1. Esmond Marcus David Romilly was a British socialist, anti-fascist, and journalist, who was in turn a schoolboy rebel, a veteran with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and, following the outbreak of the Second World War, an observer with the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Esmond Romilly is perhaps best remembered for his teenage elopement with his distant cousin Jessica Mitford, the second youngest of the Mitford sisters.
Esmond Romilly ran away from Wellington College, and campaigned vociferously against the British public school system, by publishing a critical left wing magazine, Out of Bounds: Public Schools' Journal Against Fascism, Militarism, and Reaction, and a memoir analysing his school experiences.
Back in England, she met an officer in the Scots Guards, Lieutenant-Colonel Bertram Henry Samuel Esmond Romilly, who had been seriously wounded while fighting in France.
The couple married in December 1915; their elder son Giles Samuel Bertram Esmond Romilly was born on 19 September 1916.
Esmond Romilly was born at No 15 Pimlico Road, in a busy part of London close to Victoria Station.
Esmond Romilly followed his elder brother to school, first at Gibbs's Day School in nearby Sloane Street and then, from 1927, as a boarder at Newlands Preparatory School at Seaford.
Just before his ninth birthday, Esmond Romilly began at Newlands in the May 1927.
Giles has revealed that he and Esmond Romilly had been entered for Eton College at an early age, and were expected to go there.
The meetings duly took place, and Esmond Romilly was impressed by them, although his ideas were far from clearly formed: "When I went back to Wellington for the summer term, I took with me an odd collection of ideas".
Esmond Romilly had written a fiery letter to a left-wing student magazine, the Student Vanguard, in which he asserted that "Every boy is compelled to join the Corps at the age of fifteen and must stay there until he leaves", a patently untrue statement for which he was required to provide a written apology.
Towards the end of the 1933 summer term, Esmond Romilly took advantage of a school holiday to visit the Parton Street bookshop in West London, where he had arranged to meet one of his communist correspondents.
The Parton Street premises, part bookshop, part circulating library, partly a centre for radical intellectuals and poets, was run on a philanthropic basis by David Archer, a Cambridge graduate and former Wellingtonian with whom Esmond Romilly struck an immediate rapport.
Whatever the outcome of the arranged meeting, Esmond Romilly had, as Ingram remarks, found a new spiritual home in which to revive his flagging spirits.
Esmond Romilly's mood was further improved at the start of the summer vacation when he attended a communist demonstration at Deptford.
Esmond Romilly was again forced to apologise, this time under direct threat of expulsion, and to provide an undertaking that nothing similar would occur in the future.
In January 1934, after Esmond Romilly had addressed a meeting of the Federation of Student Societies, the brothers decided to launch a new magazine, Out of Bounds.
Esmond Romilly's solution was simple; rather than give up the project he would run away from the school.
The fugitive Esmond Romilly found his way to Parton Street and set up his headquarters there, amid considerable press interest and speculation: "Mr Churchill's Nephew Vanishes" was a typical headline.
Esmond Romilly had been assiduous in developing a distribution network "in every cloister and dormitory he could reach", and had acquired a wide selection of contributions, so that the magazine ran to 35 pages.
Esmond Romilly spent the summer and autumn months quietly, in London, subsisting on a small allowance from his father.
Esmond Romilly began a new project, with his brother Giles, in the form of a book in which the pair recounted and analysed their experiences of school.
The book Out of Bounds: The Education of Giles Romilly and Esmond Romilly was published in June 1935, to a generally favourable reception, and sold well enough to run to a second edition.
Esmond Romilly used his share of the publisher's advance to open a public schools news agency, "Educational News and Features", but the venture soon collapsed.
Esmond Romilly gave his employers a week's notice and, on 19 October 1936, took the boat train to Dieppe.
Esmond Romilly arrived in Marseille penniless but found a charity willing to support him while he looked for a ship to take him to Spain.
Esmond Romilly became part of the group under the leadership of Lorrimer Birch, a Cambridge-educated scientist who, in Esmond Romilly's later assessment showed true qualities of leadership and organisation: "a communist first of all, but determined that his communism shouldn't interfere with his fairness of judgement".
Two days later Esmond Romilly's unit was sent to defend the Madrid-Valencia highway near Vaciamadrid, close to the outskirts of the city.
Esmond Romilly survived the fighting, but contracted dysentery and was invalided back to England early in January 1937.
Esmond Romilly was the second-youngest of the renowned Mitford sisters, daughters of the 2nd Baron Redesdale.
Esmond Romilly was herself a rebel against the restrictions of her upbringing and family life and hoped that Romilly would help her get to Spain.
Esmond Romilly had acquired a press card and a contract from the News Chronicle to report on the war and had thus obtained a visa.
The families, bitterly opposed to the union, hoped to avoid press attention, but Esmond Romilly opportunistically exploited press interest by selling his story through an intermediary.
Meanwhile, there had been a degree of rapprochement with both families and so both Lady Redesdale and Nellie Esmond Romilly attended the ceremony.
The couple remained in Bayonne since Esmond Romilly hoped to return to Spain to report on the war.
Mitford found a job in a New York fashion house, and Esmond Romilly attempted without success to work as a freelance journalist.
In Washington, DC, Esmond Romilly signed a contract with The Washington Post to provide a series of articles recounting their adventures under the title "Baby Bluebloods in Hobohemia".
The plan was to continue the tour in the spring, westward, Esmond Romilly hoped to find work on a ranch before he moved to Hollywood and finally Chicago.
Esmond Romilly departed for Canada to begin training, first at Toronto and later at Regina, Saskatchewan, while Mitford remained in Washington, pregnant with her second child.
On 30 November 1941, while participating in a raid on Hamburg, Esmond Romilly's aircraft failed to return and was lost over the North Sea with all on board.