CHRIS KOENIG looks at the other side of rural Swinbrook - home to the aristrocratic family with fascist links

Oxford may be the home of dead languages and undying prejudices, at least according to John Bright, but there is something almost unbearably moving about Swinbrook in that context. In particular, the churchyard. Even more particularly the grave of Unity Mitford, avowed Nazi and boon companion of Hitler.

The Cotswold village is so very, very English and yes, charming. And charm, that weasel word, is the leitmotif of the story of the beautiful, gilded Mitford sisters, specifically the fascist ones: Diana and Unity who grew up nearby, first at Asthall and then Swinbrook. By complete contrast, Jessica was to join the Communist Party.

It was a dangerous charm, too, and the fact that Diana and Unity were connected to anyone who was anyone in the British establishment, meant that they were shielded from harm; even while interned at Holloway Prison during the war, Diana and her Blackshirt husband, Sir Oswald Mosley, were able to live comfortably in a cottage and grow strawberries, thanks to the intervention of Diana's cousin, Winston Churchill.

Diana wrote in her autobiography, A Life of Contrasts, of the riotous meeting at the Carfax Assembly Rooms, Oxford (now the HSBC building in Cornmarket), on May 25, 1936, whither she had journeyed from Swinbrook to see her future husband, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, address an audience of hundreds which included opponent and future Cabinet minister Richard Crossman.

Students and others theatrically read and rustled newspapers - The Oxford Times, very probably - as Sir Oswald's speech got under way . A heckler taunted him; was told to shut up and fighting broke out. The Radcliffe Infirmary treated dozens of injuries that night.

Our sister paper, the Oxford Mail, reported: "In a second the whole hall was a struggling mass of people. Someone threw a chair. Others followed suit, using not only wooden chairs but steel chairs which made terrible weapons."

Diana wrote that her future husband's 'stewards' threw the antis out and the meeting proceeded for another two hours, adding that the newspapers in general only reported the rioting bit. Sadly, that may have been the case since members of the Oxford University Fascist Society were there in force and probably gave Sir Oswald a sympathetic hearing.

Diana and Unity were two of a very limited band of people who knew both Hitler and Churchill well. Diana wrote: "But I didn't love Hitler more than I did Winston. I can't regret it, it was so interesting."

But was her sister Unity, whose far-right parents, Lord and Lady Redesdale, christened Swastika for her second name, actually in love with Hitler? Diana reckoned not, since she seemed to show no signs of jealousy towards his mistress Eva Braun. She was certainly enthralled by him and became a Nazi, even embracing anti-Semitism. Some have blamed her for convincing Hitler that his ideas would be well received in Britain.

In any case, she became so depressed when her two beloved countries went to war that she shot herself in the head. Special arrangements were made through string-pulling by influential people, both British and German, for her to be repatriated to England through Switzerland in 1939.

Suffering from brain damage, and with the bullet still lodged in her head, she lived out the rest of her life in Swinbrook with her mother. She died of meningitis in 1948.