English aristocrat and soldier Thomas (Tom) Mitford was BOTD in 1909. Born in Batsford, Gloucestershire, he was the third child and only son of David Freeman-Mitford, the 2nd Baron Redesdale. He and his six sisters grew up in Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire, later portrayed in his sister Nancy‘s novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. As the heir to the baroncy, he was the only Mitford to receive formal education, sent to boarding school aged eight and later to Eton College. A handsome, bright and popular student, he had romantic relationships with fellow students James Lees-Milne and Hamish St-Clair Erskine. In the 1920s, he and Nancy became part of the aristocratic social circle known as the Bright Young Things, befriending Harold Acton, Cecil Beaton, Robert Byron, Tom Driberg, L. P. Hartley, Gavin Henderson, Brian Howard, Richard, David and Olivia Plunket Greene, Edith and Osbert Sitwell, Stephen Tennant and Evelyn Waugh. In 1929, he took part in an art hoax devised by his brother-in-law Bryan Guinness, posing as the fictitious modern artist “Bruno Hat” at an art exhibition. He moved to Berlin later that year on the pretext of studying law and immersed himself in the sexually permissive culture of Weimar Germany, pursuing affairs with his school friend Byron, the dancer Tilly Losch and the Hungarian aristocrat Janos Almásy (who later had an affair with Tom’s sister Unity). He also became enamoured with Fascist politics and the rise of the Nazi Party, attending the 1933 Nuremberg Rally with his Hitler-loving sister Diana and brother-in-law Oswald Mosley. At the outbreak of World War Two, Tom joined the British Army. Originally posted to Italy and North Africa, he refused to fight against Germans and was transferred to the Devonshire Regiment in Burma (now Myanmar). He was killed in battle in March 1945, aged 36. Details of his life were recorded in Nancy’s novels, his sister Jessica’s memoir Hons and Rebels and in the letters and diaries of Lees-Milne.