Asthall Manor Park. The youngest of the Mitford sisters Deborah, later Duchess of Devonshire, was born at Asthall in 1920. Her sister Diana had an appendectomy on the spare-bedroom table. The Mitfords were great socialites, and Asthall hosted frequent hunting and shooting weekend parties, regular guests included Clementine Churchill, Frederick Lindemann and Walter Sickert. Nancy Mitford's fictional Alconleigh in "The Pursuit of Love" is based largely on Asthall, and family life there is described in Jessica Mitford's autobiographical "Hons and Rebels". Redesdale had never planned to make Asthall Manor a permanent home, and in 1926 the family moved into nearby Swinbrook House
Pamela Frankau service in Hampstead Cemetery. Margaret Webster dedicated her first autobiography "The Same, Only Different: Five Generations of a Great Theatre Family" (1969) in Frankau memory. Frankau's final novel 'Colonel Blessington' was edited by her cousin, the writer Diana Raymond and posthumously published in 1968. Pamela Frankau Pamela Sydney Frankau (3 January 1908 – 8 June 1967) was a popular English novelist from a prominent artistic and literary family. Abandoned by her novelist father Gilbert Frankau at an early age, she soon became a prolific writer herself. She stopped writing for a decade after the death of her lover, the poet