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. He is perhaps best remembered for his teenage elopement with his distant cousin Jessica Mitford, the second youngest of the Mitford sisters.
Born into an aristocratic family – he was a nephew of Clementine Churchill – he emerged in the 1930s as a precocious rebel against his background, openly espousing communist views at the age of fifteen. He 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. At the age of eighteen he joined the International Brigades and fought on the Madrid front during the Spanish Civil War, of which he wrote and published a vivid account.
Before departing for Spain, Romilly had largely abandoned communism in favour of democratic socialism.