Nicholas Mosley MC RSL (1923-2017) | WikiTree FREE Family Tree

Nicholas "3rd Baron Ravensdale" Mosley MC RSL

Born 25 Jun 1923 in St George Hanover Square, Middlesex, England, United Kingdom

Ancestors

Son of Oswald Ernald Mosley Bt MP and Cynthia Blanche (Curzon) Mosley

Brother of Vivien Elizabeth (Mosley) Forbes Adam, Michael Mosley, Alexander Mosley [half] and Max Mosley [half]

Husband of Rosemary Laura (Salmond) Mosley — married 14 Nov 1947 (to 1974) [location unknown]

Husband of Verity Elizabeth (Raymond) Mosley — married 19 Jul 1974 [location unknown]

Descendants

Father of Shaun Nicholas Mosley, Ivo Adam Rex Mosley, [private son (1950s - unknown)], [private daughter (1950s - unknown)] and [private son (1970s - unknown)]

Died 28 Feb 2017 at age 93 in London, England, United Kingdom

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Profile last modified 29 Mar 2024 | Created 23 Jan 2017

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Preceded by
Mary Curzon his aunt

3rd Baron Ravensdale
1966 - 2017

Succeeded by
Daniel Mosley his son

Preceded by
Oswald Mosley his father

7th Baronet Mosley of Ancoats
1980 - 2017

Succeeded by
Daniel Mosley his son

1 Biography
2 Sources

Biography

Nicholas Mosley was a member of the aristocracy in England.

Nicholas Mosley MC RSL is Notable.

This profile is part of the Moseley Name Study.

Nicholas Mosley, 3rd Baron Ravensdale, 7th Baronet, MC FRSL (born 25 June 1923 in London), is an English novelist.^[1] He is the eldest son of Sir Oswald Mosley, 6th Baronet, an English politician known principally as the founder of the British Union of Fascists, and his first wife, Lady Cynthia Mosley, a daughter of George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston (Viceroy of India and Foreign Secretary).^[2]

In 1932 his father founded the British Union of Fascists and became an open supporter of Benito Mussolini. In 1933, when he was only ten, Nicholas Mosley's mother, Lady Cynthia, died and in 1936 Diana Mitford, one of the Mitford sisters, who was already his father's mistress, became his stepmother.

He is a half-brother of Max Mosley, former President of the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA)

Education

As a young boy Mosley began to stammer and attended weekly sessions with the speech therapist Lionel Logue to help him to overcome this disorder. He later said his father claimed never really to have noticed this stammer, but despite this he may, as a result of it, have been less aggressive when speaking to him than he was towards other people. Mosley was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. ^[3] In 1940 his father was interned because of his campaigning against the war with Germany. Despite this the younger Mosley was soon commissioned into the Rifle Brigade and saw active service in Italy, winning the Military Cross in 1945.

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. On the death of his father on 3 December 1980 he also succeeded to his father's baronetcy. In 1999 he lost his seat in parliament as a result of House of Lords reform.

Published Works

**Books by Nicholas Mosley**
Book Name	Year Published	Awards	Description
Spaces of the Dark	1951	-	-
The Rainbearers	1955	-	Against the light-hearted background of a house-party in the South of France, Richard, the hero of this unusual novel, faces a crisis in both his life and his marriage. An idealist who does not hesitate to face up to the demands which his idealism makes upon him, Richard has searched in vain since the war for somethings or someone to bring a sense of purpose into his life. At the back of his disillusionment is the haunting memory of Mary, the girl he rejected five years before in favour of his wife Elizabeth.
Corruption	1957	-	-
African Switchback	1958	-	-
The Life of Raymond Raynes	1961	-	'Half Jesuit and half Salvation Army', someone said of Father Raymond Raynes. An Anglican Monk, late Superior of the Community of the Resurrection, Fr. Raynes combined personal holiness with a passionate care for people.
Meeting Place	1962	-	Harry Gates has reached a crisis in his life. The son of rich, pleasure-loving parents, he and his American wife Melissa have reacted against the decadence of their relatives and friends. But when Melissa returns to America, Harry is left to enjoy his old friends in Fleet Street and Soho.
Accident	1964	-	Accident is a prose poem about marriage and infidelity, as well as the relationship between writing and existence, imagination and action. It is a study of the games academics play both with their students and with themselves, on campus and off, in bed or on the cricket fields or baronial halls of the landed gentry. By probing the mind of one philosopher-don, Stephen, who has second thoughts about what constitutes an accident.
Experience and Religion:A Lay Essay in Theology	1964	-	"Religion," this book begins, "is a mistrusted word now," and Nicholas Mosley, in this engaging meditation, seeks to repair that trust. Rather than trying to convince or compel the reader to accept his beliefs, he describes how religion functions in the modern world. Elsewhere, Mosley has written, "There is a subject nowadays which is taboo in the way that sexuality was once taboo, which is to talk about life as if it had any meaning." In this book, he describes religion as the source of that meaning. Despair is the fashionable attitude, but it is one Mosley, here and in his many novels, rejects in favor of a cautious optimism. He writes not to persuade, but to explain a worldview that is refreshing for the hope and intelligence it contains.
Assassins	1966	-	As one of the characters in Assassins says, "Tolstoy was right, you can't beat the Gods. It's the small things - the warp and woof - that make up the pattern. And how much influence do we have over the small? Now that's a theme for a modern writer." And Nicholas Mosley is this writer. Part political thriller and part love story, Assassins explores the "small things" that give shape and meaning to the "big events."
Impossible Object	1968	Manbooker Priza Nominee, 1969	In eight carefully connected stories that are joined by introspective interludes on related subjects, pursuing the notion, through the lives of a couple seen by different narrators, that "those who like unhappy ends can have them, and those who don't will have to look for them."
Natalie Natalia	1971	-	Natalie Natalia revolves around Anthony Greville, a conservative Member of Parliament who is tormented by his ambivalence toward his career, by his religious doubts, and by his adulterous affair with Natalia Jones, the enigmatic wife of a colleague. The course of their affair dramatizes love in its most creative and perilously destructive aspects, the two facets symbolized in the two names he has for his lover: "I sometimes called Natalia Natalie instead of Natalia," Greville says, "when she was the ravenous rather than the angelic angel... What Natalie said was often a code for what Natalia was meaning." Ranging in setting from England to Central Africa, the novel is a remarkable investigation of ethics, with fiction itself as an ethical activity.
The Assassination of Trotsky	1972	-	-
Julian Grenfell: His life and the times of his death, 1888-1915	1976	-	A biography of the First World War poet Julian Grenfell. It helps readers to understand why Julian and his generation seemed to want to die in battle. It also brings Edwardian society to life, as well as describes his relationship with his mother.
Catastrophe Practice	1979	-	Drawing upon catastrophe theory to examine the discontinuities in human personality and our tendency to progress suddenly rather than smoothly, the six characters of Catastrophe Practice struggle to disrupt traditional ways of being. These characters feel that conventional ways of interpreting the world have become destructive--conventional language, conventional feelings, conventional situations--and try to find a way to realize genuine experience.
Imago Bird	1980	-	This vivid and strikingly witty novel examines the contradictions between the public face and the private experience. Nephew to the prime minister of England, eighteen-year-old Bert tries to make sense of the grown-up world around him, a colorful crowd of television personalities, politicians, young Trotskyites, pop stars, and eccentric relatives.
Serpent	1981	-	Jason is a scriptwriter working on a film about Masada--the fortress where a thousand Jews killed themselves rather than be taken prisoner by the Romans in A. D. 73. He doubts that a film both honest and popular on such a subject can be made, and, while en route to the production site (Jason, producers and stars in first class--his wife and child in tourist), a dispute about the film and a crisis aboard the plane forces Jason to look at his life, his art, and the world around him in several different ways at once.
The Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosely, 1896-1933	1982	-	Once known as the most hated man in England, Sir Oswald Mosley (1896-1980) is an intriguing and infamous figure in British politics. Rich and aristocratic, Mosley began his political career within the fold of the smart international set: married to Cynthia Curzon, "Tom and Cimmie" counted among their friends Ramsay MacDonald, Winston Churchill, the Sitwells, and the Belgian royal family.
Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosely 1933-1980	1983	-	-
Judith	1986	-	Judith is an aspiring young actress and the mistress of a writer on a popular satirical magazine. We learn of her involvement with drugs and increasing self-delusion. After a crack-up, she seeks healing in an Indian ashram run by an eccentric and possibly mad guru. But what is at the back of appearances; how calculated is the self-destructiveness from which a new order might emerge?
Hopeful Monsters	1990	Whitbread Award for Novel and Book of the Year, 1990	Hopeful Monsters tells the story of the love affair between Max, an English student of physics and biology, and Eleanor, a German Jewess and political radical. Together and apart, Max and Eleanor participate in the great political and intellectual movements which shape the twentieth century, taking them from Cambridge and Berlin to the Spanish Civil War, Russia, the Sahara, and finally to Los Alamos to witness the first nuclear test.
Efforts at Truth	1995	-	In Efforts at Truth Mosley scrutinizes his own life and work, but examines them as a curious observer, fascinated by the constant interaction of reality and the written word. As a life, it has been colorful, in settings ranging from the West Indies to a remote Welsh hill farm, from war action in Italy to battles with Hollywood moguls, from the Colony Room to the House of Lords."
Children of Darkness and Light	1996	-	In Children of Darkness and Light, Mosley takes on what for most novelists has been the most challenging of subjects: a novel directly concerned with religious belief. A middle-aged, burnt-out journalist is sent to the north of England to do a story about the possible appearance of the Blessed Virgin to a group of children, though this may be a rumor initiated by the government to cover up a nuclear disaster. Or both. Out of such conflicting possibilities, Mosley invents a sinister world where nothing is what it seems to be. And as Mosley's narrator moves through the possibilities of half-truths, lies, conspiracies, and betrayals, he himself creates a parallel crisis in his personal life wherein he and his wife are trying to destroy their marriage or save it, or - as we come to expect in Mosley novels - do both at once. And behind all this is the possibility that the narrator - half philosopher and half would-be saint - is little more than a middle-aged man trying to justify his irresponsibility and infidelity behind a shield of wit and irony
Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley and Family 1933–1980	1983	-	Questions the motives and the understanding Oswald had of politics

Book Adaptions

Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley and Family 1933–1980 contributed to the Channel 4 television programme Mosley (1998), based on Oswald Mosley's life. At the end of this serial, Mosley is portrayed meeting his father in prison to ask him about his national allegiance. Mosley now lives in London.

Marriage and Children

Mosley has been married twice and is the father of five children^[4]:

On 14 November 1947 he m1. Rosemary Laura Salmond (div. 1974, d. 1991), daughter of Sir John Maitland Salmond and the Hon. Monica Margaret Grenfell, and they had four children:

Hon. Shaun Nicholas Mosley (b. 5 August 1949, d. 10 December 2009), m. 1978 Theresa Clifford, and had six children: Daniel Nicholas Mosley (b. 10 October 1982); Matthew Mosley (b. 6 March 1985); Francis Mosley (b. 5 July 1988); Aidan Clifford Mosley (b. 1991); Thomas Mosley (b. 23 December 1993); Monica Mosley (b. 5 June 1996)
Hon. Ivo Adam Rex Mosley (b. 14 May 1951), m. 10 September 1977 Xanthe Jennifer Grenville Oppenheimer, daughter of Sir Michael Bernard Grenville Oppenheimer, 3rd Baronet, by his marriage on 12 July 1947 to Laetitia Helen Lucas-Tooth, daughter of Sir Hugh Vere Huntly Duff Munro-Lucas-Tooth, 1st Baronet, and Laetitia Florence Findlay, and they had four children: Nathaniel Inigo Mosley (b. 15 July 1982); Felix Harry Mosley (b. 6 November 1985); Scipio Louis Mosley (b. 7 June 1988) and Noah Billy Mosley (b. 10 October 1990).
Hon. Robert Mosley (b. 24 December 1955), m. 1980 Victoria McBain, and they had three children: Gregory Mosley (b. 9 May 1981); Vija Mosley (b. 19 July 1985), a textile designer; married to Gregory Rhodes; and Orson Mosley (b. 6 June 1994).
Hon. Clare Mosley (b. 11 November 1959), unmarried, who has a natural daughter named Rosie Mosley (b. 29 February 1992).

In 1974, after a divorce, Mosley m2. Verity Elizabeth Raymond, daughter of John Raymond, and they have one son, Marius Mosley (b. 28 May 1976)^[5]

Death

Nicholas passed away on the 28th of Feb 2017 at his home in London^[6]

Sources

"British Newspaper Archives, Obituaries," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:Q269-G83Z : 26 October 2019), Nicholas in entry for Lady Cynthia Blanche Mosley, 17 May 1933; citing Obituary, Plymouth, Devon, England, United Kingdom, page , Records extracted by FindMyPast and images digitized by FamilySearch. The British Library, London; FHL microfilm 102,001,341.

"England and Wales Marriage Registration Index, 1837-2005," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QVDQ-P45C : 8 October 2014), Rosemary L Salmond and null, 1947; from "England & Wales Marriages, 1837-2005," database, findmypast (http://www.findmypast.com : 2012); citing 1947, quarter 4, vol. 5D, p. 306, London City, London, England, General Register Office, Southport, England.

"Find A Grave Index," database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6ZR7-ZTJP : 10 September 2021), Nicholas Mosley, ; Burial, Highgate, London Borough of Camden, Greater London, England, Highgate Cemetery East; citing record ID 227809756, Find a Grave, http://www.findagrave.com.

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Nicholas Mosley MC RSL (1923 - 2017)

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