of the building operated as a casino, and Romilly worked there as a croupier before landing a more regular job as a copywriter with the advertising firm Graham & Gillies.

[109] On 18 February 1939, after throwing a farewell party for their friends, the pair left England for good, aboard the SS Aurania, their destination being New York.

Eventually, he found a position in an advertising firm, Topping & Lloyd; the post, a well-paid sinecure, lasted until August 1939 and enabled the couple to acquire a second-hand car and sufficient capital to embark on a tour of America.

[114] The plan was to continue the tour in the spring, westward, Romilly hoped to find work on a ranch before he moved to Hollywood and finally Chicago.

[116] Romilly departed for Canada to begin training, first at Toronto and later at Regina, Saskatchewan,[117] while Mitford remained in Washington, pregnant with her second child (a daughter, Constancia, was born on 9 February 1941).