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David was one of nine children, and Sydney was one of four. Their respective siblings produced, between 1910 and 1927, twenty-one children with the surnames Mitford, Farrer, Kearsey, Bowyer, Bowles and Bailey, and many of these first cousins were to play major parts in the lives of the Mitford children as they grew up and visited each other’s homes. But the network of kinsmen who were to people the lives of the Mitford children were rooted further back in the family tree. Both of David’s parents – ‘Bertie’ Mitford (Bertram, 1st Lord Redesdale) and Lady Clementine Ogilvy – came from large families, and he remained close to many of them and to their numerous offspring.*
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In addressing this question, one of Clementine Churchill’s daughters stated that her mother never learned the identity of her natural father though she knew he was not Henry Hozier.14 Bertie Mitford is the most likely suspect, even though the poet and writer Wilfred Scawen Blunt claimed that Natty confessed to him that her two elder daughters were fathered by Captain George ‘Bay’ Middleton, known by his foxhunting contemporaries as ‘the bravest of the brave’, and to history as the dashing lover of the sporting Empress, Elizabeth of Austria.15 This, however, must be set against the fact that Natty told a close friend, just before the birth of Clementine, that the child she was carrying was ‘Lord Redesdale’s’.
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Mary S. Lovell (The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family)