Decca Mitford’s son, Ben Treuhaft, is a piano tuner with a purple-dyed goatee, living between Edinburgh and the West Midlands. But does he share his mother’s politics?
As I sat in the bay window of my Edinburgh tenement, a large owlish face suddenly loomed through the glass. ‘Here for the tuning,’ came an American drawl. As the man spoke, what looked like a miniature cheerleader’s pom-pom bobbed on his chin. I stared until I realised it was a neatly coiffed and purple-dyed goatee.
Although I was expecting him, it was a startling appearance. Leaning on a cane, he was sporting a golden polka-dotted bandana, a blue printed shirt under a pinstriped suit jacket and baggy trousers that semi-concealed sausagey toes packed into sandals. The overall picture was one a child might produce if you asked them to draw a pirate.
I opened the front door and he swept past me into the hall. Kicking off his sandals, he made straight for the living room, big meaty feet slapping on the bare wooden floorboards. ‘You’ll have to clear away your trophies,’ he commanded, gesturing to the knick-knacks on the piano top.
I’d found the piano tuner Ben Treuhaft on Gumtree where his profile picture grabbed my attention. Based on this image, I’d half-expected a hippy who’d never returned from orbit, not the appraising glance that hit me through the window or the funny observations that poured from him all afternoon. This shouldn’t have been a surprise, however, as Ben’s advert also mentions that he’s the son of the ‘muckraking journalist Jessica Mitford’.
Jessica, or ‘Decca’, was one of the Mitford sisters, the six aristocratic siblings whose bold lives have fascinated the British public since they were first splashed across the pages of the society weeklies in the 1920s. They were later chronicled in Decca’s sniggering memoir Hons and Rebels, and fictionalised forms of their various relatives populate her eldest sister Nancy’s novels, which prickle with the family’s distinct silly-nasty humour.
Continuing interest since their heyday has spawned the ‘Mitford Industry’ of countless articles, biographies and even an upcoming TV series, creating an almost mythical aura around the family.
Two of the sisters, Unity and Diana, had close connections with the Nazi party. Adolf Hitler was stalked by a besotted Unity in Munich, and was an honoured guest at Diana’s wedding to Oswald Mosley. As the runaway ‘red sheep’ of the family, Decca fled Britain for the USA, where she devoted herself to left-wing causes.
It was staggering to consider all this as Ben fixed the wonky piano in my living room. ‘It amazes me as much as it amazes you,’ he agreed. ‘Mostly I know this stuff through being told it as a little kid.’
He first arrived in Edinburgh in 2012, relocating from New York due to his ex-wife’s career, but he now lives in Coventry and travels back to Scotland for tunings. I watched him work in my flat, and he seemed to enjoy being enjoyed. When I asked how old the piano might be, he immediately replied: ‘I’d say the 1920s with these sexy legs.’ The sheer volume of noise generated by his trade seemed appropriate to his enormous presence. Battering away on a troublesome high key, he muttered to himself: ‘It’s so fucking sharp, I fucking love it!’
I later arranged an interview with him, vaguely imagining an article but more to contrive a way of spending time with a fascinating man and hopefully procure some top-tier gossip. Over a curry at his friend’s place, he unwound his life’s story.
Born in 1947, Ben grew up across the bay from San Francisco in Oakland, where Decca had settled after marrying the lawyer and activist Robert Treuhaft.
Despite his literary mother and Harvard graduate father, Ben never felt destined to become ‘an egghead’. Taking to the hippy lifestyle, he dropped out of college in 1967 and, a few months and many acid trips later, suddenly determined on a career direction. ‘I was moping around Berkeley, walking barefoot. I did a double take in front of these pianos and said: “Ben, become a piano tuner. That’ll solve all your fucking problems.”’ A local tuner advised him to train in piano factories on the East Coast.
‘The first thing I did was I hitchhiked to New York and knocked on Steinway’s door. They said, “We don’t hire hippies, fuck off!”’
Undeterred by this, his ascent in his chosen vocation was rapid, with stints at Yamaha then Sohmer, before Steinway finally accepted this now accomplished hippy as a concert tuner. In this role, he tuned at Carnegie Hall and for virtuoso pianists Vladimir Horowitz and Glenn Gould.
In 1974, he hitchhiked back to Berkeley where he was the go-to tuner in the Bay Area for around 25 years. Beyond this local success, his radical politics inspired a seemingly quixotic endeavour in 1994 when he became the prime mover in the ‘Send-a Piana to Havana’ project. This involved shipping pianos on a schooner to Cuba to replace the island’s crumbling antique stock, but the scheme was also a mischievous poke at the perpetual US trade embargo. ‘It was stupid not to let a piano in, that was the whole point of it – to see if we get arrested for that,’ he explained.
He didn’t get arrested, and dodged a $10,000 fine from federal authorities, but was accused of colluding with the US government by the Cubans. Their suspicions were raised after he told an interviewer that it’s easier dealing with the CIA than navigating island bureaucracy.
‘They asked me to write a thing saying that I’m not a spy for the United States.
‘I said: “Just look at me!”’
Although his attitude towards communism now appears like that of a lapsed Catholic – ‘To this day I have no idea what Marxism even is’ – it would appear he remains active in radical politics. In August 2026, he is to attend court on charges of criminal damage relating to a protest organised by Palestine Action, an activist group which targets the UK facilities of Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms manufacturer.
While describing his life’s course, Ben’s flippant humour often belies deeply felt beliefs – exemplifying the Mitford trait which has fuelled an entire industry. Having peered into their peculiar lives for my own contribution to their sprawling family scrapbook, I understand why so many are gripped by the mythology.
After the interview, I wrote to Ben asking if it ever gets tiring being regarded as an exotic specimen by journalists. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I love it – you never had someone research your father, grannies, siblings and funky self then write it up beautifully?’
