Overview
Hon. Peter Murray Rennell Rodd (16 April 1904 – 17 July 1968) was a British soldier, aid worker and film-maker. He was married to author Nancy Mitford from 1933 to 1957.
Early life
Rodd was born at 17, Stratford Place in London, the second son of Sir Rennell Rodd, a diplomat and politician who was ennobled in 1933 as Baron Rennell, and Lilias Georgina Guthrie (1864–1951). Among his siblings were Francis Rodd, 2nd Baron Rennell (who married the Hon. Mary Constance Vivian Smith), Evelyn Emmet, Baroness Emmet of Amberley (a Conservative politician and was created a life peer), Hon. Gloria Rodd (who married the painter Simon Elwes), and Hon. Gustaf Rodd (who married Yvonne Mary Marling, the youngest daughter of diplomat Sir Charles Murray Marling). He was educated at Wellington College and Balliol College, Oxford.
Career
Rodd followed no specific career and his views were erratic and changeable; having joined the British Union of Fascists in 1933, by the following year he was fiercely denouncing the movement. In 1938 he carried out humanitarian work in Perpignan on behalf of refugees from the Spanish Civil War. He was commissioned into the Welsh Guards in 1939, and during a varied war career saw service in Africa and Italy, attaining the rank of lieutenant-colonel. until he reached the age limit in 1954. After the war he attempted unsuccessfully to become a film-maker; his one completed project, For Whom the Gate Tolls, shot in Spain, was a failure. Other than this, for the remainder of his years he lived a more or less idle life, mainly on handouts, mostly in Rome and finally in Malta, where he died in 1968.
Personal life
In 1933, Rodd was married to the novelist and socialite Nancy Mitford, daughter of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale and one of the famous Mitford sisters. They divorced in 1957, although by then the marriage had been over in all but name for some years. Nancy, who was called "unabashedly snobbish and devastatingly witty" and her family nicknamed him "Prodd" or "the old toll-gater", from his skill at talking at great length on historical subjects such as turnpike roads. Rodd died in Malta on 17 July 1968. Nancy died at her home in Versailles, France, in 1973.
In media
Rodd was portrayed by Jamie Blackley in the UKTV series Outrageous (2025).
References
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