Daphne Guinness - Early Life

Early Life

Her father is Jonathan Guinness, 3rd Baron Moyne, and the eldest son of Diana Mitford Mosley and Bryan Guinness. Diana was the daughter of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, the father of the celebrated Mitford sisters. Guinness's mother, Jonathan's second wife, was Suzanne Lisney (died 2005), of Cadaques, Spain, and Paris. Lisney was an artist and muse to Man Ray and Dali. When Daphne was 13, she became aware that she had a further three half-siblings by Susan "Shoe" Taylor, her father’s mistress.

Guinness is the granddaughter of The Hon. Diana Mitford, who first married Bryan Walter Guinness. Mitford divorced Guinness and married the leader of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley. Daphne has said she did not know of Mosley's political affiliations, before she heard, in 1980, on the BBC news that he had died.

Her great-aunt Jessica gave her a taste for music, literature and politics. Jessica Mitford's causes included her involvement in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and then in the Communist Party in America.

As a child, Guinness grew up in the country houses owned by her family in England and Ireland. Holidays were spent in an 18th-century monastery in Cadaques, Spain. There her neighbours included Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Dieter Roth, and Richard Hamilton.

She remains close to her last remaining great-aunt Deborah, 'Debo', the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, whom she accompanied on her recent trip to New York: a lecture tour promoting her latest memoir, ‘Wait for Me!’