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SIR OSWALD MOSLEY

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_ Stephen Dorril is a widely respected authority on the security and

intelligence services. He has been a consultant for and appeared
on a number of major television documentaries in Britain, France, —
Canada and Hungary. He is the author of several highly acclaimed
books covering the activities of British Intelligence, most recently
MIO: Fifty Years of Special Operations. He is a senior lecturer at
Huddersfield University and lives in nearby Holmfirth with his
wife and his dog, Roger.
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 STEPHEN DORRIL

Blackshirt
Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism

PENGUIN BOOKS
 PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Viking 2006

Published in Penguin Books 2007
I

Copyright © Stephen Dorril, 2006

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Typeset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives ple

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978—0-140-25821-9
 Contents

List of Illustrations Vii

Acknowledgements Xl
Introduction

‘Tommy’
The First World War 16
The Patriotic Peace 36
‘The Vision Splendid’ 55:
The Underworld of Rejected Knowledge 73
The Labour Party 81
‘The Coming Figure’ 107
‘A Young Man in a Hurry’ I21
Gy
Se
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SA
Se‘After Baldwin and MacDonald Comes...
iPO ?” 139
The New Party 162
The New Movement 189
The British Union of Fascists 217
Universal Fascism 244
Rothermere 269
HW
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WV 295
16 The Nazis 316
17 1935 343
18 The East End . 369
19 The Abdication 398
20 The Radio Project 424
a The Darkening Clouds 443
22 The Phoney War 467
vi CONTENTS

23 Prisoner Number 2202 504

24 ‘Lucifer Fallen’ $35
25 The Union Movement 569
26 The Neo-Fascist Internationals 594
27 ‘The Coloured Invasion’ 613
28 Rehabilitation 634

Selected Notes 649

Bibliography 678
Index 687
 List of Illustrations

Section One
Ei The Mosley family home, Rolleston Hall
2 Mosley’s mother, Katherine Maud
Bi. Mosley’s grandfather, Oswald
4. The seventeen-year-old Mosley joined the 16th Lancers on 1 October
1914
- Ruins of the Cathedral and medieval Cloth Hall, Ypres, April r915
nun. Mosley in 1918
7. Mosley married Lord Curzon’s daughter, Cynthia ‘Cimmie’ Curzon, on
11 May 1920 in the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace
. The Mosleys on honeymoon at Portofino, near Genoa, 1920
- In 1925 Cimmie’s younger sister, ‘Baba’ (Lady Alexandra Curzon)
married ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, equerry to Edward, Prince of Wales
Io. Cimmie’s other sister, Lady Irene Curzon, 1923

Il. Irene, Mosley’s brother Ted and Mosley’s father, Sir Oswald, at brother

John’s wedding in April 1924

Eas Cimmie with Lionel Gable and Stewart Menzies, 1919
ES. Mosley with Mrs Cole Porter, Venice, 1923
14. Mosley, Cimmie and his brother John at Antibes, 1927
mig Mosley’s close friend, Bob Boothby, Isle de Marguerite, 1927
- Mosley aquaplaning, 1927
yf Independent Labour Party school, 1926. Mosley with John Strachey and
Fenner Brockway
18. Mosley and Cimmie at the Labour Party Conference, Blackpool, 1927
19. Savehay Farm in the village of Denham, Buckinghamshire
20. Labour Party leader Ramsay MacDonald at Savehay
te Mosley canvassing for his wife in Stoke-on-Trent during the General
Election, 1929
22. The New Party summer school at Denham, June 1931
a5 New Party Chiefs, Denham, June 1931. Left to right, W.E.D. ‘Bill’
Allen, Robert Forgan, Cimmie, Mosley, John Strachey
24. Mosley, Venice, 1923
Vili LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

25. Conservative MP ‘Bill’ Allen, 1927

26. Bob Boothby with Paula Casa Maury, 1920s
27. The former diplomat, journalist and diarist Harold Nicolson with
another member of the Mosley’s social circle, Zita James, 1932
28. Georgia and Sachie Sitwell, 1931

Section Two
29. Boxing champion Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis
30. Wreckage at Birmingham’s Rag Market after a Mosley rally in
September 1931
31. Mosley with daughter Vivien and son Nicholas at Morden Park, 1932
32. Diana and first husband Bryan Guinness, Venice, 1932
33. This framed photograph of Mosley, taken by Cimmie, was by her bed
when she died in May 1933
34. Benito Mussolini addressing the people from the balcony of the Palazzo
Venezia, Rome, 1935
35. Mosley in the black shirt modelled on his fencing tunic
36. At the Blackshirt Ball in October 1934, Mosley gave a fencing display
with fencing champion Charles de Beaumont (British Fencing
Association)
37. Lord Rothermere, whose Daily Mail enthusiastically endorsed the
Blackshirts, with Hitler, 1937
38. Mosley was best man at the fascist wedding of his Chief of Staff, Ian
Hope Dundas, and Pamela Dorman in 1933
39. Geoffrey Dorman became editor of the BUF newspaper Action
40. Director of Research, George Sutton was Mosley’s long serving
secretary
41. Director of Publicity, A.G. Findlay was one of the very few within the
BUF to know about the secret funding from Mussolini
42. Mosley addressing farmers at Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, September
1933
43. Neil Francis Hawkins was the BUF’s director general and surrounded
himself with heel-clicking young Blackshirts
44. Hawkins’s deputy in Administration was a Catholic former
schoolmaster, Brian Donovan
45. The Blackshirt Defence Corps, 1934
46. Anti-fascist counter-demonstration, Hyde Park, 1934
47. Director of Propaganda Bill Risdon represented the left wing of the
BUF
48. A.K. Chesterton, responsible with William Joyce for the movement’s
extreme anti-Semitic propaganda
49. A BUF delegation to the Nuremburg Party Rally in 1933 included Unity
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix

Mitford, William Joyce, Alexander Raven Thomson and Captain

Vincent
50. Diana Mosley with Putzi Hanfstaengl, responsible for foreign press
relations at the 1934 Party Rally
Cpe Unity Mitford speaking at Hesselberg in 1935 with the regime’s leading
anti-Semite, the notorious Julius Streicher
oe Captain Robert Gordon-Canning, MC, Mosley’s personal foreign
affairs adviser
53- During 1936 the BUF supported Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia with its
“Mind Britain’s Business’ campaign which was heavily subsidised by
Mussolini
54. Blackshirts flooded London streets during the Abdication Crisis in
support of the young king, December 1936
55. With his new Nazi-style uniforms, Mosley inspects his storm troopers
before the Battle of Cable Street, October 1936
56. An anti-fascist demonstrator is arrested by police in the East End of
London, October 1936

Section Three
57: Women clash with police in riots at a Fascist Rally, Bermondsey, 1937
58. The BUF’s chief philosopher and propagandist, Alexander Raven
Thomson, was a virulent anti-Semitic speaker
59- A BUF pamphlet ‘Defenders of democracy’ with photographs of ‘typical
specimens snapped at Red demonstrations in London’
60. Diana photographed by Mosley, 1937
61. Diana Mosley was the main channel of communication between her
husband and Hitler
62. The former chief engineer of the BBC, Peter Eckersley, was employed by
Mosley to front his radio project
63. In 1936 the Mosleys rented Wootton Lodge in Staffordshire
64. Diana with her husband, step-daughter Vivien and sister Deborah,
Wootton, 1937
65. Mosley returned to recuperate at Wootton after a violent meeting in
Liverpool on ro October 1937 where he was hit on the head by a metal
object
66. A British Union meeting in Bermondsey, south-east London, May Day
1938
67. On the eve of the war, Mosley held his last major meeting at Earls
Court, 1939
68. James McGuirk Hughes (aka P.G. Taylor)
69. Dr Albert Tester, Mosley’s adviser
70. Mosley’s military adviser Major-General J.F.C. Fuller
x LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

71. Field-Marshall Ironside, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, seen here :
with Churchill)
72. Mosley was interned during the war under Defence regulation 18B. He
was reluctantly released in November 1943
73. Mosley at the Shaven Crown public house, Shipton under Wychwood,
Oxfordshire
74. Diana and Mosley with their sons, Alexander and Max, Crowood, 1946
75 and 76. Mosley returned to street politics in May 1948 with the
formation of the Union Movement
77. Mosley seen here with Jeffrey Hamm, Commandant Mary Allen, Raven
Thomson, Victor Burgess and Tommy Moran
78. Mosley and the South African Defence Minister, Oswald Pirow
79. Francis Parker Yockey in 1948. Yockey was Mosley’s rival in
influencing the post-war neo-Nazi networks (from his book The Enemy
of Europe) —
79. Mosley and supporters, 1959
80. The Mosley family, Venice, 1954
81. Max Mosley seen here with his mother Diana leaving Old Street
Magistrates Court, August 1962

Illustration Acknowledgements
The author and publishers are most grateful to Nicholas Mosley for the use
of his family photographs. Unless otherwise credited all the photographs are
from the Mosley collection.

55 34, 70, 71, Imperial War Museum; 38, 42, 45, 56, 575 725 735 75> 79s
Corbis; 46, 77, 78, 81; Popperfoto; 69, National Archives, Kew; 49, 50, 51,
61 from David Pryce-Jones: Unity Mitford, A Quest; 29 from Lewis
Morton, Ted Kid Lewis, his Life and Times; 79, from F. P. Yockey, The
Enemy of Europe; 62, Myles Eckersley; 68, McGuirk Hughes family; 52,
Louise Gordon-Canning; 30, 39-41, 43-4, 47-8, 53-4, 58-9, 76 are from
a BUF political pamphlet
 Acknowledgements

I have a vivid memory of my first visit to London with my parents as an

eight-year-old, during the summer of 1963. It was dark as we came out of
Notting Hill tube station; here I saw two men in long trenchcoats selling a
newspaper. For some reason I found them sinister and asked my mother who
they were. She said, ‘They are Mosley’s men.’ It meant little to me until the
seventies when, undertaking independent research into the extreme right in
Huddersfield, I came across the presence of Mosleyites in the area. In the small
village where I live, just before the Second World War a member of the British
Union of Fascists (BUF) used to run up the Union Jack in front of his house
and march up and down the road in his jackboots and Blackshirt uniform. A
neighbour told me that it seemed funny at the time, at least until the war came.
The tale of Mosley shows how thin is the line that exists between legitimate
and respectable vote seeking, and what Ben Pimlott termed ‘psychopathic
rabble-rousing’. Mosley had been for much of his career ‘very much part of
the mainstream, the friend and ally of famous statesmen, and came perilously
close to holding power’. Over the years, the image of Mosley, the Fascist
leader attacking Jews in violent clashes, has softened and the idea of a new
biography grew out of an awareness that a considerable volume of new
material was being released to the National Archives in London, Belfast and
Edinburgh. For the first time, use is made of files on Mosley from Germany,
Italy and France, along with Freedom of Information Act records from the
United States, Australia, Japan and Ireland.
When I read Robert Skidelsky’s biography, published in 1975, I was deeply
shocked by its sympathetic view of its subject and quite astonishing defence
of Mosley’s turn to Fascism and anti-Semitism. Nicholas Mosley’s family-
orientated account (1982-3) was published hefore the release of the Home
Office’s ‘Mosley File’. Both books failed to shed light on the more mysterious
and hidden aspects of Mosley’s career: the attempts to influence the political
establishment, the covert ties to both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the
radio project, the ‘secret meetings’ with Fascist fringe groups in 1939-40 and
the creation of international neo-Fascist networks after 1945. Added to the
role of the ‘security services in the 1930s, Mosley’s ‘murky subterranean
xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

methods’ represented an important aspect of his activities, which deserve

attention.
This book grew out of a joint project with John Hope. My research, and
studies in general of British Fascism, owe a great deal to John, whose ability
to find sources outside the normal range of academic research opened up new
channels of enquiry; he has not always been credited for his endeavours. I have
benefited from long conversations with Bryan Clough, generous in sharing his
own research, Kevin Coogan, Kirn Rattan (for access to his unpublished
biography of John Amery), and Julian Putkowski and David Turner; both are
models for other researchers with their attention to detail and ability to
overturn accepted versions of history.
I would like to acknowledge the role of the leading expert on inter-war
British Fascism, Richard Thurlow, at Sheffield University, in paving the way
for studies in this field. The staff at the University’s Special Collections archive
on Fascism have been extremely helpful; research for this book will be placed
with this archive. Academics specializing in this competitive area, including
Dr G. T. Waddington, Colin Holmes, Professor David Marquand, Roger
Griffin, Nick Hodson, Dr Alexander Prokopov (author of a Russian book on
Mosley), Dr Eunan O’Halpin (for pointers to Irish documents), Peter Liddell
(for access to an interview with Mosley) and in Australia, Barbara Pomienes-
reski and Dr Andrew Moore, have been very co-operative. Dr David Rees
provided many documents and his bibliography of British Fascism was invalu-
able. For reasons best known to themselves, two academics were deliberately
uncooperative. In contrast, Dr Philip Coupland and Dr Graham Macklin were
always enthusiastic about swapping information and discussing Mosley. I am
grateful to Dr Keith Laybourn for reading sections dealing with the 1920s.
Some researchers in this field are wary of dealing with the Mosleyites,
fearing ‘contamination’. One or two have fallen for the Mosley line but not
talking to such witnesses is disgraceful. The Friends of Mosley is split between
those who want to keep Mosley’s name alive and those who only deal with
people sympathetic to his view. The late John Warburton was unfailingly
co-operative in answering my enquiries, even though we disagreed on almost
everything. I acknowledge David Irving’s contribution in bringing to light a
number of Italian documents. I would like to thank Michael Quill and John
Wallader (for the loan of photographs), and two anonymous ‘insiders’ who
knew Mosley in the fifties and sixties.
I would like to thank for their help Mrs Ian Hope-Dundas, Malcolm Fare,
David Sylvester, David Pryce-Jones, Sally Lescher, John Pearson and his wife,
Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, P. M. Luttman-Johnson, Michael Beaumont, Anne
Wolrige Gordon, David Metcalfe, Sir Dudley Forwood, Peter Huxley-Blythe,
Richard Cohen, Louise Gordon-Canning, Francis Beckett, Myles Eckersley,
James Clark (for use of a photograph of Peter Eckersley), Michael Neal, A.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Xiii
Baron, Nick Toczek, Larry O’Hara, Gerry Gable, J. Hancock, Nick Crowson
and Daniel Hodson.
The federal archives in Germany were exceptionally efficient in dealing with
requests for documents. I retrieved numerous files dealing with Mosley for the
period 1933-6, but those for 1937-9 were taken to Moscow at the end of
the war and have not been seen since. I received help from the Information
Centre at the German embassy in London, Dr Ansgar at the Rundfunkarchiv,
Dr Ritter and Herr Moser at the Bundesarchiy, Berlin, Karin Popp at the
Institut fiir Zeitgeschichte, Munich, the Forschungsstelle fiir Zeitgeschichte,
Hamburg, and Dr Grupp at the Auswartiges Amt in Bonn. Of particular
importance was the translation work carried out by Alan Carey (German),
Kazuo Ikegaya (Japanese) and Alfio Bernabei (Italian).
I am grateful for the help given by the staff at the Liddell Hart Centre at
the London School of Economics, the Imperial War Museum, the National
Archives at Kew, the National and the Military Archives, Dublin, the Public
Record Office, Belfast, the Australian National Archives, the Franklin D.
Roosevelt Library in Washington, the Military Intelligence Archives at Mary-
land, the Hoover Institute, California, Hull University. Special Collections and
the BBC archives. Help came from retired CIA officer Thomas T. Troy, who
forced the release of documents from the National Archives, Washington,
blocked by the British government, and Charles Higham and the Doheny
Library at the USC Cinema-Television Library, Los Angeles. The Wiener
Library in London, with its unique collection of anti-Fascist material, was a
wonderful trip back into a pre-war Eric Ambler-style world. There was ex-
ceptional service from staff of Huddersfield Library. Formerly one of Britain’s
treasures, the library system is now falling apart due to lack of funds.
Nicholas Mosley (Lord Ravensdale) was wonderfully generous in allowing
me to use many photographs that have never been seen before. I thank him
for interviews and use of the Irene Ravensdale diaries.
There was only one moment of doubt. When shown German documents
which made it plain that his father had planned an anti-Semitic campaign
some years before previously thought, Nicholas said, ‘Oh, I thought you would
leave me something of my father.’ He temporarily wavered in his co-operation
but then allowed me to see the Diana/Sir Oswald Mosley archive at the Special
Collections archive at Birmingham University before it was catalogued.
Unfortunately, almost all internal BUF documents have disappeared. Many
records were hidden in a railway arch during the war and were lost when it
was bombed. Others vanished, never to surface again when BUF members
were arrested in 1940. Diana Mosley said that at Crowood there had been ‘a
lot of BUFrecords but I am unsure what happened to them. Some were lost
with a fire at the house in Ireland after the war.’
Blackshirt finally reached the printed page with the enormous help of my
xiv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

agent Andrew Lownie, my long-suffering editor Eleo Gordon, my ‘secretary’

Linda Hamer, and my wife and sub-editor Stephanie. They have put up with
so much.

Stephen Dorril
Netherthong, September 2005
—s

Introduction

to stand
As if a man were author of himself
And I knew no other kin
William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

In the early 1970s, Sir Oswald Mosley asked his youngest brother, John, for
the diaries of their mother, Lady Mosley. She had kept a diary for over fifty
years and when she died in 1948 she left these to John. Mosley’s second wife,
Diana, recalled that John did not mind him taking the diaries which, initially,
were ‘hidden in a cupboard and forgotten about’. Then, seemingly on impulse,
Mosley decided to dispose of them. They were taken out and burnt in the
garden of their Paris home. Jerry, their chauffeur, ‘did the deed. It wasn’t a
very brilliant idea,’ recalled Diana. ‘I begged and implored him not to. I
thought it terrible of him. John had no idea that he intended to destroy them.’
According to Diana, the reason Mosley gave for their destruction was that
‘books were becoming more and more personal. He believed investigative
writers might use the diaries against him and his mother. OM thought that
writers might regard his mother, whom he adored, as trivial. She was very
devoted. She wasn’t a brilliant person. Completely a country woman, not
interested in ideas.’ He felt protective towards her, as ‘she wasn’t as strong as
she looked’.
Not all the diaries were burnt. Mosley kept back those to do with the first
four years of his life, and one of a slightly later date which survived half
scorched. He also tore out, and preserved, each entry for 2 January, his
mother’s birthday. According to Mosley’s son, Nicholas, the remaining pages
are testament to the emotional turmoil that beset this family — the ‘quarrels,
the separations, the lawsuits, the punch-ups’. Diana, however, challenged this
version. She described the diaries as merely dull and domestic. In them were,
however, details of the letters Mosley had written from school to his mother
and from the front line during the First World War.
When interviewed in her Paris home, Diana said her husband, who was
2 INTRODUCTION

‘action-orientated’, was ‘always looking to the future and claimed not to be

interested in the past. Not nostalgic, but - when it came to his memoirs he
remembered it all very well.’ She admitted that by burning the diaries he had
hoped to cauterize certain memories. Diana agreed that Mosley was a secretive
person. ‘Not about his policies about which he was completely open. Nor his
politics.’ She admitted, however, there were areas which he considered closed
and about which he refused to talk.
 ‘Tommy’

Oswald Ernald Mosley was born in London on 16 November 1896. It was a

difficult birth. His mother, twenty-one-year-old Katherine ‘Maud’ Heathcote,
second in a family of three sisters and two brothers, had married the heir of
Rolleston, Oswald Mosley, the year before. She wrote in her diary: ‘infant
Tommy began to arrive at 6.00 am and finished up after an awful 18 hours
at 11.40 (nearly midnight).’ Her own mother stayed all day and the family
doctor, Sir John Williams, ‘kept coming at intervals till 10.00 o’clock pm
when he gave me chloroform and saw me through with it’. Aware the priority
was to produce an heir, she underlined the entry: ‘Thankful. It’s a boy.’
Maud’s husband ‘“Waldie’, a rake, gambler and heavy drinker, wrote ‘endless
wires’ informing relatives of the grand event. On the following day he cele-
brated at the Derby. Maud was in a weak condition; Sir John ordered that she
not see anyone except her mother. This suited a mostly absent Waldie. A
month later Maud noted ‘Tommy weighed 12 lb 2 02’ and, despite his size,
added that the child was ‘seemingly ill a lot’.
With a note of ambivalence, Mosley wrote in his autobiography that he was
‘glad to know that I come from an old English and British family’. He added,
‘there my interest ends.’ He was always keen to have it known that he had
achieved success through his own efforts, by his own creation. And yet,
Mosley’s account of his life is littered with references to his upbringing and
; positive images of his family heritage.
The Mosleys were never one of the great families of England but this was
not through lack of money. Nicholas Mosley (1527-1612) was a prosperous
merchant, with interests in woollen manufacture. At the end of the sixteenth
century, he had been one of the ‘swindling sheep farmers’ who at that time
were expropriating the commonlands of the English people. In 1596 he paid
£3,500 for the manor, lordship and seigniory of Manchester, with ‘all its
appurtenances...’ Manchester was an unimportant market town with an
annual fair but it soon developed a monopoly of the woollen trade. With his
new-found wealth, Nicholas commissioned Inigo Jones to design his house,
Hough End Hall. He was also instrumental in raising soldiers and money to
4 BLACKSHIRT

the
finance the building of warships for the navy to defend England against
Spanish Armada.
In 1599, with a reputation for shrewd business, Nicholas became Lord
Mayor of London. His enthusiastic taxing of the London business community,
together with his financial success at what was organized piracy against the
Spaniards, earned him royal favour. Elizabeth I granted him a baronetcy and
a family motto, ‘Our Custom is above the Law’. Great wealth was created in
Manchester before the industrial revolution and different branches of the
Mosley family were able to add to an estate, which by the beginning of the
eighteenth century included properties in Staffordshire and Derbyshire -
among these was Rolleston-on-Dove in Staffordshire.
There developed two distinct divisions in the Mosley family — the Lancashire
branch on the one side and the migrants to Rolleston on the other. The
eccentric latter branch developed a farming tradition, deriving most of their
income from the land on which Manchester was built. The Lancashire Mosleys
farmed in Didsbury and Chorley, and were engaged inthe burgeoning cotton
trade. In 1729 Sir Oswald Mosley built the Cotton Exchange, which signalled
Manchester had arrived. With the expansion of Manchester as an urban
centre, new problems arose. The Mosleys played a ‘rough part’ in suppressing
the 1819 Peterloo Massacre and the Chartist riots. Mosley was often re-
proached for his family’s role but understandably was ‘never able to under-
stand why I should be held responsible for events so many years before I was
born’.
In the early nineteenth century, Manchester’s industrialists and traders took
exception to the manorial rights exercised by the Mosleys. These included a
‘tollage’ tax on all goods entering the market and ‘stallage’ on the rental of
market stalls. Municipal reformers clamoured for control of a town governed
by the ancient Court Leet. Reformers sought ‘incorporation’ and elected local
government, and after a fierce fight, in 1838 the reforms were conceded by
the Privy Council. Effective family influence in Manchester ceased in 1846
with the sale to the Corporation of the Lord of the Manor rights. The demise
of the Mosleys’ Court Leet suggests the normal process of modernization, as
the middle class replaced the aristocracy and ‘assumed the political power
appropriate to its economic position after decades of industrialization’. Man-
chester, however, was almost devoid of aristocratic influence. The Mosleys
belonged to the squirearchy and as county gentry took little interest in a town
unrepresented in Parliament.
The Mosleys remained attached to traditional values, cut off from industrial
England and suspicious of their aristocratic leaders at Westminster. In 300
years as a leading county family, only two Mosleys were elected to Parliament.
They were uninterested in academia, the arts and liberalism — ‘processes that
helped change and modernize sections of the aristocracy in the rgth century’.
 ‘TOMMY’ 5

The family’s sphere remained resolutely local and their influence limited
to
that of parsons and soldiers.
The major part of the Mosleys’ private property in Manchester was leased
out, with the family continuing to draw ground rents. Mosley’s great-
grandfather, Sir Oswald, received from the sale of manor rights an annual
income of £9,114, on a capital sum of £200,000. It was seen as a shrewd
bargain, which was resented. According to one account, the family had a
long-standing quarrel with Manchester’s Jewish businessmen. In the 1880s,
although Jews played only a minor role in money-lending, Walter Tomlinson,
a local journalist, noted that the identification of Jews with extortionate usury
was ‘extensively believed in’. Mosley’s grandfather was at the forefront of the
campaign against Jewish emancipation.
It was not long before merchants took up the Mosley seats at Ancoats and
Hulme. While bringing immediate financial reward, the sale of rights was in
the long term a disastrous error — the leaseholds were for 999 years instead of
the traditional 99. The family retired to 4,000 acres of farmland in Stafford-
shire, a feudal enclave that survived into the twentieth century. The Mosleys
simply ignored the nineteenth century. ,
Mosley’s mother’s family, the Heathcotes of Market Drayton, were Stafford-
shire gentry, though on a less grand scale than the Mosleys. Her father,
Justinian Heathcote, was a Tory squire and MP for Stoke-on-Trent. He
enthralled his grandson with tales of parliamentary life. Mosley considered
his grandfather a shrewd observer of politics. Justinian’s brother was created
Lord Anslow by the Liberal Party. The family had coal and steel interests
around Stoke and centuries-long roots in the country. This, Mosley suggested,
‘gave a certain vitality and resolution for very different purposes’.
For Mosley, it was ‘an abrupt transition in childhood from a wayside house
with a few rooms, a patch of garden, and one maidservant’ to the massive
edifice of Victorian comfort of Rolleston Hall. Situated in the picturesque
village of Rolleston-on-Dove, near Burton-upon-Trent, the Hall was a large,
- rambling, Italianate, ivy-clad mansion built on to the shell of the original hall,
which had burnt down in the 1870s. It had been inherited in 1879 by Mosley’s
grandfather, the fourth baronet, and was described by Mosley’s second wife
as ‘fairly ugly without and hideous within’.
The ‘chiming clocks inside, sweeping lawns outside’ were the sounds and
images Mosley remembered. Set in parkland, amid lakes and gardens, Rolles-
ton was maintained by over forty gardeners and menservants, along with
housemaids and cooks, and two still-room maids exclusively engaged in the
making of cakes. At Rolleston everything was managed with a stately ritual,
no more so than on Sunday when the well-ordered parade to church was
followed by luncheon where the roast was ceremoniously set down before
Mosley’s grandfather.
6 BLACKSHIRT

Rolleston had a self-contained agricultural economy. There was, Mosley

recalled, ‘little need to go outside the closed and charmed circle, and we
children never did. Our time was divided between farms, gardens and carpen-
ter’s shop, where the bearded Pritchard presided over a corps of experts who
kept all things going as their forebears had done for generations. We were
very close to nature.’ He was convinced his roots in the soil were ‘a very fine
start to life’. The pursuit of good stockbreeding, and the farm’s success in a
declining agricultural market, required estate workers to accept their allotted
place, with little scope for change. This social hierarchy deeply impressed itself
upon Mosley’s thinking.
Mosley’s misty-eyed childhood memories were overloaded with positive
images which ignored the experience of estate workers who made life at
Rolleston so pleasurable for his family. The squirearchy rejected the class
divisions of the city, which were only visible at church where the seating
reflected the true position of the lord of the manor and the villagers, but life
centred on a structured social hierarchy in which each person knew his place
and function. Women ‘curtsied, men doffed their caps and the curate made
obeisance’. It was to be the same in Mosley’s ‘classless’ Fascist movement.
Mosley described his mother as ‘extremely beautiful’; but most mothers are
beautiful to their sons. She had strong features and was tall at five feet ten
inches. Strictly religious, with an interest in spiritualism, she had, Mosley
recalled, ‘a robust, realistic attitude to life. Inever observed any male influence
in her life other than her family and an occasional preacher of exceptional
gifts. She was a paragon of virtue, but as loyal and vigorous as a lionness in
defence of her own.’ Friends remembered a good-natured woman of high
spirits.
To Maud, ‘Tom was God’. She treated him as an exclusive possession and
this intense emotional environment gave Mosley an unshakeable self-
assurance. He grew up knowing he was adored, that he was special, and that
‘anything he did must therefore be justified — the barbs and criticisms of lesser
mortals could never touch him’. Maud lavished suffocating yet emotionally
distant attentions on her son, and it was the lack of boundaries and the setting
of limits that distinguished his upbringing. Mosley’s sense of self and boundary
limits, however, developed not only in relation to his mother.
Mosley’s father, Waldie, was a slim-built young man who reached the
feather-weight semi-finals of the Amateur Boxing Association. He was ‘a
hard-riding, hard-drinking, hard-living Tory squire, much given to expletives’.
He had an almost complete freedom of inhibitions — a trait derived from his
own father — and was a typical aristocratic playboy. Waldie was a cad, who
preferred racing to farming and amused himself with gambling and woman-
izing. His exploits included shooting out lights in Piccadilly with a pistol from
a hansom cab before returning to the scene of his triumph to play a game of
 ‘TOMMY’ 7

golf down the street. Such hooliganism was classed as ‘high spirits’ among the
upper orders.
Unlike his own father, Waldie had little regard for the family’s reputation
and his betrayals greatly distressed his wife. He was described as a gloomy
blackguard but Mosley thought such a description ‘inappropriate, for my
father in my experience was the very reverse’. But not always. His mother’s
remaining diary reveals an instance of Tommy being bullied: ‘Had a miserable
time W[aldie] teasing Tom and I trying to defend him; and finally W caught
hold of my wrist hurting it badly.’ Fearing his father’s aggression, Mosley
idealized his mother, as the good parent who came to the rescue.
The Mosley marriage had been under strain and during 1901, when Tommy
was five, his mother found the quarrelling intolerable. Pregnant with a third
son — a second son, Edward, had been born two years previously — Maud left
her husband on account of his promiscuous sexual habits. This followed a
family trait, in that Waldie’s own father had pursued numerous extramarital
affairs and he, too, had separated from his wife. Tommy’s father’s sexual
habits contrasted strikingly with the Christian ethics and common sense exem-
plified by his mother. For Maud, it was not just the infidelities, but the dis-
covery of a bundle of letters from his mistresses, which revealed he was saying
the same things to them, and giving them the same presents, as he was to her.
Waldie’s father, Mosley recalled, ‘felt strongly that affairs of this nature should
be conducted with the utmost discretion and dignity’.
W. F. Mandle points out, in the only psychological study of Mosley, that
his father disappeared at the height of the critical Oedipal phase when a boy
discovers desires for his mother and a sense of rivalry with his father. The
resolution of the conflict in Tommy’s case was a dramatic one in psychological
terms, in that ‘the father left’.
A judicial separation followed, with Maud gaining custody of the three
boys and taking them to Belton Hall, on the borders of Market Drayton, near
her family’s country houses. However, she had received a meagre alimony and
they found themselves in relatively straitened circumstances, though that was
in relation to other members of their own family and class, and not in compari-
son with the general poverty of the countryside. Her chief anxiety, recalled
Mosley, was ‘to enable her sons to take part in the sports of the field ... the
only possible training for a man, and to which almost from infancy we were
ardently addicted’. Mosley now saw his father only rarely and regarded him
as ‘something of an ogre’.
With his father absent, Tommy occupied a special position in his mother’s
affections, being treated almost as a substitute for her husband. Maud did not
remarry; she showered Tommy with praise, referring to him as ‘my man-child’.
Mosley wrote of how he had always been devoted to his mother: how, as a
child, he had repaid her devotion to him by ‘gratuitous advice and virile
8 BLACKSHIRT

chase
assertion on every subject under the sun. I had no father in the house to
me around, to make me do little things for myself and keep my mouth shut until
my contribution was opportune.’ With no father to frustrate mother-f ixated
desires, such feelings can develop into a rejection of feminine values. The adult
Mosley sought out non-threatening, undemanding, dependent, even infantile
women.
Mosley saw women as symbolizing passivity, but rather than accept the
reality of interdependence, denied the need for others. He had an inflated
estimate of his own ability and his most secret desire — the one that inspires
all deeds and designs — was the need to be praised. Few would confess to this
but his autobiography comes close. That he suffered from overweening pride
was well testified by his friends.
In Maud’s attempts to compensate for his father’s desertion, she paid
Tommy overbearing attention in an attempt to make him stand out. She
supervised her son’s development, and conveyed to him her social and moral
standards. However, even though he was absent, it was his father who deter-
mined his attitudes as he began to resent his mother’s all-encompassing atten-
tions. Mosley carried from his background an attitude to manhood which
displayed a combination of sado-masochistic drives that were both aggressive
and passive — he both inflicted pain and experienced it. Interestingly, George
Orwell confided in his journal (August 1939) that he had ‘reliable information’
that Mosley — who was aggressively heterosexual — was ‘a masochist of the
extreme type in his sexual life’.
Mosley conformed to social rules more out of fear of punishment than from
a sense of guilt. This made it impossible for him to experience concern for
others. Narcissists such as Mosley function perfectly happily in the world with
a mask of charm, although this may be no more than ‘the aristocrat’s frequent
indifference to the existence or feelings of anything outside his own charmed
world’. Many noted Mosley’s immense charm and perfect manners.
Nicholas wrote that his own father had ‘no father to instil in him knowledge
of limits imposed by morals and tradition’. But that is not the case. Tommy’s
grandfather assumed the role of substitute male parent, albeit from an
emotional distance. The ‘company of one or the other grandfather,’ Mosley
recalled, ‘was constant, and no one could have been more male than these
two’. Tommy associated his grandfather with idealized virtues. Maud often
took her sons to their paternal grandfather’s Staffordshire home. Victorian
English country-house life was ‘dominated by a sort of philistine masculinity’
and little had changed at Rolleston, where sport remained the chief subject of
activity by day and discussion by night.
Mosley’s grandfather was a national figure — he was the model for the
traditional John Bull. The cartoons of Sir John Tenniel, published in Punch
during the nineteenth century, had made the honest, solid farmer, John Bull,
 ‘TOMMY’ 9

into a popular figure, with his Union flag waistcoat and accompanying
bulldog.
A judge at agricultural shows, he was well known in those circles
for his
knowledge of the breeding of shorthorns and shire horses. Sir Dudley
For-
wood, later the Duke of Windsor’s equerry, was related to Tommy on both
his parents’ side. ‘My father and mother constantly stayed with Tommy’s
grandfather at Rolleston. They told me that Sir Oswald would discuss the
breeding of the Beef, Mutton, Pork or Poultry.’
Mosley considered his grandfather ‘a man in every sense’. In his youth he
had been runner-up in the British amateur middle-weight boxing champion-
ship. He was, Mosley wrote, ‘a child of nature with a simple and generous
nature’. He evoked ‘almost universal affection from all who met him in his
small world or in wider circles, where he moved with the same unaffected
friendship as he did among his tenants, work people, country’. Although not
part of the cosmopolitan aristocractic elite, Sir Oswald’s contacts with the
world outside included Bertie, the Prince of Wales (Edward VII), and the
newspaper proprietor Lord Northcliffe, for whom he originated the Standard
Bread campaign in 1911. Sir Oswald had written to the Daily Mail offering
to anyone who sent a postcard a small specimen loaf made from wheat milled
in the traditional way between stones. Mail journalist Hamilton Fyfe recalled
that Standard Bread was pushed by Northcliffe until ‘everyone was sick of it’.
There was an atmosphere of strife between the preceding generations and
Mosley was aware his grandfather had a robust dislike for his son. Grandfather
Mosley saw Tommy as a substitute son with the result that Waldie resented the
understanding which existed between his own father and Tommy. Mosley knew
that ‘psychological wiseacres will at once draw their conclusions with the
estrangement between father and grandfather’ but questioned their pretensions.
There is no doubt that Mosley’s childhood was action-orientated and ful-
filled his view that ‘the development or atrophy of the constitution depends
on continual exertion of the will’. Tommy underwent his ‘training to be a
man’ in the absence of his father and largely developed his masculinity through
identification with popular cultural images and via the role model of his
grandfather. He thus idealized the male role and appropriated those
components of masculinity he feared would otherwise be used against him.
It was tradition that family quarrels should be aired publicly and each father
challenged his son to a boxing match in front of assembled servants. Boxing,
fencing and hunting were part of an aggressive upbringing in which being the
winner was all important. The combination of this hyper-masculinity, which
was a defence against feelings of dependence, and the lack of boundaries,
which gave little consideration to others’ feelings, ensured that Mosley was
‘always in too much of a hurry. I rushed towards life with arms outstretched
to embrace ... every varied enchantment of a glittering, wonderful world; a
life rush, to be consummated.’
10 BLACKSHIRT

was how
Recalling his childhood, Mosley said his mother’s main problem
ted nothing,
to pay the boys’ public school fees. Although their father contribu
to ask either family
it was ‘out of the question to my mother’s reserved pride
y at the ‘ample comforts ’ of his
for help’. However, if the family looked enviousl
ge that Tommy would eventual ly
grandfather’s estate, it was with the knowled
inherit it.
In 1906, Mosley went to West Downs, Winchester, at the age of nine as a
solitary, imaginative boy, prone to daydreaming. He was later joined by his
brother Edward. Under its first headmaster, Lionel Helbert, West Downs
achieved pre-eminence as the best English prep school. With its swimming bath
and electric light, the school was considered very modern. Among Mosley’s
contemporaries were members of the Tennant family and the sons of military
families, including John Sinclair, who went on to become Chief of MI6.
Mosley was bright but did not shine, which he put down to the ‘stress of
growth’. Though regarded by some as rather stupid, essays of the period show
he had ‘developed the art of self-expression’. He did’establish a reputation
among fellow pupils as a debater.
The school’s character was set by Helbert, who instilled in pupils a strong
tradition of community service. A contemporary of Mosley, Rolf Gardiner,
who became a ‘blood-and-soil’ National Socialist in the thirties, recalled that
Helbert wanted every human being to succeed according to the laws of his
own destiny and character, and ‘sought to endow small boys with an inner
fund of inextinguishable faith and fervour’. Mosley appears to have developed
his love of pranks from the headmaster, who used them to keep pupils on
their toes.
Helbert admired men of action: there was a custom for boys with grudges
to challenge others to a boxing match before their equals in the gym. Mosley
was in the Cricket First Eleven and succeeded at swimming, his favourite
pastime. He was cast in a French play, /’Avare, wearing a female dress. He
was later venerated at the school as a rising political star but there developed,
old boy Daniel Hodson noted, ‘a sort of conspiracy not to mention Mosley,
once he had put himself beyond the pale by his activities in the 1930s’. Ina
school play, The Venture, written in the thirties by headmaster Kenneth
Tindall, the name Mosley was featured as a swearword.
By now Mosley’s father had obtained a court order for his three sons to
visit him in the holidays. During one stay, when Mosley was twelve, their
father told tales of actresses of his acquaintance and urged them to kiss the
parlourmaid in front of the cook. Mosley’s memory of his father, who was
installed at Rolleston while his grandfather retired to a more modest house,
was inconsistent. He claimed his father was a ‘jolly fellow’ with whom he
established a happy relationship through their mutual love of horses. However,
he also recalled that when the three boys visited their father, they ‘sat around
 ‘TOMMY’ Ir
the house in postures of gloom and despair until he could bear it no
longer
and sent us back to my mother’.
Mosley’s next school, Winchester, England’s oldest, had been founded
in
1382 by William of Wykeham as a monastic institution. By the beginning
of
the twentieth century, public schools had come to represent a revered ideal
in
the popular imagination. ‘Eton, Harrow and Winchester are three schools of
which all Englishmen are proud,’ claimed the Sphere. They educate in a
‘gentlemanly tradition of loyalty, honour, chivalry, Christianity, patriotism,
sportsmanship and leadership’. These were the qualities deemed suitable for
an officer class intent on entering the army.
Mosley entered Winchester in September 1909 at the age of twelve. He
found the experience tougher than usual and admitted that entering a year
early was ‘one of the errors of my perpetual sense of haste’. He lacked a ‘calm,
male influence to say: what is the hurry?’. He hated the dreary waste of public
school life, which was ‘only relieved by learning and homosexuality’, though
he admitted that he had no capacity for the former and never had any taste
for the latter. His dandified appearance, being very tall - by the age of fourteen
he had already reached his full height of six feet two — with ‘striking, dark,
good looks’ and his suits from Savile Row, made him subject to male attention.
He was very conscious of his appearance; he wore his thick black hair parted
down the middle, as was the custom of fellow Wykehamists. His peers noticed
a certain theatricality about his appearance with its suggestion of ‘a stage
villain’.
To most boys, Mosley came over as being uninterested in work and aloof.
He neither socialized nor, he admitted, was he a rebel, but kept himself to
himself, sustained by daily letters from his mother. During the holidays he
spent his happiest moments with horse, dog and gun, ferreting with one of his
Heathcote cousins. Hunting was almost a religious observance. There was
rough shooting at his maternal grandfather’s and coarse fishing at Rolleston.
Over the winter of 1909-10 Mosley’s annotated game register recorded him
shooting fifty partridges, eighteen pheasants, eleven rabbits and ten hares.
‘These were the happy crumbs,’ he recalled, ‘which fell from the well-laden
tables of two grandfathers.’
At home Mosley came across the social anti-Semitism prevalent in English
society, though there is no trace of anti-Semitism in his own private life.
During his interrogation before the Advisory Committee on Internment during
the Second World War, Mosley told his inquisitors he had first come across
anti-Semitism ‘in my youth where most of one’s friends and relations would
not have Jews in their houses’. It was part of ‘an old English growth’ — a kind
of ‘whimsical brutality’ but ‘kinder’ than that expressed by the Germans.
Just before his fourteenth birthday, Mosley underwent, as a typically sensi-
tive adolescent, a spiritual experience. It did not provide any sense of revelation
12 BLACKSHIRT

of
but he claimed to have become ‘immensely impressed by the doctrine
Christian and believed in God, but also admitted he was
love’. Mosley was a
intrigued by the pagan world, which lingered on at Rolleston, and by his
mother’s spiritualism. He skipped over these areas in his autobiography, even
©
though his spiritual experience coincided with him developing a sense of
destiny, which he submerged in the ‘first exuberance of physical vitality’.
Mosley’s mother found it a struggle to meet the school fees and his grand-
father helped by setting up in 1910 a trust fund for the boys. Mosley escaped
from his dull existence at Winchester to the gymnasium. Lithe and quick on
his feet, by fifteen he had developed into a formidable pugilist in advance of
his years. The most potent influence was the boxing coach, Sergeant Ryan.
Mosley won the light-weight championship and ‘experienced for the first time
incredulity that I could be winning’. He noted that his ‘tendency to be doubtful
of success until it was proven carried me to remarkable lengths in this first
athletic encounter’. This is the first instance of the hesitancy which was a part
of Mosley’s personality. Although his mother instilled in him that he was
destined for success, the bullying which he received in childhood from his
father, and which continued at Winchester, seemed to stunt his natural self-
assurance. It is perceived that Mosley — and he himself added to this perception
— was always decisive. In fact, he was often unsure of his position and failure
resulted from him choosing the wrong moment to jump.
When Mosley announced his intention of entering the Public Schools’ box-
ing championship, headmaster Dr Rendell, who regarded the noble art with
distaste, forbade his participation. Mosley subsequently discarded his gloves
in favour of the sword and came under the charge of the fencing master,
Sergeant Major Adam. Mosley said he and the boxing coach Sergeant Ryan
had more influence on him than any schoolmaster.
Military training in schools had been regarded as a foreign concept but
following the army reforms of 1906, the Officer Training Corps (OTC) at
Winchester had been set up with the support of the War Office. Membership
was not compulsory, but neither was it voluntary, since war was considered a
probability. Those who took the corps seriously were often ‘a lonely, earnest
soul who appeared to see cadetship rather as a form of moral callisthenics
fitting the individual for citizenship than a training in field combat’. This
expression of militarism was derived from the late Victorian period romantic
revival of chivalry; ‘a conscious anachronism in which art, literature and fancy
dress played a large part’. At Winchester chivalrous ideals were celebrated
with the decorative figures of King Arthur and his knights.
An important part of the OTC ritual was 24 May, Empire Day, originally a
commemoration of Queen Victoria’s birthday. It came to represent ‘something
every bit as atavistic and fundamental as even Kipling could have wished’.
Amid much flag waving, OTC members paraded and were encouraged to be
 ‘TOMMY’ 13

aware of their duties as citizens of the world’s greatest empire. These rituals
were remembered by Mosley when he set up his paramilitary Fascist
movement.
Fencing dominated Mosley’s life and he won his school’s foils competition
against boys several years older. On 14 March 1912, aged fifteen, he rep-
resented Winchester in the Public Schools’ competition, in both foil and sabre.
The championship- once won by Winston Churchill — was organized by the
army; an illustration of militarism’s growing influence. Mosley captained
the fencing team against Eton and gained fifteen points without letting his
opponents touch him. He was the first boy to win both foil and sabre, and the
youngest winner of the two events. Peter Portal (later Viscount Portal, Marshal
of the RAF) was a team member. ‘We were rather good at fencing as school-
boys go and easily defeated the Eton team.’ Fellow pupils remembered their
‘extreme surprise’ when news of Mosley’s victory was read out by the house-
master: they had not even known that he had taken up fencing. One contem-
porary wrote that he was ‘precocious, impatient, full of contempt for most
boys of his own age, and a complete hedonist’.
In his last year of school, Mosley applied himself to academic work but was
let down by indecipherable handwriting. It was strange, a schoolmaster noted,
that ‘this hand can do anything with a sword, and nothing with a pen’. Mosley
said the problem was due to his mind moving too fast for his hand. In such
cases, graphologist Ellen Cameron notes, there is a common factor — lack of
consideration for the recipient. Diana Mosley, too, ascribed his poor writing
to his ‘impoliteness and indifference’.
Mosley’s style of writing generally indicates a person given to excessive
rationalization, a characteristic of which he was guilty. His writing was typical
of people who are self-indulgent and not well disciplined, but well adjusted
emotionally to everyday life. His large signature displayed a wish to impress
as someone of considerable importance. Mosley also had a tendency to enlarge
his writing, a trait shared with people in the public eye. Such people are
enthusiastic and self-confident, but unwilling to be confined or restricted in
any way. Mosley’s handwriting portrayed intelligence, will-power and the
desire to achieve great things. However, given his tendency to pose, the writer’s
wish for success ‘may not materialise but rather turn in on the writer who
would possibly become boastful and swollen-headed’.
Mosley left Winchester at the end of 1912. Fellow Wykehamist and Labour
Cabinet Minister Richard Crossman recalled that there were a few schoolboys
in ‘mental struggle with the tradition and in lifelong reaction against it’. These
‘radical throw-outs’ often becametraitors to their class. Certainly, Mosley hated
his time there with an intensity that went on into old age. In the late summer
of 1913 he sojourned in Brest, France, learning the language and taking the
opportunity to compete with experienced fencers. On his return to England,
14 BLACKSHIRT
and
seventeen-year-old Tommy listed his occupation as ‘private gentleman’
was intent on joining the army.
Maud was finding it difficult to fund the boys’ education. In early 1914 she
was forced to sell her jewellery, an action resented by the younger brothers,
since the lion’s share of the trust had been spent on Tommy. Fourteen-year-old
Ted was destined to pursue a career in the army, while twelve-year-old John
attended naval college before going on to Eton. The three brothers only saw
each other during the holidays. According to John’s son, Simon, on reaching
adulthood their relationship became ‘so sketchy as to be virtually non-
existent’. The three brothers were all tremendously egocentric, but Tommy
was in ‘more of a state of megalomania’.
In January 1914, after a spell of cramming for the exam, Mosley entered
the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. His short nine months as a cadet were
‘one of the happiest times of my entire life’. The rather isolated boy came out
of his shell and developed into a boisterous, rebellious young man. He returned
to his first love, horse riding, and took up polo, though he had ‘nothing like
the capacity for handling horses’ of his brother; Ted later entered the 1st Royal
Dragoons and became an instructor at Weedon Cavalry School. Mosley lost
out as a polo cup winner because a practical joker sent his favourite horse to
the wrong college. He later dealt with this senior cadet with a knockout
punch. His own love of practical joking gave him a frivolous image but
contemporaries noted a streak of cruelty in his character.
Sandhurst’s history was punctuated by rowdiness and violence. It taught
its upper-class trainees ‘impeccability on parade and hooliganism off-duty’.
Mosley admitted cadets broke every rule and off parade had no regard for
discipline. They spent free time in London provoking ‘fights with the chuckers-
out at places like the Empire’; the fights being more important than pursuing
women. Back at barracks, they were helped to bed ‘as if by nannies by the
same sergeants who, the next day, would revile them for any indecorum on
the parade ground’. This was all part of a so-called Corinthian tradition.
Older cadets decided that an arrogant Mosley needed to be taken down a
peg or two and went to his room to punish him for his insolence. John Masters,
in Bugle and Tiger, created the legend that Mosley, ‘detested by his brother
officer cadets, was thrown out of a window’. In fact, in seeking recruits
for retaliatory action, he slipped on a ledge and fell, slightly injuring a leg.
Skirmishing continued all weekend, as a result of which fifteen cadets, includ-
ing Mosley, were packed off to reflect on their ill behaviour. His friend Robert
Bruce Lockhart believed Mosley ‘bore a grudge against society’ because of
this incident.
Mosley was at home when war was declared in August 1914 and was
ordered back to Sandhurst. He recalled ‘returning through London and walk-
ing past Buckingham Palace, the enormous crowds cheering in immense
 ‘TOMMY’ 15
enthusiasm ... there was a tremendous excitement’. Passed fit for active
service, Mosley was back in E Company for the final weeks of arduous training.
He rushed through the course, though his essays were cited as models of
precision and clarity, and he was marked fifth of the cavalry entrants. ‘The
change between peace and war was one of the most dramatic moments of my
life. The playboy of the summer became the dedicated soldier of autumn.’
Most of Mosley’s friends were cavalrymen and his fellow cadets — Mike
Wardell, John Gray and Bruce Ogilvie - ‘all had this mania to get into it
because we were very much afraid the war would be over before we got there’.
He recalled a Punch cartoon showing a cavalry subaltern’s mess with the line
— ‘We’ve just time to beat them between the Polo and the Grouse.’ The
cadets regarded war as a tremendous adventure in which they were eager to
Participate. It was, Mosley recalled, ‘almost a sporting event’.
 2

The First World War

On the outbreak of war in August 1914, at Sandhurst Mosley’s school-age

volunteers grew impatient, worried they might ‘miss the adventure of a life-
time’. They were gripped with a condition approaching despair in their desire
to transfer to the battlefield. Their main fear was that the war would end
before they arrived at the front. Mosley wrote: ‘Never had men appeared more
eager to be killed.’
Mosley had originally ial to join the 17th Lancers. Their commander,
Vivyan Lockett, was a cousin and a leading polo player for England. It was
such family connections, he knew, which took one into regiments. In the end,
however, Mosley was persuaded to make the switch to a sister regiment, the
16th Queens Light Dragoons, by ‘a grand old figure’, Major Sir Lovelace
Stamer, a friend of his mother’s family.
The seventeen-year-old was gazetted to the 16th Lancers on 1 October
1914. In receipt of his commission, Second Lieutenant Mosley reported to the
Curragh in County Kildare. Twenty miles south of Dublin, the Curragh was
the depot for the Lancers. As part of the 3rd Cavalry Brigade, the 16th had
been sent to Ireland in the expectation of trouble from the Ulster Volunteer
Association in the wake of Prime Minister Asquith’s Home Rule Act. In
organizing the Volunteers, the eminent lawyer and leading Unionist MP Sir
Edward Carson acted in a reckless manner, conveying the impression, which
turned out to be false, that he was about to organize a military coup in Ulster.
At the Curragh there was a fear Ulster-born officers might disappear and that
others would resign if ordered north. The 16th moved out of Dublin just
before Mosley arrived. The regiment’s historian noted the reluctance to
‘slaughter loyal Ulstermen for the benefit of disloyal Dublin’.
Mosley was the youngest member of his regiment which, just before Christ-
mas, embarked for France. Expecting to be sent into action, Mosley discovered
there was no need for cavalry; instead, he found himself engaged in routine
drill. Eager to join the fray, he responded to an appeal for aerial observers
and transferred to the Royal Flying Corps (RFC).
Established in 1912, the RFC quickly developed a high profile and dynamic
image through the propaganda efforts of Northcliffe’s Daily Mail. The news-
 THE FIRST WORLD WAR 17

paper had been at the forefront of publicizing the achievements of air

heroes,
whose autographs were eagerly sought by schoolboys. The aeroplane
caught
the spirit of the time. There was a widespread belief that it would ‘usher in
a
new age in human development’, arriving, as it did, ‘on the heels of an
apparently never-ending series of technological innovations’. Popular attitudes
towards aviation were tied to feelings of patriotism and nationalism, and fear
that an air war would be more devastating than anything that had gone before.
However, the eagerness of young men to take to the air was seen as a sign of
national vitality and an indication that they were willing ‘to give up their lives
for the sake of higher values’. In this romantic vision of a new frontier, the
sky became a metaphor for ‘a bright and shining future’. A decade later,
aviators became a strong faction inside British Fascism.
The RFC was made up of two wings and comprised just sixty-four aircraft
and fewer than 900 men. No. 1 Wing was commanded by Hugh Trenchard.
On 24 January 1915 Mosley was posted to the 2nd Wing headquarters at
St Omer as an observer. Two weeks later he joined No. 6 Squadron, recently
formed at Farnborough. Led by Lieutenant-Colonel Burke, 6 Squadron was
established on the coast near Dunkirk to assist the projected relief of Antwerp.
Mosley was originally stationed with B Flight at Bailleul, midway between
Poperinge and Armentiéres.
Mosley took his inaugural flight the morning after arrival at Bailleul with
Burke: “We flew along the lines not knowing if I was on my head or my heels.’
It was a bumpy day, but he soon picked it up. His commander, Captain
‘Johnny’ Hawker, wrote that flying set you ‘free from the clogging clamour of
this world’ and into the ‘pure beauty of the skies above the cloud-damped
earth’. According to the squadron’s history, he inspired his men and was loved
by all who served under him. His ‘chicks’, Hawker wrote home, ‘are all
bachelors and confirmed women-haters of 20 years experience or thereabouts
and therefore very amusing’. He ran ‘a school and not a Squadron — there is
only one older than myself and the majority are not yet of age. They are a
splendid lot tho’.’
Hawker was ‘nervous as a cat on hot bricks before he flew’ and would not
eat. This worried his young, inexperienced observer. There was a belief that a
pilot might faint in the air if he flew on an empty stomach. But the moment
the plane left the ground, Mosley found that Hawker was transformed and
became the ‘boldest, perhaps the most reckless, certainly the most utterly
indifferent to personal safety when a sense of duty was involved. He’d turn
around 50 miles behind German lines to fight half-a-dozen people if he got
the chance.’
As an observer on the three-hour reconnaissance flights which flew up to
seventy miles behind enemy lines, Mosley had to survey sitings of German
defences, changes of gun placements and troop dispositions. He admitted he
18 BLACKSHIRT

was never handy with compasses and map, but then little attention was paid
to the reports. Cloud and mist proved to be a major limitation and there was
no effective co-operation with ground units.
Flying at only seventy to eighty miles an hour, which might drop to thirty
in a stiff wind in the reliable BE2Cs (known as ‘Stability Janes’) and at a
maximum ceiling of 6,000 feet, pilots and observers ran a considerable risk
from heavy ground fire. On 5 March 1915 Hawker was sent out with Mosley
on a wild scheme flying low over the lines to spot gun flashes. Hawker wrote
home that they had to ‘crash up and down between 500 and 800 feet just our
side of the line. Occasionally we got rather near the Huns and were potted at
but our people were very good and left us alone so we were all right. Quite
the most amusing joy-ride I’ve had, flung about all over the place in a gale,
and results quite successful, in fact it established a precedent.’ Mosley recalled
that ‘no machine ever came back without being plastered by fire with holes
through the wing’. A fellow observer told Mosley: “You know, we’re much
too young to be killed.’ Three weeks later he was dead.
There were few opportunities for dogfights, which were regarded as too
dangerous. Nevertheless, public imagination was captured by the idea of the
air ace, even if they built up their scores by attacking inexperienced pilots and
defenceless reconnaissance aircraft. Firing through the propellers would often
bring a German machine down. British air losses during 1915 were serious,
particularly when the Germans began placing their accurate guns eight to each
corner of a square, producing a blanket air barrage of thirty-two shells.
Mosley wrote asking his mother not to grieve if he should be killed, as he
was sure he would find death ‘a most interesting experience’. He had just
endured the common sensation of a great exhilaration at coming under fire
for the first time, but it was ‘a peculiar ecstasy which soon wore off’. Mosley
saw his share of death. When hit, men stayed with their machines until they
crashed; there were no parachutes. He recalled that the ‘flimsy contraption of
wood and canvas would then almost invariably catch fire as the petrol
exploded from the burst tank. The most fortunate were those killed instantly
in the crash, or first shot dead.’ Mosley’s roommate was shot down. He saw
his shattered skull amid the wreckage of the plane, though the image which
stuck in his mind was his smiling face of a few hours earlier.
On 14 March the squadron was transferred inside the Belgian border to
Poperinge, six miles west of Ypres. Captain Louis Strange took over B Flight.
Mosley flew regularly with Strange who, in contrast to Hawker, was ‘com-
pletely calm, cold and resolute’. Poperinge was regarded as ‘a rotten aerodrome
... no sheds, no good billets’, though the resident French pilots received the
6th with great hospitality.
While soldiers viewed the airmen with admiration, this was also mixed with
a certain bitterness and the suspicion that they had ‘somehow managed to
 THE FIRST WORLD WAR 19

escape from the degradation and daily. torment of the trenches’. The
fact that
the airmen were only ever a small proportion of the total Expeditionary Force
contributed to the myth of airmen as ‘an elite of a corps d’élite’. Peter Liddle
suggests in his study of the airmen that the technology of the air war ‘preserved
an individuality which was so swamped by sheer numbers and the nature of
the work of the Army’. Mosley enjoyed good living conditions and there was
a relaxed informality about billet life which was absent in the army, though
RFC officers still expected to be waited upon at dinner. Food and drink were
plentiful. There was a distinctive sense of liberation among the aircrews, which
exhibited itself in an ‘extreme gaiety’, living, as they did, in the shadow of a
short life expectancy.
Mosley knew that trench casualties were very heavy but thought ‘death was
more natural in those bleak surroundings. We were like men having dinner
together in a country house-party, knowing that some must soon leave us for
ever; in the end, nearly all.’ He flew with a number of famous pilots, including
A. J. Capel (later Air Vice-Marshal), Lieutenant Hereward de Havilland,
whose brother was the aircraft designer Sir Geoffrey, and Captain John Liddell,
awarded the VC posthumously. Liddell died of his wounds soon after landing,
having flown back his damaged aircraft a considerable distance. ‘It seemed,’
Mosley wrote, ‘that the will alone held the spark of life until the task was
done; it was extinguished as will relaxed.’ Ona previous occasion at Poperinge,
when Liddell landed in a pond, Mosley escaped with a minor leg injury.
With clearing skies at the end of March 1915, reconnaissance missions took
place daily. Cameras recorded enemy positions, with photographs developed
by a new Photographic Section whose head, Lieutenant J. T. C. Brabazon,
was one of Mosley’s most enduring friends. An international racing driver, in
1909 ‘Ivan’ became the first Englishman to make a powered flight in the
United Kingdom and later won the £1,000 prize offered by the Mail for the
first English aircraft to fly one mile. He was holder of Pilot’s Certificate No. 1
of the Royal Aero Club and pioneered the use of aerial photography. A witty,
genial character, Mosley thought Ivan combined ‘the most indolent demeanour
with an exceptional capacity for action’.
In April Mosley’s squadron turned to bombing, using hand grenades
dropped from 2,000 feet. Hawker was the first to drop a 100 |b bomb which
he strapped to the plane. On the 18th he dropped bombs on a Zeppelin shed
at Cognelée, outside Ghent. This earned him a DSO, even though the Zeppelin
LZ-35 which was supposed to be inside had crashed five days earlier.
The Western Front could not be described as heroic or chivalrous, but
politicians sought inspiration from the airmen, whose war could be portrayed
in romantic terms. David Lloyd George lauded the ‘Young Heroes of the
Flying Corps’ and considered ‘every aeroplane flight a romance, every record
an epic’. Pilots were looked on as aristocrats of the air but the contribution
20 BLACKSHIRT

by real aristocrats was meagre. A few patricians did fly and among the earliest
were Lord Hugh Cecil (after the war a political colleague of Mosley and
Brabazon), Lord George Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington) and the Master
of Semphill, who both turned to the extreme right.
The air war offered an heroic alternative to the squalid and anonymous war
in the trenches. Much was made of the custom of giving the downed enemy a
decent burial and ensuring news of their fate went back to their squadrons.
Mosley recalled that airmen on each side ‘sometimes dropped wreaths to
mourn the death of a great opponent held in honour for his courage and
chivalry’; a practice which faltered later in the war, when there was, Times
correspondent Aubrey Leo Kennedy agreed, ‘little of the spirit of 1914-15
left, of great adventure, almost of a crusade’. When Mosley rushed to aid a
German pilot who had crashed in a nearby field, he was appalled to discover
that villagers had already put him to death.
While Mosley was on leave, he learned of his grandfather’s death. Dogged
by diabetes, he died aged sixty-seven. Mosley’s father nominally inherited
Rolleston but his grandfather had arranged that much of his legacy bypassed
his son and went straight to his grandson. Mosley was now, on paper, a
wealthy man, inheriting £60,000 (£3 m) and, eventually, the lion’s share of
land then worth £274,000 (£13 m).
By mid April 1915, Mosley was in France for the second Battle of Ypres.
The Germans sought to break the deadlock in Flanders by mounting mass
attacks on the British lines. They failed and a seventeen-mile salient was
created around the Flemish town of Ypres. Not far away, in the trenches, was
a German soldier, Adolf Hitler. His impression of Ypres was of towers ‘so
near that I could all but touch them’. Encircled by a medieval moat, the town
was dominated by the towers of St Martin’s Cathedral and the architectural
glory of the Cloth Hall. The Ypres Salient took on ‘an emotional significance
which its strategic value never for a moment warranted’. On 20 April the
Germans subjected Ypres to heavy bombardment. The Cloth Hall was utterly
destroyed. ‘The work of centuries of genius took only hours to destroy,’
lamented Mosley.
Mosley had been ordered to help with the communications of the 2nd
Canadian Infantry Brigade, which was holding dugouts on the Salient’s eastern
fringe. Royal Engineers had been experimenting with No. 6 Squadron on
wireless signalling from aircraft to the artillery. Mosley helped set up a trans-
mitter to radio back to base the location of gun placements. During his
secondment, he witnessed the first gas attack of the war.
The 22nd of April was a warm spring day. At 5 p.m. Strange was on
reconnaissance over German lines when he saw a burst of flares, which sig-
nalled the release of chlorine gas. His attention was attracted by what appeared
to be streams of yellowish-green smoke coming from the German trenches.
 THE FIRST WORLD WAR 221

The smoke swept towards the French lines, occupied by an African battalion
,
the ‘Turcos’. Mosley and the Canadians heard the outbreaks of violent
cough-
ing as the Turcos fled to escape the gas. Mosley became aware of a ‘curious
acrid smell and a feeling of nausea’. The Canadians advised them to ‘urinate
on our handkerchiefs and place them over our mouths and noses; above all
we must make no movement which required deep breathing’. Mosley suffered
no consequences from the gas but hundreds of troops were poisoned, though
only a few died. The gas had been effective more as a psychological weapon:
it was the panic which caused the greatest damage.
‘It was an unforgettable spectacle,’ Mosley recalled. ‘As dusk descended
there appeared to our left the blue-grey masses of the Germans advancing
steadily behind their lifting curtain of fire. It appeared there was nothing to
stop them.’ When Strange flew above the Salient he discovered a new front
line close to Ypres. The ground lost had no strategic value but British C.-in-C.
Sir John French insisted on defending it, with appalling consequences. War
correspondent Philip Gibbs wrote that ‘bits of bodies, and clots of blood, and
green, metallic-looking slime made by the explosive gases, were floating on
the surface of that water below the crater banks. Our men lived there and died
there ... Scraps of flesh, booted legs, blackened heads, eyeless heads, came
falling over them when the enemy trench-mortared their position.’
Making his way back to his squadron, Mosley passed through Ypres and
had the extraordinary experience of finding himself alone in its great square
under tremendous bombardment. It was the most poignant memory of his
life. He was spellbound by the ‘enduring vision as noble buildings collapsed
in a sad fatigue born not of centuries but of a moment of bitterness, like a
child’s house of cards under a wanton hand, as heavy shells descended in
direct hits’. He suddenly realized ‘what the Europeans were capable of doing
to each other; the waste, the tragic absurdity’. The Germans failed to launch
a mass assault to capture Ypres but the British still suffered 60,000 casualties.
This, combined with lack of ammunition, scuppered any chance of a successful
counter-attack. Sir John French blamed the failure on the shortage of shells.
The subsequent Shells Scandal had important repercussions at home.
On 23 April Poperinge’s aerodrome came under German shellfire, forcing
the squadron to retire to Abeele. On the following day, Mosley was ordered
home for medical treatment. During a flight a piece of shell hit his head and
knocked him unconscious, leaving him with slight concussion. On another
occasion he crash-landed and damaged his knee when thrown forward in the
_ cockpit. In London, he visited a bone setter who treated the knee. Although
ordered to rest, Mosley indulged in high spirits in Brighton with an aspiring
airman, Geoffrey Dorman (later a leading Fascist). He also had his first love
affair with an older woman, Lady Wodehouse, ‘a wax doll with her white
fluffy hair and fur cap and muffs’.
22 BLACKSHIRT

near
In early May Mosley trained as a pilot at the Shoreham Flying School,
The instructo r was French pioneer aviator Maurice Farman, whose
Brighton.
rushed
outdated Longhorn aircraft was used for training. Many pupils were
through their solo flight before they were ready. ‘At the sight of the craft
before us,’ one of Mosley’s contemporaries recalled, ‘we put our heads on one *
side like puzzled terriers.’ Mosley was more experien ced than most but the °
solo flight was still ‘a terrifying mixture of exhilarat ion, terror, panic and
desperate concentration’. In fact, he was overconfident and, with his mother
watching, crashed his plane.
Touching down too fast, Mosley’s machine hit the ground with a bang
before bouncing back into the sky. Swept up by a changing wind, he found
himself flying at 70 mph towards a hangar. He managed to open the throttle
and miss the hangar by a hair’s breadth. His mother was impressed by his
antics but Farman had made ready for a disaster. With difficulty, he made a
pancake landing, smashing the aircraft’s undercarriage in a heavy crash. His
legs were driven hard into the floor of the cockpit and injured, one of them
severely. Mosley scrambled out and, ‘as sometimes happens with severe shock,
I felt nothing much at the time as I was completely numb’. He was sent back
to the bone setter and, though the injury was serious, his leg was patched up
and he was declared fit for duty. A consolation was that he was awarded his
pilot’s certificate (No. 1293) on 2 June 1915.
Back in France, on 25 July Hawker won a VC for a solo attack on three
German aircraft. It was typical of his fearless approach but in his letters he
was anything but gung-ho. The air war ‘will leave a world in mourning, for
few will escape’, though he recognized it would ‘revolutionise thought’.
In Italy, syndicalist journalist Benito Mussolini realized aviation’s ‘symbolic
implications went far beyond its technological significance’. Flight was a ‘meta-
phor for the new Nietzschean age that was dawning’. The airman myth — a
key component of Fascist thought — incorporated ‘idealised visions of war and
youth with futurist revolutionary ideas’. Writers such as the editor of The
Aeroplane, C. G. Grey (later a Fascist and colleague of Dorman), put an
optimistic spin on the war. He argued there had been comparatively little
damage, due to the success of ‘aerial reconnaissance detecting otherwise covert
troop movements’. In reality, troops on the ground were dying im-ever greater
numbers.
A shortage of officers led to the recall to the front of those who had been
seconded to duties elsewhere. On 21 February 1915 the Ypres Salient had
seen the worst day in the 16th Regiment’s war; ten officers and forty-seven
men undertaking dismounted service in the line were lost to German mines.
Although awarded his pilot’s certificate, Mosley decided his first duty was to
his regiment: ‘It was not an order but a choice.’
Mosley’s experience of the air war had a profound effect on him, but it had
 THE FIRST WORLD WAR 23

been brief. Wartime records reveal that he spent no more than seventy-five
days in the RFC in France. He had seen action but it was typical of his
manipulation of his past, that he would make more of his record than was
warranted.
In autumn 1915, Mosley was on a troopship back to France at the head of
a draft which he had collected from the Curragh. His regiment had seen little
action and had remained billeted at St Marie Capel. Lieutenant-Colonel Eccles
joined the regiment as Commander on 1 October, when the 16th was dis-
mounted and served as infantry digging trenches around Ypres. After the
Battle of Loos, Mosley reported to headquarters and, for a time, life was
agreeable. ‘I was put in charge of the squadron mess, but soon sacked for
doing us too well; the fare was appreciated but the bills were not ... These
tranquil and happy days did not last long.’ On 19 October Mosley was posted
to Rouen for tunnel duty, digging placements for mines. It was ‘the most
unpleasant part of the war’ because there was always the possibility of being
buried alive.
The elite cavalry disapproved of being converted into infantry. Officers had
their own made-to-measure uniforms with neatly pressed jodhpurs tucked
into high leather riding boots and tended to look more impressive than the
working-class recruits, who were on average five inches shorter than the men
of the officer class. Despite a better diet and more robust health, like other
troops the cavalrymen succumbed to ‘trench foot’, a form of frostbite aggra-
vated by standing too long in cold water. Over 200,000 soldiers were invalided
out because of it in the first three months of 1915. Colonel Henry Graham,
in his history of the 16th, recalled ‘crouching in shallow trenches, waist deep
in mud and water, in some of the most detestable countries of violent climate
in Europe’. The 16th came under ‘an incessant rain of shells to which it was
impossible to make any effective reply on account of the salvo of shells, of
which the enemy had an apparently inexhaustible supply’. There was within
the regiment a deep sense of suppressed anger and frustration at the lack of
shells.
Following the publication of Sir John French’s dispatch exposing the shell
shortage, the press-led Shells Scandal caused outrage in Parliament. It under-
mined Asquith’s government and led, in May, to the formation of a Coalition.
The munitions crisis forced politicians ‘towards positive collectivist action’
and the setting up in June of the Ministry of Mynitions (MoM) under Lloyd
George.
_ Thecreation of MoM, vital for the mobilization of the engineering industries,
provided a role to which Lloyd George was peculiarly suited. He was ‘nothing
of a theorist, very little of a planner’, but justified Winston Churchill’s assertion
that ‘at getting things done Lloyd George was incomparable’. It was a quality
which made him a hero in the armed forces and, in particular, to Mosley. In
24 BLACKSHIRT
the
September, Lloyd George took over responsibility for all war materials and
six months
supply of shells began to grow to thirty times more than it had been
previously. Colonel Graham noted that there was great support for Lloyd
George within the regiment but not for the ‘amateur strategist’ Churchill.
From 23 November Mosley was attached to the headquarters of the 3rd |
°
Infantry Brigade. His regiment had various billets until 2 January 1916, when
it settled in Wavre. He reported to a Welsh battalion, composed of ex-miners:
‘good troops suffering heavy losses’. He returned all the better for his sojourn
with the infantry to the 16th, which remained in the trenches until 9 February.
There was, Mosley recalled, ‘a certain exhilaration in going up over the
top at night’. Henry Williamson in the London Rifle Brigade (and a thirties
Mosleyite) shared the experience of ‘the night turning into a total brilliance
as a battery of howitzers opened upon our left and 2,000 guns fired at once
. as soon as the barrage began, all the nightingales came out, you could
hear them singing like hell’. For Mosley, there was a ‘tragic loveliness in that
unearthly desolation, the ultimate nihilism of man’s failed spirit’, but the
‘grinding shock of noise wore men down’. Surrounded by such horrors, a
wound was a release, and death, peace. On 13 February, Mosley came upon
the dead body of a friend in the Royal Scots Greys, Lord Weymouth.
The worst part for Mosley was navigating the trenches where the boards’
large holes could not be seen in the dark. His injured leg went through them
with ‘a result not only painful but temporarily disabling’. The leg had swollen
badly and each movement hurt. Standing for long periods up to his knees in
water did little to prevent the injured bones, which had not entirely set, from
becoming infected. Mosley was incapacitated and, although he refused to
leave his men, he was ordered to hospital and left on a stretcher.
On 15 February Mosley returned to England to see a specialist. He wanted
a well-known surgeon, Sir William Watson-Cheyne, to operate on his leg but
he was about to retire. Fortunately, Sir William’s son was a 16th Lancer and
he persuaded his father to operate. There was a fear Mosley’s leg might have
to be amputated but the surgeon’s skill in replacing the infected parts with
other pieces of bone saved it.
The regiment remained billeted until 19 June, when it joined with the 3rd
Brigade at Sec Bois. Recovering from surgery, on 17 July Mosley was promoted
to lieutenant. It is unclear what he was doing during the autumn of 1916.
Indeed, the army was unaware of his whereabouts and believed he was shirking
his responsibilities. The army Director of Personnel noted his ‘large amount
of sick leave’ — on two occasions he failed to show up for medicals. The army
made strenuous efforts to track him down and consideration was given to
disciplinary action. Towards the end of the year, he underwent a second
successful operation, which left his leg an inch and a half shorter. In his
absence, his regiment was posted to the Somme.
 THE FIRST WORLD WAR 25

After four months away from the front, Mosley’s war had effectively ended.
National Archives military specialist William Spencer said on release
of
Mosley’s War Office file that ‘his war record hardly reflects the dynamic image
he later tried to portray’. Nicholas said his father ‘did not talk much about
the trenches. He had seen little active combat, and this played on his mind.’
Mosley recognized his record was not all he had hoped it to be. ‘He had
no
personal fulfilment from his own role in the war.’
Mosley admitted that he owed ‘my whole education to hospital in the first
war’. He remained conscious of his lack of an academic education. He spent
his time in hospital making the most of the opportunity for self-education. As
_ is often the case in such circumstances, this learning had a longer-standing
influence on him than a formal education might have achieved. His reading
was voracious and influenced the strands of thought which made up his
personal brand of Fascism.
Mosley began reading biographies of famous politicians — Pitt the Elder,
Gladstone, Disraeli and Lord Randolph Churchill — in order ‘to train himself
for what he wanted to become’. He seemed more likely to become a soldier
than a politician, though his great-great-grandfather had been a Whig MP at
the time of the electoral reform of 1832 and, as a child, he listened to his
maternal grandfather’s stories of his own term in Parliament in the late 1880s.
Mosley’s hero was Pitt (Earl Chatham, 1708-78) and it is not hard to see why
he modelled himself on a leader who had such an electrifying presence in
Parliament. His speeches were regarded as great artistic performances, though
his disdainful self-confidence won him few friends. Pitt was the Empire’s true
visionary and, as the authentic voice of patriotism, considered himself ‘the
only saviour of England’. Mosley aspired to be of the same stature and
expected his aspirations to be achieved.
Mosley studied Benjamin Disraeli, whose speeches could floor them all.
Like Mosley, he had been ‘discontented, fascinated by new and esoteric ideas’
and unwilling to play the ‘docile party man awaiting his turn for promotion’.
A dandified young bounder, Disraeli’s Young England movement created a
splash out of all proportion to their weight in the attempt to resuscitate a
‘mythical benevolent feudal system’. The 1938 book, Young England, linked
-Mosley’s Blackshirts to Disraeli’s feudal socialism and his attempt to crush the
bourgeoisie. The connection was made between Young England and Mosley’s
background in the squirearchy. The Tories stood for ‘the sort of firm govern-
ment which his ancestors enjoyed administering on their estates’. They had
‘always preserved intuition based on tradition, and the Fascists have managed
to preserve this in very good measure’.
Mosley saw in Chatham and Disraeli a tale of romance, in which ‘great
passions raise the soul to great things’. During convalescence, he read and
learnt off by heart whole chunks of romantic poetry, which he later recited to
26 BLACKSHIRT

, who
his children. He was introduced to the romantics by Harold Nicolson
knew him from when he was ‘thrashed ’ at Sandhurst . Employe d by the Foreign
Office, Nicolson was, recalled Mosley, ‘completely at home in that world. His
ies
métier was diplomacy and the writing of belles-lettres.” He wrote biograph
, the |
of Alfred Tennyson (1923), Lord Byron (1924) and Mosley’s favourite
late romantic Algernon Swinburne (1926).
The enfant terrible of Victorian poetry came from an aristocratic family
related to the Redesdales. He produced intoxicating works marked by an
idiosyncratic brand of vitalism, mysticism, Hellenism, sadomasochism and
political radicalism. Swinburne influenced modernists such as T. S. Eliot and
Ezra Pound. A High Church Anglican who made elaborate use of biblical
imagery in his poetry, at Oxford - where he was a member of the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood — Swinburne formed a club of religious sceptics and
political radicals.
Mosley’s favourite Swinburne poem was ‘Atalanta in Calydon’, a dark
vision in the spirit of Greek: tragedy. He was attracted to the poet’s lyric
powers, displaying insistent alliteration, rhythmic energy and evocative
imagery. He was also drawn to the private world of ‘masochistic and insatiable
love and passions’. Beneath it all, Pound wrote, was a ‘passion not merely for
political, but also for personal liberty’, with heroes ‘enobled in dying for causes
they exalt’.
Swinburne believed — as did Mosley — in intentionalism (a belief in the
supremacy of individual historical actors). It was Thomas Carlyle (1795-
1881) who initiated leadership theory with his biographies of ‘Great Men’.
He introduced German Romanticism into British culture, ridiculing the work
of purist historians, whose work left the soul ‘wearied and bewildered’. His
writings left a deep impression on British Fascists, especially William Joyce.
He was an impassioned political critic dismayed by the social breakdown of
industrial Britain; the wealthiest country in the world was a country riven with
‘poverty, misery and discontent among the working classes’. In proto-socialist
language, he condemned laissez-faire and adopted the Chartist slogan ‘a fair
day’s pay for a fair day’s work’.
Carlyle argued that social balance required reverence towards those with
heroic qualities to be encouraged, for they alone were ‘capable of bringing
society back into line with religious principles’. He became a bigoted reaction-
ary and his epic studies of the French Revolution, Cromwell and particularly
On Heroes and Hero Worship (1841) were censured for fostering militarism
and totalitarianism. This great-man theory of history led to the belief — which
Mosley signed up to — ‘in the magically gifted individual who transforms his
era and people’.
The mystical element in Swinburne influenced the occultist Aleister Crowley.
Although Mosley’s politics could not be regarded as ‘illuminated’ — i.e. he did
 THE FIRST WORLD WAR 27

not embrace the irrational — there was, Richard Thurlow noted,

an element
of magical thinking in wanting to control the actions of the universe. Influence
d
by his mother, Mosley read the theosophical works of Helena Blavatsky
and
Annie Besant.
A former circus bareback rider, Madame Blavatsky founded in 1874 the
Theosophical Society, which fused ideas of International Brotherhood with
research into comparative religion and the occult. A religious fraudster, she
claimed to be in psychic rapport with ancient masters residing in the Hima-
layas, whose successors were, the Aryans. It was a doctrine that appealed to
the late Romantics. Mrs Besant was an anti-vivisectionist, friend of George
Bernard Shaw and member of the Fabian Society. Theosophy, Mosley
acknowledged, ‘appeared to be a quite logical religious theory but it was, of
course, entirely lacking in proof for anyone who had not enjoyed these strange
and felicitous experiences in dream journeys’.
Theosophy was part of the cultural rebellion and quest of the late Victorian
period against decadence. It was another modern movement concerned with
achieving ‘ecstasy’ and acting as a catalyst for the ‘rebirth’ of a spiritually
decaying West. Mosley was an intrigued non-believer but there was a marked
similarity between his romanticism and the traits of the magician — ‘the force
of mind, the will to achievement, the striving to transcend human limitations,
a dialectical view of the universe and the union of intellect and emotion’.
Proof that European civilization was in decay was to be found on the
Western Front where, from the end of 1916 to mid 1917, Britain lost men at
a higher rate than at any period of the war. However, Mosley remembered
these days as ‘magical’. He was not confined to hospital for the whole of the
fifteen months between surgery and his return to his regiment. Until the end
of the war, he engaged in a hectic social life, ‘in an almost frenzied desire to
swallow all beauty in one gulp. I was plunged into it even before I left hospital,
as I was permitted to go out on my crutches to luncheon.’ It has been suggested
that ‘in the sensitive survivor hedonism and nihilism struggled for mastery
with idealism’. However, it was not a great struggle — hedonism won out.
Mosley admitted he had ‘an unlimited capacity for enjoyment, and fortune
had given me the means to indulge it’.
Mosley was able to partake of his favourite pastime — hunting — despite
riding in leg-irons. The sport transported him back to ‘the life and spirit of
the early roth century, without crowds, only horses, hounds and the beautiful,
sweeping scenery’. It was during these escapes from treatment that he became
the lover of Margaret Montagu, a hostess in Leicester, where he was joined
by Harold Nicolson.
Mosley took a flat in Grosvenor Square and sallied forth to houses of the
famous hostesses — Mrs Ronnie Greville, who inherited a brewer’s fortune
and lived in Charles Street, and Lady (Sibyl) Colefax, a kindly woman with a
28 BLACKSHIRT

in
charming house in King’s Road, Chelsea, to which ‘everyone of interest’
London life went. Lady Colefax presented a contrast to the sparkling Ameri-
cans who dominated the capital’s social scene. These included the dynamic
Nancy, Lady Astor and the witty Lady (Maud) Cunard, who had ‘limitless
effrontery’. Lady Cunard, wrote Mosley, understood society ‘should consist of
conversation by brilliant men against a background of lovely and appreciative *
women, a process well calculated continually to increase the supply of such
men’. Although aged only twenty, Mosley regarded himself as one of the
‘brilliant men’.
Sporting a clipped moustache, suave, with a slight but suitably heroic limp
from his ‘aviator’s ankle’, Mosley appeared as a war veteran. He had the look,
presence and manners to succeed, and already had a reputation as a seducer
of women. Besides Margaret Montagu, he became the lover of Catherine
D’Erlanger. The parties held by the hostesses were ideal for these assignations.
They comprised largely the same group of people, with a similar morality with
regard to affairs. It was a convention in this free-living, immoral set that young
men had affairs ‘only with married women of their social background who
would know what the rules were’. They kept to a code in which ‘no confidence
is ever betrayed’.
Mosley had no burning desire to hurry back to the front line, though the
army was agitated by his absence. He was declared fit and, on 22 June 1917,
reported for duty to the Curragh in Ireland. The regiment had experienced
the ‘16th’ and the Easter Rising, which he saw as the beginning of guerrilla
fighting. ‘Soldiers moved about in military formation, point out flankers. You
came into a village — point shot dead. We’d pan out and encircle the village
... Every woman knitting, every man digging the garden. What was that shot?
Never heard a shot. Who did that? And we leave completely baffled.’ Mosley
recognized guerrilla tactics were one reason why C.-in-C. Henry Wilson later
withdrew the army and substituted the hated ‘Black and Tans’. He realized,
however, that Republicans had little choice except ‘to fight us in that way’.
and that it was a very effective strategy.
Mosley was not in Ireland for long but enjoyed Dublin society and the
hunting. But while their Irish hosts were ‘giving us drinks and smiling at us’,
they were ‘quite capable of putting a bullet in our backs’. On 2 July Mosley
received orders to proceed to the Army Training Centre at the Eastern Com-
mand Cavalry Depot at Eastbourne, to instruct wounded officers. However,
owing to his ‘inability to march’, he was categorized C3 — fit for office work
only. ‘I was out of the war for good with one leg an inch and a half shorter
than the other.’
Mosley’s army experience played a large part in the character of his later
Fascist movement, with its paramilitarism. It is ironic, therefore, given the
circumstances of his final assessment, that he had such a high regard for
 THE FIRST WORLD WAR 29

marching. On parade ‘discipline was absolute, with the most meticulous

regard
for time-honoured rules vigorously enforced in a fashion quite adequate
ly
rough’. But in the mess, relaxing with intimate friends, the idea of
a large
family of arms looking after its members came to the fore.
Mosley’s view of military life had echoes of his Rolleston childhood, with
its blindness to notions of class and the idea of a natural order born of the
soil. One of his cherished memories was of army athletics where ‘an absolute
equality prevailed between all ranks’. But this was not a matter of equality:
notions of hierarchy remained intact, though in a more subtle fashion. Regi-
ments, he believed, had a collective character, whose ‘intimate relationship
between ranks and practical working methods had slowly evolved under men
with a pride in their ways and traditions in the manner of a natural and true
aristocracy’. They sensed they belonged to an elite of service and achievement.
Despite his admiration of the rank and file, Mosley argued that the army’s
collective spirit depended on ‘something unique’, namely leadership.
Mosley’s romantic reminiscences of trench solidarity — ‘fired by struggle
and suffering’ - were shared across Europe by the ‘Front Generation’ of
socialists who turned to Fascism. French literary Fascist Pierre Drieu la
Rochelle, whose own military service was a crucial formative experience,
was already writing about how his generation had been transformed by the
experience: “There would soon come a time for these returning warriors to
emit their cry of revolution. When peace comes the uneasy time will not be
over.’ The Front Generation hoped to release the war’s ‘noble inspirations’
for creative purposes, even if this set them at odds with the traditional socialist
movement. In contrast to trench solidarity, orthodox Marxist notions of class
consciousness appeared ‘pallid and theoretical’. The notion of ‘war socialism’
would not, however, extend further than putting the interests of society as a
collective before the ambitions of the individual.
Mosley had yet to develop his ideas. He was still immersed in his social life
and, using his friends, arranged a transfer to an administrative post in London,
where he resumed his affairs. A renowed lover was the exotic American actress
Maxine Elliott, who lived at Hartsbourne Manor, just outside London. A
classic beauty, Elliott ‘looked like a Roman Empress should have looked’,
wrote Mosley. She later migrated to the Chateau de |’Horizon in Antibes,
where he continued to visit her. It was through such society that he came to
know a diversity of gifted people and met eminent politicians, including
Minister of Munitions Lloyd George, Minister of War Winston Churchill and
Attorney-General F. E. Smith, who sat up ‘till three or four in the morning
talking in fashion entrancing or combative according to the company’. Smith
advised him that ‘if you were a Frenchman or a German your profession
would clearly be the army, because in those countries it is the great profession.
In England it must, of course, be politics or the Bar, or both.’
30 BLACKSHIRT
s
On 25 February 1918 Mosley was seconded to the Ministry of Munition
was able to study the administr ative machine. He was par-
(MoM), where he
ies
ticularly impressed by wartime intervention and planning, and the possibilit
for the peace.
©
Lloyd George was Mosley’s first hero. The New Liberalism of the 1890s
had changed the ideological background to British politics. ‘A body of theorists *
had seen the collectivist successes of German social reform and worried about
the onset of Britain’s economic decline. Lloyd George emerged from that
landscape of mind.’ He was a hero to soldiers because of his actions over the
Shells Scandal. He understood his enemies and, although intensely disliked by
the aristocracy, many admired him because in power ‘he knew what he wanted
to do and why he wanted to do it’. As Minister, Lloyd George had appointed
his own staff from outside the Civil Service, and reorganized without regard for
the orthodoxies which slowed reform. These pioneers proved an inspiration to
Mosley, who was particularly impressed by the ‘brains behind the throne’,
E. M. H. Lloyd, responsible for army contracts, and E. F. Wise, director of
offensive and defensive operations.
‘The idea that industry would have to be deliberately organised for war
production’, Lloyd wrote, ‘encountered subconscious resistance in a Govern-
ment committed to the doctrines of free trade.’ However, the sacrifices
demanded by the war, combined with Lloyd George’s populist instincts,
encouraged collectivist elements. The experience of state intervention led to
talk of social reform and reconstruction, and re-stimulated ideas of ‘social
imperialism’.
Mosley was part of the metropolitan elite which constituted the readership
of The Times. It is almost inevitable, therefore, that he read the articles on
post-war industrial organization which The Times published during July and
August 1916, republished as The Elements of Reconstruction, with an intro-
duction by Lord Milner, right-wing diehard and enthusiastic social imperialist.
The anonymous authors — ‘men of high intelligence and right-wing sympa-
thies’ — argued wartime experience should be joined to the lessons of “German
State socialism tempered by elements of British guild socialism’. They wanted
a national plan to counter the ‘chaotic world of individualistic business run
for unchecked private profit’. Prefiguring Mosley’s later ideas, the authors
acknowledged their approach was a development towards nationalization; not
by socialist ‘appropriation’, but by ‘co-ordination and co-operation, and by
bringing the State into partnership by developing the crude beginnings of the
“controlled establishment”’. Against class warfare, like Mosley, they sup-
ported guild socialism, which had prepared the minds of workers for industries
upon a national scale. Observers later said there was. about the programme,
‘faint shades of an incipient fascism’.
In December 1916 a press campaign against Prime Minister Asquith over
 THE FIRST WORLD WAR 31

the shells shortage had been launched. with the energetic assistance of Max
Aitken (Lord Beaverbrook), and The Times and Mail, owned by Northcliff
e,
‘a more megalomaniac and less likeable newspaper proprietor than Beaver-
brook’. Lloyd George cultivated self-made men and constantly intrigued with
Northcliffe, while parliamentary machinations were initiated by W.A.S.
Hewins, a leading social imperialist and former secretary of Joseph Chamber-
lain’s Tariff Commission. The moves led to Lloyd George replacing Asquith.
The new Prime Minister bypassed the Treasury in authorizing military
expenditure and an aggressive MoM expanded its spheres of interest with a
multiplying of controls. It added up to a system of economic planning of a
kind never before possessed by government. Lloyd George introduced a five-
man War Cabinet and departments headed by ‘Controllers’ dealing with
labour and food production. Imports were negotiated by government contrac-
tors, while prices were fixed and the channels of distribution controlled.
Technocratically run, businessmen exercised wide powers, even if they de-
clined to draw fully upon the extensive powers conferred on them by the
State.
MoM became a key player in the conduct of air policy. It liaised with the
Air Board, which had been created in 1916 under the presidency of the Lord
Privy Seal, Lord Curzon. Like his two successors, he was to play a significant
role in Mosley’s life. Curzon resigned in December and was replaced by the
industrialist Lord Cowdray, who in turn was succeeded by the newspaper
proprietor Lord Rothermere. The Air Board’s responsibility for overseeing
aircraft procurement was a success and, during 1917, aircraft production
increased by 74 per cent and helped strengthen the RFC.
Increased production resulted from a crackdown on labour unrest (strikes
were declared illegal) and the introduction of compulsory arbitration. It was
in the industrial relations area that Mosley was employed and where he had
his ‘first insight into industrial conditions and the negotiations with trade
unions’. There has been speculation that he had contact with the security
services. The MoM developed its own security agency, PM2, to counter
industrial militancy. Mosley did deal with the captains of industry who staffed
MoM’s upper echelons. They had previously been denied access to the ‘secret
councils’ of government by the alliance of landed and commercial wealth that
largely controlled the State. .
The MoM experiment in State intervention undoubtedly contributed to the
winning of the war. Modernizers looking to the future contemplated the
possibility of continuing the model for peacetime reconstruction. They did
not, however, anticipate the determined effort to revert to pre-war laissez-faire.
The ‘Official History of the Ministry of Munitions’ insisted there had been
‘no definite plan’ and argued that the experience of wartime State control
‘retarded rather than hastened the spread of State socialism’. No one at this
52) BLACKSHIRT
not
time presented the theoretical case for State intervention, but Mosley did
planning. Faith in a technocra tic approach was
forget this example of national
in the
to find full expression in the enthusiasm for planning which emerged
r in Mosley’s ideas. Revolted by the slaughter in the
19308; in particula
encourag ed by the sense of communi ty engender ed by the need °
trenches, but
for co-ordinated national effort, the war provided him with a model for ’
national planning and a stimulus for Fascism’s more socialist origins.
On 8 July 1918 Mosley was declared ‘permanently unfit’ by the army and
twelve days later Nicolson found him a job in the Foreign Office, as a military
adviser, though he knew little about foreign affairs. He became an administra-
tor in the War Department, providing quick answers to letters. The ‘rigmarole
was absurd’ but he came to realize the importance of regulation. His colleagues
became key figures in his early political career. Lord (Robert) Cecil headed his
department, which consisted of ‘one soldier and myself, three professional
diplomats, Nicolson and two others’, while a number of young Conservatives
drifted in and out. Both Mark Sykes and Aubrey Herbert displayed ‘charm
and intelligence’, while Henry Bentinck, brother of the Duke of Portiand, and
Godfrey Locker-Lampson, the elder of two MP brothers, were known to
detest the ‘goat’, Lloyd George. Mosley combined shooting with speaking for
Herbert in his Yeovil constituency.
A visitor to Maxine Elliott’s salon was Freddie Guest, Chief Whip of the
Lloyd George Liberals in the Coalition government, and cousin and crony of
Churchill. He played a dubious role as ‘evil genius’ in raising funds for the
PM’s notorious slush fund. He suggested to Mosley he enter Parliament under
the Liberal banner; but he already had an arrangement with the Conservative
Whip Sir George Younger. Knowing ‘little of Conservative sentiment’ but
‘propelled by a sense of patriotism’, Mosley became an MP in order to
represent the war generation or, as his son suggests, himself. Brooding in
Whitehall, Colin Cross wrote, he ‘acquired a sense of personal destiny which
was never to leave him’.
On 23 July 1918 Mosley was adopted by the Harrow constituency, despite
complaints that his wealth had bought him the nomination. Under the nomen-
clature ‘Omega’ in the Harrow Observer, he suggested ‘the electorate will turn
with relief from the last throes of these legal intriguers to the original and
vigorous reconstruction programmes of the young soldiers who are now
appearing in every constituency’. Like a number of aristocratic friends, he
combined ‘an uninhibited private world with a sense of social responsibility’,
though he took the opportunity to pander to voters’ anti-German sentiments.
He said Germany’s chief war aim was the ‘creation of an empire in eastern
Europe, self-sufficient in raw materials, moulding primitive Balkan and Rus-
sian peasantry into a slave labour force capable of under-selling Britain’s
traditional exports, in a colossal economic war that would decide the fate of
 THE FIRST WORLD WAR 33
the Western world’. He wanted to ‘bind our colonies to us with bonds
that no
strain can ever burst asunder’.
On 26 September the Foreign Office informed the War Office it was dispen-
sing with Mosley’s services ‘owing to reorganisation of political departments’.
He requested he ‘be placed on half-pay in order to devote himself to’ his
business and political activities. I feel that I could render more service to the
country in that capacity.’ Pay was a matter of indifference to him and he no
longer required his army pay of £91. He was released by the Foreign Office
on 1 October 1918, by which time the Germans were on the point of collapse,
the war’s end was in sight, and with it would come a general election.
In the year 1918 teenage conscripts took their place in ranks depleted by
huge losses. At the front there was no longer the enthusiasm of 1 914. Morale,
one officer wrote, had ‘settled on to a rock-bottom of fatalistic despair, in
which the majority carried on mechanically, waiting for their next wound’,
The end of the war delivered a tremendous outburst of emotion, tinged with
despair at the scale of human sacrifice that the carnage had wrought. Just after
5 a.m. on 11 November the instrument of armistice was signed. Wireless
signals were dispatched proclaiming a ceasefire for 11 a.m.
The Times reported unceasing drizzle during the day. This did not dampen
people’s ‘intoxicating spirit of joy’. The crowds in Parliament Square, cheering
and weeping, heard Big Ben strike for the first time since the start of the war.
At twelve noon Henry Williamson ‘mourned alone, possessed by a vacancy
that soon the faces of the living world would join those of the dead, and be
known no more’. And then a great terror came over him, ‘that the whole
world that I had known for so long had come to an end... It must NEVER
HAPPEN AGAIN.’
Just six days short of his twenty-second birthday, Mosley entered the Ritz
interested by the ‘sounds of revelry which echoed from it. Smooth, smug
people, who had never fought or suffered, seemed to the eyes of youth — at
that moment age-old with sadness, weariness and bitterness — to be eating,
drinking, laughing on the graves of our companions.’ On that same night he
saw his future wife, Cimmie Curzon, draped in a Union Jack, singing patriotic
songs. Later, she ‘tore round Trafalgar Square with the great crowd setting
light to old cars’.
In the square Osbert Sitwell, a Grenadier Guards officer, later a Mosleyite,
found the crowd dancing ‘so thickly that the heads, the faces were like a field
of golden corn moving in a dark wind’. But his joy that the nightmare was
over was tinged with melancholy. He had seen the crowd when it ‘cheered for
its own death outside Buckingham Palace on the evening of the 4th of August
1914; most of the men who had composed it were now dead. Their heirs were
dancing because life had been given back to them.’ Mosley ‘stood aside from
the delirious throng, silent and alone, ravaged by memory’. From a regular
34 BLACKSHIRT
“There
strength of 400, his own regiment had been reduced to fifty-three men.
war,’ he vowed. ‘Through and beyond the failure of men
must be no more
we of the war generatio n are marching on and we shall march
and of parties,
on until our end is achieved and our sacrifice atoned.’
Whether Mosley had those thoughts at the time or embroidered his memory
is unclear, but he certainly came to regard himself as the spokesman of the
trench soldiers — a society of men bound together in a special brotherhood.
The Manchester Guardian’s drama critic, C. E. M. Montague, published
Disenchantment, in which he suggested people would ‘find it hard to under-
stand the simplicity and intensity of faith’ with which phrases such as ‘the war
to end war’ were ‘taken among our troops, or the certitude felt by hundreds
of thousands of men who are now dead that if they died their monument
would be a new Europe, not soured and soiled with the hates and greeds
of old’.
Nicholas recalled that his father ‘talked with genuine horror about the war’.
Friends remarked that tears would well up in his eyes. The enormity of the
war induced Mosley to re-examine his life and became the recurring memory
that forced itself to the surface at moments of doubt. Its lesson was simply
‘the necessity to keep faith with those who had paid the ultimate price’. He
now devoted his life to politics ‘to ensure that the useless slaughter of the war
was not repeated, and that the survivors of that horrific experience should live
in a better world.’ These were not ignoble aims.
There was nothing inevitable about Mosley’s conversion to Fascism. Many
who shared similar experiences turned to the left and to Communism, or
reverted to their pre-1914 world and conventional party politics. But Fascism
was a phenomenon tied to the First World War. Without it, a similar creed
might have developed but its character would have been very different. Richard
Bellamy, author of a semi-official history of the British Union of Fascists, We
March with Mosley, believed Fascism was conceived ‘in the mud and blood,
and brotherhood of the frontlines’. The shattering experience of war shaped
Mosley’s particular form of socialism and nationalism, as it did for others of
the Front Generation.
In The Birth of Fascist Ideology Zeev Sternhell suggests the war ‘offered
proof of the mobilising capacities of nationalism [and] revealed the tremen-
dous power of the modern state’. It demonstrated the ‘capacity for sacrifice,
the superficiality of the idea of internationalism, and the facility with which
all strata of society could be mobilised in the service of the collectivity’. Besides
displaying the importance of authority, leadership and propaganda, the war
had shown, above all, ‘the ease with which democratic liberties could be
suspended and a quasi-dictatorship accepted’.
Mosley claimed the ‘horror of Europe simply committing suicide’ was his
impulse in politics. He admitted, however, that he ‘hadn’t the faintest idea
 THE FIRST WORLD WAR 35

whether I could do it or not’. In a German military hospital, Adolf Hitler was

recovering from a gas attack, which had left him temporarily blind. ‘So it had
all been in vain the death of two millions .. . In these nights hatred grew in
me, hatred for those responsible for this deed. That night I resolved I would
enter politics.’
 3
The Patriotic Peace

Three days after the armistice was signed, Prime Minister Lloyd George went
to the country as head of the Coalition. His appeal was basic: trust the man
who had produced the shells to build the houses. In a speech nine days later
he said: ‘There are many things that are wrong and which ought not to be -
poverty, wretchedness, and squalor. Let us cleanse this noble land. Let us
cleanse it and make it a temple, worthy of the sacrifice which has been made
for its honour.’
Candidates acceptable to the Conservative Bonar Law and Liberal Lloyd
George received an official letter signed by both leaders (described by Asquith
as a ‘coupon’), which ensured the electors of the two parties would not vote
against approved Coalition candidates. As a Coalition-Unionist, Mosley was
an enthusiastic supporter of Lloyd George and, as a representative of the
young soldiers who had perished, shared the yearning for unity that the
Coalition expressed.
In his election addresses, like other politicians who had served in the State
machinery during the war, Mosley saw no reason why the same policies could
not continue in peacetime as part of the reconstruction. Mosley looked to the
State to create the ‘land fit for heroes’ by taking a directing role with the ‘State
as Leader’. ‘Munitions were produced like that in war, so why not houses in
times of peace?’
Mosley wanted education from the cradle to university and schemes for
health and child welfare. Power and transport would come under public
control, though the debate between public and private ownership seemed to
him irrelevant. Many of his later ideas were here in elementary form with
essential industries shielded, and unfair competition and foreign dumping
curtailed. A prosperous home market would be sustained by a minimum and
high wage system. He argued the ‘cost of production depended not so much
on the rate of wage as on the rate of production in mass-producing industries’.
It would be achieved by ‘increased efficiency and organisation’.
Mosley was blessed by the support of Field Marshal Edmund Ironside,
C.-in-C. Allied Troops Archangel, northern Russia, who appeared on his
election platform. Mosley espoused standard patriotic sentiment but also
 THE PATRIOTIC PEACE 37

anticipated his later politics, with the call for immediate legislation ‘to prevent
undesirable aliens from landing; and for the repatriation of those who are
now resident in this country’. He supported the xenophobic attitudes towards
the Germans in language which paralleled his later attack on the Jews. They
had ‘brought disease amongst them, reduced Englishmen’s wages, undersold
English goods, and ruined social life’. But he refused to follow the ‘old men
who had never fought’, in demanding ‘reparations and revenge’.
When asked on 26 November 1918 to summarize his own policy, Mosley,
reported the Harrow Observer, said it was socialistic imperialism. ‘It was an
ugly phrase, but it was pregnant with the future’ as a policy designed to evoke
action from the whole nation. He countered criticism that the combination of
nationalist and socialist ideas was a foreign invention with the claim that such
ideas were ‘in the very air of Europe, thrown high by the explosion of the
war’, but the combination emerged in ‘completely different forms’ in each
country.
Mosley argued that the seeming paradox of nationalism and socialism was
the ‘first crude expression of political synthesis’, which he saw as ‘the solution
to many of the false dilemmas of our time’. His socialism was the socialism of
the trenches and referred to a sense of comradeship and the (imagined) dissolv-
ing of class barriers of the ‘Greatest National Party that the country has ever
known’. In peace, the military ideal was the model for the social ideal.
Mosley insisted that the roots of his ideas were already in English soil, in
the combination of radicalism and imperialism of the pre-war Birmingham
school of Joseph Chamberlain. His turn-of-the-century social imperialist
movement had been a major attempt to change the direction of official econ-
omic and political policy. In his study of social imperialism Bernard Semmel
argues Mosley ‘combined virtually all of the salient views of virtually all of
the social imperialists and to have welded them into a British fascism’. Indeed,
many of his early political statements consisted of paraphrasings from their
writings and speeches.
The social imperialists proposed to defend Britain’s position by consolidat-
ing its Empire within the world economy, thus making the country self-
sufficient. It embraced a tariff reform programme which was designed to
maintain prosperity, but also to meet the military challenge of other states.
Internally, they aimed to increase industrial efficiency by granting concessions
to secure working-class loyalty and hoped to stabilize class relations through
appeals to patriotism and collective national goals. Social imperialism em-
braced the Fabian—Liberal imperialist strategy of ‘national efficiency’ associ-
ated with Sidney and Beatrice Webb; the ‘constructive imperialists’ such as
the economist, W. A. S. Hewins; the ‘nobler socialism’ of the idealist High
Commissioner in South Africa, Lord Milner; and naval imperialist and MP
Carlyon Bellairs, who later supported Mosley’s Fascist movement.
38 BLACKSHIRT

National efficiency was an outgrowth of the Boer War (1899-1902), which

raised questions about the capacity of the State to organize for war. In its
aftermath, Conservative diehards emphasized the need to modernize Britain
to meet the German challenge. Upper-class Liberal imperialists such as Milner,
who thought the democratic system ‘rotten’, emphasized technocratic sol-
utions with the ‘higher types’ of George Bernard Shaw’s plays, organizing the
Empire. From 1903 a core of constructive imperialists - Hewins, Leo Amery
and J. L. Garvin, editor of the Observer - supported an alternative strategy
of tariff reform identified with Colonial Secretary Chamberlain, who was
convinced the working class wanted ‘imperialism and social reform’.
Following in the footsteps of Disraeli’s Young England, which had unsuc-
cessfully pushed a similar agenda, Chamberlain determined to transform the
Empire into an integrated unit large enough to sustain Britain as a great power.
A key influence was London School of Economics economist H. J. Mackinder
whose book, The Geographical Pivet of History (1904), argued thatin order
to defend itself against Germany, Britain had to be transformed. He wanted
investment in the lower classes’ productive potential; attacked the slums as the
‘scrap-heaps of abandoned and disused portions of our national man-power’;
and promoted a minimum wage.
Mackinder’s enduring influence was on the concept of ‘geopolitics’. He shared
the view of historian Sir John Seeley that the Empire was ‘not an Empire at all
in the ordinary sense of the word but a supernation’. The two argued, as did
Mosley later, that in order to protect its industrial position, Britain needed to
adopt imperial federalism so as to integrate the scattered British ‘white settler
colonies’ of the Empire into a ‘Greater Britain’, economically integrated by
means of a system of tariff protection.
However, Chamberlain’s plan for an Imperial Zollverein failed to carry the
Conservative Cabinet and in 1903 he resigned to campaign for the Tariff
Reform League (TRL), chaired by the Duke of Westminster. He mobilized
support through a campaign directed by the editor of the Express, Ralph
Blumenfeld, a Mosleyite in the thirties. He promoted a ‘producers’ alliance of
industry and labour’, and introduced the idea of a patriotic ‘national com-
munity’ as a defence against free-trade internationalism and working-class
militancy. But he also emphasized the dangers of foreign competition and the
threat posed by alien immigrants employed as sweated labour. In the same
East End Limehouse district - the centre of Jewish immigration from Eastern
Europe — in which Mosley would launch his own anti-Semitic campaign,
Chamberlain attacked the ‘only one race which I despise — the Jews’.
The campaign descended into stereotypical racial caricatures of the banker
as a ‘sly, ill-sshaven East End huckster’. The racial arguments would be
deployed in the same manner by Mosley. However, although anti-Semitism
 THE PATRIOTIC PEACE 39

was common, there were few prominent figures who would openly support
the campaign. Mosley would discover the same reticence.
Chamberlain was forced to abandon the Zollverein plan because white
colonies feared exploitation by Britain. It was never a coherent policy since
the majority of exports went to countries outside the Empire and, within it,
there was comparatively little trade with Britain. H. G. Wells’s criticism that
such a policy would bring Britain ‘into conflict with every people under the
sun’ was as valid then as when Mosley promoted the idea in the 1930s.
Protectionism was adopted to broaden support into a mass movement.
Diehard MPs and manufacturers in the West Midlands and North demanded
protection from increased foreign competition in a self-contained empire,
sheltered by high tariff walls, in a version of economics based upon scientific
Social-Darwinism. Like Mosley’s hero, Chatham, they regarded trade as war
in ‘an unending duel for raw materials and markets’. In the view of free trade
economistJ.A. Schumpeter, they had joined with ‘the dark forces of the feudal
past’. The most interesting diehard was Henry Page Croft. From a family of
landed baronets, Croft saw himself as another Chatham, saving the State from
parliamentary stalemate by promoting the nation and empire. He advocated
an aggressive State activism to facilitate co-operation between the classes in
order to end class conflict. Like Mosley, Croft merged ‘20th century expec-
tations with a degree of 19th century paternalism’. There was something
‘almost Elizabethan’ about Croft. Again like Mosley, he saw himself as ‘a man
of action’, who wanted to translate ideas into action.
Also a man of action was Robert Blatchford, editor of the socialist Clarion.
A spokesman for the rank and file, he criticized the Labour Party leadership
for being ‘totally subservient to anti-patriotic, cosmopolitan Liberalism’. His
socialism was characterized by economic nationalism, imperialism and patriot-
ism. Blatchford rejected parties as purposeless factions, politicians as frauds
and parliament as undemocratic. There were many similarities between his
ideas and Mosley’s, and a number of his ‘Merrie England’ socialists, including
his own family, joined the BUF.
Chamberlain’s stroke in 1906 left the tariff reformers bereft of their source
of inspiration. In truth, the country’s democratic tradition ran too deep for
social imperialists to challenge parliamentary institutions. Also rejected was
Corporatism which, for continental syndicalists, was the ‘embodiment of the
concept of identity of interest of all producers = worker and capitalist’. Social
imperialists accepted the observation of Charles Maurras of Action Frangaise
that socialism could be made to fit nationalism ‘as a well-made hand fits a
beautiful glove’, and he foreshadowed Mosley’s own National Socialism.
Mass support had been expected but the many-faceted nature of the tariff
left many baffled. In addition, a widespread belief — fuelled by Treasury reports
40 BLACKSHIRT

~ which insisted tariffs would increase bread prices and reduce wages was a
major obstacle to working-class support. Tariff reformers suspected news-
paper support was censored by threats of an advertising boycott — the same
explanation Mosley later used to account for his poor press coverage in the
1930S.
The Tariff Reform League represented a serious challenge to the liberal econ-
omic system and drew formidable opponents. It threatened to mobilize forces
of discontent into a political movement drawing support from both the right and
the left. Industrial modernization required drastic institutional restructuring,
which implied - and Mosley concurred - planning, protection and monetary
policies to meet the needs of production. Chamberlain, however, had been
unable to usurp the stability of the ‘institutionalised network of the City, Bank
and Treasury which stood for economic orthodoxy’ and the required State
intervention was out of the question in Edwardian times. Chamberlain’s plan
never ‘moved beyond the conception of a protected system to the idea of an
organised or managed one’. This was to be Mosley’s contribution.
Some of Mosley’s ideas, A. P. Thornton noted, ‘came from Milner, who for
long inveighed against the waste of human power through bad social and
industrial arrangements in England’. The imperialist Leo Amery agreed that
Mosley had drawn on the ideas of Milner, who advocated a Parliament of
Industry, producer co-operatives uniting workers and managers, and a
National Industrial Council to co-ordinate trade corporations. From social
imperialism came the notion of the nation above class, social efficiency, mili-
tant nationalism, centralized state power, controlled economy and anti-
Semitism. However, the fact that during the Edwardian era, unlike on the
Continent, there had not been a populist nationalist movement nor significant
influence from romantic nationalism helps explain, suggests Thurlow, the
uphill task which Mosley later faced in his attempt ‘to revolutionise society’.
The general election of 14 December 1918 was a sober affair. It had been
called in haste; most troops were still abroad and only one in four soldiers
voted. The election was favourable to young soldiers: ‘old enough for Flanders,
old enough for Westminster’. On the wave of post-war enthusiasm, the twenty-
two-year-old Conservative Unionist Mosley was swept on the Coalition
coupon to Parliament as the youngest MP. ‘The astonishing thing’, wrote a
. reporter in Harrow, ‘was the almost unanimous support for Lieutenant
Mosley. From every other window his face looked out; his red favours met
the eye of men, women, and children; his supporters harangued the crowds at
street corners; and Mr Mosley himself was here, there and everywhere.’ With
the receipt of the postal military vote, the final figures gave Mosley 13,950
and his opponent 3,007.
More than half of the electorate voted for the Gailitiots, giving it 484
MPs. The Labour Party became the largest opposition party, with fifty-nine
 THE PATRIOTIC PEACE 41

members, while the Asquith Liberals secured only twenty-six seats. About a
hundred of those elected were of the war generation. It appeared, Mosley
wrote, that the ‘young men, the new men, the men of the war, were in charge’.
In fact, of the 168 newly elected Unionist members, fewer than forty-five were
under forty years of age, while only sixty-eight had been in uniform during
the war. Traditional Tories queried the new intake’s quality. Stanley Baldwin
considered them ‘a lot of hard-nosed men who look as if they had done well out
of the war’. J. C. C. Davidson was surprised that ‘the old-fashioned country
gentlemen are scarcely represented at all’.
Lloyd George’s Cabinet was fired by ‘a conviction that party controversy
was out-moded and that the government’s programmes, seeking for a middle
way between socialists and die-hards, represented a viable and valid consensus
acceptable to men and women of goodwill’. For younger MPs the idea of
‘centre’ politics was taken exceptionally seriously and was inextricably tied to
the fortunes of the Coalition, which symbolized for them the ‘mass urge for
social improvement’. In reality, the Coalition lacked a coherent policy or
effective machinery of co-ordination. It remained on the level of rhetoric. The
election destroyed old-style Liberalism and, despite the advances of Labour,
established the supremacy of Conservatism for two decades. Lloyd George
accepted he was the ‘captive rather than the leader of a majority’ which
preferred Conservatism to reconstruction.
Mosley entered Parliament intoxicated by the idea of renewal but recognized
he was beginning his political career ‘without the benefit of a modern political
apprenticeship’. He was ‘an émigré from a dying enclave of old England, with
something of the attitude of a professional soldier’, who believed the nation
was ‘an ideal homeland of democracy and social justice’. He wanted to build
a better and more modern nation, constantly adapting to the developments of
the age. It was no surprise, therefore, that he chose for his maiden speech on
17 February 1919 the ‘Aerial Navigation Bill’, which aimed to develop civil
aviation.
Mosley had made few set speeches and recognized he was ‘shockingly bad’
in delivery, though he had a talent for vituperation. He consciously worked
on becoming a great parliamentary speaker and studied past orators. He took
voice lessons and practised by replying to points made in The Times leader.
He studied ‘every nuance of gesture and expression in front of a mirror’ in an
effort to perfect his act.
Mosley’s speech was described by C. C. Geesin The Aeroplane as ‘somewhat
flowery and needlessly polysyllabic’. Apologizing, in the words of Chatham for
the ‘atrocious crime of being a young man’, he claimed ‘British air supremacy
was threatened’ by a Bill which would stifle the one remaining realm of heroic
activity where the fruits of science and modern production were incorporated.
He opposed: control by ‘anonymous bureaucrats in Whitehall who had
42 BLACKSHIRT

hindered rather than brought an end to the War’, and supported a shift of
responsibility to those who understood flying, such as the ‘private exploiter
of aviation’. He wanted control of aviation by aircraft makers and airmen. In
a theme central to his thinking, Mosley argued against officialdom stifling
‘entrepreneurial spirit’.
In a second speech on aviation, Mosley called for a single air chief instead
of control by the Secretary of State for War and Air, Winston Churchill (whose
parliamentary private secretary was Mosley’s friend Ivan Moore-Brabazon).
‘The innovative nature of aviation technology and the role it played in national
identity and defence demanded the full, undivided attention of one man and
should not be allowed to drift into the control of bureaucrats.’ Mosley doubted
whether Churchill was suited to the ‘less exacting pursuits of peace’ or had
the capacity to do both posts. He declared they were ‘living in a period which
is seeing what I may call the passing of the superman or the “twilight of the
gods” ’. He reminded Churchill that ‘the first Napoleon excelled, not merely
in the realms of martial display,and military achievements, but also in the
gentler sphere of peaceful administration’.
Mosley’s espousal of aviation revealed, noted Colin Cook, an early sight of
his corporatist ideas and his proposed Fascist society where individuals would
_only vote on issues based on their occupation, and with direct experience
essential for the ‘true expression of the nation’. It also reflected his love of the
Elizabethan buccaneers, whom he regarded as the true spirit of Britain, which
was now embodied in the airmen.
After his maiden speech, Mosley celebrated with dinner at the house of
Margot Asquith, the former PM’s wife. She had an original way with phrases
which amused Mosley. He recalled that ‘Margo seized his hand with a claw-
like grip’ and said his speech ‘reminded me in some ways of my old friend
Lord Randolph Churchill. But, dear boy, do not share his vices, never live
with six women at once, it is so weakening.’
During these first months of parliamentary life, a colleague remembered a
lonely Mosley ‘wandering unhappily about the lobbies of the House, uncertain
of his mind’. The war had ‘planted the seeds of doubt; parties were changing,
new political creeds running molten from the crucibles of old faiths, and he
did not know which to make his own’. On unknown ground Mosley could be
awkward and shy, and found it difficult working with others. One cause he did
take up was promoting the embryonic League of Nations. ‘If we allow these
miniature Napoleons, who exist in every country, to continue to strut the
European stage with these weapons in their hands, there will never be peace.’
During a by-election at Plymouth in March 1919, Mosley spoke on behalf
of Lady Astor. It is obvious from her adoption speech why Mosley supported
her campaign. ‘If you want a party hack don’t elect me. Surely we have
outgrown party ties. I have. The war has taught us that there is a greater thing
 THE PATRIOTIC PEACE 43
than parties and that is the State.’ Mosley liked her ‘unlimited effrontery’ and
felt she was ‘much better when she was interrupted’ and dealt with hecklers.
Nancy’s hectoring style, however, antagonized male voters and she had to
temper her ‘assertiveness with humility, presenting herself as a wife doing her
duty for her husband’.

Mosley knew Nancy through her sister, Phyllis Brand, who was ‘immensely’
attracted to the young MP and invited him to help with the election. Unfortu-
nately for Phyllis, he only had eyes for another young canvasser, Cynthia
“Cimmie’ Curzon, daughter of Lord Curzon, one of the most glamorous figures
of the Imperial age. A Cliveden habituée and favourite of Lady Astor, Cimmie
had briefly met Mosley at Trent Park, home of the rich socialite Sir Philip
Sassoon. Here in Devon they met by arrangement early each morning on
Plymouth Hoe.
Curzon had been appointed Viceroy of India at the young age of thirty-nine.
The family lived in great splendour at Hackwood Park, Hampshire, and
later at Kedleston, Derbyshire, the home of Curzon’s father Lord Scarsdale.
Cimmie’s mother, Mary, was the daughter of Levi Leiter, a Chicago million-
aire, whose family originated from Leitersburg in Maryland. The Leiters were
thought to be Jewish, but — despite many Semitic first names among the family
~ they were, in fact, Mennonites, a Protestant sect from Switzerland.
Curzon disliked Americans with ‘Jewish-sounding origins’ who lacked dis-
tinction. On the other hand he was obsessed with the spectacle of wealth;
money, and lots of it, helped to assuage his prejudices. His father owned
10,000 acres and on his death left an estate of £450,000 (£22.5 m). Curzon
was also happy that Levi Leiter settled £250,000 (£12 m) on Mary, and
provided an annual income for his daughter of £6,000 (£300,000). Out of the
marriage settlement, Curzon received an income of £4,000 plus his daughters’
shares, amounting to £10,000 per year until they came of age. Leiter left the
money for his granddaughters in a trust controlled by their father, who was
officially designated their guardian but had to appear before a judge each year
for permission to use it.
Curzon had three daughters, Irene (born 1896), Cimmie (August 1898) and
Alexandra or ‘Baba’ as she was known to her family (1904). Cimmie inherited
her father’s congenital malformation of the spine, though months of treatment
ultimately proved successful. As upper-class Edwardian children born into
wealth and privilege, the girls viewed their father as loving but distant, ‘an
Olympian figure whose letters expressed the affection he was too busy to show
by companionship’. Their father would occasionally join them in summer at
the family villa, Naldera, in Broadstairs.
When Levi Leiter died in 1904, £10,000 per annum was left in trust to each
daughter, though Curzon used the income to pay for houses at 1 Carlton
44 BLACKSHIRT

House Terrace in London, and Hackwood Park. Hopes for a male heir were
dashed when Mary suffered a miscarriage. Cimmie was only seven when her
mother died of a heart attack in 1906, aged thirty-six.
The war meant that Cimmie, who reached eighteen in 1914, did not have a
coming-out season and ball. She was sent to a boarding school at Eastbourne
where she was the centre of a rather tomboyish, dashing circle of girls. Cimmie
enjoyed a certain degree of freedom, which was not to her father’s liking (he
was President of the Anti-Suffrage League). In 1917 he married an Argentinian
divorcee, Grace Duggan, who enjoyed an amorous life; her wealth allowed
him to maintain the grandeur of his way of life. Like the rest of his circle,
Curzon viewed his friends’ liaisons with sympathy and pursued his own affairs
wholeheartedly but discreetly.
Over the winter of 1917-18 Cimmie set up house in a Mayfair maisonette
with her sister Irene, and worked as a clerk in the War Office. During the
summer she was a landgirl on a farm and undertook a social welfare course
at the London School of Economics, which included working in the East End.
This was regarded as daring. Cimmie had a reputation for being ‘wild: a rebel
with a conscience’. She remained, however, as a rich, privileged woman, part
of London society. She was tall, with strong features, and had great charm
which, those who knew her agreed, ‘came from a genuinely sincere and lovable
personality’. By the end of the war many of her male friends had been killed.
Those who survived and came to call were treated by her father, who regarded
Cimmie as the ‘most Curzon’ of his three daughters, as assailants. Mosley was
more discreet than others and the couple continued to see each other during
the spring.

In Parliament, Mosley maintained his verbal attacks on opponents. Yet he

also thought it ‘much better to hold great principles without personal animos-
ity than to have no principles and yet to feel enmity’. He attracted attention
from older politicians, who ‘gave me the sense of being eternal contempor-
aries’. He felt an affinity with Lloyd George, with his passionate appeal for
reform. This was partly because Mosley saw himself as a potential member of
this select group of ‘great men’. ‘What is wrong with our civilisation is that
the best men are often either excluded altogether until they are needed in some
catastrophe or kept waiting for their chance too long, which wastes not only
their time but the vital assets of the nation.’
Churchill developed a ‘kindly flattery’ by seeking Mosley’s opinion as typical
of the new generation. He helped promote the political careers of a number
of ‘suspect patrician lightweights’ but it was Churchill’s great friend, F. E.
Smith, who exerted the most influence. The Lord Chancellor regarded himself
as a ‘progressive Unionist, social reformer and friend of the ordinary un-
unionised working man: a Tory Democrat’. Described by Beaverbrook as the
 THE PATRIOTIC PEACE 45

‘cleverest man in the kingdom’, Smith dispensed lavish hospitality to young

men at his house, Carlton, in the Cotswolds. He spurred them on by referring
to the glittering prizes that life had to award. He was, David Clark observed,
‘a walking illustration that there is such a phenomenon as an over-endowment
of charisma. No one trusted FE, though many loved his company.’
In his study of Mosley’s contemporaries, Children of the Sun, Michael
Green identifies Smith as an uncle to such young men, conveying an attitude
of ‘unscrupulous roguery’ about the rules of life. Like the other ‘wicked
bachelor uncles’ to the ‘Sonnenkinder’ of the twenties — Churchill, Beaver-
brook and Lloyd George — he was the enemy of pious father figures such as
Stanley Baldwin. Mosley had seen Smith’s character traits in his father: the
lack of boundary setting and the willingness to gamble. A great drinker, Smith
attempted ‘to burn the candle at both ends without ill-effect on his physical
or intellectual powers’. Mosley, who drank little, wrote that ‘while the per-
formance of youth could be indefinitely repeated, with almost greater effect
in age, it was not so easy with such a habit of life to absorb new knowledge
or to learn new tricks, equally difficult for old dogs and old drunks’. He noted
that ‘the wayside became strewn with young men who thought that to be
brilliant it was necessary to adopt his fashion. What was the secret of his Pied
Piper appeal to the young? Wit and irreverence.’
Another Smith acolyte was Robert Boothby, a rebellious quasi-Tory sup-
porter of the Coalition. He became part of Mosley’s circle, which included
Harold Nicolson, Leslie Hore-Belisha (MP), newspaper publisher Esmond
Harmsworth, the young Irish journalist-adventurer and Churchill devotee
Brendan Bracken, Walter Elliott (who was regarded as a future prime minister),
Moore-Brabazon, Cecil L’Estrange and journalist Colin Coote, a Coalition
Liberal fresh from the trenches, where he had suffered gassing. Mosley’s circle
deferred to experienced politicians but it was not long before disillusionment
crept in and suspicion tempered their deference.
The old games soon resumed and the old men again took a firm hold of the
reins. ‘The young men were in a minority,’ Mosley recalled, ‘and the “hard-
faced men” were in a great majority. The profiteer outnumbered the fighter.’
Fired with the ideals of wartime unity, new members wanted ‘to teach the old
fogeys their business’. Dubbed ‘the Babes’ by the press, they attempted to
build a base in Parliament and, on 7 April, a forty-strong New Members
group was formed, consisting of Unionists (though the Coalition Liberal Oscar
Guest was elected chairman). Mosley joined Coote as a secretary.
New Members, Coote recalled, were determined ‘to see that our generation
had not died in vain’ and took their election programmes seriously. They
backed Lloyd George’s crusade to ‘force through the great measures of our
programme against the resistance of the reactionaries within the Coalition’.
Mosley already regarded himself as ‘a man not of the parties but of the centre’.
 46 BLACKSHIRT

By and large, it was the able Clydeside Unionist Walter Elliott, a firm supporter
of Colin Addison’s policies on health and housing, who advocated a permanent
Coalition Party. In their ambitious dreams, young Coalitionists envisioned a
centre party under Lloyd George reaching out to the moderate wing of the
Labour movement, though they regarded the Labour Party itself as irrelevant.
Mosley became the rising star. ‘Bursting with energy and ideas’, he stood
in ‘glamorous contrast to the old gangs’. He received universal praise for
his early speeches, which upheld the free trade system. Coote testified to
the genuineness of ‘his contempt for the old fuddy-duddies’ bafflement
with unemployment’. Mosley regarded his early speeches as immature, but
acknowledged that their positive reception meant that it was ‘impossible to
call me just a crank’.
Coote thought Mosley displayed enormous talent. ‘He could absolutely flay
the skin off anybody inefficent in debate. He was no admirer of persons.’ But
he also suffered from ‘a persecution complex which caused him to be much
more rude than he need be’. He was not popular, since-he ‘always exuded an
air of too gracious condescension’. Coote recalled the way he played on his
limp, ‘and that curious curl of the upper lip which made him always look as
if he had a bad smell under his nose’. Observers suspicious of his sudden
_ reputation for brilliance and wit marked him down as arrogant.
In the months following the conclusion of the Versailles peace treaty of July
1919, the PM was determined to fuse the Coalition government into a centre
party. ‘National unity alone can save Britain, can save Europe, can save the
world,’ Lloyd George declared. The Cabinet, however, was sceptical of fusion’s
merits and was ‘inclined to reflect on the sad fate of Joseph Chamberlain’.
Churchill had become a ‘reactionary of the deepest dye’, and wholly without
sympathy for the ‘foreign and fallacious creeds of socialism’. Like many
disaffected patricians, he supported Lloyd George’s claim that Labour’s suc-
cess had opened the door to Bolshevism. In the Weekly Despatch, Smith
proclaimed the need for a National Party to fight a crusade against this evil.
The three senior politicians encouraged co-operation with businessmen on
a common programme to fight by-election Labour candidates in industrial
constituencies.
In a speech to a hundred MPs at the Criterion Restaurant on 15 July 1919,
the New Members heard Smith argue ‘modern problems were technical rather
than ideological, calling for managerial skills rather than grand debates on
principle’. The young men applauded his call for ‘a great National Party’.
Primed by Chief Whip Freddy Guest with Lloyd George’s approval, the press
reported on a ‘political sensation’ but the enthusiasm quickly evaporated. ‘We
met and we discussed,’ Mosley recalled, ‘but not much more happened.’ The
limitation was ‘the power of the party machine, which in the absence of grave
crisis is always overwhelming in British politics’.
 THE PATRIOTIC PEACE 47
Also addressing the New Members was Lord Robert Cecil, a rigid free
trader who headed a ‘group of high-minded centrists whose effectiveness rose
and fell with the fortunes of their eccentric leader’. The son of former Prime
Minister, Lord Salisbury, the aristocratic Cecil had been removed as foreign
minister at the peace conference. Thereafter, he attacked Lloyd George’s
foreign policy ‘hip and thigh’. A passionate evangelist for the League of
Nations, Cecil criticized the PM’s cynical circumvention of his beloved League
as an ‘instance of old-style nationalism rejecting the glowing opportunities
present for creating a new international law and international morality’. His
solution to domestic troubles was profit sharing and industrial co-partnership,
which he hoped would create a bulwark against socialism. These ideas
attracted Mosley, though he realized it was naive to believe conflicts between
labour and capital could be resolved by restoring Christian fellowship within
industry.
A combination of support for the League of Nations and the Anti-Waste
League of Rothermere was the programme Cecil wanted to push in by-
elections. What he sought above all was ‘a union of landowners and labour
against the intervening classes’. It was Young England in a more appropriate
setting. Cecil enlisted aristocrats of conscience against the ‘money-grubbing
Coalitionists’. This dream of a non-ideological party of the centre made up of
moral Conservatives and patriotic Labour was shared by Mosley. The Tories,
he told Cecil, had sold out to the ‘bourgeois profiteer’, while the socialists
were too concerned with ‘ultimate issues’.
The hope that a ‘backstairs fronde of big politicians and press magnates
could shake the system’ was out of date but Rothermere continued to play the
kingmaker. He campaigned against wasteful public spending (squandermania)
and helped create a public demand for ‘efficiency’. His newspapers praised
anti-waste MPs such as Mosley. For once his propaganda exercise did chime
with the Treasury, which wanted to return to the pre-war system of free trade
based on the gold standard as a necessary means of continuing its dominance
of the State system and control of expenditure.
Rothermere’s papers warned the country faced economic ruin unless there
was remorseless economy. A link was made between squandermania and
‘bungling officialdom’, as his propaganda, sparked by the 1917 Russian Revol-
ution, attacked all forms of government control. Advocates of State control
were labelled crypto-Communists and were excluded from major participation
in national affairs. The three-way relationship between the State, capital and
labour, which had been fostered during the war, was allowed to collapse and
few of the changes endured. Trade soon converted back to private hands, the
government abandoned reconstruction and withdrew from intervention in
the economy, as the control apparatus was dismantled in an effort to restore
the pre-war status quo.
 48 BLACKSHIRT

Mosley was persuaded by Lord Salisbury to become Secretary of his People’s

League for Economy, an upmarket version of the Anti-Waste League. He
considered its dashing and amusing president, Leslie Hore-Belisha, to be an
‘outstanding Jew’. Mosley supported the Rothermere-backed League’s attacks
on the ‘profligacy of the Coalition Government, both in the wild expenditure
of public money and the sale of public assets at knock-down prices, often to
dubious political characters’. Salisbury used the League to strengthen the
diehard position and to persuade Bonar Law to stand as leader.
In October 1919 Mosley became President of the League of Youth and
Social Progress, in which role he achieved notoriety for exploiting the youth
racket. In his inaugural address he spoke of the two mentalities — ‘the mind of
1914 and the mind of today’. He warned of the old men creeping back ‘to
dominate your new age, cleansed of their mistakes in the blood of your
generation’. Mosley discovered that the League was run by a ‘smooth and
smug little Liberal typical of the middle-aged politicians who in each genera-
tion exploit youth’.
In supporting the entrepreneur and attacking bureaucracy there was a
glimpse of the future Mosley, with his commitment to efficiency and free
markets, but there was little evidence of his later radicalism. He associated
- with dyed-in-the-wool Tories whose commitment to reform was wafer thin.
What they proposed was an attempt to stave off socialism with minimal
change to institutions and the political system. The diehards’ whole stance
was paternalistic and tied to outdated values derived from their aristocratic
backgrounds. They veered from an incipient modernism to nostalgia for a
feudal past.

During the peace conference Cimmie Curzon had stayed in Paris with Elinor
Glyn, who reported on the treaty negotiations for the Hearst newspapers.
Until he married for a second time, Lord Curzon had an affair with Elinor,
who was known as a great courtesan. They talked about Mosley and Elinor
told Cimmie ‘there is a reason for knowing your Tom very thoroughly’.
She had heard something of his reputation. Cimmie subsequently rebuffed
Mosley’s advances and a proposal of marriage; an unusual outcome for
Mosley, who regarded himself as irresistible. She had an inkling that her father
and Mosley were two of a kind. Elinor warned her Mosley was a type of man
with whom she was all too familiar and that she was about to make a serious
mistake.
Elinor wrote a memoir about her relationship with Curzon in which she
said he had ‘always been loved by women, but he has never allowed any
individual woman to have the slightest influence upon his life’. She believed
he had ‘never paid real homage to a woman in his life; it is women who pay
homage to him’. Mary Curzon’s biographer noted her unhappiness derived
 THE PATRIOTIC PEACE 49
from her husband’s failure ‘to nourish her intelligence and to notice her
loneliness’. Elinor added that ‘all his concern for her when she was ill, did not
compensate for his neglect of her other needs’. Cimmie’s father had wanted a
wife who was ‘like a daughter, presumably busy with her feminine occupa-
tions, while he was busy with his’. The husband must be free and unhampered.
Unconsciously, the man Cimmie was rejecting was a version of her father.
On her return from Paris, Mosley wrote to his ‘darling’ that he had been
told his writing ‘could only mean genius or lunacy: in my youthful arrogance
I welcomed the former conclusion, but since the present obsession I am driven
to believe that the latter alternative is true’. He believed ‘the will of men could
conquer all emotion or pain whether spiritual or physical and mould the world
to be just a reflection of its own personality’. But he had discovered ‘an
emotion which is more powerful than even the human spirit’. He again pro-
posed marriage but Cimmie was unmoved. ‘And now Dear about your lunacy,’
she teased him, ‘don’t let it be a disease .. . I can’t love you as you love me
... I should adore to be the really glorious friends we could be: please be
satisfied with that, I know it’s a rotten poor return.’
Mosley returned to the offensive, but again Cimmie dismissed him: ‘Let me
know that my being unable to love you in the way you want isn’t going
to spoil things for you between us...’ He persuaded her to go hunting in
Leicestershire, where she was finally worn down and gave in. He declared he
had never given his love to any other woman but warned of his vital side,
which was necessary for ‘a life of struggle’. However, he assured her that his
real love would ‘always prevent the original wild animal hurting or distressing
you’. Unhappily for Cimmie, she would discover that Mosley’s vital side was
the stronger.
Lord Curzon’s expectation that Cimmie would marry a peer or statesman
was rudely shattered by Mosley’s proposal. On 21 March 1920 he informed
his wife he had known the Mosleys in the old days in Derbyshire and noted
that Rolleston was advertised in Country Life as to be sold. He added that
Mosley had admitted to Cimmie ‘flirting a bit with married women but had
now, at the age of 23, given that up and was full of ambition and devoted to
a political career where every sort of prize awaited him’. The Salisbury—Astor
set ‘looks upon the young man as rather a hero and that he is really promising’.
Cimmie had no idea if he had money and her father feared that ‘financially it
will hit me rather hard’. 2
It was a daunting experience for a young suitor to meet a man from whom —
Stanley Baldwin received ‘the sort of greeting a corpse would give to an
undertaker’. Following the meeting, Curzon wrote to his wife that their pro-
spective son-in-law had ‘rather a big nose’ and was Jewish in appearance. He
had discovered he was ‘quite independent and has practically severed himself
from his father who is a spendthrift and a ne’er-do-well’. The estate was run
5O BLACKSHIRT

by trustees who ‘will give him £8,o00-£10,000 a year straight away and he
will ultimately have a clear £20,000 [£1 m] per annum. He did not know that
Cim was an heiress.’ After Cecil described Mosley as an ‘able and promising
warrior, not in the first flight, but with a good future before him’, Curzon
gave his consent to marriage.
Mosley dispatched a proposal of marriage to Cimmie, who finally relented.
Their engagement was announced on 26 March. ‘They were going to have a
great career together,’ Cimmie told her father. ‘He was destined to climb to
the very top — with her aid.’ Nancy Astor wrote to her that she would be ‘just
the kind of wife he needs and wants. I feel he must have a great soul, or he
would never have asked you to share it.’
Lydia Allen, a housemaid at Rolleston, remembered the newly engaged
couple staying at the Hall. Mosley was ‘not half so nice as his father. He was
more of a snob. He would never even say “good morning” to you. She was
very nice. We had champagne.’ Lydia recorded in her diary that when the
couple left, Mosley ‘did not tip any of the staff. Sir.Oswald tipped us all,
saying his son had no change, which he knew was a lie.’ The family’s nanny
recalled his ‘terrible rudeness to servants’. Nicholas Mosley admitted his father
‘was sometimes frightening. He had a way of suddenly switching from being
the benign joker to someone with his chin up, roaring, as if he was being
strangled. He would usually roar when he was not getting what he wanted
from servants.’
Lydia would not have a bad word said against the Mosley family. “They
did a lot for the village. They used to hold benefit cricket matches for the
soldiers returning from the War. They employed most of the village. The
farmers on the Rolleston estate belonged to them.’ Their self-enclosed, almost
feudal world, however, was about to collapse. They were badly affected by
the inflation crisis of 1920.
In the immediate post-war period there had been an economic boom, charac-
terized not only by low unemployment but also by rapid inflation. Rother-
mere’s newspapers were full of tales of boom-time speculators who flourished
because of government waste, and helped forge a coalition of savers and
middle-class consumers, who supported deflationary policies. With support
from Salisbury and Cecil, Anti-Waste independent Conservative candidates at
several by-elections, including the successful election of Rothermere’s nephew
and Mosley’s friend, Harold Harmsworth, put pressure on the government.
In April, Chancellor of the Exchequer Austen Chamberlain delivered a
deflationary budget which ‘slammed on the brakes’, ended the boom and
signalled the return to ‘sound finance’.
Largely indifferent to economic issues, Mosley was unconcerned by the re-
assertion of traditional institutional control, even though deflationary measures
were incompatible with ideas of reconstruction. The economic collapse put paid
 THE PATRIOTIC PEACE Sx

to hopes of a land fit for heroes and ushered in a decade of mass unemployment
and inter-war depression. Politically ambitious, Mosley was preoccupied with
seeking advancement. He liquidated all his ‘outside interests and distractions’,
_ selling off his hunting horses and polo ponies, and because the war had made
it unviable, put Rolleston up for auction.
Inflation, taxation, death duties and the decline of incomes destroyed the
wealth of many landed gentry. It led to the sale of country houses and farms
in a ‘most fearful and prolonged haemorrhage’. During the twenties, 29,000
small country estates were put on the market. The effect on middle-class
society in rural areas was profoundly disturbing. ‘With rupture of continuity
came loss of faith.’ Rolleston was sold to a speculator, the estate divided into
separate farms and the Hall pulled down in 1928. Mosley said it was a ‘terrible
uprooting causing me much sorrow at the time. An established institution of
old England had come to an end.’
Mosley was rich, but taxation and inflation ate into his wealth. In 1914,
with an annual income of £10,000 (£540,000), he would have retained 92 per
cent of it; by 1920 this fell to 57 per cent. Taking into account inflation, by
1925 Mosley would have required £18,000 (£1 m) per annum to preserve the
real value and, because of taxation changes, he would have actually needed a
gross income of £30,000 (£1.6 m).
Seven weeks after the announcement of their engagement, Mosley and
Cimmie were married on 11 May in the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace.
Newspapers reported the chapel was ‘so small that the guests scarcely have
room even to study one another’s gowns — but the privilege of being married
in this building is a highly prized favour’. Best man was Mosley’s Sandhurst
friend Bruce Ogilvy, brother of the Earl of Airlie, and his guests included
Robert Boothby and Harold Nicolson. Cimmie had wanted a quiet wedding
but her father was intent on planning the social event of the year. The cream
of high society were invited, along with the highest ranks of Europe’s royal
families. King George and Queen Mary were present, as were the King and
Queen of Belgium who had flown across the channel in a two-seater aeroplane
especially for the occasion. In addition to the select hundred guests inside,
several hundred more were invited to a glittering reception at the Foreign
Secretary’s residence at 1 Carlton House Terrace.
Outside, the crowds were twelve deep and had to be held back by the police.
The King acknowledged the cheers, as did Mosley, who looked stiff, like an
actor unsuccessfully taking off Douglas Fairbanks. The other Curzon daugh-
ters were in attendance: Irene noted that sixteen-year-old Baba seemed ‘even
more in love with Tom than Cimmie is’. The bride was showered with gifts
of pearls, diamonds and sables. Mosley gave his wife a diamond tiara, a silver
wristwatch and a sapphire ring. The newspapers proclaimed Cimmie the ‘Bride
of the Year’. -
52 BLACKSHIRT

The honeymoon was spent near Genoa, at Portofino, then a small fishing
village. The Mosleys stayed in the Castello Brown, which belonged to the
family of Francis Yeats-Brown, later author of The Bengal Lancer and Fascist
sympathizer. ‘Across the lovely bay’, wrote Mosley, ‘you could see at Spezia
the tragic water, wine-dark with Shelley’s drowning; along the heights which
linked Portofino with Rapallo strode Nietzsche in the ecstasy of writing
Zarathustra.’
Newspapers described Cimmie as the ‘personification of the society girl,
tall, willowy, with a slightly bored expression, lovely complexion, and express-
ive blue eyes. She dresses in the most exquisite taste, and is a fine set-off to
her handsome husband in whose company she almost invariably appears.’
Mosley emerged as one of the leaders of the new beau monde and every week
he and Cimmie were seen in attendance at society events. The Prince of Wales
was a frequent guest at Carlton Gardens where Cimmie’s stepmother held
‘frivolous parties’ for her. The Mosleys were photographed at Ascot, Henley
and countless charitable functions before they flew off to chic foreign resorts
such as Venice and Deauville. The society columns gushed about her beauty,
though the photographs reveal a very tall (compared with her contemporaries),
stout, average-looking woman with a pleasant smile.
Mosley’s descriptions of his wife are endearing but not passionate. Most
relationships are repetitions to a greater or lesser degree of the original relation-
ship with our parents. Elinor Glyn’s memoir suggests Cimmie simply ended
up colluding in a replay of her own parents’ marriage. His relationship with
Cimmie was a mirror image of the one with his mother.
‘Like most people,’ Mosley wrote, ‘I have a great appreciation of real
goodness of character, and I have never seen that finest of qualities in higher
degree in any human being. She was a good woman in the true, natural sense
of the word.’ Cimmie was a champion of the underprivileged, at least in
theory. Mosley described her as having advanced liberal views, though she
considered herself to have ‘Bolshevist’ sentiments. Cimmie, in fact, was ‘in
the well-known tradition of the warm-hearted, emotional person with an
instinctive sympathy for the underdog’. She rebelled against her father and for
that reason reacted strongly against Conservatism. It did not go much further,
however. Her intellectual understanding of socialism was limited. Nicolson
unkindly thought her ‘stupid’.
People reacted to Cimmie in a very different manner from the way they did
to her husband, who was seen as remote and lacking warmth. He gave the
impression of using people for his own ends. That was never said of Cimmie,
who was transparently sincere. She had many admirers but there was never
any hint of a sexual charge in their devotion to a mother-like figure. After the
marriage, Elinor Glyn emphasized to her the importance of loyalty and the
need to be her husband’s ‘Chief of Staff always’. There is little doubt that
 THE PATRIOTIC PEACE 53

Cimmie adored her husband but she. did not appreciate until near the end
that he wanted a mother substitute who would set no boundaries but would
support him at whatever cost to her own feelings. Mosley loved her after his
fashion but it was not a mature love. The fact that he idealized her, while at
the same time abused her trust, is indicative of narcissism.
Everything seemed to be going Mosley’s way. He combined the ‘attributes
of the old school - a baronetcy and huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ in the shires
- with the preoccupations of the new, post-war world’. He had the back-
ground, war record, marriage and burgeoning career for a successful future as
an MP. The couple acquired a Queen Anne town house, a few minutes’ walk
from Parliament, at 8 Smith Square, from where Mosley conducted a hectic
social life, which he claimed was a necessary balance to the obsessions of
politics. However, he spoiled an entirely reasonable defence with his gift for
self-dramatization. To become the complete man, what was required, Mosley
argued, was ‘Ganzheit’ (wholeness). Perhaps, but he was also simply having a
good time.
The gossip columns were busy with accounts of Mosley’s ‘jazzy’ private
life. He continued to be an habitué with Boothby of the salons of Mrs Ronald
Greville, and Ladies Astor, Cunard, Londonderry and Colefax. Boothby
thought he was in paradise, amid the luxury and generous hospitality of
these wealthy hedonists. Leaving Parliament after late sittings, Mosley would
frequent fashionable nightclubs where it was observed he was not in the
company of his wife. It is not clear how long it was before he betrayed
Cimmie; her sisters imagined a few years. More likely is Mosley’s second
wife’s suggestion of a few months. He was accustomed to using the salons for
‘flushing the covers’ (a reference to pheasant shooting) of married women.
Romantic novelist Barbara Cartland often saw him at the Café de Paris, where
he presented a ‘rather frightening figure — tall, dark, with almost black eyes
which never seemed to smile’. But he kept a smile for Cartland’s friend Hilary
Charles who, with her sister, resembled ‘pretty, fragile butterflies’.
The social scene also extended abroad when the Mosley circle travelled to
Italy and France. In Rome, the widowed Princess Jane di San Faustino presided
over a cosmopolitan crowd. Mosley found Rome a ‘university of charm, where
a young man could encounter a refinement of sophistication whose acquisition
could be some permanent passport in a varied and variable world’. In Paris,
the house of Elsie de Wolfe, who had made a fogtune as an interior decorator,
had ‘one of the most voluptuous settings it was possible to encounter’. With
the latest fad, a floodlit garden and swimming pool, Sunday was a ‘delicate
scene of beautiful women and young men’. Mosley had been introduced to
Paris society through Elsie’s English and half-Jewish husband Charles Mendl.
Late in the war he served as an intelligence officer in Paris, where he was
responsible for handling the press at the embassy. Rumours which circulated
54 BLACKSHIRT

suggesting he had ample funds with which to bribe the foreign press were
dismissed by Mosley, but he did have a long-standing relationship with MI6.
Mosley had many admirers. After reporting on one of his appearances on
the polo field, the Tatler ran the caption, ‘Is it true that he is future Prime
Minister of England?’ This was not taken seriously but when the old Speaker
of the House, Lowther, heard Mosley make a speech, he remarked to Edward
Wood (Lord Halifax): ‘Watch that young man. He will probably be Prime
Minister.’ There were, however, those who wondered if the whole edifice was
‘almost too good to be true’.
 | 4
‘The Vision Splendid’

Mosley said his political life was predetermined by an ‘almost religious convic-
tion to prevent a recurrence of war’. His allegiance now swung towards the
leading advocate of the League of Nations (LoN), Lord Robert Cecil. On his
return from honeymoon he became secretary to the Lord Cowdray-funded
League of Nations Union. Whereas the League represented to Cecil a forum ©
of moral opinion, for Mosley it meant the willingness to use power to settle
international disputes. However, with the United States’ withdrawal, the
League became in practical terms a European organization for the maintenance
of peace. Despite differences, Mosley admired Cecil’s ‘experienced and
traditional wisdom of statesmanship’.
By the summer of 1920 Cecil established himself as a leading critic of the
government not only on foreign policy but also on industrial questions. Against
a background of ongoing industrial unrest, Cecil discussed with newspaper
proprietors Rothermere and Cowdray the idea of a centre party to promote
high wages and productivity, and oppose reactionary employers and militant
workers, in opposition to both Labour and Lloyd George. They would advo-
cate ‘conciliation and union of Classes at home, peace in Ireland, L of N
foreign policy and above all economic sanity and retrenchment’. It would
overcome the Lloyd George Coalition by ‘innate moral superiority’.
Mosley recognized that the ‘intoxication of the early days had fizzled out’
and now felt betrayed. No attempt had been made to use the ‘great machine
of war for greater purposes of peace. Despite every protest, the productive
machine so painfully and laboriously erected was scrapped or sold at knock-
down prices to the profiteers ... Everything for which we fought — peace
abroad and reconstruction at home — was thrown to the wolves of the great
vested interests.’ .
Ireland was the issue around which disillusioned Tories joined in opposition
to the Coalition. During the autumn, Mosley and his young Unionists — Robert
and Hugh Cecil, Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, Godfrey Locker-Lampson,
Aubrey Herbert and Mark Sykes - advocated granting Home Rule to Ireland
with dominion status. In the Harrow Gazette on 15 October 1920 Mosley
said, ‘The answer is not reprisal and counter-violence but a separate Ulster,
56 BLACKSHIRT

naval and military safeguards for Britain, a limited right of manoeuvre in

foreign policy for Ireland, but a basically independent nation.”
The diehards pressed Lloyd George to introduce tough measures in Ireland.
Sinn Fein and the Dail had been declared illegal. The government had pushed
through the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, providing for Irish Home Rule,
with two Irish Parliaments, one for the South in Dublin and the other for
the six Protestant counties of the historic province of Ulster in Belfast. The
unwillingness of hardliners to grant concessions led to the use of counter-terror
against Irish nationalists. Ulsterman Sir Henry Wilson, C.-in-C. of the army
in Ireland, acknowledged his troops were acting rough, but since they were
being constantly sniped at, thought it acceptable to hit back. Even though
they offered no alternative, Tory MPs Samuel Hoare and Edward Wood
warned, in August, that ‘coercion alone will not re-establish law and order in
Ireland’.
Faced both with backbench pressure and limited available forces, the
government decided to employ “irregulars’. Mosley subsequently received evi-
dence from a neighbour of the Curzons that torture was being used in Ireland.
This was confirmed by information he received from the Irish poet and
economist A. E. Russell, and a country lawyer in Tralee, J. D. Connor.
Hardened ex-officers and disillusioned demobilized veterans were recruited
into auxiliary police units known, because of their black belts and khaki
uniforms, as the ‘Black and Tans’. Recruited to maintain order, these ‘gentle-
men adventurers’ brought their knowledge of brutality to the task. Their “habit
of charging round wildly in open lorries’ also led to many casualties; in six
months 600 auxiliaries were killed. ‘The rage of men without discipline who
feel unable to hit back while suffering heavy losses’, noted Mosley, ‘produced
the stupid and brutal acts of individual violence which could have no effect
except to swing opinion against them.’ He said the name of Britain was ‘being
disgraced, every rule of good soldierly conduct disregarded, and every decent
instinct of humanity outraged’. He had no problem with hitting back at the
IRA but the reprisals were an ‘inefficient way of going about things’. For
Mosley, the policy was ‘symptomatic of a fundamental weakness brought
about by a failure of leadership’, which undermined Britain’s greatness.
By attacking their Irish policy, Conservatives claimed Mosley was ‘badly
letting down the side, adding disloyalty to impudence’. It was impossible for
him to get a hearing in the Commons and he decided, on 3 November, to
cross the floor and face his critics as an Independent. ‘It was better to confront
what appeared to me as a charge of howling dervishes than to stand in the
middle of it.’ Lord Henry Bentinck and Aubrey Herbert also crossed over in
a gesture against government policy. At the time, changing sides was not
considered an event of significance. Mosley thought Herbert, who had a
passion for the League of Nations and Albania — as head of the wartime
 “THE VISION SPLENDID’ 57
Adriatic Mission he had been offered its Crown — charmingly vague but blessed
with ‘very acute intelligence’. Thereafter, Herbert’s energies were exercised in
forming a centre party.
Suddenly, the storm: burst as the Conservatives tried to prevent other rebel-
lious ‘class traitors’ crossing over to the opposition benches. The backlash
surprised Mosley and he had speedily to develop a ‘certain ferocity in debating
method’. He acknowledged it was a ‘wicked animal which defends itself when
attacked’, but it was only ‘by assailing with personal ridicule the noisiest of
my assailants that I could get a hearing’. He admitted it was several years
before he advanced an argument ‘without first beating down interrupters’.
Time and again, Mosley and the small group of cross-party dissidents spoke
out against the terror in Ireland. His energy and the ferocity of his attacks on
the government marked him out as a potential leader. There were those who
had reservations, especially when it became apparent he believed he had ‘a
special role to fulfil and was somehow marked out for greatness’. David Cecil
disparagingly told Herbert that the twenty-four-year-old Mosley ‘had got hair
that is too new and an unused face’. Herbert noted that Mosley had the
‘elements of great success in him but will be a lost leader one day’.
Early in November a Peace with Ireland Council was formed to campaign
against attempts to solve the Irish problem by force and for a just and lasting
settlement between the two countries. The Council’s strength lay in its non-
party and mainly English membership, which could not be dismissed as a
‘fifth column’ of Sinn Fein. Lord Henry Cavendish-Bentinck was appointed
Chairman, with Mosley as Honorary Secretary. In the Commons on
11 November Mosley asked MPs to recognize ‘that we have lost in the
catastrophic competition (of fighting terrorism with terrorism), and must start
again on a new basis, to rebuild the efficiency of civil administration, and
restore our discipline’.
Large meetings against the policy of reprisals were addressed over the winter
of 1920-21 by a galaxy of eminent supporters, including the Tory Sir John
Simon; Labour’s J. R. Clynes, Margaret Bondfield and Ramsay MacDonald;
Mosley’s friends, Lady (Mark) Sykes and Lady Bonham Carter; and leading
writers G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Chesterton’s pamphlet, ‘What
are reprisals?’, argued that ‘to burn down a factory and a row of shops because
a comrade has been murdered is not self-defence — it is senseless revenge’. The
Council attracted Englishmen whose ‘sense of jystice and fair play had been
wounded’ and pride in their country damaged by the actions of the Black and
Tans. Council member Aubrey Herbert apologized for his youthful folly in
supporting Sir Edward Carson’s call for Ulster resistance ‘as he now feared
that such support would lead to problems in the empire’. Such opposition
represented real unease inside Coalition ranks.
The Irish troubles became a conflict of terrorisms, symbolized for both sides
58 BLACKSHIRT

by ‘Bloody Sunday’. On 21 November Michael Collins’s IRA volunteers

assassinated eleven suspected British intelligence agents and, in revenge, the
Black and Tans fired on an Irish football crowd killing twelve people. Lord
Robert Cecil called for an inquiry and three days later along with Mosley
voted against his own front bench. Mosley’s speech won high praise for its
‘cogency of argument and the loftiness of its tone’. He was shocked at the
government’s defence of reprisals which ‘slurred over entirely the difference
between the right of a man to hit back and to defend himself against cowardly
and dastardly attacks, and the right of men to revenge themselves for the sins
of the guilty upon the heads of the innocent population of Ireland’.
In Common Sense, ‘Socraticus’ wrote that Mosley’s stand had been taken
‘not out of a desire for notoriety — no one who has had half an hour’s talk
with Mr Mosley could entertain that suspicion for a moment — but from
obedience to strong conviction’. Mosley said that ‘if the Government could
only prevent the murders, or catch and punish the men who commit them,
there would be no demand for-reprisals’. He blamed the failure on the inef-
ficiency of the security police and called for a ‘well-organised Intelligence
Service’. Mosley described the Irish policy as a ‘competition in terrorism’ in
which there was a ‘struggle between the Government and the murderers to see
which can intimidate the community more successfully’. The government
wanted ‘to burn villagers out of their houses but it would be to no avail since
such action gives them precisely what they want — a propaganda case against
us all over the world, which brings them in fresh funds’. Affairs in Ireland,
Mosley regretted, had developed into war. The only solution was a withdrawal
of British forces to the coast, where ports could be held as strategic posts.
Ireland was one more issue with which Lloyd George had to deal as the
Coalition struggled. The boom had collapsed, two million were unemployed
and organized labour was increasingly militant with eighty-six million working
days lost in strikes. Housing was cut as part of the Treasury’s deflationary
strategy.
Mosley’s orthodox solution to the economic crisis emphasized that free
trade was the only way to maximize prosperity. ‘Half the world is unable to
buy the goods which this country is in a position to offer.’ He shared the
views of the centrists who opposed protectionism and, as a fully fledged
internationalist, championed League of Nations reconstruction loans, cur-
rency stabilization and lower tariff barriers. He did not criticize policies of
economy, which he advocated ‘with all the fervour of a Gladstone’, and
deflation, because he ‘did not as yet see the connection between the two’. It
was another two years before he perceived the contradiction between sound
finance and the dream of a land fit for heroes. :
With the new year, the Wilsonian vision of a new international order lay
crippled. In its place stood the Versailles treaty, which split Europe into those
 ‘THE VISION SPLENDID’ 59
states it had benefited and those it punished. Convinced Germany would
inevitably revive, Lloyd George warned his fellow peacemakers against the
treaty conditions. A. L. Kennedy wrote (27 January 1921) that the assumed
‘perpetuity of arrangements made for Germany by her victors .. . raised the
perplexing question of how the provisions of the treaties could be maintained:
“Who is going to prevent her maintaining or assembling armed forces?”’’
Mosley was the most energetic advocate in the Commons of the LoN, but
realized it was floundering and with it the hopes of a new politics of co-
operation.
Mosley wanted to unite all the anti-Coalition forces — Liberals, ‘patriotic’
Labour and Cecilian Tories - in partnership. Its nucleus would comprise
political friends such as Herbert, Cavendish-Bentinck, the two Cecils, Locker-
Lampson, Walter Guinness, Billy Ormsby Gore, Sam Hoare and Edward
Wood, who combined ‘high-mindedness with wit, and polemics with laughter’.
During February Lord Robert Cecil announced he would sit among the oppo-
sition MPs, fuelling speculation that he might support the Labour Party. He
acted as a ‘vital catalyst’ in Mosley’s progression from Coalition Unionism to
the Independent Labour Pary, but he proved a reluctant leader, being neither
ambitious nor decisive.
Mosley continued to bully the PM into replying to questions about govern-
ment approval of reprisals. On 25 February, while her husband was busy
campaigning with the Peace with Ireland Council, Cimmie gave birth to their
first child, Vivien. The first to congratulate the Mosleys was Margot Asquith,
who was aware of the dangers of childbirth as a result of her own tragedies;
she had experienced three stillbirths. She impressed upon Cimmie the ‘impor-
tance of avoiding pregnancy for a long period’. She knew how this was to be
done: ‘Henry always withdrew in time, such a noble man.’
On 7 March Mosley taunted the government as having ‘denials on its lips
and blood on its hands’. He was not surprised Lloyd George was committed
to ‘a wicked policy, but I am astonished to find them committed to a
thoroughly stupid policy’. He then trapped the PM into a damaging exchange
by asking if ‘any proposals for the initiation or continuance of the policy of
reprisals in Ireland were laid before the Cabinet’. Lloyd George refused to
answer. Mosley’s retort, ‘Does the Right Hon. Gentleman admit official sanc-
tion?’, was met with opposition cheers. Mosley had private information and
had framed his questions accordingly. A week |ater the Council adopted a
peace policy calling for the withdrawal of the Black and Tans, talks with Sinn
_ Fein and a military truce. .
Mosley tried to persuade Cecil to assume the leadership, as he was convinced
that it lay within his power ‘to change the whole course of the history of the
decade’. As to his own position, he thought it ‘no use chopping and changing,
and until I see:a very clear advantage in moving again I think it would be
60 BLACKSHIRT

better to stick where I am’. He had, however, dropped the label ‘conservative’.
On 17 April Mosley wrote again: ‘The hour lends itself entirely to our purpose
and especially to the reappearance of Grey [Liberal Foreign Secretary at the
outbreak of war who supported the LoN].’ There was an opportunity ‘for a
confederation of reasonable men to advance with a definite proposal for the
reorganisation of our industrial system . . . We are anathema to the bourgeois
profiteer who really is the present Government and no true reconciliation
could ever take place while that element predominates on the other side.’
Mosley observed to Cecil that they were ‘so immersed in the detail of every
day existence that .. . one loses entirely the vision splendid of politics within
the four walls of the H. of C.’. He had not, however, lost the ability to spot a
political opportunity. ‘The yearning of the electorate for any escape. . . might
be lashed to a white heat by a timely exposure of the Irish atrocities to crown
the present disgust.’ Further indiscipline on the part of the auxiliaries was duly
exposed. On 21 April Lloyd George was compelled to admit there had been
‘deplorable excesses’. Cecil argued the law had been. brought into disrepute
because the reprisals had never been placed on a constitutional basis.
When Cecil declined to take the lead, Mosley turned to Lord Grey as the
‘best hope of an effective rallying together of all the stable progressive elements
in the country’. Grey was seen as the one public figure ‘unsullied by the war
and the internecine political strife that followed it’, though some considered
him an authoritarian figure hovering in the wings for his chance at power.
Cecil inaugurated a conspiracy to project Grey as head of a centrist movement.
Impatient for results, Mosley’s own intrigues became ‘quite febrile’. He
appealed to Lord Cowdray for financial backing and arranged a secret meeting
between Cecil and Labour’s Arthur Henderson to discuss an anti-Coalition
alliance. News of the manoeuvres leaked and was splashed on the front pages
under the headline GREY WHIGS ON THE GREEN BENCHES. The high-minded
intrigue was stillborn. The aristocratic call for unity on a radical non-party
basis was nothing more than anti-socialism and its non-partisanship a mask
for old-style paternalism. The quest failed because there was no consensus on
‘what unity was composed of and where the centre was to be located’.
By spring 1921 Northcliffe’s newspapers and the liberal dailies were hostile
to the government’s Irish policy, which was discredited even among those who
had advocated it. Ardent Unionists such as Sir Henry Wilson insisted that
‘unless the Government used the regular army ina properly conducted military
campaign, it should abandon repression altogether’. Organized ex-servicemen,
however, considered such criticism an attack on the army and took the oppor-
tunity to break up meetings of the Peace with Ireland Council. Mosley wrote
on 7 May to the writer J. L.Hammond that Lord Bryce, who had chaired an
inquiry into alleged German atrocities in Belgium, had agreed to be president
of a commission which would ‘delegate certain persons armed with legal
 ‘THE VISION SPLENDID’ " <6x
assistance to go to Ireland and secure evidence in to the reprisals’. It was not
required as, after months of bloodshed, the Cabinet suddenly reversed policy
and in June ended the reprisals.
On 11 July, government negotiations with Sinn Fein produced an autumn
truce. Mosley wanted Irish leader Eamon de Valera to ‘accept Lloyd George’s
invitation right off, without any conditions’. If ‘he took this course he would
have the whole of the English public opinion at the back of him’, In December,
a peace treaty was signed in which Collins and James Griffith surrendered the
North and accepted both membership of the Commonwealth and an oath of
allegiance to the Crown. They also allowed Britain use of certain ports.
While the treaty was a potential disaster for the Irish, for Conservatives it
shattered the unity of their party and for this they never forgave Lloyd George.
Mosley felt the PM had forfeited his claim to speak on behalf of the Liberal
ethic because of his morally repugnant policy. Mosley later compared his
stance to the revulsion felt by the young during the sixties to US policy
in Vietnam. Irish policy, concludes Kenneth Morgan, was a ‘monument to
ignorance, racial and religious prejudice, and ineptitude’. It ‘tore the heart out
of the Unionist Party, leaving it without a cause to defend’, and was the
beginning of the end of Lloyd George. By contrast, Mosley’s stance made his
name both in Parliament and among Catholics. Nationalist MP T. P. O’Con-
nor honoured Mosley as ‘the man who really began the break-up of the Black
and Tan savagery’. He would ‘always be regarded by every good Irishman
with appreciation and gratitude’.

Mosley’s actions brought down Conservative wrath and led to sustained

criticism from his local newspaper, the Harrow Observer. In riposte he bought
its rival, the Gazette, and launched a broadside against the ‘budding Napo-
leons of the press world who purposely dedicate their pens to the power of
evil’. Although political parties no longer owned newspapers, they exercised
considerable influence through their patronage of proprietors and channelling
of information to editors. A modern politician, Mosley grasped the necessity
of access to the media. He also knew that money was at the heart of politics.
Without it, politicians were doomed to failure. He funded his local Unionist
Association and by doing so ‘retained the organisation in his own hands’.
Mosley’s time as a press lord was brief and in July 1921 he was forced to
sell the loss-making Gazette to its rival. His habit,of printing his own speeches
verbatim contributed to the paper’s declining circulation. He was in difficulty
over the settlement of his estate and had incurred debts through buying
unsuitable houses. He turned for help to Cimmie, whose father still had access
to her allowance. On her twenty-first birthday she was awarded Leiter Trust
money of £150,000 (£7.5 m) and an annual income of £9,000 (£450,000). In
addition, she was left £20,000 by her grandmother.
62 BLACKSHIRT

When Cimmie married, her father consulted Mosley’s lawyer ‘as to the
propriety of asking her to leave a portion of the entire fortune now hers to
assist her father’. Arrangements had been made for her to leave with him the
income which accrued from the Marriage Settlement, estimated to be about
£3,000 (£150,000) a year. He was, however, embarrassed by the sudden
withdrawal of the income of his eldest daughter, Irene, and Cimmie’s request
for her rightful share. Curzon’s art collection had been purchased with money
from his daughters’ account. ‘It was therefore a difficult moment when Cimmie
decided,’ Mosley recalled, ‘with my support, to take the rest of her own.
I insisted, and she agreed, that no detailed rejoinder should be made to his
reproaches.”
Curzon complained to his wife that he had received (21 September) the
‘most outrageous letter from a daughter to her father’. Cimmie described his
attitude as ‘unwarrantable, unaccountable and incomprehensible’. Leiter Trust
cheques had gone to her and she had passed them on, but she gave warning
that this would no longer be the case. A despairing Curzon pondered whether
he would have to sell Broadstairs. ‘What a fool Tom Mosley is making of him-
self,’ Grace wrote back. Curzon, angered by his ‘sinister’ son-in-law’s role in the
quarrel, replied that the Mosleys ‘mean to take the whole money. The best thing
to doisto say Take it. Icannot stand the perpetual torrent of threats and abuse.’
On 1 November he informed Grace that Cimmie had offered him an allowance
but he would ‘sooner not accept it at all than know it is found grudgingly and
with obvious regret’. It ended his relationship with his two eldest daughters
and the estrangement lasted till his death in 1926. Beaverbrook later revealed
that Curzon died owing £80,000 (£4 m) in unpaid taxes.
Hunting was Irene’s ruling passion and she devoted most of her time to the
Craven Lodge, a noted hunting box at Melton, Leicestershire. In 1922 the
Lodge was bought by Mosley’s close sporting friend Michael Wardell, who
converted it into an exclusive hunting club for weekend visitors from London.
They included Curzon’s third daughter, Lady Alexandra, dubbed the ‘most
beautiful brunette in London’ during the 1922 Season. The chic Baba had
been the girlfriend of Prince George, the younger brother of the Prince of
Wales. She soon threw the Prince over for a dashing Indian Cavalry officer,
Captain Dudley ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, son of the head of Industries in the Irish
prison service. High-spirited and a superb horseman, Fruity was on the Prince
of Wales’s staff to look after polo ponies. Royal staff thought him an ‘excellent
fellow’ but ‘weak and irresponsible’. Baba had also taken an interest in
Cimmie’s husband, though the feeling had yet to be reciprocated.

In Parliament, Mosley was one of the few MPs capable of delivering a major
speech without notes. He could dominate an audience with a mastery of voice
and technique, though he admitted the ‘weapons of sarcasm and invective’
 ‘THE VISION SPLENDID’ 63
took precedence over ‘more reasoned passages’. This, however, was necessary
since he had been educated ‘in a tough school of debate’. He attacked Lloyd
George over his partiality to being treated as a ‘Roman emperor’ at soirées at
the villa of Sir Philip Sassoon, the PM’s millionaire Parliamentary Secretary,
who was regarded as a joke by younger MPs. Mosley said the PM would be
‘regaled in the evening with the frankincense of admiring friends and the
abrasions of controversy’, and then soothed by a ‘liberal application of pre-
cious ointment from the voluptuous Orient’. When he attacked Churchill,
Clementine wrote to her husband, on 13 February 1922, that ‘Master Oswald
is a very cheeky young Cub and needs keeping in his place, but of course it is
rather an honour to have one of the leading figures in the Country holding
you down to it’.
Throughout the spring, negotiations took place between Harrow’s Unionist
Association president and Mosley over his status. A. K. Carlyon found it
‘extraordinarily difficult’ to bring him to the point. He could never give a
straight answer and developed ‘an unrivalled skill in qualifying any written or
spoken statement he could be induced to make with some loophole, by which,
if convenient, he could escape from the obvious meaning of his words’.
Patience wore thin for an MP who was the master of ‘procrastinating devices’.
An explanatory document from Mosley on 24 May, Carlyon claimed,
‘would make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for us to put him forward
as a Unionist candidate’. Mosley would accept the label of Progressive Con-
servative but would not enter Parliament unless he was ‘free to take any action
compatible’ with his principles. His first consideration ‘must always be the
triumph of the causes for which I stand’. When asked if he would take the
Conservative whip, he replied that ‘a gramophone would be more suitable to
these requirements than a human being’. Typically, he bypassed the local
Association by circulating a letter to its 4,000 members, proclaiming that he
had ‘no intention of becoming a spokesman for lost causes on the Government
backbenches’. The break with Harrow Unionism was inevitable.
The Coalition had substantial achievements to its credit in the field of
housing policy and the relief of poverty. They were, however, judged to be
little more than ‘cunning devices, mean expedients, crafty compromises and
shoddy betrayals’. When the PM announced, in October, that the Coalition
would call an election to renew its remit, Conservatives rebelled. On the rgth
Bonar Law, who had announced his withdrawal from politics, was persuaded
to lead the rebellion at the Carlton Club, where a decision was taken to
withdraw from the Coalition. A week later, Parliament was dissolved. The
Conservatives were divided between a Bonar Law majority and an influential
minority who wanted to maintain the Coalition; the Liberals were split into
rival factions led by Asquith and Lloyd George; and Labour hardly seemed a
party.
64 BLACKSHIRT

In his election address, Mosley said the war had ‘destroyed the old party
issues, and with them the old parties. The great new issues will shortly create
new Party alignments.’ Only then would he be prepared to state his party
allegiance. He was convinced ‘some new political force was on the point of
being born’ and, in a powerful Commons speech, urged the creation of a ‘third *
force’ between Bolshevism and reaction. He was prepared to work with men *
who held similar opinions, but colleagues considered him too much of a
maverick ever to be restrained within the confines of a traditional party.
At the age of twenty-six, Mosley stood at the general election as an Indepen-
dent. Crucially, the Liberals and Labour decided not to run candidates against
him, and many party workers canvassed on his behalf. Funding his campaign
was eased when, on Cecil’s advice, he secured from Cowdray £10,000
(£500,000) to fund Independent candidates, including leading feminist and
LoN campaigner Mrs Ray Strachey. His endorsement of Mrs Strachey dis-
mayed Conservatives. Mosley’s own election address ran to 5,000 words and
was liberally sprinkled with tributes from the eminent — an early example of
what was to become a characteristic practice. He always felt himself to be
unjustly maligned and the frequent quotation of statements of praise was his
method of redressing the balance.
The result in the November election surprised even Mosley’s most optimistic
supporters. He polled 15,290 votes to his Conservative opponent’s 7,868. In
the Nation, H. W. Massingham said he was the ‘most attractive personal
element in the election. He is a figure of individual strength and purpose, a
young man of genius, perhaps the most interesting in the late parliament. If
character, a brilliant and searching mind, and a repugnance for mean and
cruel dealings fit men for the service of the State, Mr Mosley should rise high
in it.’ He is ‘something of a star, and of no common brightness’.
The election gave Bonar Law’s Conservatives, with 347 seats, a majority of
eighty-eight over the combined seats of Asquith’s Liberals (sixty), Lloyd
George’s Liberals (fifty-seven) and Labour (142). The election’s significance
was that the Tories were back in the saddle and were to remain so for most
of the century. It also signalled the demise of the Liberals. Lloyd George never
regained power and few of his colleagues worked willingly with him again.
Ironically, it was the negatives which made him an attractive figure for Mosley.
There was the brilliant oratory, contempt for traditional parties and the
capacity ‘to secure the loyalty of men of ability, who nevertheless recognised
that he was a vulgar upstart’. Mosley admired his capacity for action which
‘many Englishmen later regarded as a sufficient justification for the continental
dictators’.
Aubrey Herbert realized the centre party experiment was over: ‘It was
obvious that we were broken up.’ Cecil entered the Conservative government
and offered Mosley a post, but he declined. ‘Tom’, Herbert wrote, ‘is a fox
 ‘THE VISION SPLENDID’ 65
who has lost his tail and wants the rest of us to do the same.’ The rift with
the Tories had grown too wide and he wanted ‘far more positive action than
it then presented’. He was courted by the Liberals but they were a lost cause.
It seemed only the Labour Party could offer opposition to the Tories.
Mosley was still largely known for his speeches on foreign affairs and the
British Empire, which ‘could supply all our needs’. He advocated a return to
the Salisbury days of ‘splendid isolation’, which expressed the ‘deeper wishes
of the nation at large’. For Mosley foreign and domestic affairs were intricately
connected, since foreign adventurers wasted resources which should be
directed to domestic concerns.
Following the Balfour Declaration of Britain’s intention to work for the
establishment of a national home for Jewish people in Palestine, violence
spread throughout the Middle East. The British managed to ride out the storm
and Churchill, the Minister responsible for the region, forged an ‘ingenious com-
promise’ for Mesopotamia (now Iraq) to become a nation, with Feisal as its
King. Mosley, who was known to the Zionist office in London as an opponent,
spoke out against Churchill’s adventure. Expressing a view that he retained
all his life, he told MPs he was ‘strongly opposed to the sacrifice of British
lives in any but a British quarrel’. He charged the government with ‘running
round the world looking after the business of every people except their own’.
The slump and long-term unemployment brought poverty to many ex-
servicemen and Mosley began to take an interest in their plight. If his solution
still revolved around traditional control of finance and reduced taxation to
stimulate free enterprise and efficiency, he also favoured discrimination in
favour of ex-servicemen and urged that capital projects ‘contribute in some
degree to the solution of the national question of unemployment’. He viewed
unemployment as a symptom of a country in decline and saw its cure in a
social imperialist vision of a greater Britain. British Fascism’s own chronicler,
Richard Bellamy, wrote that if Fascism was conceived in the war, it was ‘born
out of the hopeless misery and squalor of the post-war slump’. For the moment,
however, Mosley remained ‘the very independent Member for Harrow’.

Sometime during the winter of 1922-3, while pregnant with their second
child, Cimmie learnt of her husband’s affair with a mutual friend with whom
they had spent time in Venice the previous summer. Cimmie remained
unaware, however, of another illicit relationship. On a hunting weekend in
Melton Mowbray, Mosley had slept with her sister Irene. On another occasion
in St Moritz, unable to ski because of his leg, Mosley had a fling with her
stepmother Grace. He only managed to escape scandal because it was confined
to a ‘charmed circle’, who were ‘clued-up about contraception’.
Despite their brief encounter, Irene was ‘heavily censorious’ of Mosley’s
affairs and especially of the pain caused to his wife. Cimmie was distressed
66 BLACKSHIRT

but it was always she who ended up apologizing: ‘I am so sorry for the way I
harry you — have made too high a mountain out of the molehills of your faults
_..No one has ever had a sweeter man.’ There were, however, terrible rows.
He had a frightening temper and was known to abuse her verbally, sometimes
publicly. Cimmie forgave his philandering and acted the dutiful wife, playing
~

hostess at their home in Sloane Square where politicians such as F. E. Smith,

now Lord Birkenhead, were regular visitors. Birkenhead described Mosley —
a welcome guest at the inter-war salons, where both politicians pursued women
~as the ‘perfumed popinjay of scented boudoirs’.

When Bonar Law’s Cabinet first met, Birkenhead sneeringly referred to its
‘second-class intellects’. Cecil drew huge cheers at a meeting when he replied
that ‘England preferred to be governed by second-class intellects than by
second-class characters’. A few months later the PM was struck down by an
illness and he was to succumb to it during the autumn of 1923. Throughout
Bonar Law’s illness, Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon. presided over Cabinet
meetings. Over the short term of the 1922~3 Parliament, during which Curzon
did not quite become PM, Mosley honed his political skills.
The Westminster Gazette said Mosley had ‘courage and coolness, an excellent
command of English and a quick wit’. His voice, however, was betrayed by a
‘high-pitched note’. Determined to eradicate it, he took voice lessons, which
eliminated the falsetto. He acquired a measured rhythm of speech with his
‘calculated changes in pitch sounding like a car changing gear’. The Gazette
now wrote that he was ‘spoken of by old and experienced parliamentary hands
as composed of the stuff of which Prime Ministers are made. The most
polished literary speaker in the Commons, words flow from him in graceful,
epigrammatic phrases that have a sting in them for the Government and the
Conservatives.’ He told Archie Sinclair he was determined to be PM in twelve
years’ time.
Mosley’s support of the LoN wavered as he veered away from policies of
intervention. When, in January 1923, French troops occupied the Ruhr in
pursuit of reparations, he suggested that if the League policy failed, then
Britain should withdraw into isolation. He did not think the ‘generation which
bore the brunt of the last war . . . are going to lift another finger to cleanse the
Augean stables of European diplomacy. I do not believe they will consent to
the pouring of another drop of British blood down the gaping drains of its
seething animosities, its racial hatreds, its atavistic prejudices . . . it is perfectly
useless for any Government to appeal for an armed intervention in European
affairs.’ However, on 15 February he admitted if the French matter was
allowed ‘to drift on we should be faced with the alternative of fighting a
disastrous war, entailing immense expenditure in lives and money, or of
withdrawing with grave loss of prestige’.
 ‘THE VISION SPLENDID’ 67
Curzon worried that his son-in-law might ‘become a good debater in the
wilderness, a brilliant lone-wolf’. Mosley, however, had calculated that the
Labour Party was the logical vehicle for his ambition. ‘I shall not blame you
if you join Labour,’ Curzon wrote, ‘but do not remain in ineffective isolation.’
For the Front Generation, an institutional base in politics was a necessity but
locating one was not easy and to an extent ‘circumstances dictated individual
choices’. Mosley was uncertain of the Labour leadership and wished ‘they
would abandon their habit of discussing ultimate issues and advance in a
concrete and concise form an immediate programme to deal with immediate
issues’. A Morning Post reporter was reminded of ‘Disraeli before he had
taken his political bearings’.

On 25 June 1923 Cimmie gave birth to their first son, Nicholas. Mosley
believed his wife’s distress over his adultery upset the child, but it did not alter
his behaviour, nor her total allegiance to him. He believed the upbringing of
children should be left to professionals, such as Nanny Hyslop, Cimmie’s
nursery maid. Mosley venerated motherhood; it reinforced his image of
Cimmie as ‘a paragon of virtue’. Ever the dutiful wife, she entertained Labour
leader Ramsay MacDonald and even invited him to join them on holiday
in Venice. MacDonald politely declined but, susceptible to the aristocratic
embrace, soon became part of the Mosleys’ social circle, which now included
Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The daughter of a liberal industrial mag-
nate, Beatrice had led a conventional upper-class life until her friendship with
Herbert Spencer made her aware of social injustices.
Tall and handsome, ‘Gentleman Mac’ had the bearing of an aristocrat but
his unmarried parents had been a ploughman and-a Scottish servant girl.
Because of his illegitimacy and the social stigma, MacDonald was insecure
and ‘intolerant of all who questioned his omniscience’. Beatrice Webb con-
sidered him ‘an egotist, a poseur and a snob, and worst of all he does not
believe in the creed we have always preached — he is not a socialist’. MacDonald
was a champion of moderation, who instilled confidence, even in his political
opponents.
Mosley, Beatrice noted in June 1923, is ‘the most brilliant man’ in the
Commons. ‘He would make his way in the world without his adventitious
advantages, which are many — birth, wealth and a beautiful aristocratic wife.
He is also an assiduous worker in the modern manner — keeps two secretaries
at work supplying him with information but realises that he himself has to do
the thinking!’ She added: ‘So much perfection argues rottenness somewhere.
Is there in him some weak spot which will be revealed in a time of stress by
letting you or your cause down or sweeping it out of the way?’
Mosley said Beatrice ‘bestowed angels’ wings or a tail and horns entirely
according to her agreement or disagreement with the views of the person in
68 BLACKSHIRT

question’. She had nevertheless pinpointed a flaw in Mosley’s otherwise perfect

front — his loyalty was not to any party or faction but only to himself.
MacDonald, she added, was ‘much taken with him, and he with MacDonald’.
The editor of the Independent Labour Party’s journal Forward, Thomas
Johnston MP, told her that there were three men — Sidney Webb, Patrick
Hastings and Mosley — who were detested by the Tories because they were ©
traitors to their class. This accounted for, she realized, ‘the growing popularity
among the extremists of the two very “bourgeois” figures and the one super-
aristocrat’.
A week later Beatrice wrote to Harold Laski at the London School of
Economics that Cimmie was ‘ready that her husband should join the Labour
Party’. He was asked to help expedite the move. The young don was fascinated
by the aristocracy and eager to help the ‘clever and eloquent’ Mosley. He
organized a debate with the Duke of Northumberland on whether man’s
aggressive instincts could be permanently curbed. Mosley quoted from Tenny-
son’s In Memoriam: ‘Will the ape and tiger ever die?’.He opposed the Duke’s
arguments against the League of Nations with a call for effective machinery
to settle international disputes.
At the end of August Mussolini’s Italian army occupied the Greek island of
Corfu. Mosley wanted Britain to invoke the League’s Article 16, which pro-
vided for economic sanctions against an aggressor. Curzon consulted the
Treasury about the possibility of enforcing sanctions but this was not pursued.
Mosley felt his father-in-law had done little and attacked Prime Minister
Stanley Baldwin’s lack of interest. The diehards, however, were sympathetic
to the anti-Communist dictator and their mouthpiece, the Morning Post,
treated the matter as a simple case of ‘Mussolini versus Lenin’.
Cecil worried that Mussolini’s successful defiance of the League might lead
to chaos in Europe. ‘A powerful member of the League has refused to carry
out its treaty obligations and has succeeded in doing so with impunity, some
might even say with an increase of prestige.’ Following an Italian assault on
Malta, Mosley claimed the ‘essential ingredient of will in statesmanship was
lacking from the League’, which had been wrecked by the dictator. He made
‘a most offensive speech about him to the effect that he had triumphed like a
drunken motor-car driver, not by reason of his own skill but because all
sober people had been concerned to get out of his way’. Mosley subsequently
developed a sneaking admiration for Mussolini for upholding the interests of
his country ‘much more vigorously than Baldwin and Curzon’. He saw the
failure to intervene, however, as the end of the League. Isolationism, and the
desire not to become entangled in Europe, was the central plank of his thinking.
He attacked Churchill for his reckless campaigns, which deprived Britain of
‘essential air squadrons’ for home defence.
For their summer vacation the Mosleys visited Venice where their hostess,
 ‘THE VISION SPLENDID’ 69
Olga Lynn, a popular opera singer, gave glamorous dinner parties at the
Restaurant Cappellfor o her exotic ‘Oggie’s circle’. This included Cecil Beaton,
Tallulah Bankhead, Diana Cooper and, occasionally, the Prince of Wales. A
recent addition was Mosley’s friend, Foreign Office diplomat Josslyn Hay
(later the Earl of Erroll). Hay announced his engagement in the Tatler, on
23 September, to Lady Idina Gordon. She was hardly the ideal diplomat’s wife
as she did not give a damn what other people thought. Idina’s dictum was ‘to
Hell with husbands’, and Mosley took due advantage.
In late October the Mosleys travelled to Paris to spend a few days with their
friends the Mendls. They met up with ‘Jimmy’, Duke of Alba, Diana Cooper
and her husband Duff (a diplomat at the Paris embassy), the wealthy Murphys,
and songwriter Cole Porter and his new wife. Porter was showcasing his
futuristic jazz ballet, Within the Quota, written by Gerald Murphy, the man
Scott Fitzgerald drew upon for Dick Driver in Tender Is the Night. Murphy
was the centre of the American movement of Sonnenkinder in exile.
Revered as the most beautiful woman in the world, Porter’s wife, Linda
Thomas, was aware her husband — described by Mosley as ‘a little dark elfin
creature’ — was homosexual but was prepared to maintain the facade of a
heterosexual marriage. There were rumours she was a lesbian. She was a close
friend of Charles Mendl’s wife, a member of an international sapphic set. Duff
Cooper wrote to his wife that Mosley ‘got into trouble in Paris owing to his
excessive attentions to Mrs Cole Porter. He went to her bedroom uninvited so
that she had to complain to Cole. Adulterous, canting, slobbering Bolshie - I
don’t like him.’ Cooper never altered that view. Such behaviour was typical of
Mosley. Lady Rosebery told Robert Rhodes James that she had had ‘one of her
best ball-gowns torn and ruined when escaping from his amorous clutches!’
Barbara Cartland, who had just published her first novel, considered Mosley
to be a cad — defined by Charles Mend! as ‘someone who makes you go all
crinkly-toes’. He was, she told a friend, ‘sinister and aggressively masculine’.
He was ‘a seething volcano and I am sure when he stood at the crossroads he
took the downward path to hell. He seldom smiled and when he talked he
would stand, staring with black eyes as if he looked into a fathomless future.’
She asked him once if he was ‘doing anything exciting’. Mosley replied he
was, but ‘the people who are exciting are very difficult to excite. They are
quite content with everything as it was yesterday.’

Mosley had not previously expressed interest in economics but during 1923
he switched his interest from foreign to domestic affairs. The fight for such
ideals as renewal ‘would have to go on, and that the field on which it must be
waged was home ground’. He studied contemporary theorists and subscribed
to, and even considered buying, A. R. Orage’s New Age — an ‘Independent
Socialist Review’ — which championed economists from what Keynes dubbed
70 BLACKSHIRT

the ‘underworld of rejected knowledge’. He was convinced government poli-

cies, ‘far from ensuring a return to prosperity, were actively discouraging it
through deflationary policies and an obsession with the return to the gold
standard at pre-war parity’. He had moved a considerable distance from being
a Cecil acolyte and was not tied to the intellectual baggage of orthodox
‘_*

economics. Free trade, budgetary balance and the gold standard were no f
longer seen as permanent fixtures of the institutional system.
An election was due in 1923 and Prime Minister Baldwin decided to make
protectionism the issue upon which it was to be fought. The mounting
unemployment figures strengthened the argument for protectionism and the
government proposed a number of mild measures which would largely leave
free trade unaffected. Mosley was not infected by the sudden enthusiasm for
protection, since he believed ‘fluctuations in the exchange rate of foreign
countries made nonsense of any tariff barrier’. He had, he wrote, ‘foreseen
the era of competitive devaluation to gain an advantage in the export trade’.
Baldwin’s dissolution of Parliament on 13 November gave Mosley his third
fight for the Harrow seat. ‘Almost alone among candidates’, noted the Sunday
Express, he pointed out that the government’s ‘insanely exaggerated
deflationist policy was one of the principal causes of unemployment’. He
opposed protectionism, since it would prove to be beneficial mainly to the
profiteers. ‘Is there any chance’, he asked, ‘that wages will rise to correspond
to prices? They will be kept down, there will be more unemployment and the
wage-earning classes will be at the mercy of monopolistic industrialists.’ He
insisted he was not a free trader, it was simply that protection which relied on
half measures would be undermined by a lack of control and organization.
He wanted more attention paid to Empire development through organized
transport and credit facilities.
At the general election on 6 December the Independent Mosley polled
14,079 votes, his opponent only 9,433. That he held the seat with a substantial,
though reduced, majority in the face of local protectionist tradition was a
triumph. His refusal to stand as a Conservative and his avowal as ‘an unremit-
ting opponent of any Conservative administration’ in a Tory district, where
he was routinely denounced in the press, lost him many votes. The country
decisively rejected protectionism. The Conservatives lost eighty-six seats and
found themselves in a minority of almost a hundred. The reunited Liberal
Party, with Lloyd George campaigning under Asquith’s free trade banner,
secured 159 seats, an increase of forty, but it would never again win as many
seats. Labour, which denounced protectionism as a cause of higher prices, had
a total of 191 MPs. It did not escape Mosley’s attention that the up-and-
coming party was Labour, which had seen a dramatic rise in its vote, doubling
it to four and a half million.
Baldwin did not resign, but held on until January 1924, when his govern-
 “THE VISION SPLENDID’ 71
ment was defeated on a vote of confidence. Speaking from the opposition
benches, Mosley saidhe was voting against the Conservatives because
administrative blundering has added to our miseries of unemployment, a policy
which leaves us a ghastly heritage of slums, starvation and suffering in our midst.
The handiwork of this Government is written all over the map of our country in the
characters of human anguish. For my part, if I gave one vote to keep in power for
a one night such a Government, I should feel that I deserved to be drummed out with
ignominy from the great army of progress.

On 18 January Ramsay MacDonald became the first Labour Prime Minister.

_ He hailed Labour as a progressive party, which appealed to a broad range of
voters. On the eve of taking office he told constituents he did not care to be
called a Socialist and preferred to be looked on as ‘a sort of non-party Party
leader’. The party was a loose alliance representing a variety of semi-socialist
ideas. Socialist rhetoric was acceptable as long as commitments did not disturb
working-class interests.
Mosley had for months hovered on the edge of joining Labour but was
unconvinced it represented the new political alignment he was seeking. His
friends likened him to ‘a Victorian Tractarian clergyman trembling on the
brink of Rome’. His talks with the Webbs and Harold Laski finally persuaded
him of the party’s technical competence. Despite the huge social divide that
separated potential middle-class and aristocratic recruits from the grass roots,
he recognized his path now led inevitably to Labour. Celebrating the formation
of a new government, Mosley said ‘the army of progress has struck its tents
and is on the move’.
Mosley’s mother congratulated him. ‘How enormously I admire your amaz-
ing courage and self-sacrifice of most things that appeal to men of your age
and up-bringing; and how I pray with all my heart that your dreams for the
benefit of struggling humanity may come true, and that I may live to see your
present attitude justified by results and the world appreciate that far from
being a pushing self-seeking politician you were in fact willing to be a martyr
for your Religion — for it seems to me that is what your Politics are.’ She also
issued a note of warning. If Labour ‘meant what you and some of those in the
party are striving to make it every one of us would back you. But to my mind
the tragedy of it all is that the vast mass of your often very ignorant supporters
do not mean what you mean by Socialism.’ It was ‘an old story — as old as the
Bible. When the Jews found following Christ meant the cross and not an
earthly sovereignty and defeat of the Romans they turned on him and crucified
their Lord.’
Was Mosley a pushing, self-seeking politician as his critics alleged? An
ambitious young man seeking a quick route to the top of the greasy pole?
Many of his contemporaries believed so, but the Tory press also referred to
ie BLACKSHIRT
socialist.
his socialistic leanings while a Labour paper described him as a guild
Amabel Williams-Ellis, sister of John Strachey, wrote a novel, The Walls of
Glass (1927), which referred to Mosley at this time. * “And then he suddenly
went over to Labour. To Labour!” repeated the girl, mildy surprised. “Why?”
“Vanity”, answered Lady St Aubrey succinctly. “He thought there would be?
less competition.”’ He hoped Labour would provide a receptive political’
vehicle for his ambitions but he was doing so at a moment when the great
divide was not between a Conservative Party which abhorred activism and a
Labour Party calling for change, but between ‘the economic conservatives and
economic radicals across the political spectrum’. Mosley would find it as hard
to fulfil his ambitions in Labour as he had in the Conservative Party.
 5 ‘

The Underworld of Rejected Knowledge

“My path now led inevitably to the Labour Party,’ Mosley recalled. It seemed
clear that ‘the only hope now lay in the party which had been thrown up by
the mass of the people to right their wrongs. Through and beyond the failure
of men and of parties, we of the war generation are marching on.’ On 27 March
1924 he joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the means of entry for
middle- and upper-class recruits.
He had been busy reading ‘socialist’ sources, in particular the pre-First
World War guild socialists G. D. H. Cole, $. G. Hobson and A. R. Orage.
Commentators later ascribed his Fascism to a number of writers from whom
he drew little of interest. ‘The tradition of the medieval guilds in England, of
the Hanseatic League and the syndicalism of the Latin countries’, he admitted,
‘was much nearer to my thinking.’
Guild socialism was a fusion of the co-operative movement and the English
medievalist reaction against the nineteenth century. The latter strand was
evident in Arthur J. Penty’s The Restoration of the Gild System (1906). A
disciple of William Morris, he believed trade unions could restore workers’
control through industrial guilds based on workshop methods of production.
From Robert Owen was derived the idea that self-governing workmen would
develop higher moral characters and a desire to serve the community. Penty’s
Utopian plan for social reconstruction struck a chord in Edwardian radical
thought, but he failed to make a breakthrough and it was left to Alfred Richard
Orage to promote guild socialism.
Like many spiritualists, Orage was dismayed by the suppression of individu-
ality envisaged by socialist collectivism and wanted a socialist party ‘untainted
by the gross material demands of the working man’. Inspired by nationalism’s
ability to rouse the people, he applauded the ‘imagination, wholeness and
- sanity’ of what Tom Steele identifies as a National Socialism, which envisioned
an aristocratic elite ruling a democracy subordinate to ‘beautiful’ ideas. Influ-
_enced by G. B. Shaw — the ‘leader of a new patriotism’ —- and German romanti-
-cism, during 1906-7 Orage introduced Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas to Britain.
He was intrigued by the galvanizing myth of the ‘superman’. His was a dynamic
ideology linked to Carlyle’s hero-worship with a belief in the ‘evolution of a
74 BLACKSHIRT
d
higher type through achieved states of consciousness’. Nietzsche reaffirme
Orage’s belief that society was ‘decadent and in need of regeneration’. This
was all close to Mosley’s own thinking.
In 1907 Orage became co-owner-editor of the New Age, which served as a
clearing house for new ideas. With a circulation of 25,000, its contributors?
included G. D. H. Cole, T. E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, H. G.’
Wells, Hilaire Belloc and G. K: Chesterton. There were strands of thought
within New Age thinking which led to Fascism, though most contributors
finally opted for ‘something closer to the neo-feudalistic corporatism of TS;
Eliot’s thirties Christian clerisy’.
The outburst of pre-war industrial protest seemed to vindicate Orage’s
anti-parliamentarianism. A section of the labour unrest was led by syndicalists,
who advocated open industrial warfare, culminating in a general strike that
would destroy capitalism. Orage interpreted syndicalism in Nietzschean terms
as ‘a contribution towards the revaluation of values’.
A key contributor to the New Age was philosopher and art critic Thomas
Ernest Hulme, who acted as a transmitter of proto-Fascist ideas. In the 1930s,
H. W. J. Edwards noted that before Hulme died in the Great War, ‘he wrote
about the arrival of a new age, which neither he nor his generation would live
to see. It is beginning to arrive now.’ Hulme promoted the vitalist philosophy
of Henri Bergson and adopted the position of French Catholic intellectual
Charles Maurras and his anti-Semitic Action Frangaise, with its support of a
revolutionary conservatism of hierarchical values, authority, nationalism and
obedience to the State. Unsurprisingly, this has been portrayed as being
synonymous with Fascism.
Hulme was the intellectual mentor to the American émigrés — painter
Wyndham Lewis, poets Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. “Who today’, asks Zeev
Sternhell, ‘could deny the importance’ of these writers ‘in the culture of the
twentieth century?’ Sternhell argues the cultural revolt preceded the political
and, in effect, Mosley’s modern movement would not have developed in the
way it did without this cultural revolt. Eliot, who admired Action Frangaise,
acknowledged Hulme as the ‘great precursor of a new state of mind’.
During 1912 New Age opened its columns to social movements hostile to
parliamentary democracy, including syndicalism and guild socialism, sections
of women’s suffrage and the distributists of Belloc and Chesterton. Through
Odon Por, Avanti’s London correspondent, contributors were introduced to
a radical mix of socialism and syndicalism. British syndicalism had none of
the radicalism or violence of the Continental version, partly because there was
no ingrained hostility to the State. Its influence waned as the wave of industrial
unrest abated. However, it was not insignificant, particularly with its mascu-
line work-centred ideology, espousal of direct action and appeal to a move-
ment instead of a party. In its attack on Labour leaders seduced by the
 THE UNDERWORLD OF REJECTED KNOWLEDGE 75

trappings of power and refusal to treat the State as ‘neutral’, it offered an

alternative Labourism. Mosley took this alternative vision into the Labour
Party.
As his imperialist sentiments came to the fore, Orage sought a patriotic
theory of the State and found in guild socialism a movement better suited to
Britain. Power would be transferred from employers to the unions by means
of encroaching workers’ control. New Age ran articles by Quaker and ILPer
» Sidney G. Hobson, who wanted a spiritual revolution to reunite the community
under a national culture. A government of industry would embrace all
workers, while economic policy would be controlled on behalf of the whole
community and not, as the syndicalists intended, by a section of it. Guild
socialism sought a third way between syndicalism and orthodox socialism,
but in Hobson’s authoritarian vision the individual would be subordinate to
the State. Observers made the connection between his ideas and Mosley’s
corporate Fascism.
Bloomsbury artist Quentin Bell remembered Wyndham Lewis as ‘a brutal
Fascist before the Fascists existed’. Lewis had been introduced to Nietzschean
ideas in Paris, where he attended lectures by Bergson, encountered Maurras
and Georges Sorel’s anti-materialist revision of Marxism. With Hulme as its
chief propagandist, Lewis’s and Pound’s vorticist wartime art project aimed
to revitalize the ‘sick sensibility of an apathetic generation’. There was an
affinity between vorticism and Fascism in its synthesis of the Fascist style of
aggression with Sorel’s ideas.
In 1916 Hulme translated Sorel’s Réflexions sur la Violence, which pro-
claimed the highest good is heroic action enacted by an exclusive group ‘bound
together in fervent solidarity and impelled by a passionate confidence in
its ultimate triumph’. Sorelians were sympathetic to capitalism because it
encouraged technological and social progress. They refused to question private
property and profit, and were hostile to plutocracy and high finance. This was
the origin of the ‘intermediate regime’ idea put forward by Front Generation
neo-socialists such as Mosley. In this form of National Socialism the masses
would be inspired to overthrow the bourgeois order by social myths which
would centre on a ‘strict morality and expectation of apocalyptic success’.
Sorel’s ethic was of the political sect ‘living in the midst of a continuous crisis,
with all the stress on purity and all the fear of contamination’. Mosley based
his political philosophy on the inevitability of ‘crisis’ and the transformation
of society by what was, in essence, a millennial cult. An aristocracy of
producers joined to a youth avid for action would rule in the new society.
These ideas were promoted in New Age by Ramiro de Maeztu, a Basque
philosopher, who argued wartime solidarity had a ‘permanent value which
will make it survive the necessity that has brought it forth’. Influenced by
Hulme, he claimed the army was organized like a guild, with every member
76 BLACKSHIRT

having a function, and hoped, like Mosley, that this social organization would
spill over into civilian life.
The architect of the new phase of guild socialism was Oxford don George
Cole. He extended Hobson’s ideas on national organization to a congress of
guild delegates and consumers’ bodies, which would serve as a court of appeal, +
with supreme power resting with a ‘national commune’, but rejected his?
mystical view of the State. There were ideological divisions between his vision
of decentralized socialism and Penty’s medievalism. Penty called himself a
nationalist and drifted off into the preservation of rural England, helping
establish the Rural Reconstruction Association. He finally joined the BUF
which recognized him as one of its inspirations.
With the war exposing the gulf between the financial and the industrial
spheres, the New Age became a vehicle for monetary reformers and much
‘funny money’ theory was run through its pages. Out of frustration that they
were not taken seriously, almost all these ‘currency cranks’ turned to the right.
A prolific inventor, Arthur, Kitson, made a fortune from his Birmingham
engineering firm but was lost in financial crashes. His critique of banking
derived from his failure to finance his own patents. A devotee of the “quantity
theory’ of money (the larger the supply of money, the higher the price level),
he opposed the gold standard, because it ‘was what was produced and not the
amount of gold bullion, which defined the wealth of the nation’. He argued
that the possibility for plenty was thwarted by the monetary system and the
manipulation of financiers. Kitson wanted the Bank of England nationalized,
a managed currency and a policy of high wages. His ideas were derided by
economists but he did influence radicals, including Mosley, who developed
them into a more coherent vision.
Orage was a convert to the ‘social credit’ theories of former RFC pilot
Major Clifford Douglas, who was convinced economic depressions stemmed.
from the inability of demand to absorb current production. This was because
money represented by the wages paid to the producers had already been spent
on consumption before goods had reached the retailer. He argued people
could not consume the full product of their labours because of intricate
accounting, which created costs faster than purchasing power was distributed.
If technology increased productivity, then the State must increase propor-
tionatély the ability to pay for such goods. This could be done through a
‘national dividend’ for those on low incomes and the fixing of a ‘just price’ at
the retail end.
_ Building on the ideas of de Maeztu, Douglas argued for the continuation of
wartime price controls and credit changes to increase production. He believed
industry, financed by interest-free credits, could institute rapid technological
development and create a ‘leisure state’. However, New Agers realized the
working classes were not sharing ‘in the benefits of this new age of plenty and
 THE UNDERWORLD OF REJECTED KNOWLEDGE Ag §

that what was transpiring was increasing poverty in the midst of plenty’.
Mosley
shared this view and came to see social credit ideas on ‘underconsumption’ as
a
possible solution to unemployment.
Douglas’s national dividend was the precursor of Mosley’s advocacy of
consumer credits, which would be ‘scientifically’ directed to the working class
to increase consumption. But, whereas Douglas viewed it as a citizenship right,
Mosley saw credits as a reward for work effort. The New Age supported social
credit’s reduction of economic injustice to a single cause: the lack of sufficient
purchasing power on the part of the consumer. It expressed popular resent-
ment against capitalism and promised the resolution of economic problems
but without any major alteration of political structures. Douglas believed that
the battle was now between ‘Finance, on the one side, and Capital and Labour
on the other’.
Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound embraced social credit. Orage taught
them that without economic change, political reform was useless. Through
the New Age, they converted to social credit and, more particularly, to anti-
Semitism. Douglas talked of ‘international money-power’ and a ‘hidden
government’. Kitson’s interest in the Jewish bankers’ conspiracy was inspired
by his friend, Henry Hamilton Beamish, Chairman of the anti-Semitic Britons
group, and his reading of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. ‘The world’s
rulers’, Kitson wrote, ‘are men mainly conspicuous by their noses, who occupy
quiet offices at the backs of the great banking houses of London.’
Guild socialism was not haunted by the cesspit of anti-Semitism, but it was
torn apart by the Bolshevik Revolution and, in 1920, militants split off to
form the Communist Party of Great Britain. Cole worried that Austrian
interest in guilds as a ‘third force’ attempt at direct democracy ‘will show itself
hostile not only to the old political Socialism but also to Communism, and
even that it may become the rallying-point of the much-despised “Centrist”
elements’. This reactionary faction was ‘trekking at its best speed for the land
of spiritual values, in which gross material things can be forgotten’. It derived
its inspiration from an idealized past rather than a future vision. In its ranks
were not only theosophists but also advocates of the return to the land and
social credit theories.
Mosley was influenced by this form of national guild socialism when forming
his modern movement. Some guild socialists found their spiritual home in the
BUF, attracted by his economic ideas and his synthesis of social imperialism,
syndicalism, guild socialism and the New Age philosophy.
Guild socialism was accepted at the 1922 ILP conference — at the moment
when it collapsed as an effective doctrine. The post-war economic slump
exposed that this bureaucratic form of decentralized socialism, where decisions
were made on the basis of ‘instantaneous, direct and complete knowledge of
decision-making throughout the economy’, had no practical policy to deal
78 BLACKSHIRT

own
with it. The solution was ‘planning’, with each industry regulating its
affairs subject to co-ordina tion at the centre. This was attractive to proto-
corporatists such as Mosley, who believed ‘self-government for industry’ might
be ‘an enticing slogan for the capitalist class’.
Clifford Allen was the driving force behind the recruitment of middle-class *
and radical intellectuals whose contributions reinvigorated the ILP. From °
1923, greater attention was paid to measures for dealing with unemployment
and included debates on ‘funny money’ theories and state intervention led by
E. H. Lloyd, J. A. Hobson, Frank Wise and H. N. Brailsford. These were not
true socialists but reformers who wanted a more equitable capitalism. Author
of Stabilisation: An Economic Policy for Consumers and Producers (1923)
and Experiments in State Control (1924), Lloyd said monetary policy should
aim to stabilize internal prices — by centralized purchase of food and raw
materials on long-term contracts — rather than the exchange rate, and argued
for state intervention in funding investment. As Principal Assistant Secretary
at the Ministry of Food, the economist and MP Frank Wise understood
planning issues ‘in a way which was denied to his purely political colleagues’.
He popularized the writings of John Atkinson Hobson, an economist in the
Ministry of Reconstruction, who tried to reconcile liberal and socialist
principles.
Hobson’s recognition came by way of his seminal study Imperialism, written
against the background of the shambles of the Boer War. Arguing that imperi-
alism did not pay, he put forward a conspiracy theory of ‘sinister interests’.
To Hobson, Jews were international financiers, who took their gains ‘out of
the financial manipulation of companies’. The war had been planned by
‘organised international Jewish power’ with support from ‘Jew press’ mag-
nates, who had brainwashed the public into supporting their piratica! imperial-
ism. Hobson eventually revised his views but his analysis of ‘Jew power’ was
accepted by many ILPers, who propagated a rich Jew anti-Semitism as part
of their anti-capitalism rhetoric. It served as the basis for Mosley’s own
‘rationalist’ anti-Semitism.
Fortunately, it is The Economics of Unemployment (1922) for which Hob-
son is best remembered. Hobson argued lack of consumer demand was the
reason for unemployment. There was ‘insufficient effective demand in the
economy because the rich could not buy more than a limited amount of
the goods produced, as their needs were sated, while the poor could not do so
because they lacked the necessary purchasing power’. Redistribution — the key
to eradicating the oversaving surplus of the rich and raising demand — would
enable industry to produce at full capacity, and thereby increase the demand
for labour and cure the unemployment problem. Hobson suggested unemploy-
ment was exacerbated by high interest rates and argued for the ‘scientific
control of credit in the public interest’ with the bank rate varied with the
 THE UNDERWORLD OF REJECTED KNOWLEDGE 79

volume of industrial activity. Mosley drew heavily upon these ideas for his
own economic thinking.
Hobson’s under-consumptionist thesis was only seriously scrutinized by
J. M. Keynes, who made his name with his controversial book The Economic
Consequences of the Peace, published in r919, the year he resigned from the
Treasury and returned to Cambridge to teach economics. A free trade Liberal,
who dismissed nationalization and rejected class division, he argued for prag-
matic State intervention, a managed currency system and the stabilization of
domestic prices at the expense of the exchange rate. Although he accepted
Hobson’s thesis that over-saving depressed effective demand, they disagreed
on the consequences. Hobson argued it resulted in underspending, whereas
Keynes held it led to under-investment. The solution was either an increase in
consumption or investment. Keynes’s preferred remedy was a small public
works programme financed by borrowing to increase jobs and help restore a
cycle of cumulative prosperity. Hobson’s was to promote spending by raising
working-class incomes by means of higher wages.
Hobson sympathized with the social credit hypothesis with its under-
consumptionist element. The idea of a national dividend to increase spending
won the support of activist Clydeside MPs, within whose ranks the guild
socialists had been active. They were led by John Wheatley, an ex-miner of
Catholic Irish descent. ‘Dumpy, unprepossessing, peering myopically through
thick round spectacles’, he did not look like a working-class hero but to
Glasgow slum dwellers there was no greater figure. Wheatley kept alive
Labour’s ‘aspirations to social justice while offering it the means, in office, to
lift the economy out of recession’. In sanctioning the building of thousands of
new houses he became acutely aware of the crippling effect of high interest
rates. He rejected free trade and simple protectionism in favour of planning.
If there was one Labour person whom Mosley admired it was Wheatley.
Wheatley detested the internationalism of Shadow Chancellor Philip
Snowden and Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald. He believed a socialist ‘had
done his duty when he had seen British workers all right’. Echoing later
criticism of Mosley’s own thinking, New Leader editor H. N. Brailsford
dismissed this statement as ‘socialist nationalism’. Wheatley denied his sol-
ution would ‘degenerate into socialist imperialism’ and countered that ‘to
advocate an economy based on exports was to be forced into a position of
capitalist imperialism’. 3
Hobson’s under-consumptionist thesis informed the ILP’s 1923 ‘Socialist
Programme’, which aimed to distribute wealth by way of a ‘living wage’.
Credit would be scientifically controlled to expand purchasing power. A Com-
mittee on Production would ‘consider the needs of the nation, and the labour,
agriculture and industrial resources available to meet them’. Industrial and
Import Boards, -based on the ideas of Lloyd and Wise, would purchase and
80 BLACKSHIRT

be
distribute raw materials. Finally, a National Industrial Authority would
charged with administe ring a military-s tyle ‘common plan’.
Interest in monetary policy was awakened within the ILP by the editor
of Forward, Tom Johnston. When Keynes published A Tract on Monetary
Reform and pointed out the connection between inflation and employment, *
Wheatley took note: ‘When the first symptoms of a boom occur, credit should °
be instantly restricted, and the bank rate raised. At the first suspicion of a
slump credit should be expanded in volume and cheapened by lowering the
bank rate.’ The ILP wanted to nationalize the Bank of England in order to
control the banking system and credit. Johnston, who had a populist approach
in his sympathy for the Empire, relentlessly attacked finance capital, which he
associated with a ‘cosmopolitan and parasitic rentier class’, and was not above
descending into anti-Semitic innuendo with his remarks about bankers. The
similarities with Mosley’s later rhetoric are apparent.
The ILP’s strategy was laid out at its 1924 conference. The economic ‘chaos
and suffering cannot be remedied unless we reorganise our national resources
by means of .. . national planning’. Crucially, just as he was about to join the
Labour Party, it was planning which came to dominate Mosley’s thinking, not
Keynesian monetary policy.
 6
The Labour Party

Following his entry in April 1924 into the Labour Party, Mosley wrote to
Labour’s first Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald: ‘You stand forth as the
leader of the forces of progress in their assault upon the powers of reaction.
In this grave struggle I ask leave to range myself beneath your standard.’
MacDonald replied how pleased he was that he had joined Labour and
expressed ‘the hope that you will find comfort in our ranks and a wide field
in which you can show your usefulness’. He was ‘very sorry to observe in
some newspapers that you are being subjected to the kind of personal attack
with which we are all very familiar’. .
Mosley’s motives were questioned in attack after attack by the press, which
accused him of betraying his class. The Evening Standard described him as a
‘political renegade’ and his career as a political rake’s progress. In the Com-
mons, Tory MPs intensified their barrage of ‘snarls and jeers’ at this ‘irrespon-
sible careerist and adventurer’. When his father joined in, Mosley said it was
unsurprising that ‘our tranquil relations exploded when in his view I entered
the devil’s service by becoming a socialist’. A move to expel Mosley from
White’s Club was quashed by Ivan Moore-Brabazon.
Cimmie supported her husband’s decision and also joined Labour. He said
she was ‘someone with whom in partnership he might set out to alter the
world’. She claimed humanitarianism directed her towards the Left. She advo-
cated protection of the countryside and preached a variant of Christian
socialism.
MacDonald predicted that the more Mosley was attacked, the ‘greater the
enthusiasm of the Left’. His reception on a speaking tour was ecstatic. Observ-
ing the reaction, the ILP’s John Scanlon wrote that ‘stories of his fabulous
wealth had spread all over the country ... The, press lost no point in this
human story, and those of us who had visions of a dignified working class
steadily gaining confidence in itself as the future owners of Britain had our
first shock of disillusionment.’
Mosley’s debut at a rally organized by London Party Secretary Herbert
Morrison was reviewed by Egon Wertheimer, German correspondent of the
82 BLACKSHIRT

socialist newspaper Vorwarts. He thought Mosley had found his true constitu-
ency. ‘Suddenly a young man with the face of the ruling class of Great Britain
but with the gait of a Douglas Fairbanks thrust himself forward through the
throng to the platform followed by a lady in heavy, costly furs.’ Greeted by
‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’, his speech was ‘a hymn, an emotional appeal
directed not to the intellect, but to the Socialist idea, which obviously was still
a subject of wonder to the orator. No speaker at such a meeting in Germany
would have dared to have worked so unrestrainedly on the feelings without
running the risk of losing for ever his standing in the party movement.’
‘But then came something unexpected,’ Wertheimer observed. ‘Suddenly the
elegant lady in furs got up from her seat and said a few sympathetic words.
She said that she had never before attended a workers’ meeting, and how
deeply the warmth of this reception touched her. She said this simply and
almost shyly, yet like one who is accustomed to be acclaimed and, without
stage fright, to open a meeting for charitable purposes.’ An excited steward
whispered in Wertheimer’s ear, that it was ‘Lady Cynthia Mosley’; and later
‘as though thinking he had not sufficiently impressed me, he added “Lord
Curzon’s daughter”. His whole face beamed proudly.’
Scanlon was taken aback by the response. ‘They still had the superstitious
notion prevalent in all simple minds that salvation would come from above
... Heaven to them was a place where only rich people congregated and where
was an abundance of rich food, rich drink and rich raiment ... To most of
them it was quite unattainable, and therefore when anyone chose to leave this
perpetual nightclub in order to mix with the workers, their love and admiration
knew no bounds.’ Then there began the ‘heartbreaking spectacle of local
Labour Parties stumbling over themselves to secure him as their candidate’,
even though, there was ‘not a particle of evidence to show that he understood
one of the problems in their lives’. Although Mosley’s wealth engendered
mistrust, party members were welcoming. In Germany, he would ‘have been
mistrustfully watched to see whether he was genuine and no careerist’.
Mosley was one of a group of wealthy socialists who helped the Labour
leader, whose wife had tragically died early. Mosley subscribed to the running
costs of his car and Cimmie saw to his every need on trains and in hotels.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Snowden observed that an intimate social
relationship was established ‘such as never existed between MacDonald’ and
Labour’s ‘plebeian members’. It was difficult to determine whether Mosley
was courting MacDonald, or vice versa. To other social superiors MacDonald
was infinitely more ingratiating. The Labour hierarchy ‘wore evening dress,
hobnobbed with the rich, hankered after knighthoods and kowtowed to roy-
alty’. Beatrice Webb thought it shocking that its leaders were entranced by ~
London society and royalty.
Mosley claimed he associated with MacDonald as an intermediary in the
 THE LABOUR PARTY 83

interests of party unity, as he was — except for the sickly Clifford Allen, who
was doomed to early death — one of the few people on speaking terms with
both wings of the party. Mosley was on amicable terms with the party’s chief
organizer, ‘Uncle Arthur’ Henderson, who was anxious to attract intellectuals
to Labour. MacDonald, however, considered the ‘aristocrats of the Ponsonby—
Trevelyan—Buxton type’ to be a ‘big disappointment’ because they joined the
Left. Mosley formed a close relationship with Charles Trevelyan, brother of
the historian, whose pacifist sympathies had led him to resign from the Liberal
government. Although no one questioned his idealism, Trevelyan proved to be
uncritically enthusiastic about the Soviet Union. He was appointed president of
the Board of Education and became Mosley’s ‘most intelligent supporter in
the Cabinet when it came to the crunch’.
Mosley’s great enemy within the party would be Philip Snowden, whose
voice was the only one to be heard when it came to economic policy. Just
before he joined, and had already expressed an interest in Keynes, Mosley
asked Snowden ‘whether, in view of the recent researches of leading econom-
ists into the possible effects of a reform in the monetary policy upon employ-
ment, an authoritive committee to enquire into this subject will be constructed
by His Majesty’s Government’. Snowden dismissed the idea as irrelevant.
Snowden advocated thrift and hard work as the cornerstones of his econ-
omic policy, and zealously advocated free trade and deflation as the essential
road back to normality. On taking office, he was visited by Bank of England
governor Montagu Norman, who was taken aback by his desire to rebuild the
gold standard, which was Norman’s singular obsession. Snowden was in awe
of Norman, who embarrassed himself by his ‘ineptness in front of academic
terriers’ such as Keynes, with his readiness to ‘sacrifice the investment needs
of British industry on the altar of restricted credit’.
Snowden was a bitter man who seemed to ‘loathe his fellow human beings’.
Son of a Yorkshire weaver, he had contracted spinal TB and walked with
some difficulty. Encouraged by an ambitious wife, Snowden preferred to move
in society circles rather than among ordinary members. Mrs Snowden had
no compunction in accepting some diamonds from Lady Rothschild. James
Maxton said her ‘sole ambition in life was to occupy the position in society
which Lady Cynthia Mosley had recently vacated’.
_ ILP members were impressed by Mosley’s speech to their April 1924 con-
ference and Beatrice Webb was already suggesting the time had come for a
new generation of Labour leaders — ‘Frank Wise-Wheatley—Greenwood-
Shinwell—Alexander—Mosley’ — who would be ‘free alike from the cold timid-
ities of the old trade unions and the hot-air conditions of the ILP leaders’. She
expected this younger left wing would become disillusioned with MacDonald,
but would have ‘a tussle to remove him’.
When Mosley visited some Liverpool slums, he told a journalist it was
84 BLACKSHIRT

‘damnable. The rehousing of the working classes ought in itself to find work
for the whole of the unemployed for the next ten years.” It was the Clydesiders,
Maxton and Wheatley, with their ‘real impulse of vital feeling’ and determi-
nation to carry out rank-and-file wishes, which attracted Mosley. Wheatley’s
Housing Act was regarded as the government’s only achievement. He pushed };
through radical measures to alleviate overcrowding and high rents by con- |
structing 500,000 council houses over the following decade and demonstrated
that Labour ‘could do more than tinker with the capitalist system’.
Wheatley, said Mosley, was ‘the only man of Lenin quality the English Left
ever produced’. In debate, he was a master of fact and figure, a quality which
appealed to Mosley, who, too, adopted the ‘lawyer’s ability to master a
complicated brief rapidly’. Wheatley attacked free trade as anti-socialist and
argued for non-tariff protection, national import boards for stabilizing prices
and eliminating profiteering by middlemen, and nationalization of key indus-
tries. It was a set of policies which Mosley largely appropriated for his own.
Seventy constituencies, including highly winnable ones, offered Mosley a seat
in place of Harrow, which would be difficult to hold as a socialist. Glasgow
leader Patrick Dollan persuaded the ILP to waive the rule that no one could
be a candidate until he had completed a year’s membership. In July, Mosley
chose the Birmingham Ladywood constituency, whose previous candidate
had been expelled for joint membership of the Communist Party. The Daily
Worker accused Mosley of turning to Labour only when he was ‘seated in the
saddle’ and the seat had been worked ‘up to within sight of victory’.
The bait for taking on Ladywood was the sitting MP, Neville Chamberlain.
Mosley had fought clause by clause his Rent Act, which removed rent controls,
claiming it was the ‘most monstrous piece of class legislation that ever dis-
graced the Statute Book’. Mosley told reporters in Birmingham that he aimed
‘to win a victory that would not merely give him a hardly-won seat, but would
entitle him to his spurs in the movement to which he is a recent convert’.
Mosley asked Birmingham to ‘overthrow the false gods of reaction which
have dominated the city for the last generation at the cost of so much suffering’.
The city was a Chamberlain family stronghold, but Neville had just a 1,500-
vote majority and was vulnerable. Mosley employed two ILP organizers, Allan
Young, a young Clydesider who was agent for the Borough party, and Bill
Risdon, a miner from South Wales, as full-time propagandists. Another key
figure was Frank Horrabin, an ILPer with a guild socialist background. Local
official J. Johnson said Young was ‘forever building schemes of organisation
that were splendid if only they could have been carried through!’ An astute
economist, he acted as Mosley’s political secretary and provided research
assistance. As close to Mosley as anyone, Young was, like many Mosley
acolytes, smitten with Cimmie. She helped ‘make life less lonely because of
your capacity to “feel”. Ideas and actions are the playgrounds of life — but to
 THE LABOUR PARTY 85

feel is to live greatly.’ Young and Risdon were excellent organizers, and by
September Chamberlain was acknowledging ‘that viper’ as a credible threat.
Mosley contributéd substantial sums to the ILP and was soon elected to its
National Administrative Council and Financial Committee. The latter was
chaired by J. A. Hobson, and committee members included Wise, Brailsford
and a middle-class academic recruit, Hugh Dalton, a fierce rival of Mosley.
Dalton was an admirer of the libertarian, anti-socialist economist, Friedrich
von Hayek, and a believer in free trade.
ILP Secretary Fenner Brockway recalled the powerful presence on the com-
mittee of the ‘arrogant and compelling’ Mosley, and the ‘extrovert and confi-
dent’ Dalton. Both men came from Tory family backgrounds, were ambitious
and aggressive, and treated politics as ‘a battleground, without regard for
injuries inflicted or received’. Dalton, however, disliked his rival more intensely
than anyone else in his entire political career, while Mosley was unimpressed
with the ‘third-rate don’, especially since Labour seemed to love a don ‘like
the Tories loved a lord’.
That September, at the Webbs’ house, Mosley met his most important
collaborator. Mosley thought the twenty-three-year-old Evelyn Strachey — he
used the name John from the late twenties — had ‘the right blend for action’.
Both were well-off socialist converts and refugees from the upper class. As
Strachey’s biographer suggested, the relationship was based on mutual needs:
‘if Strachey welcomed a leader — perhaps had often looked for one — Mosley
needed a man of ideas.’
Strachey’s father, St Loe Strachey, was the free trade editor of the Spectator,
mouthpiece of the radical Right. St Loe’s cousins included historian Lytton
Strachey and James Strachey, psychoanalyst and translator of Freud. Deeply
affected by the death of his elder brother, Strachey hated his father and his
public school. He showed respect for authority but constantly rebelled against
it. At Oxford he was something of a dandy and edited a Conservative journal
with his friend Robert Boothby. Strachey left without graduating, having
become conscious of a ‘sudden and bewildering loss of faith in the whole
moral, religious and social ideology which we had inherited’. He became
intoxicated with the sexual freedom he found in the bohemian milieu in which
he lived his disordered life. One observer said he was only ever a ‘potential’
personality, always ‘in subjection to some idea outside of himself’. Sister
Amabel thought him cold-hearted and there was an element of the cynic in
him, as there was in Boothby.
Strachey spent his holidays at Lake Como, where Boothby educated him in
monetary policy. By early January 1924 he was arguing against free trade and
a return to the gold standard, which his father thought was ‘a conspiracy to
enslave Britain by the Jews of the City’. Strachey had an affair with Elizabeth
Ponsonby, daughter of Labour Minister Arthur Ponsonby, who introduced
86 BLACKSHIRT

him to Fenner Brockway. Strachey was offered a winnable seat in Birming-

ham’s Aston area, which encompassed ‘some of the worst slums of the city’.
Although he later attracted the label Communist, Strachey feared ‘social
regression and catastrophe — a dark age of unreason’. Capitalism’s decadence
and the development of a militant working class created the danger of a ‘blind
head-on collision between the two contending forces’. He agreed with Mosley
that the ‘wrongs of life are not righted simply by turning the world upside
down and putting what is underneath on top; in effect, just replacing the
gentle tyranny of an old order with the harsher tyranny of communism’. He
wanted a socialism of reason as a defence against barbarism but, paradoxically,
raised reason to ‘the level of a faith’.
Mosley considered Strachey had ‘one of the best analytical and critical
intelligences’ he had known, but not a particularly creative one. He claimed
Strachey’s earlier work described his thinking but had added no ‘substantial
invention’. Mosley probably underrated Strachey’s abilities, just as he over-
rated his own. It is largely true that Strachey was the ‘thinker’ and Mosley the
‘interpreter’. One observer said Mosley’s speeches were ‘brilliant, political
creations, though not very philosophical’. ILPer Jon Paton confirmed from
staff members that Mosley’s effectiveness ‘largely depended on the quality of
his briefs. His knowledge of the matters we were discussing seemed to me
always to have a superficial quality, and more than once I thought I detected
him floundering when some of the more technical aspects emerged.’
Mosley was a magpie political operator who stole ideas from wherever he
found them. He discussed monetary matters with Strachey, and with Young
and Sydney Potter, who kept abreast of current economic thinking and were
close to Frank Wise. Mosley was a consummate politician, putting forward
clear-sighted policies based on coherent research. He put an intellectual gloss
on what he was doing by referring to the need for synthesis but often the
process was crude. Sometimes it worked, at other times the contradictions
were apparent. His great ability was to adapt quickly to new ideas.
After ‘scandal and mismanagement’ wrecked the government’s reputation,
the Liberals joined the Conservatives in a temporary alliance. On 8 October
1924 the two parties voted MacDonald’s minority Labour administration out
of office.. Mosiey threw all his oratorical energies into the general election,
speaking from dawn to dusk in Ladywood. ‘None of us who went through
that fight with him will ever forget it,’ reported the Town Crier. ‘His power
over his audience was amazing, and his eloquence made even hardened Press-
men gasp in astonishment.’ Mosley’s vigorous campaigning had an effect. ‘It
was a joyous day when in the courtyards running back from the streets in the
Birmingham slums we saw the blue window cards coming down and the red
going up.’ Mosley wanted Birmingham ‘to lead England in the march of
Labour’.
 THE LABOUR PARTY 87

Chamberlain alleged the government had been under the thumb of Commu-
nists and reminded constituents that it had lent Russia millions. The Conserva-
tives built up the ‘Red Bogey’ threat to devastating effect. On 2 5 October,
four days before polling, came the ‘Zinoviev Letter’ bombshell. In itself, the
Mail’s use of the forged letter was not decisive, but the cumulative effect of
such smearing did have an impact. A tired MacDonald addressed numerous
meetings with increasing anger — he referred to opponents as ‘mangy dogs
sniffing round a garbage heap’ — but voters deserted the Liberals and supported
the Tories. Labour’s failure was one reason Mosley did not manage to pull
off an election coup. The second was his presence on a ‘White list’ of candidates
who endorsed women campaigners. Anti-feminist feeling ensured that he lost
votes.
There were two recounts. First, Chamberlain was in by seven; then Mosley
in by two. Mosley, a counter recalled, was an ‘agitated man’, while Chamber-
lain was as ‘calm as you like it’. Chamberlain asked for a recount, in which
sixty votes for Mosley suddenly vanished. A Tory teller was allegedly seen
‘disappearing towards the lavatories with a pile of votes in his pocket’. The
final count was not concluded until 4.20 a.m., when the ‘wretched members
of the counting staff were completely exhausted’. The final figures were
Chamberlain, 13,374, and Mosley 13,297. Labour officials agreed the final
figures did not tally with the total votes cast.
The election returned 415 Conservatives to Westminster, 152 Labour MPs
(a loss of fifty seats) and forty-two Liberals. The Tory vote rose by two and a
half million and the Labour vote by just over a million, whereas the Liberal
vote fell by 30 per cent. Stanley Baldwin returned to form his second adminis-
tration.
The closeness of the Ladywood result seemed a victory to Mosley’s sup-
porters who left the town hall to find a massive crowd in the square singing
the ‘Red Flag’. For Mosley it was ‘a defeat of far more benefit than an easy
victory in some safe district’. To his followers he was a hero denied, who had
earned his socialist credentials. The result heralded the crumbling of the Tory
hold on the West Midlands.
Mosley’s continuing attacks on Chamberlain — ‘once more we have got the
old dud back at the Ministry of Health’ - infuriated the Tories, who accused
him of being unscrupulous. To Edward Wood he was ‘that swine’. The PM’s
wife considered Mosley the ‘most objectionable candidate standing in the
whole country’. It seemed that if Mosley cultivated Ladywood, he would win
the seat at the next election. The Birmingham Mail, however, revealed that
‘despite the protestations of undying love for Ladywood and his great mission
to fight for the soul of Birmingham, he has decided to cross the city boundary.
Now the soul of Birmingham can go hang for all Mosley cares.’
Mosley was. free of the parliamentary calendar and engaged in intensive
88 BLACKSHIRT

reading and reflection, in an effort to outline his own position. Over the
winter the Mosleys travelled to India and he took with him Keynes’s Tract on
Monetary Reform, which said economics was ‘about choices and the need to
make choices’. The bankers had chosen to cut costs and deflate, which could
only lead to a ‘transfer of wealth from the rest of the community to the rentier ~

class ... from the active to the inactive’. He said governments, by directing
the money supply, could affect the economy in areas which previously had
been thought to be at the whim of the market. $
Keynes was unconcerned with class struggle and promoted ‘an identity of
interest between workers and manufacturers against their common enemies —
the rentier and banker’. It was a position to which Mosley subscribed. Was
Mosley, therefore, a proto-Keynesian? Skidelsky championed the view that he
was and had been among the first to perceive Keynes’s importance and trans-
late his ideas into practical policy. It is easy to see why Mosley, eager to
seize an opportunity for rehabilitation, willingly accepted this argument and,
indeed, helped promote it. What better than to be presented as the lost prophet
of his generation who had presented the economic solution to the problem of
unemployment, while his mentor’s economic theories had shaped the post-
Second World War world.
That Mosley appropriated certain of Keynes’s ideas is beyond doubt, but
for the notion that Mosley was foremost a Keynesian the evidence is slim.
Whether he actually read all of the Tract is unclear; by his own admission, he
did not read his later works. His knowledge appears to have been derived
from a series of articles Keynes published in the press during 1924. The
main input came from discussions between Boothby and Strachey; the latter
transmitted the ideas to Mosley, as did Young. This was only part of ‘an eclectic
blend of many different, often contradictory, elements which he combined into
a mixture peculiarly his own’.
Central to Mosley’s thinking were the ideas he encountered within the ILP.
He subsequently argued that Fascism ‘simply added ideology to the economics
of my Labour Party days’. Keynes was the intellectual icing which Mosley
applied to his synthesis, in order to appease critics who considered his original
sources of inspiration ‘cranks’. Keynes stated that Mosley was first and fore-
most an ideological planner, which Keynes was most definitely not.
At Port Said, Mosley picked up a copy of G. B. Shaw’s The Perfect Wag-
nerite, an interpretation of the allegory in Wagner’s Ring cycle of operas. Shaw
portrays it as a ‘parable about the collapse of capitalism and the emergence of
a classless type of man to lead the proletariat’. Mosley admired Shavian
vitalism with its belief in the power of ideas as the decisive motive force in
human history. Shaw was supreme ‘in his understanding of the great men of
action and in his adumbration of what men might one day become’. Like
Carlyle, he was convinced that government must be carried on, ‘liberty or no
 THE LABOUR PARTY 89

liberty, with a conviction that only the superior individual can enforce the
necessary discipline’.
Mosley saw himself acting out in life the central drama of Shaw’s plays:
‘the vital man, with ideas and impulses, confronting the inert creature of
ideology and habits’. In 1925 he saw Caesar and Cleopatra at the Royal
Court, paying particular attention to the unconventional heroic portrayal of
Caesar, ‘the supreme example of the great masters of action’. Mosley recog-
nized Shaw’s insight into a hero who is absent of ‘passion in serving his
overriding purpose’. He recalled with delight ‘the scene when Caesar takes
Cleopatra’s arm to escort her into dinner, whispering that it was time to get
down to business for he had despatched her assassin with one of his own a
few hours before. This was Julius to a “T’’.’
The drama critic Desmond MacCarthy wrote, after seeing the same pro-
duction, that Shaw’s Caesar was ‘a man in whom the black passion of personal
domination was at least as marked as practical reason’. His driving force was
‘the desire of the unscrupulous adventurer for glory in the Roman sense — the
desire to make or destroy something great’. MacCarthy argued that ‘great
men have been of all shapes and sizes, and the plungers, the colossal egotists,
who go so far because they do not know where they are going, seem to me to
have drawn even more men irresistibly after them. If that is true, it is a reason
for being a republican rather than a Caesarean, in the past, now, and for ever.’
Given our knowledge of the twentieth century, MacCarthy was surely right.
Mosleyites believed Shaw had sympathy for Fascism and considered him a
seminal figure in its development, pointing to his authoritarianism. His goal
was the social organization of the Empire, and ‘its rescue from the strife of
classes and private interest’. He had belonged to a group of imperial Fabians,
the Coefficients, who called for national efficiency and fused together national
and socialist aspirations into a pre-Fascist ideology. It was left to Mosley to
channel ‘the immense volume of intellectual national socialism into a fascist
party’. Shaw considered Mosley’s ‘air of certainty, driving perhaps from
maternal adoration unchecked by any paternal competition, and furthered by
his wealth, social privilege and prominent looks, was marvellously appealing
in a world of danger and confusion’ — could he be the superman whose advent
Shaw had been prophesying? All Ramsay MacDonald had to offer was muddle,
whereas people would ‘hear something more of Sir Oswald before you are
through with him’. 6
When the Mosleys reached India they visited Madras, where they entered
the strange circle of Mrs Besant. A non-believer in theosophy, Mosley pointed
to the effect of the war ‘on the spiritual needs of people and the rise of bogus
mediums’. Besant explained ‘man’s rise from bestiality was accomplished with
the help of visitors from Venus’ but Mosley found that ‘any request for
evidence would be regarded as philistinism’. He believed ‘highly rational
 90 BLACKSHIRT

people often lose the faculty of reason when confronted by occult powers’.
Initiates such as J. F. C. Fuller (admirer of Aleister Crowley and Mosleyite)
were seekers after truth, which was ‘an end in itself; truth may not be found
but the search was worthwhile’.
Besant was a champion of Indian independence: Mosley was not, even
though he could not help but notice the suffering of the masses in the slums
of Bombay. He developed a deep affection for India, which was enhanced by
his introduction to Gandhi. He subsequently wrote a report on India, which
he circulated among British politicians. He suggested ‘we could stay in India
as long as we wished without so much trouble as some anticipated’ but ‘if we
did go, there would be bloodshed on a great scale’. He studied the country’s
agriculture and concluded what was required was ‘a mogul with a tractor and
a deep plough’. Typically it would require someone of ‘an extraordinary genius
of thought and action of the supreme Caesarean category’.
On his return from India, Mosley declared that Birmingham, home of
Chamberlain’s unauthorized programme, ‘must be to the Labour movement
what Manchester has been to Liberalism’. By March, Mosley had put together
an ambitious second programme to deal with unemployment. Allan Young
had helped shape the ideas and instilled in them the Hobson and Wise doctrine.
_ Strachey was chief assistant in working out the ‘Birmingham proposals’,
though Mosley was certain his own contribution made it decisive, though they
had largely originated in discussion circles before he finally synthesized them.
Input came from Boothby, who made his successful Commons maiden
speech on unemployment on 25 March 1925. From the beginning of the year
the Conservatives had engaged in a deflationary drive to put the pound back
on the gold standard. The speedy restoration of pre-war normalcy and
deflationary policies, however, only served to increase unemployment, which
Boothby regarded as an ‘unnecessary evil’. He called for new industrial confi-
dence, taxation cuts and an end to the class war. Boothby was already
immersed in Keynesian thinking.
It has been suggested that it was Mosley who moved the ILP towards-an
interest in monetary policy as a means of expanding demand but, as he himself
admitted, discussion along these lines had already taken place. Clifford Allen
argued in the Socialist Programme for ‘an expansion of purchasing power
brought about by an increase of bank advances’ as a remedy for unemploy-
ment. New Leader editor H. N. Brailsford acknowledged his debt to Hobson,
Wise and, more specifically, to the credit policy ideas of Lloyd and Keynes,
and wrote articles (‘Socialism for Today’) on the lack of ‘effective demand’
and the need for the stabilization of prices to counter potential inflation. It
was Brailsford not Mosley who won over the ILP to the necessity of controlling
banking since ‘one could not impose on industry the obligation to pay a true
living wage, without at the same time facing the regulation of credit, the
 THE LABOUR PARTY 91

control of prices through the importation, by a National Board, of food

and raw materials, and the reorganization of the more depressed industries’.
Brailsford and Mosley often worked in parallel, and the latter’s own credit
theory was derived from the ILP’s under-consumptionist thinking.
In April 1925 Britain returned to the gold standard at the pre-war rate of
exchange of $4.86. With free trade reaffirmed, the ‘holy trinity of liberal
financial orthodoxy was completed by the Treasury’s sustained pursuit of the
balanced budget’, which only served to deepen the slump. Mosley attacked
the Chancellor, Winston Churchill, who ‘faced with the alternative of saying
good-bye to the gold standard and therefore to his own employment, or
good-bye to other people’s employment, characteristically selected the latter
course’. Following Kitson’s line, Mosley charged that Britain clung to free
trade ‘for the sole reason that the process is a means of collecting the usury of
the City’. Transport and General Workers’ Union leader Ernest Bevin declined
to join the attack because he regarded Mosley as ‘the kind of unreliable
intellectual who might at any moment stab him in the back’.
At an April ILP conference in Gloucester, Mosley presented the Birmingham
proposals: an incomes policy, control of credit, abandonment of the gold
standard and a national corporation to plan output in key industries. He
moved a resolution for a ‘public banking system capable of giving such accom-
modation to industry as will enable it to increase the purchasing power of the
workers, so that new home markets can absorb industry’s real productive
capacity’. His chief contribution was the ‘requirement of consumer credits in
addition to producer credits and their combination with national planning’.
Banking and credit, he added, were the economy’s key points and their control
was essential to any effective planning. A floating exchange rate coupled with
the bulk purchase of foodstuffs and raw materials would protect external
trade.
Mosley outlined his proposals in The Times (‘Socialisation of Banking’) on
15 April. They were criticized by the economist Robert Brand, who said they
would lead to inflation and render exports uncompetitive. Mosley replied that
‘an increase in the supply of money accompanied by a corresponding increase
in the supply of goods available for purchase is not inflation’. Manufacturers
would increase production if markets were provided, so that inflation would
only arise when unemployment had declined to a point ‘at which the maximum
productivity of the nation had been nearly reached’. Given that real demand
existed ‘in the shape of underpaid poverty but not effective demand in the
shape of purchasing power’, an increase in the purchasing power would engage
the services of ‘men and machines now idle’ and result in a ‘substantial
increase in real wealth’. Mosley had anticipated the Keynesian position that
in conditions of idle capacity, an increase in production would not necessarily
lead to a rise in price.
 92 BLACKSHIRT

Mosley’s inability to supply a satisfactory answer to Brand’s question of

how an increase in purchasing power could help exports raised the question
of his real knowledge. Strachey’s answer that an increase in demand would
lead to an increase in demand for foreign goods and, in turn, expand foreign
trade, supports the idea that he was the thinker, not Mosley.
There were fundamental differences between Mosley and Keynes. Whereas
Mosley proposed a supply of credit to increase demand and stimulate extra
production, the latter believed credit should be expanded to meet an increase
in production. For Mosley, the danger of inflation resulting from the injection
of new money would be met by socialist planning by way of an Economic
Council to co-ordinate productive capacity. In this way he ‘welded together
the socialist case with modern monetary theory’. To appease ILP fears, the
Council would not have legislative powers, so there would be ‘no possibility
of a thinly disguised state tyranny operating through such a board’. The
proposals were well received by John Wheatley, though he criticized the
absence of any commitment to redistribution through taxation.
Hugh Dalton attacked Mosley’s ‘half-baked schemes’ and his willingness
‘to seize any panacea that might offer a political advantage’. However, Daniel
Ritschell notes, it is ‘the job of politicians out of power to have bold opinion.
_ It is not to Mosley’s discredit that he should have taken up and embellished
with socialist rhetoric the boldest opinions around.’ He sought intellectual
guides who would take him ‘beyond Marxism’. He discovered them among
the most progressive of liberal thinkers but he believed he needed to go ‘beyond
Keynes’. The search for radical ideas to synthesize with progressive economics
led him into areas which were distinctly non-socialist.
Strachey was all but a social creditor and, with Mosley’s help, attempted to
move the ILP in the direction of Major Douglas. Unfortunately, Douglas had
shortcomings as a leader and a minority faction, led by H. E. B. Ludlam, a
Coventry printer who headed the Economic Freedom League and edited its
journal, the Age of Plenty, demanded a more action-orientated movement.
Under Strachey’s direction, Ludlam organized support in the New Age. A
League member was the youth leader and theosophist John Hargreave. After
coming under the influence of Rolf Gardiner, Cambridge social creditor and
student of German youth movements, he initiated a brand of anti-war, outdoor
philosophy known as the Kibbo Kift, an ‘instrument of social regeneration
and pure action’. Strachey urged the League to concentrate on those the New
Age ignored — the unemployed masses.
In mid 1925 the ILP reviewed its ‘living wage’ policy as a piece of political
propaganda. It was, for Wheatley, ‘no longer a question of the plan’s being
logically practicable, politically expedient, but of its advocates’ success in
hammering the symbol so deeply into the consciousness of millions of people
that they are ready to march for it’. This was a Sorelian, syndicalist appeal for
 THE LABOUR PARTY 93

a single challenge by the industrial and political movements acting together.

‘With our eyes open we are asking for the impossible.’
A pragmatic Mosley was interested ‘neither in the ILP’s dreamy vision of a
socialist world nor in nineteenth-century capitalism, which was breaking down
before our eyes’. He wanted Labour to meet the challenge of unemployment
‘here and now’. He rejected his collegues’ preoccupation with ultimate issues
and lectured them on the need for realism. Within the ILP, critics charged
that he aimed merely to bolster capitalism. However, he had the support of
Wheatley and George Lansbury, who explained that as socialists they had to
take the world as it was. They departed from ILP policy in adopting ‘a
progressive policy towards the Empire’. Internationalists such as Brailsford
and Brockway regarded this as heresy, and dismissed them and Mosley as the
‘new school of Socialist-Imperialism’.
Mosley’s proposals were completed in August and detailed in his pamphlet,
‘Revolution by Reason’. On the 7th he outlined the content at the ILP summer
school at Dunmow, Essex, where he urged socialists to recognize that monet-
ary policy was ‘a factor upon which prices, employment and everything else
depended. A gold standard socialist is a contradiction in terms.’ He wanted
to expand credit in a scientific manner by way of consumers’ credits. Producers’
credits would also be necessary for ‘the production of the goods for which
consumers’ credits create the demand now lacking’.
This was ‘sweet to the ears of social creditors’ who agreed that demand
must precede supply and that absence of purchasing power was the central
problem. The idea of selective credit expansion had been dismissed by the
ILP as dangerously inflationary but Mosley argued the ‘costs of production
depended primarily on the rate of production rather than the rate of wages’.
He maintained that wages could be increased almost indefinitely to the limits
of ‘maximum productivity’. Defending what became Keynes’s post-General
Theory position, Mosley recognized that ‘when the maximum production of
the nation is nearly reached, no new money must be created or inflation will
follow’.
The quantity theory of money which underpinned Mosley’s monetary policy
prescriptions was derived from Kitson. The concept of the creation of purchas-
ing power to evoke production, Mosley noted, was rejected out of hand; ‘even
Keynes went no further than urging on quantity-theory lines an adequate
supply of credit to prevent a fall in the price-level, credit which would only be
available to producers and general borrowers through the ordinary banking
mechanism’. His long-standing unwillingness to abandon the quantity theory
reinforced the impression that he ‘never read, or never properly understood
Keynes’s later General Theory’.
Credit expansion, Mosley argued, would be an emergency measure and,
once the economy recovered, new demand would allow industry to pay higher
94 BLACKSHIRT

wages through rising productivity. It was, Daniel Ritschell suggests, “an econ-
omy of high wages, rather than either Keynesian credit expansion or the
socialist option of redistribution of wealth, that was his distinctive remedy for
the slump’. But because ‘capitalism lacked a co-ordinating intelligence’, such
a remedy, Mosley argued, required socialist planning. Otherwise it would lead
to inflation with higher prices and not increased production. He embraced
ILP planning and wanted an Economic Council - an idea welcomed by social
creditors as their own — with statutory powers ‘to estimate the difference
between the actual and potential production of the country and to plan the
stages by which that potential production can be evoked through the instru-
ment of working-class demand’. It would ensure that demand did not outstrip
supply and cause a price rise.
To stimulate consumption, wages would be fixed at generous levels and
financed by forcing companies to accept overdrafts from nationalized banks.
Credits would be earmarked as assistance to wages but would not subsidize
industry, though producer credits would be given to socially useful industries
to raise output and lower prices. Taking ideas from Frank Wise and E. M. H.
Lloyd, he proposed that Import Boards would replace some imports with
domestic production and bulk purchase food and raw material on favourable
contracts.
Mosley depicted ‘Revolution by Reason’ as a practical alternative to the
nationalization of industry in which the central position of the City and its
restrictive financial policy would be replaced by a producers’ alliance. The
document was impressive. It identified the major constraints to expansionist
policies — ‘sound’ money and the high exchange rate — and proposed workable
policies on both counts. He received, however, only a respectful hearing as
the content drifted above the heads of the ILP rank and file. Few could grasp
that ‘the value of money itself could be, and was, manipulated’. The high-wage
thesis was anathema to Snowden, who argued ‘it was for wages to adjust to
whatever monetary policy was deemed best by Montagu Norman’. ILPers did
not believe industrialists and workers had common interests and dismissed
Mosley’s policies as reformist. The impact within the Labour Party and trade
unions was minimal.
In the Daily Herald (24 April 1925) Mosley insisted that socialism’s core
was ‘not so much a political spirit as a religious one’. He took his lead from
Lassalle, who spoke of love and reconciliation in opposition to class conflict.
He saw modern problems in terms of ‘the struggle between the Christian and
the Nietzschean conceptions of man’. He took from Christianity ‘the immense
vision of service, self-abnegation and self-sacrifice’, and from Nietzschean
thought ‘the virility, the challenge to all existing things which impede the
march of mankind, the absolute abnegation of the doctrine of surrender’.
Despite the title of his pamphlet, the substance of Mosley’s rhetoric was
 THE LABOUR PARTY 95

permeated by a concern that had nothing to do with reason. His vision at

the-end of ‘Revolution by Reason’ was apocalyptic. ‘Crisis after crisis sends
capitalist society staggering ever nearer to abysses of inconceivable catastrophe
for suffering millions.’ Therefore ‘we must recapture the spirit of rapturous
sacrifice. In our hands is the awakening trumpet of reality. Labour alone holds
the magic of sacrifice. Dissolved are all other creeds of baser metal beneath
ordeal by fire.’ Such talk was reminiscent of millenarianism and bore resem-
blance to the ‘illuminates’ and the emerging Fascist movements, characterized
by similar demands for guilds and assaults on international finance. The shared
enemy was the banker. Mosley told ILPers that by controlling banking they
could ‘dominate the whole field of capitalism and capture its innermost fort-
ress’. It naturally followed that projected on to the bankers was a hatred of
Jews.
Within the plan of ‘Revolution by Reason’ to avoid the ‘middleman’, Stuart
Rawnsley spotted evidence of Mosley’s later attacks on Jewish financiers.

Purchasing power is transferred from the pockets of the workers to the pockets of
the idle rentier and owner of fixed interest-bearing securities ... By the obscure and
secret working of the hidden bankers’ hands, wealth is thus filched from the poor
and poured into the coffers of the idle rich. When we regard the present condition
-of the anguished masses, may we not ask whether history itself holds evidence of a
more sinister and heartless villainy?

For those ILP members reared on Hobson’s anti-Semitism, there was no need
to decipher its coded meanings.
At the summer school, responding to a talk by Communist Willie Gallacher,
Mosley said he would ‘use every means to crush’ any attempt by Communists
to overthrow the government. This would not, however, involve Fascist means.
He warned that Fascist Italy was the greatest danger to peace. Ministers had
shown their true intention by praising Mussolini. They ‘would like to be
Fascists but have not the courage; they have not the courage to wear their
black shirts’. The Conservatives wanted to use Fascism to overthrow Russia.
Ten days later Beatrice Webb observed that ‘the ILP and their middle-class
friends, fearing to be superseded, as the left-wing, by the Communistic trade
union leaders are plunging head-over-ears into grandiose schemes of revolu-
tionary change’. She singled out Mosley’s state organization of credit as mis-
chievous. He had warned ILPers that ‘evolutionary socialism was not enough’
and that measures of a ‘drastic and socialist character’ were required. How-
ever, his socialism was simply defined as the ‘conscious control and direction
of human resources for human needs’. It differed little from Labour’s ‘senti-
mentalised cult of human brotherhood’. He later admitted it was ‘an error to
use the term socialism’.
96 BLACKSHIRT

In July 1925, before leaving for their annual holiday in Italy, the Mosleys
celebrated the wedding of Cimmie’s sister, Baba, to ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, who
had just joined the British Fascisti. For a wedding present they gave Baba
ruby-and-diamond earrings. On the journey through France they were joined
by Strachey, who aided the slow evolution of a book version of ‘Revolution ~

by Reason’. Boothby appeared in Venice, where he joined in discussions with

~

his two friends as they wrote together, which he thought the ‘height of political
audacity’. Oxford academic C. M. Bowra recalled having dinner with the pair
in a palazzo on the Grand Canal. Mosley ‘put forward bold and constructive
ideas. He was a forcible talker, who set out to be magnetic and tried to win
my support by saying that he wished Britain to resemble ancient Athens.’
Bowra found his manner disturbing but was enchanted by Cimmie’s ‘genius
for healing the wounds which her husband inflicted on all kinds of people’.
Another observer, Celia Simpson, thought Strachey was unwisely under
Mosley’s influence and despite his extreme socialism was ‘snobbish and imma-
ture’. His sister Amabel, a literary figure and wife of Clough Williams-Ellis,
creator of Portmeirion in Wales, recalled that Mosley and her brother were,
like Boothby, ‘apt to enjoy themselves, but they were less thorough about it.
Pleasure was only pursued between anxious moments.’
‘This was the period’, Boothby recalled, ‘when Mosley saw himself as Byron
rather than Mussolini’ and self-consciously tried to match the poet’s feats. He
was ‘certainly a powerful swimmer and used to disappear at intervals into the
lagoon to commune with himself’. On one occasion he set out to swim to the
Lido because Byron had done it. The press had no interest in his ideas but was
interested in him as a celebrity. ‘We were pursued throughout our holiday,’
Mosley recalled. It was felt scandalous ‘for moneyed people to pretend to be
Socialists’.
Friends had ‘seldom contemplated a more whimsical turn of the social and
political wheel’ than when, on 21 September, Cimmie was adopted as a Labour
candidate for Stoke-on-Trent. She was, however, revered by Boothby, who
praised her legendary ‘valour and devotion’, and predicted that ‘your husband
(damned Socialist though he is by God) will be Prime Minister for a very very
long time, because he has the Divine Spark which is almost lost nowadays’.

In September 1925 Strachey published his extended Revolution by Reason,

dedicated to ‘OM’ — ‘who may some day do the things of which we dream’.
It was more urbane than Mosley’s version. Strachey said capitalism was ‘in a
blind alley’ and argued, as did the social creditors, that ‘the only way capitalism
had of saving itself was to engage in cut-throat, and eventually ruinous,
competition, or in imperialism, or in what was perhaps the worst evil of all, a
state tyranny working through gigantic combinations’. Social credit hopes
were encouraged by his acknowledgement that the ‘whole scheme would
 THE LABOUR PARTY 97
depend upon the National Credit, which was “‘directly proportionate to the
national capacity to produce wealth”’. He was, however, more directly influ-
enced by Keynes, that there was a close relationship between the amount of
money in circulation and price levels. He accepted money supply had to be
related to the needs of production and not to gold reserves. A general theme
was his belief that capitalism’s crisis would lead to violent revolution. It was
imperative to find an alternative to the ‘blind, head-on collision’ between
workers and capitalists. A revolution by reason was needed to prevent class
conflict bringing about a dark age of unreason.
ILP response was positive but Labour intellectuals were hostile. They high-
lighted the ‘vast practical problems in co-ordinating the money supply, pro-
duction and demand as he envisaged’. Dalton, appointed Reader in Economics
at the London School of Economics, said that ‘to go off gold again isn’t
practical’. He criticized the proposed Economic Council and its many tasks
because he could not ‘see the necessary supermen on the horizon who could
tackle them all’.
Keynes liked the book. However, he could not appreciate Mosley’s ‘flash of
intuition about a “lack of effective demand’’’. Had Mosley been able to
explain properly how it could occur, noted Skidelsky, ‘he, and not Keynes,
would have been the author of the new economics’. The economist considered
the proposals failed to ‘face the fact that it is precisely the industries which
cater for foreign trade [coal, steel and textiles] which are underemployed and
not those which produce for working-class consumption’. Even so, Keynes said
‘it is scarcely to be expected that we should agree on all the very complicated
monetary points which arise, about which no one has ever written clearly. I
am still too confused in my own mind to know exactly what I want to do.’
Even Dalton considered the book a remarkable achievement for a ‘twenty-
four-year-old, untrained in economics to explain and synthesise differing
theories’. Strachey’s and Mosley’s attempt to understand the relationship
between banking and the economy as a whole was unusual on the Left. Their
measures were not socialism but were an advance on Labour policy and
more relevant than their critics’ efforts, which reiterated ‘existing orthodoxies
camouflaged with socialist rhetoric’. Their problem was that as critics of
the Bank of England—Treasury—City nexus, they were on their own. Their
proposals were not seriously considered because they ‘clashed with the City’s
most cherished tenets’. And at no point did Labour display a willingness to
challenge this consensus.
Mosley lamented that it was ‘impossible to get serious discussion of any
subject except at the mass meetings’. The New Leader (20 November) noted
his visit to Glasgow and the huge crowds singing the ‘Red Flag’. But even if
he attracted the largest meetings, his speeches were not reported in the press.
He developed a conspiratorial view that ‘dominant forces’ - ‘King Bank and
98 BLACKSHIRT

King Bunk’ - were determined to prevent change. The press lords were ‘masters
of certain aspects of business and finance but almost entirely ignorant of
serious politics’. Their dream was to form governments of ‘their cronies in the
way that men form clubs, not serious parties supporting new ideas and clear
courses’. He later recognized that he cronied himself ‘with some result’.
The ILP suffered a blow with the resignation of an ailing Clifford Allen.
Before he resigned, Allen appointed Mosley to a Living Wage commission
under Brailsford, whose collection of articles, Socialism for Today, was pub-
lished in October. In the following month the ILP issued its Industrial Policy
which drew on guild socialism and wartime planning. The ILP now fell victim
to hasty projects, with decisions determined by propaganda necessities. When
supporters moved to the left, the ILP lost its influence with Labour leaders.
This explains why Mosley began to snuggle up to MacDonald. Dalton watched
with a ‘special loathing’ as he turned the ‘lonely susceptible old man into an
intimate friend’. When Mosley invited MacDonald and Dalton to his country
house, the latter refused, irritated that the Labour. leader had swallowed
the bait.
Mosley’s distancing from the ILP coincided with his trip to the US over the
winter of 1925-6, when he claimed he changed his thinking, having discovered
the secret of American economic success. The striking feature is the large
number of other politicians who made the discovery. During his own visit,
Boothby wrote that the ‘era of mass production is upon us. And mass pro-
duction involves large economic units.’ Vernon Willey, President of the Federa-
tion of British Industries, noted that, despite high wages, ‘prices were actually
falling because the huge home market enabled industry to make rapid technical
progress and pass on the economies to the customer’.

In the US, the Mosleys were stalked by journalists and were treated like
celebrities. They were interested in Cimmie’s own turn to the left. She
explained that she and her father were ‘two very typical figures, and that the
same drama has been enacted in many homes; only I do not know another
man who was so splendidly, so utterly symbolic of the old world, the pre-war
world, as was my father. I should like to think that I am as typical of the new
world, the post-war world.’
In Washington, Cimmie visited her Leiter relatives, who were involved in a
lawsuit with an English branch of the family, the Suffolks (Mary Curzon’s
younger sister had married the Earl of Suffolk), over misappropriation of
trustee funds. Mosley was surprised by the strong anti-Semitism prevalent
among the Leiters, particularly since it was assumed, wrongly, that they were
Jews. In New York, he observed the slums and the segregation of communities.
He wrote to Strachey on 15 January 1926 that the slums were ‘not so bad as
our worst. The interesting thing from our point of view was that the rents
 THE LABOUR PARTY 99

have all increased in proportion to wages ... it seems as long as rent and
interest survive, the proportionate toll is taken of the workers whatever wages
they may draw.’
The ultimate destination of those interested in American industrial success
was the Ford Motor Company’s vast River Rouge plant in Detroit. Front
Generation socialists were interested in the new phenomenon of scientific
management known, firstly, as Taylorism and then as Fordism. Frederick
‘speedy’ Taylor, father of the stop-watch-and-clipboard approach, popularized
a process of labour discipline and workshop organization based upon studies
of human efficiency and incentive systems. It became the basis of all time and
motion studies, and the norm in Detroit factories.
Americanism, suggests Charles Maier, reflected the ‘powerful demand for
technocratic expertise that had been encouraged by the First World War’.
Technocratic management appealed to proto-Fascists because it promised a
‘non-zero-sum’ world in which expanded production would make socialist
redistribution irrelevant. It would eliminate scarcity and offer a revolution in
the nature of authority, with the neutrality of scientific managers ending class
confrontation. This:change from ‘power over men to the administration of
things’ undermined notions of class and, as such, there was ‘an element of
elitist proto-syndicalism about the model’.
In Britain Mary Follett, a scientific management theorist, published at the
end of the war The New State. Influenced by guild socialism, she argued
that ‘scientific government by experts and schemes for the self-regulation of
industry’ aimed at increased production, reflected a ‘quest for a new concept
of authority that would transform the economic interests now smothering
the public welfare into the very bearers of the community’s advance into
abundance’. The quest for a ‘public syndicalism of the producers’ was pro-
moted in Germany by Walter Rathenau. It went beyond the old guild system by
appealing to a community of production in which ‘all members are organically
interwoven’. The social creditors opposed this planned approach precisely
because it was in essence syndicalist and did not differ widely from Fascism.
At the Ford factory Mosley found ‘striking confirmation’ of his thinking.
Fordism looked at production as a whole and its results were spectacular in
reducing costs, lowering prices and increasing sales and profits. Ford produced
‘the cheapest article and paid the highest wage in the world [five dollars for
an eight-hour day]; in terms of money value, nothing on earth could compare
with that original Tin Lizzie’. However, the speeded-up assembly line left
workers struggling to keep pace. Mosley thought them ‘primitive types ...
ideal for the job because normal labour was apt to find it too monotonous’.
Ford’s de-skilled workers hated the regime and even high wages could not
mask the rapid turnover of labour.
Henry Ford hoped high wages would turn workers into ‘partners and
100 BLACKSHIRT

accomplices’ in a producers’ alliance against finance capital. He attacked the

bankers for their unwillingness to invest in manufacturing and, like Britain’s
self-financing Morris Cars, was forced to plough his own money into the
business. He was a currency ‘crank’, opposed the gold standard and, inevitably,
turned to anti-Semitism. His own newspaper, the Dearborn Independent,
attacked Jewish influence on American politics. Such propaganda was admired !
by Hitler, who kept a life-size portrait of Ford next to his desk.
Mosley saw the ‘birth of a new world’ at a Pittsburgh steel works where a
few men were ‘manipulating masses of machines’. In this technological vision,
Mosley realized there would be chaos as economies adapted to new realities.
Automated machinery and unskilled labour would threaten British industry
by enabling undeveloped countries — ‘Oriental and African labour does not
mind monotony as much as the Europeans do’ — to compete against it. In fact,
this was decades off but Lancashire cotton was already being undermined by
low-wage competition. Mosley believed this could be countered by the State
aiding private enterprise to conduct business freely. There was not much
socialism here.
On his return from the US, Vernon Willey urged on the FBI the need for
‘collectivism, amalgamation and cartel agreements’. Fordism was accom-
panied with a shift to protectionism, but despite the promises of social revol-
ution, its ideological implications were conservative and firmly pro-capitalist.
Britain’s most successful mass car producer, William Morris, had a hand-
powered assembly line with craftsmen on piecework rather than a daily wage.
Productivity was modest and because of lack of investment, weak demand
and ruthless price cutting, car makers faced a constant cash crisis. The problem
was the small domestic market, which industrialists argued required low wages
in order to be competitive with exports. For Mosley, mass production for a
large home market held the industrial key and it was ‘not so much the rate of
wage as the rate of production which determined the cost of production’.
Out of the blue, the Mosleys received an invitation to meet Franklin D.
Roosevelt, Governor of New York and a likely presidential candidate. They
were invited to Florida to meet Roosevelt on his houseboat, the Larocco, for
a fishing trip. ‘We had a great mutual sympathy,’ Mosley recalled. ‘He had a
tremendous sense of compassion — a feeling that the suffering to which the
mass of people in unemployment, in bad housing and the rest of it were
being subjected at the time was unnecessary and should be remedied. He was
therefore a radical in politics.” FDR wrote that they were ‘a most delightful
couple and we shall miss them much’.
Mosley was not entirely impressed by their host. ‘Here was this man para-
lysed below the waist, a superb-looking man, a kind man, a man whom you
couldn’t help but liking but at the same time seemed to me largely without
the mental capacity to be President of the United States.’ He had ‘scarcely an
 THE LABOUR PARTY Ior

inkling of the turmoil of creative thinking then beginning in America, in the

technical sphere of money, and in the industrial regions with the vastly paid
technicians of the miass-producing plants who already foresaw a productive
potential which would eventually confront statesmanship with a problem to
overwhelm all previous economic thinking’.
On rs February Mosley wrote to Strachey that he had conversed with
Federal Reserve Board economists, who were ‘fully abreast of the thinking of
Keynes’. On his return, Mosley described the Federal Reserve as a ‘semi-
socialist banking system’. He was interested in hire-purchase — then almost
unknown in Britain — but saw it as a ‘haphazard form of his own more scientific
consumer-credit proposals’. What was required was national planning, not
the piecemeal way in which the Americans applied these new ideas.

In April 1926 Mosley’s article, ‘Is America a Capitalist Triumph?’, praised the
‘amazing feats of mass production’ and claimed high wages was the ‘thinking
medicine with which we must dose British industry’. The ILP welcomed the
concept of high wages and recognized the necessity of a large home market
in developing in full the possibilities of mass production. Brailsford’s Can
Capitalism Save Itself? accepted that American technique held out the promise
of eliminating poverty. He presented it as an alternative to Communism:
Henry Fordism, not Marxism, was the future that worked.
Mosley argued that Britain needed to be part of a larger economic unit
‘insulated’ from those external factors that caused economic failure. He
retreated to social imperialism but not the ‘old, crude Conservative protection
of industrial inefficiency’. Protection ‘in a small island which contains a few
of the necessary foodstuffs and hardly any of its industrial raw materials is a
very different thing from an empire containing nearly all of these requisites’.
In April ‘Socialism in Our Time’ was adopted at the ILP’s Easter conference.
An ambitious vision of socialism, it proposed redistribution to alleviate under-
consumption. State-imposed wage levels would redistribute income towards
the poverty-striken working class as a way of generating new consumer
demand and thus eliminating unemployment.
Mosley claimed the new ILP policy was largely set out in Revolution by
Reason and, therefore, the debate ‘solely concerned the best method of putting
into practice the great conception of a Living Wage’. He thought it ‘useless to
undergo the great struggle to nationalise the banks if, in the end, we employ
them exactly as our enemies would employ them’. He criticized plans to
nationalize weak industries with the result that they would be left to ‘hold
the baby’. Whereas Brailsford wanted to persuade industries to reorganize
themselves, Mosley argued capitalism had ‘never responded to anything except
the stern use of economic power in the hands of the workers’.
Mosley’s militant urge to action was the ‘common spark’ of the Front
102 BLACKSHIRT

Generation’s dissatisfaction with orthodoxy. They recognized that progress

towards socialist goals did not have to wait until capitalism had collapsed.
Geoffrey Elton belonged to a group of parliamentary candidates who met
regularly with Mosley and Strachey to discuss a ‘party of the classes motivated
against the profiteer’. A ‘ruthless’ Strachey was also demanding action. They *
would experience direct action during the General Strike of May 1926.
‘All the workers of this country have got to face a reduction of wages,”
murmurs Mr Baldwin between a sermon and a subsidy,’ Mosley said in a
speech. When mine owners demanded a ro per cent wage cut from their
workforce and the TUC warned this would mean a general strike, Baldwin
offered a compromise. The miners were supported by railwaymen and trans-
port workers, who persuaded the government to buy off a strike with a
temporary subsidy to the coal industry. The subsidy was due to expire on
30 April and the unions prepared to resist. The time bought allowed the
Chancellor, Winston Churchill, and the reactionary Home Secretary, Sir
William Joynson-Hicks, known as ‘Mussolini Minor’, to stiffen the PM’s
resistance. The government broke off negotiations and the General Strike
began.
Mosley had a core of followers and an operating base in Birmingham.
However, he did not establish lasting support in the West Midlands, where
not all Labour members endorsed his leadership. They did, however, praise
his role in the strike — he made up to twenty speeches a day — which included
buying an interest in the Town Crier and funding a strike bulletin, edited by
Strachey. Mosley narrowly escaped arrest — he was out of town at the time- —
when the Birmingham Strike Committee was rounded up on charges of stirring
up disaffection.
Mosley established close relations with Arthur Cook, the Miners’ Federa-
tion’s fiery secretary. He admired the Leninist Cook as a ‘true product of
England if ever there was one’. The friendship developed under the influence
of Strachey who edited the Federation’s journal, the Miner. Cook resigned
from the Communist Party in 1921, but he had few political differences
with the Communists. Arthur Horner recalled that to the miners Cook ‘was
magnificent, utterly inspiring; the man who always raised them to the furthest
heights of their determination to end the injustices and miseries from which
they suffered’. Beatrice Webb, however, considered him a man with ‘no intel-
lect and not much intelligence - drunk with his own words, dominated by his
own slogans’.
When the strike dragged on into the autumn, Mosley spoke in mining areas
and helped starving miners with a donation of £500 (£15,000). He saw in the
miners’ solidarity the comradeship of the war years.and became a regular
speaker at the Durham miners’ gala, where he was given a tumultuous recep-
tion from the r00,000-strong crowd. He said watching the miners marching
 THE LABOUR PARTY 103

with bands and banners convinced him ‘colourful methods were not so inap-
propriate to British politics as some supposed’ and inspired his later Fascist
marches. The strike’s end, however, was a disillusioning experience for those
of the war generation who hoped returning soldiers ‘would be a political force
for peace; 1926 showed that no such force, no such unity existed’.
During the summer, Mosley attended the ILP’s annual school at Lady
Warwick’s ancestral Easton Lodge in Norfolk. Its grounds were then as freely
available to socialism as her previous favours to her royal lover, Edward VII.
Jon Paton recalled that the lecturers included the ‘famous or near-famous’,
such as H. G. Wells, Major-General J. F. C. Fuller and Basil Liddell Hart,
‘whose lectures were certain to be given space in the newspapers’. Included
among the acknowledged experts in their field were Keynes, Lord Lothian,
Walter Elliott and Beaverbrook, a defender of a lost cause.
Mosley arrived, Amabel Williams-Ellis noted, with ‘a pigskin suitcase and
golf clubs as well as a tennis racquet. In Labour gatherings he was apt to walk
through the life of the place, but this was seldom if ever resented. After all, he
genuinely wanted to know other people’s views.’ However, Fenner Brockway
felt he displayed ‘intolerance and a growing impatience of public opinion’.
When Wells intervened in a discussion and insisted on the need for technicians
in the transformation to socialism, Mosley ‘attacked him demagogically as a
paternalist, intellectual’. It angered Brockway who went for him ‘in what was
perhaps our first conflict’. Cimmie soothed any bad feelings by singing Negro
spirituals!
During 1926 the Mosleys bought Savehay Farm, a red-brick, half-timbered
Tudor house, near Denham, in Buckinghamshire, for £5,000 (£150,000). The
house was redesigned by Clough Williams-Ellis who, a few months previously,
had entertained strike-breaking bus drivers. Leading ILP figures were invited
to Denham, in what were ‘less like practical experiments in socialism than
lavish exercises in feudal patronage’. Allan Young was overcome by the experi-
ence. He wrote to Cimmie: ‘You gave me beauty — pictures that will live for
ever: space — in the sense that I was separated from the vortex of petty
problems: privacy — in the sense that your fine culture (which is feeling) enables
you to refrain from interference .
In September the ILP’s commission, chaired by Hobson and among whose
members was Mosley, reported on the viability of the living wage. It argued
for redistribution and increased consumption by, way of a family allowance
scheme and a minimum wage. The living wage’s initial cost would be achieved
by printing new money. Industries which refused to co-operate by raising
wages would be summarily nationalized. This led inexorably to the adoption
of full-scale planning, based on the guild socialist notion of encroaching
control. As the planning centre of the nation’s industrial life, an Industrial
Commission would be able to enforce the amalgamation of businesses in the
104 BLACKSHIRT

interests of efficiency. Joint-stock banks would direct the flow of credit and a
National Industry bank would foster staple industries. It has been suggested
that planning owed its presence to the publicity given it by Mosley but ILPers
were already discussing a socialist model.
Neither Mosley’s ‘Revolution by Reason’ nor “The Living Wage’ was *
accorded the attention they deserved. Ramsay MacDonald did not bother to °
”

read ILP documents and senior figures rejected the policy. It was remitted to
a Committee of Inquiry and quietly forgotten. However, these were ‘incisive, -
coherent programmes with greater realism than anything produced by contem-
porary academic economists’. They recognized the economy was not a self-
righting mechanism, implicitly assumed the multiplier effect of putting money
into the economy and the importance of monetary demand in determining the
level of employment. Keynes was sympathetic, on the basis that it was worth
trying new ways to increase demand, but was wary of the credit expansion,
because of the threat of inflation.
Mosley made no attempt to align himself with any faction within the Labour
Party but retained good relations with the Labour leader. MacDonaid, noted
Beatrice Webb, ‘consorts with the de la Warrs, Mosley and J. H. Thomas and
one or two smart ladies, whilst he is constantly in the company of the great
who emphatically can’t belong to the Labour party’. He associated with a
circle distinguished by ‘its aristocratic flavour — leaders of fashion or ladies of
the stage attended by six-feet-tall and well-groomed men [Mosley]’.
Neville Chamberlain decided not to seek re-election at Ladywood. He
explained to his agent that there was ‘such a large mass. of uneducated and
credulous people, ready to be influenced by the sort of opponents I have had
in the past, that my position must be precarious’. Conservatives believed they
might succeed with a new candidate, on the basis that Mosley’s ‘perpetual
abuse aroused more criticism than sympathy’. However, when Chamberlain
abandoned the seat, Mosley felt free to seek a by-election opportunity, rather
than wait for the next general election.
Mosley had been selected for the Forest of Dean, but was forced to withdraw
because of protests from the Birmingham Labour Party. Herbert Morrison, a
former critic of the parliamentary party who had become ‘the prudent defender
of the party establishment’, had been outraged by this ‘disdain for the party’s
constitution’ and Mosley had had to appear before the National Executive
Committee (NEC). He was reprimanded but then, on 26 November, the sitting
MP for the Smethwick constituency announced his retirement.
Mosley was adopted for the seat on 4 December, but without consultation
with head office, which was entitled to select a candidate for a by-election.
Morrison regarded this as a serious irregularity. Mosley was accused of ‘having
bribed the previous Member of Parliament to retire’ (he was ill and died three
months later). Snowden warned the party not to ‘degenerate into an instrument
 THE LABOUR PARTY 105

for the ambitions of wealthy men’ and referred to candidatures being ‘put up
to auction and sold to the highest bidder’. Mosley’s avowal of socialism
gave him ‘feelings of nausea’. Newspaper cartoons portrayed Mosley as a
‘Jewish-looking money-lender bribing the poor with bags of gold’. At first he
was refused endorsement but the NEC eventually relented. However, relations
between Morrison and Mosley were permanently embittered.
Following his decision to leave Ladywood, Labour members suspected
Mosley of putting his own ambitions before the good of the party. They said
there was ‘not much difference between Chamberlain leaving Ladywood in
order to be sure of keeping in parliament, and Mosley leaving Ladywood in
order to be sure of getting into parliament’.
There was little doubt that Mosley would win as Labour had taken the seat
in 1924. However, the campaign turned vicious very quickly with a press
onslaught from Beaverbrook and Rothermere. His opponents were portrayed
as genuine working-class candidates in contrast to ‘the aristocratic poseur
fighting them on behalf of the working class’. Rumours about Mosley’s luxuri-
ous lifestyle circulated. He allegedly left his Rolls-Royce (he did not have one)
on the outskirts of town and transferred to a lowly Ford, while Cimmie had
changed her dress embroidered with diamonds for more modest attire.
The Mail persuaded Mosley’s alcoholic father to pour out his grievances
against his son. On 13 December he said ‘more valuable help would be
rendered to the country by my Socialist son and daughter-in-law if, instead of
achieving cheap publicity about relinquishing titles [Mosley said he would not
accept the baronetcy he would inherit from his father], they would take more
material action and relinquish some of their wealth and so help to make easier
the plight of some of their more unfortunate followers’. In the Express, Sir
Oswald said his son was ‘born with a gold spoon in his mouth — it cost £100
in doctor’s fees to bring him into the world. He lived on the fat of the land
and never did a day’s labour in his life. If he and his wife want to go in for
Labour, why don’t they do a bit of work themselves, or why doesn’t Lady
Cynthia sell her pearls for the good of the Smethwick poor?’
Mosley replied that ‘my father knows nothing of my life and has very
seldom seen me. So far as I am aware, he contributed nothing to my education
or upbringing, except in the form of alimony which he was compelled to
contribute in a court of law.’ The Town Crier remarked that the press lords
had ‘created such a position in Smethwick that if on the eve of poll Mosley
had committed bigamy or murdered his wife, nobody in Smethwick would
have believed the story’. Wheatley supported his colleague and told the Herald
that he was ‘one of the most brilliant and hopeful figures thrown up by the
Socialist movement during the last thirty years’.
At the by-election of 21 December 1926 Mosley received 16,077 votes, a
majority of 6,582 over his Conservative and Liberal opponents. Mosley told
106 BLACKSHIRT

8,000 triumphant supporters outside Smethwick town hall that his election
was a ‘great victory over Pressocracy’. His success, however, earned him a
reputation for extremism. Tories said he was an ‘unscrupulous demagogue
playing shamelessly on the passions and cupidity of a moronic electorate’. The
Morning Post warned that his electioneering was ‘an experiment in mob
psychology of a kind that has never been attempted before’. The Times
suggested Mosley was seeking ‘the readiest way to power’.
The Mosleys celebrated Christmas at Nancy Astor’s. She had ‘greatly dis-
approved of what she thought of as Tom’s defection to Labour’ but Cimmie’s
sister, Irene, noted that ‘everyone was very decent to him’. He did, however,
look ‘lonely and lost for once’.
Labour leaders were wary of Mosley but activists talked about him as a
future leader. They understood he wanted to create policies and a broad
consensus to deal with unemployment and had soft-pedalled on some issues
in order to attract neutral minds. However, on his return to Westminster in
January 1927, he learned, as his Front Generation counterparts discovered on
the Continent, that ‘in the eyes of party elders, new men on the move might
easily appear to be young men in too much of a hurry’.
 7
“The Coming Figure’

When Mosley returned to Parliament in the new year of 1927, MPs speculated
about his motives. He seemed to be someone with ‘a great soul, but little
heart’ and no deep attachments. Beatrice Webb thought him ‘brilliant but
without weight’. Philip Snowden dismissed him as ‘a man on the make’, while
Michael Foot later argued that he used the party as ‘a vehicle for his ideas and
ambitions’.
Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson was questioned continually about Mosley’s
sincerity. Colleagues considered him “all artifice, a series of roles carefully put
on for different occasions’. They observed his stylized performance with his
studied movements of hands and body, the polished phrases, the elaborate
courtesy. Leslie Hore-Belisha thought his friend’s persona was an act and
noted his resemblence to Chatham, who was ‘an actor. Natural only in his
unnaturalness, he cannot be imagined off-stage. Nor can Mr Mosley. Dark,
aquiline, flashing; tall, thin, assured; defiance in his eye, contempt in his
forward chin, his features are cast in a mould of disdain. His very smile is
a shrug. His voice is pitched in a tragedian’s key. His sentences are trailed
away. He is the only man in the House who has made an Art of himself.’
Analyst James Glass argues the narcissist is the ideal type of Hobbesian
natural man who forsakes internal dialogue for the restless pursuit of power.
Cold and ruthless, he moves through the world ‘without any inner feeling of
constraint, without any sense of principle or commitment to anything other
than self-gratification’. Mosley learnt from Shaw the doctrine that for a man
of action, ‘people and ideas are not right or wrong, good or evil, but useful or
useless’. Mosley remarked that ‘the ability to assume as many shapes as Proteus
is an indispensable requirement for political leadership in the modern age’. He
was a perfect politician for a mass society. ILP colleague Sydney Potter admired
his ‘extraordinary maturity of mind’ but knew him as ‘an arch-flatterer’. He
‘grasped my hand between both of his and said: “Sydney, old boy, they tell me
you were superb.” But when he said this, he wasn’t looking at me at all, he
was looking over my shoulder at the hungry mob longing to see him.’
Amabel Williams-Ellis described Mosley as a swashbuckler. His ‘unparliamen-
tary good looks’ were suggestive of the ‘dark, passionate, Byronic gentleman-
108 BLACKSHIRT

villain of the melodrama, in whose presence young ladies develop unaccount-

able palpitations and sedate husbands itch for their riding-whips’. When
Mosley lunched with Keynes, they were joined by his wife, Lydia Lopokova,
a brilliant demicaractére ballerina in the Diaghilev company. She confessed to
her husband that ‘she dreamt of kissing him’. Keynes described him as ‘a rake,
a seducer of both crowds and women’. To Ellen Wilkinson he was “The Sheikh’
— not the ‘nice kind hero who rescues the girl at the point of torture, but the
one who hisses “‘At last ... we meet”’’.
Mosley defended his public artifice as an elaborate defence of his privacy.
His infidelities were the subject of comment, though the gossip was not taken
seriously, either by those who peddled it or by his conquests. Such episodes
were ‘tacitly forgotten by all parties the next morning’. Irene and Baba knew
he had a mistress in Paris, called Maria. He was also pursuing a Hungarian
beauty, Blanche, actress wife of the American star John Barrymore. Mosley
confessed that she had ‘extraordinary qualities’. She would have ‘felt at home
with the men and women of the Renaissance, perhaps, in their less extreme
moments, even with the Borgias; in some moods she might even have been
equal to their extremities’.
If he allowed himself introspection, Nicholas thought his father ‘might have
seen that within the area of his own short-term drives and obsessions there
were possibly seeds of self-destruction: he had a gambler’s love of challenge
and risk’. Mosley’s priorities were clear: ‘Vote Labour; sleep Tory’. He felt no
guilt about his infidelities and protested his undying love for Cimmie, who
was humiliated by his philandering but still forgave him. Theirs was a typical
upper-class inter-war marriage in which it was perfectly acceptable to play the
field in private as long as the public face was straightforward and virtuous.
Mosley’s was neither.
Zita Jungman, wife of painter Nico Jungman, first met the Mosleys in
August 1927 at Cannes. Aware of the popular view of Mosley as the ‘dashing,
debonair buccaneer’, Zita had not expected to like him. She found, however,
that he was ‘gentle and attentive’. Others had noted his charm and shyness.
There was a staged vulnerability, apparent in the almost childlike ability to
get what he wanted. Zita described Cimmie as ‘pretty, rather fat, strong, and
ruthlessly direct’. She was having a terrible time trying to please her husband.
Cimmie wrote to him that she felt ‘like a Mum as well as a Mistress (can one
be the Whore as well as the Bore or vice versa?)’. She could not win. He had
a fling with a married woman at an ILP conference and then with the wife
of a Conservative MP, who obtained a photograph of a naked Mosley. During
a speech in the House, Mosley became aware from the laughter that a photo-
graph was being passed round the Tory benches. This was outside the rules of
the game and he threatened a fight.
John Strachey’s own life was an emotional wreck as his relationship with
 “THE COMING FIGURE’ 109
Yvette continued to deteriorate. He wrote of his ‘emotional failure and impo-
tence towards the outside world’. When his father died, he fell into depression.
He had made no progress in persuading Labour to take Mosley’s ideas seri-
ously. When Midland Bank Chairman Reginald McKenna made proposals
for credit reform, Labour leaders greeted them with contemptuous silence.
Strachey declared, ‘such inactivity might almost lend itself to the interpretation
that those who direct the financial policy of the Labour Party are even more
Conservative than the bankers themselves!’
By September 1927 Mosley was openly criticizing Snowden for being wed-
ded to sound finance, which meant restoring investors’ confidence by paying
off the national debt. He argued money should be spent on stimulating the
home market, and ‘not be passed on to wealthy bondholders who might save
it or invest it abroad’. Mosley attacked the adherence to the gold standard,
complaining that ‘the expansion and contraction of credit is dependent on the
discovery or exhaustion of far-away goldfields and the gold manipulation of
foreign statesmen and financiers’. He also chided Snowden for being an ardent
supporter of the City’s ‘reactionary elements’, which were a ‘fantastic negation
of the purposes of our Party’. ,
Mosley was targeted as a dangerous socialist by the diehards and their allies
in the British Fascists. A Cambridge meeting was broken up by hundreds of
undergraduates, carrying Union Jacks and Fascist flags. Turning on them,
Mosley retorted that they were no more than ‘black-shirted buffoons, making
a cheap imitation of ice-cream sellers’. Such robust rhetoric went down well
with the ILP rank and file who, in October, elected him to Labour’s National
Executive Committee. The secret of his advance, observed Egon Wertheimer,
was that he was ‘a much harder worker than even his closest friends realise’.
Dalton, who had been pushed off the NEC, considered Mosley’s talk of
creating markets by printing money as ‘arrant nonsense, bad arithmetic
and bad economics’. Keynes replied that Dalton lacked ‘either subtlety or
distinction’.
- Mosley was absent from Parliament for long periods owing to illness. There
may have been an element of hypochondria in his absences, which a Tory
critic described as ‘politically useful’. It was observed that he liked to trust
glamorous doctors ‘whether or not there was very much for them to cure’,
though there was the recurring problem of his leg. Long days of canvassing
brought on a debilitating attack of phlebitis, which left him in pain. Cimmie
was ‘miserable at your being phlebitic, it really does seem that your troubles
are unending and cumulative . . . always piling up’.
Mosley served on an NEC committee preparing a programme for the general
election and sent MacDonald a memorandum - less radical than the ILP’s
policies — urging revision of monetary policy, children’s allowances and an
extra £1 a week pension for those aged sixty-five and over who retired. He
IIo BLACKSHIRT

advocated a tax on luxuries, an embargo on the export of capital, bulk

purchase of foodstuffs and raw materials, and the setting up of a powerful
Economic Council. MacDonald, however, wanted a general statement to
appeal to middle opinion and rejected Mosley’s desire for an unambiguous
programme of action to deal with ‘unemployment, wages, rents, squalor, the
threat of war — all the issues which send Parliament to sleep’.
MacDonald acknowledged in January 1928 that ‘someone who would put
the trumpet more frequently to his lips would be a better leader, but would
that be good for the Party?’ There were many ‘inflammatory influences in the
Party to keep it hot’, but ‘confidence goes further than programmes’. Mosley
submitted a shorter memo but when MacDonald dithered, he moved at the
NEC on 28 March that the draft be considered immediately. This was defeated
by only ten votes to eight. Even so, ministers from the first Labour government
had undergone a psychological change, which expressed itself in a ridiculous
fear of ‘being identified with left-wing political sentiments of which but a few
years before they had been the exponents’.
During spring 1928 relations between the ILP and Labour deteriorated
sharply. Responding to increasing disillusionment among Clydesiders, Wheat-
ley discussed with ILP leader James Maxton and Miners’ leader Arthur Cook
plans to unite the Left. In June, they prepared the ‘Cook—Maxton Manifesto’
for a mass propaganda campaign intended to overthrow Labour’s compromis-
ing leadership. The campaign failed to generate support and was written off
asa failure. It illustrated, Brockway recognized, ‘that the rank and file, however
dissatisfied with the leadership, will not countenance the destruction of unity’.
There was in Wheatley’s failure a lesson to be learnt, but Mosley later failed
to heed the warning, even if he now broke contact with the ILP and devoted
himself wholly to the work of the Labour Party, in the belief that unity was
necessary to win a majority at the next election. Even so, he was not re-elected
to the NEC and appeared as something of a solitary force. In areas such as
Lancashire he was unable to dispel the suspicion that he was a pampered,
rich man.
In contrast, Irene viewed her sister’s political development as ‘astonishing’.
On 13 May 1928 ‘Cim gave us a long socialist dissertation. She was so certain
and heartwhole one could not argue with her.’ When she was adopted as
Labour candidate for Stoke, she was ostracized by former society friends, who
turned ‘a cold shoulder to the renegade’. Lady Astor was one of the few still
willing to see her. The Mosleys were welcome in the international set centred
ona handful of rich hostesses in the principal European cities, where they
enjoyed a world of gossip and a rather cruel kind of fun. Nicolas has described
his parents’ circle as one in which ‘personal relationships, even love, were
matters of intrigue, conquest, possession, power; everyone was in the business
 ‘THE COMING FIGURE’ IIl
of becoming one up on everyone else’. Adultery was accepted and while the
Participants ‘knew everything about everybody, the papers knew nothing’.

During the summer of 1928, Denham was host to the Tennants, Sitwells, Cecil
Beaton, William Walton, Oliver Messel and other ‘Bright Young Things’. The
writer and poet Osbert Sitwell was the inheritor of the baronetcy and the
literary family’s home, Renishaw, in Derbyshire. He served in the war, but
became a pacifist and much of his early work was devoted to this cause.
Sacheverell, youngest of the Sitwells, was an incurably romantic poet and
writer, regarded as a cultural trail-blazer of twentieth-century taste. ‘Sachie’
and his wife Georgia, a banker’s daughter, were regularly seen with the
Mosleys in London or on weekends at Savehay.
A great friend of the Mosleys was Dick Wyndham, with whom Sachie had
collaborated on A Book of Towers. Others included Idina Erroll, chic wife of
the Earl of Erroll. After one party, Georgia wrote that Idina was ‘hungry
looking, spoilt and vicious’. She had been married four times and had numer-
ous lovers, including Mosley. Georgia ‘flung herself into this new, smart, party
life, taking to its customs and values with almost frantic enthusiasm’. Flirting
with Mosley was one custom. Sachie’s biographer noted that the self-centred
and dominant Mosley was the opposite of Sachie, which was part of his
attraction for Georgia.
On 6 July the Sitwells spent a weekend at Savehay with Beaton, Wyndham,
Strachey, Zita Jungman and Stephen Tennant as guests. Dressed up in old
Edwardian clothes belonging to the first Lady Curzon (Mary Leiter), they
made a cine-film with a script by the homosexual and transvestite Tennant,
involving motor-car chases, seduction, abduction and attempted murder.
Cimmie played the role of a prostitute, while Sachie, Georgia and Mosley
were uncomfortably cast together as three detectives. Georgia thought the
weekend hilarious, though she quarrelled with her husband about her plans
to travel to Antibes to holiday with their hosts.
A pupil at West Downs and Winchester, Stephen Tennant was a neighbour
to Mosley in Smith Square. His mother was Pamela Wyndham. Brother David
ran Soho’s Gargoyle Club, which by day was patronized by politicians and
civil servants; by night, it was a bohemian club for a social, sexual and
intellectual set, which included Mosley. The Tennants’ eldest brother and their
cousins were killed in the war. David subsequently developed a ‘romantic
death-wish, cloaked in the mystic cult of chivalry’. The Tennants were rich:
the Wyndhams were aristocratic; both produced politicians and intellectuals.
‘Dirty Dick’ Wyndham had grown up in Wiltshire, at Clouds, a Victorian
country house decorated with Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Wounded in the war,
Dick remained in the army and was appointed ADC to Field Marshal Lord
II2 BLACKSHIRT

French, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. In 1920 he married the daughter of

French’s mistress, Winifred Bennett. It took some days before the ‘puzzled
newly-weds, virgins both, managed to discover how “it” was done’. After
divorce in 1925, Dick broke from his upper-class roots and ‘sought to embrace
a wider world where his muffled artistic talents might find expression’. He +
found a mentor in Wyndham Lewis. When in London, Dick stayed at the *
Hyde Park Hotel with one foot in White’s (Mosley’s Club) and the other
in Bloomsbury. He always carried ‘a battered black book containing short,
cryptic notes — “small breasts, tight bottom, free on Wednesdays” ’.
The Mosleys’ circle found itself portrayed in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter
Point (1928). The suitably named ‘Everard Webley’, leader of the ‘Brother-
hood of British Freemen’, was Mosley, with all his ‘bombast and pomposity’.
Huxley was prophetic of his Fascism and incisive about his relations with
women. He suggested a ‘marriage between sexuality and violence in the
Webley/Mosley mind, a sadistic streak in his character which aligned with the
tradition of the strangely alluring Gothic villain’. In June, Nancy Mitford had
wondered: ‘How is one to find the perfect young man, either they seem to be
half witted or half baked or absolute sinks of vice or else actively dirty like
John Strachey.’
That year, 1928, the Mosleys spent their holiday at Cap d’Antibes, where
their guests included Irene, Baba and her husband, Charles and Elsie Mend,
Douglas Fairbanks, the Benjamin Guinnesses and the Casa Maurys. Married
to the Cuban racing driver Marquis de Casa Maury, Paula Gellibrand had
posed for Beaton and was another conquest of Mosley. Educated in England
and a Royal Flying Corps pilot, ‘Bobby’ de Casa Maury had founded Curzon
Cinemas. Barbara Cartland recalled that Paula had ‘an exoticism about her
which makes her outstanding, even in a room filled with other beauties’.
Mosley’s circle also included what The Times called a ‘summer club for
socialist intelligentsia’ of G. B. Shaw and Somerset Maugham. Cimmie, who
‘queens it with the best’ on the beaches, Shaw observed, was nervous of
exposing herself to the waiting press photographers. Mosley had no such fears.
He ‘evidently fancies himself very much in bathing shorts and displays with
pride a sunburnt, muscular torso’, wrote Georgia Sitwell. At dinner, he flirted
with Georgia. Shaw loved the landscape but hated the people, and left for
Geneva.
Mosley was rude in public to Irene, who recalled with despair the rows
between him and her sister. These usually ended with Cimmie sobbing and
Mosley shouting. When he went to the casino, she talked to Cimmie, who was
on the edge of a breakdown, ‘over the misery of her present life and Tom’s
insulting behaviour to her’. It hurt Irene to hear her sister’s ‘rending loyalty
to him saying he had never been unfaithful, she only wished he would not
make a fool of her in public’. Despite the betrayals, Cimmie led the party-going
 “THE COMING FIGURE’ nr
activity. She was pathetically dependent upon him and there was something
almost self-destructive about her obsession with her ‘hero’, She would forgive
her ‘baby boy’ almost any misbehaviour.
The fun was broken by news that Mosley’s father, who was in France, was
dying of sclerosis of the liver. When a telegram from his brother Ted, who
was with their father at La Baule, reached him Mosley did not react. Ted
wrote that he was ‘disgusted to find that on the one occasion I have asked you
to help me you have let me down. . . Ican assure you I should not have asked
you to come here if I considered that your presence would disturb my father
at this time.’
In October Mosley’s father died aged fifty-four. Mosley recognized the ‘final
explosion’ was due to his increasing drinking. He attended the funeral along
with his mother and two brothers but was not mentioned in his father’s will.
He did, however, inherit the family estate woith £250,000 (£6 m) before death
duties. Much of it was in the form of land in Manchester but, with 999-year
leases, the income was fixed and, with inflation, its value quickly diminished.
Mosley had an annual income from trustees of £8,000 (£200,000). He was
rich but not extravagantly so. However, there was Cimmie’s income from the
Leiter Trust of a similar amount. Naturally, details of the inheritance ‘started
the Press hounds yelping’:
Mosley decided his father’s baronetcy, which had not been ‘worth taking
up’, was now ‘not worth giving up’. When Georgia Sitwell remarked that a
baronetcy was rather a false position, neither one thing nor another, Cimmie
took care to point out her husband’s exact rank. ‘So different a point of view’,
she thought, ‘to what one feels ... a socialist should have.’ Arriving at the
Mosleys’ London home, she found them admiring the family diamonds. ‘Tom
actually says [Cimmie] will need the tiara one day, to wear — as Queen of the
Communists I suppose!’ Georgia’s reaction did not affect her affair with
Mosley and she continued to visit him at 22b Ebury Street, a bachelor-style
flat that was just one huge bedroom, where ‘at the press of a switch warm air
wafted in’. :

Mosley was becoming a force to be reckoned with in Labour. MacDonald

saw in him a worthy successor, ‘someone who might some day do the things
which he himself had once dreamt of doing’. In October, he travelled with the
Mosleys across Europe. In a passage deleted from his autobiography, Mosley
described meeting in Austria ‘a woman who as a type seemed to me something
of an old Viennese tart: faded blonde, very sophisticated, very agreeable’. Frau
Forster was MacDonald’s mistress and was well known at socialist gatherings.
In Berlin, the Mosleys met Harold Nicolson at the British embassy. He was
bored and under pressure from his wife, novelist Vita Sackville-West, who
had a low opinion of creative people working in public service. An aristocrat by
 114 BLACKSHIRT

temperament whose world consisted of ‘weekend parties, exclusive luncheons,

Bloomsbury and the Travellers Club’, he was looking for fresh horizons. He
was well aware that he belonged to an elite. Witty, urbane and anti-Semitic,
he was a colossal snob.
Nicolson acknowledged that there was an ambiguity about himself. He was
regarded ‘by the bohemians as conventional, and by the conventional as
bohemian’. This was symbolized by his bisexuality and his marriage to Vita,
a lesbian and more masculine character than her husband. They maintained
a marriage which avoided ‘all admission of sexual irregularity’, including his
trips to Berlin’s homosexual bars. The clubs shocked Mosley and suggested a
‘nation sunk so deep that it could never rise again’. The Friedrichstrasse was
described by one visitor as the ‘pornographic shop-window of Germany’s
shame’ where sleazy clubs offered every vice. Mosley was revulsed that the
‘sexes had simply exchanged clothes, make-up and the habits of Nature in
crudest form’. Berlin was damned by the Nazis as the capital of ‘cultural
Bolshevism’. Nicolson had learnt.from friends in Munich of Hitler’s increasing
influence but had been reassured by their protestations that the ‘ex-corporal
could never become a serious menace’.

On his return to London, Mosley encouraged Strachey to visit America to

study industry but also to seek a rich wife. He found one in Esther Murphy,
daughter of Patrick Murphy, owner of a New York department store. Part of
the American bohemian literary scene, the Murphys had holidayed with the
Mosleys in the south of France. Strachey’s subsequent visit to the Soviet Union
influenced his increasingly radical perspective, which was joined, through the
encouragement of his cousin James, to an interest in psychoanalysis. First
signs of this synthesis appeared in a series of articles (‘The New Generation’)
in the New Leader. Strachey wanted a society of ‘pure Communism’ based on
a new morality, which would see the abolition of private property — a view
certainly not shared by Mosley.
Mosley had begun to attract interest from the other end of the political
spectrum. Beaverbrook focused on him as a coming figure in socialist politics.
On 1 October he informed US journalist Herbert Swope that Mosley’s oppon-
ents ‘stigmatize him as an adventurer and declare that as a consequence he
has no future in politics’ but this was ‘premature and ill-informed’. Mosley was
not ‘any more of an opportunist than a good many other eminent politicians
I could name’.
Hugh Dalton wrote in his diary (x October) how Mosley ‘stinks of money
and insincerity . .. a huge gap existed between his public rhetoric and private
values’. Mosley drew attention to the fact that aristocrats such as himself
‘tended to be on the Left’, while the middle-class newcomer Dalton was a
reliable supporter of the Party hierarchy. Wertheimer observed that Dalton
 ‘THE COMING FIGURE’ 115

was ‘not flashy like Mosley and in the Party his position is welded by closer
bonds of affection and respect’. Intellectually he was made of ‘incomparably
better stuff’ but on virtually every economic point he was simply wrong.
In October Labour’s draft programme, ‘Labour and the Nation’, was agreed
but Mosley regretted that progressive ideas made only a fleeting appearance.
It consisted of a ‘high-minded statement of the moral case for gradualist
socialism, heavily flavoured with the scientific optimism of the day’.
Snowden told the annual conference that he had no intention of using the
budget to create jobs. He warned that while an ‘unprincipled Government in
the absolute control of currency and credit’ could reduce unemployment by a
million, it would be at a ‘terrible price which the country would have to pay
sooner or later’. This was ‘a power I am not prepared to put without reserve
and control into the hands of any political government’. Members assumed
unemployment was capitalism’s fault and only a few believed it was possible
to do something while the means of production were privately owned. How-
ever, the leadership had even less interest in fulfilling members’ desires than
dealing with unemployment.
Mosley despaired at Snowden’s unwillingness to try solutions at hand.
Lloyd George’s Liberal Party’s ‘Britain’s Industrial Future’ was pioneering in
advocating a Keynesian investment programme to tackle unemployment. It
was pro free trade but Keynes concluded that loan-financed public works were
required to deal with unemployment. He was suggesting state management of
demand by means of varying public spending and investment. The Yellow
Book included pragmatic proposals for industrial rationalization and por-
trayed corporatist self-government as an ‘ideological compromise between
state socialism and individualistic private enterprise’. The mixed-economy
proposals were not radical but still had little impact. Labour moderates, who
‘proved to be far from wedded to socialism’, criticized the Yellow Book for
its ‘aversion to the socialist principles of public control and ownership’.
In Parliament in November Mosley suggested the Empire, as a market for
British products and a source of raw materials, could be an economic unit
which rivalled the US in self-sufficiency. Essentially a social imperialist, he
saw the Empire as a means to a ‘greater Britain’ and the guarantee of peace.
‘If the world was carved up between the great powers in such a way that their
requirements for raw materials were satisfied, and so that they contained
sufficient population to absorb the ever-increasing output of industry, then
the chief cause of modern wars would be eliminated.’ Like the Marxists, he
interpreted great-power struggles ‘almost exclusively in economic terms’.
Mosley’s speech attracted Beaverbrook’s attention as a potential recruit to
his Empire Free Trade campaign. On 26 November he told former Canadian
Prime Minister Sir Robert Bowden there were no young men to rescue Britain
from its deep sleep, except Mosley. ‘He is a careerist like Birkenhead and
 116 BLACKSHIRT

Churchill. The type is familiar. Mosley has more character than Birkenhead
but less personality than Churchill.’ A few weeks later Beaverbrook wrote to
Mosley about their ‘personal relationship’. Mosley found himself confronted
by two alternatives: either ‘to serve the new world in a great attempt to bring
order out of chaos and beauty out of squalor’ or become a ‘flunkey of the
bourgeoisie’. He regretted that many of his class had chosen the latter course.
On Christmas Eve the Mosleys stayed with the Webbs. Cimmie told Beatrice
that Labour people, ‘especially the better sort and the intellectuals, are shy of
us, except the few snobs among them who are subservient’. Beatrice thought
Mosley was ‘dead certain of Cabinet office, and possibly has a chance of
eventual premiership’. Harold Laski had overcome his own fascination with
Mosley, partly, he told Beatrice, because of his ‘luxurious and fast life’. Despite
reservations, she regarded Mosley, Dalton and Trevelyan as the most likely
successors to MacDonald as party leader.
Published at the end of the year under the pseudonym ‘Janitor’ (J. G.
Lockhart and Lady Craik), The Feet of the Young Men-contained a prophetic
and telling profile of Mosley. He was compared with Philippe Egalité, an
aristocratic revolutionary featured in Thomas Carlyle’s history of the French
Revolution. Egalité had been ‘disappointed in his early ambitions, turning
. against his own caste, sunning himself in the applause of the crowd’. This
unpleasant fate had lost ‘none of its attractions for the young politician of
ample purse and elastic principles’. Mosley had ‘cast himself for the same
glittering part but lacked the power to play it’.
Mosley, Janitor observed, had been ragged at Sandhurst but ‘not as fre-
quently as was desirable’; his war service had been useful for ‘receiving a
severe wound which has not been without its political value’. His Smethwick
campaign had been ‘one of the most unpleasant contests that has taken place
since the War’. Janitor noticed the ‘atmosphere of violence and unrestrained
personalities which surround Mr Mosley’s political career is always someone
else’s fault’. It suggested a dog, whose appearance when taken for a walk was
‘the signal for every dog within sight to set upon him. So far as I could see, he
did nothing to provoke them; but 1 am bound to add that he seemed thoroughly
to enjoy the succession of general action into which our progress invariably
developed.’
Mosley was not a popular figure ‘save for brief intervals and among men
who do not know him. That his own class should dislike him is only natural,
for it is not enough for Egalité to turn his own coat; he must also thoroughly
dust the coats of his former friends.’ His attack on banks was ‘calculated to
appeal to the more extreme of his colleagues’. The ILPers will
use him for just as long as he serves their purpose, but they will never make a friend
of him. It is this sense of ostracism that is the secret of Mosley’s truculent demeanour,
 “THE COMING FIGURE’ ry
for when a man of his years becomes embittered he becomes very bitter indeed, and
the less sure he feels of himself, the more noisily will he confront the world. Yet
truculence, bitterness, are likely to avail him little in the course he has set for himself.
If he fails in it, his failure will be final.

It was a remarkably prescient commentary.

Although generally viewed as a playboy, during 1929 Mosley began to be
seen as a ‘serious politician who worked hard with big ideas — ideas he was
desperately eager to see translated into action’. His ‘scientific and practical
creed’ was influenced by Douglas Cole, whose The Next Ten Years in British
Social and Economic Policy (1929) was a prophetic treatise, anticipating the
next decade’s socialist thinking on State planning. It envisioned the ‘conscious
development of national economic resources’ by an Employment and National
Investment Board and public corporations.
In March, Lloyd George produced a modified programme, the ‘Orange ~
Book — We Can Conquer Unemployment’. Drawn up by Keynes, it envisaged
two years of emergency public investment paid for by government borrowing.
Plans for road construction were on a scale of German efforts in the thirties.
A house-building initiative would restore the Wheatley housing subsidy, which
the Tories had cut. Altogether, 600,000 jobs would be created at a cost of
£250 million. Keynes claimed there would be a ‘cumulative effect’ with ‘greater
trade activity making for further trade activity’. Labour’s response was to
delete from its own draft proposals for investment through deficits so that
they could point the finger of irresponsibility at Lloyd George and his ‘madcap
finance’.
At the committee considering the manifesto, ‘How to Conquer Unemploy-
ment’, Mosley and Cole put forward constructive plans for the reconstruction
of industry under the authority of a National Economic Council promoting
the scientific planning of production. However, during the strenuous NEC
debate, MacDonald objected to Mosley’s draft, with its ‘hectic rattle of
machine-gun prose’, and the inclusion of commitments he had no intention of
implementing.
The arguments did not affect their personal relationship and MacDonald
suggested to the Mosleys they ‘all go down to Fowey in Cornwall, and named
the party which he wanted to take’. She turned out to be the ‘obvious vamp’
from Vienna, Frau Forster, recalled Mosley. He believed MacDonald’s ‘con-
duct in private affairs was all too similar to his action in public affairs’. He
was a model of ‘public virtue and private decorum’, and the product of the
‘squalid curse of Puritanism’. Mosley suggested statesmen ‘should either know
much about love, or refrain from it’. Oddly, given his own proclivities, he said
Ministers ‘ought to live like athletes, not dine out, go to banquets and dinners,
but only see people relevant to business’. What was required was a new kind
118 BLACKSHIRT

of statesman (i.e. Mosley) — ‘men of calm and balanced character, of freedom

yet of self-control, of discriminating taste rather than of inhibition’.
Taking his lead from Shaw, Mosley said Caesar’s experiences in early life
‘certainly gave him more practice in handling all situations, both delicate and
dangerous, than had the less fortunate MacDonald’. In Caesar, ‘hysteria was
excluded, all was ruled by purpose served by character. We need a return to
character with neither the hysteria of repression nor of licence, in harmony
with life, nature and purpose reaching ever higher.’ Mosley quoted Nietzsche
that such supermen appear ‘immune from the glow and blast of the passions’.
Mosley displayed ineffable self-importance and an obnoxious, inflated sense
of superiority. He adored himself. The key to the success of such people is
often not their talent but an irrepressible desire for admiration. They crave
opportunities for self-enhancement and believe they are entitled to special
treatment because they are ‘God’s gift to the world’.
In April Mosley was best man at Strachey’s marriage to Esther Murphy, a
dandy wife, who was clever, dominant and a lesbian. Strachey was attracted
to her bohemian world and her money. Within months he was confiding in
Mosley that the marriage was ‘awful’. He had difficulty in reconciling his
politics with the turmoil and materialism of his private life.
On 10 May 1929 Parliament was dissolved. Stanley Baldwin went to the
country against a backdrop of high unemployment with the slogan ‘Safety
First’. In his election address, Mosley said it was ‘an offence against God and
man that women should be imprisoned in the damp and disease ridden walls
of a slum house and have to bring up children to share their misery’. Such
problems ‘can never be solved by a creed of indifference and despair. These
pleasant, sleepy people are all very well in pleasant, sleepy times, but we live
in a dynamic age of great and dynamic events. In such an age we summon all
classes to a united effort of the whole nation in the war against poverty.’ He
also wrote of his fear ‘not that the Labour Party will do more than a united
nation demanded ten years ago’ but that ‘in the face of the terrific opposition
they will encounter, they will not do as much’. He was determined that
‘through and beyond the failure of men and parties, we of the war-generation
are marching on and we shall march on until our end is achieved and our
sacrifice atoned’.
There was suspicion of ruling-class recruits but Wertheimer observed that
‘far from having weakened the Socialist character of the movement, it is they
who have given new life and impulse to the Socialist side of the agitation’.
Mosley lent glamour and respectability to the party, and could gain seats
which ‘must otherwise have fallen into enemy hands’. He intended to create
his own Birmingham caucus and sponsored candidates, with up to £250
(£7,500), while four-page election sheets were distributed throughout the city.
Standing in Erdington, Jim Simmons discovered ‘money was no object’.
+
 “THE COMING FIGURE’ 119
Cimmie had a difficult campaign in Stoke-on-Trent. Opponents derided her
as a ‘Dollar Princess’ on account of her American inheritance. She insisted she
had invested it in Britain and the Labour Party. She was also not forgiven by
former friends for what was viewed as treachery. Irene had walked out of a
party at Georgia Sitwell’s because of ‘all the filthy things’ said about her
sister’s ‘election in sables and pearls’. Wertheimer considered Cimmie the
‘most eloquent and debonair figure in the Socialist world, whether here or
abroad’.
A fortnight before election day, Irene was at Savehay when a row took place
over the trivial matter of cars for the election. Mosley was ruthless and ‘vilely
rude’ to Cimmie, despite her being ‘exquisite and faithful in her love’. On top
of this, Cimmie was pregnant. The majority of women candidates were single,
or childless wives, or had grown-up children. She was the exception but she
refused to be defensive. Articulate on the platform, Cimmie agreed a woman’s
place was in the home but that was the ‘very reason why we should take an
interest in politics’ which was the ‘bread and butter of life’. She recognized
she was in a privileged position but was ‘not satisfied with things as they are.
Surely to goodness if I am not satisfied, then the millions who live in squalid
and miserable conditions are not.’ Working-class audiences took to her and,
as the campaign wore on, ‘it was her opponent who found himself struggling
to cope with hostile heckling’.
In the general election on 30 May, Cimmie scored the most impressive
victory by any woman between the wars. She doubled the Labour vote to
26,000 and achieved a majority of 7,850, despite facing a well-entrenched
sitting member. The local newspaper speculated that ‘many of the flappers
were doubtless flattered by the opportunity of voting for a lady of title and
wealth’, though clearly many men were equally keen. To celebrate the success,
Irene gave Cimmie a gold bracelet inset with diamonds forming the words
‘Stoke 1929’.
_Mosley’s West Midlands colleagues enjoyed similar success, with eleven
Labour gains. Strachey was elected for Aston. J. Johnson, President of the
Birmingham Labour Party, recalled that when they won Erdington Mosley
ran ‘across Victoria Square easily outstripping the crows at his heels, with
_ his huge strides, throwing his hat into the air and nearly breaking the back of
our little four-seater car as he jumped upon it to congratulate us. Nobody pre-
sent could have doubted the genuineness of his Socialism at that time.’ In
Smethwick Mosley secured a majority of 7,340 over his opponents. He told
the cheering crowd, ‘I am sure, now that it is all over, we can settle down
together quite happily as members of one great nation.’ He had earlier
expressed the view that ‘we might lift our national problems above the clamour
of faction and party strife’, which seemd to imply his willingness to sacrifice
Labour for a non-party, nation-orientated movement.
120 BLACKSHIRT

Irene and Cimmie drove to Smethwick to a tremendous reception. ‘Everyone

murmured that Cim and Tom had broken the great Chamberlain backbone
in Brum,’ wrote Irene. ‘Seldom have I taken part in such a frenzy of thrill and
nervous tension.’ Six days later an exhausted Cimmie had a miscarriage. Close
friends believed Mosley had ‘exploited his wife’s willingness too freely, often *
persuading her to speak when she was exhausted’. Harold Nicolson observed ~
that beneath his teasing of Cimmie lay ‘a streak of cruelty’.
Outside the West Midlands there was no spectacular Labour advance,
though the party emerged as the biggest single party with 287 MPs compared
with 260 for the Conservatives. The Liberals trailed with fifty-nine seats. Also
rejected were several progressive young Tories sympathetic to Keynes, and
ideas of planning and industrial reorganization. Harold Macmillan took the
defeat personally, as he saw himself as the guardian of Stockton’s unemployed.
However, he was regarded as being ‘eccentric and without serious political
prospects’.
The electorate had conspicuously failed to make up its mind and, without an
overall majority, Ramsay MacDonald was forced to form a minority Labour
government. For three years he and Mosley had been working together on the
NEC’s foreign affairs subcommittee. They were social friends and had toured
Europe together. It seemed that Mosley was slated for a senior post.
 8

‘A Young Man in a Hurry’

Speculation within the Labour Party centred on whether Mosley might become
Foreign Secretary in the new government. He had an inkling he was being
considered for the Foreign Office and certainly Harold Nicolson hoped his
friend would recall him to a post in London. In a letter dated 15 June 1 929,
Harold Laski reveals colleagues argued about the Foreign Office, which Prime
Minister Ramsay MacDonald would have given to Mosley had not Arthur
Henderson ‘stood out to bursting point’.
As he went in to see the PM, A. V. Alexander passed a leaving Mosley.
Accepting the post of First Lord of the Admiralty, Alexander said, ‘I’ll try
anything you like to give me.’ A pleased MacDonald replied, ‘I see you’re in
a very submissive mood. Very different from our friend who has just gone out.’
The antipathy felt towards Mosley by Labour leaders meant there was little
chance of him becoming Foreign Secretary. In the event, Henderson was
appointed to the post. Mosley was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of
Lancaster, which was not a Cabinet post. He was furious at a snub that
‘rankled’.
Mosley served under Jimmy Thomas, with responsibility for unemployment.
The National Union of Railwaymen’s chief was self-consciously aware of his
working-class origins and lack of education, which found expression in an
open scorn for intellectuals and distrust of economists. ‘Go upstairs; see what
the experts are doing; and tell them not to’ was one of his sayings. He was
corrupt; his drinking and gambling were a serious problem. From his vantage
point in the City, Oliver Stanley remarked to Mosley that Thomas was ‘finding
it more difficult to move in and out of the market than previously, when he
was selling a bear on railway stock before a strike he called or threatened
himself’. Mosley commented that among his cronies Thomas claimed his
dabbling on the market was a ‘little perquisite of office which his abilities and
services justified’. It eventually brought about his downfall.
Churchill described Mosley as a ‘ginger assistant to the Lord Privy Seal and
more ginger than assistant’. Further assistance came from the Under-Secretary
for Scotland, Tom Johnston, and George Lansbury, who held the post of First
_ Commissioner of Works. They were suspicious of the aristocratic Mosley with
I22 BLACKSHIRT

his ‘metallic charm and Douglas Fairbanks smile’, but accepted he was out to
get something done. However, Thomas had no executive authority and they
could only co-ordinate existing instruments in efforts to deal with unemploy-
ment. Realizing they were assisting a man out of his depth, they bypassed
their boss, who spent his time travelling abroad, failing ‘to unearth any new
answers to British unemployment’.
Lansbury’s appointment was compensation for the exclusion of John
Wheatley, the one ministerial success in 1924. His reputation had been damaged
by an unsuccessful libel action. However, he was still hero-worshipped by the
grass roots. He warned colleagues against accepting office in a minority govern-
ment because the country was entering a slump. He said Labour would become
capitalism’s instrument for implementing cuts. MacDonald dismissed the ILP’s
position — that it would prefer defeat as it would make socialism the dominant
issue in politics — as romantic. Within days of Parliament reassembling, James
Maxton proposed that the ILP’s block of nineteen MPs consist only of those
who agreed with Wheatley. Appointed secretary to this ‘parliamentary suicide
club’ was the new MP for Peckham and future Mosleyite John Beckett.
Beckett’s wartime experience turned him to the left. He became Chairman
of the National Union of Ex-Servicemen, secretary of the No More War
Movement and was then employed as Clement Attlee’s agent. He helped
formulate the ILP programme during the mid twenties and was elected to
Gateshead as Labour’s youngest MP. Despite these credentials, Fenner Brock-
way believed Beckett lacked a socialist philosophy and built up his following
through rabble-rousing oratory. He had to bé restrained ‘from going to
extremes in action and language’. He was particularly contemptuous of
Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Snowden.
Labour had pledged to deal with unemployment, but MacDonald inter-
preted the lack of a clear majority as the need for caution. However, even if
Labour had received a decisive vote, it is unlikely that policy would have
differed. Snowden, who did not waver in his commitment to long-held preju-
dices, had ‘the mentality of a Poor Law Commissioner’. He was more reaction-
ary than his Tory counterpart, Neville Chamberlain, who was in comparison
‘urbane and humanitarian’. Snowden believed in balanced budgets, free trade
and had no faith in public works to cut unemployment. On his appointment,
Churchill said the ‘Treasury mind and the Snowden mind embraced each other
with the fervour of two long-separated kindred lizards’.
Snowden hated Mosley’s advocacy of State intervention and despised his
new economics. He chided him: ‘You are a young man who cannot remember
previous depressions; they have often recurred in my lifetime and have passed
away.’ In Cabinet, he insulted him with the aside that he was a ‘presumptuous
fool and an economic ignoramus’.
When Labour took office in June, unemployment stood at 1,164,000, just
 ‘A YOUNG MAN IN A HURRY’ 123
under ro per cent of the insured population. Thomas, however, proved
incapable of grasping the scope of the problem. Deputy Cabinet Secretary
Thomas Jones thought the team around him ‘ill-assorted and ill-qualified’.
Johnston was lightweight, Lansbury’s ideas were limited to a romantic rural-
ism, while Mosley had the ‘disruptive quality of being a young man ina hurry’.
It was inevitable that the relationship between the viceroy’s son-in-law and
the ex-railwayman would prove to be an unhappy one. Opposition leader
Stanley Baldwin, who was resting at Sir Philip Sassoon’s Trent Park after the
election defeat, remarked that Mosley was ‘a cad and a wrong un, and they
will find it out’.
For the only time in his life, Mosley kept a diary — largely indecipherable —
which ran for six weeks (11 June to 22 July). He discussed unemployment
with civil servants, uncertain of the purpose of his department; economists,
including Keynes, and the Midland Bank’s Reginald McKenna, who agreed
with a Treasury recommendation for ‘expansion in small doses’. They were
useful talks even if Thomas only had ‘good railway projects and little else’.
On 22 June Mosley invited the PM to Denham to ‘a review of the entire
unemployment situation — stressed that only speedy results could be obtained
from three measures (1) lowering retirement age (2) raising school leaving age
(3) in addition, discussed railways, roads, colonial expansion, in particular,
Western Australia’. MacDonald’s response was to utter ‘Oh’. It was ‘Party
policy - Snowden must agree’. The PM agreed his Chancellor was an obstacle
to efforts to tackle unemployment.
Four days later Snowden informed Cabinet he would permit increases in
unemployment benefit and a relaxation of the means test, but refused to
countenance job creation schemes which were not self-financing. He refused
to believe that relief works could contribute to the export problem which lay
behind unemployment. Thomas concurred and opposed the raising of loans.
In late June, Douglas Cole said he hoped the reason why Thomas had not
announced new employment schemes was because he was about to put forward
a ‘more comprehensive scheme’. The government, however, was committed
to no more than launching inquiries. Stanley Baldwin summed up their
approach as ‘My Ministers are going to think’.
On 29 June Thomas created a committee of his junior ministers to study
the proposals Mosley had raised with the PM. Four days later, during the
King’s Speech, Thomas unveiled a modest five-year £37% m programme of
road building and £25 m credit facilities for public utilities. Churchill compli-
mented Thomas for ‘not being hampered by foolish Socialist ideas’ and
expressed compassion for the ILP, who ‘dreamed that they were clearing a
pathway along which the toiling millions were to advance towards Utopia,
but they wake to find that all they have been doing was to set up a ladder by
which the hon. Baronet [Mosley] could climb into place and power’.
124 BLACKSHIRT

Anxiety deepened following a rise in US tariffs, which hit British exports and
reduced commodity prices in the dominions. Seizing the opportunity to exploit
Tory unease, Beaverbrook called on 30 June 1929 for an Empire Free Trade
crusade. Under his proposals Empire trade would be protected by tariffs and an
internal free trade area. On 9 July his editor-in-chief and former Tariff Reform *
Leaguer Ralph Blumenfeld met with Mosley, along with Evening Standard
diarist Robert Bruce Lockhart. Mosley said Labour ‘must do something for the
underdogs and that if he could have another sixpence on to the income-tax he
could keep Maxton and the Clydesiders quiet for ten years’. He also said he
intended to be Prime Minister. On 15 July he announced a Colonial Develop-
ment Bill, the handling of which, with ‘good temper and grasp of detail’,
impressed the Express ‘as the Minister responsible for the first Act laying
down these important principles to protect native labour from exploitation’.
When Treasury opposition made the work of the Thomas committee ineffec-
tual, members decided to develop their own proposals. Mosley moved into
offices in the Treasury Chambers and brought in his Birmingham organizer,
Allan Young, and Strachey as his Parliamentary Private Secretary. Lansbury
sent his proposals to Thomas but ‘only slowly did he realise that none of them
would be tried’. On 28 July Beatrice Webb heard from Mosley and Lansbury
that Thomas ‘does not see them [and] is in the hands of that arch-reactionary,
Horace Wilson [his Permanent Secretary], whom he obeys implicitly’. Thomas
was rattled and when not drunk was in a state of panic.

In August the Mosleys began their vacation in Antibes with Irene and the
Metcalfes. Guests included Strachey and his new wife, Dick Wyndham, Ameri-
can actor John Gilbert, and the de Casa Maurys. Mosley spent most of the
time closeted with Paula de Casa Maury and at dinner they speculated about
which of the Curzon sisters would succeed in attracting Gilbert — ‘the heavy-
weight (Irene), the lightweight (Baba) or the middle (Cimmie)’. When Cimmie
spoke, he cut her dead with sarcastic remarks and the evening ended in uproar,
when he accused his wife of being drunk.

Following his return to London on 4 September, Mosley talked to Keynes,

who said that ‘exceptional conditions required exceptional measures’. Mosley
studied any scheme — even if ‘a little fantastic’ — he thought might stimulate
employment. He asked Air Minister Lord Thomson about the ‘possibility of
roofing over Termini on the South Side of London, such as Victoria Station,
in order to make a central aerodrome’. He envisioned aeroplanes landing on
its roof.
Labour MPs were disillusioned with the PM’s indecisiveness but the rank
and file idolized him. Working-class criticism of policy took the form of ‘a
vague feeling that aristocrats and intellectuals were gaining too much influ-
 “A YOUNG MAN IN A HURRY’ 125
ence’. Mosley and Charles Trevelyan were voted off the NEC, despite being
industrious members. Local authority deputations who met Mosley to discuss
public works found him ‘blazing with enthusiasm and returned to their towns
with a high opinion of the young minister’. In September, he set off on a
speaking tour to ginger up local authorities. He was annoyed that he could
not order them to carry out national plans and, on r1 September, proposed
that central government take over responsibility for road building. With an
eye to the November municipal elections, he advised voters to return council-
lors who are ‘energetic and prepared to support large local plans for dealing
with unemployment’. Henderson regarded him as a ‘wealthy pusher’ for
openly expressing his irritation with the slow pace of government.
Mosley called for a body under the PM to consider proposals for long-term
reconstruction. Civil servants who worked with him were enthusiastic but the
Treasury believed money was best spent modernizing export industries. When
he begged Ministers to decide on the amount of money they wished to spend
on unemployment, he was ignored. Snowden’s view that public works should
be self-financing dominated proceedings and became an obstacle to road-
building schemes. However, the rapid growth of unemployment convinced
Mosley of the need for short-term measures though he faced opposition from
a hostile Minister of Transport. ‘Clearly Mosley suffers somewhat from Lloyd
George’s complaint: the road complex,’ commented Herbert Morrison. ‘A
road is a means of transport; road works can assist, but cannot possibly be a
principal cure of immediate unemployment.’ Morrison reacted with shock to
a Mosley memorandum of 24 September calling for a dozen ‘speedways’
traversing the country.
On 4 October, in the New Leader, Strachey noted the ‘lack of action in
overturning the obstacles’ Ministers found in their way. Douglas Cole, too,
was openly critical of the government and, like Mosley, believed industry’s
rejuvenation depended on extending the home market, since an upturn in
overseas trade was unlikely. Social imperialism re-emerged as central to
Mosley’s thinking. The international system of trade placed the country at the
‘mercy of international finance and exchange manipulations’. He worried
about competition from developing countries with their sweated labour, and
shared the social creditor fear that modern machinery would destroy rather
than create employment, as deliberate dumping below production costs would
lead to the collapse of world markets. He said imperial socialism had grown
up and become ‘adult in a greater sphere’, even though it was a form of
National Socialism.
Similar ideas were espoused by car manufacturer William Morris, ICI Chair-
man Lord Melchett and Beaverbrook, who wanted to encourage imperial
solidarity through economic links in the dominions, which provided British
industry with an assured market. His Utopian Empire Crusade was a revival of
126 BLACKSHIRT

tariff reform and again food taxes were the key issue, since it was questionable
whether the public would accept them or whether the dominions would open
their markets. Conservatives were also uneasy that the policy implied a system
of planning.
A. L. Rowse said the clue to understanding Beaverbrook was that he took
after his Irish mother. He was warm and generous but also ‘vindictive and
venomous’, with no respect for truth. He was a good raconteur but was
‘unreliable and irresponsible’. He was financially corrupt and corrupted others.
It was his generous side which attracted left-wingers, such as new MP Aneurin
Bevan, whose future wife, Jennie Lee, recalled Nye being ‘quickly taken up
and petted as an amusing bit of political rough trade by the Beaverbrook set’.
Bevan was also susceptible to Mosley’s charms and his closest ally was
Strachey, who introduced him to his raffish circle and the Portmeirion home
of Clough Williams-Ellis.
In developing his ideas, Beaverbrook turned for advice to Frank Wise. It
was understood that Wise and Lee were a couple. A-dark beauty, Lee was
entirely at ease with her sexuality and capable of seducing anyone. Charles
Trevelyan was her wealthy mentor, supplying money and advice. She, in turn,
‘twisted him around her little finger’; and, given his promiscuous life, his wife
had reason to worry. The two were lovers and there is reason to suspect that
Lee may have been tempted by Mosley. Early on, he invited her to dinner
where he introduced her to the delights of ‘eating half a dozen slobbery grey
oysters’. In an interview, she admitted Mosley had been her pin-up.
In Parliament, Lee was indignant at the failure to begin roadwork schemes.
She wanted ‘no more dilly-dallying’ and was not appeased when Mosley
‘looked down on me from his superior height and tried to calm me. His tone
would have been quite all right for reciting poetry in the moonlight, but it
simply added to my wrath on this occasion.’ She was unaware that he was
‘fighting his boss as hard as we left-wing ILPers were attacking openly on the
floor of the House’.
The official report on retirement and school-leaving age, and Mosley’s
response, were sent on 22 October 1929 to the Treasury for assessment. On
the following day, ‘Black Thursday’, Wall Street succumbed to panic when
the US share index fell from 452 to 372. Thomas turned to drink for conso-
lation. Two days later Lansbury told Mosley he was ‘in despair about the
whole business of unemployment. We all seem to be working in such an
uncoordinated way.’ Across the Atlantic, ‘Black Tuesday’, on 29 October, was
catastrophic, with losses amounting to $10 billion. The Wall Street Crash
reverberated all around the globe and was followed by a decline in world
trade, which ushered in the worst depression of modern history. With a
collapse of exports and upsurge in unemployment, it might have been expected
that the stranglehold of orthodox economic management would be challenged
 “A YOUNG MAN IN A HURRY’ 127
by the economic radicalism of Mosley.and Cole. Thomas, however, failed to
push his Ministers’ proposals and with an adverse Treasury report their posi-
tive merits were doomed. Thereafter, the Cabinet simply staggered into what
MacDonald called ‘an economic blizzard’.
Cimmie made her Commons maiden speech during the Old Age Pensions
Bill. Described as the ‘bright star of the debate’, she demolished Neville
Chamberlain’s argument that people were demoralized by being given some-
thing for nothing. It was a ‘ground on which I am very much at home. All my
life I have got something for nothing... Of course, some people might say I
showed great intelligence in the choice of my parents, but I put it down to
luck.’ Pointing to the Tory benches, she said, ‘People on the opposite side of
the House are also in that same position. They also have always got something
for nothing. Now the question is: Are we demoralised2’ Cimmie charmed the
Commons and was more trusted than her husband. She had no great interest
outside her home and children, but she had a good rapport with ‘the common
people and did her best, according to her lights, to assist them’. After her
speech she was invited by the BBC’s Hilda Matheson, whom she had known
as Lady Astor’s secretary, to talk on The Week in Parliament, explaining
politics to women.
On 2 November Beatrice Webb talked to Mosley, who was ‘contemptuous
of Thomas’s incapacity’. Thomas’s defence in the Commons of his stewardship
was a bitter disappointment for James Maxton: ‘One of my enthusiastic
colleagues on these benches said that Labour was in for twenty years. Well, I
hope so. God knows that at the rate of progress indicated in the Lord Privy
Seal’s speech they will need every minute of it!’ Thomas’s failure inspired
Ministry of Labour official H. B. Butler to put together a memorandum
which argued that what was needed was for the PM to chair a policy-making
economic general staff consisting of all Ministers connected with unemploy-
ment. Under its auspices, standing committees would advise on economic
policy. Butler proposed a secretariat consisting of twelve higher civil servants,
who would act as the research and collation body for the work of the economic
staff and standing committees. It was to be an influential memo, to which
Mosley clearly had access.
With Mosley disillusioned with senior Ministers, his Tory and business
friends believed he might jump. In early November he presented to a ministerial
conference a version of the Butler memo and called for a Cabinet of action on
the lines of the War Cabinet, assisted by an economic general staff to co-
ordinate policy. He also preached the ‘productioneering’ philosophy of a
high-wage, high-productivity economy through labour co-operation and
market stability. This had strong corporatist overtones and would have led to
a radical departure in economic policy, as most fought shy of the kind of
full-blooded approach that Mosley advocated.
128 BLACKSHIRT

In the face of strong foreign competition, older industries had contracted

and Lancashire cotton, priced out of the India and Far East markets, only
survived because of the forced adoption of short-time working. In contrast in
the US, where the tariff on imports was raised to 40 per cent, the economy
grew by an annual 7 per cent and exports by over 25 per cent. American
merchandise increasingly replaced British goods in foreign markets. America’s
prosperity was explained, said Reginald McKenna, by ‘the superior working
of the American Federal Reserve System, which was far more responsive to
industry’s credit requirements than the Bank of England’. Since his trip to
the US, Mosley had been expressing similar ideas and was applauded by
industrialists such as British American Tobacco’s Sir Hugo Cunliffe-Owen
and Alfred Hacking, Secretary of the Society of Motor Manufacturers. They
were crusaders for a self-contained ‘United Economic Empire’ and praised
Mussolini’s success in restoring order in Italy.
Protectionism in Britain was promoted by the Empire Industries Association
(EIA), which campaigned for ‘the Extension of Empire Preference and the
Safeguarding of Home Industries’, and whose leaders, Sir Henry Page Croft
and British Fascist Patrick Hannon, were survivors of the Tariff Reform
campaign. Members included agricultural protectionists, imperialists and cap-
tains of industries such as textiles, cars and chemicals, which faced technologi-
cal change. They included those who later supported Mosley — Sir Felix
Pole, closely aligned with William Morris, and social imperialist MP Carlyon
Bellairs. Major funders were Sir Samuel Courtauld and stockbrokers J. and
A. Scrimgeour, who later contributed to the BUF.
With Lancashire a hotbed of radicalism and farmers claiming they were
being ‘crucified on a cross of gold’, protectionism, through the energetic efforts
of the EIA, became a force within Conservative ranks. It was this constituency
to which Beaverbook hoped to appeal as he broadened his Empire Free Trade
campaign with the help of Rothermere, in a classic example of press barons
attempting to wield power.
EIA adherents had been involved with the wartime Ministry of Munitions
and supported Lord Milner’s semi-corporatist and anti-socialist approach to
industrial relations. When Milner died in 1925, his call for a new industrial
framework based on the co-operation of labour and capital in industrial
Joint Councils, and a national ‘Parliament of Industry’, was taken up by the
middle-way ‘young Tories’ led by Robert Boothby, Oliver Stanley and Harold
Macmillan. On 5 November 1929 Beaverbrook discussed with Boothby, Mac-
millan, newspaper publisher Edward Hulton and Walter Elliott the possibility
of ditching Baldwin. Churchill suggested forming a ‘Young Party’. They were,
however, suspicious of him as he was ‘bound hand and foot to Free Trade’.
Among possible recruits were Mosley, Keynes and Labour MP William Jowitt,
who was ready to jump. All the mavericks seemed to be contemplating setting
 “A YOUNG MAN IN A HURRY’ 129
up new political groupings. Shortly. after, Beaverbrook and Rothermere
formally launched their Empire Crusade.
On 22 November Mosley, Lansbury and Johnston proposed to a ministerial
conference a scheme for pensions for those over sixty years of age, belonging
to ‘insured industries who can be regarded as effective competitors in the
labour market’. Its Chairman, Arthur Greenwood, was sympathetic, but
Thomas — at Snowden’s bidding— forbade a vote on it. Mosley complained
that the road programme was ‘not good enough’. He castigated Morrison for
believing money was saved ‘if the Treasury contribution to schemes was low
and the local authority share high’. Snowden resisted providing too per cent
grants to local authorities for road building, because it would replace local
authorities with ‘state dictators’.
Morrison was the sort of Minister civil servants liked. Mosley thought him
a ‘bureaucrat, devoid of vision and incapable of movement beyond his office
stool’. London’s ‘Mr Fix-it’ was a popular figure among members and had
been voted ahead of Mosley in the NEC elections. His biographers claim his
arguments were those of ‘an energetic minister who fought vigorously for
policies he believed in’. He saw as well as Mosley that the existing policies
were failing and worked hard to get money out of the Treasury. During
December he proposed an annual increase of £17 million to the five-year
programme, but it was still inadequate for the scale of the problem.
According to Henderson, Thomas was ‘in such a state of panic, that he is
bordering on lunacy’. Mosley wanted him sacked but MacDonald was depen-
dent on Thomas’s trade union power base and support in the party. Mosley
worked on ideas, with research help from Strachey and Young. On
12 December the PM spoke to him and acknowledged Thomas had handled
things badly, but was baffled on what to do — ‘the cup has been put to my lips
and it is empty’. On Christmas Eve he wondered ‘if the sun was setting on the
empire, worried about the rise of tariffs and the decline of trade, brooded on
the backwardness of British industry, dreamed about the dearth of work’.
Along the lines of the Butler plan, Henderson suggested the PM take charge
of policy, set up a committee on unemployment, employ Cole as chief
researcher and let Mosley carry out agreed plans.
On 30 December MacDonald informed Mosley he had received many letters
‘warning against those who are sponging’. He had been looking into pensions
at sixty to relieve the labour market but ‘Malthus is right’, the country was
overpopulated. He wanted it tackled in a way other than by money. As he
dimly saw the problem, the solution was to ‘hang on to what we are doing
but weed out the spongers all round’. In essence, he confirmed Wheatley’s
initial fears that Labour would do capitalism’s bidding and reduce the standard
of living of its own supporters.
In January 1930 the unemployment figure rose to 1,537,000. Cole, a
130 BLACKSHIRT

member of the PM’s Economic Advisory Council, said the unemployment

situation constituted a national emergency and the government would be
judged on its ability to tackle it. When Fenner Brockway took a memorandum
on work schemes to the Thomas committee, Mosley and Lansbury admitted
they were ‘utterly disillusioned’. Mosley casually told Thomas he had ‘jotted
down a number of new proposals. Some you will agree with and some you'll
probably turn down; but, in any case, Jim, I’d like you to see them.’
On 15 January Lady Curzon told Harold Nicolson that Mosley was ‘anxious
to leave the Labour Party and to reconcile himself with his old friends’. The
fact that he had rented an office and taken on staff suggests he was organizing
in case things did not work out. Political commentator Cecil Melville believed
leaving was a foregone conclusion but ‘without some form of powerful finan-
cial support his ambitions would just fizzle out. These considerations caused
him to delay his resignation.’ When, on 16 January, he asked for Lansbury’s
and Johnston’s support, they hesitated since they suspected he was ‘preparing
his ammunition for a break-away movement’. ILPers agreed he ‘prepared
his scapegoats well in advance’. Four days later he informed Nicolson that
‘big things are happening’. On 23 January 1930 he sent his memorandum to
the PM.
Mosley admitted the memorandum was a synthesis of available plans. He
had help from Boothby and Strachey had been a major influence on its direc-
tion, prefiguring much of it in the New Leader. Mosley’s ‘opening shot in his
rebellion’ within the government called for control of banking; bulk purchase
of imports; credit to revive purchasing power; raising the school-leaving age
and lowering the old age pension limit. A coherent package, it bore similarities
to Cole’s criticism of government policy, Ernest Bevin’s ideas on pension and
school-leaving schemes, and Lloyd George’s road programme. There were
sections on government machinery; reconstruction planning; credit policy; and
short-term relief for workers displaced by rationalization. There were larger
grants for road building - £200 million was expected to employ 300,000 men
for three years, whereas Lloyd George wanted to employ 600,000 men over
two years — but it was modest and designed to be executed with the ‘maximum
speed and minimum cost’.
Mosley’s vision of a large domestic market with high wages and cheap
money remained the central theme of his thinking. He supported this with a
Keynesian argument about the multiplier effect of public works, which he
argued would ‘siphon off the surplus unemployed from the job market, create
a “shortage of labour”, and thereby lend substance to higher wage-demands’.
Such a policy ‘might well produce here conditions on which prolonged Ameri-
can prosperity has rested’. Having had ‘to walk warily through a labyrinth
of time-consecrated departments, and to deal amiably with many agreeable
gentlemen at not much more than the pace they were accustomed to travel’,
 “A YOUNG MAN IN A HURRY’ 131

he admitted public works could not be set in motion without organizational

change. Following the Butler proposals, he wanted ‘in supreme control a
Minister who controls nearly all the major Departments of State’, and was
serviced by a committee of economists. He attacked the Treasury view as a
‘white flag’ policy in that ‘nothing can ever be done by the Government . . it
is a policy of complete surrender’. His novel concept of deficit financing
shocked Snowden.
The memorandum was less radical than ‘Revolution by Reason’. It ditched
nationalization of banking and consumer and producer credits in favour of
public works as the means of increasing credit. What distinguished it was the
proposed siege economy, with the State assuming responsibility for economic
welfare. It was, David Marquand observes, ‘a young man’s memorandum -
brash, perhaps lacking in a sense of administrative practicality, yet with an
intellectual vitality and panache that still sparkle through its pages’. Despite
this, he received lukewarm support from the PM, who considered it ‘too
complicated’. Home Secretary John Clynes viewed it as ‘something approach-
ing insanity’. Mosley had acted beyond his brief and it was not for a junior
Minister ‘to reorganise the nation’s economy’. Snowden was provoked to fury:
“What would be the effect of a sudden reversal of our present policy and the
announcement that we were going to embark on a campaign of unrestricted
expenditure financed out of loans?’ The effect ‘might well be to create a very
serious shock to confidence not only in this country but abroad’.
In attacking Mosley, on 13 January Morrison told Thomas that spending
Ministers had ‘as much duty to have proper regard to economy as Labour
understands it as the Chancellor himself’. His dislike of Mosley was based on
his experience in committee. When questioned by him, Morrison ‘felt some-
thing of the superiority of the aristocrat in his attitude in relation to myself as
a working class Minister. If he had asked him as a colleague, he would
have complied but he acted like an aggressive Counsel in Court severely
cross-examining and attacking a hostile witness.’ In Cabinet, on 3 February,
Thomas drew a melancholy picture of rising unemployment but Ministers
refused to criticize him in the expectation that economies would eventually
produce expansion. Mosley fine-tuned his proposals in an attempt to overcome
their fears. He sought advice from Keynes on raising a loan of £200 million
over three years for public works. Keynes, who had been almost wiped out
financially with the crash, said the Treasury’s objection to borrowing was a
‘most desperate fallacy’.
On 8 February Mosley’s memo was leaked to the Telegraph and Ministers
thereafter spent more time discussing the propriety of Mosley’s methods than
his policies. On r9 February the Cabinet discussed the wide circulation of the
memo, which had been left ‘lying about quite openly’ in Strachey’s house.
Thomas accused Mosley of leaking it, but since MacDonald wanted to ensure
 132 BLACKSHIRT

Thomas was not upstaged by Mosley he took no action. Two days later
Thomas offered his resignation but the PM declined to accept it — ‘we must
endure however hard the road may be’. In despair, MacDonald asked, ‘Is the
sum of my country sinking?’ Mosley argued it was for critics of his proposals
‘to present a reasoned alternative which offers a greater prospect of success’.
He did not want further inaction. ‘If the Cabinet wished to adopt his plan,
well and good; if not, he would rather fight than talk.? MacDonald settled for
the appearance of action by setting up expert inquiries, whose reports were
destined to gather dust. Mosley’s memo was assessed by a committee, chaired
by his arch-enemy Snowden. On 22 February, after dining with Mosley,
Georgia Sitwell wrote in her diary: ‘Will Tom resign?’
The collapse of exports led to an interest in tariffs among economic interests
hitherto opposed to them, and a retreat to Empire as a way of coping with the
chaos into which the country had been plunged. As the Manchester Guardian
reported friction inside government and possible resignations, Mosley made
overtures to disillusioned Tories who talked of creating a ‘New Party’ and
Beaverbrook, who launched a fighting fund for his own Empire Crusade. Its
head, Sir Hugo Cunliffe-Owen, had been promised £70,000 (£2.1 m) from
Beaverbrook’s business colleague Sir James Dunn, the Duke of Westminster
_ and Lord Rothermere. The Crusade attracted recruits from the Empire Indus-
tries Association and the young Tories’ guarded support. The day after the
launch, Mosley was at Oliver Stanley’s house, with Ralph Blumenfeld,
Boothby, Elliott and Ivan Moore-Brabazon, who ran the Conservative Candi-
dates’ Association with Macmillan. Nicolson recorded that the conversation
turned to ‘talk about the decay of democracy’ and centred on ‘whether it
would be well to have a Fascist coup’.
The Empire Crusade was transformed into the United Empire Party (UEP)
on 18 February 1930. Until then, Beaverbrook’s concept had oscillated
between a pressure group — which was spectacularly modern with aeroplanes
bombarding the populace with leaflets - and a fully fledged political party.
With a combined total of eight nationals and Rothermere’s chain of provincial
papers, the press barons were ‘laying down a joint barrage scarcely paralleled
in newspaper history’. The Crusade took off like wildfire in Tory areas in the
south but it was not supported by a single senior politician of weight, though
there were hopes of recruiting Mosley. The hostile response to the UEP’s
foundation shook the newspaper barons, who had misjudged the diehards’
loyalty and willingness to break ranks. Beaverbook decided to withdraw and
Rothermere used the UEP remnant to publicize his diehard manifesto.
By March, MacDonald felt his tiredness ‘right to the centre of my being’.
He was under considerable personal strain. Mosley was contacted by Mac-
Donald’s Viennese mistress who said the government would be in trouble if
she were not helped. He went to see her in a flat in Horseferry Road. She said
 “A YOUNG MAN IN A HURRY’ 133

she had known MacDonald in Switzerland when he was an impoverished

young man. She had been to Downing Street but an hysterical PM had thrown
her out. She was demanding money for a number of lyrical but pornographic
letters from MacDonald, which she threatened to publish in France. In a
passage cut from his autobiography, Mosley said he called her bluff and told
her if she tried to get them published, the Secret Service would make sure her
life was ‘not worth a moment’s purchase’.
On 12 March Nicolson believed Mosley was about to resign: ‘Even Ramsay
who till now has been a pillar of strength to him is said to be looking at him
with a cold eye.’ Two days later Snowden’s committee attacked Mosley for
his ‘confusion of mind’. State action to reduce unemployment was inherently
suspect and ‘the finance of these schemes would not stand a moment’s con-
sideration’. Mosley said he was not advocating ‘wild-cat finance’ and claimed
the backing of Keynes, who thought it an illuminating document. Keynes,
however, was discovering he was ‘not quite as fashionable as he thought’.
Snowden forbade his Committee on Economic Outlook from discussing
State-aided schemes.
Nine days later Mosley’s memo was leaked in the Manchester Guardian,
which confirmed he had been ‘muzzled’ but said ‘even the ILP has never
produced anything more fantastic’. Labour MPs rejected it, either because it
was too extreme or they simply could not understand it. Having consulted
Keynes and Boothby, he issued a proposal for a State finance corporation to
provide long-term credit for newer industries. Investment could not be left to
banks, because they had never played ‘a big and consciously formative part
in the industrial development of the country’. There was support from the
Federation of British Industries (FBI), which wanted trade flows and invest-
ment plans to be linked and, with the TUC, wanted the Empire developed as
an economic unit. On 15 April the FBI presented to the Economic Advisory
Council proposals for intra-imperial economic co-operation, with Britain
keeping existing preferences, and industrial growth in the dominions. For
once, the arguments were going Mosley’s way.
To MacDonald, all solutions appeared unpromising. On 1 May Snowden’s
committee report condemned Mosley’s memo. State-financed works were an
illusion as they interfered with normal business and undermined the demo-
cratic system of local government and the Chancellor’s special responsibility
in the sphere of finance. His unyielding adherence to a balanced budget was
the decisive obstacle.
When, on 8 May, Thomas accused his Ministers of leaking the memor-
andum, Lansbury lost his temper. Cabinet Secretary Maurice Hankey then
‘put his pencil down, and took no notes’. Policy on unemployment was in
ruins. Five days later the PM informed the Cabinet that the country would
find itself with two million unemployed before the end of the year but was
 134 BLACKSHIRT

confident things would then get better. He acknowledged that ‘owing to

slowness of local authorities’, only £10 million of the £95 million available
for employment schemes had been used. Mosley pointed out that spending on
roads was ‘no greater than under the Conservatives’. When he argued local
authorities should be bypassed, Arthur Greenwood said ‘the result would be
chaos’. Mosley was exasperated by the lack of urgency.
The Economic Advisory Council decided, on 16 May, against developing
the Empire as an economic unit. Though Empire trade was important, foreign
trade was more important still. It was ‘absurd to compare the conditions
prevailing in the United States — a self-supporting country, with vast internal
resources and a high protective tariff — with the competitive conditions under
which the population of these islands must live and work if the standard of
living to which we are accustomed is not to be radically altered’. Only one
worker in seven, however, was engaged in exports, which undermined
arguments against concentrating on the domestic economy.
Mosley was finding himself increasingly isolated. He had the support of
Cole, who had become less enthusiastic about his capacity to effect any change
in policy and was closer to Mosley than his wife, Margaret, would concede.
ILPers were sympathetic but many distrusted him. One critic said he looked
_ far too much like ‘a man in search of a party to lead’.
John Wheatley was still greatly admired by ILPers as the main hope for
change. During spring 1930 he regularly met with John Beckett, the ILP’s
unofficial whip, who was ‘lovable in his utter devotion’ to Wheatley, and later
to Mosley. In early May, Wheatley, Beckett and Maxton decided to transform
the ILP into a new political party, and hoped to ‘asset-strip’ the Communist
Party of its best people. But then tragedy struck. Already ill with a heart
condition, Wheatley suffered a brain haemorrhage and died on 12 May 1930.
Mosley was shocked by the death of the one ILP figure he unreservedly
admired.
Mosley had lost patience with the Labour leadership. On 13 May he met
with Bruce Lockhart, Empire Crusade factotum to Beaverbrook, and his friend
Mike Waddell. Although they believed ‘Tom will probably resign next week’,
he delayed his decision. Crusade fund-raiser Cunliffe-Owen said the mood in
the City was ‘apathetic and there was little chance of raising money’. The next
day Mosley left for Wheatley’s funeral, where he laid the biggest wreath. He
walked along Glasgow’s rain-swept streets, where thousands of constituents
paid their respects to the last substantial voice of British socialism. Dalton
smugly assumed that without Wheatley the Left ‘will be like sheep without a
shepherd’. Beckett wanted to fight on but Maxton had a ‘queer philosophy’
which made him ‘an impossible leader’. The obvious candidate was Mosley
but he was a ‘spoiled young careerist, with more money and ego than sense
... whom real socialists regarded with amused disdain’.
 “A YOUNG MAN IN A HURRY’ 135

On his return to London Mosley had a letter from Boothby, who had
contemplated the state of politics with ‘a jaundiced but more or less unbiased
mind’. It would be a great tragedy if he resigned. He was the ‘ONLY ONE
of my generation who is capable of translating into action any of the ideas in
which I genuinely believe. If you stay where you are that opportunity is bound
to come soon. Go, and where are you?’ He cited the example of Lord Randolph
Churchill, who resigned in 1886 over his thwarted spending plans. He never
resurfaced, notes Graham Stewart, ‘from the quicksand of political wilderness
into which he plummeted. He had chosen the wrong issue upon which to
resign and paid the penalty accordingly.’
Boothby pictured his resignation. ‘You will make the case against the
government — but nine-tenths of the audience will be hostile. All the pent-up
fury which you have deliberately, and I think rightly, roused in so many
breasts will simultaneously be released ... The cumulative effect of so many
hostile forces would overwhelm Napolean himself.’ Among the young Tories
‘there is not one of them with either the character or the courage to do
anything big’. Walter Elliott would not ‘take a step that might even remotely
prejudice his political position’. The alternative was ‘to remain within the
official fold and by making yourself increasingly oppressive to the “Bright Old
Things”, strengthen your power. With every increase in the unemployment
figures the position which you are known to have taken up becomes more
impregnable and easier to justify.’ He urged him not to ‘chuck it away’.
On 19 May Mosley went to see the PM and informed him of his intention
to resign. According to Melville’s version, he said he was ‘prepared to remain
if the Government would give him an undertaking to include certain financial
provisions in the next Budget’. This brought him into collision with Snowden,
who warned MacDonald that in Mosley he had ‘a more dangerous enemy
than in any one in the other political parties’.
The Cabinet engaged in a heated debate. The PM thought the unemploy-
‘ment figures deplorable and required ‘fundamental thinking’ but Greenwood
was ‘not sure how to handle the problem’. A frustrated Mosley snarled that
‘you must make a greater effort or throw up the sponge’. He called for a
programme of £100 million to be raised by loan, but Lansbury retorted that
‘you’ve got a £100 million and you have spent £15 million. Where are your
schemes?’ Mosley replied, ‘money could not be spent if detailed inquiry had
to precede the spending. A Napoleon could spend £200 million in three years.’
Thomas warned it would bring local government to a standstill. To employ
300,000 on roads, added MacDonald, would mean 300,000 back where they
were at the end of three years and was no permanent solution. But, asked
Mosley, ‘can we have 2 million unemployed?’ He quoted the authority of
Keynes against the Treasury but Thomas said ‘business men riddle Keynes’,
to which Mosley replied, ‘Keynes wipes the floor with them.’
136 BLACKSHIRT

‘This country,’ Mosley went on, ‘if it is to survive at the present standard
of life, has got to be isolated from other countries ... The high purchasing
power of home population is the only solution.’ Ministers had little to offer.
Morrison said it was ‘still open to us to remember that Socialism is the only
remedy’. Lansbury claimed ‘there is no way out of the world situation, but by
some form of international agreement’. MacDonald recorded that Mosley
made a ‘very bad impression’ and had been ‘on the verge of being offensively
vain in himself’. Johnston, however, pleaded they should use his talents which
had been ‘trampled on and ignored’. Mosley refused to speak at that night’s
debate, since he no longer supported the government’s position.
After the debate the Mosleys stayed with Beatrice Webb. ‘Is he or is he not
going to resign?’ she wondered. He said the party was ‘breaking up in the
country’, MacDonald was a ‘great artist’ and, strangely, that he respected
Snowden, even though he had under his wife’s influence become anti-socialist.
Mrs Snowden said ‘she needs no friends because she is so intimate with the
royal family’. Beatrice wondered if Mosley had ‘sufficient judgement and
knowledge’ to lead the party. He intended to head ‘a new group who will vote
solidly to keep the Labour government in office, but will be continually critical
in the house and propagandists in the country’.
On the next morning, 20 May, Mosley handed the PM his letter of resig-
nation as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. The PM noted it was written
in a tone of ‘graceless pompousness’. When Ministers met that afternoon,
Thomas said, ‘Let us play the game. No one wants to kill the ambitions of a
young man.’ The PM claimed the Cabinet had not accepted Snowden’s report
rejecting Mosley’s memo but had referred it to the party conference and that
credit would be considered by the Macmillan Committee. Mosley, however,
could not wait: Were the Cabinet in favour of a £200 million scheme or not?
Perhaps he had misunderstood them. ‘All these thousands who trusted us
should be given a chance of saying what they prefer. Only clean thing is to
submit it to the test.’
‘Are all these revelations today’, asked the PM, ‘reason for resignation?
I say No, and I am very sorry.’
Mosley replied, ‘I say Yes and am very wee Better for me to go. ’ma
dissident Junior and a minority.’
MacDonald who, Mosley recalled, was ‘superb in the injured role of the
old queen suffering an attack of lése majesté’, claimed, ‘It is I who am a
dissident Senior in a minority and tired, and should go.’ He begged Mosley to
‘stand by the Government, the Movement, and the Party’.
An exasperated Mosley replied that for ten months he had warned them
and ‘stood the racket for principles in which I fundamentally disbelieved’. He
had now decided to ‘fight on principles and policy’.
According to Melville, Snowden dramatically accused Mosley of being ‘a
 “A YOUNG MAN IN A HURRY’ 137
traitor to the cause of Labour, and one who was incapable of political loyalty;
adding that the English people had no time for a “pocket-Mussolini” ’. Mosley
stormed out.
MacDonald thought the situation appalling. Ministers had to push local
authorities to speed up their work and he wanted weekly meetings with heads
of departments to ‘speed up everywhere’. Which was close to what Mosley
had demanded.
Johnston and Lansbury pleaded with Mosley to reconsider. MacDonald put
forward a compromise formula, drafted to satisfy Foreign Secretary Hender-
son. Agriculture was offered to Mosley, who ‘turned to his satellite moon
(whom some would hold to have been his evil genius) John Strachey for
advice’. His counsel was to refuse: ‘What the people want is Action.’ Mac-
Donald thought the ‘test of a man’s personality is his behaviour in disagree-
ment: in every test Mosley failed’.
Mosley slammed ‘the door with a bang to resound through the political
world’. Boothby was in the House and remembered his friend’s relief and
determination to ‘bring these grave matters to the test’. That night, Mosley
admitted to Bruce Lockhart that he had been ‘meditating on this step for
weeks’: it would strengthen his position in the party. Irene thought he had
committed a ‘stupid egotistical error’, but was thankful Cimmie whole-
heartedly agreed with his stance.
Mosley sincerely wished to get things done, but his actions were rarely
interpreted so generously. The Times said his ambitions were ‘always stronger
than his allegiance’. The Herald, however, declared it was the adherence to
‘Treasury dogma’ that caused the dispute. As J. R. Cline acknowledged, the
weight of Mosley’s criticism was directed ‘specifically against Snowden who
was a bitter critic of MacDonald’. ‘To put the matter simply,’ George Catlin
admitted, ‘by and large Mosley’s policy was right and Snowden’s wrong.’
Mosley’s resignation was treated sympathetically by Birmingham news-
papers and by the rank and file, which expected him to stay loyal to Labour.
On 22 June there was almost a revolt in Cabinet when proposals were put
forward for pensions at sixty, raising of the school-leaving age, expanding the
road programme and an emergency council of Ministers. Clearly Mosley’s
resignation had an effect. Whether his proposals would be put into practice
was another matter. That evening, Mosley appealed to MPs to support a
motion expressing dissatisfaction with government unemployment policy.
At 8 p.m. Mosley rose to deliver his indictment. George Strauss, Morrison’s
Parliamentary Secretary, considered it ‘one of the most dramatic meetings I
have ever attended’. He made the speech with ‘no bitterness, no recrimination’
but with ‘a very high note of emotion. It was a magnificent piece of rhetoric
which I wouldn’t have missed for worlds.’ Strauss still considered the proposals
weak, but others felt he ‘must know what he was talking about and as
138 BLACKSHIRT

something, obviously, had to be done to stem the rising tide of unemployment,

his plan should, at least, be carefully considered, and, in view of the apparent
failure of the Government to cope with the matter, they certainly deserved
some censure’.
ILP Parliamentary Secretary W. J. Brown thought the speech a ‘magnificent
performance that moved the party deeply’. The platform was nervous as to
the outcome, since MacDonald’s ‘vague phrases carried no conviction’. There
was a dramatic moment when Mosley — who, if he had been smart, would
have withdrawn his resolution — let his ‘vanity overstep itself’ and allowed
Arthur Henderson to outmanoeuvre him. Brown considered Henderson’s atti-
tude to Mosley similar to those who said, ‘He isn’t really one of us! True, we
have drunk his wine and smoked his cigars, and been flattered by an invitation
to his house. But he doesn’t really “‘belong’’. Got too good conceit of himself!
—a bounder.’ Despite Mosley’s efforts to rouse them, trade union-backed MPs
reacted, in Jennie Lee’s phrase, ‘like a load of damp cement’.
Henderson appealed to Mosley ‘to take the noble line which would be
consistent with the manner in which he had affected his resignation, to with-
draw his motion, and allow his various proposals to be discussed in detail at
Party meetings’. Everyone assumed Mosley would agree but after asking a
henchman how many votes they had, and when told fifty, he insisted on
putting it to the vote. Instantly, support deserted him. There were twenty-nine
votes for Mosley and 210 for the government. Junior Minister Vernon Harts-
horn remarked that it was ‘a pity he didn’t withdraw. He would have done
himself a lot of good.’ Whereupon, Cimmie indignantly said ‘he didn’t care
for his own good, but only for his Party’.
Thanks to the tactical misjudgement, little damage was done to the govern-
ment. Mosley had ‘turned his supreme chance into defeat because he thought
the rescinding of his vote of censure would show weakness on his part’. But
he had decided ‘in advance of the meeting, to bring the party to a decision
or eventually to leave’. The Herald considered his decision courageous and
predicted ‘he will do big things’. The Manchester Guardian argued it would
be good for the government to be harassed by a left-centre critic with his
influence outside greater than inside it. The Times, however, considered his
tactics a sign of ‘petuousness’. Looking back, Irene thought that he always
‘failed in his judgement of his fellow-men, and was inept at the vital crossroads
in his political career’.
Strachey recalled the ‘spectacle of Mosley sitting silent and alone, brooding
with an indescribable bitterness, as the elderly, portly trade union officials and
nervous pacifist intellectuals filed out’. A stab of premonition flashed through
Strachey’s mind. ‘How had the Italian Social Democrats looked at the Con-
gress of the Italian Socialist Party which expelled the Editor of Avanti? Had
they not been sure that they had finished with that tiresome fellow Mussolini’
 2
‘After Baldwin and
MacDonald Comes... ?’

On 28 May 1930, in the Commons, Mosley sat with folded arms, ‘grand,
gloomy, wrapped in the solitude of his own originality’, as he prepared to
defend his resignation. He rose, ‘a sheet of paper in one hand, stabbing the
air with his favourite gesture of a man throwing a dart’. He had begged the
government ‘to make up its mind how much it was prepared to spend on
unemployment, how much money it could find, and then to allocate the
money available according to the best objects we could discover. As it is, like
bookmakers on the race course, the man who can ....make most noise and
get through the turnstile first, gets away with the money.’
Mosley argued it made no sense for capital to ‘g0 overseas to equip factories
to compete against us, to provide employment for people in those countries;
while it is supposed to shake the whole basis of our financial strength if anyone
dares to suggest the raising of money by the Government of this country to
provide employment for the people of this country’. Described as ‘Birming-
hamism rampant’, he was responding to a situation which left ‘British pro-
ducers vulnerable in an era of high tariffs and low prices’. He struck a unique
note, notes Daniel Ritschell, ‘in his willingness to combine the expansionary
economics of high wages with the protectionist heresy usually associated with
the Tories’. This would require, however, the reorganization of the whole
basis of industrial life by a strategy of national planning.
Speaking without notes, Mosley’s speech lasted over an hour. At the end,
he became ‘visibly exhausted and the pallor of his face in combination with a
break in the voice’ rendered the speech all the more effective. Building to a
climax, he roared that ‘if the great powers of this country are to be mobilized
and rallied for a great national effort, then Government and Parliament must
give a lead’. He begged MPs ‘to give the vital forces of this country the chance
that they await’.
Then the cheering broke out, ‘loud and prolonged, from every section of
the House’. His speech, the Evening Standard stated, was the ‘triumph of an
artist who has made his genius perfect by long hours of practice and devotion
to his art. There is no politician who works harder or who takes more pains
to master his problems.’ Boothby considered it ‘the greatest parliamentary
140 BLACKSHIRT

tour de force this generation will hear’. In the gallery Lady Mosley was ‘so
full of pride and joy in my man-child it almost choked me ... How I hope I
may live to have the joy of seeing “all your dreams come true” for the good
of the country and your own honour and glory.’
Speaking after Mosley, Lloyd George described his proposals as’ ‘an inju-
dicious mixture of Karl Marx and Lord Rothermere’. Churchill criticized both
Lloyd George and Mosley with the jibe that there was little difference between
the two, except that while the former had said ‘we’ could conquer unemploy-
ment, the latter had claimed, typically, that only ‘he’ could achieve it. Before
the debate, MacDonald had feared the government might be defeated. In the
end only five Labour Members abstained and it survived with a majority of
twenty-nine.
Labour’s Joseph Wedgwood observed a changed mood on the backbenches.
‘Man after man was saying to himself: “That is our leader.”’’ Ellen Wilkinson
realized the speech had made Mosley ‘a hero of all the young members in all
parties who are impatiently demanding new ideas to°meet a catastrophic
situation’. The Herald reported that a ‘sense of national emergency breaking
down Party barriers seemed to sweep over the Members’. The Times, however,
warned that ‘parties cannot be expected to combine in nationalising the banks,
in drenching the roads with money’. Mosley’s approach to planning proved
to be a stumbling block to any hoped-for coalition.
After the speech, Mosley celebrated at the Astors’. Frank Pakenham (Lord
Longford) recalled Mosley staring at him with that ‘odd look with which he
seemed to transfix women’. He said, ‘After Peel comes Disraeli. After Baldwin
and MacDonald comes... ?’? When Pakenham asked, ‘Who comes next?’
Mosley growled, ‘Comes someone very different.’ On the following day Beat-
rice Webb wondered whether MacDonald had found his successor in Mosley.
He had a young man’s zeal but she doubted whether he had the strength of
character to succeed. He was loose with women and aroused suspicion because
he was an intruder who was ‘not easily assimilated’.
The debate was followed by news of another by-election defeat. When
rumours of a ministerial revolt circulated, MacDonald worried that Mosley’s
supporters were ‘buzzing in the lobby and signing petitions’. On 31 May the
PM received a letter from sixty Labour MPs calling for the head of Thomas,
who was subsequently shunted off to the Dominions Office. By taking charge
of unemployment policy himself, MacDonald hoped ‘to quell the disaffection
which Mosley’s resignation had brought to a head’. Mosley’s post was down-
graded and handed to Clement Attlee. That the future belonged to ‘this small,
quiet man and notat all to Mosley’, noted Seaman, ‘is a euemosting illustration
of history’s unpredictability’.
Mosley’s appraisal of the poor prospects for a revival of exports evoked a
sympathetic response in the Board of Trade. Indeed, so sympathetic was its
 “AFTER BALDWIN AND MACDONALD COMES... ?? 141

report that Snowden refused the PM a copy. Scribbled in its margin is the
note: “Written for the Chancellor alone.’ A. J. P. Taylor commented that
rejection of Mosley’s memorandum was ‘the moment when the British people
resolved unwittingly to stand on the ancient ways’.
Mosley rented rooms off Ebury Street and put together a secretarial staff,
and employed political scientist George Catlin — married to Vera Brittain — as
chief researcher. When Catlin lunched with Mosley, he was impressed by the
galaxy of talent which included Wedgwood Benn (later Lord Stansgate and
father of left-wing Labour MP Tony Benn), Keynes and Douglas Cole. A
parliamentary candidate for a West Midlands seat, Cole acknowledged that
Mosley’s memorandum was ‘broadly on the right lines’ and expressed his
support in speeches, though it was conditional upon Mosley remaining loyal
to the party.
Churchill had been rattled by Empire Crusade and feared a United Empire
Party candidate might stand in his constituency. On 19 June he elaborated the
case for an ‘Economic Parliament’ in his Romanes lecture at Oxford Univer-
sity. He wanted the issue of protectionism to go away and conceived the
lecture as a way of distancing himself from the controversy. Churchill set out
the classic doctrines of free trade, which had ‘found their citadels in the
Treasury and the Bank of England’ but could see that ‘they do not correspond
to what is going on now’. Having championed Treasury orthodoxies, this was
a remarkable admission. He further argued that economic issues should be
dealt with by an economic sub-parliament ‘free from party exigencies, and
composed of persons possessing special qualifications in economic matters’.
Two days later in The Times, Mosley called for a twentieth-century parlia-
ment which would act like a shareholders’ meeting, possessing the power
to reject but not amend government motions and uninvolved in day-to-day
administration. ‘Here’, suggests Skidelsky, ‘was an outline sketch of the Cor-
porate State. In time Mosley would fill in the details.’ However, Churchill’s
lecture did not make him a closet Mosleyite. His economic sub-parliament
had little to do with a corporatist, quasi-Fascist state, since he saw it as an
advisory body wholly subservient to the will of Westminster. He soon aban-
doned such calls for intervention. That Mosley’s ideas became ‘progressively
more interventionist’, Graham Stewart notes, ‘only made alliance with Chur-
chill less likely’.
Catlin thought it significant that the walls of Mosley’s offices carried large-
scale maps of the Empire and the Soviet Union. The Soviet map was inspired
by John Strachey, who promoted Russia as a market for British trade. His
new paramour, Celia Simpson, had become increasingly interested in Commu-
nism and her strong character influenced the course of his political trajectory.
During the summer he re-established ties with the ILP, willing as he was to
vote against the government.
142 BLACKSHIRT

Mosley’s advocacy of import controls, quotas and bulk purchasing, to

get round the problems of food taxes posed by Empire Crusade, was very
contemporary, Catlin thought. Mosley’s article for the Herald, ‘Empire Unity
— But No to Food Taxes’, was echoed by Ernest Bevin, who backed a TUC
report issued on 26 June, which pressed for ‘as full a development as possible
of the economic relations between the constituent parts of the British
Commonwealth’.
In the Commons on 16 July, Mosley proposed an insulated Commonwealth,
containing ‘nearly every resource, human and material, which industry
requires’. Commodity Boards would restructure industries into a centralized
organization for the home market, while Import Boards would be made up of
consumer, employer and worker representatives. He realized opponents would
dismiss ‘your planning, your control, your import Board as all socialism and
have none of it’ but ‘many useful things, from the pavements we walk on to
the drainage system of our homes, are Socialism at present’. He expected a
crisis but had faith people would know how to handle it; ‘it clears their heads
and steels their nerves’. However, he feared a ‘long, slow, crumbling through
the years until we sink to the level of a Spain, a gradual paralysis beneath
which all the vigour and energy of this country will succumb’.
Beaverbook congratulated Mosley for ‘a very fine achievement’ and was
ready ‘to make overtures in your direction in public, if you wish me to do so’.
Mosley wrote in the Express that the modern man is a ‘hard, realistic type,
hammered into existence on the anvil of great ordeal’. Pre-war men were much
nicer but the question was ‘whether their ideas for the solution of the problems
of our age are better than the ideas of those whom that age has produced’. He
had ‘always been painfully aware that our outlooks and methods’ of party
leaders were ‘those of different planets’. This was his familiar theme of the
‘young minds’ against the ‘old gangs’. A realignment of political forces was
widely anticipated and Mosley was considering forging ‘a national consensus
of the most vital elements in the country’. He continued discussions with the
young Tories and was surprised by the interest shown by the shy Harold
Macmillan. Temporarily out of Parliament, Macmillan worked alongside
Boothby, even though the latter was conducting an affair with his wife,
Dorothy. The pair were irresponsibly indiscreet, but the affair never reached
the papers.
Hugh Massingham remembered the hive of activity at Smith Square and the
lively discussions with Nicolson, Stanley, Macmillan, Elliott, Boothby and two
liberals, Leslie Hore-Belisha and Sir Archibald Sinclair (Churchill’s adjutant
during the war). Cyril Joad cowered in the corner ‘occasionally letting out a
squeak of protest whenever the necessity of violence was mentioned, as it
usually was’. Macmillan warned that economic collapse would ‘lead to a
breakdown of the whole party system. No other single party will form a
 “AFTER BALDWIN AND MACDONALD COMES... ?’ 143

Government and there will be a cabinet of young men’, with Mosley as Prime
Minister. Nicolson added that Macmillan was ‘kind enough to include me in
this Pitt-like Ministry’.
ILPers were angry over the lack of action on unemployment. On 18 July
the fiery John Beckett seized the House of Commons Mace - the first person
to touch it since Oliver Cromwell — shouting, ‘Mr Speaker, these proceedings
are a disgrace.’ He stormed out of the Chamber to the toilets, planning ‘to
place its head in one of the magnificent porcelain receptacles which I believed
would conveniently accommodate it’.
Although he had been forthright in criticizing the government, Mosley did
not vote against it. He did not want to antagonize members because he still
hoped to become leader. His message was spread within the ILP by Strachey
and W. J. Brown, but many members were wary of his thinking, which
Brockway thought leant towards ‘Economic Imperialism’. Ellen Wilkinson
noted that he was beginning ‘to stray rather dangerously’. Harold Laski told
Beatrice Webb that Mosley and Cole were co-operating. On 25 July Cole
called for non-tariff protection and extended co-operation with the Empire.
Laski thought Mosley ‘ignorant’ and that Cole was ‘gambling with one pro-
posal after another’; which said more about Laski than the proposals. The
ILP became hostile because he was ‘too close to the Tory position’. That was
unfair since he added little to its ‘own position on the subject of controlled
trade with the empire’.
Mosley behaved with ‘punctilious correctness, neither seeking the publicity
of revelatory interviews, nor indulging in criticism of his colleagues’. His
loyalty countered suspicions of ambition. His tragic flaw, however, was
impatience, and his conviction that he was right. ‘The one’, suggests W. F.
Mandle, ‘fed on the other and Mosley’s errors grew greater as time went on.’
But as unemployment increased and the government failed to respond, a very
sincere man might well have acted in the same way as a very ambitious one.
Attlee submitted on 30 July his own memorandum, “The Problems of British
Industry’, which owed a great deal, with its call for industrial rationalization,
to his secretary, Colin Clark, who had previously assisted Mosley. Attlee
said Snowden’s argument against a tariff was ‘fatal to any project whereby
a special position is given to any branch of British industry . . and most
Socialist proposals’. His conclusion was pure Mosley — ‘the betestial thing is
the translation of ideas into action’. Inevitably, ‘the Treasury ensured that the
memorandum never reached the Cabinet and it sank without trace.
Alone at Lossiemouth, on 14 August the PM had ‘private concerns, so
unsettling that I have no peace here and must seek it in London’. MacDonald’s
former mistress had reappeared on the scene. It seems that his mental decline
in the early thirties was due, in part, to this woman’s blackmail attempt.
Mosley found MacDonald ‘quite unconscious of anything in this affair except
 144 BLACKSHIRT

his personal emotions; he ran true to the form of Puritanism relapsing into
hysteria’.
The man chosen to buy off the woman and retrieve the letters was Jimmy
Thomas. This was not wise, as he was corrupt. The £3,000 (£100,000) bribe
came from Thomas’s friend, Sir Abe Bailey, a South African mining millionaire
involved in the 1926 General Strike negotiations. Thomas was sent to Paris,
where he met the woman but came back without the money or the letters.
When Mosley learnt that he had ‘sidelined to Monte Carlo and lost the lot’,
he contacted Sir Charles Mendl, Press Attaché and MI6 agent at the Paris
embassy, who paid her off with secret service funds sent by Sir Robert
Vansittart, head of the Foreign Office and previously MacDonald’s Principal
Private Secretary. Mendl later told Mosley that all he remembered of the
destroyed letters was a line from a poem — ‘Porcupine through hairy bowers
shall climb to paradise’.
Mosley gambled with his own private life. Cimmie knew he was conducting
affairs with their friends but, despite the urging of her sisters, refused to stalk
his Ebury Street bachelor flat. She did write that she was ‘entirely bewildered
and depressed’ and did not understand why he was ‘so horrid’ or why her
mere presence drove him ‘demented’. She complained he left her to look after
_ Nicholas, who had had an operation for appendicitis, and went away ‘with
another woman for the weekend’. He replied, “You can be the sweetest most
feminine one in all the world, or you can be a real old nagging harridan.’
During the summer, Wyndham Lewis published his satire The Apes of God,
featuring the Mosley circle. Dick Wyndham (Dick Wittingdon) was portrayed
as the ‘Ape-Flagellant’ with a taste for ‘fast cars and whips’ and the Sitwells
were caricatured as ‘baby-talking middle-aged infants’. However, the satire
was blemished by undercurrents of anti-Semitism. Sachie’s wife Georgia was
described as a Jewish enchantress holding ‘all the trumps in her neat kosher
fist’. The woman whom Mosley went away with was probably Georgia, who
later confided to his second wife that ‘we all went to bed with him but
afterwards we were rather ashamed’.
Mosley was increasingly aware of the sexual allure of Cimmie’s sister Baba.
Beautiful and exquisitely dressed, she delivered her ‘witty remarks in a languid
drawl’. Fruity was charming and loyal, but was considered ‘too stupid’ by
Georgia. He did not notice the attention Baba was paying to Mosley because
she was pregnant. The birth of twin daughters took place after a long labour,
during which it was feared she might die.
The Mosleys went their separate ways after their usual summer break
at Antibes. Cimmie travelled to Turkey accompanied by Zita James. On
5 September the women visited Leon Trotsky, who was charming but scathing
about Labour. He later referred to Cimmie’s husband as an ‘aristocratic
coxcomb who joined the Labour party as a short cut to a career’. He found
 “AFTER BALDWIN AND MACDONALD COMES... ?’ 145

the meeting ‘banal in the extreme’ and recorded that Cimmie referred con-
temptuously to MacDonald and spoke of her sympathies towards Soviet
Russia. When the pair reached Russia, Cimmie noted ‘all the nonsense talked
about only wearing old clothes so as not to be conspicuous, typhoid, the
frightful food shortages, no soap — bunk from beginning to end’.
Cimmie wrote home to her husband that ‘even when I am hundreds of miles
away your shadow falls on me’. She believed he was carrying on with Paula
Casa Maury, who was now, in fact, with Bill Allen. ‘All my talk about self
sufficiency serenity peace etc — Balls Balls Balls.’ She had ‘never really in my
heart of hearts trusted’ him and her efforts ‘to adjust myself to you so as not
to be hurt result in the very symptoms that make you hurt me more’. If she
appeared indifferent, he ‘just got fiercer and fiercer and destroyed me more
and more’. Cimmie noted that in the ‘hols you play hard — with other people’,
but ‘where does Mum come in?’ She confided in Dick Wyndham how dis-
tressed she was. He said she had the misfortune of being a happy person and
had to dampen her natural happiness ‘in order to be immune from the misery
of a miserable world’. If her husband did ‘an occasional flit to Paris: they are
annoying, but no more so than an occasional attack of flu’.
Mosley wrote to Cimmie in the rational manner he used for a ministerial
brief. The problem was how to ‘reconcile and to blend into a perfect life’ their
marriage (1) and their individual happiness and freedom which were ‘essentials
of the full personality’ (2). They were afraid the ‘small incidents of (2) may
destroy (x): each of us consequently is inclined to snatch small bits of (2) for
himself or herself while striving to thwart rather than to assist the other. That
situation is commonplace in the marriage of all remarkable people — it is small,
contemptible and atavistic — in our case it should be entirely lacking because
(x) is so much stronger than in almost any other example of which one can
think.’ He might be more reasonable if he ‘did not feel that you had severely
restricted me’. It was all one-sided. He admitted he slept around, though there
was no evidence that Cimmie had ever contemplated such an action, and was
simply oblivious to the hurt he inflicted.
Mosley wanted her to have such confidence in their marriage that ‘we should
have no feeling of fear and regret of any kind if one of us enjoyed things apart
from the other’. To lead ‘what we believe to be a moral life in our immoral
society some subterfuge is necessary if we are to retain our power to change
that society’. In this ‘triumph of the modern mind’, freedom was possible if
they ended ‘all small jealousies and fears’. He titdevedlcsin these statements,
which indicated his incapacity for mature love. His rational manipulation of
Cimmie, the demand to be admired and loved, and his ruthless behaviour to
one the self perceived as necessary for his own interests was typical of a
narcissist.
Just as crowds were swayed by the glorious words, so too was Cimmie, who
146 BLACKSHIRT

replied that everything he said was true. She was ‘tricky’ because she was
unsure of the marriage’s permanence. The affairs had begun early; she lost
confidence and developed an inferiority complex. She had not been ‘persuaded
you really really appreciated me, you were always finding fault, and liking
people so utterly different to me’. She went through ‘agonies ... when you
have got off with lovely ladies .. . it has very often nearly driven me dippy. I
have always felt that you won on the swings and roundabouts.’ She acknowl-
edged that he wanted a mother figure for a wife and only stayed together
because of their public position and ‘not because we really do love and value
each other’. And then, cravenly, she apologized and hoped ‘this won’t appear
as a very one-sided sort of letter as yours was so fair’. Cimmie was cajoled
into accepting a position which was immoral and dispiriting.
The exchanges illustrate the ways in which the personal and the political
are intimately intertwined. The negatives of Mosley’s character became posi-
tives in terms of leadership. The utter self-belief and the unwillingness to
contemplate that he could ever be wrong added to the turning outwards of
his internal rage, ensured that his gift of popular leadership was, as Catlin
admitted, formidable. He could display ‘courage, intelligence, originality and
eloquence’.
Mosley adhered to the contingency theory that leaders are people whose
qualities work in times of crisis. Barely concealed was the idea that when the
crisis erupted it would require great men, such as himself, to save the nation.
There was a sense of him willing the crisis. Not fearing failure, Mosley types
‘respond brilliantly to crises because it gives them a chance to glorify them-
selves’. He was the Hobbesian predator, who engages in a restless pursuit of
power and, in the process, searches for others to devour ‘in the incessant
motion that determines life in the natural condition’.
Harold Laski asked George Catlin whether he had ‘penetrated beyond the
periphery of Mosley’s consciousness’. He replied that he was ‘a great egotist
but did not know the answer’. He had, John Beckett noted, the ‘worst possible
temperament for success at Westminster’. He suffered fools badly and had no
time for the ‘wearisome babblings of decrepit Trade Union leaders’. Beckett
noted that, whereas Stafford Cripps and Hugh Dalton would ‘spend hours
walking from one simple Labour member to another... listening with charm
to their reminiscences’, Mosley had no time for such pleasantries. They sus-
pected he was only interested in using colleagues. Beckett recalled Cimmie
‘running to and fro in the lobby using her charm to undo the harm of Mosley’s
brusque manner. The poor lady fought a losing battle, seldom succeeding in
securing more than two friends for three enemies made by her husband.’ This
explained his unpopularity. .
Following victories in the September 1930 German election, Hitler increased
his representation from twelve to 105 seats. The Mail published a celebratory
 “AFTER BALDWIN AND MACDONALD COMES... ?’ 147

article by Rothermere (written by his journalist mouthpiece George Ward

Price). “These young Germans have discovered, as the young men and women
of England are discovering, that it is no good trusting to the old politicians.
Accordingly they have formed, as I should like to see our British youth form,
a Parliamentary party of their own. Under Herr Hitler’s control the youth of
Germany is effectively organised against the corruption of Communism.’ He
had for the same reason founded the United Empire Party, ‘for it is clear that
no strong anti-Socialist policy can be expected from a Conservative Party
whose leaders are themselves tainted with semi-Socialist doctrines’.
Others took note of events in Germany and were also looking for leadership.
On 19 September twenty-two businessmen signed a letter in The Times
announcing the setting up of a National Council of Industry and Commerce
(NCIC). Created by Sir William Morris because no party was prepared to
champion big business, its backers included Lord Melchett, ICI’s Sir Harry
McGowan, Sir Felix Pole of AEI and the spokesman for the metal-bashing
industries of the West Midlands, Sir Ernest Petter, who had previously advo-
cated a National Industrial Party. Behind the scenes were figures such as
Conservative MP Arthur Steel-Maitland, a life-long social imperialist. The
NCIC claimed people were ‘tired of the ... slavish adherence to economic
theories which have lost all relation to the facts of modern business life’.
Industry was ‘going to the wall and normally peaceable, patriotic workmen
were being driven to Bolshevism’. Government needed to be run on business
lines, freed from ‘the fog of party politics’. Morris said British workmen were
‘screaming for a leader’.
Morris had successfully fought to retain the McKenna Duties, which
imposed a tariff on motor imports, particularly against cheap US cars. Ill
health prevented him running as a pro-protectionist MP but he used strong-
arm squads from his workforce in rumbustious election campaigns. Morris
was an enthusiast for the monetary theories of Arthur Kitson and subscribed
to the diehard and anti-Semitic Patriot. He was a power in the land and saw
himself as ‘the Englishman’s Ford’, presenting the masses with a ‘technological
key to a new society’. Pro-rearmament, he manufactured aero engines because
he feared economic weakness ‘might be matched by a military weakness too’.
By 1930 Morris believed the industrial system was collapsing and sought a
benevolent dictatorship.
It is easy to see why Morris found Mosley’s ideas attractive. Taking advan-
tage of Imperial Preference, almost 90 per cent of car exports went to the
Empire. The NCIC wanted to protect the home market and to advance the
cause of inter-Empire trade. It hoped to push the Tories into adopting pro-tariff
and imperial policies, and to persuade the public of the merits of protection and
capital’s case against Labour. Morris’s link to Mosley was through Wyndham
Portal, Chairman of Portal’s, manufacturers of paper for the Bank of England.
 148 BLACKSHIRT

On 25 September Mosley discussed with Bruce Lockhart ‘the growth of

feeling against Parliamentary government’. He was not in favour of Fascist
methods. ‘General opinion was that so far feeling is against the politicians, but
not against Parliamentary traditions.’ Beaverbrook was seen in the company of
Mosley, Lloyd George and Morris, but despite his hostility to Baldwin, he had
not given up hope of rejoining a reformed Tory Party. Exceptions were NCIC
members ‘whose disgust with the Conservative leaders was such that they no
longer trusted in Tory support’. These manoeuvrings were frowned upon by
Tory loyalist Sir Cuthbert Headlam, who considered Mosley an ‘unpleasing
type’ who was willing ‘to ally himself with any party or body of persons which
would accept him as its leader. The eternal “ego” is the only thing that interests
him.’ What the politics of a Mosley party ‘might be is quite immaterial so long
as he is its big noise. He is no more a socialist than I am. He is in fact and
always an ‘“‘Oswald Mosleyite”’.’
In early October, fearing the country was on the edge of an abyss, Morris’s
circle called for the formation of a coalition government supporting an import
tariff. The King sent the PM a message urging him to heed the warnings.
MacDonald arranged through the King’s friend Lord Mottistone a private
dinner with Lloyd George and Churchill to discuss the possibility of a national
_ government. No records were kept but ‘all those present were dissatisfied
with the existing party system and hankering after a new right-wing social
democratic coalition’. MacDonald talked of his readiness to form such a
coalition and was “doing everything possible to telegraph his availability for a
National Government to other party leaders’.
A Mosley ally in Birmingham, Jim Simmons, had complained in the Town
Crier of Westminster’s ‘futile hopes and bitter disappointments; and the insur-
mountable barriers that burden progress’. The hopelessness was ‘embittering
our souls’, and those ‘crushed by the machine’ were meeting in the corridors.
Ernest Bevin’s report on trade policy, which closely followed Mosley’s own
proposals, was accepted at the September TUC conference. However, his
personal distrust of his colleague ensured that when it came to the party’s
Annual Conference in October at Llandudno, Mosley would not receive his,
nor trade union, support. Mosley was not surprised, as he noted ona speaking
tour a distancing between the unions and constituency parties. He would
have to rely on the support of the grass roots for whom he shone as ‘a beacon
of hope’.
In the weeks leading up to Llandudno, several thousand copies of Mosley’s
memorandum were dispatched to local parties with requests for delegates’
support. Mosley, however, had lost ground in his own territorial power base.
It was Doncaster not Birmingham which moved his resolution at Conference.
By going over the head of the government, he had ‘thwarted any possible
return to it in its present form’. Conference opened the day after the loss of
 “AFTER BALDWIN AND MACDONALD COMES... ?’ 149

the airship R.ro1, which had crashed near Beauvais. Among the forty-eight
killed was Lord Thomson, Secretary of State for Air and the PM’s closest
political friend. The disaster was a tragic blow but MacDonald retained his
oratorical skills and ‘touched the heart’ of delegates. On 7 October Doncaster
moved that the Mosley memorandum be considered by the National Executive
Committee and that it issue a report. George Catlin sat in the gallery with
Cimmie, ‘all taut with anticipation about Tom’s speech’.
Mosley summarized to delegates the difference between his proposals and
the government’s public works programme costing £122 million. What had
not been revealed was that it was spread over five years. As it had been
estimated there would be 4,000 new jobs for every £1 million spent, the
proposals only provided work for 100,000 men — ‘one man in employment
for every ten men out of employment since they came to office’. Mosley had
grasped, David Marquand notes, ‘the central point of the doctrine which
Keynes was now beginning to hammer out — that what influences the level of
unemployment is the effect of Government spending on demand, not the
intrinsic value of the projects on which Government money is spent’.
The government’s policy rested on rationalization, which Mosley agreed
was necessary but would undoubtedly ‘displace more labour than it employed
fresh labour’ and could not be considered a solution for unemployment.
‘Force of words and that confident, arrogant, dominating personality’, Catlin
observed, ‘were given body in argument by citation after citation of effective
statistics at the expense of the platform’s decisions.” One eyewitness was
‘hypnotized by the man, by his audacity, as bang! bang! bang! he thundered
directions’. He electrified them with his call for a policy of permanent recon-
struction. He renewed his criticism of relying on a revival of exports; he
supported the TUC’s advocacy of closer ties to the Empire, which was ‘the
proper basis for developing the “American system” on an American scale’.
He argued that ‘the principle was to have an organism planning, allocating,
regulating trade rather than leaving those great things to the blind forces
of world capitalistic competition’. Such a policy was in direct conflict with
Snowden’s policy, but it was ‘vitally necessary to adopt it’.
Mosley said if Labour’s proposals were ‘rejected then they too could be put
before the country. At best, they would have their majority, at the worst they
would go down fighting for the things they believe in. They would not die like
an old woman in bed; they would die like a man on the field - a better fate,
and, in politics, one with a more certain hope of resurrection.’ As he ended,
Brockway recalled, ‘delegates rose en masse, cheering for minutes on end...
Here was a potential leader, authoritative, courageous and passionate.’
Mosley’s resolution was narrowly defeated by 1,251,000 votes to
1,046,000. The constituency parties voted ten to one in his favour but trade
union leaders won for the executive. It was rumoured he would have won had
Igo BLACKSHIRT

not the miners’ leader, A. J. Cook, been delayed by a late train. In fact, the
miners’ executive had decided to oppose the resolution. Constituencies had
their revenge by removing Jimmy Thomas from the NEC and electing Mosley
with 1,362,000 votes, fourth in the poll behind George Lansbury, Hugh
Dalton and George Dallas, but ahead of Herbert Morrison. Initially, Mosley
looked to be the victor, but it proved a miscalculation. He overestimated his
position and underestimated the leadership’s strength. Most politicians would
have regarded the vote as a good campaigning base but Mosley did not take
that view.
That night, Catlin found Mosley in the Grand Hotel’s dining room in
discussion with Allan Young. ‘Suddenly, Mosley pulled himself up. ‘This
means a dictatorship.”’ Catlin recalled ‘the frisson when my singing ears
heard the remark. A dictatorship in Britain?’ A Continental journalist observed
that the Labour movement might have found in Mosley its Hitler. The Man-
chester Guardian agreed that to compare the ‘new Socialist Imperialism,
subordinating Parliamentary institutions to its own imperative needs’ with
National Socialism was not so absurd. A few days later Snowden’s PPS wrote
to Churchill that he did not ‘think this country will really follow Sir Oswald
Hitler’.
Mosley remained popular in the constituencies and received rousing recep-
tions to his speeches to the rank and file. He cultivated the Wolverhampton
MP W. J. Brown, Secretary of the ILP MPs and founder of the Civil Service
Clerical Association. He had a high reputation as a trade union negotiator
and was personally charming. He had been on a spiritual journey since his
youth, which led him to eastern mysticism. His time in Parliament, however,
represented the ‘greatest period of disillusionment of my life. I emerged from
it disillusioned ... with the whole political set-up.’ Beckett said Brown had
intense conviction and his ‘fireworks in contact with Mosley’s explosives were
bound to cause trouble’.
Mosley assembled around him a parliamentary ginger New Labour group.
Brown acted as its secretary and contact man with other dissident groupings,
including the ‘intelligentsia’, which criticized the lethargy of trade union MPs
who unquestioningly supported the government. He wanted Mosley to leave
Labour and start a new movement with the ILP but Mosley resisted because
of the incompatibility between his ideas and those of former colleagues. The
New Labour inner core was Mosley, Cimmie, Strachey, Brown, Dr Robert
Forgan and Aneurin Bevan, who had the ear of Beaverbrook.
Nicknamed the ‘armchair revolutionary’, former Welsh miner Bevan wrote
to Strachey on 17 October that there was ‘a tremendous mass of opinion on
the OM lines and I am pretty anxious to have a hand in shaping what
those lines should be’. Bevan acted as a bridge between Mosley and left-wing
unionism, in particular A. J. Cook. Bevan’s biographer notes that he had an
 ‘AFTER BALDWIN AND MACDONALD COMES... ?’ Igi
overwhelming desire ‘to do something or anything to tackle the nearly 50 per
cent unemployment’ among his constituents and only Mosley ‘seemed to
offer action’. Bevan was attracted to his fighting quality and the fact that he
denounced the complacency of the Commons in the sort of apocalyptic terms
which impressed Bevan. Mosley thought Bevan ‘brilliant but frothy’.
Forgan was a charming but naive son of a Church of Scotland minister. An
army medical officer, Vice-President of the Medical Society for the Study
of Venereal Diseases and an international authority on sexually transmitted
diseases, he became a socialist as a result of his experience in the public
health services of Glasgow, where he developed a ‘sincere enthusiasm for
slum-clearance, better nutrition and preventative medicine’. Forgan was
regarded by ILP colleagues as kindly and generous, and full of vitality.
Flirting with Mosley was Oliver Baldwin, wayward son of the Tory leader.
He fell out with his family when they suggested he had invented his account
of imprisonment by Bolsheviks and Turks during the 1921 Armeno—Russo
war. The Evening Standard said he had ‘absorbed something of the Russia
in which he has lived and suffered’, and had an arty appearance ‘reminiscent
of the William Morris—Rossetti days’. He displayed the ‘classic symptoms of
a demoralized and emotionally shattered youth’, and it was only when he
committed himself to Labour that his life regained a sense of purpose.
ILP journalist John Scanlon reported that talk centred on how long it would
be before Mosley became party leader. Labour’s old men could not stay in
power long and ‘even Socialists, who had no particular love for Sir Oswald,
were saying nothing could stop it. The prophets, however, had overlooked
the one man who could stop it — Sir Oswald himself.’ If he had had a little
humility, Jennie Lee wrote, ‘many of us on the left could have come together
and, in time, offered effective alternative leadership’. He had, however, ‘an
unshakeable conviction that he was born to rule’. She wrote to Frank Wise,
‘The Mosley—Bevan group is young, vigorous, unscrupulous. They are to be
reckoned with but I simply cannot conceive of myself working with them.
There is something fundamentally unsound mentally and spiritually.’
A certain bitterness had entered Mosley. When MPs rejected his proposals
and he angered them by saying that he would appeal to the wider movement,
Brockway believed the ‘dangers of his personality were becoming apparent’
and his isolation within the party led him ‘to take his first step to separate
himself from it’. Mosley thought the moment had arrived to revive ideas of a
centre party. However, it was not clear to what extent his collaborators would
be committed. He knew that, privately, Ernest Bevin was critical of Snowden’s
negative attitude and MacDonald’s vagueness, and it was on the basis of such
feelings that he approached Arthur Henderson and ‘urged him to lead a revolt
against MacDonald in order to seize the prime ministership for himself’.
Henderson despised MacDonald but recognized he was indispensable as
152 BLACKSHIRT

national leader. He distrusted Mosley, as did Bevin, who would not compro-
mise the unity of the party.
Fifty backbenchers attended Mosley’s weekly meetings but he discovered
that ‘listening was one thing, and acting, quite another’. He cut a solitary
figure on the NEC, supported only by Fred Jowett and C. P. Trevelyan. His
efforts to rally MPs behind imperial insulation were rebuffed. Dalton, who
regarded such ideas as ‘pitiable’, wrote derisively on 23 October that Mosley
was ‘much with Keynes.at present but could only take in the cruder arguments’.
Keynes’s Economic Advisory Committee recommended changes to benefits,
public works schemes and a temporary 10 per cent tariff on imports, but
Snowden ensured the report was buried. He gave way to Transport Minister
Morrison on the need to finance modest public works schemes but demanded
cuts in benefits to balance the budget.
By October 1930, after fifteen months in power, unemployment stood at
2,319,000. On the 28th the King’s speech set out Labour’s programme, includ-
ing raising of the school-leaving age and a Royal Commission on unemploy-
ment insurance. It was savagely attacked from all sides for its timidity. Mosley
had come to the conclusion ‘that in a real crisis Labour would always betray
both its principles and the people who had trusted it’. He likened the govern-
ment to a ‘Salvation Army Band which turns out with banners flying for
Judgement Day but when the first rumble of the approaching cataclysm is
heard, turns in disarray and flees’.
The air was full of initiatives for coalitions and demands for a government of
businessmen. These were encouraged by the Observer and Week-End Review
(WER), which exposed the old gang’s ‘ineffectual ways of running the
country’. The WER had been launched earlier in the year by staff of Beaver-
brook’s Saturday Review, following their resignation in protest against his
Empire Free Trade Crusade. Through editor Gerald Barry, an RFC pilot and
pacifist, and leader writer Max Nicholson, the WER established itself as a
dissident Tory journal seeking ‘leadership, industrial leadership, moral leader-
ship’. They found it in Mosley.
Mosley’s discussions with young Tories were led by Oliver Stanley, with
contributions from Macmillan. Boothby was a regular with his friend W. E. D.
‘Bill’ Allen, Ulster MP for West Belfast and Chairman of David Allen & Sons,
printers and advertisers in Northern Ireland. Allen believed in the need for
action and decided Mosley was the man to provide it. Philosopher and adven-
turer, he was widely travelled, with a romantic political outlook. He had been
a special correspondent for the Morning Post in the Balkan and Riff wars, and
was fluent in Russian and Turkish. He visited Soviet Georgia in 1926 and
produced histories of Georgia, Ukraine and the Caucasus, as well as papers
on mountain warfare. ‘Immaculate in appearance and unruffled manner’,
Allen had the ‘qualities and some of the defects of the gentleman scholar’. He
 “AFTER BALDWIN AND MACDONALD COMES... ?’ 153
could afford, The Times noted, ‘to indulge in hypotheses and idiosyncrasies
which would make a professor’s hair stand on end’. Allen has wrongly been
profiled as an MIS agent (possibly mischief making on Mosley’s part), whereas
his background is typical of an MI6 or Military Intelligence agent.
Allen was deeply affected by the death in 1927 of his elder brother Drennan,
and beholden to his mother Cissy, who funded his excursion into politics. He
inherited her ‘adventurous cast of mind but lacked her tenacity’. John Beckett
said he represented ‘the spirit of modern chivalry’. In Parliament, he was the
spokesman for a group of young Tories who ‘took “noblesse oblige” in a
practical form, and to whom patriotism and imperialism meant care for the
British and Imperial peoples, rather than a careful network of financial intrigue
cloaked by wild waving of the Union Jack’. The Allens had a Tudor-style
mansion at Commonwood, Chipperfield, where they brought their guests,
including Mosley. Close to Jennie Lee, his marriage to Lady Phyllis King,
daughter of the Earl of Lovelace, was not a success and he later became
intimate with Paula Casa Maury, Mosley’s mistress.
Allen was among the disgruntled Tories who met on 26 October at Cliveden
with Boothby, Macmillan, Elliott, William Ormsby-Gore, Brendan Bracken
and Terence O’Connor. They differed little from Mosley on policy and could
count on the support of half a dozen Liberals and twenty Mosleyites.
Agreement was reached between the young Tories and Mosley’s supporters
to make converging speeches in debates. On 29 October he claimed sweated
labour, cartels and commodity price falls required an insulated Empire, behind
a ‘wall of modern design, of varying type and size of brick and of device’. Its
size would ‘give us power to exact concessions from foreign countries’. He
agreed decision making would be complex but “every modern process is com-
plicated’. He appealed for a cross-party coalition ‘to lift this great national
emergency far above the turmoil of party clamour’. Strachey admitted this ran
counter to Labour principles but ‘in a world such as it is today we must face
the fact that something of the sort is necessary’. He was aware they were
arguing for National Socialism. Oliver Stanley accepted ‘nationalization’ of
the Empire. There followed the spectacle of W. J. Brown expressing his admir-
ation for Stanley and, in turn, receiving praise from John Buchan, who called
for ‘an emergency Government to deal with an emergency situation’.
Distrust of Baldwin led rebels to flirt with figures such as Beaverbrook, to
whom they were not normally attracted. Mosley’ acted as their representative
at dinners given by Lloyd George, the moving spirit in the group of ‘brilliant
old men’, or by Rothermere, who loathed weak leadership, which was an
‘unhealthy inclination in the decade of dictatorship’. Rothermere proposed
Mosley for membership of the influential Other Club, founded by Churchill
and Lord Birkenhead as a political dining club. Support in the constituencies
for protectionism alarmed the leadership, which feared losing seats to the
154 BLACKSHIRT

United Empire Party. On 30 October its candidate at the South Paddington

by-election romped home to victory.
‘Prospects for the break-up of old party alliances seemed good,’ said the
Observer. ‘No one remembers a time when discontents were so rife in all
parties together and when movements were so kaleidoscopic.’ On 3 November
Harold Nicolson, now working on the Evening Standard’s ‘Londoner’s Diary’,
met Mail Chairman Esmond Harmsworth and Beaverbrook, who said Mosley
would form a new party. Next day Nicolson saw an uncertain Mosley: ‘If he
strikes now he may be premature. If he delays he may be too late.’ He said if
he had ‘£250,000 [£8.5 m] and a press I should sweep the country’. Nicolson
begged him to wait as he should not trust Beaverbrook.
The air was thick with talk of political realignment. On 19 November
Morris’s Council of industrialists called on politicians to discard party politics
as it was ‘long past when parties can or should be considered at all’. In a letter
to The Times, Bill Allen said the conflict between the old men and the young
was the ‘only reality for each political party. We have no respect for grey
hairs, grey theories, methods and conditions.’ The Observer hinted at a Lloyd
George—Mosley tie-up. Churchill was said to be working hand-in-glove with
Lloyd George on a national coalition.
With Birkenhead’s death in September, Churchill led diehard opposition to
Indian reform. He opposed the Round Table Conference call for an all-India
federation and a measure of self-government. He criticized Baldwin’s failure
to mount a sustained attack on the government’s relaxation of British authority
in Egypt and its recall of the imperialist-minded High Commissioner Lord
Lloyd. Rothermere promised Churchill support for a crusade as India assumed
‘cardinal importance in Conservative politics’. However, young Tories sus-
pected Churchill of intrigue in his ambition to reach the top and considered
his India diehardism wholly outdated.
The emphasis on a national solution above party was attacked in the Com-
mons by Frank Owen, who accused Mosley of preaching the ‘crudity of
economic nationalism’ and unleashing the ‘jingo imperialism’ of Joseph Cham-
berlain. Strachey and Bevan were prepared to swallow this ‘as a business
arrangement in a world that seemed to offer few immediate alternatives’.
They did not criticize when, on 14 November, Mosley addressed a group of
advertising men and hinted at parallels between his demand for action and
the Continental movements, though he assured them that they would ‘never
see in England people walking about in black shirts’,
When, on 20 November, his group was criticized at a party meeting for
failing to adhere to party discipline, Mosley retorted that ‘if there is to
be a
scrap it shall be a scrap to the finish’. To jeers, he hastened to add, ‘but it
will
not be fought out here but at the Labour Party conference’. There was
ironic
laughter, for the next conference was a year off. Attlee moaned to
Dalton,
 “AFTER BALDWIN AND MACDONALD COMES... ?’ 155
“Why does Mosley always speak to us as though he were a feudal landlord
abusing tenants who are in arrears with their rent?’ To the leadership’s annoy-
ance, he supported an ILPer standing at a by-election in opposition to the
government’s unemployment policy.
On 30 November Nicolson was at Cliveden with Lord Lothian, J. L. Garvin
and the Young Tories discussing Parliament’s future. They concluded the
country was about to enter an economic crisis, which had to be dealt with ‘on
undemocratic lines’. Later he learnt that Mosley was going to launch his mani-
festo, thereby ‘practically creating the National party’. Mosley hoped Morris
would finance him and expected the Young Tories to join, with Beaverbrook’s
backing.
Baldwin was annoyed by the Young Tories’ support for Mosley. Party
Chairman J. C. C. Davidson was informed that Macmillan would probably
join Mosley. However, as Boothby had predicted, their revolt was ineffective
as they lacked coherence. They included the diehard Edward Marjoribanks;
the maverick Macmillan; the moderate Victor Cazalet; and Churchill’s sup-
porter on India, Brendan Bracken. There were few common links except
youth. Chances of forging an alliance were unrealistic. Bill Allen believed they
were ‘held back by a combination of personal mistrust of Mosley and
pragmatic conformity to the established structure. Breaking away from the
Conservative Party was not so attractive in reality as it had been to talk about.’
Mosley admitted his tendency was ‘to drive things too hard’. When he tried
to fix a date for action, the Young Tories’ impotence was revealed. Elliott
was lambasted by Baldwin, who condemned those who had strayed ‘on strange
trails’, for supporting Mosley and made his peace. Pressure was put on the rest
and the conspiring evaporated ‘in the cold world of political realities’. The ideo-
logical differences between them and the Mosleyites turned out to be acute and
could not be bridged. They could not contemplate the nationalization of the
banks and a dominant role for the State.
_ By December 1930 there were 2,500,000 out of work. Mosley was con-
vinced that ‘in crisis Labour would always crack. I simply thought the leader-
ship had built a party with a structure, character and psychology which was
inadequate to great events.’ The coming crisis would ‘at last give the frustrated
war-generation its chance to make its own independent impact on politics.
The “modern mind” would take over.’
The first step was the ‘Mosley Manifesto’ — ‘an’-immediate plan to meet an
emergency situation’. The draft was purged of Mosley’s rhetoric and the
imperialist theme, and slanted leftwards by Strachey, Bevan and Brown. Their
‘National Policy’ began with a warning that the immediate question was ‘not
a question of the ownership but the survival of British industry’. Familiar
proposals included high wages, targeted tariffs, planning, an emergency
Cabinet, Import and Commodity Boards, imperial self-sufficiency and slum
156 BLACKSHIRT

clearance. The State would constitute a public utility organization, turning

out ‘houses and building materials as we turned out munitions during the’
war’. Budget surpluses would subsidize prime necessities and the taxes of
skilled, technical and managerial workers would be reduced. A Cabinet of five
Ministers would legislate through orders in Council, with Parliament stripped
of its privilege to block executive action. Parliament would become a business
assembly to implement the ‘national will’. It was a major assault on parliamen-
tary democracy.
The signatories claimed they had lost none of their socialist faith, but action
was needed: ‘afterwards political debate on fundamental principle can be
resumed’. Critics doubted whether spending £200 million over three years to
employ 100,000 men annually could have had significant effect, but no one
else ‘was advancing plans to put 300,000 men to work’.
On 4 December draft copies were hawked around the Commons. Fenner
Brockway was listed sixth in order of anticipated willingness to sign up (the
first five - Cimmie, Strachey, Brown, Forgan and John McGovern — signed)
but refused, as did Will Lawther and James Maxton, even though Brown had
worked to modify the content to suit their concerns. The manifesto’s denial
of socialism’s immediate relevance alienated ILPers, who thought it was ‘orien-
tated in such a way as to make it a buttress for the stabilisation of Capitalism’.
Cole refused, as he viewed it as a ‘conspiracy against the Government’.
Seventeen MPs signed; most were young and had entered Parliament in
1929, with half from the West Midlands. Mosley claimed others had offered
to sign, but ‘only wholehearted supporters were encouraged to do so’. The
small number of signatories from Birmingham indicated Mosley’s declining
influence, though support came from mining constituencies in Wales, the
North and Scotland, and the Miners’ Federation’s Arthur Cook did sign.
Contemporaries believed his deteriorating physical state — he had had a leg
amputated — contributed to a ‘mental and moral collapse’.
The Mosley manifesto was printed in the Observer on 7 December, with
edited versions (‘A National Policy for National Emergency’) in the Telegraph
and The Times. Garvin saw merit in its ‘unflinching recognition that without
a national awakening to the necessity for “‘peace-energy on a war-scale” the
Empire cannot be maintained and Britain’s traditional greatness in the world
cannot endure’. Mosley was the ‘only leader of his generation who has the
courage to strike out a new path, even though it may lead him temporarily
into the wilderness’. There was no consensus among reviewers. The problem
was its ‘wonderful eclecticism’ with something in it ‘to attract every floating
straw of current opinion’.
The manifesto was published on 12 December as a pamphlet to rally sup-
port, but it was not a success. Maxton condemned ILPers (Brown, Forgan,
McGovern, Philips Price and Simmons) for supporting ‘imperialist and auto-
 ‘AFTER BALDWIN AND MACDONALD COMES... ?’ 157
cratic’ policies. In turn, Mosley accused Maxton of using the parrot cry of
dictatorship as an excuse to prevent anything being achieved. ‘If, in England,
it is impossible to get things done, then England is done.’ His argument was
not helped by Harold Nicolson, who agreed in a BBC broadcast that in the
coming crisis Parliament might have to be replaced by a junta of experts.
Cole distanced himself from Mosley and set up a New Fabian Group to rally
the young with ‘some decent Socialist literature instead of Mosley amateur
clap-trap’, though he believed the Mosleyites ‘might be useful in a wider
movement of a less melodramatic sort’. Herbert Morrison, who had not read
the manifesto, described Mosley as having ‘true-blue Tory blood in his veins’.
He had been ‘reared in upper class society and had become accustomed to
giving orders purely because of their personal wealth or social position’.
Dalton dismissed the manifesto with the quip that it would lead to ‘Five
Dictators and a Tariff’, which was the view of the cartoonists, who compared
Mosley with Mussolini. ‘Would all the five chosen rulers be efficient and
righteous men?’ asked the Spectator. ‘Would four be? Would there be three?
Would two be? If not, there would only be one left?’
The only analysis came from Keynes, who liked its spirit. He said the central
debate was between planning and laissez-faire. There were three views: firstly,
Snowden’s trust in natural forces; secondly, the hastening of natural forces
and reducing wages; and thirdly, the manifesto’s collective planning. Keynes
was aware that the third option would shock those ‘with laissez-faire in their
craniums’ but ‘how anyone professing and calling themselves a socialist can
keep away from the manifesto is a more obscure matter’. He said that in a
previous generation, Lloyd George and MacDonald ‘would be where Mosley
is. Let them not, then, look too schoolmasterlike on his ebullience ... We
should be grateful to Sir Oswald Mosley for an effort to clear the air.’
The Young Tories fired off letters to The Times, praising the tariff and
Empire policies. Macmillan assumed that those who did not support it, cared
‘more about party machinery and the survival of the old party conflicts than
about national unity and national effort’. They published their own manifesto
on 17 December, acknowledging that ‘representative government may be
inconsistent with efficiency’. However, the tone was conservative with calls
for spending cuts, reform of national insurance and reduced wages. Hopes of
an alliance were dashed on the rocks of ideological divisions on planning.
Whereas socialists viewed Mosley’s national planing as an attempt to make
capitalist society stable, sympathizers saw it as a ‘dangerous challenge to that
society’. The Week-End Review voiced Young Tory objections that his planned
economy could only be enforced by ‘something near dictatorship’.
It has been assumed that there was a consensus among planners — as
pragmatic thinkers with a non-partisan technocratic faith in the application
of the scientific method — which transcended party politics. Daniel Ritschell,
158 BLACKSHIRT

however, rightly claims the variety of planning approaches has been glossed
over. Planners who professed approaches rejected by Keynes have been con-
verted into ‘unsuspecting Keynesians’. Skidelsky attempted to rehabilitate
Mosley’s ideas by reinterpreting them in terms of their alleged Keynesian
roots. He later stressed ‘the distinction between the approaches of Keynesian
demand management and physical planning’ but the point is, Keynes was not
a planner. There were distinct differences between his expansionism, Liberal
mixed-economy, Labour gradualism, Tory industrial corporatism, State
socialism and Mosley’s proto-Fascist corporatism. Mosley placed planning on
the national agenda and introduced it into the vocabulary of British politics
in the 1930s, but he failed to make ‘a deep impression on the general public
or the Labour electorate’. This revealed ‘the difficulties inherent in any attempt
to secure a consensus around the idea of planning’. ;
The National Council of Industry and Commerce supported the manifesto
and in a letter in The Times, Sir Felix Pole, Wyndham Portal and William
Morris described it as ‘a ray of hope’. It was the ‘forceful gesture of a young
and virile section of the Labour Party, providing concrete evidence of the
possibility of the formation of a vigorous Industrial Party’. They visualized ‘a
homogeneous alloy of young men of clear vision and unclouded ideas, men of
modern metal, who, rid of the baseness of old party policies and led by a
mature brain, will combine to form a new element that will lead this country
to security and then prosperity’.
Suspicions of Mosley were ‘too long standing to be overcome by the secretive
lobbying of known adherents’. He had set out his stall too early and, in
December 1930, there were few takers. Repeatedly, his sense of timing was
out: it had been over his resignation; it was over his manifesto. A shrewder
politician, suggests W. F. Mandle, would have waited, ‘for there were signs of
change — to be followed, however, not anticipated’. The logic of his national
planning did not yet coincide with contemporary politics and he found himself
isolated. Fascism was to be his ‘last Quixotic challenge to a political world that
had rejected him and his ideas long before he came to reject this world himself’.
Boothby was horrified to learn Mosley was thinking of forming his own
party. He sent an urgent letter warning it was not practical politics. The Young
Tories ‘won’t play, and it’s no use deluding yourself that they will. Even on
the assumption that Macmillan decided to play, how many votes can he swing?
Not two.’ There was a possibility of Lloyd George but he was regarded as ‘a
shit’. Mosley could ‘sway more votes than any other contemporary politician’
but Boothby doubted he could recruit MPs: the mugwumps will be ‘solidly
arraigned against you .. . and the intelligentsia venomously hostile’.
There might be press support but Rothermere was ‘beyond the pale. In any
decently organised community his papers would be suppressed and he would
be executed.’ And Beaverbrook was ‘in the impregnable position of being able
 “AFTER BALDWIN AND MACDONALD COMES... ?? 159
to double-cross and let down the side at a moment’s notice, without loss of
power or even prestige’. How would people react to a ‘Beaverbrook—Mosley-
Rothermere—Lloyd—Macmillan-Stanley—Boothby combination’? They might
say, “By God now all the shits have climbed into the same basket.’ Mosley had
underestimated the power of the political machines. The ‘shrewdest electioneer
in the country’, Dr Hunter, was convinced ‘two only — right and left, will
wield political power in this country in the years that lie ahead’. The only
thing to do was to ‘try and collar one or other of the machines, and not ruin
yourself by beating against them with a tool which will almost certainly break
in your hand’.
Perceptively, Boothby added that if there was an ‘economic crisis this winter,
there may be a widespread demand for a national Government, new men and
new measures’. Then the situation would be ‘fundamentally changed, and a
game of a kind we cannot yet envisage may yet open out’. Mosley could ‘do
more for us than anyone else now alive. Only for God’s sake remember that
this country is old and tradition-ridden, and no one — not even you — can
break all the rules at once. And do take care of the company you keep. Real
shits are so apt to trip you up when you aren’t looking.’ Inevitably, it was
prescient advice that Mosley chose to ignore.
Since Mosley’s manifesto did not include food taxes, which were a non-
negotiable part of his own policy, Beaverbrook would not, he told fund-raiser
Philip Cunliffe-Owen on 6 January 1931, provide ‘any cash contribution to
Mosley’s fund’. Mosley told the Herald that a ‘Beaverbrook—Mosley Combi-
nation was all bunkum’. Soon support from the Young Tories drained away.
The Express said the ‘disquieting thing about the younger men’ was that they
had ‘none of the boldness of youth’. When, on 27 January, Churchill resigned
from the shadow cabinet over Baldwin’s India policy, commentators thought
there was an opportunity for Mosley. Churchill, however, had decided he had
no intention of joining his ‘Suicide Club’.
_ Mosley had not quite finished with Labour. Bevan and Brown asked MPs
to convene a conference to debate unemployment. In committee room 14
Mosley delivered, according to MacDonald’s biographer L. MacNeill Weir,
‘one of the most effective and impressive speeches ever heard’. He appealed
for action and the ‘applause indicated to the leaders ranged along the platform
that here was a man to be reckoned with’. MacDonald should have replied
but, instead of ‘facing up to Mosley as Greek would meet Greek’, the PM -
dismissed on the previous day by Churchill as the ‘boneless wonder’ — sheltered
behind Henderson, who opposed the motion.
Henderson asked Mosley to withdraw his motion but he refused and, in
doing so, again blundered. His oratorical triumph secured much sympathy;
so much so that he appeared as a possible leader but, characteristically, he
wanted an instant result. ‘Like a revivalist, he was out for sudden conversions’
160 BLACKSHIRT

— but the vote, noted Weir, put members in a dilemma. ‘As the Government
was being indicted, every Member of the Government became an accused
person, and to have supported Mosley’s motion would have been self-
condemnatory. Again, Members would naturally be reluctant to vote for this
new-comer and against the well-tried leaders of the Party, especially when the ~
said leaders were lined along the platform, keenly watching every hand that —
went up.’
Mosley was defeated by ninety-seven to thirteen. At dinner, Nicolson noted
that democracy for Mosley was ‘dead — and so it is for me. The people must
be treated humanely but firmly.’ The desire to enact his proposals obsessed
Mosley and he now campaigned ‘for a transformation of political life, this
being the only way he could see his policies being carried out’. ‘Action’
dominated Mosley’s article ‘A New National Policy’ for the Week-End
Review. ‘We create a new philosophy, the broad principles of which, like all
dynamic forces, must be kept flexible and adaptable to the realities of whatever
situation it confronts.’ His National Economic Planning Organization, co-
ordinating economic activities, implied a State-run economy and was far
removed from any Keynesian notion of ‘managed capitalism’ and temporary
State intervention.
Keynes was committed to finding a ‘third way’ alternative to Marxism and
laissez-faire (and Fascism). He was a liberal, a believer in individual liberty,
the rule of law and limited government. Mosley wanted sweeping regulation,
with control over investment and production, prices and wages. In a crucial
shift, he put ‘national’ in front of planning, and stressed his proposals’ non-
socialist nature. Talks continued with the Young Tories but their model of
industrial self-government was designed to provide private enterprise with the
‘chance of self-government, as an alternative to the dead hand of the Socialist
or the Fascist State’.
H. Hamilton Fyfe in the Queen’s Quarterly believed Mosley would ‘play a
prominent part in British politics, whether he becomes a Dictator (not on the
Mussolini model) or gives back to the British people their faith in democracy
as a working system. Now there is no more interesting figure in public life.’
Bevan and Brown were alarmed when Labour Monthly labelled Mosley the
‘advanced guard of fascism’ with his call for a ‘new psychology’ and a
‘renascent and resurgent Britain’. Boothby shared their feeling when he dis-
covered Mosley was attempting through the NCIC’s Colonel Portal to raise
funds in the City to launch a party. He wrote to him on 30 January that this
was madness. “You have persistently disregarded every piece of advice or
suggestion that I have ever ventured to offer. And so, my dear Tom, I cannot
feel that you have greatly missed the benefit of a judgement which you
obviously do not value highly!’
Mosley met with William Morris, a ‘genuine and ardent patriot’ but one
 “AFTER BALDWIN AND MACDONALD COMES... ay 161
‘less well versed in the technique of politics, a business genius who seemed
rather lost outside his own sphere’. Mosley found the conversation tedious
because he had come to talk money but ‘that point never seemed to be reached’.
However, at the end of lunch Morris handed him a cheque for £50,000
(£1.7 m). He had been ‘studying me for some time — the object of the seemingly
pointless conversations were now clear — and had developed full confidence
in me and had decided to back me’. Morris liked risk takers and promised
further support if Mosley looked like getting anywhere.
Speaking at Rochester on 2 February, Mosley confirmed he was ‘in a hurry
because we believe that if the present situation is allowed to drift on, a
catastrophe will overwhelm the country’. He had concluded the national
position was so grave that ‘drastic and disagreeable measures will have to be
taken’. Two days later Cimmie confirmed to Nicolson that her husband was
about to launch a new party. He would do so in the midst of a world slump,
which appeared to be opportune timing.
 IO

The New Party

The world slump at the beginning of the thirties was the most severe in history
though Britain suffered less than some countries. There had been a world
industrial boom during 1925-9 but not in Britain, which only managed
moderate growth. After 1929 there was no financial collapse as suffered by
Germany, but Britain still experienced a slump. Mosley was proved right in
that the world depression ended hopes for an export-led recovery.
Against this background, Snowden rose in the Commons on 11 February
1931 to warn that ‘some temporary sacrifice’ was necessary ‘in order to
make future progress possible’. W. J. Brown said the speech represented the
‘surrender of the whole philosophy of the Labour movement to the bidding
of the financial interests of this country’. For his attack, he was expelled from
the trade union group of MPs. ‘The orthodox members of the Party were
blind and deaf,’ Jennie Lee recalled, ‘but far from dumb in repeating the
doctrines of the leaders. Their chief sport, then as always, was persecuting
anyone who tried to tell them that the Emperor was stark naked.’ Mosley
enlivened the debate with his claim that putting ‘the nation in bed on a
starvation diet are the suggestions of an old woman in a fright’.
Brown half jokingly suggested to Mosley they set up a new party. On
13 February the pair lunched with Bruce Lockhart and talked about breaking
across party lines, but admitted the ‘young man’s movement’ could only come
via Labour since the Conservatives were ‘dead’.
On the following day Mosley suggested to H. G. Wells that ‘the only chance
of successful progress in this country is in co-operation with the more intelli-
gent of the big business people’. Wells had recently published The Autocracy of
Mr Pelham, which charted the rise of a Fascist leader of the ‘Duty Paramount
League’. He treated Mosley (Sir Osbert Moses) as a positive character, who
pleads ‘in vain with a sheepish crowd of government supporters for some
collective act of protest’ against the forced dissolution of Parliament. ‘Moses’
was half-Jewish and this was a common misconception even among those
close to the Mosleys. Mosley noted that Wells detested ‘anyone who physically
was an entirely different type to himself’. The other literary figure admired by
Mosley, George Bernard Shaw, urged him to break with Labour and start a
 THE NEW PARTY 163

new movement — “The Activists’. Shaw, however, soon changed his mind and
insisted he remain in the party, on the grounds that he was ‘bound to succeed
MacDonald’.
On the weekend of 15 February, at Savehay, the Mosleys were joined by
Nicolson, Stanley, Macmillan and other MPs to create his New Party. The
Observer reported Mosley would ‘start a platform campaign, which will be
opened in nearly all the big towns early in March’. Fifteen Labour MPs were
_ expected to join. Cimmie found it difficult to follow her husband’s ‘repudiation
of all the things he has taught her to say previously’. Nicolson said she was
not made for politics but for ‘society and the home’. Mosley wanted Nicolson
to head the party’s publicity committee, which was being advised by Week-End
Review editor Gerald Barry. Cyril Joad attended the preparatory meetings
where the atmosphere was an uneasy truce between ‘a Socialism which is
vestigial and a fascism which is incipient’. For the moment socialism had the
upper hand.
It was rumoured that six Labour MPs were about to join Mosley, who
hoped Aneurin Bevan would resign. Opponents thought Bevan suffered from
a Mosley complex in that he only played the game on his own terms and, if
thwarted, would break up things. Although he believed in the proposals, he
told Jennie Lee ‘it’s the Labour Party or nothing. I know all its faults but it is
the Party we have taught millions of working people to look to and regard as
their own. We can’t undo what we have done.’ Allan Young said Bevan refused
to join because he had an old mother and was ‘dependent on his miners’ trade
union subsidy’. Bevan, however, wanted to know ‘Where is the money coming
from? Who is going to pay? Who is going to call the tune?” He warned it
would ‘end up as a Fascist party’.
Bevan tried to prevent Strachey’s resignation, as did Amabel Williams-Ellis.
She was fascinated by Mosley. He had the right views, was handsome but
when he made sexual advances he ‘had to be resisted’. She begged her brother
not to resign because ‘a cure should be attempted from within’ but Strachey
felt ‘something very definite had to be done and quickly’. Amabel warned this
meant Fascism. He ‘swore that at the least sign of that, he would leave’. On
23 February Forgan and Strachey resigned, claiming there was ‘a prospect of
social breakdown and it had to be arrested’. Allan Young wrote to Cimmie
that Mosley ‘displayed all the qualities of intellectual courage and ability,
combined with the caution great actions demand’. Caution was not usually
considered a Mosley characteristic but at crucial moments he could hesitate.
Beatrice Webb regarded Mosley’s defection an ‘amazing act of arrogance
. . Slamming the door with a bang to resound throughout the political world’.
His one chance was to become ‘the He-man of the newspaper lords’ but his
egotism would clash with Beaverbrook’s and they would part company. He
had already been nicknamed the ‘English Hitler’ but she believed the British
164 BLACKSHIRT

would not elect a Hitler. He lacked fanaticism and deep down was a cynic
who would be ‘beaten and retire’.
Written by Strachey, Young, Brown and Bevan, the New Party’s ‘National
Policy’ was published on 24 February by Macmillan (run by Harold’s elder
brother). Planning, self-sufficiency, imperial preference and developing the —
home market were its main features. Protection was seen as the answer to the ~
problems of newer industries such as electrical goods and aircraft. While ‘every
effort should be made to develop the Empire, there was no reason why trade
should not be encouraged with other countries, for example, Russia’. Notice-
ably absent was Mosley, who was uninterested in the details since he would
discard aspects with which he disagreed.
The NP programme had links to social imperialism, though Mosley went
further in wanting a mass movement outside the party system and in advocat-
ing State direction of the economy. He explicitly identified the City as the chief
obstacle to success, but shared the social imperialists’ strategic and geopolitical
views. Its economic nationalism was akin to Fascist notions of autarchy.
Mosley wanted to put the solution of unemployment on ‘an emergency war
footing, abrogating normal, peace-time rights, riding roughshod over normal
peace-time susceptibilities’. With its themes of nationalism, class harmony,
leadership and anti-parliamentarianism, it was only a small step to Fascism.
This new activist style of politics was recognized by the Spectator as a form
of Fascism.
Beatrice Webb thought the ‘National Policy’ fell ‘dead in the no-man’s-land
between those who wish to keep and those who wish to change the existing
order’. The NP was just ‘another bubble on the surface of political life’. The
launch was eclipsed by the withdrawal of the official Conservative candidate,
Ivan Moore-Brabazon, from the St George’s Westminster by-election because
he opposed Baldwin. The fielding of an Empire Crusade candidate, Sir Ernest
Petter, in this safest Conservative seat in the country demoralized party leaders
and Mosley hoped to take advantage, confident he would sweep the country.
Things soon went wrong, however.
On 25 February Mosley went down with influenza. Three days later he
staggered to his office, ‘appealed for voluntary workers and funds, promised
to run 400 candidates at the next election and then went to bed’. He told
Nicolson this was ‘the first serious collapse of my life, and what a moment!”
In the end, only nine MPs defected to the New Party and, even then, most
were temporary recruits. Mosley had expected more but they had ‘melted like
snow upon the desert’s dusty face, for the good reason that the sun was still
shining’.
Oliver Baldwin resigned on 26 February and styled himself as an Indepen-
dent, but agreed to appear on NP platforms. Spoilt, unstable and homosexual,
the son of the Conservative leader had not spoken to his father for nearly a
 THE NEW PARTY 165
decade. J. Lovat-Frazer and Frank Markham joined, but George Catlin dis-
trusted the anti-American tone, though he helped Mosley’s secretary, George
Sutton, and Cecil Melville as ‘fact-gatherers’. Bevan dissuaded some ILPers
from joining, but many ILP branches tolerated dual membership. George
Strauss erased his NP past and John McGovern fleetingly joined but was
persuaded to withdraw by Brockway. Other ILP recruits included John
Scanlon, Parliamentary Secretary to Sir Patrick Hastings, Leslie Cumings, a
prominent London official, Bill Risdon, an organizer in the Midlands. Rebel-
lious young left-wingers Iain Mikardo and Wogan Phillips, husband of novelist
Rosamond Lehmann, also jumped. Mikardo soon detected an ‘authoritarian
attitude at odds with the mores of the Party’ but it did not deflect him from
supporting its ‘socialist programme’.
In the Observer on 1 March, Mosley called for a ‘mobilisation of energy,
vitality and manhood to save and rebuild the nation’. Comparisons made
between the NP and Hitler’s movement alarmed Brown, who had second
thoughts about joining a quasi-Fascist import given that the NP had been
planned as a ‘breakaway movement to the Left — not the Right’. He was leaned
on by his union and, in order to stiffen his resolve, Mosley went by ambulance
to see Brown. Carried into his living room on a stretcher, he told Brown he
had obtained ‘a guarantee from William Morris to cover his salary for several
years’. Brown resigned on 4 March but still declined to join, fearing he would
lose his union post. Mosley developed pleurisy and pneumonia, a serious
matter before the discovery of antibiotics, and was laid up in bed. It was a
stumbling start for a movement of energy and youth. Beaverbrook said Mosley
had done ‘a foolish thing’ and should have stayed inside Labour and
‘bombarded it from within’.
On 3 March Cimmie resigned, as did Sir Charles Trevelyan, but he empha-
sized he had ‘not the slightest sympathy with the action of men like Mosley.
Officers who command the battalions can retire, but they must not rebel.’ His
criticism of Baldwin was heard in silence and he received no cheers. The mood
had changed. ‘Like shipwrecked passengers in an open boat’, David Marquand
notes, Labour MPs ‘assumed instinctively that their only hope of survival
was to huddle together against the storm: when a few hardy souls jumped
overboard, the rest clung to each other even more tightly than before’.
Although Young Tories and Liberals promised to work on the NP’s behalf,
only the Empire Crusader Bill Allen took the plunge. When Nicolson informed
Beaverbrook he was joining Mosley, his boss expressed ‘deep sympathy with
me in my obstinacy and wrong-headedness’. A meeting was held on 5 March
in Southampton Row; posters said the speakers would be Mosley, Cimmie,
Allen, Strachey, Brown and Bevan. Mosley was ill and Bevan backed out after
the Miners’ Federation withdrew their sponsorship. Cimmie was ‘undaunted
_ by two ghastly hecklers, a communist and a drunken Labourite’. According
166 BLACKSHIRT

to Irene, ‘she dealt with them and the crowd finally got livid with them and
wanted them evicted’. They were removed by stewards who were denounced
as ‘Fascist thugs’. Only the Telegraph reported the event. The press, wrote
Nicolson, was ‘determined to boycott anyone who tries to be independent of ;
them’.
Strachey realized the enormity of what he had done, aware of the jibe it was
a Fascist party. ‘Maybe we have committed political suicide.” Young took
charge of organization in its Great George Street headquarters, a Welsh Liberal
and accountant, Sellick Davies, acted as treasurer and Robert Forgan was
its whip.
On 10 March Mosley was officially expelled by Labour for ‘gross disloyalty’.
MacDonald wrote to him, mixing the regretful with the ironic: “You remain
true, while all the rest of us are false ... We must tolerate your censure and
even contempt; and, in the spare moments we have, cast occasional glances at
you pursuing your heroic role with exemplary rectitude and stiff straightness
to a disastrous futility and am empty sound.’ An editorial in Birmingham’s
Labour paper expressed the general view that had Mosley ‘devoted your ability
and eloquence to the task of converting a majority of the people to the socialist
policy of the Labour party, thus ensuring the return of a majority Labour
Government at the next election, you would have been a great figure in our
Movement — honoured for your service and well rewarded with office. But
you could not wait.’
Michael Foot suggested that with his clumsy breach with the party, Mosley
had ‘tossed away the massive support he had been accumulating throughout
the country’. By walking out of government in May 1930 and out of the party
in March 1931, he had exposed his unsuitablity for leading the Labour Party.
He had ‘no love for it, no roots in it, no compunction at the breach with old
comrades. He could leave as easily as he had joined, without a twinge of
conscience or regret.’ Mosley identified the party with himself, rather than the
other way round, and did not appreciate that members’ support was for parties
not the politicians. A Birmingham colleague wrote that ‘ambition is a good
quality when it is directed to the service of one’s fellows but it is a soul
destroying tyrant when dedicated to self aggrandisement and the lust for
power’.
A statement by the Birmingham Borough Labour president on 6 March
reflected the determination to fight Mosley. Stories circulated that he was
bribing candidates and agents to leave the party, in a wrecking move against
the Labour movement. The sublimated suspicion about his motives ‘mani-
fested itself with venomous force’. Catlin recalled that Mosley’s former associ-
ates ‘took a speedy opportunity to clean themselves with scrubbing brushes’.
Westminster rumour mongers had a field day with ‘horrid tales of his bullying
at Winchester’, while plans were prepared to crush the NP at birth. The Times
 THE NEW PARTY 167

said a decision had been taken by Henderson, Dalton and Morrison to

oppose
the defectors as upper-class traitors.
Watching Cimmie being verbally assaulted at Stoke, Bill Allen said there
was something ‘supremely noble in her as she faced the angry audiences of
disappointed Labour supporters’. On 15 March Oliver Baldwin’s speech at
> Manchester’s Free Trade Hall — ‘Socialism is like a radish, red only on the
_ outside, not like a tomato, red all the way through’ — was disrupted. Organized
disruption followed in Liverpool (29th) and, again, Manchester (30th), with
"meetings in Dundee and Hull closed down.
The St George’s by-election on 18 March proved to be a turning point in
the tussle between Beaverbrook and Baldwin, who had considered resigning
but at the eleventh hour decided to fight back. He went to support the new
candidate, Duff Cooper, and produced the famous line that Beaverbrook and
Rothermere were pursuing ‘power without responsibility, the prerogative of
the harlot throughout the ages’. Cooper won decisively with the result that
Empire Crusade was relegated to obscurity. The defeat indicated the difficulty
Mosley faced in challenging the two major parties. On 20 March Margot
Asquith warned Harold Macmillan about Mosley: ‘Tom has played the fool
to a degree I never thought possible as he is very clever — but not quite as
remarkable as he thinks he is.’ It was expected that Macmillan would defect,
but his ‘political antennae began to quiver’ and he had second thoughts.
As commentators began to draw parallels between events in Britain and
Germany, on 17 March 1931 the Daily Worker declared the NP to be Fascist.
Nine days later Wyndham Lewis - the first writer definitely to link Hitler
with Mosley — published Hitler, the first biography of the Nazi leader. Lady
Rhondda, editor of Time and Tide, commissioned the biography from Lewis,
who believed Nazism was responding to Communism. He found in Nazism
his favourite themes — ‘a hatred of parliamentary and bourgeois democracy,
a horror of money and finance and a cult of youth’. He celebrated Hitler’s
young street fighters as pillars of the law who, in contrast to a culture eroded
by feminine values, were ‘morally pure, personally austere and enlightened’.
Hitler was seen as a man of peace whose racialist ideology might unite Euro-
peans against war. Frederick Voigt, the Manchester Guardian correspondent
in Berlin, claimed Lewis had been taken in by Nazi propaganda and had been
‘naive and gullible’ in judging Hitler.
The press viewed Mein Kampf as the ‘literary folly-of-youth of a failed
putschist who had dispelled the boredom of prison by do-it-yourself philo-
sophising’. Hitler was perceived as having the ‘usual rag-bag of prejudices,
resulting in the usual practices of social discrimination’. Lewis glossed over
anti-Semitism as a ‘curious Germanic idiosyncrasy’. When Hitler was com-
pared with Mosley, he was seen as being no less respectable than Labour’s
enfant terrible. Lewis wrote of Mosley ‘standing to attention as stiff as a
168 BLACKSHIRT

puppet, clutching his cane, his heels together, with an enormous topper upon
his moustachioed dandy’s head’. He had ‘wondered what a Credit-crank
would be like in real life, and now I know!’.
In April Lewis was approached by the Nazi propagandist Dr Hans-Wilhelm
Thost, correspondent of the Vélkischer Beobachter and co-founder of the
Anglo-German Club in Oxford of which Nicolson was a member. He said his
biography was ‘not at all bad for an Englishman’ but criticized the assertion
that the Jewish question was a ‘racial red herring. If you do not understand the
Judenfrage you have not understood Hitlerism. Without the Jewish question
Hitlerism would not exist.’ Thost had a social dilemma. His father had been
a friend of Lord Curzon and he had a letter of introduction to Cimmie. He
was, however, reluctant to present it because of her ‘Jewish’ ancestry. ‘What
a fearful obstacle-race life was’, mused Lewis, ‘for a member of the Nazi party,
winding his way in and out of the family trees of his father’s oldest friends.’
Beatrice Webb spent the first April weekend with Virginia and Leonard
Woolf, and discovered that BBC director-general John Reith was a disciple of
the NP. Mosley, she wrote, believed he will sweep the constituencies and
become prime minister. She found it odd that he ‘should be so completely
ignorant of British political democracy, of its ... slowness of apprehension
of any new thought’. He was ‘already choosing his Cabinet! Which argues
megalomania.’ NP policy was for an inner Cabinet of five. Wits said the five
would be (x) Sir Oswald Mosley, (2) the late Chancellor for the Duchy of
Lancaster, (3) Comrade Mosley, (4) Tom Mosley and (5) the member of
Parliament for Smethwick.
Mosley, said Catlin, was ‘a genuine experimentalist looking for a good plan
-a Napoleon itching for any campaign’. He had returned from recuperating
at Beaverbrook’s villa in the South of France in an extremely enthusiastic
mood. On rx April an area office was opened in Birmingham, where Labour
attacked local organizer Dan Davies, former Secretary of Aston Labour Party,
and E. J. Bartlett, ex-Chairman of the Birmingham branch, for attempting ‘to
buy candidates, organisers and propagandists by offers of good jobs’. Labour
Chairman J. Johnson warned the NP against putting up candidates because it
would arouse ‘more political bitterness than has been known for a generation’.
Members were ‘more united in their determination to fight the Mosleyites
than they ever were to fight the Communists’.
Mosley decided to hit back ‘in the place where it would hurt most’. A
Lancashire cotton town with 46 per cent unemployment, Ashton-under-
Lyme’s Labour Member had died, leaving a majority of 3,407. The NP’s
by-election candidate on 30 April 1931 was Allan Young. At an NP propa-
ganda committee meeting Mosley said he would ask Shaw, Wells and other
intellectuals for their support. A committee member was former BBC Chief
Engineer Peter Eckersley, who had been forced to resign over his affair with
 THE NEW PARTY 169

a married woman, Dorothy Clark. An RFC veteran, war had demoralized

him and for a time he was attracted to the League of Nations. When that
failed, he adopted pacificism.
Eckersley was a friend of Wyndham Lewis and his modernist flat in Swan
Court became a centre of radical discussion. He knew Strachey as a BBC
» literary critic and was introduced through him to Mosley. Eckersley was driven
_to the right by his mistress who, like their artistic friends, was weary of
democracy and became a ‘passionate seeker after revolutionary causes’. He
chaired the NP’s London Committee and worked closely with Bill Allen,
who donated his billboards to the campaign. Eckersley suggested hiring time
on Radio Paris, an early indication of the interest in using radio for political
broadcasts. Modernist in use of new media, they hoped to use cinema
advertising and set up a newspaper.
Bill Risdon and Strachey’s agent, Dan Davies, quickly created an organiz-
ation of enthusiastic young officials. With Beaverbrook’s agreement Bruce
Lockhart attended NP planning meetings for the Strachey-directed campaign
which, according to the Herald, cost £35,000 (£1.3 m). Labour made great
play of the NP’s ‘hidden backers’. William Morris donated £50,000 and
£5,000 each came from GWR magnate Wyndham Portal, who spoke at
Ashton, and tobacco millionaire Hugo Cunliffe-Owen. Lord Inchcape was
rumoured to be a backer but most finance came from Lancashire cotton
interests. Mosley revealed that Labour had a secret fund solicited from rich
men such as Bernhard Baron, another tobacco millionaire. Labour leaders
were ‘stricken with dismay at this subtle counter-thrust’, which was
represented as another piece of Mosley’s treachery.
Red NP posters with the single word ‘CRISIS’ were plastered on giant
billboards. The cotton town was suffering from an export slump and heavy
unemployment. The NP’s policy of a quota system for imports was designed
to tackle precisely this situation. It was therefore surprising that the NP’s
campaign concentrated on parliamentary reform. The Times thought it ‘fan-
tastically remote from practical politics’, though attempts were made to woo
the 4,000 Catholic voters.
Parties employed professional speakers to put over the message in an era
without microphones. Jack Jones was a working-class speaker for the Liberal
and Communist Parties. At NP headquarters, he met the ‘political flotsam
and jetsam’ of ex-candidates and ex-election agents, who were joining ‘to do
battle with “the old gang”’. He was taken on at £5 (£120) per week as a
national propagandist. Also recruited was Herbert Hodge, cab driver and
jobbing journalist. A socialist, he was ‘antagonised by the Communist Party’s
rigid dogmatism and class-hatred’, and thought Labour was ‘staggering from
one futility to another’. Here was a ‘chance to build up something new and
clean and vigorous, a party determined to break away from the old doctrines
170 BLACKSHIRT

and prejudices’. He was enthused by the idea of ‘men and women of goodwill
in both classes working together for a class-less society’.
The free-flowing funds, Hodge found, attracted ‘job-hunters, professional
politicans, and smart-alecs of all sorts — like blue-bottles round a dropped
cod’s-head’. He considered Mosley ‘an actor playing a part, perfectly ©
rehearsed, but a part in which he had no personal belief’. His handshake was
‘limp, his manner over-cordial’. His ability to switch on his artificial smile was
‘uncanny. Like talking to a robot.’ But at meetings in front of up to 7,000
people he was ‘imbued with the sense of a great mission’. He was ‘an
impassioned revivalist speaker’, Nicolson wrote, ‘striding up and down the
platform with great panther steps and gesticulating with a pointing index,
with the result that there was real enthusiasm towards the end and one had
the feeling that 90 per cent of the audience were certainly convinced at the
moment’.
A street-corner speaker, Hodge was unsure of policy detail but was enthused
by the ‘beauty of the basic idea. Our slogan “Britain First’? meant socialise
Britain first . . . socialism behind the barriers of regulated imports and exports.’
It also meant something different to every member. Jones made most of the
second-string speeches as the ‘X-Men of the first grade’ were rarely available.
Cimmie was a willing speaker and worked like a Trojan, addressing scores of
street meetings for women, as did Strachey’s wife, who ‘could hold a crowd
long enough to rest some of those whose throats were wearing’. A meeting on
23 April was disrupted, claimed the local paper, ‘under the Communist
banner’. Were these Communist actions or those of Labour supporters, as
Henderson had promised?
On 27 April Mosley met with colleagues to discuss progress. Canvass returns
indicated they might win but he had little confidence in their accuracy, though
he believed they would beat Labour. At the by-election the Conservative vote
was 12,420. Labour narrowly lost with 11,500 votes. For a third party, the
NP achieved a respectable vote of 4,472. ‘We just managed to save our
deposit,’ Jack Jones recalled, ‘and in doing so made a present of what was a
Labour seat to the Conservatives.’ When the result was announced, the rowdy-
ism intensified into violence. Labour supporters hurled shouts of ‘traitor’ and
‘Judas’ at Young and Mosley.
Mosley was advised by the police to make his getaway through the back of
the town hall. He declined but agreed to his wife being smuggled out. The
objective was the hotel on the far side of the square, which meant forcing a
passage through the crowd. Dan Davies said he would be lynched if he did.
Jones remembered Mosley, ‘white with rage, not fear; he showed his teeth as
he smiled contemptuously out on to the crowd’. He then remarked to Strachey,
‘That is the crowd that has prevented anyone doing anything in England
since the war.’ Mosley later claimed the crowd had been manipulated by
 THE NEW PARTY 171
‘sophisticated communists’. With a police escort, he plunged ahead.
‘Men
cursed; women shrieked and spat at us,’ recalled Jones. At the hotel,
Mosley
was almost cheerful.
Mosley claimed no harm was done by the violent scenes in Ashton, ‘except
to the psychology of Strachey’. His friend was, indeed, appalled and suspected
they were on the wrong side. Labour blamed the NP for its defeat. ‘Did not
_ Brutus stick the knife into Caesar?’ suggested Manny Shinwell. ‘The stiletto
in the back is as old as the hills.’ The Herald cried ‘WRECKERS’. Mosley ‘poses
_as the champion of the unemployed. In fact, he is an ally of Mr Baldwin.’
By-election swings throughout the country were running at 8.4 per cent against
Labour and Ashton would have gone Tory anyway.
Neville Chamberlain told Beaverbrook that Mosley had ‘no chance against
the Labour machine’. Beaverbrook disagreed: he ‘polled an immense vote.
Remember, he had no newspapers backing him. I have always had the advan-
tage of newspapers, as well as my own campaign. I do not write that fellow
down. He may peter out, but if he does as well the next time, he will bring
the pigs to market.’ Tories now closed ranks around an anti-socialist agenda.
Following by-election success on the back of a rise in unemployment to 22
per cent, Chamberlain believed they would make a clean sweep of the North
with their message of economy and protection for the home market. The
slump’s impact forced a convergence between the Conservatives and the
Liberal’s right wing, headed by Sir John Simon, which signalled the eventual
fall of the Labour government.
On 4 May Mosley recruited F. M. Box, the Tories’ chief agent for Yorkshire.
Box drew up plans for an electoral machine. A list of parliamentary candidates
was compiled, including Nicolson. Beaverbrook said this was folly, since he
‘cannot attract Socialist working-class votes’. Nicolson worried that NP policy
was ‘too intricate to be understood by the electorate’ and urged on Mosley ‘a
new attitude of mind’. On 6 May they met Keynes, who said it was impossible
“to get across an economic programme when the only arguments the electorate
can understand are the simple political slogans’. They were aware, however,
that they were nearing a crisis. On 11 May the collapse of Austria’s Kredit
Anstalt bank brought German banks to the brink of disaster. The Bank of
England was forced to step in to prevent complete chaos.
In the Fortnightly Review, Cecil Melville produced an overview of the NP,
whose assumption was not that ‘we have a class war so much as we have a
class deadlock. We shall try to do something towards unlocking it.’ This might
be achieved by emulating the Nazi movement with which there were strong
similarities. Both were National Socialist, had the support of industrialists and
were ‘protagonists of industry versus banking finance’. The NP proposed ‘to
help both industrial capital and the industrial worker to their mutual benefit’.
It had a ‘good chance of realising this hope, provided it can succeed in
172 BLACKSHIRT

reconciling the many interests which it represents — to become the principal

magnet for a new “Centrum” in British party politics’.
Melville shied away from Nazi methods but Cyril Joad suggested today’s
problems required a ‘new political technique, making use of a new political
machinery’. It would be carried through by a ‘strong man with a strong “
policy’. He recognized that ‘many of the tendencies have a markedly Fascist f
complexion’ but when they ultimately take shape, ‘it would be the nearest
thing to Fascism which the British nation with its known peculiarities of
political temperament, its centuries of political training, and its loyalty to
Parliamentary institutions could manage’. Joad expected success among young
men ‘ready to dance in thousands to any tune Mosley may choose to pipe
them’. But incipient Fascism may get ‘the better of vestigial Socialism, and we
shall have to deal with castor oil young men pure and simple’.
Believing the crisis had arrived, on 14 May Strachey, Young and Allen met
secretly with Mosley, who claimed violence at meetings was organized by
‘dedicated agents and warriors of communism’, playing on ‘the anarchy
inherent in the Left of Labour to secure confusion, disillusion and ultimately
the violence which is essential to their long-term plan’. After Joad suggested
a Nazi-style defence force, it was announced that NP ‘biff boys’, led by Peter
Howard, England rugby player and Oxford captain, would enforce order at
meetings.
Evelyn Waugh had been at Lady Cunard’s, where he noticed that Nicolson,
attracted to ‘virile and manly youths of the better classes’, was inflamed with
the ‘forceful but terribly immature’ Howard. Other Oxford graduates were
introduced to the NP, including Christopher Hobhouse and Mosley’s cousin,
James Lees-Milne. Strachey wanted to recruit young workers to counteract
the influence of the ‘strapping Oxford hearties in their plus-fours and sports
cars’ but was repelled by the idea of a militarized defence force. Nicolson
found the idea ‘faintly erotic’. He was probably sexually attracted to Mosley.
Lees-Milne noticed that he was ‘fascinated, almost to a masochistic degree, by
Mosley’s compelling personality and autocratic manner’.
Mosley told the Express that the biff boys would use the ‘good old English
fist’ but the Evening Dispatch warned that ‘unless discreetly kept in the back-
ground, the brawny peace-preservers would probably have a provocative
rather than tranquillising effect’. He was accused of ‘cynically welcoming
disorder at his meetings as a way of publicising his readiness to deal with “Red”
disruption’. Mosley admitted the ‘reserve function, its long-term purpose’ was
to ‘take control in a revolutionary situation’. In a leaked memo, he claimed
the Communist challenge ‘will seriously alarm people here. You will in effect
have the situation which arose in Italy ... We have to build the skeleton of
an organisation so as to meet it when the time comes. You have got to
have an iron core in your organisation around which every element for the
 THE NEW PARTY 173
preservation of England will rally when a crisis of that kind comes.’ He
was
restraining members who wanted to do ‘something dramatic immediately
if
the movement is not to stagnate’.
Mosley tried to woo sympathetic Tories associated with Charles Portal
(later Air Marshal) and Moore-Brabazon, who was considered a prize. There
had been an encouraging response from those Young Tories ‘distinctly fascist
in character’, and it was expected that if the NP won seats then they and the
young Liberals and Labour MPs would join. There was, however, irritation
at the lack of courage of Mosley’s parliamentary supporters to declare
themselves.
Labour Ministers delivered thunderous condemnations at meetings in rene-
gades’ constituencies. Dalton said the aim was to ‘bomb the traitors out of
their holes’. There was a press boycott. Strachey claimed ‘explicit instructions
have been issued that no mention must be made of the Mosley party. We’re
on the political correspondents’ black list.’ The NP failed to attract mass
support; the Herald estimated that by June there were fewer than 1,000
members.
Mosley’s inner circle upheld the Nazi movement as a model organization.
In early June he sent two emissaries, Major Thompson and Leslie Cumings, to
Germany — probably arranged through Dr Thost — to study Hitler’s methods,
though he said the trip was a ‘holiday-cum-business affair’. Melville revealed
that other NP members visited the ‘Brown House’, the Nazi headquarters in
Munich. Strachey claimed a circular stated the NP ‘will be the British equiva-
lent of the Nazi movement’. The evolution to Fascism was dictated by Mosley,
who controlled policy and funds. The NP’s Fascist faction, however, was
disappointed by the slow progress and the refusal to commit ‘to a definite
policy of dictatorship’.
Jack Jones travelled down to Denham with Strachey and Joad for an NP
summer school. Strachey told him he was going ‘to clear the air with a good-old
fashioned Marxian speech’. At which, Joad ‘sighed heavily’; he was already
regretting joining the NP. When Hodge arrived at the old timbered Elizabethan
farm he wondered, ‘What did Mosley want with politics when he owned all
this?” The weekend revealed the existence of a Fascist faction and a socialist
one. Everyone disagreed about policy and discussion degenerated into oratori-
cal wrangles. Activist Peter Winkworth spoke on the need for a revival of ‘The
Attic Spirit’ enforced by ‘absolute dictatorship’. Ctmmie was troubled, as was
_ Strachey’s wife. Nicolson spoke like a diplomat and Forgan talked ‘non-
commitally — for they are all his friends’. Box stood in the background with
‘a smile on his face’ as Young ‘squirmed impatiently’ and Mosley talked
‘soulfully of the Corporate State’. Denham, thought Jones, was ‘a charming
little place in which to agree to differ’.
Discussion took place on the proposed Morris-funded youth clubs. Joad
174 BLACKSHIRT

argued the ‘new Continental movements showed how the organisation of

Youth supplied the impetus for change’ and the necessity for ‘Youth active-
force propaganda’. Mr Papineau, Treasurer of Oxford University, wanted to
appeal to reason not rowdiness and Young was ‘uneasy lest the Party should
be forced into Hitlerism’. The NP ‘should not meet communist force with ’
fascist force’. Nicolson wanted the ‘cranky disaffection’, which he dreaded, r
kept to a minority.
Few of Mosley’s friends cared for his new associates. Georgia Sitwell
lunched with him and his ‘not very nice satellite’ Bill Allen at the Carlton. The
talk was all politics but she found ‘Tom a little disappointing as a political
figure’. He was ‘too preoccupied with Freud. It may be a joke but it goes too
far.’ Mosley had joined the Birmingham Fencing Club. He viewed fencing as
a ‘natural extension of the sense of chivalry of the cavalry officer and airman’.
It is, Richard Cohen notes, a ‘dramatic, ritualistic and individualistic sport
which obviously appealed to Mosley’s sense of theatre’. It is also strongly
embued with sexual imagery with obvious Freudiam.connotations. Strachey
complained it was ‘impossible to get him to transact important NP business
because he was so busy fencing’. Despite his injured foot, he was an impressive
fencer, being taller than his opponents. He belonged to Salle Bertrand and in
1931 was runner-up in the championship — proving himself to be ‘one of the
leading épéeists of the time’ — and for two years a member of the national
team.
Mosley joined the army and RFC officers of the London Fencing Club. He
was, however, not popular with older members, mostly Tories, who felt he
had been ‘a traitor to their party’. He formed a close partnership with Charles
de Beaumont, an upper-class antique dealer who embodied the sport. A boxer
at university and founder of the Cambridge Scout Troop in the mid-twenties,
he was in business in Italy, where he was introduced to Fascism. De Beaumont
went out on a limb in supporting Mosley, partly as a means of promoting
fencing.
The NP lacked publicity and the BBC refused it airtime. Beaverbrook said
it required ‘immense sums of money, and brilliant journalistic support, but of
course there is a conspiracy of silence in the newspapers’. On 16 June Mosley
invited Nicolson to edit an NP newspaper, Action, at £3,000 (£102,000) per
year. Max Aitken thought he was ‘a fool hitching his wagon to Mosley’s star’.
Mosley proposed setting up an evening paper and wanted Randolph Hearst,
who was friendly with Mussolini, to invest £1,500,000 (£45 m) in the project.
Nicolson disliked being ‘financed by a foreign source’. A more modest idea of
an ‘Evening Wire’ came from Robert Lynn, editor of the Northern Whig and
Empire Crusader, whose Ulster seat had been taken over by Bill Allen. Lynn
said he could gain a controlling interest in a wireless station on Sark; a scheme
Mosley pursued four years later.
 THE NEW PARTY 175

Morris agreed to back Action with £5,000 and guaranteed £1 5,000 per
annum. Mosley admitted the car maker was his chief backer and that Portal’s
efforts at raising City funds were largely unsuccessful. Only Mosley had
knowledge of the donors and kept his colleagues in the dark on finance. A
reason for secrecy was that, he told Nicolson, the Prince of Wales was a
supporter. He wanted to ‘get a line on Lady Houston, who, being a snob,
might be dazzled by the Prince’s name, and might give us money’. To collect
society donations, Sybil Colefax was employed under the ‘vain glorious
impression that “people of influence” would give the party substance’.
Nicolson considered ‘this cadging a most unpleasant necessity’.
With 25 per cent of the insured workforce on the unemployment register,
the NP’s inner circle debated its future direction. On 16 June Strachey wrote
on the NP’s progress for the Week-End Review. The NP was the ‘only alterna-
tive to waiting with MacDonald and Baldwin for immediate decline and
ultimate catastrophe’. He repeated Melville’s line that the NP was a ‘Utopian
attempt at social compromise’, and wanted to fuse left-wing domestic aims
and Commonwealth insulation in a form of National Socialism. Melville
agreed the NP was a National Socialist movement, which sought to ‘cut across
existing conceptions of Right and Left’ and ‘combine the two in an advanced
national form’. The central concept was National Planning, which Strachey
supported as ‘soundly socialist’. The class-conscious Young was not so sure.
When Mosley turned the temporary compromise of national planning into
the permanent ideology of the Corporate State, Strachey and Young rowed
with him over what this meant. The more he explained, ‘the more it seemed
to be remarkably like Capitalism: or rather it seemed to be Capitalism minus
all the things which the workers had won during the last century of struggle’.
They believed planning’s reformist rhetoric was ‘nothing but a reactionary
trap for the unwary socialist’ but were ‘willing to carry self-deception very far
in order to avoid a break which was extremely painful to both of us’. Aneurin
Bevan told Strachey he had ‘allowed himself to be subordinated to Mosley’s
superficially stronger personality’. At the time, his personal life was in turmoil.
Celia Simpson, a strong character and committed socialist, encouraged him
to break from Mosley.
At Birmingham’s Cannon Street Hotel, on 30 June, Mosley spoke of a ‘new
political psychology, a conception of national renaissance, of new manhood
and vigour’. Young was outraged and considered resigning. Three days later
Strachey addressed the youth movement and repudiated the idea of disciplined
violence to counteract disruption of meetings. Mosley angrily reprimanded
him. He would ‘allow no independence’, Nicolson discovered, and ‘claims an
almost autocratic position’.
During the summer the youth movement - ‘the iron core of the organisation’
— became an autonomous section under the control of Peter Winkworth.
176 BLACKSHIRT

However, it proved to be ‘an apple of discord’. The political section, under

Cumings, Strachey and Young, was made up of ILPers deeply suspicious of
these ‘Fascists’. Mosley had boasted that if a revolutionary situation arose,
these ‘pioneers’ would ‘come down on the supine Government and the dis-
orderly workers and knock their heads together’. Then they would impose the ’
Corporate State. He declared there could be ‘no corporate state without a —
private army’ and referred to the NP as the ‘British equivalent of the Nazi
movement’.
While the NP was embroiled in factionalism, the government was in crisis
over the rising cost of benefits. On 18 June the Anomalies Bill was introduced
to increase the Unemployment Insurance Fund from £90 million to £115
million with variations in its availability. Mosley opposed the Bill and said
the government by this measure had bought itself ‘another short lease of your
own miserable lives. You buy it at the expense of the poorest of your supporters
who voted for you in more slavish days.’ Ministers blamed their troubles on
the City, but Mosley pointed out to Snowden that ‘they did not walk out of
the Bankers’ palace until it fell about their ears’.
Strachey and Young assumed they ‘would not dream of allowing to pass
this opportunity of demonstrating that its whole policy was to oppose such
“economy” efforts to solve the economic crisis by cutting down the workers’
standard of life’. They were astonished, therefore, when Mosley wanted to vote
against ILP amendments. They subsequently learnt that he had received an
urgent telephone call from one of the NP’s City supporters ‘politely threatening
us with the loss of financial support if we acted against the Bill’.
Strachey and Young threatened resignation unless Mosley opposed cuts to
benefits. He reluctantly agreed, and Strachey and Cimmie worked with the
ILP, and those Labour MPs who had signed the Mosley manifesto, in harrying
the government. At an all-night session on 15 July Cimmie said, ‘If I had shut
my eyes in this debate I might well have believed that it was the Conservative
Government bringing in a Conservative measure.’ On 20 July Mosley sat with
the opposition, displacing Brendan Bracken from his customary seat. The
press said he had taken up ‘the most reactionary attitude of supporting drastic
economies at the expense of the unemployed’.
Kredit Anstalt’s collapse led to a crisis which sent a shock wave through
Germany, where unemployment rose to more than three million. By July,
rumours circulated that MacDonald and Baldwin were planning a ‘National
government’ to deal with the financial crisis. On 21 July Mosley and Nicolson
met at Archie Sinclair’s house with an assembly of political talent — Lloyd
George, Churchill, Bracken, Garvin, Hore-Belisha, Henry Mond and Esmond
Harmsworth - who had little confidence in the Labour government or the
Tory leadership being able to cope with the crisis. Lloyd George dangled
before them the prospect of a grand political alliance, under his leadership.
 THE NEW PARTY E77

Mosley was tempted but Churchill refused to submit to another’s leadershi

p.
Mosley concealed his presence from Strachey and Young, telling Nicolson
there would be no split until the autumn. ‘In other words he wishes to
use them
a little more before he flings them aside.’ Mosley expected to be approached
‘in
the event of a National Government being formed to cope with the crisis’ but
worried that forming a ‘National Opposition’ might ‘wreck the last hope of
orderly solutions and play staight into the hands of the communists’.
The NP’s own crisis arrived sooner than expected. On 20 July Strachey put
forward a proposal for ‘close economic relations with the Russian Govern-
ment’, which would require a break with the US. Mosley said only a Commu-
nist ‘could possibly support such an extraordinary proposition’. The policy
was rejected by Mosley, Cimmie, Forgan, Nicolson and Allen to Strachey’s
and Young’s two votes. Two days later Strachey wrote to Mosley that the
differences between them were ‘really so wide as to make argument imposs-
ible’. Young said he had been ‘aware of the dangers implicit in a movement
such as ours’, which ‘could only have been avoided by a leadership above
suspicion as far as working-class interests were concerned. You have not given
us that leadership but rather have provided grounds for the suspicion that the
party would become Hitlerist, Fascist, and ultimately anti-working class.’
On 24 July Strachey and Young, who was on the verge of a nervous
breakdown, resigned. An emotional Strachey claimed Mosley’s ‘faith has left
him. He is acquiring a Tory mind. It is a reversion to type.’ Mosley said he
was ‘pathological’. Strachey’s ‘great hirsute hands twitched neurotically as he
explained, with trembling voice, how unpathological he really was’. Mosley
admitted his description was ‘tactless’ but he frequently teased Strachey with
the suggestion that he was ‘governed by Marx from the waist up and Freud
from the waist down’. The observation, however, was accurate. Strachey left
his wife for Celia, who joined the Communist Party, something he never did.
After their marriage, Strachey and his new wife underwent a three-year course
of analysis.
Having detected Fascism’s ‘cloven hoof’, Joad feared the NP was ‘subordin-
ating intelligence to muscular bands of young men’ and also resigned. Recent
convert Osbert Sitwell told the Week-End Review he was aware Strachey’s
home was ‘in Moscow rather than in London’. Hodge thought their resig-
nations ‘looked like desertion’. Mosley told The Times that Strachey and
Young had tried ‘to force on us the dogmas and doctrines they had promised
to leave behind’. He purged the NP of ‘all associations with Socialism’.
Nicolson felt the party was ‘heading straight for Tory Socialism’, which, with
its implied synthesis of Right and Left, meant Fascism.
Mosley appeared on 1 August at a rally at the Sitwell estate at Renishaw
Park in Derbyshire. He told a crowd of 40,000 that ‘for two years we have
_had a crisis in Britain, and what had British statesmanship done about it?
178 BLACKSHIRT

Nothing at all.’ The Sitwells, wrote D. H. Lawrence, ‘taught England how to

be young’. Osbert, born in 1892, Edith and Sacheverell in 1897, grew up on
the estate feeling ‘very alien to its traditions’. The seventeenth-century laird
George Sitwell had made a fortune from coal and iron. Until he met Mosley,
Osbert said he had ‘never encountered an English politician who was not
living, in his own mind, before the year 1888’.
Osbert had been disillusioned by a war in which politicians ‘indulged in all
the treacherous democratic claptrap’ and which was ‘consummated by a mil-
lion British deaths’. He was another writer, apprehensive about a second war,
who put his feelings into print. Richard Aldington’s bitter novel Death of a
Hero appeared in 1928; a year later, R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End, a tragic
portrayal of life in the trenches, was staged; hugely successful was Erich Maria
Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Henry Williamson, destined to
become a devoted Mosleyite, revisited Ypres and in 1930 produced The
Patriot’s Progress, based on the experiences of a bank clerk invalided home
and stripped of all illusions. The idea was created that the war had been ‘a
dirty trick played by the older generation on the young and that it was
responsible for most, if not everything, that was wrong with England’.
The books were followed by popular films portraying the waste of war,
including Journey’s End and Westfront 1918, which introduced ‘talkies’ to
audiences, including Mosley, who thought Dawn Patrol the ‘best yet — over-
drawn in personal things but wonderful flying pictures’. He was moved and
depressed by it. It took a decade for the war to penetrate popular culture,
principally, Robert Graves believed, because the war’s danger had ‘filled the
blood with a kind of drug and it had taken that time before the blood was
running fairly clear again’. Distance shaped personal experiences for the war’s
survivors among whom there had been confusion and aimlessness. By 1930
the cause for which they had fought was lost and youth had lost the peace.
Believing the war had shown that ‘the nation was a more binding ideal than
class, that reason was weaker than instinct and feeling, that action was superior
to and relatively independent of thought, that spirit was stronger than flesh’,
they were tempted by Fascism.
Osbert Sitwell admired Fascism’s father figure, the poet d’Annunzio, who
founded a state that attracted ‘beautiful idealistic boys from all over Italy
to fight in its army’. The Sitwells were among those dandified writers and
intellectuals in rebellion against the old men, identified by Martin Green as
the Sonnenkinder. They idolized the young as the Supermen, were preoccupied
with style, were immature and selfish with a sexuality rooted in narcissism.
These Children of the Sun associated with the cousins of the dandy — the naif
and the rogue. The naif was the ‘sun-bronzed young man with his shirt open,
bringing the radiant candour of his gaze to bear on the mess the fathers have
made of the world’. The rogue scorned the intellectual actions of both naif
 Rolleston-on-Dove, near Burton-on-Trent. Inherited in 1879 by Mosley’s
grandfather, it was described by Diana Mosley as ‘ugly without and hideous within’

2., 3. Mosley’s mother, Katherine Maud and his grandfather, Oswald

(the model for ‘John Bull’)
 4. The seventeen-year-old
Mosley joined the 16th
Lancers on 1 October 1914
and was soon transferred to
France, where he served
with the Royal Flying Corps
as an observer

| ‘ CaS hn) y bail Nv i

Ypres in April 1915, Mosley witnessed the destruction of

the town’s celebrated Cathedral and medieval Cloth Hall. ‘The work of centuries of
genius took only hours to destroy? he lamented
6. Suave, with a slight but
suitably heroic limp from his
‘aviator’s ankle’, Mosley
already had the look,
presence and manners in
1918 to succeed, and
had a reputation as a
seducer of women

(Left) 7. Mosley married Lord

Curzon’s daughter, Cynthia
‘Cimmie’ Curzon, on 11 May
1920 in the Chapel Royal, St
James’s Palace

(Above) 8. The Mosleys went

to Portofino in Italy on
honeymoon
 9. Cimmie’s younger sister, ‘Baba’ (Lady Alexandra Curzon) married
‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, equerry to Edward, Prince of Wales, in 1925. Baba
had a crush on Mosley, which developed into a full-blown affair

to. Cimmie’s other sister,

Lady Irene Curzon (later
Lady Ravensdale), was a
popular member of the
hunting set to which
Mosley belonged

m at 5
11. Irene, Mosley’s brother Ted, who joined 12. Cimmie introduced her
the Army, and Mosley’s father, Sir Oswald, husband to Stewart Menzies
at brother John’s wedding in April 1924 to (seen here on her left, in 1919
Carol Timmis with his friend, Lionel Gable)
 (Left) 13. Mosley got into trouble with his
excessive attentions to Mrs Cole Porter

(Above) 14. Mosley, Cimmie and his

brother John at Antibes, 1927

15. Bob Boothby at Isle de

Marguerite, 1927 16. Mosley aquaplaning, 1927
 ish Gal ' ; e a Nay i Meg

17. Independent Labour Party school, 1926.

Mosley with his important collaborator, John
Strachey and Fenner Brockway (centre)

18. The Mosleys photographed at the

Labour Party Conference at Blackpool, 1927

19. Savehay Farm in the village of Denham,

Buckinghamshire was modernised for the Mosleys by 20. Labour Party leader Ramsay
the architect, Clough Williams-Ellis MacDonald at the farm
 Dll z

21. Mosley canvassing for his wife in Stoke-on-Trent during the General Election.
Irene gave her successful sister a bracelet with ‘Stoke 1929’ marked out in diamonds

22. The New Party

was intended to break
the log jam ofBritish
politics but the setting
for its summer school
at Denham in June
1931 was hardly new
or modernising

23. New Party Chiefs,

Denham, June 1931.
Left to right, W.E.D.
‘Bill’ Allen, Robert
Forgan, Cimmie,
Mosley, John Strachey
Pret cc

24. Mosley showing off his 25. Conservative MP ‘Bill’ 26. Bob Boothby advised his
body at the Lido, Venice Allen in 1927 friend against starting up his
own party. Here he is seen
with Paula Casa Maury

27. The former diplomat, journalist 28. Photographed here by Cimmie in 1931, Georgia
and diarist Harold Nicolson with Sitwell also had an affair with Mosley
another member of the Mosley’s
social circle, Zita James
 THE NEW PARTY 179

and dandy, being ‘a Tory radical in politics, and yet their effective ally against
the fathers’. Mosley was the brutal rogue, though a dandy in his ‘conscious
enjoyment of his own style and in his rebellion against responsible morality’.
He was the narcissist, obsessed with his own sexual appetite.
‘Byronic, Napoleonic, Nietzschean’, Mosley was the nearest to a political
leader the Sonnenkinder found. He briefly led a band of dandy-aesthetes — the
Sitwells, Oliver Messel and Cecil Beaton — and political naifs such as Oliver
Baldwin, and the rogues such as the young Esmond Romilly. Among the NP
circle were Empire Crusader Peter Rodd, model for ‘Basil Seal’ in Waugh’s
Put Out More Flags; frivolous dandy Hamish St Clair Erskine; naturalist and
nude sunbather Cyril Joad; and Randolph Churchill, ‘always in trouble and a
trouble to his friends’. At its head was the Prince of Wales, the youthful, blond
and pleasure-seeking royal with signs of a social conscience, who toyed with
supporting the NP.
By the time the banking crisis spread to Britain, the government was in
trouble as the Bank of England’s reserves drained away ‘in a golden haemor-
rhage’. At the begining of August 1931 bankers warned that Britain would go
over the precipice unless foreign confidence was restored by a balanced budget.
The May Committee recommended raising taxes, reducing wages and cutting
the dole by 20 per cent. Keynes condemned the proposals as ‘replete with folly
and injustice’.
Despite the sense of crisis, the Mosleys set off in August to France. On the
way, Mosley stopped at Oxford to talk to William Morris, who agreed to
make more funds available. Mosley had been approached by Forgan for
money. Having given up lucrative medical work, he suggested the NP could
ill afford to lose another MP. Mosley gave him £500 (£17,000). Peter Howard
was offered £650 a year to head the biff boys. He wrote to his fiancée, Doe
Metaxa, daughter of a Greek family in exile, that Mosley was ‘the most
unpopular person in England today. But you have to be a rather big person
-to be as hated as that. He is rather Mussolini-like, you know, when you talk
to him.’ He agreed Mosley was the ‘most vindictive hater of anyone I know’
but he would ‘never desert him while he still needed me in politics because
he really does believe he can help the British working classes and no one
else can’.
Nicolson hired for Action an ‘intelligent Jew’ named Hamlyn as general
manager, and sub-editor Noel Josephs, ‘an? embittered ILPer with an
inferiority-complex who should be able to give me the acid I require’. On
17 August he informed Mosley he had taken on as economic adviser a protégé
of Keynes, Rupert Troughton, who had published Unemployment: its Causes
and Their Remedies. He wrote that the ‘criticism of “impractical” is the
criticism which age levels against the ideas of youth, which conservatism levels
against innovation’. Nicolson worked on an NP propaganda film with shots
180 BLACKSHIRT

of the unemployed set to ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. It ‘cut to somnolent old
gentlemen sitting on front benches in parliament filmed in slow motion’.
A scene of Trafalgar Square had a jeering crowd shouting ‘England wants
Action’.
The Mosleys were joined for their holiday in Antibes by Cecil Beaton, Doris
Castlerosse, Beatrice Guinness and daughters Baby and Zita Jungman, and
Mosley’s new girlfriend, the petite Lottsie, wife of the rich Alfred Fabre-Luce
of Crédit Lyonnais. Mosley would whisk Lottsie off to Villefranche or to
Monte Carlo. Cimmie, who was pregnant with a third child, did not know
how to deal with the affair, which took place in full view of everyone. She
was happy when her husband condescended to pay her attention but was
usually in a blind rage.
With the financial crisis worsening, the government could either seek a loan
to appease American investors or go off the gold standard and default on its
obligations. The latter course was deemed unacceptable and so negotiations
opened with New York bankers for a loan, conditional on a balanced budget
and cuts in benefits. The Cabinet accepted the terms by eleven votes to nine
but it was not enough to secure the loan. On 21 August more cuts were
demanded, but the Cabinet refused. Nicolson wrote to Mosley that ‘people
may say that during the gravest crisis in present political history, you prefer
to remain upon the Mediterranean. On the other hand, I do not see what you
would do were you here at this moment, and I feel that it is more dignified to
be absent and aloof, than to be present and not consulted.’
With the Cabinet split, on 24 August the Prime Minister resigned. To
colleagues’ astonishment, on his return from Buckingham Palace MacDonald
announced he had accepted the King’s invitation to form a ‘National’ govern-
ment to implement emergency measures. Essentially a Conservative adminis-
tration, there were four Tory Ministers (Stanley Baldwin was Lord President
of the Council), two Liberals and three Labour Ministers, including Philip
Snowden as Chancellor, who announced cuts of £70 million. However,
Labour had already committed itself to £56 million, thus the National govern-
ment ‘came into existence for a task no more herculean than that of reducing
Government expenditure by £14 million’. In view of this bitter betrayal for
Labour, MacDonald was expelled from the party. G. B. Shaw wished Mosley
had waited: ‘If only he had known that MacDonald was contemplating politi-
cal suicide!’ He feared the new party was the National government, not
Mosley’s.
The joke around Westminster was that ‘poor MacDonald has had to resign
and Mosley has sent for the King’. The news only reached Mosley when he
read the following day’s papers. When H. G. Wells joined the Mosleys, ‘they
seemed not to think of anything except whether Mosley, who was going to
England next day, ought to sit on the Opposition Bench and what should be
 THE NEW PARTY 181

the colours of the Mosley party’. Cimmie remained behind and Wells observed
her drive over to the casino, where she ‘danced deplorably in public, and then
got drunk and smashed up her car driving it home’. To Irene’s horror she ‘fell
asleep at the wheel and hit the rocks on the hairpin bend’. Wells saw it as an
instance of their inability ‘to exercise self-discipline even in a time of crisis’.
Irene thought Cimmie had simply stopped caring what happened.

When he reached London on 26 August, Mosley told Nicolson ‘we should

build up rather than cut down’. It would be impossible, ‘having been the first
to preach crisis, to cease our lonely voice now that the crisis has come’. The
NP had been derailed by the decision of the new Labour leader, Arthur
Henderson, to go into opposition to its former leaders: ‘In the end even the
worm turned at the prospect of the final betrayal being demanded of it.’
Mosley believed Labour supporters would ‘no longer respond to our appeal
since Henderson and the machine have transformed the crisis into a class
conflict’. He would appeal to Fascism’s traditional target: the ‘little people,
the shopkeepers, clerks who wore a white collar under their black coats’ — the
class ‘most threatened by the economic crisis because they were not organised
as were the blue-collar workers’. They might elect a few MPs if the election
was delayed, or fail, in which case he would retire from public life for ten
years. Even then, he would be ‘no older than Bonar Law was when he first
entered politics’.
Bruce Lockhart had been in Munich and was shown around the Brown
House by Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s adviser and editor of Vélkischer Beo-
bachter. On his return on 27 August he saw Mosley, who expected the
National government would be compelled ‘to remain longer than they intend,
and without a constructive policy the revenue situation (which depends on
industry) will get steadily worse. This is when the New Party will come in.’
He admitted he had made a study of Hitlerism.
Mosley had been seeing Churchill and claimed the support of Lloyd George
and Beaverbrook, who ‘must join eventually’. On 31 August, through Ran-
dolph, Churchill approached Mosley to join him and the ‘Tory toughs’ in
opposition. Randolph spoke at the NP Club where, to loud applause, he said
‘castration was a modern remedy for ineffectives in the hygienic world of
thought. It ought to be applied to political ineffectives. It would, however, be
unnecessary in the case of Baldwin and MacDénald as they were old women
already.’
On 8 September, following Parliament’s reinstalment, Mosley gave one of
his last Commons speeches. He attacked those who believed a ‘bankers’ ramp’
had subverted the government. ‘If the Labour Party had said that it was the
banking policy of the last ten years, a policy they supported, that was respon-
sible for this situation — a policy which their Chancellor of the Exchequer
182 BLACKSHIRT

supported and which they supported him in supporting, then they would be
getting at the root facts of the present situation.’ He agreed with Douglas
Cole’s article ‘Was it a bankers’ conspiracy?’ that the crisis was a direct result
of defects in Labour thinking. He urged MPs to adopt a constructive policy
and added, in a line taken from Keynes, that he did ‘not care who does it.
I do not care so much what the policy is.’ The way out was ‘not the way of
the monk, but the way of the athlete. It is only by exertion, by a great attempt
to reorganize our industries, that this country can win through, and I venture
to suggest that the simple question before the House is whether Great Britain
is to meet its crisis lying down or standing up.’ The diehard Leo Amery
observed that Mosley had been ‘free to make the speech I should have liked
to make’.
At a Trafalgar Square rally on 14 September Mosley claimed there was ‘an
element of farce in the tragedy’ for Labour in that it had ‘every resource of
the State at its command. What happened? The great day dawned, and Labour
resigned; cleared out just when they had the realisation of their greatest wish.
What must we think of a Salvation Army which takes to its heels on the Day
of Judgment?’
By mid September a Mosley luncheon group in the Commons comprised
Amery, Jowitt, Bracken, Boothby, Hore-Belisha, Randolph Churchill and Ter-
ence O’Connor. On 16 September he attended a meeting at which Keynes said
current policy was ‘perfectly mad. We have been making in the last few weeks
as dreadful errors of policy as deluded statesmen have ever been guilty of.’ In
order to reduce unemployment he wanted more spent on ‘education, public
health and public works and as little as possible on the dole’.
Throughout September the rift widened between the NP’s political and
youth sections. Nicolson was alarmed that Glyn Williams, with his ‘extraordi-
nary flair for working-class movement and organisation’, wanted uniforms
for the youth section since they had ‘a thirst for colour and for drama’. The
‘active force’ of stewards was built up by Edward ‘Kid’ Lewis, a former
England welterweight boxing champion and Whitechapel Jew. Incongruously,
he was accompanied on his tours by the effete Sachie Sitwell.
Cecil Melville published The Truth About the New Party and suggested the
modern movements had been ‘born of a state of crisis, and depended on the
acuteness of that crisis for their success’. It was happening with Hitlerism and
Mosley believed ‘it will happen with Mosleyism’. Accused of ‘political Douglas
Fairbanksism’ and sneered at for being ‘un-English’, Mosley was determined
to create a movement that would ‘justify as qualities those very things which
his opponents stigmatised as defects’. He believed that when the country faced
a crisis as catastrophic as was the crisis of war, the English ‘will then again be
flamboyant and he is getting ready to give them a flamboyant leadership’.
However, ‘suppose this calculation on the crisis should misfire? Suppose the
 THE NEW PARTY 183

calculation should be avoided, got round, got over, in some ordinary, hum-
drum sort of way? In that case the political evocation of Romanticism would
fail. That would be the end of Mosleyism.’
On 20 September Mosley addressed 20,000 people on the Green at Glasgow.
He warned that ‘before the crisis is ended the nation will welcome more drastic
measures’. To counter the disruptive hecklers, the biff boys advanced on a
group of ‘Communists’. At which point a stone was thrown and hit Mosley
on the head. His personal bodyguard fought off the attackers but not before
three were slashed by razors. Eventually, he ‘drove away, waving his hat to
the crowd, and still smiling’. On the following day he told colleagues that ‘this
forces us to be fascist and that we no longer need hesitate to create our trained
and disciplined force’.
The National government imposed deflationary measures in order to restore
confidence in sterling but to little effect. On 21 September Snowden had to
suspend the gold standard. Hearing the news, former Labour Minister Tom
Johnston commented that ‘no one ever told us we could do that’. For Montagu
Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, it was a blow to the Bank’s
prestige and ‘the shattering of his plans for world capitalism’. He then suffered
a breakdown. There was, however, a sense of renewal as the ‘cross of iron’
was lifted, thus ending a decade of deflationary finance. Abandoning the gold
standard led to a more accommodating monetary policy and when the bank
rate fell it provided the stimulus for recovery.
On 22 September Mosley learnt that the Young Tories were ‘forcing an
Election for October’. There had been a meeting between Empire Industries
Association members — Henry Page Croft, Lord Lloyd, Sir Patrick Hannon
and Leo Amery — and Baldwin, which agreed to Tories going to the country
under MacDonald. During a discussion on fascismo, Mosley forecast a rapid
increase in Communism. Nicolson feared the ‘black-coats’ would vote
National, the workers Labour, and the Communists would ‘collar our imagin-
_ ative appeal to youth’, leaving the NP without a constituency. He wanted
Mosley to join with the National Party but predicted the Communists ‘would
win with a revolution’. The NP needed a theory and a vigorous youth move-
ment but he shied away from Fascism, which ‘unless based on class hatred,
would not make a significant enough appeal’. He supported a National Social-
ism of social reform, the organic state and disciplined planning. He described
the NP platform as ‘State capitalism’ which caught well the ‘peculiar character’
of Mosley’s national planning.
Mosley was not ready for an election. Nicolson told his wife, Vita Sackville-
West, he was ‘not optimistic about any single one of us being returned to
parliament except perhaps Cimmie’. They expected to be annihilated. They
would concentrate upon becoming a movement rather than a parliamentary
party.
184 BLACKSHIRT

Hodge recalled that Mosley seemed happiest on the platform. On

25 September at Birmingham’s Rag Market, he was protected from hooligans
by ‘half-baked college-boys out for a lark’. Mosley ‘hoped they’d have some
“fun”? and was like a ‘big sixth-form boy, the captain of his side, telling them
to go and win’. When the heckling began, Mosley jumped into the crowd with
his bodyguard, but was forced back under a barrage of chairs and bottles.
Hodge noticed a ‘flash of a smiling Mosley surveying the scene of desolation’,
before he ‘escaped through a side exit on police advice’. He blamed the chaos
on Mosley: ‘To go to speak at a meeting accompanied by a strong-arm squad
was asking for trouble.’
On 30 September Peter Howard was asked to set up provincial ‘Pioneer
Clubs’. The man behind this initiative was detective novelist Peter Cheyney,
an impulsive physical type who had been severely wounded in the war. A
journalist, he published a pro-Fascist journal for Ukrainian émigrés. During
the twenties he ran a private detective agency with retired Special Branch
Detective-Inspector Harold Brust. In the General Strike he worked with
Colonel Ralph Bingham, a British Fascisti member and co-founder of the
extreme National Fascisti, known for its provocative violence, running a depot
of the Organization for the Maintenance of Supplies. It was in this atmosphere
_of authoritarian discipline that Cheyney developed his love of policing and
Fascism. When Bingham was appointed Secretary of the Order of the Hospital
of St John of Jerusalem, Cheyney renounced his faith and became editor of its
journal, Chivalry. He was almost certainly associated with the British Fascisti.
He was a special constable but kept this ‘very secret’, perhaps because he was
an informer.
On joining the NP, Cheyney took up fencing and was tutored by Charles
de Beaumont, soon winning the Salle Paul Club épée championship. He carried
his patriotism to such extremes that he challenged to a duel ‘anyone who
sneered at Britain’. Nicolson took a violent dislike to this ‘unpleasant Jew
fascist’ who thought like ‘a gangster and talks in terms of a soap-box poli-
tician’. Despite his protests, Mosley supported Cheyney. When asked about
him he was evasive and dismissed his politics as ‘immature and unimportant’.
However, Nicolson, who did his best to persuade Mosley ‘to get rid of the
thugs’, believed Cheyney ‘sinisterly wielded power’ over policy and his ‘malign
influence and thick-eared philosophy’ influenced Mosley into seeking mastery
of the streets.
On 1 October Mosley secretly met Neville Chamberlain. The Tories were
‘anxious to get some of us in and are prepared to do a secret deal’. Election
organizer Box was invited to meet their Chief Agent to see if a bargain could
be struck. Five days later it was announced a general election would be held
on 27 October. Forgan saw John Reith about political broadcasts and it was
agreed that ‘if they were putting fifty candidates in the fold... they would
 THE NEW PARTY 185

have a claim’. The NP manifesto, ‘A National Plan for a National Crisis’, was
issued on 7 October, omitting any reference to corporatism. The party was
unclear whether or not to oppose the National government and chose to
reiterate calls to put the ‘interests of the National above those of the Party’.
In his last parliamentary speech, Mosley appealed for a planned industrial
policy. Buttressed by a meeting with Keynes, he criticized the obsession with
budget balancing — ‘deficits are the fashion nowadays. All the best countries
have deficits.’
On 8 October appeared the first of the thirteen issues of the Nicolson-edited
Action, costing 2d. The ideological content was developed through Mosley’s
front-page leader and Nicolson’s ‘Action Looks at Life’ column, which stated
man’s intelligence is “capable of creating a Modern State as organic as the
human body. A State in which all will possess their function, and in which there
will be no division and no conflict of interest.’ The means to accomplishing this
was the Corporate State — co-ordinated, co-operative and controlled. He drew
attention to the Continent and said the same phenomenon was certain to
occur in England but ‘framed to accord with the character and high experience
of this race’. Mosley wanted a movement which ‘grips and transforms every
phase and aspect of national life’. It would be one of ‘iron resolution and
reality’, cutting ‘like a sword through the knot of the past to the winning of
the modern State’.
Nicolson knew he was not suited to run a journal. Action was intellectually
subtle but journalistically amateurish. Iain Mikardo was surprised by its mixed
bag of contributors and contents: politics and economics, including a sympath-
etic account of the Soviet system; the arts and sciences; the environment; the
generation gap. Among its contributors were Christopher Isherwood, Peter
Quennell, Vita Sackville-West, Raymond Mortimer, the Sitwells and Alan
Pryce-Jones.
Pryce-Jones was assistant to J. C. Squire, editor of the London Mercury.
. His pacifist views found a platform in the journal of the Promethean Society,
whose members included W. H. Auden and Wyndham Lewis. The Twentieth
Century’s first editorial in 1931 proclaimed a scientific attitude — ‘the only
method of approach for anyone who cares more for intellectual honesty than
for party, creed, or shibboleth’. They believed a state of crisis was natural
since they had ‘never known any other’. For a brief period these poets and
writers flirted with the NP. In reviewing Audert’s The Orators, John Heyward
noted the striking images of a ‘sick England with a sick people, its industries
closed and its workers idle; its middle classes fearful and defensive, afraid of
change, afraid of life; and the young, feeling the need for action, but uncertain
and afraid, and wanting a leader’.
Looking back at this period, Auden admitted he was someone ‘near the
border of sanity, who might well, in a year or two, become a Nazi’. Peter
186 BLACKSHIRT

Quennell said it was impossible to tell if the thirties poet was ‘a Communist
or a young Hitlerite’ since the ‘prodigious melodrama of modern Europe cast
its shadow in some form on to his mind’. Mosley offered a radical solution
but within a year Auden and the Prometheans turned to the left as Mosley
proved to be too impatient to be the leader they sought. Politics was not the
area — ‘too heavily patrolled by father-figures’ — to win success.
The NP rejected Chamberlain’s offer and would accept ‘no coupons from
the National Coalition’ in the election. Nicolson warned his readers to expect
no dramatic NP successes: ‘Our day will come in 1933 . . . within a measurable
time this country will be exposed to the dangers of proletarian revolution and
massacre, starvation and collapse.’ Mosley saw the election as an opportunity
for propaganda. On 16 October Reith met with Box and agreed to a political
broadcast ‘if they had forty candidates but they only have twenty-three so
they are out’. Peter Howard agreed to stand at Merthyr — one of Labour’s
safest seats. He had not seen before the poverty of the Welsh valleys. Watching
at play children who were suffering from malnutrition, ‘in a moment, anger,
pity, humiliation, a compound of every deep feeling of the human heart rose
within me. For I saw that almost every one of these children had mis-shapen
legs or ankles.’ The indifference he experienced back in London infuriated
Howard. Nicolson admitted he was the ‘best of a fantastically bad bunch’.
London organizer Albie Smith told Hodge the other parties had ‘scooped
all the competent election agents in the country and we were left with duds’.
To his surprise, Hodge was asked to stand at Limehouse; and in Whitechapel
stood Kid Lewis, an East End legend for fighting his way up from the gutter
to fame as a boxer. ‘Yet here he was,’ recalled Joe Jacobs, ‘back in the gutter,
so far as we Communists were concerned.’ He had heard people pay tribute
to Mosley’s political ability but wondered how this could be explained, ‘other
than that he was out for cheap publicity’.
In presenting the NP as a centre party, Mosley played down corporatism
and informed The Times (18 October) he had ‘no use for Fascism or anything
else that comes from abroad’. He tried, unsuccessfully, to buy time on commer-
cial radio. The NP film, Crisis, was banned by the censor on the grounds that
shots of snoring MPs were calculated to bring Parliament into disrepute.
People were ‘urged from walls and hoardings to “‘Take Action” ’. The election
was roughly fought but it was NP meetings which were subjected to the worst
disruption. On 18 October at Birmingham, Mosley was mauled by the crowd
despite his bodyguard. Violence had been expected and the local branch had
been issued with small clubs, the size of a policeman’s baton, with instructions
only to use them if attacked.
The 15,000 crowd became restive when Mosley’s microphone went off.
When he strode into the crowd and appealed for silence, scuffles broke out
(he was accused of assaulting two men but was later acquitted). Howard
 THE NEW PARTY 187

claimed the ‘Communists tried to kill‘us with chains and bottles and I got cut
on the head just before the real fighting began. I and Mosley had just been
fighting with batons and clearing the space around the platform.’ A section
then ‘charged the platform, brandishing chairs and chair-legs, hurling bottles,
and swept all before them’. A hundred police restored order. London organizer
C. F. Kendrick was carried ‘unconscious from under the feet of the mob, where
he had fallen after being struck with a bottle’. Dozens of people received minor
injuries and Mosley emerged with lacerations. Hurrying away through the
Bull Ring, Lewis ‘pulled his hat down over his eyes and turned his coat-collar
up. Opponents, seeing Lewis’s smallness, chose to attack the boxing champion
— with the result that Cheyney and de Beaumont stood by watching until they
shook with laughter.’
On 19 October, 10,000 people turned out in Glasgow, where the crowd
ended up stoning Mosley. Jack Jones had warned that to bring bodyguards
would invite trouble. After the meeting Mosley refused to be hurried away by
car and walked back to his hotel under police guard. He ‘smiled all the way
at those who from both sides shouted “traitor” at him’.
Five days later the Manchester Guardian reported that at the Free Trade
Hall there was a microphone, but Mosley had it disconnected. ‘I hate these
machines,’ he explained. The audience was ‘stirred and finally swept off its
feet by a tornado of peroration yelled at the defiant high pitch of a tremendous
voice’. Mosley was ‘already thickly encrusted with legend. His disposition and
his face are those of a raider, a corsair; and his place in the history of these
times will be won, if at all, with the sword.’ Campaigning for the NP, James
Lees-Milne thought him a hypnotic monster. ‘He brooked no argument, would
accept no advice. He had in him the stuff of which zealots are made. The
posturing, the grimacing, the switching on and off of those gleaming teeth,
and the overall swashbuckling ... were more likely to appeal to Mayfair
flappers than to sway indigent workers. I did not think the art of coquetry
. ought to be introduced into politics.’ Beatrice Webb predicted voters would
reject the political showman and the excitement at meetings did evaporate.
A wave of patriotic fervour swept the National government into office on
27 October 1931. The Conservatives won 473 seats and the Liberal vote
virtually disappeared. It was calamitous for Labour. Four-fifths of its seats
were lost because of anti-Labour pacts which gave National parties a free run
against socialists. Labour was represented by only forty-six MPs and five
ILPers; also elected were thirteen National Labour MPs supporting Ramsay
MacDonald. The notion that the election was a form of ‘Fascist coup d’état’
was both ‘a characteristic response by Labour people to the enormity of their
defeat, and a legend that would endure for over a generation’.
The election was a disaster for the NP. Mosley obtained 10,500 votes at
Stoke but was bottom of the poll. Sellick Davies in Wales achieved 30 per cent
188 BLACKSHIRT

of the vote in a straight fight with Labour, but Kid Lewis attracted a derisory
154 votes and, like all but two of twenty-four NP candidates, lost his deposit.
The total votes cast for it were 36,377, compared with 74,824 for twenty-six
Communist candidates. With a reduction in the number of three-cornered
contests, a third party was destined to do poorly. The NP’s election organiz-
ation was ramshackle and a tactical error — based on Mosley’s delusion that
‘working-class areas would catch fire by his daring policies’ — was the targeting
of safe Labour seats. Mosley told Nicolson that ‘we have been swept away in
a hurricane of sentiment’ and that ‘our time is yet to come’.
The election re-established the two-party system, though it was disguised
by the existence of a ‘National’ coalition in which the Tories formed the
dominant element. Churchill suggested to Mosley that he stand in a by-
election, with promises to come out in his support. He decided he would wait
until the ‘reaction against the National Government assumes a more definite
shape’. In fact, he found himself ‘marooned in the loneliness of political
independence’.
NP members argued that from such defeats their Continental counterparts
had ‘returned with fresh strength to triumph over their opponents’. The identi-
fication with Hitlerism coincided with sweeping internal changes. The head-
quarters was closed, regional groups were disbanded and officials were sacked.
Action’s employees left or were sacked. Sellick Davies was discovered taking
£270 (£9,000) from the till and a candidate was found to have several aliases.
Only Box, Forgan and Howard were retained. Hodge thought there had been
one benefit from the election failure — ‘it shook off some of the blue-bottles.
The cod’s head was now a bony skull.’
The NP had been infiltrated by adventurers and crooks, and their dismissal
for incompetence and corruption heralded the destruction of its orthodox
side. The youth movement’s triumph over the political faction was symbolic
of Mosley’s rejection of electoral politics as he readopted Corporatism as the
main policy plank. The new movement ‘must differ fundamentally from the
old political parties in both ideology and organisation. It must be a movement
of youth which willingly accepts the discipline, effort and sacrifice by which
alone great executive purposes can be achieved, and by which alone the
modern state can be built.’
 dbya

The New Movement

Mosley abandoned conventional politics. An unintended result of the massive

vote for the National government was to push fringe parties to extra-
parliamentarianism and a more physical response. Harold Nicolson, who
hated the violence associated with Fascism, was fearful of the change of the
direction Mosley was taking. ‘He believes in fascism. I don’t. I loathe it,’ he
wrote on 2 November 1931.
Mosley said increased violence made it impossible to hold meetings — ‘just
as it had driven many Conservatives away from towns where the hooligan
element was particularly strong’. An ILP recruit to the NP, John Beckett, had
been convinced by his trips to Italy that ‘here was a great new conception of
civilisation’. If Fascists were ‘brutal reactionary thugs, then also they were
the finest and best informed actors I have ever met’. Following Communist
disruption of his meetings in Peckham, Beckett set up his own defence force
led by a local boxer, anticipating, his son Francis notes, ‘one of Mosley’s least
respectable initiatives’. Mosley cited the disruption at Birmingham as a key
reason why he organized Blackshirts to prevent ‘red’ violence curtailing free
speech. He would ‘not tamely submit to intimidation and ruffianism’.
‘New men came to us,’ said Mosley, ‘who were ready to fight for their
beliefs, in type the dedicated blackshirt.’ The youth movement recruited ‘splen-
did young Britons who shared a vision of national rebirth’. Herbert Hodge
heard of mysterious goings-on at King’s Road, Chelsea, where, Albie Smith
told him, graduates were ‘drilling and doing all sorts of military dags under
the orders of ex-officers’. He noted Mosley’s friendship with a ‘distinguished
general of known political and intellectual proclivities’, and another high-
ranking officer, known as ‘the British von Seeckt’. The Fascist-style youth
clubs in Greenwich and Birmingham alarmed Nicolson, who feared Mosley
shared the fantasies of Peter Cheyney and Ralph Bingham. “They really are
the devil.’ The clubs were designed to produce Spartans skilled in fencing,
boxing and public speaking. Needless to say they attracted a number of thugs
who, Mosley admitted to The Times, carried truncheons.
The young toughs were initiated into the NUPA (New Party) elite corps of
‘shock troops’. Cheyney said they would ‘learn realism as opposed to bunk,
190 BLACKSHIRT

vibrant nationalism as opposed to sloppy internationalism, discipline as

opposed to the post-war ideal of sloth, and a comradeship unknown to the
Red “comrades” of the sickly sickle’. The aim was to establish national
‘NUPA-Shock-Propaganda Controls’ by 1933 and a ‘Political-Shock-Youth
Movement’ by 1935. Newspapers were alarmed: HITLERIAN STORM TROOPS
and MOSLEY’s THUGS ran the headlines. Before long, the Communists and
NUPA were inter-reliant and constituted the main audience at the other’s
meetings, with the result that a tradition was born.
Mosley intended to ‘concentrate on clubs and cells within clubs: a new move-
ment cannot be made within the frame of a parliamentary party’. Italy was the
primary source of the new faith, but he also turned to Germany for inspiration.
On 3 December Bruce Lockhart met with Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg,
who was in London, and then discussed the situation in Germany with Mosley,
who ‘talked a great deal about the necessity for militant organisation against
Communism’, since ‘the man who could control the streets would win’. On
to December an Action editorial praised Hitler’s achievement. The new
direction was evident from talks to NUPA recruits — ‘Hitler’s nephew on Hitler’.
Addressing socialists on 13 December, Keynes said Labour had been ‘out
of sympathy with those who have had new notions of what is economically
sound . .. such as Lloyd George or Oswald Mosley or myself’. Because of his
association with Mosley, Keynes was viewed with suspicion by Labour, which
had set its face against his strategy of demand management through active
monetary policy and public investment to achieve full employment. It was
a ‘dangerous illusion’ as only socialist planning could end the ‘anarchy of
unregulated private enterprise’. Keynes sympathized with the National govern-
ment and told Mosley there could be prosperity in ten years, though the
‘transition between a battered capitalism and the organised State would be
slow and bitter’. However, he ‘portends no disasters’: Mosley disagreed.
The only protection against Communism was the Corporate State, which
was the ‘conception of a society working with the precision and the harmony
of a human body. Every interest and every individual is subordinate to the
overriding purpose of the nation.’ This was National Socialism — ‘the subordi-
nation of the individual to the State’. In the Corporate State, Action said, ‘if
something is not in harmony with this then it must be a microbe, a virus
harmful to the body’. It was not clear what would happen in the event that
‘something’ was not in harmony but reducing enemies to the level of a virus
was common among anti-Semites. NP philosophy contained elements of
eugenics with the desire to protect the British race through contraception,
abortion and sterilization. Nicolson wondered why the ‘most civilised race on
earth was retrograde in matters which vitally affect the future of the race’ and
wanted a Royal Commission of Eugenics appointed to “gaze with virile eyes
upon the implications of such a decision’.
 THE NEW MOVEMENT I9I

Action was losing £340 (£11,000) per week and its thirteenth issue on
31 December was its last before it was amalgamated with the Saturday Review,
which published Mosley’s articles. Mosley admitted they had failed ‘both as
a party and as a paper to arouse the people to any sense of their necessities’.
If normality returned, Britain would be subject to a ‘slow and almost impercep-
tible decline’, but he had no intention of allowing that to happen. ‘Better the
great adventure, better the great attempt for England’s sake, better defeat,
disaster, better far the end of that trivial thing called a political career than
strutting and posturing on the stage of Little England, amid the scenery of
decadence, until history writes of us the contemptuous postscript: “These were
the men to whom was entrusted the Empire of Great Britain, and whose
idleness, ignorance, and cowardice left it a Spain.” We shall win; or at least
we shall return upon our shields.’
Mosley’s funding of the NP and Cimmie’s legal costs involving the Leiter
estate left them with large overdrafts and forced them to let out Savehay Farm
and Smith Square. Cimmie and the children moved into a flat in Ebury Street.
He was desperate for allies but industrialists were appeased by the National
government’s ditching of the gold standard and the introduction of protection-
ism, and united behind its promise of attacking socialism. On 8 December
NUPA’s Christopher Hobhouse learnt that Mosley wanted money from the
Fascists and Nazis. Three days later Mosley revealed that Rothermere wished
‘to place the whole of the Harmsworth Press at his disposal’; however, he
wanted to ‘lie low for a bit but would be grateful for it later’. Cimmie detested
Rothermere, who accelerated Mosley’s drift towards Fascism, arranging an
introduction to Mussolini. She disassociated herself from Fascist tendencies
and contemplated putting a notice to that effect in The Times. _
Rothermere followed closely the career of Mussolini, whose significance
had been grasped by the Mail’s correspondent in Rome, Sir Percival Phillips,
who honoured him in his 1923 book, The Red Dragon and the Black Shirts:
How Fascist Italy found her Soul. The paper portrayed him as ‘the Napoleon
of modern times, a leader who worked hard, had given up alcohol and smok-
ing, and sacrificed his social life’.
On 30 December Bruce Lockhart heard that an NP delegation was off to
Rome. ‘Tom is taking his épées with him and hopes to fence his way into
Mussolini’s presence.’ Bill Allen went, as did Esmond Harmsworth, who
later joined Mosley in Berlin. Esmond was witty and attractive but not a
commanding figure such as Rothermere. A former Tory MP, he had not
sought re-election in 1929, in order to chair the Mail group. Obsessed with
his wealth, Rothermere had stepped down as he did not want to lose his
dividends in the face of new cut-throat competition.
The group studied the ‘new political forces born of crisis, conducted by youth
and inspired by completely new ideas of economic and political organisation’.
192 BLACKSHIRT

They wanted to be prepared for ‘when this country comes to pass through great
events’. In fact, Nicolson hoped Mosley would be discouraged by witnessing
Fascism at first hand. They arrived in Rome on 2 January 1932 and were
joined by Christopher Hobhouse, who arrived from Munich, ‘full of Hitler’.
Aged twenty-one, Hobhouse was the son of a mentally unstable Canon of
Winchester and a mother who had died young. A reckless character, he was
another Oxford graduate seduced by Nicolson. Hobhouse said the Nazis
believed they had ‘tried to do things too much on the grand. We should have
begun in the alleys.’ The following day a worried Nicolson wrote to his wife
that ‘the Fuhrer contends that we British hitlerites are trying to do things like
gentlemen. We must be harsh, violent and provocative.’ Mosley gave Vita ‘the
creeps’.
The Italians treated Mosley with the utmost deference — regarding him as a
‘duce in erba’. Lavoro Fascisto’s editor told them about the Fascist electoral
system, which impressed them as ‘not electoral at all’. On 5 January Mosley
said the future lay with NUPA, which would correspond to the Nazis’ SS or
Schutzstaffel organization. Hobhouse argued it should be working-class, while
Nicolson insisted it be constitutional. Mosley thought they might succeed with
the backing of Rothermere. Nicolson handed him a copy of a State-controlled
newspaper devoted to Mussolini. Mosley ‘grinned with delight, slapped his
leg and joked: “I’d like to make Max [Beaverbrook] produce a paper like
that.””’
The British ambassador, Sir Ronald Graham, arranged an interview with
Mussolini. While they waited, they met Princess Jane di San Faustino, who
addressed a delighted Mosley as the ‘beautiful boy’. He was amused when a
guest ‘asked if I was still a Bolshevik!’ He talked to Prince Philip of Hesse,
nephew of Kaiser Wilhelm II, married to Mafalda of Savoy, daughter of Italy’s
King. Hesse enthusiastically supported Hitler’s hopes for a German-Italian
alliance and became a key intermediary between the Fiihrer and Mussolini.
On 6 January the group spoke with Mussolini’s Party Secretary Achille Starace,
known for his vanity and mindless loyalty, and toured the Pontine marshes and
land-reclamation schemes. When queried about opposition, Starace shrugged:
‘We do not understand! We believe in solidarieta.’ Mosley informed Cimmie
that the State’s powers were enormous and that Corporatism ‘interferes
immediately with inefficient ownership and management’. She wanted to know
about the condition of the workers.
State intervention through public works — housing, reclamation and roads
~ was impressive but assistance to industry was unsuccessful and the Corporate
State achieved little. The economy was depressed, industry was in recession
and growth was lower than in all other European countries. The million
unemployed were controlled by ‘brutal repression just as those in work were
disciplined by fierce paternalism’. Mussolini’s policies were a mixture of self-
 THE NEW MOVEMENT 193

advertisement and opportunism, and failed to make Italy self-sufficient. Nicol-

son was shocked that Mosley was impressed by Fascism. He cannot ‘keep his
mind off shock troops, the arrest of MacDonald and Thomas, their internment
on the Isle of Wight, and the roll of drums around Westminster. He is a
romantic. That is a great failing.’ Certainly, Mosley had an image of himself
as the self-created hero. In The Holy Terror, H. G. Wells described him as a
‘Byron without the limp’.
On 7 January Mosley met Mussolini at the Palazzo Venezia. He was received
in the fifteenth-century Hall of the Mappamondo, with its first globe of the
world. They talked in French until the dictator insisted on speaking in poor
English. ‘No one who knew him could deny his charm or sense of humour,’
Mosley recalled. ‘He had the quickest and clearest mind of any statesman I
have met except, possibly, Lloyd George.’ He was an ‘Elizabethan swash-
buckler’, who liked Wagner, read Byron and Nietzsche, and shared with
Mosley an interest in Caesar.
Mussolini was, his biographer R. J. B. Bosworth concluded, ‘no more than
an ambitious pseudo-intellectual from the provinces who convinced others,
including many foreign observers, that he was a supreme leader who could
lead Italy through a forced process of modernisation into top nation status’.
Mosley reinforced Mussolini’s inflated view of his standing in the world and
the belief that the measures taken in Italy could be turned into ‘a coherent
political doctrine of universal validity’. He had previously pleased British
Conservatives by stating that ‘fascism is not an article for export’ but now
wanted to develop it as part of Europe’s rejuvenation.
Mussolini invited Mosley to stand with him during a Fascist parade. In
public, he looked like a silent screen villain but he governed by terror, sup-
pressing civil liberties, banning trade unions and imprisoning people without
trial. Nicolson was appalled and refused to appear in public with the murderer
of Matteotti. He quarrelled with Mosley, packed his bags and left Rome.
Mosley travelled on to Munich to study Nazism. He was advised by Boothby,
who lectured in Germany on the economic crisis. Boothby’s friend was ‘Putzi’
Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s personal private secretary and court jester, who intro-
duced him to the Nazi leader, who read his speeches with interest. Nothing is
known about Mosley’s visit.
On 13 January, in London, Nicolson was visited by Cimmie, who was
pregnant and in poor health. Her relationship with her husband was ‘wretched’
and had rendered her ‘miserable, angry and confused’. She said she loathed
Fascism. Five days later Mosley returned, buoyed by Mussolini’s advice to
call himself a Fascist. He hoped in the autumn to rope in Rothermere but
feared he could not be kept ‘on ice for so long, and that we may be forced to
do something violent in the spring’.
Hitler announced he was a candidate for the presidency on 22 January
194 BLACKSHIRT

1932. In the Evening Standard Boothby said Hitler had ‘youth, abundant
vitality, and passion’, and that ‘deeply felt passion retains the power to move
men to heroic action and painful sacrifice’. On the same day Nicolson and
Hobhouse arrived in Berlin on a fact-finding mission, even though the former
felt the Nazis had been ‘a catastrophe’. He wrote to Vita that he had learnt
that if Hitler came to power ‘he will get rid of all the Jews’. Nicolson was an
upper-class anti-Semite with attitudes rooted in his reaction against Bolshevism
and was pro-Zionist because it removed Jews from the country. He was
appalled by Nazi methods but admitted he ‘disliked Jews’. Nicolson spent
time in a debauched tour of Berlin nightclubs after meeting Peter Rodd and
the bisexual Tom Mitford. ‘Everyone looked hungry, with eyes like wolves,
and Hitler was the sole topic of conversation.’
The NP had East End Jewish ex-servicemen members, who met in a Jewish-
owned property in Bow. They marched with the NP because they were afraid
of being portrayed as unpatriotic. Philip Sylvester, father of the art critic
David, was a member. A Russian émigré with an antique shop in Chancery
Lane, Philip was a prominent Zionist, who preferred gentiles as friends and
invited leading speakers to his synagogue for debate. He did express disquiet
over NP policy and sought from Mosley ‘reassurances that the movement was
not anti-Semitic’.
At the beginning of 1932 Kid Lewis — born Solomon Mendeloff — visited
Mosley with his son, Morton, with a similar request. Mosley sat at his desk
flanked by brown-shirted bodyguards who gave the Fascist salute. When Lewis
demanded to know if he was anti-Semitic, Mosley smiled at his naivety and
replied, ‘Yes.’ At which point Lewis allegedly ‘struck an open hand across
Mosley’s face, sending him and his chair crashing against the wall’. Nicolson
told Mosley an openly anti-Semitic movement would be counter-productive,
in terms of converting public opinion, because of Britain’s underlying liberal
culture.
Rothermere gave Mosley space in the Mail on 1 February to outline the
‘new psychology’. With Mussolini, ‘Every moment possible is wrung from
time; the mind is hard, concentrated, direct — in a word, ““Modern”.’ The
secretive King’s Road club became the core of the new movement. Hodge
thought it ‘girl-guidish on the surface’ but there was the ‘urge of elderly leaders
to achieve power at any price’. He disliked what he saw and left the NP. Fired
up by the trip to Italy, Mosley set about turning NUPA into a ‘Union of
Fascists’ and searched for allies in the obscure world of Fascist groups. Robert
Forgan approached the Imperial Fascist League (IFL) and the British Fascists
(BF) with a proposal that they accept Mosley as leader and merge with
the NP. ;
These Fascist parties recruited from the ranks of the British Fascisti, which
had recalled the jingoism of Chamberlain’s social imperialist campaign and
 THE NEW MOVEMENT 195

adopted similar nationalist beliefs and use of anti-Semitism. Before the First
World War, politicians had faced militant action by suffragettes, trade union-
ists and Ulster Unionists, while diehards bent on national regeneration revolted
against the liberal State. They praised men of action and supported a militancy
which ‘shaded off imperceptibly into a cult of violence’. A leading figure was
Henry Page Croft, whose National Party, created in 1917, campaigned for
the organic State, in which citizens would work to end unemployment and
poverty. In his call for a joint council of employers and employees, and policies
of a minimum wage, profit-sharing and Imperial Preference, one glimpses a
‘body of opinion which foreshadowed 1930s fascism’.
Croft countered the idea of workers’ revolution with ‘national socialism’.
His Nietzschean socialism of the Right idealized a nation threatened by ‘alien’
influences. His backing of anti-alien laws owed much to wartime anti-German
and anti-Jewish riots instigated by the thugs of the Anti-German Union whose
founder, Sir George Makgill, alleged that a ‘hidden hand’ of German Jews
controlled events. His network of spies investigated disloyal elements, reports
of which went to MIS Director-General Sir Vernon Kell. At the war’s end the
AGU was transformed into the British Empire Union, with funds from William
Morris — Mosley’s principal backer. Makgill’s son, Sir Donald, became a BUF
member and his wife headed its women’s unit. Croft’s sister also became a
Blackshirt.
Croft lacked magnetism and his National Party was wiped out at the 1918
general election. Industrial unrest resumed post-war as workers tried to pre-
serve wartime gains. The Labour Party’s growth and the emergence of the
Communist Party unnerved employers, who turned to Makgill, who set up
the Industrial Intelligence Board (IIB) to keep them abreast of unrest. It
supplied intelligence to Lieutenant-Colonel John Carter, a former senior MI5
officer responsible for the Special Branch. Makgill recruited ex-officers
to launch assaults on strikers. These ‘gentleman soldiers’, defending ‘Old
England’ from Jews and Bolsheviks, figured prominently in post-war fiction.
Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond (1920) battled “Bolsheviks, Anarchists,
members of the Do-no-work-and-have-all-the-money Brigade’, who organized
industrial unrest by ‘using the tub-thumping Bolshies as tools’, so that Jewish
financiers could make fortunes. Mosley conformed to the stereotypical Sapper
hero who had been in France where ‘the salt of the earth went to Play the
Great Game’. Captain Drummond was the decefit Englishman who believed
the working classes needed gentleman sportsmen to lead them against the
Communists. In The Black Gang (1922) Drummond’s vigilante squad give
the Bolshevik Jews ‘a taste of their own medicine — a taste of the whip’.
Virginia Woolf observed that strikes ‘broke in to our life more than the war
did’. Fear of revolution hung over society and thrust ‘itself into consciousness
whenever the people came out on to the streets en masse’. The threat of general
196 BLACKSHIRT

strikes in 1920-21 was crucial in the development of Fascist groups. Croft

used paramilitaries to disrupt strikes and promoted the Corporate State as a
way of eliminating class and industrial confrontation. His ideas were dissemi-
nated by currency crank Arthur Kitson in the Age of Plenty (later the pro-
Mosley New Political Economics journal). The National Party had the
elements of a Fascist movement and Croft compared his failed effort with
Mosley’s: both were ‘tilting at windmills’.
The National Party was absorbed in 1922 into a wider movement headed
by the Duke of Northumberland, an influential diehard figure with MIS
connections. He established the Patriot, which detailed the conspiracy against
the Empire. Anti-Communism transformed his racialism into anti-Semitism,
largely by way of Nesta Webster, wife of a police official from an Anglo-Indian
family. As the daughter of a bank director, it was ironic that she dedicated
her life to exposing the conspiracy of international finance. Her writings
influenced Churchill, Lord Sydenham, Henry Hamilton Beamish, founder of
the Britons Publishing Society, A. K. Chesterton, senior BUF propagandist,
and Arnold Leese, leader of the Imperial Fascist League.
The sense of impending crisis and the example of Mussolini were the
motivating factors in Northumberland’s creation of the British Fascisti (BF).
‘All those brutal attacks on Christianity, individual liberty, patriotism and
loyalty to the throne,’ he warned, ‘under which — but for the coming of Fascism
— Italian civilization had perished, are to be reproduced here in Britain in
1923.’ In May, twenty-six-year-old Miss Rotha Lintorn-Orman asked for
recruits in the Patriot, whose offices housed the BF headquarters. She had
served in a volunteer ambulance corps founded by her mother, who provided
funds of £50,000 (£1.25 m). Lintorn-Orman shared premises in Great Russell
Street with the Partito Nazionale Fascista Italiano who marched alongside
their BF counterparts. The BF, however, was not truly Fascist. Members, who
wore black handkerchiefs in their top pockets, were card-carrying Conserva-
tives, with a “Thatcherite’ agenda of secret ballots in trade unions, abolition
of picketing, consumption of Empire goods, State economy, promoting
agriculture, suppression of Communist Sunday schools and anti-alienism.
According to its President, Brigadier-General R. B. D. Blakeney, the BF
would, in ‘the spirit of intelligent patriotism’, prevent the ‘swarms from the
slums’ being used by Bolsheviks through its paramilitary force maintaining
vital public services in the event of a general strike. Military and upper-middle-
class members joined from the Anti-Socialist Union with which it co-operated
in anti-Communist activities. Propaganda written by Nestor Webster pushed
Empire co-operation and social reform in a manner similar to Mosley. Express
editor Ralph Blumenfeld was one ASU supporter who flirted with Fascism, as
did Sir George Makgill, whose contact with the BF was future Tory MP John
Baker White.
 THE NEW MOVEMENT 197
White sat on the BF’s Fascisti Grand Council as its first Intelligence Chief.
Running Section D of Makgill’s IIB, he investigated ‘subversion, communism,
and the international traffic in drugs and women’. He was in regular contact
with MIS’s Brigadier Jasper Harker — an example of the alignment between
Fascism’s anti-Communism and MIS5’s counter-subversion work. A branch of
the War Office staffed by army officers, MIS duties included detecting espion-
age and seditious movements directed against the armed forces. Its funding
was drawn from the Secret Service fund administered by the Foreign Office’s
Permanent Under-Secretary of State. Because MI5’s work was confined to
British territory, enquiries against ‘suspicious individuals and subversive politi-
cal movements’ abroad were carried out by MI6, using agents run by Carter’s
SB unit.
Makgill’s leading operative in Liverpool was the BEU’s James McGuirk
Hughes, who had a gift for intelligence work against left-wing groups. Under
the pseudonym ‘P. G. Taylor’, he later ran the BUF’s Department Z. Born
to Katherine McGuirk and tram owner Arthur Hughes, he was granted a
commission in the RFC. In 1920, working as a political organizer, he married
Valerie Taylor Tahan, whose father was connected to shipping. BUF member
Alex Miles said Hughes boasted he had been ‘expelled from Soviet Russia for
espionage and from his membership of the CPGB for the same purpose’. His
‘Special Propaganda Section’ was financed by Cunard, to whom he provided
a blacklisting service. His infiltration agents obtained plans on strikes and
undertook agent provocateur activities on behalf of the BF. During 1924, in
a ‘severe blow to the Reds’, he burgled the headquarters of the International
of Labour Unions and the Minority Movement. Hughes claimed the help of
Scotland Yard and received funds from SB liaison officer John Carter.
One of White’s agents was Maxwell Knight, later responsible for MI5’s
infiltration of Mosley’s BUF. That he served as BF Director of Intelligence
(1924-7) was later confirmed by BF member and BUF Director-General
Neil Francis Hawkins. Knight was responsible for the paramilitary units,
counter-espionage and intelligence gathering, and establishing Fascist cells in
trade unions. A colleague was William Joyce, with whom he shared a girlfriend,
Hazel Barr, a member of the BEU.
Born in New York, Joyce wasa naturalized American citizen. In 1909 his
family returned to Ireland, where they rented land from Lord Clanmorris (his
son John Bingham became an MIS officer in Knight’s section). Brought up as
an ‘extreme Conservative of strong Imperialistic ideals’ with an inflated sense
of patriotism, he grew up in a world of feud and betrayal. He elevated his
work as a fifteen-year-old informer for the Black and Tans to ‘service with the
regular forces of the Crown in an intelligence capacity against the Irish guer-
rillas’. Chillingly, a teacher predicted he would ‘either do something very great
in the world or he will finish on the end of a rope’. In 1922 the family moved to
198 BLACKSHIRT

England and he enrolled in the University of London’s Officer Training Corps.

A year later he started an English Language course at Birkbeck College and
became president of its Conservative society, working as a volunteer for Lord
Howe, Lord Curzon’s son.
In January 1924 the seventeen-year-old Joyce joined the ‘K’ society, a
shadowy group of BF working-class thugs who battled with Communists.
They eventually gained the upper hand and, White claimed, ‘forced the Com-
munist Party to abandon much of its militant activity, such as breaking up
constitutional meetings by force, denying its opponents free speech’. This is
what Mosley hoped to achieve. While protecting Jewish Tory candidate Jack
Lazarus during the 1924 general election, Joyce was razored by a ‘Jewish
Communist’. The Mail featured his photograph after the attack, with the
caption ‘Victim of Hooliganism’. With a scar running from his right ear to his
mouth, Joyce became a youthful hero of British Fascism.
In 1924 the BF was renamed the British Fascists to avoid the charge that it
owed loyalty to Italy. Membership was estimated at 100,000, with the
Women’s Units accounting for a sixth of the total. This included ex-suffragette
Mary Allen, who created the Women’s Police Auxiliary and went on to become
a Mosleyite. She was part of an upper-class lesbian subculture among militant
women’s groups on the extreme right.
Knight’s section became notorious as a result of its operations, which
prompted newspapers to suggest the BF was a more serious menace than the
Communists. The kidnapping in March 1925 of Harry Pollitt, Secretary of
the National Minority Movement, caused outrage. Despite this, Knight was
invited to an Intelligence Persons’ Club dinner hosted by Vernon Kell at the
Hyde Park Hotel and was asked to join a reserve of intelligence officers in
case of a national emergency. When the BF began recruiting in military circles,
the Army Council prohibited serving personnel from joining any Fascist body
to prevent it from exploiting its military associations. Similar fears were
expressed when Mosley and ‘P. G. Taylor’ planned to set up Fascist ‘cells’ in
the armed forces.
With its army-style units designed to organize transport and communi-
cations in an emergency, the BF provided a model for the semi-official Organiz-
ation for the Maintenance of Supplies (OMS) but the government was hostile
to BF offers to provide volunteers for the strike-breaking OMS. Having
previously turned a blind eye to BF activities, Home Secretary Joynson-Hicks
threatened to withdraw support for the OMS if the BF request was accepted.
The Home Office portrayed the BF as an eccentric movement surviving on the
resources of Lintorn-Orman, who was dependent on alcohol and drugs. ‘Jix’
objected to the BF’s vague commitment to corporatism and Fascism, and
requested it dismantle its paramilitary units, which was accepted by most
members when the General Strike erupted.
 THE NEW MOVEMENT 199
A rival National Fascisti was formed by disaffected members. One defector
was Colonel Bingham, an important influence on Mosley’s thinking on Fas-
cism, and Arnold Leese, who reacted against BF policy of allowing Jewish
members. The NF was a small, highly visible group of militant blackshirts,
inspired by Mussolini and advocates of the Corporate State. The NF ran a
boxing and fencing club to train members for direct action. However, it
quickly dissolved following public ridicule of its militarism, which included
parading with drawn swords. NF members later formed an East End BUF
branch in Bow.
The failure of the General Strike dissipated the threat of revolution and,
with the Communist Party in decline, the BF was left without a cause. Diehards
such as Croft subsequently used the BF’s ‘Q’ divisions of ‘able bodied men of
pure British race’ to steward meetings. They were led by an officer bearing a
Union Jack, who took the platform salute as the speaker passed through. In a
manner copied by Mosley, hecklers were removed by BF stewards placed
throughout the halls.
In the 1929 General Election the BF proclaimed the solution to national
bankruptcy was a ‘man of great patriotism’, who would impose tariffs, cut
expenditure and institute a State lottery. The BF, however, was soon splitting
into factions. One centred on the North Riding’s Lady Downe and the director
of the Children’s Clubs, Lady Sydenham. A second sought a Fascist ideology
and was tied to the British Institute in Florence and its director, Captain
Harold Goad, who had been on the first Fascist march in London, and James
Strachey Barnes of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. In spring 1923
the Institute moved into the Palazzo Antinori and Goad worked hand-in-glove
with the Fascists. Like Mosley, he believed the guilds contained elements of
Fascism and his books, What is Fascism? and The Making of the Corporate
State, transposed Italian principles into the British experience.
A relation of John Strachey, Barnes was brought up in Italy and converted
to Catholicism. An RFC pilot, post-war he served under Harold Nicolson as
an expert on Albania and became a friend of Mussolini. Barnes said Fascism
would ‘create harmony in the universe by transcending the decadence of
western society’. In 1927 he became Secretary of the Lausanne-based Centre
International d’Etudes sur le Fascisme (CINEF). A year later he published
The Universal Aspects of Fascism, with a foreword by Mussolini, and agitated
for a Fascist international to promote corporatism and European union. On
27 October 1930 Mussolini acclaimed Fascism as a ‘universal phenomenon’.
From this moment, wrote Dino Grandi, later ambassador in London, Musso-
lini ‘tried to help the “grotesque” imitation of fascism abroad’, including the
‘ambitious Mosley’.
Barnes eulogized Fascism in a volume for the 1931 Everyman Home Library
and criticized the BF for its lack of ideology. It did subsequently call for
200 BLACKSHIRT

corporations and attempted — possibly at Mosley’s instigation — to co-ordinate

activists into a single body. In May the BF, Unity Band, Legion of Loyalists,
Kensington Fascists and Imperial Fascists called for the abolition of the ‘system
of parliamentary party government’. The BF co-operated with the National
Citizens’ Union (NCU), whose Vice-President, Esmond Harmsworth,
employed the ‘Q’ divisions to steward its ‘Hands Off Our Empire’ crusade.
The BF colour guard at the Croft-organized Albert Hall rally was led by
Francis Hawkins, formerly of the OMS. At the same time, Rothermere’s
United Empire Party affiliated with the Unity Band, a group of anti-Semitic
Christians. BF members were anti-Semitic — of the ‘mild, doctrinaire type
which excludes Jews from golf clubs’ — but it was only sanctioned as official
policy after Mosley’s approach.
Maxwell Knight resigned from the BF in 1931 to join MI5, where he
recruited agents to penetrate the Communist Party. Hawkins went to a meeting
at the War Office where Knight revealed he was assisting the BF’s anti-
Communist work. At the same’ time Knight sounded out Joyce ‘on whether
he would go to Germany as a British agent, become naturalised and join the
Nazi Party’. That he ran Joyce was confirmed by the latter’s brother, Quentin,
who was separated from fellow internees in 1940 because he knew of his
interrogator’s Fascist past.
Graduating with a first-class honours degree from London University, Joyce
married Hazel Barr. He joined the Junior Imperial League as a speaker in
Chelsea.He avoided expressing his anti-Semitic feelings among the upper
classes, who were ‘so intermarried with Jewish grandees that half of them
were half-Jewish themselves’. He befriended solicitor Captain Charles Lewis
(later editor of the BUF’s Blackshirt newspaper) and hoped to become an MP.
He was not, however, liked and when it was discovered he had seduced one
of his pupils and wanted a divorce to marry her, moral pressure was brought
to bear and he left the ‘Imps’ just before the National government was formed.
Rebuffing MIS’s approach, Joyce took up psychology at King’s College.
Knight noted the emergence of ‘a natural aptitude for intrigue and an
abhorrence of compromise’.
Knight later used his BF connections in operations against Mosley. Hawk-
ins’s ex-Communist father-in-law, Arnold Bristol, was recruited and his
brother-in-law also spied on the BUF. While Knight was sympathetic to an
anti-Communist version of Fascism, he was antagonistic to German Nazism;
it was a common prejudice on the extreme right. However, it raises the issue
of Joyce’s role within the BUF. Was his extremism explained by his action as
an agent provocateur?
Mosley met with Hawkins of the BF’s Grand Council. A short, tubby
salesman of surgical instruments and lineal descendant of the Elizabethan
sailor, he attended several NP meetings. His political imagination was limited
 THE NEW MOVEMENT 201

to the idea that ‘the country needed tidy, orderly administration to replace the
confusions of democracy’ but he had been impressed by Mosley’s intention to
achieve power speedily and introduce a Corporate State, and recommended
acceptance of Mosley’s terms.

Mosley’s personal life was at the time undergoing a major upheaval. On

28 February, at the twenty-first birthday party of Barbara St John Hutchinson
— soon to marry Victor Rothschild — he sat next to Diana Guinness. Tall, slim
and blue-eyed, the beautiful twenty-one-year-old knew of his reputation as a
lady killer. The two discussed politics all through dinner but she had decided
she had met her fate. They began an affair, which neither bothered to keep
secret. From that first encounter she followed him ‘absolutely blindly’; fell
wildly in love and ‘knew it would never end, except with death’.
The Hon. Diana Freeman-Mitford was born on tro June 1910, the fourth
child of seven born to Sydney and David Mitford, Lord and Lady Redesdale.
The ‘unconventional personality of their father and the toughness needed to
survive the bullying of the eldest sister, Nancy, had honed a personality with
a core of steel’. Already a star, at eighteen she married the Hon. Bryan
Guinness, the rich poet-heir to Lord Moyne. His father was Colonel Walter
Guinness, Minister of Agriculture and brother of the chairman of the Guinness
brewery. James Lees-Milne said Diana was ‘a goddess, more perfect, more
celestial than Botticelli’s sea-borne Venus’. An infatuated Evelyn Waugh, who
dedicated his 1929 novel, Vile Bodies, to her, thought her beauty ‘ran through
the room like a peal of bells’.
The couple had two children, Jonathan and Desmond. In summer 1930,
when boredom ‘left her longing for the metropolitan pleasures’, Diana
returned to London, determined to be ‘unlike anybody else’. She was intelligent
and witty, and quickly made an impact.on the small, close-knit London society.
Her house in Buckingham Street, wrote James Knox, became a ‘haven for her
husband’s most amusing friends’, notably Waugh, who was in love with her,
the homosexual writer Robert Byron, the poet John Betjeman, the Anglo-
American Brian Howard and Harold Acton. Through such friends she enjoyed
the intellectual company she craved. Diana was designated to take over the
leadership of London society from Lady Cunard, who called her ‘Golden
Corn’ and treated her as a surrogate daughter.
Vaguely pro-Liberal, Diana admired Lloyd George. She was anti-Tory and
would not vote for her father-in-law. Mosley was not her ‘genre. None of my
other friends was the least bit like him.’ But she did have a tendency to
hero-worship and welcomed ‘a single, strong leader who would accomplish
wonderful things’. Mosley was sure of himself: ‘He knew what to do to solve
the economic disaster we were living through; he was certain he could cure
employment. Lucid, logical, forceful and persuasive, he soon convinced me.’
202 BLACKSHIRT

Her son Jonathan suggested, ‘It was the passion of Juliet and the conversion
of St Paul; emotion and conviction were inseparable.’
Cimmie had been unwell for months, suffering from fainting spells. On
8 March Nicolson learnt she had ‘kidney trouble’ and there was concern she
might lose the baby. Throughout the spring, Georgia Sitwell clung to her
position as Mosley’s chief mistress as his relationship with Diana blossomed.
The Guinnesses moved to Cheyne Walk, to a house which had belonged to
the American artist James Whistler. Diana’s social life was taken up with
endless parties and new social friends were added, including eccentric
composer Lord Berners, surrealist Edward James and dancer Tilly Losch, with
whom Diana’s brother, Tom Mitford, was in love. However, this was not
enough for Diana. When Mosley said she could help him achieve his dreams,
she felt she had been enlisted in a crusade. In Mosley, Lees-Milne observed,
Diana ‘found her hero, the man of her dreams. His cause became her cause
and she subordinated everything to his dynamic interests.’ Randolph Churchill
remarked that she had ‘no fundamental moral sense’. She rarely did anything
wrong, but ‘did not actually see anything wrong in sin’. Diana became a
political animal with a potential for extremism.

In March 1932 Mosley wrote in the Political Quarterly that the crisis would
produce ‘new parties, new types and new forces’. He intended to meet the
crisis with a movement for those who ‘turned their backs on the old world and
on the old political system’. Communism would supersede the ‘woolly-headed
Social Democrats and flabby conservatism’ but the old parties whose organiz-
ation ‘rests on women’s buns and tea fights will not put up five minutes
resistance against the new and modern reality’. Only the Corporate State could
defeat Communism. The new movement ‘must be indigenous and peculiar to
the British mind and nature’, since its supporters would be dismissed as
‘fanatics and romantics’. At a meeting with Forgan and Howard, it was
suggested NUPA ‘keep fascismo alive in this country and that the NP can
now acknowledge its own death’. On 5 April the New Party was dissolved.
Five days later Hitler came second to Hindenburg in the German presidential
election.
Howard greeted the end with relief, since Mosley’s thoughts were with
Fascism, which he detested. Mosley’s ‘shirt darkened as day followed day’.
He decided to adopt as the movement’s symbol the fasces, the bundle of sticks
symbolizing unity, and the axe, as carried by the lictors of ancient Rome,
signifying the power of the State. Soon afterwards, Nicolson ‘picked his hat
off the peg’, while Howard was handed his, and they both walked out of the
NP together. Howard joined Beaverbrook’s Empire Crusade Club and became
a ruthless political journalist of ‘unbespoken hatred for the men in power’ and
a prominent figure in Moral Rearmament. Peter Eckersley, who left to take
 THE NEW MOVEMENT 203

up consultancy work, said he was ‘only a Mosleyite when it seemed to me

that he was leading a movement to bring about the true reforming spirit of
the Labour Party. I cannot feel that Mosley’s present methods are bringing
that about.’
Nicolson hoped Mosley would retire into a ‘studious life for a bit’, and then
emerge fortified to become Prime Minister. If he became entangled with the
‘boys’ brigade’, he would become ‘a revolutionary — and to that waste land I
cannot follow him’. Nicolson joined National Labour; Colin Coote thought
this ‘another lost cause which consisted of himself, MacDonald’s father and
son — and the unfortunate J. H. Thomas’. Cyril Connolly regarded him as ‘too
upper-class and international to fit into the Labour Party, too patrician to
accept the Tories’ appeasing worldliness, too infected with the New Party’s
pristine desire for change and action to vote Liberal’. Soon afterwards,
Nicolson published a novel, Public Faces, which envisaged a Churchill-
Mosley government by the mid thirties.
Establishment friends had not abandoned Mosley. On 15 March he was
approached by Tory whip David Margesson to stand as a National Indepen-
dent, and J. M. Kenworthy MP, who suggested he lead the Labour Party. He
said it ‘would be impossible for him to re-enter the “machine” of one of the
older parties’ and ‘place himself in a strait-waistcoat’. The country was entering
a new phase and he felt he could accomplish more as a Fascist. Nicolson
argued people would not stand for violence and if he resorted to it, he would
be ‘detested by a few and ridiculed by many’. He was prepared, however, to
run the risk of ‘further failure, ridicule and assault, rather than allow the
active forces in this country to fall into other hands’. When Georgia Sitwell
lunched with him, she found him ‘a trifle absurd as usual about Superman,
Nietzsche, Schiller and Napoleon’.
On 27 April Mosley chaired a NUPA meeting at which Henry Hamilton
Beamish of the Britons Society and Arnold Leese of the Imperial Fascist League
spoke on ‘The Blindness of British Politics under the Jewish Money-Power’.
Son of an admiral, brother of a Tory MP, underpinning Beamish’s anti-
Semitism was the disillusionment of the post-war years, which he channelled
into resentment and prejudice. A retired veterinary surgeon and authority on
camel diseases, Leese had been a member of the BF and the National Fascists.
The IFL was very much his private affair. With only 500 members, it would
have been without importance if the Nazis had not chosen to promote it. The
ILF’s magazine, The Fascist, received a donation from a ‘National Socialist’
— Dr Thost of the Vélkischer Beobachter, who wrote in the journal that
Hitlerism was peacefully working for the unity of the Nordic race. MIS
reported that the IFL, whose flag featured a swastika superimposed on the
Union Jack, ‘sought to maintain the closest relationship with Germany’.
On 8 May NUPA held a rally in Trafalgar Square attended by 1,500 people,
204 BLACKSHIRT

who heard its new Fascist anthem. ‘Communists’ heckled speeches by Robert
O’Hagen, Patrick Moir and Vincent Collier, but were held in check by grey-
shirt stewards. Ten days later they spoke on ‘The New Party’s Approach to
Fascism’ to sympathetic IFL members who insisted on the primacy of the
Jewish question. Leese’s comment, that he accepted corporatism but anti-
Semitism would obscure it, led to an intense debate within NUPA. Moir was
‘anxious to conduct an entirely anti-Jewish campaign at the expense of all
other interests’. NUPA said that if Jews ‘impede our movement’s constructive
policy, they will be dealt with as occasion demands’.
Leese disliked Mosley’s ‘muscling in to the fascist field’ and was unwilling
to sacrifice his leadership to an opportunist who rejected racial nationalism.
‘Hitlerism at its base is the true Fascism of the Northern European, and true
guide to our own politics in the years ahead,’ he declared. The psychologically
impaired Leese said Mosley was a ‘kosher fascist’? run by Jews to discredit
Fascism. Mosley regarded the IFL as a crank society, which existed purely for
‘the purpose of Jew-baiting’. He considered the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion, which it and the Britons promoted, a silly forgery, and the existence of
a world-wide secret conspiracy a ludicrous fantasy. He had, however, no
qualms about their members joining NUPA.

The crisis of Cimmie’s health passed and on 25 April she gave birth to a third
child, Michael, who was christened at Morden Church with Nicolson, Forgan
and Zita James as godparents. In pain with the kidney infection, Cimmie had
‘the exuberance that could light people up when she came into a room’, but
she was no longer elegant. In order to regain her health, she left for the Villa
d’Este. She wrote to her husband on the occasion of their twelfth wedding
anniversary, hoping the year would be ‘better than beastly 1931’ and that
‘loveliness and understanding and sympathy be with us and between us’.

Mosley was in discussion with Hawkins, whose aide was E. G. Mandeville-

Roe, a schoolmaster and the editor of British Fascist. He argued that the BF
must adapt its ideas ‘to suit the truth of the moment’ which required the
Corporate State and an anti-Semitic policy barring Jews from public posts.
The adoption of Fascist ideology was less the result of the economic crisis than
of the state of the BF, which was reduced to a small hard core. The Communist
Party was not a serious threat and the General Strike’s end proved the threat
of revolution had passed.
A memorandum setting out a basis for fusion with NUPA ran into oppo-
sition from an angry Ms Lintorn-Orman, who considered Mosley a near-
Communist. The three BF Grand Council women’s units representatives
rejected the merger, whereupon Hawkins and Mandeville-Roe resigned to join
Mosley. With them went the BF’s most effective official, Lieutenant Colonel
 THE NEW MOVEMENT 205

H. W. Johnstone, chief of the men’s units and, importantly, the membership

lists.
There was little radicalism in the BF’s authoritarian reaction but it did link
itself to Italian Fascism, even if in a diluted form. Mandeville-Roe wrote a
book on the Corporate State which, together with the work of Alexander
Raven Thomson, was the source of such ideas in the BUF. The BE also
provided a model for organization and a recruitment pool for his administrat-
ive clique. However, its paramilitarism and foreign style offended public
opinion. Ultimately, it failed because anti-Communism and nationalism had
more respectable outlets.
A worried Nicolson told Mosley it would prove impossible to disassociate
NUPA from ‘young Bermondsey boys with Gummikniippel’. It was the ‘more
active element which colours the whole. If we ever have fascism in this country,
it will creep in disguised in the red, white, and blue of patriotism and the
young conservatives.’ The NP’s transition to Fascism was marked by the
integration of ‘nationalist, socialist, imperialist and racist attitudes into a
coherent theory of National Socialism’. This version of social reform, disci-
plined planning and the organic State partly originated with Nicolson’s friends
in Vienna, some of whom joined the SS.
Support for National Socialism came from A. R. Orage, who on his return
to England joined the Economic Freedom League, and Maurice Rickett’s
Chandos group, formed by social creditors and distributivists attracted to the
new age philosophy of Dmitri Mitrinovic, an émigré Serbian sage. The group
was effectively the editorial board of Orage’s fresh venture, the New English
Weekly (NEW). Edited by Philip Mairet, contributors included T. S. Eliot,
A. J. Penty, Hilaire Belloc and Italian apologists Ezra Pound and Odon Por.
The NEW praised Mosley for being the political champion who gave
expression to the revolt of youth. It disliked the violence associated with
Fascism but pleaded that its excesses were ‘as peculiar to Italy as are particular
manifestations of communism to Russia’.
On 25 May Lord Tavistock addressed NUPA on the ‘Douglas System of
Social Credit’. A vegetarian pacifist, writer on the care of parrots and heir to
the Duke of Bedford, his National Credit Association wanted a ‘just and
equitable system of finance, scientifically adjusted to the needs of the nation’.
Tavistock, MIS reported, had flirted with Communism and ‘fell into the
hands of every kind of crank and eccentric’. Despite promoting autarchy and
repudiating the liberal-socialist past, he was dismissed by ex-ILPers Marshall
Diston and Leslie Cumings on the basis that Britain’s dependency on foreign
food supplies was a more important issue than ‘this dubious system’.
ILP input is a striking feature of the NUPA debates. The Communist Party’s
Rajani Palme Dutt argued the Blackshirts emerged from ‘the heart of the
Labour Party and the ILP’. So did BF members who dismissed Mosley’s
206 BLACKSHIRT

ILP-style propaganda as ‘merely a Socialistic attack on capitalism under the

name of Fascism’. Certainly a NUPA faction believed Mosley’s objectives
were ‘frankly socialistic’. Fascism, claimed Bill Risdon, was ‘custodian of the
ideals of the early Socialist pioneers’ and Mosley was the twentieth-century
equivalent of Robert Owen.
John Strachey thought Bill Allen was surprisingly left-wing and accepted
that Mosley had developed a fascisme du gauche. It was an economic revolt
against obsolete capitalism and a spiritual reaction against materialist Marx-
ism. Labour Party critics noted the similarity with the authoritarian socialism
of Hendrik de Man of the Belgian Workers Party and the French neo-socialists
around Marcel Déat. These Front Generation socialists, notes Philip Rees,
were ‘equally disillusioned with the dogmatic sterility of socialism, concerned
with the gap between radical rhetoric and conservative practice, disturbed by
the bureaucratisation and embourgeoisment of the official labour movement’.
In trying to broaden socialism’s appeal to the middle classes and youth,
the neo-socialists accepted the need for authority and order, and above all
nationalism.
NUPA policy, said Risdon, rested on nationalism, preservation of private
property and the notion that ‘the interests of the State as a whole comprised
the interests of every section within the State’. ILP deserter John Scanlon
believed that if technicians, managers and workers ‘could combine to produce
for use, they could end the fear of poverty and the fear of war tomorrow’.
Ideas came from left sources but the emphasis was not on class conflict, but
on a productivist alliance of all classes within the nation to produce national
unity. This black socialism, wrote Oswald Spengler, was about dominating
life: ‘We need a class of socialist mastermen. Once again: socialism means
power, power and yet again power.’ Leadership and discipline were the keys
to integrating the working class into the community and the basis for national
regeneration. Thurlow notes that Mosley’s aristocratic image of society, the
technocratic belief in progress and vision of men as machines, enabled him to
slip easily from socialism to Fascism.
On 28 May Randolph Churchill celebrated his twenty-first birthday at
Claridge’s. Rude, spoiled and unstable, he was related to the Mitfords through
his maternal grandmother, Lady Hozier, sister of their maternal grandmother,
Lady Clementine Mitford. His best friend at Eton had been Tom Mitford and,
at sixteen, he fell in love with Diana. He dropped out of Oxford, took to
drinking and gambling, and became notorious as a boorish party guest. Mosley
attended his party with Rothermere and Esmond Harmsworth, Beaverbrook
and Max Aitken, Viscount Hailsham and Quintin Hogg, Lord Hugh Cecil,
Austen Chamberlain and General Sir Ian Hamilton. Mosley was still a
respected figure.
Although contemptuous of MacDonald’s leadership, Liberal free trader
 THE NEW MOVEMENT 207

Robert Bernays feared Mosley’s extra-parliamentarianism and Churchill’s agi-

tation over India might become inter-twined and undermine the National
government. Churchill’s ally was Rothermere, who wanted to involve Lord
Lloyd in the India Defence Committee, whose Secretary was ex-British Fascist
Patrick Donner. After a visit to Rome, Churchill, who believed Fascism had
saved Italy from the Bolsheviks, was greeted in the Commons with ironic cries
of ‘Mussolini’ by MPs who suspected his dictatorial ambitions. A vague kind
of corporatism was accepted by the Milnerites Lord Lloyd and Henry Page
Croft, who were favourably disposed to Fascism. However, Austen Chamber-
lain, whose wife wore a Fascist pin, said that Mussolini’s methods, though
admirable in Italy, would not work in Britain.
Mosley had not abandoned ideas of an anti-Semitic campaign. He obliquely
outlined the policy in ‘The New Movement Fights for the Corporate State’:
‘International financiers who to-day control our financial system in the inter-
ests of foreigners, and the alien agitators whose propaganda seeks to destroy
the greatness of Britain in the interest of foreign powers, will be sent where
they belong. Britain First will be the motto of the Corporate State.’ This was
code for Jews and Communists, who, in the conspiracy theory, were one and
the same.
Mosley was writing The Greater Britain, an outline of Fascist policy. His
reference to a conspiracy of ‘international Jewish bankers’ was dropped when
Nicolson complained it displayed a ‘destructive platform manner’. Jewish
banks are the ‘villains of the piece’ but there is a ‘Nazi note in these denunci-
ations which will cause many people to question your seriousness’. Readers
were ‘impressed by propagandists who take off their boots before they start
kicking below the belt’. Mosley thought Nicolson ‘unsuited to the rough and
tumble of a new movement advancing novel ideas’. The idea attracted him
‘but he was repelled by the process; he loved the end, but could not bear the
means’. Nicolson told Cimmie the passage had been cut but Mosley merely
deleted the overt Jewish references. ‘We have within the nation a power largely
controlled by alien elements, which arrogates to itself a power above the State,
and has used that influence to drive flaccid governments of all political parties
along the high road to national disaster ... No State can tolerate within its
body the irresponsible superiority of such a power.’
Such representations saturated British society long before they were insti-
tutionalized by Mosley. The image of the Jew which, Bryan Cheyette argues,
was central to modern literature, was ambivalent, in that the Jew was con-
structed as spectacularly civilized but also as an unchanging Semitic other. It
followed there were ‘good’ Jews (Mosley’s friends) who adapted to patriotic
and cultural norms, and ‘bad’ Jews, who conspired to undermine the national
interest. It was in this latter tradition that Mosley’s anti-Semitism was
grounded. Unlike the Nazis and the IFL, he rejected the idea that biology
208 BLACKSHIRT

prevented Jews from changing their behaviour, allowing him to make a distinc-
tion between different forms of Jewish conduct.
Before the First World War, national anxieties were projected on to Jews.
J. A. Hobson labelled them international financiers par excellence, with a
mixture of radical and reactionary politics; Catholic authors Hilaire Belloc
and G. K. Chesterton highlighted ‘Jewish’ finance scandals, such as the
Marconi affair, and depicted Jewish financiers as an alien force destroying
Britain. Post-war socialist suspicion of capitalist power was transferred into
fear of the ‘golden international’, while nationalists, wary of any propensity
to form a nation within a nation, attacked Jewish influence.
The chief interest that Mosley challenged was not capitalism but finance, a
power within the State. He argued the system of international finance was
kept going ‘for the sole reason that the process is a means of collecting the
usury of the City’. Finance allowed ‘quick jumping financiers’ to gamble with
the prosperity of industries and nations. It broke governments ‘by cracking
the whip of a financial logic to which all parties in the state subscribed’. People
must organize against the ‘giant rogues’ of international finance ‘their own
police force to deal with the enemy and the exploiter’.
In attacking the City, Mosley would be targeting his own class. Given that
abolition of class conflict was central to Fascism, the solution was to have the
Jews represent all that was bad about finance. ‘You can hardly exhort your
storm-troopers to street fighting’, Cecil Melville wrote, ‘with an involved
analysis of the difference between productive capital and loan capital.’ So,
‘instead of just downing the Banker for being a Banker, let’s down the Banker
as being a Jew!’ This removed the ‘anti-capitalist sting’ and united both right
and left by enabling them to ‘project their own foreignness vis-a-vis the English
political culture on to the Jew’.
A Liberal MP, Belloc tested ‘the limits of liberalism from the left — by
maintaining a rabid anti-capitalism — and from the right — by positioning at
the heart of his politics an exclusivist vocabulary around “race” and nation’.
He supported Action Frangaise, whose leader Charles Maurras provided the
model for Mosley’s anti-Semitism. Belloc presented a vision of an all-powerful
‘Anglo-Judaic plutocracy’ dominating the country but claimed ‘no-one can
say with truth that I have ever objected to the practice of Judaism’. However,
‘I do object most strongly to Jewish cosmopolitan financial influence.’ Mosley,
too, reacted to ‘facts’ about Jewish power in a ‘rational’ non-fanatical way.
He had believed anti-Semitism was for ‘halfwits’ but began to think about
Jews as ‘unpleasant foreigners, with no right to interfere in “British” business’.
Melville recognized that anti-Semitism was ‘integral to fascism and essential
for the purpose of mob politics’. Maurras thought it a ‘methodical necessity,
a real historical requirement’. It all seemed ‘terribly difficult without the
providential appearance of anti-semitism’. Things were ‘smoothed over, and
 THE NEW MOVEMENT 209

simplified. If one were not an anti-semite through patriotism, one would

become one through:a simple sense of opportunity.’ Melville agreed there was
in Mosley a ‘good deal of the dross of political opportunism’. He became an
anti-Semite because he had to. ‘The masses could not be taught to hate
capitalism, since he only wanted to control it, and he hoped for business
donations.’ He needed anti-Semitism as an ideology of radical nationalism to
retain the devotional core and realized the propaganda gain of ‘concentrating
all his fire on a single opponent’. During the summer Mosley sanctioned a
debate within NUPA on Fascist ideology.
The debates were partially recorded in the three issues of the internal
newsletter, the New Times, edited by John Proctor. Mosley said it would
express ‘the vigour and virility of the Movement. Without fear or favour, it
will cut through the cant and humbug of current thought and politics to the
building of the constructive conception of the Corporate State.’ Patrick Moir’s
survey of policy stated strikes would be ended and financiers prevented from
acting against the interests of the State. They would ‘clear away the slums,
and promote imperial and economic unity, with a firm hand in India’. What
needed to be resolved was which variety of Fascism to emulate.
L. G. Waterman worried members placed ‘too much emphasis on learning the
lessons of the exceptional conditions under which Mussolini came to power’.
The use of force was ‘only one aspect of the Italian fascists, whereas its under-
lying aspect was the ideal of a moral revolution’. Sympathy for Leese blinded
them to the ‘most important object of our movement — the establishment of the
Corporate State’. He identified a schism between supporters of Nazism and
backers of Italian Fascism. He bemoaned the obsession with Hitler: ‘We have
more photos of Hitler in the Club than Il Duce.’ Waterman argued Mussolini
and the Corporate State were superior and regretted the adulation of the
‘provocative and disorderly violence of the Nazis’.

Mosley continued to fence all over England and was elected to the committee
of the Amateur Fencing Association. Observers noted that, as a symbol of
‘Savile Row Fascism’, he dressed like a ‘fencing instructor with a waist fondly
exaggerated by a cummerbund and chest and buttocks thrust out’. Runner-up
in the British Epée Championship was a formidable achievement for a man
with a gammy leg. On 15 June Mosley and Charles de Beaumont, founder of
the All England Club, put on a fencing display’*for NUPA women. It was
unpopular with the head of the Defence Squad, who believed ‘a Youth Move-
ment such as ours will lose its manhood the day the first woman enters as a
member’. Women ‘should never have anything to do with the running of the
country. Let’s confine women to a monthly Ladies night.’
Cimmie returned from the Villa d’Este in pain but was able to attend, on
19 June, a dinner to which Georgia and Sachie Sitwell were invited. Irene was
 210 BLACKSHIRT

shocked by. the loucheness of the Mosley set with its “gossip and “muck”’’.
On 7 July the Mosleys went to a party in honour of Diana’s sister, Unity, who
arrived with her pet snake, Enid. The 300 guests did not fail to notice that
Diana, in a ‘pale grey dress of chiffon and tulle and all the diamonds I could lay
my hands on’, spent the evening dancing with Mosley. Next day, she told Cela
Keppel she was in love and wanted to leave Bryan. Soon after, Mosley left for
Paris on the way to his family’s holiday in Venice. Diana, too, made her way
through France, where he planned to run into her as if by chance. When they
met at Arles, they went sightseeing and borrowed Bob Boothby’s room for
their liaison. Cimmie was aware of the threat posed by the dazzling Diana,
twelve years her junior, and was in pain both physically and emotionally.

’ Before he left, Mosley told colleagues he was keen to launch an anti-Semitic

campaign against the bankers and appointed a gung-ho Moir to head research
and Cumings to lead the propaganda. Newspapers reported that speakers in
Westminster were attacking Jews. On 7 August a NUPA loudspeaker van in
Croydon broadcast anti-Semitic slogans. When Jewish passers-by objected,
two greyshirts were arrested for shouting ‘Down with the Jews’. Members
took exception because ‘they think this should be corrected to “Down with
the Bloody Jews”’. Three weeks later, nineteen-year-old J. Maddocks was
convicted of posting anti-Jewish stickers, bearing the words ‘Nationalise the
wealth of the Jew Banks’ and ‘Expel all Jews from the Country’. A NUPA
statement said ‘anti-Jewish propaganda is neither authorised nor approved by
Sir Oswald’. The Jewish Chronicle on 26 August said these assurances meant
nothing unless Mosley rid his movement of anti-Semites, but this he refused
to do.
With Mosley back in London, bickering continued within NUPA over
anti-Semitism and the means of seeking power. Cumings told the Herald the
‘young men of our clubs will undoubtedly form the nucleus of Storm Troops’.
In August, Chatham News carried a letter from Patrick Woodroffe, dissociat-
ing himself from NUPA because of its Italo-German Fascism, its Corporate
State policy and Nazi salute. Rumours of an imminent change of name to
Fascist were confirmed by a letter from Mosley sent to those on the member-
ship lists provided by Hawkins.
The adoption of Fascism was boosted by the appointment as Italian
ambassador of Dino Grandi, who had ‘won his spurs as a brutal squad leader
during the fascist conquest of power’. In July, Mussolini took over the reins
at the foreign ministry with an aggressive Fascist policy and demanded the
Anglophile darling of the Cliveden Set take the post. Tall, good-looking, with
a pointed beard, Grandi attracted women and he took it for granted that he
could play away from home. His first conquest was Mosley’s sister-in-law,
Baba Metcalfe.
 THE NEW MOVEMENT 211

Grandi informed Rome that every day he explained to admiring audiences

Fascism’s merits. On-13 August he cabled that H. G. Wells was proposing ‘un
nuovo “fascismo”’. Mosley wrote to Wells, who had considered joining the
NP, to congratulate him on a speech supporting ‘Liberal Fascism’. He included
a copy of The Greater Britain. ‘I am afraid the word “Liberal” has not much
relation to my book, but it certainly is an attempt to create a scientific Fascism
which is free from the excesses and repressions of the Continent.’ Mosley
added that ‘like most prophets, you will probably have the unpleasant experi-
ence of recognising many of your own teachings of the past reproduced and
reshaped by less capable hands’. Wells, however, objected to the ‘displacement
of the power of reason with the charisma of “leaders” ’, and disliked Mosley.
Grandi believed British Fascism had a formidable future and told Mussolini
he had advised Mosley to take ‘revolution into the streets’.
Instead, Mosley sought out business support. Irene was asked to arrange a
meeting with Israel Sieff, Chairman of Marks and Spencer and the man behind
the think tank Political Economic Planning. Launched in June 1932 to produce
a programme of national reconstruction by way of capitalist planning, the
PEP grew out of Max Nicolson’s ‘National Plan’, published in the Week-End
Review. Mosley hoped there would be a meeting of minds between PEP and
his anti-socialist version of planning. PEP was committed to political activism
along the lines advocated by its ‘young Prometheans’, led by Nicolson, head
of the Technique of Planning (Tec Plan) study group, which promoted Wellsian
technocratic policies of ‘scientific’ modernization.
Mosley was ‘a remarkable talker, with an acute and well-stocked mind’,
Sieff discovered. He wanted PEP to be the ‘brainbox’ of his movement. When
Sieff declined because of its non-political nature, Mosley said he was ‘making
a mistake’. Perhaps Sieff thought he had because he invited Mosley to address
a group of businessmen looking for a leader. Mosley impressed him as a
‘dynamic figure, of that rare charismatic type which when suitably motivated
can work wonders in the service of their fellow men’. A highly controversial
meeting took place at Sieff’s home in Regent’s Park in early September.
The businessmen belonged to the Industrial Group, an elite from which the
TEC planners hoped to enlist support. They had the backing of PEP Chairman
and Bank of England Director Sir Basil Blackett, who was convinced of the
need for closer economic ties with the Empire. Although their planned econ-
omy would be ‘made to conform with British ideals of freedom’, the idea so
disturbed members that Blackett had to resign. The TEC Plan was sub-
sequently scuppered as Sieff turned against planning and promoted industrial
self-government. The ideological differences with Mosley grew rather than
diminished.
Industrialists, according to Irene, admired Mosley’s energy and would have
- financed him, but for his ‘high-handedness and tactlessness’. According to
212 BLACKSHIRT

Sieff, Mosley said ‘a political party must ultimately be based on emotion. Only
feeling could win power and carry plans into effect. A new movement must
find somebody or something to hate. In this case it should be the Jews.’
Sieff’s nineteen-year-old son Marcus confirmed his father’s description of the
meeting. Mosley ‘did not seem to think that he had said something particularly
unacceptable, but the effect on the company was instant’. Mosley added, ‘Of
course, it doesn’t apply to Jews like you, Israel,’ but the insult had been made
and Sieff asked him to leave. Mosley denied the story but why would both
Sieffs lie? He had repeated to Irene that ‘a dynamic creed such as fascism
cannot flourish unless it has a scapegoat to hit out at, such as Jewry’.
A former Communist and Oxford graduate, E. D. Randall, wrote in the
New Times’s September issue that ‘yelling anti-Jewish slogans from vans,
shrieking death and murder to the Jews’ was not the way ‘to convert people
to the ideals of the NP’. However, he did not dismiss anti-Semitism. Jews
‘being largely responsible for the present political, economic and social chaos,
ought to be publicly denounced and deserve to be howled down’. He did not
advocate ‘the elimination of the anti-semitic element from our propaganda.
No member of this club has greater cause to hate the Jew than I, nor carries
in his heart more bitter hatred.’ However, he recognized the Jews’

power and cunning to smash any organisation directed against his race. A tiny
movement such as ours simply cannot afford, in its early stages, openly to make
anti-Semitism its main plank . . . Let us wait until we have become a power in Britain:
then we can translate our hatred of the despicable parasites —- who seek to profit in
our downfall — from futile words to deeds! The public have long succumbed to the
incessant hidden prompting and whispering of our Jew-ridden press, and are quite
unprepared for a sudden, bitter anti-Jew movement. We have got to clear away all
the old rubbish from their minds — Jew-manufactured lies, distorted facts, twisted
opinions, international-mindedness.

This was official NUPA policy and that of the shortly to be launched BUF.
Anti-Semitism was central but could not be advocated openly until the move-
ment was strong enough to confront the inevitable backlash. There was an
ironic conundrum here: Mosley could not openly attack the Jews because they
were too powerful; the precise reason he gave as the basis of his own ‘rational’
anti-Semitism. The campaign was pre-planned and worked to a timetable. For
the moment, however, Mosley manoeuvred to keep the policy secret, while at
the same time attempting to keep on board the pro-Nazi faction.
Beaverbrook advised Mosley to ‘tour the Empire and return as its expert to
rally the forces of an imperial conservatism’. He would dedicate himself to ‘a
national renaissance’ and replied on 9 September that he believed ‘in the
constructive conception of Fascism which I am preaching, and am indifferent
 THE NEW MOVEMENT 213

to the fact that this course probably means “political suicide”. If by any chance
the normal political system does not endure, it is perhaps better from the
nation’s point of view that Fascism be built by me than by some worse kind
of lunatic.’
Mosley tested the waters by turning the Newcastle branch into a prototype
Fascist one. Manufacturer’s agent Michael Jordan, Bill Risdon, parliamentary
agent for Gateshead, and Bill Leaper, another ILPer and journalist on the
Newcastle Evening Chronicle and Mosley’s northern organizer (who turned
out to have Jewish ancestry) floated the new. movement on a self-financing
basis. With instructions from Forgan, Jordan launched branches across the
north-east; resembling the Salvation Army in structure, they became the model
for Fascist organizations. Jordan was rewarded with the post of Area Adminis-
trative Officer for Northumberland, Durham and Tees.

Cimmie had fallen from a loft and suffered a back injury, which induced a
bacillus coli infection of the urinary tract. Since childhood she had suffered
with a spinal curvature and lumbago attacks. To regain her health, she went
to Contrexeville in France. She wrote home that she was looking forward to
‘you building up your organisation, coping with sales of your book, having a
happy time with your family — and some stolen moments with lovely sillies
but not too many’. All she wanted was a ‘little public demonstration, want to
show off a bit, and it is that part that gets hurt and upset’. Mosley said he was
‘back at the grindstone — far, far away from Venice pleasure and temptations’.
She was distressed by his affair with Diana and wanted him to be frank with
her, but felt he was ‘only sweet to me when you want to get away with
something. I would understand if you give me a chance, but I am so kept in
the dark.’
On Cimmie’s return, the Mosleys attended a fancy dress ball at Biddesden.
Writer Rosamond Lehmann, there with her husband and NP member Wogan
Phillips, recalled that a beautiful Diana, wearing a white Grecian dress, danced
with Mosley, who was suitably dressed in black, the pair looking ‘as though
they were magnetised together’. Lady Pansy Lamb said Diana told everyone
‘how thrilling she found him, like having a crush on a film star’. However, it
was ‘the most awful evening, Tom in triumph with this dazzling beauty, and
Bryan, the host, looking like a shattered white rabbit’.
Cimmie’s misery was compounded by her husBand’s confession of all the
women he had slept with: ‘But they are all my best friends!’
Mosley told Boothby what he had done.
‘All?’ asked his incredulous friend.
Yes, all. Except, of course, for her sister and stepmother.’ Mosley apolo-
gized to Cimmie for being ‘such a Porker’, but his life was ‘so strenuous and
214 BLACKSHIRT

hectic’. Leaving behind his distressed wife, he departed on a secret visit to

Rome in pursuit of funding from Mussolini. He wrote home that he had
received a tremendous reception.

On 29 September, dressed in a grey shirt with a gold Fascist badge, Mosley |

met with Bruce Lockhart. ‘His British Fascism is Mussolini in policy: corporate
state, Parliament to be elected on occupational franchise .. . House of Lords
to be replaced by a National Corporation which will act as Parliament of
Industry. Organisation on Hitler group system ... members to wear grey
shirts and flannel trousers. Storm troops: black shirts and grey bags.’ There
was no mention of anti-Semitism but Herald journalist Hannen Swaffer knew
about the debates. He wrote on 1 October that it had been decided not to
attack the Jews as such. They would, however, be criticized if they were either
Communists or international financiers acting against British interests. The
forecast proved to be right.
A.J. P. Taylor, often sympathetic towards Mosley, described the New
Party as the ‘greatest personal miscalculation since the fall of Lord Randolph
Churchill’. Colin Coote considered it a ‘catastrophic blunder’ since it had been
founded upon ‘an abysmally wrong political judgement — that there would be
a Communist revolution’. Mosley ‘wasn’t really a very sound man in many
ways. I always felt that the outward bonhomie that he engendered was a bit
phoney. Indeed the man started with a great sense of logic but he never had
really much sense of either strategy or tactics.’
Had Mosley waited, Harold Macmillan said, he ‘might have been supreme.
He struck too soon, and fell for ever. In politics the essence of the game is
“timing”’.’ Bill Allen admitted he was ‘constantly questing and uncertain — the
New Party had failed before it had been launched’. Perhaps Mosley struck too
late. It might have worked had he been Fascist from the start but now the Tories
pulled the strings in an authoritarian and patriotic National government which
pre-empted his appeal by adopting economic ideas that brought about a recov-
ery of technology-based industries, though the ‘drastic overhaul of the state
machine which he wanted, and the ambitious programme of state intervention
which he proposed, were resisted’. Labour had been routed and the Liberals
split. There was ‘little for Mosley to bite on beyond the controversy over India’.
The NP was another ‘third force’ which unsuccessfully tried to break the
mould of British politics. Mosley spent large sums of money and had used
modern campaign techniques, but to little avail. The two-party system was
impervious to new ideas and new parties. Whatever the nature, popularity
and strength of the third force - Communist, extreme right, Liberal, social
democrat — the political system’s regressive structure ensured that only
immense organization and vast resources for a media and electoral campaign
could sustain a breakthrough.
 THE NEW MOVEMENT 215

Mosley decided he had lost a battle rather than a war. What was required
was the ‘grip of an organised and disciplined movement, grasping and permeat-
ing every aspect of national life’. He now stepped outside the party racket and
turned to pure Fascism. He jettisoned much of the theoretical baggage and
search for economic ideas. He had ‘finished with people who think, henceforth
Ishall go to the people who feel’.
_ Macmillan said Mosley was doomed when he ‘tried to bring Fascism into
England’. When he said ‘he was thinking of putting his supporters into black
shirts’, Macmillan replied, ‘You must be mad. Whenever the British feel
strongly about anything, they wear grey flannel trousers and tweed jackets.’
Walter Elliott thought it ‘courting failure to tell people that they have first to
dress themselves in black shirts and throw their opponents downstairs in order
to get the corporative state’. The growing acceptance of new economic ideas
alleviated the need to travel the low road of street corner politics.
For the social imperialists - opposed to Germany and Fascism — Mosley
was a great talent gone ‘badly and perversely wrong’. Whereas he preached
revolution, Carlyon Bellairs (MP 1915-31), who joined the NP, merely
wanted reform to strengthen the status quo. ‘It was a tragedy’, wrote Leo
Amery, ‘that such real gifts, instead of being constitutionally employed within
the Socialist Party, should, through lack of balance and patience, have been
subsequently frittered away, not only in aping the theatrical posturings of
continental dictatorships, but also in adopting their more odious features.’
John Strachey wrote to Boothby that the saddest thing about Mosley was
that, ‘contrary to general opinion, he had a heart’. Genuinely concerned about
social problems, ‘he can’t break his heart, it was broken very early ... There
was some left when we first knew him — but now, I fancy, none.’ He was seen
as suspect, putting principle before party and engaging in a personal political
odyssey across the spectrum of high politics. Macmillan regarded Mosley as
the most able man he had met. Boothby said he was the ‘only man that I have
ever known who could if he played his cards rightly have been the leader of
the Conservative or Labour Party’, but had destroyed ‘a great parliamentary
career, because of his own idiosyncrasies, because of his character. He smashed
it for no good reason.’ It was his ‘arrogance, his insolence, his persecution
complex’, which was responsible. Colin Coote agreed it was hubris.
In summarizing his career thus far, the Evening Standard said Mosley was
an ‘astonishing man’ but also an ‘astonishing failuré’. He had thrown away a
succession of opportunities and was destined for an ‘ultimate and tragic retire-
ment into obscurity’. He sarcastically replied that he was
clearly a great gambler, who prefers backing a horse at 5 to x with a prospect of
winning great stakes, to backing an even-money favourite with the prospect of
winning stakes too. small to attract him. To his peculiar mind, the blue and gold
216 BLACKSHIRT

prizes of democratic statesmanship — the pomp and decoration without power of

achievement — are not worth the having or the buying. He prefers a great gamble on
abnormal events, on the winning of a position which might enable him to re-write
the pages of history in terms of achievement for the British Race.
 IZ

The British Union of Fascists

Approaching his thirty-sixth birthday, Mosley launched the British Union of

_ Fascists at 12 Great George Street on 1 October 1932 with thirty-two founder
members. He asked them ‘to march with us in a great and hazardous adven-
ture. We ask them to be prepared to sacrifice all . . . to dedicate their lives to
_ building in this country a movement of the modern age.’ They will ‘face abuse,
bitter animosity and possibly the ferocity of struggle and danger. In return we
can only offer them the deep belief that they are fighting so that a great land
may live.’ Rothermere telegrammed support from Monte Carlo and welcomed
the BUF as the only alternative to socialism.
d
The BUF’s black shirt was modelled on Mosley’s fencing tunic, with button
fastening over the shoulder; his own was tailor-made in black silk. Recruits
received a badge representing the fasces and were required to recognize the
necessity for ‘discipline and loyalty to its leadership’. On the back of the
}
3

- membership card was the official creed: ‘To win power for Fascism and thereby
establish in Great Britain the Corporate State.’ Mosley’s Fascism was largely
based on his reading of Shaw’s interpretation of Nietzsche, with fantasies of
' cleansing the world of decadence, and owed a great deal to Orage and the
New Age. However, he misread Nietzsche, whose superman hopes ‘by seeing
people’s struggles for power and their capacities to delude themselves about
these, to have some power over himself’. He was never intended to have power
over others.
Mosley wrote in the Italian review Ottobre that modern forms of dictator-
:ship were an ‘eternally recurrent phenomenon of British history, which
invariably coincide with our great. periods of dynamic achievement’. The
virility of the Tudor dictatorship re-emerged in the ‘so un-English personality
~ of the yet so English Chatham, who founded the British Empire by overawing
a corrupt Parliament with the power of his popular support’. His Fascism
:derived from Sorel and Nietzsche, but he had been influenced by English men
‘of action such as Hobbes, Bolingbroke and Carlyle. His 40,000-word synthesis
of these inputs was published as The Greater Britain, with a cover designed
by one of the foremost graphic artists of the day, Ted McKnight Kauffer.
Salesmen from Mosley’s publishing company sold the book, at 2s. 6d., all
218 BLACKSHIRT

over the country. It received wide publicity and 10,000 copies were quickly
bought.
The Manchester Guardian said it was

an extravagant eulogy of the Fascist State (according to Mussolini and Hitler), a’

denunciation in familiar vein of the ‘old gang’ of politicians and parties, and an’
exposition of a domestic policy for Britain which contains — with Fascist flavouring
~ most of the mixed Socialist and Protectionist ideas with which Sir Oswald endowed
his ill-fated New Party. The Corporate State is to be created, but instead of a
dictatorship there is to be a Government with ‘absolute power to act’. The Crown is
to be maintained but the House of Lords is to go, and Parliament must look out for
itself. Violence is not ruled out. If the situation degenerates rapidly, ‘something like
collapse may come before any new movement has captured Parliamentary power’.
In this case, ‘other and sterner measures must be adopted for the saving of the State
in a situation approaching anarchy’. But, Mosley says, ‘in no case shall we resort to
violence against the forces of the Crown; but only against the forces of anarchy if
and when the machinery of the State has been allowed to drift into powerlessness’.

Mosley said the parties could not halt the ‘spineless drift to disaster’. They
‘squat impotent in front of the problems of the day like a hypnotised rabbit
in front of a snake’. Those fed up with the Baldwin—MacDonald old gang
would turn to the BUF. The Corporate State would deal with mass unemploy-
ment. Producers’ interests had been sacrificed to the interests of cosmopolitan
finance. ‘In every struggle between producer and financial interest in recent
years, the latter power has been triumphant to the detriment of the national
interest.’ State intervention would ensure finance served the national interest.
‘The Gordian knot must be cut.’
By permanently correlating wages, prices and rising output at the maximum
level of production, the Corporate State would ‘submerge social conflict in an
equitable distribution and make possible the material utopia of socialism
without any of the economic anarchy associated with this creed’. In drawing
together ideas of planning and technocracy, Mosley rejected the anti-scientific
thinking associated with Fascism. His rhetoric was Wellsian: ‘Science shall
rule Great Britain.’ It provided the means by which to conquer the material
environment and ‘the means of controlling the physical rhythm of civilis-
ations’. Many Fascists feared ‘Brave New World machine-fantasies’ but Mos-
ley hoped to master the machine ‘to meet modern fact’.
The Corporate State seemed to be revolutionary but it was merely superim-
posed upon capitalism, rather than substituted for it. ‘Just as the centralised
authority of the Tudor kings protected the citizens from the depredations of
the robber barons, so’, Mosley wrote, ‘the corporate system will protect and
promote a genuine private enterprise in face of the large industrial combines
 THE BRITISH UNION OF FASCISTS 219

and concentrations of financial power.’ Worker participation would be within

limits imposed by the ‘over-riding authority of the organised State’.
‘He who talks of planning within the limits of the present parliamentary
and political system’, Mosley went on, ‘either deludes himself, or physically
shrinks from the effort and the danger of real and fundamental reorganisation.’
* Planning could not succeed without strong executive government. Fascism
would ‘not hesitate to act when the State interests are threatened and the
action of such a power will be decisive’. In a Mosley regime, economic power
would rest with an authoritarian State ‘ultimately controlled by no one but
himself’. He annunciated its totalitarianism: ‘There will be no room in Britain
for those who do not accept the principle “all for the State and the State
for all”.’ When anyone rejected this principle, ‘so that his activity becomes
sectional and anti-social, the mechanism of the Corporate system descends
upon him’.
The Corporate State would handle security, defence, foreign affairs and
national propaganda. Mosley envisioned a self-contained Empire with a ‘per-
manently functioning machinery of economic consultation and planning in
place of haphazard conferences’. He assumed ‘white commonwealth’ countries
— South Africa, Canada and Australia — would join the project, while those
that refused would be forced to co-operate. A ‘Britain First’ policy ensured
‘we shall never pursue the folly of an aggressive Imperialism’. In a reorganized
League of Nations, he would ‘call a halt to the flabby surrender of every
British interest which has characterised the past decade, and has reduced this
‘nation to the position of a meddlesome old lady holding the baby for the
world’. He would work for universal disarmament but, recognizing that the
_ Air factor had ‘altered the position of these Islands’, he would raise Britain’s
Air Force ‘to the level of the strongest power in Europe’.
Fascism, said Mosley, was a revolt against the materialism of the modern
world, ‘where there are no spiritual landmarks’ and in which the young were
reared ‘to venerate metallic fetishes, factories and machines’. The hope was
‘youth dedicated to the resurrection of the nation’s greatness and shrinking
from no effort and from no sacrifice to secure that mighty end’. Their ideal
7was a ‘morality of the Spartan pattern tempered with the Elizabethan atmos-
phere of Merrie England’. He appealed to his countrymen ‘to take action
j
while there is still time’ but if ‘the Empire is allowed to drift until collapse and
anarchy intervene, we shall not shrink from that final conclusion, and will
organise to stand between the State and ruin’,
B In the Fortnightly Review Cecil Melville said The Greater Britain was ‘an
- exposition of the English variant of National Socialism’ and noted its closeness
to the ‘philosophic violence of Georges Sorel’. It had the brilliant qualities of
many of Mosley’s ideas but ‘the unfortunate thing about it all is that probably
220 BLACKSHIRT

the majority of average Englishmen will be put off, by a not unnatural distaste
for fascist theatricality’.
His deputy, Dr Robert Forgan, followed Mosley into the BUF from personal
loyalty but also for the salary of £700 (£23,000). These were exciting days;
for Forgan; his office was his home and the movement his life. He organized»
the first rally on 15 October in Trafalgar Square. Following riots at Stoke,
Mosley declared, ‘We do not want to fight but if violence is organised against
us, then we shall organise for violence in reply.’ He told the Morning Post's
W. F. Deedes that Mussolini had said ‘the road to power lay in creating fierce
opposition. Against every ten adversaries, you recruited one staunch ally.’
According to Britain’s ambassador in Paris, William Tyrrell, Mosley had
been given a ‘terrific dressing down’ by Mussolini. On 14 October he told
Mosley’s former mentor, Lord Cecil, that he had said Fascism was “quite
unsuitable for England’. Colin Coote, whose visit to Rome had given him ‘a
horror of the police state’, said Italians had a proverb: ‘An italianised English-
man is a devil incarnate.’ That is what ‘the public came to think a British
adaption of Mussolini to be’.
Forgan went to Rome to solicit funds but Mussolini did not think it a wise
investment. Lord Sydenham was there with former ambassador Rennell Rodd
when Mosley’s name was mentioned. ‘Ah,’ said Mussolini, ‘he has been spend-
ing most of this summer on the French Riviera. I spent quite a lot of time on
the Riviera myself, but I was in exile struggling to make a living with my
hands. It’s not a place for serious reformers to linger in private villas for more
than a few days. He wants too much the best of both worlds.’ A. J. P.
Taylor thought Mosley was ‘not a sticker. Often at a moment of crisis the
self-appointed saviour of his country was not to be found: he was at a fencing
match.’ True dictators ‘thought of politics and nothing else. Mosley gave the
impression that politics were for him an exciting hobby. Though he spoke
repeatedly of action, this worked out in putting on a performance rather than
of practical work.’
Diana countered that Mosley worked incredibly hard. The fencing was used
as cover for his political activities. Taking part in championships in Paris,
Rome and Milan enabled him to meet European Fascists, safe from the prying
eyes of the security services. Diana accompanied him and recalled that he
fenced with skill and an immense will to win. His ‘whole character was in
evidence when he was fencing: the “happy warrior’’’.
On 24 October Mosley said at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, that
hostility would be directed only at those Jews who were anti-British or financed
Communism. At the heated meeting he abused hecklers, who were violently
removed by his Fascist Defence Force, as ‘three warriors of the class war — all
from Jerusalem’. Blackshirts later marched to the Cenotaph where police
ordered them to disband following shouts of ‘to hell with the Jews’.
 THE BRITISH UNION OF FASCISTS 221

Irene was at the meeting with Baba and wondered why Mosley descended
to ‘the Jerusalem inanity’, since the ‘little man in the balcony was quite
inoffensive’. He was a ‘silly schoolboy only proud of some silly scuffles and
glorying over his menials throwing two lads down the stairs . . . all this vanity
to [Diana] — much muck muck’. When Israel Sieff saw her on 31 October, he
was so bitter at Mosley’s ‘inane jibe to the heckler’ that he decided ‘not to
give him money for his industrial investigations. Oh! how tactless Tom is. It
makes me sick.’ Mosley subsequently issued an order barring Jew-baiting —
indicating it was a problem that had to be curbed.
There was speculation that Wells and Shaw would throw in their lot with
Mosley. Kingsley Martin noted a resemblance between Wells and Mosley with
their planning and contempt for old party games. ‘Both describe themselves
as revolutionaries: both aim at the formation of a corps of young people
pledged to the fulfilment of a single social ideal.’ Wells saw his supporters as
‘Liberal Fascists or Communist Revisionists or enlightened Nazis’ and
preached an ‘Open Conspiracy’ of a directorate of managers, scientists and
engineers. However, Wells’s society did not acknowledge allegiance to ‘any
unit smaller than the world’, whereas Mosley was a pure nationalist.
Shaw told a Fabian meeting on Bonfire Night that Mosley was ‘one of the
few people who is thinking about real things and not about figments and
phrases’. People disliked him because he is ‘going to do something and that is
a terrible thing. You instinctively hate him, because you do not know where
he will land you; and he evidently means to uproot some of you.’ He recognizes
Fascism is the only ‘practical alternative to Communism’. Shaw reminded the
audience that Mussolini began with twenty-five votes but it did not take him
long ‘to become the Dictator of Italy. I do not say that Mosley is going to
become Dictator of this country,’ but ‘you will hear something more of Mosley
before you are through with him’.
The BUF considered Shaw a Fascist. In On the Rocks, Prime Minister
‘Chavender’ nationalizes everything, forbids strikes and institutes compulsory
public service. The working classes were ‘ready to go mad with enthusiasm
for any man strong enough to make them do anything, even if it’s only Jew
baiting’. Shaw celebrated progressive Jews, but also believed Jews ‘did not
encompass a “biologically” ordered future’ and supported eugenic means of
dealing with racial difference: ‘extermination must be put on a scientific basis
if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apolitically as well as thoroughly’.
When Nazis shouted ‘Down with the Jew Shaw’, in an attempt to clear himself
of suspicion of pro-Jewish bias he claimed ‘a pro-Fascist bias’, to give weight
to his protest.
To Mosley it seemed the ingredients which were to bring Hitler to power
existed in Britain. He expected the system to collapse into chaos, thus provid-
ing Communism with its historic opportunity. Mass unemployment, a failing
222 BLACKSHIRT

social democratic party and middle-class insecurity indicated an opening for

the Communists to exploit. With the political vacuum and a middle class
searching for a saviour, new ideas, argued Mosley, ‘will come violently, as
they have come elsewhere’. In the crisis, ‘reason, persuasion vanish and organ- .
ised force alone prevails. Either Fascism or Communism emerges victorious.’
Mosley claimed his meetings were threatened with disruption by ‘hundreds
of men, accompanied by violence often prepared in semi-military fashion’. At
Battersea, ‘Communists’ armed with broken bottles attacked BUF stewards,
who countered with rubber truncheons. The stewards included ILP militants
who brought to the BUF ‘both a hatred of communism and considerable
experience of street fighting’. Alexander Miles said the violence had the effect
of ‘fanning to a white hot flame the faith of these young men in Mosley’. They
recalled a ‘spirit of brotherhood, equal to the early days of the Socialist
Crusades’.
Fascism grew ‘out of chaos, with bloodshed, rioting and revolutionary
conditions’, thought Irene, but she could not see it spreading to Britain without
the ‘cataclysmic whip of national bankruptcy’. Mosley insisted Fascism would
succeed by constitutional methods and only when confronted by ‘red terror’
would he meet force by force to save the country. When the crash came, the
‘man who could control the streets would win’. It became clear, however, that
Fascist aggression was used to provoke Communist retaliation in the hope
that it would precipitate the crisis which would thrust him into power. He
had ‘a curious ability to transmute thuggery into a kind of idealism’. Public
order was threatened by political extremism and it seemed something like a
revolutionary situation had developed. At his party’s conference, Labour’s
Stafford Cripps declared that ‘the one thing that is not inevitable now is
gradualness’.
A challenge came from the hunger marches of the Communist-dominated
National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM). With 40,000 members,
mostly in South Wales, Lancashire and Scotland, Harry Pollitt admitted it had
‘a greater degree of support than either the Communist Party or the BUF could
command’. In the autumn, there were disturbances in Glasgow and Belfast,
where two demonstrators were killed and fifty injured, and several days of
rioting on Merseyside. Demonstrations were forcibly put down in North
Shields and London by mounted police. The treatment meted out to marchers
was more severe than anything experienced by the BUF. The trail of violence
throughout the country aroused disquiet but the government insisted a firm
line was necessary because there was ‘the very material connection between
those in Moscow’ and the NUWM.
Attempts were made in late 1932 to bring in an Act with sweeping powers
to prohibit marches, which alienated moderate opinion. The violence, how-
ever, was not on a revolutionary scale and the NUWM was more often the
 THE BRITISH UNION OF FASCISTS 223

loser than the beneficiary of the ‘politics of violence’. It acted within traditional
British restraint and-was more constitutionally minded than Mosley’s Black-
shirts. The working class, Ross McKibben argues, ‘was never a revolutionary
one; more than that, its political culture was undoubtedly defensive’.
Communism rarely emerged from the political fringe and Mosley later
recognized he had overrated its threat. Communist Party membership was
only 6,000, with half concentrated in the mining areas. The unemployed who
joined — 3,000 during the thirties — soon left. When industry revived, support
collapsed beyond the hard-core activists. At the same time Labour’s vote rose
and the ‘chance of a vacuum for extremist parties to exploit had gone’. Even
with the slump at its worst, unemployment produced apathy and a ‘remarkably
quiescent’ political scene.

It was an open secret among Diana’s friends that she was planning to leave
her husband. Mosley encouraged her in her decision ‘to devote the rest of my
life to him’. She confided in Cela Keppel how ‘marvellous was his lovemaking
compared with her husband’s inexperienced advances’. She knew he had
not given up his other affairs, including that with Baba. He had no ethical
boundaries, though he never considered women of the middle or working
classes worthy of his attention, only making advances to women ‘he thought
were equal to him’. Caesar was a favourite character because he could ‘dally
with Cleopatra, but as soon as the call came from politics or battle he could
drop it and stay away’. He did, however, Nicholas noted, ‘risk a lot of his
politics by his overt relationship with Diana while still married to my mother’.
Diana was only twenty-two but was ‘convinced of the permanency of what
I had decided to do; other people gave it a year at most’. She was never
unfaithful and was uninterested in sex: ‘beauty and art are what matter’. With
her goddess-like quality, she was almost sexless. The exquisite manners and
disdain for the opinion of others disguised a vulnerability as she hid her
jealousy. There was a coldness about her affair. Everyone knew Mosley had
had many affairs — so she did not think Cimmie would mind: ‘What difference
would it make?’ The Mitfords were horrified. Nancy wrote on 27 November
that her social position ‘will be nil if you do this. You are so young to begin
getting wrong with the world.’ On Christmas Eve Diana’s father-in-law, Lord
Moyne, and her father, called on Mosley — ‘dead white and armed with
knuckle duster’ — to see if he would give her up. Rebuffed, they decided to put
detectives on him. Bryan did not want a divorce and left for Switzerland
having forbidden Mosley to enter their house.
At a Christmas party given by the Maughams, an excited eighteen-year-old
Unity Mitford met the ‘absolutely charming’ Leader, who was not the wicked
monster described by her family. He did his eye trick of raising his eyebrow
which, one mistress noted, ‘he obviously thinks is very fascinating and which
224 BLACKSHIRT

indeed has a great effect on some people’. The Mosleys held their celebrations
at a house at Yarlington, in Somerset, where they were joined by Baba and
Fruity Metcalfe, who played Santa Claus, and by Diana, which made for an
interesting time. ;
Diana left her husband and moved with the children to Eaton Square, close »
to Mosley’s bachelor flat. She subordinated her movements to his furtive visits;
he announced his arrival with a tap of his cane on the window. Only friends
‘so intimate that they would understand her cancelling at the last minute in
the event of Mosley turning up’ were invited. Lady Cunard remained close
and Diana continued to see Nigel Birch and a director of London Films, John
Sutro, who had been asked to stand as a New Party candidate. John Betjeman
was a non-political friend, as was the wealthy collector of surrealist paintings
Edward James. The affair caused complications. A New Year’s Eve party at
Baba’s was a trying event as Diana turned up without her husband. Everybody
knew she was ‘Tom’s new girl’, though most were unaware she had left Bryan.
The pair revealed all to Georgia Sitwell but were ‘very irritating’.

In the Observer on 8 January Lloyd George lamented that the world was
like ‘a lunatic asylum run by lunatics’ as no leader commanded confidence.
MacDonald was senile, Baldwin was disparaged, Churchill was unreliable and
even Lloyd George was discredited. There was a possibility of economic chaos
and the National government might fall. If it did, The Times believed Mosley
would appear a credible figure who was prepared ‘to save Britain in a struggle
of violence with the Communist Party’. The Manchester Guardian warned he
was ‘deliberately inciting physical opposition and public disorder’, like Hitler
in Germany.
On 30 January 1933 Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor. The Mail said it
was ‘one of the most historic days in the latter day history of Europe’. There
was a reluctance to criticize Hitler. On 10 February the Jewish Chronicle’s
Berlin correspondent claimed his programme was ‘not the Nazi programme
at all’. The paper was alarmed by BUF anti-Jewish innuendoes but when
Mosley said ‘we do not attack Jews because they are Jews, we only attack
them if we find them pursuing an anti-British policy: any Jew who is not
anti-British will always get a square deal with us’, it asserted he had ‘arrived
at the safe haven of tolerance and common sense’. Anti-Semitic feelings,
however, ran high in BUF branches in Hull and Leeds, where walls were
plastered with posters. In Manchester, Jews were threatened with violence,
shops were painted with the slogan ‘Perish the Jews’ and a synagogue had
swastikas chalked on its walls.
In the Blackshirt’s first issue in February, Mosley declared: ‘Fascism alone
today can hold open meetings in “Red” strongholds without police protec-
tion.’ It was important to demonstrate the BUF’s ability to stand up to ‘Com-
 THE BRITISH UNION OF FASCISTS 225

munist’ disorder. On 24 February Mosley spoke against his old ILP colleague
Jimmy Maxton in a debate, later the subject of a libel suit against the Star.
Maxton challenged him as to what his Defence Force would do if faced with
a left-wing takeover. Mosley — ‘dressed for the slaughter in his black shirt’ —
replied that behind the Labour Party ‘will emerge the organised communist,
the man who knows what he wants; and if and when he ever comes out we
will be there in the streets with Fascist machine guns to meet him’. The Star
said Mosley was ready to take over the government with machine-guns. A
jury disagreed and awarded him £5,000 damages. In his summing up, Lord
Chief Justice Hewart asked the jury whether Mosley ‘did not appear to you
to be a public man of no little courage, no little candour and no little ability?’
A week later the clash between Fascism and Communism was the subject
of Mosley’s table talk at Lord Dufferin’s. Conservatives thought they could
control the situation but even Rothermere ‘did not realise what is coming’.
Mosley admitted he needed ‘disaster here to give him a chance’ but maintained
‘England is the country best adapted to Fascism’. A few years ago, ‘six men
started the Nazi movement. After a year’s struggle they numbered only 63
men in the whole country — what slow progress compared to the great strides
of our British Union of Fascists in these first five months of its existence!’
On 5 March the Mosleys listened to a wireless address by President Roose-
velt at Lloyd George’s house. Cimmie wrote to Roosevelt that they had been
‘terrifically excited’ by his speech. He wrote back that he admired Lloyd
George and hoped he had started ‘a liberal trend of affairs in this country’.
Mosley criticized Roosevelt’s policies. Exports, agricultural incomes and
industrial production fell by a half, and during 1933 unemployment in the US
rose to fifteen million. He said the failure was due to ‘the absence of a coherent
national plan to check forces inimical to the stability of the State’. America
had ‘made a god of unregulated anarchy in private enterprise’. The ‘very
energy of American libertarianism’ was the best argument for Fascism but
only corporatism could set the temporary boom on a permanent footing.
Mosley admitted in Italy’s Gerarchia that the BUF had had a difficult start
with the ‘weapons of ridicule and defamation used against us’ but was now
progressing. He said the BUF was ‘not imitating Italian fascism. Fascism is a
national creed and the English are a very insular people.’ However, he
announced his support of the ‘iron realism of universal fascism’ and played
host to foreign Fascist leaders and admirers.
In March Eric Campbell, leader of the Australian New Guard, contacted
Mosley, following a suggestion from Rear-Admiral Gerald Dickens, the Chief
of Naval Intelligence. The New Guard had a following of 100,000 ex-
servicemen, with a hard core of 20,000 ‘Ironsides’. In London, Campbell
found Fascism was not frowned upon and, in the circles around Lady Dalton,
heard ‘high praise for Mussolini’s objective approach to problems that beset
226 BLACKSHIRT

his country’. He found Cimmie ‘elegant and charming’, and Mosley a ‘fine cut
of a man with more than an ordinary share of personal magnetism, if perhaps
a trifle dramatic’. He attended a BUF meeting chaired by Cimmie but thought
the Blackshirts ‘unpleasant and unconvincing types’. Mosley provided him ,
with letters of introduction to Italy and Germany.
Fascism was considered more curious than disreputable and Mosley was
welcome at Establishment functions. He debated Fascism at a Foyle’s Literary
Luncheon with Megan Lloyd George and was involved in a verbal contest at
the Cambridge Union with Clement Attlee, who thought he talked ‘pretty fair
rot. It is really Mosley and nothing more.’ Mosley explained Fascism to the
English-Speaking Union, though it had ‘only been in existence little more than
ten years’ which was too soon for it to ‘have assumed a crystallised form’. It
was a practical creed of action based on a Spenglerian approach and
Caesarism. Only Fascism could secure ‘order out of the economic chaos which
exists today’. Blackshirts believed they were living through a crisis and that
selfless efforts were needed to save the country. Britain was in ‘acute danger’
and they were determined, in a crusading spirit, ‘to act as a modern St George’.
Most believed the BUF was there to solve the ‘devil’s decade’s’ social and
economic crisis — namely unemployment.
Mass unemployment was the popular image of the thirties, but it was also
true, noted A. J. P. Taylor, that ‘people were enjoying a richer life than any
previously known in the history of the world: longer holidays, shorter hours,
higher wages. They had motor cars, cinemas, radios, electrical appliances.’
The two sides of life, however, did not join up. Higher consumption helped
fuel industrial growth and by the summer of 1933 unemployment began to
decline as the revival gained pace. New industries forged ahead, but exports
from staple industries declined. The result was that unemployment reached
one and a half million, mostly concentrated in the deprived areas of south
Wales, Scotland and the north of England.
In these areas, many people felt degraded by their experience of the dole
with its invasive Means Test and loss of self-respect, which revealed the ‘utter
sham of party politics’. Mosley was the only leader, said Blackshirts, who was
proposing a cure for the evils of the thirties. However, George Cole wrote in
the New Statesman that ‘conditions do not exist in Britain for the growth of
fascism. We have no ruined middle classes . . we have no economic suffering
extreme enough to drive men to desperate ventures and. . . we are not suffering
under the psychology of defeat.’ The crisis never had, Ross McKibben notes,
the ‘same socially disintegrating effects that it had elsewhere. It was contained
within the existing state structure and within traditional party allegiances.’
In an attempt to break these allegiances, J. Paton, a Covent Garden porter
and ex-leader of the National Unemployed Workers Movement in Battersea,
formed a Fascist Union of British Workers (FUBW) as the ‘forerunner of the
 THE BRITISH UNION OF FASCISTS 227

one big administrative union which will represent the workers’ interests under
fascism’. The FUBW aimed to ‘protect the interests of workers, whether in
employment or unemployed. To fight against wage cuts and all reductions in
the standard of life, to fight the Means Test and all means to bully the
unemployed.’ It encouraged the unemployed to join Fascist clubs.
In April Charles Bradford, an ex-Communist steel erector, took charge of
the FUBW, which enjoyed some success in representing workers at public
assistance committees, and gained a foothold among non-unionized workers
in the Midlands and the North. It attempted to infiltrate selected union
branches by organizing Fascist cells. Special Branch reported in May that a
Brown Shirt Section was recruiting ‘unemployed manual workers of the navvy
type as distinct from the younger and rather better educated men who make
up the Black Shirts’.
A BUF Women’s Section was established in March, under Lady Mosley,
with premises at 233 Regent Street, which had been donated by a Fascist
sympathizer. Female Blackshirts, who made up 20 per cent of the membership,
held the St John Ambulance certificate and were trained in ju-jitsu — ‘a pre-
caution made necessary by the behaviour of Communist women at some of our
rougher meetings’. The BUF attracted former suffragettes, though Mosley’s
advocacy of women’s rights was superficial: ‘The part of women in our future
organization will be important, but different from that of the men; we want
men who are men and women who are women.’ The men still dictated policy
on birth control, sterilization and abortion.
Essential to Fascism, notes Julie Gottlieb, was a stress on the masculine.
Macho Fascism was personified by the Duce himself; an example which Mosley
emulated. He was a man who ‘thinks and feels for Britain as a man, and all
true men, all true women, recognise his lead and follow him unfalteringly
through ordeals which only they can face and they can survive’. With ‘his tall
athletic frame, with its dynamic force and immense reserve of strength; his
- unconquerable spirit, with its grandeur of courage and resolve’, he was a model
of virility. There was an element of homoeroticism in the BUF, paralleled by
homophobia, which created rifts in a movement with homosexuals in key
positions. Blackshirt propaganda ‘symbolically castrated opponents’ by ascrib-
ing to them feminine characteristics, which were associated with softness and
weakness. Fascist sexuality was measured against the effetism and decadence
of intellectuals, and the old women who ruled Britain.
Against the old who ran Britain, there was ‘a curious cult of hatred’, George
Orwell noted. Their dominance was ‘held to be responsible for every evil
known to humanity . . . throughout almost the whole nation there was a revolt
of youth versus age’. Alex Miles acknowledged being ‘swept up in this hot
flood of feeling that here was a Leader who typified Youth’. Silke Hesse made
the point that the model Fascist society is of a gang of adolescent youths.
228 BLACKSHIRT

There was heated discussion on whether clubs should be mixed or exclusively

male. The latter conception won the day, despite warnings that to confine
them to young men would be emulating Nazi organization.
Mosley’s revolutionary patriotism attempted to supersede Conservative love
of King and Country with ‘a determination to build a country free from
unemployment, poverty and despair’. However, he knew Fascism would not
pose an attraction for an increasingly prosperous middle class insulated from
economic insecurity, so hoped the loss of Empire would put patriotism to the
fore. The spectacle of Britain ‘increasingly belittled and bewildered, her former
glory and power diminishing’, angered diehards and he dropped economic
policies in favour of an Empire-orientated, self-sufficient unit. Indian consti-
tutional reform was the National government’s crisis and one Churchill’s
supporters exploited. Robert Bernays discovered Rothermere had hosted a
dinner party of ‘all the crooks in politics’ - Beaverbrook, Lloyd George,
Bracken, Boothby and Mosley.
In choosing India as the issue “best calculated to dissociate the Conservative
Party from Mr Baldwin and break up the National Government’, the Econom-
ist judged Churchill chose well. On 6 April Samuel Hoare observed that
Churchill was convinced ‘he will smash the government. . . and thinks England
is going Fascist and that he will eventually be able to rule India as Mussolini
governs north Africa’. With Mosley waiting in the wings, the scenario of a
Churchill-led proto-Fascist diehard ramp was not implausible. Fascism was in
the air. Hitler had forced through the Reichstag the enabling law, the prelude
to the establishment of dictatorship.
In response to events in Germany, Mosley was determined Fascism would
come to Britain but wanted ‘to avert the collapse which has led to bloodshed
and violence on the Continent’. However, he anticipated a positive role for
his paramilitary force if he was ‘called upon to save the nation in a condition
of anarchy’. Skidelsky believed the violence was ‘at least as much the result of
anti-fascist demonstrators interrupting meetings or attacking fascists’. Stephen
Cullen argued Fascists were ‘far more the victim than the perpetrator’ of
violence and that it occurred almost exclusively in connection with the defence
of their meetings. Although he did not look for fights, avoiding them was not
Mosley’s priority and he admitted that at times the fighter took over and the
soldier came to the fore. He denied his Defence Force carried weapons, but it
soon became apparent that the I Squad used weapons to impose its will. In
Manchester, Fascists set the pattern of violence.
On 12 March, at the Free Trade Hall, Mosley said his stewards did not
want violence but would insist on the right to free speech. He began, reported
the Manchester Guardian, ‘smilingly with some references to his legend, but
he has not got very far before the smile disappears and the face says clearly
“into battle’. It is an earnest, gripping mood. First that apathetic audience is
 THE BRITISH UNION OF FASCISTS 229

arrested, then stirred, and finally swept off its feet by a tornado of a peroration
yelled at the defiant high pitch of a tremendous voice.’ Hecklers were harshly
dealt with. When one was felled by a blow from a steward, the audience’s
mood became hostile and fights broke out. To quell the disruption, the I Squad
used lengths of hosepipe supplied by Defence Force leader Eric Hamilton
Piercy, a former salesman and special constabulary inspector often seen at
Mosley’s side. The police eventually closed the event by ushering the stewards
into the lobbies. Manchester foreshadowed future disturbances.
Mosley went out of his way to parade the uniformed Defence Force, whose
jackbooted I Squad inner core regarded itself as an elite within an elite. Even
within the BUF its members had a reputation for brutality. Mosley stated the
use of weapons was forbidden but, two days after Manchester, Fascists used
rubber hoses — loaded with lead shot — and others knuckledusters, to attack a
jeering crowd on Rochdale’s town hall square. Arthur Fawcett recalled a
coachload of members travelling to the north-east with the sole intention of
‘doing over the Reds’. The BUF strategy was to carry out campaigns in
working-class districts where the Defence Force actively sought a fight.
The violence originated with I Squad members imported from London to
bolster local ‘pansy gangs’. According to north-east organizer Michael Jordan
there was little violence until the I Squad intervened and unleashed a campaign
of provocation. They hurled insults at crowds, or launched unprovoked
assaults, to goad the crowd to react. The violence then developed a momentum
of its own and proved to be infectious. Within a few months local members
were involved and adopted the new tactics as their own. Jordan was convinced
the violence had been deliberately orchestrated by the leadership.
Edward Bailey organized Reading’s Defence Force, which worked to the
strategy of Piercy and regional organizer Captain Keenes. In secret, Mosley
chad said ‘there must be a fight in Reading to secure the mastery of the
Blackshirts over all others’. Bailey attended training sessions for plain-clothes
- members to practise disruptive heckling for the pre-arranged violence. For the
Belle Vue rally, after which Italian Fascist Party Secretary General Achille
Starace congratulated Mosley on his ‘gallant performance’, two weeks’ train-
ing and rehearsal took place. Bailey claimed the tactics were ‘usually successful’
and enabled blame to be attached to the Communists.
Piercy had allegedly said that, although the BUF claimed to be seeking
power by the ballot box, it was in fact preparing to seize power by force. It
was not organized for elections and Blackshirt Arthur Beavan admitted that
with ‘most of us being ex-Servicemen’, it seemed ‘perfectly natural’ that it was
organized as an army. Mosley drew a parallel with the New Model Army.
With 20,000 disciplined members, the BUF represented ‘a force equal to
Cromwell’s and more experienced in war’.
It has been argued that ‘the glorification of war and violence was not to be
230 BLACKSHIRT

found amongst the ideas of the BUF’. It was true its propaganda said war was
‘an evil to be avoided’, which suggested it was pacifist, but that was not the
case. Spengler had written that ‘armies will in the future take the place of
parties’, and Mosley turned explicitly to an army-like model for the BUF
structure, which was based on a number of headquarters in the main urban
areas, organized as military barracks, in which squads of uniformed Black-
shirts would live and train for crisis day. The New Statesman believed the
BUF’s militarism was an ‘incitement to violent resistance’, designed to help
bring about the very situation Fascism was intended to meet.
Piercy boasted to Bailey that in the event of a crisis — which could be
engineered — Mosley would, under the guise of ‘saving England from Mob
law’, take power by force. Fascists enlisted in the army would ‘bring companies
of soldiers and arms and ammunition’, allowing the BUF to have a ‘machine
gun in every street’. No doubt this was bravado but others reported that the
BUF ‘would step in following the crisis of a resurgent Labour Party’. Experi-
enced politicians such as Forgan argued that to gain power, ‘we had ro years
of hard, slogging, painful endeavour, slow organisational activity to face’.
Mosley was not prepared to wait. ‘He wanted power almost at once,’ Alex
Miles realized, ‘and thought he knew how to get it.’
On 9 March 1933 the Nazis won 43.9 per cent of the vote in the Reichstag
election, whereupon Hitler created the Gestapo, which persecuted Jews. The
Jewish Chronicle now took Nazism seriously and published smuggled-out
photographs of Jew baiting. With 60,000 Jews fleeing Germany, the paper
supported a boycott of German goods to ‘extinguish the fire of persecution at
its source’. Organized Jewry feared intervention would unleash an anti-Semitic
backlash from Tory MPs, such as J. J. Stourton and Peter Agnew (later
members of the anti-Semitic Right Club), who were in touch with the BUF.
In Parliament, Edward Doran asked the Home Secretary on 9 March to ‘take
steps to prevent any alien Jews entering this country from Germany’, while
Stourton revealed the Jewish identities of the refugees. Two days later Doran
referred to the resentment caused by the ‘invasion of undesirable aliens’ and
asked that the Home Secretary ‘give them notice to quit before serious trouble
develops’. Mistrust of refugees led inexorably to the rejection of ‘refu-Jews’,
in a campaign in which the BUF played a leading role.
The government did little to help Jewish victims of the Nazis because it was
convinced that allowing their entry would fuel anti-Semitism. A number gained
entry to fulfil employment needs as maids and nannies to wealthy families.
Ironically, a private organization serving this need, the Anglo-German Servants
Agency, was run by the German wife of Alexander Raven Thomson, who was
about to join the BUF. The general ill feeling towards the refugees reminded
Aldous Huxley of Wordsworth: ‘The land all swarmed with passion, like a
plain devoured by locusts.’ That was Europe in 1933 — ‘the awful sense of
 THE BRITISH UNION OF FASCISTS 231

invisible vermin of hate, envy, anger crawling about .. . Let us hope we shall
not have to scuttle when Tom Mosley gets into power.’
Communism’s official position on Fascism was determined by a Comintern
resolution on 1 April 1933, which set the tone for the decade not only by
condemning social democracy for leading to Fascism but also by confronting
Fascism via the United Front. There was little guidance on how to apply the
principle to Britain. Communist Party policy was to work with the ILP and
Labour against Fascism, but it was the rank and file, not the leadership, which
campaigned. The Daily Worker recorded many local initiatives but turned a
blind eye to CP involvement in anti-Mosley activities which were deliberately
played down by the Central Committee. There was opposition to the BUF in
the North but the CP leadership felt Fascism’s threat came from the National
government. Reporting in the summer to the Central Committee on the Euro-
pean Anti-Fascist Congress in Paris, Ted Bramley dismissed the fight against
the BUF as irrelevant to the main anti-Fascist struggle and said CP leaders
had ‘waged a fight against the line of breaking up fascist meetings’.
Despite Communist and Labour Party reservations, cross-party activists
fought BUF efforts to establish a bridgehead in Manchester. R. H. S. Phillpott
reported to the TUC that local Blackshirts were ‘undoubtedly anti-Jew’. BUF
membership legitimized for some youth gangs already present feelings of
anti-Semitism and violence towards other gangs. Blackshirts were engaged in
frequent street fights with anti-Fascists from the Jewish Young Communist
League, who responded to ‘a violent situation which was not of their making’.
Mosley disclaimed any interest in the ‘Jewish Question’, as did the Black-
shirt, which was edited by Cecil Lewis, a solicitor who had served in the Indian
Army and as a political officer in Iraq. He spent time in Italy where he acquired
his Fascist convictions and was employed by Mosley as a legal adviser. Lewis
pioneered a Fascist literary style of violent invective with opponents described
either as ‘scum’ or ‘sub-human’.
On x April 1933 the Blackshirt stated that the idea that the BUF was
anti-Semitic was old gang press propaganda. Jew baiting in every shape and
form was forbidden. ‘The early propaganda of the Nazis against the Jews has
considerably complicated their accession to power and their ability to deal
with Socialist, Communist and financial enemies of the State.’ It was lying
propaganda that the Nazis were persecuting the Jews: “Dr Goebbels, Minister
of Propaganda, has offered a challenge to anyone who can name one single
Jew who has met his death in the course of the national revolution.’ It all
seemed to indicate that, because of an internal policy debate, anti-Semitism
was being curbed. A few speakers were removed from their posts but the
statement was entirely to do with Mosley’s visit to Rome.
*
232 BLACKSHIRT

The Mosleys attended the International Fascist Exhibition, celebrating

Fascism’s founding. According to Irene, Cimmie was going through heil over
Diana, who was recklessly ruining her life because of ‘her crush on that vain
insensate ass’. She was happy to be away from London, whose gossip columns
were trying to dig out details of the affair. With the banner headline ‘FASCISM
AND PEACE’, the Blackshirt announced on 17 April that the ‘firm friendship
of fascist nations will build the new Europe’. In Rome were representatives of
other movements, including Hermann Goering. The Exhibition, Mussolini
said, ‘was a thing of today, therefore very modern and daring, with no melan-
choly memories and decorative styles of the past’. It emphasized the regime’s
desire to live in the age of machines, in which technology’s dehumanizing
effects would be subdued through the Corporate State returning machines to
their role of ‘serving man and the community as instruments of liberation, not
as a means of increasing misery’.
Mosley was received by Arturo Morpicati, Vice-Secretary of the Fascist
Party, and Achille Starace, who presented a banner to the BUF delegation.
Mosley appeared with Mussolini on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia and
handed him a parchment BUF membership card in a leather case. Mosley was
advised not to copy Nazi aberrations: ‘anti-Semitism is a symptom, not of
Fascism but of Germany’. Holding up Fascism for emulation, Mussolini
criticized deviations from its ideals by the German imitator. He branded the
Nazis heretics for their pagan racism. Mussolini was intrigued by Hitler,
perhaps even jealous. Thus his anti-Nazism became more pronounced as his
standing on the European scene was weakened by Hitler’s success. Throughout
the spring of 1933 he warned Hitler that his anti-Jewish measures were causing
outrage throughout Europe.
On 20 April the Manchester Guardian reported that the terror in Germany
‘has become a war of extermination waged by Brownshirts against the entire
left’. In Rome, Mosley said the BUF was not anti-Jewish and that Hitler ‘had
made his greatest mistake in his attitude towards the Jews’. The Blackshirt
quoted Goering: ‘The German Government will not tolerate persecution of a
person merely because he is a Jew’ and thought it ‘unfortunate that this policy
was not maintained in the Nazi Movement from their early days’. There had
been anti-Semitic outrages in Germany and the ‘disciplined movement of
world Fascism looks to the Government to suppress them’. It praised the
single-mindedness of Mussolini, who ‘avoided conflict with Jews, with Church,
with sectional interests of any kind’.
It is argued that anti-Semitism was unknown to Fascism outside the Teutonic
races, but though Italy was considerably less racist than Germany, it was racist
nonetheless. Of a Jewish population of 45,000 in 1938, 10,000 ended up in
concentration camps. Racism was endemic in Fascism, as was borne out by
the regime’s harsh treatment of the Libyans and Ethiopians.
 THE BRITISH UNION OF FASCISTS 233

Mussolini harboured anti-Semitic prejudices and saw Zionism as a threat

to Italian nationalism. He exploded that ‘the Jews are my worst enemies’ when
his daughter Edda told him she was going to marry a Jew. Radicals wanted to
go down the anti-Semitic route but were prevented from doing so by insti-
tutional limitations which blocked racial versions of Fascism. Even so, Jews
were excluded from public positions. Head of the Science Academy and father
of radio Guglielmo Marconi was a Fascist hatchetman and systematically
blocked Jewish candidates at the behest of the dictator. Anti-Semitism was
less virulent than in other European countries (for social and historical reasons)
but there existed ‘an anti-semitic ferment, a subterranean movement that
became open only with the racial laws’.
The Mosleys were honoured by sharing Mussolini’s platform at a march
past of Fascist contingents. However, he failed to appear and they, Blackshirt
editor Captain Lewis and John Celli, BUF organizer in Italy, had to stand in
the pouring rain for two hours, as 35,000 Blackshirts marched past. The
Telegraph reported that Cimmie wore a ‘light mackintosh, brown felt hat and
— for the occasion — black gloves, which are the correct wear when giving the
Fascist salute. This she did repeatedly as unit after unit obeyed the order “Eyes
left!”’.’
The Mosleys returned to London praising Fascism. The Pontine Marshes
had been drained and villages built. They had seen evidence of Communist
crimes, such as ‘holding the heads of living men in steel furnaces until they
were burnt off’. Cimmie had been impressed but Nicholas disputed Diana’s
claim that his mother was a Fascist convert. She made an extra effort to be
loyal. Irene ‘expressed the hope that the man she worshipped and adored had
finally pegged his creed to a pattern that he could serve without any more
deflections’. An early infiltrator into the BUF had ‘reason to believe that she
is not in full accord with his activities’. Cimmie devoted many hours in her
failing health to working out a card-index system for the BUF. Spotted at a
meeting, a reporter asked her about her politics. She replied, ‘I am a member
of my husband’s Party.’
Mosley sent his aide-de-camp, twenty-four-year-old Ian Hope Dundas, to
Italy to study Fascism. The son of Admiral Sir Charles Dundas, ADC to
King George V, he was educated at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth.
Well-dressed, handsome and arrogant, he resigned his commission in 1929 to
become private secretary to Brendan Brackén, who recommended him to
Mosley, for whom he performed special duties. A daughter from his second
marriage, Lynette, believed he was ‘probably into Mosley for money and not
for ideological reasons’. He was introduced to Mussolini by Harold Goad, an
important contact for the BUF. Goad lectured at the University of London
and was a member of a pro-Fascist Corporate State study group within the
Royal Institute of International Affairs, which included Sir Charles Petrie,
234 BLACKSHIRT

Muriel Currey and Major Strachey Barnes, who never joined the BUF, believ-
ing anti-Semitism was for idiots. The group was too political for the RITA and
its meetings were moved to Miss Curry’s flat where Ambassador Grandi was
a frequent guest.
Fascism, Beverley Nichols observed, was ‘mercifully confined to Italy. The
youth of England had not yet begun to prance about the street in black shirts,
like perverted Morris dancers, pushing the palms of their hands in the faces
of the startled bourgeoisie.’ Faith was put in Mussolini’s remark that Fascism
was not for export but his Grand Council announced the ‘expansion of fascism
inthe world’ as official policy and, after Dundas’s visit, there developed close
relations between Italy and the BUF. Dundas was regarded as a friend by
Italia Nostra in whose columns he frequently appeared. Italian papers reported
at length on Mosley and, in particular, his references to a pan-European policy
and his willingness to join others in developing universal Fascism.
Prompted by restlessness among Fascists who looked to Galeazzo Ciano for
fresh energy, Mussolini subsidized foreign groups as part of a widespread
propaganda campaign. A decisive factor was Hitler’s emergence. If Italy failed
to institutionalize these contacts, a Fascist International might be co-opted by
the Nazis, which was intolerable to Mussolini. In London, Grandi told friends
‘Mussolini was ‘becoming unbalanced and thinking of himself as the Pope of
Fascism, infallible, above criticism and surrounded only by satellites, toadies
and flatterers’.
‘Our deep and abiding friendship with the fascist movement in Italy’, Mosley
stated in May, ‘is based on the solid rock of our friendship between men who
hold in common a vast conception and a greal ideal. Such friendship raises no
question of subordination, it raises only a question of common service to a
common cause.’ A delegation of Italian Fascists were welcomed at a reception
at Denham. The interpreter was the Italian-born BUF district officer for
Liverpool. ‘It was a shock’, Alex Miles wrote, ‘to discover that the “British”
Union of Fascists required the service of an Italian and a further shock was
provided by the extremely close relations I found to exist between the staff of
the Italian Consulate in that city and local Fascist headquarters.’ The BUF
constitution forbade enrolment of foreigners but Italians were made honorary
members. A consequence of Mosley’s Rome visit was that Italian intelligence
was allowed to insert agents into the BUF.
Mosley was influenced by the ‘adventurous, irresponsible and intelligent’
Bill Allen who, John Strachey said, would provide ‘a useful facade of theory’.
He argued emphasis ‘on the conception of the nation does not preclude
that Universalism which is the antithesis of Internationalism. A revolutionary
movement, developing in different countries as the expression of the will-to-
power of a generation already decimated by war, would hardly seem likely to
envisage the initiation of new wars as the over-riding objective of its inspi-
 THE BRITISH UNION OF FASCISTS 235

ration.’ An integral universalism built around European racial culture would

‘assure to Europe, peace — and to the world, order’.
To bring the pro-Italian groups under his control, in June Mussolini created
the Comitati d’azione per l’Universalita di Roma (Action Committees for
Roma Universality, CAUR). Under Eugenio Coselschi, CAUR developed
secret links and distributed funds to the burgeoning Fascist groups, including
the BUF. Asvero Gravelli, the militant editor of Ottobre and a leading propa- |
gandist, used CAUR to promote Fascism as the ‘solution to the crises besetting
the West’. He wanted to ‘group together the best elements in Europe, to instil
the experiences of fascism, to nourish the revolutionary spirit and to establish
devotion to the cause of European dictatorship’. CAUR, however, attacked
the Nazis because of their racial theory.
In Ottobre’s survey of British Fascism, Gravelli praised Mosley for rejecting
Nazi racial doctrine, for acknowledging Fascism’s Italian origin and adopting
corporatism. He accepted newspaper reports of 17,000 members were ‘a gross
underestimation’ and claimed there were 370 branches and from ‘a calculation
of the income of the BUF, one can infer that there are about 700,000 members’.
The figures were created by the BUF, which made every effort to give the
impression that it was ‘larger and more powerful that it actually is’. Gravelli
said the emphasis had been ‘on those aspects of fascism which are particularly
British but the international alliance of fascism is the superior form of organisa-
tion for the young fascist forces. Fascist youth must be able to build up a new
European and world entity. British fascism will get strength from this.’
Mosley denied the BUF was subordinate to Italian Fascism but ‘the truth
is’, Johannes Steel wrote in The Nation, ‘that the actions of political parties
are determined less by the terms of their formal programmes than by the
sources from which their funds are drawn’. Mosley did not slavishly copy
Mussolini but policy was shaped by his opinion. He temporarily buried anti-
Semitism in order to secure funding and for this reason attacked Nazi racial
policies. He followed up with a public hymn of praise to Mussolini ‘as the
chief architect of European peace and thanked the Duce’s genius’. The dictator
was now satisfied that the BUF was worth long-term investment.
BUF finances fluctuated wildly. Some weeks there was no money to pay
officials’ salaries. At other times the movement was flush with funds, financing
propaganda on a scale as large as Conservative Central Office. TUC infiltrator
H. R. S. Phillpott reported that ‘a couple of months ago the BUF was ..
doing a relatively small amount of propaganda work and not very much
money was being spent. Since then, however, there has been a considerable
speeding up both in activity and in expenditure. Whether the extra money is
“new” in the sense that it is not Mosley money it is, of course, impossible to
say.’ He was unaware of the Italian subsidies which had come on stream.
Mosley made clandestine arrangements for banking of the money. When,
236 BLACKSHIRT

after the war, Home Secretary Chuter Ede raised the issue of Italian funds,
Mosley claimed all BUF activities were ‘paid for direct from its own bank
account. The wage bill and all the considerable expenditure or propaganda
and organisation were met by cheques drawn on that account. This account
... was in the hands of the Government of the day. If Italian money was paid
into this account how and when was it paid and through what accounts did
it pass?’ Journalists tried to question Count Grandi, who had taken refuge in
Portugal, but he refused to respond. The Spectator (14 June 1946) noted that
‘no one could seriously suppose that traces of a transaction of this kind would
be allowed to appear in any accounts’.
Bill Allen’s secretary, Major G. J. H. Tabor, later told Special Branch that
his boss had opened a confidential account at the Westminister Bank Charing
Cross branch in March 1933. Tabor said he had been given ‘large payments
of foreign notes by Allen to pay into the account, but he never had any idea
where the money came from’. MIS believed Tabor, who with Allen and
Dundas controlled the account, lied. It has been suggested that Allen was an
MIS agent, but though he was very briefly interned and questioned by Francis
Aiken-Sneath, the files show he was hostile to MIS, which regarded him as
‘completely amoral and politically unstable’. Allen contacted MIS in 1941
and only told the truth about the account after being shown evidence from
telephone taps. When asked about Allen being an agent, author Dorothy
Carrington said ‘one would absolutely hesitate to think that he was reliable.
Perhaps he was a dark horse; he may have been more intelligent than he
looked.’
From spring 1933 the BUF received suitcases of large parcels of mixed
European currencies, worth around £5,000 (£170,000). According to Grandi,
the first ‘present’ was handed to Mosley. Forgan, who paid in cheques into
the Charing Cross account - the first on 6 June — claimed he had no knowledge
of the source of the parcels but assumed they came from the Italian embassy.
During 1933 a total of £9,500 (£313,000) was banked, though most Italian
cash was never deposited. Mussolini supported the BUF to the tune of £60,000
(£2 m) a year.
In contrast, the Germans were cautious in dealings with Mosley. Alfred
Rosenberg, Hitler’s chief Jew baiter and head of the NSDAP’s Foreign Policy
Office (APA), was interested in an association of kindred movements but
attacked their racial confusion. Through its director for Britain, Otto Bene,
the Overseas Organization (AO) was regularly informed about the BUF’s
attitude to the Jewish threat, which the Nazis feared would drive Britain into
the service of Jewish interests. The Jewish question dominated policy, which
favoured ‘anti-semitic-national protagonists’, such as the IFL’s Arnold Leese
and the Britons’ H. H. Beamish over Mosley, who had ‘Jewish blood’. He was
treated coolly by Nazi journalists, who recognized that, given the ‘health of
 THE BRITISH UNION OF FASCISTS 237

imperialist Englishness’, what was required was not so much a movement such
as the BUF but a “rejuvenation of the political leadership’.
Rosenberg visited London on 5 May, as guest of Sir Adrian Baillie, a
Unionist MP who later joined Mosley’s pro-Fascist January Club. The fact-
finding mission was a diplomatic disaster, best remembered for the placing on
the Cenotaph of a wreath bedecked with a large swastika. An annoyed Hitler
thereafter gave the key role on foreign affairs to former champagne salesman
Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was independent of the Foreign Office. The
APA retained contacts with the BUF but these were short-term. The Blackshirt
asserted that once Hitler had remodelled Germany, the ‘so-called atrocities
and harshness would end. Three-quarters of the reports were not true . . . for
the Reds had begun the violence.’
There were Jewish protests against Rosenberg’s visit and assaults on BUF
news vendors in Piccadilly and the Strand. Inspector Wells believed ‘Jews
visiting the area will not tolerate the arrogance of the fascists’ and recom-
mended Mosley ‘be told that in view of the breach of the peace his proposed
action is likely to cause, it cannot be allowed’. Special Branch subsequently
began monitoring the BUF, particularly in the East End following reports of
Jew baiting.
The BUF was identified by the public with Hitler and, influenced by events
in Germany, Jewish activists organized an anti-Nazi lobby to oppose it on the
streets. Skidelsky argued this was ‘an advanced point in an interactive chain
of provocation and counter-provocation’. According to the BUF, a British
Union of Democrats ‘sent van-loads of Jews all over the country to break up
Blackshirt meetings’ — the ‘organised bands of Communists’ about which
Mosley complained. Skidelsky claimed violence occurred because of ‘the atti-
tude of Jews themselves, and they must take a large share of the blame for
what subsequently happened’. Following criticism, he changed ‘a large share’
to ‘some’ in the paperback edition of his Mosley biography.
Although the police reports Skidelsky cited were inconsistent, he claimed
‘some local Jewish communists were more violent than anything produced by
East London or any other branch of British fascism . .. Whether they deliber-
ately used Jews as front-line troops in order to expose fascism’s anti-semitic —
potential, or whether Jewish communists showed particular relish for this
work, is difficult to say: probably a mixture of both.’ The original conclusion
read: ‘A Jewish malaise of this time was to be obsessed by fascism. If some
Jews found it intolerably provoking they certainly went out of their way to be
provoked. Fascist meetings drew them as a magnet. The very sight of a
blackshirt in uniform was enough to make their blood boil.’ Skidelsky deleted
this passage for a less provocative one.
Mosley found it difficult to hold back the activists. William Joyce, who was
studying for a postgraduate course in Philology at King’s College, joined the
 238 BLACKSHIRT

BUF and, as Area Administrative Officer for West London and then Director
of Propaganda, used his influence ‘to give the party a strongly anti-semitic
direction — and I may say that I succeeded in that direction. These were
marvellous times.’ Joyce cloaked an inferiority complex behind an arrogant
manner, but was a brilliant public speaker with a passionate but cold, clinical
voice. ‘Thin, pale, intense, he had not been speaking for many minutes before
we were electrified by this man,’ a Fascist observed. ‘Never had I met a
personality so terrifying in its dynamic force, so vituperative, so vitriolic. The
words poured from him in a corrosive state.’ Joyce was lost in a ‘colourful
dream-world where he was the universal teacher, the model patriot and the
scourge of the Jews’. MIS files made note of his mental instability and his
romantic streak, which made him ‘doubly effective and doubly dangerous’.

For months Cimmie had been unwell with severe abdomen pains and unhappy
with her marriage. In early May the Mosleys spent the weekend at Savehay
Farm but after a row over Diana, Mosley stormed out. On 8 May, after a
wretched night, Cimmie wrote her last letter to him. ‘I do love and adore you
so as much as 13 years ago and in a way more frightenedly as then I had
confidence and was happy and now I cannot figure anything quite out any
-more ...I am feeling too done in to cope much more.’ That evening she was
rushed to a London hospital with appendicitis. The operation appeared to go
well. Next day Mosley went to Diana’s for lunch with Unity, who recorded
that ‘the Leader was feeling happier’. Cimmie, however, developed peritonitis.
Diana worried that if she died ‘people would say that she had lost the will to
live’ and she, Diana, would be seen as being responsible. For several days she
did not see ‘a very busy, very miserable and tired’ Mosley. Cimmie continued
to go downhill and died on 15 May.
Dr Kirkwood told Irene that Cimmie had ‘never fought from the start. Both
mentally and physically she had never lifted a finger to live.’ He informed the
Telegraph that ‘she must have meant far more to her husband than the world
knows . . . they had a very beautiful time together during their last few days’.
As Cimmie lay dying, ‘poor Tom was trying to get through to her how
magnificent her life had been ... Tom murmuring to her his last words of
love.’ When he went for a walk in the garden, Irene asked her fiancé, Miles
Graham, to hide Mosley’s revolver, in case he did ‘something dreadful’. When
Cimmie was laid out, he sat for hours gazing at her coffin.
Cecil Beaton was in Rome when he heard of Cimmie’s death. He responded
on 16 May: ‘I am so upset I could cry. I owe much of my happiness and
success to her appreciation and friendliness.’ Her body was taken to Smith
Square, where lilies surrounded the coffin, with a garland of roses plaited by
Lady Diana Cooper trailing from it. On 19 May a memorial service was held
at St Margaret’s, Westminster, presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
 THE BRITISH UNION OF FASCISTS 239

It was ‘unbearably sad’, wrote Georgia Sitwell. The King and Queen and the
Prince of Wales sent their condolences; among the mourners were Lloyd
George, Ramsay MacDonald and a tearful Churchill, who appealed for a
memorial fund which resulted in the building of a Day Nursery in Kensington.
A gushing obituary in the Observer marks her out as the Princess Diana of
her day. Her death ‘removes from politics an extraordinary gracious and
charming personality. She had been given the balanced sanity of many gifts —
patience, the unrelenting strength of life, the divine relationship of life’s conti-
nuity. Cynthia Mosley’s death is a tragedy, her life a service, possibly a
sacrifice. Thus she leaves a man of destiny — to fate, and this is the greatest
tragedy of all.’ She had ‘stepped from grandeur at its blazing ephemeral
uncertainty to the gutter to help the humble and the meek, the poor and the
desolute, the mother-woman who understood the Nazerene’s injunction ‘‘to
suffer little children”’’ . Reynolds News reported that ‘the whole nation wept
at her death’.
Opinion was divided on whether Cimmie’s health had been undermined by
Mosley’s ‘romping from bed to bed as from party to party’. Nancy Astor
considered his grief theatrical and that it would ‘pass like a mirage’. Harold
Nicolson believed her death really did fill him ‘with grief and remorse’. Her
death, however, only added to the hatred MPs felt towards him. Mary Hamil-
ton, a Labour MP in the 1929 government, said Cimmie had been ‘sacrificed
to the hurried ambitions of her husband. Everyone liked her, and not only her
lovely face: everyone felt her sincerity, we should have written off Tom much
sooner but for her.’ Irene thought ‘it was best she had gone to suffer no more
at Tom’s hands’. Devoted Fascists idealized Cimmie for her womanly virtues
and, above all, her loyalty.
For a year, Cimmie’s body lay in a chapel at Cliveden. An elaborate tomb
was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and his son, Robert, on the banks of the
River Colne, at Savehay Farm. It consisted of a terraced sunken garden, with
a tomb of pink marble and a sarcophagus in gold travertine stone, engraved
with the inscription ‘Cynthia Mosley, my beloved’. Mosley, the bearers and
two workmen were the only people there when the coffin was finally interred.
Cimmie’s estate was valued at £20,951 (£712,300), with income from her
Leiter Trust (£8,000 a year) divided between her three children. Mosley’s own
fortune was around £300,000 (£10.2 m). His stocks and shares were looked
after by his brother John, who worked for City’ brokers Spurling, Skinner and
Tudor. Edward looked after the trust of Lord Anslow, who had been made a
peer by Lloyd George and was a next-door neighbour to Rolleston. His
medieval doll’s house near Horsham had been left to John, who was six foot
three inches tall. John lost money in the Crash but by the end of the thirties
retained control of his stockbroking firm. John’s son, Simon, did not consider
the Mosleys a close-knit family as the brothers rarely met. John was ‘very laid
240 BLACKSHIRT

back’ about Mosley’s activities. ‘He disapproved a bit but not a great deal.
He was philosophical.’
Irene, Baroness Ravensdale became guardian to the Mosley children and
dedicated herself to the role of surrogate mother, especially to Michael.
Nicholas and his sister Vivien found Aunt Baba (Lady Alexandra Metcalfe) a
more distant figure, but they were impressed with her air of glamour. Nicholas
recalled that his father ‘saw his role with children as making jokes’. He
wormed it out of his nanny that his aunts were hostile to Diana because they
felt she was responsible for his mother’s death. ‘Peritonitis is what killed her,’
Vivien acknowledged, ‘but with Diana there, she didn’t want to live.’ After
Cimmie’s death, Baba embarked on an affair with her bereaved brother-in-law,
much to the anger of her adoring husband. Mosley later told Nicholas that ‘it
was taboo for a young man to go to bed with an unmarried girl; this would
spoil her for the marriage market. Married women, however, after they had
had a legitimate child or two, were free to play the game.’ Irene did not
object, even though the two sisters were great rivals. They united, however,
in discouraging Mosley from seeing Diana.
Diana said Mosley found Cimmie’s death shattering. He ‘blamed himself
for having allowed her to work too hard — he thought her physical resistance
had been undermined by her political exertions’. In consequence, he became
overprotective towards Diana. ‘If I was ill he thought I was going to die; he
imagined it might be a result of the tension caused by his own life of struggle
and strife.’ Diana could now nail her colours to his mast, ‘colours which to
most of her friends were of a most disturbing hue’. High society was shocked
to learn that she had asked Bryan for a divorce, to which he agreed. After
attending the Women’s League of Health and Beauty, Diana and Unity would
dine at the Eatonry with Mosley, occasions which laid the groundwork for
their obsession with Fascism.
Mosley said he would devote himself to Fascism as a ‘fitting memorial’ to
Cimmie. His public and private life were put in separate compartments and
no BUF officials were invited to Denham. He gave up his social pleasures in
London, as well as Mediterranean holidays, and occupied himself with speak-
ing tours and administration. His mother took over Cimmie’s public role.
‘There must be someone to help him in his work and I am going to do my
best to fill the gap.’ Diana was content to be a mistress to Mosley and dedicated
herself unswervingly to his cause, which led to ‘a certain blindness to flaws in
either the man or in his ideals’. On 6 June she informed Unity about Mosley’s
love affairs. Years later she was ‘quite meticulous’ in doing the same to
Nicholas. ‘She gave me the instances and the dates of all the women he’d
flirted with.’
Around this time Mosley asked Baba, whose intense sexual and emotional
attraction to him was mirrored by her loathing and jealousy of Diana, to join
 THE BRITISH UNION OF FASCISTS 241

him on a trip through Bavaria. He persuaded Diana that, until her divorce
became final, seeing Baba would be useful cover for him. There was a row,
though Diana claimed she did not mind the affair. ‘I might be jealous of a
deep friendship but not sexually jealous.’ Mosley and Baba ‘had this thing for
each other, and it’s life. And with sex, opportunity is so important.’ She said
he would always come back to her, though Irene hoped his obsession with
Baba would oust Diana. The permutations of deception and self-deception
seemed endless, as he juggled people and passions. On 16 June the dissolution
of Diana’s marriage was announced.

At a house party given by Mrs Richard Guinness, Diana and Unity were
introduced to Dr Ernst Hanfstaengl, an official of the Nazi Party’s foreign
press department, who was attending a World Economic Conference to assess
reactions to Hitler. ‘He is David to Hitler’s Saul,’ the hostess told Diana, who
had ‘often met drawing-room communists who breathed fire and slaughter’
but he was her ‘first drawing-room Nazi’. The eccentric son of a Munich
fine-arts publisher and an American mother, at six feet four inches tall, he was
awkward-looking with his huge frame. ‘Putzi’ - Bavarian dialect for ‘little
fellow’ — was among the first of the middle class to join the Nazis and the
‘Chauffeureska’, Hitler’s inner circle. Irene referred to him as the jester lover
‘bugger’ Hanfstaengl — ‘a magnificent type of man who plays the piano beauti-
fully, is anxious and oily and utterly evasive on any real question’. The British
embassy in Berlin cabled London that anything he might say should be taken
with a large pinch of salt, as his ideas were ‘fantastic’.
Putzi recalled meeting Unity — ‘she was very much second string to her sister,
tagging along’. Diana asked him about the Jews. He replied that ‘people here
have no idea of what the Jewish problem has been in Germany since the war.
Why not think for once of the 99 per cent of the population, of the six
million unemployed. Hitler will build a great and prosperous Germany for
‘the Germans. If the Jews don’t like it they can get out. Let them leave Germany
to us Germans.’ Putzi invited them to visit Munich. Otto von Bismarck,
Counsellor at the German embassy, contacted him with a request to introduce
them to Hitler. ‘After that I had Unity on my hands.’
Unity was born at the outbreak of the First World War. The choice of her
middle name, Swastika (the Canadian town where she was conceived), was
prescient. Almost six feet tall, with big hands and feet, she could look beautiful
and was sometimes mistaken for Diana. Romantic by nature, rather dreamy
and somewhat unruly, she secretly joined the BUF behind the backs of her
parents, to whom any mention of ‘that man’ Mosley was taboo. His mother
viewed her with suspicion: ‘This wretch is wanting to sell black shirts and
walk in parades and attend all meetings — for what reason?’ Claud Phillimore
observed that she was ‘determined to do something against convention. She
242 BLACKSHIRT

had a strong masculine streak in her. She was immensely influenced by Diana,
and I suppose not well balanced. She wore the fascist emblem to flaunt her
outrages, to bait her parents.’
On 1 July the BUF marched in London with Mosley amassing his Fascists
in Eaton Square, near his mother’s house. The march of 1,000 young Black-
shirts and 100 girls in black shirts and skirts was ‘a splendid show’, reported
Irene. Among those watching from Colin Davidson’s window in Grosvenor
Place were Zita James, Beatrice Guinness and Hanfstaengl. Mosley had a
knack of attracting disreputable figures and on the balcony were new members,
Joseph Hepburn-Ruston and his wife, Baroness Ella van Heemstra, parents of
Audrey Hepburn. The Baroness was a Christian Scientist of mixed Dutch—
French—Hungarian origin and Jewish ancestry. The family’s Castle Doorn,
near Utrecht, had given sanctuary to the Kaiser following his abdication. Her
husband, variously described as an adventurer or financial adviser, had been
born in Bohemia cf Scottish (he wrote a book on Fascism’s Celtic roots) and
Austrian parents. During 1923-4, he met his future wife while serving as
British consul in Sumarang, Java, then part of the Dutch East Indies, where
he may have been acting for British Intelligence. The couple returned to Europe
and settled in Brussels where he supposedly managed a branch of the Bank of
England. It has been suggested Hepburn-Ruston was employed on undercover
work of a ‘delicate’ nature by the Bank’s Governor, Sir Montagu Norman.
More likely, he dabbled in investments as an independent broker.
Mosley was proselytizing among the titled. A meeting of upper-class ladies
was held on 6 July in his house, where Anthony Rumbold, whose father was
ambassador in Berlin, heard Mosley speak ‘much more of Italy than of his
own movement’. The BUF, suggests Julie Gottlieb, was a cult in veneration of
one man. His matinée idol persona helped pack meetings with ladies in evening
dress, who ‘come to watch fascist brutality in order to pander to appetites
which everything else decadent in the world can no longer satisfy’. The middle-
aged Lady Pearson was one titled woman, with a crush on Mosley, who flirted
with Fascism. His dandified appearance, however, also facilitated the derision
of his many detractors and his ‘political Douglas Fairbanksism’ was a ready
target.
Aristocrats joined the BUF, but most despised Mosley as a traitor because
he attacked inherited wealth. ‘No longer will the country house of the decadent
plutocracy stand empty for three-quarters of the year while their owners
disport themselves in the night clubs of Europe, while the peasants, because
they have no land, are relegated to the care of the “local authorities.’ He
excused himself of the charge of hypocrisy. Some felt the patrician in the
faultlessly tailored black shirt was unpopular with his own class but ‘too
scornfully aristocratic to be beloved by the masses’.
Mosley was buoyed by articles in the New Statesman in July by Keynes on
 THE BRITISH UNION OF FASCISTS 243

national self-sufficiency. He believed Keynes had validated his own thinking

but when he wrote to congratulate him, the economist said their purpose ‘was
to save the country from me, not to embrace me!’ The rise of Fascism alarmed
him and he wanted to ensure it would not be imposed on the country. Diana
admitted Mosley met Keynes ‘a few times but they were not close’; he admired
him but ‘his influence was overrated’. Mosley was finding it difficult to attract
allies.
 3
Universal Fascism

Following negotiations with Nazi representative Dr Thost during July

1933, The Times published ‘purified’ extracts from Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Despite hundreds of articles on Germany, editors disconnected Nazi ideology
from practice. Its essence — race theory — was ‘so remote from the liberal
Weltanschauung that few were willing to come to grips with it’.
On 10 July the Daily Mail announced ‘YOUTH TRIUMPHANT’. George
Ward Price urged ‘all British young men and women to study closely the
progress of this Nazi regime’. Any acts of violence were ‘exaggerated to give
the impression that Nazi rule is a bloodthirsty tyranny’. Germany was ‘falling
under the control of its alien elements. In the last days of the pre-Hitler regime
there were twenty times as many Jewish government officials in Germany
as had existed before the war. Israelites of international attachments were
insinuating themselves into key positions in the German administrative
machine. . . It is from such abuses that Hitler has freed Germany.’ Rothermere
believed Jews were playing a malevolent role and complained they were
‘everywhere’. Goebbels thought the article ‘wonderful’ and had it reprinted
throughout Germany.
Three days later Ward Price met with the Prince of Wales who, in conver-
sation with Prince Louis Ferdinand, his cousin and the Kaiser’s grandson, was
‘quite pro-Hitler’. He said it was ‘no business of ours to interfere in Germany’s
internal affairs re Jews, and added that dictators were very popular these days
and that we might want one in England before long’.
In an effort to retain Mussolini’s favour, Mosley clamped down on anti-
Semitism. Interviewed by the Jewish Chronicle on 28 July, he said attacks on
Jews were ‘strictly forbidden’. Anti-Semitism was not known in Italy. ‘The
attacks on the Jews in Germany do not rest on any Fascist principle but are
manifestations of an inherent quality in the German character. For many
centuries religious and racial tolerance has been part of the British character,
and I give my assurance that under Fascism that great tradition will be pre-
served.’ He attempted to close down other Fascist groups. BUF members
resented that they ‘might be blamed for the display of hostility towards the
Jews’ because of the actions of others. When British Fascist members counter-
 UNIVERSAL FASCISM 245

demonstrated in Hyde Park against an anti-Hitler protest and began shouting

anti-Semitic slogans, they followed it up with an attack on the BUF. Later,
Blackshirts raided the BF headquarters and caused considerable damage.
At the end of July, Grandi met with Mosley, who expressed his ‘profound
gratitude for the precious assistance’. Grandi assured him Mussolini followed
his progress ‘with particular interest’ and that arrangements had been made
for the ‘delicate operation of the consignment to be carried out in the most
secret way’ via the diplomatic bag for delivery by ‘Dottore Enderle’. A courier,
Enderle’s nephew Arturo Resio, was ‘told to carry out the assignment with
the maximum caution’, because his uncle ‘could be easily singled out, since he
has carried out similar tasks in the past’. Resio left Rome on 26 August
and was responsible for ‘slipping unobtrusively’ the instalment of £5,000 in
packages of used notes to Mosley.
Former Labour Home Secretary J. R. Clynes observed that Mosley was
becoming ‘the Greta Garbo of British politics’. He was ‘surrounding himself
with a fog of mystery so dense that even his own followers must be finding it
difficult to penetrate it’. During his wartime interrogation Francis Hawkins,
who controlled the fund collectors but not foreign donations, said money had
been sent abroad to hide the identity of British donors and that Mosley put
money into his solicitor’s account to conceal his own contribution. He was
aware money came from France but never knew its source. Cheques from
Ireland (Bill Allen’s) and Switzerland (allegedly Nazi funds) were also
deposited. The Italian funds were laundered via Minculprop, the Ministry of
Culture and Propaganda headed by Count Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law.
Only Mosley was privy to the details and relied on his collector for France,
Ian Dundas, to visit the Italian embassy in Paris once a month to receive
money through the Italian Press Attaché Amadeo Landini.
Grandi informed Mussolini that the
underground movement in English political life has given rise to manifestations not
without significance ... these Chinese of the Western world prepare, slowly but
surely, their Revolution. They may come last but they will find out that the Revolution
has taken place anyway . . . Even here there is the noise of a pick-axe. Mosley picks
up fights in the streets, the mass of young Tories is in open rebellion and the theme
of every group, tendency, party, is the following: one must concentrate the power of
the State in a few peopie. °

Rothermere was pushing ‘an openly fascist campaign’, which was considered
‘good business in selling more copies of a major newspaper. In my view this is
an interesting indication, don’t you think?’ The important point was Grandi’s
acknowledgement that, on Mussolini’s behalf, he had studied the ‘Summer
Autumn programme of action Mosley plans to undertake. Upon my sugges-
tions and advice he has prepared the programme enclosed for your approval.’
246 BLACKSHIRT

Flush with Mussolini’s subsidies, in August the BUF moved into head-
quarters next to the Duke of Wellington’s Barracks in Chelsea. Previously the
Whitelands Teacher Training College, the grey pseudo-Gothic pile at 232
Battersea Park Road, was renamed the ‘Black House’ — by its opponents the ;
‘Fascist Fort’. A Union Jack floated over the entrance and the walls were
plastered with posters: ‘Shall Jews Drag Britain Into War?’ An inmate said ‘it
was filled with students eager to learn everything about this new, exciting
crusade; its club rooms rang with the laughter and song of men who felt that
the advent of Fascism had made life worth living again’. With its ex-
serviceman, ex-officer complexion, the Black House operated in a paramilitary
fashion. Army terms and methods were used; ‘discipline, fitness and obedience
were proclaimed as virtues; the need for leadership emphasised’. Mosley said
he had ‘reverted to type and lived in the spirit of the professional army where
I began; I was half soldier, half politician.’
Within the Black House existed a Ruritanian atmosphere. Day-to-day activi-
ties of the Defence Force, who slept, ate and trained there in readiness for
meetings, were ‘regulated army fashion by the sound of the bugle summoning
them for parades, mealtimes and lights out’. Reveille at 7 a.m. heralded a
programme of drill and administrative work. Enhancing the martial image
was the military band. Mosley wanted Sousa’s ‘Stars and Stripes’ as a Fascist
anthem, with words by Osbert Sitwell.
The Black House was expensive to run and attracted an oddball collection
of recruits. There were fights, disobedience and petty thefts. Special Branch
reported an incident in which a man was badly wounded by a knife during
horseplay between inmates. It was rumoured the cellars were used for punish-
ment purposes. Headquarters was run by an administrative clique recruited
from the BF, led by the trusted Francis Hawkins, who was always at his desk.
Officials who did not commit their lives to the task were labelled clock-
watchers by ‘FH’, who denounced them as unworthy of the cause they served.
Colleagues found Hawkins always accessible but difficult to get close to. A
homosexual, he surrounded himself with unmarried men but was disliked for
the favouritism he granted to his ‘Mafia’.
The best leaders employ constructive dissenters ‘prepared to tell them, when
the time comes, that they are crazy’, but Mosley surrounded himself with
uncritical loyalists who, Diana said, were ‘faithful and had integrity’. Captain
Brian Donovan was Assistant Director-General. He had been wounded in the
war in France and received the Military Cross. He was said to have served in
the Middle East with Lawrence of Arabia. He was posted to Turkey and
fought with the Indian Cavalry on the North-West Frontier. Donovan had
been a school headmaster and had recently interviewed George Orwell for a
teaching post. A devout Catholic, he had a religious conception of the State.
Blackshirts regarded him as ‘inflexible, exacting and an incompetent martinet’.
 UNIVERSAL FASCISM 247

Next in importance came Mosley’s long-time secretary George Sutton.

Wounded in the war, Sutton had chaired the North St Pancras Labour Party.
As the ‘only man alive who can make head or tail of what Mosley writes’,
there was always a queue of people, Diana recalled, ‘waiting for Sutton to
decipher notes they had received from OM’.
Within the BUF elite there was a preponderance of highly educated youth.
Another characteristic was the number of middle-class business-professional-
farming-independent types and lower-middle-class journalists and travellers.
They displayed a high degree of restlessness; with changes in jobs and loca-
tions. Senior officials were often ex-officers with varied travel experiences
around the world. A typical official was Northern Organizer Richard Bellamy,
who had been a Black and Tan, later a jackaroo in the Australian outback
and then a coffee grower in New Caledonia. Experiences such as his were not
untypical of the feelings of rootlessness engendered by war. Bellamy said of
his Blackshirt comrades that often their ‘minds lay rooted in the halcyon past
which had ended abruptly in 1914’.
Bill Allen said Fascism appealed to those ‘younger-minded middle class who
are conservative by temperament and strongly nationalist in spirit, and to
those rarer and more dynamic individuals who, naturally revolutionary in
their outlook, have been disappointed and exasperated by the failure of all
leadership from the left to approach any fulfilment of their aspirations’. Many
of the best recruits came from the ILP, including Bill Risdon, who ‘gave a cool,
logical exposition of economic policy’ and became Director of Propaganda.
The BUF’s left wing achieved some success with the Fascist Union of British
Workers, which criticized the TUC, Labour and the Communists for putting
the welfare of foreigners before British workers’ interests. The Communist
International found the FUBW was achieving results with its propaganda
against the means test and demands for work with decent wages for the
unemployed, and was concerned about this ‘deceptiveness, because in the ears
‘of so many workers it rings true’. Alex Miles expected FUBW activities would
be expanded but he ran up against Mosley’s ‘distrust of a working class
wing of organised character’. In the end, its appeal did not prosper since
working-class occupational groups were unwilling to disown the trade unions.
Efforts to win support in non-industrialized sectors with weak unionization
attracted groups outside traditional labour-capital confrontations.
A Home Office report said BUF membership comprised marginal members
of all social and economic classes and occupational groups — working-class
domestic servants, lower-middle-class shopkeepers and middle-class cinema
owners in competition with large chains. They were unpoliticized and had not
voted for the major parties but supported ‘a “hero” in an “heroic” age’.
*
248 BLACKSHIRT

In August Mosley travelled with Baba through France, where they began an
affair. When Nicholas asked his aunt about it, she ‘drew herself up in the best
Lady Bracknell manner and said, “I’d never have gone to bed with your father
while your mother was alive!”’ Irene noticed the kindness Mosley showed
Baba, which he had never displayed to Cimmie. He told Diana that sexual
flings were to be treated almost as a joke.
Diana and Unity were on a sightseeing trip to Bavaria. Their interest in
Germany had been fired by their brother Tom, a strong advocate of German
culture, who read Schopenhauer and Kant, and in common with friends
believed Germany had been unjustly penalized by the victors at Versailles.
They were accompanied by Mosley’s friends Lord Hinchingbrooke and Nigel
Birch, and had an invitation from Otto von Bismarck for the first big Nurem-
berg rally. The Nazis were now controlling propaganda abroad. In a report
on British-German relations on 16 August, Ambassador Leopold von Hoesch
counselled against any ‘vehement and blatant’ propaganda campaign and
suggested sponsoring prominent Britons for trips to Germany as the best way
to strengthen support for National Socialism. A BUF contingent had visited
Osthofen and toured a ‘concentration Camp for political prisoners, commu-
nists and other Reds’.
Arriving in Munich, the Mitfords realized Hanfstaengl was not as well
accepted in official circles as they expected. Putzi ‘fished haphazardly in the
social currents that flowed his way and, as often as not, when his temper
flared, rejected prize catches’. He said the sisters were pretty but had ‘no
chance of meeting Hitler if you don’t wipe that stuff from your faces’ — it
conflicted with the Nazi ideal of womanhood. They did so but were dismissed
by Rudolf Hess — ‘too much make-up’.
On 21 August the pair attended the Day of Victory, celebrating the Nazis’
seizure of power. It was a huge political circus with nearly a million performers.
Part of a BUF delegation, Unity wore a black shirt. Also present was William
Joyce who, in applying the previous month for a passport for ‘business travel
and holiday purposes’, had falsely claimed to be a British subject by birth.
Like many BUF officials, he preferred the Nazis to Italian Fascists because of
their racial policies. Diana described witnessing a ‘demonstration of hope in
a nation that had known collective despair’. British newspapers barely men-
tioned the Parteitag and, when they did, it was to describe it as militaristic,
though Diana thought it ‘not even as militaristic as a torch-light tattoo in
England’.
‘A feeling of excited triumph was in the air,’ Diana wrote home. When
Hitler appeared, she felt ‘an almost electric shock pass through the multitude’.
Unity ‘underwent nothing less than a religious conversion’. Nazism appealed
to her on a very simple level. She told the Evening Standard that on seeing
Hitler, ‘there was no one I would rather meet’.
 UNIVERSAL FASCISM 249

Diana’s parents were horrified that ‘she accepted hospitality ‘from people
we regard as a murderous gang of pests’. Friends wondered how a ‘passionate
‘subscriber to all that was most civilised in their world, should be in thrall to
such a dark and ugly creed’. Diana was aware of where it might lead and
wrote to Roy Harrod asking if it was ‘not preferable that in a movement such
as this one, that might so easily become barbaric, there should be some civilised
persons throwing in their weight with the inevitable boxers, old soldiers,
suffragettes and oddments’? Mosley was ‘so clever and in his way so civilised
and English’ that the BUF ‘could not be comparable to the German movement.
But if everyone of sensibility, charm and intelligence shuns him, there is
definitely a danger that he will come to regard these virtues as vicious and the
possessors of them as enemies.’
Diana’s activities were now directed towards one aim, ‘that of her Fihrer
at home’. She intended to forge close links with officials who could be of use
to him. She went to stay in Rome with Lord Berners, an ageing homosexual,
who was almost a P. G. Wodehouse creation. However, he had been an
assistant to Sir Rennell Rodd at the embassy in Rome, where he encountered
the Futurists. Novelist, composer and dilettante, he had the instincts of the
diehard right. Many of his friends were less naive but held extreme views,
including fellow diplomats Harold Nicolson and Gerald Wellesley, future
Duke of Wellington, and his one-time fiancée Violet Trefusis.
At the end of August Claud Cockburn wrote in The Week that Mosley and
Lady Houston, owner of the Saturday Review, had joined forces to publish a
new weekly. When, two months later, the Fascist Week appeared, Lady Hous-
ton denied involvement. She had been left £6 million (£120 m) on the death
of her third husband and donated large sums to patriotic causes. When in
1931 the government refused to pay for the RAF entry to the Schneider
trophy, she provided £100,000 to commission a plane, which spawned the
Spitfire. Lady Houston contemplated writing out a cheque for £100,000
-(£3.4 m) for the BUF because she admired their ‘revival of English manhood’.
Unfortunately for Mosley, she changed her mind and tore it up.
Mosley hoped to prosper in rural areas, where campaigns were waged under
the patronage of wealthy agriculturalists such as Lady Pearson, who said the
BUF would ‘restore the Land to the service of the People’. The American wife
of the tenth Viscount and lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary, and former leading
British Fascisti, managed her Hillingdon estate tn Norfolk. The BUF received
numerous £100 (£3,000) subscriptions from such supporters. Ralph Bellamy
saw Mosley speak in an East Anglian market town. ‘A light would flash in his
eyes [which] seemed to indicate some inner flame or fire. He showed extensive
knowledge and a deep understanding of the many aspects of his subject,
memory for facts and figures, and above all there remained with me the
recollection of his strong magnetism in that strong voice as he spoke
250 BLACKSHIRT

on and on, without strain and affectation in political but unaffected prose.’
Mosley wanted to exploit the ‘Tithe Wars’. Tithes had been paid to the
Church based on the value of the corn crop, but with the restoration of free
trade prices fell. However, farmers were still required to pay the same tithe.
If it was unpaid, Church Commissioners could seize property. BUF member
and East Anglian farmer Ronald Creasey recalled many poverty-stricken
farmers being pushed ‘to the utmost despair and many suicides’. They ‘shot
themselves with their own guns, because of the mercilessness of the Church
and the tithes’.
On three occasions from the summer of 1933, Blackshirts appointed them-
selves defenders of downtrodden farmers with instructions to obstruct bailiffs
collecting the tithe. Despite police warnings, they took over a farm near
Wortham, Suffolk, run by an East Anglian novelist, Doreen Wallace, who
refused to pay the tithe. When the Church sent in bailiffs, Creasey persuaded
Mosley that it was an opportunity to ally the Fascists with a popular cause.
National Political Officer Dick Plathen was sent to mount an operation.
Blackshirts set up camp at the farm, fortified the entrance with trenches and
prepared for pitched battle with the Church’s agents. The BUF remained for
sixteen days, until a busload of fifty London policemen arrested nineteen
Blackshirts who pleaded guilty to unlawful conspiracy to effect a public mis-
chief. National Farmers Union branches rejected militant action but direct
action did have an effect. In 1936 a law was passed which provided for the
tithe’s phased abolition, though farmers paid the anachronistic tax into the
mid seventies, and it was only in 1996 that it finally passed into history.
Despite widespread depression in agricultural areas, the modernized charac-
ter of British agriculture — highly mechanized and cushioned by generous
government subsidies through Walter Elliott’s ‘socialist’ Agriculture Act -
ensured that wealthy landowners were largely impervious to BUF propaganda
and did not desert the National government.
Mosley’s romantic nostalgia for a rural past found favour with Nietzschean
Tories of the organic movement, who feared modernity and cosmopolitanism,
and dreamed of a pure and spiritual national renewal. They favoured the
English Mistery, led by US-born Lord Lymington, educated at Winchester
and a Conservative MP. Besides a return to the soil, they advocated selective
breeding for the development of racial traits and the elimination of alien
control of finance. ‘We felt that outside influences were corrupting our stan-
dards and national purpose,’ Lymington wrote. ‘We believed in ritual as man
is a ritualistic species.’ Royalism was at the core of their belief along with an
admiration for Mussolini.
Influential in the movement for an organic socialism was A. J. Penty. A
member of the Rural Reconstruction Association, Penty praised Mussolini for
creating a Corporate State — in essence the ‘Regulative Guild State’. He sup-
 UNIVERSAL FASCISM 251

ported Belloc’s and Chesterton’s Distributist League, which wanted property

vested in the many, ‘mirroring the Middle Ages, when peasant property was
the distinctive form of landholding. Belloc had met Il Duce, who shared his
belief that the ‘International Financiers govern us’. One commentator noted
that the League, ‘once a Jacobin Radical organization which owed pretty
well everything to Mr Chesterton, is now partly Tory and partly Fascist’.
Corporatism disposed distributists, such as Douglas Jerrold, to accept Fascism.
Mosley recognized allies among them, such as Penty, who said Fascism was
the best defence against Communism even if he recoiled from its totalitarian-
ism. His son Michael wrote articles for the BUF. Mosley made an unsuccessful
attempt to subsume the League within the BUF.
The link between English Mistery, the distributists, social credit and BUF
thinking was elucidated by John Strachey’s former friend H. F. Ludlam, who
edited a financial paper, the Age of Plenty, and acted as a BUF expert on
corporatism. There were similarities between the Fascist and the social credit
analyses. Raven Thompson said, ‘the class war becomes a sheer absurdity in
an age of plenty, for what object can there be in struggle between the classes
when there is plenty for all?’ Pro-Fascists such as aviator A. V. Roe, military
writer J. F. C. Fuller and Catholic convert Christopher Hollis, brother of the
future head of MIS, all adopted social credit. The Green Shirt Movement for
Social Credit felt so threatened by the BUF’s apparent appropriation of its
ideas that its leader, John Hargreave, publicly dissociated himself from
Mosley.
Artist and social creditor Wyndham Lewis met Mosley for the first time in
1933 —Mrs Naomi Mitchison having arranged an appointment. Lewis thought
him ‘a good fellow’. The meetings were an excuse for cloak-and-dagger theatri-
cals. ‘Lewis used to come to see me in most conspiratorial fashion at dead of
night with his coat collar turned up,’ Mosley recalled. He feared assassination,
‘but the unkind said he was avoiding his creditors’. Despite the promptings of
Lewis and Ezra Pound, social credit never took centre stage in BUF thinking.
Mosley disliked its anti-puritanical attitude to work and the social equality
implied by the idea of a national dividend. Ludlam was considered an
unpleasant ‘little man who wanted to be a god’ and there were rivalries
between the BUF and the Green Shirts, whose Liverpool headquarters was
broken up by Blackshirts.
In autumn 1933 a cousin to G. K. and Cecil Chesterton threw in his lot
with Mosley. A Fleet Street sub-editor, A. K. Chesterton’s wife Doris was a
Fabian socialist who belonged to Wells’s Federation of Progressive Societies
and Individuals. She said her husband had called himself a socialist but was
really a prophet in search of a creed, who fell for Mosley. Chesterton believed
in Carlyle’s suggestion that you should ‘find in any country the ablest man
that exists there; raise him up to the supreme place and loyally reverence him;
252 BLACKSHIRT

you have the perfect government for that country; no ballot box, parliamentary
eloquence, voting, constitution building, or other machinery whatever can
improve a whit’.
Chesterton was a volcano about to erupt. He believed Fascists were the ,
‘soldiers of Britain’s civil life’. Mosley said that ‘more than any writer of this =
time, he expresses in dynamic and passionate prose the resurgent soul of the
war generation ... he could find no home but Fascism’. For Chesterton, the
personal was political. When life is ‘depraved and insupportable, as when it
is called a decadent age’, the Fascist ‘is able to come to grips with his personal
problems by dealing with the problems of society in which his own, either
directly or symbolically, are exteriorized’.
During September on a visit to Rome, John Beckett decided the Italians
were ‘achieving all those things — national unity and abolition of class privilege
~ for which I had hoped from the Labour Party’. Approached by Dr Forgan,
he was reluctant to commit to the BUF since he ‘never had any faith in
Mosley’s character’. He was ‘completely insincere and his judgement seemed
erratic’. Forgan said he now took his mission ‘extremely seriously’ and
arranged several meetings with Mosley. According to a report to the British
Foreign Secretary, Beckett’s conversion was given large headlines by many
papers in Italy, which represented it as an important political event.
Beckett put aside his reservations partly for financial reasons — Mosley
offered a stable income. Beckett and his wife Kyrle Bellew, a Labour councillor
in Peckham, managed the Strand Theatre, which during 1933 made substantial
losses, which bankrupted him. Their relationship then disintegrated, each
blaming the other for the financial disaster. Beckett went to Forgan’s tailor,
bought a black shirt and quickly became one of the best-known Fascists in
Britain.
Beckett claimed his BUF speeches were ‘practically the same as those I had
made in the ILP because my change of organisation had no effect upon my
socialist convictions’. One difference was the anti-Semitism, which surfaced
after his mother’s death in 1932. Dorothy Solomon was Jewish; a secret he
guarded so well that his son only discovered it years after his father’s death.
There were these in the BUF, however, who knew he had a Jewish background.
A rabid anti-Semite, initially influenced by Joyce, he was convinced he ‘just
opposed international money power which happened to be controlled by
Jews’.
Another important recruit was thirty-four-year-old Alexander Raven Thom-
son, the BUF’s leading intellectual and chief propagandist. He had been in
Germany, where he read economics at university and married the daughter of
the German inventor of X-rays. Thomson had learnt the process for silver
paper and on his return to England set up a factory to manufacture it. He had
a private income and devoted several years to studying politics. For a brief
 UNIVERSAL FASCISM 253

period he was a member of the Communist Party in Battersea. In 1931 his

wife formed the Anglo-German Agency for Domestic Servants, which accepted
Jewish refugees from Germany as well as ‘Aryan’ servants.
In 1932 Thomson published his reply to Spengler’s Decline of the West,
Civilisation as Divine Superman, which Mosley thought exceptional. ‘His
approach differed from mine because his conclusion was as pessimistic as
Spengler’s, and his concept of the future seemed to me an almost ant-heap
collectivism.’ Thomson argued civilization could avoid decay if it adopted a
communal spirit of the type found in insect communities. Civilization was the
master, not the servant, of man, granting him ‘the immense advantages of
co-operation and specialism only as a reward for surrendering his freedom to
the higher aims of the communal spirit’. Bill Allen wrote that Thomson
‘professes to see in this superorganism the true superman. Civilization is not a
biological process in the upward progress of mankind; it is a “‘super-biological”’
force governed by “‘super-biological” laws, directing the actions of mere men
to the realization of its higher aims, the very realization of the “‘superman’’.’
Thomson had discovered a ‘hidden key’ which ‘seemed to shed a flood of
illumination over so much that was obscure and inexplicable’. With his belief
in religion restored, he believed Fascism provided a Utopia closest to his ideal.
A romantic reactionary, he dreamed of a cleansed and united nation but also
shared the radical ethos of the BUF’s left wing which attacked laissez-faire.
He claimed Fascism came from the left, emerging not from Marxism but
syndicalism. Building on his ideas, Mosley developed a complex system of
industrial self-government, based on delegates from corporations being elected
to a national chamber to decide industrial policy. In a rare confession of an
error, he later admitted his Utopian structure was too bureaucratic. He had
falsely assumed mere national will could reconcile sectional conflicts.
Raven Thomson was known as a fighter-intellectual, who ‘breathed political
and philosophical truth’. He created a ‘feeling of something approaching
euphoria among his audience, disarming his opponents before they were able
to utter anything in opposition’. He was Mosley’s personal representative in
discussions with the Nazi Party and on visits to Germany, but many regarded
him simply as a ‘yes man’. When Blackshirts supported strikers at the Firestone
factory in Brentford, TUC General Secretary Walter Citrine warned they were
‘using the methods of the Communists. They were using every strike, every
grievance, as a means of agitation.’ Supporting the strike was divisive and, on
the advice of Captain Lewis, the BUF legal adviser, Mosley sent Thomson to
ask Nazi representatives in London ‘whether the Nazi Party had ever sup-
ported strikes’. He reported that they did not support strikes.
The Foreign Office’s Permanent Under-Secretary of State, Sir Robert Vansit-
tart, learnt in September that ‘a close watch is being kept on Nazi activities in
this country’. Of particular interest was Otto Bene, a salesman for a German
254 BLACKSHIRT

company, but in reality a Nazi official reporting to Rudolf Hess. Attitudes

towards the BUF were confused by the anatagonism between the NSDAP,
which preferred contact with individual Fascists, and the German Foreign
Office, which had yet to be nazified.
Initially slanted towards Mussolini, BUF publications now paid homage to =

National Socialism, reflecting the divisions within the movement. During

September the Blackshirt portrayed Hitler as a messenger of peace. Nazi
official Gunther Schmidt-Lorenzen visited England to study at first hand
British Fascism. A guest of Viscount Downe and Lady Downe at their 42,000-
acre farm at Wykham Abbey, Yorkshire, he found among their circle of
military and aristocratic figures a friendly view of Germany. They told him of
a ‘rising wave of rejection of international Jewish capitalism’ and introduced
him to British Fascist leaders, who exaggerated the BF’s membership at
400,000, attacked Mosley for ‘accepting money from Jews’ and being friendly
with ‘men such as Baron Rothschild and Sassoon’.
Lady Downe introduced the German to the ‘un-English’ Mosley. ‘His dark
hair, his very expressive features, perhaps playing for effect, show this. He
knows how to put himself and his political views over through his style and
is without doubt a skilled and man-of-the-world fighter for his cause.’ The
British might not accept Fascism, but Mosley claimed the ‘bad world-wide
situation and the resulting distress in agriculture and industry and the desire
and hope for improvement were pushing astonishing numbers of supporters
to him’. He had ‘great sympathy with the great Hitler movement and wished
for nothing more than to be able to remain in close contact with events in
Germany’. He was sending ‘capable men’ to Germany to make direct reports,
since there had been ‘no contact with the representatives of our embassy for
a long time’. When the German expressed concern regarding his leniency
towards Jews, Mosley insisted ‘it wasn’t correct that he was paid by the Jews;
his attitude and tactics with regard to the Jewish question was one more suited
to the English character and which appealed more to the English sense of fair
play. It is better to say “Here is a man who brings in international finance and
is flooding us with interest — here is another who is in touch with international
communists and who are damaging English industry — both are Jews”. Judge
for yourself what happens to them.’ Mosley admitted it was a ‘machiavellian
policy’.
Mosley bent policy to attract potential suitors. At the end of September, the
BUF attacked the ‘international finance of the City of London, which is of
course largely Jewish’ and the ‘low type of foreign Jew . . . who are to the fore
in every crooked financial deal’. In Manchester, Mosley claimed Jews were
dominating British life, although he carefully distinguished between ‘good’
and ‘bad’ Jews. For the first time the BUF revealed how it would deal with
the alien financier: ‘They will go out of the country ... for these are the
 UNIVERSAL FASCISM 255
elements which the Fascist state cannot and will not absorb. They are a cancer
in the body politic which requires a surgical operation.’
Schmidt-Lorenzen’s report was studied in Berlin with key passages outlining
BUF policy on the Jews underlined. Hans Thomsen, responsible for the foreign
press in the Reich office, thought the comments on the rival British Fascist
movements “unusually to the point and fascinating’. Schmidt-Lorenzen recom-
mended ‘it should be our first task to support the growing fascism in England’.
A copy was passed on to Hitler. To deal with any misunderstandings, BUF
Chief of Staff Ian Dundas sent Mandeville-Roe to Germany to meet Hitler in
order to bring about ‘the mutual harmonisation of press reports’.
Mosley remained close to the Italians and on 30 September wrote for
Antieuropa on ‘Dictatorship’. He praised Cromwell’s Ironsides as a ‘deter-
mined minority, who carried through one of the most efficient and ruthless
revolutions in the history of the world, and in the space of a few years
completely transformed the character and psychology of the nation’. Modern
dictatorship came from ‘an organised and disciplined movement hammered
into shape, coherence and corporate sense in the struggle in the streets —
possessed by a religious sense of national renaissance, and therefore set apart
almost as a priesthood, dedicated to the service of its country’.
Mosley was back in favour with Irene who supported his political efforts.
He told her dramatically that his ‘life was over, he wanted to put fascism on
the map and he did not mind if a bullet met him’. Cimmie talked to him and
was ‘always by his side’. On rr October Harold Nicolson visited him at Ebury
Street, where he was recovering from a bad back and still grieving for Cimmie.
Mosley told him he was making ‘great progress in town and country alike. He
gets very little money from the capitalists but relies on subscriptions. His aim
is to build up from below gradually.’ During the autumn a recruitment drive
in Scotland created twenty branches. This picture was repeated in Yorkshire,
with twelve branches, Manchester boasted eight and a further ten were active
in Lancashire towns.
The Blackshirt referred to ‘the emotion surrounding the dipping of the
Union Jack and BUF flags at the Cenotaph’ during a march in Manchester.
Northerners had ‘looked with respect on these sturdy silent men marching
with a precision brought about by organised control’. However, the Metro-
politan Police Commissioner attributed the rise in disturbances to the wearing
of military style uniforms. Special Branch began compiling reports on the
BUF, based on an agent in its headquarters.
The expansion was funded by Mussolini’s subventions. In late October his
Foreign Ministry asked Grandi to ‘get the above sums into Mosley’s hands in
whatever form your Excellency considers best’. The courier Resio was ‘doing
all in his power to ensure that the sum arrives in Mosley’s hands in the easiest
way for him to withdraw it secretly’. Grandi confirmed a package had been
256 BLACKSHIRT

delivered to Mosley, who signed the ‘usual letter of thanks’. On 21 October

£1,900 in notes, $7,150 and 25,000 Swiss francs were dispatched. Tweive days
later Swiss francs worth £1,533 (£52,000) were deposited in the Westminster
account. An infiltrator, W. H. Stevenson, was able to inform his TUC contact, ,
Mr Dunbar, on 24 October of rumours that Mosley ‘received from Italian >
sources a subsidy of £5,000 a month. This is to continue until the aggregate
sum is £200,000 [£6.8 m], and then the position will be reviewed.’
Stevenson’s information was better than that of MI5. He said a ‘good deal
of bickering appears to be going on in the ranks’. There was discontent because
Mosley’s programme ‘lacks novelty and virility; for example, Walter Elliott
has put through his plans for agriculture, and Cripps has stolen his thunder
about dictatorship’. Irene went to a dinner at the Italian embassy and sat next
to Elliott. Grandi was ‘thrilling on Tom’. He watched his every move and, ‘as
the press gives no fair verdict of his speeches, writes home himself the truth’.
He predicted the spread of Fascism after a Labour government. ©
In late 1933 writers and politicians associated with Everyman and the
English Review expressed sympathy with Mosley as part of a campaign which
looked as though it might create a genuine Fascist threat. This paralleled
Mosley’s attempt to ‘permeate’ the Establishment, a task given to his deputy
Dr Forgan.
The English Review Circle included its Catholic editor Douglas Jerrold, and
foreign editor Sir Charles Petrie; London Mercury editor Sir John Squire;
brewing magnate, intelligence officer and co-editor of Air Norman Thwaites;
Muriel Curry, co-author with Harold Goad of The Working of a Corporate
State (1933); Arnold Lunn, Lord Lymington, Sir Arnold Wilson and,
indirectly, Leo Amery and Sir Edward Carson. They admired Mussolini’s
revitalization of Italy as a great European power and his accommodation with
the Vatican. They were less impressed by Germany because ‘corporative ideals
have made no appeal’.
Led by Jerrold, the Circle wanted the Conservatives to take on corporatism.
The campaign was co-ordinated with diehard leader Lord Lloyd, with the aim
of ousting Baldwin. Grandson of a director of Lloyds Bank, Conservative MP
until 1925 and High Commissioner for Egypt (1925-9), Lloyd chaired the
Empire Economic Union and attracted the interest of fifty MPs. It was
rumoured Lady Houston was funding him to found a new party. Tory parlia-
mentary candidate Sir Henry Fairfax-Lucy argued in the Saturday Review
for a ‘fascist or corporative’ government. Jerrold wanted a ‘strong central
government to speak for the nation, and not merely for a class, on national
issues’.
Prominent in the campaign was Indian Cavalry officer Francis Yeats-Brown,
author of The Lives of a Bengal Lancer and from September editor of
Everyman. He shared the Fascist outlook with his restlessness and mysticism.
 UNIVERSAL FASCISM 257

He resembled the ‘best type of his fellow-countrymen in the Elizabethan age,

who combined the spirit and courage of the warrior with the gentler qualities
of the scholar’. Born in Italy, Yeats-Brown had met Mussolini many times.
Visitors to his house at Portofino included Harold Goad, of whom he wrote
he had ‘never met a man who is nearer a saint’. He had spent time among
Germans ‘living on the brink of ruin’ and, though worried by the anti-
Semitism, believed Hitler — his favourite book was The Bengal Lancer -
‘promises them a way out’. Yeats-Brown outlined his intentions in Everyman:
“We must be governed by a small group of men or one man with dictatorial
power.’ England needed a ‘systematic cleansing’ and a Corporate State.
The National government was racked with internal dissension, particularly
over India. Mosley waited in the wings for the political rupture he hoped
would provide an opening. Another chancer was Churchill. That summer, the
India Defence League (IDL) was launched with the support of peers, MPs and
military figures, and funding from the Duke of Westminster, Lady Houston
and Rothermere. Its autumn campaign, led by Lloyd and Churchill, fuelled not
implausible Conservative fears that a ‘Churchill-led destructive proto-Fascist
diehard ramp’ might emerge. At the end of October a by-election in East
Fulham produced a swing of 29 per cent to Labour. It raised the possibility,
said Churchill, of ‘socialists’ sweeping the election. Sir Stafford Cripps would
be in power and ‘Fascism would follow’.
Everyman’s directors withdrew their support from Yeats-Brown and on
10 November sacked him after only seven issues. MIS had expressed concern
about his editorship, his advocacy of ‘alien’ ideas, his links to Lloyd and
position on the fringes of the royal circle. MIS learnt that his activities had
been funded by a foreign source — almost certainly Mussolini. The diehard
campaign reached its climax on 21 November at the Savoy. Jerrold wrote
there was ‘enough anti-political dynamite in that room to have unseated half
a dozen leaders’. Intended as the launch pad for a campaign against the
government’s neglect of distressed areas where the Tories were losing votes,
the dinner was a disaster after Lloyd failed openly to challenge Baldwin.
Afterwards, Jerrold spoke to three friends. ‘Two had decided to become
Fascists; the third was by ten o’clock a convinced Communist.’ Mosley hoped
to pick up the diehard remnants.
Forgan was tasked with building links with those whose support was ‘crucial
if the BUF was to gain respectability within the political and social establish-
ments’. He operated from the BUF’s Central London branch, which had
expensive offices in Curzon Street, Mayfair. Its members were titled people
and high-ranking military officers, who helped publicize plans for a forum for
discussing Fascism and corporatism. Those invited included Yeats-Brown,
Squire, Petrie. and, key behind-the-scenes, Thwaites and Captain H. W.
Luttman-Johnson.
258 BLACKSHIRT

Wounded during the war, Thwaites was posted on special duties to the
United States, after which he retained close ties to the intelligence community.
Attached to the Prince of Wales’s staff, in 1924 he stood as a Conservative
candidate. A Bengal Lancer and like Yeats-Brown a Cavalry Club member, ,
Luttman-Johnson left India and moved to Scotland, where he enjoyed shooting
on his Perth estate. Following the death of his wife in 1930 ‘Uncle Bill’,
according to his nephew, sold Railton cars and for financial reasons had ‘fallen
in with Mosley, who employed him in some capacity’. He hated Communism,
extolled Mussolini and, somewhat less so, Hitler. In December he helped
create a club to ‘inquire upon modern methods of Government’. Its remit was
vague so that those ‘who did not wish to openly embrace membership of the
BUF could nonetheless support it’. Mosley saw it as an opportunity to build
a wider Fascist movement.
Forgan’s debating club was established in the new year as the January Club.
MIS identified Forgan, Sir Donald Makgill, Yeats-Brown and Luttman-
Johnson as co-founders. Sir John Squire and Luttman-Johnson became Chair-
man and Secretary respectively of a front organization controlled by Forgan,
who nominated its officials. Squire said he was happy to be one of Mosley’s
lieutenants: ‘I have been one in spirit ever since he resigned his Cabinet job
over unemployment.’ Luttman-Johnson admitted the Club had been founded
as a platform for Mosley. Lord Midleton, former Secretary of State for War,
put his Mayfair flat at the Club’s disposal. It was run by George Makgill’s son
Donald, whose wife, Esther, ran the BUF’s Ladies’ Section —- an example of
continuity with twenties proto-Fascism.
MIS viewed the Club as a powerhouse for the development of Fascist
culture. It ‘brought fascism to the notice of large numbers of people who
would have considered it much less favourably otherwise’. Patrons included
the English Review Circle and a network of aristocrats, diplomats and military
men from Mosley’s social circle. It attracted 200 influential figures who dined
at the Savoy or the Hotel Splendide, with reports featured in the Tatler.
Members included Rothermere, Lloyd, Basil Liddell Hart, Sir Henry Fairfax-
Lucy, General Sir Hubert Gough, Sachie Sitwell, Sir Philip Magnus-Allcroft MP
and Ralph Blumenfeld. Those in regular attendance were Wing-Commander
Sir Louis Greig, Gentleman Usher to the King, Lord Erskine, eldest son of the
Earl of Mar and an assistant government Whip, and Lord William Scott,
brother of the Duke of Buccleuch. Guests included ex-BF member the Earl of
Glasgow and Lady Russell of Liverpool, and directors of Siemens, London
Assurance, Vickers, Handley Page and Morgan Grenfell. Speakers included
Forgan and Raven Thomson, and BUF sympathizers such as Miss Muriel
Currey, Commandant Mary Allen and Air Commodore J. A. Chamier.
Jullio Sanducetti of the ‘Friends of Italy’, Giovanni Telesio, a journalist on
Lavoro Fascista, and Italian propagandist Luigi Villari were Club regulars.
 UNIVERSAL FASCISM 259

MIS monitored the leading lights of Fascio di Londra, in particular Mussolini’s

agent Camillo Pellizzi and Villari, who kept in touch with Mosley’s circle.
Attached to the University of London, Pelizzi told Rome he was inundated
with requests for information on Fascism. He gave funds to journalists to
present a positive image of Italy.
Diehards joined the Club in opposition to Baldwin, which resulted in ‘a
remarkable, if temporary, upsurging of Fascism’. Edward Grigg hoped Mosley
‘would not exploit a huge crisis for the next election, thereby antagonising
men in the Conservative ranks who might join him if not intimidated by
extreme methods’. Petrie said they were not Fascists as such, but were ‘so
weary of the drabness of the Baldwin regime that they were prepared to
embrace almost any alternative. Whether, had Mosley succeeded, they would
have liked what they would then have got is another matter.’ Fascism was
seen as foreign and his interpretation of corporatism was different from theirs.
Many agreed it had ‘nothing necessarily to do with fascism, or the colour of
men’s shirts’. However, admitted Petrie, ‘this cannot blind us to the fact that
at one moment it was a very considerable force indeed’.
From November the BUF slid into anti-Semitism, attacking alien financiers
and highlighting alleged Jewish rackets. On 4 November Jews were blamed
for the mounting criticism against Germany. The Blackshirt editorial ‘Shall
Jews Drag Britain to War?’ said a campaign existed to force Britons to inter-
vene in German affairs. Jewish power was widespread: Conservatism was
subservient to Jewish international finance and socialism was dominated by
Jewish intellectuals. It has been argued this outburst was initiated by an
‘anti-Semitic vanguard’ but this was untrue, as evidenced by Mosley’s speech
six days later, at Ealing town hall, where he opposed ‘Jewish interests fostering
a spirit of war’ and accused the Jews of ‘organising a minority race within the
nation’. He objected to German Jews finding refuge in Britain and ‘taking
jobs from Englishmen’. He stated that ‘whatever happened in Germany is
Germany’s affair, and we are not going to lose British lives in a Jewish quarrel’.
Mosley later said that ‘violent things were said and written on both sides
when tempers were up in a bitter controversy’, but denied culpability since
‘party journals were in other hands, because I was often absent from London’.
Chesterton chided him for forgetting the ‘meetings of the policy directorate
over which he presided every week to read page proofs’ of the paper. Another
official confirmed Mosley ‘vetted every issue before it was put to bed, if he
was out of London he checked it over the phone’. Mosley regularly tested
reaction to anti-Semitism in order to assess opposition strength. When the
Jewish Chronicle responded strongly to these ‘stale and trashy oddments,
taken from the rag-bag of the pedlars of Continental anti-semitism’, he
retreated to a more reasoned position.
*
260 BLACKSHIRT

On 6 November Nancy Mitford wrote to Diana after attending a BUF meeting

at Oxford full of Tories ‘who sat in hostile and phlegmatic silence’. Mosley
was wonderful but there were ‘several fascinating fights, as he brought a few
Neanderthal men along with him and they fell tooth and nail on anyone who ,
shifted his chair or coughed. One man complained that the fascists’ nails had »
pierced his head to the skull.’
Nancy had been in love with the Earl of Rosslyn’s homosexual son, Hamish
St Clair Erskine, with whom her brother Tom had had an affair at Eton. While
Nancy was naive, Hamish — a socialite member of the New Party — was
self-centred and wanted to escape from her overbearing expectations.
Hamish’s sister, Lady Mary, intimate of Bruce Lockhart and friend of Unity,
married Philip Dunn, son of the steel magnate and Beaverbrook partner
Sir James Dunn. She announced her engagement on the same day Hamish
announced his to Philip’s sister Kit. It exemplified the incestuous nature of the
circle around Mosley. Lady Dunn’s obituary described her as a passionate
anti-appeaser, even though she attended Mosley’s secret pro-peace meetings.
At the end of 1933 Nancy married Peter Rodd, son of Lord Rennell,
former ambassador to Italy, where he had spent much of his childhood. A
correspondent for The Times in Germany and now working for an American
bank in London, Peter was enthused by Beaverbrook’s Empire Free Trade
campaign. Politically erratic, he had been a Communist at Oxford but was
fascinated by Mosley and joined the January Club. Both he and Nancy wore
black shirts, but she finally ended in the socialist camp. Nancy was ‘politically
immature, her opinions too frivolous to be taken seriously’ but that did not
restrain her from airing her opinions. Diana thought Rodd an ‘excruciating
bore’ and a ‘very superior con man’.
After Nancy’s and Peter’s wedding, Mosley fell ill with phlebitis and was
ordered to rest. For most of the summer and the autumn, Diana had deliber-
ately not seen Mosley, who was courting Baba, or ‘Ba-ba Blackshirt’, as she
was dubbed by Chips Channon. As a counter to Diana, Irene encouraged the
affair and told Fruity he ‘must learn to put up with this sort of thing’.
Mosley’s womanizing was the subject of intrigue within the Black House as
officials manoeuvred to gain his ear. ‘Baroness Marovna’ — film actress Mary
Tavener — had met Mosley a month after Cimmie’s death, when he visited a
studio with a view to making a film on Fascism. According to Tavener, Mosley
begged her to come to him, otherwise he might have to marry Diana. ‘A deep
mutual love of Spirit and mind as well as body’, Mosley wrote, ‘can help to
set the final seal of greatness on destiny.’ In a bizarre reply, Tavener claimed
royal descent — according to Diana, she said she was the reincarnation of Mary
Queen of Scots - and urged him to stay away from ‘that blonde lady of easy
virtue who you mentioned was pursuing you’ and who had tried to break up
his happy marriage with Cimmie. ‘This type of woman will stop at nothing to
 UNIVERSAL FASCISM 261

satisfy their urge to possess.’ Marrying Diana would ‘bring endless scandal to
your name by confirming the hysterical and fantastic stories that this pitiful
creature has caused to be circulated about your alleged love for her prior to
Cynthia’s death’.
Unfortunately for Mosley, the letter fell into the hands of Joyce, who was
emerging as a rival to the Leader. Tavener said she had been spurned by
Mosley, who ordered his secretary not to return her calls and had barred her
from the Black House. Mosley’s response to any hint of blackmail was a
categorical denial. He had countered a threat from a maid with a demand that
she produce cast-iron evidence. According to Diana, he confronted Tavener,
who claimed ‘she had sexual relations with OM at Smith Square in 1933. She
hadn’t.’ Shortly after, Tavener received a series of threatening anonymous
notes. Four years later she launched a lawsuit for slander against Mosley, on
the grounds of breach of promise and for displaying a photograph of her,
which his associates dubbed the mermaid portrait.
By the time of the lawsuit, Joyce had left the BUF, at which point he
wrote to Tavener detailing the peculiar goings-on in the Black House. The
interception of mail, including Mosley’s, was one of the ‘sordid trifles’ which
were an everyday event. A gold love token had been taken from her letter
which itself had been copied and distributed among the ‘Kamaraden’. It had
also been translated into French and Italian, so useful was it as ‘a poisoned
dagger for Tom’s back’, and a copy had been given to the ‘huntress’ (Diana).
‘Did you never anticipate that said Nymph’s possession fixation, as you so
aptly described it, might include espionage of the movements to her unsus-
pecting “target” and that she would yet again inevitably pay handsomely for
“aid” in the removal of any possible rival.’
Diana dismissed enquiries about Tavener with a wave of her hand, but she
was more jealous than she admitted. Her all too noticeable charm was used
to protect herself from personal questioning and she was practised at feigning
indifference. Tavener was being followed — those doing it sent her details of
her movements — but whether Diana paid is unknown. Joyce’s ranting letter
displayed his mad side but it did reveal the intrigue that swirled around
Mosley. The deceivers — ‘Tom’s Judas Chorus’ — included one who had a
grudge against him because he had been a victim of the Leader’s practical
joke: a castor-oil cocktail.
In order to establish links with the Nazis, on 5 November, Mosley sent
- Raven Thomson to the Reichspartei at Nuremberg. Saxony’s Minister of
Justice, Thierack, reported to Dr Lammers at the chancellery that Thomson,
who was staying at a Brownshirt camp, was ‘so enthusiastic about his experi-
ence that he told me quite openly that Germany’s rise was now unstoppable
and that it was high time that people in England sought an alliance with this
re-awakened nation’. BUF branches were opened in Cologne and Berlin,
262 BLACKSHIRT

which the British consul reported were run with Nazi approval. The BUF had
arranged ‘to supply through the Gauleiter a monthly list of the members of
the Branch and their addresses for the information of Premier Goering’.
The Nazis were happy to liaise with the BUF but were unsure about adopt-
ing formal relations. Thomson sent a signed Mosley photograph to Thierack, :
who requested one of Hitler to send in return. The request was considered
but, after receiving another report from Schmidt-Lorenzen, Thomsen said that
because the British Fascist movements were ‘in conflict with one another’, he
did not ‘consider it proper to enter the conflict’. He added that Mosley’s
‘personal relationships with influential Jewish circles in England do not seem
prudent’. Dr Lammers agreed ‘it would be more expedient to allow the matter
to rest’.
This decision was noted by Special Branch whose note takers had been at a
London NSDAP meeting, where Otto Bene told members it was ‘strictly
forbidden for any Nazi to discuss ox participate in English politics and particu-
larly they were not to fraternise with members of fascist organisations here’.
Frustrated by the ruling, Mosley instructed the I Squad to end the festering
row between the groups. A Blackshirt attack on an IFL meeting in Great
Portland Street resulted in Arnold Leese being thrown to the ground, ‘half-
stripped of my clothes, struck on the face with a leaden “‘kosh” and much
bruised by kicks’.
BUF official photographer Kay Fredericks was among the fifty Blackshirts
involved in the attack. Each was given a Communist badge to wear. Thomson
was in charge and at a signal from him ‘we were to break up the meeting and
if possible beat up Leese’. The IFL leader had ‘no sooner opened his mouth
when Thomson gave the pre-arranged signal. The hall burst into uproar’ as
the Blackshirts attacked Leese. Newspapers described it as the ‘biggest fight
that had ever been seen at a London meeting; our enemies deliberately smashed
as many chairs as they could, knowing that we, who had no large fund behind
us, would have to pay the owners of the hall for them’. Leese realized the idea
was to ‘finish and silence the IFL’.
The attack and the use of false badges had been co-ordinated by P. G. Taylor,
whose responsibilities included investigating rival organizations. ‘Taylor’ (aka
James McGuirk Hughes) had recently left his employment in the offices of
The Aeroplane and joined the BUF, having disclosed his security service work
to Mosley. He said he knew about his secret role in paying off the Austrian
woman blackmailing Ramsay MacDonald because her rooms had been
‘bugged’ by MIS. Mosley accepted Taylor because his closeness to Special
Branch ‘need not have clashed. He was “on our side”, which seemed good
enough.’ He told him ‘we will observe your methods with interest. Carry on.’
Taylor served as the BUF’s Chief of Intelligence in ‘Department Z’ (the letter
on the door of his office), which operated as a secret service from a room on
 UNIVERSAL FASCISM 263

the second floor of the Black House. Inside was a piece of theatrical showman-
ship with black-painted walls and no furniture except for a small table in the
centre, over which was suspended an electric lamp. Taylor had ‘three separate
telephone lines each under a different name’.
BUF officials were suspicious of the ‘Chief Snoop’. ‘Why does he avoid even
our own cameras?’ Until 2005, no photographs of him had been found. Taylor
sported a small moustache, every inch a cultured Englishman — a typical
ex-army major. When headquarters worker ‘Mrs B’ saw him leave a local
Catholic church with a woman and a teenage girl, he cut her dead. ‘It was as
though he didn’t want to mix family with business.’ Fredericks recalled Taylor
hinting that he had once been a highly placed agent in the Communist Party,
extracting as he did so ‘the last drop of drama from the word’. He was ‘fond
of telling in breathless whispers of his escape from Russia ‘“‘with a price upon
his head” and of his connections with high police circles in Britain’. A BUF
member who had served with the British Military Mission in Russia was later
surprised to see Taylor speaking on the BUF’s behalf as he knew him to be an
agent. Mrs B said his Home Office affiliation was general knowledge. He
grinned whenever asked ‘if he had caught anyone today’.
Charles Dolan, formerly an ILPer and Communist, employed in the Propa-
ganda Department, said Taylor had ‘contact with all political units. Trades
Unions and workers’ organisations, the Labour and Communist parties especi-
ally being among their happiest hunting grounds.’ Fearful of the menace of
Moscow in our midst, he organized the ‘shadowing of the mildest of Labour
MPs’. Taylor ran a nationwide network of agents, according to a leaked
paper. In Edinburgh, ‘only the District Branch Officer knows anything about
them. They are members of some parties and may even be respectable members
of a committee. They are men of the night who will probably never be known.’
There was support for ‘our German cousins’ at the highest level of British
society. Grandi told Mussolini, ‘the only person who told me that the British
are stupid to be upset at Hitler has been the Prince of Wales one evening after
dinner.’ On Armistice Day, Edward confided in Count Albert Mensdorff,
former Austrian ambassador, of his fondness for Nazism. ‘Of course it is the
only thing to do, we will have to come to it, as we are in great danger from
the Communists here, too.’
As if in response to the German rebuff, Mosley expanded BUF activities.
‘The leader was going to have a big push around England,’ Unity learnt on
13 November, but Diana ‘couldn’t go as a result of the divorce which had
been made absolute’. Five days later the Blackshirt came out against the ‘oily,
material, swaggering Jew’ and the ‘pot-bellied, sneering money-mad Jew’. The
_ TUC’s spy reported that the BUF had ‘taken on a definite anti-Jew com-
plexion’. There had been disciplinary trouble at the Southampton branch
when ‘some Jews were asked to leave and others left of their own accord’.
264 BLACKSHIRT

Subsequently, 400 Jews left the BUF and their recruitment was discouraged.
At the end of 1933 Mosley claimed it was ‘quite untrue that we organised
provocative marches and meetings in Jewish areas’. The authorities viewed
the BUF as a threat to public order, particularly in the East End where
incidents arose from selling the Blackshirt in Jewish districts. The newspapef
vendors acted within the letter of the law but their behaviour was considered
‘deliberately provocative’. Mosley complained of Jewish attacks on his sellers
and assured the police he would ‘do everything in my power to prevent any
breach of the peace and to carry out any regulations laid down by the police’.
He affirmed, however, the ‘right of Englishmen to pursue any legal and peace-
ful activity in this country without molestation and assault’.
Mosley addressed hundreds of meetings, the vast majority of which were
peaceful. However, the BUF set out ‘to goad, incite and provoke a violent
response from their adversaries. The purpose was to establish a pattern of
confrontation and escalating cycle of violence from which it was hoped the
movement would derive benefit.” Reports document incidents in which Black-
shirts engaged in provocation and unprovoked assaults, and that the tactic of
organized anti-Fascists was generally disruption and not violence. By
December Northern Organizer Michael Jordan had been dismissed. Men of
violence arrived, at which point, ‘all hell was let loose’.
Employed as a paid speaker, Charles Dolan alleged his speeches were
designed to incite the audience to react, thereby engineering the intervention
of the National Defence Force. A document sent by Defence Force Control on
22 December in respect of a meeting at Finsbury Park revealed that ‘50 plain
clothes (The Knuckle Duster Boys) and 12 Defence Force will be on duty. The
boys want trouble, so let it rip.’
Dolan linked the violence to Mosley’s strategy for acquiring power by way
of political disorder. He publicly professed to wanting to win electors’ support,
but knew he could not win a majority and ‘intended to use eventually the
Defence Force when the time comes to seize power’. Dolan claimed Mosley
knew such a strategy required military support, so the BUF sought army,
navy and air force recruits, who were to be appointed to lead Defence Force
units and help establish contact with serving army officers. This was con-
ducted covertly and such members were ‘known only to and controlled by
headquarters’.
Mosley tasked P. G. Taylor with an ambitious scheme to establish fascist
cells in the armed forces, Civil Service and trade unions. This was considered
vital if the BUF was to combat the Communist Party on its own ground.
Mosley admitted the Blackshirts were designed as a counter-revolutionary
force. Dolan believed this was why he ‘organised contacts within left wing
organisations, such as the Trade Unions, the Communist Party, and wherever
discontent appears capable of stampeding into some sort of action that fits in
 UNIVERSAL FASCISM 265
his secret plan’. The contacts were to act as agents provocateurs, ‘advocating
violent action or spreading criticism of existing leadership in order to foster
the time for a strike or riot’. Mosley would then step in to ‘save the Nation
from The Red Terror’. Dolan heard Mosley say: ‘Rats will always take my
cheese.”
Mosley maintained there was nothing illegal in his activities, and the fact
that he recruited Taylor, who was deeply involved in his more secret activities,
suggests he ‘played a complex intelligence game with the authorities’. He
wished to acquire early intelligence of what measures were planned against
him but was also aware that the views of MIS officers with regard to Commu-
nism were similar to his own. He recognized that ‘some security service
personnel were far less anti-fascist than anti-communist’. Mosleyite John
Warburton speculated that Special Branch inserted Taylor into the BUF so as
to be ‘in a position which they thought might be useful in the organisation of
BUF’s well known fighting qualities should a “Red Revolution” erupt and
threaten a take-over of the State’.
MIS was undergoing a major reorganization. Institutional rivalry, factional
hostility and ambition delayed the emergence of a co-ordinated security service
until r October 1931 when the Secret Service Committee transferred Scotland
Yard’s intelligence staff, including its leading subversion expert Guy Liddell,
to MIS to create a new security service to centralize information on subversion.
Designed to save money, operations against the Communist Party were trans-
ferred to MIS from the Special Branch. Security work was underfunded and
B Branch under Jaspar Harker had a staff of only six officers for counter-
espionage work against German and Italian intelligence agencies, which MIS
feared were in contact with the BUF.
The agency employed by the Secret Intelligence Service to supply it with
information on Communist activities was transferred to the control of MI5’s
‘M Section’. Maxwell Knight, British Fascist’s intelligence chief and Section
D member, officially became an MIS officer and M Section’s head. In 1943
Knight stated he had been involved in investigating Fascism for sixteen years,
and an MIS officer for twelve. His tasks included penetrating agents into the
CP, known enemy secret service agencies and the BUF. Fascist membership
did not cause Knight any difficulty with MI5, whose former army personnel
were strongly anti-Communist. Continuing to report to his SB handler,
-Taylor’s BUF duties were identical to those which Knight carried out for
the British Fascists: compiling intelligence dossiers on rivals and enemies,
‘supervising counter-espionage and sabotage operations.
Taylor, who lived at 144 Sloane Street, close to Knight’s flat at number 38,
was immortalized in Knight’s anti-Semitic novel Crime Cargo (1934). It was
memorable only because of teasing references to Taylor, who appears as the
villain and ‘pig-eyed Irishman’ ‘Baldy McGurk’. Intriguingly, the dashing hero
266 BLACKSHIRT

is ‘Dennis Joycey’ (Joyce). That all three were connected by the British Fascists
and intelligence activities confirms the impression of collusion between the
secret state and Fascism in the area of anti-Communism. The fact that in the
fifties Knight visited Mosley in Paris only adds to the view that MIS surveillance
of the BUF was not a straightforward affair. ;
Fredericks said Mosley paraded the ‘mythical bogey of Communism in the’
hope that it will scare into his ranks the middle classes, who are even more
worried than the aristocrats by the thought of a proletarian rising in our land’.
He knew Fascism’s progress was hindered by the weakness of the Communists
but Sorel suggested ‘the middle classes allow themselves to be plundered
quite easily, provided a little pressure is brought to bear, and that they are
intimidated by the fear of revolution: that party-will possess the future which
can most skilfully manipulate the spectre of revolution’. The Blackshirt
bragged ‘the organised and disciplined masses of fascists today will have little
difficulty in repelling Red terror’.
The Communist Party was,too small to pose a real threat. The figure who
did frighten the middle classes was Stafford Cripps, MP for Bristol East since
1931. A successful barrister, his father (Lord Parmoor) and an uncle (Sidney
Webb) served in the first Labour government, but his political background
was, if anything, Tory paternalist. Cripps became a socialist, ‘not as the result
of a Damascene conversion, but because Labour needed a solicitor-general
and offered him the job’. His move to the left was a shock. Hugh Dalton
dismissed him as a ‘dangerous political lunatic’. During 1932 he became leader
of the Socialist League and argued Labour should develop a full socialist
programme and implement it by assuming emergency powers and ruling by
decree. There was widespread hostility from both wings of the party to this
strategy, which smacked of dictatorship, and his argument that it was designed
to forestall Fascism failed to convince trade union leaders. Although there was
little chance of his ideas coming to fruition, Cripps did instil fear on the right,
in particular with Rothermere.
At a conference on 23 November, Home Office officials, Police Com-
missioner Lord Trenchard, MIS officers and Special Branch Head Superinten-
dent Canning decided the BUF needed monitoring and tasked the SB with
collecting intelligence on Fascist and anti-Fascist activities, and MIS with
collating this material. MIS feared the BUF had a secret organization for
action in an emergency and wanted to influence the armed services. It believed
it received funds from Mussolini but lacked evidence and wanted warrants for
mail openings and telephone tappings, but faced resistance within the Home
Office.
Mosley knew he would attract MI5’s attention and made arrangements to
conceal his secretive activities. In addition, he compiled a list of members
whose identity was to be kept secret. This included women’s policing pro-
 UNIVERSAL FASCISM 267
ponent Mary Allen, one of a number of suffragettes who became Fascists. Its
militants, Cecily Hamilton noted, were the first to use the word ‘Leader’ as a
reverential title. On a smaller scale, Emmeline Pankhurst was the ‘forerunner
of Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini — the Leader who could do no wrong!’
Mosley hoped Allen would provide him with advance warning of moves
against him by the authorities. In 1932 Allen set up the paramilitary Women’s
Reserve (WR) to deal with strikes. Police observed Allen visiting the British
Fascist’s headquarters in search of ‘particulars of the people in key positions
in the electrical and gas undertakings in London’, but with the BUF’s forma-
tion there was a realignment towards Mosley. Conforming to a Fascist tra-
dition, Allen and other officers placed their aircraft at the disposal of the WR,
which organized pilot training at private aerodromes. Allen made overtures
to the authorities, seeking official recognition of the WR’s usefulness. It is
possible she aimed to place her cadets in positions where they might obtain
useful information.
In the following spring Allen was present at a BUF-held air rally in Glou-
cestershire, attended by 250 Fascists. Commander Godman said the aim was
to give members a chance to acquaint themselves with aeroplanes. Mosley’s
interest in aviation led to the formation of a Fascist flying club with plans to
train forty pilots. The prospect of a BUF Air Defence Force led to questions
in the Commons. Mosley sympathizer Michael Beaumont defended the move,
saying it was ‘no more than a flying club, on all fours with other flying clubs
in this country’.
On 19 December Mosley was best man at Ian Dundas’s wedding to debut-
ante Pamela, daughter of Geoffrey Dorman and niece of Ernest Shackleton.
The ceremony was rich in symbolism. The bride’s gown was trimmed with
golden fasces and the cake, in the form of fasces, was placed on a table draped
with the Union Jack. Dorman had been with Mosley in the RFC and wrote
for the pro-Fascist Aeroplane until 1930, when he began writing adventure
books. BUF organizer for South London, Dorman wrote on aviation and
motoring in Blackshirt under the pseudonyms ‘Blackbird’ and ‘Bluebird’. The
BUF attracted aviators such as Sir Alliot Verdon Roe, the first Englishman to
fly in 1908 and designer of Avro aircraft; Air Commodore Sir J. A. Chamier
of the Air League, a generous funder to the BUF; and Norman Thwaites, the
League’s Secretary. The airmen, thundered Bill Allen, were ‘Caesar-men’ —
modern warriors of the Faustian world who stalked with ‘cynical laughter
over the ruins of the Reichstag. These men are the expression of some new
potent consciousness — the Fascist revolution.’
H. G. Wells wanted an elite of airmen to rule ‘without scruples about using
violence’. His Modern State Movement of disciplined air force shock troops
was portrayed in The Shape of Things to Come, released in 1933. In a war’s
aftermath, black-costumed airmen of the Air Dictatorship create a technocractic
268 BLACKSHIRT

world State. Wells believed socialism was about the scientific replacement of
disorder by order, which required dealing with the alien nationalism of the
Jews, whose behaviour was irrational. Mosley still hoped to gain his support
but there was always a fundamental divide between his own ultra-nationalism
and Wells’s belief in world government.
In December the head of Berlin’s Economic Policy Association, Dr Margarete’
Gartner, arrived to monitor Fascist progress. In the twenties she had welded
propaganda agencies into a network of contacts for the foreign policy-making
elite. Funded by Krupps and with the support of Goering, as air representative,
she promoted commercial intelligence. The German ambassador made her
aware of the delicacy of her mission.
Gartner first talked to BF member Madame Arnaud, who bad-mouthed the
BUF for its ‘Jewish capital and Jewish members’. On 15 December Forgan
dismissed the slur and said they attacked Jewish propaganda against Germany.
Mosley said ‘England will be fascist in four to six years’, but Gartner reported
to Berlin that the press did not support that impression. They dismissed
Mosley with ‘a scornful hand gesture’. The BUF was financially ‘badly off’,
membership was ‘not growing too well’ and there was ‘no mood of idealism
in England as in Germany and Italy’. However, ‘intelligent and discerning
acquaintances’ considered the prospects for BUF MPs were ‘not so bad’. On
her return to Berlin, officials admonished her for telling Mosley that, contrary
to the Fiihrer’s position, the colonial question was not urgent in Germany.
Shortly afterwards Gartner, who was not a Nazi, became aware she was under
‘Gestapo surveillance.
In the Blackshirt at the end of 1933 Mosley wrote that he expected great
progress in the new year. ‘The light spreads over England at Christmas and
the marching legions in their ordered strength move forward to a new and
Greater Day.’
 14
Rothermere

Mosley approached newspaper barons for support. The BUF’s women’s

organizer, Lady Makgill, was Beaverbrook’s former secretary and it was
arranged for him to meet the Leader. Nothing came of the meeting, but
two weeks later Blackshirts became aware discussions were proceeding with
Rothermere. A Mail executive, Collin Brooks, said Rothermere’s prevailing
mood was ‘politically one of the deepest pessimism. He was convinced Britain
had entered a phase of decline, had lost her old militant virtues, and, in
her softness, was lusting after strange idols of pacifism, nationalisation, and
everything which would continue to sap self-reliance.’ His pessimism partly
related to his financial woes. He wanted to be the richest man in Britain and,
though he had not lost in the Crash, his fortune had declined.
Rothermere’s emissary, George Ward Price, who wore a monocle, hob-
nobbed at the dictators’ courts and authored Nazi eulogies, which appeared
under his boss’s name in the Mail, the only popular newspaper to condone
the Nazis. In interviews, Nazis were provided with a platform to soft-sell their
policies. Hitler, readers were assured, was ‘obviously sincere. There is no man
living whose promise given in regard to something of real moment I would
sooner take.’ He would save mankind from Communism but Rothermere also
recognized ‘Hitlerism means war’ and advocated air rearmament to meet the
threat.
Mosley, who was about to visit Rome, received a telegram from Rothermere
affirming his support. Although the Italian Foreign Ministry thought it an
‘inopportune moment’, since the British Foreign Secretary was due to arrive,
they would ‘see to it that all goes smoothly, without indiscretions’. The pre-
vious autumn, senior BUF officials noted ‘funds were not coming in as
expected’ and recognized the urgency of Mosley’s visit.
On 8 January Grandi sent to Rome a Mosley letter relating to the instruc-
tions concerning the receipt of payments. Mosley was ‘persuaded it is better
to leave out his lieutenants from the thing and receive personally the money’.
He asked Grandi ‘to convey his gratitude’ to Mussolini when Rome sent a
fourth instalment of £5,000 (£170,000). MI5 discovered later that during
270 BLACKSHIRT

1933 the BUF received a total of £20,000, of which only £9,500 was deposited;
the remainder was used to cover existing debts.
Mosley travelled on 9 January from France to see Mussolini, one of half a
dozen meetings over a period of three years. On this occasion he had the ‘most
violent arguments with Mussolini on the subject of anti-semitism’. Mosley”
made his allegiance to universal Fascism by enrolling in his Fascist CAUR’
international, though his support was ambivalent, as he feared domestic re-
action. With Diana’s divorce finalized on 15 January, Mosley asked her to
accompany him to Grasse, where they rented a house from Sir Louis Mallet.
On his return, Mosley met with Grandi who told Mussolini he had ‘never
seen him so sure of himself and so confident. He told me that the talk with
you had enriched and illuminated him and he left the Palazzo Venezia more
determined than ever to do battle.’ Payments arrived in larger denominations.
BUF officials recalled seeing bundles of foreign notes. Mosley told those eager
for their salaries: ‘We’ll put you right up now.’ Baba had been encouraged to
develop her relationship with Grandi. She suspected the origin of the funds
but never discussed it with her lover. On 24 January a courier left Rome
carrying £20,000 in seven packages of foreign currency. Six days later they
were given to Mosley, who verified the contents. The BUF received monthly
payments of £5,000, which during 1934 totalled £77,800 (£2.66 m), rep-
resenting almost all the BUF’s annual expenditure, which Hawkins later con-
firmed averaged £70,000 during 1934-6. Grandi reported to Mussolini that
Mosley expressed his gratitude for the money and had told him ‘how, with
generous spontaneity, you had accepted his requests for future material
assistance’.
MIS did not learn details of the Charing Cross branch account until July
1940 when Dundas was briefly detained. It suggested the Italian subvention
‘puts the Fascist Movement in this country in an entirely new light’. Where
once ‘it seemed to have roots in this country, these roots now appear to be
very much frailer and to have been kept alive only by artificial means’. The
BUF was dependent on foreign funds without which it ‘would probably cease
to exist’. Mosley admitted to Grandi that he owed the definitive conversion
of Rothermere and his newspapers entirely to the Italian dictator.
For months, Mosley had worried about associating the BUF with the ‘too-
much-discussed’ Rothermere. Grandi, however, had managed before Christmas
to overcome his doubts ‘by pointing out the immediate and practical advantage
that would accrue to his movement by suddenly gaining, without effort or
expense, the group of newspapers which, because of its circulation and influ-
ence on the masses in Great Britain (above all in the provinces), is by far the
strongest of them all’. Rothermere was second-rate but that was ‘another
reason for not taking too seriously any harm that may later come out of the
fact of being associated with him’. He convinced Mosley but Rothermere only
 ROTHERMERE 271

made up his mind after Ward Price went to Rome. ‘If Mussolini believes in
Mosley, then let’s get strongly behind him, with the whole newspaper group.’
Then the headlines, recalled Mosley, ‘came pelting like a thunder-storm’. There
was no consultation, just ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’.
Rothermere, who with Harmsworth and Ward Price joined the January
Club, feared a Communist insurrection, against which event he set about
preparing estates in Hungary. He worried militants were rallying to Stafford
Cripps’s Socialist League, and he and Mosley were rival candidates for an
inevitable dictatorship. Both were Wykehamists and outsiders, driven by an
inner, unshakeable conviction of their own righteousness. They were fine
orators who adopted theatrical methods for their rallies. The Mail said the
BUF offered ‘an alternative at the next general election to rule by Cripps’.
The prospect of a Fascist takeover following a Labour election victory was
not only entertained by maverick press barons. Like other MPs, Bob Boothby
believed the National government was moving towards ‘a very considerable
electoral debacle’. He thought the Conservative Party was rotten to the core
and ‘so terrified of Communism that it would welcome a Fascist counter-
revolution’. Rothermere said ‘no strong anti-socialist policy can be expected
from a Conservative party whose leaders are themselves tainted with semi-
socialist doctrines’. Socialist activists saw Britain as a battleground over which
Fascist forces were advancing with the only effective resistance being a Labour
government armed with emergency powers. The National government was
“quasi-Fascist’, though, in fact, it was ‘Labour’s electoral advance that was
responsible for making the threat of Mosley credible’.
Rothermere regarded the Blackshirts as an adjunct to the Tory Party in the
same way as the Socialist League operated as a Labour ginger group. Their
function was to provide a defence against Communist-led insurrection. Their
example would embolden Tories to rediscover their traditions and end the
National government. His aim — shared by January Club members — was to
use the BUF as partner in a diehard triumph over Baldwin. Although he had
not read The Greater Britain, he supported its anti-socialism, its stance on
India and call for a stronger air force. On 15 January the Mail announced the
Great Switch-Over. ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ claimed the ‘spirit of the age
is one of national discipline and organisation’ and that Britain’s survival
depended on ‘the existence of a Great Party of the Right with the same
directness of purpose and energy of method as, Hitler and Mussolini have
displayed’. The danger of Cripps necessitated a Fascist movement. Rothermere
added, ‘The socialists who jeer at the principles and uniform of the Blackshirt
being of foreign origin forget that the founder and High Priest of their own
creed was the German Jew Karl Marx.’
Mosley was portrayed as a protectionist in the tradition of Joseph Chamber-
lain. Unsullied by contact with the National government, he represented for
272 BLACKSHIRT

the middle classes sound Conservatism. His Blackshirts were ‘ready to take
control and prevent national bankruptcy and disaster’. Prominence was given
to developing the Empire and expanding air defences (the Mail advocated ‘a
programme of building at least 5,000 first-line machines without delay’).
The Corporate State was ignored by Rothermere who promised to preserve ©
Parliament after implementing a few wise reforms. The tag Fascists was ©
dropped in favour of Blackshirts, who were praised for their authoritarian
style, not their revolutionary nationalism.
The Observer on 21 January suggested Mosley had ‘stolen the thunder both
of the Left and the Right’. As with the Nazis, there was a BUF ‘reactionary
wing composed of violent anti-Socialists, and a revolutionary wing, recruited
from the ILP and the Communists’, which was ‘considerably stronger than
the Right’. Headway had been made with the unemployed in the ‘big industrial
centres of the North. This success in the areas that have remained unshakeably
loyal to Labour for so many years is the most impressive fact about the Fascist
movement.’ The paper was impressed by its presence.in Manchester and the
fact that Mosley had addressed 100,000 people in Birmingham’s Bingley Hall,
in his biggest ever rally.
Grandi reported that Rothermere’s ‘sudden conversion to fascism was, in
political circles in London, for several days the object of angry comments on
many sides, but its effects were immediately seen. The fact that the most
widespread group of newspapers in England gave a whole page to the Birming-
ham meeting ‘‘forced”’ all the English papers, from the conservative Times to
the anti-fascist Daily Herald, to give a full and faithful account of it.’ What
should have been a triumph was, however, undermined when Mosley’s
phlebitis flared up again and confined him to bed.
On 22 January in the Mirror Rothermere attacked the alarmists who whim-
pered that Blackshirts are ‘preparing the way for a system of rulership by
means of steel whips and concentration camps’. George Catlin said that behind
Mosley’s ‘eloquent appeals Englishmen visualise the concentration camp’.
However, few panic mongers, the Mirror countered, had ‘any personal know-
ledge of the countries that are already under Blackshirt government. The
notion that a permanent reign of terror exists there has been evolved entirely
from their own morbid imaginations, fed by sensational propaganda.’ Black-
shirts ‘were disciplined to defend free speech’ but were prepared to ‘meet like
with like’.
Blackshirts, Rothermere said, had ‘no prejudice either of class or race’.
They would stop war as the ‘only safeguard against crafty and ruthless men’,
operating ‘secretly with the aid of foreign money to promote the class war’.
An upcoming hunger march by the unemployed was ‘evidence of the hidden
hand of Bolshevism in our midst’ and showed the need for a ‘steel framework
 ROTHERMERE 273
of patriotism and discipline’. A trade union infiltrator into the BUF reported
that it intended to run an agent provocateur-style operation against the march.
‘Their plan is to ferment disorder through a few individuals apparently uncon-
nected with the BUF, and then to come on the scene as a body of Blackshirts
to restore order.’ On 29 January the Mail claimed Cripps had changed his
tune as the result of the BUF.
The Jewish Chronicle feared the BUF had adopted anti-Semitism. Although
such propaganda was downplayed, in an interview on 2 February, Dundas
said Jews were excluded from membership because of the ‘physical opposition
on the part of a certain section of Jews towards their movement’, and Mosley
called for a ban on Jews as officials and MPs. In reply to a question on the
class war during a Chiswick meeting, Joyce said Jews were not a class: ‘I
regard them as a privileged misfortune. The flower or weed of Israel shall
never grow in ground fertilised by British blood!’ When Jewish groups called
on Mosley to repudiate the speech, under pressure from his new partner he
was forced to smother the incipient anti-Semitism in BUF propaganda — a
telling commentary on Mosley’s claim that he was unable to control what
went into his papers.
Grandi acknowledged collaboration with Rothermere would not be easy.
‘The first differences have already begun to show,’ he told Mussolini. Mosley
was asked to put up ‘candidates (among whom Rothermere naturally wants
to infiltrate his old friends from the failed Empire Party) for the municipal
elections’. Grandi said it would be a mistake and told Mosley it was ‘in the
provinces that we must begin and from there that we must move on to the
besieging of the city’. He added that ‘what happened in our own Revolution
will happen with Rothermere: the reactionaries believed they could use us to
defeat socialism and democracy and then be in charge themselves; when they
realised that the threat of socialism was a joke compared with the Revolution
which you were preparing, they were alarmed and tried to withdraw, but it
was too late’.
_ As a newcomer on the political scene, Fascism made compromises in the
quest for power and chose to ally itself with conservative forces. Their elites’
willingness to work with the Fascists, ‘along with a reciprocal flexibility on
the part of the fascist leaders’, were, therefore, important factors.
Grandi characterized Britain as ahippopotamus ‘slow, fat, heavy, sleepy and
weak-nerved’. He felt sympathy for Mosley as the ‘expression of something
absolutely new and unexpected in England . .. He wants to bring back Tudor
England, the England of Elizabeth, an England that wasn’t “natural” but
sectarian, that ate oxen roasted on the spit, chopped off people’s heads, tilled
the soil and committed piracy on the high seas.’ If Mosley ‘knows how to play
his cards, this is the moment because the Labour Party was divided’. Labour’s
274 BLACKSHIRT

only leader of value was Cripps but he was ‘no more than an aristocratic
intellectual, ready to put out brave ideas, but not equally ready to risk his
own skin to defend them. Mosley is considered an unscrupulous adventurer,
but he has guts and a personal scorn for danger, exactly the qualities which
the masses like to see in their leaders.’ Grandi said ‘England must get ready to *
choose between fascism and labour’. ’
Rothermere kept on friendly terms with Germany and hoped to curtail its
military threat by offering concessions on its ex-colonies and by giving Hitler
a ‘free hand’ in the East. But in case of failure, he also campaigned for
rearmament. ‘There is nothing in modern politics’, the News Chronicle
reported, ‘to match the crude confusion of the Rothermere mentality. It blesses
and encourages every swashbuckler who threatens the peace of Europe — not
to mention direct British interests —- and then clamours for more and more
armaments with which to defend Britain, presumably against his lordship’s
pet foreign bully.’ Mosley sought closer links to the Nazis. At the end of
January the British ambassader in Berlin reported the BUF had opened a
branch in the capital.
Mosley’s problem was that diehards believed in the superiority of British
ways and were hostile to foreign concepts. He was like a Continental politician
and ‘not quite respectable’. The Everyman said he did not have ‘the instinctive
understanding of the English character that would enable him to transform
an intellectual concept from Italy into a typical English political movement’.
Catlin said he had ‘yet to discover a characteristically English formula such as
that which enabled Cromwell to combine individualistic liberty of the Puritan
with the authoritarianism of the Protectorate’.
In February police charged three Blackshirts with inflicting grievous bodily
harm on George Richardson, an infiltrator for the Labour movement, who
sold information to the News Chronicle. He told his handler Mosley was
‘quite apart from the members generally. He used to go into the headquarters,
and go straight to his room, and the rest of them never saw any more of him.’
Dundas was described as a ‘poor type’, Forgan was ‘not important’ but Joyce
was ‘very able and idealistic’. The general run of officers were ‘of the hooligan
type who think nothing of “beating up” people they dislike’. Richardson’s
role was soon uncovered by Taylor’s Department Z and he was denounced as
‘a crawling rat’.
Alex Miles claimed ‘no member could afford to laugh at “Z” because it
spied on every officer’, and at the first sign of disaffection ‘that man became
suspect’. Taylor conducted the courts of inquiry which punished recalcitrant
members involved in squabbles and feuds. Opponents claimed the cellars were
used for punishment purposes and Special Branch alleged a man had been
seriously wounded during horseplay between Fascists. Richardson said he had
been struck and pinned to the floor by Blackshirts before castor oil was forced
 ROTHERMERE 275
down his throat. At a subsequent trial the Blackshirts denied the incident,
though Richardson’s stomach when pumped did contain castor oil. One
defendant admitted striking Richardson but was acquitted because the
evidence was not strong enough to convict.
MIS had an ‘unimpeachable’ source on contacts made by January Club
members with army officers. Major-General J. F. C. Fuller was a prominent
guest, as were Conservative MP Brigadier-General E. L. Spears and General
Sir Hubert Gough, a leader of the 1914 Curragh Mutiny. These contacts led
MIS to believe the Club was forging dangerous ties to the army. The Service
was obsessed with the belief that such links were the beginnings of a potential
‘fifth column’, though the evidence was thin.
Aneurin Bevan and Jennie Lee were alarmed at the prospect of a Fascist
revolution and made arrangements to go into hiding. Such views were not
uncommon. Virginia Woolf listened to the ‘nearly mad’ outpourings of the
German conductor Bruno Walter, who had recently fled Germany. His talk
on the poison of the Nazis made a violent impression on her. “These brutal
bullies go about in hoods and masks, like little boys dressed up, acting this
idiotic, meaningless, brutal, bloody pandemonium.’ She feared the Blackshirts
and on 15 February told Quentin Bell, ‘We are to have Mosley within five
years. I suppose you and Julian [his brother] will be for it.’
Friends of Lord Marley, opposition Chief Whip in the Lords and previously
Under-Secretary for War (1930-31), feared Mosley’s progress and founded
an anti-Fascist society, which had been promised funds. He told the editor
of the Manchester Guardian, W. P. Crozier, they would keep track of BUF
activities and organize counter rallies. Marley had an overheated view of the
dangerous Mosley, who had plans for a march on London and had organized
a private aeroplane squadron. Mosley was ‘so hot-headed that he was capable,
if his march on London were interfered with, of ordering the squadron to
drop bombs on the city. Conditions were conceivable under which certain
Tory politicians and Generals would connive at Mosley’s coup and abstain
from putting it down.’ He told Crozier that if Mosley was rebuffed, ‘he might
then lose his head completely and order his various sections to take any violent
measures that were within his power’. This was not based on reality but
Marley, who acted as the innocent cover for Communist-inspired bodies,
expressed the fears of many authoritative figures.
Mosley’s Fascism was a crisis-dependent phenomenon with hopes of power
being contingent on Labour’s electoral challenge being interpreted as a real
threat. Convinced Fascism would displace ‘flabby conservatism’, he angled his
appeal at those dissatisfied with the National government. He argued, like
Rothermere, that the threat came from Cripps’s Socialist League, which was ina
‘unity front’ with the Communists. He played on the fear of a socialist takeover,
believing Cripps’s emergency powers rhetoric was his greatest propaganda
 276 BLACKSHIRT

asset. He hoped such fears would take root among the middle classes and
‘events would transform this apprehension into crisis proportions, which
would be his route to power’.
Events moved Mosley’s way when, in a trio of by-elections in February,
Labour achieved large swings against the National government. The upsurgein |
its fortunes conferred on the BUF a fashionable popularity, even though Herbert
Morrison claimed Cripps’s ‘socialism in our time brigade’ had been killed off.
Tories considered aligning themselves with a ‘suitably house-trained’ Mosley.
Backbencher Cuthbert Headlam believed colleagues ‘might well fall in with a
Fascist coup d’état, preferring a bourgeois revolution to a proletarian one’.
There was deep unease within government circles about Mosley’s success.
On 16 February Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon warned Home Secretary Sir
John Gilmour of the ‘danger of letting this silly business of playing at Mussolini
go on in this country’ with the ‘folly of coloured shirts and tin trumpets’.
However, ‘as long as people imitate Germans or Italians without breaking
the law, one can only deplore their want of national spirit’. Gilmour and
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Trenchard wanted the black shirt
uniform banned. Trenchard claimed the BUF was in contravention of the
1819 Act which proscribed ‘unauthorised exercises, movements or evolutions’
and that it was ‘to all intents and purposes an unauthorised military forma-
tion’. His reactionary style and apparent friendship with Mosley, who cham-
pioned the RAF which Trenchard had founded, led Lord Marley to claim he
protected BUF demonstrations. In fact, by February he wanted an end to
uniformed stewarding of meetings and a stop put on ‘movements of this kind
while they are still comparatively small and easy to deal with’.
Trenchard complained to the Home Secretary that the BUF had passed false
information (presumably from Taylor) about a Communist plot to attack its
Holloway branch and an alleged IFL plan to attack its headquarters, and
suggested that this ‘mischievous nonsense’ would best be dealt with by out-
lawing the Fascists. Discussion culminated in the drafting of a ‘Bill to Prohibit
the Wearing of Uniform’. Three attempts to bring forward a Public Order Act
were dropped as it became clear that Labour and Liberal MPs were lukewarm
to the idea.
Rothermere’s deployment of an ‘arsenal of gutter press’ techniques had an
immediate impact on Blackshirt recruitment. There was ‘terrific enthusias
m
and it seemed there was no limit to what we might achieve’. The Home
Office reported that the BUF was attracting ‘a better class of recruits
and its
membership is increasing’. There was a surge of 17,700 paying
members,
including an influx of ‘Generals, Admirals, big business men, and the Debs
of
the period with Union Jacks around their lily-white shoulders, who
probably
saw just the one side of it; the patriotic side’. It helped boost the reactionar
y
wing of former British Fascists.
 ROTHERMERE 25

The BUF’s growth led the government to query its funding. In the Lords,
on 28 February, Lord Feversham admitted the ‘exact source is unknown, but
it is obvious that substantial financial backing is forthcoming from various
sources other than that of the private wealth of the leader and the dues or
subscriptions of members’. John Strachey wrote that the BUF was ‘an
extremely expensive undertaking’ but Mosley’s ‘private fortune is not unlimi-
ted’. He remained sphinx-like on the funding and, officially, was removed
from direct contact with the BUF’s financial side, in order to confuse MIS,
for whom it had ‘not been possible to obtain reliable information on this matter
since the facts are known only to Mosley and his most trusted assistants’. A
side effect was that he never exercised effective financial control. The 1940
Advisory Committee inquiry into the BUF Trust found there was a deficit for
1933 and surpluses for 1935 and 1936 but there was no way of verifying the
subscriptions and donations.
The Mail claimed the BUF’s annual income was £70,000 (£2.38 m). The
30,000 to 40,000 members at the height of its success paid a shilling a
month if employed and fourpence if unemployed, which brought in £12,000
(£408,000) a year. Expenses largely consisted of salaries totalling £20,000.
Dr Forgan was paid £750 as Deputy Leader, John Beckett received £700 as
editor of Action, while the total salaries of the twenty officers in the lower
rank were in the neighbourhood of £500 (£17,000).
With the injection of Italian funds, BUF activity increased dramatically. It
cost nearly £2,000 to transport five hundred Fascists from London to Man-
chester and a similar number to Birmingham for meetings. Propaganda was
produced on a lavish scale, at around £3,000 a week. The Blackshirt and the
more highbrow Fascist Week (which cost a penny and tuppence respectively,
with circulations of 25,000 to 30,000) paid their own way. They were run by
companies in Lady Mosley’s name as a means of protecting them from libel
suits.
In seeking funding Mosley had been influenced by the Italians who said
‘they had got the money from capitalists and had double-crossed the capitalists
and gone over to the working-class which they intended to serve’. This money
did not go through the books. ‘It was a joke among our people the lengths
these people would go to conceal their connection.’ Rothermere insisted on
personally handing to Mosley a gift of money.
In 1940, in front of the Advisory Committee, Mosley admitted that Morris
(Lord Nuffield) had given ‘large sums of money but he went as far as to
publish in the Jewish Chronicle that he was not supporting us because his cars
would have been subject to a boycott’. In his July letter to the Chronicle,
Nuffield denied he was anti-Semitic — which was untrue. He enclosed a cheque
for £250 (£8,500) for the fund for German Jewry which, his biographer notes,
‘was very small by his standards’. There was no record of financial support in
 278 BLACKSHIRT

his cash books but there were larger than normal payments to the National
Council of Industry and Commerce, which ‘may have been a way of chan-
nelling the money to Mosley’.
A Labour research document claimed Mosley received money from Lord
Inchcape, Lord Lloyd, Baron Tollemache, Air Commodore Chaumier, Vincent
Vickers, the Earl of Glasgow and Sir Charles Petrie. Rumoured contributors
included Sir Henry Deterding of the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company, whose
name was linked with Mosley by both anti-Fascists and ex-Fascists. A BUF
official, G. P. Sutherst, said Lancashire cotton mill owners donated. ‘Very
rarely we would approach a person who Mosley had reason to believe might
put his hand in his pockets,’ recalled a fund-raiser, but ‘it was sizeable small
fry stuff’. The income from small funders was £12,500. Richardson claimed
‘there were no wealthy persons giving secret contributions’.
In fact, Mosley hid significant contributions from prying eyes. A millionaire,
later peer and Conservative Minister, bitten by enthusiasm for Fascism, con-
tributed £40,000 (£1.36 m) and collected £50,000 from friends. The New
Statesman later identified him as Wyndham Portal, a New Party fund-raiser.
He became Chairman of the Commission on Unemployment and ‘expressed
regret for being misled’ but his pro-Fascism remained a secret and, as Viscount
Portal, he went on to serve as wartime Minister of Works. Portal was close to
~ the Prince of Wales who, it was rumoured, contributed anonymously. Donors
included the stockbroker and contributor to the Empire Industries Association
Alex Scrimgeour, and the Tory MP Henry Drummond Wolff (£1,000).
Scrimgeour was a friend of Joyce, through whom he channelled £11,000 to
the BUF as a bulwark against Communism.
Branches such as Hull were funded by local businessmen who formed clubs
to collate support. Contributors ranged from directors of regional companies
to small firms and were the saviours of Headquarters, which had ‘a perpetual
struggle to find money’. Fund-raising luncheons presented by Mosley were
organized at the Criterion and January Club gatherings were lucrative.
Wealthy landowners such as Viscountess Downe in Norfolk and Lady Pearson,
who ran the Canterbury branch and was the sister of Henry Page Croft, and
Jorian Jenks, a farmer and activist in Surrey, put on garden parties. Regular
subventions came from rich members such as Bill Allen and Sir Alliot Verdon
Roe, who served on the BUF finance committee. On temporary loan as its
financial secretary, Allen’s accountant, Major Tabor, said the BUF ‘must do
what Allen wants because it is his money which keeps them going’.
In February 1934, under the pseudonym ‘James Drennan’, Allen published
his Spengler-derived BUF: Oswald Mosley and British Fascism. He had mar-
ried Mosley’s former companion, Paula Casa Maury, and spent much of his
time in Ireland writing his History of the Georgian People and helping Oliver
Wardrop, former British Commissioner of Transcaucasia, create an
exile
 ROTHERMERE 279

Georgia Committee. Allen celebrated Fascism as ‘an insurrection of feeling —

a mutiny of men against the conditions of the modern world’. He presented
Mosley’s career in heroic terms and argued for a collectivist ‘Elizabethan’
model of society, instead of a failed liberal bourgeois system. It was British
Fascism’s most systematic defence.
Allen leaned heavily on Stirling Taylor’s Modern History of England (1932),
which posited an Elizabethan golden age. ‘In the great days of the Tudors...
were laid the foundations of a national state of a seriously planned economy.
Had the Elizabethan system been maintained the coming of the Industrial
Revolution and of the Age of Mechanics might have been a slower process,
but it must undoubtedly have been steadier and more ordered.’ Blackshirts
linked ‘feudalism, the guild system, Tudor centralised authority and the spirit
behind the achievement of Empire to their own conception of the corporate
state’. Fascist synthesis would combine the ‘virility of the Elizabethan with the
intellect and method of the modern technician’. The ideal was Mosley who
represented ‘the spirit of the Tudor aristocracy’.
Mosley said Fascism was a movement ‘to secure national renaissance by
people who felt themselves threatened with decline into decadence’. He prom-
ulgated the image of a national community, purged and rejuvenated, rising
phoenix-like from the ashes of a morally bankrupt system and its soft culture.
The revolution consisted of ‘hardening the character and purifying and energis-
ing the community rather than making the social structure or the economic
system more just or free’. It provided a means for checking social change
rather than advancing it. Fascists used nineteenth-century degeneration theories
of national decline and decay of empire, and demonized those who were
perceived as different.
For Allen, Fascism was a ‘counter-revolution against an industrial revolution
which had uprooted man from the open country and cooped him up in the
city’. He viewed with horror and fascination Spengler’s megalopolis, which
sucked ‘into its iron belly the insignificant units who swarm in from all the
- outlying lands of the old “culture”’. The city, progress and modernity were
‘paradoxically, the very agents of decline’. The contradictions were evident in
the hopes of BUF Utopians such as Birmingham schoolteacher Louise Irvine.
Fascism was ‘hostile not only to dark satanic mills and soulless factories but
to the very cities which contained them’. After the slums had been destroyed,
people would be rehoused in small and self-syfficient communities, in rural
environments.
Mosley discussed the ideas of German philosopher Oswald Spengler with
Allen, Mandeville-Roe, who wrote a book on the Corporate State, and
Alexander Raven Thomson, the BUF’s principal philosopher. Mosley said
Thomson, who during 1932 published his Spengler-derived Civilisation or
Divine Superman, ‘intellectually, towered above the men I had known in the
 280 BLACKSHIRT

Labour Cabinet’. It was Spengler who provided the broad background of Fascist
thought and Mosley’s reading of his ponderous Decline of the West confirmed
his analysis of Britain in decay and helped inject an apocalyptic edge.
World history, Spengler claimed, exhibited a cyclical pattern based on the
growth and decay of cultures, which could be understood by an ‘intuitive
spiritual organic logic of existence’ which he termed destiny. As each culture
neared the end of its cycle the creative stage closed and a stagnating stage began,
whose collapse into barbarism could only be delayed by heroic Caesar-type
figures.
The new Caesars relied on blood, instinct and realpolitik to control the
masses and govern nations. Representing the ultimate in the will to power,
the natural aristocratic leader had returned ‘in the grim serenity of Mussolini,
in the harsh force of Hitler’. Mosley was the dramatic figure who dominated
his audience; under physical attack, ‘men shrank back from his giant frame
and giant spirit’. The Blackshirt said ‘a stone that struck his head flew apart
at the impact’. He cast himself as a fact-man who would lead his people to a
higher destiny. The ‘original will of devoted masses, subject to revolutionary
discipline and inspired by the passionate ideal of national survival’ would
replace ‘the will to power of a higher order of the individual superman’. Every
Blackshirt was to be ‘an individual cell of a collective Caesarism’.
- Mosley claimed the Fascist fact-man would rescue Europe from the external
threat of Bolshevism and internally from the Jews. He rationalized his anti-
Semitism in terms of Spengler, who distinguished between ‘good’ Jews, who
assimilated to the national culture, and ‘bad’ Jews, who did not. The inner
spiritual difference between Jews and Faustian Europeans was responsible for
the inevitable hatred between the two groups, which could not be overcome.
Spengler’s cultural anti-Semitism was derived from an apartheid perspective
and a belief that mixing cultures led to stagnation. Mosley envisaged a policy
of separation for Jews (and later for blacks in Africa).
In contrast to Spengler’s pessimistic conservatism, Mosley believed Fascism
could renew European culture in ‘a mutiny against destiny’. Caesarism and
science would evolve Faustian man and a civilization which renewed its youth
in a persisting dynamism. It would produce a ‘final union of will with thought
to a limitless achievement’. Fascism would create a society in which man
‘could become like a God and control like a magician the forces of the
universe’. In a mystical note, he told Peter Liddle that after the Caesarist
stage
there would be ‘eternal light’. Thomson saw Fascism as the twentieth-century
expression of ‘the will to infinitude’ and Mosley as the leader who
would
transform the world.
For Mosley, Fascism would ‘respiritualise the thought of the people
until
the principles of religion return to their hearts — the militant service
and
mystical love’. Blackshirt Olive Hawks recalled the ‘desire to merge
into the
 ROTHERMERE 281

greater unit of nation or faith’, which derived from Fascism’s spiritual instinct
of self-sacrifice, which set them apart from ‘people who drifted along’. Fascism,
Mosley preached, comes ‘with the force of a new religion’. It was infused with
ritual as an alternative to Marxist faith. Its core was the idea of national
rebirth in which the individual would be fused with the mass to overcome
oppositions between private and public, individual and collective. It had the
totalizing aim of a millenarian cult led by a charismatic leader, whose ‘dyna-
mism was recharged in the liturgies of mass meetings where irrational forces
of the chosen and the symbolic took over from individualism and rationality’.
Freud believed surrendering to the mass generated a feeling of safety so that
‘all individual inhibitions fall away and all the destructive instincts ... are
awakened’.
Fascism contained a passion for destruction and could not fail to end in
ruin. BUF songs drew on the image of the revolutionary spirit arising over the
martyred bodies of the dead. The ‘Marching Song’ (sung to the tune of the
‘Horst Wessel’) called up ‘the voices of the dead battalions’, who ‘still march
in spirit with us’. A verse of ‘Onward Blackshirts’ (sung to the Italian anthem
‘Giovinezza’) reads, ‘Heroes: your death was not in vain! ... For a free and
greater Britain, Stand we fast to fight or die!’ E. D. Randall wrote, ‘Mosley:
Leader of thousands! Lead us! We fearlessly follow to conquest and freedom
— or else to death!’
The forbidden became legitimate when Fascists put on the black shirt. ‘Our
Blackshirt Sons’, wrote Anne Preston, ‘get into black shirts and at once they
are in a fine new world. The transformation of a bored and aimless youth into
an active Fascist is nothing short of a miracle. From a slouching and selfish
young cynic he is changed as if by magic into a keen confident lad ... His
eyes grow steely and his flabby muscles seem to harden overnight.’ Anti-Fascist
journalist Winifred Holtby was outside the Black House when she saw a
woman with ‘close-cropped black hair, black beret, black blouse and party
badge’. Her uniform was

business-like, her walk determined, her air pleasantly self-confident. Perhaps she saw
the Blackshirts as crusaders, marching to sweep away from their beloved country
decadence, lethargy and confusion. They would smash the foul slums and build a
new Jerusalem; they would take the unemployed youths, rotting their lives away in
squalid by-streets and give them a part in the corporate state, a faith, a hope,
something to live for. z

She suspected, however, ‘the civilisation of the concentration camp’ and ‘did
not relish a country in which men are afraid to speak their mind’.
There existed within the BUF a strand of ‘Fascist feminism’, which attracted
former suffragettes to the possibility of a carefully controlled revolution,
opening new fields of activity to women but avoiding social and class
282 BLACKSHIRT

dislocation. In April Women’s Section Head Lady Makgill was forced to resign
for embezzling funds. She was replaced by Mary Richardson, one of the first
suffragettes to be forcibly fed and threatened with confinement in a mental
home. After working in London’s East End, she stood for the ILP and then
joined the New Party. She saw in the Blackshirts the ‘courage, action, loyalty,
gift of service, and ability to serve which I had known in the suffrage move-
ment’. A colleague, Norah Elam, argued that Fascism ‘is the logical, if much
grander, conception of the momentous issues raised by the militant women of
a generation ago.’
In April Commandant Allen, who met Mosley through Elam, spoke at the
January Club, dressed in a ‘dark blue tight-fitting tunic, dark blue breeches,
black top-boots and a peaked cap’. She had visited Germany ‘to learn the
truth of the position of German womanhood’, and talked about her audience
with Hitler and Goering. Her zest for National Socialism was reflected in the
pages of the Policewoman’s Review, which carried Nazi and anti-Semitic
propaganda. At a BUF meeting at Oxford University she endorsed Mosley as
head of a movement which sought ‘to put country first, and not to interfere
with other nations’. Allen maintained she was ‘not herself a Blackshirt’, but
officials assumed she was a secret member.
Baba Metcalfe strengthened her intimacy with Mosley by donning the black
shirt and regularly attending his meetings, which Irene thought ‘unnecessarily
provocative’. Peter Rodd had recently joined the BUF and bought black shirts
for himself and his wife Nancy. She had just begun work on a book, Wigs on
the Green, with a heroine modelled on her sister Unity. It contained a comic
sketch of the leader of the ‘Union Jackshirts’, ‘Captain Jack’ (Mosley). Neither
Unity nor Diana was amused.
Rothermere backing of the BUF had always been intended as a short-term
measure to put pressure on the National government. The ruse worked and
he received undertakings from the Prime Minister for radical changes with
more spending on aircraft and the creation of a ministry of propaganda. The
promises, in fact, came to nought, which left him feeling cheated. Esmond
Harmsworth told Leslie Hore-Belisha that espousal of Mosley’s cause intensi-
fied after this setback. At the same time Mosley’s diehard friend, Ivan Moore-
Brabazon MP, discussed with him ‘the future policy of the BUF’.
Rothermere published Mosley’s articles, advertised BUF demos and printed
accounts of his meetings. Randolph Churchill said Mosley’s speech at Leeds
was ‘one of the most magnificent feats of oratory I have ever heard. The
audience ... were swept away in spontaneous reiterated bursts of applause.’
His ‘eloquence has often been compared to that of the leaders of Fascism
in
other countries. He does not thunder like Mussolini. He has most in common
with Dr Goebbels. Both possess a voice with a real ring of conviction which
 ROTHERMERE 283

carries a thrill to the audience.’ When there was a disturbance at Manchester’s

Free Trade Hall, blame was heaped on the Communists.
In Germany, Mosley drew praise from the shaven-headed and sadistic whip-
wielding Julius Streicher, whose Jew-hating newspaper, Der Stiirmer, had
previously abused the BUF as ‘a Jewish “catch-up” movement’ and Mosley
as having ‘Jewish blood in his veins’. With its disgusting articles, obscene
cartoons and slogans advocating terror against Jews, Der Stiirmer had one of
the highest circulations of all German periodicals, with a claimed readership
of 500,000. Its spring issue, available through Blackshirt sellers, was devoted
to ‘ritual murder’ and openly incited Germans to physically exterminate
the Jews.
Der Stiirmer had said ‘the Party which in England strives in this anti-Semitic
spirit is led by a certain Mosley. This man acknowledges nothing of a Jewish
or a race problem. He is therefore not opposed by the Jews, on the contrary
they praise and support him.’ In March, editor Karl Holz admitted a mistake
had been made. An agent sent by Streicher convinced them of the genuineness
of the BUF’s anti-Semitism. ‘We are now glad to be able to state that this
movement is furiously combated by Jewry and thereby proves that it is anti-
Semitic.’
During March Mussolini ordered an attack on Jews. Leftists arrested in
Turin were referred to as ‘Jewish anti-Fascists in the pay of expatriates’. The
Germans realized this was ‘the first time a distinction had been made between
Jews and non-Jews in Italy’. With competition between Rome and Berlin for
the allegiance of foreign Fascists, Mussolini gave his blessing to anti-Jewish
currents and urged the Austrian Chancellor to add a ‘dash of anti-Semitism’
to his programme in order to take the wind out of the sails of Nazi-backed
Fascists.
Hitler responded by allowing a pro-Nazi German lawyer based in Zurich,
Dr Hans Keller, to found the ‘International Union of Nationalists’, whose
expensive-looking pamphlets extolling a ‘nationalism of Race’ were subsidized
~ by Goebbels. Keller promoted a German Europe opposed to ideas of collective
security as a ‘limitation of power’. Eventually run out of the embassy in
London, the IUN was anti-Semitic, anti-Italian and referred to CAUR as the
‘Vatican-Fascist International’.
The existence of two internationals posed a dilemma for Mosley. Was he
to support CAUR, given that he relied on Mussolini for funding, or the IUN,
since many Blackshirts admired the Nazis? But too close a relationship would
be counter-productive if his diehard supporters perceived the BUF as a foreign
movement. ‘We were sometimes suspected of being organised in a fascist
International,’ Mosley wrote. ‘On the contrary, we were too much national.
There were sporadic meetings between leaders but no form of systematic
 284 BLACKSHIRT

organisation.’ That is not quite true. He built up branches overseas and created
covert links, which avoided MIS surveillance, with similar movements abroad.
The fostering of ties with Fascist movements was left to the secretive Foreign
Relations Department run by Dr Georg Pfister and his mysterious ‘German’
second in command. A Swiss subject born in Naples, Pfister’s family left in
1906 for Australia, where he was naturalized four years later and served with
the Australian Army during the war. He was connected to the German Aus-
lands Organisation and moved to England in the 1920s. His department made
arrangements for BUF deputations to Germany and Italy, and senior officials
who were ‘continuously disappearing on mysterious visits abroad’. On
18 March the British consul in Genoa reported a visit by forty BUF members.
Interviewed by H. P. Knickerbocker, Pfister told the American journalist of
Fascism’s worldwide expansion. The BUF had branches in Berlin, Cologne,
Milan, Rome and Paris. There were ties with the Ulster Fascists, the Australian
New Guard, and the Canadian Union of Fascists boasted of its receipt of
‘fighting support funds’ from Mosley. His representative. in Winnipeg, Hubert
Cox, reiterated that anti-Semitism formed no part of CUF policy, emphasizing
that Mosley had condemned it. During the summer BUF representative
Edward York travelled via New York to the West Indies to set up branches.
In New York he called on the German consul and said he ‘hoped to do justice
‘to the German viewpoint’. On the Riviera Branch Secretary Captain R. Coates
lectured to expats on Mosley’s success.
Mosley’s adherence to universal Fascism was kept secret from members.
They were predominantly from urban areas, with the main area of strength
in London and the South-East. There was support in Liverpool, Leeds and
Manchester, which had premises in the heart of the Jewish area, but apart
from outposts in south Wales and Scotland, the BUF could not be classed a
British union. It made efforts in Ulster but, except for Joyce and Allen, was
largely indifferent to Ireland. The North was a different matter and Blackshirts
made their presence felt under the title ‘Ulster Fascists’, witha badge of the
Red Hand of Ulster imposed on the Fascist axe and bundle of rods. They
were autonomous but closely associated with the parent BUF and sharing
a common corporatist policy. The attempt to transcend divisions between
nationalists and unionists within a framework of imperial unity was short-
lived, as Mosley called for the imposition of economic sanctions ‘until
Southern Ireland behaves herself as a loyal member of the Empire’.
A committed supporter of Unionism, Rothermere claimed in April that he
and Mosley were ‘entirely at one .. . in thinking that Ulster must have from
now on unyielding support’. All the momentum came from Rothermere, whose
mother was from County Down. During a visit to Belfast on 6 April, Northern
Ireland Prime Minister Lord Craigavon urged him to use his influence
with
Mosley to stop BUF criticism of his government. Rothermere told Mosley
he
 ROTHERMERE 285

was disappointed that the Blackshirt had attacked Stormont: ‘This is a very
grave mistake.’ The province was the ‘most valuable recruiting ground of
anywhere in the United Kingdom and did not want my enthusiasm for your
cause to be diminished by such an unnecessary and unfair attack’. Mosley was
conciliatory but the most Rothermere achieved was a suspension of Blackshirt
criticism and Mosley’s agreement not to visit Belfast to support the Ulster
Fascists.
During April MI5 began investigating Mosley’s links with Italy and
Germany. Kell enquired of the Home Office Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir
Russell Scott, whether he expected him ‘to take any special steps about Nazis
in this country’. Scott said that unless MIS ‘discovered in the ordinary course
of its work any case of subversive propaganda or other inimical steps against
the interests of this country’ it was ‘to leave them alone’. MI5’s remit had
been expanded to cover Fascist movements with international ramifications,
whose significance as instruments of foreign powers were as the ‘potential
nuclei of a “Fifth Column” ’. It was unclear whether this covered the BUF.
Jack Curry, formerly of India’s Intelligence Bureau, was first to grasp the
nature of the Nazi threat, though there was no knowledge of direct contacts
with the BUF for subversive purposes. Fascist growth, however, worried the
Home Secretary, Sir John Gilmour, who, on 9 April, blamed disorders on
the BUF’s semi-military and provocative behaviour. When MIS discovered
Mosley’s visits to Rome involved making arrangements for funding, a decision
was made to investigate the BUF.
MIS5’s B Branch was responsible for the investigation and Maxwell Knight’s
M Section was assigned the task of penetrating the BUF. Enquiries indicated
contacts between the Auslands Organisation and senior BUF officials centred
on a pro-Nazi faction led by Allen, Joyce, Thomson and Pfister. MIS noted,
however, that ‘when these contacts showed signs of getting out of control
Mosley issued orders forbidding any contact with foreign organizations except
under the control of his own headquarters’. Mosley was conscious of MIS
operations, in fact, so security conscious, suggests Thurlow, ‘that he appeared
to be more concerned with limiting and controlling the information the auth-
orities received about his activities than with running an efficient organisation’.
In the Nation, Johannes Steel warned in ‘Is Britain Going Fascist?’ that
the BUF was run with ‘fascist efficiency and employs the same methods of
organisation and propaganda that the Hitleriges use’. The Black House was
staffed with Nazis ‘who have been sent by Hitler to instruct Mosley’s stalwarts
in political terrorism’. Rumours that the Nazis had contributed £50,000
(£x.7 m) to the BUF led MIS to investigate German propaganda agencies
which aimed to influence public opinion ‘in Hitler’s forward policy in Europe’.
Grandi informed Mussolini on 15 April that he told Mosley ‘to disregard
the popular:districts of London and to speak in the open air in the small
 286 BLACKSHIRT

backstreets and at street corners. Revolutions are made in the streets.’ After
recovering from another bout of illness, Mosley put his energy into a meeting
at the Albert Hall on 22 April, organized by Bill Risdon.
When Mosley entered the Hall, the 10,o00-strong audience raised their
right arm in the Roman salute. He ‘limped across the length of the hall to the
rostrum; his chin was high and his face, deathly pale, wore a relaxed, confident
expression’. Robert Bernays MP found the meeting ‘horribly impressive’. His
‘description of Baldwin as the perfect representative of Britain asleep, with the
Blackshirts as the incarnation of Britain awake, was perfectly done’. The
audience was riveted. Ward Price said he had ‘heard Mussolini, Hitler, and
Goebbels, the three great Fascist orators of the Continent, address vast meet-
ings. None of them, to my mind, equalled Mosley, who, in his eloquence,
thrilled his huge audience in a way that men are rarely moved in their whole
lives by public speech.’
L. MacNeill Weir could not ‘believe that the soft-spoken, courteous, seem-
ingly shy young man, without a.hint of hauteur’ he had known in the Com-
mons ‘had metamorphosed into the haughty attitudinarian who, the cynosure
of a thousand eyes, stands a majestic figure, in the blazing spotlight of the
Albert Hall, to receive the clamant homage of a multitude of worshippers’.
Mosley resembled in the veneration of his supporters German Socialist Las-
salle, founder of the Social Democratic Party. ‘Hot-blooded Rhinelanders
received Lassalle like a god. Nothing was lacking — garlands hung across the
streets, maids of honour showered flowers upon him, interminable lines of
carriages followed the chariot of the “Leader”.’ Both were young, wealthy,
clever and ambitious. The resemblance of their careers was ‘too close to be
casual’.
The audience, observed Bernays, were ‘exiles from Empire outposts, dis-
gruntled Conservative women, hard-faced beribboned ex-servicemen and
young toughs from the shops and the banks. It was the lower middle classes.
It was the people of England who, as in Chesterton’s poem, have not yet
spoken. God help England if they ever do for they are a mass of prejudice,
ignorance, intolerance and cruelty.’ At the end, they rose to their feet as
Blackshirts chanted: ‘MOSLEY — Mosley! We want Mosley!’
Mosley was the last of the great platform speakers. He made 200 speeches
a year and spoke without notes. He recorded a draft and learnt it off by heart.
Bernays said the content was ‘nothing more than extreme Toryism ... the
so-called reform of parliament, the strong hand in India, parity in the air,
extreme economic nationalism ... But it was expressed in superb language.’
He exerted every resource of his will-power to persuade his audience, who
demanded the same surrender of the will as other demagogues. ‘Admit all
this,’ Weir added, ‘and the preposterous pageantry and cheap demagogism
falls into place as the merest stage properties of the “act”.’
 ROTHERMERE 287

Mosley hoped to attract intellectuals but Wells, who was at the Albert Hall
meeting, now mocked Mosley. The ‘little snob-cad has found his advantage
in over-expressing the secret desires of the upper classes, and the political
adventurer has found an abundant following at this social level, needy, yet
passionately eager to feel a “bit superior”’. Anyone who saw Blackshirts
‘running like the wind down Regent Street from the Jewish prize-fighters,
who broke up their demonstrations, knows the real quality of this weedy
reactionary riff-raff’. Their model was the Empire ideology of Kipling’s Stalky
and Co. ‘in which the idea of nasty little quasi-upper-class boys taking the law
into their own hands was glorified’.
T. S. Eliot’s wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, did join the BUF. An emotional
wreck with her marriage disintegrating, she found the idea of a Jewish con-
spiracy appealing. Although he believed ‘reasons of race and religion com-
bine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable’, Eliot dis-
tanced himself from the ‘infection’ which emanated from Ezra Pound. In the
Church Times on 2 February 1934, he invited Catholics who sympathized
with Fascism to question its orthodoxy that absolute monarchy ‘can never
return’ and that the State was an absolute. On 12 March Eliot warned
Pound against Mosley. Not long after, he drafted The Rock, satirizing totali-
tarianism with a scene of Blackshirts chanting anti-Semitic abuse. Mosley was
unable to turn intellectual flirtation with Fascism into allegiance to the BUF.
Few remained members for long and those who did were ‘not particularly
bright’.
The Albert Hall meeting produced the German embassy’s first report on the
BUF. Its author, Prince Otto von Bismarck, grandson of the Iron Chancellor,
and his wife Princess Ann-Mari were popular in social circles. He disclaimed
interest in the anti-Semitism which characterized Nazi accounts of the move-
ment. On 25 April he said the BUF had ‘grown stronger in industrial areas’.
He was impressed that Mosley, an ‘effective but moderate orator’, attracted
10,000 people to a ‘totally undisrupted meeting’. Berlin noted with interest
Mosley’s comment that no one should be persecuted because of his race and
that ‘in fascist England, the Jews would be ruled and not vice versa’. Bismarck
concluded that Mosley’s ‘fight to seize power seems difficult since the economic
improvement in England and the reduction in unemployment has reduced the
number of disenchanted people’.
Hitler viewed British domestic politics as .a conflict between ‘Jewish-
Bolshevist’ and national political groups. The German Foreign Office cau-
tioned against official contact with the BUF and within the Nazi Party there
were ‘considerable misgivings about an opening of official relations with the
BUF?’ because of Hitler’s desire not to endanger chances of an agreement with
the British. Even more so, Mosley’s official rejection of anti-Semitism and his
alignment with Mussolini were significant hurdles to an alliance.
288 BLACKSHIRT

According to Special Branch, Mosley had designated Dr Pfister as his sole

channel of communication with Germany. Faced with Hitler’s reluctance to
embrace Mosley, Pfister set up a back channel via Berlin publisher and former
owner of the Bergisch-Mdrkische Zeitung Walter Bacmeister. Contact had
been made at the end of 1933 when Pfister sent him a copy of The Greater :
Britain with the aim of securing a German publishing deal. He was asked for a
revised edition with a ‘more comprehensive appreciation of German National
Socialism’. It was translated by Emil Chalet, who was made a honorary BUF
member.
During April 1934 Pfister told Chalet he was looking forward to ‘signifi-
cantly closer co-operation and a better understanding between our two move-
ments’, particularly on the Jewish question since Mosley now took a
‘completely unambiguous stance’. The Jewish question ‘can be finally settled
only when it is resolved here. The centre of Jewish power is here in London.
To hope that the present government would get rid of this Jewish bondage,
would be self-deception. That we will take over at the helm everyone knows
who has his hand on the pulse of the nation. Draw your own conclusions.’
Pfister added that the BUF was the ‘most effective means in England so far
for Nazi propaganda’ and quoted Mosley’s recent speech: ‘We stand by our
friends and against our enemies.’ He wanted a German ‘well-disposed towards
us’ to visit, in order ‘to pave the way for a private meeting in Germany between
Hitler and Mosley’.
The Mail said Mosley was the ‘paramount political personality in Britain’
and claimed the BUF was ‘caught up on such a wave of deep-seated popular
enthusiasm as must sweep it to victory’. Membership had doubled to 34,000
and Blackshirts believed that their time had finally arrived. In some towns the
BUF ‘had taken hold like wildfire’ with forty-two London branches and 112
in the provinces. During recruitment drives, speakers arrived with a coachload
of Blackshirts who would march with a band through the streets to meetings,
with new recruits encouraged to fall in behind. Support was concentrated in
a chain of branches along the south coast from Margate to Plymouth, with a
few branches in non-industrial towns such as Blackpool and Harrogate. In
the industrial Midlands and the North, branches were flourishing with support
from small traders, shopkeepers and the middle classes.
Mosley claimed to have twenty branches in Scotland. After a speech sug-
gesting ‘Scottish people should be allowed to manage their own affairs’, MIS
spotted him talking to Sir Compton Mackenzie, Scottish nationalist and later
author of Whisky Galore, who had been hounded for breaching the Official
Secrets Act by publishing in 1932 Greek Memories, about his time as an
intelligence officer. The Communist Party’s Harry Pollitt claimed Mosley
offered Mackenzie ‘Wales and Scotland and I will have England only’. The
BUF was itself a victim of Scottish sectarianism. Its association with Catholics
 ROTHERMERE 289

‘created a great hostility between them and Protestant extremists who were
bitterly opposed to all things Catholic’.
With high unemployment, Lancashire was thought to have the ‘best poten-
tial for revolutionary action’. The BUF found favour with cotton workers
wanting to protect their jobs from foreign competition. Mosley claimed it was
possible to recover the markets for British cotton in India and restore no fewer
than 65,000 jobs in the process. Nearly 5,000 members were recruited among
the middle class and businessmen, who were discreet in their support. Mosley
appealed to both working-class Tories and Labour voters with his patriotic
and anti-capitalist rhetoric, and posed an electoral threat to local Conservative
MPs.
According to the Home Office, the increasing number of middle-class Mail
recruits Mosley was attracting were derisively called ‘Albert Hall Fascists’ by
Blackshirts. In fact, all kinds of people joined for a variety of reasons. Stuart
Rawnsley’s study of the North uncovered cotton workers, self-employed,
small businessmen, shopkeepers and Catholics, but also those from across the
social classes. In rural areas farmers became members; in Manchester the
majority were non-unionized or unemployed working-class recruits. New
adherents came from the Left and the Right, and those with no experience
of conventional politics. There is no one theory which explains this spread
but Communists were probably right in suggesting that Fascism appealed to
different classes at different times.
MIS noted that Mosley drew the support of sympathetic Tory MPs such as
Moore-Brabazon, Drummond Wolff, and Colonel (later Sir) Thomas Moore
wrote in the Mail on 25 April that there were no ‘fundamental differences of
outlook between Blackshirts and their parents, the Conservatives’. All were
‘filled with the same emotions, pride of race, love of country, loyalty, hope’.
The Mail said Mosley expressed views ‘identical with those of the robuster
minds in the Conservative Party. Like them, he stands for law, order, free
speech and English methods.’
- Blackshirts were weary of the ‘uncanny conspiracy among our friends and
our enemies to regard us as the future propaganda machine for the Tory
Party’. Fascism was being watered down. Fredericks said the BUF ‘rapidly
lost all semblance to the true ideas of Fascism’. Pioneers were overshadowed
by newcomers: ‘We did not want to become the shock troops of the Tories —
taking all the kicks and getting nothing.’ The Left faction wanted the new
recruits to be the basis of a mass movement, which would be ‘obtainable only
if we outrivalled the Labour machine’. Miles said Mosley wanted ‘a quicker
method?’ — a coup d’état, albeit a law-abiding one, in which Tories, forced to
make a choice between Mosley or Moscow, would invite him to take over.
When H. R. Knickerbocker asked Mosley about the preconditions for Fas-
cist rule, he admitted middle-class despair was ‘not as severe or sudden in
290 BLACKSHIRT

Britain but there is a mass of white collar people who will become unsupported
unemployed in desperate straits in a probable depression’. He did not yet see
a danger of Communist revolution but ‘if Labour win the next election and
then acts simply to retain power the radicals will feel deceived and will revolt.
The moderate socialist government will either be dissolved or will go the way
of the extreme left. Either way will lead to upsurge of fascism.’ He was wary
of Tories ‘wanting fascism without fascists. Impossible.’
Herbert Morrison told Knickerbocker Fascism succeeded where the econ-
omy and the government were in a state of collapse. But ‘this was not going
to happen. If fascists think we will allow power to slip away without a fight,
as happened in Germany, they can think again.’ Knickerbocker concluded
Mosley would not succeed because he ‘came on the scene when economic
recovery had already started’ and ‘government institutions still have public
support’. His appeal to the middle classes was only temporary. Fredericks
thought they were ‘horrified when they found its socialist side’. Many potential
supporters refrained from enrolling or, having joined,.soon faded away.
In the spring MIS prepared its first report on ‘The Fascist Movement in the
United Kingdom’. Kell asked chief constables for information and ‘their
opinion as to the importance to be attached to this movement in their areas’.
He discovered the BUF was ‘more active and successful in the industrial areas
and that their achievements in the majority of the Counties may be regarded
as negligible’. However, monitoring was deficient and he did not know whether
it had a ‘secret organisation in being, or under preparation, which would
enable them to take effective action in an emergency’, or if it intended ‘to
influence the Armed Forces by direct propaganda or otherwise’. Nor did he
have evidence of funding from Italian or German sources.
MIS knew little of Mosley’s attempt to build links with the Nazis. In May he
wrote a foreword for a German edition of Bill Allen’s book, which Bacmeister
passed to Thomsen at the Reich Chancellery. The BUF, ‘like the movement
which today rules Germany, springs from the very soul of the mass of the
people. It rises from the inner spiritual urge of the new generation to find new
and higher forms of European civilisation.’ Hitler has said a European war

can only result in the triumph of our common enemy, the international Marxist
movement, which lies ready to destroy forever European culture. He is right. Such
strife between fascist nations would be a crime against fascism and against European
civilisation .. . Individually we will each fight to save our great nations from the
dark forces that menace them with destruction. Together we will strive to save
Europe from the dangers that encompass the highest of all civilisations and to build
in the future a Europe which is worthy of the modern mind and spirit.

On 4 May, Bacmeister informed Secretary of State Lammers that his agent,

Chalet, was exchanging letters with Pfister. He said the BUF inner circle
 ROTHERMERE 291

believe ‘the takeover of power by Mosley in England is only a question of

time’. If this was true, then ‘a strong German interest could be supported in
the near future for the presence of unofficial relations between the BUF and
German authorities’. It was underlined by Lammers who passed it upwards
and noted that Pfister had talked of ‘British efforts to arrange a meeting of the
German Fiihrer and the British leader’. Bacmeister believed it was his national
duty to continue the contacts and wanted to meet with a chancellery official
‘who has a broad view of the political significance of the matter’, so that he
could ‘judge the delicacy with which this matter must be handled’. He met
with Lammers who referred the matter to the party’s Foreign Affairs Office
and the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs. Thomsen ‘now officially made
Mr Chalet your middle man’ with the BUF but said it would be necessary ‘to
guard against undesirable errors’. During May, Unity Mitford returned to the
Munich home of Baroness Laroche to learn German but also to contact Nazi
officials.
The Germans were in receipt of reports on the BUF from a secret informant.
On 2 May he told them questions were being asked about ‘whether the link
with the big business press lords will bring about the long-term survival of the
movement or whether inner tensions could destroy it’. The Jewish question
created problems since 75-80 per cent joined on the basis that policy ‘would
follow the German example’. Mosley had to tread carefully because he had
been married to a ‘half-Jewess’ and had ‘accepted financial support from
Jewish Circles’.
Mosley’s attitude to Jews was outlined in Allen’s book in which he said,
‘national pride has no need of the delirium of race. The English and the Italians
are strong enough to ignore — and to absorb — the Jews, but in Germany they
remain a constant intellectual provocation to a people sensitive to the newness
of their nationhood.’ Mosley’s paymaster, Mussolini, attacked Nazi racialism,
‘drunk with a stubborn bellicosity’. On 6 May, at Liverpool, Mosley’s claim
that ‘there will be no racial persecution, no man will be persecuted because
he is a Jew’, was noted by German observers.
Mosley, however, concluded with a warning that Jews ‘will have to put the
interests of Britain first’, instead of putting ‘their own race before the interests
of the country in which they reside’. They could not join the BUF because
they showed ‘bitter hostility to Fascism, victimised our people and bitterly
attacked us in the press. It would be folly to admit declared enemies to our
ranks.’ To counter accusations that Fascism was a foreign creed, Grandi
suggested Mosley mention that ‘the founder of the Conservatives, Disraeli, and
that of socialism were Jews’. On 12 May he attacked Tories for worshipping ‘at
the shrine of an Italian Jew’. A worried Rothermere wrote to a Jewish friend,
Eric Wollheim, authorizing him to reveal his ‘true feelings in regard to the
anti-Semitic question’.
292 BLACKSHIRT

The Nazi informant reported that young Tories wanted to use the BUF to
give their party ‘fresh blood and frontline troops’. Walter Elliott ‘is close to
fascist thinking even though he does not approve of the model chosen by
Mosley’ but the Tories and aristocratic classes ‘are preparing themselves to
seize upon the new fascist trends’. They are ‘preparing for the widely expected *
day of violent conflict with Marxism. A battle with the Communist Party is *
hardly expected but rather with the Socialists [led by Cripps] who are currently
gaining supporters in massive numbers.’ He noted that Mosley had ‘more
points of contact with Italian fascism than National Socialism’.
Mosley benefited from internal Tory disputes over India. John Strachey
noted that when diehards demanded Empire Free Trade, he called for protec-
tionism and fortification of ‘islands on the Cape route to India’. Lord Lloyd,
who spoke to the January Club, warned in the Morning Post that ‘you cannot
be surprised if the Conservative Party will not look after the interests of this
country as well as of India, that more and more people in this country will
prefer a black shirt to a White Paper’.
Lloyd George told Lord Bledisloe of the widespread unease in Tory ranks,
‘not only in regard to Baldwin’s India policy’, but ‘in regard to the general
Socialist and Liberal principles with which he seems to seek to infest all
Conservative thought and actions’. The right wing might ‘break away from
Conservatism to Fascism’. The only obstacle was Mosley’s personality but the
Manchester Guardian warned he was ‘making headway, as Rothermere wants
him to do, by attracting Tory die-hards and creating a new Tory party of in-
tolerance and reaction’. Assistant editor Arthur Cranfield admitted Rothermere,
with his ‘whims and telephone calls’, set the paper’s policies. He specified ‘to the
inch the space to be given to Mosley and his absurd blackshirts’.
Beaverbrook was too wedded to the parliamentary system to be seduced by
Mosley and his papers ignored the BUF. He thought it ‘strange indeed’ to
see Express Chairman R. D. Blumenfeld, ‘a Jew, even one so comfortably
assimilated’, a member of the January Club. Beaverbrook liked Mosley
and even when attacked by him told Rothermere on 7 May that he did not
‘mind how much or how often Mosley dresses me down. You and I have sent
too many arrows forth, to complain of the self same shafts.’ Rothermere
offered that ‘if he attacks you I shall drop his Blackshirts’, but Beaverbrook
did not want Mosley ‘to feel restrained in this respect ... politics thrive on
personalities’.
‘If people of this country in great numbers were to become adherents of
either Communism or Fascism,’ Baldwin warned, ‘there could only be one end
to it. And that one end would be civil war.’ MI5 reported that ‘it is impossible
to resist the impression that taken as a whole’, civil servants ‘tend to under-
estimate the importance of Mosley’s mewextieatih
The BUF’s high profile led to hostile popular opposition. When John Beckett
 ROTHERMERE 293
returned to the North, he had to run the gauntlet of 3,000 anti-Fascists at
Gateshead and 5,000 at Newcastle. At Leicester, Chesterton was prevented
from speaking. ‘Physical assaults’, recalled Richard Bellamy, ‘became frequent
and dangerous. Open air meetings often ended in trouble, affrays and minor
riots.’ Anti-Fascist disruption and the ruthlessness of the BUF Defence Force
attracted publicity. One Blackshirt thought the tactics unnecessarily provoca-
tive and complained that people were ‘apt to feel they were at the mercy of
any “‘whipper-snapper” in big boots’. Julius Streicher said the baptism which
the BUF has ‘already received in bloody battles in public halls and streets
assures it a happy future, provided it continues in its way without compromise’.
Leaked Fascist orders for meetings at Edinburgh’s Mound, the equivalent
of Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, London, described tactics adopted by the
Defence Force. Once the speaker arrived, ‘the Plain clothes section drifts
along in ones or twos and take up any position they think fit. They never
communicate with each other and always take the side of the people around
them.’ They can ‘yell Communist slogans. If any trouble breaks out they do
not take any part in it. Their orders are to let the uniformed men look after
it. When the uniformed men are being overwhelmed the speaker gives a signal
to the leader of the section. He gives the order for the Plain clothes men to
enter the skirmish. It is their duty to get the uniformed men out of the crowd.’
On 28 May the Home Office came round to Trenchard’s view that it was
‘becoming difficult to distinguish these Fascist performances’ from the ‘military
exercises, movements or evolutions’ prohibited by the 1819 Act.
Rumours circulated in the Black House that thirty MPs were secretly sym-
pathetic to Mosley and ‘wait only for the day when open advocacy of Fascism
may become a politically profitable manoeuvre’. The only converts who broke
ranks were Carlyon Bellairs, former social imperialist and author of The Ghost
of Parliament, and H. M. Upton, son of Viscount Templeton. Miles claimed
pledges of support were reinforced by the presence in the Lords of ‘some
twenty-two peers of the realm. The Earl of Erroll is not the only belted bulwark
of the aristocracy who has accepted membership of the BUF.’
A week before his thirty-third birthday, Scotland’s Lord High Constable
Joss Erroll visited the Black House and was spotted at Quaglino’s at a table
with Otto von Bismarck. A founder member of the British Fascists, he joined
the January Club and discussed with Mosley plans to launch Fascism in the
colonies, as a solution to Africa’s agricultural depression. He added his voice
to Mosley’s rallying cry to develop Empire trade ‘in a long-term plan to make
the Empire a great self-contained economic unit’ with ‘the highest standard of
civilisation in the world’. Erroll attracted publicity and when The Times
announced his appointment as BUF representative in Kenya, Mosley’s every
move was covered by the press. It helped that he was friends with figures such
as Ribbentrop:
294 BLACKSHIRT

At the end of May the Savoy hosted a Blackshirt Dinner, publicized by the
Tatler. Attending were close friends of the Prince of Wales, Fruity Metcalfe
and Count and Countess Munster. On 31 May the Home Secretary button-
holed the Prince and told him of his anxiety over the growth of the Blackshirts.
John Aird, an equerry of the Prince, talked to Edward on the way back. ‘We ©
agreed that, without knowing much about them, we both thought it quite a
good movement except for Mosley.’
Pfister sought increased exchange of information with the Nazis and hoped
for more reporting on the BUF in the German press. As the most effective
channel for NSDAP propaganda in England, he told Bacmeister he was ‘per-
sonally ensuring that all readers of the Blackshirt have the material to place
the new Germany in the most favourable light’. There followed a visit to the
Black House by Nazi agent Dr Thost, who was introduced to P. G. Taylor,
who showed him a purloined ‘plan which was currently being prepared on
the Jewish side for a general attack — Press, finance, trade boycott etc. — against
Germany’. Thost was impressed and his report to Berlin opened the way to a
change in relations with Mosley. On 2 June the Nazi Party’s Foreign Office
assured Bacmeister that ‘considering the significance of the questions raised,
some decisions have not been made’, but the German press would report
extensively on the forthcoming BUF rally at Olympia — against which anti-
Fascists had agreed to organize a counter-demonstration — and that the close
ties between themselves and Mosley would be emphasized.
 I$
Olympia

The BUF’s rally at Olympia received wide advance publicity from Rothermere’s
papers, which offered free tickets to readers who sent letters under the heading
“Why I like the Blackshirts’. Anti-fascists responded looking for the opportu-
nity to disrupt the meeting. ‘It soon appeared’, L. W. Bailey recalled, ‘that
nothing, however ludicrous, could fail: “I like the Blackshirts because I want
to die for my country and they seem to offer the best opportunity.” Fired by
curiosity rather than commitment, I sent my letter.’
Special Branch knew of anti-Fascist preparations for action and a plan to
carry out ‘something spectacular’. A report on 7 June said Communists were
‘active among the Jewish elements in the East End, from whom they hope to
obtain a large number of demonstrators’. This report probably came from
P. G. Taylor, who was in receipt of information from an agent inside the
Communist Party. Claims of collaboration between the police and the BUF
were fuelled by rumours that Mosley lunched with Trenchard on the eve of
the rally.
No information on BUF preparations appeared in the SB reports, which
suggested to Skidelsky that the BUF ‘took no special precautions’. In fact,
Alex Miles recalled, ‘The hall had been surveyed in order to discover how
many men were required to control each exit and entrance.’ Men were shipped
in from around the country to swell the ranks of the Defence Force, whose
section commanders received sealed orders. On the day, alcohol was on sale
and money flowed freely, ‘almost as freely as blood flowed during the course
of the meeting’. Officials said the idea was to ‘teach the bloody Reds a lesson’.
Former Herald editor Hamilton Fyfe saw in Oxford Street ‘bands of young
men, mostly Jews, on their way to the meeting ... in a fighting mood’. Over
1,000 anti-Fascists were involved in a counter-demonstration against a similar
number of Fascists who marched from the Black House to Olympia; another
goo Blackshirts, mostly stewards, made their way separately.
The Daily Worker forecast readers would see ‘hundreds of Rolls-Royces
and fine cars — showing the class who want more fascist action against the
workers — to maintain their dividends’. Lord Erroll, Sir John Rhodes and
Sir George Duckworth-King wore black shirts. Diana’s friend Lord Berners
296 BLACKSHIRT

composed a ‘dreary little tune’ for the event. He told Mosley, “You'll never
win because you’ve taken on both the Jews and the buggers.’ Diana did not
attend because she was running a temperature. Peter Rodd’s father sounded a
warning note to Nancy Mitford: ‘Can you not persuade him to stick to the
business at hand and not to advertise himself in these Fascist demonstrations? 7
If he becomes identified with an anti-semitic campaign you must see yourself
what that would lead to.’ He admired the BUF spirit, ‘but things are manifestly
taking a wrong direction’.
Collin Brooks, Rothermere’s fixer and author of ‘shock’ thrillers, was a
guest. BUF members who read his column in the Sunday Dispatch considered
him a Fascist fellow-traveller. Anti-Semitic, he belonged to the English Mistery
and the Grosvenor Kin, which aimed ‘to recover the lost values of older
England, and to nurture men of all classes who might be worthy of leadership’.
Brooks was accompanied by journalist John Bingham (shortly to join Maxwell
Knight in MIS).
At 8.45 p.m. searchlights scanned the end of the -hall. Along the centre,
Blackshirts waited as ‘trumpets brayed as a mass of Union Jacks passed
towards the platform’. ‘Hail Mosley!’ swept the hall. Irene felt that Cimmie
‘must be there and seeing all that she would be glad’. Unfortunately, Mosley’s
entrance failed to coincide with the fanfare. Eventually, he mounted the plat-
form and gave the salute — ‘so high and so remote in that huge place that he
looked like a doll from Marks and Spencer’s penny bazaar’. His speech was
largely inaudible as the loudspeakers were not tuned in.
‘From time to time in the history of great nations comes the moment of
decision, the moment of destiny,’ he began. ‘This nation again and again in
the great hours of its fate has swept aside the little men of convention and
delay and decided to follow men and movements who dared go forward to
action.’ It was all, George Catlin noted, ‘familiar to anyone who knew Mosley
in his Socialist days’. ‘The old gang of politicians do not confront unpleasant
facts... What is required is to confront with courage the situation; to maintain
and raise the standard of living by developing the home market; to turn out
the old politicians.’
Opponents had been silent but ‘then began the Roman circus’, Brooks
recalled. Orchestrated heckling could be heard: ‘Hitler and Mosley mean
hunger and war.’ The interruptions were answered by chants of ‘MOSLEY?’.
He then launched into virulent anti-Semitism, talking of European ghettos
pouring their dregs into the country. There was pandemonium as stewards
hurled themselves at a heckler. Brooks saw him being ‘battered and bashed
and dragged out — while the tentative sympathisers all about him, many of
whom were rolled down and trodden on, grew sick and began to think of
escape’. It was brutal. “There is no pause to hear what the interrupter is saying:
there is no request to leave quietly: there is only the mass assault.’
 OLYMPIA 297
Special Branch’s Sergeant Thompson reported that ‘removals and interrup-
tions from all parts of the arena’ lasted for an hour. As hecklers were removed,
others took their place. The fact that many were Jewish was used by the BUF
as fuel for its anti-Semitism. Brooks found it interesting that Mosley was
‘cock-a-hoop when an interrupter was battered out and growing apologetic
as the psychological tone of the audience changed into disgust and personal
fear’.
The breaking of glass ‘added to the trepidation of the old ladies in the
audience who had come to support the patriots’. The Times noted the many
people of middle age who wore neither blackshirt nor badge: people with a tired
expression and wrinkled brows: some of the people who bore the strain of the war
... they seemed to be looking for the reason beneath this resurgence of youthful
enthusiasm and militant spirit, lest they should have missed a chance of deliverance
which those in their inexperience had miraculously found. The impression gained
was that the inquirers had neither found the secret nor caught the enthusiasm.

Many disliked the theatricality. Yeats-Brown’s biographer John Wrench ‘could

not envisage anyone as devoid of humour as Mosley becoming a great national
leader, able though he was’.
Brooks’s party left at 10.30 with ‘the loud speakers still preventing our
hearing a word Mosley said’. The hall was half empty. Georgia Sitwell found
it ‘very unpleasant. Terrifying crowds of roughs, dozens of fights, casualties,
broken heads and glass.’ She left feeling ill. One of Brooks’s party, previously
sympathetic to the Fascists, decided that ‘if it’s a choice between the Reds and
these toughs, I’m all for the Reds’. Fredericks claimed that ejections were
‘accomplished by the simple method of throwing him or her down the iron
staircases leading to the corridors and outer hall. If the unfortunate still
retained consciousness after this unpleasant experience, he probably thought
he had been thrown out and that was that.’ It was, Wrench said, a ‘disgusting
exhibition of force’. When stewards claimed a female comrade had been
slashed with a razor, violence escalated.
In the corridors 200 Blackshirts, aptly called ‘the wolves’, were already
drunk. Their role was to beat up those ejected from the hall. “The fact that so
many received quite serious injuries’, Fredericks claimed, ‘originated in this
double beating-up process. It was not a matter of six to one this time, but
about twenty or thirty.’ News Chronicle editor Gerald Barry ‘saw a man lying
on the floor, obviously powerless and done for, being mercilessly kicked and
horribly handled by a group of Blackshirts’. They were ‘kicking a miscreant
in the stomach and all over the body more brutally than anything I have ever
seen in my life short of the war. It made me feel physically sick.’ At one
entrance ‘policemen were so disgusted that they drew their truncheons, driving
the blackshirts: back into the main hall and calling them “‘bloody bastards”’’.
999
298 BLACKSHIRT

A BUF official complained that the police had no right to be in the hall and
they were forced to leave.
The log entry at Hammersmith police station stated the meeting passed off
without serious violence. The report to the Home Office said thirty people
had been ejected ‘with a certain amount of violence’. Fredericks thought ita °
miracle that no one died: he had not seen ‘so much blood in all my life’. Five *
people were detained in hospital and fifty needed treatment. A doctor said it
was obvious weapons had been used.
Baldwin’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, Geoffrey Lloyd, told the York-
shire Post he was ‘appalled by the brutal conduct of the Fascists. There seems
little doubt that some of the later victims of the Blackshirt stewards were
Conservatives endeavouring to make a protest at the unnecessary violence.’
He said Mosley’s ‘tactics were calculated to exaggerate the effect of the most
trivial interruptions and to provide an apparent excuse for the violence’.
Mosley was a ‘political maniac and all decent people must combine to kill his
movement’. :
When Bob Boothby and Archie Sinclair met Harold Nicolson on 12 June,
they said the Commons was ‘up in arms against the Fascists and that something
will be done about them’. Isaac Foot argued violence was Mosley’s policy and
that he had adopted the Italian method of using agents provocateurs to incite
disorder. He wanted an inquiry into the wearing of uniforms and their ‘setting
up a kind of glamour of civil war to attract youth’. Mosley said those MPs
who claimed to witness Blackshirt violence at Olympia were ‘liars and jackals’.
Brendan Bracken told Baba that the Tories were ‘so frightened of the BUF
that they might rush a bill through forbidding the wearing of black shirts’.
Unity wrote to Diana commiserating with her for missing the rally: ‘Too awful
for you. It does sound such heaven.’ Was it a success, she wondered. ‘Does
the Leader think so? All these absurd attacks in the papers are bound to do
the Party a certain amount of harm.’
Mosley refused to apologize. Appearing on BBC radio with Gerald Barry,
he claimed it was all the fault of organized ‘Red violence’. ‘We knew all about
it, and so did the authorities. For weeks before the meeting, incitements to
attack it were published, and maps were printed to show how to get to the
meeting.’ Blackshirts never attacked their opponents, but when the victim of
violence, they hit back hard and ‘so would any Briton worthy of the name’.
Ex-suffragette Mary Richardson wrote that she admired Blackshirts ‘the more
when they hit back, and hit hard’.
Mosley published a pamphlet, ‘Red Terror and Blue Lies’, with a photo-
graph of him examining weapons taken from the Reds. According to Fred-
ericks, who took the photograph on instructions from a Defence Force officer,
the weapons had not been taken at the rally. He had previously been asked
by Mosley ‘to fake some pictures ... to give the impression that it was the
 OLYMPIA 299
blackshirts who had been attacked’. He swathed the head of a Blackshirt in
bandages and dabbed it with red ink. It was ‘published as representing an
atrocity of the red front’.
Mosley’s refusal to condemn the brutality suggested to many that the BUF
was composed of sadistic thugs. The Telegraph, hostile to the idea of a Defence
Force, said on rr June there was ‘no room here for private armies’. Former
Blackshirts acknowledged the violence was overdone. Mosley, however, con-
tinued to believe Blackshirt spirit had ‘smashed the biggest organised attempt
ever made in this country to wreck a meeting by Red violence’.
_ Olympia is often portrayed as a turning point in Mosley’s fortunes: from
then on his respectable support fell away. Even if it had been a memorable
experience, Brooks thought the ‘whole thing was a fiasco and . . . the personal
appeal of Fascism has been drowned by such a display of un-English methods’.
Jon Lawrence argues Mosley had been exposed harnessing the rowdy tech-
niques of Edwardian politics to an avowedly anti-democratic purpose. ‘It did
not help that Mosley underlined the organised character of his “force of arms”
by swapping a conventional steward’s arm-band for a blackshirt uniform.’ In
fact, support did not evaporate. Many admired his defence of free speech.
Letters in the Morning Post were pro-BUF, which was seen as the victim of
the violence.
Opinion in the Carlton Club was divided: anti-Baldwin rebels voiced sup-
port for Mosley. Ina Commons debate on 14 June pro-Mosley MPs, including
Sir Patrick Hannon, Moore-Brabazon, Drummond Wolff, Thomas Moore and
Vice-Admiral E. A. Taylor, one of Rothermere’s Empire crusaders, kept silent.
T. F. Howard and Earl Winterton said reports of Blackshirt violence were
exaggerated and asserted the disruption had been organized by Communists.
Patrick Donner said, ‘Communists were armed with razors, stockings filled
with broken glass, knuckledusters and iron bars. . . Can it in equity be argued
that the stewards used their fists, when provoked in this manner, with more
_ vigour than perhaps the situation required?’ MPs cheered Mosley’s readiness
to suppress Communism. T. P. O’Connor said the BUF ‘thrives on the feeling
that is prevalent in the Conservative Party, that it is utterly fed up with
interruption of meetings — organised interruption and hooliganism’.
Dubbed the first parliamentary Fascist convert by the Chronicle, Michael
Beaumont claimed ‘respectable, reasonable and intelligent people’ were joining
the BUF. MPs elected in the 1931 National landslide feared it might split the
anti-Labour vote by running its own candidates. F. A. Macquisten said Mosley
is ‘going to do all the things they said they would do but have not done yet.
That is very awkward for the Conservative Party but this is a matter on which
Hon. Members had better talk to the Conservative leaders.’
The view among Ministers, noted Deputy Cabinet Secretary Thomas Jones,
was that ‘organised Communists had got not only what they asked for, but a
300 BLACKSHIRT

great deal more with excessive brutality’. Mosley ‘cut a poor figure the moment
things went astray’ and had ‘not got the personality which would carry his
movement to victory’. Although Blackshirts had physically won the battle of
Olympia and the Communists the propaganda war, the fallout proved to be
complex. ‘
Rumours circulated that Rothermere’s papers would no longer promote the ©
BUF. In fact, the Dispatch justified Fascist behaviour and continued to endorse
Mosley. This was a cause of concern to MIS, which placed Rothermere high
on its list of ‘important personages’ backing Mosley. ‘Support lent to a fascist
or extreme nationalist movement by a powerful section of the English press
might prove very convenient to the Weltpolitik of the Third Reich at this
juncture.’ Ward Price enthusiastically reported that ‘Red hooligans savagely
and systematically tried to wreck Mosley’s magnificently successful meeting.
They got what they deserved.’ When the ‘necessity is forced on them, the
Blackshirts are able and willing to meet violence with violence’. This reaction
explains why Mosley was delighted with Olympia.
George Catlin observed that ‘only one thing can make Mosley — and that
one thing is the Communists’. Blackshirt violence at Olympia had a tactical
purpose: it produced a visible spectacle of public disorder. ‘This was’, Nick
Smart suggests, ‘necessary so as to make the sense of crisis immediate. People
might read newspaper reports of socialist uprising in Vienna with more than
usual attention if they considered the same would soon be on their doorstep.’
On 10 June Rudoph Gessner, an adviser to ‘socialist’ Vienna, told an East
End audience at Limehouse not to think ‘British people are different from the
Germans or Italians and that you will have an easy going Fascism. After
Olympia from now on all the brutally inclined Britishers will join the Fascists
because then they can be as brutal as they want with impunity. Very soon it
will be capable of committing the brutalities and atrocities which happened
in other countries. The Mosley meeting proved that.’
Many people found the fighting exciting rather than offensive, and Cuthbert
Headlam feared that all the attention was ‘doing a good deal to advertise the
Fascists’. Olympia, noted the Home Office, ‘provided an unprecedented fillip
to recruitment. For the next two days people of different classes queued up
from morning until night at the National Headquarters.’
Olympia changed the Nazi viewpoint. Unity told Diana that German press
accounts of Olympia were marvellous. On 11 June, Vélkischer Beobachter
acclaimed the ‘energetic defence of the Blackshirts in a bloody battle’ and
attributed the violence to Communists. Previous embassy reports on the BUF
were ‘not calculated to arouse the interest of the leading Nazis’ but Berlin was
now informed that Mosley had a great success. Foreign Ministry Director
Dickoff underlined Bismarck’s conclusion that Olympia was ‘symptomatic of
events which are occurring throughout England: growth of support for British
 OLYMPIA 301
fascism, lively activity in meetings and recruitment together with the growth
of an aggressive and defensive rejection of fascism by its opponents’.
Dickoff circulated a memo suggesting Mosley was welcome to visit Germany
but ‘the time should be carefully chosen’. The Nazis worried the British
government might move against Mosley even though Bismarck said no action
would be taken because of the law of free speech. Dickoff said Mosley could
meet Hitler at the Nuremberg party rally ‘without too much clamour’. A few
days later he wrote to Bacmeister and it was decided correspondence between
the two representatives would refer to individuals in code — Pfister (Georg),
Oswald (Oskar), Hitler (Arnold), Charlet (Emil) and Bacmeister (Wilhelm).
On 11 June Mosley talked with Pfister about Germany and a verbatim
report was sent to Charlet. ‘It is beyond question that the present and future
outlook brings my operation ever closer to Arnold’s so that close co-operation
is absolutely necessary. We both have the same aims.’ To emphasize the point
Mosley declared, ‘we are in excellent agreement with our business friends in
the south [Italy] but Arnold’s business is of greater importance.’ He also made
clear his commitment to anti-Semitism: ‘As far as our opponents of non-Aryan
race are concerned, we will have to take the most drastic measures as soon as
we are in power, or we will have no rest.’ Pfister said they could pass on the
statements to the right quarters.
On 14 June Cimmie’s will was published, leaving property valued at £20,951
(£710,000) with the residuary estate held in trust for her children. Mosley was
left Savehay Farm and appointed executor with the Public Trustee. Leiter
Trust money could be used for the family but not to support his Fascist
activities. Despite Mussolini’s funds, expenditure outstripped income and
Mosley was forced to make economies. Taylor was told to offload all his
salaried agents, except one in the Communist Party (still useful to MIS). He
was given new responsibilities as the FUBW was merged into the Industrial
Section of the Propaganda Department. Resigning in protest at Mosley’s action
_ its head, Andy Barney, warned Miles that ‘we are distrusted by those who
control the Movement. Time will prove whether we of the working-class are
wanted.’
The Home Office built up a profile of Mosley drawn from the ‘observations
relayed by some of his associates’. He was a poor administrator and, while he
had contributed considerably to the ideological content, the true thinker was
Bill Allen. MI5’s first report, released on 18 June «1934, devoted considerable
attention to Allen, intrigued by his relationship with Mosley, his financial
dealings on behalf of the BUF and Establishment links, through membership
of White’s and people such as Lord Glenconner, a director of his poster firm.
MIS was interested in Forgan’s propaganda, which ‘turns a smiling face to
every section which might feel that its interests would be endangered by the
introduction ofa fascist regime. While it attacks the financiers of the City of
302 BLACKSHIRT

London, it promises investors that their interests will be safeguarded. While

it is more active and successful in the industrial areas, it makes special efforts
to attract farmers and rural communities.’
Fascist theory, MIS noted, ‘contemplates the use of force to defeat insurgent
anarchy in an emergency.’ A Fascist coup was far away but it was concerned *
that ‘since the Armed Forces of the Crown would be a factor in such an”
emergency, the Fascists ... must adopt a definite attitude towards them,
directed to securing their sympathy, more or less active — or even the power
to control them, if and when the ultimate issue arises’. MI5, however, did not
yet know Mosley’s intentions.
The Mail rejected the ‘utterly baseless fiction that the Blackshirt movement
is anti-Jewish’, but in an interview with Reuters in early June, Julius Streicher
said he had information from an envoy that the BUF ‘has positively defined
its attitude towards the Jewish problem’. Mosley ‘realised that the tactical
reserve hitherto observed by him in this question is no longer expedient’.
Pfister wrote to Bacmeister, an old pan-German, who regarded the BUF’s
‘attitude towards Germany as crucial — but not its attitude to Judaism’. It is
clear from his letters that his friends were wary of his involvement with the
‘Jewish-dependent BUF’. To counter such views, on 29 June Pfister forwarded
material to be used for a book Bacmeister was planning on Mosley’s attitude
towards the Jews.
In July Pfister visited the Nazi Party to negotiate a meeting between Mosley
and Hitler, but Otto Bene refused to pursue the matter and, moreover,
informed Dr Bohle, head of the Foreign Department, that Mosley was of ‘little
importance’. Pfister arranged a secret meeting to resolve the matter. Mosley
told Bene, ‘We have never received a penny from Jews. I give you my word of
honour.’ Pfister noted it was ‘an expression which I have never heard him use
before. For him it is the highest compliment.’ Mosley outlined the BUF’s
covert strategy. It was made explicit it was an anti-Semitic movement and had
intended to be so from its inception. ‘During the first months I intentionally
said not even one word against the Jews. If I had done so we would never
have been able to withstand the power of the Jews. We would have been
simply crushed. We were not strong enough then. Today we are so strong that
we are feared.’
Mosley said his plan had succeeded. ‘The Jews have attacked us, at first
sporadically, then more and more. From “underground” methods they have
moved to open attack in the press. Now we must defend ourselves against
these attacks and have been forced into counter measures.’ He was ‘adamant
that we should attack no Jew on the grounds of his religion or race. We attack
them because of their damaging influence on the people, because of their
internationalism, because of their many activities of all kinds against the good
of the people. The outcome is the same.’ He told Bene the ‘anti-German world
 OLYMPIA 303
boycott by the Jews is led from London. And I imagine that you are well
aware in Germany what it will mean if we break Jewish power here... Open
war — raising hell — will probably come in two or three months ... I will
contribute my part in order to hasten this explosion and I have so organised
my plan of campaign that they will find us ready, whatever they do.’ Bene
made a report of the meeting which for the moment would be kept secret. ‘We
don’t want to disclose any of our intentions to the children of Israel,’ wrote
Pfister. “When the critical moment comes we will let the actions speak for
themselves.’
On 30 June 1934 Hitler liquidated internal rivals, including Ernst ROhm
and other Brownshirt leaders in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’. Hitler told
the Reichstag he had given ‘the order to burn down to the raw flesh the ulcers
of this poisoning of the wells in our domestic life’. Deputies greeted this with
wild acclaim. Many people had believed the Nazis were like other parties, but
now, even the Express was shocked. ‘There has never been anything quite like
it in the history of the world. Jews are still murdered in the concentration
camps; they are still beaten in the streets. But from this week-end the screw
tightens. There is nothing they can do except run round helplessly in circles
until they die.’
Not everyone was squeamish. On 1 July Unity wrote to Diana that when
she heard about the purge, she felt ‘so terribly sorry for the Fihrer. It must
have been so dreadful for Hitler when he arrested R6hm himself and tore off
his decorations. Then he went to arrest Heines and found him in bed with a
boy. Did that get into the English papers? Poor Hitler.’
MIS observed that Rothermere and Mosley were alone in adopting a
friendly attitude to Hitler. On 2 July the Mail said Hitler had saved Germany
by making a clean sweep of his enemies. On the same day Pfister sent congratu-
lations to the German Foreign Ministry for the ‘brisk way in which A. H.
cleaned out the stables. Such matters are just unavoidable.’ Mosley had said
it would ‘be a mistake if a party such as ours, when it comes to power, carries
on with any minister of the old regime. Mussolini had regretted it’ and, Mosley
said, ‘I will be on my guard against that. Even today, from my well tested
officers who have the right spirit, I could put together a better ministry than
England has had for many, many years.’
Pfister revealed that Rothermere’s wings had been clipped by Jewish threats
to withdraw advertising from his papers. BUF speakers were working ‘to
expose Jewish lies’ and requested material on emigrants to England so that
they could ‘expose these filthy Jews. If we can prove that even just a half dozen
“undesirables” have gained good posts, then that will make a big impression
on the public.’ It would be used in questions on Jewish refugees by anti-Semitic
allies in the Commons.
Pfister said the Jewish question had been ‘brought to the fore in our policies’.
304 BLACKSHIRT

Mosley knew at the beginning, when the party was weak, that the Jews could have
rendered us harmless. So he waited until the rulers suddenly became aware that our
policies were diametrically opposed to theirs and that we were to be taken seriously.
Then they attacked us. Mosley wanted that. Then at the Albert Hall Mosley explained
that he was obliged to defend himself and took up the gauntlet. The battle is now “
not quite open but it will soon be.

Pfister’s committee was dealing with the matter. It included Joyce — ‘too
impulsive and would best like to get stuck in straight away’.
Mosley argued ‘there was no shadow of suspicion that we were an anti-
semitic movement when Jews attacked our Olympia meeting’. Because he did
not attack Jews on account of race or religion he was not, therefore, anti-
Semitic, even though he admitted to Bene the outcome was the same to racial
versions. He claimed the ‘quarrel arose ... for clearly discernible reasons.
There is not the slightest doubt that some Jews began it in Britain.’ They were
‘in a state of considerable alarm and liable to jump to unjustified conclusions’.
During his wartime interrogation he gave a slightly different version. Jews had
seen how their co-religionists were being treated in Germany and they no
doubt said, suggested Lord Birkett, ‘this Fascist Movement in Britain is the
same type of movement existing in National Socialist Germany?’ to which,
Mosley replied, ‘Yes.’
Mosley’s claim that the Jewish question was ‘a topic which had no place
whatever in party policy’ was simply untrue; it had merely been suppressed
during the Rothermere period, which indicated the degree to which it was
under his strict control. Birkett asked him whether his attitude ‘to the Jewish
problems arose because they had attacked your meetings, so you thereupon
gave the problem some consideration?’ ‘Mosley agreed. He had thought it ‘the
work of cranks. But then I wondered “why are they so opposed to us?” We
want to stop certain things. We want to stop international usury, we want to
stop the whole money-lending racket. We do not like price-cutting. We do not
like the sweating of labour. Gradually it dawned on me that certain people
were very much engaged in these things.’ This was, of course, a smokescreen.
Mosley chose for the task of researching the matter A. K. Chesterton, who
was hopelessly anti-Semitic with a conspiratorial view of Jewish activities.
Chesterton claimed ‘Jewish money was being poured into anti-Fascist activi-
ties; the Jews were forming organisations which carted toughs around in vans
to create uproar at Fascist meetings; the influence of Jewry was making itself
felt through all the media of “national” propaganda; and that no less than 50
per cent of persons convicted of assaults on Fascists bore Jewish names’. He
confirmed Mosley’s view that Jews were ‘prominent in the attack on us at
Olympia’, even though Harold Laski had been troubled by ‘the refusal of the
Jews here to adopt a fighting attitude’. He warned that ‘Jews could not save
 OLYMPIA 305
themselves by pretending to be more English than the English’. Initially, the
Board of Deputies of British Jews viewed the BUF as a minor threat. Laski
attributed this to fear of being seen as collaborating with Communists.
Chesterton wrote in ‘The Tragedy of Antisemitism’ that his report left
Mosley ‘genuinely puzzled’ about why Jews attacked the BUF. Then, Mosley
recalled, Chesterton found the reason in the close ties between anti-Eascism
and Jewish interests. There was ‘no great financial, industrial, or commercial
' trust or combine which was not dominated by the Jew, whether acting in
person or by proxy. The whole capitalist racket, the whole of the national
Press, the whole of the “British” cinema, and the whole bunch of purely
parasitical occupations were found to be Jew-ridden. Every vitiating and
demoralising factor in our national life was Jew-influenced where it was not
Jew-controlled.’ His report was not published but Chesterton produced a
summary claiming Jewish donations influenced political parties and that they
ran the Communist Party.
In ‘Jews and Fascists’ Mosley claimed the report revealed the ‘victimisation
of our people by Jewish employers and the pressure of Jewish interests on our
supporters’. He told Birkett of the example of a female Blackshirt who was
dismissed. ‘This occurrence forced the Jewish question on the attention of
many who had paid no more attention to Jews or their particular problem
and character than any other section of the community.’ Blackshirts com-
plained ‘our girls were dismissed from shops owned by Jews. Our people were
persecuted. Our supporters were blackmailed by Jewish interests.’
Mosley imagined he had stumbled on some great secret. The BUF was
not anti-Semitic but was countering financial and political interests which
happened to be run by Jews. So was not the BUF justified in openly retaliating?
Chesterton declared that Jewish domination of national life ‘precludes the
possibility of an economic square deal for the British people ... until that
power has been politically crushed’. In the knowledge that a transcript was
- unlikely to be made public, Mosley admitted to Birkett that ‘having looked at
the Jewish problem, I developed what is called anti-semitism’.
The traditional account of Mosley’s anti-Semitism argues the BUF’s violent
tactics at Olympia eroded its support and created the desperate need for a
new dynamic to revitalize an ailing movement. The Jews were thus ‘the helpless
victims of a cynical and politically-motivated campaign’. Others suggest the
anti-Semitism is best understood ‘as a result of, the interaction of bitterly
opposed fascist and anti-fascist elements’. The interactionist model places a
share of the blame for the anti-Semitic campaign squarely upon the shoulders
of the Jewish community itself, because of its attacks on Fascism, though the
proportion of blame attributed varies. Skidelsky’s analysis — in many ways
identical to Mosley’s exercise in retrospective self-justification — went as far
as to suggest that Jews should take ‘a large share of the blame’ for what
306 BLACKSHIRT

followed. A more sophisticated interactionist account suggests the progression

towards anti-Semitism was not cynical political opportunism but a genuine,
integral part of the movement.
A Special Branch report on anti-Semitism ideanee the inner leadership of
former BF members, such as Joyce and Hawkins, as primarily responsible for *
pushing Mosley in that direction. It was true that they wanted it immediately
implemented, but anti-Semitism had been accepted as a core policy prior to
the BF’s absorption into the movement. Nor can it be concluded, as did
Skidelsky, that from 1932 to 1934 Mosley ‘regarded the Jewish issue as more
of a liability than an asset, a diversion from his main task’. Nor did he decide
to go ahead only after long deliberation. The theory of the reluctant Mosley
is an attempt to absolve him from his responsibility for reintroducing into
politics an abhorrent policy which, as communications between Pfister and
Germany reveal, he fully endorsed.
Mosley said he rejected the Jewish conspiracy theory and biological racism.
There was, he insisted, ‘no evidence of occult Jewish power, simply the determi-
nation to fight by men who in this case had the means to do it, which I had
ot’. He accepted anti-Semitism’s ability to smooth over contradictions in
Fascist ideology but was ‘genuinely puzzled’ on how to present it in ‘rational’
terms; the Chesterton report solved the problem. Its pseudo-research and
its conclusions, which presented anti-Semitism in terms of a ‘well-earned
reputation’ argument, were exactly what he had been seeking in order retro-
spectively to justify a campaign which he had decided would be launched in
the autumn.
Mosley needed to assure the Nazis that he was worth supporting. The Pfister
communications reveal the extent to which he attempted to appease them in
expectation of a meeting with Hitler and the possibility of funding. Dietrich
Aigner believes Mosley’s ‘turn to anti-semitism without a racial stamp, hap-
pened more under the influence of the German example than under German
propaganda’. He cemented relations with Germany in terms of the Jewish
question. The Jews were provoking conflict between the two countries and
their goal was to instigate war. This became the leitmotif of BUF foreign
policy. At one with Hitler’s policy, Germans should have one greater Reich
with their former colonies returned. That autumn, ‘amid scenes of tumultuous
enthusiasm’, Blackshirt reported, Mosley ‘took up the challenge flung at his
movement by Jewry’.
The almost simultaneous occurrence of the Night of the Long Knives and
Olympia drew MI5’s attention to the BUF’s close affinities with the Nazis. It
had no hard information about funding, though there were rumours of a
£50,000 (£1.7 m) gift from Germany — via Rosenberg’s friend, Deterding.
MIS, however, found it difficult to obtain permission to investigate the BUF’s
Continental links. During June Guy Liddell asked to intercept correspondence
 OLYMPIA 307
between the Nazi Party in London and Berlin, on the grounds that it was
‘acting as an agency of the German Secret Police’, but the Home Office refused
and only allowed interception of a few minor BUF figures. Permission to
monitor Mosley’s correspondence was denied because he had been an MP
and was known to be litigious. MIS relied on agents who were unaware of
Pfister’s back channel to the Nazis.
During the summer MIS promoted the line that ‘red violence’ was respon-
* sible for Fascism’s growth and accused Communists of promoting violence by
publicizing such activities against the BUF. The Fascists were ‘aware of plans
to break up their meetings and regarded it as an incitement to violence,
justifying direct action’. Labour and trade union circles were criticized for
accusing the authorities of pro-Fascist bias; an accusation which MI5 deemed
unjust, since Fascists ‘had never made organised attempts to break up
Opponents’ meetings’.
There was a degree of discrimination among police, who had a greater
suspicion of Communists than of the BUF. They were more scrupulous about
_ the law when dealing with Fascists as opposed to anti-Fascists. They did not
baton-charge Fascists, though there were numerous occasions when police
acted violently against anti-Fascists. Locally, pro-Fascist prejudices — such
as in York where the Chief Constable and other policemen were BUF sup-
porters — did exist, though impartiality was maintained at senior levels of the
Metropolitan Police.
Indoor meetings passed off peacefully as Mosley, wary of the Home Secre-
tary introducing new police powers, modified his tactics. MI5 argued parlia-
mentary and press hostility had persuaded him to abandon the policy of using
Blackshirts to overwhelm hecklers. The ban on police at indoor meetings was
rescinded and stewards were instructed to threaten disrupters with prosecution
under the Public Meetings Act. Branches were ‘discouraged from distributing
free tickets to all-comers, and reminded that they could ask the police to eject
persistent interrupters’. When Mosley asked police to steward a proposed rally
at White City, officers said he was trying to engineer a situation whereby they
would be blamed for any disturbances. In the end, he had to abandon the
rally. Fearing another Olympia, Trenchard persuaded the owner that he ‘might
consider the size of the bond to be deposited by Mosley to be sufficiently large
to make it impossible for him to agree’.
During the summer the Blackshirt attacked the ‘tottering Tories’. In an
interview on 4 July with Signor Franzero of I] Giornale d'Italia, Mosley
announced the BUF ‘would present itself to the voters as soon as its electoral
machine was ready, mainly in working class towns’. Rothermere, however,
was concerned Fascist candidates might put the National government in jeop-
ardy by splitting its vote. Ironically, it was his parliamentary strategy, rather
than the violence, which undermined Mosley’s position with Rothermere. In
308 BLACKSHIRT

July the National government appeared to acquiesce to his demands when it

announced an increase in RAF squadrons. This was the news he had been
waiting for as it satisfied his ego that ‘he had the insider influence he felt was
his by right’. Believing the government ‘would not collapse from within and
that diehard resistance to the India White Paper policy would be contained’, *
Rothermere decided he no longer needed Mosley. :
‘Then came a sudden message,’ Mosley recalled. Rothermere decided not
to fund a manufacturing project, costing £70,000 (£2.38 m), in which the
BUF would be an outlet for Blackshirt cigarettes. Learning of the scheme in
which members would be instructed to smoke, an official chortled: “Truly the
way of Fascists will be hard if their taste in cigarettes is to be made to conform
with their political convictions.’ Mosley had established New Epoch Products
and registered a factory for production. Rothermere saw it as an opportunity
to use spare capacity in his Canadian paper mills. On the Board of Directors
sat his associates, Sir Max Pemberton and Ward Price, as well as Mosley and
Dundas. Mosley envisaged the project as the basis of.an industrial empire to
include banking and retailing. However, he learnt that Rothermere was ‘in
trouble with certain advertisers, who had not liked his support of the black-
shirts and in company with many other people had now heard of the tobacco
business and liked it still less’.
Two days before the split, Mosley spoke at Portsmouth on the theme of
‘No Compromise’ with the message that Fascists would never tarnish their
creed by working with Conservatives. There followed a contrived exchange
of letters heralding Rothermere’s withdrawal. In a letter to Mosley on 14 July
he confirmed he was not interested in Fascist ideology, but also pointed to a
possible resumption of co-operation: ‘You have a unique gift of personal
appeal, and the assistance which I have rendered you was given in the hope
that you would be prepared to ally yourself with the Conservative forces to
defeat Socialism at the next and succeeding elections . . . 1do not see why we
should not come together on the foregoing lines.’ Mosley responded that ‘you
are in accord with many aspects of our policy, such as the strong maintenance
of the British Empire, notably in India, and the creation of a British air force
second to none in the world’. But ‘you are a Conservative, we are fascists’.
The break with Mosley, however, was not final. That weekend Rothermere
filled the Dispatch with pro-Fascist articles, which Collin Brooks thought
missed the point, namely ‘that to answer Communist brutality by Fascist
brutality in the middle of an orderly audience of peaceful citizens is to undermine
the whole theory of the modern State’.
The German Press Attaché FitzRandolph forwarded to Berlin copies of the
Rothermere/Mosley exchange. The uncertainty surrounding his position and
the ‘relatively insignificant power that Mosley could bring to the political
scene make it necessary to maintain our principle of indifference towards the
 OLYMPIA 309

BUF. This position could well be advisable in view of the sneering critical
attitude of the press at the present; the same view would have to consider a
“private” approach towards the Fascists (Reichspartei Day — Nuremberg) as
not appropiate with regard to timing.’ Bismarck said Rothermere was ‘trying
to show a rapprochement with the Mosley policy; the subsequent exchange
of correspondence was to demonstrate to the English readers the relationship
of R. to M. and M. to R. since this relationship seems not always to be
properly appreciated’. The Nazis were informed by ‘reliable sources’ that ‘the
Jews threatened to remove their advertisements’ and Rothermere had ‘quickly
to decide between the future of his newspaper and expressing his political
opinions. He decided for the continuation of his newspaper.’ Protests had
come from the Jewish firms, Lyons and the Carrera Tobacco Company.
Mosley claimed Jewish advertisers had exerted pressure ‘at the point of an
economic gun’. Hugh Cudlipp agreed they had become uneasy and ‘the Jews
provided a large slice of his income’. Esmond Harmsworth had warned the
economics were unsustainable and that readers were affronted by the Mosley
campaign. He was alarmed by the circulation decline but ‘had given up trying
to understand his father’s motives’. MIS referred to Rothermere’s decision as
‘a matter of business, no doubt’.
Mosley believed the dispute could have been settled if Rothermere had stood
firm. He had asked him what his brother, Northcliffe, would have done. He
would have said, Mosley claimed, ‘One more word from you and the Daily
Mail placards tomorrow will carry the words “Jews threaten British Press”.
You will have no further trouble.’ Rothermere felt he was ‘asking too much,
not for himself but for others who depended on him’. In the World’s Press
News he was asked whether his support of the BUF had been a crusade or an
incident like the Mail’s standard bread campaign involving Mosley’s grand-
father. He replied, ‘Definitely an incident.’
In his letter to Mosley Rothermere said he had ‘made it quite clear in my
- conversations with you that I never could support any movement with an
anti-semitic bias’. Mosley said he was ‘not prepared to relax our attitude
towards Jews’ because — using the Chesterton research - ‘80 per cent of the
convictions for physical attacks on Fascists were pronounced on Jews, while
the Jewish community represents only 0.6 per cent of the population’. Chester-
ton recalled there was ‘a sigh of relief when his Lordship repented in haste
and celebrated his dropping of the Blackshirts with two leading articles full of
ridiculous praise for the Jews’. As soon as the break was made, Mosley
mounted a campaign of anti-Semitism. On 20 July the Blackshirt linked
socialism with Jewish finance and ‘the unsavoury Oriental’. Bismarck reported
that within the BUF anti-Semitism was ‘unquestionably developing apace’.
Robert Forgan opposed anti-Semitism as tactically unwise. He cultivated
_ through the January Club prominent Jews, including Gladstone’s biographer
310 BLACKSHIRT

Sir Philip Magnus-Allcroft, who was ‘not quite the only one of my faith to
have embraced the Club’, though H. L. Nathan, a Jewish Liberal MP for
Bethnal Green, did speak out against Mosley. During the summer Forgan
had talks with BoD Deputy DrJ. Blonstein, and Chairman of the BoD’s
Parliamentary Committee Sir Lionel Cohen (later Lord Justice of Appeal), to’
thrash out a Jewish—Fascist agreement. Joyce claimed the BUF was offered’
£100,000 (£3.4m) by Edward Barron, son of the proprietor of Carreras, to
end its anti-Semitism, but without consulting Mosley he rejected it with ‘an
impolite message’. Given Carreras’s role in the Mail boycott, this is not
implausible. When James Lees-Milne attended Mosley’s funeral, Magnus-
Allcroft told him Mosley had approached his cousin, Lionel Cohen, with an
offer to call off the persecution of the Jews for a suitable payment.
On 28 July Forgan met BoD President Harold Laski, who thought him a
‘pathetic figure’. Convinced the anti-Semitic infection of the BUF was irrevers-
ible, he said he could no longer work with Mosley as he visualized a Fascist
state assuming ‘a different form to that adumbrated by Mosley in his speeches’.
He admitted the BUF was collapsing but refused to provide details. MI5
claimed a rapid decline and high turnover in membership from a peak of
50,000 in July. However, Olympia had increased numbers because ‘people
thought the reports of the meeting were exaggerated’ and after Rothermere’s
desertion people realized Mosley was not going over to Conservatism, though
events in Germany harmed the movement and Olympia eventually proved to
be a decisive setback.
In Olympia’s aftermath and only six months after retiring from the army,
the acclaimed military theorist Major-General J. F. C. Fuller wrote to Mosley,
‘This is the worst day of your life; you should always join a man in his worst
moment.’ He was ‘glad the position between you and Rothermere has been —
cleared up. The press is valuable, but its danger is that it always aims at
mastership, and that its principles are regulated by dividends. As it can only
create great emotions and not great movements it cannot destroy a great
movement. Every great movement starts off in a minority of one. The strength
of a new movement is in indirect proportion to the resistance offered to it.’
Fuller — the BUF’s most important recruit — had been placed on the retired
list following differences with the War Office over the future of mechanized
operations. He ridiculed the army’s amateurishness. It was widely held that
Fuller and his mentor, Lord Ironside, were the two ‘most conceited men in
the Army’. Ironside, who had supported Mosley when he stood for Parliament _
in 1918, considered him ‘straight and fearless’ but military strategist Basil
Liddell Hart held that his inability to tolerate criticism was the reason for
his attraction to Fascism, which brought out ‘all that was unsavoury and
unappealing in both his character and his thought’.
A misplaced intellectual, who admired Carlyle and Cromwell, and wrote
 OLYMPIA 311
poetry in the style of Swinburne, Fuller’s main friends were Douglas Jerrold
of Eyre and Spottiswoode (publisher of his books) and Francis Yeats-Brown.
He was intrigued by Aleister Crowley and disillusioned with democracy. His
attraction to Gurdjieff’s Law of Three was reflected in his belief in the threefold
order. He shared Mosley’s interest in Spengler, social imperialism, Mackin-
_der’s geopolitics and a vision of a technocratic elite. He had, Mosley noted,
an ‘exaggerated intolerance of bureaucracy of any kind’ and believed in the
“fallacy spread by social imperialism that if the administrators were changed,
then a more efficient policy could be introduced’. Fuller’s prime concern was
liberating man’s mind from the ‘mechanical monster it has created ... to
intellectual and spiritual ends’.
Fuller lectured to the New Britain group, political dissenters who held
Communist, Fascist and pacifist attitudes, who were pro-European. Dissatis-
fied by its vagaries, he concluded Fascism had come to stay and was admitted
to Mosley’s inner circle as his adviser on military matters; he would have been
Minister of War had Mosley come to power. Fuller persuaded Liddell Hart,
who joined the January Club, to visit the Black House to dine with Mosley.
Liddell Hart eventually became repelled by the enthusiasm. for violent action
and, after the shock of the Night of the Long Knives, considered the BUF
absolutely Nazi and would have nothing to do with it.
Rothermere’s support had brought in public schoolboys, ex-officers and
Tories, but unifying them into the movement proved too big a task for Mosley.
They wore ‘boss-class’ black shirts and privileged members such as Lord Erroll
had their BUF badge copied in silver and ate in a separate canteen. Special
Branch reported unrest among the rank and file who grumbled about ‘class-
conscious officers’. When Mosley threw a ball, it was at venues where they
felt out of place. On 27 June a Blackshirt Cabaret Ball was held at the Prince’s
Galleries in Piccadilly, hosted by Lady Mosley. The Blackshirts’ Dance Band
provided the entertainment for the lords and ladies.
_ The Policy and Propaganda section, controlled by socialists under Risdon,
aimed to put ‘reality into the Socialist phrases in the Party’s programmes’ but
clashed with the organizational wing, which was supported by the influx of
ex-officers. This conservative side eventually stripped Risdon of authority and
proceeded ‘to weed out any and every speaker who showed even the faintest
tinge of ““Red”’. Frequent purges took place, with propaganda officers car-
peted by Box for indiscipline. °
On 15 July, at a rally in Newcastle, John Marchbanks, General Secretary
of the National Union of Railwaymen, accused the BUF of being active in the
armed forces, compiling blacklists on its rivals and foes, and for ‘assembling
in the guise of a military machine with the object of overthrowing by force
the constitutional government of the country’. He based his claims on the
testimony of Charles Dolan, who had approached him in April, disillusioned
312 BLACKSHIRT

with the BUF’s paramilitarism. With his loss of faith, Dolan transferred his
loyalty to Methodism, eventually becoming a pastor. After his defection he
was approached by Alex Miles, a former ILP colleague, who offered him
£100 (£3,400) to emigrate to Canada; an offer authorized by higher officials.
Predictably, Mosley sued Marchbanks for slander. The case was not heard
until February 1936. Mosley won but the jury only awarded him a farthing
in damages and recommended he pay legal costs. The judge stressed the
technical nature of the decision, adding that Marchbanks’s remarks were so
close to the truth as to be fair comment.
The movement, wrote Richard Bellamy, had drawn to itself ‘almost every
unstable person and adventurer’. G. $. Gerault admitted some ‘hoped to cash
in in a big way eventually out of victory, but meanwhile were content with
chicken-feed from petty theft and mean little rackets’. Others exploited the
lax security and opportunities for criminal activity. Brixton’s branch was
organized as a brothel and Newcastle’s secretary was convicted of burglary.
People, Bellamy recalled, ‘felt that they could not afford to be associated
with the types congregated at the local headquarters. In these spots nothing
remained but a bad odour, still lingering three or four years later.’
Gerault sent Mosley a negative report. Although his policy on the Jewish
question had been ‘very sound and appealed much to the public mind’, he was
now ‘going definitely in for the persecution of Jews on German lines, and that
has produced very grave repercussions’. There was a ‘feeling that the leader is
being jockeyed either knowingly or unknowingly into an impossible position
by Joyce; and there are those who say that he is now, to all intents and
purposes, the Movement’. Mosley wrote in the margin, ‘Joyce!!!’ MIS, aware
Joyce was trying to supplant the BUF’s Chief of Staff, relied on an optimistic
appreciation of him by Maxwell Knight, who said that although he was a
fanatical anti-Semite with a ‘mental balance not equal to his intellectual
capacity’, it was unlikely anything could ‘shake his basic patriotism’.
It was becoming clear, Kell reported, that with Olympia Mosley ‘suffered a
check which is likely to prove decisive’. He was ‘not making progress any-
where’ and BUF membership was ‘nearer 5,000 than 10,000’ (later confirmed
by Forgan). January Club members resented Mosley’s efforts to dominate the
Club and, according to MIS, those ‘erstwhile members who had been pleased
to be identified with Mosley when the climate had been mild’ now scrambled
to safety. In rural areas enthusiasm for the BUF faded among farmers once
the tithe war ceased to be an issue and it lost support in the middle-class areas
of the South and the East. In addition, it lacked funds.
With Rothermere back on side, Chancellor Austen Chamberlain’s key sup-
porter, Joseph Ball, approached editors requesting they deprive Mosley of
publicity. He had been attached during the war to MIS and, as a full-time
officer, handled subversion and espionage against the armed services. He
 OLYMPIA 313
played a significant role in the Zinoviev story and in 1924 — still an MIS
_ officer — joined Tory Central Office to look after propaganda and intelligence.
He subsequently directed the Conservative Research Department and from
1934 ran the National Publicity Bureau, a Tory front which campaigned
for the National government. The Bureau’s pro-appeasement policy was run
4 through the anti-Semitic Truth magazine, which Ball used to attack Chamber-
lain’s critics. Although staff supported Mosley, Truth ‘feared and distrusted
Hitler and loathed Nazism’, which accounted for its ambivalent attitude to
‘the BUF.
Inspired by an article in Lord Lothian’s The Round Table and another in
Harper’s magazine, which suggested Mosley’s prominence was due to the
‘unmistakable alliance between would-be-dictators and desperate industrial-
patriots’ and to Conservative fear of socialism, MIS speculated on whether
the economic situation suited Fascist growth or, reflecting a view held in
industrial circles, that economic failure could lead to socialism. It stressed
conditions were very different from those on the Continent but if economic
recovery collapsed, ‘apprehension in regard to socialist progress’ might ‘induce
a number of leading industrialists to contribute large sums, in order to keep
the movement in being’. With this in mind, Ball met with the heads of ICI,
Morris Cars, Courtaulds and the League of Industry, which had once courted
Mosley.
Ball helped provide a conduit for funds from executives ‘precluded from
subscribing to any party organisation’. The aim was to accommodate industri-
_alists tempted to back Mosley with promises of sympathetic concern for their .
interests, including increased rearmament spending. Morris transferred his
support away from Mosley and his biggest donation of the period — £75,000
(£2.5m) — went to the Bureau. Ball received a KBE for his propaganda work
in Tory constituencies.
Those disillusioned Tories who had supported Mosley returned to the
fold. They liked the excitement of the Blackshirts but were frightened by the
violence. Britain, notes Martin Blinkhorn, generally lacked an authoritarian
tradition and its ‘social order was considerably less convulsed’ than on the
Continent. Industrialists also returned to a Tory Party they saw as the best
defence against a unionized and politicized working class with whom they
were perpetually in conflict. Despite corporatism’s promise of breaking the
violence of faction, they refused to put their faith ig the ‘superior wisdom of
an authoritarian leader’, whose prediction of an apocalyptic economic collapse
failed to materialize.
Mosley recognized conditions were more favourable in Italy and Germany,
where the severe depression led to mass unemployment. The British economy
performed much better than he envisioned and unemployment never reached
Continental levels. He blamed the lack of progress on this factor. National
314 BLACKSHIRT

and personal income increased by 20 per cent and industrial production by

46 per cent in the period 1932-7. The reason for recovery was partly due to
an upturn in the economic cycle and the surge in house building, fuelled by a
‘cheap money’ policy. ‘The whole thing is economic,’ Mosley later wrote, ‘and
if the war hadn’t come the economic situation would have returned and in my
view today quite calmly and in retrospect we should undoubtedly have won.’
Unemployment was a regional problem with higher rates north and west of
the Humber-Severn line. Except for some success with its cotton campaigns,
Fascism’s main centres were south and east of this line. Mosley launched
another cotton campaign at the Floral Hall in Southport, where he repeated
his plans for Lancashire. A letter to the Cotton Factory Times said he ‘has
promised to put you on the same footing as your Italian and German counter-
parts. What more can you ask him for? Hail Mosley — the man with a mission.’
Apart from Lancashire, he made little impact in areas of high unemployment
such as central Scotland or north-east England. Cumings was sent to organize
in south Wales, but soon left the BUF.
The unemployed voted for Labour’s reformism rather than radical solutions.
The depression ‘blunted rather than sharpened the edge of social discontent’,
which was also a problem for the Right’s béte noire and alleged ‘Communist’
sympathizer Sir Stafford Cripps. In the autumn Wyndham Lewis did a drawing
of Cripps, wearing ‘steel-rimmed spectacles and a frosty curl to the lip’, which
appeared in the London Mercury next to a portrait of Mosley in Blackshirt
uniform, with projecting jaw, under the ironic byline ‘Two Dictators’. ‘The
Governess and the Gorilla’, Mosley commented when he saw them. He found
Lewis ‘agreeable but touchy’. He recalled they had ‘considerable mental sym-
pathy but I would certainly not claim he agreed with me in all things’. Lewis
considered men were essentially weak and craved authority, not freedom. ‘We
should naturally seek the most powerful and stable authority that can be
devised.’ Lewis’s disdain for ordinary humanity led him to advocate Fascism
until 1938, but though he contributed to the journals he was too individualistic
to join the BUF.
Ball closely liaised with newsreel companies and persuaded them not to film
BUF demonstrations; the unofficial ban remained in place for the rest of the
decade. Mosley had written to BBC Director-General Sir John Reith asking
‘to be allowed to participate with other political movements in all future series
of wireless talks’, but the BBC imposed an unofficial ban on extremist views,
and denied both Fascists and Communists, as well as independent mavericks
such as Churchill, wireless time. Neither Mosley nor the Communists were
allowed to broadcast for another thirty years.
Despite setbacks, Blackshirts ‘worthy of the cause stuck it out’, Mosley
recalled, ‘and found that the almost universal hostility put more iron into their
souls’. There was a new emphasis on struggle. During July Nancy Mitford
 OLYMPIA 315
wrote that Mosley had ‘the character, the brains, the courage, and the determi-
nation to lift this country from the slough of despond in which it has for too
long sheltered, to a utopia. Soon the streets will echo beneath the feet of the
black battalions, soon we will show the world that the spirit of our forefathers
is yet alive within us, soon we shall be united by the sacred creed striving as
,one man for the Greater Britain.’ Blackshirt editor Bill Leaper observed that
the movement’s spirit was ‘more powerful, the character is more steel-like, the
determination to keep itself unsullied is stronger than ever’.
 16

The Nazis

During the summer of 1934 MIS reported that Mosley had been making
‘crude attempts’ to establish relations with other Continental Fascist move-
ments. These were largely secret as he was concerned how such contacts might
be viewed by those who were hostile to foreign ideas and, in particular, the
radicalism and racism of the Nazis.
An early visitor to London was José Antonio Primo de Rivera, son of the
late Spanish dictator. An Andalusian playboy with a social conscience, José
founded Falange Espafiola, basing it on Italian Fascism rather than his father’s
authoritarian model. It appealed to students with its call for national violence
but was largely insignificant and survived on Italian funds. Léon Degrelle’s
Belgian Rexists were also student-based but developed a broad base through
yellow press exposure of scandals. A friend of Bill Allen, Degrelle met Mosley
at the Allen family home. He was, Martin Conway notes, ‘a man of great
charm whose personal magnetism disarmed even the most suspicious of
opponents’. At different times the Rexists — in receipt of Italian subsidies —
were Catholic authoritarians, Poujadist populists and National Socialists.
Another recipient of Mussolini’s funds and Mosley visitor was a former
Norwegian General Staff officer who had resided at the British legation in
Moscow and was regarded as a British Secret Service agent. Minister of
Defence Vidkun Quisling was an anti-Bolshevist, who during 1931 underwent
a political transition from liberalism to National Socialism and founded the
National Union. He promoted a racist interpretation of the Nordic race as
part of a grand coalition beginning with Great Britain and Scandinavia. He
was ‘neither particularly German nor Italian in sympathy. Culturally he was
above all pro-British.’ Norwegian Greyshirt Terje Ballsrud had talks in London
with Mosley and in Dublin with Eoin O’Duffy. With a flair for publicity,
former police commissioner O’Duffy set up the Blueshirts as a section within
the Fine Gael Party to promote the reunion of Ireland, oppose Communism
and alien influence in national affairs, and support corporatism.
An acquaintance of Commandant Allen, O’Duffy admired Mosley and there
were rumours that the two were in league to organize Blueshirt units in
Northern Ireland. The initiative, however, was disastrous, especially since
 THE NAZIS 317
Stormont wanted to ban BUF literature. It contributed to O’Duffy’s political
demise and the collapse of the weakened Ulster Fascists. In the autumn, a
faction under Captain Armstrong regrouped as a regional branch of the BUF.
With the termination of Rothermere’s support, Mosley found little reason to
concern himself with either part of Ireland, though he remained hostile to
Stormont.
Mosley’s most intriguing visitor was Armand Grégoire of the French
Frangiste. Founded in 1933 by Marcel Bucard, formerly of Action Francaise,
it adopted the trappings of Italian Fascism but was violent and anti-Semitic.
They only had 1,500 members and the funding from Frangois Coty — perfume
millionaire and publisher — and Mussolini was relatively small. It was too
pro-Nazi to win popular support.
Grégoire was described in a French Sireté report as ‘one of the most danger-
ous of Nazi spies’. Swarthy, with a duelling scar, he had been born in Metz
and was awarded the German Iron Cross during the war. He practised law
and was attorney for the German embassy. He wrote in Le Franciste that
‘naturally, we hope with all our heart for an alliance with Nazi Germany. We
fully realize that this alliance constitutes the only possible means of avoiding
the universal corruption of the world.’ He represented Ribbentrop, Hess,
Goering and later German ambassador Otto Abetz, and acted for Wallis
Simpson and dealt with Mosley’s affairs in Paris. He had contacts with the
BUF and, as a prominent Nazi collaborator, was possibly a conduit for Nazi
funds to Mosley.
MIS kept tabs on Raven Thomson, Mosley’s representative to Germany,
though they differed on relations with the Nazis over the question of anti-
Semitism. Around Mosley there was serious rivalry, which was exacerbated
by Nazi meddling. MIS considered Mosley ‘a puffed-up mediocrity, finding
difficulty in holding his position in the eyes of colleagues and foreign associ-
ates’. He had to balance support for Italian Fascism and Nazism — ‘a strategy
which accounts in part for his failure to insist on uniform commitment to a
central policy’.
According to Eric Drummond, British ambassador in Rome, the Italian
press promoted Mosley, whose objective now was to secure a meeting with
Hitler. Dr Pfister was a personal friend of Julius Streicher, whose son, Lothar,
came to London during August under government restrictions. He told Pfister
he would be ‘happy to arrange a meeting with Hitler’.
In its second report on 1 August MIS had no information on Nazi funding
though it believed that any such link was likely to derive from the ‘close
connection between the BUF and Austrian Nazis’. During 1934 Italo-German
differences over Austria increased and the failure of Mussolini’s meeting with
Hitler, and the murder on 25 July of Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss, in which
Austrian Nazis attempted a coup in Vienna, created tensions. When Mosley
318 BLACKSHIRT

arrived in Rome, he found Mussolini ‘in such a rage that none of his associates
dared approach him on the subject’. If ‘this country of murderers and paeder-
asts were to overrun Europe’, it would be the end of civilization. Hitler was a
‘sexual degenerate, a dangerous fool’ and National Socialism was ‘savage |
barbarism’.
In response to the threat on Italy’s border, Mussolini rushed troops to the
Brenner Pass. Mosley believed he was even contemplating war. The problem
for Mosley was that he was playing both sides. Pfister was intriguing with the
Austrian Nazis and his officials had met Otto Skorzeny, later notorious for
his special forces exploits.
Pfister was one of the few BUF figures trusted by the leading Nazi in London,
Otto Bene, who regarded Mosley as a ‘political adventurer of no serious
consideration’. Visiting Nuremberg on 4 September, he told Hitler the BUF
was a ‘powerful movement’ but Dundas, Pfister and Thomson were ‘more
worthy than Mosley of recognition and co-operation’. MIS considered Joyce
a man of ‘great energy but not of the calibre to take Sir Oswald’s place as
leader’. Much of the disruptive factionalism was a result of the rivalry between
Joyce and Pfister. An informant to Maxwell Knight, Joyce briefed against
Mosley to the Nazis. He was partly responsible for the eclipse of Pfister and
suspension for intrigue with Austrian Nazis.
Mosley planned a big rally in Hyde Park against which, for the first time,
the Communist Party decided to support a mass anti-Fascist demonstration.
Its leaders’ main concern, however, remained the ‘encroaching Fascism’ of the
National government. Palme Dutt told Harry Pollitt he was ‘right about the
danger of seeing only Mosley and not NG. But in fact the danger is a double
one. The other danger is to see NG as a whole issue and Mosley as a minor
detail . . What is essential is for our people to see and explain all the time the
twofold character of the fascist offensive, both NG and Mosley, and the
effective division of labour and INTERPLAY of both.’ Though Joe Jacobs
was right to maintain that the CP was reluctant to take part in anti-BUF
campaigns, this time preparations were undertaken by a Co-ordinating Com-
mittee for Anti-Fascist Activities, under the guidance of John Strachey. Such
campaigns led to bigger recruitment for the CP and increasing militancy.
Mosley’s response was to order all BUF branches to attend.
On 9 September in Hyde Park, up to 100,000 people were ranged against
the 2,500 Fascists protected by 7,000 police. Mosley let fly at his tormentors:
‘Behind the Communist-Socialist mob were Jewish financiers who supply the
palm-oil to make them yell.’ The police kept the Fascist and anti-Fascist meetings
apart and only eighteen people were arrested. Special Branch suggested the
crowd came for the political theatre, with the Fascists generally seen as objects
of derision. Fascist gatherings were being outnumbered by anti-Fascist crowds
which, in London, helped to check the momentum of the BUF.
 THE NAZIS 319
The Morning Post said public interest demanded the government ban such
rallies outright. It also suggested, to Mosley’s annoyance, that both Commu-
nists and Fascists had been intent on turning the rally into a pitched battle,
and that only good policing had preserved order. The Telegraph declared
‘public opinion has sensibly hardened against Mosley during the past three
months’. Fascism was seen as a threat both to free speech and public order.
Pleased with its success, the CP announced it intended to fight Fascism on a
broad United Front. However, Labour Party leaders were unwilling to support
it, in the belief that Mosley was overrated and that passive measures denying
_ him publicity were the correct response.
Bismarck reported to Berlin that Hyde Park was ‘an absolute fiasco and will
not be likely to lend new drive to Mosley’s movement which at the moment
is losing ground’. Apparently, Mosley was so depressed that Forgan doubted
his leader’s sanity. However, Bismarck also reported that BUF growth had
led to a ‘much more serious judgement of the ‘Fascist danger” ’. The Cabinet
‘considered it necessary to wage a campaign against fascism. According to
certain information available to the embassy, the press lords’. . . jointly agreed
to throw down the gauntlet to fascism ... the press attacks on Germany in
the last few months, stems from this moment.’

That autumn Baba planned to go to the Nazi Congress at Nuremberg, and

sent Mosley a picture postcard of Hitler’s house with the query, ‘Is Mrs G still
at Denham?’ In fact, on 11 September Diana, Unity and Tom Mitford attended
the Congress, where they made friends with Streicher’s youngest son, Elmar.
Wearing a black shirt, leather gauntlets and a BUF badge, Unity said she
believed in uniting the Nordic races: ‘Sooner or later we’ll all be fascists.’ Back
in London, Diana and Mosley formulated a plan to promote his cause.
Around this time MIS became suspicious of Diana and placed her under
surveillance whenever she travelled abroad. It knew she had visited Rome, to
‘study fencing’, but her studies had ‘thrust her into the society of fascists’. She
went back to Munich, rented an apartment and enrolled on a German language
course. Diana claimed her activities were ‘entirely connected with business
and not at all with propaganda’, but they were inextricably intertwined.

The next stage in the launching of an anti-Semitic campaign were Mosley’s

speeches in Manchester and at the Albert Half. On 29 September 3,000
protesters, including Young Communist League militants, opposed 1,500 Fas-
cists. Mosley was protected by the lake at Belle Vue, with his Blackshirts
assembled on the dance floor in front of it. Searchlights picked out anti-Fascists
and fire engines with water cannon were on standby. When Mosley tried to
speak, he was greeted by shouts of ‘Down with Fascists’. Despite powerful
- amplifiers, a Manchester Guardian journalist, ‘sitting in the midst of Sir
320 BLACKSHIRT

Oswald’s personal bodyguard within three yards of where he was speaking’,

was barely able to hear a word.
Mosley made a venomous attack on ‘these Jewish rascals’. They were the
‘sweepings of the continental ghettos, hired by Jewish financiers’. Drawing on —
the Chesterton report, he attacked ‘the organised corruption of Press, Cinema
and Parliament which is called democracy but which is ruled by alien Jewish
finance’. He referred to the ‘yelpings of a Yiddish mob’ and ‘foreign Yiddish
faces’. Mosley used all his theatrical tricks to make an impression but, accord-
ing to an observer, ‘without any effective sound he appeared like a demented
marionette. Defeat stared him in the face and he knew it, as did his audience
which slunk away as soon as the police bodyguard was removed. The humili-
ation of the fascists was complete.’ The only sound was the singing of ‘bye
bye Blackshirt’ to the tune of ‘bye bye blackbird’.
Manchester passed off with little disturbance, Bismarck reported. Berlin
underlined his comment that ‘the anti-Jewish attitude of the English fascists
is expressed in ever stronger terms’. He did not know if Mosley’s utterances
‘come from his own convictions or whether he is pushed this way by the rank
and file of his comrades’, but the new stance ‘brought about a more unfriendly
attitude in the whole of the press’, which barely mentioned the meeting. In
October MIS decided the BUF no longer constituted a serious political threat.

Grandi’s influence over Mosley concerned officials. Box was credited by

Special Branch with confirming Mussolini’s funding when he commented it
was ‘a pity that Rome was now deciding Mosley’s policy’ and that ‘the man
who pays the piper calls the tune’. Grandi wrote to Irene hoping to deepen
his relationship with Baba. She was aware of her sister’s ‘dominating ways
and influence’ over Mosley, whose adoration of Baba was ‘tempered with
tenderness and the yearning to control this love and not to mar it all’.
On 12 October, Baba attended a Blackshirt Ball at the Gargoyle Club,
whose owner, the Hon. David Tennant, wanted to promote the club. Mosley
lent his support to a programme of épée fencing with Scottish champion
Charles de Beaumont, which attracted ‘Britain’s loveliest women’, including
Miss Diana Churchill, Ladies Mary Lygon, Mary St Clair Erskine and Sylvia
Ashley who, the Express reported, ‘applauded the English Hitler as he cut and
thrust, parried and returned with immense fire and exquisite precision’. The
Jackson twins, Derek, who married Pamela Mitford, and Vivian had a ringside
table.
The Jacksons were rich and intelligent. Their parents died when they were
young and newspaper magnate Lord Ridell became their guardian. Derek was
recruited by Professor Lindemann for the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford,
specializing in spectroscopy, and Vivian was an astrophysicist. Impulsive,
during the fencing the twins heckled, egging each other on. Mosley told them
 THE NAZIS 321
to keep quiet but the heckling turned into a political argument and they invited
him to ‘come outside’. At five foot eight, they were no match for Mosley’s
six-foot-two frame. The situation was defused by Tennant with champagne:
‘If not oil, then let wine be poured.’ They all shook hands and became friends.
Derek often expressed support for Mosley, though his reactionary politics had
strict limits.

During the autumn Forgan was sent to inspect Scottish branches as a way of
getting him away from headquarters. His wife had recently attempted suicide.
He was out of his depth in the BUF with its discipline and his administrative
methods were ‘more akin to those of an army orderly room than to a political
office’. Officials disliked him for failing to take them into his confidence and
his choice of subordinates. He was a ‘kind man, who lacked judgement of
character’.
On 8 October Fuller delivered his ‘Report on the organisation of the BUF’,
which was described as chaotic. They ‘cannot fail to succeed if certain radical
changes are made in organisation and discipline’ but if they were not carried
out, ‘either the movement will decline or it will break up into hostile factions’.
‘Blackshirtism’ was developing into a ‘Frankenstein monster’. It appealed ‘to
the young and inexperienced, but if it is unchecked, it will lose more votes in
the next elections than anything else’. Britain was an ‘old country, very solid,
stable and. . . their instincts are against violent change. Most of the Blackshirts
are too young to realise this. In a revolutionary country they would be right,
but in a conservative country they are wrong.’ Fuller wanted their enthusiasm
channelled into winning seats but doubted ‘whether a single seat will be won
in 1935 Or 1936’.
BUF propaganda — Forgan’s responsibility — lacked both ‘art and common-
sense’. John Strachey wrote that Forgan ‘will never be able to organise the
propaganda of the British fascists with the reckless brilliance that Goebbels
achieved in Germany’. Fuller wanted ‘to concentrate propaganda on potential
districts which show a marked Fascist inclination’. Fascism should be pre-
sented in a British guise, with foreign influences ‘rigorously exorcised and
every endeavour made to register it acceptable to British traditions’.
The movement had been pushed into a militarism with the result that its
political organization had been superimposed upon its defence organization.
Fuller wanted this reversed with the Defence Férce ‘to automatically slide
from a semi-military to a fully political footing’. Mosley agreed to it being
kept as an elite propaganda instrument but Fuller warned the existence of the
BUF was precarious as it was ‘a one-man show’. Without Mosley it would lose
its finance and disintegrate. They were ‘sadly lacking in able men’. Fredericks
observed that Mosley was ‘surrounded so thickly by professional political
racketeers that he only knows what they want him to know. Of latter days he
322 BLACKSHIRT

has become almost as inaccessible as the Great Mogul. It is quite impossible

for an ordinary member to get anywhere near him.’ Even his mother found it
difficult because of the intrigue: ‘Insubordination from people whose word
you preferred to take to mine and who would disappear from the movement
by your instructions.’ Fuller wanted a triumvirate to discuss important issues:
headquarters should be ‘a Corporate State in embryo. It is the acorn of the
eventual oak.’
It was difficult for Mosley to implement Fuller’s report, as he was over-
whelmed by internal problems. It was one reason why, on 12 October, Forgan
resigned, ostensibly on the grounds of ill health. Differences in philosophy,
coupled with his organizational and financial failings, were noted by the Home
Office as reasons for his resignation. Internal rivalries dated back to the spring
when Box, Beckett and Risdon attempted to reshape the BUF along party lines.
However, Hawkins’s military faction resisted the restructuring and during the
summer a military-style Court of Inquiry, comprising Captain Reavely, Major
Lucas and P. G. Taylor, was established to stamp out factionalism.
The resignation of Forgan, who was popular with the left wing, caused a
revolt that nearly split the movement. It was led by Charles Bradford of the
Industrial Propaganda Department, who ‘plotted to take over the movement
by force and oust those officers who had crawled in during the boosting period
of the Mail’. Mosley ‘flew into a tearing rage and threatened to shoot them in
the guts’. At the October court martial — presided over by Piercy, Hawkins
and Taylor — Bradford and Frederick Knowles were accused of threatening
deputy Chief of Staff Archibald Findlay and conspiring to ‘seize the building
and make demands to Mosley that certain officers be dismissed’. Risdon was
said to be one of the disenchanted Blackshirts involved in the ‘subversive plot’.
He was nursing a grievance because people who had joined the movement
after he did had been given prominent positions.
Mosley summoned staff to the club room, where the I Squad was armed
with lead tubing. Two hundred Blackshirts stood by, while Mosley and ‘his
satellites considered how to deal with the mutineers’. News of the upheaval
reached provincial branches, which voted in favour of the rebels. When Mosley
entered the room, the atmosphere was ‘sullen and brooding. A spark would
have set light to the tinder of discontent already smouldering.’ Members were
aware of rumours about Forgan’s resignation but Mosley convinced them he
‘had not left the ranks for ever and would return when health permitted’.
Being financially dependent on Mosley, the mutineers realized ‘if they went
too far there was considerable danger of them being without jobs’. He assured
them that ‘those who march with me to Fascist victory shall have their reward’.
The revolt was crushed and the ringleaders were later expelled.
Special Branch reported that Mosley had decided ‘to purge the movement
of undesirable elements’, including ‘ex-members of the Communist Party and
 THE NAZIS 323
National Unemployed Workers Movement’ whose presence hindered ‘the
recruiting of the better class of citizen’. The movement was beset by scandal.
Piercy was engaged in an affair with Joyce’s wife, who was pregnant. While
women were expelled for sexual misconduct, Piercy was reappointed Chief
Inspector of Branches, away from London, to avoid any scandal. Six months
later he left the BUF
One result was P. G. Taylor’s promotion. He assumed the title ‘Industrial
Adviser’ with responsibilities for the disbanded FUBW. Miles commented
that if this ‘means that one controls a number of people who burrow into
organisations such as Trade Unions . . . so that the controller of these ferrets
may “advise” his employers of their intentions and actions, then, of course
Mr Taylor was rightly described’. Taylor oversaw the shift in BUF policy to
‘permeation’ of the unions. The burrowers included agents provocateurs.
Such events highlighted the contradictions between Mosley’s ideas on
leadership and his delegation of administrative functions. He had previously
said Fascism’s leadership ‘may be individual or preferably in the case of the
British character, a team with clearly allocated functions and responsibility’,
but in the 1934 edition of the Greater Britain now wrote that ‘undoubtedly
single leadership in practice proves the more effective instrument’. His intellec-
tual stature and the lack of any credible alternative figure ensured he had little
coherent opposition but only retained consistent support from inexperienced
political mavericks.
MacNeill Weir knew Mosley to be an extremist but thought ‘his vaulting
ambition accompanied by a lofty pride, seems to have completely changed his
character. He would have been saved from this by a wise restraint.’ He was
unable to accept criticism and operated in ‘an autocratic fashion where he
brought the tablets down from the mountain to his adoring supporters’. His
disciples’ adulation, however, fed his arrogance and ‘led him to excesses of
pompous ostentation’. Blackshirt hero-worship was religious in its intensity.
John Charnley recalled meeting Mosley: ‘I saluted him in the customary
fashion and stood to attention. Even to write of this episode after fifty years
still fills me with emotion. Then he stood up, looked at me with those penetrat-
ing eyes, which seemed to be alive with electrifying sparks, shook me vigor-
ously by the hand and said, “Charnley, I need men like you.” From that
moment I have been his man.’
The devotion was reciprocated by Mosley, who never believed a Blackshirt
was ever at fault. At the end of a rally he would gather them together and ask
for further sacrifices. He would stretch out his arms and cry, ‘You are blood
of my blood, spirit of my spirit!’
‘Crikey, has the old man gone off his head?’ whispered E. D. Randall,
author of the BUF marching song. Randall represented a cultish faction, who
saw themselves as engaged in a spiritual revolution.
 324 BLACKSHIRT

Mosley argued that the Fascist ‘transformed his own life into the new man
... free from the trammels of the past’. To become a Fascist was to be stripped
of ego boundaries and thus become absorbed into a regenerated national
community. The ‘post-Fascist utopians, such as Randall and Thomson,
despised modern values and sought a total spiritual revolution’, though their
criticism of bourgeois decadence ‘paled before their hatred of Marxist deca-
dence’. They demanded the liberation of the race from ‘materialism and from
the repression of natural tendencies’. Randall called for ‘youth to leave the
unreality of cities for the reality of cosmic harmony . . . for the truths of Blood
and Spirit; to return to the life of the soil and sun’. This implied ridding
England of the Jews.
On 28 October the BUF held a rally at the Albert Hall. Rumour spread that
Mosley was ‘going to attack the “‘Yids”’. There had been some discussion
beforehand about the speech’s content, which revealed the influence of
Chesterton and Fuller.
Fuller wrote to Mosley that ‘the Jews cannot destroy Fascism unless Fascists
create a fulcrum from which the Jews can operate their final lever. This fulcrum
is anti-semitism in such force as will lead to a popular outing in their favour.’
These sentences were underlined by Mosley with the admission that he was
’ “n favour of putting the onus of aggression on to the Jews’ since it ‘can be
shown ... that the Jew is the aggressor’. Mosley highlighted the statement
that ‘what the big Jew yearns for, that Fascists will knock little Jews on the
head, so that non-Jewish opinion will be shocked. They will spend millions to
exploit this situation.’
Inside the Albert Hall there was an electric atmosphere when Mosley took
to the rostrum. He said he had ‘encountered things in this country which,
quite frankly, I did not believe existed. And one of these is the power of
organised Jewry, which is today mobilised against Fascism.’ He opposed Jews
because they attacked Fascists. Jewish employers victimized Fascist employees
and ‘big Jews’ in advertising frightened off potential Fascist support. In refer-
ring to Rothermere he claimed, ‘big business men have come to me and said:
“I dare not come out for Fascism, or dare not remain with you, because if I
did the Jews would ruin me and my business.”’ These ‘big Jews’ were more
of a menace than the ‘sweepings of foreign ghettos’ allowed to enter Britain.
He said ‘a new phase had entered the history of Fascism’. The BUF would
fight organized Jewry as ‘an unclean, alien influence in our national and
imperial life’. It marked ‘the end of the sparring with the issue, and the
beginning of the real fighting’.
He whipped the audience into a frenzy: ‘They have declared in their great
folly to challenge the conquering force of the modern age. Tonight we take
up that challenge: they will it: let them have it!’ The applause lasted fifteen
minutes. It was a classic performance in describing a conspiracy ‘as far-ranging
 THE NAZIS 325

as ever Rosenberg conceived’ and a commitment to anti-Semitism ‘as firm as

Hitler’s’. The BUF: was presented with ‘the glittering example of the Nazis
who had come to power as an avowedly anti-Semitic party’.
_ Irene had gone out of loyalty to her dead sister, ‘in case some awful accident
should happen to this new dictator’. She found his anti-Semitism ‘terrifying’.
Nonetheless, it ‘excited terrific applause from packed audiences, whom he
could get fighting mad with enthusiasm with the Mosley rhetoric’. Hearing
the ‘ranting attack on the Jews’, Francis Yeats-Brown felt sick but his female
companion was thrilled. Prompted by revulsion at the anti-Semitism, he wrote
to Wrench on 1 November forecasting the collapse of the January Club. Its
social functions had been successful but MIS wrote off the Club, now chaired
by Norman Thwaites, secretary of the Air League. A recent dinner had ‘very
few persons of note and no young officers’. Thwaites soon afterwards dissolved
the Club, which Yeats-Brown welcomed, as it became evident that Mosley
saw in the Club a ‘ready-made opening for propaganda’.
On 2 November 1934 the Blackshirt heralded ‘The Leader’s Great Clarion
Call’ and the coming battle between the ‘cleansing spirit of Fascism’ and
organized Jewry. It no longer differentiated between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Jews.
They were the ‘symbol and source of all evil’ and ‘organized as a racial
minority within the State to conduct a furious agitation with all the force of
their great money power, which can have no effect except to drag this country
towards war with Germany’.
Reaction in Germany was positive. Der Stiirmer said Mosley was ‘an intrepid
fighter’ and featured a photograph of a BUF meeting with the comment that
he ‘has long angered and provoked the Jews’. His Defence Force ‘gave the
Jews and the Reds a good hiding whenever an opportunity arose’. Bismarck
reported to Berlin that Mosley, ‘with a frankness not previously heard’, had
‘turned against the jews’. But the Mail, ‘mouthpiece of English fascists did not
mention the meeting with a single word’. MIS was not entirely convinced
Rothermere had dropped the BUF and believed he still had ‘a more than
sneaking regard for Mosley’ and that the BUF was still a viable political force.
On 6 November Robert Bernays mused that even without Rothermere, Mosley
had been able to fill the Albert Hall: ‘No other politician could come within
measure of that. . . Itseems to indicate that Hitlerism is not nearly as unpopular
as we would like to imagine.’
Mosley and Diana visited Paris, where he bought her a Voisin car, which
she drove to Germany to join Unity as press representatives at the Nuremberg
Rally. An acquaintance, Rosemary Macindoe, recalled that when Unity saw
Jews being beaten up she used to say, ‘Jolly good, serves them right, we should
go and cheer.’ There were jokes about the concentration camps. ‘If somebody
does anything bad, they said, “We'll send them to Dachau.”’ The young
Macindoe was swept off her feet by Diana’s admiration of the Leader, which
326 BLACKSHIRT

was shared by Unity, who ‘may have been in love with Mosley too’. Diana’s
flat was visited by SS men from the Brown House with access to its senior
officials arranged through Putzi Hanfstaengl.
The BUF’s new stance was criticized by Roberto Farinacci, a rabble-rousing
journalist on the Fascist Grand Council, for copying Nazi aberrations. He
added that the ‘trouble with British Fascists was that, though they adopted
the black shirt and the Roma salute, they were British patriots first; they
opposed Italian claims on Malta [where Italian secret service funds were used
to influence the island’s elections]’.
Taking Fuller’s advice, Mosley concentrated on targeting propaganda on
particular groups and regions. Ex-miner and boxer “Tommy’ Moran was
sent to south Wales; Beckett concentrated on Tyneside; and rural areas were
assiduously wooed. There was an anti-Catholic campaign in Edinburgh and
an anti-Protestant one in East Anglia. Late 1934 saw efforts in East London
to champion grievances against Jewish immigrants. The manipulation of ethnic
hostility and hatred, notes John Brewer, was ‘reserved for those areas where
it was assumed to have the greatest effect on the host communities’. It was
‘cynical opportunism of the worst kind’.
Lancashire was again the centre of attempts to revitalize the movement. In
Manchester on 25 November Mosley attacked the government’s recent report
on India for its toleration of Indian nationalism, its failure to tackle sweated
labour and for allowing Japan to swamp Indian markets with cheap cotton
goods, the cause of unemployment in Lancashire. Japan was attacked as the
‘almost almond-eyed cuckoo’. He wanted trading arrangements with the white
dominions to lead, in the long term, to a planned imperial economy. Fuller
advocated an Imperial Council to co-ordinate imperial defence.
MIS recognized that Mosley wanted to turn Lancashire into a Fascist strong-
hold but dismissed his ideas as weak, though his speeches were ‘punctuated
with prolonged cheers’ when he blamed ‘international Jewish finance’ for
destroying jobs. Bill Risdon had expected support among former ILP col-
leagues but hostile memories of Mosley ensured he made little progress. The
working class remained wedded to the Labour movement and the BUF’s main
appeal was directed towards the petty bourgeoisie, unorganized sections of
the working class and the small independent businessmen. These groups were
deemed likely to succumb to the anti-Semitic appeal.
Mosley’s emphasis on India impressed the diehards, including Leopold
Amery, Sir Edward Grigg and Churchill, and rumours spread that Lord Lloyd
was contemplating financing the BUF. In a repeat of the British Fascists’
relationship with the Conservatives, Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland MP used Black-
shirts to steward a meeting in Brighton, organized by peace lobbyists who
were considered by local anti-Fascists as BUF fellow-travellers. Mosley hoped
to gain a foothold in ruling circles but they rejected British Fascism ‘while
 THE NAZIS 327

continuing to indulge in fantasies regarding the comfortably distant continen-

tal variety’. Sir Charles Petrie believed Mosley’s ‘flirtation with Hitler and
Mussolini caused his movement to be regarded as something not far removed
from a foreign conspiracy: had he put his followers into blue pullovers instead
of black shirts much would have been forgiven him. Then, again, there was
grave distrust among the more sober-minded of the implications of his anti-
Semitic policy.’
In Kenya the East African Standard reported that Joss Erroll had returned
‘with a constructive and energetic plan to convert the Colony to the Blackshirt
policy’. Elspeth Huxley’s mother, Nellie Grant, was at the first meeting in
December when he addressed settlers in the Rift Valley. ‘Everyone cheered to
the echo’ what he said. ‘British Fascism simply means super-loyalty to the
Crown, no dictatorship, complete religious and social freedom, an “insulated
Empire” to trade with the dirty foreigner, higher wages, lower costs of living.’
When he said Fascism stood for complete freedom, ‘you could hear Mary
Countess at the other end of the room saying that within five years, Joss will
be dictator of Kenya’.
In Zurich on 5 December the neo-Nazi International Union of Nationalisms
held a conference, followed by a congress in Berlin. Keller regarded the del-
egates, who had been invited by Goebbels, as representatives of their peoples
rather than their governments. With a slogan, ‘Nationalists of all centres,
unite!’ Keller wanted ‘to unite the peoples against the Communist Inter-
national, which is their mortal enemy’. Mosley avoided the congress, whose
British delegates centred on English Mistery and included Michael Beaumont
MP, T. P. Cornwallis-Evans, Viscount Lymington and the Marquess of
Graham. The IUN lacked a coherent ideology and all that united the disparate
groups was anti-Semitism.
Under CAUR’s auspices, the Italians held-a meeting of their own inter-
national at Montreux in Switzerland. Mosley, in the city for a fencing compe-
tition, attended in a private capacity. Irish Blueshirt General O’Duffy was
elected to its co-ordinating committee, which included Mosley’s acquaintances
Coselochi (Italy), Clausen (Denmark), Bucard (France) and Quisling (Nor-
way), with the task of establishing an “Entente de Fascisme Universel’ around
Mussolini’s conception of corporatism. The Congress agreed to Mussolini’s
moderate policy of ‘defensive’ anti-Semitism against ‘certain Jewish groups in
certain places which have installed themselves as in a conquered country,
openly or secretly exercising an injurious influence on the material and moral
interests in the homeland’. The conflict, however, between Rome and Berlin
on the question of anti-Semitism ‘exposed the impossibility of a coherent
Fascist International’.
On 20 December the German Consul General in Danzig reported that he
n
had met George Pitt-Rivers of the Wessex Agricultural Defence Associatio
 328 BLACKSHIRT

and self-confessed Mosleyite. He believed that while Fascism and National

Socialism were ‘embraced because of the necessity through the lack of any
other way out of a confused situation, Britain will have fascism not because it
must embrace it but because it wants to’. Pitt-Rivers was ‘worried by the
increased Jewish population and the control exercised over the press, cinema
and the economy, especially banking’. The BUF had grown dramatically in
just two years — he claimed ‘two million members!’ — and he believed Mosley
‘will be playing a significant role in the near future’, which will ‘benefit
England’s relationship’ with Germany.
The Prince of Wales admired the Nazis and established a study group to
analyse events in Germany. He was introduced to Mosley in January 1935 by
society hostess Lady Cunard, whose drawing room was “alive, night after
night, with excited conversation about the merits and demerits of Mussolini
and the Fiihrer’. He questioned him on ‘the strength and policy of the BUF.
These were explained at length by Mosley.’ He later claimed “Tom would
have made a first-rate Prime Minister’.
Emerald Cunard embroiled Edward’s lover, the married American socialite
Wallis Simpson, in the Nazi connections that dogged her for many years. A
favourite courtier was an opera set designer, Gabriel Wolkoff, brother of the
' late Tsar Nicholas II’s naval attaché in London. Admiral Wolkoff had been
awarded the Order of the Bath in r915, in recognition of his services to Britain.
The Wolkoffs settled in London, running in South Kensington the Russian
Tea Rooms, a centre of anti-Bolshevik intrigue. The Admiral headed a group
of anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi White Russian exiles determined to crush the Soviet
Union. His daughter Anna, who was naturalized in 193 5, was a dressmaker for
Princess Marina, who introduced her to Wallis and Pamela Jackson (formerly
Mitford). Anna allegedly became a Nazi agent and was of interest to Special
Branch.
Treasury stinginess and the Air Ministry’s technological conservatism
ensured that Britain was ‘peculiarly weak in the air’. Fuller’s argument that
offensive power would increase in the air with a parallel decline of ground
forces was adopted by Mosley, who wanted to ‘immediately raise the air
strength of Britain to the level of the strongest power in Europe’. He was
influenced by Fuller’s belief that only Fascism could tame the ‘mechanical
monster’ and wrote in mystical terms about air power: ‘Not until man has
mastered the machine and the machine has mastered material limitations will
the soul of man be free to soar beyond the fetters of materialism.’
Enthusiasm for the aeroplane was a right-wing phenomenon. Airmen
included wealthy aristocrats associated with aircraft companies such as Geof-
frey de Havilland and the Duke of Buccleuch. The Prince of Wales bought a
De Havilland Gypsy Moth, which he flew from his private aerodrome in
Windsor Great Park. The Air Ministry was overseen by Lord Londonderry, a
 THE NAZIS 329

man known to be sympathetic towards Nazi Germany. The Aeroplane was

pro-Fascist and anti-Semitic, and deputy editor Geoffrey Dorman took plea-
sure from young people’s interest in aeroplanes, which made them ‘good
Fascists’. He reported on ‘a youth’s joy at the sight of a Nazi sign on an
aeroplane’.
That Rothermere had not cut his links to Mosley was confirmed when in
1935 he created a National League of Airmen (NLA). He feared that in the
coming war, 50,000 enemy aeroplanes, ‘laden with bombs and gas, will rise
into the air and set off at more than 200 miles an hour to rain destruction on
this country’. He spent £50,000 (£1.7 m) on a campaign to ‘awaken the
country to its dangers and the need for rearmament in the air’. The NLA
was headed by Norman Macmillan, former RFC flyer and the Mail’s air
correspondent, and supported by Fuller, Freddy Guest, the Duke of West-
minster and Admirals Sir Murray Sueter and Mark Kerr. Sueter, a wartime
naval aviator, belonged to a number of pro-German organizations.
On 23 January Rothermere arranged a meeting with Mosley, along with his
newspaper executives, including Brooks, Brittain, McWhirter and Sir George
Sutton. Brooks found Mosley was ‘less aggressive than one imagined — much
more stalwart in build. He dominates a table, but not unpleasantly.’ At this
meeting, with Mosley centre stage, the ‘League was practically formed’. That
Rothermere was interested in a wider political agenda was evident from a
letter he sent to Lloyd George two days later. ‘I am quite sure that right-wing
politics are going to rule this country very soon. The right-wing movement
has captured Italy and Germany and is capturing France. Come out very
strongly on India and air armaments and I believe at the end of a couple of
years you will be the leader of the Conservative Party and once more Prime
Minister.’
The NLA was supported by The Aeroplane’s editor C. G. Grey: “Thanks
largely to Adolf Hitler and Signor Mussolini, we are now well on the way
towards building up an Air Force which in due course will enable us to help
them and the United States to meet the real enemies of civilisation, the Russians
and the Japanese. Perhaps I should say enemies of the White race, or human
sub-species as Prof. Huxley would have us say.’ Such views, and Mosley’s
attack on Japan during the Lancashire cotton campaign, led Japanese Foreign
Minister Hirota to instruct the ambassador in London, Matsudaira Tsune-
yoshi, to monitor the BUF. He wired Tokyo that’ it was ‘quite newly established
so political influences in and out of the country is esteemed not large at this
stage. Ideology: 1) Absolute loyalism to Nation, King. 2) England as No. 1.’
MIS told the Home Secretary, Sir Russell Scott, that the BUF ‘has failed
almost everywhere’. Where it ‘seemed to have roots in this country, these roots
now appear very much frailer and to have been kept alive only by artificial
means’. It was ‘for all practical purposes dependent on foreign funds’. In
330 BLACKSHIRT

February 1935 the PM was told BUF weekly expenditure was £8,225
(£300,000). The Home Office estimated the true figure for total annual expen-
diture at between £40,000 (£1.36m) and £80,000 (the latter was close to the
truth). MIS believed that without such funds, British Fascism would have
ceased to exist. Mosley ‘is, in fact, reported to have sent a message to Mussolini
to that effect’.
The BUF was not in receipt of Nazi funds but Mosley was in regular contact
with Joachim ‘von’ Ribbentrop, who ‘had been in London and in touch with
us even before he came to power’. Having spurned Foreign Office channels,
Hitler improvised. Ribbentrop set up the Dienststelle Ribbentrop or “Buro’
under Rudolf Hess’s secretariat to prove that Nazi methods were superior to
those of traditional diplomacy. Special Branch reported that Otto Karlowa
had ‘completed’ the Nazification of German organizations in Britain.
A former wine merchant who impressed Hitler with claims to contacts in
London’s politicial and social circles, Ribbentrop was a self-styled ‘England
expert’. He regularly sent Hitler a précis of the British press, which on
14 January included a Mail article — ‘possibly the best to appear in the British
press’ — on the Saar plebiscite, which returned the region to Germany. Two
days later a wireless broadcast from the Saar sounded to Yeats-Brown ‘like
the paean of triumph of the new world — keen and clear and purposeful —
nationalistic, patriotic, romantic, over the turgid hypocrisies of the old order.
But God save us from Mosley in this country! He is no good.’ Ribbentrop
included Mosley’s Despatch article, ‘Why I want friendship with Germany’.
Hitler forebade spying in Britain because, if discovered, ‘it would endanger
his grand policy. The tidbits of information that espionage might bring in
were not worth this risk.’ Ribbentrop created Information Post III, using
unconventional diplomats, but it did not engage in espionage. He gained
access to Mosley through the geopolitical thinker Albrecht Haushofer. At the
behest of Goebbels, his son Karl visited London ‘to test the feelings of leading
politicians and their reactions as well as to put the German viewpoint’.
With the BUF drawing closer to the Nazis, Mussolini sent his own emissary
to assess whether his annual subsidy of £86,000 (£2.9 m) was a worthwhile
investment, with membership dropping to 5,000 and no sign of the ‘strict
disciplinarian, authoritarian, centralised character of mass movements’. Policy
was made by the Policy Directorate, whose membership was fluid, depending
on the management of internal power.
BUF leadership was divided into mutually hostile cliques. The two most
influential factions favoured an electoral strategy with a view to contesting
parliamentary seats at a general election. However, they remained divided and
a perpetual battle raged in the Directorate between the ‘politicals’ and the
‘bureaucrats’. The central issue was whether resources should go to building
up the organization or to mounting propaganda. The dispute was between
 THE NAZIS 331

those such as Hawkins, Box and Dundas, who supported a military organiz-
ation with an emphasis on disciplined marches, and those who wanted to
convert the masses to Fascist ideology. The second faction of Joyce, Beckett,
Thomson and Chesterton hoped a socialist government would come to power
and provide them with ‘an opportunity to lead a reaction’. They were a distinct
elite and, as ‘intellectuals’, were in conflict with the autocratic Hawkins, who
put a higher value on reliability.
The doctrinal Fascists considered Mosley too cautious and advocated
uncompromising anti-Semitism. The black shirt would be retained as a symbol
of virile, heroic struggle. They wanted to build a popular movement in the
factories, with the goal of electoral success. Under Box, Beckett and Risdon
plans were drawn up for election agents and propaganda officers. Like Fuller,
Box favoured the development of conventional party campaigning and
opposed Blackshirt ‘physical force’ methods and Joyce’s Jew baiting. MIS5’s
Maxwell Knight said Joyce was ‘a born leader of men, and a rare combination
of a dreamer and a man of action’. Fuller, however, had a poor opinion of
him and friction was present from the start. Mosley liked Box and tended to
side with Fuller’s assessment. ;
Box was appointed as Forgan’s successor with a brief to reduce expenditure.
The Box/Fuller axe fell heavily on the movement’s radical wing. The paramilit-
ary complexion was de-emphasized with the abolition of the national and
local defence forces. The network of Fascist social clubs was eliminated and
the I Squad was allowed to dwindle to fifteen ‘storm troopers’. Centralization
was extended with the liquidation of area headquarters, with branches super-
vised by a system of national inspectors. Box’s ‘victory’, however, proved to
be pyrrhic. Indeed, MIS considered him to be ‘defeatist’ in his confrontation
with the paramilitary Hawkins and Dundas.
Beckett thought headquarters a ‘mess’ with ‘a huge staff of badly paid and
useless people’. The 200 speakers ‘made trouble wherever they went, and their
only qualification seemed to be their cheapness and extreme servility’. Senior
officers were ‘quite happy if they could sit at their ease while a few underpaid
hacks clicked their heels and saluted’. Box ‘did succeed in averting the adminis-
trative chaos which threatened almost daily with the inflow of hundreds of
new members and the outflow of a number almost as great’. The Vauxhall
branch had 160 members but only forty paid the subscription. Most were
‘young men and women of an average age (19-Zo0)’ and ‘of the illiterate type’.
The pattern was repeated at other branches with no more than a quarter
classed as ‘active’. Internal discord eroded membership while the reorganiz-
ation and purge of criminal elements had ‘inadvertently, motivated the re-
signation of those unable to concede to the absence of democracy within
the BUF.
Mosley accepted Fuller’s recommendations and plans for an electoral
332 BLACKSHIRT

machine were institutionalized on 21 January. 1935. A Political Section

embraced a new category of non-uniformed members, with executive powers
to develop local constituency organizations to cover electoral wards. Although
‘Blackshirt Command’ held joint executive powers with the Political Section,
the thrust of the reforms, as Box and Fuller intended, was in the direction of .
conventional party politics. The radical Blackshirt units were expected to
inject the ‘vital spirit of endeavour’ with regard to doorstep canvassing and
street propaganda, but they were subordinate to the Political Section on
political administration matters. However, the BUF structure was ill equipped
to cope with Britain’s political system and the Box/Fuller initiative proved to
be a failure. Appeals to struggle might be ennobling, Thomas Linehan notes,
but they were ‘qualities too vague and eclectic to cope with the technical
and quantitative machinations of electoral politics’. Paramilitarism attracted
volatile recruits, who ‘alienated potential support from more conventional
constituencies’. The conservative ex-military elements proved as bad for the
BUF’s image as the radicals. °
Special Branch said Beckett was ‘spreading stories to the effect that the
Blackshirts are finished and that all their past efforts have been in vain’. He
blamed Box. and demanded his removal. Innumerable internal disputes
revolved around the personality and leadership clash between Joyce and Mos-
ley, which was chronicled in detail by MIS. Such disputes were settled by
Mosley who, in accordance with advice from Blackshirt Command head
Francis Hawkins, mostly sided with the administrators.
Dissension extended to relations between Box and the Women’s Section,
which was characterized by ‘personal antipathies, professional incompatibility
and conflicts of interests’. On 12 February Lady Mosley wrote to her son,
upset that he had ‘succeeded in making me look a complete fool’. She said she
was being squeezed out, unable to travel around districts and left without a
desk from which to work. Little more was expected of her than ‘looking
pleasant on all occasions’. She did not think the Leader had ‘any idea of the
difficulties I had to face ... when we moved to N. HQ. Intrigue the whole
time. Insubordination from people whose word you preferred to take to mine
and who have since disappeared from the movement by your instructions . .
.’
The situation deteriorated when Mosley appointed Mary Richardson to
organize the Lancashire area. Box opposed this executive decision and threat-
ened resignation over her ‘dishonest inefficiency’. Lady Mosley said she ‘would
like to resign, and would do so if it were not that such an action might cause
damage to the movement and harm the prestige of her son’. Shortly afterwards
Richardson was expelled from the BUF for organizing a meeting protesting
at
the unequal pay for women employed by the movement. Because the Women’s
Section contributed to the increasing conflicts, its independence was
eroded
and its profile was downgraded.
 THE NAZIS 333

During 1935 Mussolini appointed Ciano as Under-Secretary for Propaganda

to extend the message of universal Fascism. Mosley was a member of the
British épée team, which came fifth at the European Championships at Lau-
sanne and he was invited to a CAUR conference at nearby Montreux. Ciano
regarded some of the delegates as an embarrassment. Dr Clausen was a ‘notori-
ous’ Hitler supporter ‘absolutely financed by him’, while Bucard was ‘a noted
pederast’ only ‘interested in Italian lire’. The Jewish question split the meeting
which, Ciano acknowledged, ‘showed that the issue of racism went very
deeply indeed into the structure of European fascism’. A meeting in Paris
on 30 January proved to be ‘the next-to-last gasp’ of Mussolini’s Fascist
International. Shortly afterwards he decided to withdraw the BUF subsidy,
with a final payment in February.

On 9 February, having tried for months to catch his eye, Unity Mitford was
introduced to Hitler at the Osteria restaurant in Munich. Most days, Hitler
would lunch until 3 p.m. with a relaxed but influential group of companions,
including Martin Bormann, architect Albert Speer, photographer Heinrich
Hoffman, Munich’s Gauleiter Adolf Wagner, Hitler’s Adjutant Julius Schaub,
Dr Theodor Morell and Press Chief Otto Dietrich. Talk for Hitler, Dietrich
said, ‘was the very element of his existence’. According to Schaub, Hitler knew
nothing of Unity’s background. She wrote to Diana that Hitler ‘felt he knew
London well from his architectural studies’. He talked about war and said
‘international Jews must never again be allowed to make two Nordic races
fight against one another. I said no, next time we must fight together.’ After
‘the greatest man of all time’ had left, she wrote to her father that she was ‘so
happy I wouldn’t mind dying’. Unity wrote at once to Diana, with the idea of
her too meeting Hitler.
Unity, Speer recalled, was ‘in love with Hitler . . . her face brightened up,
her eyes gleaming, staring at Hitler. Hero-worship. Absolutely phenomenal.’
Dietrich said she was an ‘enthusiastic follower’ of Mosley and had ‘many
private conversations about Anglo-German relations with Hitler, whose secret
itineraries she accurately guessed. Hitler frequently included her among the
guests who accompanied him on his travels.’ She introduced Hitler to her
father and her brother, when they passed through Munich. Farve, wrote
Diana, ‘has been completely won over to him and admits himself to have been
in the wrong until now’. Mosley urged Diana té return to Germany, where
she was in turn introduced to Hitler and quickly established a friendship with
the Nazi leader. Irene was ‘saddened deeply’ by tales from Baba of Mrs
Guinness, who was ‘wriggling her way into Tom’ and ‘goes everywhere with
him in a black shirt’, and was acting as his ‘entrée to Hitler and Goebbels’.
The Prince of Wales, who admired Hitler, was admonished by the King for
expressing views contrary to official Foreign Office policy. He continued,
334 BLACKSHIRT

however, to develop indiscreet relations with the German ambassador,

Leopold von Hoesch, and criticized the Foreign Office for being ‘too one-sided’
in its approach to negotiations with Germany over the naval agreement
in March 1935. He made clear ‘his complete understanding of Germany’s
position and aspirations’.

MIS5 was worried by the ‘revolutionary nature’ of Mosley’s ‘bitter attacks’ on

existing institutions’. An SB agent purloined minutes of the Research Direc-
tory, which revealed plans to infiltrate trade unions, including ‘the permeation
of the Miners’ Federation’. In early spring MIS5 claimed the BUF was trying
to form ‘cells’ in Civil Service branches and feared a ‘highly placed’ source
was leaking information. When William Rogers in the Treasury Solicitor’s
Department was identified as organizer of the BUF’s Queen’s Gate branch, it
created even more concern. MIS, however, later admitted that attempts to
establish cells had met with little success. It also reported that the BUF had
an ambitious scheme to investigate ‘all Jewish firms throughout the world’
prior to ‘detailed attacks on Jewish financial houses and the whole system of
international finance’.
When the National government failed to deliver promised policy changes,
Rothermere again applied pressure on the Tories. He backed an unofficial
Conservative candidate on a diehard ticket at the Liverpool Wavertree by-
election, during which twenty-three-year-old Randolph Churchill was
attacked as a Mosleyite. Rothermere’s newspapers fully supported the Sunday
Dispatch journalist who was paid an annual subvention of £2,500 (£85,000).
Donations were made by the Duke of Westminster, his father and Lady
Houston. In the event, Randolph split the Tory vote and handed a safe seat
to Labour.
Rothermere expected support from the India Defence League (IDL), which
had widened its scope to ‘all Imperial questions including Defence and the
general maintenance of Conservative Principles’. On 12 February Randolph
told Collin Brooks that ‘his father and Lord Lloyd had both wanted the seat
to be fought’ but the League ‘turned down the project’. He decided, therefore,
to build an organization, using remnants of the IDL and the support of the
National League of Airmen, which Brooks wanted to fight a by-election at
Norwood. Rothermere, however, said ‘the pilots might think we had merely
organised them for a political ramp’. Instead, Randolph plunged into the
contest with a candidate of his own, Richard Findlay, an RFC flyer who
‘resigned’ from the BUF on 22 February. Two days later Rothermere told
Brooks ‘he'll get the women’s vote. They like °em over thirty. With hair on
their chests.’
The backdrop to the by-election was the Committee stage of the India Bill.
Mosley took up the issue ‘in hope of attracting the well known Conservat
ive
 THE NAZIS 335

leaders opposed to the Bill to join the BUF’. He moved staff to Manchester
for a new cotton campaign in order to ‘take advantage of developments’.
According to Special Branch, Lord Lloyd had approached Mosley through
Rothermere with an offer to join the party ‘in any capacity’. In this context,
Findlay’s decision was in line with BUF policy but, as a candidate seeking a
wide support, he had to distance himself from Mosley.
There was manoeuvring going on between Randolph and Mosley. Churchill
said his son had ‘got a considerable fund through Lady Houston and appears
disposed to form an organisation to run candidates not only at by-elections,
but against Government supporters at the general election. His programme
seems to be to put Socialists in everywhere he can in order to smash up
MacDonald and Baldwin.’ Houston also signed a cheque for the BUF for
£100,000 (3.4m). However, ‘she changed her mind and tore it up’. Comman-
dant Allen reported in the Saturday Review that Houston was still angry with
Mosley for an attack on her in the Blackshirt.
Churchill tried to induce his son ‘to withdraw his candidate who is an
ex-Fascist airman (not much good)’. Rothermere withdrew his backing after
consulting the City — he was obsessed with his wealth. He feared their candi-
date might split the vote and allow in a socialist, which would ‘precipitate a
crisis’. In the March by-election, Findlay polled 2,698 votes and lost his
deposit. The official Conservative, Duncan Sandys, won the seat against a
Labour opponent. Mosley remained in contact with Findlay but, knowing
MIS would monitor their correspondence, played down the connection by
claiming he had merely received many ‘long and tedious letters’ to which he
politely replied.
The failure of the by-election was a blow to Mosley’s attempts to build an
alliance with Conservative forces and create a political space in which the
BUF could operate.

In March Diana drove her new Voisin car through the Black Forest snow to
Munich. On the rrth Unity introduced her to Hitler. Diana later told Nicholas
Mosley she believed this meeting had ruined her life, and ‘your father’s’.
However, in letters to Unity, she referred to Hitler as ‘beloved’ and admitted
‘we were very great friends’, though ‘I didn’t love Hitler any more than I did
Winston’. She was ‘very, very fond of him’. Diana Tennant, a friend of Unity
staying at a German finishing school, admitted*they were ‘Nazis to a T, the
whole lot of us, and I’m not ashamed of it’. Mosley encouraged Diana to stay
on in Munich ‘as I was naturally interested to hear more of developments in
that country and of these personalities. They were introduced to his whole
circle.’
Diana found Hitler ‘incredibly frank and wonderful, charming’. He was
‘neat and clean looking, so much so that beside him almost everyone looked
 336 BLACKSHIRT

coarse. His teeth had been mended with gold.’ He did ‘imitations of marvellous
drollery which showed how acutely observant he was. I never heard him rant.
He was extremely polite to women. He bowed and kissed hands...’ Hitler
described the two Mitford sisters as ‘angels’. They were the type of beauty he ;
admired, ‘so much so that both sisters got away with wearing the make-up of ,
which he so disapproved’. Hitler was both fascinated by and afraid of women,
but they were entranced by him. The truth was, Diana wrote, that in private,
‘Sweet Uncle Wolf’ ‘inspired affection’. She claimed that she never heard him
mention the Jews: ‘I know that he didn’t like them, that he hated them, that
he murdered them. . .’
Diana made a telling point to Nicholas about the difference between Hitler
and Mosley. When people met his father they thought: ‘Here is this wonderful
man who has an answer to everything himself so what is there for us to do?
When people met Hitler they thought: here is this wonderful but unfortunate
man who seems to have all the cares of the world on his shoulders, so we must
do all we can to help him.’ This was not an isolated view. In a review of Mein
Kampf, George Orwell said he had ‘never been able to dislike Hitler’. He had
‘the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly
way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified,
and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. He is the martyr,
the victim. One feels . . . that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win,
and yet that he somehow deserves to.’
‘Masterful’ was the wrong word to use about Mosley, Diana thought. His
followers ‘adored him and looked up to him and thought him perfection and
thought that he could lead them into a promised land’. With Hitler it was
different: ‘He had a very soft side to his nature, so that people terribly felt
they would like to help him; and that tremendously applied to women. There
was something almost vulnerable ... about him which made men want to
help him and made women want to cherish him.’ She admitted Mosley ‘had
not got that at all’.

At the beginning of March it had been expected the BUF would announce it
would put up candidates at the general election, but MIS reported on the rth
that it did not do so because Mosley could not reveal, even to senior officials,
the real state of the movement’s finances. Reports from chief constables indi-
cated that, except in Manchester, BUF ‘membership had declined,
branches
had closed, sales of the Blackshirt had dropped, and enthusiasm had
cooled’.
Mosley was forced to impose swingeing cuts, including closing the expensive
Black House. In the Blackshirt, in ‘The Next Stage in Fascism’, he said
disci-
pline was to be tightened in a movement organized on army lines with
every
Blackshirt attached to a small unit as part of a Section, which, in turn,
would
belong to a Company. At the top of the hierarchy would be the Leader.
Only
 THE NAZIS 337

those committed to door-to-door canvassing would be entitled to wear a black

shirt. The aim was to.establish a BUF branch in every constituency.
The changes entrenched the position of the paramilitary faction and pro-
voked outbreaks of unrest among members, with serious dissatisfaction in
London, Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds. When Scottish branches threat-
ened secession, Mosley sacked administrative staff and replaced them with
_ those of proven loyalty. As Director of Organization, Hawkins was responsible
for the entire movement and restricted the Political Section to providing
technical instruction for Blackshirt officers.

The Italians had grown weary of Mosley’s excuses for the lack of progress.
Sceptical about the merits of universal Fascism, Grandi told Mussolini he was
‘flushing money down the sewer. At the moment you are spending a great deal
of money in England. Until a few days ago, you were giving Mosley about
3,500,000 [£60,000] in monthly instalments of about 300,000 lire. All this
money, believe me Duce, even on the best supposition simply goes down the
drain. At the present time we should concentrate our efforts in a different
direction. With a tenth of what you give Mosley, I feel I could produce a result
ten times better.’ Mussolini agreed and the funding was reduced. Even so,
during 1935, £86,000 (£2.94m) was deposited in the BUF’s secret account.
Baba saw Grandi constantly and he confided both his personal and political
worries to her, including the worsening situation in Africa, where Mussolini
wanted to build an empire. When she was later asked about the funding of
the BUF she replied, ‘Of course, I thought I knew what was going on. But if
you ask me “‘Had I got evidence?” the answer is ““No”.’ Dundas was sent to
Rome to plead with Mussolini to reconsider his decision.
The wartime Advisory Committee studied the audited account of BUF Trust
Ltd for the year ending February 1935. That the total deposited in the Charing
Cross account was close to the published income of the movement during
1934 (£36,812) and 1935 (£75,606) gave credence to MI5S’s claim that the
BUF was only kept going by Italian money. According to MI6 sources, during
1935 Mosley received a one-off payment of £35,000 (£1.5m) from oil magnate
and Nazi associate Henry Deterding.

Despite Mosley’s meeting with Bene, London Nazis continued to shun the
BUF. They reported that the movement was collapsing and that without
Italian subsidies it would ‘run into the sands very quickly’. In mid-March
Fuller and Allen returned from a trip to Germany, where they had met Finance
Minister Hjalmar Schacht. They had been hindered by Bene’s reports. Fuller
had been received by Hitler ‘not as a member of the BUF but as a British
officer visiting Germany’. He ‘could not understand why senior high officials
were so ignorant of the activities of the BUF and of the Political situation in
 338 BLACKSHIRT
Great Britain generally’. Pfister, in regular contact with Schacht, who had a
high regard for Mosley, discovered from German friends that a memorandum
sent to senior officials, though not to Schacht, indicated the BUF delegation
was not ‘persona grata’ and was to be offered ‘as little assistance as possible’. _
Pfister learnt that the snub had arisen because ‘a certain high Nazi official _
who visited this country had not been favourably impressed by a meeting he
had with the Leader’. On a visit to Berlin, Archibald Findlay ‘had not created
a favourable impression’ and on a second visit ‘a still less favourable impres-
sion’ with his demands to see Hitler. A third reason was Lady Mosley’s
interview with a French journalist in which she said ‘Hitler was the greatest
enemy of the BUF since people in this country would not join on account of
the brutal methods in Germany’. When Berlin expressed ‘disappointment that
the Leader had shown so little appreciation of their victory in the Saar’, Pfister
knew something was wrong since Mosley had personally delivered a special
message to the Nazi press representative in London. He discovered the message
had been suppressed.
Despite doing what Pfister thought was in the best interests of the movement
by contacting Austrian Nazis, it had been against Mosley’s express orders.
Mosley later said he ‘wanted to combat the growing up of any international
idea. I forbade any of our leading people to visit Italy or Germany without
express permission.’ The real reason was that he feared surveillance by the
intelligence services. Pfister, who was briefed against by Joyce, was suspended
from his post for six weeks and ordered to break off correspondence with
Germany. This caused Pfister problems with his rent and he was forced to go
cap in hand to the Leader. Mosley kept properties in London which were
rented out to officials, including Findlay, who was responsible for the move-
ment’s financial affairs, including secret funding. Pfister was considered by
MIS to be an ‘agent of the Nazi party in the headquarters of the BUF’ and
was sacrificed by Mosley, who took care to avoid known Nazi agents. Pfister
later moved to Germany and became a member of the Nazi Party.

Italian attempts at a Fascist international collapsed in the spring with the

last
CAUR meeting in Amsterdam on x April 1935. CAUR and the Nazis’
own
Fascist international faded into the background as a clear detente
developed
between Rome and Berlin. Mussolini helped consolidate the secret
alliance
with Germany by sharing confidential British Cabinet documents, which
had
been supplied by a ‘pro-Fascist’? MP.
Foreign contacts were developed in an even more secretive
manner by
Captain Robert Gordon-Canning, a Research Directory member
and Chair-
man of Action Press. The forty-seven-year-old Etonian was Mosley’s
foreign
policy adviser. Like Mosley, his niece, Mary Redvers, recalled
that he came
from a hunting and shooting background, whose family estates
in Hartbury,
 THE NAZIS 339

Gloucestershire, had been sold after the First World War. Diana said he was
‘a typical English gentleman who thought the country was going downhill
quickly’. He was a descendant of the nineteenth-century Prime Minister and
Foreign Secretary George Canning. He had a distinguished war record (roth
Hussars, MC), had travelled in Palestine and India, and had a special interest
in the Arab world, having served on the staff of the Rif leader, Abd-el-Krim.
_ According to his daughter Louise, ‘Bobby’ was ‘very highly regarded by the
Arabs and had a large number of contacts with them’. He thought the Rifs
had been unjustly treated, which brought him into conflict with the Foreign
Office. He was a romantic in inclination, modelling himself on Lawrence of
Arabia, and published several plays. Because of his interest in Morocco, Louise
said, ‘the French were very anti him’. He was employed by MI6 and was
presented with a cigarette case inscribed with ‘for services to the Secret Service’
for help in France during 1926-7. His daughter recognized that he had been
involved in ‘a lot of undercover activities’.
Gordon-Canning’s reasons for joining the BUF were, according to his
daughter, tied to his experience of the war: ‘He was there on Christmas Day
when both sides stopped fighting.’ He had been at the Somme, wrote poetry
about the war and became pro-German. Although ‘a cold, emotionally frigid
man’, he was also ‘very active, very charismatic, very kind, though extremely
innocent’. Strongly anti-Bolshevist, in Fascism he discovered a ‘certain barbaric
splendour’ and a ‘warrior spirit opposed to that of the nightclub’. He also
found an outlet for his anti-Semitism. He disagreed with Mosley over the use
of uniforms. He told his daughter that ‘Britain had never had a standing army
and the British people would not stand for it’.
Gordon-Canning had married well and ‘threw money at the BUF’, acting
as Mosley’s banker and contact man with Hitler. In 1935 he made a special
trip to Berlin and, fearful for his life, took out an expensive insurance policy.
In March he created the January Club’s successor, the Windsor Club. Its
confidential membership was by invitation of its front man, Luttman-Johnson,
who attracted to the Club well-connected right-wingers such as Sir Henry
Fairfax-Lucy and Douglas Jerrold.
Despite setbacks, Mosley packed out meetings and on 24 March addressed
8,000 people at the Albert Hall. He attacked ‘international Jewish finance’,
which was ‘sweating the East and ruining the West, destroying the Indian
masses and filling the unemployment queues of Lancashire’. The enemy was
‘that nameless, homeless and all powerful force which stretches its greedy
fingers from the shelter of England to throttle trade and menace the peace of
the world. This is the force which ... challenges Germany with chatter and
menaces of war, using the power of the Press to insult and to provoke the new
world force of Fascism.’ He warned that ‘Jews must either put the interest of
Britain before the interests of Jewry, or be deported from Great Britain’. He
340 BLACKSHIRT

brought the crowd to its feet with a rousing finale. ‘This shall be the epic
generation which scales again the heights of time and history to see once more
the immortal lights — the lights of sacrifice and high endeavour summoning
through ordeal the soul of humanity to the sublime and the eternal. The
alternatives of our age are heroism or oblivion. There are no lesser paths in
the history of great nations. Can we, therefore, doubt which path to choose?’
That night there was an attempt to contact Cimmie through a medium.
Lady Mosley claimed she had sent a psychic message saying she did not want
the children to be with Mrs Guinness. Mosley was an absentee father who
took little interest in his children’s lives. His youngest son was almost a
stranger. Irene worried about Michael, whom she had come to regard as
the son she had never had, and Vivien, who was subjected to her father’s
‘unpredictable moods and sudden ferocious teasing’. His overriding interest
was politics and the Curzon family solicitor was convinced he would sell
Savehay Farm to fund his ambitions. Mosley had thoughts of asking his
children to refund him any nioney he spent on Denham when they came
of age.
On 4 April Ian Hope Dundas returned from Rome, where he had presented
radio broadcasts supporting Italian Fascism, with the news that ‘although he
had been successful in interviewing highly-placed officials, Mussolini refused
to see him’. Shortly afterwards Mosley made an unscheduled trip to Italy but
he, too, was unsuccessful in restoring funding to previous levels and was forced
to make further cuts.
The National League of Airmen had some success. People, Collin Brooks
wrote on 27 March, ‘are very much alive to the German menace and very
angry at the lack of an adequate air force’. Care was taken ‘not to attack
Germany, though when any incautious speaker does so it is only a few Fascists
who object’. Churchill was incensed by Rothermere’s appeasement. He
told his wife on 13 April, ‘he thinks the Germans are all powerful and that
the British are hopeless and doomed. He proposes to meet this situation by
grovelling to Germany.’
The Mail urged building 10,000 planes and pleaded for ‘a British Goering’
to cut through interdepartmental wrangling. ‘Blackbird’ (ie. Dorman) wanted
the aviation industry run ‘under a modern fascist system of government with
an Air minister who knew his job’. Mosley supported the ‘thoroughly fascist
sentiments’ of the rearmament campaign. Britain had a thriving aviation
industry and was the world’s largest exporter of aeroplanes. It was achieved
by the sort of planning and co-ordination between ministries of which Mosley
approved. With help from Lady Houston, Rothermere paid Bristol Aeroplane
to build a prototype aircraft, dubbed ‘Britain First’ — the slogan of the BUF.
The Blenheim light bomber flew for the first time on 12 April 1935 and was
 THE NAZIS 341

presented as a ‘peace gift’ to the Air Ministry. Ordered by the RAF, it played
a significant role in the Second World War.

On 14 April in Leicester Mosley opened a new crusade against organized

Jewry ‘so that relations with leading representatives of National Socialist
Germany could be intensified’. Mosley learnt ‘there was a body of opinion’
among Nazis in Munich that was ‘not nearly so keen to avoid offending Great
Britain’ and wanted to establish relations with the BUF.
Alfred Rosenberg was responsible for ‘arranging a possible visit to Germany
by Mosley’. He had spoken ‘to the Fiihrer about it numerous times’ but ‘a
secret meeting was not expedient, since such a meeting would probably become
public. Rather, the Fiihrer informed me that he would not stand in the way of
a possible visit since he wanted to grant a hearing to every British politician
(regardless of party-political affiliation) who is endeavouring to do justice to
Germany.’ Rosenberg then discovered that a meeting with Hitler was being
arranged in ‘great secrecy’ by Ribbentrop, who scored a diplomatic triumph
by negotiating the Anglo-German Naval Treaty. By agreeing to limit the
German fleet, he eased British fears of a German sea threat and a naval arms
race. Hitler believed the treaty freed him from British interference in his own
plans.
Mosley travelled to Munich on 25 April and was received at the Fiihrer’s
flat in Prinzregentenplatz. Hitler ‘slipped shyly into a room’, Mosley recalled.
‘His bombast was reserved for the platform. Unlike Musso, who was all
bombast and impossible to talk to. Not so Hitler.’ His ‘hypnotic manner was
entirely absent; perhaps I was an unsuitable subject; in any case, he made no
attempt whatever to produce any effect of that kind. He was simple, and
treated me throughout the occasion with a gentle, almost feminine charm.’
The conversation was translated by Paul Schmidt but no record survives.
According to Mosley, Hitler ‘talked in a very cool fashion’, clarifying the
relationship between the Nazis and the BUF, which had to be subordinated
‘to his foreign policy goal of coming to an agreement with Great Britain’.
Hitler was a ‘completely inert, white, exhausted creature’, until they discussed
the possibility of war between Britain and Germany, which Mosley said would
be like ‘two splendid young men fighting each other until they both fall
exhausted and bleeding to the ground, when the jackals of the world would
mount triumphant on their bodies’. Hitler spoke ‘passionately against fighting
the English. He had developed a complex that he must avoid fighting us if he
could.’ Mosley said, ‘if you get into a war with the English they will never
stray, they’re like that, you understand that, don’t you? They will go on
fighting till the bitter end.’ Hitler replied, ‘Yes, I do.’
Herbert Dohring, a member of the Fithrer’s bodyguard, recalled that Hitler’s
342 BLACKSHIRT

favourite film was the 1935 production of Yeats-Brown’s Lives of a Bengal

Lancer. It influenced his thinking and he ‘would always praise how a small
country like England could run and manage this huge Empire. Hitler always
wanted to have a friendly relationship with England.’ Mosley later told James .
Lees-Milne that, had he spoken German, he believed he could have influenced .
Hitler. He ‘wanted unity with us in the fight against Bolshevism’. But, Lees-
Milne replied, ‘he wanted war with other, smaller countries which he could
overwhelm’. Mosley tacitly agreed.
Hitler and Mosley talked for an hour but ‘the word Jew was never men-
tioned’. They moved to the drawing room for lunch with the Duchess of
Brunswick, only daughter of the Kaiser and a great-granddaughter of Queen
Victoria; Winifred Wagner, English-born daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner,
who ran the Bayreuth Festival, and was connected to the Mitfords via the
grandfather Redesdale, a great friend of her husband’s; and Unity Mitford.
Hitler hoped Unity would be surprised at meeting Mosley but was unaware
they already knew each other. Mosley remembered her ‘stage-struck by the
glamour and panoply of the national socialist movement and the mass admir-
ation of Hitler’. She asked Hitler what he thought of Mosley. He replied, ‘Ein
ganzer Kerl! [Quite a man]’
Also present were Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, and
his wife Magda, Ribbentrop and Werlin, a director of Daimler-Benz. Mosley
had a discussion with Hermann Goering and his wife, actress Emmy Sonnem-
ann, known for her vulgarity and Wagnerian appearance. The ‘small, dark
and (ironically) Jewish-looking’ Goebbels was the only one of the Nazi hier-
archy with whom foreigners found conversation amusing. Diana thought him
‘intelligent, witty and sarcastic’.
Goebbels hero-worshipped the Fiihrer as the ‘natural creative instrument of
divine destiny. I stand by him profoundly moved. What a fellow, what a man.’
The little Doctor with the club-foot claimed his limp was the result of a war
wound but it was probably due to infantile paralysis. According to Staff
Officer Wilfred von Oven, it was partly bitterness about his deformity —
psychologically crippling in the context of National Socialist eugenics — that
made Goebbels a malevolent monster. He had hatreds he never lost. A virulent
anti-Semite, Goebbels was absolutely loyal and Hitler appointed him national
director of the Ministry for Propaganda (ProMi). Goebbels thought Mosley
made ‘a good impression. A bit brash, which he tries to conceal behind a
forced pushiness. Otherwise acceptable however. Of course, he’s on his best
behaviour. The Fiihrer has set to work on him. Wonder if he’ll ever come to
power?’
 17
1935

Mosley boasted Hitler liked him, admired Diana and had been entranced by
Unity, who was influential with Hitler as part of his Osteria group, though he
learnt ‘only afterwards that she was a follower of Mosley’. Unity’s diary
records every meeting with the Fiihrer in red ink. The red-letter days number
140 — about two or three times a month. She wrote to Diana that Hitler said
Mosley was unwise to import Fascism and adopt the black shirt — both were
foreign to British traditions. He said he should have referred to the revolution
of Oliver Cromwell — and called his men ‘Ironsides’.
Hitler, Albert Speer recalled, said ‘it was a mistake to export ideas such as
National Socialism. To do so would only lead to a strengthening of nationalism
in other countries and thus a weakening of his own position.’ Other move-
ments had produced ‘no leader of his own calibre’. Mosley was one of the
‘copyists who had no original ideas. They imitated us and our methods slav-
ishly and would never amount to anything.’ He believed that ‘in every country
you had to start from different premises and change your methods accord-
ingly’. Speer’s claim that Hitler ‘thought nothing of Mosley’ changed as the
Fiihrer learnt more about the British Fascist.
Speer believed Hitler used Unity for unofficial leaks. She was not a spy but
‘it was amazing that someone not German was around Hitler and could listen
to details of party politics and far-reaching policy. Hitler made no secret of
his thoughts [but] his outspokenness was calculated, talking secrets knowing
that rumours would be spread.’ Unity was tight-lipped with journalists as to
the details of her conversations; to private individuals she argued his case,
often to shock. She talked freely with Hitler and pressed him on his relations
with Britain. He said he wished to cement an alliance with a fellow Nordic
nation. Unity fed his admiration of ‘the English cotisins’, amid ‘profound and
widespread German ignorance of British politics, national life and wider
‘history’.
The BUF praised Hitler’s pledge of friendship to Britain in his May 1935
Reichstag speech as ‘the most important European event for a decade’. It
welcomed the ‘rough, gauntleted handshake of the New Germany, glad to feel
again the iron grip of a worthy foe now comrade in the struggle against
344 BLACKSHIRT

... the perfidious advance of Communist World Revolution which would

assuredly otherwise overrun Europe’. Mosley conceded the right to aggressive
expansionism, based upon the desire to unite the Germanic people. Hitler’s
desire to achieve ‘racial union’ was considered legitimate and he argued that ,
even if Britain and Germany pursued different political aims, they could still
complement each other in striving for peace.
On 7 May Diana and Unity lunched at the Osteria with Hitler. Also present
were BUF members Baroness Ella van Heemstra and Joseph Hepburn-Ruston,
who attended Nazi rallies, and she contributed articles to the Blackshirt. ‘The
Call of Fascism’ (26 April) was dedicated to ‘King and Empire, the Corporate
State, and the revolt against alien domination of banking’. Hepburn-Ruston’s
role as a covert propagandist for Mosley included frequent visits to the Brown
House and led the Dutch government to question Nazi influence among its
citizens. Queen Wilhelmina asked the Baroness’s father, a court official, to
speak to his daughter on the subject. Hepburn-Ruston took umbrage at the
interference and supposedly walked out of the marriage. In fact, the Baroness
found her husband — a lookalike for Hollywood idol Ronald Colman — in bed
with the governess. He was next heard of in Berlin working for German
Intelligence and then running several ‘businesses’ in London with fellow
Mosleyite Dr Arthur Albert Tester.
Tall, well-dressed, monocled, Tester described himself as a financier, though
the Foreign Office considered him a ‘first class crook, who lives by swindling
the public through the formation of bogus companies’. Born in Stuttgart, the
son of a British consul and a German mother, he was imprisoned during
the First World War. At the war’s end, developing a reputation as a racketeer,
he was connected to naval security and may have undertaken ‘intelligence
work for the occupying forces’. In 1927 Tester was expelled from France,
suspected of spying for German Military Intelligence. Three years later he was
imprisoned for fraud and, on release, moved to England where he bought
Naldera, on the Kent coast near Broadstairs, for his German wife and six
children. The house had been built for Lord Curzon as a seaside retreat;
Cimmie spent her summer holidays there. Tester bought the Lucinda, a luxury
steam-yacht on which he held lavish parties, and ran an expensive office in
St James’s Place with Hepburn-Ruston. Most of Tester’s time was spent in
Europe where he set up bogus companies and absconded with investors’ funds.
In 1932 Tester joined the BUF. He admitted — when a personal letter from
Mosley was found on him ina security check — that he was a great admirer of
the Leader. A German Foreign Office report revealed that Tester’s brother-in-
law, Arthur Uckert, had been ‘active with the Secret State Police since 1 933%
He had moved with Tester from Berlin'to England and stayed until August
1934, when he returned to Germany and joined the State Security Head Office.
The files reveal Tester’s links to ‘the inner circle of Reichsfiihrer Himmler’.
 ED3'5 345
He was ‘leader’ of the Broadstairs BUF and told the Express he was Mosley’s
personal aide-de-camp and wished ‘they were not called Fascists in England.
National Socialists would describe us better.’
Tester predicted to the Herald that Mosley would attain power. When
Mosley was later interned, Tester wrote that ‘the highest principle which
determined my life and directed its course’ was ‘to achieve his freedom so that
. he, whose calling is to lead England out of chaos, remains alive and can fulfil
_ his objective. I accept him alone as my judge; he will one day judge whether
I have the right to be called one of his shield bearers.’ Despite the negative
press Tester received, Mosley never denied his role.
German documents acknowledge Tester as a ‘representative of the Mosley
Party to Germany’ and the man ‘who got Mosley, who was previously turned
towards Italy, interested in National Socialism’. British Foreign Office files
refer to allegations that Tester ‘finances Mosley’s movement’. He claimed he
‘did not receive either directly or indirectly any financial benefit for my political
and propaganda activity. From the German Government or from private
German organisations or people.’ A number of authorities disputed this.
According to captured US Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) files, Tester was
the one genuine Nazi agent in the BUF. The CIC regarded Tester as ‘an official
of the BUF’ and an ‘S. D. official’.
MIS surveillance of Naldera confirmed Tester ‘entertained many visitors
from abroad and many Englishmen, some avowedly connected with the Fascist
movement’, including Joyce and Mosley. During 1935 he was granted an
interview by Belgian Premier Graf de Broqueville, which was published in
Action. In the same year he arranged for a Hamburg-based barrister assisting
the German Foreign Office, Dr Behn, to interview Mosley. When a second
interview was arranged, Behn was banned from entry to Britain. Joyce later
told the Germans he had known Tester ‘personally’ but warned them of his
activities. He was known to Fritz Hesse in the German embassy in London,
who wrote that ‘he smells of a smart businessman with whom it is best doing
no business’.
On 9 May Unity and Diana had lunch at Hitler’s flat, where they were
joined by Gordon-Canning. Mosley’s representative later met with Rosenberg
and officials of the Nazi Party Foreign Department to ‘deliver a request’
which he felt ‘unable to set down in writing’. Rosenberg subsequently had an
audience with Hitler to put to him the request for*funds.
Manchester Guardian journalist Paul Willart found Unity ‘a good contact’
but also ‘a stupid girl, illiterate. She had mopped up everything in the Stiirmer.’
She told Lady Phipps, wife of the British ambassador, that Streicher was ‘her
favourite among the Nazis’. She said ‘Jews were traitors’ and wanted “everyone
to know she was a Jew-hater’. During a home visit with Diana, Unity produced
an autographed photograph of Streicher, which proved too much for their
346 BLACKSHIRT

sister, Decca, who remembered Diana drawling: ‘ “But, darling,” opening her
enormous blue eyes, “Streicher is a kitten.”
German diplomats in London realized anti-Semitic propaganda should not
be given too much prominence and, since they received no guidance from Berlin,
used their own discretion. Streicher, however, displayed little restraint as he now;
praised Mosley for his anti-Semitism. On 9 May at Nuremberg he congratulated
Mosley for a speech at Leicester which drew attention to the Jewish Question.
Mosley replied and on the following day, Streicher’s Frankische Tageszeitung
published the telegram (reprinted in the Herald) under the headline THE
AWAKENING OF THE PEOPLES. ‘I value this message of yours, in the midst of
our hard fight, greatly. The might of Jewish corruption [as reprinted] must
be overcome in all great countries before the future of Europe can be assured in
justice and peace. Our fight is a difficult one. Our victory certain.’ Skidelsky
chose not to publish this telegram and, David Pryce-Jones noted, did not even
hint at ‘the relation of Mosley and his movement to Streicher’.
MIS saw Mosley as vain and unrealistic but possessed with sufficient machi-
avellian cunning to keep his activities within the law. He was perceived as ‘a
renegade aristocratic dilettante and traitor to the labour movement, a figure
of ridicule rather than a threat to the ability to protest’. From the summer of
1935 the BUF was viewed as having only minor political significance but there
was concern about the growing links with Continental counterparts. Maxwell
Knight’s Fascist sympathies waned when he learnt of Mosley’s contacts with
Germany. Margaret Leighton makes the point that he ‘could have been por-
trayed as the reliable tool of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in the same way
that communist leaders were said to be pawns of Moscow’. In fact, most
official pronouncements on Mosley ‘bore an air of bemused tolerance’.
At the end of May Mosley flew to Rome, accompanied by Dundas and Peter
Symes, National Inspecting Officer in Birmingham, to revive the subsidies.
Funding was resumed but Mussolini extracted a high price, insisting he support
his Abyssinian campaign. MIS learnt that he also insisted the BUF demonstrate
its potential for achieving power. Once in power, it was agreed a Mosley
government would recognize Italy’s legitimate interests in the Mediterranean,
which included Malta.
On 5 June Diana learnt that a flat had been found for her on the orders of
Hitler. ‘It belongs’, Unity wrote, ‘to a young Jewish couple who are going
abroad.’ Their brother was introduced to Hitler. Tom ‘adored the Fiihrer — he
almost got into a frenzy like us sometimes, though I expect he will have cooled
down by the time he gets home’. On 18 June Unity wrote to Der Stiirmer
bemoaning the fact that
the English have no notion of the Jewish danger. Our struggle is extremely hard.
Our worst Jews work only behind the scenes. They never come into the open, and
 ms 347
therefore we cannot show them to the British public in their true dreadfulness. We
_ hope, however, that you will see that we will soon win against the world enemy, in
spite of all his cunning. We think with joy of the day when we shall be able to say
with might and authority: ‘England for the English! Out with the Jews!’

Streicher invited Unity to Hesselberg for the midsummer ‘blood-and-soil’

festival on 22 June. A crowd of 20,000 heard her brief speech praising
"Streicher. On the same day the Miinchener Zeitung published ‘Confessions of
an English fascist girl’. She said Mosley was ‘a man imbued with his sense of
mission and an unshakeable belief in the victory of his cause ... we English
fascists are behind him with the same enthusiasm as today the whole German
people are behind their wonderful Fiihrer.’ She added that ‘the moment our
Jewish enemies are ready to attack us — the time for this, we know, is likely
to be soon — then our struggle at last will reach its final decisive stage’. A copy
was forwarded by the British embassy with a note that ‘Miss Mitford, although
only 20 years of age, appears to represent Sir Oswald Mosley at Munich’. The
Foreign Office added that ‘the Embassy do not seem to know about Miss
Mitford’s acquaintance with the Chancellor which is very curious indeed’. It
was ‘true that her family are friends of Mosley’ but the official could not
believe she ‘represents’ him, even though ‘she sees Herr Hitler very often’.
When, on 24 June, the Frankische Tageszeitung asked Unity about the low
_ profile of the Mosley movement, she said it was ‘ignored in the main papers,
as once happened in Germany to the National Socialists’. She acknowledged
~ Mosley had not originally been anti-Semitic, but he ‘very soon recognized that
the Jewish danger . . . fundamentally poses a danger to all the peoples of the
world’. She said the BUF would ‘put up some candidates in the certain hopes
_ of winning seats . . . But that will be only one more springboard and there can
be no looking back until we have swept the whole nation with us.’
Mosley was aware of Unity’s activities in Germany and, if they annoyed
him, on no occasion did he admonish her for her statements. He was happy
for her to develop contacts within Nazi circles at the very highest level. Nancy
Mitford mocked her: ‘We were asked to stay with somebody called Himmler
or something, tickets and everything paid for . .. Actually he wanted to show
us over a concentration camp, now why? So that I could write a funny book
about them.’
Nancy sent an advance copy of Wigs on the Green to Diana. The book is a
mild satire but Diana removed passages she thought damaging to Mosley.
Nancy recognized their point of view, ‘that Fascism is something too serious
to be dealt with in a funny book at all. Surely that is a little unreasonable?
~ Fascism is now such a notable feature of modern life all over the world that
it must be possible to consider it in any context.’ She believed the book ‘far
more in favour of Fascism than otherwise’. The heroine, Eugenia Malmains,
348 BLACKSHIRT

is a fair-haired eighteen-year-old who spouts Fascist ideology. Eugenia, re-

cognizable within the family circle as Unity, is not wholly a figure of fun. She
says things Nancy believed: ‘The rich have betrayed their trust, preferring the
fetid atmosphere of cocktail-bars and night-clubs to the sanity of a useful
country life.’ One of the young men (based on Peter Rodd) is the voice of
Nancy: ‘Western civilisation is old and tired, the dark ages are practically
upon us anyhow, and I should prefer that they march in with trumpet and
flag than that they should creep upon us to the tap of a typewriter.’
Diana was angry and ‘felt that when Mosley and his supporters were being
attacked in real street fights she could not have much to do with a sister who
was publicly laughing at them’. Nancy told Unity she wished she ‘had never
been born into such a family of fanatics. Please don’t read the book if it’s
going to stone you up against me.’ The book attracted little attention but
Mosley banned Nancy from visiting Diana.
After her disparaging remarks about Hitler, Mosley avoided his mother.
On 26 June she wrote that she had been ‘troubled for a long time because it
is obvious to me that I was not really wanted by you in the BUF any longer.
If my position is going to be made difficult by your showing me, as you have
so often done, that you do not want me, then the best thing is for me to go.’
He let her down in front of all her subordinates, despite ‘the time and money
I have spent ... I do not suppose you will ever realise what it has cost me
to write this letter.’ The breach was healed but she no longer played a part in
the BUF.

BUF opposition to the India Bill was organized by Joyce, who described its
backers as ‘one loathsome, fetid, purulent, tumid mass of hypocrisy’ hiding
behind ‘Jewish dictators’. By forcing through the India Act in July, the govern-
ment took a step towards Indian self-government. The India Defence League
had support in the country but ‘the bitter battle fought within the Tory ranks
over the issue was never to be repeated’. Nor again did Mosley have an
opportunity to exploit the issue.
Mosley did, however, take the opportunity to exploit anti-Semitism, particu- |
larly in London’s East End. The Bethnal Green and Bow branches had been
formed in the previous autumn and, during the winter, a Shoreditch branch
whose organizer was J. F. ‘Duke’ Sutherland, a Catholic law clerk and racing
driver who was an important contact with Germany and conduit for Nazi
funds. In the summer of 1935 Richard ‘Jock’ Houston in Shoreditch and
Edward ‘Mick’ Clarke at Victoria Park Square, Bethnal Green began to gain
receptive audiences. Within six months eighty meetings were held in Bethnal
Green alone and within the year nearly half of the BUF membership was to
be found in Bethnal Green, Stepney, Shoreditch and Hackney.
The East End remained rooted in traditional industries — the docks, clothing,
 re) 349

shoe and furniture manufacturing — which were severely hit by an economic

downturn. It was not a ‘Depressed Area’, as it suffered lower unemployment
(15 per cent) than the worst-hit regions, but many families were crowded into
run-down, insanitary Victorian slums. Blackshirt Fred Bailey recalled that
conditions were appalling: ‘My father was out of work for ten years. He
* laboured to keep our heads above water. He would earn a shilling as a bookie’s
runner or a look-out for a game of dice. We were means tested. My family
was brought to the means test because of that and they had to go before the
Board. You had to sell everything before there was any money.’
Bailey was typical of East Enders featured in the novel What hope for Green
Street (1945) by another Blackshirt, Olive Hawks. It is a highly partisan
account ‘of why so many working class families in East London supported
“Imperial Socialism” and the social factors that prevented the wishes of ordi-
nary people from materialising’. According to Mosleyite John Warburton,
‘There was no hope. The one thing they had was patriotism and to them
Mosley brought that hope.’ But instead of turning their anger against the
powerful, Mosley’s working-class recruits sought a scapegoat for their situ-
ation. Bailey ‘resented the way the East End was being used as a sweatshop’.
Warburton admitted, ‘they didn’t like the people who a generation earlier had
come from Russia and Poland and who now lived in Aldgate and Whitechapel.’
Britain’s Jewish poplulation in 1935 was around 330,000 (0.8 per cent of
the population). During the late nineteenth century there had been an influx
of 100,000 Ashkenazi Jews from Russia who mostly settled in Leeds,
Manchester and the East End, which by 1935 contained about 150,000 Jews.
The Jewish community was easily identifiable with its ‘East European culture,
Yiddish language, respect for Jewish law and deeply held traditionalist
religious practices’. This was, notes Robert Wistrich, ‘the single most potent
factor in the new anti-semitism which attained a new virulence in Britain’. It
combined ‘negative stereotypes of poor immigrant Jews with a whole range
of “rich Jew” anti-semitism, intellectual racism, Social Darwinism and class
snobbery, with vulgar conspiracy theories about Jewish plans for world domi-
nation. The newcomers were closely identified with the practice of sweated
labour, disease-ridden, clannish, materialistic, criminal and unpatriotic.’
A key BUF figure was ex-Liberal Mayor Charles Bennett, whose chemist
shop in Green Street was ‘a centre of vigorous resistance to the menace of the
-_price-cutter and chain store’. A former Vice-President of the Bethnal Green
Chamber of Commerce, Bennett organized shopkeepers on behalf of a BUF
front, the British Traders’ Bureau. The Nazis had a high regard for Bennett,
who had married a German and whose children were educated in Germany.
Ribbentrop identified him as ‘one of the most active comrades of Mosley’ and
his trips to Berlin were sponsored by Goebbels, who noted that he ‘made use
of every opportunity to learn about German rebuilding and to carry our
350 BLACKSHIRT

philosophy back to the Mosleyites’. Bennett was invited to Hitler’s last birth-
day celebration before the war.
There was long-standing anti-Jewish feeling in the area and BUF speakers
made a direct link to the British Brothers’ League, which had earlier gained,
support for anti-alien legislation to control immigration. Among those who
listened to BUF speakers were parents and grandparents of Blackshirts who
had supported the League. Founded in 1901 by Captain Shaw, it attracted
local Conservative and Liberal MPs. Its tactics of mass meetings, inflammatory
oratory and popular mobilization were highly successful but also led to anti-
Jewish violence. Speakers referred to ‘savages’ and ‘scum of humanity’ but
made few direct references to Jews because the leadership believed overt
anti-Semitism would harm the League’s progress. The legislation was tame
but the League lived on until 1923, providing an outlet for G. K. Chesterton’s
Distributists in their veiled attacks on Jewish influence. ‘A generation of East
Enders’, noted Colin Holmes, ‘were familiarised with a populist movement,
basing its tactics on the mass meeting, that allied jingoistic nationalism with
anti-alien feeling.’
Both in the local furniture trade, Owen Burke and Mick Clarke — the only
important grass-roots leader thrown up by British Fascism — spearheaded the
Blackshirt assault in Bethnal Green. The pair spoke at street corners to jeering
audiences. ‘Night after night,’ recalled John Beckett, ‘squads of their comrades
used to receive the riot-call, and from Chelsea the old vans would rush to
extricate the venturesome speaker from a hostile crowd.’ Gradually they
developed receptive audiences, particularly among the Stepney Irish — tra-
ditionally anti the Jewish community — who came to dominate the local BUF.
Speakers played on local resentment against Jews who were accused of taking
over the furniture, tailoring and hairdressing trades, and of being engaged in
local government corruption.
Fred Bailey claimed the campaign ‘was verbal more than anything else’.
That is certainly not how those subjected to it viewed it. William J. Fishman,
a sixteen-year-old Stepney Labour League of Youth activist, said the BUF
‘deliberately played on the irrational fears and hatreds of the slum dwellers.
Fascist incursions were mounted against the Jews. Attacks ... were stepped
up as blackshirt gangs made daily, more often, nocturnal, forays into the
ghetto ... East End Jews, in the front line of attack, had no alternative but to
resist.’
The Jewish establishment response aimed to deny Mosley publicity. They
advised, recalled Joe Jacobs, that Jews ‘should not draw attention to them-
selves by taking part in anti-Fascist action on the streets. They seemed to think
that it would only play into Mosley’s hands if he could point to more and
more Jews as Communists.’ They pleaded for ‘trust in the authorities’ but
events in Germany ‘didn’t seem to show that this attitude was right’. As the
 1935 32

BUF campaign intensified, East End Jews joined the Communist Party in
increasing numbers. ©
The Popular Front idea was formalized at the Seventh World Congress of
the Comintern in July and adopted by the British Communist Party at its
National Congress in the autumn. It was, however, opposed by the Labour
movement and CP leaders remained wedded to the idea that the National
government posed the real threat. Mosley represented a ‘lightning conductor’
for the government whose ‘reformist leaders point to Mosley as representing
the sole menace of fascism’. This allowed them to promote the National
~ government’s repressive measures of preparation towards Fascism as a lesser
evil compared with Mosley, while the masses’ attention was fixed on him.
Individual Communists, however, were preoccupied with the BUF. When
Mosley’s ‘travelling circus’ tried to penetrate south Wales and Lancashire, it
encountered fierce resistance. ‘We would physically throw them out as well as
politically throw them out,’ a Manchester Communist recalled. Joe Jacobs’s
account of Communist—Fascist rivalry in the East End illustrates the divide
within the CP over strategy. Philip Piratin favoured a more sophisticated
approach but Jacobs advocated ‘the maximum force available’. A Special
Branch report details how Communists ‘succeeded in driving the fascists from
the streets of Camden Town and forced them to vacate their branch there’.
The same tactic was attempted in the East End, but ‘did not meet with the
same success’.
In the summer, links were established between BUF officials and Otto Bene,
now leader of the NSDAP’s foreign division, though they were not without
stress, since ‘Bene’s entourage regard both Mussolini and Mosley with some
contempt as being financed from Jewish sources’. Nevertheless, Joyce sent the
Germans a report, in which the BUF’s anti-Semitic agitation was stressed.
Mosley made his first East End appearance at Stratford Town Hall, West Ham,
on 17 July 1935. He told the crowd he was ‘going to tell you who your masters
Jewish
are ... Who backs the Conservative Party? who but international
who put razor gangs on the streets. Who finances
financiers? They are the people
in your
the Labour Party? The Little Jews in Whitechapel who sweat you
days later he turned on the ‘decadence of our legislators’
sweatshops.’ Two
Abyssinia’.
who were ‘hysterically seeking to protect the negroid savage of
to link Eritrea
Italy announced it wanted to run a railway through Abyssinia
called up his
with Somaliland. Addis Ababa refused permission and Mussolini
appeal’ to his people,
troops. When Emperor Ras Tafari made a ‘stirring
us conglom eration of tribes
Mosley denounced them as a ‘black and barbaro
principle ’. How was it possible ‘to
imbued with not one single Christian
the Four Great Powers of Europe with a
envisage the “equality” of one of
in the conditio ns of the Dark Ages?’.
barbarous Negro state existing
Saturday Review,
Alongside Garvin in the Observer and Lady Houston’s
Bina BLACKSHIRT

Rothermere led opposition to sanctions against Italy. He claimed ‘an Abys-

sinian victory over a white race would raise in the Dark Continent and other
continents far worse and more far reaching problems than any it could solve’.
In an article on 24 July he said, ‘all sound-thinking Britons will wish Italy well:
in the great enterprise to which she has set her hand.’ The Mail suggested ‘the’
British public take no interest whatever in the slave-owning Abyssinian
Empire. And in this war which now seems inevitable their sympathy is wholly
with the cause of the white races which Italy is so firmly upholding.’
Once a supporter of the League of Nations and its right to act against illegal
interventions, Mosley was now in Mussolini’s pocket and claimed a change
of heart ‘due to the League’s transformation into an instrument for main-
taining the status quo and the personal weaknesses of League delegates’. In
The First of the League Wars (1936) Fuller claimed that ‘what the League
definitely wanted was a war to smash Fascism, for that was the object of
the occult power that was controlling its destiny ... socialists, communists,
half-sane and deluded people shouted for military sanctions and the closing
of the Suez Canal. These meant world war, the destruction of Europe and the
expansion of atheistic Bolshevism — here the occult powers revealed them-
selves.’ Behind it all was the Jewish conspiracy, whose only opposition was
Fascism — ‘a powerful religious conception — divinely manifested in
nationalism’.
Mosley’s problem was in getting his message across to the public. On 26 July
he was informed by the BBC that a broadcast of a talk by him might be
possible in the autumn and rumours spread through BUF headquarters that a
talk was planned. The BBC’s Gladstone Murray reported to his controller
that ‘this communication has given Sir Oswald great satisfaction and should
keep him quiet over the summer and autumn. I do hope, however, that the
plan succeeds this time.’
Two days later Mosley set off with his two elder children and Baba, who
somehow believed his relationship with Diana was platonic, for a holiday in
a villa owned by her friend Lady Rennell at Posillipo on the Italian Riviera.
As they left England, Diana was involved in a car crash. Her face was cut so
badly that her looks were only saved by a leading plastic surgeon, Sir Harold
Gillies (later a national figure for his work restoring the burnt faces of Battle
of Britain fighter pilots), whose skill left her without a scar.
Diana eventually made it to the villa, arriving during a dinner at which
Mosley and Baba were entertaining Italy’s Crown Princess, a childhood friend
of the Curzon sisters. Vivien remembered hearing a row between the grown-
ups that night with doors being banged. Next day Mosley took Baba and his
children for a three-day trip on his yacht (named after Vivien) to Amalfi,
during which he managed to convince Baba of his devotion. As Anne de
Courcy notes, ‘the status quo that so suited Mosley both temperamentally and
 1935 353

_ physically had been satisfactorily restored.’ Diana tended to treat Mosley’s

philandering as he had once advised Cimmie to do, as a tiresome ‘silliness’
_ that he could not help. She admitted she suffered ‘agonies of jealousy’, but
was confident ‘he’d always come back to me’. Diana, too, attracted admirers,
and Mosley was apt to be jealous when he was apart from her. She became
pregnant during the stay and later had an abortion.

_ Franco Zeffirelli’s film Tea with Mussolini was factually based on the strong
British community in pre-war Tuscany. Most were civil servants and army
officers retired from far-flung posts of the British Empire; a number were
wealthy and lived in grand villas. Most were sympathetic to Italian Fascism
and the ‘head of the English Fascists’ in Italy, John Celli, recruited them to
the BUF. The irony was that they were often not only regarded as potential
spies by their hosts but were later vilified as traitors in their homeland. Military
records list 114 ex-pats, including Celli, classed during the Second World War
as ‘renegade British subjects’ and liable for arrest. Unfortunately, Foreign
Office records on those facing arrest have not survived.
‘English women adored Mussolini because he was macho and well man-
nered,’ recalled Zeffirelli. ‘Only in the end did they realise what a bastard he
_ was.’ One was Diana’s friend, Violet Trefusis, whose mother, Alice Keppel,
had been Edward VII’s lover. Violet was a lesbian; one of her lovers was
Harold Nicolson’s wife, Vita Sackville-West. Her parents had bought a ‘super-
- luxurious villa full of treasures’ in Florence. Her friend Vitetti had moved
- from the London embassy to the Foreign Office in Rome and arranged for her
to see Mussolini. Trefusis recalled skidding on the marble floor as they were
introduced, ‘scattering the contents of my bag, lipstick, cigarettes, bills, com-
pact, love letters. What could Mussolini, who prided himself on his way with
women, do but help me pick them up?’ She wondered why ‘Oh God, why had
we interfered in Abyssinia, interfered without interfering, brandishing threats,
- recoiling before acts?’

At the end of August Mosley tried to enlist Rothermere in his anti-sanctions

campaign. Gordon-Canning approached his personal assistant, Harry
Morrison, and invited Collin Brooks to Ebury Street for lunch which, Brooks
recalled, ‘was set on a balcony entered by stairs that might have been designed
_ for Macbeth’. Mosley was joined by the ‘rather silent’ Gordon-Canning and
they talked freely for an hour, mostly about the National League of Airmen,
which Brooks said had ‘inevitably attracted crooks’. Mosley recounted ‘the
trouble he had had in purging the Fascist movement of such fellows’. Mussolini
told him ‘discipline must be a light rein at first and only gradually tightened’.
He instanced Hitler as ‘one suffering from clever scoundrels, which made the
~ night of the knife inevitable’.
354 BLACKSHIRT

Brooks thought that ‘on the mastery of the streets’, Mosley was convincing.
When he asked whether he contemplated a coup d’état, Mosley said, ‘Look
at Hitler, he was legal to the point of ridicule - “Legality Hitler”.’ Only
‘in strange unforeseen circumstances’ would there be a coup. When Brooks,
suggested his moment would come in 1938, he expected ‘another economicy
crisis then. What has amazed me has been our progress despite trade recovery.’
Brooks thought he had misjudged the situation: “Discontent is not evident in
bad times, but always in improving times, when the share-out is in question.’
Mosley was ‘rather wrathy with Rothermere not for withdrawing support but
for starting the supporting campaign too violently’.
It was from this time of Mosley’s open support of Mussolini that MIS began
to regard the BUF with ‘very grave suspicion’. It feared Mosley might have
a secret organization ready for action in an ‘emergency’. In response, the
Committee of Imperial Defence set up a subcommittee chaired by Sir Claud
Schuster, Permanent Secretary to the Lord Chancellor, to devise emergency
legislation in the event of war. It was concerned what role the BUF might play
in aiding a potential enemy. To counter the threat, MIS used penetration
agents, ‘most but not all of whom were controlled by Knight’s M Section and
the shadowing staff’. Knight’s agents revealed that Italian Military Intelligence
was recruiting within the BUF and that some of Mosley’s close aides and
friends were assisting Nazi propaganda agencies.
According to German files, Fuller wrote intelligence reports on British
organizations and individuals for Goebbels and Himmler, chief of the SS. In
September he attended the German Army’s manoeuvres at Liineburg and
reported in the Mail on 9 September on ‘a great national demonstration’.
Hitler had been present, ‘moving from point to point and taking the keenest
interest in what he saw’. He met Hitler’s senior staff, some of whom were
suspicious that he might be a spy. In fact, he did report on such visits to the
War Office. Hitler told Diana that Fuller was ‘a difficult man to work with’,
though Mosley found him, ‘absolutely logical’. Hitler admired Fuller but
was acutely embarrassed, Mosley discovered, whenever the subject of his
association with Aleister Crowley was broached.
Mosley was in Italy when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. Beckett took control
of propaganda, launching a campaign against sanctions under the slogan
‘Mind Britain’s Business’. BUF income ‘swelled mysteriously until it was able
to spend over £3,000 [£102,000] per month’. With Fuller’s ‘organisational
experience, a great deal of useful spade work was done’. Mosley had set the
tone with meetings on 1 and 2 September in Manchester and at London’s
Adelphi Theatre. When an Englishman secured an oil concession for an Ameri-
can oil company from Abyssinia, Mosley saw it as evidence of the role of
international financiers. ‘Over the whole dispute rises the stink of oil. And
stronger even than the stink of oil rises the stink of the Jew.’ The Free Trade
 29. Boxing champion Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis joined Mosley’s New Party and trained its
defence force, the “Biff Boys’, originally made up of Oxford rugby players and
undergraduates but eventually a group of East End toughs

30. The violence associated with Mosley’s NP meetings, particularly the wreckage
a
caused at Birmingham’s Rag Market in September 1931, led to Mosley embracing
: more militant movement
 31. With the break-up of the New Party, Mosley took time away from politics.
Mosley with daughter Vivien and son Nicholas at Morden Park, 1932

33. This framed photograph of Mosley, take

32. Diana and first husband Bryan by Cimmie, was by her bed when she died
Guinness photographed by Cimmie at May 1933
the Lido, Venice, 1932
 34. Mosley sought the backing of
Mussolini, seen here addressing the people
from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia, 35. Destiny. Mosley in the black shirt
Rome in 1935 modelled on his fencing tunic

36. Mosley enlisted his aristocratic friends 37. Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail
into the BUF At the Blackshirt Ball in enthusiastically endorsed the Blackshirts.
October 1934, Mosley gave a fencing display Although fearful of another European war,
with fencing champion Charles de he praised Hitler and the Nazis
Beaumont
 Mosley was best man at the fascist wedding of his Chief
of Staff, lan Hope
Dundas, and Pamela Dorman in 1933. Dundas was the channel for funds from
Mussolini to Mosley

39. Geoffrey Dorman had 40. Director of Research, 41. Director of Publicity,
been an airman in the First George Sutton was Mosley’s A.G. Findlay was one of th
World War and became long serving secretary very few within the BUF t
editor of the BUF know about the secret
newspaper, Action funding from Mussolini
42. Mosley hoped for success in agricultural areas. He is
seen here addressing farmers at Aylesbury,
Buckinghamshire, in September 1933 43. Neil Francis Hawkins was
the BUF’s director general and
surrounded himself with heel-
clicking young Blackshirts

44. Hawkins’s deputy in 45. During 1934 the Blackshirt Defence Corps, seen here
Administration was a Catholic with its specially adapted vans, was largely responsible, with
former schoolmaster, Brian its heavy-handed stewarding, for the violence that came to
Donovan. He was intensely be associated with BUF meetings
loyal to The Leader
 47. Director of Propaganda Bill 48. A cousin of G.K. Chesterton,
Risdon represented the left wing of A.K. Chesterton was responsible with
gt. des ;
the BUF which included a number of William Joyce for the movement's
former Communists and members of extreme anti-Semitic propaganda
the Independent Labour Party
 i ae

ey
oe a <i
49. A BUF delegation to the 1933 Nuremberg
Party Rally included Unity Mitford, William
Joyce (flanked by French fascists in the front
row), Alexander Raven Thomson (with 50. Diana Mosley with Putzi Hanfstaengl,
moustache) and Captain Vincent (adorned responsible for foreign press relations at
with medals) the 1934 Party Rally

51. Unity opened many channels for Mosley to

leading Nazi officials. Unity speaking at
Hesselberg in 1935 with the regime’s leading
anti-Semite, the notorious Julius Streicher

52. From 1935, Captain Robert Gordon-

Canning, MC, an Arabist and financial
backer of the BUF was Mosley’s personal
foreign affairs adviser with responsibility
for relations with Nazi Germany
 53. During 1936 the BUF supported Italy’s 54. Blackshirts flooded London streets
invasion of Abyssinia with its “Mind Britain’s during the Abdication Crisis, December
Business’ campaign which was heavily 1936, in support of the young king, who
subsidised by Mussolini was regarded as a Fascist monarch

55. With his new Nazi-style uniforms, Mosley

inspects his storm troopers before the Battle of
Cable Street, October 1936 56. An anti-fascist demonstrator is arrestec
by police in the East End of London,
October 1936
 a3) 355
Hall audience responded with several minutes of applause. He insisted the
BUF was willing to take up arms in times of war, ‘but we shall not fight in
foreign quarrels for foreign ideals, or for foreign finance’. No Briton ought to
die for Abyssinia: ‘Britain is against all war and ... not one drop of British
blood shall ever be spent except in defence of Britain and our Empire.’ The
main burden of his speech was that collective security was ‘collective madness’:
‘keep out and stay out’ was his policy.
Daniel Waley, in his study British Public Opinion and the Abyssinian War,
claims the BUF campaign against British government policy in the Italian—
_ Abyssinian dispute was ‘isolationist and anti-League rather than pro-Italian’.
In fact, Mosley opposed the League because his sympathies lay with the
aggressor. Grandi told Irene that Mosley was ‘the only man talking sense in
England’. Michael Pugh notes that BUF support for the Italians was predict-
able but ‘the militancy of its campaign could not have been foreseen’ and does
not ‘explain why the BUF took so determined a stand against the trend of
British foreign policy’ given that a Peace Ballot survey showed that over eleven
million people favoured League sanctions against the Italians. The explanation
is that Mosley had to prove to Mussolini he was receiving value for his money.
Mosley unleashed his costly campaign with dozens of Blackshirts appearing
in the streets carrying placards with the slogan ‘Mind Britain’s Business’. The
BUF organized a 1,000 pro-peace meeting during September and chalked
‘Mind Britain’s Business’ in 175,000 places and ‘Mosley Says Peace’ in
100,000 others.
The BUF’s extremist version of the conventional right-wing mixture of
imperialism and isolationism was championed in the House of Lords by
Lord Mottistone, Churchill’s Under-Secretary for Air (1919), and the pacifist
Labour peer Lord Ponsonby. The former portrayed the Italians as underdogs
— ‘You have 200,000 young fellows — we all know what a charming people
the Italians are — up against 600,000’ — and accused Abyssinia of committing
‘the most frightful atrocities’. The theme was echoed by Italian propaganda
in the Blackshirt, which on 13 September published photographs purporting
to show victims of Abyssinian torture. To counter such savagery, the BUF
said a lesson in white civilization from Italy was long overdue.
The Foreign Office estimated that during the first nine months of its peace
campaign the BUF received monthly payments of £5,000 (£170,000) from
Italy. It was, however, not enough to change British public opinion. Grandi
recognized it would require considerable time to convince the British that Italy
needed to protect its interests in Africa. BUF door-to-door canvassers collected
signatures for a petition but the results were never revealed. On 18 September
Grandi requested and received extra funds from the Ministry of Popular
Culture.
356 BLACKSHIRT

Mosley had reason to celebrate when on 3 September 1935 Sir Malcolm

Campbell, in a Rolls-Royce-engined Bluebird adorned with the pennant of the
BUF Volunteer Transport Service, broke the land speed record at the Bonne-
ville Salt Flats. He achieved 301.1292 mph. A romantic adventurer, educated
in Germany, he had served with the RFC and had been a pilot to the Prince”
of Wales. He made his money selling cars, dealing in diamonds and formulating ©
libel insurance for newspapers. The Mail’s motoring correspondent and one
of Rothermere’s diehard friends, he unsuccessfully stood for the Conservatives
in Deptford in 1935. Campbell was a ‘convinced fascist and the nominal head
of the propagandist British Movietone News, which displayed thinly disguised
attacks on Trade Unionism and Parliamentarianism’. He frequently visited the
Black House and was part of a racing-car network which embraced the BUF’s
Automobile Club.
Automobile Club regulars included former RFC observer Captain D. M. K.
Marendez, seen frequently in his Alvis at Brooklands, and Miss Fay Taylour,
Britain’s leading female racing.driver. In partnership with Marendez, Campbell
bought two airfields and, at government request, set up a flying school at
Barton to train airmen for war. Marendez not only knew Mosley but also
Reichmarshall Goering. He was once caught photographing RAF installations
and was threatened with imprisonment. Marendez worked with Thomas
Godman, son of the Mayor of Gloucester and Receiver of the Hampton car
company. Nicknamed ‘Goering of the West’, Godman often visited the Black
House and was remembered as an important member of the BUF’s Gloucester
branch and its Blackshirt Flying Club, which was viewed as a dangerous
development by MIS when members began flying to Germany.
After the Second World War the US Counter-Intelligence Corps interrogated
a Nazi official, Lothar Eisentraeger, about pre-war ties to the BUF. He said
‘his only contact with Mosley was through a Commander Godman who also
contacted the former Finance Minister Dr Hjalmar Schacht’. Schacht claimed
‘he never met or heard of a Commander Godman’. However, it is clear
from the transcript that the CIC was intrigued by the story. In particular,
Eisentraeger’s reference to ‘an affair involving Admiral Canaris [chief of
Abwehr intelligence] and Mosley’, the nature of which remains unknown.

After the holiday at Posillipo, Diana joined Unity for a visit to Nuremberg.
Before festivities began, they were guests of honour at the Congress of Nazi
Groups Abroad held at Erlangen, Bavaria. The sisters, reported the British
United Press, ‘were given seats at the speaker’s table, where Julius Streicher,
Germany’s Jew-baiter Number One, was addressing the congress’. It was a
characteristic mixture of folk dancing and racial hatred. According to the
Frankische Tageszeitung (to September), he interrupted one of the speeches
to introduce the ladies at the top table: film-maker Leni Riefenstahl, Frau
 E935 357;
Troost, the wife of Hitler’s architect, and the Mitfords, who were treated as
official BUF representatives and had ‘the Nazi message in their blood’. Mosley
was a ‘courageous man’ who had ‘set himself the task of solving the Jewish
problem’.
The next day Unity and Diana attended the Nuremberg Congress, sitting
behind Hitler, with Tom Mitford and journalist Michael Burns. They were
accompanied by Putzi Hanfstaengl, Riefenstahl and Sigismund FitzRandolph
~ of the London embassy. Attending as the BUF representative was Gordon-
_ Canning, along with a number of sympathizers. Funded by the Ministry of
Propaganda and guests of the Fihrer were Henry Williamson, the Mosleyite
novelist, and his friend the journalist John Heygate, who had married Evelyn
Waugh’s first wife. Heygate worked at UFA Films in Berlin as a propagandist
for Goebbels and supervisor of English versions of German films. He was
impressed by Hitler’s movement of ‘blood-brotherhood’ with its ‘pride of race’
and wrote that ‘there are innumerable young men like me who are waiting for
a great leader’. He later disowned his National Socialist past in his 1940 book
These Germans.
The Mitfords heard Hitler read out the Nuremberg Laws, which deprived
Jews of their citizenship. Williamson was overcome by ‘the romantic mixture
of military parade, rousing speeches, together with elements akin to Wagnerian
opera and religious ceremony’. Struck by the way people ‘gave up all for an
idea and bound themselves together for their beliefs, and fought the forces of
gold and disintegration and rival ideas’, he was moved to exclaim ‘Heil Hitler!’.
He was convinced Germany ‘would create her own destiny, no more crowd
hysteria or mass panic, no more political parties fighting for power’.
Williamson returned home a convert ‘to a dreamy, idealised Hitlerism
(rather than Nazism)’. Heygate recognized that his friend ‘lived on fantasy’.
He needed hero figures to venerate and he turned Mosley into an heroic idol.
Following the death of T. E. Lawrence (who had considered joining the
January Club) in a motorcycle accident on 19 May 1935, Williamson created
the myth that he had been going to see his hero on a matter connected with a
peace mission to Hitler. With Lawrence of Arabia’s name to attract them,
ex-servicemen would gather in the Albert Hall and begin ‘a whirlwind
campaign which would end the old fearful thought of Europe (usury-based)
for ever. So would the sun shine on free men!’ Williamson’s blood-and-soil
Fascism was romantic with its ‘quest for perfectiow and idealism’ but he had
a ‘distinctly unChristian attitude toward Jews’.
Hitler deeply impressed Gordon-Canning: ‘As an Englishman proud of the
heritage and tradition of my country, I can say without hesitation as he passed
by us from the depth of my heart “Heil Hitler”.’ He gave an account to
Mosley, who also received reports from BUF personnel in the Reich. Phillip
_ Spranklin worked in the Munich Foreign Press Office run by Henrich'Hoffman
358 BLACKSHIRT

under the aegis of Goebbels’s Ministry. Beckett’s wife remembered him as one
of ‘the wilder young men on the publicity side, still in his late teens’. Clever
but mischievous, he was a friend of leading Mosleyite journalist Bill Leaper
and E. D. Randall, now teaching in Germany. Spranklin identified with Nazism
to the point of losing his British nationality. ‘
There was an increasing exchange of visitors between London and Berlin. *
In September Herr Hildebrand of the Hitlerjugend organization visited Mosley
and presented lectures to the BUF, which were published in the Blackshirt.
Two months later the British authorities ordered his deportation. The Commu-
nist Party observed these events and sent a file on Hildebrand to Moscow.
Dr Karl-Hans Galinsky, a Manchester University lecturer who had spoken at
the January Club on Hitler, wrote a laudatory account of the BUF for the
Germans. After describing Mosley’s speech at the Albert Hall — ‘We fought
Germany once in our British quarrel. We shall not fight Germany again in a
Jewish quarrel’ — he observed that there was ‘something of the Elizabethan in
his gallant, rather arrogant air. He is the Englishman of the Carolean tennis-
court; of the duelling-ground rather than of the Pall Mall Club. He is a big
man of blood and bone, of strong tones, no feeble creature of grey shadings. He
is a personality with all his individual qualities and faults, no self-complacent
bladder of conventions.’
During the autumn the BBC decided to produce a series of educational talks
on ‘The Citizen and His Government’. It gave Mosley reason to hope an
agreement had been reached with regard to him being allowed to broadcast.
The last talk was to feature lectures on Fascism and Communism by Mosley
and Harry Pollitt. On 13 September the Foreign Office’s Rex Leeper contacted
the Controller of Programmes, Alan Dawnay, urging the BBC to drop the
Pollitt talk. The Foreign Office’s Permanent Head, Sir Robert Vansittart,
then expressed concern to Sir John Reith that Mosley was being allowed to
broadcast. Prompted by Italy’s. recent attack on Abyssinia, he worried as to
the use Mosley might make of the opportunity. These points were considered
by the Board of Governors but were rejected after assurances that Mosley
would not be allowed to refer to Abyssinia. Vansittart remarked at a meeting
on 27 September that he saw little possibility of the international situation
developing in such a way that a talk by Mosley would be innocuous. Mosley
was ‘an agent of Italian fascism taking his orders from Italy’.
The Foreign Office threatened to bring the BBC to heel. The Minister for
League of Nations Affairs, Anthony Eden, outlined the government’s objec-
tions in a memorandum to Cabinet. It would be unfortunate if publicity were
given to ‘a man who was known to be in close touch and sympathy with
Mussolini’. He suggested the BBC class the talks as ‘not in the national
interest’. Vansittart said that ‘should it be decided that Mosley should not
speak then there would be no need to inform the public that it was because of
 13") 21
Mosley, but merely to say that, owingto the present situation, it was not
considered desirable to go forward with this particular series of talks; it should
be left to listeners to form their own conclusion as to why the series had been
dropped, but probably 90 per cent would assume it was the Mosley issue’. In
the event, an imminent general election solved the problem and provided a
pretext for postponing the talks. The BBC Board agreed ‘not to say anything
about the private discussions that had been taking place between the Foreign
Office and ourselves’.

_ Mussolini viewed foreign policy as a means of invigorating ‘moribund fascism’

by channelling internal frustration into external violence. At 5 a.m. on
3 October 1935 his legions began a mission, Grandi declared, ‘to civilise the
black continent’. The British Minister in Addis Ababa reported that the first
bomb from the opening air raid on Adowa fell on a hospital building marked
with a red cross. General Rudolfo Graziani’s Expeditionary Force killed thou-
sands of civilians and starved infants in concentration camps; his men posed for
photographs holding severed heads. General Pietro Badoglio’s planes sprayed
mustard gas over villages. Acting as an agent for the War Office, Fuller said
in the Mail that ‘it proved a decisive tactical factor in the war’. The head of a
Red Cross hospital commented, ‘This isn’t war — it isn’t even slaughter. It’s
the torture of tens of thousands of defenceless men, women and children with
bombs and poison gas.’
The BUF defended the tactics. On 7 October Fuller visited Mussolini with
a letter of introduction from Mosley. He introduced himself as ‘a full-blooded
Fascist’ and said press hostility to the invasion was the result of Jewish influ-
ence. He offered his services as Rothermere’s special envoy on Abyssinia
‘attached to BUF HQ’, who could ‘get away from the other correspondents.
As a soldier I shall know how much not to report.’ Passage was arranged for
Fuller on a troopship to Abyssinia, where he spent three months observing
the war. The Mail and the Morning Post were the only papers to support
Mussolini, though a number of Fascist-inclined writers and academics reported
sympathetically on the Italian action.
Fuller was joined by Reuter’s correspondent James Strachey Barnes and
Muriel Curry, former branch secretary of the League of Nations Union and
BUF member, who became a war correspondent after travelling to the area
on a permit from the Italian government. She was adopted as a mascot by
- General Villa Santa’s Gavinana Division, broadcast from Rome and received
the Croce di Guerra. Evelyn Waugh believed Italian control of Abyssinia
‘would be for the benefit of the Ethiopian Empire and the rest of Africa’. Such
writers were helped by Grandi’s secret funds of around £2,000 (£68,000). He
reported to Rome on 25 October that ‘much has already been done’.
Beckett organized BUF propaganda but direction came from Grandi who
360 BLACKSHIRT

sent Rome ‘samples of the leaflets distributed in Grosvenor Square during the
attempt to demonstrate against the Italian embassy’. At his request, British
Fascists ‘marched carrying placards with the words “Why should Britain assist
Abyssinia?” ’. Members filled out audiences at newsreel shows — ‘so that they
can clap and counteract any criticism’. Grandi told Mussolini he sent his
request to Mosley, who ‘tells me that it will be done’.
BUF propaganda suggested Afro-Asians had similarities with Jews. Haile
Selassi - ‘Jewry’s new idol’ — was portrayed in cartoons with exaggerated
Jewish features. The Blackshirt said ‘the powers of Jewish international finance
and Jewish-controlled Bolshevism’ were ranged against ‘the regenerated Fas-
cist nations of Europe, prepared to fight to the last ditch for the principles of
white civilisations’. Radicals wanting an overt anti-Semitic campaign were let
off the leash to exploit the issue in the East End. On 5 October Joyce told a
Bethnal Green crowd, ‘If war comes and you have to leave your land for a
foreign battlefield, the Jew will not march with you; but he will stay here and
advance unchecked, into possession of your opportunities, your homes, and all
that you dare call your own.’
Mosley portrayed himself as a restraining influence on his lieutenants’
extreme anti-Semitism, but this runs counter to the evidence of his own
speeches. When he spoke to branches in the West Midlands, members heard
speeches dominated by abusive anti-Semitism. He refused to veto the vehement
anti-Semitism of the BUF press and in the East End walls were daubed with
the slogan ‘Perish Juda’. Complaints about BUF behaviour multiplied with
stories of Fascists terrorizing Jews. The Communists reacted after Italy invaded
Abyssinia but, again, the upsurge in anti-Fascist activity came from the rank
and file. This was the case even when the emergence of the BUF in the East
End proved to be ‘a great boost to morale, strength and membership’. In some
areas anti-Fascism proved to be the CP’s only successful platform.
Mosley warned in Giornale d’Italia that the anti-Italian drive was directed
by Jews who wanted to plunge the Western world into a fratricidal war. ‘While
this propaganda had little effect on opinion in the Western democracies’,
Mosley claimed it had ‘a profound impression on Mussolini and many
members of his entourage’. Meir Michaelis suggests the idea of a ‘Jewish’
sanctionism was ‘encouraged not by Hitler (who adopted a policy of neutrality —
between Italy and the League), but by Western anti-semites, especially in
England, who supported the fascist aggression’. There followed anti-Jewish
polemics in the Italian press attacking ‘world Jewry’ and its responsibility for
Anglo-French hostility to Italy. Secret police reports to Mussolini claimed
Foreign Office Minister Anthony Eden, who was denounced as a ‘special
enemy of Italy’, was ‘of Jewish extraction, the bastard son of King George V’
and a ‘most beautiful Jewess’. Mosley’s role illustrated the degree to which he
 1935 361
was willing to submerge the movement’s nationalist ideology in his desire to
court Mussolini’s support.
Grandi flooded Britain with propaganda through BUF contacts, Carlo Cam-
agna, secretary of the London Fascio, Camillo Pellizzi of University College,
Cesare Foloigno at Oxford, and Luigi Villari, a member of Mosley’s Windsor
Club. The British-Italian Bulletin produced a supplement edited by Camagna,
which included articles by Ian Hope Dundas, Ezra Pound and Harold Goad,
* who defended Italy’s imperialist role because of Abyssinia’s ‘scandalous and
_ barbaric’ conditions. Out of Muriel Curry’s flat propaganda efforts were run
involving Barnes, Yeats-Brown and Sir Osbert Sitwell. Curry was the BUF’s
_ chief enthusiast for the organization of womanhood in Italy and an intelligence
asset of Grandi. Sitwell wanted a ‘respectable fascism’ with government
‘allowed to get on with its business, to be given a good bus service and
punctual trains’.
Liberal opinion was thrilled when the British government on 11 October
condemned Italy’s aggression. However, the desire to preserve Italian partici-
pation in the Stresa front against Germany meant that military intervention
was unlikely. A week later Mosley ended the Peace Campaign and, announcing
that since military sanctions had been abandoned, released members from
special duties. It was, however, ‘a hollow triumph’. He miscalculated the
public mood and ‘popular indignation with Italy outdid the BUF’s own brand
of patriotism and threatened to smother the movement’. On 18 November the
League passed a blockade resolution and Britain took the lead in imposing
- economic sanctions. In fact, it was privately preparing to back down but it
was a blow to Italy and the Fascist movements that had tied themselves to
Mussolini.

With the perceived ‘success’ of the campaign, Mosley persuaded Mussolini to

reinstate funding to previous levels. According to the Secret Service in a report
of 22 October, Mussolini resumed monthly payments of £3,000 (£102,000).
Italian agents forwarded to Rome hignly favourable assessments to justify
their salaries and exaggerated their accounts. They claimed there were 500,000
pro-Mussolini, pro-BUF Fascists. ‘Most Englishmen, and most true English
intellectuals’, announced Villari, ‘supported the war.’
Mosley made ‘any investigation into the finances of the BUF impossible’
and MIS investigators ‘had to content themselvesewith the observation that
the funds were derived for the greater part from “unknown sources’’’. Jack
Curry believed the details were known only to Mosley’s inner circle, ‘one of
whom went regularly either to France or Switzerland to collect the money in
pound notes’. In sharp contrast, the Service knew from intelligence intercepts,
deciphered by the Government Code and Cipher School under the codename
362 BLACKSHIRT

MASK, that the CPGB was receiving £3,000 (£112,000) per month from
Moscow.
MIS had no evidence of ‘serious Italian espionage in this country’ since it
had no ‘reliable information which would enable us to see the purely espionage
aspects in clear perspective’. It conducted an inquiry into the Nazis’ worldwide’
Auslands Organisation (AO), which had been created as the Party’s foreign’
division by a Hess protégé, Bradford-born Ernst-Wilhelm Bohle. Members
were organized into ‘cells’ and collected political information in their host
countries and occasionally military affairs. Its chief contribution ‘was in pro-
viding the names of potential spies’. MI5’s B Branch warned that ‘we should
not lose sight of the fact that .. . the whole energy of the machine could be
utilised in the reverse direction’. It was ‘a ready-made instrument for intelli-
gence, espionage and ultimately for sabotage purposes’.
Also of concern to MIS was the Ribbentrop Biro, whose staff tried to
establish contacts in the upper echelons of British society sympathetic to the
idea of an Anglo-German alliance. Home Office files on the BUF make a
reference to Margarete Gartner, ‘well known as a Nazi propagandist’, who
developed the contacts she had made in the previous year. She had been
responsible for creating the Anglo-German Association which had been dis-
solved in April over allowing Jews to join. Richard Meinertzhagen, a former
AGA member and wartime British Intelligence officer, had been in touch with
the German embassy and ‘an influential body of businessmen’ with a view to
creating a new organization more assertive in its support of Germany.
Backed by Ribbentrop, who had been introduced to prominent figures by
merchant banker Ernest Tennant, the Anglo-German Fellowship (A-GF) was
created in October. Its German twin, the ‘Deutsch-Englische Gesellschaft’,
was active in the ‘para-diplomatic sphere’. Fellowship members took part in
the celebrations to mark the opening of the D-EG in Berlin in January 1936.
Under its Chairman Lord Mount Temple, the A-GF — its secretary was out-
spoken anti-Semite Elwin Wright — drew its support from Tory backbenchers,
peers, retired officers, industrialists and financiers, who wanted ‘to promote
good understanding between Britain and Germany’ without necessarily
implying approval of National Socialism. Walter Hewel was an A-GF member
and Ribbentrop’s personal liaison to Hitler, enjoying immediate access to the
Fiihrer.
Goebbels later told Wilfred von Oven that ‘there were quite a number of
influential Tories who entirely agreed with the Fiihrer’s championing of a
policy of Anglo-German conciliation’. Goebbels who, Diana admitted, never
liked Mosley and resented Hitler’s interest in him, added

In saying this, I don’t even take any account of Mosley. He was an outsider of small
political significance. Fascism is a plant that does not grow in the soil of Britain. It
 ED'S 363

does not seem to go down well with the English. And what Mosley was doing
over there with his Blackshirts, harmed rather than benefited our cause. Far more
important were a number of Conservatives who pleaded for a close association with
Hitler although, from the ideological point of view, they had nothing in common
with him.

To the Nazis, the Anglo-German societies were ideal propaganda platforms

. from which prominent Germans could lecture foreign audiences. They were
also part of the Biiro’s intelligence network, whose ‘permanent escorts’ ques-
tioned guests about the state of British public opinion. Although the A-GF
could be seen as a pro-Nazi bridgehead — its members ‘an anti-communist
conspiracy in business, high finance and high nobility of the island kingdom
who did important work for Hitler, including trying to strengthen the anti-
Soviet and “‘pro-German” alignment of the British government’ — its influence
on British foreign policy decision making was ‘insignificantly small’.
During October MIS noted that BUF officials had ‘distinctly pro-Nazi
tendencies and social relations between the two have been fairly close’. They
‘attended gatherings.of Nazis in London and the effect of such intercourse on
both sides must be considerable’. Mosley was finding a sympathetic audience
in Germany as Unity’s efforts bore fruit. On 24 October she was invited
to tea with Goebbels and Hitler, who talked about the German-English
relationship. Goebbels believed the Fiihrer’s ‘thoughts are gaining a foothold
in England’. It looked that way to Special Branch, which reported that Dr
Thost, who had ‘a reputation for political intrigue’, was under some sort of
cloud with Otto Bene for an indiscretion. His ‘association with certain British
politicians, and with members of the BUF has caused the trouble’. Spreading
the Nazi gospel was legitimate but spying would cause a problem for Hitler’s
efforts to court the British government. In November, Thost’s residency permit
was withdrawn and he was asked to leave Britain because ‘his stay would not
be in the public interest’.
~- On Diana’s return to London, she broke her rule of not involving herself in
politics by attending her first and only demonstration. On 27 October in Hyde
Park she came across a large demonstration organized by the Non-Sectarian
Anti-Nazi Council, among whose speakers was Labour leader Clement Attlee.
When a boycott of German goods was proposed, a sea of hands went up in
support, then a single hand to vote against it. The News Chronicle reported
that Diana ‘stood in the crowd on her own and recorded a lone vote. . . During
the singing of “God Save the King”, while the crowd stood bare-headed, Mrs
Guinness raised her hand in the fascist salute.” The crowd jeered and turned
nasty. John Warburton and a fellow Blackshirt were close by and escorted her
to safety. Unity recorded that Hitler was pleased with what “Diana had been
doing at Hyde Park’, rallying support for the Nazis. Diana did not ‘regret
364 BLACKSHIRT

getting involved. National Socialism was a great fact. You couldn’t just evade
it at that time.’

At the end of October, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who six months earlier
had taken over from MacDonald, called a general election. Mosley had said ,
the BUF would win a majority of seats in two successive general elections
before implementing the full programme of the ‘Fascist Revolution’. He had
considered standing in Evesham or Ormskirk but the BUF was not in a state
to launch an election campaign. On 28 October Mosley announced he was
not fielding candidates and would campaign for voter abstention with the
slogan ‘Fascism Next Time’. Supporters were ‘not to waste a vote for a farce.
Wait for the real battle. This election is a sham battle, which at the next
election will be followed by the real battle: not until Fascist candidates enter
the field as challengers for power will any reality be introduced into British
politics.”
The Windsor Club did support candidates against the ‘old Gang’. Sir Henry
Fairfax-Lucy did ‘what I could’ to help a Committee member and Tory MP,
Colonel Alfred Todd, at Berwick-on-Tweed. A friend of Lord Erroll, Fairfax-
Lucy, who had land in Kenya, wanted a ‘drastic reform of parliamentary
government’ and would support Fascism if that was what was required. There
was help through U. C. S. Hayter of the Indian Empire Society for those
opposing the government’s India policy. The pro-Nazi MP for Basingstoke,
Henry Drummond Wolff, had resigned, ostensibly for health reasons. How-
ever, he and the previous constituency MP, Lord Lymington, shoehorned into
the seat Patrick Donner, British Fascist and Secretary of the India Defence
League. Before Donner’s adoption the local agent wrote to Wolff that he
understood Donner ‘had a successful interview’ with Mosley, suggesting he
was ‘adopted with Mosley’s approval or co-operation’. Protest letters in The
Times attacking sanctions against Italy were organized by Club Chairman
Luttman-Johnson. Round robin names included Douglas Jerrold, who advised
on whom to approach, Lord Salisbury’s nephew Algernon Cecil, Arnold
Wilson, Ronald Graham and Lord Phillimore.
The 1935 general election was a comfortable victory for Baldwin’s National
government. A loss of ninety seats still left a parliamentary majority of 255
for the Conservatives. The return of 154 Labour MPs increased the party’s
strength but was considered a poor showing that did not materially alter the
situation, since the Liberals dropped from thirty-three to twenty seats. The
National government’s comprehensive victory showed what little impact
Fascism had made on the public.
According to Ambassador Grandi, on the day after the election he was
called by Sir Robert Vansittart ‘and we started to work on what became
known as the proposal Hoare—Laval which should in fact be called Vansittar
t—
 1935 365
Grandi’. Having assured voters he was-not trying to ‘do a disreputable deal’
behind the League’s back, Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare agreed on a peace
plan with French Minister Pierre Laval, which rewarded Italy by giving it
Abyssinia’s fertile plains and more territory than it had captured. In return,
Abyssinia would gain an outlet to the sea. The pact undermined the policy of
collective security and legitimized Fascist aggression by seeking to reward it.
There was an outcry that Baldwin had won the election on a League pro-
gramme, which he immediately jettisoned. ‘Never’, reported French ambassa-
dor Charles Pineton, ‘has Italian support for Mussolini been more complete.’
The Duce turned a squalid colonial adventure into a patriotic crusade and
sent a more vigorous commander to Abyssinia. The Express published a
picture of Grandi and captioned it ‘The Winner’. In fact, with a narrow circle
of friends in London, Grandi had sent Mussolini misleading information about
the government’s willingness to stand up to Italy. Even so, the championing
of Grandi bruised Mussolini’s ego and and he was recalled back to Rome. A
war against Britain was now spoken of with confidence by Mussolini and
Britain’s weakness gradually consolidated Hitler’s enthusiasm for a ‘combi-
nation of the Fascist powers’ that might be ‘transformed into a world-wide
anti-British alliance’.
Contact between the BUF and Italy was strengthened after Mosley agreed
in December that Dundas become the permanent liaison with the Italian Fascist
Party (PNF). Dundas and his wife had cruised around the Mediterranean with
Mosley and Diana, and had spent a few months in Italy. In Rome, they were
housed in the Villa Albani with a butler and servants. Ciano sent roses and
the couple regularly met Mussolini. Dundas’s daughter, Lynette, recalled that
they had a good life and ‘always had lots of money’. All they had to do was
‘reach under the bed into a trunk of cash’. Dundas ran English broadcasting
from Italy. His broadcasts were numerous but no recordings appear to have
survived. There was comment in the British press and he can be seen as the
first of the radio ‘traitors’. His daughter admitted he was ‘a kind of Lord
Haw Haw’.
Box criticized Mosley’s obligations to Rome. MIS sources and the peace
campaign now left no doubt as to the source of the funds. There was, recalled
Guy Liddell, an air of triumph in MIS at the discovery of the Italian subsidies.
When Mosley told Box ‘We will be ready for the next election’, he replied,
‘You won’t be ready in ten years’ time.’ Disillusioned with Mosley, Box
decided to resign; a decision kept secret for fear of the disastrous effect on the
movement’s morale.
When Chesterton went on a fact-finding tour of the Midlands, he reported
that in one district the offices were ‘part thieves kitchen and part bawdy house’.
Many branches were moribund. The lack of a close relationship between centre
and periphery was partly blamed on Mosley, whose ‘political background and
366 BLACKSHIRT

experience lay in the British party system not in organising extra parliamentary
movements’. He was forced to sell the lease of the Black House for a rumoured
£50,000 (£1.7m). New offices purchased in Sanctuary Buildings, Westminster,
bizarrely also housed the Home Office. The landlord was approached by '
Special Branch but could not prevent Mosley taking the lease.
After Box’s departure, Hawkins’s ex-officer class dominated the BUF.
Beckett had no time for his ‘heel-clicking and petty militarism’ but, notes his
son, ‘does not seem to have realised that all this was an intrinsic part of the
creed’. Hawkins was promoted to Director-General, ranking second to Mos-
ley, who reserved for himself absolute control of policy and propaganda. The
secret of Hawkins’s influence was his unquestioning loyalty, a quality to which
Mosley attached high value when so many were deserting him. Mosley received
adulation and expected it. Blackshirts, Colin Cross noted, ‘even saluted him
when he went into the sea to bathe at the Movement’s summer camps at
Selsey’. They ‘whispered his name in religious awe and every Fascist speech
had its quota of praise for the Leader, who was presented to the public as a
superman. Criticism was totally taboo and humour nearly so.’ A minority
complained of his megalomania. Beckett referred to him as ‘The Bleeder’.
The political leaders — Beckett, Chesterton and Joyce — quarrelled with
Hawkins’s choice of men for posts. Brian Donovan, Assistant Director-General
(Administration), was one of his martinets and was considered ‘too taut,
inflexible, exacting’. The new system, which was intended to provide an
unbroken chain of command from the Leader to the active member, was in
practice riddled with personal jealousies. Beckett later blamed the ‘malicious
intrigue rampant in the BUF’ for which he was partly responsible. Factional
civil war broke out with rumours of favouritism and of promotions based on
homosexual friendships. In the long term, Mosley kept the allegiance of the
bureaucrats far better than that of the political idealists ‘for whom the BUF
in the end proved an inadequate vehicle for their ideas and ambitions’. In the
short term, however, the BUF’s anti-Semitic campaign remained in full swing.
The BUF was among the weakest manifestations of Fascism in Europe. It
was unable to make inroads into the Conservative and Labour vote, and failed
to elect a single MP or local councillor. It had been ‘squeezed out’ as a major
force in both conventional and extra-parliamentary politics. John Stevenson
argues that failure stemmed from developments outside of Mosley’s control;
British Fascism had to operate in an unpromising climate, both politically and
economically. There was no economic collapse, national humiliation through
defeat, street violence, or polarization into two armed camps.
George Orwell wrote that a foreign observer in England ‘sees only the huge
inequality of wealth, the unfair electoral system, the governing-class control
of the press, the radio and education. But this ignores the considerable agree-
ment that does unfortunately exist between the leaders and the led.’ There
 T1935 367
was little reason to throw off their electoral allegiance to the Conservatives or
to dismiss Baldwin’s leadership.
The middle class did well economically. Those living in the South experi-
enced the ‘most sustained period of growth in the whole inter-war period’.
Mosley noted that exports to imperial markets rose from a third to two-fifths
of her total exports, while the proportion of imperial imports into Britain rose
dramatically. He could argue it was the result of mild protectionism, which
eased pressure on the balance of payments and the pound, and allowed cheap
money, with bank rate at 2 per cent. The housing boom brought home-
ownership to the lower middle classes for the first time; exactly the group
that turned to Fascism abroad. Mosley’s case for public works schemes was
weakened since ‘such a project’s main beneficiary — the construction industry
— was already flourishing’. Instead of ‘the outsize concrete monuments of a
British Mussolini’, three million homes were built and jobs increased by a
third during the 1930s. The long-term consequence was a distortion of the
British economy and the weakening of manufacturing.
Unemployment remained high at 2.4 million and was seen as ‘the greatest
threat to the stability of the state as well as to the welfare of families and
communities’. At the end of November the Prince of Wales was reported in
the Illustrated London News as saying of unemployment that ‘something
should be done’. It was, however, largely confined to specific areas, of which
the middle class remained ignorant. The BUF opened propaganda centres in
Lancashire and enrolled hundreds of members, which worried the Labour
Party. ‘If any totalitarian creed stood a chance of adoption by the Lancashire
workers,’ commented H. Pelling, ‘it is likely to be fascism.’ Risdon, however,
could not deliver the expected breakthrough. When propaganda eased off
through lack of funds, Fascist support melted away.
Rearmament helped drive down unemployment to below two million. The
Treasury, however, regarded public works as futile and snubbed Germany’s
‘debatable doctrines’ despite the fact that they had an almost immediate effect.
The Nazi cure was much discussed within BUF circles. When Lady Downe
spoke to the King’s Lynn branch after returning from Germany, ‘she explained
how unemployment had been reduced from five to two million since the Nazis
came to power’. With exports still only 75 per cent of their 1929 level, it was
hard, as Mosley had predicted, to claim that increased industrial efficiency
was ‘a sufficient cure for unemployment’. Howeyer, his natural backers were
out of recession, doing well and had no need of his shock troops.
Mosley hoped the crisis of the loss of Empire would attract support because
‘fascism not the Conservative Party’ was ‘the true mantle of patriotism’.
However, contrary to Lloyd George’s fear that Baldwin’s moderation would
drive diehards into Mosley’s arms they joined, instead, with Churchill.
The organizers of disorder ‘were content to stop short of generating the kind
368 BLACKSHIRT

of violence seen on the Continent’. The Fascists acceded to police instructions,

which fitted in with Baldwin’s view of the English and their antipathy to
Continental methods. Having adopted a position which necessitated waiting
for history to take a particular turn, Mosley was left marooned when history
did not turn in the required direction. So long as the Communists were kept :
in check, there was no reason for the middle class to feel threatened. Ultimately,
Smart suggests, ‘it was the Labour party that let Mosley down. Its failure to
fulfil that change-agent purpose Mosley had mapped out for it was the killer
blow.’ The Socialist League had presented a challenge, but ‘at the moment
when it frightened its opponents most, the party reverted to type: becoming
as before the epitome of loyal oppositional respectability, imbued with parlia-
mentary values. The non-materialization of the socialist threat was what
rendered the Fascist challenge stillborn.’
The BUF degenerated into an organization increasingly dependent on a
localized campaign playing on populist anti-Semitism. Paying membership
had fallen but it recovered at the end of the year, tripling to around 15,000,
at which level it remained for the next fifteen months. The surge in recruitment
was partly a result of the Abyssinian peace campaign, which ‘tapped into an
authentic anti-war feeling amongst many East End workers’. When Gordon-
Canning dined with Bruce Lockhart on 15 November, he was ‘full of optimism
for the future of Fascism’. He took ‘comfort from the large percentage of
non-voters in the election (30 per cent) and thinks Fascism will recruit most
of this’.
Mosley was just as optimistic when in early January 1936 he addressed
staff, and affirmed his admiration for Nazism and a desire to emulate its
methods. According to an SB informant, Mosley dreamed of a ‘disciplined
troop of BUF MPs marching into Parliament and giving it “the shock of its
life” ’. Favourable ‘as the police frequently were, they were often obliged to
protect Red hooligans’, nevertheless, the BUF would triumph over the ‘droning
dirge of the “Red Flag”’ and replace it with ‘discipline, confidence and chal-
lenge — and nothing can stop them’. The Home Office warned that Mosley’s
rhetoric ‘must be taken seriously for what it was, a genuine statement of intent
to undermine the political stability of Britain’.
 18
The East End

With the country swept by a harsh winter, George V developed bronchitis.

On 19 January 1936 the King died and was succeeded by the Prince of Wales.
The Duke of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, a Nazi Party member and President of the
Anglo-German Fellowship, attended the funeral as Hitler’s emissary. He told
Edward the Fiihrer wanted friendly relations with Britain and asked him if it
would be ‘useful’ for Hitler and the PM to meet. ‘Who is King here?’ came
the reply. ‘Baldwin or I? I myself wish to talk to Hitler.’ Minutes of the meeting
were sent direct to Hitler. The BUF lauded the ‘steel-true’ King as an ‘airman
hero’, who was destined ‘to throw the whole influence of his brave spirit into
Britain’s resurgence’.
Major-General Fuller returned from Abyssinia and reported on the Italian
Army’s ‘staggering inefficiency’ to Rothermere, who was ‘mentally staggered’
by the news. Fuller wrote to Mosley on 8 February warning that Continental
Fascism ‘will not fit the English. Both Hitler and Mussolini are riding for a
fall. They may get up, but we do not want to fall with them; because we may
never be able to get up again.’ He realized his ideas ‘would not be popular
with many of your staff’ but ‘we are not Italians, we are not Germans, we are
British — this is the fundamental fact to guide us’. Mosley ignored the advice
and, with an eye to new funding, switched his allegiance from Italy to Ger-
many. The anti-Semitism campaign and the dropping of the label ‘Fascism’
and its replacement by ‘National Socialism’ marked the shift in thinking.
A favourite slogan was ‘If you love your country you are National, if you
love her people you are Socialist - Be a National Socialist’. The Blackshirt
praised Hitler, while Blackshirts emulated the Nazis with their uniforms, songs
and salute. Under the BUF’s first Constitution, they were organized according
to the German model of black guards and storm troopers. Mosley enhanced
the standing of the elite corps by issuing a special uniform. He referred to the
Germans as ‘Our Blood Brothers’ and could ‘say without any hesitation ...
from the bottom of my heart, “‘Heil Hitler”.
In late January, when Ian Hope Dundas and Mosley visited Rome, Mussolini
decided to reduce the subsidy by £43,300 (£1.47m) per annum. Because of
370 BLACKSHIRT

the funding crisis, Bill Allen sent Mosley a letter on 11 February guaranteeing
to back any loan to the BUF of up to £10,000 (£340,000). On the following
day Allen sent him a proposal to develop a commercial radio station on Sark.
The Italian leader was not convinced the BUF was making progress and sent
his agent to make enquiries. In response, Mosley made ‘extravagant claims’ |
about the East End campaign and decided to concentrate resources in the area.
Anti-Semitism united all sections of the BUF in their hatred of Jews. Half
of the national membership was concentrated in the East End boroughs. In
Shoreditch, a working-class subculture within the rank and file approved of
provocative physical force Jew baiting. The volatile mix of populist anti-
Semitism and Fascist violence threatened to get out of control. The Bethnal
Green campaign was led by mob orator Mick Clarke, who had the ability,
according to John Charnley, ‘to take hold of an audience and ring it until their
very withers withered away’. A genuine Cockney, Clarke was labelled the
‘Julius Streicher of the BU’, due to his parading about in a full-length black
leather coat and to his rabid anti-Semitism. Those skilled in populist street-
corner agitation, such as Bill Bailey and Jock Huston, who had a lengthy
criminal record, brought much adverse publicity to the movement.
Mosley still believed he might be allowed to take part in a BBC discussion,
The Citizen and His Government, but Anthony Eden’s memorandum for a
Cabinet meeting on 12 February suggested the BBC ‘withdraw the objection-
able items of their programmes’ as not being in the national interest. The BBC
felt ‘there could hardly be a period in the history of Fascism when Fascist
arguments would be less likely to commend themselves to the British public’.
However, the PM was able to report a week later to relieved Ministers that
the BBC had agreed to withdraw the Mosley talk and had agreed to make ‘no
public reference to government intervention’. The Controller of Programmes
wrote to Mosley on 17 March that the BBC had taken ‘no decision to exclude
Fascism in Britain from the microphone’. His ‘invidious treatment’ was raised
in the Commons by Sir Reginald Blair, who had known Mosley in the War
Office at the end of the war, but to no avail.
The Foreign Office had reason to worry about the deteriorating situation
in Europe. German troops marched into the Rhineland on 7 March 1936 but
Hitler hoped this breach of the Locarno Treaty would not provoke military
countermeasures from the Allies. Mosley welcomed the reoccupation as help-
ful to peace by removing one of Germany’s main grievances. When the troops
entered, Diana and Unity were in Cologne to greet Hitler.
On ro March the German ambassador, Leopold von Hoesch, persuaded
Edward VIII to threaten abdication if Baldwin wanted war over the Rhineland
crisis. After seeing the PM, the King telephoned von Hoesch to report success.
Listening in was Press Attaché Fritz Hesse. Edward had seen ‘that bastard’
Baldwin and given him a dressing down. ‘I told him I'd resign in the event of
 THE EAST END 371

war. There will be no war. Don’t worry.’ Hearing the news, Hitler said, ‘At
last. The Kingof England will not intervene. He is keeping his promise.’
As a result of a 70 per cent cut in Italian funding, on 11 March Mosley
announced a reduction in Headquarters personnel. With active membership
estimated at 4,000, he began a new recruitment drive. The Blackshirt adopted
‘The Patriotic Workers Paper’ as its sub-heading and devoted itself to ‘matters
appealing to workers’. George Orwell saw evidence of the new direction at a
meeting on 16 March in London of around 700 mainly working-class people
and too Blackshirts. He was dismayed by their reaction to Mosley: ‘He was
booed at the start but loudly clapped at the end.’ They were ‘bamboozled’ by
Mosley, who spoke from ‘a Socialist angle, condemning the treachery of
successive governments towards the workers. The blame for everything was
put upon mysterious international gangs of Jews who are said to be financing
... the British Labour Party.’ Mosley extolled Germany but dismissed a
question about concentration camps. ‘We have no foreign models; what hap-
pens in Germany need not happen here.’
For a rally at the Albert Hall on 22 March, the Daily Worker organized
a counter-demonstration. Around 8,000 anti-Fascists demonstrated against
Mosley’s last meeting at the Hall, where he said ‘it was the intention of British
Fascism to challenge and break for ever the power of the Jews in Britain’.
Those Jews who did not ‘put Britain first? would be deported.
The Beckett-edited Blackshirt and Action launched an attack on Jewish
influence. On 2 April Action implied that Lord Camrose, owner of the Tele-
graph, was of Jewish extraction and his paper was subservient to international
finance. In the subsequent libel case the jury agreed the article was defamatory
and awarded damages of £12,500 (£425,000) to Camrose and £7,500 to the
Telegraph. This had little effect, since the company publishing Action ‘folded
up’ following the award. It had been set up in such a way as to avoid libel
damages.
_ In April Mosley changed the movement’s name to the British Union of
Fascists and National Socialists — ‘British Union’ for short. The fasces symbol
was superseded by a circle of unity enclosing a flash of lightning — dubbed by
opponents the ‘flash in the pan’. The changes coincided with a new peace
campaign. Blackshirts wrote ‘Mosley Says Peace’ in whitewash on walls across
Britain and on the doorstep of tro Downing Street. He envisioned a United
Fascist Europe, with the Empire a key factor, to replace the League of Nations
as the body to maintain peace. He claimed there was no conflict between
Britain, whose ‘world mission’ was Empire-centred, and Germany’s quest for
a union of German people. The BU tried to reassure the public that the
Germans did not want a worldwide Empire, for that could lead to ‘racial
deterioration’.
At the end of April Diana was dispatched to Berlin with a wild money-
372 BLACKSHIRT

making scheme. Goebbels was told the idea was ‘to make available £50-
100 million [£1.7-3.4 billion] through loan bank Morgan. That would be
wonderful. And Mosley would be saved by it. Fiihrer will pursue the matter.
Baron v. Schroeder is to test the ground in London.’ An excited Goebbels _
brought the Filhrer to Schwanenwerder for a discussion with Diana, who °
repeated the offer from Mosley. ‘Sounds very positive. A representative of —
Morgan’s Bank must come to Germany and negotiate with v. Schroeder. We'll
see what comes of it.’
Kurt von Schroeder managed the Cologne bank J. H. Stein and belonged to
the ‘Keppler Circle’ who donated large sums to Hitler. Stein owned a share of
the Schroeder banking houses and Kurt was a frequent traveller to its London
branch, J. Henry Schroeder. Chaired by Baron Bruno von Schroeder, the bank
was a large underwriter of German debt. It supported the Anglo-German
Fellowship and was banker to the Allens. Bruno’s son, Helmut, a partner in
the bank, had married Margaret Darell, whose grandfather, Justinian
Heathcote, was Mosley’s maternal grandfather. In the summer Bruno rented
Rutland Gate from the Redesdales and stayed with Nancy Mitford.
According to Diana it was all Bill Allen’s idea. ‘I remember thinking, “Why
should Morgan bring Allen into it?” They could have gone straight to the
German government. Allen dealt in fantasies.’ Mosley said he was ‘a Walter
Mitty character’ but, Diana noted, ‘it was he who suggested the radio advertis-
ing, about which he knew a great deal as advertising was his family business’
and which Mosley fully supported. The proposal was that they would receive
a commission for their efforts.
J. P. Morgan was not a name plucked out of the air; Mosley knew Thomas
Lamont, the bank’s Chairman, having met him at Lady Colefax’s. It had
floated the loan for the Dawes Plan to resolve the reparation dispute that
burdened the German economy and the Young Plan, which established the
Bank of International Settlement. It had been involved with the Du Pont family
- controllers of General Motors and financiers of Fascist and anti-Semitic
groups — in the 1934 attempted coup d’état launched against the ‘Jewish-
controlled’ President Roosevelt. According to Charles Higham they received
the support of Baron von Schroeder. The bank’s London branch was Morgan
Grenfell, among whose officials was Francis Rodd, brother of Diana’s brother-
in-law Peter Rodd. Francis was regarded as ‘suspicious’ and Kingsley Martin
classed him as a Nazi ‘fellow-traveller’. Quite what happened to the loan idea
is not known; presumably it collapsed, but three years later Francis was in
discussions about a half-billion-dollar gold loan to Germany through the Bank
of International Settlement, which proposed the restoration of its colonies, a
removal of the embargo on its goods and a non-aggression pact.
When shown details of the Allen scheme Diana added, ‘George Drummond
was involved.’ Disfigured in the second Battle of Ypres, he chaired
 THE EAST END 373

Drummond’s Bank, the London Branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland, in

which Diana held an account. High Sheriff for Northamptonshire, he gave
money to the BU and knew Mosley through their mutual love of hunting. A
friend of Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, Drummond
was regarded by MIS as a ‘Nazi sympathizer’. He was like a life model for
Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 novel The Remains of the Day.
Captain Drummond entertained royalty at Pitsford Hall, where the Prince
of Wales had been a regular participant at the Pytchley hunt. It appears Edward
was the father of Drummond’s daughter Edwina. It was known within the
family that he was in love with Drummond’s wife. In 1937 Edwina greeted
the King when he visited Munich, where she was at finishing school. King
George VI was a godfather to his first-born son George. Drummond was a
prominent member of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection. He
thought Britain was ‘spineless’, its ‘spirit had gone’. Everyone was aware of
his German connections through membership of Anglo-German friendship
societies and visits to Germany. His chauffeur, Jack Brooks, recalled him
meeting Hitler and Heydrich. Ribbentrop visited Pitsford, where guests
allegedly changed into Nazi uniforms.
Alf Goldberg worked at Moon’s garage, near Victoria Station, in which
Mosley stabled his cars. ‘I would see Mosley or other members of the BU
hierarchy arrive, change to a suitable limousine and depart for Croydon
Airport, which was then the main London aerodrome for the Continent.’ They
returned with German officers and ‘would then transfer to smaller cars and
proceed to destinations best known to themselves’. Goldberg believed this
included Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire, home of Lord Brocket, an industrial
magnate and a Hitler admirer. Brocket cultivated relations with Germany and
entertained Ribbentrop and Mosley lavishly at Inverie House on his Knoydart
estate in Scotland. Because he was closely connected with leading Nazis,
Halifax ‘used him as a channel through which to communicate to Hitler and
Ribbentrop the views of the Government’.
On 29 April Grandi talked with Edward VIII on restoring friendly relations
between Britain and Italy. When Grandi said people were suggesting the Suez
Canal be closed, the King asked, ‘Why? To stop the victorious Italian troops
from returning home?’ Diana’s friend Gerald Berners came back from Rome
talking of Italian fury at the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Anthony
Eden, and his pro-sanctions policy. The Duchess of Sermoneta had told him
she wished she could open a vein and let out every drop of her English blood.
The Italians occupied the Abyssinian capital and on 9 May King Victor
Emmanuel was proclaimed Emperor. Grandi reported to Rome that everyone
in England was hanging on Mussolini’s every word. He was ‘glad to find
himself in a world where even respectable journalists, while not obvious
Fascists, could-be persuaded to write favourable articles on Italy in return for
374 BLACKSHIRT

a small monthly payment’. There was marginal influence from ‘a number of

street rallies’ organized by the Anti-Sanctionist League and the BU. Mosley
mounted protest meetings in Hyde Park on 6 June and in the East End against
the presence in London of the exiled Emperor Haile Selassie.
Luigi Villari, employed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, wrote in Nuova
Antologia that he was grateful to Mosley for support over Abyssinia and his
proposal that while Malta should remain part of the Empire, Italian should
be taught in schools. In an otherwise balanced picture of the BU, he wildly
overestimated membership at 800,000.
Sanctions against Italy failed to achieve their objective and were quietly
withdrawn, confirming Mosley’s contention that they would lead either to
war or to a humiliating retreat. James Strachey Barnes said Italy ‘won the
contest of 1935-36 hands down by dint of the daring spirit and vitality of
youth, reminiscent of England’s Elizabethan age, when, as a little country, she
successfully challenged the might of Spain’. Mosley claimed his campaign had
played a part and he attracted.large audiences but Italian aggression was so
naked that the BU emerged ‘not as a party of peace concerned with British
interest, but as an unofficial ambassador of Mussolini, and an apologist for
fascist violence’.
Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg believed the BU was damaged by its
campaign. The British government’s anti-Italian stance had majority support,
yet the BU, though it stood for ‘British interests exclusively’, by supporting
the Italian cause could not help but be suspected of being in league with
Mussolini. Rosenberg pointed out the error of duality of loyalties in BU policy.
It was a psychological mistake for Mosley to call his movement ‘Fascist’.
‘Using a label of foreign origin conflicted with the pride England possessed
for her own traditions.’ His view, however, was not believed by all leading
Nazis.
Mosley’s officials returned from Germany with messages of support and
‘glowing reports of national efficiency, aesthetic grandeur and happy women’.
As chief Women’s Propaganda Officer, Anne Brock-Griggs attended the May
Day celebrations when 80,000 German youths gathered to praise Hitler in ‘a
feast of colour and an example of orderly discipline’. The Vélkischer Beo-
bachter welcomed ‘the open words of the Leader of the British Union which
reach the core of the British question. Every national patriotic movement —
even if it is not anti-Semitic in its beginnings — must some day come up against
the Jewish question and seek a solution for it.’ On 16 May the Blackshirt
alleged that ‘no leading paper in this country dare publish anything which is
at all contrary to Jewish interests for fear of losing its advertisements’.
On Empire Day, 24 May, Mosley used a march in Watney Street to unveil
the BU’s new uniform — a military-style outfit with coat, peaked cap, belt and
buckle, and jackboots. It reminded observers of Hitler’s SS. The resemblance
 THE EAST END 375

was confirmed by the adoption of an armlet bearing the lightning-flash emblem

in red, white and black. The uniform was restricted to Headquarters officers
and stewards, which reinforced the idea of a sinister Nazi elite. Mosley later
admitted that its introduction had been a mistake.
On the following day Mosley spoke at a meeting at the Carfax Assembly
rooms, Oxford, whose disruption, Skidelsky suggested, resulted from an
organized Communist conspiracy. An observer, Arthur Exell, claimed the
local anti-Fascists’ intervention was aimed ‘not to smash up the meeting’ but
to ‘prevent the Fascists from adopting their customary brutal methods with
interrupters and to secure a fair hearing for all genuine questions put to
the platform’. Future Labour MP Christopher Mayhew, who was fiercely
anti-Communist, also claimed workers were there ‘to stand by our comrades
if rudely treated’.
Skidelsky maintained that Communists were encouraged to disrupt the
meeting and named Basil Murray as a culprit. In fact, Murray shared the
Liberal politics of his father Gilbert Murray. Mosley was looking for a confron-
tation. Future Labour MP Patrick Gordon Walker said he ‘provoked the
audience beyond endurance’. Protected by ‘a squad of twenty tough-looking
Blackshirts’, he described Labour as ‘pink rabbits in the pay of the Jews’. It
looked as though the meeting would end peacefully but Mosley’s decision to
eject a heckler marked the point at which the ‘audience’s sense of decency had
been outraged’ and the meeting descended into chaos. The hall became ‘a
struggling mass of people’. Frank Pakenham claimed he was punched and four
Blackshirts ended up in hospital.
The first East End BU rally took place on 7 June in Bethnal Green. It
was left to Joe Jacobs, secretary of the CP’s Stepney branch, to mount a
counter-demonstration. CP leaders “did not see the anti-Mosley/BU movement
as particuarly important when ranged against the need to ... mount a mass
movement against the “‘pro-fascist’’ National Government’. The 5,000 crowd
grew so hostile that it was dispersed by the 600-strong police. The pro-Mosley
Collin Brooks attended for the Mail. ‘It was the anti-Jewish references that
drew the cheers. These references the Mail took out because they thought
Jewish advertisers would be offended. This is the power of the Jew. Here is
the justification of Fascism.’
Two weeks later, in Finsbury Park, 20,000 anti-Fascists shouted Mosley
down. Stepney CP branch remained divided ovtr tactics. Jacobs wanted to
‘drive Mosley out of East London’, using ‘maximum force’. Phil Piratin wanted
more than ‘Fascist baiting’ since Mosley had attracted many ordinary working-
class people: ‘Do you bash ordinary people?’ Jacobs wrote an open letter to
Stepney’s three Labour MPs — Clement Attlee, Dan Frankel and J. H. Hall -
asking them to join a united front ‘to smash the Fascist menace now, when it
is beginning to show itself’. After a bitter debate, Piratin’s view prevailed.
376 BLACKSHIRT

Mosley said, ‘the great and powerful were afraid when our Fascist move-
ment opened its crusade against Jewry . . . Up to three years ago anti-semitism
was unknown as a strong force in Britain. Today, in any audience, the strongest
passion that can be aroused is the passion against the corruption of Jewish
power.’ With meetings every night, rallies every weekend and violence against _
Jews from Fascist thugs, the BU created ‘in miniature the mass psychology of
fascism’, even if by German standards the violence was comparatively modest.
Mosley advocated withdrawing citizenship from all Jews. ‘All nations have
a right to say that foreigners who have abused their hospitality shall leave the
country.’ He admitted before the Advisory Committee in 1940 that ‘in the
fascist state, Special Commissions were to be set up to decide whether indi-
vidual Jews were more Jewish or British in their attitude, and those who failed
to pass the test would be expelled’. His ‘final solution’ was to resettle Jews in
one of the ‘many waste places of the world possessing great potential fertility
(excluding Palestine)’; Madagascar was mentioned. When Diana was asked
for her own solution, she suggested they could have gone ‘somewhere like
Uganda: very empty and a lovely climate’.
At the end of June, after Mosley left a meeting at Hulme Town Hall,
Manchester, he was confronted by a 3,000-strong crowd. The police had to
escort his car to the local BU headquarters. However, a hostile crowd gathered
outside, and windows were broken and the Fascist flag was torn down. Nellie
Driver, a BU Nelson member inside the headquarters, believed it was the
action of drunken ‘Reds’ which had inflamed them, after it was rumoured
Blackshirts had trampled to death a three-year-old boy. After a night of
violence, order returned. The Manchester Guardian concluded, ‘the crowd
had been so numerous that, had it wanted, it could have caused far greater
damage.’
The violence led Beaverbrook to remark that Mosley had embarked on a
‘path that can never lead him anywhere’. MIS reported that his only success
was in the East End but even there it was limited and generally discredited
because of the violence. Mosley, however, believed the BU would make a
breakthrough and told officials it would contest the 1937 London County
Council elections and prove it had the East End’s overwhelming support. He
planned to stage a big BU rally through Jewish areas to demonstrate that the
movement was.a significant force and merited Mussolini’s aid.
Mosley was desperate for money and Diana tried to persuade the Germans
to fund the BU. She admitted ‘Mussolini sent money for a while’ and said she
‘begged the Germans ~ not Hitler himself — for money, but they never gave
any’. This was untrue. On 19 June Goebbels recorded that she had been
successful. Funding the BU was highly significant. Hitler’s support of foreign
movements was rare, and occurred only if they advocated pan-Germanism
and therefore fitted into his expansionist foreign policy. ‘Mosley needs money,’
 THE EAST END 377

Goebbels wrote. “Wants it from us. Has already had £2,000 [£78,000] ...
£100,000 necessary. £60,000 [£2,040,00] promised. Must submit to Fiihrer.’
On the following day he ‘got hold of £10,000 for Mosley’. This was a substan-
tial sum, given Germany’s foreign currency shortages. Arrangements were
made by Franz Wrede, head of the press office, for it to be secretly smuggled
to Mosley. Described by Otto Dietrich as ‘an arrogant, stupid, fanatic Nazi’,
Wrede was posted as correspondent of the Berlin Lokal-Anzeiger to London
where, according to German documents, he was ‘in close association’ with Dr
Tester, Mosley’s aide-de-camp.
In June 1936 the Joint Intelligence Committee recommended directing atten-
tion ‘to the potential danger of Nazi and Fascist Party Organisations in this
country’. However, no more staff were made available for an already over-
stretched Security Service. It was easy for Mosley to organize a courier service
for the Nazi funds, evidence of which was never uncovered by MIS. Only after
the war did it discover the extent of Italian operations among BU personnel.
On 8 July ‘Mr Bianchi’, who had enrolled him ‘in the Fascist Intelligence
Service’, asked Theodore Schurch ‘to join the Royal Army Service Corps as a
driver’. The eighteen-year-old lived with his British mother and Swiss father
in Stoke Newington. He joined the BU because ‘he was persecuted at school’
and ‘rapidly assimilated its doctrines’ — including anti-Semitism — noting that
‘many more illustrious people than himself held these views’. From 1936 he
supplied Italian intelligence with information. The BU had been in touch with
him ‘through Edward King and according to his instructions I volunteered for
overseas service in the Middle East’. He eventually embarked on 11 November
1937 for Palestine, where he was put in touch with a friend of Bianchi. Schurch
claimed ‘he only gave the Italians information which he knew they already
had. He never gave accurate information to the enemy but false information.’
His defence later alleged Schurch had been ‘caught young when he knew no
better and jockeyed into a position from which he could not recover’.

Diana returned to London, staying with Gerald Berners at Halkin Street or

with the Dunns near Regent’s Park. Mosley had left Ebury Street for a flat at
129 Grosvenor Road, a former nightclub on the Chelsea river front, decorated
by Diana in a Greek style. She managed to keep her friends, including Jewish
ones, though some thought her mad for her views. “What a bully you are,’ she
wrote to Roy Harrod. ‘I thought we had a divine day and not a hint of dread
politics. As you know, I feel very strongly about these things so very likely it
shines out of me willy nilly.’ Her son Jonathan pointed out that ‘in polite
society anyone attacking another on politics puts oneself in the wrong’, and
guests who disliked Diana’s views would normally have kept their feelings to
themselves.
Diana lunched with her cousin, Winston Churchill, who wanted to hear her
378 BLACKSHIRT

opinion of Hitler. The others present — Lord Ivor Churchill and Sarah Churchill
— were ‘simply fascinated’ when she said the Fithrer had asked her about him.
She was the only person who knew them both well on a personal level and
suggested the two should meet. ‘Oh, no. No!’ Churchill replied. He had
recently helped found Focus, a loosely organized group intended to convince
the public and government of Hitler’s aggressive intentions. He helped Harold
Laski produce The Yellow Spot, documenting anti-Jewish measures in Ger-
many, including the murder of thirty-four Jews in Dachau concentration camp.
Mosley was still welcome at Churchill’s influential Other Club and was never
expelled.
Mosley was in trouble with the Courts about the provision of the children’s
money for Savehay Farm: a judge reduced the payments on the grounds that
they enabled their father to spend more of his own money on Fascism. Shortly
afterwards Diana went to live in Staffordshire, at Wootton Lodge, a beautiful
Elizabethan house but icy cold and completely unmodernized, owned by
Captain Unwin VC. Mosley agreed to rent it for £400-(£12,800) a year with
an option to buy. Diana installed the central heating out of her yearly allow-
ance from Bryan Guinness of £2,500. Wootton was ideal for Mosley, as it
was close to Manchester, where there was strong BU support, and for meetings
in the Midlands and the North.
The couple spent much time together at Wootton with its wild and beautiful
countryside. They no longer holidayed on the Mediterranean and the children
stayed during the summers of 1936-7. Nicholas, who was at Eton where ‘the
whole business of my father fell away’, was as unlike his father ‘as it is possible
for father and son to be’. In his detached way his father ‘was fond of him and
was anxious for him to enjoy his holidays’. Mosley loved fishing for trout in
the pools or stalking rabbits with a .22 rifle. ‘We lay on the grass in the sun
in summer,’ Diana recalled, ‘and trudged through snow in winter. We were
alone as a rule living in the moment.’

During July Mussolini’s agent, journalist C. M. Franzero, sent Rome a negative

report on the BU. Monthly contributions were subsequently reduced from
£3,000 to £1,000. On 10 July MIS had information from ‘an absolutely
reliable source’ that the funding had stopped altogether. Mosley had made
‘some advances’ with the Nazis but it had no evidence that financial help
was actually forthcoming. Its source had little evidence of significant outside
funding. However, the secret BU bank account uncovered by Special Branch
during the war showed that during 1936, £43,300 had passed through it and
an astonishing £224,000 (£7.6m) had been laundered into BU funds between
1933 and 1937 by way of foreign currency transactions.
Mosley’s foreign affairs adviser, Robert Gordon-Canning, was involved
with leading Catholic Mosleyites, MI6 friends and Spanish Fascists in the
 THE EAST END 379

clandestine transfer of Generalissimo Francisco Franco to Morocco at the

outbreak of the Civil War. Gordon-Canning had served as a cavalry officer in
Palestine and with the Rif leader, Abd-el-Krim, and envisaged himself as a
latter-day Lawrence of Arabia, siding with the Arabs against the Jews. Spain’s
over-officered army had sought to preserve some imperial prestige in
campaigns of pacification against the tribes in Morocco and Franco had
commanded the Spanish Foreign Legion in 1923-7 during one such campaign.
By 9 July 1936 Franco agreed to assume command of the African army and
fly from his hideout to Tétouan. The operation was organized in London by
Spanish monarchists with ties to British politicians and businessmen. Junta
Nacional included the Duke of Alba, English Review editor Douglas Jerrold
and aviators. Jerrold thought Mosley an important man, who was ‘telling the
truth as he sees it, and he is one of the few people in England who are even
trying to do so. He has sacrificed the certainty of office for the certainty of a
life in the political wilderness.’ The BU did not campaign on the Spanish Civil
War but it had the backing of a large number of Catholic members; 12 per
cent of its leading officials were Catholics. The Catholic Herald and the Tablet
were among the few journals which sympathetically reported on Mosley and
the BU.
The company carrying out the clandestine flight was chosen by aeronautical
inventor Juan de la Cierva, whose Autogiro was built by A. V. Roe (Avro), a
generous funder of Mosley. ABC’s London correspondent, Luis Bolin, made
the arrangements with Olley Air Services, whose chief pilot was Mosley’s
friend Lord (Jeffrey) Amherst, later a founder of British European Airways.
Mosley knew Amherst at Sandhurst. Wounded in the battle of Loos and
winning a Military Cross, he subsequently joined the RFC. They were both
acquaintances of Roger Senhouse, a guiding light behind publishers Secker
and Warburg. The Bloomsbury-linked Senhouse was a friend of the Mitfords
and a cousin of Cimmie’s father. His suitcase of letters, many from Mosley,
whose ‘discretion was much the lesser part of their content’, later disappeared.
Employed at Heston Aerodrome, headquarters of the British Intelligence-
linked Airwork Services, Amherst was a frequent visitor to Berlin and met
Hitler. He subsequently joined Olley Air Services — ‘Fly Anywhere: Anytime’
— which was backed by Sir Hugo Cunliffe-Owen, Chairman of BAT and
one-time backer of Mosley, and like so many of Mosley’s friends (and senior
MI6 officers), a member of White’s.
The £2,000 (£64,000) for chartering Olley ie a de Havilland Dragon
Rapide came from Spanish millionaire Juna March, who channelled the funds
through Kleinwort Benson, a bank with strong ties to MI6. Amherst was told
the London insurance market footed the bill. On 11 July the Dragon Rapide
— flown by ex-RAF pilot Captain Cecil Bebb — helped by Major Hugh Pollard,
a retired British Intelligence officer — took off from Croydon en route to Las
380 BLACKSHIRT

Palmas to collect Franco. Told that his mission was ‘to get a Rif leader from
the Canary Islands to start an insurrection in Spanish Morocco’, Bebb thought
it ‘a lovely challenge’. The plane landed in Lisbon on 12 July. Two days later
the Spanish Civil War began and five days after that the exfiltration operation
was carried out. Bebb returned to Croydon, promising to keep quiet about his
mission.
On 16 July Mosley announced the BU would fight seats in the municipal
elections in the following March: ‘East London will be asked to choose
between us and the parties of Jewry.’ This broke with the BU’s claim that
‘it was a waste of energy to fight local elections, Fascism being capable of
implementation only at national level’. It was a risky move as the municipal
register was unfavourable but with Mussolini threatening to end the subsidy,
Mosley had little alternative but to demonstrate that his movement was making
progress.
MIS acknowledged that his attacks on the Jews struck a chord in the East
End but there was ‘a good deab of anti-semitic feeling there and anti-semitic
speeches are therefore welcome. There does not seem to be any reason for
believing that public opinion in the East End is becoming seriously pro-Fascist.’
However, in a Commons debate on 10 July MPs viewed the BU’s campaign
as a ‘threat to traditional political values that could not be tolerated’. Home
Secretary Sir John Simon subsequently insisted the police enforce the law, with
shorthand writers taking notes of what was said at meetings and inspectors
charging speakers contravening the law.
The police not only permitted anti-Semitic abuse to go unchallenged but
also engaged in unnecessary violence against anti-Fascists. Reports describe
them using batons and fists with little discrimination, causing injury to
bystanders. But it was not only East End meetings that attracted violence. On
17 July BU hard man Tommy Moran was at ‘the roughest and toughest
meeting that I ever attended’. At the Corporation Field, Hull, ‘the reds did
everything that was filthy’. After the meeting police collected ‘bicycle chains,
brush staves with 6-inch nails in the end, chair legs wrapped with barbed wire
and thick woollen stockings containing broken glass in the heels’. Twenty-
seven BU supporters and over a hundred Communists were injured. A bullet
pierced a window of Mosley’s car. The incident attracted little publicity, which
suggests it was not a ‘genuine attempt’ to assassinate him, and the BU did not
exploit its propaganda value. However, Mosley’s behaviour under attack
added to his mythical status among Blackshirts. Moran said, ‘The Leader
was. superb, if we loved him in the past his courage last Sunday made us his
for life.’
On 19 July the Board of Deputies of British Jews set up a Co-ordinating
Committee ‘to unify and direct activities in defence of the Jewish communities’.
Its President, Harold Laski, organized a number of agents to report on BU
 THE EAST END 381

activities and provide advance notice of meetings. The key mole was Captain
Vincent Collier (‘Captain X’), an Irish ex-officer, former New Party and Sinn
Fein member who admired Mosley’s support for Irish independence. Laski
submitted regular reports to the BoD on the progress of the campaign.
On 3 August Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Philip Game issued a
memorandum on ‘Anti-Jewish Activities’, which ordered the police to carry
out the policy as outlined by the Home Secretary. Formerly Governor of New
South Wales, Game’s actions during the constitutional crisis of 1932, when
he dismissed the Prime Minister, provide an insight into his behaviour towards
the BU. From an English liberal background, he genuinely believed, notes
Australian academic Andrew Moore, ‘in the superiority of “constitutional
methods” and objected when it seemed that these may have been subverted’.
His ‘adherence to democratic processes was sincere’, and his opposition to the
Fascist New Guard, when it adopted a paramilitary complexion, ‘would prove
to be enduring’.
In response to the new instructions Mosley ordered speakers to obey the
law. During August the SB reported that he had ‘given a definite warning to
its speakers to refrain from attacking the Jews at public meetings, it being
emphasised that arrests of its members for Jew baiting is likely to do the fascist
movement more harm than good’. The order was opposed by Joyce and
Beckett, who urged a policy of courting arrests and imprisonment to ‘intensify
antagonism towards Jews’.

After settling into Wootton, Diana left for Berlin where she joined Unity for
Hitler’s invitation to the Olympic Games. On 23 July they were at the Goebbel-
ses’ villa at Schwanenwerder with Hitler. Diana conveyed a plea from Mosley.
‘He boldly asks for an infusion of £100,000 [£3.4m],’ recorded Goebbels. On
the following day Hitler talked with them about ‘Richard Strauss . . . the Jews
and Bolshevist danger. He will keep that danger down in Germany. The rest
of the world can do what it wants.’ Diana always insisted Hitler never raised
the subject of the Jews. She was too clever to admit to the use of anti-Semitic
language, but letters to Unity show that there was such talk. At a dinner with
Hitler she referred to brother Tom’s Jewish sympathies. ‘I said, “The lackey
of the Jews has almost become a National Socialist” and he roared with
laughter and said, “Your brother is a splendid young man.””’
In August Goebbels received ‘Wrede’s reports of his English visit and the
delivery of money. Very informative. Mosley must work harder and be less
mercenary.’ Diana, however, ‘wants money again for Mosley’, he wearily
recorded on 6 August. ‘She was fed with hopes. Should help themselves
sometimes.’ Goebbels checked with Hitler: ‘The Fiihrer has turned down
giving money to Mosley for the moment.’ Goebbels recalled his own penniless
start and expécted the BU to begin the same way.
382 BLACKSHIRT

There had been rumours that Mosley might be picked for the British
Olympic fencing team. He was not, on this occasion, but was for the national
team the following year, after which he retired from the sport. In any case,
he believed attendance was not politically expedient and there had been
opposition to English athletes going to the Games.
While in Munich, Diana asked the advice of the British consul about
arrangements for getting married in Germany. ‘He told me British subjects
were married by the ordinary registrar in Germany, and vice versa.’ Hitler
agreed to ‘ask the Berlin registrar to keep the marriage quiet’. Diana later
explained that they knew the press would soon be on to it ‘if they married in
a registry office in England’. Mosley said Cimmie had been subjected ‘to the
most blackguardly abuse from some sections of the press and it was my desire
that no woman should again be subject to such treatment merely because she
happened to be married to me’. Diana was fond of Magda Goebbels, who
helped with the wedding, which was arranged for October.
An intelligent middle-class woman, Magda’s background was high society.
She was brought up by her Jewish stepfather, Max Friedlander, whose name
she took for her own. Married to a Russian Zionist activist, Victor Arlosoroff,
who became foreign minister of the Jewish Agency and was murdered in 1933,
she was converted to Nazism by a speech by Goebbels. She divorced and
became his secretary. The attraction was not physical; she felt the need to
attach herself to charismatic, rich and powerful men. A ‘noted philanderer,
sometimes carrying on liaisons in the bedroom next to hers’, Goebbels’s affair
with Czech film star Lida Baarova was blatant. Magda, as ‘first lady’ of the
Nazi regime, appealed to Hitler for a divorce but he insisted they remain
married and that Goebbels give up his lover. Their Berlin home was a magnet
for Hitler and top Nazi officials.
The Mitford sisters were driven to the Games each day and travelled with
Hitler to the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth, where they met Winifred Wagner.
Diana found the festival ‘an experience as heavenly as the Olympic Games
were boring. For the first time I heard Parsifal.’ Mosley told the Birkett
committee that, with Frau Goebbels and Frau Wagner, Diana was one of the
three women for whom Hitler had the highest regard in the whole world. They
returned to Munich in his private train. ‘Thousands of people were shouting
“Heil! Heil!” along the track and we didn’t sleep a wink in the excitement.’
One of few women whom Hitler considered as a near equal, Winifred was
English by birth. Adopted by the German anti-Semitic Klindworths, friends of
the Wagners, she married Siegfried, the composer’s son, and ran the Bayreuth
Festival to ‘present the pure art of Richard Wagner’ after her husband’s death
in 1930. After the attempted putsch in Munich 1923 she had declared her
alliance to Hitler. Winifred immersed herself in anti-Semitic Nazi ideology
and visited him in prison, providing the notepaper on which Mein Kampf was
 THE EAST END 383

written. He once asked her to become his wife. Hitler regularly went to
Bayreuth where Wagner’s music reduced him to tears.
Hitler praised the anti-Semitism at the core of the music of Wagner, who
had been influenced by Schopenhauer and the idea that Christianity was
polluted by its Jewish origins and required purification, and the pioneer of
‘racial science’ Joseph Gobineau. Wagner conflated the two in Parsifal, whose
hero is an Aryanized, racially pure Christ figure who seeks mankind’s redemp-
tion. ‘It is so poisonous’, suggests David Cesarani, ‘because it forms a compen-
dium of German nationalism, racism, and anti-semitism.’
That the Mitfords were descended from Bertie Redesdale, backer of racial
ideologist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, was of huge importance to Hitler.
An Englishman by birth and a German by choice, after marrying Wagner’s
daughter Eva and settling in Bayreuth, Chamberlain became the chief link
between Wagnerism and the extreme Right, meeting Hitler in 1923. When the
first international writer to align himself with the Nazis died in 1927, Rosen-
berg praised him as ‘the founder of a German future’. Hitler mentioned the
Redesdale—Chamberlain relationship constantly, regarding his meeting the
Mitford sisters as no mere chance. They were the living embodiment of his
racial theories. Bertie believed racial origins determined almost everything.
Through Chamberlain, he became a friend of Siegfried Wagner and Winifred
told Diana her grandfather’s photograph always stood on Siegfried’s writing
table.

The BU opened its election campaign at the end of July with a Raven Thomson
speaking tour of the East End. The crowds were bored by his restrained
utterances but applauded when he moved on to violent invective. He warned
‘the gloves had been taken off. The fight is on. It is Gentiles against Jews,
white men against black men.’ Blackshirts chalked details of meetings on the
pavements — ‘All Out Aug 16th for Pogrom’ - and posters — ‘Kill the Jews’.
Over the following two years the BU held over 2,000 meetings in East London.
BU speakers placed an emphasis on the notions of ‘blood and soil’ and the
Blackshirt said National Socialism was necessary for Britain’s salvation.
Hitler’s expert on the United States, Colin Ross, and colleague Albrecht
Haushofer, asked Mosley to write an article on BU foreign policy. It was for
publication in Rosenberg’s Zeitschrift fiir Geopolitik (Journal of Geopolitics),
edited by Karl Haushofer, who with his concept of ‘Lebensraum’ for the
German people helped legitimize the border expansion of the Third Reich.
One of Haushofer’s pupils was Dr Fritz Hesse, a propagandist attached to
the German embassy who cultivated British Establishment members. A
member of the Dienststelle Ribbentrop, Hesse was its foremost ‘England
expert’ and went on to edit the Haushofer journal. A version of Mosley’s
article was published in the July issue of the Fascist Quarterly as ‘The World
384 BLACKSHIRT

Alternative: European Synthesis within the Universalism of Fascism and

National Socialism’.
Based on the Italo-Abyssinian crisis, Mosley said the balance of power idea
had put world peace in jeopardy. Failure had been due to attempts ‘to restrain
particular nations within circumstances which denied them not only the
national honour of great nations but also the means of free and prosperous
existence’. He wanted a return ‘to the fundamental conception of European
union which animated the war generation in 1918 and has been frustrated by
the perversion of the League of Nations to exactly the opposite purpose that
it was intended to serve’. He warned of ‘the jackal of oriental Communism
summoning the Western peoples not only to the suicide of Europe but to an
oriental Armageddon which will finally make the world safe for anarchy and
Jewry’. Using Haushofer’s concept of geopolitics, he advocated ‘a Union of
European people of German race in a closed economic system’ against Soviet
Russia. An alliance of Fascist governments would form the basis for world
peace, from which both Communism and capitalism would be banished.
Although Italy’s friendship was necessary to safeguard Empire trade routes,
Mosley’s article was a paean of praise for Nazi Germany. ‘In proceeding to
build first a system of European union we shall naturally begin with Germany’,
whose objective was ‘the wealth and happiness of its people’. To secure this
she would require ‘an adequate supply of raw materials and full outlet for
expanding population. But less than any other great nation of today her
philosophy leads her to think of limitless colonial Empire — which to the Nazi
mind suggests loss of vital energy, dissipation of wealth and the fear of
detrimental admixture of races.’ Her objective lay ‘in the union of the German
peoples of Europe in a consolidated rather than a diffused economic system
which permits her with security to pursue her racial ideals’. On this ‘profound
difference of national objective between the British Empire and the new Ger-
many’ rested ‘the main hope of peace between them’.
Haushofer promoted the idea of ‘leader’ nations and Mosley agreed ‘nations
must be either hammer or anvil’. They had the ‘duty to lead the more backward
countries in their sphere of influence and thereby enrich not only themselves
but the world by the production of fresh resources for civilisation’. Mosley
envisaged a carve-up of the world’s resources by the Fascist powers, who were
‘enthusiastic imperialists’. Seditious Indian nationalism would be rooted out
and its advocates would answer ‘with their lives and their property’. On the
basis of ‘British power throughout the world and German power in Europe’
the two could become ‘the main pillars of world order and civilisation’.
However, there was a need to ‘remove all cause of friction between Britain
and Germany’.
In a speech at Hastings, Mosley warned that ‘Britain, holding in very feeble
hands the vast Empire won by the heroism of our forefathers, is denying the
 THE EAST END 385

right of the great and virile populations of Germany, Italy and Japan to
advance into territories where British interests are nowhere affected . . . Sooner
or later these virile nations expand or explode. Which do you want? Do you
want colonial development or a world war?’ In return for excluding from
India its goods which competed with Empire produce, Mosley would support
Japan’s exploitation of northern China. If its colonies were returned, it would
eliminate the possibility of German explosion in Europe ‘by the provision of
means of her peaceful expansion’. This chimed with Hitler’s view of Britain
as an ally to control the world’s trade routes while he marched east to gain
access to raw materials and ‘living-space’ for Germans.
Mosley’s ‘rationalisations for trying to keep peace in Europe, to avoid a
“brothers” war” between the two representatives of the Faustian culture,
Britain and Germany’, owed, notes Thurlow, ‘much to Spengler as well as his
desire not to repeat the political and human disasters of the First World War’.
With Britain free to pursue an imperial policy, he was prepared to sacrifice its
influence in Europe. The half-Asiatic Russians of Spengler’s nightmares would
be told ‘Hands off Europe and back to the East where you belong!’ while
Germany would beallowed to carve up Eastern Europe and Ukraine. Mosley
intended that such a policy would be negotiated from a position of sufficient
defensive strength to render Britain invulnerable to attack if Hitler turned
on the West. Taking up the ideas of Fuller, rearmament in the air and the
mechanization of the army became central planks of his defence policy.
Karl Haushofer praised as ‘important’ Mosley’s article. In Ribbentrop’s
office Rudolf Karlowa thought that ‘as the independent view of an Englishman
[it] needs no criticism by us and fits our standpoint well’. ‘Das grosse Entweder
Oder’ appeared in September and attracted considerable attention among
Nazi officials. Diana was in Berlin when it was published and was invited to
luncheon at the Reichskanzlerei. Hitler was holding it in his hand: ‘You know
they say I never read anything.’ He said he greatly admired it.

During August, Mosley was recuperating following an operation for appendi-

citis. Baba, who had been at the Olympic Games, had been due to go to the
French Riviera with him but refused to go when she heard he had also invited
Diana. Temporarily, their relationship was off. Mosley and Diana stayed in
Sorrento and he was out of the fray for two months’ convalescing. In his
absence the East End campaign appeared to be in decline, which MIS put
down to his lack of staying power. Officials bemoaned his ‘unwillingness’ to
keep up the momentum and ‘fear’ of police pressure. Joyce was seen as a more
potent figure among those who had contempt for Mosley’s opportunism. This
reflected a body of opinion among the London-based Nazi elite.
On 14 August Magda Goebbels wrote to Diana with a date of 17 October
for the wedding. ‘You are taking on difficult tasks, and just as in the past, so
386 BLACKSHIRT

even more in the future you will need your strength and health. Give my best
wishes to the Leader. A thousand kisses to you too. I am so fond of you.’ On
11 September Ribbentrop told Hitler he had heard from Gordon-Canning
that Mosley had recovered and was in Rome where he had ‘several conver-
sations with Mussolini. I have informed Mosley that the Fiihrer has agreed to |
receive him.’ Ribbentrop’s envoy, Stammer, organized details in London.
When Diana went to the registrar’s office, an official queried her father’s
Christian name — ‘David?’ In Germany it was regarded as a Jewish name and
the official thought the marriage might contravene the Nuremberg race laws.
The adjutant accompanying Diana assured him that in England a David could
be perfectly Aryan.
On 17 September Hitler asked Magda if their house could be used for the
wedding. Goebbels was ‘not too keen. But the Fiihrer wants it. Magda is too
closely involved. Greater reserve would be appropriate.’ He was not pleased
with the arrangement, since he discovered that one of the witnesses was to be
Bill Allen, whom he did not trust. But he did not tike Mosley either and
quarrelled with Magda about the wedding.
Mosley later explained to the Birkett Committee that around this time he
discovered the BU was nearly bankrupt. ‘I was advised by those responsible
for our funds that substantial contributions to HQ had practically ceased.’
He blamed

the growing hostility of the capitalist, which had begun with my public refusal
of Rothermere’s suggestion to adopt a more conservative policy and to abandon
anti-Semitism, appeared to have resulted in the entire hostility of the money world
and a practically complete boycott of our funds. Capitalism had discovered that we
were a genuine revolution and were not to be bought off or used for their own
purposes.

In fact, they ended their funding in 1934 and he was dependent on foreign
subsidies, and it was this aspect which Mosley wished to hide.
‘I was therefore’, Mosley wrote, ‘confronted with the classic problem of the
revolutionary — lack of money. So far the problem had been solved in one of
two ways. (1) The Socialist way: to take money from capitalism and stay
bought. (2) The Fascist way: to take money from capitalism and to double
cross the capitalists in the interests of the workers.’ The pompous language
obscured the reality that Mosley was desperate and was willing to pursue any
means of raising funds. The means was chosen ‘partly by design and partly by
accident’.

In February 1936, during the accession of King Edward VIII, the government
became interested in the propaganda potential of Radio Luxembourg. Thought
had been given to transmitting the King’s speech through Luxembourg, as it
 THE EAST END 387

would give a much wider circulation in Europe than the BBC could provide.
The BU had been frustrated at its inability to secure airtime either on the BBC
or even Luxembourg. Since the days of the New Party, Allen and Mosley had
sought a radio outlet but Luxembourg raised the possibility of exploiting radio
advertising.
As director of David Allen & Sons, which was diversifying into the new
_ medium, Allen was in a position to steer Mosley into profitable commercial
radio ventures. The development of sponsored radio had impressed Bill’s
brothers, Geoffrey and Sam, during visits to America. The success of pro-
grammes from Luxembourg and Radio Normandy demonstrated that Britain
offered an expanding market for radio and confirmed the practicability of
broadcasting sponsored programmes in English from Continental stations.
Mosley’s friend, Robert Boothby, was a representative of the Jack Buchanan
Radio and on the Allen board, and had invested money in an Allen company,
Mills and Allen.
The Allens’ rival was wealthy Conservative MP Captain Leonard Plugge,
a cross between ‘a playboy-sportsman-buccaneer and a dilettante electrical
experimenter’. He owned Luxembourg, which broadcast popular dance music
interspersed with talk in English and advertisements by British firms. He had
extended his operations from Radio Normandy to stations at Toulouse, Lyon
and Paris, running the network through the International Broadcasting Com-
pany. Limited in power and confined to the late hours, these were minor
operations compared with Luxembourg, which had one of the most powerful
transmitters in Europe and reached peak audience figures of four million in
Britain.
Hiring a former Plugge employee, the Allens sought concessions to set up
commercial radio stations in Continental countries. The project appealed to
the Allens’ flair for action and they set up a company to deal with radio
advertising, though there was opposition from the BBC (supported by the
Foreign Office) to advertisers using Continental wavelengths. Mosley was
enthusiastic: as ‘an added incentive to the great fortune this would have meant
for my cause was the good crack it would give my old enemy the Press. For
they have ever been terrified of the development of radio advertising as a great
threat to their advertising income.’ He hoped radio advertising ‘would crack
up much of the National Press’ and planned to use profits to purchase local
newspapers. %
The project began in September 1936 following the return of Frances
Eckersley from a holiday in Germany. She was a member of the literary
Stephen family and married to Peter Eckersley, former BBC engineer and New
Party member. Dorothy, whose son James Clark was tutored by William
Joyce, joined the Anglo-German Fellowship and became a fanatical admirer
of Hitler. A former ILPer, Dorothy and her husband visited Germany, noting
388 BLACKSHIRT

the progress in combating unemployment. Peter was a delegate at the Union

Internationale de Radiophonie and had pioneered pan-European ideas for a
United Europe. He also chaired the League of Nations Union and wrote for
the pacifist magazine of Lord Allen, who was notorious for meeting Hitler.
Peter feared another war and believed Hitler was a man of peace. He also |
went through a period of anti-Semitism.
On his return from holiday Peter, who was involved in private ventures in
broadcasting technology, fell in with the Allens, who unfolded their plans for
commercial broadcasting in English to a British audience, offering advertising
airtime to British businesses. It was to be a great money spinner. He accepted
their generous offer of the use of their aeroplane and a salary of £1,000
(£34,000) per year (Mosley paid him an additional £2,500) to be their techni-
cal adviser. The Allens retained a ‘controlling interest’ in patents of Eckersley’s
Wired Wireless System, for which they found backers, including the brother
of Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare, Oliver, who worked with the Allens and
had the ear of Lord Perth, Seeretary General of the League of Nations, and
was an amateur radio enthusiast; Stanley Baldwin’s former Private Secretary
and a friend of both Diana and Mosley, Lord Hinchingbrooke (who relin-
quished his title to revert to his name of Victor Montague); and Simon Har-
court Smith, attached to the British embassy in Brussels where commercial
radio was flourishing.
The whole venture was shrouded in secrecy and the Allens explained that
Mosley was the silent partner in the project. The syndicate would present
itself as a British commercial venture. In their six-passenger plane, the Allens
scoured Europe from Finland and Latvia to Greece and Portugal looking for
suitable opportunities. The authorities in Ireland and Iceland were canvassed,
and visits were paid to Sark and Lundy. Germany also became a target.
On 15 September the Allens stayed at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin, a place
frequented by the Nazi hierarchy, and approached the German Post Office
about setting up a commercial station. The Allens knew Germany was short
of foreign currency and emphasized the rewards which would flow from the
influx of foreign currency. A senior member of Hitler’s staff, however,
informed them Germany had no need of a foreign-owned radio station and
turned the scheme down. They then moved to Italy where Eckersley inter-
viewed Senatore Marconi. On 8 October he was in France to see if Andorra
could offer a site but the situation was compromised by the closeness of
the Spanish Civil War. Negotiations were started with Radio Toulouse for
transmissions of English programmes.

Invited as a guest to the Nazi Parteitag, Irene found ‘it ‘breathtaking in its
splendour’ and felt the ‘aloneness’ of Hitler ‘in his colossal undertaking’. Vera
Brittain watched Goering followed in by a ‘procession of Fascist flags — the
 THE EAST END 389

most highly organised pageantry in the world, to which Mosley’s Wagnerian

displays are childish toy demonstrations’. A BU delegation headed by A. K.
Chesterton fulsomely praised the Nazi regime. His wife recalled that he found
it ‘difficult to sleep because of recurring nightmares of the horrors of the First
World War. This, combined with his selfless work for Mosley, proved to be
too much even for his iron constitution.’ Beckett remembered ‘finding him,
drunk and filthy in some dive, and returning him to his wife to be cleaned up’.
Mosley paid for him to attend a German clinic and he spent the winter of
1936-7 mixing convalescence with observation of the Nazi regime, through
_ the efforts of a senior Nazi official who was ‘able to command the opening of
all gates’.
The German Foreign Office avoided contact with BU personnel while Lloyd
George was on a private visit to Germany. Accompanying Lloyd George,
Thomas Jones wrote that ‘Hitler was forty-six, Ll G was seventy-three, alike
only in their perfect grooming and the brilliance of their blue eyes, these two
actors exchanged courtesies’. Hitler gave a signed photograph to his guest,
who replied ‘how honoured he was to receive the gift from the greatest living
German’. In England, he confided to friends that Hitler was ‘a mixture of
mystic and visionary. He likes to withdraw from the world for spiritual
refreshment; that he has no vices, or indulgences or ambition.’ Despite evidence
of Nazi terror, such views were not uncommon. Ward Price thought Hitler
‘the saviour of western civilization’.
After the Parteitag, Diana wrote to Unity that Hitler was ‘so wonderful and
really seemed pleased we had gone’. On 20 September she had a late-night
meeting with Hitler and Goebbels, who watched films about Mosley’s BU.
‘Perhaps it will work,’ wrote Goebbels. ‘We began in the same way.’
Commandant Mary Allen secretly visited Germany at the invitation of SS
Chief Heinrich Himmler; a trip she later denied making. She returned wanting
a British ‘Hitler of the spirit’. She secured an interview with Sir Thomas Inskip,
Minister for Co-ordination of Defence, and offered the assistance of her
Women’s Reserve to counter the conspiracy to ‘inflict a Communist dictator-
ship on England’. The matter was referred to Sir Hastings Ismay who turned
down her request since he was in receipt of an SB report that she was ‘a secret
adherent of Mosley’s BU’ and was ‘in a position to obtain useful information
for the Union through her contacts’.
The Home Secretary had no doubt that the BU campaign was ‘stimulating
the Communist movement so that the danger of a serious clash is growing’.
Joyce refused to stifle the anti-Semitism in the face of pressure from the
authorities. In fact, he wanted to intensify the campaign in the belief that any
arrests would increase anti-Semitic feelings in the country. There were clashes
in Manchester, Hull and Bristol with anti-Fascists — ‘or more often between
anti-fascists demonstrators and the police’. These climaxed on 27 September
390 BLACKSHIRT

with violent rioting on Holbeck Moor, Leeds. Forty Fascists were injured in
an ambush mounted by anti-Fascists, who rained down rocks on Fascists. The
event was ‘one of the things which inspired a dread of what was going to
happen in Cable Street’.
The BU announced it would celebrate its fourth anniversary by marching
through East London on Sunday 4 October 1936. The Communist Party,
facing a grass-roots rebellion if it did not respond, called on workers to oppose
Mosley. A Popular Front organization, the Jewish People’s Council against
Fascism and Anti-Semitism, gathered 77,000 signatures for a petition to stop
the march. Slogans such as ‘Bar the road to fascism’ and ‘They shall not pass’
— echoing the stance of the Spanish Republican government against Franco —
were chalked on walls. The BU was infiltrated by Communist agents — a
medical student provided much of the information about BU plans — who
enabled the CP to organize the counter-demonstration.
On the eve of the march, Mosley’s front-page article for the Blackshirt said
the BU fought ‘the great Jewish interest which controls much of our national
life’, and that the fight had begun when Jews had forced the issue: ‘We did
not begin the struggle until we had overwhelming evidence of its necessity.
We did not begin — the Jews began.’ With business pressure, victimization and
physical attacks, Jews had provoked the BU. Mosley forbade unchecked racial
anti-Semitism which, he argued, made the Jews appear ‘as a wronged and
persecuted people’. It was ‘bad propaganda and alienates public sympathy’.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Philip Game wrote to a journalist
friend in Melbourne that Mosley was ‘making a blatherskite in East London.
The antis have sworn not to let him pass and have collected to the tune of
ro-12 thousand in the route and are causing a bit of trouble and danger. I
expect there will be some fun and a few broken heads before the day is out.
I shall be glad if it brings things to a head as I hope it may lead to banning
processions all over London.’
At 2.30 p.m. 3,000 (including 400 female) Blackshirts assembled at Royal
Mint Street, Stepney. Three-quarters were said to be under eighteen, some
wearing the BU Cadets grey uniform. London’s full complement of mounted
police were present with 6,000 foot police. At 3.25 p-m. Mosley arrived in a
bullet-proof car with motorcycle escort. He wore the new SS-style uniform of
black military jacket, grey jodhpurs, Sam Browne belt, jackboots and a peaked
cap; round the left arm was a red-and-white armband. He inspected his ‘storm
troopers’ prior to a march east for a meeting in Summer Lane, Limehouse,
and then on to Victoria Park in Bethnal Green for a final rally.
The Fascists were surrounded by 1,000 police who isolated them from the
100,000 counter-demonstrators — the largest anti-Fascist demonstration yet
seen in London. An observer noted ‘their grim determination, Mosley was
that day to be denied the streets of Stepney’. Before the march could start,
 THE EAST END 391

police led baton charges to clear Mint Street of demonstrators, who let off
fireworks that sounded like gunshots. Scuffles broke out and three Fascists
were injured — almost the only BU casualties on the day. Newsreel showed
Tommy Moran picking off his attackers one by one. He was finally felled by
a blow to the head from a chair wrapped in barbed wire.
Commercial Road, a continuation of Summer Lane, thronged with a
_hyped-up crowd. An eyewitness recalled three bus loads of police arriving,
some giving ‘Hitler salutes’ and shouting ‘Jew bastards’. Anti-Fascists had
information from a police inspector that Mosley’s route would take him
through Cable Street. Jack Spot claimed to have lain in wait with his gang:
‘Some had knuckledusters; many had coshes. Others were armed with old-
fashioned cut-throat razors with a hollow-ground blade that sliced through
flesh like butter.’ It was the police, Phil Piratin recalled, who ‘then attempted,
not the fascists, to come into Cable Street . . . and it was the police who were
beaten up. It was the police whose batons we took away.’ Anti-Fascists had
broken into a builder’s yard and a lorry loaded with bricks was overturned
and used as a barricade. Police were met by a shower of concrete and glass.
Gladys Walsh claimed she saw ‘Communists with their clenched fists rolling
marbles under the police horses’ hooves and stuffing broken glass up their
noses to bring the mounted police down’. She made up her ‘mind from then
on to be an active BU member’.
Seeing the police struggle to clear a way for Mosley to proceed with his
march, Fenner Brockway telephoned the Home Office demanding the march
be called off. After an hour Game decided it would be impossible to get the
crowd to make way for the Fascist march and telephoned the Home Secretary,
Sir John Simon, for permission to give orders for the march to be called off.
Simon agreed but officials said he had no powers to ban a legal march and
that it was inadvisable to make a martyr of Mosley, who was litigious and
had never lost a case in court. They were therefore loath to overreach police
powers in dealings with him. Game therefore used the only legal power at his
disposal and re-routed the march to the West End.
‘As you can see for yourself,’ Game told Mosley, ‘if you fellows go ahead
there will be a shambles.’ Journalist Bill Deedes was standing next to them.
‘Mosley declared he must have direct orders to cancel the march, and retired
to consult his officers.’ At this point rioting was reaching its height in Cable
Street. On Mosley’s return ‘Game repeated his order. Mosley consented and
the march was turned west’ — down Great Tower Street and Queen Victoria
Street towards the Embankment. Among the Blackshirts were ‘cries of dis-
appointment’. The BU said ‘the decision was immediately obeyed because the
British Union obeys the law and does not fight the police’.
Blackshirts set out through empty streets to the Embankment at the Temple,
_ where they dispersed. Some made efforts to hold meetings in the Strand and
392 BLACKSHIRT

Trafalgar Square, where minor fights broke out. Back in Aldgate, the crowds
and the barricades disappeared from the glass-and debris-strewn streets after
assurances were given that Mosley’s march had been cancelled. In Cable
Street the police scaled the obstructions without injury and, according to a
policeman, ‘the few defenders gave up and ran into their houses. We cleared’
the obstructions and stood by to prevent any further trouble. The whole
episode was over in roughly an hour and when we were recalled to our
contingent all was quiet, with not a soul in sight.’ Between 100 and 200
anti-Fascists were hurt. Anti-Fascists gained a victory without ever sighting
the opposition. Jack Spot was arrested and was sent down for six months.
At 5.30 p.m. in Aske Street, Blackshirts were told that ‘owing to the influence
of the forces of the left and of the Jews the leader will be unable to speak. He
was persuaded not to come on here only because his life would have been in
serious danger.’ Many made their way to the Great Smith Street headquarters
to hear Mosley speak from an upstairs window. ‘We never surrender. We shall
triumph over the parties of corruption because our faith is greater than their
faith, our will is stronger than their will, and within us the flame that shall
light this country and shall later light the world.’ Irene and Baba agreed ‘the
Jews and communists created the disorder’.
The day ended with an outbreak of violence against Jewish businesses in
Roman Road with shop windows smashed. Many of the local Jewish com-
munity had arrived from Eastern Europe and the Fascists ‘seemed to them to
be analogous to the East European perpetrators of pogroms. To them, Mosley
loomed as an even greater threat than his actual activities may have warranted.’
The violence had been, compared with events on the Continent, relatively
minor. Of the eighty-eight arrests, eighty-three were anti-Fascists. Anti-Fascists
had defended vulnerable Jewish communities and Mosley’s image was dented
and the disturbances eventually led to the Public Order Act, which impacted
on BU activities.
Cable Street suggested that Mosley was not a serious revolutionary. A
Shoreditch member blamed the humiliation on his legal policy: Blackshirts
‘were disappointed ’cause a lot of them thought, we should have gone forward.
There would have been bloodshed . . . It would have either finished the party
completely or you would have made the breakthrough. You would have hit
the Reds! But Mosley was very law abiding. He was too law abiding!’ He was,
Nicholas suggests, ‘someone who gambled for power on his own terms, but
was not prepared to put everything into the gamble; which is why, although
he lost, he survived’.

The fact was that Mosley was due in Germany for his wedding and had he
been arrested would not have been able to get to Berlin the next day. On
5 October the Ribbentrop Biiro confidentially told the Frankfurter Zeitung
 THE EAST END 393

that Mosley ‘is coming to Berlin for a few days. Nothing concerning his visit
must appear in the German press. This ban extends to the controlled foreign
reports.’ According to Diana, Ribbentrop, now ambassador in London,
‘invited the couple to dinner in the hope that they would confide in him, which
they did not. Ribbentrop was visibly annoyed, and the Mosleys extremely
embarrassed.’
Diana and Unity stayed at the Goebbels’ Berlin house, where the wedding
was to take place, and Mosley at the Kaiserhof. Diana was dressed in a pale
gold tunic. Standing at the window of an upstairs room, she saw Hitler walking
through the garden that separated the house and the Reichskanzlei: ‘the leaves
were turning yellow and there was bright sunshine. Behind him came an
adjutant carrying a box and some flowers.’ Unity and Magda Goebbels were
Diana’s witnesses, Bill Allen and Gordon-Canning were Mosley’s; the only
other people present were Hitler and Goebbels. After the short ceremony
Hitler said, ‘This is an occasion which we must not speak about, it is a secret
and we must ensure the news does not get out.’ He ordered the registrar to
put the marriage certificate in a drawer.
The Goebbels gave Diana a leather-bound twenty-two-volume edition of
Goethe’s works inscribed to ‘Liebe Diana’. Hitler gave her a photograph of
himself in an eagle-topped silver frame which had pride of place in their
bedroom at Wootton. Magda invited the guests to lunch at Schwanenwerder.
Diana said their contacts that day were purely social but Unity recorded that
‘a Dolmetscher [interpreter] arrives and the Fiihrer and the Leader go and talk
alone’. Hitler was careful in his relations with Mosley. At the lunch was
Henriette Hoffman, daughter of Hoffman the photographer. She already knew
the Fiihrer kept his distance from the BU and had asked him why. He said
that ‘if he joined forces openly with Mosley he would lose his prospects of
manoeuvring with other politicians, like Lloyd George’.
The rest of the day was spent at the Sportpalast where Hitler, Sefton Delmer
reported in the Express, attacked European democracy and Bolshevism. Mos-
ley understood no German, but was interested in observing his theatrical
performance. Behind him sat Unity and Diana, who distinguished themselves
by giving the Nazi salute on every possible occasion. Mosley gave an interview
to the Lokal-Anzeiger and urged as ‘a contribution to peace’ the return to
Germany of former colonies now held as British mandates. Nothing would
then stand in the way of a close alliance between England and Germany.
The party went back to the Reichskanzlei for a dinner hosted by Hitler.
During the meal the new Lady Mosley gave Goebbels the inside story of the
affair between Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson. The King wanted to marry an
American woman, already divorced from one husband but still married to
another. Goebbels was dismayed at the depths to which ‘a proud Empire could
~ sink’. This was ‘the King who had openly praised Hitler’s social programme’.
394 BLACKSHIRT

Goebbels and Hitler were shocked and agreed to forbid newspapers to print
news of the scandal. This was the last time Mosley saw Hitler. The newly-weds
stayed the night at the Kaiserhof but had a quarrel and ‘went to bed in
dudgeon. Next day we flew home to England.’
Although it was supposed to be a secret, the wedding was known to the
Foreign Office. St Clair Gainer, the British consul in Munich, had been asked
to be a witness. ‘He had been dreading it, prevaricating as best he could,’
recalled his wife, ‘and he was very pleased when they switched to Berlin. Why
keep the wedding secret? I asked Unity, and she said she could not imagine
why it was all so secret.’ Mosley said he was protecting Diana from attack by
his political opponents but there were other reasons. Baba came to believe he
insisted on keeping the marriage secret so that he could continue his affair
with her — a liaison she would have ended if she had known of his marriage.
There was also the radio project and its confidential negotiations to consider.
He had kept his own involvement a secret and did not want to risk exposing
his ties to the project by way:of Diana.
Mosley denied to his children that the wedding had taken place and did not
tell his mother, despite the fact that she idolized him and, with her religious
convictions, was troubled by his living in sin. Diana did, however, tell her
parents and her brother Tom. In the Express on 11 October Delmer wrote
that ‘Mosley arrived unannounced on Monday and slipped away quietly on
Thursday. His stay in Germany was devoted to studying the organization of
the Nazi party.’

By autumn 1936 there was a rising tide of anti-Fascist activity, as the events
of Cable Street moved into the realm of myth. Anti-Fascists portrayed it as a
‘great rising of East London workers against Mosley’. Mosley condemned it
as ‘the first occasion on which the British Government has openly succumbed
to Red Terror’. The police rejected the idea that the entire population of the
East End had risen against Mosley and claimed the main activists had been
Communists. Blackshirt editor John Beckett suggested the anti-Fascist mobiliz-
ation was ‘a revolutionary dress rehearsal’ and Joyce claimed it had all been
orchestrated by ‘the combined resources of Jewish Finance and Muscovite
subversion’. Ten days after Cable Street, at Salmon Lane, Limehouse, Mosley
insisted a ‘Red army mobilised from all over Britain’ had been at the forefront
of it.
Part of the Cable Street mythology was that it ‘effectively checked Mosley’s
campaign in east London’. The police, in fact, argued it threw ‘out of perspec-
tive the events of the month as a whole’. The BU was ‘steadily gaining ground’
in Stepney, Bow, Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Hackney. ‘A definite pro-
fascist feeling has manifested itself throughout the districts mentioned, and
the alleged Fascist defeat is in reality a Fascist advance.’ In the following
 THE EAST END 395

week, Mosley addressed a series of successful meetings in Stepney, Shoreditch,

Bethnal Green and Stoke Newington, without any interference, in front of
‘manifestly pro-fascist’ working-class audiences. Police said the BU’s London
membership had ‘increased by 2,000’.
Cable Street, however, proved to Mussolini that opposition to the BU was
greater than Mosley had indicated. In Rome for his customary meeting with
_ Mussolini he was interviewed instead by Foreign Minister Ciano, who asked
him whether it was true that he had just been in Berlin. Mosley replied ‘without
further explanation, “‘Yes”’. He ‘did not entirely trust’ Ciano’s discretion and
did not give him the reason for the visit, which he admitted, ‘ruptured my
relations with Mussolini’. Mosley was told that Cable Street was viewed as a
defeat and they were considering ending the subsidy. Mosley’s excuse was that
the ‘real’ East End had been ‘overwhelmed’ by ‘Alien Jews’, and boasted that
the depth of Fascist support would be expressed at the LCC elections in
March 1937. His Blackshirts would sweep the polls, demonstrating the BU’s
inevitable advance to power. A message arrived saying Mussolini was ill and
could not see him. He had, however, relented on the subsidy and would
postpone a final decision until after the elections.
The BU’s East End campaign saw an increase in attacks on Jews by young
Fascist hooligans. The breaking of shop windows, the desecration of Jewish
cemeteries and synagogues, and the spread of anti-Semitic graffiti led to a
highly charged atmosphere. Increased street corner meetings at which BU
speakers made anti-Semitic remarks inflamed passions still more. BU speakers
played a game with the police to see how far they could go in abuse without
breaking the law. At a meeting in Bethnal Green, Mick Clarke said it was
‘time the British people knew that East London’s big pogrom is not very far
away now. The people who have caused the pogrom to come near in East
London are the Yids ... Mosley is coming every night of the week in future
to East London and by God there is going to be a pogrom.’
BU speakers felt they had little to fear from the police, who were regarded
as their natural allies since many were ex-army men who were ‘extremely
patriotic’ and, therefore, agreed with their views. Jeffrey Hamm recalled police
laughing at points made by speakers and enjoying the meetings. One eyewit-
ness claimed the police were ‘very anti-semitic’ and ‘corrupt in the way they
obtained convictions against Jews’.
Policemen were disciplined for not arresting blatantly abusive anti-Semitic
speakers, but Sir Philip Game admitted speakers’ tactics kept mostly within
the law, which was vague and difficult to enforce. Attempts to prosecute them
foundered on the belief of the Director of Public Prosecutions that proceedings
would probably fail, because Fascists criticized the Jewish people as a whole
rather than those present at meetings. The BU claimed it was defending the
_ right to free speech, even though it was responsible for the bulk of the violence,
396 BLACKSHIRT

particularly against the opposition who were usually attacked after meetings.
MIS claimed Fascists never attempted to break up opponents’ meetings but
this was challenged by a Home Office official who marked the report with the
comment: ‘This is not true.’ It indicated that ‘not all officials automatically
branded the communists as chief culprits’. However, they all agreed that the
two extremes fed off each other. In a memorandum on 9 October Game, who
wanted a ban on all political marches, suggested ‘the real clash may come
eventually not with Fascism but with Communism. If that does come would
it not strengthen the hands of whatever Government was in power, if the
nettle of Fascism had been grasped, and received drastic treatment today.’
A week after Cable Street, Mosley did march through the East End. On
11 October he spoke to an enthusiastic 12,000-strong crowd at Victoria Park
Square. At the end, John Warburton recalled, Mosley announced he was going
to speak in Limehouse. ‘He was told he couldn’t march there. ‘‘Very well,” he
said, “I'll walk.” The crowds followed and as he walked, they started to shout
“Good old Mosley’’. People were leaning out of their downstairs windows to
try to shake his hand.’ There was also a victory parade by 10,000 anti-Fascists,
which was charged by Fascists, resulting in scuffles and arrests. While 2,000
special constables were occupied with the affray, in the Mile End Road a
group of 200 Fascist youths set fire to cars, smashed windows and looted
Jewish shops, attacking anyone who looked Jewish. There was a razor-slashing
and one Jew, a hairdresser, was picked up and hurled through a plate-glass
window; after him the Fascists threw in a four-year-old girl. The ‘Mile End.
Road Pogrom’ was the most violent anti-Semitic outbreak the East End
had seen.
For Bill Deedes, who lived in Bethnal Green, that Sunday ‘offered a dis-
turbing glimpse of the bitterness and hatred which six months of active politi-
cal and race strife have generated in the East End . . . Political passions have
reached a pitch when ordinary, apparently decent citizens are ready to vilify,
spit upon and injure their neighbours.’ Deedes believed he was ‘witnessing a
mild version of what was happening in Spain between the extremes of right
and left’. The police drew truncheons and mounted police were used against
anti-Fascists. Of the eighty-five arrests, seventy-nine were anti-Fascists, while
seventy-three police and forty-three demonstrators required medical attention.
On 13 October the President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews,
Neville Laski, met Labour’s Herbert Morrison to urge him to keep his people
away from Fascist demonstrations, since Mosley thrived on the publicity
the confrontations produced. Laski arranged an unattributable meeting with
Harry Pollitt, CP General Secretary. The three agreed that Jews themselves
helped stimulate anti-Semitism through poor housing conditions, low wages
and bad workshops. Jewish employers could help solve the problem if they
ceased using sweated labour and if landlords looked after their houses. ‘Jews
 THE EAST END 397

ought to be super-correct in their economic conduct,’ Morrison said. In local

politics ‘Jews play too prominent a part. They should keep in the background
... and leave it to the Gentiles to fight for them.’ His attitude was no better
than Mosley’s who wrote in Action that ‘the Jew himself created anti-Semitism.
Created it as he has always done by letting people see him and his methods.
» Even Hitler was not an anti-Semite before he saw a Jew.’
_ Also present was Felix Frankfurter. ‘It is heart-breaking’, he wrote, ‘that
‘the three spokesmen could not agree on a public campaign of meetings jointly
‘sponsored by their organisations to counteract the well-organised gangsterism’
and the ‘beatings-up of Jews’, which ‘will one day mean minor pogroms’.
Morrison was afraid of joint action with Pollitt, and Laski was ‘afraid of an
appeal to the CP and its effect on the rich Jews’. Laski’s final comment was
that ‘even rich Jews will risk fascism in the hope of buying themselves off
rather than strengthen the working-class cause’.
That night Mosley addressed a crowd of 12,000 at Bethnal Green and then
marched to Limehouse. Mosley told the crowd, ‘I challenge and expose tonight
the corrupt power in England of international Jewish finance.’ Collin Brooks
was in touch with BUofficials. He thought ‘anti-semitism is a rising force, as
everywhere’. The Nazi hierarchy, too, believed anti-Semitism was beginning
in England. The National Socialist press created the impression that in London
‘Jews and Communists walk arm in arm’. The exultation which greeted Mos-
ley, the ominous ‘Perish Judah’ on walls of houses and the rioting in the East
End, notes Dietrich Aigner, ‘left no doubt that anti-semitism was in the air.
England was becoming “Jew Conscious”’.
+tUY
 Hey
The Abdication

Mosley insisted the BU had few links with the Nazis and stated that Diana
represented him alone, not the BU; though he and the movement were, in
effect, one and the same. Diana would make at least fifteen trips to see Hitler;
all of which were monitored by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). On
one occasion her luggage was searched by Special Branch, which found the
autographed photograph of Hitler that he had given-her as a wedding present.
Mosley’s standing within the Nazi movement changed from month to month
and depended on who was making the assessment. On 20 October 1936
Goebbels, who disliked him, recorded that ‘the Fihrer issued a damning
judgement about Mosley. Exactly my opinion. He is not a great man.’ |
Ribbentrop was more sympathetic and on the same day told the British
ambassador, Sir Eric Phipps, that he had recently had a good talk with Mosley
about the ‘terrible danger’ of Communism. Phipps, who regarded the German
as ‘ignorant and boundlessly conceited’, concluded that the Nazis were waiting
to see if he could woo Britain. ‘If he fails the “party” will give up playing la
carte anglaise and will strain every nerve to isolate us, and then Gott strafe
England will be their motto.’
Mosley considered the idea that Unity, ‘immature for her age, who amused
Hitler, had any influence at all’ ridiculous. Military Adjutant Gerd Engel,
however, recalled how her light-hearted talk was ‘taken seriously by Hitler,
because he had fixed ideas about things, and once he got an idea into his mind
it was very difficult for him to get it out’. He depended on personal impressions
and Unity, described in an MI6 report as ‘more Nazi than the Nazis’, helped
shape his perceptions of Britain. Speer said she was the sole exception to an
agreement among Hitler’s personal entourage that politics should not be
mentioned. Reinhardt Spitzy recalled her making ‘withering jokes about its
ruling class, thus encouraging him to believe that the British people would
soon grow weary of this privileged clique. Here was another fatal misunder-
standing.’
Magda Goebbels described a lunch at Schwanenwerder at which the Mitford
sisters attacked Hitler for Ribbentrop’s appointment. Unity predicted he would
become a joke in London but, despite her dislike of him, she strengthened
 THE ABDICATION 399

_ his admiration for ‘the used-to-ruling Tories’. Ribbentrop courted ‘eccentric’

aristocrats on the fringe of decision making. ‘Each of them’, recalled Spitzy,
‘specifically cultivated to make cheap propaganda and generously supplied
with foreign exchange.’
In London, Mosley was trying to recruit intellectuals to his new British
Union Quarterly. Ezra Pound was a ‘bustling and practical person, making
the shrewd observation that Englishmen of my class never grew up until they
” were forty’. There was a lunch with Wyndham Lewis and the former editor
of the Review of Reviews, Lovat Dickson, at the Leader’s flat in Ebury Street.
Attended by Joyce, the meal was served by ‘heel-clicking blackshirts who
raised their arms in 45-degree salute on entering or leaving the room’. Lewis
agreed to write ‘Left wings and the C3 mind’, which was unequivocal in its
loathing of Marxism as ‘an enormous evil’.
Lewis intended to visit Germany and Joyce told him ‘it had been arranged
that I should see the Fiihrer’. In his 1937 essay, ‘Insel und Weltreich’, Lewis
praised Mosley’s ‘great political insight and qualities as a leader’, and por-
trayed Hitler as ‘the most unassuming and simple of men’. His anti-Semitism
was a ‘mere bagatelle’ and understandable, given the character of German
Jews. Jewish immigration to England would mean that men ‘of the same
blood as Chaucer and Shakespeare’, who had not had the ‘low cunning’ to
accumulate money, would be forced to abase themselves before ‘some off-
spring of an Asiatic bazaar tout’. He sketched Mosley and portrayed him as
dramatically handsome and ‘poised on the brink of some gesture or action’.
Lewis wanted Roy Campbell to meet Mosley, in the belief that ‘these two
men would be on the same wavelength’. The South African-born poet had
been brought up like Mosley in ‘a wholly pastoral, pre-industrial world,
became proficient in every form of outdoor activity and had a belief in the
excellence of physical action’. The reactionary nostalgia of Broken Record
(1934) rejected the values of urban, democratic society and the ‘herd-like
masses’. A militant Catholic, he admired Fascism for being ‘religious, not
fanatical; human and not mechanical’. He failed ‘to see how a man like Hitler
makes any “‘mistake” in expelling a race that is intellectually subversive’.
The crucial event in Campbell’s life was the Spanish Civil War, in which he
was badly wounded and decorated ‘for saving life under fire’. He saw the Civil
War as ‘the ultimate encounter between light and darkness, tradition and
chaos, Christianity and atheism, Europe and Asia’. According to Tom Buch-
anan, he was ‘an isolated (and even hated) figure in literary circles’ for his
support of Franco. Campbell insisted he was simply ‘pro-European, anti-
Soviet’. He was far from alone among Catholic intellectuals in his attitude
to Spain, which ‘reinforced the distance between Catholics and mainstream
intellectual life’. Campbell recalled that the BU was ‘at its zenith and I was
regarded as a hero of the Right’.
400 BLACKSHIRT

In the new year Mosley proclaimed his support for Franco, who was ‘per-
forming a good work for the whole of civilisation’, but said ‘the whole of
Spain is not worth one drop of British blood, and if we were in power we
would not interfere in the quarrel in any shape or form’. It was denied there
were Italian and German troops fighting for the Nationalists despite over- ;
whelming evidence that Italy had supplied planes and German pilots were
practising dive-bombing techniques. The BU press denied reports of National-
ist atrocities even to the extent of claiming Guernica had been destroyed not
by German bombers but by the Republican government. From spring 1937
Major-General Fuller made frequent visits to Spain and insisted stories of
killing prisoners were ‘pure invention’. He sent his observations to an inter-
ested War Office. He recognized the war had ‘ushered in the new era of the
airmen’.
BU secret member Mary Allen also visited Spain, establishing links to the
Falange. Guy Hamilton, journalist, sometime admirer of Mosley and a contact
agent for MIS, provided the authorities with evidence that Allen was ‘Franco’s
most dangerous agent in Britain’. A dossier on her visit to the Nationalists
was kept by Republican Foreign Minister Julio Alvarez del Vayo, who showed
it to Hamilton. She was highly regarded by Falangists and was the guest of
Franco, who was told that Mosley planned to launch protests in the event of
the British government siding with the Republicans. By championing Franco
the BU increased its prestige among Catholics.
Mosley’s meeting with Campbell was unsuccessful. While he found Lewis
‘touchy but agreeable’, Campbell, who was offered the post of Fascism’s
official poet, was a ‘more robust character’. Campbell’s wife recalled that he
said, ‘It’s no good, kid. He’s as bad as the others.’ Lawrence Durrell wrote
that if he loved Campbell, ‘it was precisely because he turned down Joyce’s
overtures’. He decided he was “going back into the ranks to fight Red Fascism,
the worst and most virulent variety, and that when the time came I was ready
to fight black fascism and that I could (although badly disabled) knock out
both their brains with my crutches there and then!’ Campbell did, however,
contribute to the BU Ouarterly’s first issue.
Despite points of convergence, modernist intellectuals of the authoritarian
persuasion did not join Mosley. Lewis could not stomach the ‘repression,
violence and concentration camps’. Campbell was horrified when Mosley
‘calmly discussed ... using mortars in local conflicts’. Douglas Jerrold put it
directly to Mosley: ‘Fascism had the crudity to destroy; it lacked the subtlety to
create.’ As Leslie Susser argues, modernists ‘might invoke discipline as a cure-all
for the spiritual malaise of the modern age, but in Britain they would never
surrender their ingrained notion of politics that respected individual needs.
They could sympathise with a fascist analysis of the modern predicament, but
not go the whole way with its cure.’
 THE ABDICATION 401

Strangely, it was Joyce who courted the artists of modernism, which the BU
identified ‘with the decadence of the dying culture, the fascist phoenix was
supposedly rising to replace’. He wrote that ‘intellectuals - who form the
nuclei of decadence in the capital of the great industrial societies — please their
own morbid mentalities (and incidentally fill their pockets) by a propaganda
of filth which engulfs an increasing proportion of the youth of each generation’.
He wanted Fascism to apply ‘the stomach-pump of common sense to the
unclean system of English intellectualism. If our intellectuals are still seeking
new sensations we have something original for them.’
Through his propaganda efforts Joyce was recognized as the BU’s most
skilful officer and the immediate post-Cable Street period entered Fascist
folklore as ‘a golden age, when the BU appeared an unstoppable force’. In the
East End, the feverish rate of recruitment continued and support more than
tripled by November to around 20,000. ‘Respectable’ middle-class Fascism
was undergoing a revival, particularly in southern England where it was
intended to contest seats in a general election. Collin Brooks learnt from
Mosley’s circle that, as part of their appeal, they ‘wish to reduce gradually the
usage of the title from “British Union of Fascists” to “British Union” and to
eliminate foreign savour. If the Government forbids uniforms, this transition
will be the simpler.’ Spurred on by the likelihood of legislation, councils
allowed them halls on condition uniforms were not worn. George Orwell
wrote that ‘if, some day, an authentic fascism were to succeed in England, it
would be more soberly clad than in Germany’.
MIS reported the BU was ‘being captured by the personality of Joyce’, who
was tipped as ‘a possible successor to Mosley and a future Viceroy of India ina
BU-headed government’. If Fascism was to be taken seriously, ‘it seems likely
that Joyce will continue to play a prominent part’. His leadership qualities were
‘much more potent than Mosley’s’. For radical Blackshirts, Joyce represented
the expression of revolutionary ‘rank-and-file’ National Socialism, through his
‘unwavering adherence to fascist ideology and principles’. Maxwell Knight
repeated his assessment that it was unlikely that anything ‘could occur to shake
his basic patriotism’. This was so even though MIS intercepted a wildly optimis-
tic intelligence report Joyce sent to Berlin about the BU.
The ambitious Joyce was opposed by Francis Hawkins who, on 19 October,
as Director-General of Organization assumed control of the headquarters,
internal affairs and political machinery. Promgting his henchmen, such as
Brian Donovan as his assistant, into key personnel positions enabled him to
outflank Joyce and win the war for Mosley’s ear. Joyce argued Hawkins’s
boy.
takeover of the training of the party speakers left him as a glorified office
He was convinced Mosley was a figurehead controlled by Hawkins, who was
named by a Special Branch report as ‘the most powerful figure in Mosley’s
Council’. By early November Joyce was gradually marginalized.
402 BLACKSHIRT

At a luncheon for wealthy sympathizers at the Criterion, Mosley presented

his anti-Semitic policy which, he confirmed, had been planned from the begin-
ning. An infiltrator for the Jewish Board of Deputies reported that Mosley
said, ‘since the international financier and speculator in our midst is our real
enemy it became clear why we did not raise the Jewish question during the ’
first two years of our party’s existence ... we were told when we first raised ,
this question of vital interest that we would be crushed in six months. Every
attempt was made, but, like Englishmen, we have fought back.’ The govern-
ment was under criticism for its failure to deal with the violence associated
with the East End campaign. The PM believed the banning of uniforms would
eliminate a major source of provocation and clear the government of the
charge of inactivity. On 9 November 1936 the Home Secretary, Sir John
Simon, introduced the Public Order Bill with tough powers to control both
political disruption and public protest in general. Tory MP Oswald Lewis
acknowledged the government had taken advantage of the consensus against
the Fascists in order to introduce wider measures.
The official Italian periodical Nuovo Antologia played down the role of
anti-Semitism within the BU, which had ‘no racial policy against the Jews,
but encourages them to be British before being Jewish’. It admitted, however,
that Mosley was ‘not much liked by the public, partly because of the numerous
changes during his political career’. The word ‘Fascism’ was also ‘not much
liked by the general public, it sounds very foreign, and therefore suspicious’.
BU similarities with foreign movements were all too obvious. ‘Few facts of
Nazi anti-semitism were left unstated by the Press,’ notes Andrew Sharf.
‘And the Press, with the few exceptions . .. was uniformly disgusted by these
attitudes.” What made matters worse was that Mosley was at no stage critical
of the dictators’ actions. Laudatory articles on Mosley and his movement
appeared in glossy Nazi propaganda magazines such as Europea will leben.
On 12 November the Home Secretary confirmed rumours that the BU received
foreign funds, without going into detail.
There was good reason to be concerned about Mosley identifying with the
Fascists and Nazis. Mussolini declared an ‘Axis’ had been formed between
Rome and Berlin. Robert Mallett found in Italian archives ‘abundant evidence
that Mussolini actively pursued an alliance with Hitler’s Germany, and pre-
pared Italy for a “‘parallel” war of expansion alongside the Third Reich against
Britain’. On 15 November Goebbels admitted they had turned ‘anti-English’.
They were ‘pouring unbelievable amounts of money’ into armaments. ‘We’ll
be prepared. Domination in Europe is as good as ours.’ That day he saw
Diana. ‘Mosley wants money again. Not at the moment.’ Mosley’s reaction
was almost instant. MIS noted his ‘closer approach to the German spirit in
his more pronounced attacks on the Jews’.
In mid-November Mosley asked Baba to undertake ‘some important secret
 THE ABDICATION 403

service work’ for him in Italy. Infatuated with the Leader, she asked Irene to
go with her, to act as a smokescreen for her undercover task. MIS believed
details of Mussolini’s subsidies were known only to a few people around
Mosley. One courier was Dundas and another may have been ‘Michael F.’, a
solicitor in the City, prominently connected with the BU and a ‘responsible
person for receiving funds for the Fascist Party from abroad’. Small amounts
had already come from Hitler and ‘a rather larger sum from sources in
Switzerland’.
One differentiation from its Continental counterparts was the BU’s absolute
identification with and sycophantic reverence with which it beheld the young
King. He was portrayed against a Union Jack with the title ‘England’s Sore
Need — A Benevolent Dictator’. After Edward VIII visited distressed areas in
Wales, Collin Brooks noted on 18 November that ‘the suggestion has been
made in many quarters that he could, if he wished, make himself the Dictator
of the Empire. Some minds see in the South Wales activity and brusqueness a
sign that he may yet dominate the politicians.’ Chips Channon said the King
was‘pro-German’ and Ribbentrop described him as ‘a kind of English national
socialist’. Blackshirts regarded him as a ‘member of the war generation, a
kindred spirit’. Edward, wrote Raven Thomson, was ‘the stuff of which Fas-
cists are made’.
‘He who insults the British Crown thus insults the history and achievement
of the British race,’ the BU stated. But there was the problem of the King’s
relationship with American divorcee Mrs Simpson. ‘The King’, Mosley
declared, ‘has been loyal and true to us. My simple demand is that we should
be loyal and true to him ... The recompense of his country for twenty-five
years’ faithful service is the denial of every man’s right to live in private
happiness with the woman he loves. Let the man or woman who has never
loved be the first to cast the stone . . .” The Blackshirt headline — not long after
Mosley’s secret marriage —- was LET KING MARRY WOMAN OF HIS CHOICE.
Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin warned the King he would resign if he
married Mrs Simpson. His opposition was founded not on morality but on
the quality of Edward’s friends (Churchill, Lloyd George, Rothermere and
Beaverbrook) and the undermining of the monarchy. Secretary of State for
India Lord Zetland wrote privately on 27 November that Edward ‘had been
encouraged to believe Winston Churchill would be prepared to form an
alternative government’. This would raise ‘a problem compared with which
even the international issues, grave as they are, pale into comparative insignifi-
cance’. Brooks thought the King ‘may do anything — he may even dismiss
Baldwin and send for Mosley, and attempt a fascist coup d’état’. Ministers
call
feared this was ‘not impossible’. Churchill might form a government and
an election, which might lead to a Fascist government. Mosley was organizing
for this very possibility.
404 BLACKSHIRT

The BU’s ‘Save the King’ campaign was directed by Beckett and attracted
the support of ex-servicemen. He attempted to rally public opinion with
leaflets, chalking the walls and a special newspaper, Crisis, which sold 37,000
copies. Action published a photograph of the King getting out of an aeroplane
with the byline ‘A Symbol of the Modern Age which the old men hate’. The *
campaign, however, was spectacular for its lack of impact. BU organizers ,
soon realized they had misjudged the country’s mood. Richard Bellamy found
‘reports were extraordinarily unanimous’. The middle classes, particularly the
lower middle class, regarded the proposed morganatic marriage (by which
Mrs Simpson would be Edward’s wife but not Queen) as ‘an affront to petit
bourgeois respectability and considered that Edward should abdicate, some
said the sooner the better’. The working classes ‘were solidly for the King.
They knew he sympathised with their plight.’ Even this was wishful thinking.
Observers noted most people were ‘resolutely hostile’.
With the crisis front-page news, Mosley was in Liverpool, where he was
joined at the Adelphi Hotel by, Joyce and Beckett, who found him ‘in a state
of great excitement’. He claimed ‘to be in direct communication with the
Court. The King was strengthened by the knowledge of the support of his
movement, and for this reason would accept Baldwin’s resignation and call
upon Mosley to form a government.’ Mosley later admitted he had been in
secret correspondence with Edward. He denied seeing Edward but he had a
number of close contacts with the King, such as Fruity Metcalfe. There was a
feeling within the BU that ‘something was going on and that they were going
to achieve power’.
Mosley detailed plans to Joyce and Beckett ‘for governing without parlia-
ment’. He ‘strode about the room in excitement as he explained that millions
of pounds would be available to fight an election in such a cause, and that as
Prime Minister he could broadcast as often as he wished. This, he was certain,
could not fail to turn the electorate in his favour.’ There was then a telephone
call and Beckett recalled that when Mosley replaced the receiver ‘he turned to
us and explained that he had received most important news from Court. He
apologised for speaking in cipher, but said he always used it because his
calls were intercepted by the CID.’ Beckett thought Mosley’s secretiveness
schoolboyish but was sure he ‘really believed he was on the threshold of great
power’. He was certainly under surveillance. MIS was worried by his attempt
to organize support for a ‘King’s Party’. ‘Certain delicate enquiries’ were also
made under Baldwin’s direction involving ‘matters touching on the Consti-
tution and ultimate issues of sovereignty’, which MIS recognized were ‘far
removed from any question of guarding the King’s Realm from penetration
by external enemies or of rebellion by a section of the King’s subjects. They
involved its innermost integrity . . .’
On 4 December Beaverbrook and Rothermere picked up Mosley and Lady
 THE ABDICATION 405
Houston as recruits to their own campaign, but Lloyd George was in the West
Indies convalescing. The Chairman of Associated Press, Esmond Harmsworth,
promoted the idea of a morganatic marriage. The King had been seen by
Churchill, who told him he ‘must allow time for the battalions to march’.
Harmsworth said Churchill would ‘take office if only to be Prime Minister for
a day’. Edward’s defeat ‘would be fatal — tantamount to silent civil war. In
any issue between the King and a democratic Premier, the monarchy would
go, even if — as is possible — the King’s party won an election.’
On the following day Tory Chief Whip Margesson told the PM that forty
Tory MPs supported the King. Lacking a majority, Churchill would be com-
pelled to seek a dissolution. ‘And therein,’ Zetland concluded in a second
letter, ‘lies the supreme danger, for the country would be divided into opposing
camps on the question of whether the King should be permitted to marry...’
General Sir Ian Hamilton, former Commander-in-Chief at Gallipoli, who had
seen Hitler secretly under cover of British Legion trips to Europe, told Baldwin
‘there would be an ex-servicemen’s revolution if the King abdicated’. Detective
author Anthony Cox (‘Francis Iles’) heard from military friends of ‘a con-
spiracy by certain young hotheads, junior captains in the Household Brigade,
to take up arms against the Government and for the King and putting the
Prime Minister under arrest’. Ceremonial guards outside Buckingham Palace
were said to have been issued with live ammunition. In Berlin, Diana talked
to Hitler and Goebbels about the King’s plight. The latter was disgusted by
the news: ‘That an empire can sink so low.’ He recorded that Hitler ‘approves
money for Mrs Guinness’ and had released the money as arranged. ‘As a result
there will be peace. But they need so much.’ Mosley was back in favour.
The Director-General of the BBC, Sir John Reith, feared ‘we might have
the King as a sort of dictator, or with Churchill as PM, which is presumably
what that worthy is working for’. Sir Mark Pepys, Earl of Cottenham, had
already chosen Churchill’s government: ‘Duff Cooper and Sassoon were to
take the Exchequer and the Air Ministry, and Hoare and W. S. Morrison
could be counted on.’ A descendant of the diarist, Cottenham was a racing
driver and air ace for Vickers. A Fascist sympathizer, he told Brooks that
‘some change of leadership must come’ but Mosley’s record was ‘too bad’, as
demagogy was ‘less essential here than it was in Germany or Italy’. At the
beginning of the war, Cottenham was recruited into MI5’s Transport Section,
but soon resigned to live in the United States because he ‘could not reconcile
himself to a war against Germany’.
The King had ‘a night of soul-searching’ about supporting a King’s Party.
‘In the end, I put out of my mind the thought of challenging the Prime Minister.
By making a stand I should have left the scars of civil war.’ The idea had been
doomed to failure. The Imperial Policy Group, founded around the India
issue, sought to convince governments that Britain’s secret foreign policy was
406 BLACKSHIRT
free hand against
to keep out of European conflicts in order to give Hitler a
the Soviet Union. Its secretary, Kenneth de Courcy, hoped to persuade Edward
MP told him MI6
there was support for a King’s Party but Thomas Dugdale
which doomed the idea.
had a case against Mrs Simpson; a stain of scandal
The King decided to abdicate and summon ed Baldwin , who called a Cabinet
sent message s to Mosley of ‘polite thanks
meeting for 6 December. The King
he had ‘felt unable to take advanta ge’.
for his offers of support’, of which
from
‘On 8 December Goebbels talked with Wrede who had returned
London. ‘Our attitude regarding the Royal crisis is much praised over there.
The question of money for Mosley has been settled. Wrede wants to go to
London to contact Mosley. I welcome that.’ Hitler said, ‘the King is to be
pitied. The men in England have no guts.’ It was not until the Abdication Bill
was laid before Parliament on 10 December that German people learnt the
truth. Ribbentrop lunched with J. C. C. Davidson, a confidant of Baldwin,
and warned ‘there would be shooting in the streets’ when the King’s Party
restored Edward to the throne Davidson reported that Ribbentrop talked
‘more nonsense than I have ever heard from anyone in a responsible position’.
It was ‘quite obvious he had been stuffing Hitler with the idea that the
Government would be defeated’.
Senior Lords civil servant Colin Davidson congratulated Edward on his
‘determination not to encourage a “King’s Party”. It was within your power
to create civil war and chaos. You had only to lift a finger or even come to
London to show yourself, to arouse millions of your subjects to your support.’
On the night of 10 December Scotland Yard flooded central London with
policemen hours before Edward’s abdication. Special Branch feared a “public
uprising’ spearheaded by Blackshirts. Part of a crowd of 5,000, 500 Fascists
were outside Buckingham Palace chanting, ‘One two three four five, we want
Baldwin, dead or alive!’ Fascist youths led 800 demonstrators to ro Downing
Street and others picketed Parliament with placards reading ‘Sack Baldwin.
Stand by the King!’ In the end, only five arrests were made. That night Jim
Lees-Milne was with Diana at Wootton. They listened in tears to the King’s
abdication broadcast: ‘I remember it well, and Diana speaking in [baby talk]
to Mosley over the telephone.’
Ribbentrop told Hitler the abdication was ‘the result of the machinations
of dark Bolshevist powers against the Fihrer-will of the young King’. The
Fiihrer said the reason was because the King wanted Anglo-German rapproche-
ment. There was now ‘no other person in England who is ready to play with
us’. A depressed Hitler said that with Edward on the throne ‘there would have
been no differences — and no war — between England and Germany’. Diana
claimed, ‘if the King and my husband had been in power, there would have
been no war with Hitler.’
 THE ABDICATION 407

‘We would have stopped it dead in its tracks,’ claimed Mosley. ‘I know this
to be true. Although [Edward] and I considered it unwise for us to meet, we
maintained a correspondence before and after the abdication crisis. The King
already had a strong aversion to war with Germany. We would have told
Hitler that he could do what he liked in the East. If he wanted Ukraine, he
could have it as far as we were concerned, but we would have told him not to
touch the west.’ Edward admitted as much in a 1960s interview: ‘I thought the
rest of us would be fence-sitters while the Nazis and the Reds slogged it out.’
Mosley still entertained illusions of grandeur. He was thought by MIS to
be working for the ex-King’s return. On 11 December 3,000 people attended
a meeting in Stepney where he demanded the abdication issue be put to the
people. Windows were smashed and there was a street battle with anti-Fascists.
The telephone call between Mosley and his royal contact proved to Beckett
that the Leader was ‘dangerously near the borderline between genius and
insanity’. He knew the man as ‘a dilettante society friend of Mosley’s, who
lived in as fictitious a world of grandeur as Mosley himself’. Beckett had left
Mosley ‘convinced that he already believed himself in charge of the nation’s
affairs’. His ‘powers of self-delusion had finally conquered his sanity. He
could not realise that nobody except himself and the comical little group of
ex-peddlers and humourless ex-officers with whom he was surrounded took
him at all seriously.’ Critics who complained about his concentration on the
East End whispered that Mosley ‘liked the East End for reasons of vanity; that
in the East End he could pretend that he was already the idolised Leader of
the people’.
MIS had been surprised by the display of pro-Fascist sentiments in the East
End but ‘instead of keeping the situation at boiling point’ the BU ‘allowed it
to subside’. By December the enthusiasm of the ‘Cable Street Fascists’ waned,
with many drifting away, never to return. Given the huge propaganda effort,
the number of recruits who stayed was modest. Mosley decided ideological
Fascism made few converts and, for reasons of conviction and economy,
supported Hawkins, who argued populist campaigns based on activism and
discipline attracted recruits, who could then be converted to Fascism.
As a result of an increase in violence the government rushed through the
Public Order Act, which became law on 1 January 1937. Home Office officials
were cautious about restricting civil liberties but police chiefs wanted the
banning of uniforms — the definition of which was left to the courts, with
prosecutions the responsibility of the Attorney-General — as well as controver-
sial marches and public meetings. Insistence that uniforms led to trouble
stemmed in part from an aversion towards a ‘rival organization’. The attitude
to
was not pro-Fascist but pro-police. Section 2 of the POA made it an offence
organize meetings ‘for the purpose of enabling them to be employed for the use
408 BLACKSHIRT

le
or display of physical force in promoting any political object’. A ‘reasonab
but forbidde n at
number’ of stewards were permitted for private premises
open-air meetings. Police were given the power to ban for a period of three
months marches if thought likely to cause a breach of the peace. The Cabinet
’
opposed the extension of the ban outside East London, where it was used to
ban both Fascist and anti-Fasc ist processio ns, and trade union marches.
According to Sir John Simon, the Act worked like a ‘charm’. Herbert
Morrison claimed ‘it smashed the private army and I believe commenced the
undermining of Fascism in this country’. It deprived the BU of the propaganda
value of its paramilitary displays. Mosley addressed a meeting at Hornsey
wearing a black shirt and tie under his suit, and set the fashion for speakers.
Members took to wearing high-necked black sweaters. Fascists continued to
wear the uniform at private gatherings but did not challenge the new Act,
though the author John Mortimer recalled walking with his father on the
Embankment and seeing Fascists carrying their uniforms on coat-hangers. In
many ways it was a relief to Mosley, who realized the Nazi-style uniform had
been a mistake as it ‘made us much too military in appearance ... The old
soldier in me got the better of the politician.’
‘One thing is clear,’ wrote Kingsley Martin, ‘Sir Oswald’s form of Fascism
is making less than no progress in England at the moment.’ In fact, the number
of meetings rose and during 1937 the Metropolitan Police supervised over
7,000 Fascist or anti-Fascist marches and meetings. The POA halted BU
recovery but only temporarily. It forced Mosley to become more ‘respectable’
to attract the middle classes and in the long run the BU increased its support
so that by the beginning of the war it was higher than at any time since the
peak in 1934.
To gain respectability, lunches were arranged at the Criterion and attempts
were made to ‘popularise books calculated to awaken sympathy for fascism’.
The Right Book Club (RBC) was created in 1937 to counter the success of
Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club. Its moving spirit was the anarcho right-
winger Christina Foyle, who received the support of Conservative Central
Office and former January Club members Francis Yeats-Brown, Charles Petrie
and Douglas Jerrold. It was responsible for publishing Ward Price’s I Know
These Dictators and Sir Arnold Wilson’s Thoughts and Talks Abroad, which
expressed admiration for Nazi Germany. Chairman of the book committee
was Norman G. Thwaites, who also chaired the BU’s Windsor Club. A rival
National Book Association (NBA) was organized by the historian Arthur
Bryant and published Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The NBA’s pro-German tenor
overlapped with the RBC’s pro-appeasement stance, but in Bryant’s view
true Fascism had ‘no resemblance whatever to the foolish, provocative and
completely unnecessary play-acting under the name of Fascism which we
know in England’. He did not consider Mosley to be a bona fide Fascist leader.
 THE ABDICATION 409

The combined middle-class membership reached 15,000, but their influence

was limited.
A BU official mentioned Italian funding in letters from Rome intercepted
by MIS, where there was an air of triumph at the discovery. When it became
known that Mosley had been subsidized to the extent of ‘about £100,000
[£3.4m] and when it was probable but not established that he was being
subsidised by the Nazi Party’, Sir Robert Vansittart interceded on MI5’s behalf
with Sir Russell Scott, Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office,
with the new information in an attempt to secure a warrant for ‘a carefully
restricted examination’ of Mosley’s correspondence. However, Scott refused
because of his status as a former Minister.
The BU was, in fact, nearly bankrupt. Mosley had to mortgage his estate
for £80,000 (£2,720,000) and put £100,000 into BU funds. He could no
longer afford his share of the unkeep of Savehay Farm and decided to let it
and allow the children to stay at Wootton. The Curzon sisters were horrified
by the thought of Cimmie’s children being in the same house as the woman
they held responsible for her death. Mosley suggested Irene pay for the upkeep
and make arrangements for the children to repay her when they came of age.
The blackmail worked. To the outrage of her solicitor, Irene agreed to pay
her brother-in-law’s share out of her own pocket.
Miss Black of the BU Accounts Department told a Special Branch informant
that no proper balance sheets were kept, the subsidiary companies were in a
state of chaos and accountants simply arrived at some figures to satisfy Mosley.
If ‘we don’t make drastic improvements the whole movement in the North
will blow up’. On 13 January 1937 Goebbels gave Wrede ‘the job of finding
out what state the Mosley Movement is in. I’ll get a report in three months.’
Wrede’s role in channelling funds to Mosley was revealed in secret documents
of the Luxembourg Nazi Party, later obtained by Frederick (later Lord) Elwyn
Jones. A socialist barrister involved in fighting cases arising out of the BU
marches in the East End, Elwyn Jones supported the anti-Nazi underground,
particularly in Germany and Austria. According to the documents, on
22 January, francs worth £4,000 (£128,000) were dispatched to the BU
through ‘Agent 18’.
Joyce wanted to intensify the East End campaign but Mosley was unwilling
to challenge the law. Special Branch reported that Joyce’s ‘manner had steadily
been becoming more parade ground like and his head was cropped closer than
ever before’. Maxwell Knight observed that he ‘knows what he wants in life,
and is out to get it. I feel somehow, despite the fact I dislike the man intensely,
that in him there is someone who might one day make history. With all his
faults he remains in my mind one of the most compelling personalities of the
whole movement.’ He was, however, ‘an expert at intrigue’ and Knight was
‘acutely conscious that he is irritated sometimes to the point of insanity by the
410 BLACKSHIRT

men above him, especially the old men’. Joyce was in correspondence with
Christian Bauer, a German journalist in London believed by MIS to be engaged
in espionage. He was deported in November.
Putzi Hanfstaengl did not like Unity. He had confided in her his ‘criticisms
of the influence of Goebbels and Rosenberg on Hitler’, but his fatal error was .
to comment on the Nazis’ war culture. She passed this on to Hitler. On
6 February 1937 he proposed a practical joke: Putzi would be told to report
to a military airport for a secret mission. A pilot would take him up and would
hand him orders that he was to be dropped behind the Republican lines
in Spain. After circling a few times, Putzi would be dropped off at Munich,
none the worse. Diana and Unity laughed at the plan, not supposing it would
be carried out, but it was — exactly as planned. Putzi was shaken to the core
and left Germany for Switzerland, and travelled on to London, terrified the
Gestapo was after him.
Following government pressure on prominent BU backers to stop donations,
Mosley was forced to hand over regular sums to keep:the BU afloat. He took
out a loan from Lord Amherst of £12,000 (£408,000) in February, followed
by another £5,000 in June. Mosley’s own income was £17,000, made up of
dividends worth £10,000, Lady Mosley’s £3,500 and a grandmother’s legacy
of £2,300. The day after the Putzi incident Diana saw Goebbels, who had
decided Mosley was ‘spending a fortune and not accomplishing anything.
Now I’m not doing any more regarding this business. I’m referring them to
Wiedemann.’
Mosley decided to gamble and devote his limited resources to putting up
six candidates for the East London council. MIS discovered that a decision
had been made to put ‘the Jewish question’ at the heart of the campaign.
Mosley wanted the enemy attacked where his corrupt power was strongest.
They were going to fight the ‘parties of Jewry’ and speakers were instructed
to show ‘that all the present democratic parties are completely Jew-ridden’
and were ‘the flunkeys of finance and the jackals of Judah’. Raven Thomson
explained that every vote cast would be a vote on the ‘Jewish question’.
Mosley sought to attract the votes of Irish Catholics, who ‘run like a bright
thread through Mosley’s chequered career’ and in the East End supported the
BU as a vehicle for their local grievances. The campaign was run by two local
Irishmen, Owen Burke and Mick Clarke, along ethnic lines by playing the
Irish off against the Jews. Clarke said ‘the best thing to do when you meet a
good Jew is to shoot him’. Catholic anti-Semitism was a source of anxiety to
Anglo-Jewry in the inter-war years and Mosley found an ally in the popular
Catholic Herald, which was ‘an irritant in the life of the Jewish community’.
The election addresses were written by Mosley, accounting for their virul-
ently anti-Labour tone. The Pioneer said voters ‘tried to secure revolutionary
changes through the Labour Party and you have failed because that Party and
 THE ABDICATION 4II

their Communist allies are also controlled by the Jews’. Jewish landlords,
shopkeepers, employers and councillors were all strongly criticized. On the
hustings in Bethnal Green Mosley said electors ‘must choose between us and
Jewry’, and appealed to them to ‘give the Jews notice to quit’.
On 8 February Special Branch passed a report to MIS on the growing
differences within the BU. Joyce was at the heart of the in-fighting. His
‘irritability of manner’ was a sign that he felt his talents had not been properly
recognized. He was going through major personal changes. His marriage to
Hazel, who had been subjected to regular physical abuse by him and had had
to put up with his numerous affairs, had ended in divorce. Hazel’s second
husband was Eric Piercy, former head of the I Squad. Joyce married fellow
BU activist Margaret White on 13 February at Kensington Register Office.
Mosley’s campaign in the East End was a massive affair and by February
police were required to attend up to 1,400 meetings, which was equalled by
anti-Fascist demonstrations. The POA did not stop the street-corner meetings
which heightened tension in the area and Police Commissioner Game acknowl-
edged it did little to protect the Jewish community. Since ‘most assaults
occurred at night and the victims could rarely identify their fascist assailants,
the police were hardly ever successful in tracing the offenders’. Jewish groups
felt police deliberately minimized the extent of the anti-Semitism in reports to
the Home Office. The Commissioner argued that routine reports of Jew baiting
could now be discontinued since ‘criticism and heckling’ was being ‘kept
within the bounds usually considered permissible at election times’.
Colin Cross noted ‘a widening divergence in policy and methods between
the powerful East End movement and the isolated, idealistic provincial Fascist
branches’, where ‘patriotism was the mainspring and anti-Semitism an embar-
rassment’. Mosley addressed large audiences but Beckett knew it was ‘a stage
army which attends him everywhere. In the north the same 100 or so have
been his “brothers in arms” in every place at which he speaks.’ They were
bussed in and ‘given reserved seats in the front rows, and they behave as
hysterically as film star fans’. Mosley drove through streets ‘alive with oppon-
ents shouting his name, to a hall where admirers greet him with enthusiasm
all the more boisterous because of the “dangers” which their hero has just
escaped’. Only in Bethnal Green and Shoreditch did the Fascists represent
growing strength. ,
Right up to the count, Mosley was certain of victory and predicted they
would win four seats. He said canvass returns proved it but Beckett knew
they showed they could not win. Mosley was furious he had seen them and
reprimanded the man responsible. Beckett said Mosley was ‘capable of inspir-
ing great love and great enmity’, but ‘not one person of integrity has remained
his associate, although his brilliance and magnetism have drawn to him the
best of his generation. This is the fault of his enormous ego, combined with a
412 BLACKSHIRT

The man
peculiar shallowness of judgement and ability to deceive himself.
carrier of unwelco me tidings
who brings him good news is his friend, the
slowly becomes his enemy.’
The
In the election on 6 March 1937 not one BU candidate was elected.
Bethnal Green where the BU came second. In *
highest vote was 23 per cent in
achieved and 14 per cent in Shoreditc h. Labour’s ©
Limehouse 16 per cent was
vote held up and denied Mosley the benefit of any anti-Lab our sentiment . Its
proportion of the vote fell only in Shoreditch; elsewhere it was the Liberals and
anti-socialists who lost out. Mosley made little headway among the ‘ordinary’
working class, and his failure to win over the Irish constituted a decisive check
to attempts to establish a secure power base and was a telling blow to the
Fascists. The BU lost, and lost heavily.
On hearing the results Mosley smashed his fist into his palm and exclaimed,
‘Better than Hitler!’ He explained that in 1928 Hitler had polled only 2.7 per
cent, but had returned twelve members to the Reichstag and five years later
was in power. He told a German newspaper, ‘Our-position is now nearly
equal to that which was formerly in existence with you in Germany. In the
east end of London we have now gained the absolute majority . . . Our struggle
against the Jews has helped us to win.’ It was true that young supporters were
ineligible to vote, but he never captured the East End, where ‘the forces of
anti-fascism always remained stronger than those of fascism’. The reality was
that Hitler had won a national vote whereas Mosley fought a small number
of constituencies that offered the best prospects of success. Goebbels was un-
impressed. ‘The red majority has only been strengthened. Mosley didn’t win
any seats. He came away empty-handed.’ At the rate of progress shown in the
LCC election it would have taken half a century for the BU to come within
reach of power.
Mosley had not fulfilled the promise made to Mussolini and the BU experi-
enced its most serious crisis to date when, on 10 March, the Italian leader told
him he was ending his subsidy. The decision was final. Two days later Special
Branch reported the ‘foreign money has to a considerable extent ceased’.
Dundas was ordered back to London from Rome. His family were temporarily
homeless and stayed in one of Mosley’s London properties. Shortly afterwards
Dundas and his wife separated. Not only Mussolini but also domestic backers
withdrew support, discouraged by the lack of success.
The Charing Cross Westminster bank account was closed in May 1937.
The total Italian subsidy, which includes money not banked in the Charing
Cross account, was £234,730, worth around £8 million in today’s money.
A. G. Findlay handled the final cash subsidy for 1937 of £7,630; not greatly
different from the previous year for the same period. BU expenditure for the
year dropped to about £20,000 (£680,000), less than half the usual amount.
Special Branch reported that Mosley was shocked by Mussolini’s decision,
 THE ABDICATION 413

which plunged the movement into a series of internal crises from which it
never really recovered. Mosley announced he would give his whole income to
the movement, but this was not enough to maintain all of the BU’s salaried
posts.
The cuts in every sector were set against factional infighting between the
‘politicals’ such as Beckett and administrators like Hawkins. Beckett heard
from Joyce an authoritative rumour that Mosley wanted rid of both of them.
Beckett was bitter about the conduct of the campaign and considered Hawkins
and Donovan to be ‘utter fools and that if Mosley was not as great a fool as
they are, he is certainly far too complacent’. The officials sent to the East End
had been ‘worse than useless’. Raven Thomson was ‘a dangerous idiot who
frothed about the Jews and boasted that he would soon be elected and giving
orders’. Exasperated by the lack of realism on the night of the election, Beckett
had ‘very nearly resigned’.
On 11 March Mosley handed many officials envelopes containing money
and a letter giving them a week’s notice. Headquarters was cut from 143 toa
skeleton staff of thirty and expenditure, hitherto running at £2,000 per week,
was cut to £500. Many paid speakers of the Propaganda Department-were
dismissed in acrimonious circumstances. The cull included the legal officer
Captain Lewis, Joyce and Beckett, and, according to the latter, ‘every other
man or woman on his staff who had ever reasoned with or contradicted
Mosley or his henchmen’. Joyce had a face-to-face confrontation with the
Leader but it did him no good and he was expelled for ‘financial irregularities’.
A week after the dismissals John McNab, an official in the Jewish sub-
department of the Propaganda Department and editor of the Fascist Quarterly,
complained about the treatment of Joyce. ‘Mosley went livid and thumped
the desk and shouted that Joyce was nothing but a traitor; that he would never
rest until he had broken him; that he would roll him in blood and smash him.’
When McNab returned to his office, a uniformed guard gave him ten minutes
to leave the building. In a private document Mosley wrote that ‘those no
longer on the salaried staff have offered voluntary service in their spare time,
which is gladly accepted, and will consequently be available to the Movement
as speakers, writers or voluntary organizers. The exceptions are Messrs Beckett
and Joyce who have not emerged in the same manner from this stern test of
character.’ He thought Joyce ‘intensely vain, a quite common foible in very
small men’. He ‘did his best to create a revolt in,the party, which I overcame
without difficulty. He failed to shake our members, whose morale was much
too strong for him.’
Joyce claimed the charges against him were based on a forgery that black-
ened his name. He sued for wrongful dismissal and won an out-of-court
settlement. He formed, with Beckett, the National Socialist League, along with
McNab and Vincent Collier, a propaganda officer and agent of the Board of
414 BLACKSHIRT
had
Deputies of British Jews. Financed by stockbroker Alex Scrimgeour, who
given £10,000 (£340,000) to the BU, the violently anti-Semi tic NSL was
committed to a pro-Nazi racial nationalist ideology. It was never a serious
political force but attracted enough support to give Joyce a living.
It is a matter for conjecture, noted Robert Benewick, ‘whether the Black- ©
shirts who succeeded in stirring up some racial hatred in East London made
real converts or only prodded a latent anti-semitism into action’. BU candidate
Charles Wegg-Prosser, whose writings betrayed ‘a faint “Communism is Jew-
ish” trend’, resigned when he saw anti-Semitism in action. He issued an open
letter through the BoD to Mosley, denouncing anti-Semitism as ‘a smoke-
screen to cloud thought and divert action with regard to our real problems
... You sidetrack the demand for social justice by attacking the Jew, you give
the people a false answer and unloose lowest mob passion . . . I tried to interest
these people in real problems, unemployment, wages, housing, and so on. I
watched with dismay the mentality which said “Get rid of the Jews, and you
will automatically get rid of unemployment, slums, sweating”.’
The criticism did strike home. Action issued a reminder that ‘this task of
repelling Jewry is a small and incidental feature of the British Union Campaign.
Our task is to build a prosperous Greater Britain. From that task we shall
neither deviate nor allow ourselves to be driven; and the Jews are only impor-
tant in so far as they stand between us and our objective and will not be
allowed to distract us from the great ends to which Mosley has called us.’ On
14 March Collin Brooks met with Yeats-Brown and Fuller who were leaving
for Spain to see Franco. ‘Fuller says that Mosley is now intent upon dropping
the label of Fascism’ and ‘still thinks his day will come when the next economic
stress affects people’.
The reduction in personnel was followed by a restructuring of the organiz-
ational machinery, which included closing northern regional offices in Man-
chester and combining administrative and political functions in the London
headquarters. MIS reported that ‘the significant feature of this upheaval is the
complete victory of the Hawkins “‘blackshirt” clique, which has practically
eliminated those who were opposed to its conception of the BU as a semi-
military organisation rather than an orthodox political machine’. A former
propaganda officer complained the BU was ‘bureaucracy run mad’.
The propagandists believed ‘National Socialists had been driven out’ and
‘were being victimized because they tried to enlighten the Leader as to the true
state of affairs in the organization’. As Hawkins took control, it seemed the
movement had succumbed to ‘heel-clicking and petty militarism’. His role,
however, was overstated. It was to P. J. Taylor that Mosley turned to salvage
the disaster, rather than Hawkins, who waited outside Mosley’s office while
the Leader consulted with Taylor — a fact officials noted with surprise.
Luckily for Mosley, on 17 March he received 22,700 francs (£91,000) from
 THE ABDICATION 415

‘Agent 18’. In total, he had delivered nearly £220,000 in today’s money —a not
inconsiderable sum. MI5 believed the Nazis subsidized the BU ‘for purposes of
propaganda likely to be favourable to German policy’.
Unity wrote to Diana on 26 March that she had stayed in Nuremberg ‘with
the lovely Gauleiter’. The only irritation was the presence of Streicher’s son,
_ Elmar, who made ‘the most amazing statements about England [he had been
there the previous year to survey the BU] and he is always believed in prefer-
“ence to me’. On 9 April Diana reported that Goebbels admitted ‘Mosley is
_ slowly winning through’. He was still plagued by financial problems. The
Public Order Act frightened away contributors, since it empowered the auth-
orities to audit the finances of any organization deemed to be violating the
law and required it to reveal the sources of its funds. The statute created
difficulties with regard to the secret subsidies to which Mosley had become
accustomed. It therefore became essential that he find other sources.

Geoffrey Allen had secured a concession to operate a station in Andorra but

its construction was stopped by the civil war in Spain. An agreement had been
made with Kieztoushi and Tremoulet of Paris and Toulouse to run two ‘English
hours’ per day on Radio Toulouse. A programming company was set up in
London and the English programme was opened in grand style by a speech on
Anglo-French friendship by Winston Churchill and a talk from Peter Eckersley.
The station intended to provide people ‘with an entertaining alternative to the
dreary schoolmasters at the BBC’. Mosley hoped to compete directly with
Luxembourg by serving the British market from west, south and east Europe.
Ireland was to be the western supply; Sark or Belgium the southern; Denmark
or Germany the eastern. The Allens visited Dublin, where Radio Athlone had
commercial channels and could offer studio time. After Bill Allen told Mosley
about it, thought was given to a station on Sark in the Channel Islands, where
the BU had a supporter.
Exploiting commercial radio had been suggested by Captain Dudley M.
Evans, invalided home from the war in 1917. An Anglo-German Fellowship
member, he was impressed by Nazi achievements. He was classed on M15’s
Suspect List as ‘a fanatical BU member’. Evans introduced Mosley to Colin
Beaumont, a BU member with family connections to the Mosleys, who knew
about commercial radio through contact with Captain Plugge. His mother,
the Dame of Sark, the island’s quasi-feudal ruler, admired Mosley, as did her
friend Lady Dunn. During the war Sibyl worked in the War Office’s Postal
Censorship Department and in the Foreign Office. In 1932 the first flight was
made to the island by Fascist sympathizer Lord Sempill. That Christmas she
became the first woman to land on the island by aeroplane. The Home Office
noted she was not wealthy but was ‘anxious to do all she can for the island
within her means’.
416 BLACKSHIRT

his father
The current Seigneurie de Sark, J. M. Beaumont, remembers
be based loosely on Radio Luxem-
‘talking of this idea of a radio station to
bourg. My father was always full of money making schemes! ’ Sark was outside
hoped to persuade his friend to allow a
the BBC’s jurisdiction and Evans
Beaumon t ‘got on very well’ with Mosley and agreed ©
station to be built there.
whereby Mosley would create a holding company to ~
a thirty-year contract
finance the construc tion costs and Beaumon t would receive 25 per cent of the
profits. The Allens would share the profits and advanced money to the BUF
Trust and New Era Securities, obligations later cancelled.
Mosley set up holding companies to obscure his partnership with the Allens,
including to negotiate contracts, Air Time, whose principal directors were Bill
Allen and Peter Eckersley, and the New Museum Investment Trust to conclude
agreements. Mosley’s investment of £10,000 was obscured by accountancy
smokescreens created by James Herd. The system of loans and guarantees
between the directors and Mosley was set out in a secrecy document which
obliged signatories not to divulge his role. Diana stuck to the pact and even
Unity was unaware of the real reasons for her trips to Germany. Mosley later
asked Skidelsky to delete names connected with the project from his biography.
He did not want the business ‘to be traced to various well-known men who
were engaged in it ... It would not embarrass me, but it might embarrass
them.’
In March, Allen completed the agreement with Sark to host a station, even
though Eckersley advised the Post Office would never allow it and the BBC
would seek an injunction to block transmission. Mosley was optimistic the
courts could be convinced Sark was not bound by British law because of the
legal autonomy granted it by Elizabeth I. The matter would need to be settled
by the Privy Council.
Mosley employed Frederick Lawton, a colleague of Tom Mitford in the
chambers of C. T. Le Quesne KC, a silk with roots in the Channel Islands. A
future Lord Justice of Appeal, Lawton was the son of Wandsworth Prison’s
sadistic governor. He flirted with Communism, converted to Roman Cath-
olicism and founded Cambridge University’s Fascist Association. Called to the
Bar in 1935, he helped Mosley in a libel suit and in 1936 almost stood as a
Mosleyite candidate in Hammersmith and defended Blackshirts accused of
offences under the POA. After visiting Sark and researching medieval land
law, Lawton advised legal prospects were fair. Mosley recognized government
opposition was ‘likely to be much more intense if they discovered by any
means fair or foul that I should benefit, and consequently it was of immense
importance to cover my connections with the island and the business’.
Mosley claimed he ‘attempted to get the German concession some time after
getting the Sark concession. It was an entirely new idea to them, and it took
over a year of very hard work through intermediaries to get them to entertain
 THE ABDICATION 417
the project.’ By March, Eckersley was presenting ‘practical ideas’. He wrote
to his wife from Berlin that Diana Guinness was ‘the only one in the [Allen]
team who is neither hysterical nor fantastical. It is a relief to get a little honest
pessimism, coupled with determination.’ Diana was never referred to as ‘Lady
Mosley’, as everyone was anxious not to alert the press as to what she was
doing. Eckersley insisted he was not engaged in ‘some political racket’ but he
did see an Anglo-German station as a means of fostering co-operation between
the two countries as part of his passion for peaceful coexistence in a ‘United
States of Europe’. Eckersley travelled on to Vienna, where the Allens failed to
find studios, then to Copenhagen, again with no success, then back again to
Berlin to meet ‘DG’.

Returning from Germany in April, Chesterton was promoted by Mosley to

Director of Propaganda. He became editor of the Blackshirt and published a
series of articles, ‘Aspects of the German Revolution’, full of sycophantic
praise for ‘the splendid Nazi manhood and womanhood of Germany, old
strugglers and young enthusiasts alike. ““Comrades! The Blackshirts of Britain
salute you! Heil Hitler.”’ ,
Nazi thinking was evident in the ‘blood and soil’ philosophy. Novelist
Henry Williamson recognized that the BU had the most supportive agricultural
policy, with increasing stress placed upon the ‘moral’ advantages of rural life.
In a speech on 24 April Mosley warned ‘the roots of Britain are being dragged
from the soil’. The ‘drift of population from country to town’ was a symptom
of decadence. ‘Any civilisation that is to endure requires constant replenish-
ment from the steady, virile stock which is bred in the health, sanity, and
natural but arduous labour of the countryside.’
Chesterton wrote that ‘unless they know, mystically, that beneath the con-
crete lies the earth which has nourished their race for a thousand years and
. .. that it is their own earth from which their blood is shed and renewed, then
they are a lost people and easy prey for those who have lacked roots for many
centuries’. BU agricultural expert and Sussex farmer Jorian Jenks had been
educated at Harper Adams Agricultural College and Balliol, and held agricul-
tural appointments in England before becoming a victim of the slump and
emigrating to New Zealand. Returning to England, Jenks was a leading light
in the Rural Reconstruction Association and wrote studies of the organic
movement. The combination of blood and soilemysticism and modernism,
however, resulted in an unstable pledge to ‘repeople the land’ and encourage
the ‘small working farmer’, while making ‘every method of modern science
available to British agriculture’.

On 12 April Goebbels celebrated Baldwin’s retirement and hoped his suc-

cessor, Neville’ Chamberlain, would be better for ‘Europe’s deliverance. In
418 BLACKSHIRT

Anglo-German unity lies the key to the new times.’ He praised Rothermere
for ‘speaking out very warmly for the return of our colonies and for an
Anglo-German bloc’. There was little difference between the Conservatives’
policy of appeasement and Mosley’s foreign policies.
Frustrated in domestic politics and subject to important defections, the }
adoption of a peace campaign provided Mosley with an issue around which
to capture popular support. The ex-serviceman of the last war, he asserted,
would rally to the BU because ‘we have fought Germany once in a British
quarrel and we shall not fight her again either in a Socialist or a Jewish
quarrel’. Mosley ‘grasped at what straws of hope still blew in the increasingly
turbulent international atmosphere.’
Mosley’s appeasement of Nazi Germany was denounced by Basil Liddell
Hart, who regarded ‘as double-dyed traitors those who wish to import
methods of government that are contrary to the English traditions of justice
and freedom, and uphold the aggressive policies of Great Powers which can
be a danger to us — thereby playing into the hands of the enemies of England’.
He could not forgive Fuller, who had aligned himself with Mosley and Hitler,
and ceased communication with him.

Domestically, the BU remained a threat to public order, occupying police time

and manpower. Prosecutions following the Public Order Act were almost
entirely confined to the BU, which gave rise to Fascist complaints of discrimi-
nation. The impact of the POA, however, was limited and at the end of April
BU anti-Jewish activities resumed.
Mosley maintained he had expelled the hardcore of the anti-Semites but
had no problem with BU’s publications claiming that ‘to go to a swimming
pool anywhere near London or the large cities is as efficacious as baptism in
the Jordan; one becomes positively anointed with Semitic grease’. Jews were
referred to as ‘an obscene sub-human mass . . . these ape-like creatures’. With
declining access to the press, Blackshirts resorted to outbreaks of slogan and
emblem painting and chalking. The provincial press reported many cases of
young members caught scrawling the anti-Semitic ‘Perish Judah’.
Banned from marching through the East End, the BU used other London
routes, such as through Bermondsey where serious disturbances took place.
The police reported that marchers were ‘often carried away by their anti-Jewish
feeling, and acts of damage occur. The unfortunate inhabitants are deprived
of sleep, and some of them are more or less terror-striken, for to the Jewish
resident of the East End, the Fascist is a source of grave apprehension.’ In the
first year of the POA there were 3,904 Fascist meetings and 4,364 anti-Fascist
demonstrations. The difference was that the latter did not set out to terrorize
a section of the populace.
On 28 May Diana saw Goering, who asked her to see Putzi ‘and persuade
 THE ABDICATION 419
him to go back’. She did so but informed Unity on 8 June that he was ‘quite
mad’. He said, ‘The truth is they wanted to [kill me] and they didn’t manage
it, so now they pretend it was a joke.’ MIS raised the subject of the BU’s links
to Germany with the Home Office on 9 June. It wanted to open Mosley’s
correspondence and that of Gordon-Canning, Dundas and Findlay — who
were ‘connected with the negotiations for, or payments of, German and Italian
subsidies and were suspected of being intermediaries for the communication
of secret information’. MI5’s concerns arose from ‘a source which had been
tested over and over again and always found to be extremely reliable’. A week
later Special Branch reported that Mosley wanted ‘to keep the BU patriotic
and respectable, at the same time fomenting industrial trouble in order to get
the support of the workers when a slump comes’.
By 1937 unemployment had fallen to one and a half million but exports
declined and imports rose sharply. With signs of a depression, defence spend-
ing Came into its own as an anti-slump instrument. Germany’s share of military
spending rose in 1937 to 28.2 per cent and by the next year to 42.7. Within
the BU there was anxiety that war would be used to avert a slump: ‘Although
there can be no question that war on a big scale would end depression
overnight, we appeal to the sanity of the British people to choose the lesser of
two evils. Surely a slump, however bad, is better than another war.’

On 4 June an agreement between New Museum Investment and Sark was

signed. Mosley would finance construction of the station, with Beaumont
receiving 25 per cent of the advertising profits and a £1,000 fee. Four days
later, in Liechtenstein, agreement was reached for a radio concession with
Roditi International, run by the Jewish Roditi brothers. Eckersley had under-
taken the negotiations in Paris with his Roditi contact (“Kenmare’). He did not
reveal his backers’ identity when he approached the International Broadcasting
Union to attend meetings on the strength of the Liechtenstein licence.
On the back of these two agreements Mosley launched ‘Gemona’ to involve
the Germans in a similar project. Throughout the summer Diana acted as a
negotiator on Mosley’s behalf and timed her visits to Berlin to match periods
when Hitler was present. Occasionally ‘we dined and watched a film or talked
by the fire’. She told Nicholas they spoke of events in England and Germany,
of Mosley and the BU, and the state of the world. Mosley admitted ‘it was a
habit of Hitler to convey to me his view of events through Diana’. She broached
the idea with Hitler of establishing an English-speaking radio transmitter on
German soil to broadcast to England. He was non-committal as ‘it was the
sort of thing that bored him and was left to his ministers’. Hitler handed the
project over to Wiedemann, whom Diana ‘ceaselessly badgered in letters’.
Goebbels, through Radio Zeesen, and Mussolini, through Radio Bari, broad-
cast continuous anti-British propaganda. Mosley claimed that all propaganda
420 BLACKSHIRT

would be specifically forbidden in the new stations for fear of scaring away
advertisers. The aim was to make money, with light music, sport and beauty
hints to advertise domestic products to housewives. Mosley and Diana planned
a range of ‘own brand’ cosmetics and other domestic items to be sold over the
airwaves. The opportunity, however, for propaganda, even of the mildest ©
kind, to the mainly young audience that such a station would attract was
incalculable, though Diana refuted that this was ever on the agenda. Bill Allen,
however, later revealed the real purpose of the enterprise. The broadcasting
company would be used as a safe channel for funds from the Nazis.
On 11 June Irene was shocked to receive a call from Mail journalist Ward
Price, informing her of a report that Mosley had married Diana in Berlin and
that the Fiihrer and Goebbels had been witnesses. ‘My heart stood still,’ Irene
recorded, ‘though he denied it to all of us and his children.’
Fuller complained that Mosley ‘will not see sense’ over the BU’s future. ‘He
goes rampaging on talking of fighting 400 seats. This is all absurd.’ Fuller
wanted to concentrate on ‘gutter electorates’ in the East End before branching
out. In fact, gutter anti-Semitism was becoming more virulent, which pleased
Der Stiirmer. ‘Exactly as the human blood stream, infected by a poisonous
bacillus, responds by mustering germ devourers to attack and eliminate the
invader,’ Chesterton wrote on 26 June, ‘so does a race conscious community
at once mobilize its forces to fight the alien influences which instinct teaches
would imperil its very existence.’ He said of Jewish culture that ‘when parasites
crawl in and out of art like wood-lice, then culture is decadent and the people
are brought face to face with doom’.
BU delegations visited Germany as enthusiastic admirers of Hitler’s regime.
Correspondence between an SA Division officer and BU members led to a
twenty-strong group visiting in July for a study trip. Approved by the Ribben-
trop Bureau, the group visited SA facilities on the ‘guarantee no report of this
visit will appear in the British or German press. The trip must be seen as that
of private people and in no way as that of representatives of Mosley.’ Streicher
told his guests that he considered them ‘brothers and comrades in the fight’
against the ‘one common enemy, and that is the Jew’. The BU spokesman
replied, ‘We rejoice that we have seen the world leader in the fight against
Semitism.’
Goebbels still had reservations about Mosley and on 1 July stated, ‘the
Fiihrer is only supporting Mosley because he does not believe in his victory.
But he is a nuisance to the government.’ Unity often saw the Fiihrer alone,
which his aides regarded as potentially dangerous. They were concerned about
the role she had established for herself in his life.
Hitler rescinded the prohibition on spying and gave. the green light to the
Abwehr to resume operations. MI5 lacked resources to deal with German
espionage but monitored Nazi journalists who were seen as agitators and
 THE ABDICATION 421

spies. On 7 August the Home Office refused to renew the permits of Werner
Crome, chief correspondent of Lokal-Anzeiger, his assistant Herr Wrede and
Herr von Langen of the Graf Reischach Agency. Through them Goebbels had
contact to Mosley, though MIS was unaware that Wrede was the conduit for
Nazi funding. ‘Mosley was spending a fortune and getting nowhere. I think
his cause is hopeless,’ wrote Goebbels after a request by Diana for funds.
Mosley managed to repay £17,000 of the loan he had taken out by obtaining
a mortgage from Car and General Insurance of £60,000. He was investing his
_ own money in his movement at an ever increasing rate. The total would reach
£100,000 (£3,400,000).
Diana saw Hitler on 14 August when she watched films of ‘the revolution
here, the coming of the Fuhrer, 1923 Parteitag, meetings, Schlageter being
shot, Jews, Nazis ... It was pure heaven.’ Both Mitford sisters referred to
Hitler as ‘Wolf’ — the name he went by to his intimates. Unity saw him lose
his temper and regarded the incident with awe. She wrote to Diana that ‘at
last he thundered . . . It was wonderful.’
Despite MIS fears of German intelligence penetration of the BU, the Service
still made use of the organization. On 18 August four BU members — Ford,
Dawson, Mann and J. C. Preen — burgled the home of Major Wilfred Vernon,
a technical officer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, where
innovations in fighter and bomber equipment were designed. Vernon belonged
to the Labour Party and Socialist League, and had set up a Self-Help Club for
the unemployed. He was regarded as a Communist for meeting hunger march-
ers and MIS intercepted his mail. During his absence Vernon’s home was
ransacked by burglars, who were caught by police making their getaway in a
car sporting a BU flag. In the boot were an imitation revolver, a hammer,
chisel and aluminium knuckleduster. Defended by BU barrister Frederick
Lawton, the four were found guilty of larceny and bound over for twelve
months.
‘Nobody has ever explained’, asked The Aeroplane, ‘why four amiable-
looking young men led by a self-confessed ex-Irish gunman should have been
moved to extract these documents . .. We should so much like to know what
is behind it, and who instigated these young men.’
During the trial the men stated that they wanted to expose the ‘Communist’
Vernon and not to rob him. A defendant was asked if he ‘had been reading
Bulldog Drummond’? He replied, ‘No, I happen to be a patriotic citizen.’
Preen said they had carried out the burglary on the orders of ‘a senior intelli-
gence officer’ — later identified as P. J. Taylor, who hoped to secure evidence
for MIS that Vernon was spreading Communist propaganda among troops.
However, at his hearing before the Advisory Committee, Preen explained that
Taylor, having disclosed his MIS credentials, said Vernon had stolen secret
plans to pass on to the Soviet Union. He wanted Preen to raid Vernon’s home
422 BLACKSHIRT

and to bring whatever documents were found to the Intelligence Department

at Scotland Yard. Among the papers stolen were ‘sensitive’ blueprints of the
Avro Anson and Blenheim aircraft engines, which Vernon had taken to work
on at home. Vernon was charged under the Official Secrets Act and fined
£50 for failing to take proper care of secret documents, and dismissed from *
his job. :
In 1940 MIS sent a note to the Advisory Committee stating that the interned
Preen should be released — a payoff for services rendered. The Committee was
intrigued by the ambiguity of his action; he was working both for and against
the Fascists. It illustrated the strange relationship between the BU and MIS,
which regarded some officials as patriotic and used its personnel to carry out
its freelance operations.

Hitler felt at home at the Osteria Bavaria where Unity was a regular guest.
Privy to these occasions was Phillip Spranklin, BU correspondent in Munich,
whose SS badge denoted his high status. American journalist Ernest Pope used
him ‘to lift the veil off Unity’s love life with Hitler, or other goings-on within
the walls of inaccessible Nazidom ... Phillip enjoyed proving how close he
stood to the Nazi leaders.’ Diplomatic columnist Bella Fromm wrote on
16 September that Unity was unpopular with Ribbentrop, having “quarrelled
about the methods of advancing the Fascist movement in England’. His mission
in London had been unsuccessful and he blamed the British for his failure.
Much to his chagrin, there were still ‘saboteurs’ in the Fiihrer’s entourage who
hankered after a settlement with Britain. This included Unity and Wiedemann,
Hitler’s adjutant and wartime commanding officer.
Hess was suspicious of Unity, Fromm discovered. He repeated, ‘where it
will do the most good, Réhm’s remark about her: “‘She pinches her lips so
tightly because she has crooked teeth.”’’ Hitler used her for political ends. He
‘questioned her in a conversational way about England, English politics and
Anglo-German relations’. Mary Ormsby-Gore recalled that Unity and Hitler
‘used to comb through the Tatler every week to mark the names of those who
might come over to them when he occupied England. They had great lists.’
She observed that Mosley ‘was treated seriously but not intimately’.
Hitler, his adjutant Nicholaus von Biilow noted, ‘expected that his thoughts
would be passed on in England’ by Unity. On 25 September she ‘complained
freely about Mussolini’. Goebbels could not ‘understand why the Fiihrer lets
it happen’. The British ambassador forwarded a report of a conversation with
Unity who had learnt the Duke of Windsor was due in Berlin. Hitler had told
her, ‘If Mr Baldwin had not turned out King Edward VIII I might have been
receiving him today instead of Mussolini,’ though the visit ‘was useful in
demonstrating to other countries the strength of the Berlin—Rome Axis’.
Unity was ‘as open in telling’ the ambassador ‘what Hitler had said to her
 THE ABDICATION 423

as she undoubtedly was in telling Hitler what [he] thought’. The Foreign Office
minuted that if Unity’s account ‘is true, Hitler will not have committed himself
to Mussolini in Berlin’. It was initialled by the Foreign Secretary, Anthony
Eden, who shortly after was seen by Ribbentrop, who talked about Communist
activities, which seemed to ‘obsess him to the exclusion of all other consider-
ations’. He asked Eden ‘what was the state of affairs in England. I replied that
we had virtually no communists in this country, except those whom Sir Oswald
Mosley was creating.’ This puzzled Ribbentrop, who asked Eden ‘to explain
how it was conceivable that fascism could create communism’. Three months
later Eden resigned, ‘pincered by the Berlin—Rome axis, to the considerable
pleasure of both Hitler and Mussolini’.
The Fascists and the Communists needed each other, ‘for their mutual
vilification gave them a significance which they otherwise lacked’. The CP
benefited from opposition to Fascism at home and abroad. Rallies opposing
the BU provided a major part of its activities. The CP achieved its peak, ‘not
when unemployment was at its worst, but on the eve of the Second World
War’, when membership rose to over 50,000.
Police Commissioner Game reported that the Public Order reer seems to
have killed the wearing of political uniforms without any need for pros-
ecution’. The BU had ‘dwindled steadily into insignificance’. The autumn,
however, saw serious disturbances. A march through Bermondsey celebrating
the movement’s fifth anniversary on 5 October culminated in a street battle
on the scale of Cable Street. In Liverpool Mosley was hit on the head and was
taken half conscious to hospital to treat a ‘punctured wound of the skull’. On
12 October Goebbels noted that Mosley ‘was going through the same thing
we did’. The Home Secretary was bothered by the marches but, according to
the Cabinet’s deputy secretary, did ‘not want to squash them in a hurry because
the Civil Liberties group in the House is numerous and vocal’.
The disruptions led to increased support from Der Stiirmer: ‘Mosley’s fight
is truly courageous, truly honest, and truly chivalrous ... We stretch out our
hand to this man and tell him: “Adolf Hitler said in 1925, when the Jewish
doctrine is opposed by a non-Jewish doctrine which fights with the same
brutality but with greater truthfulness, then the non-Jewish doctrine will be
victorious, if only after a very heavy fight.” The day of Mosley’s victory will
come if he persists in his fight against Judah.’ The BU now discussed the
‘means of eradicating this pest from England once and for all’.
 2O

The Radio Project

Coverage of BU activities dwindled in the press, as that received by Anglo-

German peace movements and Nazi apologists grew. Mosley, however, was
careful not to associate himself directly with groups other than his own as he
knew such ties might be used against him by the authorities. Instead, key BU
members were used to maintain contact. Mary Allen’s growing prominence
among ‘fellow-travellers of the Right’ led to an invitation to join the Council
of the National Citizens’ Union, whose leadership was dominated by Con-
servative diehards and aristocratic closet Fascists. Anti-Semitism and pro-
Nazism were increasingly characteristic elements of such groups.
The Link was founded in 1937 by C. E. Carroll, a badly wounded RFC pilot
who edited the British Legion paper and became editor of the Anglo-German
Review. Around 4,000 people joined the Link, which was more populist and
active than the Anglo-German Fellowship. Its Council included pro-Nazis
such as Professor A. P. Laurie and Sir Raymond Beazley, and had the support
of Major-General Fuller, the Duke of Westminster and Lord Tavistock. Under
the leadership of Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, Director of Naval Intelligence
(1927-30) and member of the A-GF’s Council, the Link strove for a German—
British alignment.
Domvile’s operation evolved through consultation with Dr Gottfried Roesel,
the Anglo-German Information Service Head who was his next-door neigh-
bour. A journalist on Goering’s National Zeitung and party leader for Central
London, Roesel had considerable sums of money at his disposal and worked
closely with the BU. He cultivated“‘white lists’ of potential collaborators with
a director of the Anglo-German Review, Dr Erich Hetzler, who allegedly sent
to Berlin a list of 4,000 Nazi sympathizers. The Link was aptly named. Not
only did it provide a channel for Ribbentrop and Goebbels to try to influence
British public opinion, but Domvile saw his role as the key link man between
pro-Fascist and anti-Semitic groups. He wrote for the BU newspaper under
the pseudonym ‘Canute’ and was one of its secret members.
During the First World War, Domvile had concluded that ‘behind the scenes
controlling the actions of the figures visibly taking part in the government of
the country’ was ‘the Judaeo-Masonic combination, which has wielded such
 THE RADIO PROJECT 425
a baneful influence in world history’. He blamed his early retirement in 1936
on falling out with MIS’s Vernon Kell over criticisms of British Intelligence.
During the previous year Domvile had visited Nuremberg and been féted; he
liked Himmler and his book, By and Large (1936), was a paean of praise for
Nazi Germany.
Domvile belonged to an anti-Semitic ‘subversive group’ set up in co-
operation with Nazi journalist Thost by Philip Farrer, a wartime intelligence
officer related to the Mitfords and a friend of Mosley. Members included
Fuller, who sent reports on the A-GF to Ribbentrop; Richard Findlay, Vice-
Chairman of the Link’s Central London branch, who had stood at the
Norwood by-election in 1935; ‘Billy’ Luttman-Johnson, leading light in
the Windsor Club, who offered German propagandist H. R. Hoffman help in
the event of a Communist revolution. Luttman-Johnson’s wife said he regarded
Communism ‘as a cancer which, if it took root here, would have to be cut out,
if necessary, with foreign aid’. Other members such as George Drummond,
President of the Northampton section of the Link, were recorded by MIS as
potential subversives and were put on the ‘Suspect List’.
Der Stiirmer talked of a secret organization in Britain whose object was ‘to
spread national and racial consciousness’. The Nordic League had been created
in 1935 by Nazi agents sent to London to establish a branch of the Nordische
Gesellschaft, run by Alfred Rosenberg, and used by the Abwebr and SS as a
rival organization to Ribbentrop’s A-GF. The Germans regarded the NL as
the British branch of international Nazism.
A clandestine body with upper-middle-class support, the Nordic League
had its origins in a racist and occultist order, the White Knights, Britain’s
nearest equivalent to the Ku Klux Klan. The White Knights and the NL shared
a headquarters in Lamb’s Conduit Street, and both aimed to ‘rid the world of
the merciless Jewish reign of terror’. In a room festooned with swastikas,
master of ceremonies T. Victor Rowe heard members swear a blood-curdling
oath to King Edward I, responsible for expelling the Jews from England, for
the initiation ritual. A BU member, Rowe was described by Mandeville-Roe
as a ‘German agent’. An importer of kitchen equipment from Germany, he
was alleged to have a ‘close association with prominent persons in the Nazi
regime’. The League’s ‘chancellor’ was Commander E. H. Cole, a retired naval
officer and member of the IFL, whose extreme anti-Semitism derived from his
exposure to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, when he ‘had been involved
with allied help to the White Russians in the Civil War’.
The NL’s extremism was the reason Mosley refused to get involved, but his
lieutenants, Fuller, Gordon-Canning and Oliver C. Gilbert, had been founding
members. Gilbert’s contacts with German and Japanese agents were viewed
with suspicion by MIS. NL membership was a who’s who of the Fascist
political fringe, with Maule Ramsay MP, Brigadier-General R. B. D. Blakeney
426 BLACKSHIRT

(BF), William Joyce (NSL), H. H. Beamish (Britons), Arnold Leese and P. J.

Ridout (IFL), and ‘Professor’ Serrocold Skeels (United Empire Fascist Party
and known Nazi agent). Meetings were often held under the auspices of the
BU and Nazi propaganda was distributed. Through these ties, members of
Lieutenant-Colonel Seton-Hutchison’s pro-Nazi National Socialist Workers
Party were integrated into the BU. The faithful exchanged views on the evil
of Jews and watched films of the ritual slaughter of animals. Commander Cole
said Parliament was full of ‘dirty corrupt swine’ and declared that ‘extermi-
nation is the only solution to the Jew problem’. Audiences responded with
shouts of ‘Kill the Jews’ and ‘Heil Hitler’.
The League was aided by ‘fronts’, the Militant Christian Patriots and the
Liberty Restoration League. Between them they encompassed MPs, aristo-
crats, industrialists and financiers — the Duke of Wellington, Lord Brocket,
Lady Dunn, Lady Douglas-Hamilton, Lady Alexandra Hardinge, Sir Abe
Bailey’s son, Lord Carnock, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, Sir Louis Stuart and Com-
mander Bowles MP. They were; however, relatively minor figures and the NL
provided the Nazis with a distorted ‘insider’s’ view of the British ruling class.
One trusted Nazi agent in the League, Anna Wolkoff, had been associated
with the inner circles of the BU since the time when Joyce had been an
up-and-coming BU figure. Officials visited the Russian Tea Rooms owned by
her White Russian parents, where Wolkoff held court. Special Branch noted
her presence at BU London Administration luncheons held at the Criterion
where Mosley addressed titled ladies.
Although Hitler forbade the Abwehr to create an intelligence network inside
Britain, the Abwehr and the SD engaged in the ‘development’ of secret agents
on a long-term basis. Férscher (scouts) searched among the BU and the
mushrooming anti-Semitic clubs for people who could be enticed into
espionage.
MIS had penetrated the German embassy and recruited the Press Attaché
‘Klop’, father of Peter Ustinov, Counsellor Theodor Kordt and junior secretary
Wolfgang zu Putlitz, who told them of ‘improper contact with underground
activities’ by German officials. A report sent to the Home Office on 27 January
1937 emphasized that BU members ‘would support Italy or Germany against
their own Government in the event of war’. Mosley was surrounded by a
group of ‘reckless individuals with a revolutionary outlook. Ultimately, they
hope to see a Socialist government in power when they would be able to “go
into the streets” and imitate the tactics which brought the Fascists and Nazis
to power in Italy and Germany.’ MI5 backed Schuster’s proposed Emergency
Powers (Defence) Bill. He warned that ‘in a future war ... there is a serious
danger that attempts to impede the war effort might be made by persons
actuated not by sympathy with the enemy, but by “‘internationalist” affiliations
or by disinterested opposition to the war’. He wanted the government to have
 THE RADIO PROJECT 427
powers to intern anyone ‘whose detention appears to the Secretary of State to
be expedient in the interests of the public safety or the Defence of the Realm’.
It was approved by the Committee on Imperial Defence but was deemed so
controversial that the Cabinet was not told.
By late 1937 the Nazis had little use for Anglo-German rapprochement,
preferring the Berlin—Rome axis. Hitler realized the pronouncements of visi-
tors such as the Mitfords had been ‘too consistently contradicted by events.
The failure of the BU to make headway, for instance, ultimately spoke for
itself, and did so even to Hitler’s mind.’ According to his aide, Wilfred von
Oven, Goebbels judged that Unity, ‘through her sledgehammer methods was
more harmful to us than helpful’.

After attending Nuremberg, Diana turned her attention to the quest for a
radio station in Heligoland. On 9 October Wiedemann reported to the Fiihrer
and informed Diana that ‘apart from the consideration of the technical style
and several things that the Ministry of Propaganda has raised — considerations,
which under some circumstances could have been disregarded — the greatest
objection was raised from the side of the military authorities. The Fiihrer
regrets that under these circumstances he is not able to agree to your proposal.’
Diana learnt it was Goebbels, ‘who, when things looked hopeful, always put
a spoke in the wheel. As Propaganda Minister he wished to keep radio entirely
in his own hands.’
Mosley was trying to put together a deal in Belgium, where his people ‘had
done a tremendous amount of work’. Oliver Hoare was his chief negotiator
and Frederick Lawton visited Brussels to lay the legal groundwork. Mosley
and Allen believed they had in their pocket a Belgian Cabinet Minister who
could be bribed to give the necessary permission.
Mosley’s Belgian associates were Joseph Hepburn-Ruston, who had div-
orced Baroness van Heemstra and was said to be working for the Bank of
England, and his partner Dr Albert Tester. They were behind the creation
of the controversial European Press Agency, which aimed to produce an
anti-Communist and anti-Semitic newspaper. Tester admitted that he was
acting for Mosley. Involved with the agency was Dr Richard Behn, a Hamburg
barrister assisting the German Foreign Office and director of Tester’s British
Glycerine Co. Its Belgian directors included General Henri Maglinise, former
Army Chief of Staff, and Baron Brugmann de Walzin, millionaire and Fascist
sympathizer. Its backer was Sir Charles Allom, a contractor to the War Office
for shells, who had known Mosley’s grandfather as a member of the British
Shorthorn Society. Rumours circulated in Belgium that the company was a
Nazi ‘front’ for gathering commercial intelligence. In an interview in the
Telegraph (5 April 1938), Belgian Rexist leader Léon Degrelle confirmed he
had contact with Tester and had met Mosley.
428 BLACKSHIRT

L’Indépendance Belge was for sale and Dr Behn negotiated to buy it. In the
Belgian Chamber of Deputies on 23 March 1938 a letter was read out, which
indicated that in the previous year the agency had received £110,000
(£3,740,000) from German heads of industry who were working with Goeb-
bels. Tester denied the allegation, though he had ties to Fritz Hesse, Ribben-
trop’s Press Attaché in the London embassy, who knew him as a ‘propaganda
leader with Mosley’ and as an ‘untrustworthy businessman with whom it was
best doing no business’. The British Foreign Office judged Tester to be a first
class crook who made his money through the formation of bogus companies.
These were alleged to be ‘fronts’ that allowed German firms to overcome
embargoes from European countries trying to avoid economic subordination
to the Nazi regime. According to the Express (7 September 1940), Tester was
considered by British Intelligence to be ‘a shrewd agent of Himmler’. The
Nazis were well aware of his ‘strong anti-Jewish attitudes’ which had ‘made
him many enemies’.
Mosley boasted he now ran ‘a much more formidable and far sounder
organisation conducted at a fraction of the cost’. He was, however, desperate
for money and during November tried to persuade Mussolini to resume fund-
ing. Optimistic reports were sent to the Italian embassy, but to no avail. He
was forced to put £700 (£23,800) into the coffers weekly to keep the BU
afloat. From October to the following February £11,000 was deposited, with
another £10,000 used to pay off an overdraft. ‘I did not object to spending
all my own fortune but I did object to failure. My immediate steps were to
effect considerable economies.’ He reduced his personal expenditure to about
£5 (£170) a week. ‘None of this mattered. All that mattered was that at our
1937 rate of expenditure I should exhaust my fortune before I achieved my
objective.’ é
The Home Office feared Mosley might regroup the BU around the Duke of
Windsor and it was resolved by MIS that if he attempted to do so he would
be arrested for sedition. Sir Robert Vansittart assembled a security file on the
Windsors’ dubious contacts and meetings with Fascists. They spent their
honeymoon in Austria at an alpine castle owned by Count Paul Munster, a
dual British and German citizen, who together with Fruity Metcalfe had joined
Mosley’s Windsor Club. Munster was under general observation due to his
association with known backers of Mosley. Wallis’s legal affairs were handled
by the French lawyer and Nazi agent Armand Grégoire, who had dealt with
Ernest Simpson’s shipping contacts. French Sfireté reports note that he rep-
resented Mosley and may have channelled German funds to Mosley, who
made a number of trips to Paris during 1937 with Diana, including rep-
resenting Britain in the world fencing championships. US intelligence records
suggest Mosley received funds from the Nazis via Belgium, France and
Switzerland.
 THE RADIO PROJECT 429
On 22 October the Windsors met Hitler in Berlin ‘to express their gratitude
for the moral support Germany had shown during the abdication crisis, and
at the same time roundly annoy their opponents in Britain’. The transcript of
their talk disappeared from Nazi files captured by the British at the end of the
Second World War. The couple also dined with Hess and discussed the idea
of a ‘new world order’. Hess held out the prospect of the Duke’s return to the
throne. Goebbels suggested ‘we could get an Anglo-German bloc with him’.
On 2 November the British ambassador, Sir Ronald Lindsay, told Sumner
Welles, US Under Secretary of State, there was a ‘very vehement feeling of
indignation’ against the Duke, which bordered on ‘a state of hysteria’. This
was because his supporters were ‘known to have inclinations towards Fascist
dictatorships’. His reception by Hitler could ‘only be construed as.a willingness
to lend himself to these tendencies’. Lindsay said the Duke ‘was trying to stage
a come-back, and his friends and advisers were semi-Nazis’. During November
one of the most influential men in Whitehall, Chief Industrial Adviser Horace
Wilson, told Walter Monckton, Attorney-General to the Duchy of Cornwall,
that the real worry was that if the Duke returned to England it would be
exploited by extremist groups, by which he meant Mosley’s Blackshirts. On
22 November Bruce Lockhart informed the Foreign Office that the Nazis
were convinced Edward would ‘come back as a social-equalizing King’ and
inaugurate an “English form of Fascism and alliance with Germany’.
Outside of rallying around the former King, the Home Secretary considered
the BU ‘a troublesome nuisance rather than a political danger’. Cities such as
Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool no longer had an organization, while
there were no more than a hundred active members in Lancashire. Chesterton,
who had written a glowing biography of the Leader, blamed Mosley’s inability
‘to free himself from the influence of the party bureaucrats’ led by Hawkins.
By turning the movement into a conventional party, the BU was ‘employing
lies and political bribes in order to gain votes’. As Chesterton’s biographer
suggests, for the bureaucrats ‘the party was fascism’. They gave Mosley
‘their undivided support and thus bolstered his self-importance, something
increasingly important to him as his crusade disintegrated in external
indifference’.
The BU’s low-key campaign in the November council elections was reflected
in the poor results. Forty-eight candidates in five London boroughs polled an
average of 560 votes. For the first time in its hjstory the Communist Party
won a seat, in Spitalfields East. The BU put up six candidates in Limehouse
and lost them all. The thirty-eight candidates in Edinburgh, Sheffield and
Southampton came bottom of the poll. In Leeds, with a large Jewish popu-
lation, BU candidates polled 106 and 74 votes respectively, coming below
even Social Credit.
Following his concussion at Liverpool, Mosley spent time with Diana
430 BLACKSHIRT

recovering at Wootton. ‘Solitude was what he craved, for a few days in the
whirl of his crowded, busy life.’ He used the time to write Tomorrow We
Live, a 35,000-word update of his brand of Fascism. He decided not to spend
Christmas with the children at Denham. There was ‘not one word’, recalled
Irene. ‘He is the utter limit.’ Since no one knew they were married, this
apparent flouting of the conventions was deemed scandalous.
At the beginning of 1938 diminishing finances forced another round of staff
reductions. Prospects looked bleak. More than half of the active membership
of 5,800 was concentrated in London. As the movement stagnated, the CP
regarded Mosley as a spent force. Even the Nazis seemed to believe he was
not worth supporting. In his report on British politics on 2 January, Ribben-
trop placed no emphasis on the BU.
Rumours circulated that the Beaumonts of Sark were interested in operating
a commercial radio station on the island. This surfaced on 13 January 1938
in the Express’s ‘William Hickey’ column, written by left-winger and MIS
informant Tom Driberg. Hickey said, ‘The least pleasant feature of the scheme
will be that some of its backers are wealthy businessmen known to be closely
in touch with Fascist sympathisers.’ The Post Office put paid to an agreement
under a 1934 Act which forbade transmission from the island. Hickey’s infor-
mation probably came from MIS’s Maxwell Knight, to whom Driberg had
been introduced by Denis Wheatley. The three shared an interest in the occult
and lunched at the Paternosters Club, where conversation often centred on
British Fascism.
The Allens approached the Liechtenstein government and on 21 January
Eckersley met its chief Minister Dr Hoop. At the same time Diana visited
Berlin with proposals that she handed to Hitler. She ‘assumed the famous
Secret Service knew why I was there’. On her return she received a letter from
Wiedemann, who said ‘the Fiihrer took the documents himself’. He advised
her to return to Germany ‘when things have settled down and then get your
decision from the Fihrer himself’.
Eckersley met with Robert Boothby, who was a ‘fixer’ in Europe for the
Jack Buchanan Radio Corporation of America and a director of the Allens’
company, on 18 February at Mosley’s London flat. Oliver Hoare of the
‘Boothby Group’ was employed in Belgium but his connections to Mosley
became known to the authorities. On 12 March Dr Behn, the German barrister
based in Brussels who had met Mosley in London through Dr Tester, was
refused an entry permit to England. Behn suspected the ‘English authorities’
were aware of these contacts, having found a letter on him from Mosley. On
23 March the European Press Agency was ‘exposed’ in the Belgian Chamber
of Commerce and three days later the British press picked up the story. The
Express ran an interview with Tester in his capacity as ‘legal adviser’ to
Hepburn-Ruston. He admitted his links to Mosley as his ‘aide-de-camp’ and
 THE RADIO PROJECT 431

proclaimed that the BU was best described as a National Socialist movement.

The exposure of the agency was raised in the Commons on 7 April but the
Home Secretary stated there was no evidence that it was financed by the
Germans. The resultant publicity scuppered Mosley’s ambitions. Perhaps
the expected bribe was not big enough because the attempt to suborn the
Belgian Minister failed and Hoare’s deal collapsed.
Mosley’s electoral ambitions to put up sixty candidates at a general election
were also collapsing. After a year spent building up the St George’s constitu-
ency, Westminster, Fuller decided to withdraw his name as a prospective
candidate since ‘the vast re-armament scheme, now in progress, has knocked
the main props from under my feet. Since my name went forward I have been
almost completely tabooed by the Press, with the result that journalism is
practically debarred to me.’ On 21 February Lady Downe, who intended
to stand in Norfolk, told Collin Brooks that Mosley ‘gets good meetings
everywhere, and is really trying to eliminate the Fascist flavour from his
movement’. She admitted that ‘nobody about him has much brain and that
he is often misled about the general public feeling’ but was ‘extremely anxious
to get reports of his meetings into the Press — not support editorially but
publicity’.
On 3 March Brooks saw Mosley, whose desk was dominated by a large
autographed portrait of Hitler. Mosley said Communism was ‘gaining ground
in the North and that the Tories are deceived by a new Communist tactic.
When Hitler triumphed in Germany, Communism saw that it was folly to
divide the Leftist forces and allow Fascism to slip between them. They now
work for a Popular Front, contemplate a kind of Kerensky Government, which
they will overthrow, and so do not force forward their own candidates. The
old Tories thus say — no candidates, no communism.’ He added that it was
better that Brooks was ‘outside the movement than in it’.
Following Eden’s resignation in February, Mosley remarked that his policy
would have led to war but Neville Chamberlain’s ‘means humiliation’. He
appeared to be proved right when Unity witnessed German troops cross the
Austrian frontier and the country’s incorporation into the Third Reich. On
22 January Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg learnt that Josef Leo-
pold, leader of a faction of the warring Viennese Nazis, bragged to Robert
Gordon-Canning that they were going to stage an armed uprising, aided by
the German Reich. Three days later Leopold’s, headquarters were raided by
von Schuschnigg’s police who found documents relating to a coup d’état,
coupled with an invasion by the German Army ‘to prevent further bloodshed’.
When a German agent told MIS ‘orders had been issued to intensify arrange-
ments for espionage against this country’, at the end of March it was issued
with a Home Office warrant to open Gordon-Canning’s mail.
Von Schuschnigg announced a plebiscite to determine Austria’s future, a
432 BLACKSHIRT

decision which outraged Hitler. Having read his anti-Hitler speeches, Unity
wrote to Churchill setting out her thoughts. He replied that ‘a fair plebiscite
would have shown that a large majority of the people of Austria would loathe
the idea of coming under Nazi rule’. On 11 March 1938 German troops
crossed the border and arrested the Chancellor. Unity believed Churchill was }
wrong, for on 14 March she witnessed scenes of wild jubilation as Hitler
entered Vienna.
In Vienna, brothers of Baron Louis Rothschild, who owned Vitkowitz,
Czechoslovakia’s vast iron and steel works, begged him to leave Austria while
there was still time. However, Louis did not believe disaster could overtake a
Rothschild. The SS confiscated his passport and placed him under house arrest
in the Hotel Metropole, in a room next door to von Schuschnigg. The Baron
was interviewed by an intermediary of Goering, who told him he could have
his freedom if he paid £40,000 and turned over Vitkowitz and banking assets
in London to the German Reich. At which point ‘internecine war’ broke out
in Berlin and Goering was forced to abandon the"deal, which, curiously
enough, was revived at the beginning of the next year through the intervention
of Mosley.
Action described the advance of the Nazis as ‘like a symphony; the Saar
was the allegro, the Rhineland the andante. Austria the scherzo, there remained
the finale to be played.’ Following Hitler’s takeover of Austria and the occupa-
tion of Prague on 15 March, Mosley launched a ‘Stop the War’ campaign. He
wrote that Conservative foreign policy ‘has been one of everlasting bluster,
innumerable foreign commitments, followed inevitably by ... abject humili-
ation’. With regard to the British government’s guarantee to come to Poland’s
aid if attacked, he noted that ‘any frontier incident which excites the light-
headed Poles can set the world ablaze. British Government places the lives of
a million Britons in the pocket of any drunken Polish corporal.’ The BU
plastered London with a new slogan: ‘Who the heck cares for Beck’.
Churchill attacked the ‘Heil Hitler Brigade in London Society’, which
included ‘those like Mosley who are fascinated by the spectacle of brutal
power. They would like to use it themselves. They grovel to Nazi dictatorship
in order that they can make people in their turn grovel to them.’ The ‘Stop
the War’ campaign failed to achieve widespread support. Police reports indi-
cated that Mosley’s attempts to infuse life into the movement did not evoke a
response outside the East End, where Micky Clarke was firmly entrenched.
He was transferred to headquarters, leading to rumours that Mosley was
‘jealous of him and wished to remove him from the limelight’. In fact, Mosley
wished to downplay anti-Semitism, which was no longer a prominent part in
BU propaganda and was dropped as a major issue from 1938 onwards, as
policy on foreign affairs and the Empire took its place. In the spring Mosley
was deprived of his foremost propagandist; another reason for the eclipse of
 THE RADIO PROJECT 433
anti-Semitism as the main propaganda plank. A. K. Chesterton resigned,
disillusioned with Mosley’s leadership.
Chesterton revealed his reasons in a pamphlet published by Joyce’s National
Socialist League. Mosley was associated with the intrigues that were ‘part of
the petty power politics within the Movement’. The ‘ringmaster of the whole
circus’ was Hawkins but Mosley had been

the chief partner in this absurd little set which is a reflex of something real and large
in his own mind. I have never known him give a decision against his favourites, or
fail to come to their help when they have been embarrassed ... Clearly, they are
very valuable to him: he finds them comfortable men, shielding him from the impact
of every reality, subjecting him to no heartsearchings, no self-analysis, no stress or
turmoil of intellectual conflict out of which great things might be born.

Mosley had been ‘taken in far too many times by political con men’, Chesterton
added. The result was those who had access to his ear ‘realised that he was
gullible in relation to propaganda about the growth of the movement and that
the best way to advancement was to tell him what he wanted to hear, whether
it was true or not’. Flops were written up as triumphs and enormous efforts
were made to ‘give the impression of strength where there is weakness, of
growth where there is declining influence’. Chesterton believed that, had not
his enemies “counter-demonstrated in thousands his marches would have been
about as spectacular and exciting as the progress of a troop of bedraggled Boy
Scouts on a rainy day’.
In April Mosley issued an apocalyptic warning, which hinted at megalo-
mania: ‘Facts will then be brought to light which are partly known to many
already but are hidden from the people as a whole by the machinery of the
system.’ He referred to the ‘politician who has served not his country but his
personal gain, the traitor in a hundred ways to the people’s cause’. He promised
clean courts of people’s justice will be created to reveal all their foul transactions to
the sterilizing light of day and to pass judgment upon them... Let the rats of this
putrescent system not think that any land will safely shelter them, nor any sewer of
the world provide them with a refuge ... So to the jackals of putrescence we say
today ‘Beware!’ ... The cleansing flame shall pursue you to the uttermost ends of
the earth.

On ro April Unity came across a Labour Pgrty-organized rally in Hyde

Park in support of Republican Spain, which was opposed by a small Fascist
counter-demonstration. When Unity’s swastika badge was spotted, the crowd
turned on her, ripping off the badge. Back in Munich, the episode generated
fan mail. On 28 April the Fiihrer gave her two new swastika badges.
At the end of May Collin Brooks published a pamphlet, ‘Can 1931 Come
Again? An Examination of Britain’s Present Financial Position’, which argued
 434 BLACKSHIRT

that the economy was heading for a crisis. Brooks’s pamphlet was praised by
the anti-Semitic magazine Truth, whose editor, Henry Newnham, was a Mos-
ley sympathizer and whose wife was a BU member. Throughout 1938 the BU
made efforts to exploit the recession, which became quite severe. The rise in
unemployment to 1,700,000 was, Mosley argued, ‘a warning to all who believe _
that purely monetary measures can remedy a real economic crisis’. He avoided
close association with the extreme right as ‘spurious anti-Semitism gave way
to the type of cogent economic analysis which had provided the raison d’étre
and the bedrock of Mosley’s fascism’.
Eckersley made three more trips to Germany in pursuit of a radio contract,
and Mosley gave Dudley Evans a special pass to see high-ranking Nazis. They
were unsuccessful, the obstacle being the question of a wavelength in the
medium band; to give any of these would be a sacrifice for the Germans.
Despite the setbacks, Mosley told Frederick Lawton, he intended to concen-
trate on Germany. Lawton had been taken to see the Leader by Mosley’s
younger brother John. On the way, he informed him*that Diana had married
his brother: ‘But it is secret and no one else must know.’ Lawton was told he
would work with Diana, whose appearance overwhelmed him: ‘She was so
strikingly beautiful.’ Wiedemann wrote on 11 May suggesting she ‘come here
at the beginning of next week’. Lawton claimed his employment was ‘strictly
professional. I took no part in any negotiations.” Diana, however, admitted
he was employed as a means of ‘distancing Mosley from the project’. She
dismissed him in that Mitford way as ‘a Grammar school boy’.
Goebbels arranged for Diana to see the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs,
Dr Wilhelm Ohnesorge, a short man with ‘a ratlike face’. He was responsible
for Hitler’s personal income from the sale of stamps bearing the Fiihrer’s
portrait. Most of the negotiations took place with Ohnesorge, who was sym-
pathetic because he saw the advantage to Germany of a steady flow of hard
currency. The Reich had a serious balance-of-payments deficit and Diana used
this as a lever.
Following an exhausting meeting with officials, Lawton left Diana a note:
‘Please sleep well tonight. No one could have used more skill and shown more
courage.’ Ohnesorge became her ‘valuable ally’ and approved the concession.
Germany had taken over Austrian wavelengths and Goebbels decided they
could authorize the leasing of one of them (the former Polish Katowitz fre-
' quency). “You have your wavelength, and a very nice one, too,’ Ohnesorge
told Diana. Radio engineers roughed out a plan for the proposed German-
based station. Diana and Lawton had a celebratory dinner, where, to his
astonishment, she told him she had dined the previous night with Hitler,
Goering and senior Nazis, and the topic of conversation had been what they
would do when they took over Czechoslovakia.
Along with two Mosleyites working for Goebbels, Philip Spranklin and Bill
 THE RADIO PROJECT 435

Rueff, Unity toured Czechoslovakia. They stopped at a German-speaking

town, Eger, to contact local Nazis, and Karlsbad, where Spranklin knew the
local MP, Senator Wollner. Goebbels reported she was ‘being insulted and
pulled to pieces in Czechoslovakia. There’s quite a fuss about it. The Fiihrer
welcomes it. That Unity will have steeped herself in hatred.’ Unity had taken
no part in the radio negotiations but she now intervened at the highest level.
She wrote to Diana on 4 June that Hitler ‘thinks the whole thing is OK, he has
spoken with the Minister and there will be no more [negotiation] necessary’.
Hitler authorized a meeting with Bill Allen to discuss a joint venture based in
Heligoland, in which Air Time would share the profits with the Germans.
A joint company, Gemona AG, was registered in Germany. The Reichspost
owned 55 per cent of the equity and the remainder was Air Time’s. A newly
formed company set up by the Allens would sell advertising space, and from
this income the British would pay for their share of construction and operating
costs, and 5 per cent interest on the German capital. Mosley knew the Germans
were keen on the arrangement because they would be repaid in foreign cur-
rency. ‘What the German spends inside Germany he does not care about.
What he minds, or did mind, was what he got in foreign exchange.’ Once
these charges were met, any profit would be divided 55 per cent to Germany,
45 per cent to the British. Programmes, recorded music and announcers would
be provided by another company set up specifically for the purpose. The
Germans agreed to finance construction of the station over a period of fourteen
months and cover all operating expenses. Hitler authorized a meeting to
exchange contracts. Diana and Mosley celebrated her success at Wootton on
her birthday, ro June. The Mosleys were in sight of an ‘enormous fortune’.
The wartime Advisory Committee sought reasons for German willingness
to make such an unusual concession. Mosley suggested it was partly personal:
Hitler was granting a favour to Diana, whom he liked and admired. However,
he added that the Germans ‘had a certain knowledge of me by reputation
which would lead them to the view that I should not swindle them in a business
which was very liable to swindling’.
The British government was reconsidering its position in respect of radio
advertising. Hoare and Boothby tried to persuade Lord Perth of the propa-
ganda opportunities provided by commercial radio. On 7 June, in a secret
Commons session on ‘British Advertising Broadcasting’, Boothby told MPs
he was ‘certain that if [they] knew that we were, in a position to bring all the
stations broadcasting in English (in Europe) . . . to cooperate with the authori-
ties in cultural and propaganda work, that support would be practically
unanimous’.
The Postmaster General, Major G. C. Tryon, said British firms had ‘made
strenuous effort to extend the scope of their operations’. He asked the Overseas
Broadcasting ‘Committee, chaired by Sir Thomas Inskip, Minister for the
436 BLACKSHIRT

Co-ordination of Defence, to examine radio advertising. It reported that ‘use

could very likely be made up of offers by any reputable British concerns, who,
as in the case of Mr R. Boothby (director of Allens’ group), wish to interest
themselves in broadcasting from foreign stations and have offered to co-
operate with HMG as regards the matter broadcast in foreign languages and *
who ask only that HMG should cease actively to oppose sponsored broadcasts j
in English from foreign stations’. Interestingly, this approach was not raised
at Mosley’s interrogation when Hoare’s name was mentioned.
On 18 July 1938 the radio agreement drawn up by Lawton was finally
settled with the Germans. Section B stated ‘programmes shall contain no
matter which can reasonably be construed as political propaganda or cause
offence in Greater Germany or Great Britain’. Clause five prevented the Ger-
mans introducing anti-British material into the broadcasts. Mosley explained
‘they knew it would immediately ruin their own business. They would not
build a station at some expense and then interpolate propaganda which they
could put over from other stations, ruin their business and cut off their whole
revenue, leaving themselves with a station on their hands.’ Educational talks
on German life were allowed, conveying the impression of a cultured nation.
Another clause forbade jokes about the Nazi regime by British comedians. To
monitor content, a Nazi official would be present in the studio.
Once the agreement had been secured, Diana’s role was over. With only a
few months until the birth of her baby, she returned to Wootton. Because of
the pregnancy, Diana’s parents allowed her to visit their home, though Mosley
was forbidden to set foot in the house. Diana was still regarded as ‘the enemy’
by her sister Decca.
Diana missed that year’s Nuremberg festival; officially, the participation
of British Fascists was prohibited. However, a distancing of the German
government from the BU did not prevent the continuation of contact with
individual members and invitations were sent to the BU through Lady Dyer,
formerly Lucy Schroeder of the banking family and a distant Mosley relative.
The German embassy in London warned against a relationship with the BU
beyond a personal exchange of views. A reason for the coolness towards BU
visits was, as Goebbels learnt, ‘the British are placing spies in the Mosley
Movement. Then they come to visit Germany as harmless fascists, in order to
spy. So in future we’re going to be more watchful.’
In July Mosley opened a ‘British First’ campaign. ‘Czech behaviour today’,
Mosley declared, ‘is threatening the peace of the world.’ The BU stepped up
its propaganda against German refugees who had settled in Britain for stealing
work from Britons. The police reported sparsely attended meetings and the
Jewish Board of Deputies said it had been a flop. A ban on marches through
the East End and the fact that Mosley had spoken at only twenty-one meetings,
which had all been trouble free, indicated a lack of enthusiasm and marked
 THE RADIO PROJECT 437

indifference by anti-Fascists, whose own meetings were more numerous than

those of the Fascists.
As war loomed, part-time servicemen in the BU were called up. In addition
some members, such as Major Yeats-Brown, resigned because Hitler’s invasion
of Czechoslovakia was ‘a step too far’. However, according to Leonard Wise,
a worker handling records, ‘total membership did not fall — indeed it increased
— because by now substantial numbers of anti-war recruits were coming in
.
from the left.’ The BU still needed Mosley’s funds and on 27 July he gave the
BU trusts £4,500 (£149,000).
In light of the European situation the Allens reduced their commitments.
They relinquished the contract with Radio Toulouse and sold their Andorra
holding to French partners. ‘Radio had proved to be a bad experience,’ Mrs
Allen recalled. ‘The Allen firm had lost a lot of money and wanted out.’
Development costs and losses amounted to £65,000 (£2m). The Allens had
been generous and now had to cut expenditure. Eckersley was the first casualty.
He realized he was ‘heading for bankruptcy’. Near to a nervous breakdown,
he was ‘not a pretty sight in those troubled times’, Diana recalled.
Bill Allen needed to call in loans and on 28 August wrote to Mosley
complaining the £3,000 (£102,000) given to the BU had not been repaid. The
money was borrowed on the understanding ‘that it was to be refunded in time
for me to meet my obligation to the lender. The facts were made perfectly
clear to your principal confidential representatives, and one of them signed a
receipt on your behalf. If you are to repudiate, even theoretically, obligations
entered into by one known to be your man of confidence, a situation is created
in which it is difficult to have any but the most foul relations with you.’ It was
‘a matter of pain to me that I find myself forced to write this letter to one
whom I had once believed — I will not say of friendship which one should
probably never expect of a “Nietzschean” - but of normally honourable
relations. I have really nothing but pity for a man who has to refer to a lawyer
before being able to write an (unsigned) letter to his one surviving friend.’
According to Allen’s wife, Mosley ‘refused to pay it back saying that the
money was for the party and the party had no money to pay him back’.
Mosley later claimed Allen was ‘very much involved with MIS, made no
bones about it, that is why he wasn’t imprisoned in the war, of course, because
he had done so much for them’. He told Nicholas that Allen was ‘probably
reporting conversations with me which were probably largely fictitious: he
was a tremendously boastful man . . . one of those men who simply lived in a
dream world —a Walter Mitty world, as we could call it now’. Certainly, Allen
liked dreaming up schemes but there is evidence that he was in some way
being blackmailed by Mosley. Allen was not, in fact, an MIS agent and did
not talk to them until 1942 when he was confronted with evidence from
telephone taps: He did then tell them that the radio project was a way for the
438 BLACKSHIRT

Germans to launder money to the BU through legitimate commercial concerns.

Allen probably reported to MI6, not MIS as Mosley claimed. This places
an interesting light on Allen’s relationship with his friend Kim Philby, who
was at the time operating in Fascist circles, in particular the Anglo-German
Fellowship, as an undercover Soviet agent. Allen’s falling out with Mosley
was short-lived, partly because they still had business to conduct. There is a
cryptic note from Allen in Mosley’s papers that ‘friend x’ -a German connected
to the radio project — is ‘expected by us on 4/5 September in London’.
There were different interpretations within Nazi circles of the BU’s effective-
ness; most centred on ‘how far advanced is the “judification” of Britain’. In
1938 Heinz Krieger published Britain and the Jewish Question in History and
the Present, which refuted the official figure of 300,000 as the number of Jews
in Britain. He believed, ‘as the British fascists are more and more emphasising’
a figure of two and a half to three million, which included those who have
‘cleverly hidden themselves behind old English names’ and ‘the many half-
breeds, especially among the aristocracy’. Krieger quoted with approval Mos-
ley’s campaign against Jewish control. ‘In this country we are experiencing
the same evil as was rampant in Germany until the rise of Hitler . . . Recently
a prominent Jew declared that Britain could not possibly participate in a war,
even when it is a question of self-defence, without the sanction of the Jews.’
Krieger noted the presence of ‘the jew Hore-Belisha’ as War Minister in
Chamberlain’s Cabinet.
However, Krieger wrote, ‘efforts to solve the Jewish Question which do not
treat it as a racial question, as entirely fundamental, will always be unsuccess-
ful’. Mosley’s statement that he did not ‘attack the Jews by reason of what
they are, it resists them by reason of what they do’, made ‘no sense’. What
they do ‘can only be understood by what they are’. Even so, ‘Germany will
always find in the English Blackshirts friends full of understanding and fighters
against the anti-German rabble-rousers.’ In Britain was ‘the beginnings of a
popular awakening which is preparing the way for a general recognition of
these questions and related matters’. He hoped one of Mosley’s sayings would
come true: ‘After the victory of Fascism the power of the Jews in England will
be broken for ever.’ On 3 August 1938 Italy adopted anti-Jewish laws.
Although anti-Semitism did not develop deep roots, between 8,500 and 1 5,000
Italian Jews died in the Holocaust.
One revealing aspect of Mosley’s 18B interrogation was his reported willing-
ness to expel Jews. Rather than keep them in ghettos, as ‘an eternal irritant
within the body politic’, he would remove all foreigners. Asked if this included
the Jews, Mosley replied, ‘Quite right.’ In ‘Jews and Fascists’ in Query, Mosley
asked ‘whether it is fair to regard the Jew as a foreigner. The simple answer
‘is that he comes from the Orient, and physically, mentally, and spiritually is
 THE RADIO PROJECT 439

more alien to us than any Western nation.’ His ‘Final Solution’ was to place
all Jews in a new homeland (but not Palestine), where they ‘may escape the
curse of no nationality and may again acquire the status and opportunity of
nationhood’. When Lord Birkett asked Mosley if he recognized ‘a policy of
hostility to the Jews at a time when Jews were being oppressed in Germany
would not be very popular among humane people in this country’, he replied
that ‘anti-semitism here has grown colossally in the last few years. When we
~ began it hardly existed.’ Krieger, it appeared, had grounds for optimism.
_ Strangely, as the true nature of the Nazi regime became more obvious, some
aristocrats became even more enthusiastic about Hitler. A member of the
Anglo-German Fellowship and the Link, the Mitfords’ father David, second
Lord Redesdale, had also become a firm Hitler admirer. ‘Farve really does
adore him in the same way we do,’ wrote Unity to Diana on 12 September.
‘He treasures every word and every expression.’ When the crisis over Czecho-
slovakia came to a head, the BU launched its ‘National Campaign for Britain,
Peace and People’. With reports of German troops massing on the border,
Mosley told Irene, ‘Hitler never strikes when he makes so much song and
dance about it. He does his great moves silently.’
The Czech crisis was the impetus for three organizations: Joyce’s National
Socialist League, Lord Lymington’s British Array and the League of Loyalists
to create the British Council Against European Commitments. It was essen-
tially a co-ordinating body for the Fascist fringe and part of a process that
had been taking place since the spring. Mosley knew it was under surveillance
by MIS and avoided direct contact, preferring to maintain contact through
intermediaries.
Maxwell Knight tracked these developments. He noted in September that
Joyce, who renewed his passport on the 24th, had become more hysterical
and militantly pro-German. MI5 obtained a Home Office warrant to intercept
his mail. Knight had been aware for some time of contacts between Joyce, his
brother Quentin, who worked in the Air Ministry, and a known Nazi agent,
Christian Bauer. A Secret Intelligence Service report describes a meeting in
Belgium between ‘a casual MI6 informant’, Joyce and former BU member
John McNab, who was ‘carrying secret messages to Bauer’. Knight said that
if it came to war, Joyce’s loyalty could not be relied on.
During the Czech crisis the PM’s fixer Sir Joseph Ball wanted Radio Luxem-
bourg to broadcast ‘such messages as Mr Champerlain’s statement and Mr
Roosevelt’s appeal to Herr Hitler, of which he believed the German public
were in complete ignorance’. Luxembourg’s involvement in ‘political warfare’
was the result of private initiative and improvisation. It revealed a hidden area
of Mosley’s activities: the overlap between his own radio project and British
attempts to construct a propaganda network. This crossing of wires had been
440 BLACKSHIRT

made by the ‘Boothby group’, which pointed out the potential of commercial
radio for propaganda, and advisers such as Eckersley, with their feet in both
camps.
On 26 September Gerald Wellesley (soon to be the seventh Duke of Welling-
ton) placed Luxembourg at Ball’s disposal. How he was able to do this is 2
mystery. He served in the Foreign Office during the First World War with his
‘oldest friend’ Harold Nicolson, but his activities in the thirties remain obscure.
His uncle, the fifth Duke, was a prominent anti-Semite and leading figure in ~
the Anglo-German Fellowship, and later the Right Club. Gerald’s son, the
current Duke, knew the Mitford girls. ‘I went with friends to Germany immedi-
ately before the war, and Unity was with us. I remember going out one night
and we were furious because she joined a party of her friends who were
Brownshirts. We were very angry.’ Ball acted as Chamberlain’s go-between
with the Secret Services and conducted highly secret negotiations for an
‘appeasement’ of Hitler. In addition he pulled the strings behind Truth, which
he used to attack opponents of Chamberlain and. bolster those extremist
groups against war with Germany.
Using Luxembourg for political warfare was a priority for MI6’s Section
D, which aimed to attack Germany by means other than military force. An
off-shore company, Wireless Publicity, secretly took over from Captain
Plugge’s International Broadcasting Company and, flush with secret funds,
installed its own presenter in Luxembourg, edited the scripts and, through the
advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, built the most up-to-date studio in
Europe, producing ‘cultural propaganda’.
Efforts to co-ordinate propaganda activities culminated in the creation of a
Joint Broadcasting Committee (JBC). In November Section D’s Major Laur-
ence Grand invited Hilda Matheson, BBC Director of Talks, to consider
broadcasting propaganda to Germany. On the JBC were Mosley’s friends
Nicolson and Boothby. Matheson, who had been in MIS during the First
World War, was known to Mosley, having been secretary to Lady Astor. She
had been secretary to Nicolson and lover of his wife Vita, and a companion
of Dorothy, wife of Gerald Wellesley. Interestingly, she undertook a fact-
finding tour of the very same European radio stations with which Mosley’s
group had been pursuing contracts. A clandestine ‘Travel Association’ was
opened to sell British ‘white’ propaganda — which was couriered from London
to Paris by Soviet agent Guy Burgess — for broadcast to Germany using
British-leased commercial radio stations. Involved in this operation was
Eckersley, who referred to his ‘intelligence work’. Working for the Allens, he
enquired of broadcasters as to their willingness to use ‘special recordings’ —
the ‘white’ propaganda made by the JBC.
The signing on 30 September of the Munich Agreement proved to the
Redesdales Hitler’s good intentions. Chamberlain’s return was watched by
 THE RADIO PROJECT 441

Irene and the Mosley children, who stood in the rain as the PM’s aeroplane
touched down at Heston aerodrome. Diana and Mosley listened to the radio,
hoping Munich was the prelude to a peace pact leading to the union of Europe.
‘I don’t care if 3% million Germans from Czechoslovakia go back to
Germany,’ Mosley said in praising Chamberlain. ‘I don’t care if 10 million
Germans go back to Germany, Britain will be strong enough, brave enough,
to hold her own.’ In a speech at Manchester he insisted Hitler could be trusted
~ to keep to the agreement: ‘Hitler no more wants the Czechs than we want the
aliens in our midst.’ He did, however, expect war. On 1 October German
troops moved into Czechoslovakia. Mosley proclaimed the BU opposed ‘root
and branch a war which sacrifices British lives in an alien quarrel’. Diana
admitted Munich was ‘a watershed. Our slogan was Mind Britain’s Business,
the very last thing politicians of either party intended to do.’
The subsequent failure of Munich was not blamed on Hitler. Beaverbrook’s
claim that it was the fault of the Jews was not uncommon. “They do not mean
to do it. But unconsciously they are drawing us into war. Their political
influence is moving us in that direction.’ Action alleged they were buying
country houses to let to evacuees at inflated rents. They had fled from London
like ‘a flowing river of grey slime’.
‘Friend x’ told Allen and Mosley the Germans were ready to sign the radio
contract. Allen, who had patched up his quarrel with Mosley, had dealt with
the signatories for the German-registered company Gemona AG, Dr Johannes
Bernhardt, Director of Berlin-Griinewald and member of Goering’s Four Year
Plan team, and Kurt von Schroeder, President of the Cologne Chamber of
Commerce. Mosley had to make his presence known for the signing of the
contracts. ‘We were always sure MIS knew all about the wireless project,’
Diana recalled, ‘and it never seemed to Mosley to matter in the least. It was
the Press that mattered, in connection with secrecy.’ Taking Lawton with him,
he met the German side in Paris.
Shortly before their first son was born, the Mosleys stayed at the Crillon -
Diana’s nurse went with them. For Lawton its luxury, ‘as well as the excitement
of Mosley’s company, made it an exotic experience’. Accompanying Schroeder
and Dr Bernhardt was Hitler’s aide Wiedemann. A tour of Paris nightclubs
began at the Sphynx, a high-class brothel where Lawton was stunned by the
decor and the women’s attire, and then the Scheherazade. On 9 November
1938 the two sides exchanged contracts.
That night the Nazis retaliated for the inde by a Jew of an embassy
official in Paris. There was widespread smashing of Jewish shops and windows
~ Kristallnacht — and the burning of synagogues. The nature of the Nazi regime
was apparent to all; except, it seemed, Mosley. His overriding quest for
peace meant he was willing to excuse all their actions. ‘Supposing that every
allegation was true .. . that a minority in Germany were being treated as the
442 BLACKSHIRT

papers allege, was that any reason for millions in Britain to lose their lives in
war with Germany? Why was it only when Jews were the people affected that
we had any demand for war with the country concerned?’ By now he had
succumbed to the conspiracy theory. ‘Today Jewish finance controlled the
press and political system of Britain. If you criticize a Jew at Home — then
gaol threatens you. If others touch a Jew abroad — then war threatens them.’
With the news that the German station was ‘on’, Allen formed Wire Broad-
casting, with offices in the Strand. Incorporated with capital of £15,000
(£510,000), the Allens agreed to pay Mosley £5,000 for their one-third share
in the enterprise. As neither wanted the transaction to be traceable, Allen
handed over used notes to the intermediary, Lawton, who channelled them to
Mosley. Soon afterwards the company accountant, James Herd, met with his
Nazi opposite number von Kaufmann, who travelled to London to discuss the
proposed station. Herd was horrified when he was greeted with ‘Heil Hitler!’.
Mosley returned to London with a signed agreement. ‘Thus’, he wrote, ‘we
had one Southern concession subject to a successful action before the Privy
Council with fair prospects, the Eastern concession, and there was also some
prospect of a Western concession too.’ He intended ‘to hold back the legal
fight over the Sark concession until we were able to publicise the German
concession. . .in order to make BBC and official resistance to the development
of Sark appear more useless. Thus from at least two sides, and we hoped
three, we should have bombarded the British advertising market. Our radio
competitors would have had no chance against us...” Work began immedi-
ately to construct a transmitter on the island of Borkum in the North Sea. It
seemed that the BU would soon be flush with funds.
 yralBy

The Darkening Clouds

Many observers poked fun at Mosley’s pretensions. In P. G. Wodehouse’s

1938 The Code of the Woosters he appeared as Sir Roderick Spode. At one
point Wooster tells Sir Roderick,
The trouble with you, Spode, is that because you have succeeded in inducing a
handful of halfwits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts,
you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting ‘Heil Spode!’ and you imagine
it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice
of the People is saying is: ‘Look at that frightful ass Spode, swanking about in footer
bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher!’

That was certainly the case in Lancashire where, in October, Mosley made yet
another attempt to gain a foothold in the area. The Japanese ambassador, in
replying to a request by his Foreign Minister for information on the BU, told
Tokyo the BU was ‘not powerful enough even to establish a branch office in
Lancashire’. Intent on impressing the Germans, Diana wrote to Unity that
Mosley ‘had a wonderful campaign and huge crowds. Most of our class
wanted to fight, but not the workers.’
The workers were benefiting from signs of economic recovery as the effects
of rearmament took hold. Mosley recognized such spending ‘could be regarded
as a sort of public works programme’. Areas of deep unemployment such as
Tyneside and the Clyde saw the benefits; as did Birmingham with its engineer-
ing base. Mosley’s reception, on 28 October, at the city’s Tony’s Ballroom
was marked up as a notable achievement by the BU press. Hundreds of
Blackshirts marched down the Stratford Road and gave the Leader a rousing
reception. A local bookselier, however, recalled seeing coaches arriving ‘full
of faces I’d never seen before’. Most had been impogted to create the impression
of vast local support.
The BU lost much of its working-class support. Special Branch reported that
many supporters in the East End were ‘imbued with a feeling of antagonism to
Germany’, which ‘crystallised into open rebellion’. However, in west and
north London the peace campaign drew in the middle and upper classes.
444 BLACKSHIRT

Mosley made contact with the pacifist fringe and it seemed he might emerge
as leader of a ‘peace front’. George Orwell wondered in a letter to Herbert
Read whether ‘Mosley will have the sense and the guts to stick out against
war with Germany, he might decide to cash in on the patriotism business’.
Ties were cemented with the pro-Nazi groups, such as the Link, which had,
the support of Ribbentrop. Alison Oulthwaite, editor of World Review, told
the Express that when the BU’s Philip Spranklin, who was employed by
Goebbels in Munich, spoke at the Link’s Central London branch, he ‘ranted
against the freedom of the press, and extolled the German press and the
German government’. He wondered what ‘power’ lay behind the press cam-
paign against the Nazis. The one-hundred-strong middle-class audience
‘appeared to agree with everything that was said’. Ms Oulthwaite was
‘revolted’ and resigned.
Mosley encouraged members to penetrate professional and err bodies.
Peter Heyward ran an ‘Against Trust and Monopoly’ column in Action and
organized a British Traders Bureau to promote the BU. This paid off hand-
somely and Mosley received sympathetic coverage in the Dairyman, the Green
Badge (cab drivers), the Bakers Record, the National Newsagent, Bookseller
and Stationer. Four hundred taxi men attended a meeting where Mosley
promised to eliminate private car-hire services who ‘stole the cream from the
hard-working British man who devoted his entire energies to the taxi-trade’.
At the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, 1,000 shopkeepers attended a meet-
ing and gave him a thundering ovation.
Towards the end of 1938 BU branches began to revive as ‘vanguardist’
activists adopted the Communist ‘street-block-cell system’ to build up popular
grass-roots support. The cell system and immersion in local interests was in
parallel with more sophisticated methods of propaganda. Local elite groups
of ideological Fascists began to organize in London and Manchester. Stuart
Rawnsley argues that the high turnover of membership of the early period —
Chesterton said 100,000 had passed through the movement — was charac-
terized by a lack of ideological commitment, but those who joined in the late
1930s were often imbued with steadfast beliefs in nationalist economics,
anti-Semitism and Mosley’s leadership. Membership increased by the end of
1938 to around 16,500.
Tempered by adversity, Blackshirts saw themselves engaged in a religious
crusade. For Gordon-Canning the ‘national socialist is a crusader — a warrior
in the best sense; he does not fear Death. If necessary he runs to meet it ..
death for him is not something to be avoided, it is a fulfilment, it is a symbol,
not of disintegration, but of Union.’ They found in their support of Mosley,
‘the sense of belonging, of finding meaning, of being involved in “greatness”
just by having him at their head’. In turn, he claimed that ‘in the local premises
of over four hundred branches I was just one of them. This was the most
F THE DARKENING CLOUDS 445

complete companionship I have ever known, except in the old regular army
in time of war.’
On 26 November 1938 Alexander Mosley was born at Grosvenor Road.
His birth obliged the Mosleys to make public the fact that they were married.
‘There was no more reason for secrecy,’ recalled Diana. Rumours had surfaced
in the Mail but the official disclosure made a splash, with the Telegraph and
the News Chronicle breaking the story on 28 November —- ‘Hitler was Sir
_ Oswald’s Best Man’. Irene ‘nearly fainted’ when she read the truth: ‘I felt that
my brother-in-law’s excuses of the need for secrecy and fear of his life were
_ pretty sordid.’ Opening her paper in Paris, Baba Metcalfe realized Mosley had
been deceiving her on an epic scale. She could not forgive and for the rest of
her life refused to speak of Diana.
Seventeen-year-old Vivien was at finishing school in Paris and refused to
believe the papers — ‘they’ve got it wrong.’ It was months before she came to
terms with the situation. Nicholas wrote to his father that he could not think
why he had been kept in the dark. Mosley’s mother was angry that she
appeared as a liar to BU members who did not believe she did not know.
When Irene finally met Diana at the end of December, her first impression
was of Diana’s affected voice: ‘The Mitford drawl, with its up-and-down
inflections, prolonged vowels (“orfficer” and “lorst”) and idiosyncratic “excla-
mations” was at its most pronounced when Diana was nervous.’
On 21 December Gordon-Canning and Raven Thomson lunched with
Collin Brooks and an unnamed MP to talk frankly about Brooks’s pro-
appeasement pamphlet, ‘Can Chamberlain Save Britain’. Brooks said ‘their
Cromwell had emerged too soon. I gathered that the movement is short of
money.’
In December John Beckett and Lord Lymington launched the Fascist and
anti-Semitic New Pioneer, which championed non-involvement in European
conflicts. Its pages featured former Mosleyite A. K. Chesterton, Major-General
Fuller, Array members Anthony Ludovici and Rolf Gardiner, ILPer Ben
Greene, H. T. V. (‘Bertie’) Mills and Nazi enthusiast and patriotic historian Sir
Arthur Bryant. The journal enthusiastically reviewed Mein Kampf and devoted
space to organic husbandry, whose supporters included BU agricultural expert
Jorian Jenks.
MIS no longer treated such bodies as merely eccentric lunatic-fringe organiz-
ations since they had close relations with German écorrespondents’. In general,
their influence was ‘negligible’ but a small number were engaged in espionage,
which MIS found difficult to deal with since it was poorly funded and lacked
manpower. There were only twenty-eight officers, backed by a surveillance
section of six men, and an administrative and registry staff of eighty-six.
When, after the war, the Abwehr’s Nikolaus Ritter was quizzed on his spying
nking
operations against Britain, he did not divulge everything. A heavy-dri
446 BLACKSHIRT

electrical engineer, Arthur Owens (codenamed JOHNNY), supplied him with

details of Admiralty contracts on which he worked. A Welsh nationalist, he
was the linchpin of his operation but Ritter began to be suspicious when, in
1936, it became apparent that he was playing ‘a double game’. He allowed
Owens to continue to pass material to MI6 but he was abandoned by them
and, though his file was passed on to MI5 under the codename SNOW, until
the war he worked as a solely German agent. At some point Owens made an
approach on the Germans’ behalf to the BU, to whom he put forward ‘a
scheme for the establishment of four secret transmitters in England for the
purpose of disseminating propaganda in time of war’. Owens told Ritter he
had fifteen sub-agents in England. In his history of The Double-Cross System,
J. C. Masterman wrote that ‘it is probable, though not certain, that all these
persons existed only in SNOW’s imagination’.
The BU offered a source of spies but ‘perhaps Ritter did not think of tapping
it, or had no contacts with which to do so; perhaps he did not have the time’.
In any event, suggests David Kahn, he did not recruit agents from the BU (this
excludes propaganda agents recruited by other agencies). Scouts returned
empty-handed from raids on the splintered Fascist groups. ‘Deplorable as
were the aid and comfort which members of these organisations gave the
Nazis with their strident propaganda,’ Kahn notes, ‘none of them had any
actual or direct connection either with the Abwebr or the Sicherheitsdienst.’
Aside from Mosley’s aide, Dr Tester, available Nazi records reveal no spies in
BU ranks.
In December, following exposure in the British press, Tester talked with
Hawkins and offered to quit the party so that it would not ‘in any way
be compromised’. Anthony Hepburn-Ruston went to Germany, where he
continued his commitment to the Nazi Party. Hawkins, ‘with his fair judge-
ment, saw no infringement of Party discipline’, and rejected Tester’s offer. He
attended a BU leaders’ conference in Hastings where Mosley told them: ‘Every
single fascist must show initiative and not just wait for orders from central
headquarters.’ On 22 December Tester left Southampton in his yacht Lucinda
for Lisbon, where he picked up Dr Richard Behn. The press asked ‘what new
crime of this English fascist of German extraction and supporter of Mosley
had forced him to leave’. His secretary and BU member Horace Nadal was
arrested in London and ‘interrogated for days by the Secret Service’.
MI5’s F2 branch controlled the monitoring of Nazi intelligence operations,
while Knight’s Bsb M Section infiltrated its fourteen agents — even though six
was regarded as the maximum number of agents to whom an officer could
give sufficient attention — into ‘subversive’ groups such as the Link and the
BU. MIS, Thurlow argues, was ‘always in control in monitoring both suspect
“aliens” and native fascists’.
Knight ran agents ‘Q’, a British subject of German parents, and *X’, Harald
 THE DARKENING CLOUDS 447

Kurtz, aka Court, born in Stuttgart. His father, a publisher, was a Nazi
supporter. His grandfather was Sir William Don Bt, of Yorkshire, which he
visited on holiday while a student at Geneva University. Kurtz decided to stay
and became private secretary to Lord Noel-Buxton. He was recruited in May
1938 as a salaried agent. A homosexual — which invited a risk of blackmail —
he sought British citizenship, which gave Knight a hold over the spendthrift
and alcoholic Kurtz. He had a flat in a boarding house in Ebury Street, along
with agent Q. An actor, Ferdy Mayne, was a German Jew and son of a judge.
He came to England in the early 1930s and had a cover job with the BBC.
By 1939 BU propaganda again stressed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories
with the claim that Jews sought world domination. E. M. Forster noted that
‘Jew-consciousness is in the air’. If you kept your ears open you would hear
‘people who would not ill-treat Jews themselves, giggle when pogroms are
instituted by someone else and synagogues defiled vicariously: “Serve them
right really, Jews!” ’ The German ambassador, Herbert von Dirksen, reported
that anti-Semitism was ‘revealed more clearly by conversations with the man
in the street than by press sources . . . one can speak of a widespread resentment
against the Jews which, in some instances, has already assumed the form of
hate. The view that the Jews want to drive Britain into war with Germany
finds widespread belief.’
Von Dirksen’s comments may have been wishful thinking but they were
shared by many who sought peace. On 17 January Collin Brooks lunched
with Sir George Buchanan MP, who thought Mosley ‘may yet “‘pull it off”’.
He was ‘in despair at the Jewish influence over the English press’. An exception
was Truth, which was stridently anti-Churchill, anti-American and anti-
Semitic. Action warned: ‘Jews Beware, for the whispers may very well become
a great shout for the complete removal of his race from our shores.’ This led
to the use of the chilling expression ‘The Final Solution’.
Former Mosleyite Wyndham Lewis completed his retreat from Fascism with
publication of ‘The Jews: are they human?’, an attack on anti-Semitism. It was
slated by Raven Thomson, who argued ‘no one is going to deny that individual
Jews can be both intelligent and interesting; but the problem convulsing
the modern world is not that of the individual Jew, but of the collective Jew
— the Jewish race’. Lewis was compared with Hilaire Belloc, who pointed out
the folly of ignoring the Jews’ ‘racial peculiarity’. However, both were found
wanting when compared with the BU leader: ‘We prefer Belloc to Lewis, and
Mosley to both, because he is prepared to take the lead in that inevitable
segregation of the Jewish People, which Belloc had not the intellectual courage
to advocate.’
Unable to reach a mass audience, Mosley sanctioned a campaign of disrup-
tion at meetings of mainstream politicians in east London. At Limehouse,
Hackney, Shoreditch and Bethnal Green, prominent politicians were faced by
448 BLACKSHIRT

organized interruption, including missiles and physical assault. Police officers

were assured that if the disruption continued they would have ‘the full support
of the Commissioner if they err on the side of action rather than inaction’
when dealing with disorder. Anti-Fascists, however, were worried by Home |
Office guidelines, which allowed police ‘to assist stewards in dealing with .
concerted and obviously organized interruption . . . even though no breach of
the peace has commenced’. In effect, they could act as anti-Fascist stewards.
On 16 January MI5’s Brigadier ‘Jaspar’ Harker and his deputy, Guy Liddell,
reported that relations between BU leaders and prominent Nazis were
‘extremely close’. Based on Diana’s numerous meetings with the Fiihrer, Mos-
ley told Irene that Hess was the supreme party technician, that his wife was
greatly impressed by Himmler, that what Hitler enjoyed about Goebbels was
his wit and that they all hated Streicher. MIS had a list of fifty men and two
women in whom they expressed interest, and received Home Office approval
to intercept the mail of A. G. Findlay, one of Mosley’s closest lieutenants
with contacts in Germany. As'BU relations with Germany became ‘steadily
warmer’, those with Italy ‘practically ceased’. Mosley still hoped to revive
them; the Foreign Office reported that Dr Tester appeared ‘to be negotiating
with Mussolini’. The Foreign Office learnt on 1 March from a consul general
that ‘the yacht Lucinda visited Naples at the date which he does not specify
but which was in any case before February ... the owner or charterer of the
yacht is a Mr Tester who, it is said, finances Sir Oswald Mosley’s movement,
and that he learns that the yacht remained for some time and that Tester had
some conversations with Signor Mussolini’.
MIS had no proof of German payments, despite ‘a number of reliable
reports that the movement does in fact obtain financial support from Ger-
many’. Special Branch reported that BU spending was around £20,000
(£680,000) per year. Much of it came from Mosley who, at the beginning of
January, paid £2,500 into the BU Trust and a similar amount to the BU
districts. Two months later he handed over another £8,750.
After touring north-east Germany during March, Eckersley and German
engineers planned to build their radio station at Osterlog, a remote site on the
North Sea coast. His stepson James Clark retained a map on which Peter had
pencilled in a beam station with a 100 kw medium-wave transmitter, which
had London and the east coast of England in its arc. Its location became
known to MI5 and Knight tasked his agent, naturalist Robert Blockey, to
investigate fortifications in the area. Armed with powerful binoculars, Blockey
reported seeing ‘a new breed of bird, an array of aerials with wire wings’.
The source of the location may have been Eckersley, who was involved in
government propaganda efforts. A report to the Cabinet stressed that it was
important to broadcast to the German people ‘to counter their leader’s grow-
ing warlike tendencies’. When a Hamburg station began English broadcasts,
 THE DARKENING CLOUDS 449

the green light was given to MI6’s Section D efforts to appeal to peace-
supporting Germans. Eckersley was now deeply involved in this ‘sinister
business of radio’. He helped set up a station in Liechtenstein to challenge
Luxembourg, one which had a secret agenda to carry British ‘white’
propaganda.
Appeasement of the dictators was a popular policy, at least until the dismem-
berment of Czechoslovakia in March 1938. Until then, BU policy with regard
to Germany was little different from the government’s. On 16 March Hitler
tore up the Munich Agreement and occupied Prague. That night, Irene saw
the British ambassador, Nevile Henderson, who was ‘disillusioned and could
see no daylight. He felt the out-and-out lefters, Goebbels, Streicher and
Himmler, had rushed Hitler into this.’
The BU patriots questioned the wisdom of supporting Hitler’s actions, given
his failure to honour Munich. A Limehouse member said the Czech crisis
provoked discussion by members who felt ‘the Munich business seemed to be
acceptable because Hitler was asking back for Sudeten Germans and. there
seemed to be a logic in this. The occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia
wasn’t so acceptable because some said, “This is not Germany. He’s really
occupying another country.””’ An East Ham district treasurer bemoaned the
fact that ‘when we were getting people interested and joining us, ol’ Hitler
would start his nonsense again’. Mosley’s failure to criticize Hitler led to the
stagnation of the East End movement, though Special Branch overstated the
‘crisis’.
Chamberlain’s guarantee to Poland generated a resurgence of BU anti-war
activity. On 25 March Mosley warned that ‘the jackals of Jewish finance are
again in full cry for war’. As the likelihood of war increased, the fear of being
associated with a movement viewed as pro-German ‘eased away’ from the
BU. By constantly attacking the Labour Party’s ‘war-mongering’, Mosley
appealed to a pacifist strain within Labour politics. Reports suggest support
was coming from the middle and upper classes, with up to 30 per cent of
Mosley’s audiences being women and only 5 per cent under the age of thirty.
Membership began to rise. The number of active members in London and
the rest of the country was 3,600 and 3,000 respectively. With an estimated
one active to one and a half passive members, this suggests around 9,000
London members to 7,500 provincial members. Mosley’s claim that his peace
campaign produced a large increase in membetship was probably accurate,
but there was also a rapid turnover of members.
The military connections and impeccable anti-Communist credentials meant
that prominent Fascists were not seen as security threats until the view of
Nazism underwent a radical reappraisal following the occupation of Czecho-
slovakia. From spring 1939, MIS viewed all Fascist activity with suspicion.
Rumours spread within the BU that General Ironside, who had attended with
450 BLACKSHIRT

Unity a meeting of the Anglo-German Fellowship, was a secret member. This

was reported by P. G. Taylor to Special Branch, where it caused consternation.
Ironside had appeared with Mosley on his first election platform but his
son notes that Ironside ‘was photographed so often in his role as C.-in-C. |
North Russia, there is always the possibility that Mosley could have been ,
featured in any of the published prints to further his own ends in whatever
business he was involved at the time’. Ironside had served, disguised as a
German, with the German staff in the war in south-west Africa and was the
model for Buchan’s Richard Hannay. He met Hitler in 1937 but he made no
impression on him. MI5 noted German attempts to capitalize on the pro-Nazi
activities of Ironside’s former colleague, Major-General Fuller. However, the
German military attaché, von Scheppenburg, came to believe that Fuller’s
Fascism veiled his role as Rothermere’s agent in Germany.
The threat of war increased MI5’s influence as security became a dominating
concern. This led to its expansion and increased monitoring of contacts
between pro-Nazi groups and Germany. These contacts were co-ordinated by
Gestapo agent Dr Roesel, the chief link between the BU and Goebbels’s
Ministry of Propaganda. Under pressure from MPs, the Anglo-German
Fellowship closed down in the spring, which, Domvile claimed, made it ‘all
the more necessary for [the Link] to keep one life buoy on the stormy waters
of Anglo-German relations’. In April MIS argued for Roesel’s deportation.
The Jewish Board of Deputies identified the main distributor of German
propaganda as the Militant Christian Patriots, which acted under the aegis of
the Nordic League, whose guiding spirit was Captain Archibald Maule
Ramsay, MP for Peebles. Born in India into a distinguished Scottish family,
he had been educated at Eton and Sandhurst. He was wounded in 1916 and
awarded the MC. He had a London house in Onslow Square and owned
Kellie Castle, Arbroath, where he indulged his passion for field sports. He was
not a success at Westminster; the only highlight was his service on the Potato
Marketing Board. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Ramsay described
the International Brigades as ‘the Godless’. He chaired the United Christian
Front, a group of pro-Franco supporters, including many prominent Tories.
It was Spain and his wife’s influence that made him a virulent anti-Semite. A
powerful orator, he fulminated on the ‘Judaeo-Bolshevik Plot’ and was closely
associated with pro-Nazi circles. As war drew nearer, Ramsay became con-
vinced that Jews were orchestrating a confrontation between Britain and
Germany. His first objective, however, ‘was to clear the Conservative Party of
Jewish influence’.
MIS believed the League was directed from Berlin and was the centre of
Nazi intrigue in Britain. Society ladies heard Fuller’s talk on ‘The Hebrew
Mysteries’ on 27 March, with men who ‘bore the unmistakable stamp of the
army officer in mufti’. Nina, Lady Douglas-Hamilton spoke of the PM as a
 THE DARKENING CLOUDS 451

traitor who had sold out to the Jews. While Ramsay’s extreme anti-Semitism
received a sympathetic hearing among upper-class Britons, his attempts to
reach a wider audience at public meetings usually flopped.
Special Branch transcribed speeches at NL meetings, but the most important
information was procured by an agent for the Jewish BoD. Neville Laski used
his SB contacts to employ a retired Inspector Pavey to penetrate the NL and
provide graphic accounts of the organization. Pavey’s reports pointed to strong
connections between the League and German and Japanese intelligence, and
close liaison with the German embassy. Moreover, respectable groups such as
the Liberty Restoration League, and prominent figures, were connected to it.
Laski received information on the Link, too, from the BU’s E. G. Mandeville-
Roe, who also belonged to the Nordic League. Laski’s intelligence was used ~
to supplement information in the central card file of MIS’s registry.
‘The Link was viewed by Goebbels as a vehicle for propaganda. MI5 was
interested in its pro-Nazi Central London branch, founded in January 1939
and run by Bertie Mills and Richard Findlay. Its secretary Margaret
Bothamley, a colonel’s daughter, set its tone with her hatred of Jews and
admiration of the Nazis. She gave cocktail parties at Cromwell Road, attended
by IFL and Nordic League activists, including Lord Ronald Graham, son of
the Duke of Montrose, Mary Allen and Aubrey Lees, who had worked in
Palestine as a district commissioner for the Jaffa district. He disagreed with
British policy over Zionist immigration and was very anti-Semitic. He returned
to England in 1939 and lived with a governess who was in the BU, in which
he himself was active. Other BU activists such as Claude Duvivier, the Eck-
ersleys and Lady Pearson, described by Domvile as a ‘mad Fascist’, were
attracted to the Link. In reply to a Commons question the Home Secretary,
Sir Samuel Hoare, said on 30 March 1939 that the Link was ‘mainly for the
purpose of pro-Nazi and anti-Semite propaganda’.
Behind the facade of a campaign for peace, Link and NL leaders developed
their extreme right-wing tendencies. The threat of Jewish Bolshevism led them
to seek peace with Germany so that the Empire could be defended against
both the ‘enemy within’ and the ‘enemy without’. Domvile and Ramsay were
convinced that Hitler would never attack the British Empire. Ramsay wrote
in The Nameless War that ‘totally suppressed as far as the British people were
concerned was Hitler’s repeated declaration of his willingness to defend the
British Empire, if called upon to assist, by force‘of arms if necessary’.
Domvile considered Mosley ‘a real leader and I like his policy and hope he
will succeed’. On 20 March the two met to discuss a ‘machiavellian plot’ the
BU leader was working on. Meetings were under way to co-ordinate Nordic
League activities with the other groups. Most were without significance;
however, an alliance of the far Right, with Mosley at its centre, would cause
concern in official circles. MI5 reported that he had entered into negotiations
452 BLACKSHIRT

with Commander Cole, with a view to putting informal co-operation on to a

formal footing and ‘to speaking from the League platform’. A key figure in
these talks was Gordon-Canning, Mosley’s former foreign affairs adviser, who
married Australian film star Mary Maguire and publicly distanced himself
from politics. It has been assumed that he had quarrelled with Mosley but.«
Gordon-Canning continued to conduct business with the BU leader. It seems
the publicized breach was a ploy, enabling him to act as a bridge to the other
groups without being identified as a BU link.
Domvile recorded the meetings in his diary. Those who attended included,
in addition to Mosley and Ramsay, Lord Tavistock (BCCSE), Gordon-
Canning (BU and BCCSE), the BU’s Commandant Allen, Hawkins, Fuller,
Lady Dunn and Lady Pearson, Lieutenant-Colonel C. D. Roe (BU and Link),
the Link’s Aubrey Lees, Professor A. P. Laurie and R. F. Findlay, Bertie Mills
(People’s Campaign Against War and Usury), C. G. Grey (The Aeroplane),
George Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers Earl of Mar, Norman Hay, Viscount Lymington,
Francis Yeats-Brown and Launcelot Lawton. The only exception to Ramsay’s
attempt to unify the Fascist fringe was Mosley’s refusal to connect the BU
directly to it.

At the end of March the government guaranteed Poland that if its indepen-
dence was threatened ‘His Majesty’s Government and the French Government
would at once lend them all the support in their power’. Mosley opposed the
guarantee, believing it brought war closer. Germany’s encirclement would
infuriate Hitler, who would respond by an eastward push. On r5 April Action
claimed ‘the task of our generation: to find a new ideological basis of European
union’ so that a ‘united Europe’ could play its part in a world balance of
powers. Britain and Germany alone, Mosley believed, could unite Europe.
In April Lymington’s British Council Against European Commitments
joined forces with Lord Tavistock’s People’s Campaign against War and Usury
to form the British People’s Party (BPP). Campaigning for peace, it rejected
totalitarianism but, with ideas similar to those of the New Pioneer group, its
programme was National Socialist and anti-Semitic. It worked closely at
grass-roots level with the Link. MIS took it seriously and Tavistock, who
attended dinner parties held by the BU, had his letters intercepted, as were
those of his ‘confidential agent’ Mrs Osborne Samuel.
The BPP provided an alternative focus for the peace movement to that given
by Mosley. Tavistock was President, John Beckett Secretary and Ben Greene
Treasurer. Greene, a huge man, six foot eight tall, was a cousin of the novelist
Graham Greene. His successful campaign to change Labour’s voting system
to give more weight to ordinary party members made him a key player in
Labour politics, earning him the dislike of party power-broker Ernest Bevin.
He was a Quaker and a pacifist, and had undertaken famine relief work in the
 THE DARKENING CLOUDS 453

Soviet Union and Germany. The BPP’s National Council included Richard
St Barbe Baker, a Dorset farmer and recent BU convert, Aubrey Lees and
Action columnist John Scanlon. There was also a strong blood-and-soil
element.
Tavistock recruited leading peers to the BPP’s pro-German sentiment and
activity, including Lords Darnley, Arnold and Brocket, the Duke of Buccleuch
and the Earl of Mar, a leading Mosleyite. Another strong supporter was Lord
Sempill, a famous aviator, who belonged to the Anglo-German Fellowship
and the Link. Sempill knew Ribbentrop and was ‘one of the hard core of
German enthusiasts who argued publicly for peace with Germany from the
Lords’. He believed the King and the government had been taken in by sinister
forces consisting of Jews, Americans and the pro-war party in Britain.
On 20 April 1939 Brocket was accompanied to Hitler’s fiftieth birthday
celebrations in Berlin by the Duke of Buccleuch, Lord Steward of the Royal
Household and the King’s official channel to the House of Lords. King George
VI sent congratulations to the German leader. Buccleuch believed Germany
offered the potential of a bastion against Bolshevism. An ‘imperial isolationist’,
his inclination to appeasement accorded with his conviction that it would aid
Britain and her Empire.
Also invited by Ribbentrop to the army parade on 20 April was Fuller,
whose presence caused a stir in the press. The night before he left for Germany
he was called by a Foreign Office official: ‘I thought it as well to tell you that
Sir Ian Hamilton was also asked; but that we have warned him against going
as it might prove dangerous.’ Fuller replied, ‘So far as Iam concerned I rather
enjoy a rough house.’ In Berlin, Fuller learned that the Fihrer ‘intended to
have Danzig, war or no war, and that, if it came to war, Poland would be
overrun in a minimum of three weeks or a maximum of six’.
Fuller watched ‘a completely mechanized and motorized army roar past the
Fuhrer along the Charlottenburger Strasse. Never before or since have I
watched such a formidable mass of moving metal.’ It was a proud moment
when he met Hitler, who shook his hand and said, ‘I hope you were pleased
with your children?’ To which he answered, ‘Your Excellency, they have
grown up so quickly that I no longer recognize them.’ Diana said Hitler
admired Fuller’s ‘beautifully precise and logical mind’, but thought he would
be ‘an awkward colleague’, an observation which summed him up ‘exactly,
though to Mosley he was a loyal collaborator’. ¢
Tavistock said ‘adversity can make strange bedfellows’ and the BPP co-
operated with the extremes of left and right, including the pacifist Peace Pledge
Union (PPU). With the threat of war growing, Greene was committed to
pacifism, a strong current within the ILP. Former ILPer John Scanlon, like
the writer Hugh Ross Williamson, regarded Fascism as heir to the isolationist
tradition that rejected involvement in foreign affairs as a diversion from social
454 BLACKSHIRT

reform. Director of the London General Press and a Labour candidate for
West Dorset, Williamson contributed to Action. He argued in a speech at
Parkstone in May that ‘German control of Eastern Europe would be no menace
to the people of England but it might be a menace to the great capitalist ;
profiteers who rule England’. Scanlon put Greene in contact with ‘Harry’ ,
Bohle who, in turn, introduced him to German Propaganda Ministry officials.
In May 1939 Ramsay founded a secret society, the Right Club. The shadowy
John Carlton Cross was Secretary and the Duke of Wellington chaired its
meetings. Ramsay hoped ‘to avert war, which we considered to be mainly
the work of Jewish intrigue’. He thus designed the club for ‘infiltrating and
influencing the Establishment’. The club attracted a wide range of support —
a list of 235 members was drawn up by the summer — including the Eckersleys
and a high proportion of female members, such as Mary (‘Molly’) Stanford,
Mrs Christabel Nicholson and Anna Wolkoff. It forged connections with
other extreme groups, and Ramsay, Cross and Mary Allen tried to steer the
National Citizens Union into a more anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi line but were
unsuccessful. Its London offices were, however, used as a cover for Ramsay’s
“secret societies’.
Simultaneously, Ramsay formed a Co-ordinating Committee of Patriotic
Societies to co-ordinate the activities of the British Empire Union, National
Citizens Union, the British Democratic Party, Militant Christian Patriots, the
Liberty Restoration League and the United Ratepayers Association. The
Nordic League was represented but, significantly, the BU was not — perhaps
because so many former members already belonged to the Right Club. Natur-
ally, MIS was interested in its meetings and from its inception the Right Club
was infiltrated by agents — including Vincent Collier (Captain ‘X’) — working
for the Jewish BoD and later MIS.
The BoD moles discovered members acting as pro-Nazi agents. Mandeville-
Roe identified T. Victor Rowe, a BU member until 1936, and E. Munro as
‘German agents’. Home Office reports state that Aubrey Lees, an associate of
Richard Findlay, Lord Ronald Graham and Margaret Bothamley, made ‘no
secret of his great admiration for the Nazi regime and openly criticizes the
British Government on account of “its failure to get rid of the Jewish menace”’.
At the Nordic League, Lees met Captain J. Hughes, alias the BU’s ‘P. G.
Taylor’. Although Lees knew he was an agent, Ramsay employed him as his
personal representative at the secret co-ordinating meetings.
The Jewish Chronicle reported that at an NL public meeting at Caxton Hall
on 23 May ‘the wildest speech was made by A. K. Chesterton, who delighted
the middle class audience by speaking of greasy little Jew-boy pornographers’.
Mandeville-Roe heard among ‘motor manufacturers, lawyers, boat-builders,
other press agents and journalists ... a growing view that “if only the ruddy
Jews would keep quiet there wouldn’t be all this bother. Who the hell wants
 THE DARKENING CLOUDS 455

to fight for Poland or any other Continental places? Let Hitler carve up
Europe and we'll keep his colonies.”’ Mosley had recently declared that ‘any
Englishman who will not fight for Britain is a coward; any Englishman who
wants to fight for Poland is a fool’. Mandeville-Roe said their views were those
‘of men who haven’t a good word for Mosley and have never even heard of
the Nordic League’.
In May, Unity arrived at Hitler’s alpine mountain-top retreat. At Berchtes-
gaden was Eva Braun, who was said to be wildly jealous of Miss Mitford. Hitler
told Unity on 15 May, ‘We will always keep up Anglo-German friendship, what-
ever the English Government may do.’ MIS concluded Unity was ‘fundamen-
tally a hysterical and unbalanced person who would probably be of no use to
the Germans in a war. She could not bear a war because her loyalties were now
at least half German, and would kill herself. If it had not been for her husband
and children, Diana might have done the same.’ Diana’s depression, her son
Jonathan Guinness notes, ‘came from knowing that war meant ruin for Mosley’.
It would certainly end the radio project. There was another round of staff
reductions, with paid employees such as Olive Hawks and Anne Brock-Griggs
being dismissed, although many stayed on as volunteer workers.
Mosley still hit the Germans with money-making schemes, including the
successful extraction of ‘The Austrian Rothschild’ from the Gestapo. He used
his wife’s contacts with Heinrich Himmler to help the family. In Vienna,
Himmler had told Baron Louis Rothschild that in order to secure his freedom
he would have to pay £40,000 and assign to the Third Reich all his Austrian
assets. After a few days’ consideration, the Baron had accepted the conditions
and was allowed to leave. The Mosleys acted as intermediaries, possibly
through ‘Kenmare’, the agent involved with the Liechtenstein station con-
cession employed by the Jewish publishers Roditi International. According to
MIS’s Guy Liddell, ‘Mosley got some £40,000 for the part he played in getting
some of the Rothschilds out.’ The money was shared with the Rexists in
Belgium. In May, Rothschild arrived safely in Paris and two months later the
Reich undertook to buy the Vitkowitz iron and steel factory, but when war
broke out the contract was never signed.
MIS5’s Director-General wrote to the Home Office on 16 May that there
were ‘a small number of British subjects whom I consider it essential should
be put under lock and key immediately on the outbreak of hostilities’. Kell
wanted orders signed in advance and held by MPS, but officials resisted asking
the Home Secretary to sign orders ‘under a power which does not at present
exist’. On 2 June, however, it was agreed that MIS would submit individual
requests from which orders would be prepared in advance but not signed. The
BU may have been aware of these moves. Mosley made contingency plans,
which were explained by Donovan at a meeting of officials later in the month.
Mosley attracted a large audience at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall but it
456 BLACKSHIRT

was ‘entirely ignored by the national press’. On 28 May Lady Downe was
granted five minutes with Rothermere and requested a column in the Mail ‘as
a kind of open forum, with the idea of giving Mosley some publicity’. She also
wanted him to advise Mosley. When Collin Brooks asked if he was susceptible _
to advice, Rothermere replied ‘he wasn’t. At the beginning of his campaign I ,
gave him jolly good advice, and he wouldn’t listen. I supported him very
strongly, but I found he was on wrong lines. I fear he isn’t the adroit leader
that Hitler or Mussolini is.’ He did, however, agree to meet him. At the Savoy
on 12 June were the Imperial Policy Group’s Lord Phillimore, publisher Ernest
Benn and Lord Chaplin. Brooks had earlier met Philip Farrer and was told
Chaplin was attempting to ‘get some cohesion among the Right wing people’.
Joining them to discuss starting a newspaper was the Chairman of Drum-
mond’s bank and BU supporter George Drummond. ‘Mosley was very quiet,’
Brooks recorded, ‘but Cecil Harmsworth drew him out about how a national
leader is found. Mosley was marvellous — very quiet, very expository, very
modest, very impressive.’ Brooks was asked to be ‘thé Head-quarter brains of
the Right Wing movement’, co-ordinating ‘all the scattered efforts’. He hoped
Mosley would fall into line.
Mosley argued that friendship with Germany was a necessity if ‘the security
of the Empire was to be maintained’. But he must have known Hitler’s
ambitions did not stop at Poland’s borders. As Skidelsky suggests, ‘a reputable
public line . . would have been to warn Hitler that, while there were powerful
forces in England working for peace, the only chance they had to succeed was
if Hitler moderated his methods ... Such a warning would have served the
cause of peace better than the policy of continued support for German actions.’
Diana claimed that privately Mosley did this but it went against the grain to
advise Hitler ‘to respect the susceptibilities of opponents whom he regarded
as second-rate’. Taking money from the Nazis and signing up to the radio
project at a time when most people had judged this was a regime of terror was
not the action of someone out to protect British interests.
Domvile wrote in his diary on ro July, ‘We are thinking up a plan to
amalgamate all the parties who think the same on foreign policy.’ Ramsay,
too, talked of such collaboration, as Mosley tried to rally a peace front. The
Catholic Times, Catholic Herald and Peace Pledge Union all came out against
the government’s war policy, and there was talk of an alliance with the ILP
whose journal, Forward, attacked the ‘Jewish control of British foreign policy’.
Henry Williamson asked in Action on 15 July, ‘Must the blood and sweat of
his generation drip in agony, until the sun darken and fall down the sky, and
rise no more upon his world?’

By now, large halls were closed to Mosley and he was not allowed on the
radio, nor had he any access to the press. However, he managed to secure a
 THE DARKENING CLOUDS 457

booking at the Earls Court Exhibition Hall after a last-minute cancellation.

Unity was in London.to see political friends such as Fuller, and went along to
Earls Court with Diana. Hitler had invited them to Bayreuth.
On 16 July over 20,000 people were inside Earls Court, for ‘the largest
indoor political meeting ever held anywhere in the world’. There were many
middle-class and ‘society’ people from other pro-German groups. Domvile
was delighted: ‘We had lovely seats at 10/6 — met the Fullers, Drummond,
Lady Redesdale, Streatfield and many other friends. The hall was laid out a la
Nuremberg.’ Irene and Baba came with Mosley’s children and his mother
_ Lady Mosley, and his friend Mike Wardell. Diana’s brother and new BU
member Tom, who had joined the Queen’s Westminster Territorials, was
present with Lord Hinchingbrooke MP, and Randolph Churchill. The Evening
Standard spotted Tom with a raised arm and complained to his colonel. The
Italian embassy asked for twenty-four passes for correspondents. Domvile
recalled ‘masses of the Press, all giving Fascist salute’. Goebbels insisted Ger-
man reporting of the meeting should be light ‘so that the democratic press has
no locus to depict him as being in Germany’s pay’.
The rally opened with a fanfare of trumpets, followed by ‘the pageantry of
the BU Drum Corps leading the massed flags and honour standards of hun-
dreds of branches’. The anti-war audience, even if they were not pro-Mosley,
cheered as the cry ‘MOSLEY’ echoed around the hall. There was ‘a roll of
drums and a searchlight drawn down the centre of the hall’, the BU’s John
Charnley recalled, ‘and in the distance you could see the figure in black. There
stood Mosley in a dark suit, black shirt and tie.’ He marched down the centre
aisle, ‘as he did so the cheers began to rise, developing and expanding until I
thought the roof would come down! This was the man upon whom we had
_ pinned our hopes, the man who could save our country and Empire.’ At the
plinth Mosley raised his hand, and then began his last appeal. Charnley
thought it ‘the finest speech he ever delivered. At many points he had to stop
speaking because of the wave of applause.’
‘We say to the parties tonight . . . if any country in the world attacks Britain,
then every single member of this great audience of British Union would fight
for Britain . . . but a million Britons shall never die in your Jews’ quarrel. Why
is it a moral duty to go to war if a German kicks a Jew across the Polish
frontier but no moral duty to lift a finger if a Briton is kicked in Tsientsin?’
He thundered that ‘the Empire is sold ... My friends, can we conceive of a
policy of greater insanity, heading more straight for suicide, than this: to be
prepared to fight a world war over a few acres which do not belong to us, but
to make a present to the whole of mankind of the land which was won by the
sweat, blood and heroism of our forefathers?’ At this point Randolph Chur-
chill walked out.
‘am told that Hitler wants the whole world. In other words,’ Mosley went
458 BLACKSHIRT

on, ‘Hitler is mad. What evidence have they got . . . to show that he has gone
suddenly mad? Any man who wants to run the whole of the modern world
with all its polyglot population and diverse peoples and interests — such a man
is undoubtedly mad, and I challenge my opponents to produce one shred of
such evidence about that singularly shrewd and lucid intellect whom they,
venture so glibly to criticise.’
Express reporter Frank Waters noted how ‘the audience howled, hugging
itself. He knew exactly when to make it laugh, when to cheer, when to jeer
and sneer. A top-line variety star could hardly have shown greater versatility.’
After two hours came the climax. Mosley asked whether ‘we are going, if the
power lies within us .. . to say that our generation and our children shall not
die like rats in Polish holes’. He dedicated himself to the memory of those
who had gone before. ‘To the dead heroes of Britain in sacred union we say —
Like you we give ourselves to England: across the ages that divide us — across
the glories of Britain that unite us — we gaze into your eyes and we give to you
this holy vow: We will be true — today, tomorrow’and for ever — England
Lives!’
Domvile thought the rally ‘perfectly splendid’. Francis Yeats-Brown, who
had joined the Right Club, had his doubts. He wrote to Lord Elton that
Mosley was ‘as good as Goebbels as a speaker. His references to Jews and
Baldwin were greeted with prolonged booing. Personally I agreed with three-
quarters of what he said, but the other quarter is a stumbling block ... I
listened in vain for any word that would have shown that if a crisis came
suddenly he would be behind the government.’ He would use the opportunity
for political ends, making it impossible to rally the peace forces under his
banner.
In its coverage the German press had few illusions about the mood for peace
in Britain. Helmut Sundermann, Otto Dietrich’s right-hand man, warned ‘war
hysteria’ was spreading in Britain and that the people, ‘chloroformed by mass
propaganda’, were asking when war against Germany would start. An anti-war
BPP candidate at the Hythe by-election failed miserably. BU members helped
Harry St John Philby, who received only 578 votes. On 18 July Hitler hailed
Mosley’s speech, in which he called for an abandonment of the armaments
race, the return of German colonies and the preservation of the Empire, as a
plea for peace. ‘The meeting showed that Mosley had arrived at a clear
programme: this is directed against the agitation for war and against the
influence of Jewry.’
On 19 July German Ambassador Dirksen forwarded to Berlin a report on the
growth of anti-Semitism in Britain, following the arrival of 60,000 refugees. He
said, ‘Opportunities for disseminating anti-Jewish ideas are very limited. This
fact is already reflected by the suppression of all reports of Mosley’s Fascist
meetings, which are sometimes very well attended, as well as of the antisemitic
 THE DARKENING CLOUDS 459

clashes that occur almost daily in East London.’ He noted that ‘the very
well-connected Capt. Ramsay is beginning to play a definite role’, as was Lady
Alexandra Hardinge’s organization, which was ‘showing an anti-semitic film
in which, among other things, Jewish ritual slaughter is depicted. A further
increase of the anti-Jewish feeling in Britain can be expected.’
Close ties developed between the Link, Nordic League, Right Club and the
BU, with respectable societies used as ‘cover’ for meetings, including the
premises of a society of Druids. A Daily Worker reporter graphically described
a League meeting, where guests were scrutinized by BU stewards, ‘held in a
large room decorated with imitation dolmens. The platform stands under a
kind of papier maché Stonehenge. Torch-like fittings give out a dim light. The
wildest accusations are made against the Jews ... The audience works itself
up into a frenzy of anti-semitism with cries of “‘Down with the Jews’’. At the
end of the meeting all rise, cry ““The King’’, and shoot out their hands in the
Nazi salute.’
The ‘Nazi connection’ implicated a number of Mosley’s inner circle.
Domvile’s visit to Salzburg during the summer to found a German branch of
the Link attracted press criticism. MI5 discovered that Commandant Allen,
whose ‘connection to the BU was a closely guarded secret’, made clandestine
flights from a Kent airport to hold secret talks with Goering, Himmler and
Hitler. The Right Club’s violently anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi Anna Wolkoff
visited Czechoslovakia. Though the Wolkoff family was down on its luck,
Anna’s background meant she was used to the company of diplomats and
people such as Rudolf Hess. On 17 July she met General Hans Frank, right-
hand man of Konrad Henlein, the Sudeten German leader: ‘Frank and I talked
for two and a half hours, and it was then that I heard of the forthcoming
German-Soviet pact and all it would imply.’
Like Wolkoff, Allen went to secret meetings of the extreme Right at the
Cromwell Road home of Miss Margaret Bothamley, wife of Lieutenant-
Colonel Charles Strong, a prominent BU member. They were attended by
Germans. At the end of July Bothamley, who had tried to found a German
branch of the Link, left by plane from Croydon for Germany. She returned,
but made her way back to Berlin where, like Frances Eckersley, she joined the
English section of the German broadcasting service working alongside William
Joyce. MIS discovered letters Joyce had written on 20 July to German agent
Christian Bauer to tell him that his brother, Quentin, would travel to Berlin
in early September. Joyce told Beckett that if war broke out he would go to
Germany and offer his services to Hitler. Beckett turned down his offer to go
with him. MIS recommended that in the event of a war Joyce be detained.

Mosley was pursuing the radio project and set up a new company, Radio
Variety, to sell advertising and develop programmes for the German station.
460 BLACKSHIRT

He provided the capital of £5,000 (£170,000) for the front directors, Eckersley
and accountant James Herd. Eckersley had recruited announcers to introduce
the broadcasts of live concerts, operas and sporting events. Details were sent
to von Kaufman in Berlin and construction of the station, due to open on
1 October, went ahead.
It became apparent, however, that the understanding between Mosley and
Bill Allen had broken down, and the latter withdrew from the project. Without
Allen, Radio Variety stood little chance of success. It would be, as Herd put
it, ‘a flop’. An agreement was made for Mosley to pay Allen £10,000 in return
for control of the Museum Trust and Air Time. Despite the setback, Mosley
believed he was about to make ‘an immense fortune’, which would be ‘clean
money, made by our own abilities’. He still sought the sanction of the British
government and on 23 July Oliver Hoare asked Lord Perth whether the
Foreign Office was interested in the commercial broadcasting station they
were ‘shortly to set up’. Perth said the Joint Broadcasting Committee ‘deals
with this sort of thing. They have all the information required.’

On 26 July the Mosleys gave a dinner party for sympathetic MPs, pro-Nazi
journalists and prominent figures connected with the Anglo-German Fellow-
ship, the Link and the Nordic League. Guests of honour were Tory MPs
Lieutenant-Colonel Moore-Brabazon, Captain Ramsay and Sir Jocelyn Lucas,
newly elected and assistant to Sir Henry Page Croft. A prominent A-GF
member, Special Branch noted that Lucas was also involved with the National
Socialist League and the British Council Against European Commitments. The
Standard’s ‘Londoner’s Diary’ said other guests included Mosley’s mother, Sir
Barry and Lady Domvile, Professor Laurie, Fuller, and journalists G. Ward
Price and James Wentworth Day, formerly of Lady Houston’s Saturday
Review.
Also present was Philip Farrer, recently private secretary to Lord Salisbury,
Leader of the Lords, and member of a subversive group set up by Nazi
journalist Thost. Farrer and Mosley had taken part in talks with Lord Clive
and Lord Queenborough, President of the Royal Society of St George, Collin
Brooks and others, about creating a new right-wing newspaper.
Thost returned to Germany and published a book on England, warning that
Nazi propaganda which stressed the British only wanted peace and lacked the
will to fight would not succeed. Communist demonstrations against the BU
‘gave the English towns a very small taste of what Germany had to go through’,
but he was not optimistic about Mosley’s prospects because he stuck
‘too
closely to the Italian and German models to have the slightest chance
of
success. Fascism is such a typically Italian movement, and National
Socialism
such a typically German movement, that the British fascists have succeeded
so little in building something typically British.’
*
 THE DARKENING CLOUDS 461

The day after hosting the dinner party, Diana left for Germany as Hitler’s
guest at the Bayreuth Festival. She flew to Munich where Unity had a flat
found with Hitler’s help — ‘it had belonged to a Jewish couple who had decided
to leave’.
A young John F. Kennedy wrote from Munich to his father that Unity was
‘not at all pretty’ but had ‘a certain fine Aryan look’. She was ‘in a state of
__ high nervous tension and thinks only of the Fiihrer’, who had ‘a tremendous
_ admiration for the British and would do them no harm unless they forced his
hand .. . the situation in England was due mainly to Jewish propaganda and
the only way to clear it up was to throw them out ... Even though England
got beaten in battle the Germans would give England its empire for they could
not run the world by themselves.’ She added, ‘It would be much better if the
English got defeated.’ Kennedy thought her ‘the most fervent Nazi imaginable,
and is probably in love with Hitler’.
On 28 August Major Gerhard Engel, an army adjutant on Hitler’s staff,
attended a dinner party at Frau Wagner’s where ‘the possibility of fascism in
Britain was thoroughly discussed’. Diana ‘painted a very optimistic picture.
She emphasised that anti-Semitism is constantly on the increase in Britain.’
This undermines her claim that she never talked about the subject with her
Nazi hosts. Hitler said that ‘fascism did not lie in the English character, and
although Mosley might be a fine person and had grasped the weakness of
English politics, he could not seduce a whole nation’. When Unity disparaged
Italy and was ticked off by one of his staff, Hitler came to her defence.
Subsequently, even the slightest discussion of Italy would cause him to catch
her eye and giggle.
Engel found Unity ‘to be an excellent authority on the British arms situation.
This was music to the Fiihrer’s ears. Should her statements be correct, then
the German Military Attaché’s reports are wrong. She said frankly that Britain
cannot wage a war. For the whole of London there are just eight anti-aircraft
batteries. The army has only ageing weaponry and there are tanks for only two
divisions.’ Her information came from a cousin (possibly Randolph Churchill).
Engel worried whether she was ‘a spy, a poseur or is she really the fanatical
admirer of the Fiihrer that she always makes herself out to be? One thing is
clear, she has an excellent intelligence network at her disposal. She always
knows where the Fiihrer is.’ The inner circle ‘sought information about her.
She had a shadow on her but nothing else, and Hitler did not even want that
much.’ Hitler told her ‘a lot of political and military secrets because he thought
he could rely on having them passed on to the right people by that means. He
was sure she would hand on to the English, especially Churchill, whatever
information he pre-selected.’
The account of the dinner was confirmed by Hitler himself in the Bormann-
preserved ‘Table Talk’. Hitler claimed
462 BLACKSHIRT

Churchill and his friends decided on war against us some years before 1939. I had
this information from Lady Mitford; she and her sisters were very much in the know.
One day she suddenly exclaimed that in the whole of London there were only three
anti-aircraft guns! Her sister, who was present, stared at her stonily and then said
slowly: ‘I do not know whether Mosley is the right man, or even if he is in a position,
to prevent a war between Britain and Germany.’

On the last day at Bayreuth, 2 August, Diana found Hitler in a state of

depression. He believed Britain was determined upon war. Unity’s diary quotes
him as saying: ‘If there is no miracle I see the outlook as very black. And I do
not believe in miracles.’ Diana said her husband would ‘continue his campaign
for peace for as long as such a campaign was legal’. Hitler appreciated ‘that
he has been opposed to war but I want to warn him that if he does, he
may be assassinated like Jaurés in 1914’. Jean Jaurés, editor of the socialist
newspaper L’Humanité, had been assassinated by a French nationalist for
advocating arbitration with Germany rather than violence. Mosley recalled
that Hitler had ‘a strong historic sense and my position of political opposition
to the war seemed to him similar to that of the French statesman’. Diana gave
Hitler a report on her husband’s speeches, about which he showed great
interest. After they left, Unity told Diana that she would kill herself if there
was war.
That evening’s performance was of Wagner’s Gétterdaémmerung. ‘Never
had the glorious music seemed so doom-laden,’ Diana wrote. ‘I had a strong
feeling that I should never see Hitler again, that a whole world was crumbling,
that the future held only tragedy and war.’ As for Unity’s fate, ‘there was
nothing to be done. She and I had talked it over and over; I dreaded her iron
resolve.’ When the sisters were alone, Unity said again that she would not live
to see the tragedy of war between Britain and Germany. ‘I knew well what
Unity, sitting beside me, was thinking. Next day I left for England with death
in my heart.’ Diana took the train to Derby where she met Mosley. ‘As we
drove through the summer night to Wootton I told him Hitler’s words, and
what Unity had said.’

On 3 August the Home Secretary was asked in the Commons if the Link was
‘an instrument of the German propaganda service financed by Germany’.
Domvile and Carroll had visited the German chemical firm Bayer, which
promised ‘to help the Link’. Its journal was subsidized by predominantly
German advertisers and A. P. Laurie received £150 (£5,000) for a work of
undisguised propaganda, The Case for Germany (Berlin, 1939). Although
reluctant to act unless the law was broken, Sir Samuel Hoare said the Link
was ‘being used as an instrument of the German propaganda service and that
money has been received from Germany by one of the active organisers’.
 THE DARKENING CLOUDS 463

5; Mosley’s radio project was a clandestine affair. On 15 August Herd travelled

to Dover to meet a senior German official, von Kaufman. They travelled to
the Radio Variety offices, where the German told Eckersley that because of
the international situation the radio deal was off. That night, Eckersley went
with von Kaufman to Plymouth to meet a German colleague on the SS
Carribea, in an endeavour to persuade him to come to London for further
discussions. The official refused and the two Germans left on the Carribea.
_ Eckersley, Herd later told Special Branch, ‘came back alone, very dis-
appointed’. Quizzed about Eckersley’s loyalty, Herd said he was ‘so pro-Hitler’
that he ‘would not put him in control of anything which would bring him in
contact with propaganda’. He was anti-Semitic and a member of the Link:
‘Anyway, he’s a bloody Nazi.’
The Germans gave Mosley money as recompense and returned the capital
_ sum for Gemona. Allen ‘heard about it and, in a fury, threatened to expose
where Mosley had obtained funds for the BU if he did not immediately return
the money to the rightful owners’. He did return the money, accusing Allen
of blackmail. Allen said this was a compliment, coming from ‘such an accom-
plished blackmailer’. Mosley’s radio gamble accounts for the tone of his peace
campaign, with its refusal to criticize Hitler. It was impossible for him to head
a broader based peace movement: ‘his hands’, suggests Skidelsky, ‘were tied
by his own negotiations with Berlin. He was still juggling; still sacrificing
public causes for private considerations.’
Mosley wrote that at the outbreak of war, ‘One thing at least is certain,
that but for the accident of war we should have made an immense fortune. I
should have achieved my ambition to be the first revolutionary in history to
conduct a revolution and at the same time to make the fortune which assured
its success ... It was a great labour. It went down by an accident.’ Diana
believed the station in Germany, which was the furthest advanced of the
concessions in terms of planning, was completed and went on air as Bremen
I, broadcasting propaganda to Britain during the war.

Despite the rapidly deteriorating situation in Europe and fears within the
British government that Hitler would strike out within weeks, Diana wrote to
Ribbentrop on 21 August, with ‘best regards’ from her husband, and accepted
an invitation to the Reichsparteitag at Nuremberg for herself and Unity.
‘Tickets were like gold’ and Diana requested they be accompanied by Lady
Downe. ‘She is a very good National Socialist. I am sure the Filhrer would
like her very much. She is an old friend of Queen Mary’s, and she does a great
deal of good in a small way, trying to get people to see our point of view.’
The guest list largely contained figures unconnected with Mosley who the
Nazis hoped would raise the respectable image of the Third Reich in Britain.
That Nuremberg would go ahead was always unlikely, even more so when
464 BLACKSHIRT

it was revealed that the Germans and the Soviet Union had signed a pact on
23 August 1939. It also meant that hopes of a European crusade against
Bolshevism had been dashed. ‘War for Poland was always a crime,’ Mosley
wrote, ‘now it is madness.’ The news led to talk on the Right of a Mosley.
coup d’état; an idea which seemed to intrigue Collin Brooks. :
On 22 August MIS submitted to the Home Office the names of twenty-three
people they wished to detain. Nineteen were suspected spies or ‘of hostile
origin’, and three (one being Joyce) simply pro-Nazi. Joyce’s friend Angus
McNab returned from Germany, where he had stayed with Bauer, claiming
he would never help Britain’s enemies. MI5, however, intercepted a letter to
Bauer, disclosing Joyce’s intention to go to Germany. ‘He has identified himself
unreservedly with the Nazi cause, maintains close contact with Nazi officials
and has shown he would be quite willing to take action inimical to this
country.’ Vernon Kell fed fears of German spies and invasion to his lifelong
friend Churchill, who believed — against all the evidence — that 20,000 Nazi
agents were in Britain, ready to stimulate an outbreak of sabotage.
On 24 August Sir Samuel Hoare presented the Emergency Powers (Defence)
Bill in the Commons. He warned that he was seeking ‘very wide, very drastic,
and very comprehensive powers’, which would not be introduced ‘until the
country is actually involved in hostilities’. It was passed by an Order in
Council, which did not require parliamentary assent. During the day, Joyce
renewed his British passport (at his post-war trial it emerged that the passport
officer became distressed in answering simple questions about this remarkable
action, for Joyce was on the arrest list).
Joyce’s sister Joan said that in the evening he received a telephone call from
an MIS officer warning he was to be interned. Joyce was telephoned by his
old British Fascist friend Maxwell Knight, who said Defence Regulations
would become effective in two more days and that his detention order had
already been signed. Joyce had been giving Knight information on Commu-
nists; the hope, implausibly, was that he would continue to do so from Ger-
many. On 26 August Mosley’s former chief propagandist left for Berlin,
accompanied by his second wife, Margaret, destined to become ‘Lord Haw
Haw’, the most notorious broadcaster in Germany. When the order for his
detention was issued, Special Branch’s Inspector Keeble went to arrest him,
but he had already caught the boat train to Ostend. Joyce was accompanied
by a second person making his way to Berlin whose identity remains unknown.
Novelist Henry Williamson was distraught by the worsening news. He could
not believe Hitler intended to wage war and, in desperation, wrote to Mosley
suggesting that he, Williamson, fly to Germany in a last-ditch attempt to
persuade the Fuhrer not to proceed. ‘If I could see Hitler, as the common
soldier of 1914 who fought the common soldier of his Linz battalion at Ypres,’
thinks Williamson’s autobiographical hero Philip Maddison, ‘might I not be
 THE DARKENING CLOUDS 465

able to give him, the German common soldier, that amity he so desired from
England — to beg him to halt his troops, and to save the two white giants of
Europe ... from bleeding to death, while Oriental Bolshevism waits on, to
bring Asia to the chalk cliffs of Normandy?’
On 26 August Williamson went to see Mosley, ‘a man in whose ability and
realistic vision I believed. With his invariable courtesy he rose to greet me, but
the calm and aloof strength of his usual self was withdrawn, as though for
the moment he had expended all his life, and was poor. He held my letter
half-crumpled in his hand, as though it had been thrust hastily into his pocket.’
Mosley considered it a futile gesture: ‘I’m afraid it is too late — the curtain is
down.’ Williamson asked, ‘What will you do?’ He repeated what Hitler had
told his wife: ‘They might shoot me as Jaurés was shot in Paris in 1914.’ Then
he said, ‘I shall keep on, while I can, to give a platform for peace should our
people want it. I cannot see my country sink.’ When he left, he noticed the
newsbills read NAZIS SEIZE DANZIG. Heeding Mosley’s advice, he returned
to his Norfolk farm, appalled by the approach of a ‘two-sided brothers’ war’.

With the approach of war, Special Branch noted ‘the Nordic League has
ceased’ but leading members, together with more active IFL members, met
regularly at the house of Oliver Gilbert. At the same time the Duke of West-
minster, on the advice of Truth editor Henry Newnham, joined the Link.
Diana Cooper recalled that on leaving the Savoy Grill on 1 September 1939,
in the blackout, she and Duff were given a lift in the Duke’s car. He began
‘abusing the Jewish race’, praising the Germans and ‘rejoicing that we were
not yet at war’. When he added that ‘Hitler knew after all that we were his
best friends’, her husband spat ‘that by to-morrow he will know that we are
his most implacable and remorseless enemies’.
Mosley expected air raids to begin the moment war broke out. He suggested
that Irene and the children leave Denham for the safety of Staffordshire. On
27 August Irene, the children and Micky’s nanny arrived at Wootton, where
she removed the photograph of Hitler by Diana’s bed and one of Goering from
the mantelpiece. That evening Mosley addressed a large crowd at Hackney,
accusing the government of creating a situation in which ‘if Poland whistles,
a million Englishmen have got to die’. Blackshirts carried placards with slogans
such as ‘The Jews Want War — We Want Peace’ and ‘We Won’t Fight for
Poland’. Action warned that ‘the warmongers kave still to reckon with the
will to peace of the British people finding expression through the inspired
voice of Oswald Mosley! Hail Mosley! Hail Peace!’ It said thousands of
Londoners had shouted these slogans, arms raised in the Nazi salute.
Mosley genuinely believed he was getting somewhere: ‘Our British move-
ment achieved so much in face of steadily declining unemployment figures
that it cannotbe doubted we should have won in Britain if the crisis had
466 BLACKSHIRT

deepened.’ This was an example of his willingness to deceive himself but even
respected journalist Hannen Swaffer took the view that but for the war, Britain
would have been a Fascist country: ‘Would British fascism, one wonders, have
done so disastrously at a general election in 1940 fought in the trough of a.
new depression?’ John Warburton, who joined the BU in 1933 aged fourteen, ,
said that there was in the run-up to the war, ‘a realisation that it would have
to be in a moment of crisis and that we could not achieve power’. He later
believed ‘that we could have achieved seats but deep down I didn’t think we
could achieve power but would make a breakthrough’.
‘The question is,’ Mosley suggested to Peter Liddle near the end of his life,

had I stayed in the old parties, had I possibly become Prime Minister, could I have
prevented the only thing that mattered, the Second World War. I am perfectly
satisfied I could not have got anything serious done on unemployment, poverty,
suffering, the questions of the age, in the old Parties, but I might conceivably, having,
if you like, this obsession against war, I might have prevented a second world war,
ifIhad been in that position. However, the drive for war was so tremendous that no
individual in any position could have stopped it.
 22

The Phoney War

On 1 September 1939 German troops crossed into Poland. Mosley issued a

message to British Union members to ‘stand fast ... you have lit a flame in
Britain which all the corrupt Jewish money-power cannot extinguish’. He said
‘Britain intervenes in an alien quarrel’ but asked members ‘to do nothing to
injure our country, or to help the other Power. Our members should do what
the law requires of them; and, if they are members of any of the Forces or
Services of the Crown, they should obey their orders and, in every particular,
obey the rules of the Service.’ He asked them ‘to take every opportunity within
your power to awaken the people and to demand peace’.
Neville Laski brought the message to Scotland Yard’s attention but Mosley
had cleared it with the Ministry of Information, which asked it not be pub-
lished but only distributed via BU notice boards. The authorities concluded
that his policy of opposing the war while asking his followers not to take any
action which would hinder its prosecution was the product of a very clever
mind determined to keep the BU within the law. Thereafter, BU publications
were monitored for signs of propaganda prejudicial to the defence of the
realm.
Chamberlain announced on the radio on 3 September that Britain and
Germany were at war. Diana remembered ‘a hot and cloudless morning; a
minute or two later the sirens blew an air raid warning. We went on to our
river balcony but nothing appeared in the serene blue sky.’ Unity was ‘shattered
by the outbreak of war between the countries she loved’. She attempted suicide
by shooting herself in the head. She did not succeed and lay unconscious in a
Munich hospital. On 4 September two Blackshirts in the RAF, Kenneth Day
and George Brocking, were killed in action in a daylight bomber raid over
Brunsbiittel. °
Mosley imagined the authorities would close the BU down and forbid him
to speak. ‘If he had been,’ wrote Diana, ‘he would have obeyed absolutely.
His whole record shows that; he never disobeyed the police.’ The Nazi-
Soviet pact immobilized local Communist anti-Fascism, but claims that peace
meetings were ‘larger and more enthusiastic than any in the BU’s history’ are
not borne out by the facts. The general absence of public interest in the BU
468 BLACKSHIRT

contributed to a decline in the numbers attending its open-air meetings, though

those in north-east London attracted ‘fair crowds’ of stalwarts. Large halls in
Manchester and Leeds were closed to it and during September the only BU
meetings took place in London. ;
Claims that membership had recovered to the peak level of support of 1934,
are probably exaggerated; Special Branch estimated sales of Action to be
14,000. Local branches were paralysed with many of the male speakers con-
scripted into the armed forces. Women and young Mosleyites filled the leader-
ship vacuum and supported the ongoing peace campaign. For many the BU
was their first initiation into politics and their ties to it were tenuous. Mosley
was aware the movement might just disintegrate and ordered tightened
discipline.
To protect the BU in the event of his arrest, Mosley made contingency
plans, which had been outlined by Brian Donovan to officials during the
summer. Deputies for all posts were appointed and, besides Donovan and
Francis Hawkins, six officials were sanctioned to oversee the movement: J. H.
Hone, national inspector for the North; Commander C. E. Hudson, member of
the Anglo-German Friendship society and election candidate; K. E. Marsden,
northern propaganda officer; Rafe Temple-Cotton, regional inspector and
candidate for Exeter; E. Dudley Elam, BU receptionist; and Hector McKech-
nie, meetings organizer and senior London administrator. The eight received
a signed document stating that each of them had Mosley’s ‘complete confi-
dence and is entitled to do what he thinks fit in the interests of the Movement
on his own responsibility’. MI5 suspected others — Jorian Jenks, BU Agricultu-
ral Adviser — had been authorized. Documents had been sent to regional
inspectors and area organizers, including Charles Hammond and Ralph
Gladwyn Jebb, a candidate for West Dorset.
These were not leaders of an underground organization since their BU role
was public knowledge and they were likely to be interned. There was another
covert layer, including district organizer Lawrence Harding, a former Royal
Navy officer. MIS did not appreciate Harding’s importance, an unknown
figure close to Mosley. Bitterly anti-Communist, ultra patriotic, he spoke
German and had contacts with Germany, where he received ‘training’ and
acted as BU liaison with the Nazis. Harding kept his secrets and burnt all his
diaries for the period.
Mosley had transferred funds to Mrs Norah Elam, a former suffragette
who ran the London and Provincial Anti-Vivisection Society, a BU front
organization. Her husband was one of the anointed eight. Mosley explained
that he feared Headquarters might be bombed and that he might be assassin-
ated, so decided Mrs Elam should take ‘charge of part of our funds for a short
period before and after the declaration of war. There was nothing illegal or
improper about this.’ The Elams were among those members who regularly
 THE PHONEY WAR 469

attended the secret meetings to organize-collaboration between the ‘patriotic

societies’.
The Home Office considered Mosley’s peace campaign to be subversive. He
hoped that ‘out of the misery and hardships of a long war he may eventually
be able to establish a Fascist State with himself as Dictator’. However, officials
remained wary of arresting a former Minister who threatened to sue those
who impugned his patriotism.
When Diana told Irene that Mosley intended to carry on the BU, she
despaired at their attitude. Anthony Eden’s address on 11 September on
_ Hitler’s crimes drew protests from Diana. An angry Irene left the house but
she did later speak to her brother-in-law, who predicted Germany and Russia
winning but was ‘by no means so sure we would. Hence his mission to get a
peace while the Empire was still intact.’ She thought he saw himself as ‘a
potential smasher-up of all our capitalist system when the disruption of com-
munism creeps over Europe and towards us, and with anti-Semitism as his
pillar of hate he will arise from the ashes of conservatism and profitmaking’.
He talked ‘earnestly on the curious thing that great fanatical faith has to have
hate to work on’. ;
During the following day’s lunch he was ‘so wild with rage he tore up and
down the room ina filthy blasphemous state’. He said he would ‘at once make
peace with Hitler, letting him have his huge bloc to the Mediterranean if Hitler
leaves us and our empire alone, but if he touches it we fight’. Irene argued
that Hitler ‘must touch us somewhere’ but noted that Mosley did ‘not mind
the Poles being sacrificed’. He attacked Chamberlain for saying Hitlerism must
be wiped out — ‘cannot 80 million Germans choose their Government and
would we stomach Hitler butting in here and condemning our Government
and telling them he would fight to exterminate them?’ Irene found the tirade
‘horrendous’.
Irene rebelled against using her money for the children’s upkeep even when
they were at Wootton. She had ‘crashed their castle and the funds they wanted
to give to fascism cannot now be safe unless they live in a cottage’. Mosley
said he was through with Irene.
The government was obsessed with information leaking to the enemy and
the possibility that Mosley’s supporters might make use of foreign embassy
diplomatic bags. Risk of leakage increased with the creation on 3 September
of the unwieldly Anglo-French Supreme War Council. The appointment of Sir
Edmund Ironside as Chief of the Imperial General Staff worried MIS. The
Minister for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, told Ironside he was suspected of being
indiscreet and having dubious connections (rumours he was a secret BU
member were not raised). On 13 September the King asked Ironside to make
room for the Duke of Windsor as a liaison officer on the Military Mission to
- the French. Ironside argued this would mean the Duke having access to secret
47° BLACKSHIRT

plans, which would inevitably be made known to the Duchess, who was not
to be trusted. The King did not dispute Ironside’s assessment but suggested
top secret information be kept from the Duke.
A role had been sought for the Duke so that pro-German forces did not _
coalesce around him as a ‘Peace Party’. David Cannadine suggests his views ,
on Germany were similar to Mosley’s — ‘and no one would suggest that Mosley
should be regarded as a non-risk man in the Second World War’. Diana shared
their view that the First World War had been ‘a total failure, that the Versailles
Treaty was grossly unfair, and that Germany should never have been encircled
in the 1930s’. Hitler should have been allowed to deport the Jews. “The Jews
behaved abominably in Germany and all he wantedto do was be rid of them
... anti-Semitism was endemic everywhere in Central Europe ... if the right
people had been in power in England, particularly Lloyd George, there could
have been a negotiated peace.’
A Peace Party seemed to be forming on 11 September at the house of
Britain’s richest man, the Duke of Westminster, Président of the Link. At
the conclave were the Duke of Buccleuch and Lords Rushcliffe, Arnold and
Mottistone (J. E. B. Seely, a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship); war
correspondent Sir Philip Gibbs; and Collin Brooks, about to edit Truth. The
pro-German Buccleuch said war would ‘play into the hands of Soviet Russia,
Jews and Americans’. He was already under surveillance by MI5. Westminster
read his guests a paper by former MP and BU funder Henry Drummond
Wolff, who argued that the war could be ‘set aside by deflecting Hitler’s
aggressive intentions from the external to the internal; in other words by
fomenting a revolution within Germany itself’. Mottistone told Foreign Secre-
tary Halifax about the meeting, which was described by Lord Hankey as
‘somewhat defeatist and pacifist’.
A second meeting included Lord Noel-Buxton (whose secretary was MIS
agent Harald Kurtz) and Lord Harmsworth. Westminster lamented that
London — much of which he owned — was ‘the best aerial target on the face of
the earth’. Churchill later warned his friend that ‘when a country is fighting a
war, very hard experiences lie before those who preach defeatism and set
themselves against the main will of the Nation’.
On 16 September Mosley urged the government to ‘leave the foreigners on
the continent to fight out their own quarrels’. He wanted Britain turned into
an isolated fortress and its energy converted into developing the Empire. ‘If
Germany does not blame us for any breach of the rules of war by our Polish
allies, no more should we blame them for such measures of retaliation as they
have undertaken in the East.’ War would lead to ‘the disaster of defeat, the
triumph of communism and the loss of the British Empire despite victory’.
Britain was the only country which could not benefit from war.
MIS reported that Mosley and the Right Club’s Captain Ramsay met at the
 THE PHONEY WAR 471

London and Provincial Anti-Vivisection Society, where Fascists and anti-

Semites discussed the threat posed by the promulgation of Defence Regulation
18D on 1 September 1939 and the internment of four Fascists. They agreed
to continue a peace campaign while avoiding activity which could be construed
as treasonable. On 11 September Nordic League members joined the BU in
support of Mosley’s prediction that a revolutionary situation would develop
against the ‘Jewish War’. Special Branch believed they would ‘continue to
work underground’ by working with the Peace Pledge Union, even though
they were ‘no more pacifist than Hitler’.
In Action on 16 September Mosley was portrayed as the unifying leader of
the anti-Semitic and Fascist groups campaigning for a negotiated peace. On
11 September his former foreign affairs adviser Robert Gordon-Canning who,
he later admitted, had not left the BU and was probably still working on his
behalf, saw Admiral Domvile as part of the agreement process with Ramsay.
Eight days later Domvile, John Beckett and ILP activist Ben Greene met at
Gordon-Canning’s flat, where they were joined by prominent members of the
Link, the Nordic League and the Right Club. The aim was to forge ties between
the Link and the British People’s Party, in a new joint organization, the British
Council for a Christian Settlement in Europe (BCCSE), which would work for
a negotiated peace. It was chaired by Lord Tavistock, with Gordon-Canning as
Treasurer and Beckett as Secretary.
Francis Hawkins, as BU’s chief negotiator, met Tavistock about co-
ordinating the activities of those groups that held similar views to the BU.
Special Branch noted that more than one senior BU official had ‘gone so far
as to state this country would be better off under German rule’. It feared
members were being encouraged to join civil defence units in order to spread
defeatist propaganda and to register falsely as conscientious objectors. It
claimed a BU ‘pack’ sent to teachers called upon ‘students of the revolution’
to prepare themselves for ‘the day of the British Union’s final advance’. It
emphasized Mosley’s belief that a revolutionary situation could be created
which Fascists could either exploit for themselves, or use their armed service
contacts to defeat the Communists. This might provide an opportunity for a
‘march to power’.
On 22 September two leading NL and former BU members on MIS5’s
Suspect List, Oliver Gilbert and Victor Rowe, were interned for their pro-Nazi
connections. They were alleged to be part of a group ‘prepared to go further’.
‘Hoffman’ of Munich had provided Gilbert with anti-Jewish propaganda for
distribution at NL meetings. The two were deemed to be in association with
other disloyal British citizens, ‘who were hostile to the true interests of the
country’.
Captain Luttman-Johnson, Secretary of the Windsor Club and a visitor to
Germany, was on MI5’s list but was not detained. Mosley was alarmed by the
 472 BLACKSHIRT

arrest (along with the IFL’s Quentin Joyce) of BU members E. Fawcett and
William F. Craven, active in the Liverpool docks, and Eric Thomas, a candidate
for Wood Green, who visited Germany with Gilbert during the spring and
was suspected of being a Gestapo agent.
German files reveal Thomas’s attendance at the German embassy as ‘propa-
ganda director of the English National Socialists’. He was ‘a dangerous
dreamer, about whom one should be warned’. Living in Berlin, marketing
washing-machine motors, Putzi Hanfstaengl introduced him to leading Nazis.
He edited the anti-Semitic Investigator, and in 1938 went to Nuremberg and
made contact with the Auslands Organization. Thomas served until July 1939
as Limehouse district leader and was Mosley’s contact with Hans Keller,
President of the Institute for the Rights of Nations, who allegedly introduced
him to a Nazi intelligence officer. When arrested, Thomas was asked whether
he represented the BU in Berlin, if it received Nazi funding and whether he
had met Mosley in Germany. He was warned not to mention the matter ‘or
you will come back inside again’.
Under 18B the authorities could detain without trial people they believed
capable of prejudicial acts against the State. Reasons for detention did not
have to be revealed either to the detainee or to the Advisory Committee dealing
~ with appeals. Herbert Morrison attacked the ‘extraordinary sweeping powers’
under which ‘anybody whom the Home Secretary did not like could be hanged,
drawn or quartered almost without any reasonable or proper means of de-
fending himself’. The idea of a legally managed “day in court’ in which evidence
could be challenged was, notes Professor Brian Simpson, ‘wholly incompatible
with the world of MIS, where unchecked assertions and reports from agents
and informers built up a file, where suspicion served as a substitute for proof
of guilt, and where the object of suspicion was normally never even interviewed
before the case against him was acted upon’.
Worried by Thomas’s Nazi connections, Mosley was in the dark as to what
exactly MI5 knew. His solicitor obtained a copy of Thomas’s Detention Order
in which he was accused of ‘close association with prominent members of the
Nazi Party’; ‘sympathy with the Nazi Regime’ and of having been in relations
with a Nazi Party member ‘suspected of being hostile to a person or persons
currently residing in the United Kingdom’. He was held in solitary for twenty-
five days without charge under special watch orders. He was not allowed a
solicitor and no visitors except his wife. His ‘filthy’ cell was artificially lit for
twenty-four hours a day with the small windows sandbagged.
Mosley protested in Action and Ramsay raised in the Commons the manner
in which the regulations were being implemented. Domvile’s diary and the
testimony of Francis Hawkins and Lees to the Advisory Committee confirm
that secret meetings discussed the Thomas case, mutual collaboration and
setting up a newspaper advocating peace. The participants were recorded in
 THE PHONEY WAR 473

the Domvile diary (about which MIS had no knowledge) and included Mosley,
Ramsay, Lymington and Domvile; prominent BU members such as Hawkins,
Fuller, Commandant Allen and Lady Pearson; members of the Right Club,
the BPP and the Nordic League, including Tavistock and Gordon-Canning
(BCCSE), Bertie Mills, Yeats-Brown, Professor A. P. Laurie and Richard
Findlay (RC), C. D. Roe (RC and Link); and maverick figures such as George
Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers Earl of Mar, Lady Dunn and C. G. Grey (editor of
The Aeroplane). Home Office reports on civilian morale suggested there was
considerable support for a negotiated peace and the appearance of a general
alliance of the far Right caused concern in official circles.
In October plans for a gathering of the patriotic societies took shape.
Domvile was the co-ordinator and was aided by Richard Findlay, his channel
between Ramsay and Mosley. On 1 October a meeting at the National Citizens
Union was attended by Ramsay and other RC/NL members, NCU representa-
tives, including the pro-Nazi Leigh Vaughan-Henry and Charles Featherstone-
Hammond, and BU members such as Mrs Newnham, whose husband was
editor of Truth. They accepted Ramsay as leader. Two days later Domvile
saw Mosley but there was no Ramsay ‘which was a pity’. He was in Scotland
to meet Findlay and Luttman-Johnson (both in contact with Mosley).
MIS viewed the Right Club as a ‘Fifth Column’ organization which ‘under
the cloak of anti-Jewish propaganda conducts pro-German activities’. Special
Branch reported that it was ‘centred principally upon the contacting of sym-
pathisers especially among officers in the Armed Forces’ and talk had ‘reached
the stage that a military coup d’état is feasible’. Members welcomed a German
invasion and contemplated actions to bring this about. Churchill helped feed
such ideas, warning the Cabinet that 20,000 German parachutists were ready
to land on the east coast. Given his wish to cleanse Britain of Jews, it was not
unreasonable for MIS to suspect Ramsay of being willing to co-operate with
the Germans, though the evidence suggests he was an eccentric patriot, to
whom the concept of treason was anathema. Most Blackshirts were unwilling
to assist the enemy, though some contemplated overthrowing the government
and instigating peace terms with the Nazis. Ramsay fell into this latter category
and so did Mosley.
Marjorie Amor (aka Mrs Marjorie Mackie) had joined the Right Club in ~
August at the instigation of MI5’s Maxwell Knight. Assistant secretary of the
Christian Defence Movement, she had already met the Ramsays during their
crusade to rescue Christendom in Soviet Russia. She asked Ramsay if, in the
event of a revolution, she should follow Mosley. He said, ‘Certainly not.
Before such a situation arises I shall be in touch with all the members and you
will then be told who is to be your leader.’ Mrs Ramsay said Mosley had tried
‘to get Jock to join in with him’ and ‘he had promised him Scotland’. Special
Branch said members felt that ‘if a leader should step forward the movement
474 BLACKSHIRT

would make rapid headway. Naturally, the name of the Duke of Windsor is
mooted by some . . but little hope is felt that he would lend himself to such
an intrigue.” When Amor asked what she could do to help, Ramsay suggested
she get a job in censorship because he wanted a contact there. Twelve days |
later Knight found her a job in censorship.
Ramsay considered Mosley ‘a near Bolshevik’ and Mosley considered him
to be ‘mentally unbalanced about the Jews’. Ramsay oscillated between a
wild extremism, which sanctioned the use of force against Jews, and a rigid
constitutionalism with warnings to followers not to use illegal methods. Brian
Donovan said he would not think much of any conspiracy in which Ramsay
was a prime mover since he was just a Jew hater and disliked Donovan because
he had once been a Mason.
Knight claimed the Club had contacts in foreign embassies, which were
used to communicate with Germany by means of diplomatic bags. Mrs Amor
gathered from Wolkoff that Molly Stanford was in coded correspondence
with Margaret Bothamley in Gérmany, via an IFL member living in Brussels.
They had contacts via Belgian embassy diplomats Jean Nieuwenhus and
Comte Antoine de Laubespin, who became Minister for Foreign Affairs, and
Guy Niermans, the Club’s agent in Belgium. Wolkoff sent ‘letters that she did
not want to be seen’ through the Belgian diplomatic bag. Special Branch
claimed an NL meeting on 8 October discussed ‘communicating with
Germany’ by way of Ireland, the nearest neutral country.
MIS informed the Home Secretary that the NL advocated violence and that
at a meeting with the BU T. St Barbe made a ‘wild speech’ that the King
should abdicate and a ruling council be set up by the Duke of Windsor and
General Ironside. Mosley welcomed its support, but feared its extremism.
Domvile introduced other right-wing activists to the Mosley/Ramsay efforts
at collaboration. On 10 October he met Mosley, who encouraged the idea of
co-operation. In the evening, he received a telephone call from Ramsay who
wanted the BU, NL-Right Club, the Link and Information and Policy to come
together. The idea was discussed at a productive meeting of Mosley, Hawkins
and Domvile. Significantly Ramsay, though expected, failed to turn up but
the group now included Lords Tavistock and Lymington, who were close to
Peace Party circles, which included the historian Arthur Bryant.
The British Council for Christian Settlement in Europe held its first public
meeting at Conway Hall. The Dispatch reported that 150 Britons met ‘to
bring peace to the world’. They ‘praised Hitler. They reviled the British
Government and ended by sending a resolution to Mr Chamberlain calling on
him to start peace negotiations.’ Beckett ‘liked Hitler’ and as an ex-serviceman
was ‘now a conscientious objector’ who ‘could not take part in this preposter-
ous lunacy’. Ben Greene, whose Peace and Progressive Information Service
was described as ‘National Socialist Propaganda of a remarkably noxious
 THE PHONEY WAR 475
ae
kind’, described British policy ‘as one of bluff and treachery’ and declared that
Hitler ‘had been justified in all he had done’. MIS said Greene ‘doesn’t even
think we shall win the war ... But he does think that our Government has
taken the opportunity of the war to kill the trade union movement.’ On
10 October Greene met Labour MP Richard Stokes, who expressed interest in
i
the BCCSE and whose Peace Aims Group had its first meeting on 26 October.
There was ‘almost universal anti-semitic feeling’ in London and a wide-
spread view in patriotic circles of Jews as a Fifth Column endangering the war
effort. George Ward Price wrote in the Mail on 9 October that ‘many enemy
agents came here as refugees’ and many of them ‘are Jews ... Many of the
German Jews, often themselves recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, were
the worst of their kind. In this country the national character is strong enough
to absorb the better Hebrew type; in Germany, the Jewish aliens formed a
class-conscious, self-interested community, and the misdeeds of some brought
down reprisals on the rest.’
Mosley’s peace campaign did begin to find an audience. At the Stoll Theatre
on 15 October, in front of 2,700 people, he condemned ‘Jewish capitalists for
starting a war in which Britons had no real interest’. Diana was ‘astonished
by the reception he got from the crowds who went to hear him’. At the end
of his speech Mosley asked them ‘to lift up their arms “for peace’’. A forest
of arms goes up. All this was very different from what we had expected.’ At
the New Hippodrome, 2,000 people — three-quarters of whom gave him the
Fascist salute — heard him attack War Minister Hore-Belisha as a ‘Jewish
warmonger’. Hecklers who shouted ‘Down with Hitlerism’ were ejected by
stewards. Der Stiirmer praised Mosley’s efforts ‘to save England from war.
Until the very last day he fought against the catastrophic Jewish policy of
the British Government. Mosley did not give up his struggle, even when
Chamberlain and Churchill had already decided on war.’
Despite successful meetings MIS believed Mosley had failed to capitalize
on the public’s weak support of government policy. Ministers were told he
was ‘not likely to take action at present which would expose himself to
a prosecution’. Since his anti-war propaganda was harmless, they decided
prosecution of peace campaigners would do more harm than good.
Following the success of German tanks in Poland, Ironside wanted Major-
General Fuller as his deputy. When Hore-Belisha put the case for his employ-
ment to the Cabinet on r9 October he referred‘to his ‘particular qualifications
for work in connection with mechanised formations’. He also acknowledged
the objections to employing Fuller - his antagonistic character and BU
membership. Ironside hoped an undertaking to keep him firmly under his
command would overcome any objections but Ministers said his political
views outweighed his professional qualities and rejected his appointment.
There were continuous meetings of the Fascist fringe. On 18 October
476 BLACKSHIRT

Domvile, Beckett and Finlay met Gordon-Canning at the Lansdowne Club to

discuss the BCCSE. Three days later Domvile discussed with Fuller creating
a newspaper. On the 26th Domvile attended ‘Mosley’s meeting’. Nine people
were present, representing five constituencies: Mosley and Hawkins (BU), |
Ramsay (NL/RC), Domvile and Laurie (Link), Hay and Lawton (Information .
and Policy), Tavistock and Lymington (New Pioneer and BPP). The BU, Link
and NL were enthusiastic but the antipathy of BCCSE activists to Mosley
was an obstacle.
There was relief when Eric Thomas was released on 26 October for lack of
evidence. Detainees could appeal to the Advisory Committee, chaired by
barrister Norman Birkett. MIS controlled what the detainee was told and,
although the Chairman could complain if the information was inadequate, he
had no authority over its officers. From ‘personal files’, MI5 produced the
‘Statement of the Case’ for detention but, ignorant of the procedures, detainees
had no warning of questions and were ‘reduced to general denials, protests or
grovelling’. Often the Committee based its assessment on the question: is
the detainee a sound, reliable chap? Simpson suggests there was something
‘appallingly British’ about this. It was ironic that BU members were victims
of a system which Mosley would have introduced to decide whether Jews were
patriotic Englishmen or not.
Thomas was released after an appeal to the Home Secretary (he was detained
again on 24 May 1940). Richard Bellamy claimed ‘this proved to be of great
significance, for it led to the BU’s modest collaboration with other anti-war
groups’. In fact, it had begun three weeks before his arrest. It did show Mosley,
however, that collaboration required greater secrecy, particularly with regard
to his own participation.
Berlin was kept informed about the Peace Party through Baron de Ropp,
an agent for both MI6 and the Nazis. He told Alfred Rosenberg that certain
‘English circles’ wanted ‘an early peace because of their concern for the
Empire’. De Ropp suggested it ‘would be necessary now to strengthen further
these circles which had meanwhile increased in power’. On 23 October the
German Minister at The Hague informed Berlin that ‘around Lloyd George,
the opposition to a war is even greater than elsewhere in England’. It would,
however, ‘be a mistake to believe that in spite of all his talk Lloyd George
would support a peace that would leave the solution of the questions in the
East and Southeast to Russia and us alone’. De Ropp wrote on 31 October
that he ‘agreed with Mosley on many points. Unfortunately, however, Mosley
was of no consequence and therefore of no use to the “English party”. He was
not a personality and had moreover made too many mistakes in his personal
life, also in respect to capitalism, to make it likely for him to acquire any
significant following among the English people.’
On 1 November Rosenberg suggested to Hitler there was ‘a strong England
a THE PHONEY WAR 477

which is an important security factor and of cultural value, and a second

unscrupulous one led by Jews. We had hoped to work with the first, but it
wasn’t our fault if the second had won.’ He added that ‘a strong personality
could not stand in the way of Churchill even if Mosley also thought himself
brave’. Hitler said ‘that Mosley has shown himself to be brave. Something like
a sense of blood has come to life in this Briton.’ Rosenberg was employing
one of Mosley’s collaborators in Frankfurt. ‘It’s good to keep hold of all the
threads.’ The identity of this agent is not known.
In the Spectator on 3 November author Peter Fleming (brother of Ian)
attacked ‘the thin yellow line of pacificism’ which had manifested itself among
Bloomsbury intellectuals. He abused Mosley as leader of the right wing of the
‘Stop-the-War Front’: ‘His shoddy claque is weak and too discredited to
get or deserve a hearing.’ It was led by politicians, ‘either dim or formerly
distinguished; by people who habitually court those politicians, by some rich
women; by bores’. It had been the Russian occupation of Poland ‘which swung
Bloomsbury into the Stop-the-War Front like a great wave of used bathwater’.
Mosley found time to see Baba, who was still in thrall to him but considered
his attitude ‘quite dreadful; you can’t make him admit Germany is to blame’.
Fruity focused on Mosley as the cause of their marriage problems. ‘I sincerely
hope and trust that you are not seeing anything [underlined eight times] of
Tom Mosley.’ In fact, she was seeing more of Lord Halifax, who often stayed
at her Jacobean house in Little Compton, close to the PM’s weekend residence
of Chequers.
During November BU meetings continued but only Mosley had big audi-
ences. There were 2,000 at Bethnal Green, though all but a few hundred were
BU members. Mosley claimed in conspiratorial tones that war had not been
declared on the Soviet Union because ‘Russian communism had long been
controlled by the same force that controlled British capitalism — namely Inter-
national Jewish Finance’. Resurrecting the Jewish—Bolshevik bogey helped to
bring in recruits from traditional constituencies.
On 8 November Mosley and Domvile presided over a third secret meeting.
Mosley read out a long statement relating to the BU internee Eric Thomas.
There was a shift in emphasis, with the presence of Lord Lymington and the
introduction of associates of Ramsay, including Aubrey Lees. Domvile said
Lees, who talked about alleged Jewish atrocities in Palestine, was on extended
leave because ‘he knows too much’. Home Offite reports state that Lees made
‘no secret of his great admiration for the Nazi regime’ and criticized the
government for ‘its failure to get rid of the Jewish menace’. Because he attended
these meetings, Lees was accused of being a BU member and was interned.
Much of the information on these Mosley-Ramsay discussions was derived
from Special Branch and Knight’s agents, who were identified in the internment
files of Lees and John Beckett. Lees was told by the Advisory Committee that
 478 BLACKSHIRT

James Hughes (‘P. G. Taylor’) was ‘an intelligence agent’. He knew Hughes,
who was employed by Ramsay as his representative, to be an agent and asked
him, ‘By the way, aren’t you a Home Office agent, or expert, or something?’
Hughes replied, ‘I was.’ As a leading BU official, Hughes had access to meetings
which Special Branch alleged were dominated by revolutionary rhetoric. He
was not, however, according to Beckett, a reliable witness. ‘Taylor’ ‘came to
see me and told me a long story about his own illegal activities, of which I did
not believe a word, and he then told me a long story about Mosley’s illegal
activities, of which I did not believe a word either, and then he leaned forward
to me and said: “I hope you are doing something of the sort, what are you
doing?” He is a man I have suspected for a long time of being some kind of
agent.’
Mosley complained in Action about the harsh treatment to which Thomas
had been subjected. In response to threats of legal action, on 18 November
MIS informed the Home Secretary that he could ‘rest assured that all interro-
gations undertaken by the department are conducted in a manner to which
no possible exception can be taken’. In fact, MIS used techniques to break
down an internee’s resolve. A pamphlet, ‘It Might Have Happened to You!’,
claimed they had been housed in windowless cells, made to observe total
- silence and kept in solitary confinement. In early December internees at
Latchmere House were isolated and subjected to ‘continuous third-degree
questioning’. The authors referred to the case of a suspected agent, Peter
Whinfield, son of Muriel Whinfield (herself later detained) and Lieutenant-
Colonel H. C. Whinfield, friends of Mosley and BU members. Peter travelled
extensively in Europe and was in Austria at the time of the Anschluss. MIS
said he had been in contact with espionage agents Peter and Lisa Kruger, and
was described as ‘a strictly pro-German man who was working directly for
the Nazis’. He was arrested and described in a list supplied to Churchill, as
one who ‘tried to emulate Lord Haw Haw’.
Domvile was busy on Mosley’s behalf seeing associates in an attempt to
create a peace front. On 12 November he saw Fuller, who told him ‘Ironside
is with us’. As Thurlow notes, ‘It is not surprising that MIS viewed Ironside’s
possible connections with some alarm.’ Fuller’s diary reveals his regular meet-
ings with the Duke of Alba, the Spanish ambassador, later denounced by
Churchill as a suspect person. MI5 was tapping Fuller’s telephone and keeping
track of his visits to the Mosleys.
Meetings of the Mosley-Ramsay—Domvile group on 22 November and
6 December were concerned with the ‘Menace to Freedom’. Ramsay.
announced on 23 November that he had had ‘personal evidence only yesterday
of the methods whereby people in responsible positions may be supplied with
bogus information purporting to be evidence’. At the second meeting he said
the internment procedure — with ‘no judge, no jury, no witnesses — was like
 THE PHONEY WAR 479
the Star Chamber’. The meeting was expanded with the presence of Right Club
members and, for the first time, Lady Redesdale. Tavistock and Lymington
accompanied the Earl of Mar, Scotland’s leading earl, who donated money to
Mosley’s peace campaign in appreciation of ‘your ceaseless and strenuous
work to protect Britain from the chaos and destruction that threaten to develop
from various forces and to rage with utterly uncontrollable force if the flames
of European War are not stamped out’. Mosley was described as ‘the greatest
political leader in the world’, which Domvile felt was ‘going a bit far!’ P. G.
Taylor sent a report on the meeting to Special Branch.
On x December Mosley had been seen by Richard Stokes, who had brought
together a group of fellow Labour MPs to oppose the war, providing a
link with the ILPers James Maxton, George Buchanan and John McGovern.
McGovern was an ally and co-ordinated his efforts with Scanlon and Beckett,
who knew he was being followed and used techniques to escape detection.
The meetings were increasingly dominated by Mosley, which may explain
Ramsay’s decision to withdraw. When Mrs Amor met Mrs Ramsay and was
introduced to Anna Wolkoff, she reported that Anna ‘had a superstitious
nature and an interest in spiritualism, clairvoyance, astrology and anything to
do with the occult’. MIS played on this and the fact that she was ‘very poor’.
Mrs Amor became a leading figure within the Right Club, whose activities
were run by a ten-strong mainly female inner circle, which included Molly
Stanford, Christabel Nicholson, Wolkoff and a new member, racing driver
and BU member Fay Taylour. Wolkoff acted as organizing secretary and
Ramsay’s aide-de-camp, a role increasingly assumed by Mrs Amor.
Taylour was interned in Holloway, along with Mrs Amor, who claimed to
be the RC’s ‘Secretary, Founder and Organiser’. She was at some level an
agent provocateur. She told Taylour of ‘top secret’ plans to take over radio
stations, newspapers and the government. Taylour laughed ‘at the thought of
fat, well-heeled, coffee drinking women marching on government positions’.
‘According to MIS, Wolkoff told Mrs Amor she looked forward to the Ger-
mans’ triumphal march through London and promised her a seat of honour
next to Himmler. She boasted that when they controlled the country she would
be its ‘Julius Streicher’. Mrs Nicholson cautioned the Advisory Committee
that Anna ‘was always full of wild statements and one did not really believe
more than 25 per cent of anything she said’.
Wolkoff’s hatred of the Jews found an outlet in a ‘sticky-back’ campaign
to ‘educate the public sufficiently to maintain the atmosphere in which the
“phoney war” might be converted into an honourable negotiated peace’. By
publicizing German radio stations, the sticky-backs were considered ‘preju-
dicial to the efficient prosecution of the war’. BU chalk squads were active,
targeting ‘refu-Jews’, who ‘excited anti-Semitic feeling where, prior to their
getting asylum in this country, it did not exist at all’. Britain would ‘shortly
 480 BLACKSHIRT

have British Tommies at the front while alien Jews take their jobs at home’.
The Soviet attack on Finland on 30 November made possible the converting
of the anti-war crusade into an anti-Stalin crusade.
On 8 December 1939 Bill Allen was briefly interned at Brixton, a worrying .
moment for Mosley, given their quarrel. In fact, Allen was contemptuous of .
the security officials and told them little. He was allowed to join his regiment
in East Africa, though colleagues were aware he had been interviewed by
- security. David Smiley knew Allen as a member of Mission roz in Khartoum,
specializing in guerrilla operations. ‘Extremely intelligent, well travelled, an
expert in a number of strange languages, he had a dry sense of humour and
was a most entertaining companion.’ Allen later took part in cloak-and-dagger
operations with the Special Operations Executive, serving as an Information
Officer in Beirut and Iraq.
A lunch held at Commandant Mary Allen’s Club, the Ladies’ Carlton, on
11 December endorsed Mosley as leader of the Fascist fringe. Lady Mosley,
Mrs Elam and Mrs Huth Jackson (whose Ladbroke Grove home was the
venue for future meetings) were among those present. Allen openly called for
a negotiated peace. At the end of lunch the audience ‘drank a toast to the
Leader’ which, said Domvile, ‘made the eyes of all the old bitches round the
room stick out like prawns’.
Seven days later, as part of the investigation of Peter- Whinfield, Special
Branch raided Mrs Elam’s flat and the London and Provincial Anti-Vivisection
Society. They found the list of officials to assume control in the event of
Mosley’s arrest, together with a letter stating Mrs Elam ‘had his full confidence,
and was entitled to do what she thought fit in the interest of the movement
on her own responsibility’. This was considered sinister by MIS, who were ‘not
worried so much about the propaganda, but were looking for an underground
organisation which they thought existed’. They were also concerned about
potential leaks. ;
On 19 December Goebbels recorded that he had received a ‘long report on
the secret session of the English Parliament. I shall have this broadcast by the
clandestine radio stations.’ There had been a secret session of the Commons
six days before and Ramsay was suspected of reporting it to the enemy, an
action which constituted treason. The authorities believed he had assisted the
‘Loch Lomond Wireless’, a German station.
MIS’s conspiratorial view gained the upper hand in Whitehall, where
officials doubted they could restrain a Service which put security above justice.
Communist Jenifer Hart was private secretary to Sir Alexander Maxwell, the
Home Office Permanent Under-Secretary of State, and oversaw the issuing of
telephone and mail interception warrants. Maxwell did not want to ‘restrict
freedom of thought however unpleasant the thought, or generally freedom of
speech, unless this resulted in obnoxious actions or disorder’. Hart said it was
 THE PHONEY WAR 481

‘not always easy to make these distinctions, particularly when deciding what
to do about the activities of fascists’, but Maxwell and the Home Secretary
were ‘the personification of the [then] Home Office tradition that civil liberties
should be restricted as little as possible and only then as a result of urgent
administrative necessity’. Sir John Anderson resisted interning Fascists ‘until
the pressure of events forced him to accept their necessity’.
At Christmas the Advisory Committee Chairman, Sir Norman Birkett, was
weary of resuming his ‘thankless task. I say thankless because MI5 want
everybody interned, whilst I cannot bring myself to send some simple German
girl for years of detention, when I am quite satisfied that she has been in the
country in some household for years and is not the slightest danger to anybody
... |want to keep some small element of Justice alive in a world in which we
are supposed to be fighting for it.’

The Mosleys spent Christmas at Wootton. Irene was appalled by Diana’s

‘pro-German attitude’. On Boxing Day they listened to Lord Haw Haw attack-
ing the British government. Irene told the children he was William Joyce, until
recently their father’s chief propagandist. There were rows over money. The
Official Solicitor now objected to the children’s trust money being used for
Wootton, thus freeing Mosley’s income for the BU. Mosley wanted Irene to
bear the cost but she declined and with no one willing to pay, Wootton had
to be given up. Mosley moved to Dolphin Square and took two adjacent flats
on the seventh floor of Hood House — almost next door to MIS5’s Maxwell
Knight.
With a bullet lodged in her head, Hitler arranged for Unity to be moved
to neutral Switzerland, where her mother and sister Deboarah (Duchess of
Devonshire) travelled in January 1940 to fetch her home. Hitler deeply regret-
ted her fate: ‘She lost her nerve, just when, for the first time, I could really
have used her.’ Her sister found her desperately ill: ‘She could not walk, talked
with difficulty and was a changed personality . . . she was a stranger.’ MI5’s
Guy Liddell insisted Unity and her entourage — ‘known Nazi supporters’ — be
searched on arrival, since ‘we had no evidence to support the press allegations
that she was in a serious state of health and it might well be that she was
brought in on a stretcher in order to avoid publicity and unpleasantness to
her family’. He was furious when the Home Secretary stopped the search. On
8 January he received a report that ‘there were fo signs of a bullet wound’
and warned that failure to imprison Unity would suggest she was receiving
preferential treatment because she was a peer’s daughter. She was placed under
the care of Professor Cairns, neurosurgeon at the Nuffield Hospital in Oxford.
She learnt to walk again but never fully recovered and was reduced to a
childlike state. Her mother devoted herself to Unity and looked after her until,
in 1948, the bullet moved position and she died aged thirty-four.
*
482 BLACKSHIRT

On 5 January 1940 anti-Semites successfully dislodged Leslie Hore-Belisha,

the Minister for War, who advocated an aggressive campaign against Ger-
many. On the previous day Lord Halifax told the PM Hore-Belisha ‘would
have a bad effect on the neutrals both because HB was a Jew and because his
methods would let down British prestige’. Chamberlain asked for the Minis;
ter’s resignation because ‘there was a prejudice against him’. The PM had
been under pressure from Buckingham Palace and the military, particularly
General Ironside, who had referred to ‘Horeb Elisha’. Duff Cooper had warned
the Minister the military ‘might try to make it hard for him as a Jew’. His
criticisms of the BEF in France angered the War Office, even though they
proved to be correct. Reports suggested rumours about him originated with
Ironside’s friend Fuller.
Newnham’s editorial in Truth, ‘Belisha is No Loss’, was openly anti-Semitic.
Using information collated by the BU, it listed his bankrupt business ventures,
with particular stress on his Jewish colleagues. This was distributed by Ramsay
to the MPs who heard Hore-Belisha’s resignation speech. Action celebrated
the resignation of ‘this little Jew’. Mosley later wrote ‘it was a personal sorrow
to me’ that the BU ‘played a part in that assault, as years before I had much
liked him, but it would have been a denial of public duty to prevent it’. Perhaps
as a result of this campaign, Mrs Amor reported on 17 January that Ramsay
was ‘being urged by the leading members of the Right Club to get in touch
with General Ironside’.
On 17 January Mosley and Domvile met at Hawkins’s flat with Link and
NL members for negotiations. Under Mosley’s spell and, despite denials that
he was connected to the BU, six days later Domvile was admitted into its inner
circle. His articles in Action (between December 1939 and March 1940),
under the pen-name ‘Canute’, show him to be anti-Semitic, pro-Mosley and
pro-Nazi. He wrote on 18 January that ‘Hitler did not want war, there was
no reason why he should take the initiative in starting the mass murder of his
young people, by hurling them against a wall of steel and concrete’.
Domvile was aware of MIS interest but had no inkling that the ‘nice young
man called Court’ visiting him was Knight’s agent, Harald Kurtz. Aware that
informers were active, Mosley concealed the links between himself, Ramsay
and others. A decision was made to confuse MIS by having Mosley and
Ramsay not meet together, but instead use go-betweens such as Aubrey Lees.
Mosley made it known that Gordon-Canning, now Lord Tavistock’s assis-
tant, had not, in fact, left the BU. He was with his ailing wife, MIS discovered,
on the French Riviera, where he met James Strachey Barnes, who was behind
peace movements in Italy. In Action Tavistock said the government was
responsible for the war. He came to prominence after obtaining peace pro-
posals from Henning Thomson, Secretary to the German Legation in Dublin.
These ‘official’ terms (previously stated by Hitler in a Reichstag speech) offered
 THE PHONEY WAR 483

an independent Poland and Czechoslovakia, a plebiscite in Austria, a new

League of Nations and general disarmament, in return for Germany regaining
former colonies and the Jews being given a national home. Tavistock conveyed
the proposals to Lord Darnley, who took them to Foreign Secretary Halifax
on 19 January. When Tavistock was interviewed the Foreign Office’s Alex
Cadogan described the proposals as ‘absolute bilge — fraudulent propaganda’
from pacifists and halfwits. ‘If the Germans want to say anything to us, they
won’t use this drain for their communication.’
At Allied War Committee headquarters the Duke of Windsor compiled
_ reports for Ironside on the poor state of French defences. He was prohibited
from going near the front, because General Alan Brooke feared he might ‘stage
a kind of “come back” with the troops out here’. Without advising the Palace,
the Duke flew secretly to London and on 18 January reported to Ironside, met
Churchill and persuaded the military to lift the ban on visiting the front. He
also tried to influence the government into opening up communications with
the Nazis to discuss a swift end to the war. The Duke had a meeting with
Ironside’s friend Fuller, who recorded the event in his diary but not the purpose
of the discussion.
Edward also met Beaverbrook at the home of the Duke’s go-between to the
Palace, Walter Monckton, who realized Edward’s ‘idea of himself as the leader
of an international “Peace Movement”’ and ‘rival leader to his brother, had
never left his mind’. Monckton was disturbed by what he heard and disclosed
to the Foreign Office’s Charles Peake that Beaverbrook and the Duke had
been ‘in agreement that the war should be ended at once by a peace offer to
Germany’. Peake told Harold Nicolson that Edward had spoken about ‘the
inevitable collapse of France’ and that ‘he would return to England and
conduct a movement for peace with Germany’. Beaverbrook had replied,
‘Go ahead, Sir, and I shall back you.’ Monckton warned the Duke ‘he had
been speaking high treason’ and reminded him that if he returned to Britain
‘he would be liable to UK income tax’. This, apparently, ‘made the little
man blench and he declared with great determination that the whole thing
was off’.
Ironside’s son claims his father ‘determined that the Duke was a serious
security leak. He was giving the Duchess a great deal of information that was
classified in the matter of the defences of France and Belgium. She in turn was
passing this information on to extremely dangerous enemy-connected people
over dinner tables in Paris. As a result, the information made its way into
German hands.’ On 26 January Cadogan reported that ‘secret documents
were communicated .. . to the German Government! I can trust no-one.’ On
the following day the German ambassador to Holland, Count von Zech-
Burkersroda, reported to Berlin information gleaned from his meeting with
the Duke’s adviser Charles Bedaux. There was ‘something like the beginning
 484 BLACKSHIRT

of a Fronde forming around W’. MIS feared this peace front might include
Mosley.
There was little direct evidence of illegal activity by the BU at this time.
Hinsley and Simkins list ten minor infringements of the Defence Regulations
by members of the BU during the war. However, on 8 January a naturalized
Belgian farmer and BU officer in Exmouth, Claude Duvivier, was arrested
(there was no suggestion of espionage). In a letter to a colleague, William
Crowle, he wrote that his heart went ‘out to those men on the Graf Spee —
heroes fighting for the cause, every one of them’. A former dockyard worker,
Crowle supplied information on naval shipping to Duvivier, who planned to
send it to Action to reveal ‘facts about Churchill and British ships which had
been kept from the public’. MIS learnt that before the trial, Duvivier wrote a
letter to BU Assistant Director Donovan, complaining about his arrest and
the confiscation of his documents.
Fascists had not been harassed by the authorities, however, with the Crowle/
Duvivier case and detention of Peter Whinfield, and on 24 January SB officers,
accompanied by MIS officer Francis Aikin-Sneath, raided BU headquarters to
obtain the letter to Donovan. Responsible for monitoring the BU, Aikin-Sneath
was ‘appalled by the rise of Nazism, and progressively adopted the view that
Christianity was the riposte to it’. He believed Mosley had been financed by
Mussolini and Hitler but the intelligence was ‘vague and-sketchy’.
Mosley was not surprised by the raid and assumed they were investigating
Whinfield’s ‘gadding about the Continent’. With ‘an attitude of disarming
frankness’, he explained that he had been ‘awaiting the opportunity of talk-
ing to the authorities’. He had met Whinfield at the Elams’ with others includ-
ing Lord Cottenham (an MIS officer) and Dr Kruger, an anti-Semitic author.
After the letter (which was not significant) had been dealt with, Aikin-Sneath
suggested some BU members had ‘an almost unbalanced admiration of every-
thing German. Did he approve of this?’ Mosley offered a list of those expelled
on those grounds and added that he had forbidden his wife to contact Unity,
to forestall accusations of pro-Nazi sympathies. Did he think the Germans
might use pro-Nazi members for their own purposes? He thought no but
admitted ‘an enemy agent would find the BU a good cover’. He added, ‘I do
not want the Germans to win. I want peace now ... After the politicians
reduce England and the Empire to a dung heap, they are not going to get me
to take over. I shall retire from politics.’
When asked about the BPP, Mosley gave an unflattering portrait of its
leading figures — Tavistock was ‘woolly headed’; Beckett was ‘a crook’; and Ben
Greene was ‘not very intelligent’. MIS reported that Mosley was ‘immensely
vain, a bad judge of men, extremely urbane and cunning, and entirely lacking in
sincerity. His chief handicap is probably his excessive vanity, which must make
it difficult for him to take an objective view of any situation. It also makes it
 THE PHONEY WAR 485

impossible for him to tolerate any other outstanding personality in his entour-
age.’ Hawkins was ‘a complete nonentity . . . lacking in intelligence’; Thomson
was less stupid but dim.
There was no evidence that either Cowle or Duvivier, who was sentenced
by Exeter magistrates on 29 January to six months’ imprisonment, were acting
on Mosley’s orders. However, an agent’s report of a closed meeting of officials
on 30 January shook MIS. Donovan urged the need for ‘militancy in London’
with the aim of connecting in the public’s mind ‘Mosley and Peace’, and
Jewry with ‘war and suffering’. Donovan stressed the BU was a revolutionary
movement and revolution was on the way, at which point Mosley entered and
claimed ‘our time is approaching . .. reward and victory are in sight’. It was
decided to contest by-elections for the publicity. More women would be
involved in the peace campaign, which would be concentrated in the East End.
‘They knew what they wanted and knew what would happen but they must
not talk — everyone present would know what he meant. They must bring in
new members — not necessarily a large number but a moderate number of
reliable men and women who would take their place in the ranks when the
time came for the sweep forward, which the movement would make, as their
brother parties in other countries had made when their hour of destiny struck.’
Underlying the speech, the agent reported, was a strong hint of a march to
power by armed force.
‘Mosley is making his presence felt,’ Goebbels recorded on 25 January. ‘Tf
he goes ahead skilfully he will have several opportunities.’ The BU was now
seen as the English branch of the NSDAP by MIS and ‘not merely a party
advocating an anti-war and anti-government policy’. It would ‘assist the enemy
in every way it can’ and possessed ‘a core of fanatics who would be prepared
to take active steps to this end if the opportunity occurred’. MIS may have
had in mind Dr Tester, but he had escaped their net and was now working on
behalf of German interests in the Mediterranean. He kept one step ahead of
the authorities but still sent Mosley ‘the documentary [proof] for my work
and asked him to send me his instructions’.
MILS5’s assessment led to serious disagreements with a cautious Home Secre-
tary. When Anderson recalled this period he said MIS ‘had for months pressed
him to deal with the fascists’ but he had resisted the pressure. In a rebuff to
MIS, between January and May he signed only twenty-eight detention orders.
On 7 February Mosley convened a meeting at 48 Ladbroke Grove, home
of Mrs Huth Jackson and the office of the London and Southern Counties
Anti-Vivisection Society. An SB mole said ‘the proceedings were dominated
by Mosley’ and agreement was reached for the BU to contest by-elections at
Silvertown and North-East Leeds. The group consisted entirely of Mosley
the
enthusiasts (Ramsay did not attend) and was less of a coming together of
patriotic societies than a BU ‘think-tank ’.
486 BLACKSHIRT

Two days later Truth published a letter from Tavistock claiming peace was
negotiable. On 13 February he invited the BCCSE and Mosley’s circle to
discuss the peace proposals and dealings with the PM. Domvile left with ‘more
hope than I had anticipated’. This was down to the Duke of Buccleuch,
who was trying to persuade Downing Street officials of the advantages of a
negotiated peace. He argued Britain would eventually have to sue for peace,
so ‘why not do so now, when comparatively little damage has been done and
when there is still time to avert economic ruin?’ As was the pattern, Domvile
briefed the absent Mosley, who showed great interest in the meeting.
In February a new element entered the circle around Ramsay, which had a
dramatic effect on the Right Club and, indirectly, Mosley. Barbara Allen, the
American-born wife of Bill Allen’s brother Sam, ran the American Club, where
she met a young diplomat at the US embassy. The right-wing and anti-Semitic
Tyler Kent had reported for duty in London the previous October after serving
in Moscow. Kent was born in China. His father had been posted there as a
member of the American Consular Service and Kent emulated him by joining
the Diplomatic Service in 1934. Intelligence officer Malcolm Muggeridge
described Kent, who was lionized by society ladies, as ‘one of these intensely
gentlemanly Americans who wear well-cut tailor-made suits, with waistcoat
and watch-chain, drink wine instead of high-balls, and easily become furiously
indignant’. As an isolationist, he attacked Roosevelt’s. foreign policy. US
diplomats were ‘taking part in the formation of hostile coalitions in Europe
... which they had no mandate to do’.
Kent was illegally copying and storing at his flat hundreds of US embassy
documents, dealing with ‘Germany’, ‘Czechoslovakia’, ‘British Cabinet’ and
‘Halifax’. Others were requests from MIS for US assistance in tracking down
Nazi and Soviet agents, which disclosed the identities of operatives in Britain
and America. The remainder were US Military and Naval Attaché reports on
British forces, but the most interesting were copies of cables between President
Roosevelt and the First Sea Lord, Churchill. Recently released files show that
MIS was in the dark about the diplomat’s identity and displayed little interest
in his activities.
On 21 February Barbara Allen introduced Kent to Anna Wolkoff. On the
following day Wolkoff told Mrs Amor she had a contact at the Belgian
embassy who could send letters to William Joyce through the diplomatic bag.
Who suggested doing this is open to question, since Mrs Amor admitted she
herself wanted to send a letter. Wolkoff was aware her friend had been
associated (in fact, in an undercover role for Knight) with a Communist group
and suspected she might be a Communist spy. A new MIS agent recruit to the
RC was Helene de Munck, who made periodic visits to her family in Belgium,
still a neutral country. Described as a ‘drug fiend’ and an anti-Semite, she was
 THE PHONEY WAR 487

asked by Wolkoff to carry a message to an RC agent in Brussels, enquiring

about the progress of ‘our work in Belgium’.
A curious aspect of the whole Kent/Wolkoff case is that Wolkoff met MI5’s
director-general at a dinner during the winter given by MIS officer Mark
Cottenham. Another odd aspect is that on 24 February Kent applied to the
"US Chargé d’Affaires in Germany for a transfer from London to Berlin but
was turned down. Did he intend to take his documents with him? With this
route closed, did he now seek an alternative channel?
Wolkoff visited Kent, who allowed her to see the copied cables, including
those between Churchill and Roosevelt. MIS was aware via M18, the signals-
gathering unit picking up radio traffic between Hans Georg von Mackensen,
German ambassador in Rome, and Berlin, that the Churchill—Roosevelt corre-
spondence was being leaked. When cryptanalysts decoded one message, it
turned out to be a paraphrase of one such cable. MIS agents in the RC, led
by case officer Philip Brocklehurst, believed they had stumbled across a breach
of national security.

The by-election at Silvertown, East London, was regarded as a fruitful area

for the BU, even though it was a Labour stronghold. Mosley declared it would
be ‘the only chance the people have of expressing their will. British Union
owes to the people the duty of giving them that chance.’ On 23 February
former boxing champion Tommy Moran received 151 votes against Labour’s
14,343. With less than one-sixth of Harry Pollitt’s vote for the Communists,
it was proof that the BU had derisory support. Despite the setback, Mosley
planned a ‘monster’ women’s peace campaign. On 28 February at Holborn,
his chief women’s officer Anne Brock-Griggs, along with Commandant Allen
and Olive Hawks, addressed the first large-scale BU indoor meeting organized
entirely by women. The Jewish Chronicle noted the women ‘adopted a more
hysterical anti-Jewish attitude than did their men-folk’. A March Home Intelli-
gence memo commented that Fascist propaganda was generally unsuccessful,
but not so anti-Semitism, which was ‘their only popular appeal’.
On 1 March Mosley addressed 500 people packed into the Criterion for a
BU luncheon. It received wide publicity and was deemed a great success.
Present were prominent ‘fellow-travellers’ of the extreme Right, including
Lord Ronald Graham and Anna Wolkoff from the Right Club; the Domviles,
Elams and the Fullers, Viscountess Downe, Lady Péarson, Commandant Allen
and Mrs Huth Jackson, Aubrey Lees and Henry Williamson from the BU; the
Link’s Pitt-Rivers; Ben Greene from the BCCSE and SB’s P. G. Taylor. Many
respectable society figures were not worried about attending a public event at
which Mosley said ‘the real reason why the British Government had declared
war on Germany and now refused to fight Russia [over Finland] was because
488 BLACKSHIRT

Britain was controlled by Jews and they desired to see the end of the present
German Government so that they could resume their exploitation of the
German people’. Goebbels, increasingly positive in his assessment of the BU
leader, noted on 3 March, ‘Mosley is doing fabulously again. If he keeps on
like this he will get somewhere.’ :
Tavistock pursued his peace proposals and asked an emissary, Gerald
Hamilton, to ‘go to Ireland to continue negotiations which had begun quite
favourably’. He tried to make the journey with a party of Irish nuns but
‘thanks to the venality of a decoding clerk in the neutral Embassy which had
been so helpful to me, my plan was betrayed and so never reached Ireland on
that occasion’. However, he later admitted that ‘a neutral embassy was kind
enough to allow me to use their bag’. The subsequent arrest in Dublin of an
IRA man, Stephen Held, uncovered a spy ring which led to an Englishman
named Brandy, who had ‘collaborated with the provocateur Hamilton’.
The bright young thing Brian Howard asked Hamilton, ‘Why do you persist
in remaining so “Right” when all your friends are “‘Left’”’?’ Section D records
reveal the ‘dangerous’ Hamilton was in touch with Guy Burgess, who was
attached to MI6 as part of the radio propaganda war. Burgess, who reported
his findings to Moscow, was a member of an anti-Fascist private spy network
run by Lord Rothschild, who had just joined MIS. Burgess used his homo-
sexual and Comintern contacts to penetrate Fascist groups and keep surveil-
lance on the BU. Edmund Warburton met Burgess at a mecca for left-wing
intellectuals in Bloomsbury, The Book. He realized he ‘was being run by some
government agency, and not Special Branch’.
Hitler had stated that ‘we shall have friends who will help us in all the
enemy countries’. MIS claimed ‘if there were any party designed to play this
part in the United Kingdom it was Mosley’s BU’. It began compiling a ‘Suspect
List’? of pro-Fascists who might assist the Nazis in the event of invasion. To
penetrate the groups it used ‘a well-tried pre-war agent who had for many
years given good inside information about the British Union and was in touch
with a number of people of British and German origin who held Fascist views’.
It was for Knight’s agent to be ‘placed at the disposal of Lord Rothschild in
order to attempt to penetrate “fifth column” circles in this country’. The
enquiry gradually spread until ‘the agent was directly or indirectly in contact
with some five hundred Fascist-minded people — not all of British origin —
through a number of unconscious sub-agents’. ‘Roberts’ acted as an agent of
the Gestapo, whose ‘business is to check up on the reliability of certain people
who the Germans think might be ready to assist them in time of invasion’.
Brian Howard was party to the invasion list operation as an outside ‘contact’
in ‘strictest mufti’. His biographer notes ‘it was not surprising that [MI5]
wished to make use of Brian’s extensive knowledge of pro-Nazi personalities’.
Also ‘seeking out traitors’ was John Bingham, who had been disgusted by
the
 THE PHONEY WAR 489

eventsat Olympia. On 18 April he enlisted Collin Brooks, who thought ‘it

was rather like a cheap detective novel’. The use of agent provocateur methods
against Mosleyites drew Home Office criticism. MIS retorted that ‘if these
methods cannot be employed to investigate the Fifth Column field we cannot
be responsible for its investigation at all’.
» On 29 February a meeting of the BCCSE, Link, Lords Mar, Arnold, Lym-
ington and Darnley, and Richard Stokes of the Peace Aims Group, discussed
‘Tavistock’s peace proposals, which were published in the Telegraph on
t March. Goebbels noted that ‘London is putting peace feelers out but we are
responding strongly against them. These decaying plutocrats are as stupid as
they are insolent.’ They had Beaverbrook’s support who, a Foreign Office
official noted on 11 March, was ‘under the impression that there is a wide-
spread feeling in this country in favour of a negotiated peace provided there
were some change of government in Germany’. He was said to be ‘acting in
conjunction with certain other big money interests’.
The sense of panic over the war was reported to Washington by the State
Department’s Sumner Welles. When at Buckingham Palace on 11 March
Welles mentioned the Soviet Ivan Maisky, the King misheard the name as
Mosley. Wrongly assuming he was privy to certain transatlantic arrangements,
the King reminded Welles — much to his puzzlement — of ‘our agreement that
the United States could do something — if the Mosleys don’t take over’. This
is the first indication that the threat of Mosley was used as a bargaining chip
- principally by Churchill — in negotiations with President Roosevelt.
Mosley was tied up with the Leeds by-election and could not attend all the
meetings, though he was at Ladbroke Grove on 13 March. Developing a new
theme which worried MIS, he stated Lloyd George would have to take over
and head a ‘peace’ government. When questioned about the meetings, Aubrey
Lees refused to discuss their object. Two days later an SB agent reported on
a private meeting addressed by Mosley. ‘His expressed determination to defeat
“the enemy” [the Jew] if not by the ballot box then by “other and more drastic
means”? was cheered to the echo. He added that ‘if we had ideas, which we
no doubt all had, about the ultimate future, it did not do to tell our enemies
about the more unpleasant things which were liable to happen to them’.
Implicit was ‘the suggestion of armed revolution and pogroms’. Special Branch
claimed it had reliable reports of a closed Right Club meeting where Ramsay
ended his anti-Semitic diatribe with the assertion that ‘the British people
should rid themselves of this menace [the Jews], and if one method did not
work, another should be tried . . . any means, whatever they were, would be
used if necessary’.
Mosley claimed in March that BU membership was ‘greater than that of
the corresponding month in any year since the movement’s inception’. Home
Office figures put it at 9,000, which undermines Mosley’s assertion. Certainly
490 BLACKSHIRT

it had no electoral support. In North-East Leeds the BU only polled 722 votes
against the Conservatives’ 23,882. The disastrous result may have been why
Mosley resorted to wild rhetoric.
MIS had no evidence of contacts with Germany ‘of a kind that justified
alarm’ but with the military situation deteriorating, the secret meetings were,
now seen in a sinister light. Mosley and Ramsay used them to discuss forming
‘a vast revolutionary organisation, in which they would all collaborate’ and
to ‘make preparations for a fascist coup d’état’. Collaboration was hindered
by the failure to agree on a leader.
That the Right Club was viewed as a threat by MI5 was known to Anna
Wolkoff, who wrote to Vernon Kell, protesting about the accusation. She
found it difficult to believe her anti-Jewish propaganda could be construed as
anti-government and asked Kell for advice. The Club had shrunk to a small
group that was, as Thurlow put it, ‘farcical rather than sinister’. It consisted
of ‘Ramsay, Kent, five women with eccentric views and three MI5 “‘moles”’’.
Kell suggested Wolkoff meet Maxwell Knight at the War Office. On 19 March
she admitted using sticky-backs but asked if it was an offence to hold anti-
Jewish views. Mrs Amor reported that Wolkoff was spending ‘a great deal
of time with this man from the American embassy’. Wolkoff said he was
‘pro-German’ and, from what Amor had gleaned, was engaged in ‘disseminat-
ing defeatist and anti-Allied propaganda’. It was not until 29 March that he
was identified as Tyler Kent.
Mosley finally fell out with Gordon-Canning — who, Special Branch reported
on 27 March, was suing him for £9,000 — for reasons not known. Mosley no
longer had a conduit at the heart of the BCCSE, which on 3 April held a large
public meeting at the Kingsway Hall on the ‘Tavistock Peace Plan’. Chaired
by John Beckett, Hugh Ross Williamson gave ‘an extraordinary tirade’ against
Churchill, while John McGovern delivered ‘a fulsome speech in praise of
Hitler and what he had done for the working-classes’. This ILP faction had
lost Beaverbrook’s backing, who ten days before had told Monckton that he
was giving up the peace campaign. Of the 1,500 people present half were said
to belong to the Peace Pledge Union. MIS reported that the BU was trying to
infiltrate it.
On the day (9 April 1940) Hitler’s forces invaded Scandinavia Knight moved
against Wolkoff in an agent provocateur operation. Norway’s collapse led to
a belief that it had been brought about by ‘quislings’. Journalists picked up
on the Norwegian name of Quisling, which became a byword for traitor, as
the press stoked up the Fifth Column scare. The concept had been invented
during the Spanish Civil War. Nationalists argued that Catholics, trapped by
Republican-controlled Madrid, had provoked internal disorder behind the
lines, leading to the collapse of defences. The Madrid Fifth Column, however,
was just as much a myth as the alleged role of Vidkun Quisling. It was a
 THE PHONEY WAR 491

decade before it was established that he had not played an active role in
Hitler’s attack on Scandinavia. The fear whipped up by the press, however,
put pressure on MIS to block off potential allies for the Nazis in the event of
an invasion.
MIS thought most Fascists were ‘true patriots’, who believed Britain was
‘controlled by Jewish financiers who had plunged half the world into war for
their private gain’. They were convinced ‘the best interests of their country
required its liberation by any means ... from its Jew masters’. If helping the
Nazis was the ‘best method of establishing National Socialism in Britain,
then it was the duty of every patriot to collaborate with the Nazis who would
free Britain from her alien chains’. There were concerns about the broadcasts
of Lord Haw Haw and attempts to orchestrate a Fifth Column, but the crude
propaganda and Joyce-inspired rumours made little impact and became
the object of ridicule. Attention turned to the spate of leaks of classified
information.
Ironside noted that knowledge of plans for an Allied force to land at
Narvik in Norway was widespread among military attachés. “You cannot keep
anything secret with so many people with a finger in the pie.’ MIS, however,
believed the Nazis learnt of the operation’s plans through Wolkoff’s Belgian
contact. In fact, the source was B-Dienst, the cryptanalytic agency, which
deciphered British naval messages outlining a plan to mine the entrance to
Narvik. Using the information for deception, a German decoy force put out
to sea and was spotted on 7 April by the British, who ordered their fleet to
head for Narvik. ‘As they raced away from where the action was, the German
transports completed their voyage undisturbed and landed their occupation
troops without a hitch.’ Churchill’s admission that the navy had been ‘com-
pletely outwitted’ led to paranoid fears that a Fifth Column had leaked
the plans.
On 9 April Wolkoff was asked by a naval officer in the Right Club, Lord
Ronald Graham, to meet a friend. He introduced her to ‘James Hughes’, who
asked if she would be ‘prepared to do something that would really help in the
cause of anti-semitism’. When she replied she would, Hughes enquired if she
had ‘ever sent anything to the Continent through a diplomatic bag’. Wolkoff
said she could if it was important. Hughes handed her an envelope addressed to
‘Herr W. B. Joyce, Rundfunkhaus, Berlin’, containing “some good anti-Jewish
stuff’. Wolkoff believed the letter writer [probably Knight] was a friend of
Joyce. She learnt during the afternoon from Ramsay that Hughes had three
aliases, one of which was ‘Cunningham’, and that he was not to be trusted.
Cunningham was working for MI2, a unit about which she was ignorant but
whose remit was of significance. It was responsible for ‘interpreting reports
to
received from Scandinavia about German intentions’ and and was ‘privy
plans for British intervention in Norway’.
492 BLACKSHIRT

That evening Knight added to his roster of agents within the Club Joan
Miller, a former employee of Elizabeth Arden, who was secretary to Lord
Cottenham in MI5’s transport section. Wolkoff happened to have a crush on
the sixth Earl. Miller’s account of her activities in the operation is fictitious.
Wolkoff had sought a contact for the Club within MIS and hoped a young,
secretary could be educated into ‘our way of thinking’, and Knight had
responded. Wolkoff told her she had a letter she wanted to send to Joyce,
about the line he should take in his broadcasts, but her normal channels were
unavailable.
Miller passed Wolkoff on to de Munck, who falsely said she had ‘a friend
in the Romanian Legation’, who could pass on the letter. Wolkoff had now
done enough to be categorized as an ‘enemy agent’ within the provisions of
the Official Secrets Act. On 11 April, using de Munck’s typewriter, Wolkoff
added a postscript (in German): ‘It is now very important that we hear more
about the Jews and Free Masons.’ She specified Joyce acknowledge the letter’s
receipt by broadcasting a reference to ‘Carlyle’, Joyce’s favourite writer.
Around 12 April Ramsay was introduced to Kent and browsed the
Churchill—Roosevelt cables at his flat. He said they ‘might be useful in his
political activities’. Kent lent Wolkoff two telegrams, which revealed Churchill
had arranged for the navy to give American shipping preferential treatment
over the blockade. MIS discovered that the German ambassador in Rome had
access to this correspondence which, note Bearse and Read, ‘was so secret that
even when the messages reached the Foreign Office they were regarded as
forgeries, until one of the tiny group of people in the know spotted them,
recognized them as genuine, and raised the alarm’.
On 13 April MI5 watchers trailed Wolkoff to a White Russian émigré
photographer, Eugene Smirnoff, a friend of her father’s, who worked in the
Censorship Department and collaborated closely with MIS. He photographed
two Churchill—Roosevelt telegrams. The same day marked the establishment
of the Right Club’s new meeting place. The Parlour in Manson Mews, con-
veniently close to the Russian Tea Rooms. The flat had been rented by MIS
and was occupied by Mrs Amor. A Knight agent reported on 16 April that
Wolkoff had obtained ‘a great deal of information through Tyler Kent’. She
told her RC colleagues — all MIS agents —- about a conversation on the
Norwegian campaign between the US ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, and Lord
Halifax.

While Diana celebrated the birth of her fourth son, Max, on 13 April 1940,
Mosley was busy with BU affairs. Commandant Allen agreed to head the BU’s
Women’s Section, after Anne Brock-Griggs was dismissed for ‘inefficiency’.
Allen wrote a weekly column in Action, which was unmistakably anti-Semitic
and pro-German. With Diana resting at a Sutton nursing home, Mosley
 THE PHONEY WAR 493

attended a Women’s Peace meeting at Friends House, during which Allen

delivered a ranting speech against a ‘wrong and unjust’ war. At the end of the
- month a second private luncheon at the Criterion restaurant was supported
by a rich Mosleyite, Percy Thomas Lovely. The guests heard Mosley outline
plans to build on the success of the women’s peace campaign.
On 15 April Mosley held a conference of district officials at the Denison
. Hall, Vauxhall Bridge Road, to prepare for a May Day demonstration. Mosley,
_ Special Branch reported, spoke about ‘our brother parties’ on the Continent
and praised the success of the BU’s copy of the Nazi street leadership plan.
The agent observed that ‘underlying all his remarks about the scheme was the
hint that the BU was preparing without delay for any opportunity that might
arise of a “march to power” by armed force’. A Home Office official wrote
on the report that it seemed Mosley ‘had abandoned constitutional methods
of making progress, although he confined himself to dark hints’.
Two days later, in Ladbroke Grove, Mosley attended a meeting of the
‘Mosley group’. Special Branch claimed the discussion centred on the forma-
tion of ‘a vast secret revolutionary organisation’, in which all would collabor-
ate. A Home Office file on Commandant Allen refers to meetings in March,
April and May, whose purpose was to plan collaboration and a coup.
On rg April Conservative MPs met to consider the Fifth Column, increasing
report to
pressure on the government. Three days later Anderson submitted a
the Cabinet recognizing the strong desire for action against those impeding
“get out”
the war effort. Rothermere told Collin Brooks ‘there is a move to
fear grew within the Fascist fringe that they
Ironside as being no good’. As
Mosley met with Fuller, even though he knew he
were going to be arrested,
was being monitored.
being dis-
With the BU facing increased public hostility and in danger of
its former allies.
membered by the Defence Regulations, Mosley turned on
g a propaganda
Raven Thomson ‘proposed the audacious plan of launchin
of being Nazi traitors,
attack on the Nordic League people, accusing them
to Britain and the Empire’.
and emphasising the movement’s absolute loyalty
possessi on Special Branch found
Attacks began on Aubrey Lees, in whose
said Lees was ‘certifiab le’ and accused
invitations to secret meetings. Mosley
ed stand of the peace
the NL of being parasites who ‘made the whole principl
campaign look foolish’.
meeting at Victoria
The climax of the peace campaign came at a May Day
would create ‘a land fit for
- Park. Mosley’s anti-Semitic outburst that the war
crowd. He said Britain
Hebrews to live in’ was cheered by the 4,o00-strong
but could not impose
could defend itself against a dominant Continental power
Germa ny would be forced to
its will on one. If France held the Maginot Line,
sit across the Channel and
fight a defensive war and Britain could afford to
lds, navy and air force’, Mosley
allow the warto peter out. ‘Behind minefie
494 BLACKSHIRT

wrote in Action on 9 May, ‘would rest a people entirely united at the disposal
of their nation. Therefore it is extremely unlikely that any such attack will be
delivered.’ In the event of invasion, every BU member ‘would resist the foreign
invader with all that is in us. However rotten the existing government, and
however much we detested its policies, we would throw ourselves into the
effort of a united nation until the foreigner was driven from our soil.’ Victory
could only be won by America or Russia intervening, but this would destroy
the Empire.
The situation, wrote the Duke of Windsor, ‘can’t possibly go any better
until we have purged ourselves of many of the old lot of politicians and much
of our out-of-date system of government’. Goebbels noted on 4 May that
‘even Lloyd George is being named as a successor’. Three days later, on the
eve of the Commons debate on Norway, Lloyd George was asked by Nancy
Astor to take a leading role, but he ‘preferred to await his country’s summons
a little longer’, as he ‘expected to receive it as the peril grew’. Hitler described
the English leaders as criminals. ‘They could have had peace on the most
agreeable of terms.’ However, ‘there are some people whom you can talk sense
into only after you’ve knocked out their front teeth’.
On 3 May one of Knight’s agents revealed that Ramsay — recently recorded
as saying he would ‘welcome a Civil War with shots in the streets’ — had been
told by P. G. Taylor that he, Wolkoff and Lord Ronald Graham were being
investigated by MIS. On 8 May de Munck informed Knight that Wolkoff had
heard from an RC member that Joyce had acknowledged receipt of her letter.
It is unclear, however, whether he actually did so.
The military’s Field Security Police reported that Ironside’s car had been
seen outside a house in Holland Park which, investigating officer Malcolm
Muggeridge noted, belonged to persons of ‘dubious political association’. This
was possibly 17 Stanley Gardens, home of Dr Leigh Vaughan-Henry, who
worked for the BBC. He was married to a German wife and mixed in anti-
Semitic and pro-Nazi circles. There was a ‘whispering campaign’ against
Ironside because of his rumoured Fascist associations, though Muggeridge
thought the visits were ‘personal rather than political’. Ironside’s friend Fuller,
who maintained his close ties to Mosley, lunched with the US military attaché
General Lee, who reported to MIS that Fuller was ‘a very little, old, wizened-up
man, who is bitter and outspoken against the War Office, the British Govern-
ment, and the way the war is being conducted . . . but a lot of his ideas are all
mixed up. He kept saying that the war need never have occurred.’
On 9 May Neville Chamberlain realized he might have to resign as PM.
Approaches were made to Labour’s Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood
about whether they would serve in a coalition government. They consulted
the national executive at the annual conference at Bournemouth, where Hugh
Ross Williamson recalled talk was dominated by ‘whether or not the Labour
 THE PHONEY WAR 495

Leaders had made the arrest and imprisonment of Mosley a condition of their
entering Government. The general feeling was that they had — or at least, that
they ought to.’ That evening Hitler boarded his train, bound for the Western
Front. On the following morning Operation Yellow began, with German tanks
and airborne troops invading the Low Countries and France.
Ramsay claimed he had been about to see Chamberlain and show him the
‘improper’ correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt he had seen at
Tyler Kent’s flat. However, he had failed to see him because on 10 May — at
a time when Hitler had invaded the Low Countries and France was disintegrat-
ing — he went on a fortnight’s holiday to Scotland before he had time to make
copies. Back in London, according to Robert Bruce Lockhart, in seeking
Labour support Churchill promised Attlee and Greenwood ‘the Government
will deal ruthlessly with the Fifth Column’, which was equated with the BU.
Not long before he had appeared as the champion of civil liberties. On 10 May
Churchill replaced Chamberlain as Prime Minister.
On 10 May, too, the Chiefs of Staff accepted the Joint Intelligence Commit-
tee’s view that the Nazis had a Fifth Column in place in the event of an
invasion. In deferring to the military, the Home Secretary authorized the
internment of all male enemy aliens in southern coastal areas. This draconian
action had been influenced by Quisling’s alleged activities in Norway and an
anonymous letter from a German refugee (who turned out to be a crank),
‘who warned of an imminent airborne invasion and sabotage attacks in the
south-east’. During the day Churchill discreetly warned the Duke of West-
minster not to take part in appeasement efforts. He left for Ireland. The Duke
of Buccleuch, a friend of the Windsors and brother-in-law of the Duke of
Gloucester, was removed from the post of Steward of the Royal Household
for his part in the appeasement faction.
Beginning on 11 May, enemy aliens were interned. In agreement with the
JIC, MI5 recommended the detention of 500 BU members, a move resisted
by the Home Office, which was angry at attempts to bypass it. Another reason
was that MIS’s records were in a mess. Only recently had Cecil Liddell written
to Chief Constables requesting additions to the list of BU officials which was
accurate ‘up to the end of last year’. The Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson,
interviewed Irene Ravensdale and asked her if she had evidence that Mosley
might betray his country. She had none but feared that if he felt a version of
National Socialism was desirable for Britain ‘hé might do anything’.
Enid
On 12 May Mrs Amor ascertained. that Kent, Wolkoff, her friend
‘Mr Macaroni’ , had dined together. MIS’s suspicion s
Riddell and an Italian,
of Kent were increased by a series of monitore d telephone calls to the American
she
embassy, which suggested he was Wolkoff’s contact. Knight learnt that
Mrs Amor
had ‘diplomatic material of a confidential nature’. On 16 May
subsequent
reported that Wolkoff passed documents to Mr Macaroni. At the
 496 BLACKSHIRT

trial, MI5S’s de Muncke testified that she delivered an envelope — containing

‘plans for the invasion of Norway’ or ‘an innocuous US press release’ — from
Wolkoff to his address at Cadogan Square. MIS believed Wolkoff was a
German agent, passing on sensitive information gathered from her contacts
through the Right Club and the Russian Tea Rooms. However, there was no
direct evidence for this assertion.
On 16 May Roosevelt received a telegram from his ambassador in Paris,
William C. Bullitt, that France was about to be crushed. ‘You should have in
mind the hypothesis that, in order to escape from the ultimate consequences
of absolute defeat, the British may install a government of Oswald Mosley...
which would cooperate fully with Hitler. That would mean that the British
navy would be against us.’ He urged the President to ensure that the British
fleet be moved to Canada. That day, Roosevelt cabled Churchill declining
his request for the ‘loan of forty or fifty of our older destroyers’. Tyler Kent
showed the telegram (No. 872) to Wolkoff and a copy was later found in the
possession of fellow RC member Christabel Nicholson. The matter was con-
sidered ‘so secret’ that her prosecution was ‘out of the question’. She was de-
tained but was acquitted when brought to trial in 1941, because the State
Department would not allow the telegram to be used as evidence. A word-for-
' word translation, found among captured Berlin Foreign Ministry documents,
had been forwarded by the Italians ‘from an unimpeachable source’ on 23 May
1940.
What is intriguing about telegram 872 is that MI5’s Guy Liddell revealed
in his diary that Roosevelt ‘was proposing to give us 100 destroyers ... He
also proposed to give us a portion of his first-line aircraft ... There is little
room for doubt that Roosevelt would bring the whole country into the war
now, if he possibly could.’ Was the Roosevelt—Churchill correspondence a
deception? The telegrams had been sent in ‘Gray’, a low-grade code which
had been compromised. Roosevelt knew this and during the Abyssinian crisis
had deliberately used it in a message to Rome, knowing it would be intercepted
and passed on to Mussolini. Churchill and Roosevelt wanted the Axis powers
to read their correspondence. The ‘unimpeachable source’ was not Wolkoff
but Italian signals intelligence.
With the Low Countries overrun, there was a Fifth Column panic, as
Mass Observation reported public morale at a low ebb. On 16 May MIS5’s
Director-General saw Police Commissioner Sir Philip Game to plan for an
operation against the Fascists. The US State Department’s Harvey Klemmer
discussed the threat with MIS officers and produced estimates of the Fifth
Column’s size, which varied from 1,000 to 10,000. The JIC said Fifth Column
activities ‘might well play a dangerous part at the appropriate moment selected
by the enemy. Indeed, the absence of sabotage up to date reinforces the view
 THE PHONEY WAR 497

that such activities will only take place as part of a prearranged military plan.’
The case against the BU was being ‘worked up’. Mosley’s safe had been ‘rifled
and a document has been obtained showing the whole scheme for setting up
wireless masts in Germany’. Liddell was telephoned by the Home Office’s Sir
Ernest Holderness, who was preparing a memo on the BU. He was sympathetic
to MIS and Liddell offered the use of its officers to help him.
MIS claimed the BU had been ‘in the closest touch with the German
Nazi leaders. Mosley, Raven Thomson, W. E. D. Allen, Major General Fuller,
Gordon-Canning and other leaders were frequently in Germany’. BU members
working abroad for the Germans included Edward Whitfield, who was in
touch with two German espionage agents, Clement Brunning, Phillip Sprank-
lin, and William Joyce. However, there was no evidence of contact since the
war began. The Home Secretary was still against internment and repulsed
demands to intern Fascist leaders.
MIS wanted Mosley interned and used the Tyler Kent affair to increase the
pressure. It began after midnight on 18 May with a telephone call to Herschel
V. Johnson at the American embassy, requesting a meeting to discuss ‘a
delicate matter’. Maxwell Knight explained surveillance of the Right Club led
them to Kent, who had been visited by a suspected Gestapo agent in October
1939, though he gave no reason why the embassy had not been informed.
Nor could he explain why, having carried out their sting on 9 April, MIS
waited until now before making a move. The reality was that the evidence
that Knight later gave the Americans was a concoction, a carefully contrived
record which portrayed MIS in the best possible light but which ignored
the truth that its operation had been a litany of fantasy, incompetence and
wish-fulfilment. Knight said the authorities would arrest Wolkoff on 20 May.
Johnson approved ending Kent’s diplomatic immunity and a search of his flat.
The Kent affair tipped the balance in MI5’s favour and, against a backdrop
of the military disaster in France, led inexorably to the internment of the
Fascists. Mosley’s liberty was a luxury the government could no longer afford
and restrictions against him would be ‘popular and a unifying force’. On
18 May Churchill ordered the internment of ‘very considerable numbers’ of
Fascists. He based his decision on the argument he used with Roosevelt: ‘If the
Germans broke through, and Mosley became Prime Minister, a pro-German
government might obtain easier terms from Germany by surrendering the
fleet.’ .
n
On 19 May Mosley was in Middleton, Lancashire, to support his by-electio
Conservat ives’ 32,036. It was
candidate, who polled just 418 votes against the
under
his last BU public appearance and it ended with him being escorted
police guard to the local branch, where several thousand people gathered,
a hostile
‘hurling stones until every window was smashed’. The BU faced
498 BLACKSHIRT

public; even the Cimmie Mosley Day Nursery in Kensington was vandalized.
The police had to close meetings, even in the stronghold of Dalston because
of anti-Fascist violence.
The British Army was retreating towards Dunkirk and it looked as though
the invasion of Britain was imminent. There was no evidence that Mosley >

intended any treacherous activities by helping a German invasion but there

was evidence, suggests Tony Kushner, that with Ramsay he was willing to
reach ‘a negotiated settlement by means that were unacceptable to a country
on the verge of being invaded’. On 20 May the Foreign Office’s Sir Alexander
Cadogan wrote in his diary that ‘the quicker we get [the Hoares] out of the
country the better. But I’d sooner send them to a penal settlement. He’ll be
the Quisling of England when Germany conquers us and I am dead.’
On 20 May 1940 Knight raided Wolkoff’s flat and then Tyler Kent’s. The
search uncovered 1,500 diplomatic documents and the ‘Red Book’, the Right
Club’s membership list, which Ramsay had given him in the belief it would
be protected by diplomatic immunity. ‘It is appalling,” the US embassy cabled
Washington, ‘it means not only that our codes are cracked a dozen ways but
that our every diplomatic manoeuvre was exposed to Germany and Russia
... No doubt the Germans will publish another White Book during our
political campaign which will have as its purpose the defeat of Roosevelt.’
MIS believed the raid demolished Anderson’s objections.Ithad the evidence
to implicate Ramsay and Wolkoff as dangerous Fifth Columnists. It succeeded
in condemning all the extreme groups by linking them with the RC’s ‘pro-
German and subversive activities’. On 21 May Churchill received a ‘grave
document’ on the treasonable activities of Wolkoff, Kent and Ramsay. The
Home Secretary was told that ‘dangerous elements should be interned without
further delay’. Attlee and Greenwood agreed, and further pressure from the
military led to another meeting between Anderson and MIS.
Anderson needed to be convinced the BU might assist the enemy but without
such evidence ‘it would be a mistake to imprison Mosley and his supporters
who would be extremely bitter after the war when democracy would be
going through its severest trials’. Knight described the ‘underground activities’
of the 25 to 30 per cent of BU members who would go to any lengths if so
ordered by Mosley. His order at the start of the war was ‘merely an example
of how insincere Mosley really was and how many of his supporters simply
regarded utterances of that kind as a figure of speech’. MIS, however, lacked
evidence of ‘acts prejudicial’ or ‘hostile associations’ to arrest Mosley.
Anderson agreed the case against Ramsay was ‘rather serious’ but it did not
involve the BU. Knight claimed the two were in ‘constant touch with one
another’ and that RC members were also members of the BU, some of whom
were ‘collecting arms’. Frank Newsam, the real power in the Home Office,
thought MI5 improperly wanted detention first and evidence later.
 THE PHONEY WAR 499
*
Anderson recalled that, although there was no evidence to justify the pros-
ecution of Fascists, it appeared they were preparing secret plans in the event
of an invasion, to range themselves on the side of the enemy, or to seize power
by a coup d’état and make terms with Hitler. Mosley and Ramsay were
obsessed with a ‘march to power’ with the BU leader made Prime Minister and
the Duke of Windsor back on the throne. Even so, the calm and cool-headed
Anderson never really believed in MI5’s alarmist theories. He seemed to think,
wrote Liddell, that the possibility of invasion was ‘no more than a vague
suggestion’. MI5’s view was that ‘if somebody didn’t get a move on there
would be no democracy, no England, no Empire, and that this was almost a
matter of days’. The Home Secretary said Mosley was ‘too clever to put himself
in the wrong by giving treasonable orders. He realised the War Cabinet might
take the view that, notwithstanding the absence of such evidence, we should
not run any risk in this matter, however small.’
On 22 May Sir Robert Vansittart, the Foreign Secretary’s adviser, talked
with Violet Bonham-Carter about the ‘English Quislings’. Ramsay was ‘one
of them — and had given at meetings lists of people he would have shot —
including Van himself’. Vansittart wanted to strike at.them because of the
attempts to unify the Fascist, anti-Semitic and peace groups in search of a
negotiated peace. That day Richard Stokes saw Lloyd George, hoping to
persuade him to join the search. However, he thought ‘the idea that we could
sign a humiliating peace was ridiculous . . . If there were a general agreement
on disarmament, there might be an understanding about the Navy in order to
get world peace. Otherwise we should fight to the bitter end.’
After the raid on his flat, Kent was arrested and stripped of diplomatic
immunity. It was this case that moved Churchill and led to the ‘witch-finding’
atmosphere which triggered the security revolution initiated by the PM, who
‘rolled up Magna Carta, suspended habeas corpus, incarcerated the bigoted,
the cranky, the extremist and the influential’. The BU was harried out of
existence, or, in the words of Herschel Johnson who studied MI5’s methods,
‘squelched’.
In the absence of Churchill, who was in France, Chamberlain raised the
case at the War Cabinet meeting on 22 May. The PM would ‘agree to whatever
the Cabinet thinks best’. MIS said Ramsay had been engaged in ‘treasonable
practices’ in conjunction with Kent and the Right Club was ‘carrying on
pro-German activities, and secret subversive work, with the object of dis-
organizing the Home Front and hindering the prosecution of the war’.
Anderson explained that Wolkoff, who had been interned two days previously,
had been in relations with Kent and had means of communicating with the
enemy. Ramsay had been in relations with Wolkoff, and also with Mosley,
‘though, as regards the latter, not in connection with this woman’.
MIS had no evidence the BU was involved in Fifth Column activities so
500 BLACKSHIRT

action was impossible under the existing regulation. Anderson said new
powers were required since he did not want the party, in reaction to a few
arrests, to rebuild itself as an underground organization. He envisaged arrest-
ing a small number of officials. The decision was taken by Chamberlain, .
Halifax, Attlee and Greenwood to authorize whatever was needed ‘to cripple
the organisation’; military personnel observing included Ironside. Defence
Regulation 18B was amended to allow the State to intern those who had
sympathy towards enemy powers. Fearing a possible right-wing coup, the
Cabinet wanted action taken as quickly as possible ‘against persons known to
be members of this organisation’. Orders were given for the arrest of Mosley
and thirty-three BU members. Afterwards Halifax, who had suffered the barbs
of Mosley’s oratory, noted with satisfaction that ‘we succeeded in getting a
good deal done about fascists, aliens and other doubtfuls, Tom Mosley being
among those picked up’.
Bizarrely, it was only on 22 May that ‘Mr Macaroni’, the Italian contacted
by Wolkoff, was identified by: MIS as Military Attaché Duke Antonio del
Monte, the intelligence liaison with the BU. He was suspected of passing secret
information to Italy, using the diplomatic pouch. Knight was ecstatic at the
news: ‘It is therefore reasonably certain that the known confidential infor-
mation extracted from the Embassy records by Kent is now in the hands of
the Italians.’ The breakthrough, however, came late in the day and Knight
brooded on the case for the rest of the war, aware there were ‘various loose
ends which are still untied’. In a report dated 12 March 1945, Knight made
enquiries of the Italian government about the Duke and what happened to the
information he received from Wolkoff. The reply has been weeded from the
files. Two months later he visited Kent in prison to talk about del Monte.
Kent said the pseudonym was ‘a rather silly’ alias but maintained he had no
idea that Anna was going to transmit information via del Monte or anyone
else. Knight reported that he felt ‘forced to record that I am now prepared to
believe Kent’.
On the evening of 22 May the Privy Council passed a regulation covering
those active in the furtherance of the objects of an organization which the
Secretary of State was satisfied was ‘subject to foreign influence or control’,
or persons controlling the organization ‘have or have had associations with
persons concerned in the government of, or sympathies with the system of
government of, any power with which His Majesty is at war’. It was loosely
drawn — because MIS did not have the evidence that the BU was under foreign
control — but was not used against the Right Club, the Communists, or other
groups. Mosley was one of thirty-three set out in an tensive? detention order
signed that evening.
Next morning in Action Mosley refuted the charge that ‘I desire to assist
the enemy’. He had for years ‘warned the country to be armed and prepared
 THE PHONEY WAR sol

against any attack’. If any invading parachutists arrived, they should be treated
as what they were, enemy soldiers. Mosley emphasized that he would fight an
invader, but doubted whether Britain could be successfully invaded.
The arrests began on 23 May. Diana arrived at their flat and spotted four
men ‘aimlessly staring into space’. She said, ‘Look, Coppers.’ Inspector Jones
stepped forward and said he had a warrant for Mosley’s arrest. Mosley cheer-
fully assured him ‘he had been expecting arrest and that naturally he had
made some precautions for the safe custody of such of the British Union
records as he did not wish to fall into the hands of the authorities’. Some were
buried under railway arches in south London. Mosley made a bonfire of his
papers. By chance ‘one or two floated over a wall and came into the hands of
the police’. On one was written ‘Gerald Brenan, Bell Court, Aldbourne’. The
police had considered interning Brenan until they discovered it was ‘a letter
to the Telegraph urging that Sir Oswald be arrested, and was therefore an
enemy of the Fascist Party and his name and address noted as such’. Among
documents in Mosley’s custody was a forty-four-page typed list of officers,
agents, contacts and speakers, corrected up to 25 January 1940. The police
also took away three handguns and two rifles. The officers took him to Brixton
prison.
Cadogan confided in his diary: ‘Ramsay and Mosley arrested! Quite right.
But there are 1,000’s of others who ought to be.’ Ramsay told Richard Stokes
that he had been arrested because he believed in the Protocols of the Learned
Elders of Zion and knew of the Churchill—Roosevelt cables. When Mosley’s
arrest was announced Hugh Dalton’s wife said, ‘We had to lose Norway to
get rid of Chamberlain, and to lose Boulogne to get rid of Mosley.’ In Berlin,
Goebbels noted ‘a wave of arrests of fascists. Mosley imprisoned as well. The
fat plutocrats are protecting their hides.’
John Beckett, Secretary of the Duke of Bedford’s (formerly Lord Tavistock)
British People’s Party, was arrested despite having left the BU. He received a
letter from Fuller who had taken up an unspecified War Office appointment
and could not proceed with their ex-servicemen’s campaign to ensure ‘young
men who are fighting should not have the empire pawned behind their backs,
as was the case last time’. BPP membership lists and contact files had been
put in a safe place. Also interned was Norah Elam, who in 1918 had called
for the imprisonment of ‘every man and woman of enemy blood, high and
low, rich and poor’. All headquarters staff were arrested and remained in
detention until 1944. They included Director-General Neil Francis Hawkins
and his assistant who had volunteered for war service, Brian Donovan; Action
editor Alexander Raven Thomson; propaganda officer Mick Clarke; London
administrator Hector G. McKechnie and Mosley’s secretary, George Sutton.
part
Some officials were left at large in the hope that they would reveal their
Miss E. M. Monk, was
in plans for going underground. Mosley’s secretary,
502 BLACKSHIRT

not detained. MIS5’s E. B. Stamp told the Home Office she was being kept
under surveillance.

When Diana told eight-year-old Desmond what had happened he was perfectly
calm. She decided, however, to go back to Denham. As she drove through
London, posters announced ‘MP arrested’. She telephoned Nicholas’s Eton
housemaster to tell him of the arrest, worried Nicholas might be persecuted
because of it. Mr Butterwick said, ‘He’s got his friends and that’s that.’ At
Summer Fields, Jonathan was protected because his surname was Guinness.
However, he was ‘well aware of Mosley’s anti-war stance, especially in contrast
to the fervent schoolboy patriotism around him’. He thought ‘it was no wonder
the government regarded him as an enemy’. That evening, Diana was having
dinner when police streamed through the gate. She ran upstairs and slipped
a photograph of Hitler, with an affectionate inscription, under Max’s cot
mattress.
Fascists claimed internment Was carried out indiscriminately. Individuals
were detained on ‘unsubstantiated allegations, local gossip, the use of agents
provocateurs, and whatever dubious insinuations could be hastily cobbled
together’. The arrests, Leonard Wise wrote, ‘were carried out in such a haphaz-
ard way that I have never had any faith in the Intelligence Services since’.
Non-active members were arrested, while the most active were not. Birming-
ham schoolteacher Louise Irvine was aware that headquarters had a list of
‘those 9,000 or so members who were currently active’ but individual branches
‘also had a secret membership consisting of people who could not afford to be
publicly associated with us — senior police officers, local government officials,
businessmen and civil servants. Records of these secret members were kept
neither at Headquarters nor on the branch premises.’
The immunity of prominent Fascists Viscountess Downe, former Lady-in-
waiting to Queen Mary, and her friend Lady Pearson was suspicious. Pearson
was arrested but soon released after her brother, Sir Henry Page Croft MP,
Churchill’s Under-Secretary for War and Vice-President of the Army Council,
approached Anderson. Her agent, secretary and minor Canterbury Fascists
were detained. Lady Dunn, who attended the secret meetings, escaped deten-
tion, though Howard Hall, butler-secretary to Sir James Hamet Dunn Bt, was
arrested. He was suspected of organizing an undercover group, the Home
Defence Movement, which distributed sticky-backs.
Leonard Wise was puzzled by the choice of targets: ‘It all depended on
whether or not one’s name had appeared in one of our publications.’ Neither
John Warburton nor any other member of his branch was ever detained,
‘though many members of neighbouring branches were. It is another example
of the apparently random and indiscriminate way in which the Emergency
Powers were applied.’ Blackshirts agreed ‘the Government was right, in a
 THE PHONEY WAR 503

desperate military situation, to act against anyone whose loyalties it regarded

as doubtful’, but many against whom ‘nothing incriminating had been dis-
covered’, became ‘useful scapegoats, and stayed in prison for years’. Over 700
British Union members were detained and found themselves ‘suddenly branded
as traitors in a way that seemed likely to scar the rest of their lives’.
On the day after Mosley’s arrest Mass Observation took a snap poll. Very
seldom had observers found such ahigh degree of approval for anything, with
most people saying that ‘it should have been done a long time ago’. However,
some people did object to a person being arrested for what he might do rather
than what he had done. Nancy Mitford wrote to Mark Ogilvie-Grant on
24 May that she was ‘thankful Sir Oswald Quisling has been jugged aren’t
you but think it quite useless if Lady Qs still at large...’
 23
Prisoner Number 2202

When the commander of the British forces was ordered on 27 May to evacuate
troops from Dunkirk, the hand of those who wanted a negotiated peace
was strengthened.. The Cabinet considered a grim military paper questioning
whether Britain could continue the war if France fell. Rumours swept the
country that the royal family had left for Canada and that a shadow government
had been formed. The idea that Mosley might head a puppet govern-
ment was widespread. President Roosevelt saw Canadian Prime Minister
Mackenzie-King’s emissary and told him Britain was doomed and that Hitler
was going to demand its fleet. He wanted Churchill to send it across the
Atlantic.
Churchill told the Cabinet ‘it was-idle to think that, if we tried to make
peace now, we should get better terms from Germany than if we went on and
fought it out. The Germans would demand our fleet ... We should become a
slave state,’ though a British government which would be Hitler’s puppet
would be set up — ‘under Mosley or some such person. And where should we
be at the end of all that?’ As long as morale held they should carry on and
deal with the Fifth Column.
Vernon Kell was dismissed as Head of MIS, partly because of a personality
clash with Churchill. The creation of executive security committees and the
higher profile of the military and MIS in policy created increased tension
between politicians and the security authorities. Problems arose over the PM’s
wish to appoint Lord Trenchard as Commander-in-Chief (Home Forces).
There was dismay at the dictatorial powers he wanted. Instead, General
Ironside was ‘volunteered’ for the post.
From 28 May, in the light of a ‘certain eventuality’, a German invasion,
national security was overseen by the (Security) Executive, chaired by Lord
Swinton. Its principal object was ‘to consider questions relating to defence
against the Fifth Column and to ensure action’. A report by Lord Hankey
accepted the Fifth Column’s existence and urged ‘the fullest possible weight’
be given to MIS efforts to counter it.
Swinton’s committee was a curious affair since its Pabon was Sir Joseph
Ball, the man behind Truth, which campaigned from a hawkish position on
 PRISONER NUMBER 2202 505

behalf of 18B detainees, in particular Admiral Domvile. It wanted martial law

under Ironside and argued detainees should be tried and, if convicted, shot, if
not, released. It wanted to protect ‘fellow-travellers of the right’ from deten-
tion. Links between the committee and Truth were strengthened by the recruit-
ment of a solicitor close to the magazine, William Crocker, who was chosen
to reorganize MIS. Also appointed was Dr Dearden, a psychiatrist who devised
MI5’s interrogation techniques. Richard Stokes referred to ‘this rather odd
secret Gestapo ... with a couple of toughs named Crocker and Ball’. Alfred
Wall, General Secretary of the London Society of Compositors and a former
Communist, was selected by the PM and Herbert Morrison, fellow members
of the anti-Nazi council, Focus. The PM’s representative was Desmond
Morton, his adviser on intelligence matters.
On 30 May the Home Secretary decided Diana Mosley was not to be
interned immediately because ‘there would be advantages in having her care-
fully watched as it is possible she may be a channel through which we can get
further information’. Diana paid the wages of remaining BU officials such as
Tommy Moran, who took over the leadership. Anonymous information that
she was a liaison between interned BU leaders and the movement outside
persuaded Sir John Anderson to issue warrants to monitor her correspondence
and telephone calls. ‘My wife,’ Mosley recalled, ‘too, experienced the results
of a bugged telephone or room microphone after my arrest.’
Action editor E. D. Hart was detained but not before he put out on 30 May
an issue with the headline FREE MOSLEY — SAVE BRITAIN. BU members had
been arrested but ‘not a shred of evidence had been found to support any
allegation that BU was, or ever had been under foreign influence’. It acknowl-
edged ‘more of us will see the inside of a prison, but where Mosley goes we
gladly follow’. Members were urged to ‘prepare the minds of the people for
the greatness that will be theirs when Mosley leads as Mosley most surely
will’. The slogan ‘We Carry On’ appeared in the final issue of 6 June, which
exhorted women to keep alive the movement, whose activities continued with
the production of leaflets and sticky-backs. An order comprising 345 BU
members was signed on 30 May. Compiled by Scotland Yard in collaboration
with MIS, it was based on information supplied by chief constables on promi-
came
nent or active BU members. Some BU members were arrested as they
from a
back from the beaches at Dunkirk; one was detained after returning
bombing mission over Germany. °
be
Few Right Club members were interned. The Home Office said it would
minded’ people, which included
wrong to publish the names of these ‘simple-
members,
MPs and peers, who were unaware of their leaders’ activities. BU
charged with an offence, were not given the
none of whose leaders was ever
the scum, quite rightly’, Swinton wrote, ‘we put
benefit of such doubt. ‘As to
the critical time, but a good many of them did not matter
lots of them inside at
506 BLACKSHIRT

very much.’ Anderson told Irene Ravensdale he had been in a cleft stick. The
order had been to hurl all suspects in prison but he soon had to ‘let many out
who had needlessly got caught up in the vortex. Much suffering was thereby
caused to many by the heavy-handed methods that were adopted in handling ‘
the alleged quislings.’
In the Commons on 4 June, Churchill spoke of the necessity of taking
measures of ‘increasing stringency ... against British subjects who may
become a danger or a nuisance should the war be transported to the United
Kingdom’. Many were enemies of Nazi Germany but ‘we cannot under the
present stress, draw all the distinctions which we should like to do’. There
were Fifth Columnists, for whom he felt ‘not the slightest sympathy’. He
would use the necessary powers to put down their activities until he was
satisfied that ‘this malignancy in our midst has been effectively stamped out’.
Overnight British Fascists were transformed from a political irrelevance to
potential allies of a Nazi invasion. Even Mosley’s firmest supporters wavered.
Henry Williamson told Diana he thought of writing to The Times to enquire
‘if it had been discovered that funds had been received from any foreign
country, for if so, thousands of people like myself would then immediately
disclaim all connection with such a party’.
Acting Director-General and Ball’s friend Alan Harker laid out MI5’s assess-
ment of the BU in a memorandum. ‘Doubtless a situation was envisaged in
which the country would be forced to ask for terms of peace, and should this
situation arise Hitler would only make peace with an England led by Mosley.
It was therefore Mosley’s aim to make it difficult for the government to carry
on the war.’ MIS expected BU members to assist the Nazis in the event of
invasion. Material collected for the Suspects List by Rothschild’s agent ‘left
no room for doubt that this danger was a real one’.
The Minister for Home Security, Herbert Morrison, admitted Harald Kurtz
had provided false information against John Beckett and Ben Greene. Kurtz
acted as a pro-Nazi, self-confessed member of the Fifth Column, who was
trying to make contacts in the services and was in touch with German agents,
supplying them with lists of reliable supporters. He claimed Beckett offered
to join the anti-parachute corps and would harbour escaping pro-Germans
who had been in contact with the Nazis. MIS concluded there were many
people who ‘supplied information of military value to our agent in the belief
that he was in a position to communicate it to the German Secret Service’.
At the end of May Norah Briscoe, a typist in the Ministry of Supply, and
‘Mollie’ Hiscox, a BU member in the Right Club and Link, were found guilty
of communicating secret information to a German agent (in fact, MI5’s Kurtz).
Therefore it seemed plausible that the misconduct of Tyler Kent, Anna Wolkoff
and Captain Ramsay was the tip of an iceberg. The military certainly thought
so. On 31 May Ironside reported a mass of Fifth-Column activity. “Telegraph
 PRISONER NUMBER 2202 507

poles marked, suspicious men moving at-night all over the country . . . Perhaps
we shall catch some swine.’ He remained puzzled, though, that ‘we have never
been able to get anything worth having. And yet there is signalling going on
all over the place and we cannot get any evidence. A German wife of an RAF
man who has been in domestic service in the Admiral’s house at Portsmouth
was run in for trying to get hold of some blueprints.’
Marie Ingram worshipped Hitler and joined the BU. She said the war had
been started by ‘Jews, Communists and Freemasons’, and that Britain would
be better off with a Fascist victory. She was employed by a naval officer
who oversaw mine design, and told BU members she had obtained some
information and had sent it out of the country. She was convicted of espionage
with a dockyard worker, William Swift, and sentenced to ten years, but
acquitted of stealing blueprints. Swift received fourteen years. Mrs Ingram’s
espionage was believed to be part of wider treachery. There was talk of armed
conspirators helping German invaders and members joining the Local Defence
Volunteers to obtain arms. It all lent reality to MIS’s view that there were BU
members who were willing ‘to go to any lengths’. Swift claimed that ‘when
the Germans gained power in Britain Sir Oswald would become head of state’.
Mrs Ingram looked forward to seeing the swastika flying over London.
Special Branch claimed that information from P. G. Taylor, who attended
the ‘secret meetings’, revealed evidence of planning for a coup d’état. A scepti-
cal Home Office requested more details about the ‘vast secret revolutionary
organisation’. On 8 June the branch conceded that, while ‘a certain amount
of collaboration’ had taken place, ‘no concrete plans were made, principally
because those present could not agree on a leader’. There was evidence Mosley
believed there was a chance of seizing power. There was certainly a fear that
a coup might replace George VI with the Duke of Windsor, leading to the
establishment of a peace government with Lloyd George or Sir Samuel Hoare.
Another scenario envisaged Hitler, after a successful invasion, inviting Wind-
sor to take back the throne and appoint Lloyd George or Mosley as his Prime
Minister. Ramsay said at his Advisory Committee hearing that Mosley had
offered him Scotland ‘in certain circumstances’.
US Ambassador William Bullitt reported to Roosevelt on 4 June about a
‘dismaying luncheon’ with Marshal Pétain, who accused Britain of intending
‘to permit the French to fight without help until the last drop of French blood
should have been shed’ and then, under a Fascist keader, to make a compromise
peace with Hitler. Bullitt advised that if the British refused to commit fighters
to France, it suggested they planned ‘to conserve their fleet and air force and
their army, and either before a German attack on England or shortly after-
wards, to install eight fascists trained under Oswald Mosley and accept vassal-
age to Hitler’. Churchill would not contemplate peace talks but a compromise
government would. He met calls for the prosecution of ‘appeasement party’
508 BLACKSHIRT

members with the riposte that it would be ‘foolish as there are too many
in it’.
On 9 June Churchill briefed Ambassador Lord Lothian, who was going to
meet the US President, that ‘if Britain broke under invasion, a pro-German _
Government might surrender the British Fleet . . . if Mosley were Prime Minis-
ter or some other Quisling Government set up, it is exactly what they would
do’. At the last moment Churchill struck out the phrase ‘if Mosley were Prime
Minister’. On the following day, Italy entered the war on the side of the Axis
powers. Again Churchill sought to stir fears about what a Mosley government
might do to save the country from destruction.
Four days later Hitler talked about Mosley with the Nazi hierarchy. His
adjutant, Major Engel, recalled that he ‘did not think much of him as a
personality’ but he was the ‘only Englishman who has understood the German-
European idea’. If Churchill and Bernard Shaw were ‘afraid of him and also
respect’ such ‘a vain man, who usually just womanises’, then there ‘must be
something behind it’. He added it was ‘a shame that he’s more an intellectual
than a tribune of the people’ but the Labour Party ‘did a very stupid thing
when it dropped him’. Hitler still thought that ‘perhaps he can stop this war’
and was ‘convinced his role has not run its course yet’. That was the view
within the German Foreign Office. After Dunkirk, the anti-Nazi Adam von
Trott was ‘genuinely worried that the victorious German advance might well
take in Britain and that he would need to do the maximum to protect his
friends there in the event of a German puppet government — most probably
under Mosley — being set up’.
Mosley told the Advisory Committee it was ‘an extraordinary idea’ to
suggest he would ‘act as an agent of a foreign power . . . am I in my whole life
that sort of man?’ Diana said he expected the war to be a long drawn-out
affair without an invasion of Britain, as he never imagined the French Army
would collapse. But how would he have reacted if the Germans had invaded?
Would he have done the same as Harold Nicolson, who intended to take
poison in the event of an invasion, rather than come to an accommodation
with the Nazis?
The Germans might have tried to set up a government under Mosley, though
he believed that before this could happen he would have been assassinated by
MIS. Romantically, he said he had planned to escape from prison to become
a resistance fighter against the invader. ‘I would have put on my old Army
uniform and fought to a finish and no doubt have been killed, which would
have settled the problem.’ Ultimately, he told Norman Longate, he would
have been recognized as ‘an uncompromising opponent, so that he might have
found himself back in Brixton, with German gaolers instead of British ones’.
There was no question of being a quisling in charge of a puppet Nazi regime.
Once opposition had been crushed — the stay-behind British Resistance
 PRISONER NUMBER 2202 509

Organization was expected to hold out for a few weeks — Mosley believed the
Nazis would rule with a military governor until, ‘like a victim continually
injected with some poisonous drug, they set up a collection of old gentlemen’,
or failing that ‘a weak local leader like Pétain in France’. In conversation with
Churchill on 18 June, Chamberlain wondered whether Lloyd George was
‘waiting to be the Marshal Pétain of Britain’, The PM said, ‘Yes, he might,
_ but there won’t be any opportunity.’ In Hitler’s grand design, Lloyd George
would have been the leading candidate for the role of ‘national saviour whose
statesmanship alone could save his country further humiliation’.
Major-General Fuller was considered by MIS ‘an obvious leader (in the
absence of Mosley) of the fascist element in this country. We think he may
covet a position not dissimilar to that of Marshal Pétain.’ Fuller would have
been arrested by Special Branch at the onset of an invasion. He was identified
as a military strongman willing to take part in a British Vichy, though Mosley
told Kenneth Macksey, author of The German Invasion of Britain, he could
not conceive him playing such a role. He was ‘so perverse and incapable of
doing what he was told that he could never have become a Nazi puppet’, even
though he called for ‘a coup d’état by Mosley’.
In June, Mosley’s former aide-de-camp, Dr Tester, left Athens. Before his
departure he talked with the British Consul General, Mr Sebastian. ‘I explained
that it was my conviction that in the short or long term a fascist government
would take power in England ... that the English people would sweep away
the Churchill government and that Mosley was the only person who, through
a peaceful settlement with Hitler, could end this war.’ He added that ‘the
defeat of England was not to be stopped and had become for me an absolute
certainty’. Sebastian had one word for Tester: ‘Quisling’.
It has been suggested that Hitler would have preferred an anti-Semitic
puppet leader such as Ramsay or Domvile, rather than Mosley. They were on
the ‘White List’ of collaborators. Mosley was not included precisely because
Hitler intended him to play a key role. Macksey ‘took Mosley’s protestations
with a pinch of salt’. Maurice Cowling believed Mosley toyed with the idea,
because ‘his only hope was a German occupation’. A prison officer overheard
Mosley, during a meeting with his solicitor, admit that ‘Hitler had, in fact,
appointed him to be a sort of co-leader in England’. In Brixton a member of
Mosley’s entourage accosted Beckett. ‘Hail Mosley. The Leader says that at
this time of danger for our nation, past disagreements should be put to one
side. He offers you a place in his provisional government.’ Beckett simply
laughed. The gossip in BU circles was that Mosley would appoint Fuller
Minister of War.
Mosley was not a potential traitor in the sense of either welcoming a Nazi
invasion or contemplating actions that would bring it about. However, he had
considered the overthrow of the government with the aim of negotiating peace
510 BLACKSHIRT

terms. But would he have collaborated in, if not a puppet regime, then a
pro-German government? Everything we know about Mosley, with his idea
of the ‘great men’ of history making their mark at the time of crisis, suggests
he would not have passed over the opportunity to be Britain’s saviour. Hitler ;
and Mosley might have come to an agreement that saved the Empire and
allowed Germany to pursue its objectives in Eastern Europe and Russia. In
such circumstances a publicly reluctant Mosley would not have been seen as
a traitor — at least in his eyes — but as the man of destiny who had saved
Britain from the horror of war.
Mosley hinted at the possibility of heading a pro-German government in the
BBC programme If Britain Had Fallen. ‘If and when’ the Germans withdrew,
‘leaving British people, British soil and the British Commonwealth intact, then,
and not before, by commission of the crown and by election of the people, I
will, if 1am asked to, form a government.’ That depended, of course, on which
king and what constitution. An official in the embassy in Lisbon, Marcus
Cheke, reported that the Duke of Windsor had predicted the fall of Churchill
and his replacement by a government which would negotiate peace terms. The
King would abdicate, there would be a revolution, and the Duke would be
recalled. Britain would then lead a coalition of France, Spain and Portugal,
with Germany left free to march on Russia. When Primo de Rivera suggested
he might return to the throne, the Duke said constitutionally it would be
impossible. But if Britain lost the war, de Rivera argued, even the constitution
would not be inviolate. At this ‘the Duchess in particular became very
thoughtful’.
It is not difficult to envisage a situation in which Edward, back as King of
an intact Empire, asks Mosley to take part in an election of a pro-German
one-party state, where the navy has been scuttled and Fascist squads round up
Jews and Communists. Faced with no alternative, the prospects of guaranteed
security and no war might well have made a Lloyd George—Mosley National
government a winning proposition.
Having seen its files, the Advisory Committee noted MIS had no evidence
that BU leaders ‘desire a German victory, or have any other concern than to take
the fullest advantage of the present situation in order to bring BU to power
with Mosley as its leader’. This caused consternation and MIS arranged to brief
Committee Chairman Sir Norman Birkett. The outcome was a ‘Reasons for
Order’, dated 19 June, of the case against the BU, which was ‘subject to foreign
control or influence by Italian or German political or national organisations’. It
had received funds from Italy and Mosley had associations with German
officials with regard to the radio project and on visits to Germany had received
‘signs of honour from Herr Hitler’. There was an ‘affinity’ between the NSD AP
and the BU, and Mosley extolled the German system of government with the
object of introducing National Socialism to Britain. There was nothing about
 PRISONER NUMBER 2202 jit

an underground BU, plans for a coup d’état, or Mosley being ‘in relations’
with Ramsay, but the BU could be used ‘for purposes prejudicial to the defence
of the Realm’ and ‘the efficient prosecution of the war’.
Mosley was held at Brixton prison in ‘F’ wing, condemned as unfit for
use. The unhygienic facilities shocked middle-class BU detainees but, ‘after
Winchester’, Mosley wrote, ‘prison was nothing’. His next-door companion
was a black musician who had played in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.
On the other side was John Beckett, resentful that Mosley had been allowed
a radio and he had not. Close by was Ramsay, who talked about the Tyler
- Kent affair. He thought he was on to ‘something of world-shaking importance’
but Mosley could see nothing improper in Churchill’s actions. He ‘had nothing
to attack Churchill about ... the whole thing was a mare’s nest’. He had ‘a
perfect right to correspond with the President’. The interned Gerald Hamilton
remembered Lady Mosley coming to see her son. ‘The warder called out to
the landing, “Mosley, come down, there’s a visitor for you.”” Many of the
interned people shouted out at the wretched warder, ‘Call him Sir Oswald,
you bastard!”’’ Viewing the scene, Beckett caustically remarked, ‘There goes
Mosley with his kosher fascists.’

During June Irene applied for guardianship of Mosley’s three elder children.
He was brought from prison to the Chancery Court. She argued she had
been responsible for financing the upkeep of their home (Savehay had been
requisitioned by the Ministry of Supply as a centre for research into Chemical
Warfare) and thought they might share guardianship. The father role ‘did not
come easily to him’, agreed Diana, but he was incensed by the proposal, which
seemed ‘as unnecessary as it was insulting’. The judge decided Mosley should
be guardian in name only and ‘have no direction in their education or anything
else’. He declined responsibility without authority and Irene was made guar-
dian. Vivien, nineteen, and Nicholas, seventeen, did not object to the arrange-
ment, since they did not know their father had objected. He was fond of them,
noted Diana, ‘but he felt no more responsibility for them; they had been taken
from him against his forcibly expressed will’. Nicholas stayed on at school
until he was called up.
On 17 June Diana met Fuller, who said ‘the French are asking for an
armistice’. She was astonished: ‘The most powerful army in Europe, beaten in
a matter of weeks.’ When she asked about his ‘own position, his wife said
‘they’ll never arrest Boney. He knows too much.’ Fuller wrote, ‘Although the
masses of people, secure behind a sea wall, were not greatly perturbed by the
German advance, the Government lost its head, and at the very moment when
in order to maintain internal calm, contempt of danger was imperative ...
hundreds of loyal people whose only crime was that they considered the war
a blunder, were arrested and held in custody for years on end.’
512 BLACKSHIRT

With Ironside discredited, Fuller’s protector was General Sir Alan Brooke,
Chief of the General Staff, who decided, after an Army Security briefing, he
had no ‘unpatriotic intentions’, though he continued to be monitored by MIS.
His non-internment puzzled Mosley, who believed he was not arrested because
‘they’ toyed with using him, which indeed seems to have been the case. His »
biographer notes that Fuller was the only senior BU member not destroyed by
his association with Mosley.
With the fall of France and fear of invasion growing, even Churchill
wobbled. He told ‘Pug’ Ismay on 12 June, ‘You and I will be dead in three
months’ time.’ As yet, no US arms or planes had arrived at British ports. On
24 June he warned the Canadian PM he would ‘never enter into any peace
negotiations with Hitler’ but could not ‘bind a future government, which, if
we were deserted by the United States and beaten down here, might easily be
a kind of Quisling affair ready to accept German overlordship and protection’.
On the following day he repeated the warning to his ambassador in Washing-
ton: ‘In this case the British Fleet would be the solid contribution with which
this Peace Government would buy terms.’ Goebbels recorded that Hitler had
‘not yet decided whether he wants to go at England. He wants a settlement.
There are already indirect negotiations about that.’
On 27 June the Germans, who expected help from the Duke of Windsor in
semi-exile in Lisbon, had been negotiating to form an anti-Russian alliance,
with an opposition government under Edward. They believed King George
‘will abdicate during attack on London’. Keeping an eye on the Windsors,
David Eccles reported that they were ‘very nearly fifth column’.
The Security Executive assumed the power to proscribe the BU, though it
was not closed down until 10 July. The delay enabled MIS to identify its
‘second line’ of leaders who continued its activities. Believing the threat of
internment had passed, Commandant Allen told a journalist of ‘her admiration
for the Gestapo and Himmler’ and ‘more or less said that she would help the
Germans if they came here’ — a message which alarmed security. At her 18B
hearing she proved to be ‘an untruthful witness’, who lied about attending
secret meetings. However, Anderson ‘found it difficult to accept on the basis
of his personal knowledge that she could be really dangerous’. She was only
prevented from travelling to specified areas.
MIS hoped Diana would lead them to Fifth Columnists, since she had been
the principal channel of communication between Mosley and Hitler. On
20 June Nancy Mitford revealed that she had told Gladwyn Jebb at the
Ministry of Economic Warfare ‘what I know (very little actually) of Diana’s
visits to Germany’. She thought ‘something should be done to restrain her
activities’. Diana was ‘far cleverer and more dangerous than her husband, and
will stick at nothing to achieve her ambitions — she is wildly ambitious, a
ruthless and shrewd egotist, a devoted Fascist and admirer of Hitler’. She
 PRISONER NUMBER 2202 513

‘desires the downfall of England and democracy’. Baba Metcalfe said ‘it was
Diana we were all scared of coming to power, not him’.
On 25 June Diana’s former father-in-law, Lord Moyne, who had asked her
son’s governess, Jean Gillies, to spy on her, warned Swinton that failure to
intern her would lead many ‘to draw the conclusion that there is one law for
the influential rich and another for the friendless poor’. He enclosed a summary
of Miss Gillies’s conversations with Diana and a list of dates of visits to
Germany, which he believed involved ‘bringing over funds from the Nazi
government’. There was ‘little doubt that she acted as a courier between her
_ husband and the Nazi government’. According to the governess, Diana had
said, “We are revolutionaries and we would kill.’ She believed ‘England would
never fight and told Hitler so’ and triumphantly said that if Belgium was
overrun, it would not be possible to extract the British Army, which ‘would
be caught by a pincer movement’. She made ‘no secret of her delight in what
was happening’. Diana predicted the Germans would break through in France,
cut off the British Army and take the Channel ports. Moyne believed the
strategic outline came from Hitler.
The Home Secretary thought it advantageous to leave Diana at liberty under
surveillance, but her detention order had been dispatched by MIS barrister
Jim Hale, who felt ‘very strongly that this extremely dangerous and sinister
young woman should be detained at the earliest possible moment’. On 28 June
Churchill showed MI5’s list of 150 prominent people to be arrested to his
aide John Colville. It remains secret but included two distant relatives of
Clementine Churchill: Diana and George Pitt-Rivers. Their presence ‘piqued
Winston and caused much merriment among his children’.
On 29 June Diana was arrested. Given the option of taking ten-week-old
Max with her she declined, since London might be bombed. At Holloway she
was locked in ‘a dark, airless and very dirty cell. The tiny window was entirely
blocked by sandbags.’ There was a straw mattress on the wet floor, with some
dirty blankets and grubby sheets. Ten-year-old Jonathan was at his prep school
Summer Fields, where the headmaster told him, ‘They’ve shut your mother up.’
There was one filthy toilet for the thirty inmates. Diana was told the red
cross on its door indicated it was for those with venereal disease. A prison
wardress said Diana felt tortured by living in such close confinement and
disliked eating with the BU women: ‘As soon as I decently could I abandoned
the communal style of living — upstairs and dowrtstairs had to be kept apart!’
She was welcomed by the dedicated Fascists, who showed their devotion by
cleaning her cell. ‘It is probably difficult for someone who has not experienced
it’, she recalled, ‘to imagine how demoralizing it is to be imprisoned without
trial. It is like being kidnapped — you cannot see the end.’ Jonathan visited
and thought she looked ‘funny’ because she was thin and white-faced, and
~ wore no make-up.
514 BLACKSHIRT

Mosley prepared a reply to the ‘Reasons for Order’ for his appeal. ‘The
police have raided my flat, my wife’s flat, the London house we used to occupy,
my children’s house in the country. They have also raided the offices of British
Union. At the end of this process what shred of evidence can they produce to
support the allegation that I would play the traitor to my country?’ Advisory,
Committee Chairman Birkett needed to construct as good a case as possible
to justify his internment, even though 18B (1A) had been specially drafted to
apply to him. Committee procedures combined ‘the inquisitorial questioning
of a court martial with the atmosphere of a vicarage tea-party’. In an Orwellian
touch, officially it had only three members, even though four sat in, but since
MIS did not legally exist, its case officer was not counted. Evidence was
accepted without valuation of the reliability of MI5’s sources, legal represen-
tation was not permitted and internment was often recommended even though
there was no evidence that a crime had been committed. Files depended on
unsubstantiated allegations and use of agents provocateurs. Nellie Driver’s
explanation that the people who visited her at night for alleged secret meetings
were, respectively, an insurance agent, her landlord and an uncle was not
untypical.
There were scraps of information from agent reports and the tapping of
telephones. ‘Every little man’, Mosley wrote, ‘with a “hush-hush” job could
flatulate his innuendos over the cocktails . . . provided by the tax-payer. What
a chance for every mediocrity and dunce on the fringe of politics; for every
little “Tadpole” and “‘Taper” to strut his little hour!’ It underlined for Mosley
‘the necessity for cross-examination in open court of all narks, spies, informers,
keyhole peepers, and the rest of the pestilential tribe who seek to pay off old
scores when fate gives them the chance’.
Birkett worried that Mosley might turn the appeal into a legal nightmare.
He had been the losing prosecuter in his libel case against the Star and had
been made to look foolish during his cross-examination of the Fascist leader.
The first hearings on 2 and 3 July were ‘little short of a disaster’. Birkett
was not impressive, despite knowing in advance Mosley’s defence. MI5 had
supplied him with information ‘derived from a very secret and delicate source’.
During his sixteen-hour interrogation, Mosley insisted his politics were motiv-
ated by patriotism.
‘For the last seven years’, Mosley claimed, ‘I have spent much of my time
demanding that Britain should properly be armed to resist attack, and have
violently attacked the old parties . . . for neglecting our defences. In particular
I have demanded air parity with the strongest other country — which was
Germany.’ He did not think Britain ‘should go to war for the sake of Poland
or any Eastern European question’ and was ‘opposed to intervention in a
foreign war when Britain was not properly armed for war’. He wanted to know
that if he was accused of treachery, what was his motive? ‘Some overweening,
 PRISONER NUMBER 2202 515

inordinate, or insane ambition? Is it really suggested that my ambition is to

be the ruler of a country which is totally dependent upon a foreign power?
. L have always admitted that I hold the high ambition to make a great
Santi even greater. It is not compatible with such ambitions to be the lackey
of a foreign power.’ He added, ‘If it was wrong openly to advocate Peace, why
were we not told to shut up?’ The Home Secretary had powers to warn
publications such as Action and institute heavy penalties but ‘a warning was
never given’. Birkett made the point that BU policy was the ‘immediate making
of peace’, which Mosley did not deny. He did not oppose German occupation
of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium and France, because European politics
were not Britain’s vital interest.
He had attacked the Jews because they attacked him. The BU’s anti-
Semitism was ‘an old English growth’. Mosley added that in the Fascist state
Jews would have to prove their loyalty before a state tribunal (he saw no irony
in that he was appearing before one) and that those found not working for
the national interest would be ‘humanely’ expelled. He described Joyce as ‘an
offensive little beast’ and conceded the BU had attracted a pro-Nazi fringe -
including Claude Duvivier, H. W. Luttman-Johnson, Richard Findlay and
H. P. Puller. Asked about the Right Club, Mosley said he had known nothing
of the ‘American business’ but was evasive about relations with Ramsay and
the secret meetings.
Mosley denied that the BU was under foreign influence; its emblem had
been invented by Piercy and the use of spectacle was suggested by the Durham
Miners Gala. He admitted some members had become ‘Germanised’, including
Unity. ‘In strict confidence, it was one of the small reasons why I did not want
[my marriage] published, because this girl was going on this way, and my
wretched wife, a much more intelligent woman, has struggled with it for
years.’ Birkett asked about opposition in a Fascist Britain. Mosley said ‘party
politics fade out .. . so that the microbe of party politics cannot live’.
After admitting intelligence that the BU was under foreign influence was
‘scanty’, Birkett adjourned the hearing until 15 July in order to give MIS a
chance to produce evidence of co-operation with the Germans through agents
or organizations such as the Link. ‘If “The Link” can be connected directly
with Germany, and the BU can be connected directly with “The Link”, that
would be some kind of evidence which at the moment is absent from these
papers.’ ~ -4
Admiral Sir Barry Domvile was interned at Brixton on 7 July. The evidence
against him depended on the testimony of an unnamed agent (Kurtz). Lord
Tavistock (twelfth Duke of Bedford) was placed on the Suspect List, because
he was expected to be appointed a Nazi regional governor or used as a puppet
prime minister. Although he was known as a ‘sexual pervert, physical coward
and a rebel against all authority’, he was not detained because MIS did not
516 BLACKSHIRT

want to provide the pacifist cause with a high-profile martyr. The Swinton
Committee wanted to deport overseas the BU leaders. It reasoned that because
Mosley was so fearful of such action, there must be ‘some plot on hand to
liberate them from jail for the purpose of starting serious trouble’. The 400_
Fascists held at Ascot and York should be kept under military care or removed,
from the country. They are ‘nasty gangsters who will stick at nothing’.
In early July Rothermere’s nephew Cecil King recorded that ‘the country is
already reconciling itself to the idea of a Nazi conquest’. The German officer
responsible for compiling ‘White Lists’ of potential allies was Major Walter
zu Christian, chief of espionage in Spain and Portugal, who switched to Berlin
to study British institutions. In 1936 he travelled to Britain, where he had
worked for a German export house, to create intelligence dossiers. In 1939 he
took charge of a Reich Security Ministry department in Hamburg devoted to
Britain and ordered to draw up the Sonderfahndungsliste GB (Special Search
List GB). The ‘Black Book’ of 2,700 enemies of the Reich was compiled
hurriedly during May 1940 for Walter Schellenberg, Chief of the Reichs-
Sicherheitshanptamt — Reich Security Head Office. On the list were ‘Captain
King’ (aka Maxwell Knight) of 308 Hood House, Dolphin Square, where
‘MIS briefs and debriefs its contacts’, and James Mogurk [sic] Hughes, a
British captain of 144 Sloane Street. It is likely their names were provided by
their friend William Joyce. :
Ben Greene alleged the names of the Fifth Column, among whom he ranked
himself, ‘are recorded in Germany for use when the Germans arrive’. A White
List of thirty-nine single women students who had visited Germany shortly
before 1939 had been compiled in the Gestapo’s Munich office. Post-invasion,
the Nazis intended to rely on ‘Englishmen detained since the beginning of the
war on the ground of “friendship with Germany’”’’. After checking these
‘political prisoners’ against Home Office files, Mosley’s men would be attached
to Search Commissions, with internment camps set up to screen suspects. Nazi
officials would collaborate with ‘anti-Churchill groups’ and search for ‘people
prepared to co-operate with us’. It was realized there would be few traitors
but, zu Christian noted, ‘very conveniently you had lodged all your political
prisoners, or those you thought dangerous, together in the Isle of Man’. Just
as Swinton feared, special airborne Einsatzgruppen Kommando groups were
to seize those camps and free Mosley’s men.
On 2 July Hitler ordered pre-planning for Operation Lion, the invasion of
southern Britain at some point in September 1940. Two days later Churchill
proposed sending the Duke of Windsor to the Bahamas as Governor because the
Duke was ‘well-known to be pro-Nazi’ and might ‘become a centre of intrigue’.
When Foreign Office Permanent Under-Secretary Alexander Cadogan dined at
Buckingham Palace on 10 July, he talked to the King, who was ‘amused’ at the
Chief of MI6’s ‘report of the Quisling activities of “my brother!” ’. On the
 PRISONER NUMBER 2202 527

following day Ribbentrop told colleagties he wanted to keep the Duke in

Spain, where he would ‘hold himself in readiness for further developments.
Germany is determined to force England to peace by every means ... and
would be prepared to accommodate any desire expressed by the Duke, especi-
ally with a view to the assumption of the throne by the Duke.’ On 15 July
Hitler talked with Abwehr chief Admiral Wilhelm Canaris about the Duke,
© who he regretted ‘had not been more fully signed up when it was still time’.
_ He then considered ‘the matter of Mosley. If and how he could be got hold
of.’ Major Engel had the impression Hitler was ‘still undecided and he does
- not know what and how he must do’.
On the following day Hitler agreed to Sealion - ‘Preparation of a Landing
Operation Against England’. On 19 July he made known his willingness to
end the war if the British asked for terms. Labour’s Richard Stokes wanted
Churchill to consider the proposal but the PM said it would be ‘detrimental
to National Defence at a most grave moment. Even the steps which you have
thought it right to take, if they become generally known, will be a powerful
stimulus to Fifth Column activities.’
Newspapers on 19 July carried the headline ‘tRONSIDE SACKED’. The
Commander-in-Chief Home Forces had been removed after a whispering
campaign against him but, ‘in order that the matter should be placed on a
good footing’, was promoted Field Marshal. His obsession with security led
him to suggest strange conspiracies concerning a German invasion. Malcolm
Muggeridge was responsible at Kneller Hall for protecting Home Forces head-
quarters against subversion by enemy agents. Colonel Ross-Atkinson gave
him a report that Ironside’s car had been spotted outside a house in Holland
Park occupied by known Fascists. After consulting a colleague, Bobby Barclay,
they informed his stepfather Lord Vansittart. Next day it was revealed that
Sir Alan Brooke had replaced Ironside. Fuller was warned to be politically
inactive on pain of instant arrest.
On 22 July Italy’s Gazetta del Popolo claimed the Duke of Windsor wanted
a government under Lloyd George and Ribbentrop received information from
London that he had urged the King to appoint a pro-appeasement Cabinet.
‘There are now rumours’, wrote George Orwell, ‘that Lloyd George is the
potential Pétain of England.’ When Churchill rejected Hitler’s offer, Goebbels
told the foreign press, ‘Gentlemen, there will be war.’
By the time Birkett returned to the fray, MIS’ uncovered the BU’s secret
bank account but not the source of the funds paid into it. Major Tabor
admitted being given ‘large packs of foreign notes by Allen to pay into the
account, but he never had any idea where the money came from’. It was
‘unlikely that we shall ever be able to drag the truth from him’ and those in a
position to know refused to help. Mosley’s cell had been bugged and a former
secretary was being monitored; suggesting close links between the prosecution
518 BLACKSHIRT

and judicial process. Aikin-Sneath was present on the final day when Mosley
was pressed on funding and was made to look evasive. He denied Italian
subsidies, insisting he had not enquired into the source of funds. But ‘even if
it were true. I ask why it should be a reason for holding me or my colleagues .
in gaol?’ With regard to the radio project, he emphasized the deal had been *
purely commercial. His answer that the German directors were “businessmen
and are not in the government of Germany’ was accurate but one was Goering’s
personal representative and the other a major funder of the Nazis.
Birkett concluded the BU was under German influence. Mosley’s statement
asking his followers ‘to do nothing to injure our country or to help any other
power’ was ‘the strangest message to give the supporters of an intensely
patriotic organisation’. The need to make it showed that the BU was not
patriotic at all. The Committee concluded Mosley had been frank with it when
it suited his purpose and evasive when he wished to cover up his actions. Even
so, the hearing was more ritualistic than judicial; it had no intention of
setting Mosley free. Committeé secretary Jenifer Williams was anti-Fascist and
delighted at Mosley’s detention but came to feel ‘it had not been necessary,
even considering the desperate situation of Britain’. She had seen at first hand
the violence at Mosley’s meetings but believed that as many detainees had
fought in the first war, they had been attracted to the BU in a simple-minded
way in order to prevent another war.
Mosley claimed Birkett withdrew the allegation of sepade He had, how-
ever, been responding to Mosley’s reference to his time in the Foreign Office.
‘I do not think that anybody in their wildest statements said that you were
anything approaching a traitor in those days.’ Mosley replied, ‘Thank you
very much.’ But Birkett added that he did not have to be a traitor to be
detained, and so an order did not imply the detainee was one. He was willing
to concede he had been interned for having ‘advocated a negotiated peace’.
The ultra secret Security Executive was exposed by the Herald as ‘our secret
weapon against the fifth column’. The ‘mystery committee’ was hard at work
in a big ‘hush-hush’ job but would be ‘discriminating in their snooping’.
The revelation provoked a parliamentary storm but further information was
‘refused in the Public Interest’. The Committee’s William Crocker wrote in his
autobiography, ‘Like the Ghost in Hamlet, I also “am forbid to tell the secrets
of my prison-house”’.’
The Committee recommended sending BU leaders to Latchmere House,
Ham Common, to obtain information about links to the Fifth Column. A
former mental hospital, Camp 002 was opened as an interrogation centre
under pressure from Swinton, Ball and Crocker. Its head was Colonel ‘Tin-Eye’
Stephens, an authoritarian oddball. On his return from India to England in
1933, he was attached to the courts at Lincoln’s Inn, where he met Crocker.
He undertook a mysterious role during the Italian—Abyssinian crisis and in
 PRISONER NUMBER 2202 519

1939 joined MIS. Twenty-seven BU ‘subversives’ arrived at Ham on 27 July

and were subjected to interrogations devised by Dr Harold Dearden, another
friend of Crocker, who belonged to the Bath Club, popular with intelligence
officers. In his history of Ham, Stephens skates over this period, except to
mention a few ‘treacherous . . . shabby nonentities’.
Detainees were placed on starvation rations and kept isolated with little
sleep in cells that were lit twenty-four hours a day. They were moved around
and either told of their impending release or of firing parties and hangings.
Guards intimidated internees and committed them to punishment cells for
minor offences. Portrayed as kindly, Stephens was also considered ‘an extremely
unpleasant and sadist interrogator’. Domvile’s son Compton said his memory
‘began to deteriorate. Certain periods of my life completely disappeared from
my mind.’ The resident doctor told Compton the treatment was ‘intended to
produce a state of “mental atrophy and unreserved loquacity”’’. Little was
learnt from the interrogations.
The authorities did not subject Mosley to Latchmere, which in fact was not
an official place of detention, though a list of detainees was kept by the Home
Office’s Jenifer Williams, one of the few officials allowed to know anything
about it. When Mosley heard what was going on, he began legal proceedings
and ‘the whole grisly charade quickly came to an end’. Dearden’s techniques
were refined and used during Britain’s post-war counter-insurgency cam-
paigns, and were the basis of the illegal methods used in Northern Ireland in
the early seventies.
Mosley was involved in a libel case concerning his own prison conditions.
The Sunday Pictorial claimed on 4 August that Brixton’s ‘Number One Guest’
was living a life of luxury. ‘Every morning his paid batman delivers three
newspapers at the door of his master’s cell. After his midday meal he fortifies
himself with alternative bottles of red and white wine . . . He calls occasionally
for a bottle of champagne. He selects a different smartly cut lounge suit every
week. His’shirts and silk underwear are laundered in Mayfair.’ It was untrue
but the authorities decided the detainees should be treated as remand prisoners.
Gerald Hamilton admitted they were generally ‘well treated. We weren’t
locked up in cells or anything. The cells were unlocked in the morning and
they weren’t locked up until you went to bed at night.’ But ‘all everybody
thought about’, recalled Hamilton, ‘was when on earth could they get out’.
Diana spent the libel damages on a fur coat. When she saw her husband in
court, she was shocked by his appearance. He had grown a beard and his
phlebitis was recurring.
It became clear to the Security Executive there was no Fifth Column. German
radio propaganda claims that parachutists and enemy agents were fomenting
such activity were a myth. Even MIS was ‘very much inclined to doubt’
whether it existed. Swinton suggested as much to the US State Department’s
520 BLACKSHIRT

Harvey Klemmer, who was studying Britain’s handling of the problem. Swin-
ton put his colleague in contact with MIS’s recently retired deputy Sir Eric
Holt-Wilson. Mowrer’s report to Washington on 1 August claimed ‘there is
now no organized effort to assist the Germans here. He believes that most of
the disloyal elements have been pretty well squelched. He does feel, however,
that, were the Germans to come in, some thousands of people ... would
rediscover their Fascist sympathies and team up with the invaders.’ MIS were
convinced the BU received funds from Germany. ‘Investigators maintain that
the BU spent money at a rate that could not possibly be accounted for by the
Party’s meagre contributions (members paid but a few pennies a week). It is
claimed that the money spent by the BU fell off to practically nothing the
moment war was declared and it was not possible to communicate with
Germany.”
On 15 August Churchill told the Commons he had always thought the Fifth
Column danger was ‘exaggerated’ and was satisfied it had been ‘reduced to its
proper proportions’. MI5’s ‘Black Book of British Fascism’ conceded there
was no evidence the BU was engaged in ‘sabotage or espionage on behalf of
the enemy’. Aikin-Sneath concluded that some members ‘had joined without
any realization that its policy involved disloyalty’, but ‘most were imbued
with the leadership conception and were prepared to follow the leader blindly’.
In September Hitler postponed his invasion plan until the spring of 1941.

The occupant of cell number 23 of F3 wing of Holloway, prisoner number

5433, presented a problem to the authorities since she had never been a BU
member. On 2 October Diana appeared before the Advisory Committee,
regretting she had not prepared ‘a devastating indictment of the unprincipled
politicians and their disgraceful behaviour’. She felt helpless in the face of
‘rumour, gossip, spite and lying tongues’. MIS claimed she acted as ‘a channel
of communication’ between Mosley and the German leaders; that she had
carried on with BU activities; and that she had ‘publicly and privately given
expression to pro-fascist and pro-German sentiments’. She was classed an
‘extremely dangerous and sinister young woman’.
When they broke for lunch one member sent Diana a bottle of claret.
She returned in ‘a belligerent and unrepentant mood’, admitting to Fascist
sympathies, friendship with Hitler, liking Himmler and admiring the Nazi
regime. She denied her governess’s claims but agreed ‘up to a point’ with
Hitler’s treatment of the Jews: ‘I am not fond of Jews.’ Birkett was interested
in the marriage in Germany attended by Hitler as it illustrated in the clearest
terms the intimacy which existed between the Mosleys and the Nazi leaders.
Diana considered his questions silly. ‘This friend of yours is now bombing
London!’ She replied that ‘since Britain had declared war on Germany and
we had bombed Berlin it was rather obvious that the Germans would
 PRISONER NUMBER 2202 521

bomb London’. Britain had been ‘dying for a war’. She accused Birkett of
being hostile but she, in turn, was hostile towards him. When he asked if she
‘would displace the present form of government with a fascist regime’, she
replied, ‘Yes.’
Birkett informed the Home Office’s Sir Alexander Maxwell on 4 October
that ‘it would be quite impossible, having regard to her expressed attitude and
her past activities with the leaders of Nazi Germany, to allow her to remain
at liberty in these critical days’. The Committee felt ‘the views of Hitler on the
British statesmen have been to some extent coloured by the views put forward
by Lady Mosley’. There was no problem in Diana’s children being allowed to
see their mother in Holloway but a meeting with Mosley would set a precedent.
The decision to prosecute Tyler Kent had been delayed to allow Knight to
complete his investigation of the Right Club, which he believed was ‘not only
a secret society but a revolutionary society’. Ramsay would ‘welcome a civil
war with shots in the streets and Mrs Ramsay is talking of getting her husband
out of prison with bombs when the revolution starts. She is deriving keen
pleasure from the anticipation of seeing the staff of the Home Office swinging
from the lamp posts.’ She expected Hitler ‘would leave Great Britain as a
protectorate with Ramsay as a ruler’. He sued the New York Times on
25 August for claiming he ‘sent to the German legation in Dublin treasonable
information given him by Tyler Kent’. Justice Atkinson awarded damages of
one farthing but declared ‘he was disloyal in heart and soul to our King, our
Government, and our people . . . the expression “Fifth Columnist”’ applied to
Captain Ramsay beyond question.’ A charge of conspiracy was dropped for
being ‘too. complicated’. Kent went for trial because the Americans wanted
him muzzled and a secret trial provided the mechanism.
On 23 October the trials of Kent and Anna Wolkoff began at the Central
Criminal Court. She was charged with intending to assist the enemy by
attempting to send a coded letter to William Joyce. ‘At one point’, Field
_ Security Police Officer Malcolm Muggeridge observed, ‘a whole contingent of
internees were summoned from the Isle of Man ... distraught women in
battered fur coats, blond hair whitening and dishevelled, make-up running;
men in tweed jackets to their knees, leather-patched, frayed club ties, suede
shoes’. A bearded Mosley spoke ‘with the vibrant voice of a wronged man
who asked only to be allowed to join his regiment in the battle line to fight
for King and Country’. Wolkoff claimed the letter had been planted on her to
incriminate her, and that, in turn, she had given it to Helene de Munck in
order to incriminate her. Wolkoff was pro-Nazi and would have assisted the
Germans in the interests of anti-Semitism, but she was the victim of entrap-
ment; her conviction rested largely on technical issues.
The prosecution admitted no conspiracy existed between Kent and Wolkoff
but it convinced the court she was a foreign agent - in a limited sense of the term
 522 BLACKSHIRT

—and that he broke the Official Secrets Act. It had no evidence that she passed
on secret information. In the end, she was convicted as a result of an agent
provocateur, who provided the means of communicating with Germany. Kent
was found guilty and sentenced to seven years, and remained incommunicado
for the remainder of the war.
Morrison, who took over as Home Secretary in October, was sympathetic
to MI5’s hardline approach. On 12 October the PM told his private secretary
John Colville how ‘much he disliked locking people up and the suspension of
Habeas Corpus’. In any case, ‘those filthy Communists’ were ‘really more
dangerous than the fascists’. During November the Security Executive decided
detentions should only continue where there were reasons other than office
in, or membership of, the BU. Morrison admitted to the Cabinet that ‘we
could now afford to take a rather less stringent line’. In the Commons Stokes
demanded the release of people imprisoned through ‘tittle-tattle’. He said ‘it
was quite insufferable that people should be locked up for an indefinite period
and not be allowed to have even an open trial’. Mosley should either be
tried or released. Morrison dismissed such arguments as those of ‘classic
Liberalism’, which were inappropriate in wartime.
Over 60 per cent of the 18B internees were released by the end of 1940.
. Churchill asked Morrison on 22 December to improve the conditions of those
detained, including allowing husbands and wives to visit each other. Public
danger had justified an action ‘so utterly at variance with all the fundamental
principles of British liberty’, but ‘that danger is now receding’. Arrangements
were made for Mosley to visit Holloway once a month to see Diana.
Old friends such as Robert Boothby, James Maxton and Harold Nicolson,
‘in another courageous act of friendship’, visited Mosley. When Boothby’s
visit became known, ‘his enemies were abusive; others were impressed’.
Mosley spent the time railing against the unfairness of his incarceration. It
turned into a public meeting with Mosley ‘as the speaker — no, the orator —
and Mr Boothby the audience’. On a pre-arranged signal Boothby blew his
nose and the governor ended the ordeal. Maxton’s visit led to a row on the
ILP national council. ‘God’s truth, Jimmy, how could you lower yourself —
especially to visit that bastard Mosley?’ said one member. ‘No other person
in the party’, wrote John McGovern, ‘would have got away with it so easily,
but his personal popularity allowed him to ride the storm.’
Mosley refused to see Nicolson because of a broadcast he made, which
Diana said was ‘silly and dishonest’. She blamed it on the ‘Communist spy’
and BBC producer Guy Burgess, with whom he shared a flat. It did not bother
Mosley that as a junior Minister working on propaganda in the Ministry of
Information, Nicolson displayed ‘great moral courage in acknowledging the
tie of friendship with a man assumed by many to be a traitor’. Also visiting
was Burgess’s fellow spy Anthony Blunt, employed by Rothschild in MIS.
 PRISONER NUMBER 2202 523

The reason for the visit by Blunt, whose mother was related to the Mosleys,
is unknown. During spring 1941 Mosley visited Diana, accompanied by the
‘delightful and clever’ Domvile, who saw his own wife. Mosley was experiencing
symptoms of phlebitis but it had not yet spread.
This was the time of Churchill’s worst political peril with military disasters
in North Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East. There was much criticism
of him, which Oliver Harvey, Secretary to the Foreign Secretary, noted on
18 April was led by ‘remnants of the Chamberlainites’, who used the failures
as a ‘dishonest cloak of defeatism — at the end of that road lies Lloyd George,
who would readily be a Pétain to us, with the support of the Press Barons and
City Magnates’.
Spywriter ‘Richard Deacon’ (aka Patrick McCormick), who worked with
Jan Fleming in Naval Intelligence, claimed MI6 infiltrated groups proposing
peace negotiations with the aim of using them for deception purposes. ‘Even
former sympathisers with Germany among the ranks of ex-fascists and right-
wingers who had now come to see the menace of Hitlerism allowed their
names to be lent to this kind of false encouragement to the Nazis.’ Was Fuller
one? Does this explain why Fuller was not arrested?
Fuller refused to commit himself as to the result of the war and believed ‘it
would have been better for Europe and ourselves had we come to terms with
Hitler’. The war ‘is just a vast Bedlam with Churchill as its glamour boy: a
kind of mad hatter, who one day appears as a cow puncher and the next as
an Air Commodore ... to many the war is a Hollywood show’. He did,
however, keep his intelligence ties. In early 1941 he met with MI6 Chief
Menzies and had lunch with ‘Blunt’.
In April 1941, in response to a letter to the Duke of Hamilton from Albrecht
Haushofer, who was acting on behalf of Hess in requesting a meeting for talks
‘somewhere on the outskirts of Europe’, MIS approached the successor to the
Duke of Buccleuch as Steward to the King, with a view to using him in a
deception operation. According to MI5’s ‘Tar’ Robinson, head of the double-
cross section, the ‘slow-witted’ Hamilton belonged to the peace party but now
believed ‘the only thing the country can do is to fight to the finish’. He helped
with an MI6 ‘sting’ operation to extract information from Haushofer. Deacon
claimed Fleming established an ‘underground’ Link with cells in Lisbon,
Tangier and Berne and agents posing as pro-Nazis. It had ‘influential members
which could pave the way to a negotiated peace and the overthrow of the
Churchill government’.
MI6 was also busy in Madrid tracking down a former BU member spying for
the Germans. Counter-espionage head Kenneth Benton knew of an intercepted
radio message sent from Ast Hamburg to Abwehr Madrid, ‘giving details of
a new agent, being trained and equipped for his spying mission in England’.
The BU member ‘had been in danger of arrest and had fled, early in the war,
 524 BLACKSHIRT

to Germany, hoping to get work in anti-British propaganda’. He may be the

unidentifed man who accompanied Joyce to Berlin shortly before war was
declared. Hamburg decided it was ‘too risky to let him use his British passport,
even with false personal details and photograph, and he had been given a
“false-false” passport with a real but altered photograph and a new name’.
The agent, ready for dispatch to Spain en route for England, had been trained
to construct a radio transmitter and possessed a list of British Fascist contacts.
Benton learnt that he was booked on a flight from Lisbon to England. What
happened to this BU man is unknown — was he turned and used for deception
purposes like the other spies?
On the day of Hess’s arrival on 10 May, the ‘suspect’ Duke of Bedford
wrote to a friend suggesting Lloyd George should make a stand for a negotiated
peace, as ‘the one man who could save the country’. The situation changed
with Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941 when Hitler aimed to ‘crush
Soviet Russia in a swift campaign’. Churchill proclaimed that ‘any man or
state who fights on against Nazism will have our aid . . . It follows, therefore,
that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people.’ In
private he assumed ‘Russia will assuredly be defeated’. Hitler expected Britain
would then sue for peace. Deception schemes continued. On 22 October Fuller
. met with Brendan Bracken of the Ministry of Information and the War Office’s
‘Colonel Drew’, a deception specialist.
At the Peel Camp on the Isle of Man, detainees were ditto political
meetings, elections and newspapers. Initially, those at the Ascot Camp were
demoralized and blamed Mosley for their arrest. Others blamed the public
and ‘hoped Germany would give them a good hiding. Some said they would
only see British Union put into power by Hitler; could only visualize being
ultimately released by the men in grey green uniforms.’ Most ‘would resist
such a step with their lives’. Discipline was reimposed by Charlie Watts, who
formed the ‘Hail Mosley’ and ‘F’em all Association’. As Simpson notes, ‘There
is absolutely nothing to equal persecution for consolidating ideological belief.’
Churchill was approached via his wife, Clementine, on behalf of Diana, to
see if the Mosleys could be imprisoned together. On 23 September 1941
Baba dined with the PM, David Margesson and Halifax. Churchill ‘saw no
disadvantages in putting the couples together but Herbert Morrison will be
the stumbling block. He is hard, narrow-minded and far from human about
a matter like this, and in this case he has a special dislike of Tom.’ When Baba
said it was awful to see Mosley in prison, the PM agreed but warned ‘it may
be for years and years’. On 15 November he told Morrison he would ‘not be
prepared to support the regulation indefinitely if it is administered in such an
onerous manner’. The Home Secretary was reluctant to do anything on ‘secur-
ity and political grounds’, but was willing to release Lady Domvile and transfer
the others, except the Mosleys, to married accommodation on the Isle of Man.
 PRISONER NUMBER 2202 525

Morrison had not wanted to transfer Mosley in case it hardened Fascist

attitudes. Celebrations of almost a religious character took place on Mosley’s
birthday on 16 November. Clement Hill recalled 200 BU members toasting
the Leader. ‘As the cans were raised, a rustle of curtains turned our gaze in
the direction of the stage and a portrait of the Leader came into view ... No
picture, sketch or photograph has ever brought a more spontaneous burst of
cheering than that which echoed and re-echoed throughout the building that
night.’
Watts channelled the enthusiasm into reconstituting the BU under his leader-
ship with the aim of keeping alive ‘the Spirit of BRITAIN FIRST’. MIS was
increasingly concerned that Fascism appeared to be reviving. In October 1941
the British Union of Freemen was caught producing anti-Semitic leaflets adver-
tising the New British Broadcasting Station. The Constitutional Research
Association and the People’s Common Law Parliament acted as stalking horses
for Fascists. The former’s leading spirit was Major Harry Edmonds, formerly
of the British People’s Party and the National Socialist League. Involved with
the German Zeppelin company, he founded the Wagner Society after meeting
the Wagner family. He was, John Beckett recalled, ‘always concerned with
much more than musical appreciation’. Edmonds knew Major-General Fuller
and was on the Suspect List. On 20 November General Sir Alan Brooke,
C.-in-C. Home Forces, talked with the Director of Security about Fuller’s Nazi
activities but dismissed the idea that he had ‘unpatriotic intentions’. However,
the blots on his copybook were, as his biographer suggests, ‘more than faint
smudges’.
MI5’s F3 section monitored Fascist, pacifist and nationalist groups, pro-
Germans and defeatists. It found the new groups used anti-Semitism and even
opposition to an extension of bureaucracy to attract recruits. They were weak
financially and numerically, but George Orwell noted the many pockets of
anti-Semitism, which was ‘not violent but pronounced enough to be dis-
quieting. The Jews are supposed to dodge military service, to be the worst
offenders on the Black Market etc. I have heard this kind of talk even from
country people who had probably never seen a Jew in their lives.’ Hitler
claimed in his ‘Secret Book’ that the struggle between Aryans and Jews in
Britain was ‘undecided’ and in. November told confidants he expected an
outbreak of anti-Semitism on an ‘unparalleled’ scale.
On 24 November Morrison agreed to the transfer of couples to married
quarters. A medical report persuaded him Mosley might catch pneumonia if
he spent the winter in Brixton and the last thing he wanted was to turn him into
a martyr. It was announced that the Mosleys would be housed in Holloway. On
21 December they were given a flat in the detention wing and permitted to
employ prisoners as servants. Alexander and Max were allowed to stay for
two nights. For Diana, ‘one of the happiest days of my life was spent in prison’.
 526 BLACKSHIRT

They had a floor consisting of a dining room, double bedroom and a communal
kitchen. It was referred to as ‘Lady Mosley’s Suite’. Their neighbour Major
de Laessoe was, Diana recalled, an ‘admirable person who had won the MC
and the DSO in the first war — brave, intelligent and very kind’. She had been
suffering from diarrhoea, when the Major ‘fished in the trunk which contained
all their worldly possessions and gave me an opium pill, which he said always
did the trick. I passed into a deep coma for four or five days. One would have
felt so awful for the poor major if one had died — he’d have felt such guilt. But
it cured me.’
Confinement tested the Mosley marriage but it had an unexpected outcome.
It was, Anne de Courcy notes, ‘the first time Diana had been the sole focus of
Mosley’s attention, with neither his political work nor other women to distract
him’. They were both ‘so personally fastidious that they had until then never
so much as shared a bathroom’. Diana overcame the irritations and found
Mosley was ‘a superb companion, amusing, appreciative of the smallest plea-
sures, laughing at the absurditits which abound in all institutions, brilliant,
loving, even-tempered and unselfish’. Prison welded them together.

Hitler believed in early 1942 that Germany’s position in this ‘racial war’ was
. stronger. Policy on Britain was co-ordinated by the England Komitee, whose
chief, Fritz Hesse, was Ribbentrop’s personal liaison to Hitler. The committee
included Franz Six, earmarked to oversee Britain in the event of an invasion,
Hitler’s interpreter Paul Schmidt, Karl von Loesch and Dr Roderich Dietze of
the Reich radio service and a friend of William Joyce. Erich Hetzler worked
at the Bureau Concordia on radio propaganda and had liaised in London with
Dr Roesel, compiling ‘White Lists’ of potential collaborators.
On 13 January Hitler predicted to Bormann that Churchill would fall but
‘they have in reserve men like Mosley. When I think that Mosley and more
than 9,000 of his supporters — including some belonging to the best families
— are in prison because they didn’t want this war!’ He suggested to Himmler
that ‘if Samuel Hoare were to come to power ... all he’d have to do would
be to set free the Fascists. The English have to settle certain social problems
which are ripe to be settled . . Mosley would have had no difficulty in solving
the problem, by finding a compromise between Conservatism and Socialism,
by opening the road to the masses but without depriving the elite of their
rights.’ On 26 February he reiterated his belief that if the masses made ‘a
bloody revolution’, the only thing left to the Conservatives ‘would be to make
an alliance with the 9,000 supporters of Mosley. They’d need a Cromwell to
save them, a Premier who would take everything into his own hands.’
The England Committee believed the Mosleyites were in a strong position
‘because many of the English are turning away from [Sir Stafford] Cripps
and fear Bolshevism’. There was a good opportunity for them to develop
—_——
PRISONER NUMBER 2202 527

propaganda, which could be ‘spread among the English who live in Switzer-
land, France, Spain and Portugal’. They intended to use Mosley’s former
aide-de-camp Dr Tester. With a Gestapo agent, he had set up a myriad of
front companies in Italy, the Balkans, Turkey and Egypt, whose purpose, the
British Foreign Office discovered, was to eliminate Britain’s economic interests
in those areas. In Athens at the time of the German occupation in 1941, Tester
worked for Abwehr Counter-Intelligence in Bucharest, dealing with allied
intelligence. He was later assigned to ‘work’ on the case of Major Chastelain,
a US officer parachuted into Romania to offer peace terms to the Romanian
government. When the Iron Guard attempted its putsch in 1941, the SD forces
sent to assist were housed in Tester’s estate in Deva.
The Abwehr’s von Rohrschiedt considered Tester ‘a solid man, who spoke
openly, didn’t lie, highly intelligent, a convinced national-socialist, who
believed in the final victory’. He was ‘one of those unfortunate men caught
between their two nationalities’. He made money by providing visas for rich
Romanian Jews. Tester was skilled in propaganda operations and during April
1941 suggested broadcasting talks based around Mosley’s ‘English Revol-
ution’ and the British defeats in Europe and Africa. ‘It was necessary to put
the plutocrats on trial, Mosley should be freed and named as Prime Minister.’
Tester’s articles outlining his relationship with Mosley and the BU’s view
of National Socialism and anti-Semitism were collated into a book, Quo Vadis
England, which the Nazis considered ‘excellent propaganda material’. It was
read by Mussolini who tried to recruit him as a propagandist. German
ambassador von Killinger was against it since it was Tester who had turned
Mosley away from Italian Fascism towards National Socialism. In June 1942
he arrived in Berlin, where, to the Abwehr’s fury, the Gestapo arrested him
for fraud. Joyce was wary of a rival and claimed Tester, whom he knew in the
BU, was a ‘British agent’. The Abwehr insisted the accusations were ‘pure
invention’ and the Foreign Ministry stepped in and announced Tester was
‘under our protection’.
Tester told Paul Schmidt of plans for broadcasts from a transmitter in
Bucharest, designed ‘to win over foreign peoples to the new order under
German orientation’. Tester wanted to create an alternative British govern-
ment, the ‘Revolutionary Committee of the British Union’. The project would
be run from Berlin under Foreign Office and the English Committee control.
He proposed the Revolutionary Committee ‘declare that it take over the
running of the fascist party for as long as the leaders are imprisoned in
England’. Mosleyites could be ‘found amongst British prisoners-of-war and
they will be prepared to take part in propaganda against the British govern-
ment and to work with the Revolutionary Committee’. Tester hoped it would
lead to ‘the formation of cells in various parts of the Empire, especially in
South Africa. This could lead to the formation of revolutionary committees
528 BLACKSHIRT

even in England.’ Schmidt believed Tester was ‘the man to lead this propaganda
action’.
On 18 June 1942 it was agreed in principle to recognize the Revolutionary
Committee and to seek BU members in PoW camps. Berlin would compile _
a list of members and broadcasts would start of ‘Mosley’s Revolutionary |
Committee Calling Britain’. It would seek the downfall of Churchill and
his replacement by Mosley who would negotiate peace with Germany. The
programmes would be ‘in a fight directed not against the English people but
against the Churchill government and the plutocrats, slaves of the Jews’. They
would be repeated from Rome and leaflets would be distributed among PoWs
and released over Egypt, in Libya to Montgomery’s troops and even in
England. :
Hesse was cautious and said that if he had been informed Tester was in
Berlin he ‘could have got somewhere with him. Now too late.’ Ribbentrop
vetted the proposals but after ‘higher consultation’ (i.e. Hitler) it was ‘decided
Mosley must not be endangered. Must save him for later.’ Therefore, Tester’s
‘proposals cannot be carried out’ in Romania ‘where we have no control over
the activities of this dark and not quite reliable man’, though there was the
possibility of forming a Revolutionary Committee ‘in areas under our control’.
The idea was sidelined and revived in a different form at the end of the year.
The potential fate of traitors was vividly illustrated by the Special Operations
Executive’s uncovering of an infiltrator in France during 1942. Agent
‘Blanchet’ claimed to have penetrated SOE on behalf of Mosley’s BU. French
agent Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was ordered by MI6’s éminence grise,
Claude Dansey, to kill ‘Blanchet’ after he admitted betraying a Paris cell and
operating a ‘double-cross’ radio source for the Abwehr. The assassination
turned into an ordeal. Fourcade ordered her people to administer a lethal
cyanide pill but when the poison failed to kill, she told them ‘to get him on to
a boat and drown him’. The moon, however, proved to be too bright and in
the end he was taken out and shot. ‘We offered to bring a priest to him,’
Fourcade recalled, ‘but he refused.’
Mosley pressed for the right to defend himself in court and wrote to
Churchill that it was ‘wrong that our fellow-countrymen should be given any
occasion to think that we have done something disloyal to our country’. He
wanted to be able to defend himself ‘before the whole nation from any such
suggestion.’ The Cabinet refused him the opportunity.
Increasing numbers of detainees were released — 150 were still interned —
and many were eager to renew political activity. Through visits from sup-
porters such as the Elams and via smuggled-out letters, Mosley retained control
over BU members, who wanted to set up an organization which, besides
collecting funds to aid released detainees, would fight by-elections on a negoti-
ated peace line with a ‘dummy’ leader, who could be replaced by Mosley at a
 PRISONER NUMBER 2202 529

suitable moment. As a tactic, Mosley insisted it be non-political and as widely

based as possible. Of particular importance in these plans was the Patriot,
whose circulation was less than 5,000 but ‘it reached a wide audience in social
clubs and among the forces’. Its offices were a meeting point for anti-Semites
and ex-18B detainees.
Set up in August 1942 with funds from the Duke of Bedford, Edward
Godfrey’s British National Party (BNP), which demanded a negotiated settle-
alates
ela
ment with Hitler, was seen as a revival of the BU. Godfrey, who had served
under Domvile in the navy, was a former BU member but denied being a
Fascist, preferring the title ‘English nationalist’. He was supported by Captain
Bernard Acworth of Truth and the Patriot, and the League of Ex-Servicemen,
which helped the BU candidate at Leeds in 1940 and was at the forefront of
the Fascist revival.
The Patriot helped form in September a charity, the 18B Detainees Aid
Fund, and the 18B Publicity Council, run by George Dunlop, a BU speaker in
Limehouse. Hoped-for support from Osbert Sitwell, Henry Williamson and
Hugh Ross Williamson failed to materialize and, apart from Francis Yeats-
Brown, was limited to ex-18Bs and the Patriot, though Nora Elam was able
‘to re-apply the tactics she had used during suffragette days when she had
agitated for the release of her fellow dissidents’. Mosley’s solicitor, Oswald
Hickson, warned that these groups were ‘spending a tremendous amount of
money’. Mosley had contributed £1,000 (£20,000) and Bedford £1,500.
The 18B groups were used, as Morrison feared, ‘as a nucleus for a political
party until the ban on the BU is raised’. Yeats-Brown wrote on 1 December
to Henry Williamson, ‘So we aren’t all sheep, and we still want to hear of
British Union!’ The first public meeting organized by Acworth on 6 December
at Holborn Hall was a reunion for ex-detainees. Mosley hoped new leaders
would emerge who would pave the way for his return. After his release, Charlie
Watts created a network of ex-BU internees and circulated an underground
newspaper, the Flame. There were plans for a secret organization based on a
cell system. Out of the ‘ostracism, ridicule, hate, persecution and punishment’,
Blackshirts would fight so that ‘the new Greater Britain may arise, a new
Phoenix, under our children’s hands’. Fascist slogans reappeared in London,
including the painting by Watts’s colleague Arthur Beavan of ‘P. J.’ on the
Lenin memorial.
It was, Morrison told MPs in early 1943, # mistake to believe Mosley’s
Fascism was a ‘weak and pallid affair compared with the European variety’.
He was ‘not sure there would have been anything soft or gentle if Sir Oswald
Mosley had become the Hitler of Great Britain’. He reported there had been
attempts to revive the BU. At an 18B meeting in Westminster on 17 March,
500 people heard opposition to Churchill, Russia and the war effort. This was
mingled with cries of ‘Mosley a hero’ and ‘filthy Jews’. The popular outcry
530 BLACKSHIRT

against such public meetings led to the closure of the BNP. It reappeared in
April 1943 as the English National Association and acted as a clearing house
for those wanting to revive the BU. However, within the revived groups
many were suspicious of those not interned, who were seen as suspect agents _
provocateurs or MIS agents. Even the 18B Aid Fund was viewed with suspicion ;
and Special Branch reported on petty jealousies between rivals bidding to
attract the Leader’s eye. Their mutual dislike of each other and fear of MIS
produced few problems for the authorities.
The England Committee’s Paul Schmidt befriended the traitor, John Amery,
wayward son of the Secretary of State for India Leo Amery. Captured in
France, he joined the circle around the Front Generation socialist turned
Fascist Jacques Doriot, and collaborationist leader Marcel Déat. Schmidt saw
Amery as an ideal vehicle for propaganda but was unaware of his Jewish
background. His father, author of the Balfour Declaration proclaiming British
support for a Jewish homeland, hid the fact that his own mother, Elisabeth
Leitner, was Jewish.
When Amery arrived in Berlin in September 1942 he met Joyce, who
resolved, as he had with Tester, to sabotage his position with the Nazis. In
turn, Amery thought Joyce’s broadcasts were counter-productive. He told
Hesse it was ‘insane to carry on as they did calling the British “the enemy”
and so forth’. The feud dated back tothe time when Amery had been a visitor
to the Black House. Anti-Bolshevik, he told Hesse he was ‘not interested in a
German victory as such’ but wanted ‘a just peace where we could all get
together against the real enemies of civilisation’. Amery was run by Hesse’s
assistant Ziegveld, a student in England at the outbreak of the last war who
had been interned and was a founder member of the Link.
The war was now turning in the Allies’ favour and Hitler needed an accom-
modation with them before a second front was opened in the west, and gave
his consent to use Amery as a conduit for peace moves. On 19 November
1942 he repeated on the Reichsrundfunk’s English-language service the deal
offered two years previously: British acceptance of Germany’s position in
Europe in return for German non-interference in the Empire. ‘Between you
and peace stands only the Jew and his tool, namely the Bolshevik and American
Governments. I am saying that not as a defeatist but as a patriot whose
primary concern is the preservation of the British Empire.’ Hitler described
Amery as ‘by far the best propagandist to England that we have’.
On 28 December Hitler approved an Amery plan to recruit British PoWs for
‘an English legion’. ‘The only personnel who should come into the framework
should be former members of the English Fascist party or those with similar
ideology — also quality, not quantity.’ The SS Legion of St George would need
a platoon strength of thirty men before going into action. An anti-Bolshevik
legion ‘would have great propaganda value on the Eastern Front’ and a
57. Women clash with police in riots at a
ascist Rally, Bermondsey, 1937. Violence
erupted as 15,000 anti-fascists tried to stop
the 4,000 fascists lead by Mosley

58. The BUF’s chief philosopher and 59. A BUF pamphlet ‘Defenders of
propagandist, Alexander Raven Thomson democracy’ with photographs of ‘typical
specimens snapped at Red demonstrations
in London’
 61. Diana Mosley was the main channel o f
communication between her husband and Hitler

60. Diana photographed by Mosley,

1937

62. The former chief

engineer of the BBC,
Peter Eckersley, was
employed by Mosley to
front his radio project
 ‘ee
gl Hilaeg J i i ih tesf

63. In 1936 the Mosleys rented Wootton Lodge in Staffordshire. It was convenient for
Mosley who held many meetings in the Midlands and North of England

64. Diana, seen here relaxing with her husband,

step-daughter Vivien and sister Deborah (the
Duchess of Devonshire) at Wootton

(Right) 65. Mosley returned to

recuperate at Wootton after a
violent meeting in Liverpool on
to October 1937 where he was
hit on the head by a metal object
 66. With the looming threat of war, Mosley’s peace campaign began to attract large
crowds of pro-fascist supporters. A British Union meeting in Bermondsey, south-east
London, May Day 1938

67. On the eve of the war, Mosley held at Earls Court his last major meeting,
reputedly the largest ever political indoor meeting. It was the epitome of Fascist
spectacle with marching bands and banners in the Nazi-style
 68. No photograph was believed to
exist of the mysterious James
McGuirk Hughes (aka P.G. Taylor) 69. Escaping the clutches of the
but one finally surfaced in 2005 British authorities was Mosley’s
courtesy of his daughter adviser, Dr Albert Tester

70. Mosley’s military

adviser Major-General
J.EC. Fuller was one of
f the few foreigners to
be invited to Hitler’s
birthday celebrations
in 1939

71. Fuller was

protected by Field
Marshal Ironside,
Chief of the
Imperial General
Staff (1939-40) seen
here with Churchill
 72. Mosley was reluctantly released in
November 1943 by Home Secretary Herbert a E ae “y B
Morrison because ofillness 73. Mosley and Diana lived under near
house arrest at the Shaven Crown hotel
in Oxfordshire

74. In 1946 Mosley bought a house and farm with 1,000 acres at Crowood, near
Ramsbury, Wiltshire. Diana and Mosley seen here with their two sons,
Alexander and Max
 75 and 76. Mosley returned to street politics in May 1948 with the formation of the
Union Movement

77. Mosley seen here with his main officials

and supporters in the UM, Jeffrey Hamm,
Commandant Mary Allen, Raven Thomson,
Victor Burgess and Tommy Moran
78. A key collaborator was former South
African Defence Minister, Oswald Pirow,
with whom he constructed the
apartheid-minded Euro-Africa policy
*

79. Mosley’s rival in influencing

the post-war neo-Nazi
networks was a young and
deranged American lawyer at
the Nuremberg War trials,
Francis Parker Yockey
80. Exiling himself to Europe and Ireland for much of the fifties, Mosley returned to
the fray following the outbreak of the Notting Hill riots

81. The Mosleys visited Venice with their sons

In 1954

(Right) 82. Max seen here

with his mother in August
1962, leaving Old Street
Magistrates Court, after a
hearing held into
disturbances in Dalston
 PRISONER NUMBER 2202 531
‘devastating effect’ on British domestic opinion. The operation was set in train
without the unpredictable Amery. When Rheinhardt Spitzy saw him at the
Foreign Press Club, he was ‘absolutely paralytic and incapable of conducting
a conversation’. He was ‘plagued by increasingly dark depressions and saw
no way out for himself’.
John Brown was one PoW the England Committee hoped to attract. A
Royal Artillery sergeant captured on the way to Dunkirk, he had been a
manager at Truman’s Brewery in Surrey and was the most senior BU member
to fall into German hands. BU colleagues said he had been ‘fond of a rough-
house on the streets of Whitechapel and Bethnal Green against the hated Reds
and of course their Jewish co-conspirators’. In fact, he was a ‘self-made spy’,
who learnt the codes to communicate with London from an agent of MI6’s
escape and evasion organization MI9. British Intelligence learnt from him in
February 1943 — the remnants of the German 6th Army had just surrendered
in Stalingrad — of plans for a ‘British anti-Bolshevik Legion’.
In April, Amery launched his book England Faces Europe. In a poor mental
state and drunk, on the 8th he mistakenly gave his wife, who requested a
headache pill, a poison ampoule which he carried with him to ensure a quick
death in the event of being abducted. When the following morning he tried to
rouse her she was dead. On 21 April he entered St Denis PoW camp on behalf
of a ‘committee in England’ and appealed to Britons ‘to answer this call to
arms in defence of our homes . . . against Asiatic and Jewish bestiality. Within
the limits of military possibilities, the Legion of St George will fight at the
junction of the German and Finnish troops.’ He found no support but in Paris
told Antonia Hunt, a Briton detained by the SS, that ‘when the Germans win
the war, we will have the Duke of Windsor as King of occupied England’.
An alternative government would be used to enhance peace elements within
England.
The England Committee did recruit twenty pro-Germans (PGs) who refused
to be imprisoned alongside Jews and regarded Windsor as their king and
Mosley as their Leader. They were led by Thomas Cooper, whose mother was
German. Working for a firm of oil importers in the East End, he joined the
BU’s Hammersmith branch in 1938. John Brown became Cooper’s assistant
and sent the information he collected via coded Red Cross letters to London.
e Sec-
Also recruited was Roy Courlander of New Zealand’s 2771 Intelligenc
the Germans
tion, who had seen at first hand the defeat on Grete and believed
would win the war.
the
Arrested at the end of the war, Courlander made a statement detailing
Hitler had told the England
Nazi blueprint for Britain presented to them.
counten-
Committee that if the British legion achieved 5,000 recruits, he would
British Governme nt’ based on British
ance the formation of a ‘provisional
Channel Islands. The Duke of Windsor would be
territory — the German-held
532 BLACKSHIRT

held in reserve for when the provisional government moved to London. In

autumn 1943 Hitler said that ‘after final victory, we must effect a reconcili-
ation. Only the King must go — in his place the Duke of Windsor. With him
we will make a permanent treaty of friendship instead of a peace treaty.’ The _
designated SD commander of Britain would be Franz Six, with Mosley acting .
as PM. Lost in this fantasy world, Amery saw himself as the future foreign
minister.
Amery told Courlander an anti-Jewish committee in England had offered
£300,000 to fund the Legion. He cited Domvile, Fuller, the Duke of Hamilton
and persons associated with the Link, the Anglo-German Fellowship, the Right
Club, the ‘Cliveden set’ and other pre-war pro-German groups. Few picked
up on Courlander’s fantastical revelations. What is interesting is the similarity
of the committee to Haushofer’s view of the ‘peace party’. Was Amery a victim
of the British deception operation sprung in 1941?
Following a German Foreign Office directive, in September 1943 the British
Legion was placed in the hands of Waffen-SS recruiter Gottlob Berger. He
had ‘no great belief in this unit’ but within three months the SS possessed a
British Free Corps (BFC), largely made up of former BU personnel. ‘In our
barracks’, wrote Alfred Minchin, ‘we had a photograph of the Duke of Wind-
sor, whom we all admired as he was also a rebel. We all recognised him as the
King of England.’ The BFC never fought on the Eastern Front, though Cooper
boasted ‘he had taken part in atrocities against the Jews’. After the war these
renegades were tried and imprisoned.
Excluded from the BFC, Amery travelled to Vichy France and met with BU
member Mariette Smart. Daughter of a German mother, she worked as an
interpreter in interrogations and accompanied the Gestapo on arrests of Jews,
whose deportation she directed. She delighted in betraying her French neigh-
bours and after the war was arrested and sentenced to death by a Court in
Cannes. Smart had been recruited as an Abwebhr agent for missions in Switzer-
land and Italy, where she met Theodore Schurch, the BU member working for
the Italians. When Mussolini was ousted and Italy changed sides in September
1943, Schurch was handed over to the Abwehr as a ‘going concern’ for
operations in southern France and northern Italy. Captured in Rome in April
1945 while on a mission to report on Vatican attitudes towards the Allies, he
claimed to be Swiss and his defence lawyer pleaded he had been misled by
Fascists at home. ‘Many more illustrious people than himself held these views,’
said Schurch. The court, however, was unmoved and condemned him to be
hanged.

During the hot summer of 1943 Diana recalled that she and Mosley stripped
off to sunbathe in the prison yard. A priest told a warden it was ‘like the
Garden of Eden out there — Lady Mosley in her little knickers’, Mosley could
 PRISONER NUMBER 2202 533

be ‘so naughty’, Diana remembered, in what was still a women’s prison. ‘He
does tease - he lies around sunbathing with all those poor girls all screaming
out of their windows.’ Nicholas, during periods of leave from his regiment,
and Vivien, who was working as a machine-tool operator in an armaments
factory, visited their father. In London their lives revolved round Aunt Irene,
who did relief work in the East End. She had moved in permanently to the
Dorchester, ‘a rallying-place for many of the influential and once-beautiful
people of the kind who had used to gravitate around’ the Mosleys and who
were now running the war.
Mosley felt closest to Nicholas and tried in letters ‘to show affection, and
to interest him in books and ideas which filled his own mind at that time’.
Mosley was forty-five and might have been expected to be reaching the peak
of his political life but it was ending prematurely in isolation. However, just
as with his period of convalescence in hospital during the First World War,
he used his forced confinement to educate himself and to reconsider his career
and the path he had chosen.
‘Plato’s requirement of withdrawal! from life for a considerable period of
study and reflection before entering on the final phase of action’, Mosley
wrote, ‘was fulfilled in my case, though not by my own volition.’ He set
himself the task of ‘learning to think and feel as a European’, with a philosophy
that went ‘beyond both fascism and democracy’ to a synthesis at a higher
level. There were numerous Germans in Brixton and by the time he joined
Diana in Holloway he knew enough to be able to read Goethe, Schiller and
Nietzsche, and was soon able to recite his favourite passages by heart and
quote extensively from Faust and Also Sprach Zarathustra.
Mosley was influenced by Nietzsche and Spengler but knew that behind
them ‘stood the shadowy but towering figure of Goethe, whom alone both
recognised as their master’. Faust made the most profound impression on him
—a book ‘transcending almost every other imaginative work’ — and he later
published an English translation with his own introduction. Faust rested upon
the premise that man was placed on earth for a definite purpose, to bring about
higher forms of life. Goethe, Mosley told Gerard Mignard, had overcome ‘the
age-old antithesis between man’s lower and higher self, between egoism and
altruism by showing how the lower is in fact an instrument of the higher’. He
denied identifying his own destiny with Faust, except ‘in the belief in always
striving’. He referred to Shaw’s reference: ‘perhaps in Nature that only things
survive if they are striving’. In this sense, life’s purpose is ‘the development of
the self in Achievement, as an artist in action and life, who creates, also, for
humanity’. ‘Whoever strives will be redeemed’ was the motto for his higher
form philosophy.
Diana said Mosley’s view of life was ‘dramatically influenced by Goethe’s
philosophy and his Hellenism, as well as his pantheism’. He initially explored
534 BLACKSHIRT

the Greek world through the writings of eighteenth-century German neo-

Hellenists such as Winckelmann, Wieland and Schiller. He read in translation
the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and his favourite, Euripides, and Plato
and Aristotle with their aristocratic philosophy of heroic pessimism. These ,
were for pleasure, recalled Diana. For work, despite his professed antipathy
to psychoanlysis, he read Freud, Jung and Adler.
Completion of his imagined synthesis of democracy and fascism required ‘a
healing synthesis’ — ‘a union of Hellenism, calm but radiant embrace of the
beauty and wonder of life with the Gothic impulse of new discoveries urging
men to reach beyond their present precarious balance’. With his tendency to
self-importance, he claimed his doctrine was derived from Euryclites and owed
much to sciences. ‘Modern statesmen should live and work with scientists as
the Medicis lived with the artists. This doctrine is a synthesis between Sciences
and Philosophy.’ He admitted his approach was ‘Lamarckian’. ‘Life is a steady
movement from simple to higher forms. From the simple amoeba, the primitive
organism, to where we stand today and furthermore in the future.’ He was
aware of giving offence by suggesting ‘a higher and a lower civilization can
exist in cultural achievement or even in Nature, but to follow that opinion to
its logical end, we have to affirm that Isaac Newton was in no way a higher
type than the inmate of a lunatic asylum’.
Mosley argued that if society retained ‘its evolutionary urge’ towards higher
forms, then a father figure was ‘necessary to break through the force of inertia’.
He hated puritanism, which ‘represses for the sake of repressing, particularly
in the Left’ — where ‘small souls are urged by their subconscious instinct to
hate the Father Figure of the man of action’. Dictatorship was wrong but
leadership was required.
Fascism had ‘too much paganism and not enough Christianity’. Assisting
the emergence of higher forms of life also served the purpose of God. Mosley
wrote in his composite of his wartime reading, The Alternative, that ‘no
mechanism of Society or of Government can function unless we can produce
more such men: they are the lights of humanity’. His synthesis of the ‘demo-
cratic camel and the fascist lion of Nietzsche’s Three Metamorphoses’ must
give way to something higher — the innocence and new beginning encapsulated
in the child. An old interned BU member claimed Mosley was already stating
that ‘the old fascism had gone and that we would have to unite Europe’.
Europe was that new beginning. At least, that was what Mosley would claim,
though when it came to action the vision looked much the same as the old. A
change was an emphasis on individual rights, which reflected his anger at
imprisonment without trial, but also a concession that Fascism had destroyed
such rights. :
 24
‘Lucifer Fallen’

In the summer of 1943 friends feared for Mosley’s well-being. Lady Redesdale
visited Mrs Churchill, who had been one of her bridesmaids, to ensure the
facts of his condition — the worsening of the congestion of the blood in his
lower limbs — were known to her husband. Clementine, however, infuriated
her by suggesting prison was at least protecting her family ‘from the fury of
mobs outside’. Mosley was seen by his physician, Dr Geoffrey Evans, and the
King’s doctor, Lord Dawson, who warned if there was no improvement in his
confinement — temperatures dropped to freezing point during the night — there
was a ‘substantial risk’ of the phlebitis ‘producing permanent danger to health
and even to life’. Based on their report, Mosley’s solicitor asked for his
detention order to be suspended.
The Home Office was not especially worried when Prison Medical Officer
Dr Jameson noted that the forty-six-year-old, six foot two inch Mosley
weighed only 157 pounds, though ‘the average weight for a man of his age
and height is 197 pounds’. This was blamed on ‘a mild anxiety state arising
from a deep sense of frustration and consequent depression’. This may have
been true. Mosley was an isolated figure; during August Admiral Domvile
and Robert Gordon-Canning were released, leaving few senior figures in
confinement, Jameson, however, did not support Dr Evans’s view that ‘con-
finement and isolation are breaking Sir Oswald’s nerve’, so the request to
suspend his order was refused.
Herbert Morrison criticized Mosley’s ‘class friends’, in particular ‘a fashion-
able lady ... “fluttering about” trying to use her influence in important
quarters’ on his behalf. Baba Metcalfe pressurized friends such as Walter
Monckton (who had secretly visited Mosley — the purpose of which remains
unknown) and Lord Halifax, ambassador in Washington, to appeal to the
Home Secretary to seek his release. On 4 September Halifax informed
his
Morrison that ‘a clot of blood that was in his leg has shifted up into
stomach . . . he might well die . . . and that if it happened it would be a scandal
and that nobody could defend it after warnings received’. Morrison suggested
that all Mosley needed was fresh air and exercise.
536 BLACKSHIRT

On 5 October Evans and Dawson re-examined Mosley and found his phleb-
itis was ‘clearly progressive’. Churchill asked for an update on the state of
health of Mosley, who wrote to the prison governor on 17 October, blaming
his condition on the failure to heat the annexe at Holloway during the winter .
of 1942-3, the long-term effects of imprisonment and worry about his wife’s .
health. Morrison again refused his release.
On 22 October Churchill told Manchester Guardian editor W. P. Crozier
that he worried about Mosley.
I think no good of him, but he’s been in prison all this time and he’s likely to die in
prison this winter, and he has never been accused and never tried — a frightful thing
to anyone concerned about English liberties. I did it because the country was in
danger of destruction and we could run no risk, we had to do it and we were right
to do it, but now the great emergency has passed and the necessity is no longer there.

As head of a coalition, Churchill was still constrained by the informal alliance

between the Labour Party and MIS. Diana decided they needed the PM’s
Private Secretary, Brendan Bracken, to get to ‘the big man’. On 3 November
Baba appealed for his help on Mosley. ‘There is no time to lose. In his present
condition he is a prey to flu or pneumonia and then, as his doctor said, nothing
can save him .. . Today he looked like a dying man to me.’
A conference on Mosley’s health on 9 November was attended by Dawson
and Evans, and doctors Mathieson (Governor of Holloway), Fenton (Brixton’s
doctor) and Methuen, the Medical Commissioner for prisons; all agreed it
would be wise to release him. The public, however, were resentful that people
less important than Mosley did not have such a galaxy of medical talent at
their disposal. Someone, discovering that it could cure phlebitis, sent a bottle
of rat poison to the Home Office.
Morrison faced a dilemma. To free Mosley would anger Labour supporters
but to keep him in prison would run the risk of elevating him into a martyr.
The danger, one MP said, was of Fascism becoming ‘a permanent factor in
the political issues of this country’. Nicholas was in Taranto, Italy. ‘Away
from my sophisticated friends of the Rifle Brigade, the name of Mosley sud-
denly became a difficulty .. . people to whom I had to introduce myself were
apt to say ~— “Not any relation of that bastard?”’ On 16 November he hoped
his father ‘never does anything rash politically again. It is terrible to think
how he bungled things earlier ... They are obviously still very frightened of
him . .. he is still a force to be reckoned with in the political world.’
Prison doctors recommended Mosley be released and on 17 November
Morrison informed the Cabinet he intended to do so on ‘humanitarian
grounds’. Minister of Labour Ernest Bevin, who loathed Morrison, said it
would ‘weaken morale’. Mosley, however, was no longer considered a danger
but news of his release heralded the biggest storm of Morrison’s career. He
 ‘LUCIFER FALLEN’ 537

was in trouble with his party and there was a risk he might have to resign. He
did, however, receive the support of Beaverbrook, who hailed him as a future
prime minister. While other newspapers hurled abuse, the Express gave
‘staunch support of his policy of freedom’. Told he could advocate Mosley’s
release, editor Christiansen mistakenly assumed he was equally entitled not to
do so. He recalled the ‘disastrous effect which support of Mosley had had on
¢ sales of the Mail in the 1930s’. Beaverbook was furious and only the pleadings
by managers saved Christiansen from dismissal. Against his will, Michael Foot
had to write a grudging article of endorsement.
Sackloads of letters arrived at the Home Office, protesting against the release
of the ‘Number One Traitor’. Home Intelligence reports noted a ‘storm of
indignation’ across the country. ‘A feeling lingers that Mosley represents in
this country all those things against which we are fighting.’ Working-class
comment was blunt: ‘Mosley is a traitor and a symbol of fascism.’ The Commu-
nist Party organized protests, especially in factories on war production, and
deputations of workers marched into Whitehall.
The CP’s Harry Pollitt warned on 20 November that Mosley’s release was
a ‘betrayal of the anti-Fascist war’ and had done more to harm national unity
‘than Goebbels could ever have hoped to achieve’. The Jewish Chronicle
asserted that ‘Morrison’s Folly’ raised doubts as to whether government
leaders were ‘really heart and soul in the war against the monstrosity Fascism’.
George Bernard Shaw, however, regarded their response as shameful. ‘Even if
Mosley were in rude health, it was high time to release him with apologies for
having let him frighten us into scrapping the Habeas Corpus Act .. . We have
produced the ridiculous situation in which we may buy Hitler’s Mein Kampf
in any bookshop in Britain, but may not buy ten lines written by Mosley. The
whole affair has become too silly for words.’ The Vélkischer Beobachter
claimed Mosley had been set free out of fear that he might die in gaol and
‘raise a tornado of popular indignation’.
- Mosley and his wife were released at 7 a.m. on the morning of Saturday
20 November. Press photographers were waiting outside the main gate but
the couple were taken out through Holloway’s murderess gate. Placed under
house arrest, Mosley had to report monthly to the police, undertake no
political activities, make no attempt to contact former followers and not travel
more than seven miles from his residence.
The Jacksons agreed to the Mosleys staying ‘with them at Rignell House
near Banbury. A well-known figure in government circles, Derek was employed
in secret work on ‘window’, the strips of metal paper which interfered with
enemy radar. He welcomed a ‘dead pale and frighteningly thin’ Mosley with
a feast. The press soon guessed their location and reporters besieged the house.
The Home Office then woke up to the fact that they were ‘living at the house of
a famous Air Ministry scientist who was privy to the most secret information’.
538 BLACKSHIRT

Mosley’s presence was considered risky and to forestall a question in the

Commons, Morrison telephoned Derek and said the couple must go elsewhere.
Derek swore at Morrison for ‘presuming to tell him whom he could or could
not receive in his house’. F
On 21 November the PM telegraphed Morrison from Cairo: ‘I HIGHLY.
APPROVE YOUR ACTIONS.’ Churchill had received a critical report on
MIS condemning the lack of ministerial control and its abuse of powers. He
was convinced 18B should be abolished, ‘as the national emergency no longer
justifies abrogation of individual rights of habeas corpus and trial by jury on
definite charges’. He added that ‘the power of the Executive to cast a man
into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly
to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is
the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist . . .
Extraordinary powers assumed by the Executive with the consent of Parlia-
ment in emergencies should be yielded up when and as the emergency declines.’
The Home Office vetoed circulation of his comments. Morrison was nervous
of the ‘shock to public opinion’ but the PM replied that ‘any unpopularity
you have incurred through correct and humane exercise of your functions will
be repaid in a few months by public respect’.
Morrison made a statement to MPs on 23 November and assured a packed
Commons that, although the government would continue to oppose the ‘evil
cancer’ of Fascism, Mosley no longer posed ‘any undue risk to national
security’. Chips Channon suggested arguments about Mosley’s release had
been ‘whipped up by Communists and Jewish elements’. A crowd of 2,000
people blocked the St Stephen’s entrance and were removed by police using
batons. The public lobby was crowded with ‘young factory workers indig-
nantly protesting at his release’. Morrison made a fighting speech, declaring
he would not ‘bow to the dictates of the mob. If you say I am to keep this
man in because I hate him or disagree with him but I am to let another man
out because I have sympathy with him, then the House must frame a law
under which that could be done.’ He said ‘the extraordinary powers of deten-
tion without trial must not be used except in so far as they are essential
for national security’. He was ‘not prepared to let anyone die in detention
unnecessarily’.
Press observers said it was ‘a great personal triumph’ with the heat taken
out of the issue. Channon, however, ‘rather enjoyed the ironical scene of the
Labour Party so enraged by the release of one of their ex-Ministers by a
Labour Home Secretary! Their indignation seemed great.’ He had known
Mosley but considered him ‘an unscrupulous but not unattractive fellow,
dominated by an urge for power and publicity’.
Mosley was the most detested man in Britain. On 23 November Durham
miners resolved to strike if he was not put back in jail. Hugh Dalton, who
 “LUCIFER FALLEN’ 539

‘hated Mosley worse than any other man in public life — and I don’t really
hate many of them’, wrote that the following day’s National Executive meeting
was ‘bloody awful!’. Ellen Wilkinson made ‘an impassioned defence, with
sobs in her throat, but it really isn’t very convincing, except to the purists for
civil liberty, who like to think that 18B is being administered leniently’. He
realized that Morrison ‘will get away with it after all’, despite having ‘made a
thorough mess of it’, after being advised by a ‘clever Australian Jew’. Dalton
~y¥
_ admitted he ‘would not have been at all sorry to let [Mosley] die, provided
there was not too sharp a comeback from anywhere that mattered. When so
-many millions are dying, including so many who are so worthwhile, it is
revolting to me that any step, however small, should have been taken to
prolong the life of this filthy blackguard, who was clearly marked out to be
Gauleiter of this country had the Huns got ashore.’
In a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle Diana’s sister Jessica complained
that the Mosleys’ release was ‘a slap in the face of anti-fascists in every country
and a direct betrayal of those who have died for the cause of anti-fascism.
They should be kept in jail, where they belong.’ Diana received letters from her
‘waggish sister’ sealed with stickers reading ‘Put MOSLEY back in GAOL’.
Although he had only been out a week, Lady Redesdale was able to tell Nancy
on 27 November that Mosley’s health was ‘already improved’. Morrison later
noted that ‘whatever doubts may persist about the medical advice on Mosley
— that gentleman’s survival into a healthy old age can hardly diminish them’.
On 28 November a huge crowd marched to Trafalgar Square demanding
Mosley’s reinternment. On the following day Harold Nicolson, at lunch at
the Ritz, told Liberal MP Violet Bonham-Carter he feared the affair had
‘widened the class breach’ providing ‘a nasty reminder of the prejudice and
passion of the proletariat’.
Ernest Bevin’s animosity towards Morrison boiled up and he threatened to
resign over Mosley. Morrison defended his action to a party meeting and an
official resolution, broadly supporting him, was passed, but only after a critical
amendment had been narrowly defeated. The Labour Party was, therefore,
split. Hannen Swaffer wrote in the People on 28 November that ‘it would be
almost a disaster to the working class cause if his decision over Mosley ended
the career of Morrison, the ablest and most outspoken of all the Socialist
leaders’. Two days later Churchill’s doctor Lord Moran recorded the PM
saying that ‘the government may go over Mosley. Bevin is kicking.’ On the
eve of a Commons debate, Bracken wrote to Bevin that the PM regarded him
as ‘a rock of strength’. His resignation ‘would add a great deal to [his] burdens
_.. It would indeed be an awful piece of irony if the contemptible Mosley
became the cause of splitting the only government which can see this country
through its perils and lay the foundation for a better England.’ Bevin withdrew
his threat.
540 BLACKSHIRT

In the debate on 1 December George Woods moved a resolution regretting

Mosley’s release as a decision ‘calculated to retard the war effort and lead to
misunderstanding at home and abroad’. Sydney Silverman claimed he had
seen the medical reports and none contained anything serious until
9 November, when high-level intervention persuaded the doctors to change,
their opinion. He called for the reports to be published. Morrison angrily
refused. Irene went to listen and was sickened by the venom of many MPs. In
the end the government was able easily to defeat the resolution, 327 to 62.
‘Morrison’s authority over Parliament is second only to that wielded by the
Prime Minister,’ claimed the Evening Standard. But in the country he was
continually heckled at meetings. Albert Worral at Vickers Manchester factory
shouted ‘Down with Mosley’ on a BBC Works Wonders programme but the
broadcast was cut off and he was sacked. During Question Time on
10 December Commander Locker-Lampson summed up the sentiments of
many when he told Morrison, ‘Mosley has got off, and so will Mussolini and
Hitler.’ Beaverbrook wrote to Sir Samuel Hoare that it had all been ‘a small
political comedy’. The
roles of hero and villain were both filled by Herbert Morrison. He played them with
equal vigour and aplomb, being cheered as hero from the stalls and hooted as villain
from the gallery. It is true that the comedy nearly turned into drama. This was
because another, and unauthorized, set of producers took a hand. Citrine mistook
the TUC for the Committee of Public Safety. And the Communist Party with its
genius for crowd scenes brought a series of well-disciplined processions into
Whitehall.

By Christmas, the TUC, NCCL and Labour’s NEC had dropped campaigns
to have Mosley reinterned.
Mosley was weak and desperately thin but newspapers were hostile. The
Daily Worker said he should be put back in prison because he was ‘in rude
and vigorous health’. Once it was realized Jackson was engaged on secret war
work, the Mosleys were made to leave. The house was surrounded at 3 a.m.
by police with dogs and the Mosleys were taken away to a disused hotel, the
Shaven Crown, in Shipton-under-Wychwood in the Cotswolds. They were
joined by Nanny Higgs, Alexander and Max. It was six miles from Swinbrook
and occasionally Unity would be driven over to see them. The siege by the
press continued. Fearing trouble, MI5’s Roger Hollis drew up a list of Commu-
nists living within thirty miles and Scotland Yard sent a detective called
Shipton to keep an eye on the Mosleys. He told them crime stories. The hotel’s
manager later showed visitors the rooms where the Mosleys had stayed. He
said there had been two attempts on their life by angry locals, and the scars
left by a hand grenade could still be seen on the front wall. It was the nearest
that Mosley came to action during the war.
 “LUCIFER FALLEN’ 541

Mosley decided to settle down as a country gentleman. With Savehay Farm

still requisitioned, he bought the ‘pretty, rather bourgeois’ Crux Easton, near
Newbury, with views of the Hampshire countryside for £3 5,000 (£735,000).
When his father was rector of the Georgian church, the inventor and aviator
Sir Geoffrey de Havilland spent his childhood there and, in the grounds of the
* estate, designed his first aircraft, the Tiger Moth, later flying it from nearby
Beacon Hill. With the opening of the Second Front in June 1944 the danger
_of invasion was past but the house arrest remained in force until the end of
the war. A policeman, Detective Sergeant Buswell, nicknamed by the children
“‘bugger-shit Buswell’, was assigned to keep an eye on Mosley but he was not
even billeted in the village.
Mosley’s health quickly improved and after six months he recovered much
of his old vigour. While Allied troops were fighting to free Europe, the Mosleys
walked a great deal in the local countryside. Diana’s brother Tom had been
fighting in North Africa and Italy, and returned to England in July 1944 to
the Staff College. Bill Deedes claimed Tom ‘did not share the political passions
of Unity, Jessica or Diana’. However, in a diary entry for 27 August 1944
James Lees-Milne recorded a conversation in which Tom affirmed that ‘all the
best Germans are Nazis and if I were a German I would be one’. Tom
visited the Mosleys and they discussed philosophy and politics. He had, Diana
recalled, ‘decided that the imminent invasion of Germany was something he
would prefer not to take part in’.
Prison affected Diana more deeply than her husband, though being reunited
with the four children was a huge boost. Mosley was not a demonstrative
father but loved to see Alexander and Max enjoying the countryside. He had
a big temper, which he kept under control but ‘just once or twice there was a
faint suggestion that it might be a good idea if people didn’t make too much
noise’ when he was reading. Nicholas visited when on leave — he had won a
Military Cross in the Italian campaign. His father wished him well on a career
as a novelist, though, Diana noted, ‘he did not go so far as to read his books’.
Diana organized things so that Mosley was happy. He had no visits from
friends — he had spurned or affronted most of them. He blamed Churchill
for the continuance of the war and regarded the entire Churchill family as
arch-enemies. Osbert Sitwell was one of the few to stay loyal. Diana’s friends
— John Betjeman, Robert Swann, Gerald Berners and Daisy Fellowes — often
came to stay. Mosley was, Diana said, ‘tremendofisly easy to talk to because
he was never condescending; I noticed exactly the same thing when he talked
to farm labourers. He might occasionally talk over our heads about philosophy
but even that was flattering as it assumed we were frightfully well-read.’ With
a low-boredom threshold, he loved fun and jokes.
Despite restrictions on political activity, Mosley was in contact with former
colleagues such as George Dunlop, the main force behind the 18B groups, and
542 BLACKSHIRT

Charlie Watts, who laid the basis for the Mosleyite revival. The Jewish Defence
Committee reported reunions among former BU detainees and anti-Semitic
street meetings. A fund-raising concert attended by 500 people was held at
the Kingsway Hall for the 18B Detainees Fund. The 18B Publicity Council,
staged a number of socials and dances, with up to 1,000 Fascists and their;
supporters in attendance. The 18B campaign was a link between the pre-war
BU and the new Fascist groups that would spring up after 1945. In considering
why the post-war Fascist revival happened so quickly, Douglas Hyde pointed
out that the Fascist groups never went out of existence. Most were feeble
enterprises with limited funds and only a few dozen members but they kept
alive a Fascist and anti-Semitic tradition. There were over fifty groups with
several thousand individual members. Hyde was visited by Special Branch
officers, who admitted they had ‘no worthwhile information on the neo-
fascists and neither had MIS’.
One such group was the National Front after Victory, which aimed to
co-ordinate the activities of anti-Jewish groups. It had been founded by A. K.
Chesterton who, after serving in East Africa and being invalided out of the
army in 1944, was appointed assistant editor of Truth. At an 18B Detainees
Aid Fund meeting an SB agent heard former BU member Mr Valeriani remark
that Mosley ‘had paid a lot of money for special medical attention to AKC in
Germany, and they hoped they would get a return for their money’. They
were, however, disappointed. His estrangement from the Mosleyites was total.
The British League of Ex-Servicemen and Women, led by Jeffrey Hamm, an
ex-BU member and 18B detainee, was at the forefront of the Fascist revival.
Hamm had been detained in the Falkland Islands, where he was a school-
teacher, and then moved to a camp in South Africa. Returning to England in
1941, he volunteered for the Royal Tank Regiment, but was discharged,
detained and again put on restricted release in 1944. Hamm was typical of
those Fascists whose detention forged a bond of martyrdom and strengthened
their commitment to Mosley. He organized the League to defend the interests
of ex-service men returning home and to advance policies based on Mosley’s
writings.
On 5 November 1944 the League’s first meeting in Hyde Park was met by
a hostile crowd. Despite the stipulation that they refrain from political activity,
Hamm promoted the message ‘Britain for the British’, as well as Mosleyite
attacks on ‘international finance’. The crowd responded with ‘Here we go
again. Here’s where the Jew baiting begins.’ The identification of 18B as a
Jewish regulation was a constant feature of the propaganda. Hamm’s propa-
ganda director, Victor Burgess, confirmed the League was Fascist and that
those not ‘roo per cent British by race’ would be disqualified from voting.
The League came to represent the Fascist revival on the streets in violent
public meetings. George Dunlop was disturbed by its stance as it contradicted
 “‘LUCIFER FALLEN’ 543

Mosley’s instruction to emphasize its non-political status. This disagreement

eventually led to the first split in the post-18B world of British Fascism.
However, as the League’s activities intensified it became the main contributor
in terms of members to Mosley’s own crusade.
In the new year Mosley decided the most useful thing he could do would
be to farm. There was, however, no land at Crux Easton so in February 1945
he asked the Public Trustees Department, which had looked after Mosley’s
family business, to seek a suitable country estate. He bought unseen for
£35,293,161, a 1,100 acre farm and a Queen Anne house at Crowood, near
Ramsbury in Wiltshire; a few miles from Faringdon, stately home of Diana’s
old friend Lord Berners. Mosley planned to manage it by travelling to it each
day from Crux Easton but the government decided that he could not himself
employ labour and the estate was run by the Trust.
Diana received a telegram informing her that Tom, second in command of
the Devonshire Regiment, had been shot in Burma by a Japanese sniper. He
died of his wounds on 30 March 1945 aged thirty-six. ‘His loss’, Diana wrote,
‘was something from which I never recovered for the rest of my life.’ Shortly
afterwards James Lees-Milne was at the Redesdales’ when she unexpectedly
arrived, having not seen her father, who had snubbed her marriage to Mosley,
for seven years. Diana, who was still under house arrest, motored up in a
Daimler accompanied by policemen. Nancy recalled her sailing in ‘unabashed,
and at once, like the old Diana, held the stage and became the centre of them
all’. To her surprise, her father greeted her affectionately even when she
explained that ‘the Man Mosley’, who feared he would still be persona non
grata, was waiting in the car.
Osbert Sitwell wrote to Mosley on 15 April that ‘to have been unjustly
deprived, as you have been, of a period of time, is beyond bearing. The only
comfort for you must be that it is impossible to blame you for anything that
happened in those years.’ The war was nearing its end in Europe but Hitler
still clung to hopes of a ‘national awakening’ and a rise in anti-Semitism
among the young in England. Goebbels tried to dispel Hitler’s gloom by
reading extracts from the Fihrer’s favourite book: Carlyle’s Frederick the
Great. A passage described the moment in the Seven Years War when Frederick
was saved from disaster by a miracle. But there was to be no miracle and
Hitler’s path ‘led to the grave, to the final catastrophe which had long haunted
his mind, to the twilight of the gods’. Fascism*had begun with the march on
Rome in 1922 and ended in a Berlin bunker in 1945.
Three days before she killed her six children before taking a cyanide capsule
herself, Magda Goebbels wrote to her son that ‘our magnificent idea is finished
have
~ and with it everything beautiful, admirable, noble and good that I
known in my life. The world that will come after the Fiihrer and National
Socialism is not worth living in, and for that reason I have brought the children
544 BLACKSHIRT

here as well.’ Diana, who was fond of Magda, thought it ‘just too awful to
dwell on what she did, it makes one ill. She was caught up in a ghastly
situation.’ But she was ‘not sure that she was altogether wrong. The Russians
would have got the children and they’d have put them all in different labour _
camps where they would have a ghastly time. One can’t put a hand on one’s
heart and say one would have done differently. I think she was very brave.’
William Joyce made his last broadcast on 30 April. ‘Germany is sorely
wounded’, but her people ‘understand the European position with a clarity
which is, unfortunately, denied to the people of Britain, and they realize that
the great alternative lies between civilization and Bolshevisation’. It was a
theme central to Mosley’s thinking.

The day the Second World War ended the forty-one-year-old Mosley said to
Diana, ‘Fascism is dead. Now we must make Europe.’ She believed
everything turned out according to [his] predictions. He had always said that if
outside powers were drawn into ‘Europe’s quarrels they would end the war para-
mount in our continent. England counted for nothing at Yalta or at Potsdam. Russia,
with the compliance of ignorant America, drew new frontiers. With the enthusiastic
connivance of America the British Empire began to be liquidated ... Not only was
half Europe occupied by Russia and subjected to compulsory communism but
England was gradually shrunk from a great power to its present little measure.

Mosley was engaged in political plans for the future. He wrote to Nicholas on
11 May that he had been ‘suffering early stirrings of a book: what are the
pains of women in childbirth compared to such a moment!’
The remaining thirty-nine BU member internees, detained to near the end
because of their strong pro-Nazi sympathies, were released, including Audrey
Hepburn’s father Anthony Hepburn-Ruston, who disappeared to Ireland. The
massive wartime expansion of MIS5’s power troubled Churchill and MI6 Chief
Stewart Menzies, who expressed fears of a Gestapo. After VE Day, Churchill
ensured Regulation 18B was abolished by Order in Council, though he was
aware that Special Branch and MIS wanted to retain it permanently. For the
rest of his political life Churchill had ‘a jaundiced view of the Security Service’.
Colin Cross argued ‘British fascism ended in May 1940, and has not been
revived under that name’. Fascism was a phenomenon born out of the particu-
lar circumstances that arose from the catastrophe of the First World War.
History was not to repeat itself and the havoc that Fascism wreaked across
Europe, which revealed the black core of its ideology, ensured there would be
no significant post-Second World War revival. Racist, anti-Semitic and neo-
Nazi groupings would emerge for short periods, but none would offer a real
challenge to the State or construct a coherent Fascist ideology as strong as the
inter-war variant. However, that was not how it looked in spring 1945.
 “LUCIFER FALLEN’ 545

‘Staggering as it may seem,’ Douglas Hyde wrote in the Daily Worker on

5 May, ‘former Fascists are more active in Britain today than they have been
for the last five years. They play an active part in newly-created organisations
and old ones that are being resurrected.’ MIS decided Fascism was not ‘a
transient phenomenon. It goes back, for instance, to Hobbes and in its modern
form it has not been killed by the circumstances of the war.’ There were
‘British people of National Socialist mentality who looked upon Adolf Hitler
as a great and inspiring leader. They looked on the defeat of Germany as the
defeat of all their hopes. The problem of Fascism is therefore one which, as
far as can be foreseen, seems likely to engage the attention of the Security
Service in the coming peace as it did in the inter-war period, but in very
different circumstances.’ MIS expected Fascists to continue in Europe and
that, ‘as happened before the war, there will be continued association between
them and people of a similar mentality in this country’.
Mosley was keen to compare himself with Chatham and the younger Pitt,
who had been ‘proved right by events, and were able to stamp their influence
on British history’. He admitted that ‘directly the war was over and I was free
to move anywhere in Britain I began the organisation of a political movement’.
In fact, he began planning before the war was over. In prison he secretly
communicated with followers and following his release made meticulous plans
with George Dunlop for his comeback, which included putting up candidates,
who were not suspected of pro-Fascist or anti-Jewish sympathies, at the first
post-war general election. A key figure in these moves was an insurance agent,
Dick Sayer, an activist in the BU Central Hackney branch who helped Dunlop
raise money for the 18B Detainees Aid Fund.
Mosley covertly created a front of Independent Nationalists under the
slogan ‘Freedom, Equity and Authority’. His plans were known only to a few
but the Board of Deputies of British Jews had reactivated a pre-war agent,
former Special Branch Inspector Pavey. He reported on 2 June that Mosleyites
were ‘seething with revolt’ and threatened ‘to split into separate factions, each
formulating a policy of its own to be pursued with the reckless abandon of
men who say that, having lost everything, they have nothing now to lose’.
They despised milk and water policies and blamed ‘the Jews as the cause of
all the trouble’ but wondered ‘what was Mosley doing about it’.
A week later at the 18B Detainees Aid Fund committee George Dunlop -
supported by John Jones, Edward Conner and, Alfred Flockhart — spoke with
‘Mosley’s authority’ and admitted he had ‘run the “Fund” with a dual pur-
pose’. They had discussed with the Leader ‘many proposals and counter-
proposals, each designed to further the cause of the British Union. We worked
for the day when it would be possible to come out again into the open and
we hoped at the same time to be prepared for the inevitable general election
with many candidates to take the field.’ However, ‘several things have militated
546 BLACKSHIRT

against this course. Germany collapsed much earlier than we had anticipated.
Details of the policy on which we had been working leaked out with the result
that the press confused the minds of the people, heralding the Independent
Nationalists as the old British Union with a new name.’ Moreover, there _
had been a disappointing response. ‘Financially we are not embarrassed, but _
numerically we are.’ Mosley had spent £100,000 (£3.4m) of his own money
on the BU and his resources had been drained, but he had restored this amount
by speculating on the stock market and had the funds. The problem was that
‘we can do nothing without the support of the people — and here is where the
snag lies’.
Dunlop revealed that Mosley had written a book - ‘And what a book!’ —
and would come out into the open with its publication. ‘But in the meantime
our best men are clamouring for immediate action and immediate leadership.
If they don’t get it from Mosley they will appoint local leaders.’ In Stoke
Newington Mick Clarke had already opposed the idea of Independent Nation-
alists and wanted the BU ‘in name and character — or nothing’ to fight the
Jews. To Dunlop this was unacceptable. He would take a ‘six months holiday
from politics and await a leader. A National Leader will emerge as is the way
of leaders — they are not appointed. I intend to tell Mosley this.’
Dunlop hoped that after meeting with Mosley, a directive would be issued
revealing the whole scheme. A booklet was prepared, which was ‘the real
thing. When the boys see this booklet, together with ‘““Warnings to a Warrior”
(possibly the title of Mosley’s book!) they will sing a different tune. You have
to remember that they are not only Jew-wise, but politically minded. Never in
actual fact were they so keyed-up for action, or more conscious of the power
which would slip from their grasp with disunity.’ Dunlop explained to those
‘jealous of my position with the Leader’ that he had simply stepped into the
breach when others had been interned. He hoped they ‘would all respond to
the Leader’s call once he decides to make it’.
At a hurried meeting on 14 June of the 18B Detainees committee at his flat
in Dolphin Square, Mosley said ‘recent events had ... rendered obsolete
much of the painstaking work which had been prepared’. The sudden general
election had ‘placed them at a great disadvantage, and now they must wait’.
He intended to retire to the country and for twelve months would ‘write books
and breed cattle’, but would be back ‘at the appropriate time’. He then
departed, leaving Dunlop to speak with ‘brutal frankness’. It was ‘thanks to
some of you fellows’ that the project was ‘indefinitely suspended’. He had had
to tolerate Flockhart, Franklin, Spicer, who ‘all worked against me. The
movement was killed by publicity and innuendo, and by your blah-blahs and
petty jealousies, before it had a chance of survival.’ Dunlop said the Fund
would be wound up. There was no challenge to his sweeping denunciations.
 “LUCIFER FALLEN’ 547

The decision was confirmed on 27 June when Mosley told the Mirror he was
‘not interested in active politics. My only interests are books and farming.’
Despite Mosley’s absence, the Fascist revival continued, aided by the emerg-
ence of Zionist terrorism in Palestine as Jews, fleeing from a devastated Europe,
fought Arabs and British troops to create their own state. The British League
of Ex-Servicemen said its street meetings ‘were designed as protests against
terrorism in Palestine’. Working as a bookkeeper to a firm of milliners, Hamm
moved his meetings to the traditional Fascist stamping ground in East London,
with the aim of creating publicity. However, he was so depressed by Mosley’s
statement that he considered giving up and joining the Colonial Office. Mick
Clarke did give up. He could not find a job and was for a time, along with
other internees, employed by Mosley on his farm. ‘For the majority of fascist
internees,’ Thurlow notes, ‘their experiences in the Second World War termin-
ated their interest in extremist politics.’ For others the memory of internment
became the main driving force in their re-emergence. Richard Bellamy said
‘some ex-18Bers and other former Blackshirts, mostly ex-servicemen recently
demobilised, banded together, more with the object of forming an association
of old companions than for the promotion of political ideas’.
With the end of hostilities in Europe the National Front After Victory held
its first secret meeting in June as it sought contact among a spectrum of
organizations. Closest links were achieved with the Duke of Bedford’s
reformed British People’s Party (BPP), which included extremists such as
Aubrey Lees. Support was given to Hamm and John Beckett spread the message
among the disparate groups of the need for unity against Communism. It
attracted the interest of Lord Nuffield. Lord Vansittart suggested that what
was remarkable about it was the membership, which included Pepler of the
Weekly Review, H. T. Mills of the Patriot, Henry Williamson, Major-General
Fuller, Ben Greene, Lord Portsmouth (formerly Lord Sydenham) and Collin
Brooks, editor of Truth. An anti-Semitic nationalist movement in revisionist
clothing, it represented a cross-section of the anti-Semitic, but mainly non-
Mosleyite, radical Right.
The NF After V proved to be largely stillborn. Based on intelligence derived
from the BoD mole, Vansittart made a speech in the Lords condemning the
revival of Fascism and exposing the group as a Fascist front run by ex-
internees. In doing so, he effectively prevented a merger between it and the
BPP, the result of which was to destroy the organization. News that Chesterton
told members he had a letter from the Imperial Fascist League proposing the
creation of an armed underground movement, with strict discipline enforce-
able by death, added to the view that it was an extremist group.
At the July general election the Labour Party swept to power with a massive
majority and a mandate to ensure there was no return to the conditions and
548 BLACKSHIRT

mass unemployment of the thirties. Clement Attlee, the man who replaced
Mosley in the second Labour government, was Prime Minister of a government
that might have been headed by Mosley, had he stayed the course and not
resigned from the party in 1931. On election night John Warburton, a journal-
ist and BU member, was at Labour’s victory party at the Savoy Hotel. He
heard one of Aneurin Bevan’s ‘idolisers’ raise the question of Mosley. Bevan
said that ‘if we hadn’t forced Churchill to imprison Mosley — who knows what
he might have achieved? He was getting dangerous. People were beginning to
listen to him and agree. He might have forced a quick end to the war and
become the alternative force to capitalism. Now he’s discredited, but I warn
all of you — don’t rely on it. Mosley is a man who will never be finished.”

During August the Mosleys were still living temporarily at Crux Easton, where
one of the few visitors was Irene, who saw Diana for the first time since 1940.
Irene remained jealous of Baba, an emotion which to a large extent ruined the
latter part of her life. She sought psychiatric help, but it brought little relief.
In general, the Mosleys were ostracized and few people would meet the
notorious couple. [
‘This was a time’, Nicholas recalled, ‘when the worst stories of German
atrocities had not yet come out: there was not much news of the extermination
camps, which were in territory overrun by Russia: the news.was of Belsen and
Dachau, the horrors of which could just conceivably and to some extent be
explained by the disease and starvation resulting from the chaos and bombing
of the last stages of the war.’ George Bernard Shaw argued in his preface to
Geneva (1945) that any deaths were caused by ‘overcrowding and lack of
food’. The atrocities were the result of the ‘natural percentage of callous
toughs’ among the guards and occurred in every war. When the subject was
mentioned to Mosley, there was ‘just a flash from my father’s eyes: a guillotine
look from Diana’s bright blue ones’.
Diana said Hitler might have given the Jews ‘Morocco or some other
emptyish place. And then they would have been told “either go, or stay at
your own risk’’.’ David Herbert wrote that she possessed a degree of heart-
lessness that could find her saying of two friends: ‘They had such a lovely
evening last night, let’s put them in the gas oven today.’ When a difficult
question arose in conversation it was hard to pin her down. She would lower
her eyes and employ her charm to full effect. Diana told Anne de Courcy that
‘knowing about the Holocaust absolutely did not change my perspective of
Hitler. I don’t think of him as the man who did that, I think of him as the
man I knew, who wouldn’t have been capable of that.’
In September, with their release from house arrest, the Mosleys went to live
at Crowood House, where Nicholas spent most of the time getting in the
harvest. Within a year his father was the proud owner of the first combine
 “LUCIFER FALLEN’ 549

harvester in Wiltshire. He was proud, ‘as his grandfather had been, of his herd
of shorthorn cattle’. It was an idyllic time, even if Mosley was something of a
taboo figure and few locals came to shoot. Ironically, his gamekeeper was a
black West Indian, who organized pheasant and partridge shoots. He said
Mosley ‘was almost the only white Englishman he knew who did not seem to
notice his colour’. Friends nearby — Gerald Berners at Faringdon, Daisy Fel-
lowes, the daughter of a French duke and an American mother, at Donnington,
the Betjemans at Wantage — were guests at the weekend. Nicholas, however,
recognized that the couple were largely marooned. There was little serious
intellectual challenge to Mosley’s flights of oratory at the dinner table.
Mosley found it impossible to ignore the lure of the political stage. He kept
a watch on Hampstead, where in October a popular ‘anti-alien’ petition was
launched. Under the pretext of securing homes for returning ex-servicemen,
Jewish refugees were targeted. Headed by the local Conservative MP, Charles
Challen, the petition owed much to the extreme right-wing Fighting Fund for
Freedom, led by eccentric Tory MP Sir Waldron Smithers. The petition inter-
sected with a similar national campaign being waged by Allied Newspapers
against Jewish refugees. The campaign was led by the Britons’ Vigilantes Action
League (BVAL), run by former BU activist John Preen, who compiled lists of
Hampstead houses used by Jewish refugees. The BVAL was funded by Lord
Kemsley, who was advised by Henry Newnham, former editor of Truth. The
_anti-alien petition, with its emphasis on housing shortages, was ‘a local issue
that could be channelled into its assault on the Labour government and its
nationalisation programme’.
Although it is difficult to conceive of him rejoining the political mainstream,
according to Mosley, friends tried to attract him back into the Tory fold.
There was limited convergence around an anti-socialist/Communist and anti-
nationalization agenda. This had been signposted by Chesterton’s role in
the National Front After Victory and his employment by Beaverbrook and
Conservative Central Office, and the propaganda activities of the National
Citizens Union, which included Tories such as the Duke of Wellington and
veteran Fascists such as Sir Alliott Verdon Roe and Commandant Mary Allen.
Verbal support was given to the anti-nationalization campaign but Mosley’s
name was too controversial and his ego too big to be accommodated by
another’s campaign.
Under fierce opposition, the petition issue died down but its supporters
sought out allies unconcerned by adverse publicity. A meeting was arranged
between Conservative candidate Eleonora Tennant and Jeffrey Hamm of the
British League of Ex-Servicemen. For their 21 November meeting Hamm
removed a portrait of Mosley but he need not have worried as Tennant wanted
to go ‘all out against the Jew’, though she cautioned against using the word
Jew, preferring in public the term ‘alien’. Their relationship floundered but
550 BLACKSHIRT

Hamm realized Hampstead was ‘a good stamping ground’ for anti-Semitism.

Far from being put off by the violence of the petition issue, he saw it as ‘a
good advertisement’ as the East End was producing ‘lacklustre results’. Fascists
campaigned in Hampstead on a platform identical to that of the petitioners
with handbills declaring the area had been deluged by a ‘Flood of Alien Jewish
Immigrants’ who ‘live in mansions while you live in slums’. Mosley was
impressed by Hamm’s provocative campaigning.
On 1 December Mosley told the Sunday Pictorial he had not changed his
ideas ‘one inch. I do not retract anything that I have either said or stood for
in the past.’ Asked if he was a Fascist and National Socialist, he said, ‘Yes,
but you and I have always meant different things by those words.’ It was
claimed Mosley was planning a big comeback. On the same day Charlie Watts
promised former BU members that a new movement would soon be launched
but insisted they discard the ‘Heil Hitler Brigade’, so that ‘when British Union
is again reconstituted, we can start off with a decent, clean British organisation
to which the British people can give their full confidence’.
There was mass excitement among the 800 ex-Fascists and former detainees
when, on 16 December, Mosley made a comeback at a 18B reunion dinner at
the Royal Court Hotel. In a stage-managed entrance, he entered through a
backstage fire escape. According to the Daily Worker, hundreds of hands shot
up in the Fascist salute. They chanted ‘M-o-s-l-e-y, Mosley’ for nearly five
minutes. Outside, journalists were roughly handled by Fascist thugs, which
led to questions in Parliament.
Inside, Special Branch noted the measures taken to prevent the collection of
signatures for an appeal for the commutation of William Joyce’s death sen-
tence. Mosley was not prepared to provide the State with an excuse to suppress
his views. He said he ‘did not intend to start as the Leader of any named
political party’; his object was ‘to put his own particular thoughts and ideas
on paper so that they can be read and understood by whoever wishes to read
and understand them’. At the end of his speech, Mosley was ‘the centre of a
surging mob of hero-worshippers many of whom were on the edge of hysteria’.
The SB noted the religious veneration in which he was held by supporters.
Throughout the evening, the crowd pressed round him for a word or an
autograph from “The Leader’; some burst into tears after touching his clothes.
John Warburton recalled Raven Thomson ‘rubbing his hands, full of enthusi-
asm: “When do we start?”’.’ The proceedings finally broke up to the accom-
paniment of Fascist salutes and ‘Hail Mosley’ as fur-coated women and
elegantly dressed men, including Captain Archibald Ramsay of the Right Club
and Admiral Sir Barry Domvile of the Link, got into the long line of expensive
cars waiting outside.
Ramsay was one of the last to leave prison. Willie Gallacher MP asked
Morrison whether mothers, whose sons were at war, were to be informed
 “LUCIFER FALLEN’ 551
‘that their sacrifice has enabled him to-release this unspeakable blackguard’.
One of his last acts as a Member of Parliament was to table a Commons
motion calling for the reintroduction of the medieval Statute of Jewry. The
Daily Worker spoke of the ‘Streicher-like obsession’ of ‘Britain’s No. 1 Jew
baiter’. Ramsay soon left public life and spent his money funding Britons
Publishing with Arnold Leese.
Anna Wolkoff tried to mount an appeal and wanted McGuirk Hughes to
testify, but according to Lord Jowitt’s summary of the trial published in 19 54,
the man who had handed her the incriminating letter ‘was never identified
[and] could not be called as a witness’. Hughes is believed to have left for
South America on an intelligence assignment. Home Office files disclose that
Wolkoff, contrary to reports that said she had been killed in 1969, was still
alive in 1973. Tyler Kent’s release and return to the United States in 1945,
and a request for a transcript of his trial, created ripples within the British
State. It disturbed MIS since it risked exposing the identity of undercover
agents now active in the Communist Party. Harald Kurtz worked for the BBC
and then at the Nuremberg trials, where he recorded the dying words of Nazi
war criminals. The assignment ‘did not improve his drink habit’. After much
agonizing the transcript was released. Though not made public, Kent deposited
a copy in the Yale University Library.
Irene and Baba were distressed by Mosley’s appearance at the 18B event.
“Why cannot the man keep quiet?’ Having just defeated Nazism and Fascism,
they wondered why there should be any supporters left to listen to him,
‘especially when the meeting clashed with the announcement of the death
sentences for Lord Haw Haw and John Amery’. Following Mosley’s address,
Labour MPs, critical of the failure to act against domestic Fascism, questioned
Home Secretary Chuter Ede as to what he was going to do about this ‘strutting
peacock’.
In Cabinet, Ministers for Labour (Isaacs), Health (Bevan) and Fuel and
Power (Shinwell) wanted a ban on Fascism but were opposed by Chuter Ede,
who adopted the classic Home Office line that a ban would only drive it
underground and make it more difficult to control. He was guided by MIS
reports of growing divisions between Fascists, lack of impact and numerical
insignificance, and legal advice about the difficulties in defining Fascism. How-
ever, the Foreign Office argued that leaving Mosley free was bad for Britain’s
image in those countries where Fascism had taken root, which were seeking
to establish a democratic system. Public opinion in those countries would be
influenced by the attitude taken towards the re-emergence of Fascism. The
Cabinet did establish a Committee on Fascism, chaired by the Lord Chancellor
Lord Jowitt.
Gordon-Canning sent a telegram wishing the Mosleys the best for the new
year: ‘For you both the Oak survived the Gale.’ The last link with the old life
552 BLACKSHIRT

was severed on 1 January 1946 when Savehay Farm was sold for £25,499
(£530,000) followed by a sale of its furniture. Mosley was liquidating assets
and raising cash. The family jewels he had given Diana on marriage were now
returned and sold at auction. {
Douglas Hyde noted ‘a tremendous amount of coming and going in ex- _
fascist circles today. Former Mosleyites are being contacted and sounded as
to where they stand.’ They had ‘the leading cadres, the framework of a national
organisation, the basis of a rank-and-file of some thousands, a number of
friendly bookshops in existence with more planned, and the prospect of a flow
of new material from the proposed Mosley press’. The reappearance of Mosley
would be ‘quickly followed by mergers with a number of kindred organisa-
tions’. There were fifty Fascist, neo-Fascist and crypto-Fascist groups led by
‘would-be Fiihrers trying to cash in on the enforced inactivity of the big fascist
leaders’. The idea was to ‘create a multitude of small bodies whose importance
and numbers would appear to be too small to bother with but which in fact
would in time add up to something of some significartce’.
A major problem for Mosley’s ambitions was that the traitorous activities
of former followers were still fresh in the public’s mind. The National Council
for Civil Liberties published a ‘Roll of Honour’ listing ex-BU members who
had aided the enemy by committing radio treason, co-operating with German
or Italian intelligence, or joined the SS’s British Free Corps, such as Francis
McLardy, and Benson Freeman and Gerald Hewitt who worked in Goebbels’s
Propaganda Department. This included two (William Joyce and Theodore
Schurch) sentenced to death and two (Thomas Cooper and Roy Purdy) whose
death sentences were commuted. MIS listed ten BU members who infringed
the Defence Regulations. These ‘bad apples’ were acknowledged by Mosley,
who expelled members found guilty of dubious behaviour.
Joyce had been arrested by British troops and brought to London for trial
on a charge of treason. His trial was presided over by Justice Tucker who,
Joyce noted, had in the course of the Wolkoff trial ‘described me as a “traitor”.
But we are not making this significant fact a ground of appeal . . . Nonetheless,
it is reassuring to find that . . . old Ucker did not ‘approach the trial in a state
of what might be called, for lack of a better phrase, “mental virginity’.’
Gordon-Canning, who disappears from Who’s Who at this point, helped to
defray the legal costs. He achieved notoriety for purchasing a bust of Hitler
at the sale of the contents of the German embassy. He bought it ‘to prevent a
historical work of art falling into the hands of iconoclasts’. He told a reporter
that, like Christ, Hitler would come into his own again.
The hanging of Joyce at Wandsworth Prison on 3 January 1946 for treason
and, on the following day, at Pentonville of Schurch, created a public percep-
tion of Mosley also being guilty by association. Dr Margaret Vivian wrote to
fellow Mosleyite Robert Saunders that ‘we are covered with mud to such an
 “‘LUCIFER FALLEN’ 553
extent that I doubt whether we could ever be successful, and when the next
_ war comes, we might all end in jail’. Ralph Jebb told him, ‘If there was
anything to save I would risk that but there isn’t.’ Many thought the Fascists
had learnt nothing. Before long there were disturbances at meetings of the
League of Ex-Servicemen. When A. R. Hilliard, a member of its executive,
asked why the League devoted its energies to anti-Semitism, Hamm replied
that if they dropped it, the Communists would be entitled to say they had
defeated them. Writer Rebecca West correctly asserted that Hamm’s aim was
to lure Mosley back into politics, though she found it hard to believe he would
fall for this. It would be ‘indeed as if the proposition that Queen Anne is dead
were disputed by Queen Anne herself’.
The negative reaction to Fascist activity meant that Mosley was careful
about going public. Fascists were under stricter surveillance than in the 1930s
and he was hampered by the need to do nothing that would call into question
the legality of his actions. There was pressure from anti-Fascists, 5,000 of
whom rallied in Hyde Park against Hamm’s campaign in Hampstead. In
mid-January someone located the Mosleys’ flat and plastered ‘shit and things
on the door’. Diana responded to Nancy that ‘of course they think the busy
little housewife will clean it off, but really darling I can’t be bothered’. Mosley
was forced to write to the Home Office with details of private meetings in
order to seek police protection. The first serious conflict between Fascists and
Jewish anti-Fascists took place at Whitestone Pond, near Hampstead Heath,
in February.
According to Irish documents, during 1946 Mosley ‘expressed an intention
of coming to live in Ireland’, away from the press and State surveillance. Sean
Nunan at the Department of External Affairs recalled that after consultation
with the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, Mosley’s solicitor was told ‘that the
time was perhaps not opportune for him to take up permanent residence and
that he might delay his decision for some time until international tempers were
quieter’.
The Committee on Fascism’s report was accepted by the Cabinet, which
decided not to ban Fascism but agreed to keep it under surveillance. In April
Chuter Ede insisted the law was ‘fully adequate to enable action to be taken
against all really dangerous activities’. Mosley was having planning meetings
with Fuller and Raven Thomson, the only former colleague invited to stay at
Crowood, who acted as his personal liaison at the private meetings of his
re-emerging followers. Mosley was writing the main post-war explanation of
his ideas, The Alternative. When no publisher would print and distribute his
books, he formed his own publishling company.
In August Mosley’s My Answer appeared, with a 20,000-word foreword,
which defended his opposition to the war, and a reprint of 1938’s Tomorrow
We Live. His purpose was ‘to justify our position in the past’, not to ‘provide
554 BLACKSHIRT

a policy for the present or the future’. It was a past which he recognized
constituted a major barrier to future action. However, he was unwilling to
retract anything as he rebutted the allegations of treason, opportunism and
anti-Semitism. On the first page he used Lloyd George’s statement: ‘Is every _
man or politician who opposes a war during the progress of necessity a traitor?
If so, Chatham was a traitor and Burke and Fox especially and, in later times,
Cobden and Bright and even Mister Chamberlain, all these were traitors.’ He
delivered a scathing attack on the internment of BU members, signalling to
supporters that he had kept the faith. Booksellers refused to stock it.
Mosley’s potential audience was fragmented into ‘Book Clubs’ and the
‘Modern Thought’ groups, which had been set up to provide a forum to
discuss the Leader’s ideas and a means of recruiting a generation of respectable
Fascists. Those such as the Spengler Book Club in Winchester, the Phoenix
Book Club (Manchester, Bristol and Croydon) and the Corporate Club in
Oxford, were reminders of the main themes of the BU and had pronounced
links to the past. Thomson’s Club for Fascists in Chelsea claimed 500
members. Even these activities were carried out with difficulty and Mosley
failed to break the publicity boycott. Irate proprietors of halls cancelled meet-
ings of the Modern Thought groups when they learnt of the speaker’s identity.
Some meetings were planning cells organized by Raven Thomson. The Home
Office was aware from BoD mole Inspector Pavey that the long-term plan was
to amalgamate the Clubs with populist street corner groups in a ‘spontaneous’
demonstration to coax Mosley back. He was only ‘rumbled’ when Hamm fed
him false information about the location of the book clubs. His exposure,
however, made little difference, since the Home Office learnt that the response
to ‘all Mosley’s melodramatic comings and goings’ was ‘negligible’.
Following a complaint from Mosley after anti-Fascists attempted to disrupt
a book club, the Home Office instructed Metropolitan Police Commissioner
Sir Harold Scott that ‘if a group of Communists approached the place where
a private meeting of this “book club” was to be held with the obvious intention
of preventing or breaking it up they would constitute an unlawful assembly
and it would be the duty of the police to disperse them’. Further, ‘if they
succeeded in entering such a meeting and assault any of those taking part, the
police, if they are called in, should take the names of those concerned and, if
no proceedings are taken by the victims of the assault, should prosecute the
offenders’. Such instructions led anti-Fascists to accuse the authorities of
treating the Fascists with kid gloves while using the full range of powers
against them.
The government was under pressure from the foreign press over its perceived
failure to deal with Fascism. The Russians were angry that British Fascist
material was available in Germany. In September Piers Dixon, Private Secre-
tary to Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, wrote to the Home Office, advocating
 “LUCIFER FALLEN’ 555
laws against Fascists publishing material abroad. However, it decided against
stopping Mosley sending propaganda to aid resurgent German neo-Nazi
groups. The Home Office replied that ‘to tamper with the principle of freedom
of expression would weaken our position with democratic opinion abroad’
and that ‘to prohibit the publication of Fascist literature would have equally
serious disadvantages at home’. The Cabinet rejected withholding paper
from Fascist book publishers on the grounds that they would claim political
discrimination.
When it came to newsprint the situation was different. Diana wrote on
14 October to her father that Mosley wanted to start a newspaper. ‘Somebody
ought to have a crack at those unspeakable swine.’ His ambition, however,
was curtailed by the lack of a paper quota. Diana added that she often saw
‘the newsreel at the cinema and it makes me sick with rage and misery every
single time’. She found the Nuremberg trials and executions of Nazi war
criminals, over which her old acquaintance Norman Birkett was helping to
preside, ‘a cynical farce’.
Rudolf Hess’s behaviour during the trials exasperated his lawyers and
embarrassed his fellow-Nazis. He suffered, or pretended to suffer, from lost
memory — which he would then recover. He spoke of a mysterious revelation
— revealed to him in England — which he was going to make and, on 30 August
1946, tried to make it. However, he never completed his speech. Instead, he
determined in October that the full text should be sent secretly to the only
man who could be trusted to publish it. At the head of the forty-nine pages
he wrote, in English and German, ‘To be transmitted in the most secret way
to Sir Oswald Mosley in London. A very high gratification will be granted
later on.’ His testament never reached Mosley. It was intercepted by the
American deputy commandant. Eventually it came into the possession of the
Sunday Times, where it was assessed by former MIS officer Hugh Trevor-
Roper.
‘It proves’, wrote Trevor-Roper, ‘that Hitler was speaking conservatively
when he said that Hess was only half-sane.’ Hess wrote that his captors in
England determined to kill him by ‘unimaginable sufferings’. He did not
deny the atrocities in the concentration camps but ‘the SS must have been
bewitched’. In interpreting inter-war European history, he said all the troubles
were ‘deliberately fomented by the Jews who, by bewitching the statesmen
and peoples of Europe, engineered two world wars for the weakening of the
Nordic race’. This was why the Nuremberg trials were irrelevant: the real
authors of ‘crimes against humanity’ were not the defendants. His revelation
triumphantly unmasked them as ‘the Jews’.
Mosley had met Hess and the deputy Fiihrer had received regular reports
on the BU during the thirties. Why Hess should choose him as the recipient
of his testament is not clear. However, the mystery is deepened by a typed
556 BLACKSHIRT

wartime message on a scrap of paper found in the archives of the Wiener

Library. Undated and unsourced, the message reads: “Sir OM and Hess con-
ferred last week under the auspices of British Intelligence. Danton Walker in
the News.’ If true, it sounds as though Mosley was taken to see Hess while _
they were both in prison.
An indication of Mosley’s real intentions was the publication of his first
News Letter on 15 November 1946, edited by long-serving secretary George
Sutton. A monthly publication with a pseudo-academic approach to current
political problems, it ran for fifteen issues until December 1947. Mosley wrote
that it was ‘in the interest of America to have a partner rather than a pensioner.
It is in the interest of the world for a power to arise which can render hopeless
the Russian design for the subjection of Europe to communism. We shall
thus combine in an enduring union the undying tradition of Europe and the
profound revolution of modern science.’ Print unions disrupted printing of
the News Letter. It failed to reach beyond the converted but was a means of
keeping in touch with the book clubs.
Mosley suffered a setback when, in December, he was refused a new passport
on the grounds that it was undesirable he be allowed to travel abroad. There
was also a more mundane reason. Following his arrest, his passport was lost
in transit and the Home Office had no idea as to where it might be. Ex-
detainees could be stopped from going abroad under the New Emergency
Laws Act of 1946. The Lord Chancellor, disclosing the ban to the Lords on
12 December, explained that there was ‘a reasonable chance’ that Mosley
might make mischief abroad. ‘It is only too true that fascism and Nazism have
not been rooted out . . . They are dormant at this present time, but it is possible
that they might once more be fanned into flame. If I were a Jew living in
Europe today I could imagine that I should feel deeply annoyed at the visit to
the country where I was living of a man who had, rightly or wrongly, been
identified as being very anti-Jew in this country.’ Mosleyite street corner
speakers were spewing out a torrent of anti-Semitic abuse. Special Branch
reported that Victor Burgess of the Union of British Freedom had called for
Palestinian Jews to be publicly flogged.
Just before Christmas Mosley was given a ‘Welcome Home’ party by BU
members in an East End pub. Nicholas drove his father and Diana to ‘a street
corner rendezvous — they had arranged to be picked up by a guide — and then
suddenly there were two motor bikes in front of us and we were being escorted
through streets like VIPs’. When they reached the venue his father ‘became
urgent, with his chin up, striding’; the act took over. ‘People clapped and
cheered; as he walked between them from the door to the bar they . . . touched
the hem of his garment, they wanted to get some magic from him.’ He said
there was a ‘stirring again in England and in the world some of those things
we felt so deeply together. I have always regarded the East End as the birthplace
 “LUCIFER FALLEN’ 557
of those ideas . . . They did their best to throw us in gaols, into concentration
camps but they never shook the faith within us and they never will.’ Nicholas
feared he had ‘gone back like an old alcoholic to his old haunts!’
Cynthia Jebb, wife of the Foreign Office official, ran into the Mosleys at a
bookshop. ‘He had that look in his eye (they both had) that people no doubt
acquire when they are accustomed to being shunned —- a kind of studied
indifference. Both Oswald and Diana Mosley are evil characters, Lucifer fallen
from heaven, and he in particular has a sinister and almost hypnotic power.’
Mosley decided the time had come to use that power. The book clubs were
growing and the Cabinet agreed to grant him a paper licence. Diana admitted
a principal reason for his decision to resurrect the BU was ‘the steadfast loyalty
of his political companions who had suffered for their beliefs’. She claimed
‘his own dreams were shattered’. For former BU members there was, according
to John Warburton, ‘unfinished business’. In retrospect Michael Quill agreed
that Mosley ‘felt that he was being loyal to the members’. He ‘perhaps didn’t
want to come back but didn’t want to let us down. He didn’t think he would
get power again. Not in the serious political business.’
The starting point of Mosley’s thinking was the recurring notion that capi-
talism was on the verge of its final crisis. ‘We still live in an economic crisis
which threatens the life of Britain.’ The Jewish question, however, still loomed
large. Skidelsky argued Mosley encouraged anti-Semitism ‘to die away by
refusing to recognise a Jewish question [which] meant that anti-semites sought
other pastures’. That was true during 1944-6 when he attempted a more
respectable movement but the old antagonism was revived by events in
Palestine. During 1945-8 80,000 British troops policed the territory, where
338 British subjects were killed. Following bomb attacks on the King David
Hotel and the killing of two sergeants at Natanya, anti-Jewish outbursts
resurfaced in August 1947 after publicity given to the activities of Irgun Zvai
Leumi. Riots in Salford, Liverpool and Manchester, and smaller incidents
around the country, lasted a week. Police and Jewish sources agreed that
‘although fascist groups were willing to capitalise on the violence, they were
not generally the instigators of the disturbances.’
However, it helped feed their anti-Jewish campaign. A British League
speaker claimed Britain was being run by a ‘lying rotten Jewish dictatorship’.
On synagogues hostile scrawlings appeared: ‘Hang all the Jews’. BU-like
anti-Semitism seemed to be on the rise again. In the light of the Hampstead
experience, both Mosley and Hamm agreed upon this fact. Their tactics did
not change. The objective was to create publicity and hope to gain recruits by
stirring up trouble with rallies in sensitive areas where Jews lived. The aim
was ‘to create a sense of insecurity — necessary ingredients in any possible
fascist revival’. A colleague admitted that the anti-Semitism was overdone and
it ‘did attract some thuggish, anti-Jewish types, especially in the East End’.
558 BLACKSHIRT

Opposing the revival was the Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen (AJEX),

organized by Lionel Rose. Claiming to have 10,000 members, it attempted
to combine the politics of the Board of Deputies with the drive of Jewish
Communists. At street meetings ex-army speakers defended Zionism and the .
role of Jews in the war. The idea, notes David Renton, ‘was to put forward a d
positive message of religious toleration and thus to undermine anti-semitism
through education’. The militant 43 Group was quick to oppose the re-
emergence of Mosley’s henchmen, such as Jeffrey Hamm and Alf Flockhart.
At its peak it had 2,000 members, its own paper, On Guard, distributed
petitions and daubed anti-Fascist slogans on walls. Members — Doris Kaye,
James Cotter and Wendy Turner — infiltrated the book clubs and the British
League. By summer 1947 they uncovered Mosley’s plans to create a new
movement by linking together all the Fascist groups. The 43 Goup sent anti-
Fascist ex-paratroopers and commandos to heckle Fascist speakers and turn
over Fascist platforms in an effort ‘to physically out-violence the fascists’. The
resultant public order problems delayed the lifting of the embargo on political
marches, which had been renewed every three months since 1937.
The public was horrified to find Mosleyites parading on the streets and
wondered how this had happened. Douglas Hyde in the July edition of On
Guard explained that during the war ‘the fascist organisations never went out
of existence’. Mosleyites founded their greatest support within a narrow area
between Hackney and East London. The British League had its strongest
base in the area between Shoreditch and Bethnal Green, and around Dalston
Junction. ‘A thousand working class men and women cheered wildly and
hysterically as one fascist speaker after another paid homage to Mosley,’
reported the Sunday Pictorial on 17 August. Large crowds opposed Fascist
speakers, which often led to disturbances, which were broken up by mobile
police units. Starting in the summer, confrontations regularly took place
between Fascists and anti-Fascists at Ridley Road, in disturbances similar to
those of the pre-war years. Rebecca West, reporting on the phenomenon in
the Evening Standard, described a Communist street meeting broken up by
‘boys and girls between sixteen and twenty, adolescents who were children
during the war ... and now miss the excitement ... singing and shouting
about a Mosley whom none of them has ever seen’.
Anti-Fascists felt the Fascists were on an upward curve with ‘more outdoor
meetings at both regular and new pitches, while the many new faces at these
meetings confirmed ... the success of their recruitment drive’. The police
recorded twenty-two British League meetings in the first half of August, thirty
in the second. By concentrating their resources, the Fascists could bring
together 2,000-3,000 Mosleyites. The size of the meetings suggested there
might be as many as 6,000-7,000 people nationally who looked to Mosley
for leadership. This was, however, a serious overestimate: the same hardcore
 “LUCIFER FALLEN’ 559

Mosleyites were turning up to the meetings; apart from them, he had little or
no support. ;
Hackney Trades Council could mobilize 2,000 people for anti-Fascist
counter-demonstrations, which effectively closed down most Fascist meetings.
Hamm told his League executive he had contacted the Home Office to ask for
protection from the 43 Group, while Raven Thomson was alleged to have said
that ‘if we don’t find a way to finish off those bastards, they’ll do for us’. Mos-
leyites found it difficult to expand the support base. After one meeting a Fascist
told journalist Tom Pocock, ‘Don’t get us wrong. . . We only appeal to the “caff
boys” in these street meetings. It’s no good talking to them about policy.’
Speakers such as Hamm, Duke Pile, Mike Ryan and Jock Holliwell prepared
the way for Mosley’s return. Lionel Rose noted that the Fascist speakers were
‘brazenly’ pro-Mosley and anti-Semitic. The meetings were inevitably attended
by large numbers of police and plain-clothes (SB) officers who took shorthand
notes of the proceedings. However, few prosecutions followed. Interestingly,
he also noticed the presence of German PoWs in conversation with the
speakers. The Mosleys were visited at Crowood by ex-PoWs who had stayed
in the countryside as agricultural labourers. Thomson acted as the confidential
liaison with the Nazi and Wehrmacht PoWs, careful to avoid Security Service
surveillance of meetings.
MIS hoped a blow had been dealt to Mosley’s cause when in March,
following a trial at the Old Bailey, Arnold Leese and six Imperial Fascist
Leaguers were jailed for a year for helping two Dutch Waffen-SS soldiers
escape from Epsom Downs PoW camp. Gerhard Meijer and Hendrik Tiechen
made contact with Leese after reading his letter in the magazine John Bull.
They escaped in June 1946 and made for Leese’s Guildford home, where they
were passed down a line of ‘safe houses’ in the East End. Leese arranged for
them to see the Argentine chargé d’affaires to negotiate a passage. The fugitive
Dutchmen were eventually picked up by Special Branch in December and
deported to Holland. MIS found that the Mosleyites’ ‘reactions towards Leese
and company were uncompromisingly hostile. They have done great harm to
the Fascist cause.’
It did not, however, dissuade Mosley from using a PoW as his foreign
adviser. His ‘chief German collaborator’ was an officer who ‘had been strongly
opposed to the Nazi Party; he had then been a man of the army, and later of
agriculture, rather than of politics’. US Army Coynter-Intelligence files identify
him as Dr Alfred Franke-Gricksch who, the FBI found, belonged to the
Bruderschaft (Brotherhood), an elite underground society of ex-SS officers.
The Americans claimed Mosley was involved in its creation. He certainly
offered assistance and may have provided finance. Franke-Gricksch, a former
SS officer and the Bruderschaft’s chief ideologist, was an avid proponent of
the ‘Europe as a third force’ concept and influenced Mosley’s thinking.
560 BLACKSHIRT

Skidelsky acknowledged that Mosley’s thinking on Europe had its origins

in the kind of Fascist solidarity which led Joyce to Berlin and which had
thrown up collaborators all over Europe. As Roger Eatwell suggests, the
more intellectual Fascists had shown a greater tendency to some form of ©
Europeanism than insular nationalism. There was much in common with Nazi _
‘New Order’ propaganda and the attempt to shape the destiny of Europe was,
in however perverted a manifestation, seen as a form of European unity. This
manifested itself in the need to protect Europe from invasion by the Soviet
Union’s ‘Asiatic hordes’ and the international Communist Fifth Column.
Mosley’s ideas also developed out of his pre-war thinking. In The World
Alternative (1936) he advised: ‘We must return to the fundamental concept of
a European Nation which animated the war generation of 1918.’ The article
had impressed the Nazis, particularly the geopolitics hierarchy, including a
prominent Nazi ideologue of Scottish extraction known to Mosley, Colin
Ross, who had recommended the article for publication in Germany. In 1940,
in Paris, Ross lectured on ‘The Coming of a New Eutope Within the Frame-
work of a New World Order’. He argued that ‘the European peoples find
themselves obliged to constitute together a greater community. And thus the
first step to take henceforth is the creation of Europe.’
To propagate these ideas Le Groupe ‘Collaboration’ (Grouping of Energies
for European Unity) was founded in September 1940 by an aristocratic Hitler
admirer, Alphonse de Chateaubriand. Its members included not only Henrik
de Man and Marcel Déat but other Front Generation socialists who turned to
Fascism and reunited around the European ideal. Friedrich Grimm, in charge
of Nazi propaganda in France, called for a ‘new European order’ to combat
‘Jewish Bolshevism’. Le Groupe promoted Franco-German reconciliation,
European solidarity and sponsored the ‘Jeunesse de l’Europe Nouvelle’ (Youth
of the New Europe). Ross told them that he believed in ‘the New Europe,
which will be the great common Fatherland of the French and the Germans’.
Mosley’s ideas were foreshadowed in Déat’s proclamation of a community
of European nations ranged against the evils of Bolshevism and capitalism.
Hitler’s ‘Secret Book’ raised the spectre of a future conflict with the United
States — the epitome of capitalist decadence. Europe would have a socio-
economic as well as a geopolitical aspect, in a ‘third way’ vision of organiz-
ation, in which Italy would contribute through its exploitation of its African
colonies.
Axis defeats in 1943 only served to intensify Europeanism as the new order’s
last line of defence was entrusted to the younger generation ‘still chasing an
absurd mirage’. The last-stand Salo Republic was ‘to start its existence without
a history, and unburdened by all the errors of the previous regime’. When
British traitor John Amery travelled to Lake Garda, Mussolini said he had
made a mistake in compromising with the monarchy and in not carrying
 “LUCIFER FALLEN’ 561

through a ‘Social Republic’. The stress on Fascism’s ‘social’ aspect regarding

workers’ welfare impressed itself on Mosley’s thinking. On 14 November
1944 Mussolini proposed in the Verona programme ‘a European Community,
with a federation of all nations’ and the development of Africa’s natural
resources.
Mosleyite poet Ezra Pound hoped Salo would help construct ‘a world-wide
monetary system that is honest’. The ‘agreement between Mosley and the
Social Creditors arose from this knowledge, that is, that fascism was the only
movement ... of action, capable of putting into effect monetary justice’. He
recognized in a letter on 28 November 1944 that Fascism had been ill-served
by its ‘lack of habeas corpus (few cases, but enough to serve as a scandal and
the fulcrum of enemy propaganda)’. It was a theme also picked up by Mosley.
The Eastern Front was transformed into the ‘European Front’ as Europe’s
defence became a supra-national moral obligation. The Waffen SS assumed
the role of Europe’s army and its struggle to hold back the Bolsheviks from
overrunning the West invoked an embryonic Europeanism, which became a
central myth of post-war Fascism. Neo-Fascist thinker Maurice Bardeche
wrote that ‘the Defence of the West has remained in the memory, and this is
still the chief meaning of fascist ideas’.
In Brussels in early March 1944, Léon Degrelle and his Rexists were ‘con-
cerned not with immediate military problems facing the Axis, but visionary
aspirations. Namely the forthcoming European federation.’ Degrelle, the com-
mander of the Waffen SS Viking brigade, said they were ‘preparing the political
cadres of the post-war world in the great seminary of the front line’. With the
world collapsing around them, in late 1944 the Nazis organized a New Euro-
pean conference in Prague, chaired by the SS’s Franz Six. It presented an
alternative to the Atlantic Charter, the Grande Concerte Européenne.
Six had helped plan the invasion of Britain. Head of the German Foreign
Policy Institute, he promoted the united Europe concept in his book Exrope’s
Civil Wars and the Present War of Unification. His poster propaganda in the
occupied territories depicted an idealized post-war federal Europe, which
included Britain. The British Free Corps was part of SS plans to bring together
Europe on racial lines. A Nazi sympathizer would be restored to the British
throne, with a pro-Fascist government and the BFC’s fighting men leading the
reconstruction.
In April 1945 Mosley’s adviser Alfred Franke-Gricksch had been head of
the Personnel Section of Himmler’s Reich Security Head Office preparing a
blueprint for Europe. Developing Six’s ideas, his twelve-point pan-European
peace settlement included the creation of a European Community of peoples
who would retain their rights to form their own political organization, in
allegiance to a Germanic Reich, which would drop claims to sole leadership.
Franke-Gricksch envisioned a post-Hitler Europe freed from the biological
562 BLACKSHIRT

exaltation of the German race. The Bruderschaft promoted Franke-Gricksch’s

pan-European ideas, but it also had an important role organizing ratlines for
escaping Nazis.
The Bruderschaft had contacts among S$, Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe
officers; the most celebrated being Colonel Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Hitler’s ace |
fighter pilot, who founded the Kamaradenwerk to aid imprisoned comrades.
This brought him in contact with the ‘mutual aid society’, ODESSA (Organis-
ation der ehemaligen SS-Angehérigen), created by ex-SS Colonel Otto
Skorzeny. The two Third Reich ‘heroes’ became close friends and acquaint-
ances of Mosley. The Bruderschaft had been formed during 1945-6 in a POW
camp in Germany, where a staff officer of the Grossdeutschland Division,
Major Helmut Beck-Broichsitter, discussed with like-minded prisoners ways
to salvage the future. It could be done, he argued, by bringing together the
leadership elites. He was joined by Franke-Gricksch, who had been a faithful
follower of Otto Strasser before entering the SS. Strasserite ideas on the ‘third
way’ were at the core of Mosley’s own thinking.
Franke-Gricksch’s plans were interrupted when he was transferred to a
camp in Colchester. He is said to have been recruited by British Intelligence
and allowed to circumvent denazification procedures. He remained a PoW
until the autumn of 1948 but during his detention made contact with British
Fascists. Kevin Coogan makes the point that Franke-Gricksch’s SD role had
included accumulating lists of potential British collaborators. Therefore he
already knew about Mosley and the BU. He remained a leading figure inside
the Bruderschaft and after his return to Germany became its ‘ideological
spiritus rector’. Mosleyites admit that ‘a number of them did meet him in
London with great difficulty. The Establishment in England were doing all
they could do to prevent it.’ One thing is certain, ‘the Bruderschaft was
thoroughly infiltrated by the intelligence services of all the occupying powers’.
The Bruderschaft’s mission, Franke-Gricksch argued, was to create a new
elite now that the era of the masses had passed. They would fight the ‘moral
vacuum’ and once ‘a materialistic, mechanistic view of society had been van-
quished, a new elite-led organismic German socialism would overcome social
alienation’. They would recapture power through ‘slow, methodical insin-
uation into governmental and party positions, under cover of such secrecy or
camouflage as might be necessary for the success of the venture’. In the
knowledge that he was not going to lead a mass movement, Mosley’s strategy
was based on similar lines and may have developed from joint discussions.
Certainly, he adopted the strategy of ‘permeation’, though with poor results.
In December 1946 Salo Republic members formed the neo-Fascist Movi-
mento Sociale Italiano (MSI), which promised to cleanse the ‘stinking’ atmos-
phere of Italy. It opened a European Study Centre, published Europa Unita
and created a network of neo-Fascist leaders who were invited to Rome. They
 “LUCIFER FALLEN’ 563

included Nazis, Rexists, Quislings, Dutch Mussert partisans, Spanish Falanga

and Fascists who had fled to South America. At the same time the Swedish
Fascist Per Engdahl expanded operations into Norway and Denmark, and
merged their Fascist groups into the ‘National Scandinavian Reform Move-
ment’. It is in this context that Mosley’s decision to revive his own movement
should be seen. Without a political base, he would be denied entry into the
exclusive club of neo-Fascist pro-Europeans.
The problem was that they were operating against the backdrop of the
Holocaust. In London Tidings on 6 September 1947, A. K. Chesterton rejected
Mosley’s route out of the Fascist ghetto. Fascism ‘was too narrowly nationalis-
tic. He will not repeat the mistake. He will, instead, unite Europe and exploit
Africa, that he may succeed where Fascism failed: “Hail Mosley!” shout
his followers in ecstatic agreement.’ But Fascism failed ‘so disastrously it is
impossible even to mention the word without invoking, not what its adherents
meant when they used it, but what its deadliest enemies intended people to
believe it to have meant. And that is defeat indeed!’
Around this time emerged Mosley’s only real rival as a Fascist philosopher.
Francis Parker Yockey was a shadowy intellectual and mysterious American
with many aliases, who was rumoured to be half-Jewish. A bohemian figure,
he had a brilliant mind but was also ‘high-strung, erratic, unpredictable and
dictatorial’. As a twenty-two-year-old he had addressed a pre-war meeting of
the pro-Nazi Silver Shirts. Joining the army, in 1943 he was medically dis-
charged ‘by reason of disability due to dementia praecox, paranoid type’. His
discharge and anti-Semitism did not prevent him from being employed from
1946 in the US legal team at Nuremberg, where he worked for the 7708 War
Crimes Group, investigating and prosecuting low-level war criminals and
evaluating clemency petitions. On 26 November Yockey was fired. Officials
came to believe he was a mole for the Nazi defendants, seeking to subvert the
Allies’ case. Shortly after, Counter-Intelligence-Corps raided his home, but he
managed to stay one step ahead of his pursuers.
Yockey visited England in autumn 1947 with the aim of meeting Mosley.
He was introduced to Anthony Gannon, a former BU district leader in Man-
chester, who ran the Imperial Defence League, by Raven Thomson with the
comment that he would find him interesting. Yockey said he had ‘come to
Europe to meet others in the service of the Idea, in particular, Mosley, before
writing a book’. He tried to solicit aid for condemned German officers but
Mosley, not wanting to run foul of the authorities, was wary of ‘a young man
of some ability, who had an indiscreet obsession with the Jewish Question’.
Mosley publicly denounced the trials and the ‘pursuit of vengeance against
a whole people’. He resented the treatment of soldiers ‘whose only crime
was to obey orders’ and expressed sympathy for the Waffen SS. They were
‘passionately European and entirely supported my advanced European ideas.
564 BLACKSHIRT

I had heard from many of them long before I was free to travel and had an
insight into what they were then thinking, which is perhaps almost unique.’
He believed they were natural leaders of a post-Hitler Fascism freed from the
‘old nationalism’. ;
Abandoning his wife and children, on 18 September — his thirtieth birthday _
- Yockey fled to Brittas Bay, County Wicklow, Ireland. Working without
notes, he began writing on an old typewriter — ‘the devil machine’ — a 600-page,
two-volume Spenglerian magnum opus, Imperium. A few miles away was the
pro-Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, working on his own epic undertaking
Philosophical Investigations.
On x October Mosley published his long-awaited book The Alternative —
‘Chaos looms and the people of Europe seek the alternative’. He had begun
writing his political treatise on 2 February in an old diary and finished it at
the end of May, having abandoned an earlier effort for being too nationalistic.
His second version was, in fact, little different from his BUF policy except
that he expanded it to the international stage rather than limiting it exclusively
to Britain. ‘Our creed was brought to dust because the Fascist outlook in each
land was too national, we had no sense of European union.’ In the third
issue of his News Letter (January—February 1947) Mosley had argued for an
‘extension of patriotism’ to ‘embrace all of like kind’. The book was based on
his prison readings and the distillation of a series of lost letters to Nicholas.
The second version was also the result of discussions with German advisers,
particularly Franke-Gricksch.
The Alternative is a pretentious book, full of phrases such as ‘transcending
the diurnal politics of normality’. The ‘Analysis of Failure’ collates his News
Letter pieces, dealing with day-to-day politics. The rest is a curious work
overladen with psychoanalysis, a discipline that Mosley supposedly despised.
He pondered how dynamism and action could be harnessed for the benefit of
all without causing harm to individuals. He reveals his fascination with Jung
— ‘the most outstanding and comprehensive intellect that the new science has
yet produced’ — but shows no insight into his own character. Predictably, there
is no apology for the past. It was ‘one of the tear-laden paradoxes of history’,
Mosley wrote, ‘that the man whom the mass of the English learnt to regard as
their greatest enemy cherished a sentimental feeling towards a “sister nation”
which, in the eyes of historic realism, must border on the irrational and, in
the test of fact, was pregnant with the doom of all he loved’. It seemed to
Nicholas that his father ‘had no comprehension of what had occurred and
was intent on denying the reality of the catastrophe that Hitler had unleashed’.
In some ways his thought appeared more Fascist as he attempted to readjust
National Socialism to the post-war world.
Building on Spenglerian fantasies, he now envisioned his task as defending
Europe from Bolshevik ‘barbarians’. His strategy would be based on ‘Europe
 “LUCIFER FALLEN’ 565

A Nation’. In The European Situation: The Third Force (1948), Mosley said
he proposed it because ‘it seemed to be both the deep desire of the European
and the practical necessity of the present situation’. New Europe would be ‘a
great unity imbued with a sense of high mission, not a market state of jealous
battling interests’. It would ‘insure that Europeans shall never be slaves either |
of West or East; either of finance or of bolshevism. We shall neither be bought
by Wall Street nor conquered by the Kremlin.’
Mosley’s vision was similar to that of French writer and Vichy supporter
Maurice Bardeche, who acquired a position of respect in neo-Fascist circles
after his own imprisonment. Those who ‘carry on the Fascist idea are men
who feel, more deeply and more desperately than other men, that it is a means
of salvation. In all these men without exception — there was a nostalgia for
what Fascism had failed to achieve — Socialism and European unity.’ They
approved of the Verona programme and a ‘third force’ Europe. This ‘imaginary
island lying between two hostile continents was conceived’, he wrote, ‘by
doctrinaire Fascists between 1946 and 1948”. They included those of the
German underground nationalist groups, which adapted the fantasies of Salo
and Otto Strasser’s ideas for European confederation and ‘Eurafrika’. These
were transmitted by the Strasserite Franke-Gricksch to Mosley who now
promoted an ‘extension of patriotism’ from the mythic core of the ‘Greater
Britain’ to the Utopian “Euro-Africa’.
Europe a Nation would be protected by tariffs and take its wealth from an
Africa ruled under apartheid conditions of extreme exploitation. Mosley
argued in his News Letter (March-April 1947) that ‘instead of playing the
fool by pretending that we can educate negroes in a few years into running
Africa, let us face realities. Let us develop Africa as a great estate of the
European and give the negro an assured and guaranteed place in that new
economy. He will thus enjoy ... a far higher standard of life than he will
obtain for generations by the unaided exertions of his own brains.’ Mosley’s
purpose, noted Mervyn Jones, ‘was to make each eager youngster envisage
himself, suitably clad in khaki shorts and carrying a whip or revolver, striding
magisterially across a vast plantation where countless black backs bend in
rhythm’. Mosley was not alone in his absurd vision. Former Labour colleague
Ernest Bevin, now Foreign Secretary, proposed a Third Force Euro-Africa
bloc, which would exploit the ‘invisible empire’ of the Sterling Area. The
difference was that Mosley’s version was explicitly racist. He said, ‘Have we
a “sacred trust” to keep jungles fit for negroes to live in?’
A new (white) Faustian ‘Thought-Deed’ man would be required to live in
Euro-Africa. In The Alternative Mosley argued that only through constant
striving could mankind evolve in the modern era. “The mass of the people can
only share in the benefits which modern science can bring through the devoted
service of those whom they entrust with the task of government . . . to secure
566 BLACKSHIRT

that system they must ... an altogether new and higher type of man who is
dedicated in whole life and purpose to the service of the people and the State.’
Using political soldier rhetoric, he said ‘the prime necessity of our age is to
accelerate evolution. This generation must play the midwife to Destiny in _
hastening a new birth.’
This higher type would be produced by a programme of ‘breeding, selection
and environment’. Mosley wanted to ‘deliberately accelerate evolution: it is
no longer a matter of volition but of necessity. Is it a sin to strive in union
with the revealed purpose of God?’ He provided no blueprint for the training
he envisioned for this new type, whose ‘mighty shadow has already appeared
on Earth’. Hitler was still seen as an example of a successful leader but it was
Mosley himself who was the prototype. Only he could save Europe from the
‘architects of chaos’. ‘I must give myself to this task . . . because no other can.’
He had refrained from ‘forming again a political movement in Britain in order
to serve a new European idea — “beyond both Fascism and Democracy”’’. He
believed that his ideas would win because ‘the power of God in nature is now
with us’. Mosley had simply lost all touch with reality.
Henry Williamson, whose loyalty never faltered, considered The Alternative
Mosley’s best book, though it was largely ignored. The Manchester Guardian
on 1 October thought ‘the most remarkable thing about Sir Oswald is his
entire consistency ... His programme of 1947 is in essentials his programme
of the thirties — with one verbal difference, the dropping of the word “‘Fascist”’.’
Mosley had listened to his supporters and, finally, met their needs. On
15 November 1947 he held a private meeting at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon
Street where, fifteen years earlier, the New Party had held its inaugural meet-
ing. Attending were the ‘Big Four’ pro-Fascist organizations — Gannon’s
Imperial Defence League, Horace Gowing’s Sons of St George in Derby, Victor
Burgess’s Union for British Freedom, Hamm’s British League of ex-Servicemen
-and fifty smaller groups such as the book clubs. Mosley said that by ‘linking
the union of Europe with the development of Africa, a new civilization will
appear which will surpass any power in this world’. He was considering
re-entering politics with the ‘Union Movement’. Tommy Moran, co-founder
of the Order of the Sons of St George, Michael Ryan, a shop steward of the
Transport and General Workers’ Union, and Alfred Flockhart, Mosley’s clos-
est associate, pledged themselves to it. Hamm wrote in the British League
Review that Mosley had ‘given us The Idea, and it is for us to build The
Movement that will propagate that idea’.
John Warburton was at the meeting and knew Mosley fairly intimately. ‘I
and others thought of him as a god. As I grew older I realised that he was
human but he was the most god-like human I have known. When he walked
into a room, there was a presence. When he was in small groups he was
electric.’ Although he was ‘The Leader’ and there was no vote, he ‘listened to
 “LUCIFER FALLEN’ 567
what people’ such as Hamm (‘a secretive sort of bloke’), Flockhart (‘a real live
wire’), Hector McKechnie and Robert Row ‘had to say’. Michael Quill judged
that the best people around him remained Raven Thomson and Francis
Hawkins. However, outside the circle of committed colleagues, ‘some of them
didn’t seem one hundred per cent genuine. Some were there just to be paid.
Many were not intrinsically political. They didn’t organise like parties and
involve themselves in political activity such as canvassing.’ Raven Thomson,
editor of Union, expressed surprise at the growth of street corner Fascism and
the ease of ‘getting away with it.’
A week later Louis Hydleman, Chairman of the Jewish Board of Deputies’
Defence Committee, reported that they had succeeded ‘in insulating increasing
numbers against the poison of anti-semitic propaganda’. Well-organized oppo-
sition prevented Mosley from launching the respectable movement he planned.
Instead, he was mired in the realm of street violence:
Mosley had hoped that the numerous book-clubs and discussion groups would have
provided cover for his re-appearance on a higher plane and in better company, than
his former attempt; he hoped that the Jeffrey Hamms would succeed in stirring
passions and feelings in the streets of London without Mosley himself being connec-
ted with this rabble-rousing. Instead, I believe we have succeeded in making sure
Mosley is treated as part and parcel of this rabble-rousing.

Following the pre-launch meeting, on 28 November Mosley gave an inter-

view in which he said Jews would not be allowed to join and that a Fascist
government would deport them from Britain. When journalists referred to the
Nazi concentration camps, he said ‘history will record to what extent the ruin
in Germany was brought about by our bombing and to what extent by the
policy of the Government. If you have typhus outbreaks you are bound to
have a situation where you have to use the gas ovens to get rid of the bodies.
If we had been bombed here in prisons and concentration camps, there would
have been a few of us going into the gas ovens.’ He claimed Buchenwald and
Belsen were ‘completely unproved’ and that ‘pictorial evidence proves nothing
at all. We have no impartial evidence. I don’t know the facts and nobody does
until an impartial court inquires into the whole thing.’ However, he condemned
the Nuremberg hangings. ‘Anybody can assassinate their opponents when they
win a war. It is a contemptible thing to do.’
In January 1948 Robert Saunders in Dorchester began writing to former
BU colleagues in the south-west, urging them to join Mosley’s new crusade.
He wrote to Rafe Temple-Cotton promising that the UM would be different
and not a duplicate of the BU. The East End meetings might be the same but
he blamed any violence on Hamm’s British League, which was ‘without doubt
little more than 1939 BU operating in 1947’. He added that ‘we all know that
a part of BU’s support came from people who were crudely anti-Jewish and
568 BLACKSHIRT

nothing more’, and recognized Temple-Cotton’s fear that the UM ‘will be

dominated by the same type of people’. Saunders saw the danger but ‘the
important thing is to see that UM’s leadership, locally as well as nationally,
is in the right hands’. Temple-Cotton decided not to join because of the
pre-war associations. The 43 Group’s On Guard listed those BU-Fascists
now involved in Mosley’s UM. ‘The prevalence of the “old guard”’, notes
Skidelsky, ‘soon gave it a depressingly familiar look. Like the Bourbons, the
Fascists seemed to have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.’
 =)
The Union Movement

The Union Movement was officially launched at Wilfred Street School, Vic-
toria, on 8 February 1948. In attendance were 250 delegates from fifty street-
corner organizations, provincial groups and book clubs. The UM, Mosley
argued, would ‘build where the old parties have destroyed . . . we will create
a third empire after they have lost two empires’. Several hundred police — the
largest number yet used for such an occasion — protected the meeting. Walter
Grunfeld, writing in the New Republic, noted that the UM was ‘scarcely
different from its pre-war model. It boasts the same anti-Semitism, the same
violent, anti-alien chauvinism, and the same dream of a one-party totalitarian
state blindly following its “‘leader’’.’
Certainly, street meetings were little different. A meeting at Clapham
Common on 2 February organized by Michael Ryan was closed by police after
forty anti-Fascists tried to turn over the platform. The 43 Group sometimes
resorted to violent methods to make up for lack of numbers. ‘Our com-
mandos’, Morris Beckman recalled, ‘would form three solid wedges of very
hard men. At a given signal, they would start to move slowly towards the
fascist platform. And then they would pick up speed ... When the platform
went over, the meeting was finished.’ In turn, Fascists fought like street thugs
with some carrying knuckledusters. In Romford, a gang of Maltese was hired
to repel the 43 Group and threw potatoes embedded with razors.
The 43 Group aimed to kick the Fascists off the streets and deny them a
base from which to organize. UM member John Bean believed the attacks were
counter-productive and ‘acted as recruiting agents for Mosley’. Anti-Fascist
Chanie Rosenberg disagreed. ‘If we had left them alone, Mosley would have
had some brief blossoming of sorts, and he would have kept a nucleus there
_.. The anti-fascist activity more or less eliminated any possibilities they had.’
The British League was forced to stop holding regular meetings at Ridley
Road.
Former Common Wealth member J. C. Banks agrees this was the case. ‘Far
from attempting to debate with [the Mosleyites] Common Wealth was their
main opponent particularly in Hackney and Stoke Newington, and over a
 570 BLACKSHIRT

number of week-ends throughout the winter of 1947/8 denied the fascists the
use of their prime site in Dalston Road . . . the Communists were nowhere to
be seen.’ One of the 43 Group founders acknowledged to Laurens Otter that
‘the only people who were there to stand with us and fight the fascists and the
police were Common Wealth, the ILP, the Anarchists and the Trots’. The
Labour people were an ex-Common Wealth faction around Commander Mill-
ington MP, who had been expelled from Labour for ‘his unruly behaviour in
fighting the fascists’ and had joined the ILP.
Hamm blamed the retreat on the severe winter. Whatever the real reason,
the Home Office was concerned about potential violence and asked chief
constables to report to MIS on UM meetings in their area. In spring 1948
Home Secretary Chuter Ede imposed a ban preventing all political marches in
East London.
On the foundation of the UM, the American FBI began to take an interest
in Mosley. On 7 February J. Edgar Hoover received a report that the Bureau’s
files had failed ‘to disclose any’information relating to [name blacked out]’
who was alleged to have ‘recently had several interviews’ with the UM leader
and was ‘acting on behalf of a group of Americans who are anxious to support
Mosley’. Mosley displayed his characteristic lack of political judgement by
- entrusting negotiations to a confidence trickster who was also a possible MIS
informer. In March Mosley sent Gerald Hamilton to New York to negotiate
$250,000 (£2m) from a range of right-wing American luminaries including
Colonel Robert McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune. Hamilton, who
had been interned during the war, was a ‘renowned con man and spy, whose
reputation for intrigue and mendacity was already well known’. Following a
stormy interview on his return, Mosley discovered Hamilton had pocketed
the money.
Questions over Mosley’s pre-war funding and links to Italian Fascism and
German Nazis were raised in the Commons on 25 February and again on
3 March. John Platts-Mills, the Labour MP for Finsbury, asked the Foreign
Secretary ‘if he will publish all those documents captured by the Allied Forces
which relate to the relations between’ the BU and the Nazis. Ernest Bevin
claimed none had been ‘found among the captured German Foreign Ministry
documents’. A year later, Communist MP Philip Piratin again raised the matter
but Bevin’s deputy, Hector McNeil, stated ‘the position has not changed’.
Amid calls of ‘crypto-Communist’ from the Tories, Platts-Mills asked Bevin
why Mosley’s propagandist, Bill Allen, was employed as a Counsellor at the
British embassy in Ankara. According to James Fox, Allen was in reality
working for MI6 and was friendly with Kim Philby. In 1948 Allen received
an OBE —‘as a form of polite whitewash’, according to his wife — for his work
‘passing on disinformation’ in Turkey. Bevin told the Commons: ‘I understand
 THE UNION MOVEMENT 7

this man owes no allegiance to any other country.’ Mosley had not seen Allen
since 1940, when they parted on bitter terms over money matters. When,
during 1948, they happened to meet in a restaurant such feelings had dissolved
and the two were seen exchanging pleasantries.
After six months, Francis Yockey had finished writing Imperium and
returned to London to find a publisher. Very much under Spengler’s spell,
Yockey glorified the West and bemoaned its decay in a sweeping historial tour
de force which promoted the concept of a pro-Russian Europe standing up to
the US and China, as ‘the first blow in the gigantic war for the liberation of
Europe’. He contrasted his conception of Europe as a single, integrated entity
with ‘the miserable plans of retarded souls to “unite” Europe as an economic
area for purposes of exploitation by and defense of the Imperialism of extra-
European forces’. These souls were the United States and the Soviet Union
which, in Yockey’s view, had conquered the Continent and turned it into a
spiritual swamp.
In an upbeat message, Yockey summoned beleaguered Nazis to engage in a
‘world-historical struggle’. He believed in a philosophy of cultural vitalism in
which a heroic sense of purpose emanating from an elite ‘culture-bearing
stratum’ would trickle down to the masses, thereby ushering in a quasi-
religious Age of Authority, in contrast to the decadent ‘Rule of Money’. The
Jews were blamed for plotting the war as a counter-force to the ‘European
Revolution of 1933’. Yockey was one of the first to claim that the Final
Solution was a myth. He argued that photographs of ‘gas chambers’ were
forgeries.
On 6 February Yockey contacted Major-General Fuller and military his-
torian Basil Liddell Hart, both of whom would later write glowing reviews of
Imperium. He also began working as a paid official in the UM’s European
Contact Section with Guy Chesham, which enabled him to cultivate ties to the
European-wide neo-Fascist network, which included Alfred Franke-Gricksch.
Yockey gathered around him a group of extremists influenced by his plan to
create anti-American hostility by establishing links with the Soviet Union for
funding propaganda.
Yockey continued his secret campaign against the war crimes tribunal.
Maurice Bardeche’s book, Nuremberg ou la Terre Promise (1948), was an
early attempt to deny the Holocaust. It, too, claimed that evidence had been
falsified and, like Mosley, attributed the genocide to illness and starvation.
Bardeche was in receipt of archive documents from ‘Ulick Varange’ — the
pseudonym Yockey affixed to Imperium. In his memoir Souvenirs (1993),
Bardeche acknowledged these were used to aid the defence of SS war criminal
Lieutenant-General Otto Ohlendorf, who commanded an Einsatzgruppe in
Ukraine, which murdered 90,000 people. Yockey was active in the defence
 572 BLACKSHIRT

of Lieutenant-Colonel Fritz Knoechlein, commander of the 2nd Totenkopf

(Death’s Head) unit, which machine-gunned a hundred British troops holed
up in a French farm. Mosley unsuccessfully intervened on behalf of Knoechl-
ein, who was convicted on 25 October 1948 and later hanged.
Mosley’s claim in Union that races were the ‘First Reality of European
Union’ brought him perilously close to Nazi ideas. He considered our nearest
kindred to be the Germans, the northern French and the Scandinavians. How-
ever, his contacts extended to neo-Fascists in South Africa and Argentina,
where he supplied propaganda to Dr Walter Schilling, who had a wide network
of Nazi correspondents. He found the fliers ‘terrific. Put together so skilfully.
I will do my utmost to make propaganda in German and English circles.’ A
letter to Mosley ended: ‘Perhaps you will get through to him some day that
he, Churchill, was the grave digger of Europe.’
At the end of the previous year Mosley had entered into friendly relations
with Oswald Pirow, South African leader of the extreme right-wing New
Order. In April 1948 Mosley put forward his colonial proposals in association
with the former South African Minister of Defence. In joining with Pirow,
Mosley revived pre-war links with South Africa and the extremists of Osserwa-
brandlag. The New Order had split during the war from the majority Malan
- Afrikaner Party, because it refused to join in the war against Germany but
also with the aim of creating a Christian National Socialist system, based
on the ideas of the Portuguese dictator Salazar. It rejected ‘British-Jewish
imperialism and capitalism’, and wanted independence from the Empire.
Pirow’s growing contempt for democracy, however, effectively destroyed his
political career. Post-war, he mostly devoted himself to his legal practice,
though he continued to publish a newsletter until the fifties.
Mosley denied that his joint plan with Pirow was a revival of the Empire.
It called for the division of Africa into black and white. As a Lamarckian,
Mosley believed culture rather than race was the main factor behind evolution.
He derived from Spengler ‘a belief that different cultures should be separated
from each other because contact brought decay’. At a London press confer-
ence, Mosley and Pirow advocated allocating two-thirds of sub-Saharan Africa
to black states and one-third to white because ‘equal rights between black
majority and white minority in the same state must inevitably lead to the
disappearance of Western civilization’. Pirow presented the policy as ‘equality,
coupled with separation. In other words, it concedes to the Black Man com-
plete equality of status and opportunity but in his own areas ... it means a
segregation, not of the Native but of the White Man.’ He said the ‘solution
proposed is necessary to safeguard the future of the White Man, but it is
imperative if we want to do justice to the Black Man to-day’. They never made
clear how they would separate the two.
Mosley tried to make a distinction between their proposals and South
 THE UNION MOVEMENT 573

Africa’s apartheid policy, which he nevertheless thought might develop into

something better.

A genuine apartheid, a real separation of the two peoples into two nations which
enjoy equal opportunity and status . . . is a strong contradiction to the bogus apart-
heid which seeks to keep the negro within white territory but segregated into black
ghettos which are reserves of sweated labour living in wretched conditions .
Hysterical propaganda has made the term apartheid cover both concepts, although
they are entirely opposed.

In mid April 1948 a Special Branch investigation of Fascist and Communist

organizations by Deputy Commander Len Burt reported there was serious
danger of violence in London. Mosley was planning to celebrate May Day by
staging the UM’s first march from Dalston to the East End. This was going to
be the ‘big one’. For weeks the area had been flooded with posters announcing
the ‘Leader’ would speak in Hereford Street. The event was intended to be a
showcase for recruitment and indicate that the UM was a force to be reckoned
with. On 29 April Sir Harold Scott, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner,
warned the Home Office that his powers were inadequate ‘to prevent serious
public disorder’. The Home Secretary responded by prohibiting it through the
East End and forcing Mosley to reroute it.
Jonathan and Desmond were doing their National Service and, dressed as
‘conspicuously unmilitary Privates’, escorted Diana to Hereford Road, where
mounted police drove back the assembled crowd and attempts by the 43
Group to break up the meeting. She thought Mosley ‘gallant’ but Maurice
Beckman said he ‘resembled nothing more than a middle-aged weary civilian,
puffy of cheek and eye with a drooping shoulder . . . the charismatic orations
that once inflamed his supporters into ecstasies of loyalty had now gone’. Four
hundred UM supporters then made their way to Highbury Corner, where they
formed into a larger procession, which tried to march to Camden Town. There
were, however, 1,500 anti-Fascists in their way and there was fighting along
the route, forcing the march to end early outside Holloway Prison. In trying
to keep the two sides apart, the 800 police made thirty-two arrests. The parade
was a ‘damp squib’ and the expected new recruits failed to materialize. Active
UM membership in 1948 probably totalled less than 3,750.
Lionel Rose of AJEX claimed Mosley had been ‘forced into the open before
his movement has any sound organisational structure or support. There is a
considerable gap, almost wholly empty, between Mosley and his backers and
entourage at the top, and the street corner gangs at the bottom.’ With the ban
on marches extended to cover all of London, Mosley began to feel there was
‘a barrier between him and the British People’. Meetings and street-corner
speeches took place but were met with continued opposition, and many halls
were closed to him. He informed Union readers that the ban meant Fascists
574 BLACKSHIRT

were back to the harsh times of 1940 and ‘the end of real free speech’. It was
no longer possible to build a mass movement and, instead, they would have
to try new methods, including ‘permeation’.
UM members, wrote Mosley, should infiltrate ‘athletic clubs, boxing and
cycling teams’. More seriously, he advocated joining existing political parties
in order to take them over from within. Permeation was a long-term tactic,
whose chief instigator was Charlie Watts. In a circular written by a ‘skilled
and experienced observer’, the UM was viewed as a cadre training ground for
an elite, who were to convert leading members of other organizations to
Mosley’s ideas. Senior figures recognized Fascism could not yet be revived,
but believed there would come a time when the movement would grow. When
this stage was reached, covert Fascists would be able to come out into the
open. The reality was that permeation had negligible results. However, the
transformation to a cadre elite suited Mosley’s ambitions as he increasingly
used the UM as an entré to the Continental networks he had been cultivating
through his Contacts Section. Europe, not the domestic scene, became the
focus of his activities.
Yockey had extensive discussions with Raven Thomson on Europe and in
particular American culture. He remembered ‘a brilliant young intellectual
American expatriate with a strong anti-American phobia, taking the view that
the present American influence in Europe is more damaging to European
culture than the direct but alien threat of communism from the East’. Yockey
was the lover of a mysterious Baroness Alice von Pflugl, an older woman who
lived in a mansion near Regent’s Park, who influenced his thinking along the
lines of the pro-Strasserite ‘National Bolshevist’ faction of the Bruderschaft,
of which Franke-Gricksch, who visited London to spread his gospel, was the
most vocal advocate. They believed the way to resurrect German nationalism
and stem the Americanization of Europe was by aligning themselves with the
Soviet Union, which was judged to be National Socialist and anti-Semitic.
Stalin’s military repression of Eastern Europe, Yockey wrote, was less harmful
in the long run because it did not corrupt the Western soul as American
capitalism did.
Yockey’s views put him at odds with Mosley, whose more moderate crusade
included coming to terms with American hegemony over Western Europe.
During the Berlin blockade he called for Russia’s withdrawal from Europe
and disarmament subject to Western verification. ‘If the Bolsheviks refuse to
accept this ultimatum, they should be assailed with the atom bomb and with
all other weapons of modern science which the Western nations possess, but
which the Soviets do not yet possess.’ In The European Situation: The Third
Force Mosley argued that ‘under Russia, European freedom is killed, and
under America, European freedom can still exist and even grow. That is the
basic difference which must determine the question of attitude.’ As Kevin
 THE UNION MOVEMENT 575

Coogan notes, ‘The more Mosley tilted West, the more Yockey tilted East.’
The latter wrote to a friend that when he discovered Mosley was ‘pro-Churchill
and pro-American and anti-Russian, even to the extent of mobilizing Europe
to fight for American-Jewish victory over Russia, I left him’.
Raven Thomson believed Yockey joined the UM ‘in the hope of getting our
chief to finance his book’. Elsa Dewette remembered Yockey begging for an
interview with Mosley, and when ‘his Grandeur’ deigned to see him, he treated
him offhandedly. The American left the manuscript with Mosley but when he
returned after a few days, he had the impression Mosley ‘had only glanced at
a few pages, and certainly not read it through’ because, Raven Thomson
recalled, ‘it was full of Spenglerian pessimism and was unnecessarily offensive
to America’. Hamm thought Imperium was just ‘an imitation of OM’s The
Alternative’. At this point Yockey was so desperate that he suggested Mosley
‘sign his name under it, as the author’. He refused and from then on treated
Yockey ‘with disdain and irony. He never at any moment took him seriously.’
Thereafter, Dewette added, ‘Yockey hated Mosley.’ Raven Thomson found
him to be ‘so conceited and unstable in personal relations that it is almost
impossible to work with him’. The ‘neo-Mein Kampf for neo-Nazis’ is ram-
bling and largely incomprehensible, which is probably why it has an enduring
reputation among American neo-Fascists and anti-Semites.
Mosley’s Oxford-educated lieutenant, Guy Chesham, sent him a ‘Memor-
-andum of Dissociation’ over Yockey’s treatment and lashed out at him for
‘not even reviewing this significant book, contrary to your promise’. In the
margin Mosley wrote, ‘Absurd falsehood: Why should we?’ A ‘philosophical
quibble on some difference between Goebbels and Spengler was’, Chesham
recollected, ‘your official excuse. How ironical that your group should set
itself up as the keeper of the National Socialist conscience! It has no point of
contact whatsoever with the Nazi Movement, spiritual, ideological, organiz-
ational, traditional or cultural.’ He charged that ‘your treatment of the author
underlined your well-known inability to tolerate men of intellect and imagina-
tion about you, but it was your failure to adopt the ideology of the book
which displayed the full extent of your purely social-economic activity and
your incredible delusions of grandeur. You hated Imperium because it was a
summons to action, because it demanded a shattering of illusion and a manly
facing of political facts.’ In the margin Mosley wrote that it was ‘a very dull
re-hash of Spengler’. .
Diana acknowledged her husband did not read Imperium. “Yockey came to
stay at Crowood and had talks. He was a talkative American, a very neurotic
man.’ They thought him ‘a bit mad’. Mosley ‘suffered neither fools nor mad-
men gladly and being accused by Yockey of being an American agent and tool
of Churchill placed him in that category’. He put any material on Yockey in
his ‘crackpots’ file, which included other deranged individuals such as Joyce.
576 BLACKSHIRT

Mosley dropped Yockey and warned supporters to avoid him. In May, he left
the UM when Mosley allegedly punched him on the nose during a dispute in
Hyde Park. Shortly afterwards he fell in with a group of disillusioned Mos-
leyites, who embraced him as a Fascist guru. ‘
Thanks to the wealthy Baroness von Pflugl, 1,000 copies of volume one and
200 of volume two of Imperium were published by Westropa Press, and
agreement was reached with Franke-Gricksch to publish a German translation.
Chesham warned Mosley that ‘acceptance of Imperium among political and
intellectual circles at home and abroad is now a political fact’. At this point
there developed deep divisions within British Fascism, as Mosley’s faults, both
real and imagined, notes Thurlow, ‘increasingly became the scapegoat for
British fascist political failure. Non-Mosleyite fascists, ex-BU followers and a
new generation of British “Nationalists” and neo-Nazis, either blamed Mosley
for the personal and political disaster of British fascism, or railed against the
new ideas of the Mosley movement.’
Anthony Gannon thought Mosley had suffered a loss of nerve and was
sceptical as to the UM’s prospects of ever being a real political force. ‘Whereas
Hitler’s imprisonment in Landsberg forged the steel of personal resolution
and dedication, Mosley’s sojourn in Holloway gaol proved to be the opposite.
His confidence had been shaken, he was older, less decisive, more opportunis-
tic.’ Peter Huxley-Blythe also had misgivings. As a student in a right-wing
family in the late 1930s, he became interested in Mosley. After serving in the
Royal Navy, he returned to the north of England, where he met Gannon, who
introduced him to Yockey at a UM conference. He found the UM divided
between those who remembered Mosley with nostalgia and ‘younger ones like
myself who wanted more dynamic leadership. We didn’t want to have to
apologise for the past.’ Mosley, however, ‘was not the man of action that he
was and, upon reflection, he may never have been’.
Chesham claimed the movement was ‘non-existent’. There was an ‘irreduc-
ible minimum of 2-300, all of whom are of the lowest intellectual and political
calibre’. Rebecca West had already noted the ‘low intellectual level’ of speakers
such as Michael Ryan, which was ‘common to them all’. Chesham said officials
preserved the ‘squalid status quo of the payroll and the political small-time.
Reliable only in flattery . . . trustworthy only in self-interest’, they rejoiced in
‘womanish gossip and petty, amateurish spying’. An insider agreed that the
UM was ‘riven like the BUF had been by petty jealousies. Hamm and Burgess
would not talk to each other because of affairs. The whole thing was seedy.’
Outside London, Chesham added, ‘there is nothing’. He blamed this on
Mosley’s obsession with European contacts, absences abroad, poorly pro-
duced crude propaganda and his description of disasters as ‘temporary
setbacks’.
 THE UNION MOVEMENT S27

Mid 1948 was an unsettling period for the Mosleys. At Inch Kenneth, Diana’s
mother wrote to her on 27 May that ‘Bobo is much less well and I feel greatly
worried’. Next day she died from meningitis. The Mosleys attended Unity’s
funeral at Swinbrook. A few weeks later Mosley’s mother died. She had often
stayed at Crowood and for her last years she had lived near her son John in
Norfolk. The three Mosley brothers attended the funeral, the first time they
had been together for many years. Edward had been in the army in Syria and
Palestine, and retired to Chad, Somerset. John despaired that his brother had
revived his movement: ‘Why is he doing it again, for goodness sake. It is a
waste.’ They did visit Crowood but the relationship between the brothers
remained distant.
Mosley organized several projects to recruit the children of the bourgeoisie,
including the student Corporate Club at Oxford University, run by Desmond
Stewart and P. Thomas. Simon Mosley recalled seeing his uncle and ‘his
acolytes around him’ at New College, Oxford. ‘Diana gracefully joined us on
our chaise. She had so many adoring her.’ A former don was appalled by the
‘insidious respectability which undergraduate Fascism has begun to acquire’.
There were those who said ‘Hitler delivered the goods’ and ‘those who are
more “‘intellectual” who take themselves seriously as “‘political theorists” ’.
999

Surviving 43 Group members claim credit for disrupting Mosley’s plans. Its
intelligence section scored a coup when in June 1948 Michael Maclean, UM
organizer in Birmingham, left, claiming the UM was a ‘gangster organisation’,
and set up an Anti-Fascist League, recruiting former Mosleyites who had
rejected Fascism. When Mosley’s power began to slip, ‘even his own men
started to desert him. You could see that he was a very beaten man. He knew
that we had finished him off.’ Mosley, however, was faced with a bleak
political future in England and turned towards developing his European
strategy.
_ The FBI in London forwarded to Hoover intelligence that Mosley was
planning a Fascist International. On 30 July 1948 the Daily Worker an-
nounced MOSLEY: LINK UP WITH GERMAN NAZIS. He had arranged distri-
bution of 10,000 copies of a British-printed broadsheet, Deutsches Flugblatt,
in the British and American zones in Germany. Headed by his portrait, the
broadsheet promoted Europe a Nation. Its publication caused uproar and
provoked questions in the Commons. Althouglr not illegal, this was a time
of paper shortages and such literature was viewed by the Allied Control
Commission as ‘subversive’ and in breach of rules regarding the importation
of such material.
Two weeks later the FBI in Madrid sent reports from the Spanish newspaper
Arriba that ‘Oswald Pirow Comes to Spain’ and plans to set up with Mosley
‘a new political party - The Enemies of the Soviet Union’. Britain’s Foreign
578 BLACKSHIRT

the FBI
Office heard that Mosley proposed to visit the United States and
d to arrive shortly at unknown port to attend
reported that he was ‘expecte
Conventi on, St Louis, August 21’. Smith’s anti-Sem itic
Gerald K. Smith Party
and anti-Communist Christian Nationalis t Crusade called for the deportati on ;
of Zionists and the expulsion of Blacks to Africa. With no passport, a visit from <

interested ’ in
Mosley was unlikely, though US authorities remained ‘very much
Mosley with ‘a view toward excluding him from the United States’.
for
On 16 October Mosley proposed that ‘every European be able to vote
any other European’ for a European assembly. His Europe a Nation was
‘fundamentally different from all the weak compromises which grope and
hesitate somewhere between a new league of nations and some form of old
fashioned federalism. This idea overcomes many problems which more timid
policies merely aggravate. Questions of frontiers and the old national sover-
eignties do not arise within a new and greater nation, which has only one
sovereignty and only one frontier.’
Although a core group of ex-18B internees developed a Freikorps spirit and
were dedicated to the concept of a ‘new Europe arising phoenix like from the
ashes of the old’, UM canvassers found that such dreams made no impact on
potential recruits. John Warburton thought they were ‘too far advanced for
people to understand. Mosley was interested in tomorrow. People aren’t
visionaries. They’re captured on bread-and-butter politics. He was always
twenty years advanced in his thinking. It was very hard for members to grasp
what he was advocating.’ In the East End Michael Quill found ‘big support’
for the old-style BU. The European idea ‘did not touch their hearts as did the
“Britain First” policy’. Most ‘didn’t realise the full extent of what was going
on in Europe. The BU people were patriotic “Britain” and didn’t believe in
Europe. They couldn’t accept the French, Germans etc.’ They were dismayed
by the discarding of the Empire and not enthused by his vision of Africa.
John Tyndall, who later led the National Front, was interested in Mosley
but on hearing of Europe a Nation was immediately put off. It ‘was, and is,
out of the question, being wholly undesirable and not remotely possible. He
attempted to justify the change by explaining that the British Empire now no
longer existed, having been destroyed by that war.’ This justification for
joining Europe was ‘complete nonsense’. The dominions were ‘really vital
elements of the Empire, the members of which, by reason of their white
and largely British populations, and their primary-producing resources and
consequent complementary economies, provided the basis for the self-
sufficient economic area advocated in Mosley’s pre-war policy’. Thoughts of
support for Mosley were ‘killed at birth’.
Quill claimed that some recruits embraced the Europe idea but more
Mosley’s analysis that rearmament had prevented a pre-war crisis. The British
elite would be incapable of preventing a peacetime crisis of ‘Old Gang’ capi-
 THE UNION MOVEMENT 579

=
talism, which would lead to mass unemployment. The economist Roy Harrod
talked to him about these issues and tried to persuade him to write a book
setting out his ideas but, ‘unfortunately’, Diana noted, ‘he never did so’.
Speakers were told that Labour had made such a mess of the economy — there
was bread rationing and the banning of luxuries — that they had no need to
be defensive about Fascism, since the long predicted crisis was imminent.
However, Quill found that with the ‘improvement in economic circumstances
as wartime shortages were overcome and consumer goods became available,
it became hard to build a zeal equal to pre-war’.
There was a short recession in late 1947 with wage freezes and ration cuts.
However, by spring 1948 there were signs of an upturn with unemployment
limited to 3 per cent. Living standards improved, and if there was resentment
of rationing and ‘bureaucratization’, Renton notes that the benefits were
reaped by the Conservative Party, which exercised a ‘total hegemony over the
right’ on matters such as denationalization, so much so that ‘fascism was not
even a potential rival’. John Warburton admitted that ‘at the top of the UM
they had not thought it out. It was a different world.’ While ‘the First World
War had touched everyone of that generation, after the Second, it was never
again’, though attacks on immigration gave the UM limited impetus in East
London.
From autumn 1948 the UM attacked immigrants from the West Indies but
anti-Semitism remained at the core of its agitation. Such anti-Semitism was
boosted when Sidney Stanley, an East End spiv, appeared before the Lynskey
Tribunal, accused of bribing a Board of Trade minister. Newspapers made
anti-Semitic jokes at his expense and demanded his deportation. Articles in
Union — headlined LIFE BLOOD FLOWS OUT, SEWAGE FLOWS IN - claimed
every ‘spiv and shark’ was determined to get into Britain. UM agitators revived
the chant ‘the yids, the yids, we’ve got to get rid of the yids’. In November a
UM speaker at Lewisham asked the crowd to ‘imagine what a stink they
made, all that number of Yids together’. In West Green Jews were described
as ‘filthy, parasitic vermin, feeding on the political body of the country. The
sooner we get rid of this lot the better. Hitler closed the doors of his gas
chambers too soon.’ Mosley was more careful with language but his followers
knew exactly to whom he was referring when he criticized “American
capitalists’.
Special Branch shorthand writers took dowri every word at these meetings.
‘We had a mutual understanding’, Hamm recalled, ‘that if I was carried away
as the adrenalin flowed, and started to speak too fast for them, they would
signal me to slow down, and I would do so.’ Despite this, prosecutions for
incitement were rare, although Woodrow Wyatt witnessed police removing
hecklers who had ‘the temerity to shout: “Down with fascism”’. Even
resurrecting anti-Semitism could not halt the slide in support.
580 BLACKSHIRT

At the end of January 1949 Mosley spoke at Kensington Town Hall, in

order ‘to ignite a resurgence of Union power’. Whereas she had attended no
BUF meetings, Diana now insisted on being at Mosley’s meetings, despite the
violence, which had become a regular feature. This time 700 Fascists attended
but outside an estimated 2,000 anti-Fascists demonstrated behind six divisions
of London police. The meeting was brought to a chaotic end with the release
of tear-gas canisters. On the platform above the fumes, Mosley ‘wondered
why his audience was coughing and sneezing’. Finally, with streaming eyes,
they were forced to leave the building. The ensuing mélée outside was dealt
with by mounted police, who made seventeen arrests.
In March, 5,000 people opposed 150 UM members at Ridley Road. There
were thirty-four arrests. On 11 March Harold Pinter and Jewish friends were
attacked after a meeting. They had previously encountered Fascist gangs who
used bicycle chains and broken bottles. Because the books they were carrying
were by foreign authors, the Fascists said they must be Communists. They
were saved from serious injury by running on to the open platform of a passing
bus. The teenagers’ account of the attack, which left Pinter beaten and bruised,
was rubbished by the investigating officers at Dalston police station. A report
was passed to the Home Secretary, who had been asked by MPs and the
National Council for Civil Liberties to investigate the activities of the Fascists.
However, the authorities were more concerned about Communist influence
over the NCCL. Metropolitan Police claimed there had been ‘no organised
attacks on citizens by Fascist or any other group. During the past twelve
months there have been numerous political meetings in the Dalston area but
no serious assaults have been reported to police.’
‘We were not alone’, Pinter later wrote, ‘in wondering what the Home
Secretary was doing by not banning these groups and why the police were not
getting to grips with the problem. Under the banner of free speech, they were
allowing these stupid and pathetic, but dangerous people to do serious physical
harm to others.’ Within weeks, more Jewish teenagers were attacked, one.
suffering a fractured skull. This time the culprits were caught and one,
described by the judge at the trial as the leader of a ‘Dalston strong arm
squad’, was jailed. The ban on marches was reimposed after Mosley tried to
hold one in the East End.
In April the UM put up three candidates for the London County Council,
led by Victor Burgess in Kensington. They polled 600 votes apiece, but twelve
candidates in the local elections obtained fewer than 2,000 votes in total.
Union sales were down by three-quarters and key supporters such as Tommy
Moran had left. Quill acknowledged that ‘as the UM was very much based
on the comradeship of shared experiences when one man went others soon
followed’. A bitter Moran told Reynolds News that Mosley’s concept of
leadership was ‘dictatorship and his idea of service is slavery’. Peter Huxley-
 THE UNION MOVEMENT 581

Blythe also departed. ‘One expected more of Mosley than he could give.’ He
was among the radicals who wanted action, but came to believe that Mosley
had not given his all like others ‘who had decided to have a go’.
Mosley’s political failure, his vanity and Europeanism, notes Thurlow,
‘made him anathema to all but those captivated by his personal charisma’.
Potentially a figure of the first rank, he found himself ‘baying in the backwaters
of British politics’. The UM was even more marginal to British politics than
the BU had been. It was a sideshow to keep loyalists involved.

That Mosley had given up on the UM as a mass popular movement became

evident in the summer of 1949 when he left for a four-month trip around
Fascist haunts in the Mediterranean. He wrote to Brendan Bracken requesting
help in retrieving his passport. An old Labour colleague, Hugh Sherwood,
raised the matter in the Lords, where the Lord Chancellor reminded peers that
Mosley had never been charged with any offence. He knew that by right
Britons could in peacetime leave the country and return at will, with or without
a passport. Raven Thomson had made contact with friends in Franco’s Spain
and Salazar’s Portugal to ask whether Mosley might entér without a passport.
Major de Laessoe, who had worked in Portugal, visited Spain on Mosley’s
behalf. On release from internment he farmed a smallholding in Norfolk with
a group of ex-detainees and, despite his advanced years, helped establish UM
branches in East Anglia. He died soon afterwards as a result of the strain of
imprisonment. Mosley received assurances that he would be accepted without
a passport.
In May the Cabinet agreed to return Mosley’s passport — which he said he
needed in order to go to France for the sake of his health — after word
reached the Foreign Office that they were about to be made to look like fools.
‘Curiously enough,’ Diana recalled, ‘on the eve of our departure, we were
given our passports. We were free at last.’ They had bought a sixty-ton ketch,
the Alianora, which could withstand Atlantic storms, and on 11 June set sail
from Southampton with Alexander and Max, two seamen and a butler. ‘Our
happiness was boundless,’ Diana wrote. In a leisurely cruise, they called at
Bordeaux and made for Corunna. MIS gave details of the trip to France’s
Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, which began tracking the Mosleys.
The DST’s Roger Wybot reported that Mosley ‘wants to restart his political
career. He has abandoned anti-semitism, an unwelcome view to hold after the
war, and advocates a Europe of nations ... He wishes to meet several big
shots of the French extreme right wing who escaped the purge.’
On 17 June, with Portuguese friends in Lisbon, Diana celebrated her thirty-
ninth birthday. The objective was Spain and they took a train to Madrid for
an arranged meeting with the former Foreign Minister and Fascist ideologue
Serrano Suner and his wife Zita, General Franco’s sister-in-law. Suner had
582 BLACKSHIRT

been the Caudillo’s right-hand man and his pronounced Nazi sympathies led
the Axis powers to hope Spain might join in the war. He was a carbon-copy
Nazi and imagined he was ‘going to play Hitler or Mussolini’, having, like
Franco, anticipated a German victory. Franco dismissed him in 1942 and he »
spent his remaining years rewriting his past. Suner resumed his profession as °
a lawyer and avowed a discreet loyalty to the Generalissimo. He amassed a
fortune through business operations smoothed by his family connections.
Suner obtained a Spanish passport for Mosley.
The Mosleys paid homage at the tomb of José Antonio Primo de Rivera,
who had met Mosley in London in the thirties. The Falange founder had made
a deep impression on Mosley, and ‘his assassination seemed to me always one
of the saddest of the individual tragedies of Europe’. The Caudillo’s only
concern with the Falange was to keep it quiet. Franco’s regime lived wholly
within its own little world; internal opposition was impotent and it remained
aloof to foreigners. Suner acted as Mosley’s sponsor but the government
officially distanced itself from the British Fascist, as he met political figures
such as Gaston Bergery, ex-leader of the French Radical Party who had
opposed the war. Acquitted of collaboration after spending time in detention,
he had resumed his vocation as a lawyer. Diana corresponded with her sister
Nancy, who in turn wrote to Evelyn Waugh on 30 July that the Mosleys were
having a ‘whizz of a time with special bull fights, official dinners and a minister
to take them round’. They sailed on to Majorca and met Mussolini’s Foreign
Minister Filipo Anfuso, in exile after being condemned to death but later
amnestied and elected as a deputy to the Italian parliament for his native
Sicily.
It was a summer and autumn of harbour hopping from Tangier, Antibes
and Monte Carlo, down the Italian coast to Rome, where they met members
of the Italian Social Movement (MSI). More powerful than the UM, it had
made a fresh start in the hope of winning over at least part of the electorate,
and officially played the democratic game, winning 2 per cent of the vote and
six seats in the 1948 election. It rapidly became divided between radical
neo-Fascist and conservative anti-Communist factions, but remained the most
significant post-war link with the Fascist tradition. This was symbolized by
the election as leader of Giorgio Almirante, a junior functionary in the Salo
Republic. Mosley already had contact with the MSI through Tuli Abeilli, who
had visited London, and met Ernesto Massi, its Secretary General, who claimed
the European Community was born on the Eastern front, Fabio Lonciari,
editor of Europa Unita, and General Costa, head of foreign contacts.
When the Mosleys moved on to France, the DST worried that they might
settle on the Céte d’Azur. Maurice Lacarriére set in motion ‘discreet surveil-
lance’ but it led to ‘the discovery of nothing of interest to our service. The
guests, acompanied by Mosley, visited the normal picturesque areas.’ In
 THE UNION MOVEMENT 583

Cannes they were joined by a figure from the past, Brian Howard. Speaking
fluent French and German, Mosley told an interviewer that for the first time
he ‘felt European’.
In Germany, by the summer of 1949, preparatory work for Franke-
Gricksch’s and Beck’s secret organization was complete. At a founding meeting
in Hamburg on 22 July, chaired by former Gauleiter of Hamburg Karl Kauf-
man, participants ‘swore to remain loyal to the principles of National Social-
ism’ but committed themselves to ‘an elastic ideological framework’, which
‘could encompass all the various strands of nationalist opposition’. However,
a fierce internal rivalry between the Franke-Gricksch and Beck factions, over
their respective support for the Soviet or American positions on Europe,
limited its capacity to carry through its plans. US Army Intelligence intercepted
a letter from a ‘Hamburg addressee unknown to source’, to Der Deutsche
Block’s headquarters, confirming that Raven Thomson, as Mosley’s rep-
resentative, intended to visit Munich in order to meet Karl Meissner, DDB’s
‘Reichsfihrer’.
The Mosleys moved on to Paris, where Diana renewed relations with Nancy,
unaware of her part in her arrest in 1940. Nancy believed Diana’s life had
been ruined by Mosley, who in turn considered her to be a silly woman: ‘I’ve
suffered from that type all my life.’ Nancy wrote to a friend on 27 August
that Colonel Gaston Palewski, with whom she was having an affair, ‘met them
(a great secret) and was much taken aback at being talked to as if he were a
fellow fascist!’ He thought Mosley ‘charming but a little mad’. Nancy wrote
to Waugh on 26 September that Diana and Mosley, in no hurry to return
home, were ‘in a whirl of traitors. I suspect they are up to no good.’
Mosley was considering living in France, where there would be more oppor-
tunity to propagate his European ideas. ‘If you are trying to shift a load of
manure,’ he mused to Diana, ‘you don’t start by putting yourself underneath
it.” She was in entire agreement with him. ‘The loss of the Empire was a great
blow to M. and his supporters ... My own predilection had always been for
Europe.’ He wanted ‘to become a European, in a way that is hardly possible
for somebody living in England’. His propaganda for Europe a Nation, how-
ever, was dwarfed by Churchill’s more respectable United Europe Movement.
They ended their four-month trip and left the boat in Cannes for the winter.

Mosley returned in October to find the UM in’a poor state. Alf Flockhart,
told journalist Dudley Barker they had 108 branches with up to thirty-eight
members in each, but it was a lie. There were no more than 2,000 members,
mostly concentrated in East London. Mosley redoubled his efforts and spoke
at Kensington Town Hall on 17 October to an audience, Mervyn Jones
noted, of ‘sentimental old ladies, retired colonels, flash young men bored with
their jobs and ordinary people of the small shopkeepers’. His appeal was in
 584 BLACKSHIRT

‘restoring the psychological outlet which India for 150 years provided for the
spirited young sons of the British middle classes’. He was ‘a bitter, dis-
appointed, frustrated man. He deeply resents his rejection by his country and
reacts by self-praise and hatred.’ :
Mosley presented a picture of Europe as ‘a great power able to defy .
Bolshevism and reject American aid’, and a ‘Faustian vision of Africa’. Heroic
technicians would open up the continent, ‘reclaiming marshes and deserts for
the uses of man, cutting tunnels, canals, railways and highways through natural
obstacles. Just think what could be done.’ Jones acknowledged that Mosley
did not favour sweated labour but he had made clear his contempt for Africans.
An appeal to racial fears was embodied in claims that the old parties are
‘waiting till the juju-men are ready to take over’.
Mosley’s policies were met with such indifference that the 43. Group had
ceased attacking UM meetings. ‘This was’, John Bean remembered, ‘a greater
blow to Mosleyites than all the bans on their marches ... For it was only
when a fight broke out at a meeting that they received any mention in the
press.’ AJEX was similarly convinced that ‘with very rare exceptions, the most
effective way to combat Mosley was to ignore both their marches and their
meetings’. To stem the tide, Bean recalled, Mosley resorted to provocative
marches through areas that were ‘either notorious as a Red stronghold, or
had a large Jewish population’. When he realized he was ‘wasting his sweetness
on the desert air’ to a handful of supporters, ‘some uniformed police, two
Special Branch officers and a few stray dogs’ at Ridley Road, he gave up.
Germany assumed increasing importance. The Frankfurt newspaper Abend
Post noted on 28 November that Mosley books and pamphlets ‘overflow
West Germany’. They were being sent to ‘former Hitler Youth leaders’, with
a strong pro-Mosley presence among ‘former members of the office VI (6th
HQ) of the chief command headquarters of the Waffen SS staff’. The courier
service Mosley ran was ‘taken care of by English people visiting and vacation-
ing in Germany’, which was the ‘essential basis’ of his Europe a Nation and
Euro-Africa policy. Union stated on 10 December that in Africa, ‘Germany
will find the Lebensraum of which she has been temporarily deprived in the
East’.
A prophet without honour in his own country, The Alternative gave Mosley
a certain cachet among what Bardeche termed ‘these bands of lost soldiers
who recognized each other in the murk of injustice and hatred’. He openly
sought the ‘good will’ of German admirers and dedicated the German edition
‘to his German comrades in unshakeable belief in European brotherhood by
an Englishman who has become a European’. In a new foreword he said
‘their enemy was not so much the English people but much more the small
authoritative clique in England whose politics has defeated all great projects
. and powerful performances for so long a time, not only in Europe but also in
 THE UNION MOVEMENT 585

England’. The Americans, the English and the French are accused in newspaper
reports of
the burning of living opposers at the martyr stake, whipping and other torture
methods, rape and other violations of women and children . . . whilst the Germans
were molested with accusations before a court and a judge instated by the allies
which are still too fresh, too well known and too extensive that they demand or
permit a repetition here. The Germans will surely receive the opportunity to prove
before history whether the terrible conditions in their concentration camps during
the war were evoked mostly through the bombardments of the allies and the
epidemics which followed.

US CIC reports noted the positive reviews of the book in Germany.

The volume of propaganda Mosley was sending to Germany led newspapers
to conclude that he viewed ‘the national socialistic elements in West Germany
as the most suitable partners at the organising of a fascist concentration
movement in Europe’. He was ‘continuing the tradition of a Fascist Inter-
national which Hitler was forced to abandon. He has hit on a stratagem which
gives him the air of a progressive spirit.’ The Austrian neo-Nazi paper Alpenruf
suggested on 31 December that ‘the spiritual centre of a cleansed Fascism is
today neither in Germany nor in Austria, but — strange though it may seem —
in England’. The Swedish Fascist paper Vaegen Framat claimed the European
underground movements were growing but needed to be brought together to
preserve everything that had been valuable in the past. The war had weakened
their position and co-operation was essential, even for racial policies. Nations
were not strong enough ‘to enforce the unity of Europe (which the Fascists
want on an anti-democratic basis)’, and which was now smaller on account
of the Iron Curtain, but enough nationalism would remain to justify a Fascist
International.
With the absence of a crisis and the lack of a mass base, the permeation
strategy became Mosley’s only real option. Charlie Watts wrote to Robert
Saunders that ‘when the crack-up comes, and you and I know just how
inevitable that is; when the masses of the people find that they want a strong
lead, these [covert Fascists] will be in the best position to come out into the
open and join forces with the active movement’. One of the few successes was
John Charnley of the Lancashire Chamber of Commerce, who joined the
Conservatives and within two years was Chairnfan of the Burscough branch.
Raven Thomson was responsible for external contacts and held talks with
Welsh Nationalist leaders to persuade them to join in a United Europe. He
argued that smaller nations working together would enjoy more power than
by being just an attachment to England. He was involved with the very first
signs of the “Green Movement’.
The BU’s agricultural adviser Jorian Jenks had during the war made contact
586 BLACKSHIRT

with Montague Fordham and the Rural Reconstruction Association. In reac-

tion to overuse of chemicals in farming, Jenks helped form the Soil Association
to facilitate organic farming. Robert Saunders, however, believed genetic
adjustment of crops was the answer to food shortages. Raven Thomson.
attempted to reconcile their views. Saunders joined the Dorchester Agricultural ,
Society and the Rural Reconstruction Association. He stood as an ‘indepen-
dent’ in local elections and in the early sixties came within one vote of beating
Henry Plumb in the contest for the vice-presidency of the National Farmers
Union. Links had already been made with respectable animal rights groups,
through M. Dudley Ward, who had connections with the RSPCA and the
Animal Defence Society. In the end, attempts at permeation were small scale
and those who achieved positions of authority often left a movement they
recognized was in serious decline.
In the spring of 1950, in looking at propaganda themes for the summer,
Raven Thomson warned Mosley that interest in the UM ‘is dying away in the
most serious manner. It is my’considered opinion that there is a grave danger
of the British Movement folding up as a serious political force in this country,
unless some stimulus is given.’ Mosley, however, turned his attention to
creating a European neo-Fascist International.
Mosley had talks with MSI leaders Giorgio Almirante, Alvise Loredan and
naval hero Prince Junio Valerio Borghese; Maurice Bardeche of the Comité
Frangais National; ‘passionately pro-European’ SS survivors and Wehrmacht
Partizankrieg expert Arthur Ehrhardt, later the publisher of Nation Europa;
Mussolini’s rescuer Otto Skorzeny; air ace Hans-Ulrich Rudel; as well as First
World War intellectual Ernst Junger, one of the first to advocate the union of
Europe. Mosley’s travels were monitored by US Army 430th CIC, which
observed his renewed relationship with Johannes K. Bernhardt, who had
been involved in the pre-war radio project as Goering’s representative. The
monitoring of these ‘close contacts’ was part of an investigation into a ‘possible
espionage ring in Vienna’. During February Mosley arranged for his represen-
tative in Hamburg, Karl Meissner, to confer with other Nazi figures, though
the files do not reveal the nature of the discussions.
As a practical means of realizing a post-war Fascist new order, the MSI
held a preparatory conference in Rome in March 1950, which was attended
by Mosley; Anna Maria Mussolini, daughter of the late Duce; delegates
from the Spanish Falange; associates of Swiss neo-Nazi Guy Amaudruz;
Bruderschaft organizers; French collaborationists such as Georges Albertini,
former ADC of Marcel Déat, Bardeche and Guy Lemonnier; and Sweden’s
Per Engdahl, leader of the Nysvenska Rorelsen who had been financed by
Carl Carlberg, an anti-Semitic millionaire who bankrolled European Fascists,
though he had repudiated the creed by 1950. Delegates agreed to organize a
gathering in the autumn.
 THE UNION MOVEMENT 587

Over the Whitsun weekend the UM held a camp at Lymington in the New
Forest. Late on Sunday Mosley made a brief visit, after flying in to London
from Madrid. In search of allies, he then left for Argentina to meet Peron.
With his strength in the trade unions, the Argentine leader considered himself
a social radical, combining dictatorship and (anti-American) nationalism with
a fight against the landowners. He was attacked by both Conservatives and
© Liberals. Just as Mosley wanted to unite Europe, Peron wanted to unite Latin
_ America.
On the return journey Mosley stopped off at Madrid for a pre-arranged
meeting with Oswald Pirow, who had suggested that ‘our contact must become
close’. He told Mosley ‘the New Order has latterly made more progress than
at any time since the end of hostilities’. The Alternative was ‘making a great
impression in Germany’.
Only Mosley’s closest colleagues, principally Raven Thomson, were privy
to the nature of his international travels, even Jeffrey Hamm and Robert Row
did not really know what was happening. When Nicholas asked Hamm, ‘What
did you think when my father was supposed to be head of UM, he was hardly
ever here, he was always in France, he was always going to Venice?’ he replied,
‘I did wonder about that, but then he’d say all these people were lined up and
ready to back him.’ When nothing happened Hamm would say, ‘Oh, I used
to wonder about that, too.’ John Warburton recalled Mosley disappearing off
for mysterious telephone calls to Europe and meetings whose purpose was
never explained. There was a ‘most strange atmosphere’.
CIC files reveal that Mosley frequently exchanged letters with Franke-
Gricksch, who during the summer established lines of communication to
the Soviet Military Administration and to the East Zonal authorities. The
Bruderschaft’s hitherto uniform policy line showed increasing diversity. At
one in anti-Western resentment, Franke-Gricksch and Beck disagreed on aims
and became leaders of rival factions. Representing the SS, Hitler Youth and
Conservative Revolutionary elements, Franke-Gricksch, with his folkish-racist
jargon, led the East-orientated National Bolsheviks, while the practical Beck
headed the former Wehrmacht officers, who ‘saw their task not so much in
the permanent weakening of the defensive powers of the West as in the
insistence on conditions that would make West German rearmament imposs-
ible without their own well-rewarded assistance’. Franke-Gricksch still saw
‘the task of German policy in constructing a uniting order for the European
peoples within “Nation Europa”’, though he wanted it to embrace ‘the young,
Slavic peoples of the East’.
Developing links between neo-Nazis and the Soviet Union, and a rising
tide of anti-Americanism, to which Mosley’s Europe a Nation ideas to an
extent contributed, worried British Intelligence, which monitored the Nazi
revival. The right-wing, nationalist German Conservative and Right Party
588 BLACKSHIRT

(DKP-DRP), founded in 1946, attracted former Nazis. Swiftly banned by the

Federal Republic, the DKP-DRP’s rump merged with other groups to form
the Socialist Reich Party in 1949, which was a significant force for a few years
before fading away. In 1947 Adolf von Thadden, former artillery officer and.
member of the Deutsche Rechtspartei, approached MI6. His half-sister had»
been a member of the White Rose student resistance group in Munich and
had been tortured and executed. He subsequently developed a deep-rooted
hatred of the Nazis and proved to be an extremely valuable MI6 asset as it
looked at ways of ‘tainting and compromising the extreme right and their
Soviet friends’.
In The European Situation (1950) Mosley argued Russia would launch ‘not
a war of States but a war of politics reinforced by violence’. The age of nuclear
stalemate would usher in an era of the urban guerrilla, fomenting industrial
sabotage, striking against the ‘nerve centres of opposing governments ..
which have been softened by internal propaganda and thoroughly permeated
by highly-placed agents in the key positions of administration and defence’.
When Bruderschaft leaders made contact with Werner Naumann, a man of
influence in Nazi circles, its underground activities moved from the protection
of former Nazis to overt political targets. Employed in the Ministry of Propa-
ganda in 1944, aged thirty-four, he became the youngest under-secretary in
the Hitler regime. In his testament the grateful Fihrer appointed him to
succeed Goebbels as Minister. After an amnesty was declared for former Nazis,
Naumann and friends with whom he had kept in secret contact thought ‘the
air sufficiently clear for him to venture into the open’. They co-ordinated
efforts to put Nazis in positions of influence in political parties, the press and
youth organizations. Top priority was given to penetrating the three right-wing
parties that formed Chancellor Adenauer’s governing coalition. Naumann
managed an import-export firm in Diisseldorf, where he organized talks with
the Bruderschaft banker Hjalmar Schacht and Hans-Ulrich Rudel, patron saint
of the radical Nazi underground. Although not charged with war crimes,
Rudel joined his compatriots in Argentina as a paid adviser to Peron. Also
attending the talks was Otto Skorzeny, a major figure in running ‘ratlines’ and
gun running, as well as in the reactivation of German business contacts.
Unfortunately, the Foreign Office file on Skorzeny has been destroyed, as has
one on Mosley’s ties to Austrian neo-Nazis.
The Naumann/Bruderschaft circle, with its conception of elite selection
and nationalist revival, was effective in its underground foreign dealings and
developed contacts with Bardeche, the MSI and former officials of the Nazi
Party’s Foreign Organization. CIC files and UM members confirm that Mosley
was in contact with all these individuals. ‘A highly intelligent German’, wrote
Mosley, Naumann ‘saw clearly that the only hope for all the Europeans was
the making of Europe. However, his most normal and legitimate entry into
 THE UNION MOVEMENT 589

_ politics produced a convulsion of acute hysteria in the British occupation

authority’ but ‘no move was made against him until he was in contact with
me’. Naumann admitted he had known Mosley ‘since before the war... as a
good personal friend’.
Such associations did little to reassure those having second thoughts about
supporting the UM. Dr Margaret Vivian left in 1950 because ‘any chance we
had was ruined by the disgraceful way we were treated in the war which makes
_ the proletariat regard us as Quislings’. Watts, too, recognized that ‘we were
now being held responsible for and answerable for all the vile Nazi atrocities’.
He decided he was not going to waste his life ‘on people who were not worth
the effort’ and was ‘no longer going to knock my head against a brick wall’.
Mosley tried to rid the UM of anti-Semites but was realizing he was engaged
in ‘a sterile and unpopular revival of the BU policy’.

On 27 June 1950 the writer James Pope-Hennessy, whose lover Len Adams
was a UM member, dined with the Mosleys at the Hampstead home of the
poet Derek Hill. Diana was ‘hopelessly Mitford — that meaningless exaggerated
manner and voice’, but he thought her ‘very funny about prison’. She was
bored when Mosley began talking politics but Pope-Hennessy thought him
‘remarkably intelligent, and to the point and somehow real’. Mosley said,
‘Were it not for the working people, he would leave England; they alone are
worth anything here now.’ That summer was spent sailing on Alianora to the
South of France.
In July the DST wanted to know about the Mosleys’ movements. It had
intelligence from source ‘Rose’ that they were ‘due to arrive in Paris on 28 July
under the name of “Morley” and were thinking of travelling to Antibes in
their car, registration number CHO 143, a black MG cabriolet convertible’.
At Antibes they boarded the Alianora. Roger Wybot asked DST offices in
Marseilles and Nice to keep track of Mosley, who ‘will probably meet up with
~ or will have on board people with whom he will have political contact’. The
boat was expected to move on to Naples, Trieste, Venice and other Italian
ports, where they were monitored by Italian security. On 17 August a report
was forwarded to Wybot detailing Mosley’s encounters with Italian Fascists
and the French collaborationists associated with the Pétain regime, Alfred
Fabre-Luce and Gaston Bergery.
Nice Commissioner Maurice Cottentin forwatded details to Paris of an
unexpected development. Intelligence gathered in Marseilles and passed to the
central office in Cannes revealed a plot by ‘Italian anarchists’ to blow up the
Alianora. The DST was forced to keep Mosley under closer surveillance to
protect him from the anarchists. In the end the plot fell apart because soon
afterwards Mosley sold the boat to a British subject.
*
590 BLACKSHIRT

The MSI’s second meeting took place in Rome on 22 October, organized by

its Fronte Universitario di Azione Nazionale. A new addition was Karl-Heinz
Priester, leader of the NPD’s radical wing. A former Hitler Youth leader,
Priester spoke for those who supported a united Europe as a ‘third force’. A.
European Committee was formed and elected Engdahl as president, Bardeche.
and Fabio Lonciari as vice-presidents. They agreed to organize a conference
in southern Sweden the following spring as the springboard for an openly
pro-Fascist international. An unidentified British representative briefed the
absent Mosley. US intelligence noted that he ‘did not appear at public meetings
of associations of international Fascism’ but was ‘in contact with its high-
ranking personalities’.
Even larger UM meetings were now only attracting an average of 250
people. A meeting at Kensington Town Hall in the autumn of 1950 was typical
in that violent opposition had more or less ceased. Mosley’s propaganda policy
was ‘based on the assumption that any news is good news’. Consequently the
greatest blow the opposition struck his cause, John Bean conceded, ‘was their
cessation of organised attacks on public meetings and marches. For the most
part the only recruits such publicity gained were political morons looking
for excitement.’ The audience was the same faithful supporters with a few
‘inquisitive persons, wives and girlfriends who had been dragged along to
keep the peace’. There were few active supporters outside London.
To attract a crowd, Bean would masquerade as a heckler, which came easily
because he had become ‘aware of the fallacies, half truths, and prejudices
which UM’s policy was built on’. The marches were stage-managed by East
London Organizer Alf Flockhart, a homosexual whose drum corps was nick-
named the ‘bum corps’. In October he fell from grace amid allegations, which
he denied, that he was involved in a homosexual rape. He wrote to Mosley
suggesting it would be unwise to attend the court case, one ‘that will have a
very strong distasteful smell for a long time’. Bean realized his colleagues were
‘not a band of six foot broad shouldered thugs, as the general public seem to
visualise, but a rather drab looking crowd of vacant faced nondescript men
and women — although not without courage’. When marches failed to attract
a counter-demonstration and generate publicity, the UM looked to new stunts
and the decision was taken to attack Communist meetings. ‘All this, of course,
in the quest for publicity, and to keep the “‘boys” occupied.’
Mosley was on the verge of renouncing all practical activity and had decided
to leave England. The immediate cause was a tax case which he lost; after it
his counsel remarked, ‘I should have won that case for anyone in the country
except you.’ They planned to buy a house in Ireland, attracted by ‘a low rate
of taxation and food in abundance’ and the presence of friends such as the
Jacksons, who had a large house at Tullamaine, County Tipperary, where
they hunted with the ‘noble Tips’. Appointed Professor of Spectroscopy at
 THE UNION MOVEMENT 591
Oxford in 1947, Derek was a large shareholder in the News of the World,
which was sent to him in a plain wrapper as it was banned by the censor in
the Republic of Ireland. Deborah Mitford, whose husband had succeeded as
Duke of Devonshire, was chatelaine of Lismore Castle. Diana had connections
from her Guinness days. At the end of December the Mosleys were in Paris,
seeking another home in Europe. In the new year Crowood was sold for
£80,000 (£1.6m).

Mosley predicted in Union in January 1951 that when the crisis returned,
‘Europe led by dedicated men from all nations, would shatter its fetters and
succeed where fascism had failed’. A new movement was ‘uniting these
elements in defence of Europe, which have fought for a generation against the
Soviet menace, and once in a disunited Europe engaged in internecine strife
flung the Red Army back 600 miles into the Russian Steppes’. The new
movement was centred around Nation Europa, founded as the journal of
international Fascism by Mosley and, among a select group, Per Engdahl.
An admirer of Mussolini, Engdahl’s New Swedish Movement boasted 4,000
followers and promoted a corporativist, anti-Semitic, anti-Communist and
fiercely nationalist doctrine, which appealed to Scandinavian Nazi collabor-
ators. Nation Europa’s first issue, edited by Arthur Ehrhardt, appeared in
January 1951 with the sub-title ‘Monthly for European Regeneration’.
Ehrhardt had been assigned to the counter-intelligence section of the High
Command but switched to the Waffen SS, though he did not join the Nazi
Party. In 1945 he described his aims as ‘the union of Europe on a national
basis’ and asserted that ‘Europe had already been created’ within the wartime
European SS organizations.
Nation Europa counted among its directors the Swedish industrialist Carl
Carlberg and Arthur Kogel of Chicago. Mosley and Raven Thomson contrib-
uted articles, as did Major-General Fuller and Basil Liddell Hart, which gave
it some credibility. Chief essayists were former Nazi officials and writers such
as Hans Grimm, Otto Karl Dupow, Adolf von Thadden and Karl-Heinz
Priester; from France, René Binet, Maurice Bardeche; from Italy, Professor J.
Evola and Fabio Lonciari; and from South Africa, Oswald Pirow. Nation
Europa claimed a steady rising circulation of 6,000 copies, which suggested
its influence was not considerable. However, it was directed to an ‘elite’ and
its content was above the heads of rank-and-file Fascists.
The elite were Skorzeny and Rudel, who set up an ‘external organization’
in Madrid, with subordinate roles entrusted to Himmler’s principal agent in
Italy S$S-Colonel Eugen Dollmane; former commander of the Legion Wallonie
living in exile in Spain, Léon Degrelle; and the Jew baiter, SS-Colonel Johann
von Leers. From 1951 Skorzeny did not confine his activities to Germany and
Spain and, acting as a commercial traveller, was able to present himself as a
592 BLACKSHIRT

businessman more interested in money than an adventurous life. However, he

played an important role, through Priester, former propaganda chief of the
Hitler Jugend SS and Chairman of the Deutsche Soziale Bewegung, in bringing
together the various groups in a neo-Nazi International. Priester stressed
Nation Europa’s ‘third force’ perspective and visited London for talks with
Mosley.

The Union Movement limped on until February 1951, when Mosley at Ken-
sington Town Hall denounced Britain as ‘an island prison’ and went off to a
self-imposed exile in Ireland. As in the 1930s, his rationalization for failure
was that the economic and political crisis which he needed to succeed had
unaccountably failed to happen. He told disappointed UM followers he would
‘speak in England again when the efforts of our movement from without and
from within have scrapped some of the bars. It is easier to break locks from
outside than from inside.’
Information that Mosley intended to live in Ireland reached the Irish govern-
ment. D. Costigan of the Department of Justice reminded Sean Nunan, Perma-
nent Under-Secretary of External Affairs, that Mosley had applied to live in
Ireland five years previously when the Taoiseach had suggested he ‘might try
at a later date’. There was ‘no evidence that Sir Oswald has engaged in political
activity here or that he is in any way connected with the “Black Legion” ’, and
so it was agreed he could stay. On 19 February Costigan reported Mosley had
purchased Clonfert Palace, Eyrecourt, in County Galway. The former home
of Protestant bishops, dating from the seventeenth century, it stood on the
edge of a bog less than a mile from the River Shannon and was in a poor state,
requiring bathrooms and electricity.
Costigan reported that while renovations were undertaken, Diana’s ‘two
sons, Alexander (13) and Max (11), are staying with their father in Dublin.
They spend most of their time at a Dublin riding school.’ Alexander regretted
leaving Crowood and the familiar faces, but Max adored hunting and found
plenty of opportunities with Derek Jackson and the Devonshires. Clonfert,
recalled Mosley, was ‘rambling and romantic rather than beautiful, and redo-
lent of the usual legends of Cromwellian misbehaviour’. Diana found life there
was ‘something like pre-war Wootton, there was fishing and rough shooting’.
During a visit to Paris the Mosleys discovered the Temple de la Gloire, a
run-down building of grand Hellenic proportions twenty miles from Paris,
near the village of Orsay. Built in 1800 by the architect Vignon, it was a gift
from the wife and mother-in-law of General Moreau, chief of the armies of
the Rhine, who was a rival of Napoleon’s until his death, to celebrate his
victory at Hohenlinden. Its high-sounding name became a permanent joke for
Mosley, who admitted his friends ‘thought I am always a little “exalté”, but
now I am right round the bend’. When the Mosleys purchased the Temple in
 THE UNION MOVEMENT 593

March 1951 for £5,000 (£100,000), it ‘was in need of restoration. They also
bought a flat in central Paris so as to be in contact with friends. France,
however, was the only country in which Mosley refused to be involved in
politics, although it was a good base from which to travel around Europe.
In Ireland he hoped to escape the press, the anti-Fascists and State surveil-
lance. Mosley could spend up to ninety days in England which, he said, ‘were
adequate to the meetings and conferences it was necessary to hold’. Within
the UM, many believed he had deserted the cause and a number left. Nicholas
realized his father did not take the UM ‘very seriously as a political movement.
I think he saw it as a way of ticking over, keeping a nucleus of supporters
there, in case something happened in the great big world.’ Indeed, Mosley
only needed the UM as a means of entrée into the international networks on
which he concentrated his energies and resources.
 26

The Neo-Fascist Internationals

At the end of May 1951, at the invitation of Per Engdahl, a hundred represen-
tatives of the principal Fascist and neo-Nazi groups from across Europe
assembled at Malmé, Sweden, to found a new international. Twenty West
German Nazis were invited but the Swedish authorities refused them entry
permits. ‘Dr Franz Richter’, a Nazi official who was elected a member of the
Bundestag for the Socialist Reich Party (DRP), took part in the proceedings
after getting across the frontier by using false papers to conceal his real name,
Fritz Roessler. The MSI was represented by individual members, such as
Arturo Michelini and Fabio Lonciari, because its leadership refused to be
entangled with a potentially compromising international. There was a gulf
between the conservatives, who wanted an international under their direction,
and young radicals, who sought a manifesto to rally their foreign counterparts
and simultaneously satisfy both the ‘socialist’ and the neo-Nazi factions. But
like the DRP, they were unwilling to compromise themselves too deeply,
justifying Maurice Bardeche’s claim that for them, ‘nationalism is still the
mainspring of their doctrine’. Among those who expressed solidarity with the
Malmé rally but failed to get there, having been denied visas, were its main
instigators, Otto Skorzeny, Karl-Heinz Priester and Mosley.
Malm6’s immediate goals were to rehabilitate Fascism, and to devise a
common programme and an agreed-upon framework of action. The intention
was to field candidates in the forthcoming elections for the European Parlia-
ment, so policy was moderated in order to attract popular support. Representa-
tives refused to invoke Mussolini and Hitler as their spiritual forefathers
and distanced themselves from crucial aspects of their ideology. Fascism and
Nazism in general, said Bardeche, ‘belong to the past’. The new movement
refused ‘to revive or imitate political forms that are today superseded . . . our
doctrine can make use of all the experiments of the past, but our ideal is a
new one which is only inspired by the present’.
Moderates rejected anti-Semitism in order to project the image of ‘reason-
able men who wanted the public to welcome a new “cleansed national-
socialism” purged of most of the racialist excesses of the Hitler regime’. The
third way ‘neutralism’ — ‘neither Morgenthau, nor Moscow’ — was of a kind
 THE NEO-FASCIST INTERNATIONALS 595

with which Hitler had tried to unite Europe but, aside from its Nation Europa
elements, the vague manifesto ‘reflected the ideals of Mussolini or Salazar far
more than it did those of Hitler’. However, the public announcements were,
notes Jeffrey Bale, ‘little more than cynical, opportunistic ploys designed to
alleviate legitimate public concerns’; a view confirmed by the less diplomatic
phraseology employed in their own press.
Malmé6 gave birth to the Mouvement Social Européen/Europdische Soziale
Bewegung (MSE/ESB). Engdahl was elected head of its governing ‘four-man
council’, which included Bardeche, Priester and moderate MSI leader Augusto
de Marsanich, a Minister for Foreign Affairs under Mussolini, and prepared
a candidates’ list for the planned elections — later cancelled — for the European
Parliament. Sixteen movements affiliated to the ‘Malm6 International’ and a
secretariat was set up in Rome. Activists tried to establish national branches
for their pan-European umbrella movement. The New York Times claimed
that one of its main objectives was ‘to penetrate United States and British
democratic organisations by taking advantage of the rising tide of anti-
Communism’. Contacts were established with forty extremist organizations
in Europe, pro-Arab friendship leagues and Association Argentina-Europa,
a co-ordinating body for twenty neo-Nazi groups under the leadership of
Kameradenwerk chief Hans-Ulrich Rudel.
There were no representatives of the Bruderschaft, which was in the process
of splitting. The hostility between Beck’s pro-Western faction and Franke-
Gricksch’s Russophile faction, coupled with adverse publicity about the organ-
ization’s role as a Nazi secret society, led to Franke-Gricksch’s formal
expulsion. The role of the intelligence services in these events is unclear, but
the Russians suspected Beck was working as an agent provocateur for US
Intelligence. Shortly afterwards it was formally dissolved. In the end, the
Bruderschaft did not ‘exert any realistic behind-the-scenes influence over sig-
nificant political events of the day’, although a prominent member, Dr Gustav
Scheel, former Gauleiter of Salzburg, continued to scheme with the elite group
centred on Dr Werner Naumann.
In order to increase influence behind the scenes, Naumann’s associates
strengthened their ties to military circles and veterans’ organizations, industri-
alists, youth and cultural groups, and publishers such as ex-SS man Waldemar
Schutz’s Pleasse-Verlag and the international backers of Nation Europa, which
included Mosley. The most significant contact was with Dr Eberhard Taubert
of the Volksbund fiir Frieden und Freiheit (VFF), which led to political plotting
with Skorzeny, Rudel and Wilfred von Oven, Goebbels’s former adjutant.
Naumann claimed the circle was simply a ‘discussion group’, which was
unjustly persecuted by the ‘victors’. However, his diary and secret speeches,
in which he explicitly advocated the takeover of respectable rightist parties,
tell otherwise. The chief efforts were devoted to infiltrating rightist parties,
596 BLACKSHIRT

especially the Deutsche Partei (DP), with a view towards penetrating the entire
state apparatus, and they ended up controlling North Rhine-Westphalia and
Lower Saxony, Rudel’s old stamping ground.
As the brains trust of the Fascist International, Nation Europa - on whose .
editorial board was Raven Thomson — was directed by the Mouvement Social
Européen (MSE). However, apart from press attempts to portray Malmé6 as
a ‘revival of Hitler’s Third Reich’, the MSE achieved little. It was ‘a great
success on the symbolic level and thus fanned the initial hopes of many
participants’, but it ‘soon lost the support of much of its own base’. Its financial
foundations were shaky and at the end of 1951 Naumann had to come to the
rescue by mobilizing financial assistance. He visited Paris where he met
Mosley, Bardeche, Guy Amaudruz, Jean-Maurice Bauverd, Guy Lemonnier
and Georges Albertini. Mosley helped a number of Fascist groups but not
always with money. The US CIC reported that ‘in a letter (22 June) written
by Fritz Ploetz, business manager of the DDB, a (FNU) Schmidt of the
Eggenfelden Printing Co. was asked if he is interested in purchasing 200 tons
of Swedish paper which the DDB has at its disposal. The DDB obtained this
paper through Mosley at a low price and is selling it to obtain funds.’
Bardeche attributed the MSE’s decline ‘to the failure of its component
groups to develop as anticipated and the repressive actions and surveillance
which its members were subjected to’. There were the usual personality con-
flicts among the would-be Fiihrers but it was the issue of race that proved
fatal. The ‘third force’ Europe of the ‘moderates’ such as Mosley and Bardeche
failed as ‘an answer to the dreams of the younger generations, who demanded
action and were steeped in racialist ideas’. They disliked the ‘soft-pedalling’
of anti-Semitism and founded, at Zurich, the Nouvel Ordre Européen (NOE),
which was characterized by virulent anti-Semitism.
Frenchman René Binet and other German and Italian militants founded the
European Liaison office as a rival to the MSE, and inaugurated the NOE on
28 September 1951, under his presidency and the secretaryship of the Swiss
neo-Nazi leader Guy Amaudruz. Contacts were established with Falangists,
the MSI’s right wing and the American National Renaissance Party. The NOE
supported a ‘third force’ Europe built around the Berlin—Rome axis with a
declaration that was explicitly racist. Bardeche had harsh things to say of
those who ‘take refuge in memories’.
According to US CIC files on the Swiss Youth leader Ernst Schmidt, in secret
attendance at Zurich were Mosley and Priester, illustrating the complexity of
individual ideological positions but also Mosley’s willingness to associate
himself with extreme elements, while publicly aligning himself with the
moderates. When CIC officers attempting to find more about the MSE inter-
viewed Priester in Bremen, he confirmed he had ‘met with Mosley during his
stay in Lérrach, Switzerland, and stated that he and Mosley were in agreement
 THE NEO-FASCIST INTERNATIONALS 597

about the necessity of establishing contacts and influence in South Africa’.

In October 1951 Mosley’s former German adviser, Franke-Gricksch, went
missing in East Berlin and ‘was never heard from again’. He was soon followed
by his wife. Four years later she returned to West Germany and claimed they
had been tried by a Russian military court on charges of pro-Western spying
and anti-Soviet propaganda activity. Franke-Gricksch had been condemned
to death, while she received a twenty-five-year sentence. The Red Cross later
confirmed that Franke-Gricksch had died in a camp in 1953.
Like Mussolini, Mosley reverted to his left-wing roots once Fascism had
failed. In his European Socialism he argued that international capitalism
produced conflict not harmony, but he recognized his thirties’ planned econ-
omy was ‘too bureaucratic’ and now proposed a ‘synthesis of private enterprise
and syndicalism’. His new faith envisaged a form of workers’ control in
industry and, later, the managerial revolution extolled in Europe: Faith and
Plan. This was an outgrowth of inter-war Fascist thought, as expressed in
Raven Thomson’s The Coming Corporate State and his own earlier guild
socialism. It was to be, Mosley argued, more decentralized and would extol
individual initiative. Small industrial enterprises would be allowed complete
freedom under private ownership but once they reached a certain size and
when the founder had retired from active control, they were to pass to the
ownership of their workers. The role of the State would be reduced to
pioneering new industries, initiating projects too big for private enterprise
and to provide macro-planning functions. State planning functions would be
considerable and coexisted uneasily with the ideas of European socialism.
These ideas, however, held little appeal for the electorate and the UM was
reduced to creating publicity stunts against the Communist Party. An insider
agreed that Mosley was ‘to some degree a political stunt merchant’. These
were organized by ex-paratrooper Peter Lesley-Jones (later a Bevanite), who
led a small corps of eighteen picked men. At the 1951 October general election
the CP contested seats in East London and held a march from Stepney to
Stoke Newington. The UM launched an attack on the march as it passed
through what they considered their territory in Dalston. Although twelve UM
members, including Lesley-Jones, were arrested, three of them being jailed,
Mosleyites believed it was worth it. It was thought it would generate nation-
wide publicity as the only movement actively opposed to Communism; in fact,
John Bean recalled, ‘it confirmed the general public’s view that they were a
party of lay-abouts lacking any political argument’. The Special Propaganda
Section was also responsible for organizing election campaigns but was ineffec-
tive and the three candidates, led by Burgess, received only an average of 470
votes in the 1952 by-elections. The SPS ‘fizzled out, killed by the joint jeal-
ousies of the Headquarters hierarchy and the East End mobsters’.
*
 598 BLACKSHIRT

Diana was now settled near Paris and for much of 1952 was absorbed in work
on the Temple de la Gloire. Her relationship with her sister Nancy blossomed
and, though she disliked ‘Sir Ogre’ (‘Why will one’s sisters marry these
sewers?’), Nancy became a regular guest at the Mosleys’. However, she could
never overcome her suspicions of their behaviour. The Mosleys’ routine was
to spend summers in Venice, shooting in the autumn in Normandy on the
estate of friends, winters in Ireland, Christmas in Paris with Countess Mona
Bismarck and New Year’s Eve with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who
lived nearby in the Moulin de la Tuilerie (‘the MP ). Max would then rush
back to Ireland for the hunting.
Like the Mosleys, the Windsors were exiled, cut off from the society they
craved. The couples dined together at the Mill twice a week and as frequently
at the Temple. The Duke liked to indulge in genealogical gossip. ‘He would say:
“Now let me see. Lady so-and-so was Lord so-and-so’s great-aunt. Recto?”’,’
recalled Diana. ‘I loved the Duke and have seldom met his like for charm. He
was always ready to laugh and‘ be amused and ... his face lit up in a most
engaging way. He had the almost miraculous memory that royal personages
so cleverly cultivate and which everyone finds flattering.’ In turn, he admired
the Mosleys and talked about Germany and current affairs. He said, ‘Tom
. would have made a first-rate Prime Minister.’
Diana was clear that the Windsors shared the Mosleys’ views on politics.
The Duchess was ‘politically sophisticated and knew exactly what she was
saying’. They all felt that if a separate peace had been made with Germany in
1939 and Hitler had been given a free hand against the Soviet Union, it would
have saved the world from Communism and the British Empire from collapse.
If Hitler ‘had been allowed to deport the Jews, if Britain and America had
accepted them, there would have been no need for a holocaust. There was of
course no room in Palestine for them.’ The two couples ‘could not exonerate
Hitler for being impatient and provoking World War Two’ but with ‘two egos
like Churchill and Hitler, there was little chance for peace in the world .. . if
the right people had been in power in England, particularly Lloyd George,
there could have been a negotiated peace’. They agreed ‘Allied forces should
have occupied what were now the satellite countries of the Soviets before the
Russians got to them, and should have proceeded to conquer the Soviet Union
itself’. Nancy said the friendship between the two couples was based on
nostalgia for the days of the Third Reich: ‘I believe their wickedness knows
no bounds.’ -

Back in Ireland there was concern about whether Mosley was engaged in
political activities in the country after reports on 8 February from the Depart-
ment of Defence that ‘a good many of the people with whom he was promi-
nently associated in England are again showing evidence of interest in a revival
 THE NEO-FASCIST INTERNATIONALS 599

of their old activities’. The Director of Intelligence, Dan Bryan, told Sean
Nunan on the 28th: that he had ‘no information’ Mosley was ‘taking any
interest in political or other activities here’. Government officials were
informed that while he was ‘still politically active, he probably works from
his residence outside Paris’. Bryan said, ‘He seems more or less to have lost
interest in the remnants of his Union Movement.’
Even anti-Semitism had lost its appeal. A study by J. H. Robb found that
anti-Semites had little faith in the UM and ‘most of them reject it vigorously’,
partly because of the ‘very strong disfavour in which Fascism is held’. The
UM’s street politics reinforced the image of illegitimacy, the result of the heavy
preponderance of adolescent youths at its meetings. Bean, who had wanted a
‘modern’ UM, was dismayed that ‘with several other notable exceptions
Mosley’s followers post-war contained a higher percentage of degenerates and
the socially dysfunctional than they did pre-war in the BUF’.
Mosley turned to immigration as the issue to garner support. Union regaled
readers with tales of ‘dope-pedlars, molesters of white women, and black crime’
and demanded a ‘white Brixton’. Growth of immigration from Common-
wealth countries grew rapidly during the decade. With cheap passage, most
came from the West Indies, but increasingly from India and Pakistan. The
numbers of Indians, Pakistanis and West Indians in Britain stood in 1951 at
30,800, 5,000 and 15,300 respectively, and apart from at arrival ports, black
or Asian people were few and far between. The UM argued it was ‘high
time that some public protest should be made about this influx of coloured
work-shys. Obviously the great difference between the standard of life of the
African negroes and of the British people is such that work-shy negroes are
perfectly prepared to exist in idleness and in slum conditions on the dole and
what they can scrounge from the public assistance authorities.’
In a statement on 27 February 1952 Mosley defined his attitude to the
trickle of West Indian immigration: ‘I am strongly against any offensive abuse
of Negroes.’ We must live with them as ‘friendly neighbours’ but not in an
‘ad-mixture of races’ but in an apartheid system as in Africa. “The same
principle must apply to Britain. Therefore we must prevent the residence of
Negroes in Britain.’ He wanted those immigrants already here involuntarily
repatriated with some compensation. Diana said, ‘He had thought it all out,
you know, even repatriation.’
‘There were mounting pressures within the Movement’, John Charnley re-
called, ‘to renew the initiative for a series of meetings in the major towns and
cities, and through it, build up mass support for our policies. I was very encour-
aged to receive an invitation to spend a weekend of discussion in Dublin with
OM.’ The Mosleys’ presence in Ireland intrigued the British and a diplomat
in the Dublin embassy maintained contact with Nunan. “We should always be
interested to have any further knowledge of their eventual return to Ireland.’
600 BLACKSHIRT

In September the British Foreign Office informed Dublin that Mosley was
to hold ‘a forthcoming meeting with his principal UK lieutenants in the Russell
Hotel’ and asked the Irish to keep it under surveillance. Reports sent to the
Irish government said the expected arrivals were ‘E. J. Hamm, Robert Row |
and John Charnley. A. Raven Thomson, the Secretary of the Union Movement,
would also be present. Our authorities comment that the Union Movement
has made no progress whatever since Mosley left England, and that it is only
kept going by subsidies from the leader himself, who is still a wealthy man. It
is thought in London that Mosley today is a spent force politically and that
he has little security interest.’ His money kept the headquarters going in
Vauxhall Bridge Road, the paper Union, which proved difficult to sell on
street corners, and the wages of its editor, Raven Thomson, and those of
Hamm. On 27 September Mosley met his colleagues in Dublin.
The primary purpose of the meeting was to discuss the launch of a monthly
journal, The European. Hamm was to be in charge of the business side, with
Diana its editor. Row recalled that Mosley said ‘he was deliberately recruiting
two writers who opposed our pre-war stance but now firmly agreed over
Europe. He would write a column every month, advancing his idea of “Europe
a Nation’’. The journal would also carry major economic articles and features
on the ideological clash with Soviet communism; the “cold war’’ was very
much on at the time.’ In addition, the meeting agreed to test the views and
interest of pre- and post-war members in a possible series of meetings. A
private meeting restricted to supporters of a United Europe was arranged in
Manchester, attended by the leading pre-war East End figure Mick Clarke.
But not much came of the initiative. The Dublin conclave had been monitored
by Ireland’s G2 Military Intelligence, but had little to report to officials, who
passed on information to Chadwick in the British embassy.
New Fascist internationals cropped up every few months. The European
People’s Movement was an attempt to heal the rift between moderates and
extremists. In early January 1953 it aimed to ‘unite all forces fighting to save
Christian civilization from Judaism, Communism and Freemasonry’ and to
create a united Europe in accordance with the old concept of Hitler and
Mussolini. The Congress Hall in Paris was decorated with streamers proclaim-
ing ‘the Jews are a plague’ and ‘Let us carry on the racial policy in Europe’.
Sixty delegates from Europe, the US, the Middle East and Argentina ‘sang
their Nazi songs, shouted their fascist war-cries and agreed to stand together’,
although the Malmé International and the ELO continued their separate
existences. Mosley sent a telegram supporting the new venture, which estab-
lished headquarters in Strassbourg-Neudorf. The Movement’s first chairman
was Bardeche, who said that ‘as France was so vulnerable, leadership had to
be passed on to Germany. Only under German leadership could Europe be
 THE NEO-FASCIST INTERNATIONALS 601

protected against Communism. The only solution would be the armed but
neutral United States of Europe.’
In March, The European, a ‘journal of opposition’, was launched which
Diana edited for six years, as well as writing a diary and reviewing political
memoirs. Self-consciously highbrow, it attracted serious writers, with fiction
from Desmond Stewart, one-time Professor of English at the College of Arts
and Sciences, Baghdad, who dealt with Arab and Palestinian affairs; poets and
writers Roy Campbell, Henry Williamson and Hugo Charteris. A group of
young writers were interested in Ezra Pound, who contributed, including Noel
Stock, Peter Whigham, Denis Goacher and Alan Neame, who had the look of
an SS officer but treated everything to do with Mosley as a big joke. They
gravitated to Agenda, a Poundian poetry-cum-criticism magazine. A. James
Gregor, who made his name in political science, wrote essays on syndicalism
and Nazi racial theories. According to Row, Gregor believed Fascism was a
viable creed in the contemporary world. From France came the translator
Jacques Brousse, Henri Gilbert and Michel Mohrt, novelist and literary critic
for Le Figaro. The European also published the work of old Nazis and
Vichyites. From Germany there were political exchanges from Henrich
Sanden, editor of Nation Europa, about disarmament and Russia, while Dr
Otto Strasser wrote on Europe, amid articles with titles such as “Eugenics
for Europe’. In practice the majority of contributors were sympathetic to
neo-Fascist ideas.
Mosley wrote essays under his own name and contributed a regular com-
mentary on world affairs under the pen-name ‘European’. He produced his
best non-political essays for The European, in particular, literary essays such
as ‘Wagner and Shaw: A Synthesis’, which argued against Shaw’s negative
interpretation in The Perfect Wagnerite of Wagner’s Ring. Mosley thought
that ‘what was required before there could be super-human achievement was
the emergence of the being “who weeps because he has killed a swan rather
than exults because he can kill a dragon; who holds the all-powerful spear on
condition that he does not use it”’. His work was republished in Nation
Europa and in Buenos Aires by Dinamico Social, which noted that ‘contrary
to the general belief that Asia is the key to the world’, Mosley was ‘convinced
that Europe, together with Africa and Latin America, holds the key to the
future’.
Some of Mosley’s friends thought he should have given up the UM and
concentrated on The European, as it was the most dignified of his activities.
Some Mosleyites, however, resented Diana’s ‘entertainers’. ‘She surrounds
herself with people like that. They all go across to have meetings about The
European and they always turn into parties. They’re not serious.’ While Row
and Hamm were desperate for the lowly wages, Alan Neame and others had
602 BLACKSHIRT

no difficulty in collecting the cheques for their articles. The European was not,
however, a financial success and was restricted to limited circles. The aim had
been to start a forum of debate of Mosley’s position but his isolation and
reputation meant that it was met with a deafening silence.

Mosley’s ties to the Werner Naumann circle put his name on the front pages
of newspapers across Europe, though it was not the kind of publicity he
sought. Naumann had tried to create ‘a leadership cadre dedicated to a moder-
ate, modified national socialism’ which he could insert ‘inconspicuously into
existing licensed parties’. This was frustrated by High Commissioner Sir Ivone
Kirkpatrick, who ordered the arrest on 14 January 1953 of Naumann, the
former SS General Paul Zimmermann, and F. K. Bornemann, the Brudersch-
aft’s liaison man. British Intelligence took a serious view of Naumann’s clan-
destine activities and believed he was making progress and the threat needed
to be curtailed. He exerted influence on the Deutsche Reichspartei (DRP) led
by Adolf von Thadden which, despite never having more than 16,000
members, was deemed a success.
Von Thadden’s political career took off at a time of crisis for German
neo-Nazis. Hitler’s personal bodyguard, Major-General Otto Remer, who
formed the Socialist Reich Party in the British zone, had been arrested and
imprisoned. He was entered on a ‘watch list’ of fanatical Nazis as ‘a very
dangerous man and potential Werewolf leader’. Facing another term of impris-
onment, Remer fled to the Middle East to serve a series of Arab dictators and
terror groups. Von Thadden stepped in and formed the DRP, which was
careful not to attack Dr Adenauer’s West German government. He managed
to win a parliamentary seat, which showed that there was support for National
Socialism.
In response to the arrest of Naumann, who was ‘assailed with a shower of
ridiculous charges’, Mosley employed his own solicitor to act on his behalf
for his friend. Kirkpatrick ‘then quickly learnt that British law still existed even
within the arbitrary dictatorship of the occupation authority’. On 3x March,
Chancellor Adenauer claimed documents provided by Kirkpatrick showed
that ‘not inconsiderable’ financial aid was given to Naumann by British,
Belgian and French sources. He named Belgian Fascist Léon Degrelle and
Mosley, who immediately dismissed the accusation as ‘quite untrue’. In the
Commons the Labour MP James Hoy asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer
‘if he is aware that British citizens have transferred sterling for the financial
assistance of Naumann’. He wanted to know if there was ‘any information
as to where this money is coming from’. The Treasury Secretary, Reginald
Maudling, replied that he understood Mosley was ‘a resident of Eire, and
therefore not subject to our exchange control’.
On 22 April the Irish government’s Department of External Affairs informed
 THE NEO-FASCIST INTERNATIONALS 603

the Finance Department that ‘the Naumann group are being defended by
London solicitor and counsel. Obviously Sir O could help to defray these legal
expenses by cheque to London without help or hindrance from the Exchange
Control.’ On the following day the Finance Minister, Sean MacEntee, replied
that ‘no exchange control approval for the transfer of funds to the Federal
Republic of Germany for the purpose stated in the Deputy’s question had
been sought by, or granted to, Mosley’. He told the Dail that in May 1952
Mosley’s Dublin accountants had informed the Department that he held
a contract under which he gives a portion of his time to a Swiss publishing firm for
a remuneration (including expenses) of 7,200 Swiss francs per annum. This sum,
however, is barely sufficient to cover his expenses during his visits to Europe on the
Swiss firm’s business and that of his own firm. In view of the latest developments it
cannot be overlooked that the Swiss funds at his disposal during the past two years
might have been used by him to aid political friends in Germany, but if such occurred
the transfers were made without our knowledge or consent.

The Swiss firm turned out to be that of Francois Genoud, Agent Litteraire,
Lausanne, a shadowy Swiss neo-Nazi banker who was a financier of Fascism
and used his contacts to help the networks known as ODESSA, and to manage
the hidden Swiss treasure of the Third Reich, most of which had been stolen
from Jews in the concentration camps. Genoud was a member of the Swiss
Nazi Party and worked for German military intelligence during the war.
Somehow he secured the posthumous rights to the writings of Hitler, Goebbels
and Bormann. ‘He knew everybody,’ said his close friend Otto Remer. Genoud
dedicated his life to Arab nationalism because he saw it as a natural extension
of his anti-Semitism. He was involved with Remer in the shipment of arms to
the Algerian National Liberation Front at the height of the Algerian War
and managed FLN funds through his Geneva-based Arab Commercial Bank,
which had as its consultant Dr Hjalmar Schacht. Genoud supported the ultra
left-wing anti-Israeli terrorists from Western Europe linked to the Carlos
network during the 1970s. He committed suicide in 1996. An insider also
admits that Mosley invested funds with Genoud.
Mosley’s legal team went to Germany and instituted libel proceedings
against the German Chancellor. On 7 May, referring to a statement by Dr
Dehler, Minister of Justice, that he ‘had sent a great deal of his writings to
Germany so that they could be sold and the proceeds credited to the Naumann
movement’, Mosley stated that the allegation ‘was as untrue as was the former
statement by Dr Adenauer that he had sent money to Naumann’. Adenauer
backtracked and ‘came across with a handsome apology, published to the
world’. In the end, all charges against Naumann were quashed in the Supreme
Court, which seemed to Mosley to be ‘a fair reading of the facts that British
officials were directly responsible for this whole trouble. They had no love for
604 BLACKSHIRT

me because for years I had attacked their policies in my own country in terms
which were vehement.’
Did Mosley finance Naumann? Probably not, since he needed his limited
funds for his own activities. However, he did provide valuable newsprint and .
contributed to the legal funds. UM members admit he was in contact with .
Naumann, who visited him in Paris, despite his denials.
John Bean recalled that at the beginning, ‘adulation of Adolf Hitler was
only heard in the private conversations of some members’. But then ‘both
Mosley and Raven Thomson began to come out in the open again in support
of certain aspects of the Nazi past’. By March 1953 ‘this Nazi apologia had
reached such a peak over the Naumann business’ that he decided to quit.
Mosley provided funds for Nation Europa. During the summer of 1953 a
corporation was formed and readers of the monthly were invited to buy
shares. Ehrhardt had no great difficulty in raising DM 39,000. In September
it produced a special issue on Britain and Europe, with contributions from
Mosley, Raven Thomson and Major-General Fuller, who demanded that ‘the
German army must once again become the most powerful in Europe’. This
was at a time when Mosley was working with Genoud, who acted as a
‘middleman’ between Nazi generals, former Paratroop Commander Bernhard
Ramcke and the Panzer Army Commander Heinz Guderian, and Western
government advisers over opposition to the European Defence Community, a
Cold War alliance. Mosley proclaimed that ‘a European creed existed before
the war which could and did defeat Communism’ and that ‘the victors in the
war have failed in the seven subsequent years to produce any creed to answer
Communism’. These contributions were a token of what Union called ‘the
close cooperation which now exists between all those who stand for the Union
of Europe and the restoration of our continent to a leading position in world
affairs’.
With Mosley in exile, reinvigorating the UM was left in the hands of a small
headquarters coterie that included Robert Row. Hamm was dispatched to
organize non-existent forces in Manchester. Before he quit, Bean attended the
UM’s Annual Conference in the East End — ‘one of the biggest farces it has
been my lot to witness’. Members were ‘persuaded, bribed, or blackmailed to
come along to make a presentable show of numbers’, which was not easy, as
there were so few members. Now fat, bald and increasingly a sick man, Raven
Thomson as General Secretary spoke from the platform for two hours. Then
four drummers marched round the room loudly beating their drums, after
which Raven Thomson announced that the ‘Leader’ had recorded a speech
for them on a tape recorder. He said he had not deserted them and hinted
that he was in close contact with like thinkers on the European mainland.
The recorded speech finished to loud cheers and ‘Mosley’ chants=from the
‘delegates’.
 THE NEO-FASCIST INTERNATIONALS 605

The UM was an irrelevance and, as’ Thurlow suggests, ‘the further 1945
receded into history,-the less significant the Mosleyite tradition became’ as a
new generation of anti-Mosley Fascists coalesced around ‘a motley entourage
of ex-Mosleyites (Yockeyistes), neo-Nazis, neo-fascists, racial populists, and
radical and reactionary right Conservatives, grouping and regrouping across
the far right’. This was ironic, because Mosley’s post-war ideas were more
interesting than his inter-war Fascism. The first significant anti-Mosleyite
grouping, the League of Empire Loyalists, was founded in 1953 by A. K.
Chesterton, a former Blackshirt and author of a Mosley hagiography. The
League’s manifesto was remarkably similar to Mosley’s pre-war ‘Greater
Britain’ with its idealization of the Empire, though its conspiratorial tone was
not Mosleyite.

In Paris, Mosley dined with Bob Boothby and James Lees-Milne, who found
Diana ‘as beautiful as she was at 17 and more so than when first married in
her early twenties’. Mosley was ‘fatter, rather greyer. He is well-mannered
and attentive ... when he gets talking he is on the verge of delivering ...a
benevolent dictator’s harangue. He talks of England as though it were a foreign
country and the English as “they’’.” On 10 September Lees-Milne decided his
cousin was ‘no longer extreme; whether to hoodwink or through bitter resolve
who can tell. He said only amateur politicians in England harboured bitterness
against each other; the professional ones .. . did not.’ Despite opposing him
on all matters of principle, Boothby and Beaverbrook had ‘remained the
closest friends’ and Mosley was still in correspondence with the latter. Not
everyone was as accommodating of the Mosleys. Bridget Parsons refused to
meet them. ‘She was sure that Diana would as willingly shovel us all into a
gas oven as smile on us.’ Marcel Proust’s god-daughter Priscilla Bibesco was
among the Mosleys’ friends. When over lunch Diana, indulging her love of
the Nazis, said ‘Goebbels had the most beautiful blue eyes’, Priscilla responded,
‘Such a pity, then, he had to murder all those children.’
On a cold night in Ireland in December 1953 disaster struck. Diana was in
London, having put off her journey back to Clonfert to see her father. In the
middle of the night Alexander was woken by the whinnying of a horse and
discovered that the room next to his was on fire; its origin was ultimately
traced to the kitchen chimney, which contained inflammable resin from the
centuries-old burning of wood. Alexander woke his father and the chauffeur,
and a French maid, Mademoiselle Cerrecoundo. The maid, who returned to
her room to save clothes and was trapped by the flames, was injured when she
jumped from a second-floor window on to a blanket held by Mosley and the
others.
Unfortunately, the fire brigade was fourteen miles away at Ballinasloe.
Because there was no telephone, it took a long time to get word to it and the
606 BLACKSHIRT

fire was out of control when it arrived. They managed to check the fire before
it reached the end wing, where some of the Mosley family pictures were hung,
but the house remained an uninhabitable shell. Diana was upset that all
Mosley’s letters to her from Brixton and three family portraits by Pavel
Tchelichew were lost to the flames, as were Mosley’s papers and many BUF *
and UM internal documents.
Within days they heard of a house for sale. In the Regency style, Ileclash,
famous for its salmon fishing, was situated on the cliff above the Blackwater
near Fermoy, twenty miles north of Cork and about fifteen miles from Lismore.
They bought it at once and took on a butler and a cook, Jerry Lehane and his
wife Emily, who stayed devoted to them to the end. Max was at school in
Germany, but on his return liked Ileclash, with its opportunities to hunt with
various packs, including that of their neighbour Paddy Flynn.
Bill Allen lived not far away at Whitechurch House, Cappagh, Waterford.
His wife Natasha had turned the derelict mansion into a home that attracted
numerous guests. James Villiers-Stuart, whose wife Emily worked for British
Intelligence during the war, recalled that Kim Philby and Guy Burgess had
turned up on different occasions. Bill’s fourth wife said he ‘knew Mosley was
living close by, but no longer trusted him’, though Diana recalled they dined
with him at a Paris restaurant. A curious visitor to Paris was the MIS officer
Maxwell Knight — the subject of their conversation remains a mystery.
Mosley travelled to Ireland infrequently. He preferred France where, ‘as a
matter of courtesy’, he ignored politics, ‘since we were guests living in the
country’. The British Foreign Office forbade diplomats to consort with the
Mosleys. The Paris ambassador, Sir Gladwyn Jebb, ruled that if diplomats
found themselves at a table with Mosley they had to make an excuse and
leave. At one dinner the Duchess of Windsor asked Christopher Phillpotts,
officially a counsellor but, in fact, an MI6 officer, ‘What would you have done
if you had found Sir Oswald here?’ He said, ‘You are clearly familiar with the
instructions in the Embassy circular. You know very well what I’d have done.’
The Duchess laughed. Such snubs wounded Diana, who claimed, ‘As a rule,
it mattered not at all’.
At luncheons at the Temple, Diana ‘would fall silent if Mosley spoke, her
eyes fixed upon him, listening to a story she had heard again and again, adding
the same coos of delight, expressions of surprise or peals of laughter’. She
supported his political stance wholeheartedly. Her mild anti-Semitic prejudice,
notes Anne de Courcy, ‘had become a full-blown conviction that “inter-
national Jewry” was an enemy of both her country and her husband’. Hugh
Purcell recalled sitting next to her when ‘she asked me how many Jews I
thought had perished. I answered that the accepted figure was between five
and six million. “Oh really?” she replied. “Very interesting.”’’
This was consistent with a story John Julius Norwich heard from Nancy.
1 THE NEO-FASCIST INTERNATIONALS 607

She said she loved Diana but ‘I know that I mustn’t get on to the subject of
the last war ... she will say something I can’t bear .. . how will we keep off
the subject?” When they met, Nancy had managed to do so for a couple of
days. On the final day, however: ‘We had the most terrible row .. . Diana was
determined to get on to it somehow. She made a sort of defence of Hitler.’
Nancy replied, ‘Given all that but alright, seven million Jews were extermi-
nated in the death camps.’ Diana apparently looked at her and said, ‘But
darling, it was so much the kindest way.’ Nancy walked out of the room. ‘I
just couldn’t bear it another minute.’ Diana later said her talented sister ‘was
the most disloyal person I ever knew’.
Except for his travelling, Diana was seldom apart from Mosley. She was,
however, miserable and suffered from stress-related migraines, brought on by
suspicion that he had returned to his former habits and was being unfaithful
to her, despite ‘their sense of joint destiny, the unique bonding of their prison
experience . . . and cherishing in which she had wrapped him since’, it had not
been enough. He used their Paris flat and many of his conquests were drawn
from their immediate circle, including Rita Luke and Lotsie Fabre-Luce, wives
of writers. Equally painful for Diana was an attempted reconciliation Mosley
arranged with Baba Metcalfe, who hated him for not acknowledging her
efforts to help during the war and refused to speak to Diana. The meeting was
‘a complete disaster’.

Mosley was a notable absentee, in January 1954, from another attempt to

heal the differences between the two wings of the extreme Right with the
creation of the European New Order. The MSI had become a pro-NATO
party and a bridge ‘between the old and the new ruling class, between the
clericals of today and the Fascists of yesterday’. It believed in European unity
as ‘a bulwark of Western ideas against Bolshevism’. Conferences took place
in Brussels and The Hague, with secret meetings in Madrid attended by Arab
and Latin American representatives. Mosley sent his greetings, but deemed it
prudent to avoid being associated with networks under intense surveillance.
However, the resurrection of nationalism became an obstacle to an inter-
national. There were quarrels with the MSI over the bitter territorial dispute
concerning South Tyrol. Karl Meissner, head of the German block, refused to
attend meetings of the European Social Movement with the MSI so long as it
‘encouraged the flagrant violations of the South Tyrol Convention by the
Italian Government’ against the German population.
A US CIC officer discovered that, on 18 September 1954, the recently
nn had conferred in Stuttgart with the Deutsche Reichspartei
: and told them Adolf von Thadden had held talks in London with Mosley and
the journalist Sefton Delmer. Why was Delmer, a wartime intelligence officer
running black propaganda operations against the Nazis and recently author
608 BLACKSHIRT

of a series of ‘exposés’ on the emergence of a neo-Fascist ‘fourth Reich’

involved? Von Thadden had an English grandmother and ‘liked coming to
Britain, and liked Britain very much’. He had volunteered his services to MI6
as ‘a German patriot who longed to give his country a democratic future’. Dr |
Hans Horchem, head of Hamburg’s Verfassungsschutz (West German security ,
service, 1969-81), held regular discussions on security with British Intelligence
liaison officers, who admitted ‘von Thadden was in contact with us’ in the
19505. It is likely that Delmer, just recruited as an agent by MI6’s Maurice
Oldfield, was acting as his ‘cut-out’ in a standard ‘arm’s-length’ operation.

The Mosleys had begun travelling to the reopened Bayreuth Festival, where
they renewed their acquaintance with Frau Wagner. They were friends with
surviving Nazi leaders, some of whom wanted their children to visit London
to meet people of their own age and study English. Travel arrangements were
made by Sid Proud, an extreme anti-Semite, who gathered around him a group
of UM members known as ‘the fringe’, neo-Nazis dismissed by Mosley as
‘crackpots’. Mosleyites acted as couriers for Proud, both on legitimate business
for his Spanish Travel Agency and in illegal currency transactions, often to
cover legitimate holiday bills but also to do with Mosley’s ties to the inter-
national neo-Nazi networks (he organized the travel arrangements of Otto
Skorzeny). He turned against the Leader when Mosley’s son, Alexander, who
worked for his agency, broke off his relationship with his daughter Cynthia.
He accused Mosley of being Jewish. UM insiders were aware Proud was ‘a
crook and his people bribe crooked fascists in Barcelona and Madrid but he
never takes a single risk but lets other people do the dirty work’. He was also
a Special Branch informant.
The man Mosley entrusted to deal with the visitors was Alf Flockhart who,
appropriately, had a Hitler moustache. Mosley paid their expenses while they
were in London and gave Edna and Sidney Grundy, two virulent anti-Semitic
Mosleyites, money to look after them. Trevor Grundy has described his
mother’s adulation of Mosley: ‘She used to touch him and she’d say afterwards:
“That will give me strength till next year.”’ She later committed suicide,
ending a dreadful depression. Trevor only then discovered that she was Jewish
and her family could be traced back to the Sephardic Jews of Spain.
Among the visitors were Skorzeny’s daughter Waltraut, who was studying
languages, including Russian — she said that one day Germany would conquer
the Soviet Union and interpreters would be required — Klaus Naumann, son
of Werner, and Gudrun Burwitz, née Himmler. ‘I got to know many fascists
there,’ recalled Gudrun. Sidney Proud invited her and Adolf von Ribbentrop,
son of the hanged Foreign Minister, to his house and proudly showed off his
portraits of Hitler. There was also a photographer present and the pictures
appeared in newspapers all over the world. It was an acute embarrassment to
 THE NEO-FASCIST INTERNATIONALS 609

Gudrun and Adolf because they roused people’s ire everywhere against the
Nazi children. On her return to Germany Gudrun lost her job, changed her
appearance and became secretary of Silent Help, which aided high-profile war
criminals in procuring false passports and passage abroad. ‘I see it as my
mission in life to make the world see my father in a different light,’ she
admitted. ‘My father is seen as the greatest mass murderer of all times. I want
to revise this picture.’ She was the guest of honour at several SS veteran
reunions, where officers stood to attention in front of the daughter of their
leader.
In late 1955 Mosley wrote to Nicholas that he had ‘a feeling that before
long the rush may begin again, though I am as usual premature. But when it
does, all charm of life flies, as well as all sense, for a long season!’ He missed
the political stage. An insider said he was ‘itching to get back. After the war,
he was covered in dung and had to get out but life in France had become too
comfortable. He wanted to take risks.’ He told UM secretary Jeffrey Hamm,
who succeeded Raven Thomson who had died of cancer, that he would return
in the new year for a series of meetings on Europe. Mosley addressed his first
meeting in five years on 20 March 1956, in front of 600 supporters at Kensington
Town Hall. There were 1,500 at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in November,
followed by university debates at Cambridge and Oxford. A Telegraph reporter
wrote that ‘none of the fizz has gone out of him’.
Curiously, the UM’s headquarters in Kensington was in the home of Mary
Tavener, the ‘actress’ Mosley had been involved with in the early thirties who
had threatened him with the law over her claims that he asked her to marry
him. Clearly, they had resolved their differences since she became the unofficial
secretary of a non-political charity Mosley had set up. John Warburton
remembered ‘an attractive woman, who was socially well-connected locally’.
Mosley’s most ardent pursuit was reserved for eighteen-year-old Jeannie
Campbell, daughter of the Duke of Argyll and Janet Aitken. Tall, dark, with
sparkling eyes, after living with her grandfather Lord Beaverbrook she had
several affairs with older men. She was ‘fascinated by Mosley’s views, the
power of his personality and the frisson of intrigue involved in such an affair’.
He hoped she would further his cause with her grandfather in the expectation
of publicity. In London they used chauffeur-driven Daimlers and met in a flat
rented from Nicholas, who remembered his father being ‘involved with a
girlfriend much younger than himself; they visitetl us at Lyminster; his cavort-
ings and mine would overlap in London’. Nicholas realized that Diana knew.
Mosley had a theory, much admired by Randolph Churchill, that a man
should ‘span’ at least fifty years, ‘beginning with a woman 20 years older
when he was 18, and then 30 years younger when he was 60’.
When Beaverbrook learnt of Jeannie’s affair, he sent her off to the US to
work for the Evening Standard. Mosley defended his action by claiming he
610 BLACKSHIRT

could still remain true to loved ones. ‘I so much prefer the Catholic sense that
a healthy lapse can bring you nearer to a state of grace.’ Naturally, it devastated
Diana who, in reality, was a quite fragile person. There is no jealousy like
sexual jealousy and she retaliated with ‘freezing disdain . . . and wittily malici- _
ous comments on the women concerned, a technique that sometimes cowed
even Mosley’.
Mosley made occasional trips back to Ireland, primarily to deal with his
publishing company, Euphorian Books, whose greatest success was with Hans-
Ulrich Rudel’s Stuka Pilot, about his extraordinary feats with his dive-bomber.
In 1956 he was guest of honour at a UM dinner. Mosley met Germans in
secret meetings which escaped the attentions of the Irish authorities. One was
with Otto Skorzeny, who enjoyed General Franco’s protection and the support
of the ex-dictator Peron, and on behalf of ODESSA sold at a profit weapons
hidden by the SS in France, Austria and Italy. Ireland was ideal for his
operations. Posing as a man about to retire with considerable funds at his
disposal and interested in investing money in hotels and land, he took advan-
tage of the tax-free provisions for foreigners and bought seventy large estates
for associates, including Alexander von Dornberg and Albert Schmidt, his
contact man in Dublin, who managed a coffee bar as a front. Dornberg, a
former Ribbentrop staff member, was his courier between Ireland and Ger-
many. Well-organized, Skorzeny’s ‘German colony’ was allegedly a cover for the
transfer of the ‘external organisation’s’ headquarters from Madrid to Ireland. In
the Dail Dr Noel Brown questioned the propriety of permitting a known Nazi
and still dangerous man to live in the country.
Mosley’s push fizzled out as he was absent for most of spring 1957, ill with
penicillin poisoning. When the European Economic Community was created
that year, in a familiar call Mosley reproached the British government for its
‘refusal to enter fully and completely into European life’. He advocated build-
ing a Channel tunnel and attacked anti-federalist attitudes: ‘The only thing
which is certain is that the Conservative Party will never stand for Europe a
Nation. They will never merge British Government in European Government.’
A year later he published Europe: Faith and Plan — A Way Out from the
Coming Crises, which asked: ‘Can these relatively small, isolated, individual
nations of Western Europe face for fifteen years on world markets the compe-
tition of America’s normal production surplus, plus the deliberate market-
breaking dumping of the Soviets at below European production costs?’ No,
because they ‘are dependent on external supplies of raw materials for their
industries ... they are forced to pay for these necessities by exports sold in
open competition in world markets, under conditions where they have no
influence whatever’. A closed internal free market system was necessary,
though he recognized that to put the common market before common
government negated ‘all the real possibilities opened up by European union’.
 THE NEO-FASCIST INTERNATIONALS 611

Mosley suggested a wage-price policy as the cure to Britain’s Stop-Go

problems and as the instrument for equating supply and demand in his Euro-
pean socialist economy, in which ‘it would be illegal for any man or any
organisation to pay lower wages than a rival in the same sphere of industry;
anyone may undercut a rival by greater efficiency, but not by paying lower
wages’. Mosley argued the ‘wage-price mechanism’, which would fix the levels
of wages and of prices to one another, would stabilize the value of goods in
terms of labour. He distinguished between its ‘positive’ uses to secure even
growth in a self-contained system and the ‘negative’ form of a wage-price
freeze to hold down costs in order to compete on world markets.
A wage-price mechanism, planned investment and development policy
would produce an environment ‘in which the conditions for true freedom
could be attained’. Free enterprise would operate with minimal interference
from the State, and the elimination of restrictive practices and bureaucracy
would result in vast tax reductions. It was, however, all highly centralized and
he admitted it would be ‘possible to decide which industries continued and
which ceased to exist ... The flow of labour could be controlled as directly
as the flow of water by differential levels . . . It is the most potent instrument
for shaping the future development of industry which could be devised.’ It
was almost a war economy.
Mosley’s vision also advocated ‘industrial self-government’, because
‘workers understand the problems in their own industry’. This reflected inter-
est in syndicalism and guild socialism, and dislike of ‘mandarin socialism’.
Trade unions would play a role with employers’ federations in administering
a restructured welfare state, and in the general economy; a policy which
harked back to his days in the Independent Labour Party and his support of
John Wheatley, as well as reflecting wartime developments. However, resist-
ance towards government control of wages, for instance, would result in a
violent showdown with the full force of the State against them.
The picture which emerged, suggested Skidelsky, is of ‘a rather sluggish,
high-consumption society, with a small, fast-growing sector of advanced tech-
nology created and run by an elite of creative entrepreneurs’. It added little to
the UM’s appeal and Europeanism and prices and incomes policies ‘alienated
rather than attracted working-class opinion’. Hamm wrote to Mosley that
John Charnley was ‘perturbed at the lack of response he has experienced
among businessmen regarding our industrial pdlicy’. Although he regarded
Mosley as ‘a man of vision’, because ‘his ultimate goal is so obvious to him,
he is inclined to be impatient with those who cannot see it with his eyes. He
must therefore be made to realise that it takes time to bring others up to the
acceptance of his ultimate goal.’
The Times noted the difference between official UM policy and the reasons
members had for joining. ‘Those immediately below the Leader look to him
612 BLACKSHIRT

for political guidance and seem to have a genuine desire to see his policies
instituted.’ However, some followers joined ‘because they are anti-semitic but
the largest number, it seems, because they like fighting Communists’. UM
leaders admitted these elements were ‘out of the control of the party’. An .
insider recalled that Mosley was ‘always having to get rid of crackpots. They »
were a permanent nuisance.’
Nicholas was present when Mosley reprimanded an official for disobeying
orders that they should not become involved in breaking up opponents’ meet-
ings. ‘My father shouted at him for a time; the man was saying, “Yes sir, sorry
sir”; then my father said quietly, ‘Well don’t do it again.” And as he showed
the man out into the passage some sort of wink seemed to pass between the
man and my father — a recognition of comradeship or complicity beyond the
demands of discipline.’ The same thing happened when he reprimanded Peter
Shaw, who had suggested getting ‘hold of an immigrant and hang him upside-
down from Blackfriar’s Bridge with a notice around his neck saying
“Coloureds go home”’’ as a means of generating publicity. When Nicholas
talked to his father about such incidents he would half smile and say, ‘one
must keep the boys happy’.
It was the issue of immigration which offered the UM another opportunity
to counter the decline in its fortunes. Mosley moved its operations and
resources out of its traditional stamping ground in East London to the run-
down areas around Notting Hill, where there were rumblings of discontent
over the number of black workers from the West Indies. At the same time, as
his attempts to build support in Argentina came to nought, Mosley bought up
South African shares, which delivered dividends of £5,600 (£67,000) a year.
A ‘great schemer’, an insider said Mosley now saw South Africa as ‘the final
redoubt for when the great collapse came’.
 27
‘The Coloured Invasion’

There had been a steady drip of newspaper stories, not much different from
UM propaganda, focused on scapegoats and domestic threats — black marke-
teers and spivs — which, as Trevor and Mike Phillips point out, ‘translated
easily into a widespread hostility towards the immigrants’. It seemed likely
something was going to happen somewhere. An affray in Nottingham — in
fact, not that serious — sparked off the Notting Hill riots of 1958. The riots,
the Phillipses suggest, ‘might have been predictable, but they were not inevi-
table. Race was the trigger which set them off and kept the passions burning,
but the causes were due to a number of complex elements.’
Mosley’s UM did not spark off the riots, nor was it responsible for them —
it had only a small branch in Kensington — but in the atmosphere of hostility
which began to surround migrants it provided ‘a vocabulary and a programme
of action which shaped the resentments of inarticulate and disgruntled people’.
The UM had been distributing leaflets on ‘The Coloured Invasion’ and Jeffrey
Hamm addressed large street crowds, weaving together ‘gossip, rumour and
complaint about migrants’.
Parts of Notting Hill were ‘a slum, full of multi-occupied houses, crawling
with rats and rubbish’. People were generally poor as ‘Poles, Irish and blacks
competed for jobs and living space with the natives’. There was gang fighting,
illegal drinking clubs, gambling and prostitution and ‘violence between the
various factions, the police and any unfortunate bystanders was endemic’. On
Saturday 23 August, Teddy boys in west London began converging on the
area as news of fighting spread.
On the Sunday morning police stopped groups of young white men in cars
as Teds set out looking for black victims, embarrassed, suggest the Phillipses,
‘by the fact that a bunch of provincial Teds in a tlistant town somewhere up
North were hogging the sort of headlines no Ted had seen since they had
trashed the cinemas during the first showings of Rock Around the Clock’.
After assaults on black people in Ladbroke Grove, police arrested youths
armed with ‘iron bars, table legs, starting handles and at least one knife’.
Edward Scobie in Tribune realized ‘that these white hoodlums ... had
appointed themselves a law unto themselves. Armed with daggers they issued
614 BLACKSHIRT

fascist directions to coloured people. They shouted, “Don’t walk in groups or

you will be attacked.” Metropolitan Police files confirm that the disturbances
were triggered by a 300- to 400-strong ‘keep Britain White’ mob intent on
‘nigger-hunting’.
In one street a Times journalist found men ‘singing “Old Man River” —"

and “Bye Bye Blackbird” and punctuating the songs with vicious anti-Negro
slogans’. They made ‘all sorts of wild charges against their coloured neigh-
bours’, bitter at the Labour Party for ‘letting them in’. Watching a mob of 700
men, women and children, a local reporter noted that ‘in the middle of the
screaming, jeering youths and adults, a speaker from the Union Movement
was urging his excited audience to “get rid of them” . .. Suddenly, hundreds
of leaflets were thrown over the crowd, a fierce cry rent the air and the mob
rushed off in the direction of Latimer Road, shouting, “Kill the niggers!”’’ The
mob then broke scores of windows and set upon two black men who were
lucky to escape with cuts and bruises. Small groups roamed around the district,
breaking into homes and attacking any West Indian they could find. PC
Richard Bedford came across a mob shouting ‘We will kill all black bastards.
Why don’t you send them home?’ The first night left five black men lying
unconscious on Notting Hill’s pavements.
Teddy boys, including Mosley’s sons Alexander (aged nineteen) and Max
(eighteen), had for some time been prominent at UM events. Both Mosley
boys were photographed in Notting Hill looking ‘like local toughs’.
Mosley described the Teds as ‘fine virile types, which is what youth should
be’. Mosley was abroad at the time but Max was in charge of the UM Youth
Unit recruiting teenagers for its rock and roll club. Max thought the UM
should appeal more to the Teds and show that it didn’t go on about Hitler
and Mussolini and British Fascism all the time. Alexander said Max found ‘it
hard to believe that a teenager living in the middle of London, surrounded by
millions of girls his own age, could spend Saturdays selling Union newspapers’.
Alexander was arrested while distributing a leaflet near Ladbroke Grove
underground station. The leaflet infuriated the TUC Congress in Bournemouth
into condemning Mosley for ‘fanning the flames of racial violence’. Aimed at
the North Kensington MP George Rogers, and the Labour Party, who ‘wanted
coloured invaders settling permanently in this country’, it urged people to
‘Join Mosley in this fight’. The Times concluded the UM was ‘exploiting rather
than creating the disturbances. It will not condemn the violence, but is rather
pointing to a target behind the one that is now being attacked.” Members were
rushed to this ‘hot place’ to sell Action, which claimed its propaganda was
‘directed towards diverting racial hatred to anti- government feeling rather
than inciting violence’.
The disturbances continued night after night until they finally petered out
on 5 September. Altogether, 108 people were charged with offences ranging
 “THE COLOURED INVASION’ 615

from grievous bodily harm to affray and riot and possessing offensive weapons
of whom seventy-two were white and thirty-six ‘coloured’. The Metropolitan
Police tried to play down the racial aspects to the riots in reports to the Home
Secretary, Rab Butler. Detective Sergeant Walters of the Notting Hill police
said the press had been wrong to portray the street disturbances as ‘racial’:
‘Whereas there certainly was some ill feeling between white and coloured
residents in this area, it is abundantly clear much of the trouble was caused
by ruffians, both coloured and white, who seized on this opportunity to
indulge in hooliganism.’
Statements from rank-and-file police officers make plain that ‘racial preju-
dices were leading to serious disturbances’ but these were ignored by superiors.
However, as the Phillipses suggest, ‘they were not exclusively about skin
colour or about the number of migrants in Britain’. The reality was that they
were ‘as much about the feelings of exclusion and deprivation experienced by
a wide swath of the English population as they were about the presence of
black migrants. But for the next decade political debate about the social
problems of urban life in Britain was to be distracted and dominated by race.’
Part of the reason for the scale and intensity of the-riots had been inept
policing. But the use of police reinforcements, the increasing number of arrests
and the draconian sentences handed out to the rioters had their effect. At the
Old Bailey on 16 September, Judge Salmon handed down exemplary sentences
of four years each on nine mostly lower-working-class white Teds, aged sixteen
to twenty-one. Salmon declared, ‘You are a minute and insignificant section
of the population but you have brought shame upon this district where you
live and have filled the Nation with horror, indignation and disgust.’ The
sentences curtailed all other attempts to use racial violence.
The riots marked Nicholas Mosley’s final disillusionment with his father.
When he complained about the violence, Mosley admitted he was ‘probably
guilty in not doing enough to stop it’. He tried to rationalize it all as ‘the faults
of adolescence, coupled with a driving sense of urgency in desperate situations.
A desperate child is capable of any horror. Movements can begin as children
and then can become adult . . . We are faced here with the problem of produc-
ing a leadership and a movement which is adult; the old Platonic problem of
making men fit for power.’ He was, however, excited by the opportunity the
riots presented and, in their aftermath, began a sustained campaign to build
on the support for the UM, whose membership tay temporarily have reached
1,500. However, fear of more racial disorders caused him to be banned from
most indoor venues, except in Birmingham and Manchester’s Free Trade Hall,
where there was heckling but little disruption. He was studiously ignored by
the press.
 616 BLACKSHIRT

According to the Johannesburg Sunday Times, Mosley visited South Africa in

January 1959 to meet ‘important contacts’ and promote the Europe-Africa
Association, whose secretary was a British immigrant, Derek Alexander.
Addressing a meeting of Dr Verwoerd’s Nationalist Party, Alexander said he
had given up his work as a teacher to concentrate on a nationwide campaign
on behalf of his Fascist movement, an offshoot of the European National
Movement. He published a version of the UM’s Action, on sale at State-owned
bookstalls, and was responsible for launching the Friends of South Africa, an
‘information service to tell the truth to the people of Britain about the Nation-
alists in South Africa’. Alexander talked to Cabinet Ministers, stressing the
similarity between apartheid and Mosley’s plan for ‘separate living space’ for
white and black in Africa. Mosley told the Rand Daily Mail that he was ‘a
believer in total apartheid. I think the plan of Dr Verwoerd to establish Bantu
States in South Africa is courageous.’ The PM7’s support for Mosley was
evident in the meetings arranged with Cabinet Ministers and being introduced
on the government-controlled rddio as a ‘leading statesman’.

On his return to Europe, Mosley decided to contest the October 1959 parlia-
mentary election and stand in North Kensington. He closed The European
- and diverted resources into building up his following in the constituency.
‘Someone should give this electorate the opportunity to express legally and
peacefully by their votes what they felt about the issues involved’ but realized
‘my entry would be misrepresented as an attempt.to exploit the situation’.
Even before he officially announced his candidacy, the ground was prepared
with provocative meetings and speeches. Jeffrey Hamm protested over the
prison sentences imposed upon the gang of Teddy boys convicted of violence
during the riots. Holding aloft a picture of the convicted criminals, he declared
them to be ‘some of the finest faces you could wish to see in Britain’. In April
Mosley announced he was standing at a well-attended public meeting; within
a week, in the same area, a white gang beat up three blacks and stabbed
another. The first fatality occurred when Kelso Cochrane, a young black
carpenter engaged to be married, was stabbed to death by a white gang on
Whit Sunday. Locals believed the police knew who did it but let them go. It
was an incident which helped turn people against Mosley.
Action editor Robert Row had written a thin book, The Colour Question
(1959), which attacked the Labour Party for signing the ‘Black Pact’ with
Cuba in 1951. By this treaty sugar was no longer purchased in the West Indies,
their main source of wealth, resulting in the emigration of their inhabitants to
Britain ‘to fill the slums in the “Black belts” of the big cities’. There were
250,000 immigrants in 1959 and the danger was that ‘a large number of firms
today employ coloured labour at lower wages than a white man could accept’.
 ‘THE COLOURED INVASION’ 617

The government was, therefore, ‘entirely responsible for this misery and
unemployment’. Mosley thought the whole policy wrong. Diana suggested
it would have been possible to reverse the decision taken by the government to
import unskilled labour. If great empty countries like Canada and Australia restricted
immigration, how much more so should crowded Britain? Since we had been reduced
by the war to a relatively weak position in the world we depended for survival upon
skill, brains and inventiveness; among the fifty-five million inhabitants there were
plenty of unskilled workers without importing more.

Mosley used the rhetoric of capitalistic exploitation evident in the Mosley—

Pirow proposals. He advocated ‘compulsory free passage back to the West
Indies for the immigrants, combined with heavy British investment to build
up local West Indian employment and the purchase of all British sugar from
Jamaica’ on long-term contracts. He proclaimed ‘Jamaica for the Jamaicans
and Britain for the British. I say let the Jamaicans have their country back —
and let us have ours.’ Later he suggested resettling immigrants in Guyana.
Mosley’s policy, Henry Vane noted, was ‘a curious mixture of straight-
forward left-wing anti-colonialism and anti-coloured agitation’. He said he
was dealing with an economic and social problem but supporters cited racial
issues. Diana said he ‘did not give a fig as to whether he was called a racialist
because he opposed immigration and advocated paying for the blacks to be
repatriated while investing in their islands so that they could find work’. He
used to say ‘they only come because we have neglected our colonies and they
are starving’. He foresaw mass unemployment and ‘the whole business added
an unnecessary problem to the many we already faced, and it speedily became
an irreversible problem’. Commentators noted there was ‘a cynical dose of
political expediency too’. Mosley promoted policies on race in those areas
where he hoped they would attract controversy and publicity. Vane said the
number one appeal was to ‘fears of mongrelization of the British race’.
In an interview in John Bull magazine, Mosley described himself as ‘what
Goethe called the educated soldier — that is, a man capable equally of reflection
and action. In my case I tend to submerge myself completely in either quality.’
He admitted that ‘in action, all my reflective qualities disappear’. He now
submerged himself into the unreflective man of action, as the thugs, attracted
by the ‘reputation of violence’ which clung to his name, joined a campaign
directed against black immigrants. In his desferate effort to court a mass
following, his decision reflected ‘a Jekyll and Hyde character rather than the
- ever-striving Faust’. He admitted action could become a vice, for it might treat
a minority unfairly: “You can’t have action by violating human decencies.’
During the election campaign a local anti-Fascist, Eddie Adams, recalled
that the Teddy boys supported Mosley, with ‘the old pre-war Fascist members,
618 BLACKSHIRT

mainly orchestrating what was going on... And his son was one of the main
actors in it.’ He still radiated some of the aura of a major political personality.
People ‘would really come from everywhere and listen to Mosley’, Rudy
Braithwaite noticed. ‘He was a very convincing speaker. He would speak and
things would roll out of his mouth ... he used to say, “Many of the people
who are in high places, who are politicians, would love to say what I am
saying now.” Adams heckled Mosley, who he thought was ‘a bit old fashioned
for that time. He used to speak from the back of a lorry and they would have
arc lights on him, and he would sort of say something and pause theatrically,
I suppose for applause and things like that.’ He thought he was ‘a man past
his time really, but the trouble was that if you were opposed to him, you’d be
chased up the road by some of his supporters’.
Mosley hammered away at the issue of racial discrimination, with inflam-
matory statements: ‘Every white man in a job knows that he has got a coloured
man at his elbow, ready to take that job at a cheaper rate’; ‘When the white
woman is going out to work in the cold dawn the blacks are coming back
from their all-night parties’; ‘All the places including your beautiful squares
will be inhabited by the blacks’. He exploited and encouraged racial hatred.
Mosleyites infiltrated the community via pubs where ‘they would ingratiate
themselves with local people prior to meetings by buying rounds of drinks,
which tended to win trust, and then use pub gossip to disseminate the most
virulent racism’. They found a receptive audience as in the eyes of many white
residents the ‘sight of black people living in overcrowded hovels was proof
... that West Indians were dirty and primitive’.
Mosley responded with ‘sordid tales of sexual offences by coloured men,
spiced with such nasty remarks as that West Indians provided cheap labour
because they could at a pinch live off a tin of Kit-E-Kat a day’. Nicholas had
expected he ‘at least would be putting over the aspect of his case that was
reasonable; but instead there he was roaring on about such things as black
men being able to live on tins of cat food, and teenage girls being kept by
gangs of blacks in attics’.
The UM had been canvassing in the area since the previous summer and
Mosley believed the seat was his for the taking. ‘People were running out of
their houses to shake him by the hand as he passed,’ wrote Diana to a friend.
Action on 17 October predicted a vote of 35 per cent for Mosley. ‘It was
therefore one of the chief surprises of my life when we polled only eight per
cent of the votes’ and he lost his deposit. He polled a mere 2,821 votes out of
a total of 34,912. The surprise was so great that he asked the High Court to
check the ballot papers but his case was unsuccessful. Shaken, Mosley returned
to France.
 “THE COLOURED INVASION’ 619

Diana, who never voted — not even for her husband - said in mitigation that
‘only a small part of the constituency was affected by the arrival of the West
Indians; unfortunately the remainder took the then popular liberal line’. If he
had been elected Britain would not be in the unfortunate position of being
‘the sick man of Europe. At every stage of our decline he has put forward a
constructive policy; had he been in Parliament his voice could not have been
ignored.’
The angry young Colin Wilson, who was a darling of the media with his
novel The Outsider, had been intrigued by Mosley, but now asked how he
could ‘allow his followers to use these methods? It seems to me not only a bad
thing to do, but from the political standpoint, silly and incompetent. In many
ways, Mosley shows a disturbing lack of insight into his own time.’ A decade
later Nicholas wrote that he now saw clearly ‘that while the right hand dealt
with grandiose ideas and glory, the left hand let the rat out of the sewer’.
Nicholas wrote to his father that the UM
has got the general reputation, whether fairly or unfairly, of having to depend on
racial hatred in orderto maintain its appeal and impetus. . . One would have thought
these steps would have included instructions to avoid, in speech and writing and
action, all controversial racial issues like the plague; failure to take this sort of action
seems only to mean that in spite of your words on paper, your intention is not
seriously to eradicate from people’s minds the impression of your need for racial
hatred.

Mosley reluctantly agreed to a ‘profoundly pessimistic’ Robert Saunders that

‘very direct methods may have frightened a good many people’. He had noticed
that ‘the method of indirect appeal and innuendo rather than direct, clear
statements, rather to my surprise, are very effective’.
Nicholas was so annoyed by his father’s reply that no UM meeting in
Notting Hill had resulted directly in violence, that he felt it necessary to
confront him. He saw him in his office. ‘I spewed it all out - What he was
doing was not only wrong it was squalid; he had done this before, he was
doing it again, was he so crazy as not to know what he was doing?’ After
a time Mosley said quietly, ‘I will never speak to you again.’ Expecting a
thunderbolt, Nicholas said, ‘Well, I will always speak to you.’ Then he left.
Always loyal, Diana remained silent at the meeting but had taken note of the
attack on Mosley’s ability as a father. She was unhappy over his unfaithfulness,
which was aggravated by their quarrels over money for Alexander and Max.
The older children had the Leiter money inherited from their mother and the
Guinness boys had a rich family. Mosley resented spending money on his
family and refused to allow Alexander to go to university, and dismissed his
ambitions with the jibe that it was ‘a terrible thing for a boy of twenty years
and three months who is politically ambitious never to have addressed a big
620 BLACKSHIRT

crowd or even had an article published’. Alexander had either to submit and
just be an imitation of the father he so much resembled, or to break free and
be as unlike as possible.
‘I think he was jealous of Alexander, a beautiful, brilliant young man,’ ,
Nicholas recalled. ‘He made his life dreadfully miserable.’ He had been work- +
ing for the travel agent Sid Proud, for whom he had been acting as a courier
to Spain. He left the agency at his father’s insistence to become an apprentice
chartered accountant; it was at this time that he became seriously depressed.
Encouraged by Nicholas, Alexander escaped his father’s influence by moving
to South America, where he supported himself by teaching English and French,
and working for the British Council.

Even though he found the electoral rebuff inexplicable, in January 1960,

Mosley planned yet another comeback in an attempt to win a seat in Parlia-
ment. He told supporters, ‘I will be back soon. Back in the East End and in
all the big cities.” One way the UM gained publicity was through its active
backing for South Africa in Britain. On 28 February the UM marched against
the ‘Boycott Movement’s Campaign against South African goods’. In front of
10,000 people in Trafalgar Square, Mosley promised to defeat the boycott
and reiterated his belief that apartheid should be established over the whole
African continent. ‘Jeff’ thought the sixty-three-year-old Mosley had lost none
of his oratorical skills. ‘When you listened to him you felt special, you weren’t
just a primary school boy from west London, you were a member of the
greatest country the world had ever seen that was going on to even greater
things.’ Others disagreed and supporters of the boycott clashed with
Mosleyites in the shadow of South Africa House.
In April 1960 a second ‘Lausanne Declaration’ Fascist gathering in Switzer-
land attended by Mosley was followed by outbreaks of anti-Semitism across
Europe, which were dealt with by the police. More serious was the discontent
in Belgium caused by the loss of the Congo. Jean Thiriart hoped to exploit the
situation and at the same time enter into an alliance with French extremists
of the Secret Army Organization (OAS) who wanted to delay settlement of
the Algerian question. In his Manifesto to the European Nation, Thiriart said,
‘Europe must be defended at Algiers as well as in Britain. It is the same
campaign. We cannot tolerate control of the Mediterranean by the enemies
of Europe. We shall remain in Algeria and help our European compatriots,
who are fighting for us.’ There followed a revival of neo-Fascism, galvanized
by the hope that Algeria would be a repetition of Spain in 1936. Anti-
parliamentarian and Poujadist-style nationalists hoped to unite ex-settlers in
order to pressure the Belgian government to intervene militarily in the Congo.
Thiriart and Paul Teichmann, an OAS supporter, led the Mouvement d’Action
Civique (MAC).
 ‘THE COLOURED INVASION’ 621

A radical, Thiriart, like Mosley, was influenced by syndicalism and hoped

to unite all extremist groups around a ‘European Communitarian party’,
which would form the ‘hard core’ of a ‘revolutionary centre’. Although the
number of hardcore MAC militants never exceeded 350, half of whom were
former colonists or paratroopers, his dynamic leadership lent it a degree of
influence out of all proportion to its numerical strength. It was a model Mosley
hoped to copy but he never had the seriousness of Thiriart, who used MAC
to boost the Jeune Europe International, of which he was undisputed leader.
MAC helped South Africa with propaganda and was violently anti-
Communist. For Thiriart, the quarrel between the Flemish and the Walloon
was to disappear within ‘Europe a Nation’.
Mosley placed great importance on international links and arranged many
gatherings of European Fascists. On 22 July 1960 one took place in Bonn,
where he met with Rudel — described by the Telegraph’s Bonn correspondent
as ‘one of the most inflammatory spokesmen of the neo-Nazi German Reich
Party’, and Otto Skorzeny, who arrived from his estate at Curragh, Ireland.
A month later Nancy Mitford wrote to Violet Hammersley that she had
seen Diana. The Mosleys were going to stay in Venice with Count Alvise
Loredon, secretary of the MSI, but ‘no decent Venetian will speak to him.
Meanwhile Diana says Sir O has never been so busy — it makes my flesh creep.
No doubt we shall all be in camps very soon.’ In the autumn they moved to
London, to a flat in Lowndes Court, where they planned to spend the winters
and also to enable Mosley to put in place his plans for a ‘Friends of Europe’
rally in December. He said, ‘Europe must forget and forgive and the wounds
must be healed before the construction of Europe can begin.’
Mosley had delivered a number speeches in front of large audiences in Rome
to prepare for the rally of his friends. Invitations went out to Rudel, the MSI’s
Filippo Anfuso, who after a long exile had been elected to Parliament in
Italy, and representatives from France, Austria and Sweden. Unfortunately for
Mosley, the Home Office refused permission for Rudel to enter the country
and the Marylebone Council hurriedly banned the rally from taking place
at the Seymour Hall. ‘It is a clear case of political discrimination,’ Mosley
declared.

At the begining of 1961 Alexander returned to England, where he re-

established relations with his father. He then ltft for the United States for
Columbia University. Generously, Nicholas and Michael agreed to pay their
stepbrother’s £1,400-a-year fees and provide an annual covenant of £700. His
father refused to support him, believing he was not bright enough, but Diana
did send him an allowance. Andrea Kelsey, who knew Alexander, recalled
Diana ‘saying at some times that she had to go into capital to send him money
and this distressed her’.
622 BLACKSHIRT

In the New Year the Mosleys holidayed in Nassau, as ‘house-guest of a

distinguished, retired British Foreign Service Officer, who had been head of
UK information services in New York during the Second World War’. That
the Governor of Bermuda attended a dinner party with them was noted by ,
the local American consul, whose cable to Washington was dealt with by FBI
Director Hoover. He said Mosley intended to visit the US but questioned the
reasons for refusing entry even though he was regarded by the US authorities
as a ‘controversial figure’ who should not be given ‘latitude to travel to us at
will’. The consul said that ‘if Mosley’s own government has apparently for-
given or forgotten, why is USG more harsh on this 70-year-old man than they
are? By cancelling multiple-entry visa, we irritate Mosley, but he still gets in
and I presume ... could be source of embarrassment due to demonstrations
... If he’s really that much of an embarrassment, then he should be denied a
visa and kept out (and we’re quite prepared to do that, too), not just annoyed
and then let in.’

In an attempt to present a moderate front before UM members stood in

elections, on 15 January 1961 Action declared that ‘we stand on clear cut
principles which are equally opposed to the crackpots who want to persecute
all Jews and to the cravens who treat all Jews as beyond criticism because they
fear the financial power of some Jews’. They were identified as the neo-Nazis/
Fascists who were vying with each other to replace Mosley as the head of
British Fascism. Colin Jordan was a disciple of Arnold Leese and tried to
emulate him in his extreme views on Jews; John Bean, formerly of the UM,
had formed the National Labour Party; Andrew Fountain joined with Bean
to lead the British National Party; John Tyndall and Martin Webster had
created the anti-Semitic National Socialist Movement.
Although the UM came third in council elections at Islington in April, with
a respectable 2,505 votes for its three candidates, it was still far behind
Labour’s 21,000 votes. Its only success was the election of Max Mosley as
secretary of the Oxford Union. When Mosley was invited to the Union debate,
there was an argument about whether he should be allowed to speak. Max
campaigned in favour on the slogan ‘Free Speech for Fascists’. As editor of
the student magazine Isis Paul Foot asked why they should listen to a man
who had stirred up racial prejudice against Jewish people. When Mosley
threatened a writ for libel, Isis’s printers insisted on an apology. Mosley
entertained the audience ‘with his clever oratory and aristocratic charm’,
recalled Foot, who resigned as editor.
In front of the Oxford Debating Union, Mosley ‘made mincemeat’ of Liberal
MP Jeremy Thorpe, on a motion proposing that South Africa should be
expelled from the Commonwealth, despite the Union being a stronghold of
liberalism. Mosley received an ovation from the packed house. Max’s friend
 “THE COLOURED INVASION’ 623

Robert Skidelsky said his interest in Mosley ‘was born at this point. I greatly
admire courage and intelligence, and it had taken the one for a man as
unpopular as Mosley to come to the Union at all, and the other for him to
gain a triumph.’ Soon afterwards Max ‘whipped off Skidelsky to Paris’ to see
his father. Nancy Mitford met the Warden of New College Oxford, Sir William
Hayter, whom she had known since he was at the embassy in Paris, and wrote
to her sister the Duchess of Devonshire that he had told her ‘the boys here
and at Cambridge can’t have enough of Sir O. — they don’t agree with him
but he fascinates them’.
In December 1961 the future Chancellor of the Exchequer Kenneth Clarke
invited Mosley to speak at the Cambridge University Conservative Association
on the basis that he was ‘a serious political figure who had got to be faced’.
One person resigned in protest - Michael Howard, who went on to lead the
Conservative Party. In front of 1,500 students Mosley easily outwitted Clarke
and another future Tory Minister John Gummer. Varsity noted that ‘during
the final minutes, the shouts of ‘answer the question” grew apace with the
realization that Mosley sidestepped almost every important question put to
> :
him...

At the beginning of 1962, worried by the slowness of the campaign for

European unity, the bigger neo-Fascist parties decided to forge closer links
between themselves. Mosley convened a congress in Venice on 4 March with
the aim of creating a ‘European National Party’. He visited Germany and Italy
to invite participants, then Switzerland, where he told Amaudruz, leader of
the New European Order, he was not welcome because of his open racism.
By this stage Mosley was generally regarded by the extreme Right as being
‘too moderate for the tough . . . and too tough for the moderate’.
The other key figure promoting the congress was Thiriart, who preached a
third way ‘social European revolution’. However, the congress was very much
Mosley’s affair. On 1 March 1962, dozens of Fascist and neo-Nazi groups
assembled in Venice, including the Deutsche Reichspartei led by von Thadden
and the MSI, represented by Mosley’s personal friends, Giovanni Lanfree,
Ponce de Le6n and Count Alvise Loredan, who helped to organize it. The
MSI leadership refused to sanction the Congress because it was unwilling to
jeopardize its role as a player in Italian politics, having helped in the victory
of Tambroni as Prime Minister. With almost 80,000 members, the MSI was far
more significant a force than Mosley’s minute UM. It had many sympathizers
among trade unionists and its popular press had daily sales of 100,000.
UM representatives included long-standing Mosleyites Hector McKechnie and
Walter Hesketh.
For the forum a round table was used, an idea suggested by Mosley for the
future government of Europe. From the symbol to the ideas, everything, Action
624 BLACKSHIRT

later proclaimed, was his work, including the declaration — ‘Europe a Nation
with a common Government elected by the whole people of Europe’. it would
‘free Europe from the present dominion of world finance operating from Wall
Street and the disastrous alternative of Communist tyranny’. Delegates signed ,
the ‘European Protocol’, which advocated creating a central European govern-
ment — closed, inward-looking, a white man’s club ruled by an authoritarian
government opposed to the United Nations.
The Protocol repeated the tenets of Europe a Nation and the Pirow—Mosley
proposals, and Mosley’s advocacy of the wage-price mechanism. Those that
solemnly signed it on 4 March 1962 —Lanfree, Loredan, von Thadden, Thiriart
and Mosley — agreed to change their party names to the National Party of
Europe (NPE). It was determined that its emblem would be that of the UM —
a flash of lightning in a circle. They vowed to accept the principle of central
direction by a ‘European political bureau’, under the principles of ‘Progress
... Solidarity ... Unity’. In was in such a spirit that they signed a declaration
to stop the incidents in Tyrol between Italians and Austrians of German stock.
They would, henceforth, meet at a round table event every two or three
months.
The attempt to make themselves paladins of a reunification of the ‘real’
Europe stretching ‘from Brest to Bucharest’ never got further than the signing
of the Protocol. It was, Lanfree noted, ‘almost impossible to find any traces
of this event in the European papers. The agreement reached was not even
published in Italy but only in England and Belgium.’ The NPE existed only
on paper; the Movimento Sociale Italiano continued to call itself the MSI,
and the DRP and the UM retained their old names. UM members said after
the Congress, “This makes no difference to us.’ Some of those not present,
such as Bardeche, agreed the Congress was ‘a relative consecration of his
European ideas’; however, he ‘certainly emphasised it too much’. For Mosley,
Venice was a ‘massive achievement’.
Immediately after the Congress Thiriart renamed his MAC organization
Jeune Europe (JE) and reorganized it into a clandestine network of localized
‘cells’. In seeking support for the creation of JE branches across Europe, he
contacted smaller and more radical neo-Fascist groups, as well as Kamerad-
enwerk Chief Hans-Ulrich Rudel. The JE set up branches which received
Thiriart’s instructions, propaganda and advice regarding organization, and a
JE International centre was established at Forschhausen near Frankfurt.
It was, however, the transnational contacts that accounted for its signifi-
cance as a transmitter of unconventional warfare techniques — later to be used
in ‘Gladio’-style operations — to new generations of European neo-Fascists
who had adopted the Celtic cross as their emblem. MAC was linked to
Mosley’s Union Movement, which the previous September had launched the
Young Britain Movement, headed by international athlete Walter Hesketh.
 “THE COLOURED INVASION’ 625

Other JE-linked groups included Mouvement Jeune Nation and ultras in Spain
and Portugal. Thiriart forged connections with Skorzeny and Rudel, and to
Jean-Marie Le Pen’s pro-Algérie Frangaise movement in France, which made
MAC into a ‘principal agent’ of the OAS in Belgium. But this was more
impressive on paper than in practice. Bardeche noted that neo-Fascism was
not equal to the occasion: ‘Whereas the Communists immediately transposed
the Algerian problem into terms of international Communism, the Fascists
_ never thought for a moment of expressing it in terms of a Fascist International.’

Flushed with ‘success’ in Venice, Mosley turned to the domestic campaign. He

presented a moderate front in the face of competition from the new generation
of nationalists. The Jewish Chronicle declared on 4 May 1962 that the UM
was no longer ‘pre-occupied by Jewish matters, indeed the word “Jew” is
not mentioned in its latest publications’. A month later The Times noted,
‘Mosleyites are frequently given to violently racial opinions in private but at
the moment their public behaviour is respectable to a point bordering on
piety.’
Mosley targeted the recent influx of Commonwealth immigrants. Little had
changed since Notting Hill and race relations was a potentially explosive
cauldron of prejudice and hate. The ‘coloured’ population had risen in ten
years from 74,500 to 336,000. Many British cities had black communities
concentrated in deprived inner cities, which often led ‘to rampant prejudice
and of discrimination in such areas as private housing and employment’.
Although ethnic communities were mostly peaceful, ‘there had been disturb-
ances to remind British people of the possible powder keg of racial tension
that had manifested itself in so many American cities in the past’. Mosleyites
played on these fears and, partly in response to this, in 1962 the Macmillan
government passed an Immigration Bill, which restricted Commonwealth
immigration by way of a voucher system. It was not sufficient to satisfy the
Mosleyites but it did enough to blunt any hope of electoral success.
Mosley asked Mary Tavener, who had ties to several right-wing groups, to
make an approach to Colin Jordan and John Bean. She was married to a man
who tried on the satire programme TW3 to punch Bernard Levin, who had
scathingly reviewed his wife’s acting. She was involved in attempts to get a
reprieve for an SS colonel, who had been found guilty in Italy of ordering the
shooting of partisans and with whom she appearéd to be in love. Mosley was
willing to make Jordan and Bean his national organizers, on a par with Hamm.
She outlined the advantages of unity, pointed out that Mosley still had a name
to conjure with and stressed the experience of the UM in fighting elections.
Not long afterwards she died, after falling down some stairs.
Jordan was too mistrustful of Mosley to agree to a meeting but Bean did so
at the Eccleston Hotel, where he received ‘the full Mosley hypnosis treatment,
626 BLACKSHIRT

to
with the opening and lowering of the eyelids which made his pupils appear
dilate’. He had not realized Bean had been in the UM. “We must make amends
a senior
and see that your organising and speaking abilities are fully utilised as
my movement .’ Bean was flattered but pointed out that ‘while
officer within
go a considera ble way with his views on Europe’ it was ‘prematu re
he could
to call for “Europe a Nation’”’’. The other problem was that Mosley had been
labelled an anti-Semite and, because of this, ‘he would never be able to obtain
power through the ballot box’. Bean then explained his idea for co-operation
in public rallies and elections in a ‘National Front’ but Mosley was not
interested.
Jordan attempted to organize an openly Nazi movement. When the National
Socialist Movement held its first rally in Trafalgar Square in July 1962, anti-
Fascists disrupted the meeting and the police arrested Tyndall and Jordan for
insulting words likely to cause a breach of the peace. Jordan had argued that
Hitler had been right and that we should have been fighting world Jewry in
the Second World War and not Germany. Tyndall-said the Jew was the
‘assassin of Europe’ and like a ‘poisonous maggot’ in society. Jordan was
imprisoned for two months and Tyndall six weeks. The attempts at respect-
ability were spoilt, Mosley raged, by such ‘lunatic fringe action’. Hamm
declared, ‘We thoroughly disapprove of Jordan. We feared all along his clown-
ing in [Trafalgar] Square might put our next meeting in jeopardy and it turned
out to be right.’
Mosley was scheduled to hold a public meeting in the square. These normally
passed off with little incident. However, on 22 July there were 7,000 people
present, most of them determined to stop Mosley. The rally was halted after
fifteen minutes with fifty-six arrests. A week later Mosley and thirty supporters
tried to march through Manchester to Belle Vue. He was knocked down three
times, there were forty-seven arrests and the meeting was called off before a
hostile crowd of 5,000 people.
What alarmed the Left (and the authorities) was the sign from the Venice
Conference and the rise of the new nationalist groups that the Right was
regrouping and hoped to become an international and domestic force. The
anti-Fascist challenge came from Jewish groups, who were, the Sunday Tele-
graph reported, ‘planning a nation-wide campaign . . . against Mosley’s Union
Movement’. Threats were made to sweep Fascism off the streets from the
Yellow Star movement and a faction within it, the newly formed 62 Group -
a revival of the 43 Group — supported by Jewish shopkeepers and businessmen
in the East End, who supplied funds. Through intelligence gathering and
guerrilla-like tactics, the 62 Group attempted to expose the true nature and
activities of the UM, and to prevent Mosley from speaking. This led to many
confrontations on the streets, which sometimes ended in violence.
The climax of the violence occurred on 31 July, when the sixty-five-year-old
 “THE COLOURED INVASION’ 627

Mosley was punched and knocked down in the ‘Battle of Ridley Road’, in
which sixty people were arrested. Max, who had just left Oxford and was
reading for the Bar, acted as his father’s right-hand man and at one point
saved him from a beating. Jewish ex-servicemen posing as Mosleyites had
infiltrated the cordon of over 200 policemen. When Mosley stood up and tried
to speak under a shower of coins and tomatoes, the police stopped the meeting.
While walking back to his car, he was again assaulted and his chauffeur
injured. The next day Max defended himself before the magistrates and was
acquitted.
On 30 August the police banned all political marches in London for a
forty-eight-hour period. Three days later they made forty arrests in Bethnal
Green, and Mosley was kicked and punched. A week later he finished his
speech in Bethnal Green, well guarded by ranks of police. Whether Mosley
encouraged the disorder is unclear, but his top minder Danny Harmston,
a Smithfield Market manager and professional boxer, paid a porter, Tony
Lambrianou (later a member of the Kray gang), and his brother Jimmy, ‘to
create a fracas while he’s talking’ so as to attract publicity. ‘On several
occasions’, admitted Lambrianou, ‘we were getting £50 a time to be out there
Jew-baiting.’ On 29 September, in Manchester, 250 policemen kept Mosley
and the Northern Council against Fascism apart, but he had had enough. He
decided to stop rallies in the provinces. His activity would be limited to
private meetings, door-to-door canvassing and the publication of journals. He
lamented to an insider, ‘I fear the character of the people has changed . . . they
won’t go on marches.”
The publicity generated by the violence - which the public believed belonged
to another era — did not halt the decline in UM membership. Colin Cross
estimated there were 1,000 members, mostly working-class activists, though
the true figure was probably lower. A Sunday Times reporter, Michael
Hamlyn, suggested 10-15,000 UM sympathizers but that probably included
all who had passed through its ranks. Alan Rogers, who ‘unveiled all their
secrets’ in the Herald, said ‘membership subscription was about £6,000
[£72,000], with donations which fluctuate between £5,000 and £30,000
pounds in a good year. The minimum annual running of UM costs were
between £15-16,000.’ Mosley himself made up any deficit incurred, though
some money was said to be coming from Rhodesia and South Africa.
In September Mosley sent William Webster, a former boxer, to South Africa
to raise funds. In a successful tour he boasted he had collected £100,000
(£1,200,000). He approached the government for a contribution and was
directed to Nationalist Party headquarters for a donation. Webster’s boast
was probably just that; there was some money but nowhere near as much
or four
as he claimed. Rogers concluded that the UM would put up three
candidates at the next general election, which was ‘hardly an impressive
628 BLACKSHIRT

performance for a party which Mosley believes could sweep to power within
five years’.
A last meeting in Tunbridge Wells broke up in disorder on 20 October.
Thirty-six years of grass-roots campaigning had ended in failure. One reason
for the UM’s collapse was anti-Fascist activity, which the 62 Group claimed
had ‘swept Mosley from the streets for the last time’. It was, Martin Walker
suggests, no great achievement since he had no movement of any significance
which could capitalize upon the publicity. The fighting at his meetings was
shown on television, though not a word of his speeches was reported. The
BBC’s head of talks told editorial staff that on no account was he to be invited
to be interviewed for the ‘exposure of extreme views’. He did do interviews
with popular television presenters such as Dan Farson and Malcolm Mug-
geridge, but ‘not one minute of the interview was shown in either case’. The
Director-General, Hugh Greene, had ruled that it ‘would not be right to offer
a platform to Sir Oswald Mosley’. He later admitted that a report that Mosley
would only ‘come on the air over my dead body was not an exaggeration’.

Mosley escaped from the problems at home with an invitation in September

1962 from students at the University of Buffalo, in New York, to take part in
a televised debate. Treated as a security case by Hoover, FBI agents ‘conducted
a discreet surveillance at the airport? when Mosley landed. His stay at the
Hotel Lennox was monitored by an unidentified source and plain-clothes men
were ‘stationed in the hotel lobby to keep unauthorized persons away from
the subject’.
An FBI agent took notes of the debate, during which Mosley characterized
Fascism as ‘(a) Nationalism and (b) “urge to action”, both of which are good
things in themselves, but “‘led to disaster’? because of being carried too far.
He said that at that time there was no “Fascist International”.’ Fascism, he
added, ‘was not responsible for the atrocities committed “mostly during the
war’’, which had no more to do with Fascism than the bombing of Hiroshima
had to do with Democracy’. The agent noted that ‘some of the questioners
became bitter and abusive in reference to Mosley’s attitude toward Hitler
during the war’. He defended himself by claiming it would have been ‘best for
Britain to keep out of the war and let Hitler ‘smash East”, and that Hitler
had no desire to take up ‘“‘a multi-racial empire” such as the British’. The
agent thought there was ‘much humbug in the speech as a whole. His rhetoric,
however, was that of an experienced British politician, yet some of the con-
trived climaxes in his presentation had quite a “Fascist” tone. He repeatedly
stated to hecklers that he has been slandered and accused of advocating ideas
he never stood for, and that the “truth” was to be found “‘in the record”.”
On his return to Europe, Mosley was interviewed on 22 October by the
writer Angelo del Boca. He reiterated his view of Europe as a ‘third block’,
 ‘THE COLOURED INVASION’ 629

which would rid itself of American and Russian troops, reunify Germany,
reconquer lost German territories, give Italy breathing space and put an end
to the United Nations’ power. It was megalomania, thought Boca: ‘Mosley
has foreseen everything.’ Europe would leave Asia to the Soviets; the US would
keep its protectorate over South America, and Europe take that part of Africa
inhabited by Whites. Mosley then ‘fixed his steely eyes upon me’ and added,
‘if they then tell us to get out of the whole of Africa, we must say that we have
not the slightest intention of doing so, any more than the Americans would
be willing to leave their continent to the Redskins. Europe can’t be separated
from Africa.’
In early 1963, Mosley was in South Africa advising British immigrants to
join the National Party. At home, there was little UM activity. Robert Saunders
stood for the vice-presidency of the National Farmers Union but lost by one
vote to Henry Plumb. He blamed his failure on making public his ties to
Mosley. Saunders hoped to influence the NFU and through his tireless cam-
paigning a policy to make Britain as self-sufficient as possible in agricultural
production did take root in the early seventies, and his arguments for Britain
to join the Common Market finally became NFU policy.
In the spring the Mosleys’ Irish house, Ileclash, was sold. After three years
in England, they decided to divide their time between the Temple near Paris
and a large London flat in Lowndes Court.

British MPs began warning about the international ramifications of a revived

Nazi movement. The West German Ministry of the Interior listed 450 organiz-
ations and publishing houses outside Germany associated with international
Fascism. Mosley described his activities in this area in the May edition of
Action. He had been in Bologna for a congress of Giovane Nazione, chaired
by Thiriart, who had ‘done splendid work in publishing the policy of the
Declaration of Venice in several languages’. Mosley said ‘it was a chance to
meet the new men of value to the European future’. These were radical students
who opposed the MSI’s ‘gradual trend towards bourgeois ways’ and glorified
OAS terrorist methods in the pages of its Turin review, Quaderni Neri, to
which Mosley contributed. It drew readers’ attention to the revolutionary
upsurge in Europe, which would follow the ‘path of Nietzsche’s superman’
and ‘European Nationalism’. At Mosley’s urging the extremists achieved ‘par-
tial and mediocre success’ by merging into a new grouping, Giovane Europe.
Mosley was seen as a moderate on the right, yet he aligned himself with
radical groups, which in the sixties and seventies engaged in shootings and
bombings as part of the anti-Communist ‘strategy of tension’ linked to the
MI6/CIA sponsored ‘Gladio’ stay-behind networks, which in Italy and Bel-
gium relied on neo-Fascist ‘gladiators/terrorists’. Was Mosley aware of the
deeper intelligence background that surrounded his activities? Some of those
630 BLACKSHIRT

close to him, such as John Warburton, did wonder what he was really up to
with these extremists. Curiously, BUF member Edmund Warburton had joined
the very first stay-behind network. When fighting stopped in Germany in 1945
he was recruited to a secret special forces unit to take on the Soviets.
During the summer of 1963, Jeune Europe split over the Alto Adige issue. ’
This was discussed at a special conference, where most of the delegates
belonged to the Gladio networks. The German speakers were in favour of
supporting action to create an independent Tyrolese State, but Thiriart and
the Italians said it would harm the cause of European unity and favoured a
negotiated settlement of the controversy between Austria and Italy. The dis-
pute led groups to abandon JE and form a new international, Europafront,
under the leadership of Austrian extremist and Gladio operative Fred Borth.
Thiriart accused his adversaries of ‘neo-Nazism’ and expelled them. Mosley
was party to these discussions, which shows that he was moving in some very
murky waters. UM members attended a European Easter camp in Belgium
organized by MAC and Jeune,Europe, where OAS personnel were present.
In September 1963 George Parisy, an on-the-run OAS gunman involved in a
plot to kill General de Gaulle, was arrested in a London flat with a number of
passports and a loaded gun found under the pillow of a bed he was sharing
with a homosexual member of the UM. Links to Thiriart had obviously been
of some use. ;
With Mosley abroad, Action became irregular and subject to a permanent
financial crisis until it was wound up in May 1964. When Mosley withdrew
his candidates from the June general election, it was the beginning of the end
for the UM, which was now conducted by a directorate of Bailey, Harmston,
Moloney, Quill, Row and Hamm; the last two full-time officials. There was
an active membership of no more than 200 and less than 1,000 inactive
supporters in the country. When George Thayer began studying the UM he
found a rank and file composed of ‘young and violent racists who join the
Movement as an excuse to release their anti-social attitudes’. They were
‘the misfits, the dullards and the outcasts of society’. Why Mosley, Thayer
wondered, ‘allows his Movement to be dominated by these people has never
been explained adequately’.
The fire had gone from Mosley: when he posed the question ‘What are our
chances?’ he answered, ‘None until crisis.’ The years in the political wilderness
had had their effect. Thayer noticed his pride was ‘beginning to crack around
the edges; he seems very sensitive to slights and the first glimmerings of
self-doubt are noticeable. He seemed resigned to his ostracism ... He gives
the impression that he dislikes his squalid surroundings, the furtiveness of his
life, and the men with whom he associates. Above all, he seemed to miss the
company and confidence of great men.’
The Europe campaign enabled him to attract some of the respect he craved.
 ‘THE COLOURED INVASION’ 631

In July he gave a press conference in Milan organized by Jeune Europe and

pursued contacts in West Germany, through his close friend Adolf von
Thadden, who was in discussions with leaders of the disbanded Deutsche
Reichspartei and several smaller groups. On 28 November, with West Ger-
many facing an economic depression, the National Democratic Party (NPD)
emerged from these discussions, held together by a common commitment to
German unification and an end to occupation by foreign armies. Von Thadden
was to become its ‘Fiihrer’. This was, Gerry Gable notes, ‘neo-nazism in
- three-piece suits, with the thugs operating in the shadows’. Mosley offered his
support. In a letter on 16 December to leading NPD member Wolfgang Frenz,
he stressed it was ‘of the greatest importance .. . to support the formation of
a nationalist party for Europe’.
Von Thadden came closer than anyone to giving the far Right influence over
post-war West German politics. The NPD grew rapidly and made impressive
showings in regional elections. However, Mosley backed off when his friends
developed a more radical agenda. Some became the founding fathers of the
post-war ‘Third Position’, which embraced Per6n in Argentina and emerging
leaders in Africa. Von Thadden split the NPD and its allies across Europe by
suddenly espousing a pro-Chinese and anti-Soviet line. How much this change
was due to his British Intelligence masters, who were ‘running’ him, is not
known. The NPD was infiltrated by West German security and senior
members, bought by money or blackmail, were its agents. This poses the
question: to what extent did counter-intelligence officers sustain the far Right
in their efforts to monitor it? Von Thadden later dropped the radical ideology
and the NPD lost most of its support to established conservative politicians
who adopted some of its goals during the 1970s.
Mosley asked in Action: ‘What progress was the “National Party of Europe”
making after its inauguration in Venice?’ He claimed ‘a very great advance’
had been made but complained that lack of funds was holding up progress.
‘We did not at this stage get beyond a series of meetings to establish the liaison
decided by the Conference.’ If, against the evidence, he remained optimistic,
privately he knew the problem was more than just funding. Venice had been
‘the last hope of merging the old patriotisms in a wider patriotism of Europe’.
He had found the most ardent Europeans among ‘the young Germans fresh
from the Army’ — especially from the SS regiments. However, the ‘increasing
sense of insult, humiliation and repression among many of them’ led to a
frustration with the dreams of a united Europe and caused many of ‘the
protagonists of Venice’ to be ‘thrown back into nationalism, and into a wild
futility’.
Giovanni Lanfree said Mosley ‘tried to give life to one great party of the
of
European Right but it was a failure because of the too narrow nationalism
the countries represented and the desire of the German for revenge’. They
632 BLACKSHIRT

yearned for the Nazi era and looked towards the past and not the future. All
the post-war internationals were derailed because the Germans and Italians
‘had no real intention of sub-ordinating the autonomy of their own organisa-
tions to a larger entity under someone else’s control’. They felt Mosley was
too European and that would affect their chances to win elections in their
home countries. Typically, they were riven with political rivalries between ,
leaders, who were, Mosley claimed, ‘nonentities’. There was also the Algerian
problem and whether to help or not to help the OAS. Other Fascists —
Bardeche, Amaudruz, Duprat, Coston — considered Mosley’s European action
extremely limited and said he was just a clever and opportunist demagogue.
With little success with his European project, Mosley turned again to South
Africa, which he visited during 1965, and praised its ‘latent power’. However,
Prime Minister Verwoerd had found other less controversial outlets on the
right of the Tory Party for propaganda campaigns and had little use for
the UM, which had no influence on British policy. The Vice-Chairman of the
Monday Club, Harold Soref, who was intensely involved with pro-South
African activities, was a former Blackshirt. Mosley then sought support in Ian
Smith’s Rhodesia, where a Mosleyite South African propagandist, Ivor Benson,
had been hired to mastermind the creation of a new image for the country.
In February 1966 Mosley’s name was again current when the BBC broadcast
a programme called The Threat of Fascism in the series The Thirties, during
which the commentator declared that ‘Mosley was trying to enforce his policy
by deliberately invoking violence...’ The UM began another campaign,
centred on housing shortages and immigration. However, the immigration
issue had rather fizzled out when Mosley decided to make one last attempt to
enter Parliament, standing in the March 1966 general election in Shoreditch.
He polled only 1,127 votes — 4.6 per cent of the total. All seven nationalist
candidates who campaigned against immigration lost their deposit.
The UM contested Birmingham Handsworth, a constituency with a growing
non-white population and major social problems, but it attracted only 4.1 per
cent of the poll. It was a collapse of the ‘racialist appeal’ to the electorate.
‘The people we worked with were perfect and this made it bearable for me,’
wrote Diana. She dismissed Mosley’s vote with a typically flippant remark:
‘We did not canvass and the result was no surprise. There was a feeling of
enormous apathy reflected in the high rate of abstentions.’ The reality was
that the exploitation of race and immigration rarely becomes a major political
issue when left to fringe parties. John Brewer’s study of the Handsworth
election makes the point that the UM’s failure was ‘a product of the fact that
whatever fears there were in the population were translated through the
established parties. Voters reject neo-fascist movements: they have consistently
rejected Mosley, Britain’s closest approximation to a fascist leader.’
Mosley realized the futility of the effort. He announced his retirement from
 ‘THE COLOURED INVASION’ 633

‘party warfare’. ‘I detached myself from party politics in order to advocate a

policy and action beyond parties.’ He had been rejected by the British public
but remained undaunted, with his ability for self-deception undiminished.
 28

Rehabilitation

In 1966 Mosley launched his final campaign — to rehabilitate his own repu-
tation in the eyes of the British Establishment. He issued a ‘Broadsheet’ dealing
with political topics, took part in university debates, talked to the Tory Bow
Group and spoke at the Liberal Party’s New Outlook magazine’s history
seminars. He also began work on an autobiography. The media, however,
remained closed to him. Constantine FitzGibbon, at the time compiling a
feature on British Fascism, revealed he was told on ‘no account to record the
voice of Mosley who was permanently banned from the BBC’. Mosley issued
a libel writ against the BBC’s Director-General, Sir Hugh Greene, over a
statement that he had organized violence.
When the libel was repeated, Mosley applied to the High Court to have
BBC Governors committed to prison for contempt of court. The case was
heard in February 1966 before Lord Chief Justice Parker, who in his summing
up said he had ‘considerable sympathy with the applicant .. . It is perfectly
clear that the respondents will not have him on their programme. I am not
criticising them for that, but it does disclose a curious system whereby someone
who has the ear of the whole nation can say things and the unfortunate subject
has no means of answering back in the same medium.’ When Mosley applied
to the European Court of Human Rights, which agreed to hear his complaint,
it so alarmed the BBC that the ban was dropped.
After correspondence in the Observer over his ‘quarrel’ with Jews, on 6 June
1966 Mosley contacted the editor of the Jewish Chronicle William Frankel.
He said ‘the quarrel is over’ and that it was not ‘in accord with the traditional
wisdom of your people to turn a past quarrel into a personal feud’. Frankel
disclaimed any personal feud but said, ‘Jews cannot be expected to have any
great affection for one who is known to have held opinions to which you gave
expression in the past, unless it was patent that there had been a sincere change
of attitude.’ Mosley claimed he had ‘never been an anti-Semite’ and the quarrel
had been with ‘some Jews’ who desired a war between Britain and Germany.
He explained his position and requested a meeting for‘a frank discussion.
On 3 November Mosley told Frankel he had been wrong to single out Jews.
He now recognized they legitimately felt both a Jewish loyalty and a British
 REHABILITATION 635

loyalty — as he himself affirmed a loyalty to Europe and to his own country.

Frankel felt Mosley ‘had no concept of the depth of Jewish emotions about the
Holocaust’. When he conveyed some idea of ‘the still bleeding wound’ it had
inflicted on every Jew, Mosley agreed it was too much ‘to expect Jews to welcome
his offer of reconciliation’. Frankel suggested that a statement of his attitude to
Jews be accompanied by a donation to an appropiate Jewish cause. Mosley
said it was ‘difficult for a politician to don sackcloth and ashes’. Nicholas
learnt that ‘the statement, if it existed outside his imagination, was never sent’.
In fact, Mosley did send a letter to the Chronicle (on 21 December 1969)
admitting atrocities were committed in Germany and seeking ‘an end to this
quarrel which arose from reasons long past and desire my relations with Jews
perfectly normal’. That, however, was the extent of his statement. Seemingly,
a charity donation was rejected. Someone privy to the correspondence recalled
Mosley complaining that ‘they are always raising the anti’.
Mosley had turned over the UM to a directorate of mainly older Blackshirts,
with a nostalgic faith in his political judgement. He said ‘Labour and the
Tories have failed equally; the Liberals have no answer at all. The only way is
to go above and beyond the parties to a national union of the best of our
people.’ He wanted a government of action with ‘hard centre’ ideas. He
recognized that ‘no government of the centre based on national unity has yet
been achieved in peacetime but it may be helped by a change in the system of
voting’. The UM needed ‘a strong base for a rapid advance when the great
economic crisis comes off; which we alone have warned the country for years
past. Quite often in recent times movements with lesser votes have been in
power very soon afterwards...’
A newspaper profile said Mosley lived ‘the life of a country gentleman of
around 1900 with a full staff that would certainly be unobtainable in England’.
As well as a holiday in Venice, in January 1967 the Mosleys spent time
in Johannesburg, where Diana experienced some respite from her frequent
migraines. She had fewer worries over Alexander now but it was the warm
dry climate that really helped and, henceforth, the Mosleys went to South
Africa most winters. Mosley had become very possessive of Diana. It seemed
that it was only when he needed to depend on her that he truly loved her. She
downplayed her own personality to support him. Her loyalty was absolute
and she disowned ‘anyone who offered even the mildest criticism of him, and
only adulation would serve from anyone writing about him’.
In February 1967 Diana informed Robert Skidelsky’s literary agent there
would be no conflict between Mosley’s autobiography - ‘the opening of
negotiations for peace with the British Establishment’ - and ‘the authorised
biography that is being written by Mr Skidelsky’. Skidelsky had known Max
at Oxford and was impressed when his father spoke at the Union. As President
of the Humanist Society, Skidelsky invited Mosley down to speak, which
636 BLACKSHIRT

angered some dons. Max was very supportive, though Mosley, writing his
autobiography, was not initially co-operative. Diana admitted she wanted ‘a
hagiography’.
The prevailing view of Mosley as an extremist was tempered by the creation ,
of the National Front — a merger between A. K. Chesterton’s League of Empire ,
Loyalists, John Bean’s British National Party, the Racial Preservation Society
and the Greater Britain Movement of John Tyndall and Martin Webster. With
his passionate anti-Nazism and pro-Empire stance, Chesterton — the BUF’s
former chief propagandist — was the respectable head who appealed to ultra
right-wing Monday Club activists of the Tory Party. Its membership soon
eclipsed that of the UM, although initially it had little more success than
Mosley. Ironically, the NF came into being as a result of Mosley’s attempt in
the early sixties to unite the different factions of British Fascism. He was the
catalyst, Martin Walker noted, ‘because of the seeds he had planted in the
mind of Bean’, who talked of a ‘National Front’ of like-minded bodies. Tyndall
called for the unification of non-Mosleyite groups. In 1965 New Society said
‘the break with pre-war fascism is almost complete. The BNP has no “Leader”
whom it puts forwards as a potential dictator and it avowedly works within the
Parliamentary framework ... Bean says he regards himself as “the drummer ~
boy” awakening public opinion rather than as “‘the new Charlemagne”’.’
NF policy owed much to Mosley’s vision of ‘Imperial Defence’ and ‘Econ-
omic Integration’, but the movement distanced itself from him. Tyndall
criticized Mosley for aping the continental movements in respect of the exter-
nal imagery adopted. ‘Today the focal points of world affairs have moved
elsewhere, calling for different approaches and policies, so that the question
of whether we should endorse the whole of the Mosley programme of
that earlier period simply does not arise.’ Mosley dismissed the NF’s out-
dated nationalism, which harked back to a non-existent empire and anti-
Europeanism. He blamed this on the ‘Nordic idea’, a concept destructive to
the idea of a United Europe. He told an insider the NF was ‘funded by Jews’.
Although he put forward the most coherent ideology of any Fascist in
Europe, Mosley had little influence on the extreme right in Britain in the late
sixties and early seventies. He was distrusted by the little Hitlers of
the neo-Fascist Right. He was too Fascist and too openly anti-Semitic for the
ultras on the Tory Right, and too soft and too ‘kosher’ for ‘real’ Fascists. He
failed the test as a ‘revolutionary’ Fascist. He led a violent movement but had
been too law-abiding to take command of the streets. A Fascist of any standing
would have put the Mitford family up against a wall and had them shot. He
was too much of the Establishment and only really succeeded as Rothermere’s
militant wing of the Tory Party. He failed at almost everything; even as a
Fascist agitator. He had some influence in Italy, where the younger generation
of neo-Fascists read his writings. MSI leader Giorgio Pini and those young
 REHABILITATION 637

activists who went on publicly to disown the Fascist past visited Mosley
in the late sixties. John Warburton said ‘they couldn’t get enough Mosley
material’.
Mosley’s absence from television screens ended in November 1967 when
he appeared on ITV’s Frost Programme. Face to face with old East End
opponents such as ‘Solly’ Kaye, he denied the charge of anti-Semitism and
_ claimed he had been driven to retaliate ‘against Jewish rascals yelling at me
and attacking my meetings with razors, bludgeons, weapons of every sort’. It
_ was when the 1935 message of congratulations from Streicher to one of his
speeches and Mosley’s telegram of thanks were shown that the audience began
to see through his deceptions. Frost realized he ‘saw everything through the
distorting mirror of his own fantasies, and was irretrievably consumed by
them. He would never see himself as others saw him.’
Someone who did take Mosley seriously was Cecil King, nephew of Lord
Rothermere and Chairman of the International Publishing Corporation. With
Mirror editor Hugh Cudlipp, King regularly discussed ‘what would happen,
and how soon, and who in various activities in the land could be of any use
when the fabric of the British way of life broke down’. In March 1968, when
King met with French politicians, bankers and publishers, Cudlipp asked Paris
correspondent Peter Stephens to monitor his activities. King was pushing for
a United Europe. ‘Dumbfounded hacks at the Mirror,’ wrote Chris Horrie,
‘were required to write article after article setting out the plan for “Nation
Europa”, which were then foisted on a mostly baffled Mirror readership.’
King claimed ‘that eventually there will be a dictator in Britain perhaps not
next year, but it is certainly coming because parliament is totally discredited’.
He wanted an independent strong man to take charge and ‘turned to exactly
the same “strong man” as Rothermere — Mosley’.
King suggested the Mirror serialize Mosley’s autobiography and wanted to
invite him to lunch. Cudlipp thought the idea ‘abhorrent’. King wanted advice
and to sound out Mosley as the head of a military-backed government. Lord
Louis Mountbatten, the country’s highest-ranking military officer, was his
next choice. On 8 May King had his famous meeting with Mountbatten when
they talked of the ‘forthcoming crisis’ and the likelihood of bloodshed in the
streets, and the desire for a ‘massive resurgence’. King thought the hour of his
destiny was at hand and on 11 May the Mirror led with the headline ENoUGH
IS ENOUGH, amid calls for the resignation of the Prime Minister, Harold
Wilson. Cudlipp said that in the ensuing political chaos the list of names King
had written down, including that of Mosley, would be called upon to save
Britain.
Mosley’s autobiography, My Life, was brought out in October by a repu-
table publisher, Nelson. There was a press conference at the Café Royal, where
King talked with Mosley. A sympathetic article by Tory MP Norman St John
638 BLACKSHIRT

Stevas appeared in The Times, which serialized the book. Mosley was ‘a man
of idiosyncratic views endowed with great political courage but little political
sense’. The claim that he was not an anti-Semite was convincing: “The charge
that could be levelled against him with more justification is not anti-Semitism
but a callous indifference to the fate of European Jewry.’ He claimed ‘to be a
man of action, but men of action do not wait upon the occurrence of hypotheti-
cal events. They seize them as they are and mould them to their will.’ Mosley
was ‘a man of ideas’.
Colin Coote said it was ‘the best-written volume of memoirs emanating
from my generation’. It is ably written and was greatly helped by Diana’s
editing and the research of two assistants. It is also an unrepentant and
self-deluded apologia; an unreflective account which deliberately conceals key
areas of Mosley’s political activities. He was an ‘expert forgetter’? who
expunged much compromising and dubious material on the BUF. The book
glosses over areas such as the radio project in order, as he admitted, to protect
the identities of people still alive. Those BU members mentioned by name
were already dead. Mosley argued that internment had blighted their lives to
such an extent that anonymity was the best guarantee of preventing further
grief for such committed individuals. In the end, he produced a sickly, over-
bearingly vain and narcissistic book — one of the great monuments to one
person’s monstrous ego. The great man Mosley is never wrong.
Bill Allen wrote to Mosley that his book was ‘splendid, balanced and
even kindly’. There were favourable reviews but Conservative Party historian
Robert Blake, while praising its readability, warned ‘the book should not
delude the reader into believing that Mosleyism was other than a thoroughly
evil manifestation of the human spirit’. It sold poorly; he received an advance
of £5,000 and bought back 2,500 copies. My Life’s publication did break the
BBC ban. For thirty-four years Mosley had not been allowed to say a word
on the BBC. On 24 October he was interviewed on Panorama by James
Mossman and attracted eight and a half million viewers. Mosley answered
questions on anti-Semitism (he appeared to recognize that six million Jews
had been killed), Fascism and his attitude to Hitler, whether he was waiting
for a future call and whether he should have stayed in the Labour Party. The
Jewish Chronicle said he looked ‘moderate and reasonable’, and had an answer
for each point.
Nancy Mitford wrote to her sister Decca on 15 November: ‘Have you
noted all the carry-on about Sir O? He says he was never anti-semitic. Good
Gracious! I quite love the old soul now but really!’ On the previous day King
lunched at the Ritz with Mosley, who tried ‘to convince everybody that he
was never anti-Jewish, never pro-German, and never favoured violence at his
meetings. Surely he protests too much.’ At seventy-one he still hoped to play
a political part. ‘Adenauer came to power at seventy-four and continued to
 REHABILITATION 639

be important till he was ninety-one ... He thinks an economic breakdown

here is inevitable and that then we must all be ready — but ready to do what?’
King added that Mosley had talked to Enoch Powell.
Earlier in the year Powell, a member of the Conservative shadow cabinet,
delivered his ‘rivers of blood’ speech in which he said the country was mad to
allow in 50,000 dependants of immigrants. The apocalyptic speech with its
reference to ‘wide-eyed, grinning piccaninnies’ brought ‘the language of the
neo-fascist political fringe into the heart of the establishment’. One of Mosley’s
few dynamic lieutenants, ‘Big Dan’ Harmston, mobilized 500 Smithfield
porters in support of Powell and his anti-immigration views. Powell was able
‘to cut across traditional divisions of party identification in forging his mass
constituency’. However, like Mosley, he was a maverick. and individualist who
remained a political outcast. The UM argued Powellism was ‘the last spasm
of Little England’ and its anti-Powell line was in sharp contrast to the NF’s
support. Diana said her husband belonged to the ‘hard centre’ while Powell
was of the extreme Right. In a snobbish aside to Hugh Purcell, Mosley called
him ‘a middle-class Alf Garnett’. Despite this, Harmston remained a loyal
Mosleyite. There were few left.
Skidelsky wrote to Mosley on 22 November that the ans of his own book
‘would be the central episode of your life — the period 1929-1931 — which is
not only right, but also most favourable to you’. Skidelsky later admitted he
had been emotionally tied to the period of his thesis, which had been published
as Politicians and the Slump. It added to the overly Keynesian interpretation
of Mosley’s thinking.
Ross McKibben criticized Skidelsky’s ‘neo-Keynesian critiques’ of the
second Labour government for overestimating the choices available to it and
underestimating the social and economic structural constraints. A Keynesian
solution was impossible, not because it was inherently wrong, but because too
many powerful people would not have accepted the measures necessary to
carry it through. McKibben argued ‘the problem of who had political control
of the economy had to be solved before reflationary policies could be followed.
The real barrier to such reflation was thus always a political one.’ It was true,
as Mosley argued, that government had intervened, planned and organized
during the First World War, but ‘restraints to treating depression as war’
remained and it was ‘difficult to conceive of the then British ruling classes,
however broadly or narrowly that term is interpreted, consenting to state
direction of the economy’. The failure to adopt reflationary policies, therefore,
was structural and not intellectual.
‘Whenever coherent and integrated programmes have been presented by
someone whose views have commanded public credibility,’ as Geoffrey
Ingham suggests in the case of Mosley in the 1920s (and Wilson in the
1960s), ‘the dominant class has been merciless in its condemnation.’ His
640 BLACKSHIRT

contemporaries noted that his economics were ‘not only an alternative to

Labour’s international socialism, but also to international “finance capitalism”
and, not surprisingly, he also suffered rejection by the orthodox right’. Efforts
to support productioneering appeared ‘revolutionary’ in their implications.
‘The City-industry opposition’, argues Ingham, ‘cannot be resolved by isolated
and narrowly economic adjustments. The institutional means to achieve this
end do not exist, and attempts at their creation immediately mobilise the most
deeply entrenched forces of tradition within British society.’
While undermining Skidelsky’s argument McKibben, without obviously
meaning to, made Mosley’s case for him. Mosley was a radical planner who
argued he had ‘gone beyond’ Keynes. Without articulating it, Mosley con-
cluded that without a restructuring of the State, an alternative economic
strategy could not be carried out. In one sense his decision to create a Fascist
movement was logical.and an inevitable consequence of his line of thinking,
even if he was blind to Fascism’s inherent defects. Mosley’s time would have
come during the Second World: War when the State carried out many of the
measures he advocated. It would have been interesting to have seen how he
would have dealt with Labour’s post-war Fabian-style nationalization pro-
gramme, which was at odds with his professed syndicalist ideas. Certainly, he
would have attacked New Labour economics with the same ferocity as he did
Philip Snowden, whose natural heir is Gordon Brown.
Skidelsky told Mosley ‘that your actions in the 1930s cannot be meaning-
fully discussed except against the background of your hopes and ideals in the
1920s; and that if that context is borne competely in mind, your actions in
the 1930s [forming the BUF] might not be ignobly viewed even by those who
consider that you set the wrong course’. The Duke of Windsor believed Mosley
had set the right course. On 24 January 1969 he wrote that he hoped to
discuss with him ‘some of your vital and telling criticisms of the disastrous
policies pursued by British political leaders in the 1930s’. There was also the
question of the ‘possible release of poor Rudolf Hess. It seems incredible that
such inhuman cruelty can still be inflicted upon a distinguished German who
at least tried to stop that senseless Second World War, and save so much death
and suffering.’
On 20 March King heard Mosley say that ‘the drift towards the revolution
that he tried to take charge of during the thirties has resumed. He maintains
that everything points to the decay of our society . . . he sees himself in charge
at last. This seems to me quite fantastic, but there is so little leadership of any
kind these days that even the Powells and the Mosleys are not entirely incred-
ible.’ King’s diaries were carefully written; Stephens reported that he had said
Mosley was ‘by far the cleverest politician of the 1930s. He just chose the
wrong side during the war.’ Asked if he would include him in his government,
King replied, ‘Why not? People have forgotten about his past.’ King’s wife,
 REHABILITATION 641

Ruth Railton, thought Mosley had ‘moments or periods when he is a compel-

ling influence on others, of which he is afterwards unaware. So that when he
protests that his movement was not a bullying, Jew-baiting one, he sincerely
believes this and does not realise the character or misdeeds of some of his
followers under his influence.’
In the autumn Mosley told King a crash was coming. He expected the
Americans to pull out of Europe, leaving it in ‘grave danger of serious disturb-
ance’, organized so as to give the Russians an excuse to intervene. ‘He is still
very much the professional soldier and confident he still has a part to play.’
There seemed to be, Cudlipp wrote, ‘a magnetic force that draws together in
the barren twilight of their lives, in their loneliness and their final rejection,
the Men of Destiny upon whom inadvertently or wisely destiny did not call’.
The teenage Ivor Mosley visited his grandfather and found him a disturbing
but alluring figure. ‘Like a man set in stone, a sculpture come to life, he would
fix one with his beady eyes and then open them saucer-wide. I remember
feeling a transient discomfort at this, as if Iwere the honoured victim of a bird
of prey. Being in his company was like being on stage in a static drama whose
meaning I could not fathom.’ Mosley was not an easy object of affection,
although James Lees-Milne thought he had ‘changed from the bombastic
pseudo-Mussolini to the calm, wise, elder statesman’. Bob Boothby, however,
noted that ‘at seventy-seven he is still waiting for the call’.
The oil crisis and other problems of the mid-seventies provided Mosley with
the opportunity to restate old themes. Inflation would be cured by mass
unemployment but the unemployed could be used to rebuild new public
amenities. A government drawn from politics, business and the military would
rescue the country from anarchy. Lord Londonderry wrote to him that the
country was ‘sleepwalking into a social revolution’. James Goldsmith had
asked Londonderry if he wanted his son to grow up in a country ‘where
sewage flowing in the streets is accepted as normal’. He was off to ‘convert
more useless stocks into Krugerrands’. King’s last letter to Mosley on
18 February 1977 warned that it was ‘too late for GB to pull itself out of its
decline. A takeover of Western Europe by the Russians seems to be just a
matter of time.’ He now saw Mosley as the ‘one major political figure to have
emerged since the First World War (Lloyd George and Churchill established
reputations before 1918)’.
Mosley travelled intensively, delivered speeches, recorded radio pro-
grammes, appeared on television and slowly earned a reputation as a commen-
tator on world affairs and the economy. When Lord Longford took him to
lunch at the Gay Hussar, they found themselves next to Michael Foot. ‘A
pleasure to see you over here, Sir Oswald,’ said Foot. A delighted Mosley
told Longford, ‘It couldn’t happen anywhere but England. Two old political
enemies fraternising like that.’
642 BLACKSHIRT

The UM was active on immigration but it was the National Front which
cornered the issue. The UM took part in pro-European Community activities
but John Tyndall maintained that ‘European union has been the graveyard of
every nationalist movement, both in Britain and on the continent — for the _
very good reason that it is incompatible with true nationalism, and has scarcely ,
any popular appeal.’ Attacks followed on Mosley with claims that Chesterton
had deserted him because of his ‘foreign’ ideology. Mosley banned fraterniz-
ation with other groups as Mosleyites turned on the Front. In turn, the
shadowy League of St George, formed by militant former supporters of
Mosley, was proscribed for Front members.
John Mosley, who retired after fifty years as a member of the Stock Exchange,
died in 1973 but Mosley did not attend his brother’s funeral. He was at Nancy
Mitford’s funeral in June, where the three sisters, Diana, Debo, Pam, filed past
the coffin, ‘their heads covered in scarves like black crows’. It was the first time
Diana had seen Jessica since the 1930s. Despite Jessica’s bitter attacks on
Mosley, Diana was in a forgiving mood. Though less able to overlook the
past, Jessica admitted ‘it wasn’t dreadful — we actually got along very well’.
The seventies were not a good period for Diana. She loved her husband but
wrote to Nicholas of ‘the harm he does to Aly and I suffer for it’. He was
generous to guests and the servants but miserly with the family. His clothes
were handmade but he gave little to Diana, who was expected to dress in
Parisian haute couture. He sought a reconciliation with Baba Metcalfe and
invited her to the Temple but her hatred of Diana had not diminished and it
was not a success. Diana suffered with migraines and Mosley could be an
‘angel’, but his bitterness could also come to the surface.
When the new owner of Savehay informed Mosley that Cimmie’s tomb had
been vandalized, Mosley responded by claiming, ‘It’s the Jews!’ A friend told
John Parker that while Mosley could be ‘his normal, charming, jovial self’,
at the end of one meal ‘his eyes began to flare just as they did when he was
screaming his hateful speeches before a mass rally or leading a march against
the Jews in the East End. Then he would degenerate into a tirade against the
Yids and niggers.’ After journalist Paul Callan interviewed Mosley and pointed
out that he was Jewish, Diana confided to a mutual friend that ‘had I known
I wouldn’t have allowed it. He certainly didn’t look Jewish — but, then, they
are clever and come in all shapes.’
The high point in Mosley’s rehabilitation was the publication in 1975 of
Skidelsky’s biography. He had sent chapters to Diana, who forwarded ‘furious
letters about his unfair approach to my idol. Quite undaunted, he went ahead
and produced an excellent book.’ Nicholas thought Skidelsky was ‘starry-eyed’
about his father. Skidelsky admitted his sympathies were for ‘outsiders’, whose
great merit was ‘that they were not only outsize in personality, but they
straddled the ground between Right and Left’. A Labour supporter, he was
 REHABILITATION 643

attracted to Mosley as an advocate of ‘heroic values’ and admired ‘his passion

for ideas, his courage, and the fact that he cared so much about the decline of
his country. I was loath to admit that he had a dark side.’ Critics pointed out
the ‘inherent defects of character’ but he eschewed psychological explanations.
Skidelsky developed the idea that Mosley was ‘Labour’s lost leader’ but it
is doubtful whether he could have led a democratic party. He wanted to
command a political army, not make grubby political deals. A man whose
colleagues admit he was a notoriously bad judge of events and character was
unlikely to be a good leader in a party system that required compromise. He
lacked the imagination to assess the impact on other people of his personality
or his politics. He ‘never stopped to consider why so few people accepted him
at his own self-evaluation, as a man of destiny’. Mosley rejected the political
system and preferred to go down fighting. He was not Skidelsky’s ‘authori-
tarian moderniser’ but a Don Quixote, who retired into ‘a fantasy world
where many of his ideas lost contact with reality’.
Skidelsky criticized writers for lacking ‘that indispensable quality of sym-
pathy’ but the controversy which the book aroused had to do with, he admit-
ted, ‘my unduly benign treatment of his later Fascist phase’. Skidelsky was
accused of a ‘whitewash’ since Fascism stood condemned on its own record.
He put forward the theory that Mosley had turned to anti-Semitism because
the Jews made him do so. He had a ‘real’ quarrel with many Jews and his
reasons were ‘genuine’: Jews heckled him and boycotted German goods and
he had to respond. The Jews ‘must take some of the blame for what happened’.
Skidelsky claimed ‘East End fascism was not the “socialism of fools”, but the
kind of radicalism which easily arises when the capitalist can be identified as
foreign’. It was difficult to be fascinated, as Skidelsky seemed to be, by ‘Mosley
grappling with the problem of satisfying black African aspirations while retain-
ing Africa within the framework of European political economy’. He conceded
his arguments ‘gave the impression of special pleading on Mosley’s behalf’
but it took time for him to change his view. On 23 November 1977 he told
James Lees-Milne he had come to respect Mosley, who ‘never hated the Jews:
merely thought that international Jewry was a bad thing, and that East End
Jews ought to be removed’. Lees-Milne asked, ‘Where to?’
Mosley’s reviews for Books and Bookmen and articles in the Telegraph
magazine brought a degree of acceptance. By the time Diana published her
vacuous memoirs, A Life of Contrasts, in 1977yhe was frail with Parkinson’s
disease. Differences of opinion within the family had faded. Alexander had
left politics behind and was a publisher in France. He treated his father’s
activities as a huge joke with ‘a typical kind of Mitford attitude’. Max had
been a prospective UM candidate in the sixties. ‘If I had a completely open
choice in my life, Iwould have chosen party politics,’ he admitted. ‘But because
of my name, that’s impossible.’ He entered motor sport where no one cared
644 BLACKSHIRT

about his surname, though on one occasion Baron Fritz von Kanstein, who
had won the Mille Miglia in 1940 and had been an SS colonel, said to him
‘it’s nice to meet the son of a real politician’. Max established the March
racing team and became president of the Fédération Internationale de lAuto- _
mobile, the sport’s governing body. He decided his father would not have
made a good dictator. ‘He would have been better as a conventional politician.
He was more of an ideas man.’
By spring 1980 it was clear that Mosley did not expect to live long. On
3 May James Lees-Milne dined at the Temple and found him greatly changed:
‘Shapeless, bent, blotched cheeks, crooked nose, no moustache, and tiny eyes
in place of those luminous, dilating orbs.’ The eccentric Father Brocard Seweli,
a former Distributist League and BUF member, saw him at a reception for the
publication of Diana’s biography of the Duchess of Windsor. Sewell published
a literary review at Aylesford Priory, to where Captain Brian Donovan had
retired in the fifties. ‘I think he sensed that we would not meet again, for he
was especially affectionate in his manner when I took’my leave of him.’ The
same process happened with a number of old colleagues.
In the autumn Nicholas visited the Temple following an invitation from
Diana and told his father that ‘someone should write about you. People either
think you are God or the devil, but what’s interesting about you is the truth.’
He asked if he could have his papers. The ever-loyal Diana claimed, ‘Nicholas
put on a great show of affection for the occasion; I suppose this was being
“crafty’.’ Mosley decided to give him his papers. ‘It was as if’, Nicholas
recalled, ‘he knew as part of him had always known that if anything was to
survive of what he had cared about it would be to do with efforts at truth.’
Mosley had been saddened by the recent death of his brother Edward.
Sir Oswald Mosley died on 3 December 1980 aged eighty-four. Of the 200
people who attended the secular funeral at the Columbarium at Pére Lachaise,
only three were Fascist comrades. Diana, gaunt and thin, waited in the cold
in the chapel of the crematorium for the ashes to cool. His sons read favourite
passages from Swinburne and Goethe between the music. Hugh Purcell,
making a BBC biography that turned into an obituary, recalled Fauré’s ‘In.
Paradisum’ filling the chapel. A journalist next to him whispered: ‘At least he
hasn’t been strung up by his heels!’ Purcell thought ‘this juxtaposition of high
culture and low ugliness was typical of Mosley’s life’. Two days later the ashes
were scattered by the lake near the Temple.
The Times obituary said Mosley ‘has no parallel in British public life, past
or present . . . His rise to fame was as meteoric as his collapse . . . Impatience
with the slow processes of democratic government combined with some
inherent fault of character to send him off the rails. He went Fascist . . .” The
press had difficulty finding anyone to defend him; only Bob Boothby stepped
forward and delivered a tribute on the radio. Diana wrote to thank him on
 REHABILITATION 645

12 December. ‘It was perfect . . . He so often spoke of you and your brillance,
he admired you, but it was much more than that, it was deep affection.’
Diana’s grief was overwhelming and it was thought she might commit suicide.
She suffered a brain tumour which, oddly, helped her deal with the loss. She
talked to Nicholas ‘with extraordinary openness’, perhaps hoping to ‘liberate
some of the complexities that she felt about my father, but then when this was
done she would be able to revert to a more simple form of loyalty’. In her
own autobiography ‘she had kept hidden almost everything of significance for
the sake of so-called loyalty’.
Nicholas’s Rules of the Game was published in 1982. Diana said she did
not read the second volume, Beyond the Pale (1983). ‘I did not expect him to
include the more personal material about his mother.’ The Times critic said,
‘He has emptied a bucket of mud over his father.’ Diana hated the ‘unrecogniz-
able caricature’ of Mosley, who ‘would have deplored the vulgarity and the
insensitivity, but have been amused by such a classic example of a son trying
to reduce an extraordinary father to his own level’. She cruelly added, ‘I am
sure Freud would have an explanation. Not as talented as his father.’ The
biographies were eventually used as the basis of the mini-series Mosley, broad-
cast on Channel 4 in 1999. One of its Jewish writers, Maurice Gran, believed
Mosley was ‘redeemable politically until about 1934’, which seems about
three years too late. The anti-Fascist journalist, Frederic Mullally, who
opposed Mosley in the thirties and forties, said the series ‘portrays him as a
glamorous, highly attractive, misunderstood idealist. Surely this is dangerous?’
Diana complained that the portrayal of her husband as a philanderer was
‘suburban’.
Long after Hitler’s death the first lady of Fascism remained unrepentant.
One day she expected there to be ‘statues to Hitler and Goebbels in the capitals
of Europe’. Appearing on BBC Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs in November
1989, Diana was asked if Mosley was anti-Semitic. She said, ‘He did not know
a Jew from a gentile but was attacked so much by Jews both in the newspapers
and physically on marches ... that he picked up the challenge.’ She did not
regret her friendship with Hitler: ‘I admired him very much. He had extremely
mesmeric blue eyes and also he had so much to say. He was so interesting
and fascinating, and perfectly willing to talk.’ She still found it difficult to
acknowledge that the Holocaust occurred. ‘I don’t really, ’'m afraid, believe
that six million people were killed. I think this ig just not conceivable. It’s too
many.’ To a friend she said, ‘Awful, awful things happened on both sides in
the war and we don’t really know the truth.’
Every year Diana attended the dinner organized by the Friends of Mosley
on his birthday, 16 November. The FoM had been set up to trace old BUF
members and run an ‘Old Comrades’ association. The speeches expressed the
view that ‘OM was the greatest man this country has ever known or will ever
 646 BLACKSHIRT

know’. Diana remained an icon to the faithful. On her ninetieth birthday

elderly BUF members travelled to Paris to raise a glass to her.
The Temple was sold to an American for £1 million and Diana went to live
in an apartment in the rue de |’Université. She was interviewed for this book
in 2000. The sun streamed through the window, highlighting her silver hair,
as she sat perched, dressed in a beautifully cut two-piece suit, on a pale-blue
and gilded settee like a petite bird, hands on knees, doll-like. A. N. Wilson
said ‘her face is a blank, sad stare, eerily still, like the brave composure of
someone who has decided not to flinch in front of a firing squad’. Almost
deaf, she studied the German documents brought to her with interest but
dismissed them with an aside in the exaggerated vowels of the pre-war upper
class: ‘If it is in the documents, then it must be true.’ In 2003 Diana suffered
a mild stroke. On 11 August she died peacefully in her Paris apartment. ‘Lady
Mosley will go to hell when she dies,’ thought Andrew Roberts. ‘It strikes me
that anyone who can say that she didn’t know whether Hitler was in hell or
heaven is quite likely to follow him down.’
The French specialist on the extreme Right, Pierre-André Taguieff, suggests
that ‘neither “fascism” nor “racism” will do us the favour of returning in such
a way that we can recognise them easily’. Attempts to create a modern version
~ of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s ‘revolutionary nationalist? movements have failed
—the horror of their misdeeds has been an unsurmountable barrier to their
revival. Mosley’s Europe a Nation and Euro-Africa ideas were doomed
attempts to forge a new synthesis to break through that barrier. All that is left
are fragmentary groups, which Martin Blinkhorn dismissed as ‘too tiny to
mention’ and too small to mount a semi-legal ‘conquest of power’. Fascist
ideology has evolved, spurred on by the ‘alleged threats of mass immigration,
the homogenisation of Europe by the Euro and the globalisation of culture
and economics’. Added to which has been the attack on the corruption of the
political classes; another symptom of ‘decadence’. Groups led by Jean-Marie
Le Pen in France and Austria’s Jorg Haider (and the British National Party)
have had some success, but their most significant effect has been in turning
conservative and social democratic parties to the right with their crackdown
on immigrants and refugees, and the introduction of draconian law-and-order
and anti-terrorism policies.
Is the twenty-first century safe from Fascism? In a new form and shape, an
authoritarian regime led by a charismatic leader which scapegoats outsiders
will find a mass audience. Just as in the pre-First World War period, ideas that
we dismiss as mad are probably floating around the Internet ready to be
synthesized into a destructive ideology. Historian Norman Cohn warned that
there exists ‘a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as
ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of
the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges
 REHABILITATION 647

from the depths and suddenly captures and dominates multitudes of usually
sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsi-
bility.’ Fortunately, it takes a cataclysmic event such as a world war to turn
these fantasies into nightmares.
Mosley failed, but he was the forerunner for the kind of ‘manipulative self’
which, James Glass suggests, has come to be valued as ‘a desirable paradigm’
for a political leader. Pathological narcissists are the model for the ‘successful,
admired, tough and calculating’ politician, who excels at ‘manipulation and
rational organising’, no matter what the content or techniques used. He resists
self-reflection and sees ‘all forms of human encounter in the language of
utility’. These prized values, adds Glass, have been ‘translated into a popular
ideal and dominate modern consciousness’.
He is certainly not a Fascist but New Labour’s Tony Blair is an obvious
example of the narcissist leader. ‘He is in thrall to the idea of the strong
leader,’ according to biographer John Rentoul. A devourer of biographies of
Lloyd George, Churchill and Cromwell, like Mosley he is transfixed by leaders
who ‘force the nation on to a new path by exercise of will’. The essence of his
‘third way’ was synthesis as an end in itself - a concept one commentator,
unaware of Mosley, claimed he had ‘never before seen advocated so openly in
democratic politics. It is either breathtaking, or sinisterly Orwellian.’ Political
actors such as Blair — synthetic and lacking genuineness — are dangerous and
suffer from hubris. They lead men to war.
On the death of Pim Fortuyn — killed in May 2002 by an animal rights
activist — a letter writer in the Telegraph, Quentin Fox, noticed the similarity
between the Dutch populist and Mosley, who ‘exhibited the same restless
intellectual voyaging as the former Marxist’. An academic, charming and a
master of self-promotion, the homosexual Fortuyn was something of a dandy
figure. Matthew Parris, himself homosexual, wrote that some gay men —
believers in consumerism and economic individualism — are attracted to the
populist Right, with its authoritarian streak. With his anti-establishment
message, people believed Fortuyn was demanding the ‘truth’. He synthesized
ideas from a variety of sources, including the Left’s concept of grass-roots
democracy, social democratic views on social care, liberal ideas on taxation
and an ultra-right hatred of foreigners. Fox believed that “Fortuyn’s arguments
against the narrow-minded Islam preached by farmboy imams would have
followed a similar trajectory [as Mosley in the’ 1930s] into simple hatred and
“Paki-bashing”’. Here was the potential for ‘pre-Fascism’ of a kind Harold
Nicolson had seen in the New Party and had wanted to dress in marigold
shirts.
Aldous Huxley wrote in 1937 in Ends and Means that ‘so long as men
worship the.Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise
and make them miserable’.
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 Selected Notes

The following notes are intended for the general reader. While every fact and quote
has been meticulously sourced, the notes are not a catalogue of each point, more a
selection of the relevant and most important sources. Books referred to by the author
are listed in the Bibliography. References to Oswald Mosley, A. K. Chesterton, Colin
Cross, Robert Skidelsky and Nicholas Mosley are made where they do not refer to
Mosley’s autobiography or to their biographies of Mosley. The full set of detailed
notes with appendices and a collection of documents on Mosley can be accessed on
the author’s website —-www.rogerdog.demon.co.uk.

Chapter One: ‘Tommy’

Background: Maud Mosley diary, Mosley deposit, Birmingham University (BU);

interviews with Diana Mosley, Paris; Mosley interview with Peter Liddle, 1977;
Drennan; Hamilton Fyfe, Sixty Years of Fleet Street, 1949; Forwood letter.
Manchester: Bill Williams, ‘The Anti-Semitism of Tolerance: Middle-Class Man-
chester and the Jews 1870-1900’, in Alan Kidd and K. W. Roberts (eds), City,
Class and Culture: Studies of social policy and cultural production in Victorian
Manchester, 1985; Alan Kidd, Manchester, Ryburn.
Psychology: Lasch; Chodorow; Peter Gay, Freud for Historians, 1985; W. F. Mandle,
‘Psychology and History’, NZ Journal of History, 2, 1968; Peter Davison (ed.),
George Orwell: Facing Unpleasant Facts 1937-39, 2000; Ellen Cameron, An
Introduction to Graphology, 1989.
Education: www.westdowns.com. Information from Daniel Hodson, Simon Mosley
and John Mosley; Peter Parker, The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-School
Ethos, 1987; Denis Richard, Portal of Hungerford: The Life of Marshal of the
Royal Air Force Viscount Portal of Hungerford, 1977; Sit Robert Bruce Lockhart,
Your England, 1955. ‘
650 SELECTED NOTES

Chapter Two: The First World War

Air War: Wohl; Liddle, op. cit. and The Airmen’s War 1914-18, 1987; Michael
Paris, ‘The Rise of the Airmen, c. 1890-1918’, JCH, 28, 19933 Mark Girouard,
The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman, 1981; Nigel Steel
and Peter Hart, Tumult in the Clouds: The British Experience of the War in the
Air 1914-1918, 1997; Colin Cook, ‘A fascist memory: Oswald Mosley and the
myth of the airman’, ERH, 4, 2, 1997; Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British
Society and the First World War, 1965.
Military record/action: Colonel Henry Graham, History of the Sixteenth, The
Queen’s Light Dragoons, 1912 to 1925, 1926; Mosley’s RFC records WO 339/
15781; Tyrrel Hawker, Hawker, VC, Mitre Press; Stewart, ‘Occuli Exercitus’:
No. 6 Squadron, RAF, 1963, James McWilliams and R. James Steel, Gas! The
Battle for Ypres, 1915, 1985; Ulrich Trumpener, ‘The Road to Ypres: The Begin-
ning of Gas Warfare in WWI’, JMH, 47, September 1975; Lieutenant-Colonel
L. A. Strange, Recollections of an Airman, 1989.
Reading: Liddle, op. cit.; White; Bishop; Higginbottom; Reilly, Pitt the Younger
1759-1806, 1978; Robert Blake, Disraeli; Prion; H. Edwards; Anthony Harrison,
Swinburne’s Medievalism: A Study in Victorian Love Poetry, 1979; James Webb,
The Flight from Reason: The Age of the Irrational, 1980; Lachman; Roger Griffin,
The fascist quest to regenerate time, 1998; Thurlow, ‘The Return of Jeremiah’, in
Lunn/Thurlow.
Economy/MoM/FO: Ritschell; Stevenson, British Society 1914-45; Newton/Porter;
Davenport-Hines; Marrison; Steel/Hart; Thurlow, ‘Secret; Mosley: From Empire
to Europe’, 20th-C.S, 1, March 1969.
War’s end: Malcolm Brown, The Imperial War Museum Book of 1918: Year of Vic-
tory, 1999; Osbert Sitwell, Laughter in the Next Room, 1976; Siegfried Sassoon,
Diaries, 1915-1918, 1983; Bellamy; Sternhell.

Chapter Three: The Patriotic Peace

Election/Social Imperialism: Mosley, ‘From Tory to Labour’, Labour Magazine, May

1929 and interview, Huddersfield Examiner, 4.8.75; Gamble; Searle; Semmel;
Skidelsky, Interests; Walter L. Arnstein, Edwardian Politics: Turbulent Spring or
Indian Summer?; Daniel Deudney, ‘Greater Britain or Greater Synthesis? Seeley,
Mackinder and Wells on Britain in the global industrial era’, RIS, 2, April 2001;
Geroid Tuathail, ‘Putting Mackinder in his Place: Material Transformation and
Myth’, PG, 11, January 1992; Geoff Eley, ‘Defining Social Imperialism: Use and
Abuse of an Idea’, SH, 2, May 1976; Gisela Lebzelter, Anti-Semitism: a Focal
Point for the British Radical Right; Kennedy/Nicholls.
Croft: Witherell; William D. Rubenstein, ‘Henry Page Croft and the Nationalist
Party 1917-22’,
CH, 9, 1.
Economy/parliament: Mark Thomas, ‘An Input-Output Approach to the British
 SELECTED NOTES 651

Economy, 1890-1914’, JEH, 45, 1985; A. P. Thornton, The Habit of Authority:

Paternalism in British History, 1966; Thurlow; K. Morgan; White; Cook, op. cit.
Social life/Astors: Cartland; John Grigg, Nancy Astor: Portrait of a Pioneer, 1980;
Pugh, Women; N. Nicolson; Leonard Mosley, Curzon: The End of an Epoch,
1960; Marchioness Curzon of Kedleston, Reminiscences, 1960; Hugh David,
Heroes, Mavericks and Bounders, 1991.
MP: Mosley, From Tory ... op. cit.; Campbell, Smith; Skidelsky, Interests; K.
Morgan; Sir Colin Coote, Editorial: The Memoirs of Colin R. Coote, 1965;
Seymour-Ure.
Finances: Ingham; Newton/Porter; N. Nicolson; Ravensdale; de Courcy; Derby
Evening Telegraph, 21.2.98.
Psychology: James Glass, ‘Hobbes and Narcissism: Pathology in the State of Nature’,
PT, 8, August 1980; H. Rosenfeld, ‘On the Psychopathology of Narcissism’, IJP,
45, 1964.

Chapter Four: ‘The Vision Splendid’

Ireland/government/election: K. Morgan; Martel; Margaret FitzHerbert, The Man

Who Was Greenmantle: A Biography of Aubrey Herbert, 1983; Boyce, quoting
Hammond MSS; Benewick; L. Mosley; Lord Beaverbrook, Decline and Fall of
Lloyd George, 1960; Ravensdale; Mary Soames (ed.), Speaking for Themselves:
The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill, 1998; Pugh, Women.
Foreign Policy: The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, 11; Thurlow; Bellamy.
Politics: McKibben; Skidelsky, Slump; White; Brendon.
Labour contacts: Webb diary; Kramnick/Sheerman; Ridley.
Social life: Trzebinski; Green; William McBrien, Cole Porter, 1998; Artemis Cooper
(ed.), A Durable Fire: The Letters of Duff and Diana Cooper 1913-1950, 19833
Letter, Robert Rhodes James; Barbara Cartland, Daily Telegraph, 27.6.98.

Chapter Five: The Underworld of Rejected Knowledge

Orage/syndicalism/guild socialism: S. Glass; Taylor, Orage; Steele; Finlay; Redman;

Cornford; Sternhell; Holton; Webb; Booth/Pack; Thurlow and ‘Return’; Towns-
hend; Marcel van der Linden, ‘Second thoughts on revolutionary syndicalism’,
LHR, 63, 2, 1998; Richard Price, ‘Contextualising British Syndicalism
c. 1907-c.1920’, LHR, 63, 3, 1998; A. W. Wright, ‘Fabianism and Guild Social-
ism’, IRSH, 1978. f ;
Fascist origins: H. Edwards; Sternhell; Normand; Roberts; Roger Eatwell, ‘On Defin-
ing the “Fascist Minimum”: The Centrality of Ideology’, JPI, 1996.
Hulme/Lewis/Sorel: Robert Ferguson, The Short, Sharp Life of T. E. Hulme, 2003;
Meyers; Jameson; Edward Shils, Georges Sorel: Reflections on Violence, Mac-
millan, 1961.
Anti-Semitism: Cheyette and ‘Jewish stereotyping and English literature 1875-1920:
652 SELECTED NOTES

Towards a political analysis’, in Kushner/Lunn; Holmes, Anti-Semitism; Feldman;

Claire Hirschfield, ‘The British Left and the “Jewish Conspiracy”: A Case Study
of Modern Antisemitism’, JSS, 1981; Lebzelter.
ILP: Booth/Pack; Hollis; Pimlott; Townshend; Newman; Ritschell; Skidelsky, Inter-
ests; Boyce; F. Beckett; Neal Wood, Communism and British Intellectuals, 1959;
Adrian Oldfield, ‘Independent Labour Party and Planning, 1920-26’, IRSH, 21,
1976, and ‘The growth of the concept of economic planning in the doctrine of the
British Labour Party, 1914-1935”, Ph.D. thesis, 1973.

Chapter Six: The Labour Party

Labour Party reception: Scanlon; Wertheimer; Cline; Brockway; Boyce; F. Beckett;

Webb diary; Brewer.
Birmingham: J. Johnson, ‘Birmingham Labour and the New Party’, April 1931;
David Dilks, Neville Chamberlain: Pioneering and Reform, 1869-1929, 1984.
Strachey/Labour: Dowse; Brockway; Pimlott; Thompson; Thomas; Newman;
Strachey, ‘The Education of a Communist’, Left Review, December 1934; Stuart
Macintyre, ‘John Strachey 1901-1931: The Making of an English Marxist’, MA
thesis, 1971; Martin Pugh, ‘Women & Class traitors: Conservative recruits to
Labour, 1900-30’, EHR, February 1998; Wood; Stuart Rawnsley, Fascism and
Fascists in Britain, Bradford, 1983. ;
Shaw: Mosley, Revolution by Reason, 1925; Bentley; Holroyd; Brian Holden Reid,
‘Impressions of Mosley’, 25.8.77; Aschheim, op. cit.; Hayes; Desmond MacCarthy,
Shaw: The Plays, 195t.
Revolution by Reason/Strachey: Skidelsky, Slump and Keynes; Oldfield, op. cit.;
Pimlott and Labour; Dowse; Newton/Porter; Ritschell; Rawnsley, Ph.D. thesis;
Thurlow and ‘Return’; Thompson; Macintyre, op. cit; Newman; Thomas;
Ingham; Wood; Wertheimer; Lebzelter; Mark Burrows, ‘The left-wing road to
Fascism: An investigation of the influence of left-wing ideas upon the political
ideology of the BUF’, Ph.D. thesis, 1999; Rawnsley, Ph.D.
Social: Bowra; Amabel Williams-Ellis, All Stracheys are Cousins, 1983; Robert
Boothby, I Fight to Live, 1947; Thomas.
USA: Boyce; White; Charles S. Maier, ‘Between Taylorism and Technocracy: Euro-
pean ideologies and the vision of industrial productivity in the 1920s’, JCH, 5, 2,
1970; Ray Batchelor, Henry Ford: Mass Production, Modernism and Design,
1994; BBC Radio 3, Personality and Power, October 1970; Letters, Roosevelt
archive, Washington.
High wages/policy debate/social credit: Ritschell; Boyce; Paton; Brockway,
Tomorrow; Oldfield, op. cit.; Booth/Pack; Dowse; Wood; Webb diary; Donoughue/
Jones; Snowden; J. Johnson, op. cit.; Finlay; Webb; Macintyre, op. cit.; Thompson.
ow
SELECTED NOTES 653

Chapter Seven: ‘The Coming Figure’

Views of Mosley: Webb diary; Snowden, II; Lord Elton, Among Others, 1938; Ellen
Wilkinson, Peeps at Politicians, 1930.
Personality: Glass, Hobbes, op. cit.; Amabel Williams-Ellis, The Wall of Glass, 1927;
Skidelsky, Keynes; Cannadine.
Labour: Thomas; Cline; Pimlott; Marquand; White; Wertheimer; F. Beckett;
McKibben; Paton.
Social life: Gottlieb; de Courcy; Philip Ziegler, Osbert Sitwell, 1998; Bradford,
Sachie; Philip Hoare, Serious Pleasures; Hugo Vickers, Cecil Beaton: The Author-
ised Autobiography, 1985; Michael Luke, David Tennant and the Gargoyle Years,
1991; Joan Wyndham, Daily Telegraph, 6.7.98; Anne Chisholm, Nancy Cunard:
A Biography, 1981; C. Mosley; Holroyd, Shaw; James; Lees-Milne, Nicolson; N.
Nicolson.
Reactions to Mosley: Taylor, Beaverbrook; Pimlott, Dalton; Marquand, Mac-
Donald; Wertheimer; Laybourn; Skidelsky, Keynes and Interests; Kenneth Young,
Churchill and Beaverbrook: A Study in Friendship and Politics, 1966; Webb
diary; Kramnick/Sheerman; ‘Janitor’, The Feet of the Young Men: Some Candid
Comments on the Rising Generation, 1928.
Cole: Neil Riddell, ‘““The Age of Cole?” G. D. H. Cole and-the British Labour
Movement 1929-1933’, HJ, 38, 4, 1995; Skidelsky, Slump and Interests; Newton/
Porter.
Election: Brewer; Wertheimer; Johnson, op. cit.; Pugh, Women; Anthony Sampson,
Macmillan: A Study in Ambiguity, 1967.

Chapter Eight: ‘A Young Man in a Hurry’

Office: Kingsley Martin, Harold Laski, 1953; K. Young; M. A. Hamilton, Remem-

bering My Good Friends, 1944; Farr; Catlin; Skidelsky, Slump; Boyce; Marquand;
K. Harris; Shinwell; Shepherd; F. Beckett; Brockway, Tomorrow.
Snowden and colleagues: Melville, The Truth about the New Party, 1932; Smart;
Catlin; Laybourn; Skidelsky, Slump; Riddell, op. cit.; Addison; K. Young; Thomas
Johnston, Memories, 1946; Lansbury, My England, 1934; Cline; Raymond Post-
gate, The Life of George Lansbury, 1951; T. Jones and Webb diaries.
Beaverbrook/Bevan/Lee: Taylor, Beaverbrook; Ball; Clark; Addison; A. L. Rowse,
Notebook, 1995; Campbell, Bevan; Hollis; Lee; A Kind of Exile, ITV, 1970.
Cimmie: Skidelsky and Slump; Webb diary; Lobster 42.
Protectionism/Young Tories: MacDonald papers; Skidelsky, Slump; Boyce; Taylor,
Beaverbrook; Marrison; W. R. Garside, ‘Party Politics, Political Economy and
British Protectionism, 1919-1932’, BU, 83, January 1998; Newton/Porter;
Ritschell; Davenport-Hines; R. Boothby et al, Industry and the State, 1927; Ball;
Seymour-Ure; Clark.
Internal debate: Nicolson diary; Melville, NP; W. F. Mandle, ‘Sir Oswald Mosley’s
654 SELECTED NOTES

Resignation from the Labour Government’, HS, 10, May 1963; Macintyre; Skidel-
sky, Slump; Ritschell; Marquand, Cabinet minutes; G. C. Peden, ‘The “Treasury
View” on Public Works and Employment in the Interwar Period’, EHR, May
1984; Sunday Telegraph, 3.8.69; Donoughue/Jones. P
MacDonald/Snowden/lack of action: Thomson; MacDonald diary and Thomas
papers; Snowden, II; Skidelsky, Keynes; Thomson.
Cabinet meetings: Nicolson, T. Jones and MacDonald diaries.
Beckett: F. Beckett and ‘The Rebel Who Lost His Cause’, History Today, May 1994;
James.
Resignation: Melville, NP and ‘Political Upheaval: Sir Oswald Mosley’, Fortnightly
Review, .May 1931; Marquand; Webb and Strauss diaries; Catlin; K. Young;
Mandle, ‘Resignation’; Brewer; Skidelsky, Slump; Shinwell; Ravensdale.

Chapter Nine: ‘After Baldwin and MacDonald Comes... ?’

Resignation speech: Ritschell; Skidelsky, Slump; Mandle, ‘Resignation’; Webb and

MacDonald diaries; Marquand.
Backbencher: George Catlin, ‘Fascist Stirrings in Britain’, Current History, February
1934; Thomas.
Churchill/Young Tories: Addison; K. Young; Stewart; Taylor, Beaverbrook;
Nicolson diary; E. H. H. Green, ‘The Case of Arthur Steel-Maitland’, in E. Green.
MacDonald affair: Laybourn; Marquand, MacDonald; Stephen Roskill, Hankey:
Man of Secrets, 1931-63, 1974; Michael Quill interview.
William Morris: Adeney and The Motor Makers: The Turbulent History of Britain’s
Car Industry, 1988; Boyce; Overy; Ingham; K. Young; Headlam.
Llandudno: Brewer; Marquand, MacDonald; Catlin; W. F. Mandle, ‘Sir Oswald
Leaves the Labour Party, March 1931’, AJLH, 12, May 1967; Foot; Brockway,
Left.
New Labour/bitterness: Marcus Collins, ‘The New Party 1931-2’, thesis, 1992;
Brockway, Tomorrow; Campbell, Bevan; Pugh, Women; Hollis; Mandle, ‘Leaves’;
Skidelsky, Interests, Keynes and Slump; Bullock; Marquand, MacDonald; Brown;
Laybourn.
Allen: Boothby; Mandle, ‘Leaves’; The Times, -21.9.73; Drennan; Thurlow;
F. Beckett; T. Jones diary.
Young Tories/Labour conflict: Mandle, ‘Leaves’; Colin Coote, The Other Club,
1972; Nicolson diary; Hugh Dalton, Political Diary, 1986.
Mosley manifesto/reaction: Davenport-Hines; Ball; Ritschell; Webb/Passfield papers;
Skidelsky, Slump and Keynes; Nicolson diary; Mandle, ‘Leaves’; Lees-Milne,
Nicolson.
Planning: Ritschell; D. Winch, Economics and Policy; Marwick; G. D. H. Cole,
Principles of Planning, 1935; Mandle, ‘Leaves’; T. Jones diary.
Boothby: Queen’s Quarterly, January 1931; Boothby to Mosley, 30.1.31; James.
Speech: Weir; Mandle, ‘Leaves’; Nicolson diary.
 SELECTED NOTES 655

-Chapter Ten: The New Party

Wells: Wells Archive, University of Illinois Library; Coupland; Wells, op. cit.; The
Autocracy of Mr Pelham; Catlin; Bishop.
Beginnings: Barry diary; Joad, ‘Prolegomena to Fascism’, Political Quarterly, 1931;
Foot; Brockway, Tomorrow; Brittain/Holtby; Brown; Ritschell; Catlin, History,
op. cit.; M. Collins, op. cit.; Taylor, Beaverbrook.
Desertion/reaction: Foot; Jennie Lee, Tomorrow is a New Day, 1939; Benewick;
Williams-Ellis, Stracheys; Webb diary; Seymour-Ure; Clark.
A National Policy: Thomas; Gamble; Newman; Brewer.
Lewis/Nazis: O’Keeffe; Meyers; Sternhell; Normand; Brigitte Granzow, A Mirror of
Nazism: British Opinion and the Emergence of Hitler 1929-1933, 1964.
Ashton: Brewer; J. Johnson, ‘Birmingham Labour and the New Party’, April 1931;
BBC WA, PP Eckersley papers; W. F. Mandle, ‘The New Party’, HS, 12, October
1966; HO 283 series; Melville, NP; M. Collins, op. cit.; J. Jones; Hodge; Nicolson
diary.
Result: Strachey, Fascism; Lewis; Thomas; Shinwell in Skidelsky; Taylor, Beaver-
brook; Ball.
Stewarding/Howard: Joad, op. cit.; Dave Renton, Red Shirts and Black: Fascists and
Anti-Fascists in Oxford in the 1930s, 1996; Michael Davie (ed.), The Diaries of
Evelyn Waugh, 1995; Nicolson diary; M. Collins, op. cit.; Lees-Milne, Nicolson;
Anne Gordon letter.
Debates: Melville, NP; J. Jones; Hodge; Farr; Nicolson diary.
Fencing/Beaumont/Cheyney: Sitwell diary; Richard Cohen, ‘Charles-Louis de
Beaumont: A short biography’, in Edmund Gray, Modern British Fencing, Amateur
Fencing Association, 1984; Farr, op. cit.; Gordon; Michael Harrison, Peter
Cheyney: Prince of Hokum, 1955; Information from Julian Petkowski; Nicolson
diary.
Morris/Duke: Adeney, Nuffield; Nicolson diary; Lewis; Lees-Milne, Nicolson.
‘National Government’: Martel; Brendon; Nicolson diary; Charles Edward Lysaght,
Brendan Bracken, 1979; Addison; Stewart; John Charnley, Churchill: The end of
glory, 1993.
Sitwells/culture: Green; John Pearson, Facades: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell,
1989; Wohl, 1914; Blanch; Haynes; Meyers; Steele.
Crisis: Addison; Hollis; Bishop; Nicolson diary; Farr, op. cit.; Holroyd; K. Young;
Brian Roberts, Randolph: A Study of Churchill’s Son, 1984.
Bankers/economy: Leopold Amery, My Political Life: The Unforgiving Years, 1929-
40, 19553 Skidelsky, Keynes. bf
Meetings: Smart; Nicolson diary and notes; Ritschell; Hodge.
Action: Seymour-Ure; Koss; Green; Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Litera-
ture and Politics in England in the 1930s, 1976.
Election: Charles Stuart, The Reith Diaries, 1975; Nicolson diary; Hodge; Gordon;
Jacobs; David Turner, Fascism and anti-Fascism in the Medway Towns 1927-
1940, 1993; Berry/Bishop.
656 SELECTED NOTES

Violence: Harrison, Cheyney; J. Jones; Lees-Milne, Self; Smart; Stevenson/Cook;

Nicolson diary; Brewer; M. Collins, op. cit.

Chapter Eleven: The New Movement

NUPA: F. Beckett; John Beckett, ‘Why I joined the New Party: The New Party and
the Old Toryism’, NP, 1931; ‘Mosley — Right or Wrong?’, 1961; Hodge; Melville,
NP; M. Collins, op. cit.; Nicolson diary; K. Young.
Mussolini/Italy: Brendon; R. J. B. Bosworth, ‘The British Press, the Conservatives
and Mussolini, 1920-34’, JCH, 5, 2, 1970; K. Young; de Grand.
Nazis: James; N. Nicolson, Vita; Lees-Milne, Nicolson; Lebzelter; Tony Kushner,
Politics of Marginality.
Jewish members: Sylvester letter; BBC Radio 4, Start the Week, 9.2.98; Lewis
Morton, Ted Kid Lewis: His Life and Times, 1990.
Radical Right/National Party: Thurlow; G. R. Searle, ‘Critics of Edwardian Society:
The Case of the Radical Right’; and ‘The “Revolt from the Right” in Edwardian
Britain’, in Kennedy/Nicholls; Barbara Lee Farr, ‘The Development and Impact of
Right-wing Politics in England 1903-32’, Ph.D thesis, 1976; John Hope, ‘Fascism
and the State in Britain: The Case of the British Fascists 1923-31’, AJPH, 39, 3,
1993; Chris Wrigley, ‘ “In the Excess of their Patriotism”: The National Party and
Threats of Subversion’, in Wrigley, Warfare, Diplomacy and Politics: Essays in
Honour of A. J. P. Taylor, 1986; Steven Ascheim, ‘Nietzschean Socialism: Left
and Right, 1890-1933’, CH, Vol. 23, 1988; Rubenstein, op. cit.; Henry Page
Croft, My Life and Before, 1949.
Drummond: Richard Usborne, Clubland Heroes: A nostalgic study of some recurrent
characters in the romantic fiction of Dornford Yates, John Buchan and Sapper,
1983.
The BF: Markku Ruotsila, ‘The Antisemitism of the Eighth Duke of Northumber-
land’s the Patriot, 1922-1930’, ]CH, 39, 1, 2004; Richard Gilman, Behind World
Revolution: The Strange Career of Nesta H. Webster, 1982; Douglas; Alfio
Bernabei letter; HO 45 series; Catlin, Fascist Stirrings, op. cit.
Ball/Makgill: John Ferris and U Bar-Joseph, ‘Getting Marlowe to hold his tongue:
The Conservative Party, the Intelligence Services and the Zinoviev Letter’, INS,
8, October 1993; Gill Bennett, ‘“‘A most extraordinary and mysterious business”:
The Zinoviev Letter of 1924’, History Notes, February 1999.
Hughes/Knight: Ron Bean, Liverpool shipping employers and the anti-communist
activities of J. M. Hughes, 1920-25, 1977; John Hope, ‘Fascism, The Security
Service and the curious careers of Maxwell Knight and James McGuirk Hughes’,
Lobster 22 and ‘British Fascism and the State, 1917-27: A Re-examination of
the Documentary Evidence’, LHR, 57, 3, 1992, and ‘Surveillance or Collusion?
Maxwell Knight, MIS and the British Fascisti’, INS, 9, October 1994; HO 283
series; D. Turner letter. j
Joyce: Selwyn; KV 2/245 and HO 283 series; Martland; Cole; Kenny; Bryan Clough,
 SELECTED NOTES 657

“State Secrets: The Wolkoff Files’, www.state-secrets.com; West; Cole; Benewick;

Selwyn; Joyce, Twilight over England, Berlin, 1941.
Allen: Benewick; Cabinet records; Douglas.
National Fascisti: ‘“‘Investigator”’, The Fascist Movement in Great Britain’, SR
Investigations, February 1926; Thurlow; J. Wheelwright, Pol/Marg; Benewick.
Barnes: Information from Alfio Bernabie; Farr, op. cit.; Benewick; James Strachey
Barnes, Half a Life Left, 1937; Griffin; Bianchi.
Diana: D. Mosley, Loved; Dalley; de Courcy; Guinness; C. Mosley; Lovell; Lees-
Milne, Independent, 13 August 2003.
Nicolson/Howard: Gordon; Eckersley.
IFL: Holmes; Arnold Leese, Out of Step: Events in the Two Lives of an Anti-Jewish
Camel Doctor, 1946; Benewick; Catlin; Lebzelter; Thurlow; HO 45 series.
BFs: HO 144 and 283 series; G. C. Webber, Intolerance and discretion: Conserva-
tives and British fascism, 1918-1926; Benewick; Thurlow; Lewis; Nicolson letters;
Farr, op. cit.
ILP: R. P. Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution, 1935; Ellen Wilkinson and Edward
Conze, Why Fascism?, c. 1934; Philip M. Coupland, ‘ “Left-wing Fascism’ in
Theory and Practice: The case of the British Union of Fascists’, z20thCBH, 13, 1,
2002; Philip Rees, Changing interpretation of British Fascism: A Bibliographical
Survey; Burrows, op. cit.; W. Risdon, ‘The Heritage of National Socialism’, BU
Quarterly, 1937, and ‘Can a Marxist Become a Fascist?’, Action, 10.4.37.
Churchill: Winston $. Churchill, His Father’s Son: The Life of Randolph Churchill,
1996; Smart; Stewart; Mack Smith; Cannadine; Bosworth.
NO/Greater Britain/anti-Semitism: M. Collins, op. cit.; Nicolson letters; Linehan;
Claire Hirchfield, ‘The British Left and the “Jewish Conspiracy”: A Case Study of
Modern Antisemitism’, JSS, Spring 1981; Colin Holmes, ‘J. A. Hobson and the
Jews’, in Holmes (ed.), Immigrants and Minorities in British Society, 1978, and
Anti-Semitism; Skidelsky, Interests; HO 283 series; Cheyette and Politics of
Marginality, and ‘Hilaire Belloc and the “Marconi Scandal” 1900-1914: A Re-
assessment of the interactionist model of racial hatred’, in Kushner/Lunn, Politics
of Marginality; Melville, NP; Sternhell; Mandle, ‘Anti-semitism’; D. Turner,
- Op. cit.
Grandi: Mack Smith; Italian FO records St Antony’s (NA GFM 36/141); Philip
Coupland, ‘H. G. Wells’s “Liberal Fascism” ’, JCH, 35, 4, 2000.
Sieff/PEP: de Courcy; Ravensdale; Ritschell; Israel Sieff, Memoirs, 1970; Marcus
Sieff, Don’t Ask the Price: The Memoirs of the President of Marks & Sparks,
1986; Newton/Porter; Booth/Pack.
NP/BUF: Information from John Hope; Jordan manuscript, c. 1933-4, MSS127;
‘Robert Richards’, ‘Geordie Recollections 1932-39’; Comrade, May-July 1994.
Assessment: K. Young; Taylor, History; The Thirties in Britain: The Threat of
Fascism, BBC Third Programme, 10.11.65; Harold Macmillan, Past Masters;
Bruce Coleman, ‘The Conservative Party and the Frustration of the Extreme
Right’, in Andrew Thorne (ed.), The failure of Political Extremism in inter-war
Britain, Exeter Studies in History, No. 21, 1989; Thurlow, Failure; Julian
658 SELECTED NOTES

Critchley, A Bag of Boiled Sweets, 1994; BBC 2, A Fall Like Lucifer, 1975; Leo
Amery, My Political Life, 1929-40, 1955-

Chapter Twelve: The British Union of Fascists

Corporate State: W. Warren Wagar, ‘The Steel-Gray Saviour: Technocracy as Utopia

and Ideology’, AF, 2, 2, 1979; Philip M. Coupland, “The Blackshirted Utopians’,
JCH, April 1998; Mosley, GB; Ritschell; Pimlott; Rees; Nugent; Lewis.
Italy: Martel; Earl of Portsmouth, A Knot of Roots, 1965; D. Mosley, Loved.
Anti-Semitism: Mandle, ‘Anti-semitism’; de Courcy.
Wells/Shaw: Kingsley Martin, NS, 29.10.32; Robert Row, ‘Sir Oswald Mosley’,
JHR, 1984; Holroyd; Cheyette.
Violence/-NUWM: Benewick, ‘The Threshold of Violence’, in R. Benewick and
T. Smith (eds), Direct Action and Democratic Politics, 1972; ‘The struggle against
Fascism in the thirties’, NELHB, 18, 1984; Alexander Miles, ‘The Streets are still:
Mosley’, in Mosley, c. 1937; John Stevenson, ‘The Politics of Violence’, in Peele/
Cook and ‘The State and Public Order during the 1930s’; Thurlow; Hollis; R.
Hayburn, ‘The National Unemployed Workers Movement, 1921-36’, IRSH, 23,
1983; McKibben.
Diana: de Courcy; Guinness; Gottlieb; Dalley; D. Mosley, Loved; C. Mosley; Pryce-
Jones; Lovell.
Roosevelt: Letters, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
FUBW/Women: Coupland, ‘Left-wing fascism’; William Parsons, ‘What was
FUBW?”’, Comrade, June—August 1991; Martin Durham in Politics of Marginality;
Leighton; Gottlieb; George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937.
Macho/membership: Silke Hesse, ‘Fascism and the Hypertrophy of Male Adoles-
cence’, in Milfull (ed.), The Attraction of Fascism, 1990; John Brewer, ‘The BUF:
Some Tentative Conclusions on its Membership’, in Stein Uglvik Larsen, Bernt
Hagtvet, Jan Petter Myklebust (eds), Who were the Fascists?: Social Roots of
European Fascism, University of Bergen; Stevenson/Cook.
Violence: Benewick; Skidelsky, Reflect and Interests; Stephen Cullen, ‘Political Viol-
ence: The Case of the British Union of Fascists’, ]CH, 28, 2, 1993; Stuart Rawnsley,
Fascism and Fascists in Britain in the 1930s, Bradford, 1983; Barrett; Margaret
Mullins, ‘The Left and Fascism in the East End of London, 1932-39’, Ph.D. thesis,
1985; John Hope, ‘Blackshirts, Knuckle-dusters and Lawyers’, Documentary essay
on the Mosley versus Marchbanks papers; Arthur Bevan, Mosley Black shirts;
Phillpott, May 1933, MSS 292.
Jews: Griffiths, Right; Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, 1993; Tony
Kushner, ‘Asylum or servitude? Refugee domestics in Britain, 1933-45’, BSSLH,
53, 3, Winter 1988.
CP: Laybourn/Murphy; Rawnsley, BUF and Fascism; Neil Barrett, The anti-fascist
movement in south-east Lancashire, 1933-1940.
Italy/anti-Semitism: Emilio Gentile, ‘Impending Modernity: Fascism and the Ambiva-
lent Image of the United States’, J]CH, 28, 1993; Ledeen and Ledeen, ‘Fascismo
 SELECTED NOTES 659

Universale: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International 1928-1936’,

Ph.D. thesis, 1969; Ravensdale; Griffin; Annalisa Capristo, ‘The Exclusion of Jews
from the Academy of Italy’, Israel Monthly Review, March 2002; Lebzelter;
Fredericks MSS 292; Celli: Army records, Fort Meade; N. Mosley archive, BU;
Letters Dorothy Dundas and John Warburton; Bernabie; Beverley Nichols, A
Thatched Roof, 1933; Bianchi, op. cit.; Mack Smith; W. E. D. Allen, ‘The Fascist
idea in Britain’, Quarterly Review, October 1933.
CAUR: Ledeen; Payne; Asvero Gravelli (ed.), I/ Fascismo Inglese, 1934; Mosley, ‘Le
Ripercussioni del Patto a Quattro in Inghilterra’, Gerarchi, 13, 1933.

Chapter Thirteen: Universal Fascism

Ward Price; Cudlipp; Bourne; Taylor, Beaverbrook; K. Young.

Grandi/funds: Archivo Vitetti; Renzo de Felice, Mussolini il duce: 1. Gli anni del
consenso 1929-1936, 1981; Italian FO and Ministry of Popular Culture T-586
series; Focal Point, 30.10.81; HO 283 and 45 series.
Black House: Catlin; HO 144 series; Charnley; Miles, op. cit.; D. Mosley interview;
Benewick; Bevan, Mosley Black shirts. ;
Recruits: W. F. Mandle, ‘The Leadership of the British Union of Fascists’, JPH, 12,
3, December 1966; Bellamy; R. M. White, ‘Some Features of the Development of
Fascism in England’, Communist International, 10, October 1933; Coupland,
‘Left-wing’.
Diana/Unity/Germany: Guinness; Dalley; Metcalfe; Hanfstaengl; Martland; Mark
Amory, Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric, 1998.
Agriculture: Benewick; Bellamy; Brewer; The Canterbury Tales, Channel Four, 1996;
HO 144 series; Leighton, op. cit.; Cornford; Edwards; Portsmouth; Webber,
Ideology; Robert Speaight, The Life of Hilaire Belloc, 1957; Lunn in Lunn/
Thurlow; Alastair Hamilton, The Appeal of Fascism: A Study of Intellectuals and
Fascism 1919-1945, 1971.
Chesterton/Beckett/Thomson: Baker; Chesterton, Creed of a Fascist Revolutionary,
c. 1937; Beckett unpublished manuscript; F. Beckett and letter; Comrade, July
1994; Peter Pugh, op. cit.; HO 144 series; A. Raven Thomson, Civilisation as
Divine Superman: A Superorganic Philosophy of History, 1932; Coupland, ‘Left-
Wing’; Thurlow, ‘Return’; Charnley; Miles, op. cit.
Nazis/Mussolini: HO 144 series; German and Italian FO documents; de Courcy;
Stevenson MSS 292.
English Review Circle: Leighton, op. cit.; Webber, Ideology; Smart; Wrench; Yeats-
Brown, Gold Horn, 1932; Stewart; HO 144 series; Bevan, Mosley Black shirts;
Geoffrey Alderman, ‘Dr Robert Forgan’s resignation from the British Union
of Fascists’, LHR, 57, 1, Spring 1992; P. M. Luttman-Johnson interview and
papers.
PP,
Anti-Semitism: C. C. Aronsfield, ‘Old Fascist, Writ Large: Mosley’s Memories’,
11, November— December 1968; Holmes, Anti; Lewis.
Nazis: C. Mosley; Hastings; Guinness; Pryce-Jones; Lovell; D. Mosley and Contrasts;
660 SELECTED NOTES

Chisholm/Davie; Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry
Channon, 1993; German FO documents; Searchlight No. 171, 1989.
Tavener: Dalley; D. Mosley interview.
IFL/Taylor: HO 144 series; Lebzelter; Arnold Spencer Leese, op. cit.; Ivan Greenberg .
papers; Fredericks MSS 292; Comrade, May-June 1987; Miles, op. cit.; Charles ©
Dolan, The Blackshirt Racket - Mosley Exposed, 1934; Miscellaneous papers Tait
collection, Stirling University.
Mosley/violence: Phillpott reports; Stevenson/Cook; Hope, op. cits; MEPOL 2/3069
and 3077; Treasury and Cabinet records; HO 144, 83 and 45 series; Dolan,
op. cit.; John Warburton memoir; Curry; Coupland, ‘Left-wing’; Andrew, MI5;
Masters; West.
CP/Cripps: Marchbank papers MSS 127; HO 144 and 45 series; Fredericks MSS
292; Stevenson/Cook; Simon Burgess, Stafford Cripps: A Political Life, 1999;
Skidelsky, Interests.
Allen: C. M. Hamilton, Life Errant, 1935; Douglas.
Airmen: L. Wise, in Mosley Black shirts; Coupland and Wagar, op. cits.
Gartner: Curry; D. C. Watt, Personalities: Margarete Gartner, Ambassadress of good
will, 1955; German FO documents.

Chapter Fourteen: Rothermere

Ward Price/Rothermere: Gannon; S. Taylor; Cudlipp; Paul Addison, ‘Patriotism

under Pressure: Lord Rothermere and British Foreign Policy’, in Gillian Peel and
Chris Cook (eds), The Politics of Reappraisal, 1975; Italian FO records; HO 144
and 283 series; John Hope, ‘Cable Street, the BUF and the Italian subsidy’,
Searchlight, October 1999; Mosley/Liddle, op. cit.; Bianchi; Koss; Smart; Horrie;
Mandle, ‘Anti-semitism’; Benewick; Eatwell; Griffin; Paxton.
Department Z: TUC and Miles, op. cit.; HO 144 series; Benewick.
Opposition: David Lewellyn, Nye, The Beloved Patrician, 1960; James King, Virginia
Woolf, 1994; Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, 1996; A. J. P. Taylor (ed.), Off the
Record: Political Interviews 1933-1943, W. P. Crozier, 1973.
Government: NA MacDonald papers; HO 144 series; Sylvia Scaffardi, Fire Under
the Carpet: Working for civil liberties in the 1930s, 1986; Andrew Moore, ‘Sir
Philip Game’s “Other Life”: The Making of the 1936 Public Order Act in Britain’,
AJP, 36, 1, 1990.
Funding: Strachey, Growth; Joan Leighton, ‘Power Elites and the British Union of
Fascists 1932-1940’, M.Phil. thesis, 1992; Thurlow; HO 45, 144 and 283 series;
Adeney, Nuffield; Selwyn; Maitles.
Allen/Fascism/Spengler: Thurlow and ‘Mod’ and ‘Return’ and ‘Destiny and doom,
Spengler, Hitler and “British” Fascism’, PP, 15, 4, October 1981; Jonathan Dolli-
more, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture, 1998; Roger Griffin (ed.),
Fascism, 1995 and (ed.), International Fascism: Theories, causes and the new
consensus, 1998; www.britishembassy.org.ge/information/roots; Louise Irvine,
Mosley’s Blackshirts: The Inside Story of the British Union of Fascists 1932-
 SELECTED NOTES 661

1940, 1986; Philip Coupland, ‘The Blackshirt Utopians’, ]CH, 33, 2, April 1998
and ‘The Black Shirt in Britain’, in Linehan/Gottlieb; Mandle, ‘Anti-semitism’;
Bentley; R. Gordon-Canning, The Inward Strength of a National Socialist, 1938;
Beverley Nichols, News of England or a Country Without a Hero, 1937; Olive
Hawks, Time is my Debtor; National Council of Labour, What is this Fascism?,
1934; Holtby.
Feminism: Kushner/Lunn, Politics; Douglas; Gottlieb; Hilda Kean, ‘Some problems
of reconstructing a suffragette’s life: Mary Richardson, suffragette, socialist and
fascist’, WHR, 7, 4, 1998; Stephen Cullen, ‘Four Women for Mosley: Women
in the BUF, 1932-1940’, OH, 24, 1, Spring 1986; Martin Durham, ‘Women in
the British Union of Fascists, 1932-1940’ and ‘Gender and the BUF’, /CH, 27,
1992.
Streicher/CAUR/IUN/Pfister: Pryce-Jones; Boyce; Michaelis; Soucy; Wiener Library
Bulletin, ‘The Nationalist International’; Fritz Calusen, Volk und Staat im Grenz-
land, Zurich, 1936; Pfister, Naturalization certificate, NA Australia; H. P. Knicker-
bocker, Blackshirts in England, 1934; German FO documents; Bauerkamper; HO
144 series.
Canada/Scotland/Ireland: Lita-Rose Betcherman, The Swastika and the Maple Leaf,
1975; German FO documents; J. Loughlin, ‘Northern Ireland and British Fascism
in the Inter-War Years’, IHS, 29, November 1995; R. M. Douglas, ‘The Swastika
and the Shamrock: British Fascism and the Irish Question, 1918-1940’, Albion,
29, I, Spring 1997; Philip Schlesinger letter; PRONI files CAB oF.
MIS/Italy: Curry; HO 144 series; Thurlow; Italian FO documents.
Wells/Eliot: H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, 1934; T.S. Mathews, Great
Tom: Notes Towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot, 1974; Coupland, ‘Wells’,
op. cit.; Michael Foot, H. G.: The History of Mr Wells, 1995.
Campaigns: Tony Milligan, ‘Adolf’s Tartan Army: Fascists and “men of the night”
in 1930s Scotland’, Cencrastus, Spring 1995; Barrett; Martin Pugh, ‘Lancashire,
Cotton and Indian Reform: Conservative Controversies in the 1930s’, 20th CBH,
15, 2, 2004; G. C. Webber, ‘The British Isles’, in Detlef Muhlberger, The social
basis of European Fascist movements, 1987; HO 144 series.
MIS5/Nazis/Jews/Pfister: German FO documents; Guinness; Bourne.
India/Rothermere: Webber, Ideology; Ramsden; Taylor, Beaverbrook; Koss; Stanley
Baldwin, This Torch of Freedom, 1937; HO 144 series.
Defence Force: Tait Collection, op. cit.; Cohen, op. cit.
Aristocrats: Miles, op. cit.; Benewick; Trzebinski; Ziegler.

Chapter Fifteen: Olympia

Special Branch: HO 144 series; Miles, op. cit.; Stevenson/Cook.

The event: Amory; Crowson; Addison; Catlin, Go; Ronald Blythe, The Age of
Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties 1919-1940, 1963; Wrench; Fred-
ericks MSS 292; Lewis; HO 144 series.
Reaction: Martin Pugh, ‘The BUF and the Olympia debate’, HJ, 41, 2, 1998; Jon
 662 SELECTED NOTES

Lawrence, ‘Fascist violence and the politics of public order in inter-war Britain:
the Olympia debate revisited’, HR, 76, 192, May 2003; Crowson; Smart;
K. Young; MEPO 2/3073; HO 144 series; Scaffardi, op. cit.; M. Cowling, The
Impact of Hitler, 1975; CAB 23/79.
Nazi reaction/Pfister/anti-Semitism: HO 144 series; German FO documents;
Baukamper.
MIS: Leighton, op. cit.; HO 144 series.
Rothermere/anti-Semitism: German FO documents; A. K. Chesterton and Joseph
Leftwich, The Tragedy of Anti-Semitism, 1948; Baker; Kramnick/Sheerman;
Query 1938; Lewis; Thurlow; Stephen Cullen, ‘Political Violence: The case of the
British Union of Fascists’, ]CH, 28, 1993.
Rothermere break: HO 144 series; Cudlipp; Thurlow; Mosley archive Box 8;
Brendon; Pugh, op. cit.; Koss; German FO documents; Peter Aldag, Das Judentum
in England, 1943; S. Taylor; Bourne.
Forgan: Geoffrey Alderman, The Jewish Community in British Politics, 1983; Lees-
Milne diary; Webber; Thurlow.
Fuller: Holden Reid, Fuller and Studies, and ‘Impressions of Mosley’, 25.8.77; Obit.,
The Times, 11.2.66; Trythall.
- MIS/Ball: HO 144 series; Webber and Ideology; Ferris/Bar-Joseph; Taylor, Ball;
Adeney, Nuffield; Round Table, September 1934; Skidelsky, Interests; Martin
Blinkhorn, Fascists and Conservatives: The radical right and the establishment in
twentieth-century Europe, 1990; Ritschell; Thurlow and ‘Mod’; Policy Political
Broadcasting BUF, 1934-39, BBC archives.
Economy/Cripps: H. W. Richardson, Economic Recovery in Britain, 1932-9, 19673
Forrest Capie and Michael Collins, ‘The extent of British Economic Recovery in
the 1930s’, Economy and History, 23, 1980; Thurlow, ‘Failure’; Barrett; O’Keeffe;
Meyers.

Chapter Sixteen: The Nazis

European Fascists/Grégoire: HO 144 series; Paul Preston, The Politics of Revenge:

Fascism and the military in twentieth-century Spain, 1990; Stanley G. Payne,
Falange: A History of Spanish Fascism, 1961; Soucy; Lewis; Martin Conway,
Collaboration in Belgium: Léon Degrelle and the Rexist Movement 1940-1944,
1993; Hans Fredrik Dahl, Quisling: A study in treachery, 1999; Maurice Manning,
The Blueshirts, 1970; Douglas; PRONI CAB 4/328; Loughlin; US Department
of State and Justice files; Robert Sourcy, French Fascism: The Second Wave 1933-
1939, 1995; Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s, 1995; Higham;
HO 144 series; Leighton, op. cit.
Italy: Ravensdale; HO 144 series; Bosworth; Michaelis; James; Richard Lamb,
Mussolini and the British, 1997.
CPy/rallies/Hyde Park: HO 45 and 144 series; Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain;
Margaret Mullins, “The Left and Fascism in the East End of London 1932-39’,
Ph.D. thesis, 1985; Thurlow, ‘Mod’; Pugh; Kevin Morgan, Against Fascism and
 SELECTED NOTES 663

War: Ruptures and continuities in British Communist politics, 1935-41, 1989;

Laybourn/Murphy; German FO documents; www.mucjs.org/mwolf; Mandle.
Diana: D. Mosley; Pryce-Jones; Guinness; Dalley; Gottlieb; 21. HO 144 series; de
Courcy.
Forgan/rebellion: Fredericks MSS 292; HO 144 series; Thurlow, ‘Failure’; Mandle;
Dolan/Miles/Coupland, op. cit.
Anti-Semitism: Holmes, ‘Anti’; Mandle, ‘Anti-Semitism’; Ravensdale; Wrench; Thur-
low; HO 144 series; Bondy; German FO documents; Mack Smith; R. Farinacci
(ed.), Regime Fascista; G. Preziosi (ed.), La Vista Italiana; Skidelsky, Interests;
Brewer.
Kenya: Elspeth Huxley, Nellie: Letters from Africa, 1980; Trzebinski.
IUN/CAUR: Zeman; Manning; Ledeen; Michaelis; Dahl; German FO documents.
Aeroplane/NLA: David Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a
Militant and Technological Nation, 1991; Holden Reid; Colin Cook; Soames;
Cannadine; Bourne; Addison; Crowson; Glyn Roberts, The most powerful man
in the world: The Life of Sir Henri Deterding, 1938; Japanese Foreign Ministry
documents; Baldwin papers.
Ribbentrop: G. T. Waddington, ‘ “An idyllic and unruffled atmosphere of complete
Anglo-German misunderstanding”: Aspects of the Operations of the Dienststelle
Ribbentrop in Great Britain, 1934-38’, History, 82, 265, January 1997; Richard
Spitzy, How we squandered the Reich, 1997; Louis Lochner Collection, Hoover
Institute; Wrench; David Kahn, Hitler’s Spies: German Military Intelligence in
World War II, 1978; Baukamper; Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Karl Haushofer: Leben
und Werk, Band I: Lebensweg 1869-1946 und ausgewahlte Texte zur Geopolitik,
1979.
Funding: Searchlight, No. 292, October 1999; Brewer; Benewick.
Organization/Box/Richardson: Thurlow; HO 144 and KV 2/245 series; Linehan;
Beckett; Benewick; Gottlieb.
Unity/Diana/Hitler: Pryce-Jones; Brendon; Guinness; de Courcy, DM; Diana inter-
view; West, Orwell.
Rothermere/IDL: Stewart; Crowson; Soames; HO 144 and 283 series.
Cuts/funds: HO 45 and 144 series; Searchlight, October 1999; Benewick; Bianchi;
de Courcy; Thurlow.
Nazis/BUF: HO 45 and 144 series; Thurlow, Kushner/Lunn.
Gordon-Canning: Information from John Hope, Mary Redvers and Louise Goring;
HO 144 series; Mandle; Mosley Black shirts, L. Irvine; Griffiths; Benewick.
Addison.
NLA: Crowson; Gilbert, Churchill, V; Koss; Bourne; Colin Cook; Taylor;
dle,
Hitler: Baukamper; German FO documents; Lees-Milne, Deep; Mosley/Lid
Hart-Davis ; Hitler’s Henchman: Goebbels, Channel
op. cit.; D. Mosley; Guinness;
Five, 17.12.2000; Bergmeier; Irving, Goebbels.
 664 SELECTED NOTES

Chapter Seventeen: 1935

Hitler/Unity/Diana: Dalley; Stobl; Speer; Pryce-Jones; Guinness; Lovell; Lebzelter;

German FO documents; Bondy; Hastings.
Tester/Hepburn: Walker; German FO documents; Searchlight, Nos 236 and 237;
A. A. Tester, England - Quo Vadis?, 1943; Ladislas Farago, The Game of the
Foxes, 1973.
Italy: Searchlight, No. 292, October 1999.
East End: Mosley Black shirts; Patrick O’Donegan; Brewer; Thurlow, ‘Mod’ and ‘Re
Cable Street’; Bailey and Warburton, in Morton; Robert Wistrich, Antisemitism:
The Longest Hatred, 1992; Linehan; Holmes, ‘Anti’ and ‘BUF’; William J.
Fishman, ‘A People’s Journey: The Battle of Cable Street’, in Frederick Krantz
(ed.), History from Below: Studies in popular ideology in honour of George Rudé;
Jacobs; H. F. Srebrnik, ‘The Jewish Communist Movement in Stepney: Ideological
Mobilization and Political Victories in an East London Borough, 1935-1945’,
Ph.D. thesis, 1984. ;
CP: HO 45 and 144 series; Baukamper; Morgan; Laybourn/Murphy; Thurlow, ‘Re
Cable Street’; Cullen. j
Abyssinia: Michael Pugh, ‘Peace with Italy: BUF Reactions to the Abyssinian War
1935-1936, Wiener Library Bulletin, 27, 32, 1974; Fuller, Last of the League
Wars, 1936; W. J. West; BBC R51/83, The Citizen and the Government 193 5-
36; Crowson; Curry; Peter and Leni Gillman, Collar The Lot!, 1980; West, Truth
Betrayed; HO 144 and 283 series; Simpson; Lewis; Thurlow; Wright; Trythall;
Fuller, ‘Germany: As I see it’, English Review, 60, 1935; Mosley/Liddle, op. cit.;
Beckett; F. Beckett; Daniel Waley, British Public Opinion and the Abyssinian War
1935-6, 1975; Mandle; FO 371 series; Italian FO documents GFM 36/39; Luigi
Goglia, ‘La propaganda italiana sostegno della guerra contro l’Etiopia svolta in
Gran Bretagna nel 1935-36’, Storia Contemporanea, 15, 5, October 1984.
* Italy/holiday: de Courcy and DM; Lovell; Violet Trefusis, Don’t Look Round, 1952.
Campbell: Leo Villa and Tony Gray, The Record Breakers: Sir Malcolm and Donald
Campbell Land and Water Speed Kings of the 20th Century, 1969; Comrade, Janu-
ary 1991; Automobile, May 1985 and December 1990; US Army files, Fort Meade.
Unity/Nuremberg: Pryce-Jones; J. W. Blanch, ‘Henry Williamson and the Romantic
Appeal of Fascism’, Durham University Journal, 1, 1, December 1988; William-
son; Higginbottom; Lois Lamplugh, A Shadowed Man: Henry Williamson 1895-
1977, 1991; Alexander Prokopov letter; Dr Karl-Hans Galinksy, British Fascism,
Verlag und Druck von B. G. Teubner, Berlin, 1935.
BBC: Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting,
1922-1939: Serving the Nation, 1991; W. J. West.
Fuller/Abyssinia/propaganda/Jews: Fuller, League Wars; Brendon; Wright; Trythall,
‘Boney’ Fuller; W. J. West; Gottlieb; Strachey Barnes; Martin Stannard, Evelyn
Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939; Italian FO documents GFM 36/55; Archivo
de Felice; Beckett; Mandle, ‘Anti-semitism’; Linehan; Thurlow, ‘Re Cable Street’;
Michaelis.
 SELECTED NOTES 665

Italy/funds/spies: M. Pugh; HO 45 and 144 series; Andrew; Smith; La Nuovo

Antologia; A. Gravelli, op. cit.; Archivo de Felice; Curry; Kahn.
Nazi spies: Ian Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and
Britain’s road to war, 2004; Waddington; Griffiths; Jacobsen; Zeman; Wilfred
von Oven, Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende, 1949; Angela Schwarz, ‘British Visitors
to National Socialist Germany: In a Familar or in a Foreign Country?’, JCH, 28,
1993; Karlheinz Schadlich, ‘‘“‘Appeaser” in “Action”: Hitler’s British Friends in
the Anglo-German Fellowship’, Historical Yearbook, 3, 1969; Aigner; Goebbels
diary; HO 144 series.
Election/Abyssinia: Smart; Bianchi; Brendon; CAB 23/82 minutes; Goglia, op. cit.;
de Courcy; Smith; G. Waddington, ‘Hassegener: German views of Great Britain
in the Later 1930s’, H, 81, 261, 1996; HO 144 series; Information from Alfio
Bernabei and Linette Pearson; W. J. West.
Organization: HO 144 series; FO 371 series; CAB 129/8; Italian documents St A;
Waley, op. cit.; West, MI5; Brewer; Dalley; Linehan.
Failure/economy: John Stevenson, ‘Conservatism and the failure of fascism in
interwar Britain’, in Martin Blinkhorn, Fascists and Conservatives: The radical
right and the establishment in twentieth-century Europe, 1990; Ramsden; Smart;
Stewart; Stevenson/Cook; Harrison; H. Pelling, The British Communist Party,
1958; Skidelsky, Interests; Ingham; Peden, op. cit.; Mark Thomas; Brewer;
Lebzelter; Coleman, ‘Frustration’, in Andrew Thorpe (ed.), The Failure of Political
Extremism in Inter-war Britain, Exeter Studies in History, 21, 1989; G. Orwell,
England Your England, Inside the Whale and other Essays, 1968.

Chapter Eighteen: The East End

Funds: HO 144 series; Searchlight, October 1999; N. Mosley archive, box 11; Lewis;
Thurlow, ‘Mod’; Charnley; Benewick; Cabinet minutes; BBC archives.
National socialists/Nazi funds: Sonia and Ian Angus (eds), The Collected Essays,
Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, An Age Like This 1920-1940, 1968;
Goebbels diary; Pryce-Jones; Nicolson diary and letters; Charles Higham, Trading
with the Enemy: An Exposé of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949, 19835
Information from Scott Newton.
Drummond: Information from Ben Clingin, Philip Coupland and D. Mosley inter-
view; Alf Goldberg, World’s End for Sir Oswald Mosley, 1999; Griffiths.
,
Sanctions: Renzo de Felice, Mussolini il duce: 1. Gli anni del consenso 1929-1936
Barnes;
1974; Rees, Changing; Gravelli, op. cit.; Mack Smith; Lewis; Strachey
S. Lang and E. von Schenck (eds), Memoirs of Alfred Rosenberg, 1949.
HO 144
East End/anti-Semitism: Laybourn/Murphy; Crowson; Srebrnik; Benewick;
Thurlow; Mosley, Tomorro w We Live; Holmes, ‘Anti’; Lebzelter.
and 283 series;
Nazi funds: Goebbels diary; Irving, Goebbels; Curry.
Schurch: WO 76-1107; US Army records.
ddle, op. cit.
Diana: D. Mosley and Loved; de Courcy; Guinness; Lovell; Mosley/Li
Spain: Paul Preston, Franco, 1993; Amherst; Douglas.
 666 SELECTED NOTES

Police/anti-Semitism: Moore; Thurlow, ‘Failure’; Lebzelter; MEPOL 2/3043.

Magda Goebbels/Olympic Games: D. Mosley; Gottlieb; Anja Klabunde, Magda
Goebbels, 2002; Gottfried Wagner, He Who Does Not Howl with the Wolf: The
Wagner Legacy, 1998; Geoffrey G. Field, Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision
of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, 1981; Dalley; D. Mosley.
Haushofer/geopolitics: Baukamper; Lewis; Thurlow, ‘Return’; Hans-Adolf Jacobsen,
Karl Haushofer: Leben und Werk, Ausgewahlter Schriftwechsel 1917-1946,
1979; Mosley, ‘Das Grosse Entweder Oder’, Zeitschrift fiir Geopolitik, September
1936.
Wedding: M. Goebbels letter, BU, Mosley deposit, Louis Lochner Collection, Hoover
Institute; Guinness; Goebbels diary.
Radio project: Mosley statement, BU; Pronay and Taylor; Eckersley and letter; Allen;
James; Pryce-Jones.
Allen: HO 144 series; Douglas.
Cable Street: Laybourn/Murphy; Peter Catterell (ed.), ‘Witness Seminar: The Battle
of Cable Street’, CR, 8, 1, Summer 1994; Thurlow, ‘Mod’; Mandle; Chisholm
papers, ML MSS 1246; HO 144 series; Gottlieb, ‘Re Cable Street’; Lewis;
Kushner/Valman; Clarkson; Comrade, August 1999; James Morton, East End
Gangland, 2001; Richard Thurlow, ‘British Fascism and State Surveillance’, INS;
W. F. Deedes, Dear Bill, 1999; Srebrnik; Stevenson/Cook; Linehan; Skidelsky,
- Interests.
Wedding/Berlin: Gottlieb, ‘Re Cable Street’; Goebbels diary; German FO documents;
Michael Bloch, Ribbentrop, 1992; D. Mosley; Pryce-Jones; Guinness; Irving,
Goebbels; US National Archives, Ribbentrop T120; Dalley.
Post-Cable Street: MEPOL 2/3043; Linehan; ‘Re Cable Street’; Cohen; Charnley;
HO 144 series; Searchlight, October 1999; Thurlow; Kushner/Valman; Leighton;
Andrew Moore, ‘Sir Philip Game’s “‘Other Life”: The making of the 1936 Public
Order Act in Britain’, AJP, 36, 1, 1990; Stevenson/Cook; Morton; Mandle;
Deedes, op. cit.; Laski papers; Kramnick/Sheerman; Colin Holmes, ‘East End
Anti-Semitism, 1936’, SSLHB, 32, Spring 1976; Crowson, p. 174; Dietrich Aigner,
The Struggle for England.

Chapter Nineteen: The Abdication

Lewis/Pound/Campbell: Wright, Tank; WO 106/1578; Holden Reid; HO 144 series;

Douglas; O’Keeffe; Meyers; Normand; Joseph Pearce, Bloomsbury and Beyond:
The friends and enemies of Roy Campbell, 2002; Bernard Bergonzi, ‘Roy Camp-
bell: Outsider on the Right’, CH, 2, 2, 1967.
Joyce: Thurlow; Webber; Crowson; Benewick; George Orwell, The Road to Wigan
Pier, 1936; HO 45 and 144 series; Linehan.
Axis: Andrew Sharf, The British Press and the Jews under Nazi Rule, 1964; Goebbels
diary; HO 144 and KV 4/1 series.
Save the King/Joyce/Beckett: Crowson; John Charnley, Duff Cooper, 1986; Lewis;
Warburton/Quill interviews; Beckett; HO 144 series; Thurlow; Curry.
 SELECTED NOTES 667

King’s Party: Bryan/Murphy; Crowson; Cazalet, Amery, Reith and Goebbels diaries;
German FO documents; Ziegler; West, MI5; Higham; J. Parker; Lees-Milne,
Peace; Koss; Robert Rhodes James, Memoirs of a Conservative: ]. C. C. Davidson’s
Memoirs and Papers, 1910-37, 1969.
Failure on crisis: Beckett; HO 144 series; Higham; Thurlow; Coleman, Frustration;
Linehan.
POA: Thurlow; P. Cohen, ‘The Police, the Home Office and the Surveillance of the
British Union of Fascists’, INS, 1, 3, September 1986; Thurlow, ‘British Fascism
and State Surveillance’; Benewick; John Mortimer, Clinging to the Wreckage,
1982; Anderson, Fascists and Communists, op. cit.; Webber.
Book clubs: Webber; E. H. H. Green, ‘Book Clubs and Conservatism in the 1930s’,
in his Ideologies of Conservatism: Conservative Political Ideas in the Twentieth
Century, 2002.
Funds: HO 144 series; Curry; Linehan; de Courcy and DM; Gottlieb; Goebbels diary;
F. Elwyn-Jones, The Battle for Peace, 1938, and In My Life, 1983; N. Mosley, Box
12, BU; Baukamper.
East End: Beckett; Mandle; Stevenson/Cook; Lebzelter; Srebrnik; HO 144 series;
C. Wegg-Prosser, Fascism Exposed, 1938; Joyce files KV 2/245 series; Martland;
Skidelsky, Reflect; Thurlow; Benewick; ‘Re Cable Street’, Renton and Linehan;
Goebbels diary.
Mussolini funds: Hope, Searchlight, October 1999; Beckett; HO 283 series.
Joyce: Joyce files KV 2/245; Martland; Benewick; HO 45 series; Wegg-Prosser,
op. cit.
Restructuring: Linehan; Beckett; HO 144 series; Gottlieb; Benewick.
Radio/Sark/Lawton: Guinness; Goebbels diary; History Today, March 1990;
Eckersley; D. Mosley, Loved; Simpson; HO 45 series; Barbara Stoney, Sibyl,
Dame of Sark, 1978; de Courcy, DM; Dalley.
POA/marches: Stevenson/Cook; Benewick; Baker; Morley; MEPOL 2/3110;
Laybourn/Murphy.
Radio/Gemona: Simpson; Eckersley; West; Guinness; Lovell; D. Mosley, Loved;
Goebbels diary; Irving, Goebbels; Bergmeier/Lotz; Dalley.
Visits to Germany/Nazi funds: Lebzelter; Ribbentrop files; Goebbels diary; Lovell;
Aigner; Irving, Goebbels; Lewis.
BUF spying: W. J. Brown, ‘The strange case of Major Vernon’, NCCL; History,
February 2003; Tony Bunyan, The History and Practice of the Political Police in
Britain, 1976; Nigel West, The Illegals: The Double Lives of the Cold War’s Most
Service’.
Secret Agents, 1993; HO 45 and 283 series; Hope, ‘Fascism, the Security
Hitler/Unity: Nikolaus von Below, Als Hitlers Adjutant 1937-45, 1 980; Pryce-Jones;
Ernest R. Pope, Munich Playground, 1941; Spitzy; Die Aufzeichnungen Heinrich
Heims herausgegeben Werner Jochmann, Adolf Hitler: Monologe im Fiibrer-
diary.
Hauptquartier 1941-1944, 1980; Speer, Inside the Third Reich; Goebbels
668 SELECTED NOTES

Chapter Twenty: The Radio Project

Link/Domvile: Thurlow and Kushner/Lunn; Griffiths; Aaron Goldman, ‘The Link

and the Anglo-German Review’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 71, 1972; Aigner; J.B.
White, The Big Lie, 1955; Domvile; Simpson.
Nordic League: Griffiths; Simpson; HO 45, 144 and 283 series; Thurlow; BoD of
British Jews C6/10/29.
Nazi spying: Michaelis; Farago; Curry; Kahn.
Belgium/Tester: German FO documents; John Hope and David Turner, “The Curious
Case of Dr Tester’, Searchlight, February-March 1995; Conway.
Duke of Windsor: Spitzy; Michael Thornton, Royal Feud: The Queen Mother and the
Duchess of Windsor, 1985; Speer; Higham; Bradford; Bloch, ‘Secret File’; Ziegler.
Radio: Simpson; Stoney; D. Mosley, Loved and Box 7 BU; de Courcy, DM; German
FO documents.
Austria: Lewis; David Irving, The War Path: Hitler’s Germany 1933-9, 1978; Curry;
Virginia Cowles, The Rothschilds: A Family Fortune, 1975; Benewick; Mosley:
The Facts.
Chesterton: Mandle; HO 144 series; A. K. Chesterton, Why I Left Mosley, National
Socialist League, 1938; Baker; Thurlow.
Radio/Germany: de Courcy, DM; Sir Frederick Lawton letter; Kahn; Dalley; Lovell;
N. Mosley Box rr BU; D. Mosley, Loved; Guinness; Eckersley; Nicholas Pronay
and Philip Taylor, ‘The British Government and clandestine radio propaganda
operations against Germany during the Munich Crisis and after’, ]CH, 19, 1984;
West.
Allens: Allen; Mrs Allen letter; Eckersley; Andrew; Thurlow; Information from John
Hope; N. Mosley Box rz BU. 2
Czechs/Luxembourg: Betcherman; Joyce files KV 2/245; Martland; Taylor; Pronay/
Taylor, op. cit.; West; Eckersley; John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, Deadly Illusions,
1993-
Contract: Dalley; de Courcy, DM; Granzow.

Chapter Twenty-one: The Darkening Clouds

BUF campaigns/revival: Mayall, Politics of Maginality; Japanese FO documents;

Guinness; Harrison; T. Balogh, ‘Economic Policy and Rearmament in Britain’,
Manchester School, 7, 1936; Brewer; Webber; HO 144 series; Linehan; Skidelsky,
Interests; S. Rawnsley, ‘The membership of the British Union of Fascists’, in British
Fascism, K. Lunn and R. Thurlow (eds), 1980.
Family: D. Mosley, Loved; Ravensdale; de Courcy and DM.
Pro-Nazi groups: Cornford; Benewick; Webb.
Nazi spying: Farago; Kahn; Gunter Peis, The Mirror of Deception: How Britain
turned the Nazi spy machine against itself, 1978; N. West, MI5: British Security
Service Operations 1909-1945, 1983 and MI6: British Secret Intelligence Service
 SELECTED NOTES 669

Operations 1909-1945, 1985; J. C. Masterman, The Double-Cross System in the

War of 1939 to 1945, 1972; Curry; Tester.
Knight/MI5: Thurlow; HO 144 series; Masters; Simpson; Miller.
Appeasement: Thurlow and ‘Mod’; de Courcy; Linehan; Griffiths; Webber.
Ironside: Leonard Wise letter, Sheffield University; Thurlow; Trythall; Ironside diary
and letter.
Pro-Nazi groups/co-operation: Thurlow, Kushner/Lunn and ‘Mod’; Simpson; BoDBJ
files; Benewick; ‘Re Cable Street’, Neil Barrett; Goldman, op. cit.; Linehan; Jeffrey;
HO 45 and 144 series; Bondy; J. S. Wiggins, ‘The Link’, MA thesis, 1985; Maule
Ramsay, The Nameless War, 1954; Domvile diary.
BPP/pro-Germans: F. Beckett; Thurlow; Simpson; Cornford; HO 45 and 283 series;
Griffiths; Allen.
Fuller: Griffiths; Trythall, Fuller; Wright; Jeffrey; D. Mosley.
Right Club/Ramsay/Wolkoff: Kushner; Simpson; Ramsay, op. cit.; Griffiths, R/C;
Spector Manuscript in Wiener Library; Thurlow and Kushner/Lunn; HO 45 and
144 series; BoDBJ files; Tyler Kent trial transcript; Martland; F. Beckett.
Rothschilds: HO 45 series; Eckersley; Cowles, op. cit.
Earls Court: Skidelsky, Interests; Guinness; Domvile diary; Griffiths; de Courcy and
DM; Italian FO documents; Irving, Goebbels; Charnley; Gottlieb; Bondy; Aigner.
Radio: de Courcy, DM; Mosley letter 1969, DM Box 12 BU.
Unity/Diana/Hitler: de Courcy, DM; Amanda Smith, Hostage to Fortune: The letters
of Joseph P. Kennedy, 2001; Aufzeichnungen Heinrich Heims op. cit.; Hildegard
von Kotze, Heeresadjutant bei Hitler, 1938-1943, Aufzeichnungen des Majors
Engel, 1974; Pryce-Jones; D. Mosley; Mosley/Liddle, op. cit.; J. Parker; Guinness;
Dalley.
Radio: Eckersley; Skidelsky, Interests; Dalley.
Emergency powers/Joyce: HO 45 series; Simpson; Gillman; Cole, Lord Haw Haw;
C. E. Bechoffer Roberts, The Trial of William Joyce, 1946; Martland; Selwyn.

Chapter Twenty-two: The Phoney War

144 and
Membership/plans: Kushner; Lewis; Linehan; Brewer; Thurlow; HO 45,
283 series; Simpson; Informatio n from Julian Pakowski; Gottlieb.
Ironside/leaks/Peace Party: Thurlow, ‘SS’, ‘Failure’ and Kushner/Lunn; Fuller and
Ironside diaries; Bryan/Murphy; Ziegler; Higham; Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted.
Domvile
Meetings: HO 144 series; Thurlow, ‘SS’; Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted;
diary; Simpson. i
BoDBJ
Internment/Thomas: HO 45, 144 and 283 series; Thurlow; Griffiths and R/C;
documents ; Linehan; Simpson; DM Box 16 BU.
files; Bondy; German FO
Lunn; Simpson;
Collaboration/MI5/Patriotism Perverted: Thurlow, ‘SS’ and Kushner/
series; Kushner; Clough; US NA
Griffiths R/C; HO 45, 144 and 283, KV 2/840
memo RG 84 series; Kent transcript ; Jeffrey; Crowson.
m Perverted;
BCCSE/anti-Semitism: Treasury 27/522 series; Griffiths, Patriotis
Kushner; D. Mosley; HO 144 series; Thurlow.
670 SELECTED NOTES

Ironside/Fuller: R. H. Larson, The British Army and the Theory of Armoured War-
fare, 1918-1940, 1984; War Cabinet minutes.
Berlin/Peace Party: German Foreign Policy documents, D, 8; Dr Hans-Gunther
Seraphim (ed.), Das politische Tagebuch Alfred Rosenbergs aus den Jahren 1934/
35 und 1939/40: Nach der photographischen Wiedergabe der Handschrift aus den
Niirnberger Akten herausgegeben und erlautet, 1956; J. Noakes and G. Pridham,
Nazism 1919-1945, Vol. 3, Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination.
Secret meetings/Thomas: Thurlow and Kushner/Lunn; HO 45, 144 and 283 series;
Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted; F. Beckett; Simpson; Domvile diary.
Mrs Amor/Right Club: KV 4/227 and 2/902 series; Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted;
Clough; Jowitt; Simpson; Bearse/Read; Thurlow Kushner/Lunn; Linehan; Ramsay,
Nameless War; Kushner.
Allen: HO 45 and 283 series; Thurlow; David Smiley, Irregular Soldier, Norwich,
1994.
MIS5/HO: Simpson; Jenifer Hart, Ask me no more, 1998; Thurlow, ‘Failure’;
Montgomery Hyde, Norman Birkett.
Hore-Belisha: Roberts; Kushner; Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted; Ironside diary.
Peace Party/Duke of Windsor/Ironside: Simpson; Thurlow; Griffiths, Patriotism Per-
verted; Liddell and Fuller diaries; David Dilks (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Alexander
Cadogan 1938-1945, 1971; Bloch; Donaldson; Bradford; Higham; German
Foreign Policy documents.
Raids: Hinsley/Simkins; Thurlow, ‘SS’; HO 45 series; N. West, MI5; Liddell diary;
Simpson; Kushner.
Kent/Wolkoff: Simpson; Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted; Crowson; ‘Dr Pauline
Henri’, ‘Verge of Treason: The Friends of Sir Oswald Mosley: Tyler Kent, Anna
Wolkoff and the BUF’, Searchlight, September—October 1989; Gillman; Berse/
Read; Jowitt; Kent transcript; Clough; Masters; Thurlow and ‘The Evolution of
the Mythical British Fifth Column’, 20th CBH, ro, 4, 1999.
Hamilton: Gerald Hamilton, The way it was with me, 1969; Marie-Jacqueline
Lancaster (ed.), Brian Howard: Portrait of a failure, 1968; SOE archives; John
Costello, Mask of Treachery, 1990; John Warburton letter; West/Tsarov, The
Crown Jewels.
Fifth Column: Curry; Lancaster; Brooks diary; HO 45 and 144 series; Cabinet
minutes; Thurlow, Kushner/Lunn, ‘Failure’ and ‘The Evolution’.
Wolkoff/Norway: Ironside diary; W. Schellenberg, Memoirs, 1956; Thurlow,
Kushner/Lunn and ‘Failure’; Kahn; KV 2/543 series; F. H. Hinsley et al., British
Intelligence in the Second World War, Vol. 1, 1979; Clough; Griffiths, Patriotism
Perverted; Jowitt; Simpson; Thurlow; Kahn, Hitler’s Spies: German Military Intel-
ligence in World War Two, 1978; Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted; Costello; Bearse/
Read.
Fifth Column: Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted; HO 45 and 144 series; Clough.
Invasion/Ironside: Kushner; Bloch; Clark; Goebbels diary; Cornford; Higham;
Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time: An Autobiography, 19733
Simpson; Thurlow, ‘SS’ and Kushner/Lunn; Trythall; Joint Intelligence Committee/
CAB minutes; HO 45 series; de Courcy.
[=——.
SELECTED NOTES 671

Roosevelt: Kimball/Bartlett; Joseph P. Lash, Roosevelt and Churchill, 1939-1941:

The Partnership that Saved the West, 1977; O. H. Bullitt (ed.), For the President
— Personal and Secret: Correspondence between Franklin D. Roosevelt and
William C. Bullitt, 1972; Costello; Kahn, The Codebreakers, 1966.
Kent affair/internment: Simpson; State Department #5318 documents; Warren F.
Kimball and Bruce Bartlett, ‘Roosevelt and pre-war commitments to Churchill’,
DH, 5, 1981; Thurlow, ‘SS’ and ‘Mod’; PREM 7/2 and CAB 98/18 documents;
Higham; Lash; Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted; Bearse/Read; Liddell diary; Hart.
Quislings: Mark Pottle, Champion Redoubtable: The Diaries and Letters of Violet
Bonham-Carter 1914-1945, 1998; Cross (ed.), Life with Lloyd George: The
Diary of A. J. Sylvester 1931-45, 1975; Liddell diary; Thurlow, ‘Mod’ and ‘SS’;
State Deptartment RG-84, Box 3; Irving, Churchill’s War; CAB 65/7 documents;
Gilbert, Finest Hour; Simpson; Roberts.
Arrests: HO 45 and 144 series; Simpson; D. Mosley; Dalton diary; Goebbels diary;
F. Beckett; Douglas; de Courcy, DM; Williamson.
Wrong people: Thurlow, Kushner/Lunn; Mosley Black shirts, L. Wise, ‘J Christian’
and L. Irvine; Simpson.

Chapter Twenty-three: Prisoner Number 2202

Dunkirk/Security Executive: Irving, Churchill’s War; Gilbert, Finest Hour and War
Papers; Dalton diary and Fateful Years; Pimlott; HO 144 series; A. Boyle,
Trenchard, 1962; Chiefs of Staff papers; Simpson; Hinsley/Simkins; Thurlow.
Internment: de Courcy, DM; Gottlieb; HO 45 and 144 series; Kushner/Lunn;
Simpson; CAB minutes; TS 27/493; Thurlow ‘SS’ and ‘Failure’; Hinsley/Simkins;
Gilbert, Finest Hour.
Kurtz/Fifth Column: HO 45 and 283, FO 371 series; Simpson; Thurlow and ‘SS’;
Curry; N. West, MI5.
Roosevelt: FO 371 series; Lukacs; State Department documents.
Hitler/Mosley/Quislings: Engel, op. cit.; Giles MacDonogh, A Good German: Adam
von Trott zu Solz, 1989; Kahn; Simpson; Norman Longmate, |fBritain had Fallen,
1972; Mosley/Liddle, op. cit.; Frank Owen, Tempestuous Journey: Lloyd George,
His Life and Times, 1954; K. Young; Higham; Kenneth Macksey, Invasion: The
German Invasion of England, July 1940, 1980 and letter; Holden Reid; HO 45
series; Thurlow, Kushner/Lunn; M. Cowling, The Impact of Hitler: British Politics
and British Policy 1933-1940, 1975; F. Beckett; Kushner; FO 954 series; Ziegler;
Curry. i
Diana: C. Mosley; de Courcy, DM; Gottlieb; Gilbert, Finest Hour; Colville diary;
of
Simpson; D. Mosley and Loved; HO 144 series; Thurlow; Kushner, Politics
Marginality; Dalley.
Thurlow and
Case against Mosley: N. Driver, From the Shadows of Exile (n.d.);
‘Mod’; West; HO 283 series; Simpson; Hart; Row; Mosley/Liddle, op. cit.
Schellenberg;
Invasion/White List: Sunday Pictorial, 15/22/29.3.59 and 5/12.4.59;
F. Beckett; Longmate; Lukacs.
672 SELECTED NOTES

Ironside: Thurlow, ‘SS’ and K/L; Richard Ingrams, Muggeridge, 1996.

Interrogation: William Charles Crocker, Far from Humdrum: A Lawyer's Life, 19593
Simpson; Oliver Hoare (intro.), Camp 020: MIS and the Nazi Spies, 2000; J. L.
Battersby, The Bishop said Amen, 1947; Thurlow.
No Fifth Column: Thurlow, ‘The Evolution’; Simpson; CIA records, Troy papers, «
Box 2; HO 45 series.
Diana: HO 144 series; Simpson; de Courcy, DM; Kushner; D. Mosley and Loved;
Thurlow; Dalley.
Kent/Wolkoff trials: Kimball/Bartlett; Bearse/Read; Simpson; Thurlow and ‘SS’;
Addison; H. Morrison.
Prison visits: de Courcy, DM; Gilbert, Finest Hour; Thurlow, ‘SS’; James; F. Beckett.
Deception/Hess: Costello papers; Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives, 2001;
Oliver Harvey diary; Richard Deacon, A History of the British Secret Service,
1969; Holden Reid; Kenneth Benton, ‘The ISOS Years: Madrid 1941-3’, JCH,
30, 1995, and letter; FO 898 series; Martin Allen, The Hitler/Hess Deception:
British Intelligence’s Best-Kept Secret of the Second World War, 2003; Simpson;
Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939-45, 1969.
Mosleys together: D. Mosley and Loved; de Courcy, DM; CAB minutes; Simpson;
Watts MS.
Hitler/England Committee/Tester: Rattan, John Amery (unpublished); Hugh Trevor-
Roper, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1953; German Tester file; German FO documents.
Fascist revival: Spector documents; Kushner; Gottlieb; Simpson; Wrench; HO 45
and 144 series; Peter Aldag, Das Judentum in England, 1943; Srebrnik.
Amery/England Committee: Rattan, op. cit.; Adrian Weale, Patriot Traitors, Roger
Casement, John Amery and the Real Meaning of Treason, 2001, and Renegades,
Hitler’s Englishmen, 1994; USNA, T-120 and MISC-X Section; KV 2/81 and 76
series; Spitzy; Toland; Thornton; Dalton diary; Selwyn; HO 45 series; Brendan
Murphy, Turncoat: The Strange Case of Sergeant Harold Cole, ‘The Worst Traitor
of the War’, 1989.
Diana/family/reading: de Courcy, DM; Gérard Mignard, ‘Sir Oswald Mosley, Philos-
ophy and Action after 1945’, Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, Paris,
1977; D. Mosley, Loved; Mosley, The Alternative and Mosley — Right or Wrong?,
1961; Warburton letter; Roger Eatwell, ‘Fascism and political racism in post-war
Britain’.

Chapter Twenty-four: ‘Lucifer Fallen’

Illness: de Courcy, DM; Herbert Morrison, An Autobiography, 1960; Roberts,

Halifax; Simpson; A. J. P. Taylor, Off the Record: Political Interviews 1933-43,
W. P. Crozier, 1973; HO 45 series; Stafford, Churchill; CAB minutes; Koss.
Opposition to release: HO 45 and 262 series; Richard Thurlow, ‘The Guardian of
the “Sacred Flame”: The failed political resurrection of Sir Oswald Mosley’, ]CH,
33, 2, April 1998; de Courcy, DM; Kushner K/L; Holroyd; James Lees-Milne,
Ancestral Voices, 1975; Nicolson diary.
 SELECTED NOTES 673

Churchill/Morrison: Pimlott; Gilbert, Road; Srebrnik; de Courcy; Channon diary;

Thurlow, ‘Mod’; Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival,
1940-1965, 1966; Charles Edward Lysaght, Brendan Bracken, 1979; H.
Morrison; Harris.
Tom/Diana: D. Mosley, Loved; Dalley; de Courcy; James Lees-Milne, Prophesying
Peace, 1977; Guinness.
18B groups/NEFV: Kushner K/L and Prejudice; Dave Renton, ‘The Attempted Revival
of British Fascism: Fascism and Anti-Fascism 1945-51’, Ph.D. thesis, 1998; Mig-
nard; Hamm; Simpson; Thurlow, ‘Mod’; Srebrnik; Lees-Milne, Peace; Greenberg
papers 110/5.
Nazi end: D. Mosley, Loved; Aigner; Brendon; Anja Klabunde, Magda Goebbels,
2002.
Fascist revival/Dunlop: Thurlow; Information John Hope; Vansittart Papers (‘Inde-
pendent Nationalists’).
Anti-Semitism: de Courcy and DM; Dalley; Graham Macklin, ‘“‘A quite natural and
moderate defensive feeling”? The 1945 Hampstead “anti-alien” petition’, PP, 37,
3, 2003; Catherine Shepherd, ‘Fascism in Hampstead, 1945-49’, Parts 1 and 2,
AJR Journal, 2, 4, April 2002 and 5 May 2002; Renton.
Mosley return: HO 45 series; Renton; Simpson; CAB minutes; Bondy.
Fascism ban: CAB minutes; HO 45 series; Thurlow and ‘Mod’; PREM documents.
Fascist revival: Renton; Douglas Hyde, I believed: the autobiography of a former
British Communist, 1951; Thayer.
Traitors: Thurlow, ‘Mod’; BU Roll of Honour, NCCL; WO 76 and HO 45 series;
Simpson; Renton.
Book clubs/newspaper letter: HO 45 series; Hamm; Renton; History, January 2003;
Lionel S. Rose, ‘Fascism in Britain’, Factual Survey No. 1, February 1948; D.
Mosley, Loved; Miles Jebb (ed.), The Diaries of Cynthia Gladwyn, 1995; inter-
views with Warburton and Quill; CAB minutes.
Hess: Sunday Times, 24.5.70; Lord Dacre interview; Graham Macklin letter; Box 3
Jewish Chronicle Library Collection.
Anti-semitism/opposition/AJEX 43 Group: Renton; Beckman; www.geocities.com/
- andrewjharveyl/um; Mignard, op. cit.; Tony Kushner, “Anti-Semitism and Aus-
terity: The August 1947 Riots’ in Racial Violence in Britain in the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries, 1996, K/L; HO 45 series; Lionel Rose, “Survey of Open-Air
Meetings held by Pro-Fascist Organisations April-October 1947’, Factual Survey
No. 2, February 1948; BBC History, January 2004.
S$S/New order/Europe: Thurlow, ‘Mod’; John Laughland, The Tainted Source: The
Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea, 1997; Coogan; Boca; Redman;
Littlejohn; M. L. Smith and Peter M. R. Stirk (eds), Making the New Europe:
European Unity and the Second World War, 1990; Weale; Rattan, op. cit.
Franke/Skorzeny/Brotherhood: Boca; H. Jaeger, The Reappearance of the Swastika:
Coogan;
Neo-Nazism and the Fascist International, 1960; Lee; Tauber, 1 and 11;
Warburton interview; Eisenberg.
A Prelimi-
Yockey: Coogan and Francis Parker, ‘Yockey and the Nazi International:
nary Report’, document in Wiener Library; Lee.
674 SELECTED NOTES

The Alternative: Thayer; Coogan; R. Griffin (ed.), Fascism: a reader, 1995; Boca;
Thurlow, ‘Mod’; Diana Mosley, ‘The Politics of Henry Williamson’, HW Society
Journal, 3.5.81.
UM: Renton; Rose, op. cits; Thayer; Warburton and Quill interviews; BoDBJ files; ;
Spector collection; T. Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A 4

Social and Cultural History, 1994; Renton; Saunders collection, Sheffield Uni-
versity.

Chapter Twenty-five: The Union Movement

Anti-Fascists: Renton; Rose, 2; Bean; HO 45 and MEPO 3/546 series.

FBI: FBI 100-268487—4; KV 2 series; History Today, December 2003.
Yockey/war crimes: Lee; Thurlow; Renton; Coogan; Fuller diary; FBI files CG1oo-
25647.
Pirow; Thurlow; Mosley, The Alternative; Mignard.
Meetings: Walker; Beckman; Renton; Harvey, UM.
Permeation: Rose, BoDBJ files; Mignard; Renton; Saunders collection.
National Bolshevism/Yockey/Imperium: Lee; Lewis; John George and Laird Wilcox,
American Extremists, Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen, Communists, & Others,
1996; Thurlow, ‘Mod’; D. Prowe, ‘Classic Fascism and the New Radical Right in
Western Europe: Comparison and Continuity’, CEH, 3.3.94.
Anti-immigration -Semitism/violence: J. Gross. ‘The Lynskey Tribunal’, in Sissons
and French; H. T. F. Rhodes, The Lynskey Tribunal, 1949; Hamm; MEPOL
documents; BBC History, September 2004.
Failure: Thurlow, ‘Mod’; Dalley; Guinness; D. Mosley; Bean.
Passport/abroad: CAB minutes; D. Mosley; Roger Faligot and Pascal Krop, DST:
Police Secréte, 1999; Graham Macklin letter; Guinness; Richard Thurlow, Fas-
cism, 1999; C. Mosley; Mignard, op. cit.; Tauber, 1; US CIC files; Dalley.
German propaganda: US CIC files; Jaeger.
MSI/Fascist International: Mignard, op. cit.; US CIC files; Jaeger; Jeffrey Bale, ‘The
“Black” Terrorist International; Fascist Paramilitary Networks and the Strategy
of Tension in Italy 1968-74’, Ph.D. thesis, 1995; Harvey, UM; Tauber, 1; Lee;
Coogan.
South of France: Peter Quennell (ed.), A Lonely Business: A Self-Portrait of James
Pope-Hennessy, 1981; de Courcy; Guinness; Faligot/Krop; DST dossier, French
archives.
Nation Europa: Tauber, 1; Eisenberg; Boca; Glenn B. Infield, Skorzeny: Hitler’s
Commando, 1981.
Ireland: Irish Military Archives; Dalley; de Courcy, DM; D. Mosley, Loved;
Mignard, op. cit.; Guinness; Harvey, UM.
 SELECTED NOTES 675

Chapter Twenty-six: The Neo-Fascist Internationals

Malmé/MSE: Boca; Eisenberg; Hayes, Fascism; Payne; Jaeger; US CIC files.

Brotherhood: Tauber; Jeffrey Bale, ‘The “Black” Terrorist International’, op. cit.;
‘The Naumann Plot: Evidence from the Impounded Documents’, WLB, 8, 3-4,
May—August 1953; Jaeger; US CIC files; Lee.
UM: Sir Oswald Mosley, European Socialism, 1951; Roger Eatwell, ‘Fascism and
political racism in post-war Britain’; Bean; Thurlow, ‘Mod’.
Windsors: C. Mosley; Nancy Mitford letters; D. Mosley; Ziegler; Higham; Bryan/
Murphy.
Immigration: Bean; Harvey, www.geocities.com/andrewjharveyl/um.
The European: de Courcy, DM; Mignard, op. cit.; D. Mosley.
Neo-Nazis/Genoud: Tauber; Boca; Searchlight, September 2002; Lee; Irish govern-
ment documents.
Ireland: Irish government documents; D. Mosley; de Courcy, DM; Bryan/Murphy.
Anti-Semitism: de Courcy, DM; BBC History, December 2000; BBC 1, Omnibus,
7.2.2001.
Nazi visitors: Boca; US CIC files; Grundy; Hamm; Thurlow, ‘Mod’; Norbert and
Stephen Lebert, My Father’s Keeper, 2004; Searchlight, July 2001; Mignard,
op. cit.; Warburton letter.
Women: Chisholm/Davie; de Courcy, DM; N. Mosley, Truth.
Ideas: Laughland and Sunday Telegraph, 22.7.99; Lewis; Eatwell; DM Box 18 BU.

Chapter Twenty-seven: ‘The Coloured Invasion’

Notting Hill: Phillips; Tribune/The Times/Guardian|Mirror/Sketch/Kensington News

and West London Times; Harvey, UM; N. Mosley, Truth; Grundy; Mignard,
op. cit.; Lewis.
South Africa: Johannesburg Sunday Times, 1.2.59; Rand Daily Mail, 3.2.59;
Eisenberg.
1959 election: de Courcy, DM; BBC Radio Four Timeshift: Notting Hill Riots,
23.1.2003; Mignard, op. cit.; BBC History, December 2000; D. Mosley, Loved;
Benewick; Phillips; Harvey, UM; K. Kyle, ‘North Kensington’, in D. E. Butler and
R. Rose, The British General Election of 1959, 1960; N. Mosley, Truth.
Declaration/Thiriart: Mignard, op. cit.; Eisenberg; Harvey, UM; Boca; Bale, op. cit.;
C. Mosley, Nancy Mitford letters; FBI files.
Oxford: Isis/Cherwell/News Chronicle; Robert Rhodes James letter; Paul Foot inter-
view; Mignard, op. cit.; C. Mosley, Nancy Mitford letters; Andy McSmith, Ken-
neth Clarke: A Political Biography, 1994.
European National Party: Boca; Mignard, op. cit.; Eisenberg.
Violence: Tony Lambrianou, Inside the Firm: The Untold Story of the Krays’ Reign
of Terror, 2003; Eatwell; Harvey, UM, op. cit.; BBC Archives Mosley Speaker
File. ;
676 SELECTED NOTES

USA: State Department and FBI files.

www.natvan.com/
JE: Boca; Searchlight, July-September 2002; Thayer; Eisenberg;
national-vanguard/117/ndp; Mignard, op. cit.
t in Hands-
UM: John Brewer, ‘Postscript: anti-immigration and Union Movemen
worth’, in Mosley’s Men, 1984.

Chapter Twenty-eight: Rehabilitation

1970;
Rehabilitation: New Outlook, October 1966-December 1968/April-May
Radio Times, 16.3.66; D. Mosley, Loved; The Times, 15.6.68.
Anti-Semitism: Jewish Chronicle, 13.2.98; Sunday Telegraph, 3.11.96; Insider
interview.
NF: Walker; Tyndall; Warburton/Insiders 1 and 2 interviews.
King: Horrie; S. Dorril and R. Ramsay, Smear!: Wilson and the Secret State, 1991;
Cudlipp; King diary; Ruth Dudley Edwards, Newspapermen, Hugh Cudlipp, Cecil
Harmsworth King and the Glory Days of Fleet Street, 2003.
Autobiography/TV: David Frost, From Congregations to Audiences, 1993; Thurlow,
‘Mod’; Mignard, op. cit.; Allen letter DM BU; C. Mosley, Nancy Mitford letters.
Powell: Mignard, op. cit.; BBC History, December 2000; Douglas Scheon, Enoch
Powell and the Powellites, 1977.
Skidelsky: D. Mosley files Box 12 BU; Ingham; R. McKibben, ‘The Economic Policy
of the Second Labour Government 1929-31’, P@P, 68, 1975; Pimlott; Skidelsky,
Interests.
NF: Spearhead, August-September 1975; www.alphalink.com.au/radnat/britfas-
cism/chapter 2; Searchlight, September 1982; Ray Hill, The Other Side of Terror:
Inside Europe’s Neo-Nazi Network, 1988.
Anti-Semitism: de Courcy, DM; James Lees-Milne, Ancient as the Hills, Diaries,
1973-74, 1997; J. Parker; Sunday Express, 17.8.2003.
Skidelsky biography: Times Literary Supplement, 4.4.75; Encounter, June 1975;
Skidelsky, Reflect; W. Bader, ‘The Return of Mosley’, WLB, 30, 41-2, 19773
R. Benewick, ‘Interpretations of British Fascism’, PS, 14, 3; R. Skidelsky, “The
Return of Mosley: A Reply’, WLB, 30, 43-4, 1977; R. Thurlow, ‘The black
knight’, PP, 9, 3, May-June 1975.
Death/funeral: James Lees-Milne, Through Wood and Dale, Diaries, 1975-78, 1998
and Deep Romantic Chasm, Diaries, 1979-81, 2000; D. Mosley, Loved;
N. Mosley interview and Truth; Sewell obits The Times/Telegraph 5/4.4.2000;
John Mosley letter; de Courcy, DM; Skidelsky, Interests; BBC History, December
2000; James.
Diana: D. Mosley, Loved and interview; N. Mosley interview; de Courcy, DM.
Fascism: Roger Griffin, ‘A spotter’s guide to fascism in the post-fascist era’, Search-
light, November 2002.

AF Alternative Futures; AJLH Australian Journal of Labour History; AJPH Austra-

lian Journal of Political History; BSSLH Bulletin of the Society for the Study of
 SELECTED NOTES 677
Labour History; CR Contemporary Record; EHR English Historical Review;
EHRR Economic History Review; ERH European Review of History; HJ Historical
Journal; HR History Research; HS History Studies; IHS Irish Historical Studies;
I]P International Journal of Psychoanalysis; INS Intelligence and National Security;
IRSH International Review of Social History; ]CH Journal of Contemporary His-
tory; JEH Journal of Economic History; JHR Journal of Historical Review; ]MH
Journal of Modern History; ]PH Journal of Politics and History; J]PI Journal of
Political Ideologies; JSS Jewish Social Studies; LHR Labour History Review;
NELHB North East Labour History Bulletin, OH Oral History; PG Political
Geography; PP Patterns of Prejudice; P&P Past and Present; PS Political Studies;
PT Political Theory; RIS Review of International Studies; SH Social History;
2o0thCBH 2oth Century British History; 20thCS Twentieth Century Studies; WHR
Women’s History Review; WLB Wiener Library Bulletin.
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Adeney, Martin, Nuffield: A Biography, 1993
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Andrew, Christopher, Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Com-
munity, 1985
Baker, David, Ideology of Obsession: A. K. Chesterton and British Fascism, 1996
Ball, Stuart, Baldwin and the Conservative Party: The Crisis of 1929-1931, 1988
Parliament and Politics in the Age of Baldwin and MacDonald: The Headlam
Diaries 1923-1935, 1992
Bauerkamper, Arnd, Die ‘Radikale Rechte’ in Grossbritannien, Nationalistische,
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velt and Tyler Kent, Spy, 1991
Beckett, Francis, The Rebel Who Lost His Cause: The Tragedy of John Beckett, MP,
1999
Beckman, Morris, The Forty-Three Group, 1993
Bellamy, Richard Reynell, ‘We Marched With Mosley’ (unpub. dated between 1958
and 1968)
Benewick, Robert, The Fascist Movement in Britain, 1972
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Bowra, C. M., Memories 1898-1939, 1966

Boyce, D. G., Englishmen and Irish Troubles: British Public Opinion and the Making
of Irish Policy 1918-1922, 1972
Bradford, Sarah, Sacheverell Sitwell: Splendours and Miseries, 1993
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1984
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 Index

OM indicates Sir Oswald Mosley

ABC (Spanish paper) 379 262, 328, 421, 452, Allen, Commandant Mary
Abd-el-Krim 339, 379 473 189, 258, 267, 282,
Abeilli, Tuli 582 Aeschylus 534 316. 335, 389, 400,
Abend Post 584 Age ofPlenty 196, 251 424, 451-2, 454,
Action (BUF) 371, 404, Agenda 601 459, 473, 480, 487,
414, 432, 441, 444, Agnew, Peter 230 492-3, 549
4475 452-4, 456, Aigner, Dietrich 306, 397 Allen, Natasha 606
465, 468, 471-2, Aiken-Sneath, Francis 236, Allen, Sam 486
478, 482, 484, 492, 484, 518 Allen, W. E. D. ‘Bill’ 145,
494, SOO-T, 515 Air Board 31 152-5, 165, 169,
Action (NP) 174, 179, Air League 267, 325 172, 174, 177, 191,
185, 188, 191, 277, Air Time 416, 435, 460 206, 214, 234, 245,
345,441 Aird, John 294 247, 267, 278-9,
Action (UM) 616, 618, Airlie, Earl of 51 290, 311, 314, 3375
622-3, 629-31 Airmen 17-8, 41, 267, 370-2, 386-8, 393,
Action Frangaise 74, 208, 328-9,
356, 369, 403 415-6, 420, 427,
317 Airwork Services 379 437» 440, 4975
Action Press 338 Aitken, Janet 609 570-1, 606, 638
Acton, Harold 201 Aitken, Max 174, 206 Allens, David and Sons
Acworth, Bernard 529 Alba, Duke of 69, 379, 387-8,
430, 435,
Adam, Sergeant Major 12 478 437, 440-1
Adams, Eddie 617 Albertini, Georges 586, 596 Allom, Charles 427
Adams, Len 589 Aldington, Richard 178 All Quiet on the Western
Addison, Colin 46 Alexander, A. V. 121 Front (1929) 178
Adenauer, Chancellor Alexander, Derek 616 Almirante, Giorgio 582,
Konrad 588, 602, 638 Algerian National 586
Adler 534 Liberation Front 603 Alpenruf 585
Advisory Committee Allen, Lord 388 * Alternative, The 534, 553,
(Birkett Committee) Allen, Mrs 437 564, 566, 575, 584,
382, 386, 472, 476-7, Allen, Barbara 486 587
481, 507-8, 510, Allen, Cissy 153 Amateur Fencing
514-5, 517-8, 520 Allen, Clifford 78, 82, 98 Association 209
Aerial Navigation Bill Allen, Drennan 153 Amaudruz, Guy 586, 596,
(1918)41 Allen, Geoffrey 415 632-3
Aeroplane, The 22, 41, Allen, Lydia 50 American Club 486
688 INDEX

Argyll, Duke of 609 224, 256, 271, 292,

Amery, John 530-2, 551
Amery, Leo 38, 40, 182, Aristotle 534 364, 367, 370, 388,
183, 256, 326, 530 Arlosoroff, Victor 382 403, 422, 458
Amherst, Lord Jeffrey 379, Arnaud, Madame 268 Bale, Jeffrey 595
410 Arnold, Lord 453, 479, Balfour Declaration 65
Amor, Majorie (Mrs 489 Ball, Sir Joseph 312-3,
Majorie Mackie) Arriba 577 439-40,
504, 506,
Ashley, Lady Sylvia 320 518
473-4, 479, 482,
Asquith, Herbert (PM) 16, Bank of International
486, 490, 495
Anderson, Sir John 481, 23, 30-1,
36, 63, 70 Settlement 372
Asquith, Margaret 41, 58, Banker’s Record 444
485,
495, 498-9,
500, 502, 505-6 168 Bankhead, Talluah 69
Anfuso, Filipo 582 Associated Press 405 Banks, J. C. 569
Anglo-French Supreme Association Argentina- Bardeche, Maurice 561,
War Council 469 Europa 595 565, 571, 586, 588,
Anglo-German Agency for Association of Jewish Ex- 590-1, 594, 632
Domestic Servants Servicemen (AJEX) Barker, Dudley 583
230, 251 558, 578, 584 Barnes, James Strachey
Anglo-German Association Astor, Lady 28, 41, §2, 199, 234
105, I10, 127, 239, Baron, Bernard 169
424
Anglo-German Club 168 440, 494 Baron, Edward 310
Anglo-German Fellowship Atkinson, Justice 521 Barr, Hazel 197, 200, 411
362-3, 372, 387, Atlantic Charter 561 Barry, Andy 301
415, 424, 438-9, Attlee, Clement 140, 143, Barry, Gerald 152, 297,
450, 453, 460, 468, 1545 3753 494, 498, 298

470, 532 500, 548 Barrymore, Blanche 108

Anglo-German Auden, W. H. 185 Bartlett, E. J. 168
Information Service Auslands Organization BAT 379
424 284-5, 362, 472 Bath Club 519
Anglo-German Naval Avanti 74 Battle of Loos 23, 379
Treaty (1935) 341 Battle of the Somme 24
Anglo-German Review ‘B, Mrs’ 263 Battle of Ypres 20-1, 372,
424 Baarova, Lida 382 464
Animal Defence Society Bacmeister, Walter 288, Bauer, Christian 410, 439,
586 290, 294, 301-2 459, 464
Anslow, Lord 4, 239 Badiglio, General Peitro Bayer 462
Antieuropa 212 359 Bayreuth (Wagner Festival)
Anti-Fascist League 577 Bailey, Sir Abe 144, 426 382-3, 640
Anti-German Union Bailey, ‘Bill’ 370, 630 Beamish, Henry Hamilton
(AGU) 195 Bailey, Edward (Fred) 77> 196, 203, 236,
Anti-Sanctionist League 229-30, 349-50 426
374 Bailey, L. W. 295 Bean, John 569, 584, 590,
Anti-Socialist Union 196 Baille, Sir Adrian 237 597, 604, 622, 625,
Anti-Suffrage League 44 Bakers Records 444 636
Anti-Waste League 47, 50 Baldwin, Oliver 151, Beaton, Cecil 111, 179,
Arab Commercial Bank 164-5, 167, 179 _ 180
603 Baldwin, Stanley 49, 68, Beaumont, Colin 415-6,
Archbishop of Canterbury 70, 102, 118-9, 128, 419, 430
238 155, 164, 165, 180, Beaumont, J. M. 416
ern
INDEX 689
Beaumont, Michael 267, Bellew, Kyrle 251 Binot, Rene 591, 596
299, 327 Belloc, Hilaire 57, 74, 205, Birch, Nigel 224, 248
Beavan, Arthur 229, 529 208, 251, 447 Birkett, Lord (Sir Norman)
Beaverbrook, Lord 31, 44, Belsen 548, 567 304, 439, 476, 481,
103-4, 114-5, 125, Bene, Otto 236, 253, 262, 510, 514-5, 517-8,
128-9, 132, 142, 302, 318 520-1, 555
148,
150, 153-5, Benewick, Robert 414 Bismarck, Prince Otto von
=) 158, 165, 167, 169, Benn, Ernest 456 241, 287, 293,
174, 181, 192, 205, Benn, Tony 141 300-1, 309, 319-20
212, 228, 269, 292, Benn, Wedgwood (Lord ‘Black, Miss’ (BU) 409
376, 403-4, 483, Stansgate) 141 Black and Tans 26, 56, 58,
489, 5375 549 605, Bennett, Charles 349-50 61, 197, 247
609 Bennett, Wilfred rrr ‘Black Book’ (MI5) 520
Bebb, Captain Cecil Benton, Kenneth 523-4 ‘Black Book’ (Nazi) 516
379-80 Berger, Gottlob 532 Black Gang, The (1922)
Beck-Broichsitter, Major Bergery, Gaston 582, 195
Helmut 562, 582, 589 ‘Black House’ (BUF) 246,
587, 595 Bergon, Henri 75 260-1, 285, 293-4,
Beckett, Francis 189 Berlin-Grunewald 441 311, 336, 356, 366,
Beckett, John 122, 134, Berlin Lokal-Anzeiger 530
143, 146, 150, 189, 377» 393s 421 Blackshirt, The 200, 224,
251,
277, 292-3, Berlin Philarmonic 23%=252375254-5;
322, 326, 330, 350, Orchestra 571 267-8, 277, 285,
358-60, 366, 371, Bernays, Robert 207, 278, 306-7, 309, 314,
389, 394, 404, 407, 286, 325 325, 335-6, 344,
409, 412-3, 445, Berners, Lord Gerald 202, 355, 358, 360, 369,
452, 459, 471, 474, 249; 295, 373s 3775 371, 374, 383, 390,
476, 479, 484, 490, 541, 5435 549 394, 417
SOI, 506, 509, SII, Bernhardt, Dr Johannes ‘Black Thursday’ 126
547 441, 586 ‘Black Tuesday’ 126
Beckman, Maurice 569, Besant, Mrs Annie 27, Blackeney, Brig. Gen.
593 89-90 R. B. D. 196, 425
Bedaux, Charles 483 Betjeman, John 201, 541, Blackett, Sir Basil 211
Bedford, Duke of 549 Blair, Sir Reginald 370
(Tavistock) sor, 515, Bevan, Aneurin 126, Blair, Tony 647
524, 529, 547 I§O-1, 154-5, 159, Blake, (Lord) Robert 638
Bedford, Richard 614 160, 163-4, 175; ‘Blanchet’ (agent) 528
Behn, Dr Richard 345, 275, 548, 551 Blavatsky, Madame
427-8, 430, 446 Bevin, Ernest 130, 142, Helena 27
Belgian Workers Party ISI, 452, 536, 639, Bledisloe, Lord 292
205 554s 5655 570 Blinkhorn, Martin 313,
Belgium, King and Queen ‘Bianchi, Mr’ (Italian * 646
of 51 agent) 377 Blockey, Robert 414
Bell, Quentin 75, 275 Bibiesco, Priscilia 605 Blonstein, Dr J. 310
Bellairs, Carlyon 37, 128, ‘biff boys’ 172, 175, 182 Bluebird 3 56
215, 293 Bingham, John (Lord Blueshirts (Ireland) 316
Bellamy, Richard R. 34, Clanmorris) 197, 296, Blumenfeld, Ralph 38,
65, 247, 249,293, 488 I24, 132, 196, 258,
312, 476, 547 Bingham, Ralph 184, 189 292
690 INDEX

Bradford, Charles 227, British National Party 622,

Blunt, Anthony 522-3
Board of Deputies of 322 636
British Jews 380, 396, Brailsford, H. N. 78, 79, British People’s Party
450-1;
454, 545, 85, IOI (BPP) 452-3, 458,
547, 401, 414, 436, Braithwaite, Rudy 618 471, 473, 484, 501s
554s 567 Brand, Phyllis 43 525, 547
Boer War 38 Brand, Robert 91 British Resistance
Bohle, Dr Ernst-Wilhelm Braun, Eva 455 Organization 508-9
Brenan, Gerald sor British Shorthorn Society
302, 362, 454
Bolin, Luis 379 Brewer, John 326, 632 427
Bolingbrooke, Lord 217 Briscoe, Norah 506 British Traders Bureau
Bonfield, Margaret 57 Bristol, Arnold 200 (BU) 349, 444
Bonham Carter, Lady Britain First (aircraft) 340 British Union for the
British Array 439, 445 Abolition of
Violet
57, 499, 539
Book, The 488 British Brothers’ League Vivisection 373
‘Book Clubs’ 554 350 British Union of Fascists
Books and Bookmen 643 British Council 620 (BUF) and British
Bookseller and Stationer British Council Against Union of Fascists and
European National Socialists
444
Boothby, Robert 45, 51-2, Commitments 439, (BU) 76, 128, 217,
85, 128, 130, 132, 452, 460 371, 373-4:
1355 137, 142, British Council for a anti-semitism 224, 237,
152-3,
155, 158-60, Christian Settlement 259, 263, 302,
182, 193-4, 213, in Europe (BCCSE) 304-5, 318, 334,
215, 228, 271, 298, 471, 473-4, 486, 348, 360, 370, 383,
387,
430, 435-6, 489-90 395-6, 414-5, 420,
440, 522, 605, 641, British Democratic Party 423; FUBW 226-7;
644 545 Women’s Section 227,
Borghese, Prince Valerio British Empire Union 195, 258, 282, 332, 4925
586 1975 454 ‘Fascist feminism’
Bormann, Martin 334, British Fascist 204 281-2; Funds/
461, 526, 603 British Fascisti/s (BF) 109, Mussolini 236, 255,
Borremann, F. K. 602 128, 194, 196, 198, 269-70, 277-8, 306,
Borth, Fred 630 199, 203, 204, 244, 330, 3375 345» 355
Bosworth, R. J. B. 192 245, 254, 268, 293 365, 369-71, 378,
Bothamley, Margaret 451, British Free Coprs (BFC) 409, 517, 5463
454, 4595 474 532, 552, 561 membership 247,
Bouverd, Jean-Marie 601 British Glycerine Co. 427 288-9,
368, 449,
Bow Group 634 British-Italian Bulletin 361 489; Olympia
Bowden, Sir Robert 115 British League of Ex- 295-300,
304, 3103
Bowles, Commander (MP) Servicemen and Nazis links 254, 302,
426 Women 542, 547; 308, 317; 363, 419,
Bowra, C. M. 96 549, 553, 557-8, 515, 517; Nazi funds
Box,.F. M. 171, 186, 188, 566-7, 569 377> 4035 414, 448,
$LIgg2zON3225 British League Review 517, 520; Cotton
330-2, 365-6 566 _ campaigns 314, 326,
Bracken, Brendan 45, 153, British Legion (SS) 405 329, 3673
155, 176, 186, 228, British Movietone News organization 321,
233, 298, 524, 536 356 330, 331-2,
3653
 INDEX 691
. court marshall 322; 433-4) 445, 447, Burt, Deputy Commander
East End 3 50-1, : 456, 460, 470, 489, Len 573
375-6, 380-1, 383, 547 Burwitz, Gudman (nee
396, 410, 447-8; Brooks, Jack 373 Himmler) 608-9
‘Mind Britain’s Brousse, Jacques 601 Buswell, Detective
Business’ 354-5, Brown, John 531 Sergeant 541
360-1,
368, 374; Brown, Noel 610 Butler, H. B. 127, 129-30
. decline 310, 312, 329, Brown, W. J. 138, 143, Butler, Rab 615
336,
346, 366-7, 150, 153, 155, 156, Butterwick, Mr 502
376, 443, 4495 159, 160, 162, 165 Byron, Robert 201
elections 376, 380, Bruce Lockhart, Robert
395, 410-1, 487; 14, 124, 134, 148, Cadogan, Sir Alexander
organization 401, 162, 169, 182, 483, 501, 516
412, 414, 428, 444; I9O-I,
367, 429, 495 Cairns, Professor (Unity’s
anti-fascism/Cable Bruderschaft doctor) 481
Street 389-95; (Brotherhood) 559, Callan, Paul 642
Abdication Crisis 403; 561, 574, 583, 602 Cambridge University
approach of war 440, Brunning, Clement 497 Fascist Association
449, 467-8; Brunswick, Duchess of 416
internment 502, 342 Cameron, Helen 13
505-6, 524-5, 5445 Brust, Det. Insp. Harold Camogna, Carlo 361
‘roll of honour’ 552 184 Campbell, Eric 225
British Union of Freemen Bryan, Dan 599 Campbell, Jeannie 609
525 Bryant, Arthur 408, 445, Campbell, Sir Malcolm
British Union Quaterly 474 356
399-400 Bryce, Lord 60 Campbell, Roy 399-400,
British United Press 356 Bucard, Marcel 317, 327, 601
Britons Society 77, 426, 33 Camrose, Lord 371
551 Buccleuch, Duke of 258. Canaris, Admiral 356,
Britons Vigilantes Action 328, 453, 470, 486, 517
League 549 4955 523 Cannadine, David 46, 70
Brittain (Mail executive) Buchanan, George 447, Canning, George 338
329 479 Canning, Supt. (SB) 266
Brittain, Vera 388 Buchanan, Jack 387 Canock, Lord 426
Brocket, Lord 373, 426, Buchanan, Tom 399 Capel, H. J. (Air Vice
453 Buchenwald 567 Marshal) 19
Brock-Griggs, Anne 374, Bugle and Tiger 14 Car and General Insurance
455, 487, 492 ‘Bulldog Drummond’ 195, 421
Brocking, George 467 421 Carlberg, Carl 586, 591
Brocklehurst, Philip 487 Bullitt, William C. 496, ‘Carlos Network’ 603
Brockway, Fenner 85, 86, 507 Carlton Club 63
103, 122, 129, 143, Bureau Concordia 52@ Carlyle, Thomas 26, 73,
151, 158, 165 Burgess, Guy 440, 488, I16, 217, 291, 310,
Brooke, General Sir 483, 522, 606 492; 543
512, 5175 525 Burgess, Victor 542, 556, Carlyon, A. K. 63
Brooks, Collin 269, 296, 566, 576, 580, 597 Carroll, C. E. 424, 462
308, 329, 334, 340, Burke, Edmund 554 Carson, Sir Edward 16,
353-45 375» 3975 Burke, Owen 350, 410 56, 256
401-5, 414, 4309, Burns, Michael 357 Carter, Lt. Col. John 195
 692 INDEX

Cartland, Barbara 53, 69, Channon, Chips 260, 403, Romanes lecture 141;
‘Suicide club’ 159;
Luz 538
Casa Maury, Marquis Chaplin, Lord 456 fencing 13; on Lloyd
112, 124 Charles, Hilary 53 George 23; Minister
Casa Maury, Paula Charnley, John 323, 37°, of Air 47; on OM 44;
(Gellibrand) 112, 124, 4575 585, 599-600, on Snowden 122;
616 Young Tories 128;
145, 153
Castlerosse, Doris 180 Chastelain, Major de 526 India 257, 326, 3345
Catholic Herald 379, 410, Chatham, Earl of (Pitt the Hitler 377-8, 4325
Elder) 25, 39, 41 Abdication 403-10;
456
Catholic Times 456 Chaumier, Air on Rothermere 340;
Catlin, George 137, 141, Commodore J. A. ‘Fifth Column’ 464;
142, 146, 150, 165, 258, 267, 278 attacks Fascism 432;
166, 168, 272, 296, Cheke, Marcus 510 PM 495, 497, 54,
300 Chesham, Guy 575-6 508, 510-1, 522,
Cavendish-Bentinck, Chesterton, A. K. 251-2, 523, 538; internment
Henry 32, 55-7 304-5, 309, 320, 497-8,
506, 513, 524
Cazalet, Victor 155 324, 366, 417, 420, Ciano, Count Galeazzo
Cecil, Algernon 364 429; 433 445, 4545 234, 245, 333, 365;
Cecil, David 56 452, 563, 605, 636 395
Cecil, Lord Hugh 20, 55, Chesterton, Cecil 251 Cimmie Mosley Day
206 Chesterton, G. K. 61, 74, Nursery (Kensington)
- Cecil, Lord Robert 32, 47, 208, 251, 350, 365 498
49-50,
55, 58, 64, Cheyette, Bryan 207 Citrine, Walter 253
68, 70 Cheyney, Peter 184, 189 Clark, Dorothy 169
Celli, John 233 Chicago Tribune 570 Clark, James 387, 448
Centre International Children of the Sun 45 Clarke, Edward ‘Mick’ 3.48,
d’Estudes sur le Chivalry 184 359; 379, 3955 410,
Fascisme (CINEF) Christian Defence 432, 5OI, 546, 600
199 Movement 473 Clarke, Kenneth 623
Cerrecoundo, Christiansen, Arthur 537 Clausen, Dr 327, 333
Mademoiselle 605 Churchill, Clementine 63, Cline, J. R. 137
Cesarani, David 383 5135 524, 535 Clive, Lord 460
Chadwick, (British Churchill, Diana 320 ‘Cliveden Set’ 532
diplomat) 600 Churchill, Lord Ivor 377 Clynes, J. R. 56, 131, 245
Chalet, Emil 291, 301 Churchill, Lord Randolph Coates, Capt. R. 284
Challen, Charles 549 25, 41, 135,214, Cochrane, Kelso 616
Chamberlain, Austen 50, 334-5;
457, 609 Cockburn, Claud 249
206, 207, 312 Churchill, Randolph 179, Cohen, (Lord Justice) Sir
Chamberlain, Houston 181, 182, 202, 205, Lionel 310
Stewart 383 282 Cohen, Richard 174
Chamberlain, Joseph Churchill, Sarah 377 Cohn, Norman 646
37-40,
46, 154 Churchill, Winston 29, 68, Cole, Commander E. H.
Chamberlain, Neville 84, I16, 150, 153, 154, 425-6, 452
104, 122, I71, 184, 176, 181, 188, 205, Cole, G. D. H. 73-5, 116,
417, 438-440, 467, 228, 239, 314, 367, 117, 123,125, 126,
469, 474, 482, 397, 415, 470, 478, 129, 133, 141,143,
494-5, 499, S01, 509 484, 486, 489-90, 157, 182, 226
Chandos Group 205 524, 598, 641, 646: Cole, Margaret 134
 INDEX
693
Colefax, Lady (Sibyl) Cooper, Thomas 531, 552 Crome, Werner 421
27-8,
53, 175, 372 Co-ordinating Committee Cromwell, Oliver 143,
Collier, Vincent (Captain for Anti-Fascist 310, 343, 445, 526,
‘X’) 203, 381, 413, Activities 318 647
454; Co-ordinating Committee Cross, Colin 32, 366, 411,
Collins, Michael 58, 60 of Patriotic Societies 544, 627
Colman, Ronald 344 454 Cross, John Carlton 454
Cologne Chamber of Coote, Colin 45-6, 202, Crossman, Richard 13
Commerce 441 214, 215, 638 Crowle, William 484-5
Colville, John 513, 522 Cornwallis-Evans, T. P. Crowley, Aleister 26, 90,
Comintern (Communist 327 311
International) 231, Corporate Book Club 554 Croyden Airport 373
351 Corporate Club 577 Crowood 543, 548
Comitati d’azione per Corporatism 39, 141, 157, Crozier, W. P. 225. 535
PUniveralita di Roma 185, 188, 190 Crux Easton 541, 543
(CAUR) 235, 270, Coselochi (Italian fascist) Cudlipp, Hugh 309, 637,
283, 327, 333 327 641
Committee on Fascism 5 53 Costa, General 582 Cullen, Stephen 228
Committee of Imperial Costigan, D. 592 Cumings, Leslie 165,
Defence 354 Coston, 632 173, 176, 205, 210,
Communist Party of Great Cottenham, Lord (Mark) 314
Britain 77, 102, 484, 487 Cunard 197
189-90,
195, 197, Cottentin, Maurice 583 Cunard, Lady (Maud) 28,
198, 204, 222, 231, Cotter, James 558 535201 328
263, 295, 301, 305, Cotton Factory Times 314 Cunliffe-Owen, Sir Hugh
318-9, 351, 362, Coty, Francois 317 128, 132, 134, 159,
375s 390, 396, 423, Counter-Intelligence Corps 169, 379
487, 537 (US) 345, 356, 559, Curragh, The (County
Common Sense 58 563, 585-6, 596 Kildare) 16, 23
Commonwealth Party Courlander, Roy 531 Currey, Muriel 234, 256,
569-70 Courtauld, Sir Samuel 258, 359, 361
Congress of Nazi Groups 128, 313 Curry, Jack 285
Abroad 356 Cowdray, Lord 31, 55, 60, Curzon, Lord 31, 43-4,
Conner, 545 64 48-9, 62, 66, 168,
Connolly, Cyril 203 Cowling, Maurice 509 344
Connor, J. D. 56 Cox, Anthony 405 Curzon, Alexandra (Baba
Conservative Research Cox, Hubert 284 Metcalfe), 112, 124,
Department 313 Craigavon, Lord 284 221, 240, 319-20,
Constitutional Research Craik, Lady 116 385, 402-3, 409,
Association 525 Craven, William F. 472 4575 477; 607, 642:
Coogan, Kevin 562, 575 Creasey, Ronald 250 childhood 43; Cimmie
Conway, Martin 316 Cripps, Sir Stafford 146 marriage 51;
Cook, Arthur 102, 110, 222, 256, 257, 266, personality 62;
150, 156 271, 274, 314, 526 attracted to OM 144,
Cook, Colin 41 Crisis (BU paper) 404 223, 248, 260, 352,
Cooper, Lady Diana 69, Crisis (NP film) 186 445, 535-6; joins
238, 465 Croft, Sir Henry Page 35, BUF 282; on Diana
Cooper, Duff 69, 167, 128, 183, 469, 502 333, 513; Grandi
337;
405, 465, 482 Croker, William 505, 518 Halifax 477
 INDEX
694
Curzon, Lady Cynthia Darrell, Margaret 372 de Leon, Ponce 623
(Cimmie Mosley), Davidson, Colin 242, 406 del Boca, Angelo 628
103, I12, 116, 124, Davidson, J. C. C. 41, Delmer, Sefton 393,
156, 161, 168, 340, 155, 406 607-8
Davies, Dan 168, 169, 170 del Monte, Count Antonio
344, 382, 642:
childhood/teenager Davies, Sellick 166, 187, 500
43-4; end of WWI 188 del Vayo, Julio Alvarez
33; Paris 48-9; OM ‘Dawes Plan’ 372 400
51-2, 1193 Dawn Patrol (1930) 178 de Maeztu, Ramiro 75-6
personality 52; Dawnay, Alan 358 de Man, Henrik 206, 560
politics 119-20, 127, Dawson, Lord 535-6 de Marsanich, Augusto
145, 150; OM women Dawson (BU member) 421 595
108, 112, 145-6, Day, James Wentworth de Munck, Helene 486,
213, 232; In Turkey/ 460 4925 494-5
Russia 144-5; NP Day, Kenneth 467 ‘Department Z’ (BUF)
163, 176-7, 191, ‘Deacon, Richard’ (aka 265, 274
207; children 180, Patrick McCormick) de Rivera, Jose Antonio
193, 204; BUF 226; ill 523 Primo 316, 510, 582
209, 213, 238; death Dearborn Independent De Ropp, Baron 476
239; will 301 100 Der Sturmer 283, 325,
Curzon, Irene (Lady Deardon, Dr Harold 505, 346, 420, 423, 425,
Ravensdale), 112, 518 475
£24, DET) 233, 260, Deat, Marcel 206, 530, Desert Island Discs 645
320, 420, 439, 457: 560, 586 Deterding, Sir Henry 278,
childhood/personality Death ofaHero (1928) 306, 337
43, 61; Cimmie 178 Deutsche-Englische
marriage/problems Dehler, Dr 603 Gesellschaft 362
51, TIO, 119-20, Der Deutsche Block (DDB) Deutsche Partei (DP) 596
232; on OM 221, 583, 596 Deutsche Reichspartei
469, 495, 506, 5515 D’Erlanger, Catherine 28 (DRP) 602, 607,
Cimmie’s illness/death de Beaumont, Charles 174, 623-4, 631
238; on Diana 333, 184, 209, 320 Deutsche Soziale
445, 469, 481; de Brogueville, Graf 3.45 Bewegung 591
guardian to OM de Courcy, Anne 352, 526, Deutsches Flugblatt 577
children 240, 340, 548, 606 De Valera, Eamon 61, 553
409, 465, 511 de Courcy, Kenneth 406 de Walzin, Baron
Curzon, Mary (Leiter) Deedes, W. F. 220, 391, Brugmann 427
43-4,98 396, 541 Dewette, Elsa 575
de Gaulle, General 630 De Wolfe, Elsie 53
Dachau 548 Degrelle, Leon 316, 427, Dickens, Rear Admiral
Dairyman, The 444 561, 591, 602 Gerald 225
Dallas, George 150 de Havilland, Sir Geoffrey Dickoff, (German Foreign
Dalton, Lady 225 19, 328, 451 Minister) 300, 301
Dalton, Hugh 85, 109, de Havilland, Lt Hereward Dickson, Lovat 399
I14, 116, 146, 150, 19 Dienststelle Ribbentrop
152, 154, 157, 167, de la Cierva, Juan 379 _ (Buro)
330, 362, 383,
501, 539 de Lassoe, Major 526, 581 392, 420
Dansey, Claude 528 de Laubespin, Comte Dietrich, Otto 333, 377,
Darnley, Lord 483, 489 Antoine 474 458
 INDEX
695
Dietze, Dr Roderich 526 Downe, Lady 189, 254, Earls Court Exhibition
Dinamico Social 601 - 278, 367, 430, 455, Hall 457
Direction de la 463, 487, 5or East African Standard 327
Surveillance du ‘Drew, Colonel’ 524 Eatwell, Roger 560
territoire (DST) 581, Driberg, Tom 430 Eccles, Lt-Col. (WWI) 23
589 Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre Eccles, David 512
Di San Faustino, Princess 29 Eckersley, Frances 451,
‘Jane 53, 192 ‘Driver, Dick’ 69 454
Disraeli, Benjamin 25 Driver, Nellie 376 Eckersley, Peter 168-9,
Diston, Marshall 205 Druids 459 387-8, 415-7, 419
Distributist League 251, Drummond, Edwina 373 430, 437, 448, 451,
350, 644 Drummond, Eric 317 454, 460, 463
Dixon, Piers 554 Drummond, George Economic Freedom League
Dohring, Herbert 341 372-3,
425, 456, 457 205
Dolan, Charles 263-5, Drummond’s Bank 373, Economic Policy
311-2 456 Association (Berlin)
Dollan, Patrick 84 Drummond Wolff, Henry 268
Dollfus, Chancellor 278, 289, 299, 364, Economist, The 228
(Austria) 317 470 Ede, Chuter 236, 551,
Dollmore, Eugen 591 Duckworth-King, Sir 553s 570
Domvile, Admiral Sir George 258 Eden, Anthony 358, 360,
Barry 424, 450-1, Dufferin, Lord 225 3735 423, 469
456, 458, 460, 462, Dugdale, Thomas 406 Edmonds, Major Harry
471, 473-4, 476-7, Duggan, Grace 44 525
482, 486-7, 505, Dunbar, Mr 256 Edward I, King 425
509, 515, 519 Dundas, Admiral Sir Edward VII, King 103,
Domvile, Lady 460, 487, Charles 233, 234 353
524 Dundas, Ian Hope 233, Edward VIII, King 369,
Domvile, Compton s19 234, 245, 255, 267, 3735 3933 493-4,
Don, Sir William Bt 447 274, 307; 318, 330, 406-7, 422
Donner, Sir Patrick 207, 340, 361, 365, 369, Edwards, H. W. J. 74
299, 364 403, 412, 419 ‘Egalite, Philippe’ 116
Donovan, Capt. Brian Dundas, Lynette Eggenfelden Printing Co.
246, 366, 401, 455, (daughter) 233, 365 596
468, 474, 484-5, Dunlop, George 529, Ehrhardt, Arthur 586,
SOT, 644 541-2, 545-6 591
Doran, Edward 230 Dunn, Lady 260, 415, 18B Detainees Aid Fund
Dorchester Agricultural 426, 452, 473, 502 529-30, 541-2, 545
Society 586 Dunn, Sir James 132, 502 18B Publicity Council 529,
Doriot, Jacques 530 Du Pont (family) 372 541-2
Dorman, Geoffrey 21, Dupow, Otto Karl 591 Einsatzgruppen
267, 329, 340 Duprat (post-WWII neo Kommando 516, 571
Dorman, Pamela 267 Nazi) 632 Eisentraeger, Lothar 356
Douglas, Major Clifford Durrell, Lawrence 400 Elam, E. Dudley 468, 484,
76-7 Dutt, Rajani Palme 205, 487, 528
Douglas-Hamilton, Lord 318 Elam, Norah 282, 468,
426 Duvivier, Claude 451, 480, 484, 487, 501,
Douglas-Hamilton, Lady 484-5, 515 528
Nina 450 — Dyer, Lady (Schroeder) 436 Eliot, Maxine 29, 32
696 INDEX

Eliot, T. S. 26, 74 European Economic Farson, Dan 628

Elizabeth I, Queen 3, 416 Community (EEC) Fascist, The 203
Elliott, Walter 45-6, 103, 610 Fascist Quarterly 383,
128, 132, 135, 142, European Liaison office 413
596, 600 Fascist Union of British
1535 155 259 255;
292 European National Workers (FUBW)
Elton, Lord 458 Movement 616 226-7, 247, 301,

Elton, Geoffrey 102 European New Order 607 322-3

Elwyn Jones, (Lord) European People’s Fascist Week 249, 277
Frederich 405 Movement 600 Fawcett, Arthur 229
Emmanuel, King Victor European Press Agency Faweett, E. 472
427, 430 Featherstone-Hammond,
373
Empire Crusade 129, 132, Europan Situation, The Charles 473
152, 164, 167, 202 (1948) 565, 574 Federal Reserve Board
Empire Day 12 European Study centre IOI
Empire Economic Union (MSI) 562 Federation of British
256 Evans, Captain Dudley M. Industry (FBI) 98,
Empire Free Trade 115, 4155 434 TOO, 133
124, 260 Evans, Dr Geoffrey 535-6 Federation of Progressive
Empire Industries Evening Dispatch 172 Societies and
Association 128 Evening Standard 81, 124, Individuals 251
‘Enderle, Dottore’ 245 139, 151, 154, 194, FBI 570, 577, 622, 628
Engdahl, Per 563, 586, 215, 248, 457; 460, Feisal, King 65
590-1, 594 540, 558, 609 Fellowes, Daisy 541, 549
Engel, Major Gerd 398, Everyman 256 Fenton, Dr (Brixton
461, 508, 517 Evola, Professor J. 591 prison) 536
England Komitee 516, Express, Daily 105, 124, Ferdinand, Prince Louis
530-1 I4I, 159, 172, 196, 244
English Mystery 250, 296, 303, 320, 345, 365, Feversham, Lord 277
327 393-4, 428, 430, ‘Fifth Column’ 473, 475,
English National 444, 458, 537 488-91, 495-6, 498,
Association 529 Eyre and Spottiswoode 504, 506, 512, 516,
English Review 256, 258, 311 518, 521
379 Figaro, Le 601
English Speaking Union ‘F, Michael’ 403 Fighting Fund for Freedom
226 Fabre-Luce, Alfred 180, 549
Errol, Earl of (Josslyn 589 Findlay, Archibald 322,
Hay) 69, 311, 327, Fabre-Luce, Lottsie 180, 338, 412, 419, 448
364 589 Findlay, Richard 334-5,
Erskine, Lord 258 Fairbanks, Douglas 51, 82, 425, 4525 454, 4735
Euphorian Books 610 DIZ 122 4755 515
Euripides 534 Fairfax-Lucy, Sir Henry Fine Gael 316
Europafront 630 256, 258, 339, 364 Fishman, William J. 350
Europa Unita 562, 582 Falange Espanola 316, Fitzgerald, Scott 69
Europe-Africa Association 363, 400, 586, 596 Fitzgibbon, Constantine
616 Farinacci, Roberto 326 634
European, The 616 Farman, Maurice 22 FitzRandolph, Sigismund
European Court of Human Farrer, Philip 425, 456, 308, 357
Rights 634 460 Fleming, Ian 523
 INDEX
697
Fleming, Peter 477 Franco, Generalissimo ‘Funny Money’ 76
Flockhart, Alfred 545-6, Francisco 379, 390, Fyfe, H. Hamilton 9, 295
558, 566-7, 583, 399-400, 581-2
590, 608 Frank, General Hans 459 Gable, Gerry 631
Focus 505 Franke-Gricksch, Dr Gainer, St Clair 394
Foliogno, Cesare 361 Alfred 559, 561-2, Galinsky, Dr Karl-Hans
Follett, Mary 99 564, 574, 578, 583, 358
Fontuyn, Pim 647 587, 595, 597 Gallacher, Willie 95, 550
Foot, Isaac 298 Frankel, Dan 375 Game, Sir Philip 381,
Foot, Michael 107, 166, Frankel, William 634-5 390-1, 395-6, 411,
641 Frankfurter, Felix 397 423, 496
Foot, Paul 622 Frankfurter Zeitung 392 Gannon, Anthony 563,
Ford (BU member) 421 Frankische Tageszeitung 566, 576
Ford, Henry 99-100 346-7, 356 Gardiner, Rolf ro, 92, 445
Fordham, Montague 586 Franklin (BU) 546 Gargoyle Club r1z, 320
Ford Motor Company 99 Franzero, Signor C. M. Gartner, Dr Margarete
Foreign Policy Institute 378 265, 362
(Nazi) 561 Fredericks, Kay 262, 266, Garvin, J. L. 38, 155-6,
Forgan, Dr Robert 150-1, 289, 297-8, 321 176, 351
156, 163, 177, 179, Freeman, Benson 552 Gazetta de Popolo 517
186, 188, 194, 204, French, Sir (Field Marshal Gellibrand, Paula (see
$03,920,251, Lord) John 21, 23, Casa Maury)
257-8, 268, 274, II Gemona AG 419, 435,
277, 301, 309-10, Frenz, Wolfgang 631 440, 463
FED FLE Freud 534 General Motors 372
Forster, Frau 113, 117, Friedlander, max 382 General Strike (1926) 102
132 ‘Friend X’ (radio project) Genoud, Francois 603-4
Forster, E. M. 447 438 George V, King 51, 233,
Fortnightly Review 171, Friends of Italy 258 360, 369
219 Friends of Mosley 645 George VI, King 373, 453,
43 Group 558-9, 568, Fromm, Bela 422 469, 489-9, 507, 516
569-70,
5775 583 ‘Front Generation’ 29, 34, George, Prince (Duke of
Forward 68, 80, 456 67, 75> 995 1OL, 105, Kent) 62
Forwood, Sir Dudley 9 205, 530, 560 Georgia Committee 279
Fountain, Andrew 622 Fronte Universaitario di Gerarchia 225
Fourcade, Marie- Azione Nazionale 590 Gerault, C. S. 312
Madeleine 528 Frost Programme (BBC) Gessner, Rudolph 300
Fox, James 570 637 Gilbert, Henri 601
Fox, Quentin 647 Fuller, Maj.Gen. J. F. C. Gilbert, John 124
Foyle, Christine 408 103, 2§1, 275, 310, Gilbert, Oliver C, 425,
Francis Hawkins, Neil 321, 324, 329-30, 465, 471-2
197, 200, 204, 210, 3375 9525354," © °* Gillies, Miss (Diana’s
245, 246, 270, 306, 359-400,
414, 418, maid) 513
3325 330; 337, 366, 424-5,
430, 450, Gilmour, Sir John 276,
401, 407, 412, 414, 452-3, 4575 460, 285
429, 446, 452, 468, 4735 478, 487, 494, Giornale d'Italia 360
471, 4735 501, 567 501, 509, 511-2, Giovane Europe 629
Franciste 317 5175 5475 $715 591, Giovane Nazione 629
Franciste, Le 317 604 ‘Gladio’ 624, 629-30
698 INDEX

Glasgow, Earl of 278 Graham, Sir (Lord) Grumfeld, Walter 569

Glass, James 107, 647 Ronald 192, 364, 451, Grundy, Edna 608
Glenconner, Lord 301 454, 487, 491, 494 Grundy, Sidney 608
Gloucester, Duke of 495 Gran, Maurice 645 Grundy, Trevor 608
Glyn, Elinor 48, 52 Grand, Major Lawrence Guderion, General Heinz
Goacher, Denis 601 440 504
Goad, Capt. Harold 199, Grandi, Dino 199, 210, Guest, Freddie 32, 46,
233, 256-7, 361 211, 234, 236, 245, 329
Godfrey, Edward 529 255, 263, 269, Guild Socialism 73-4, 77,
Godman, Commander 273-4,
285, 291, 99
Thomas 267, 356 320, 3375 355» 359 Guinness, Beatrice 180,
Goebbels, Dr Josef 231, 361, 364, 373 242
244, 282, 327, 330, Grant, Nellie 327 Guinness, Bryan 378
3425 349, 354, 362, Gravelli, Asvero 235 Guinness, Desmond 201,
368, 3725 376-7, Graves, Robert 178 501, 573
381-2, 389, 393-4, Gray, John 15 Guinness, Jonathan
398, 402, 409-0, Graziani, General Rudolfo 201-2, 3775 4555
412, 415, 417, 419, 359 502, 513, 573
423, 427-8, 434, Greater Britain Movement Guinness, Mrs Richard
444, 448-50, 456, 636 241
485, 488-9, 494, Green, Martin 178 Gummer, John 623
5OL, 512, 575, 603, Green, Richard 45
645 Green Badge 444 Hacking, Alfred 128
Goering, Hermann 232, Green Shirt Movement for Haider, Jorg 646
3.42, 356, 388, 418, Social Credit 251 Haigh-Wood, Vivienne
424, 432, 441 Greene, Ben 445, 452-3, 287
Goethe 533, 617, 644 454, 471, 474, 484, Hailsham, Viscount 206
Goldberg, Alf 373 487, 506, 516, 547 Hale, Jim 513
Goldsmith, Sir James 641 Greene, Sir Hugh 628, Halifax, Lord 54, 373,
Gollancz, Victor 408 634 470,
477, 482-3,
Gordon-Canning, Louise Greenwood, Arthur 129, 492, 500
339 133, 135, 494, 498, Hall, Howard 502
Gordon-Canning, Robert 500 Hall, j.3 375
338-9, 535, 353> Gregoire, Armand 317, Hamilton, Duke of 523,
357s 378-9, 386, 428 532
3935 419, 425, Gregor, A. James 601 Hamilton, Cecily 267
444-5, 452, 471-2, Greville, Mrs Ronnie 27, Hamilton, Gerald 488,
482, 490, 551 53 511, 519, 570
Gordon Walker, Patrick Grey, C. G. 41, 329, 452, Hamilton, Sir Ian 206,
375 473 405, 453
Gottlieb, Julie 227, 242 Grey, Lord 58, 60, 258 Hamilton, Mary 239
Gough, Gen. Sir Hubert Griffiths, James 61 Hamlyn (Action editor)
258, 275 Grigg, Sir Edward 259, 179
Gowing, Horace 566 326 Hamlyn, Michael 627
Graf Reischach Agency Grimm, Frederick 560 Hamm, Jeffrey 395, 542,
421 Grimm, Hans 591 547 549, 553-8,
Graham, Marquess of 327 Grosvenor Kin 296 566-7, 575-6, 5795
Graham, Col. Henry 23 Group ‘Collaboration’ 587, 599, 609, 611,
Graham, Miles 238 560 613, 616, 630
 INDEX 699
Hammersley, Violet 621 Hayter, Sir William 623 Hildebrand, Herr 358
Hammond, Charles 468 Hayter, U. C. S. 364 Hilliard, A. R. 553
Hammond, J. L. 60 Headlam, Sir Cuthbert Himmler, Henrich 344,
Hanfstaengl, Dr Ernst 148, 276, 300 3475 354, 389, 425,
‘Putzi’ 193, 241, 248, Hearst, Randolph 174 428, 449, 455, 459,
326, 357, 410, 472 Heathcote, Sir Justin 4, 479 $12, 520, 526,
Handley Page 258 372 448, 561, 591
Hankey, Lord 470 Heathcotes 4 Hinchingbrooke, Lord
Hankey, Maurice 133 Heidegger, Martin 564 (Victor Montague)
“Hannay, Richard’ 450 Helbert, Lionel 10 248, 388, 457
Hannon, Sir Patrick 128, Held, James 416, 442, Hindenburg, Chancellor
183, 299 460, 463 202
Hanseatic League 73 Held, Stephen 488 Hirota (Japanese Foreign
Harding, Lawrence 468 Henderson, Arthur 60, 82, Minister) 329
Hardinge, Lady Alexander TAL PLA 299557, Hiscox, ‘Mollie’ 506
426, 459 I5I, 159, 167, 180 Hitler, Adolf, 114, 181,
Hargreave, John 92, 251 Henderson, Nevile 449 193-4, 202, 209,
Harker, Alan 506 Henlein, Konrad 459 RZ 227 SLATS 248,
Harker, Brig. Jaspar 197, Hepburn, Audrey 242 255, 283, 287, 301,
265, 447 Hepburn-Ruston, Joseph 317, 330, 335 339,
Harmsdon, Danny 627, 242, 343, 427, 430, ~ 353-4, 360, 362,
630, 639 446, 544 365, 370, 3735 3795
Harmsworth, Lord Cecil Herald, The 105, 137, 398, 410-1, 419-20,
456, 470 142, 159, 169, 173, 423, 430, 435, 4395
Harmsworth, Esmond 45, 210, 272, 345-6, 518 448, 459, 469, 490,
154, 176, I91, 200, Herbert, Aubrey 32, 55-6, 5O2, 512-3, 526,
205, 271, 309, 405 64 539, 545, 564, 598,
Harmsworth, Harold 50 Herbert, David 548 600, 603, 626, 628,
Harpers 313 Hesketh, Walter 623-4 645:
Harrod, Roy 249, 377; Hess, Rudolf 248, 253, WWI 20, 464; end of
529 330, 362, 422, 448, war 35; Hitler (Lewis,
Harrow Gazette 55, 61 4595 523-45 555-65 1930) 1673
Harrow Observer 32, 37, 640 ‘Chauffeureska’ 241,
61 Hesse, Dr Fritz 345, 370, 333, 472; Chancellor
Hart, E. D. 505 383, 428, 526, 528, 224, 228-9; Night of
Hart, Jenifer (Williams) 530 the Long Knives 303;
480, 518-9 Hesse, Prince Philip of 192 forbids spying 330;
Hartshorn, Vernon 138 Hesse, Silke 227 OM wedding 393;
Harvey, Oliver 523 Hetzler, Dr Erich 424 Chamberlain/
Hastings, Patrick 68 Hewel, Walter 362 Redesdales 383; radio
Haushofer, Albrecht 330, Hewins, W. A. S. 37-8 427, 430; Table Talk
383-4,
523, 532 Hewitt, Gerald 552 * 461-2; Mussolini
Haushofer, Karl 330, 383, Heywood, Sir John 185, 369, 423; OM 341-2,
385 357 343, 458, 476-7,
Hawker, Capt. ‘Johnny’ Hickson, Oswald 529, 5075 509; 517, 526}
17-9, 22 535 supports BU 376-7,
Hawks, Olive 280, 349, ‘Hickey, William’ 430 403; invasion of GB
455, 487 Higgs, Nanny 540 516-7; ‘Secret Book’
Hay, Norman 452 Higham, Charles 372 525, 560
700 INDEX

Hoare, Oliver 388, 427, Howard, Michael 623 Inchape, Lord 169, 278
Howard, Peter 171, 179, Independent Labour Party
430, 435, 466
Hoare, Sir Samuel, 56, 184, 186, 188, 202 (ILP) 73, 77-80, 85,
Howard, T. F. 299 IOI, 116, 231, 522
228, 364, 388, 405,
Howe, Lord 198 Independent Nationalists
451, 462, 464, 507,
526, 540 Hoy, James 602 545-6
Hoare-Lavel Pact 364 Hudson, C. E. 468 India Defence League 207,
Hobbes 217 Hughes, Arthur 197 257
Hobshouse, Christopher Hughes, James McGuirk India Empire Society 364
172 (see P. J. Taylor) 197, Industrial Intelligence
Hobson, J. A. 78-9, 85, 262, 454, 478, 491, Board 195-6
103, 208 515, 55% Information and Policy
Hobson, S. G. 73-4, 76 Hulme, T. E. 74-5 474
Hodge, Herbert 169-70, Hulton, Sir Edward 128 Ingham, Geoffrey 639
173, 177, 184, 186, Humanist Society Ingram, Marie 507
189, 194 (Oxford) 635 Inskip, Sir Thomas 384,
Hoffman, H. R. 425 Hunt, Antonia 531 435
Hoffman, Heinrich 333, Hunter, Dr 159 Institute for the Rights of
357> 393 Huth Jackson, Mrs Nations 472
Hoffman, Henriette 593 Annabel 480, 485, Intelligence Persons’ Club
Hogg, Quintin 206 487 198
Holderness, Sir Ernest 497 Huxley, Aldous 112, 647 ‘intelligentzia’ 150
Hollis, Christopher 251 Huxley, Elspeth 327 International Broadcasting
Hollis, Roger 540 Huxley, Julian 329 Co. 387, 440
Holmes, Colin 350 Huxley-Blythe, Peter 576, International Broadcasting
Holocaust 548, 563, 567, 580 Union 419
571 645 Hyde, Douglas 542, 545, International Fascist
Holtby, Winifred 280 552 558 Exhibition (Rome)
Holt-Wilson, Sir 520 Hydleman, Louis 567 232
Holz, Karl 283 Hyslop, ‘Nanny’ 66 International Publishing
Holzer, Lady 206 Corporation 637
Hone, J. H. 468 ICh3 x3 International Union of
Hoop, Dr (Liechtenstein Il Giornale d’Italia 307 Nationalists 283
minister) 430 Illuminated politics 26-7 Investigator 472
Hoover, J. Edgar 570, Illustrated London News Iregun Zvai Leumi 557
577; 622, 628 367 Ireland 55-9
Horabin, Frank 84 Imperial Defence League Ironside, Lord (son) 483
Horchem, Dr Hans 608 563, 566 Ironside, Field Marshal
Hore-Belisha, Leslie 45, Imperial Fascist League Edmund (Lord) 36,
107, 142, 176, 282, 194, 203-4, 207, 310, 449-50, 469,
438, 469, 475, 482 236, 262, 276, 474-5, 478, 482-3,
Horner, Arthur ro2 425-6, 465, 472, 494, 504, 506, 517
Horrie, Chris 637 5475 559 Isherwood, Christopher
Houston, Lady 175, 249, Imperial Fascists 200 185
256-7, 334-5, 340, Imperial Policy Group Ishiguro, Kazu 373
351, 370 405, 456 Isis 622
Houston, Richard ‘Jock’ Imperial Zollverin 38-9 Ismay, Sir Hastings 389
348 : Imperium (1948) 571, Ismay, General ‘Pug’ 512
Howard, Brian 201, 488 575 Italia Nostra 234
a

INDEX 7OI
Jackson, Derek 320-1, Johnstone, Lt. Col. H. W. Junior Imperial League
537-8, 540, 590-1 205 200
Jackson, Pamela 642 Joint Broadcasting
Jackson, Vivian 320 Committee (BBC) Kahn, David 446
Jacobs, Joe 186, 318, 440, 460 Kameradenwerk 595
350-1, 375 Jones, Inspector sox Karlowa, Karl 385
James, Edward 202 Jones, Inigo 3 Karlowa, Otto 330
James, Zita 144, 204, 242 Jones, Jack 169, 170-1, Kauffer, Ted McKnight
Jameson, Dr 535 173, 187 ang,
‘Janitor’ 116 Jones, John 545 Kaye, Doris 558
January Club 237, 258, Jones, Mervyn 583 Kaye, Solly 637
260, 271, 275, 278, Jones, Thomas 299, 389 Kebble, Inspector 464
272, 293, 309, Jordan, Colin 622, 625 Keenes, Capt. 229
311-2, 324, 339, Jordan, Michael 213, 229, Kell, Sir Vernon 195, 198,
357-8, 408 264 285, 290, 312, 425,
Jebb, Cynthia 55x Josephs, Noel 179 455, 464, 489, 504
Jebb, Sir Gladwyn 512, Journey’s End 178 Keller, Hans 283, 327, 472
600 Jowitt, (Lord) William Kelsey, Andrea 621
Jebb, Ralph Gladwyn 468, L2§5R52;'55z Kemsley, Lord 549
553 ; Joyce, Joan 464 Kendrick, C. F. 187
Jenks, Jorian 278, 417, Joyce, Margaret 411, 464 ‘Kenmare’ 419, 455
445,
468, 585-6 Joyce, Quentin 200, 439, Kennedy, Aubrey Leo 20,
Jerrod, Douglas 251, 4595 472 58
256-7, 311, 339, Joyce, William 237-8, Kennedy, John F. 461
364, 379; 400, 408 248, 260, 273, 278, Kennedy, Joseph 492
Jeune Europe (JE) 624, 318, 366, 399-400, Kensington Fascists 200
630 404, 464, 486, 497, Kent, Tyler 486-7, 490,
Jeune Europe International 515, 5235 550, $525 495, 498-90, 500,
620 575: 506, 521-2, 551
Jeunesse de l’Europe biography 197-8; Kenworthy, J. M. 203
Nouvelle 560 Carlyle influence 26; Keppel, Alice 353
Jewish Agency 382 Knight/MI5 200, Keppel, Celia 210, 223
Jewish Chronicle 210, 238, 265, 330; anti- Kerr, Admiral Mark 329
224, 230, 244, 259, semitism 304-5, 351, Keynes 69, 79-80, 83,
273,277, 454, 487, 360, 394, 409; rival 103-4, 108-9,
537s 625, 634-5, 638 to OM 312, 318, II5—6, 120, 122,
Jewish People’s Council 385, 401; India 348; 124, 128, 130-1,
against Fascism and marriage 411; leaves 1335 141, 149, 1575
Anti-Semitism 390 BU/NSL 412-3, 4335 160, I71I, 179, 185,
Joad, Cyril 142, 172, 173, 439; Germany/‘Lord 190, 242-3
1775 179 Haw Haw’ 459, 481, Kibbo Kraft 92
Johannesburg Sunday 491, 526-7, 530, ° Kieztoushi (radio project)
Times 616 551 415
‘John Bull’ 8, 617 Joynson-Hicks 198 King, Cecil 516, 637, 640
Johnson, Herschel V. 497, Jung 534 King, Lady Phyllis 153
499 Junger, Ernst 586 King David Hotel 557
Johnson, J. 84, 119, 168 Jungman, Nico 108 Kirkpatrick, Sir Ivone 602
Johnston, Tom 80, 121, Jungman, Zita 108, 111, Kirkwood, Dr 238
£23 730; P3 7785 180 Kitson, Arthur 76, 93, 147
702 INDEX

Lansbury, George 121, Lees, Aubrey 451-3, 454,

Kleinwort Benson 379
Klemmer, Harvey 496, 520 123, 130, 133, 135, 472; 477, 482, 487,
Klindworths (German 137, 150 489, 493, 547
family) 382 Lansdowne Club 476 Lees-Milne, James 172,
Larouche, Baroness 291 187, 201-2, 310,
Knickerbocker, H. P. 284,
289-90 Laski, Harold 68, 71, 118, 342, 406, 541, 605,
Knight, Maxwell 296, I21, 143, 146, 304, 641, 643-4
310, 378, 380, Leese, Arnold 203, 204,
318, 346, 430, 4735
481, 490, 516, 606: 396-7, 451, 467 236, 262, 426, 551,
BF 197, 198, 200; MIS Lassalle (German Socialist 559, 622
200, 265, 285; M leader) 286 Legion of Loyalists 200,
Section 285, 446-8; Latchmere House 478, 439
518-9 Legion of St George (SS)
agents
354, 473, 4775
482, 488, 494; Joyce Laurie, Professor A. P. 424, 530-1
Legion Wallonie (SS) 591
312, 330, 401, 409, 452, 460, 462, 472
439, 464; Right Club Laval, Pierre 365 Lehane, Jerry 606
Lavoro Fascista 258 Lehmann, Rosamond 213
474, 497-8, 500
Knoechlein, Lt.Co. Fritz Law,:Bonar 48, 181 Leighton, Margaret 346
Lawrence, D. H. 178 Leiter, Levi 43
572
Knowles, Frederick 438 Lawrence, Jon 299 Leiter Trust 113, 191, 239
Knox, James 201 Lawrence, T. E. (Lawrence Leitner, Elizabeth 530
Kogel, Arthur 591 of Arabia) 246, 357 Lemonnier, Guy 586, 596
Kordt, Theodor 426 Lawther, William 156 Leopold, Josef 431
Kredit Anstalt 171, 176 Lawton, Frederick 416, Le Pen, Jean-Marie 625,
Krieger, Heinz 438 421, 427, 434, 436, 646
Kristallnacht 441 441-2 Le Quesne, C. T. KC 416
Kruger, Dr 484 Lawton, Launcelot 452 Lesley-Jones, Peter 557
Kruger, Peter and Lisa 478 Lazarus, Jack 198 Levin, Bernard 625
Krupps 268 League of Empire Loyalists Lewis, Capt. Charles 231,
K Society 198 605, 636 233, 253
Ku Klux Klan 425 League of Ex-Servicemen Lewis, Edward ‘Kid’
Kurtz, Harald (Cort, ‘X’) 529 (Solomon Mendeloff)
447, 470, 482, 506, League of Industry 313 182, 186, 187, 188,
515, 551 League of Nations 55, 60, 194
Kushner, Tony 498 66, 169, 219, 352, Lewis, Morten (son) 194
355, 360-1, 364, Lewis, Oswald 402
Labour League of Youth 383, 388, 482 Lewis, Wyndham 74, 77,
350 League of Nations Union II2, 144, 168-9,
Lacarriere, Maurice 582 55> 359 185, 314, 399, 447
Ladies Carlton Club 480 League of St George 642 L’Humantie 462
Lamb, Lady Pansy 213 League of Youth and Liberty Restoration
Lambrianou, Tony and Social Progress 48 League
426, 451, 454
Jimmy 627 Leaper, William ‘Bill’ 213, Liddel, Capt. John 19
Lammers, Dr (Nazi 314, 358 Liddell, Cecil 495
official) 261-2, 290 Lee, General (US attache) Liddell, Guy 306, 365,
Lammont, Thomas 372 494 _ 448, 455, 481, 496-7
Landini, Amadeo 245 Lee, Jennie 126, 138, 151, Liddell Hart, Basil 103,
Lanfree, Giovanni 623-4, 153, 162, 275 258, 311, 418, 572,
631 Leeper, Rex 358 591
 INDEX
793
Liddle, Peter 19, 280 Londonderry, Lord 328, MacEntee 603
Lindemann, Professor 320 641 McGovern, John 156, 165,
L’ Independence Belge 428 Longate, Norman 508 479; 490, 522
Lindsay, Sir Ronald 428 Lopokova, Lydia 108 McGowan, Sir Harry 147
Link, The 424-5,
439, ‘Lord Haw Haw’ 365, McGuirk, Katherine 197
444, 451-2, 459, 464, 478, 481, 490, Macindoe, Rosemary 325
462, 470-1, 489, 551 McKenna, Reginald ro9,
506, 515, $23, 530, Loredan, Count Alvise 122;.428
532, 550 586, 621, 624 McKechnie, Hector G.
Linton-Orman, Rotha Losch, Tilly 202 468, 501, 567, 623
196, 198, 204 Lothian, Lord 103, 155, Mackenzie, Sir Compton
‘Living Wage, The’ 79 313, 508 288 ‘
Lloyd, Lord 154, 183, Lovat-Frazer, J. 164 MacKenzie-King
207, 256-7, 278, Lovelace, Earl of 153 (Canadian PM) 504
292, 326, 334-5 Lovely, Percy Thomas 493 Mckibben, Ross 222, 226,
Lloyd, E. M. H. 30, 78, 79 Lowther (Speaker of the 639-40
Lloyd, Geoffrey 298 House) 54 Mackinder, H. J. 38
Lloyd George, David 19, Lucas, Major 322 Macksey, Kenneth 509
23-4, 29-31, 36, 40, Lucas, Sir Jocelyn 460 McLean, Michael 577
46, 55-9, 63-4, 70, Ludlam, H. F. 92, 251 Macmillan, Dorothy 142
115-7, 130, 148, Ludovici, Anthony 445 Macmillan, Harold 120,
153-4, 157-8, 176, Luke, Rita 607 128524292435 2535
181, 193, 201, Lunn, Arnold 256 158, 163, 168, 214,
es ;
224-5, 228, 292, Luttman-Johnson, Capt.
389, 3975 393, 4795 H. W. 257-8, 339, Macmillan, Norman 329
476, 489, 494-5, 364, 425, 471, 473, McNab, John 413, 439,
507-9,
$17; 523-4, 515 464
554, 598, 641, 647 Lutyens, Sir Edward 239 McNeil, Hector 570
Lloyd George, Megan 226 Lutyens, Robert (son) 239 McNeil Weir, L 159-60,
Locker-Lampson, Luxemburg 387, 439, 286, 323
Commander Godfrey 449 Macquisten, F. A. 299
36, 540 Lymington, Lord 250, McWhirter (Mail
Lockhart, J. G. 116 256, 327, 364, 439, executive) 329
‘Loch Lommond Wireless’ 445, 452, 472, 474, Maddocks, J. 210
480 477> 479 489 ‘Madison, Philip’ (OM)
Lonciari, Fabio 582, 590-1 Lynn, Robert 174 464-5
London Assurance 258 Lyons 309 Maglinise, General Henri
London Films 224 427
London General Press 454 ‘Macaroni, Mr’ 495, 500 Magnus-Allcroft, Sir Philip
London Mercury 185, MacCGarthy, Desmond 89 258, 310
256, 314 McCormich, Colonel Maguire, Francis 552
London and Provincial Robert 570 ° Mail, Daily 9, 16, 19, 104,
Anti-Vivisection MacDonald, Ramsay 57, 146, 154, 191, 198,
Society 468, 470, 480, 71, 795204, 110; T12, 224, 244, 271, 277,
485 I16, 121, 123, 127, 288, 30-3,
309, 322,
London Society of 129, 132-3, 135; 330, 340, 3525 3545
Compositors 405 143, 151, 165, 180, 359s 375s 420, 445,
London Tidings 563 187, 193, 205, 224, 456, 4745 537
Londonderry, Lady 53 239, 262 Mairer, Charles 99
704 INDEX

Mairet, Philip 205 Massingham, H. W. 64, Mikardo, Iain 165, 185

Majoribanks, Edward 142 Miles, Alexander 197,
155 Masterman, J. C. 446 222, 227, 234, 242,
Makgill, Sir Donald 195, Matheson, Hilda 127, 440 274, 293, 295, 301s
258 Matteotti (murder of) 193 312, 323
Makgill, Lady Esther 258, Maudling, Reginald 602 Militant Christian Patriots
269, 280 Maughan, Somerset 112 426, 450, 454
Makgill, Sir George 195, Maurras, Charles 39, 75, Miller, Joan 492
196, 258 208 Millington, Commander
Malan Afrikaner Party Maxton, James 83, 110, (MP) 570
122, 124, 127, 194; Mills, H. T. V. ‘Bertie’
572
Mallet, Sir Louis 270 156, 157, 225 445, 451-2, 472,
Mallet, Robert 402 Maxwell, Sir Alexander 547
Malmo International 480-1, 521 Mills and Allen 387
Mayhew, Christopher 375 Milner, Lord 30, 37-8,
594-5, 600
Manchester Cotton Mayne, Ferdy 447 40, 128
Exchange 3 Medical Society for the Minchin, Alfred 532
Manchester Guardian 132, Study of Venereal Miner, The 102
Diseases 151 Miners’ Federation 102,
133, 138, 167, 187,
319, 345, 376, 536, Meijer, Gerhard 559 165, 334
566 Mein Kampf 167, 244, Ministry of Munitions
Manderville-Roe, E. G. 336, 382, 408, 445, (MoM) 23, 30-1, 128
204, 205, 255, 279, 5375 S75 ; Mirror, Daily 272, 547,
425, 451, 454-5 Meinertzhagen, Richard 637
Mandle, W. F. 7, 143, 157 362 Mission tor 480
Mann (BU member) 421 Meissner, Karl 583, 586, Mitchison, Naomi 251
Mar, Earl of 258, 452-3, 607 Mitford, Lady Clementine
4755 479» 489 Melchett, Lord 127, 147 206
Marchbanks, John 311-2 Melville, Cecil 130, 135, Mitford, Deborah
Marconi, Guglielmo 233, £36,)7By L755 BS2s (Duchess of
388 208, 209, 225 Devonshire) 481, 591,
Marendez, Captain Mendl, Sir Charles 53, 69, 642
D. M. K. 356 I12, 144 Mitford, Decca 346, 436,
Margesson, David 203, Mensdorff, Count Albert 638, 642
405, 524 263 Mitford, Diana Freeman-
Marina, Princess 328 Menzies, Stewart 523, 544 (Guinness, Lady
Markham, Frank 165 ‘Merrie England’ socialists Mosley) 205, 223-4,
Marks and Spencer 211 39 232, 246-7, 260-1,
Marley, Lord 275, 276 Mesopotamia (Iraq) 65 263, 282, 296, 298,
‘Marovna, Baroness’ (see Messel, Oliver 111, 179 303, 346, 354, 383,
Mary Tavener) 260 Metcalfe, Capt. Dudley 440, 455-6, 475,
Marquand, David 131, ‘Fruity’ 62, 144, 224, 505, 511-2, 522,
149 294, 428, 477 553:
Marsden, K. E. 468 Metexa, Doe 179 meets OM 201; politics
Martin, Kingsley 221, 372, Methuen, Mr (medical 201, 377, 617, 6395
408 commissioner) 536 _ car crash 252; social
Mary, Queen 463, 502 Michaelis, Meir 360 210, 377; OM/
MASK (codename) 362 Michelini, Arturo 594 womanising 220, 336,
Massi, Ernesto 582 Mignard, Gerard 533 353, 366, 642; on
 INDEX
795
.Cimmie 233, 238, 303, 319, 3355 Morris, (Sir) William
240; meets Putzi 241; 356-7, 415; Hitler, (Lord Nuffield) 73,
Germany
247, 319, 333» 342-3,
345, BOO, E25, E285 nA7;
325, 335, 356-7, 370, 398, 400, 148, 157, 160, 165,
371-2, 385, 398, 421-2, 432, 435, 169, 179 195, 277,
402, 415, 418; Hitler 455; OM wedding 313
248, 335-6, 343, 393-4; Olympic Morrison, Harry 353
345> 354, 363, 370, Games 381-2; Nazi Morrison, Herbert 81,
389, 405, 410, 421, informant 461-2; 104-5, 125, 129,
448, 453, 4625 suicide 462, 467, 481, £30, 8D505,05,751267,
Goebbels 362, 405; 576 276, 290, 396-7,
Olympic Games/ Mitrinovi, Dimitri 205 408, 420, 472, 505,-
Bayreuth 381-2, 461; ‘Modern Thought’ Groups 6, 521, 524, 529,
wedding 393-4, 445; 554 a7
Wotton 378, 406; Moir, Patrick 204, 208, Morrison, W. S. 405
radio project 416-7, 210 Mortimer, John 408
419-20, 434-53 anti- Moloney (UM official) Mortimer, Raymond 185
semitism 376, 520, 630 Morton, Desmond 505
607; arrest/internment Monckton, Walter 429, Mosley, Alexander 445,
501-2, 513-4, 520, 483, 490, 535 525, 540-1, 581,
525-6, 532-4, $373 Mond, Henry 176 592, 608, 619-20,
war 465-7; brother Monday Club 632, 636 635, 643
541; post-WWII Monk, Miss E. R. 501 Mosley, Lady Cynthia (see
555-6 573s 575-9» Mont, Michael 601 Cimmie Curzon)
583, 617, 635, 589, Montague, C. E. M. 34 Mosley, Lady Diana (see
597, 605, 621, 632, Montague, Margaret 27 Diana Mitford)
645; A Life of Montrose, Duke of 451 Mosley, Edward (brother)
Contrasts (1977) 643; Moore, Andrew 381 IO-I, 14, 112, 239,
OM death 644-5; Moore, Sir Thomas 289, 577s 644
death 646 299 Mosley, Ivor 641
Mitford, Nancy 112, 223, Moore-Brabazon, Lt Mosley, John (brother)
260, 280, 296, JabuG. Trantix4, 4x5 1,14, 577
314-5, 347-8, 503, 81, 164, 173, 282, Mosley, Lady (Katherine
512, 553, 583, 598, 289, 299 Heathcote) ‘Maud’
606-7, 623, 638, 642 Moral Rearmament 202 (mother) 1, 3-4, 6-8,
Mitford, Pamela (nee Moran, Lord (Dr) 539 EAaigity
4, 227,277,
Jackson) 320, 328 Moran, ‘Tommy’ 326, 311, 332, 340, 410,
Mitford, Tom 194, 202, 380, 391, 487, 505, 457; 460, 480, 511,
206, 247, 319, 346, 566, 580 Dik
357, 381, 394, 416, Moreau, General 592 Mosley, Max 492, 502,
457> 541; 543 Morgan, J. P. (US bank) 513, 525, 540-I,
Mitford, Unity 210, 243, 372 . 581, 592, 598, 613,
282, 298, 346-7, Morgan, Kenneth 61 619, 622-3, 635,
363, 389, 433, 450, Morgan Grenfell 258 643
461, 484, 540: Morning Post 68, 105, Mosley, Michael (son)
meets OM 223, 238, 152, 299, 319, 399 204, 240, 340, 465,
300; meets Putzi 241; Morpicati, Arturo 232 621
biography 241; Morrell, Dr Theodor 333 Mosley, Nicholas
Germany 247, 291, Morris Cars 100 (1527-1612) 3-4
706 INDEX

Mosley, Nicholas (son), 136-9, 141; defeat in 354; East End 380,
Party 125, 148, 1503 396; commercial
240, 419, 4375 511;
642: Mosley manifesto activities/radio project
diary 1; on father 8, 155-7; Young Tories 372, 386, 388,

50, 108, 233, 378, 128, 153, 155, 1595 416-7, 419-20,
392, 612, 615; on funds from Morris 435-6, 460, 463;
mother 233; OM 161, 169, 179; New Cable Street 390-4;
circle rro-1; OM Party 162-4, , 168, wedding 392;
arrest 501; WWII 181, 185-6; fencing Abdication Crisis
174, 184, 209, 220, 403-7; Peace
533, 5365 5445 post-
war 548-9, 556, 564, 320,
33, 3815 campaign 432, 436,
587, 608, 618-9, Mussolini/Rome 456, 469, 475, 485,
621, 644-5 193-3,
232, 269-70, 493-4; co-operation
Mosley, Sir Oswald (1729) 285; anti-semitism with Right 451-2,
194, 207-8, 212; end 460; WWI/secret
3
Mosley, Sir Oswald (great- of NP 202-3; Diana meetings 470-8, 482,
grandfather) 4 201; The Greater 493; coup d’etat/
Mosley, Sir Oswald Britain 207, 211, 217, quisling
490, 496,
(grandfather) 8, 20, 219, 271, 288; BUF 500, 503-4, 507-10,
309 217-9, 226, 279-80; 5325 527-85
Mosley, Sir Oswald: Rothermere 269-72, internment 514-5,
birth/diary 1-3; 284, 309; BUF 525, 535; release/ end
childhood 4-8; school finances 235, 266, of war 537-8; Crux
10-13; personality 269-70, 277, 285, Easton/Crowood
traits 7-8, 146; affairs 330, 3375 351, 361, 541-4,
591; Nazi
with women 27-8, 366, 371, 409, 412, atrocities 548, 563-4,
65, 69, 108, 126, 421, 428, 437; anti- 567; Fascist revival
145-6, 223; social life semitism 224, 231, 545-5, 552-6; post-
29, 52-3; finances 244, 254, 259, 264, war neo-Nazi links
I12, 239; army/ 273, 287, 288, 291, 559-61, 602-3;
Sandhurst, RFC 303-6, 309, 318, Union Movement
16-19, 20-2, 28; 320, 324, 339, 348, 566; Europe a Nation/
WWI 20-2; Politics/ 3545 360, 365, 3975 Euro-Africa 565-6,
reading 25-6, 48; 402, 410, 438, 4473 572-4,
584, 588;
social imperialism Universal Fascism Ireland/France 592,
II5, 125, 142, 1503 283-4, 327; anti- 598; Fascist
MoM/FO/War Office communism 221-3, International 577-8,
30-3; 1918 General 275; violence/Fascist 586, 588, 594, 596,
Election/MP 36-40; Defence Force 220, 607, 623-5, 629-303
Cimmie 44, 493 225, 228-30, 246, South Africa/Rhodesia
Ireland 56-8; ILP/ 264, 293, 295, 612, 632, 6353
Labour Party 81-xx; 297-8, 321; Notting Hill/
Revolution by Reason Abyssinia campaign immigration 614-7;
tor; Parliament/ 354-5,
358, 3745 USA 628; end of UM
minister 107, 118-9, Nazi links/funds 630-3; Venice
I21, 136; 290-T, 301, 317, 628-31; ,
McDonald’s affair 338, 377, 381, 406, rehabilitation/King
113-6, 132-3, 1433 409, 414, 422, 430, 637-8, 640;
economic rebel 131, 458; Hitler 341-3, autobiography 638-9;
 INDEX 797
assessment 640-7; 257, 263, 285, 373, Committee (NEC —
death 644-5 422, 496, 527, 586, Labour Party) roa,
Mosley, Simon (son of 595, 600, 645: 109, 116, 120, 129,
John) 14, 239-40 WWI 22; League of 149
Mosley, Vivien (daughter) Nations 68; OM National Farmers Union
58, 240, 340, 352, 192-3, 220, 386; 250, 586, 629
445, 511 anti-semitism 233, National Fascisti (NF)
Mosley, ‘Waldie’ (father) 283, 291, 438; Hitler/ 184, 199, 203
3s 5-75 9, 81, 102, Axis 317, 353, 402, National Front 578, 636,
113 423, 427, 496; 642
Mossman, James 638 Abyssinia 351-2, National Front After
Mottistone, Lord (J. E. 358-9, 361, 365, Victory 542, 547, 549
Seeley) 148, 355, 470 369; Universal National Government 187,
Mountbatten, Lord Louis Fascism 199, 234, 188, 271, 313, 318,
637 327, 3533 funds BUF 351, 364, 375
Mount Temple, Lord 362 236, 255, 266, 269, National Industrial
Mouvement Social 337, 261, 378, 412, Council 40 c
European/ 428, 484; turns National Labour Party
Europaische Soziale against BU 340, 412, 62:2)
Bewegung 595-6, 624 448; Salo/Verona National League of
Mouvement d’Action 560-1 ~ Airmen 329, 334, 340
Civique (MAC) Mussolini, Edda National Minority
620-1, 624-5, 630 (daughter) 233 Movement 197, 198
Mouvement Jeune Nation My Life (1968— OM) National Newsagent 444
625 637-8 National Party 195-6
Moviemento Social National Party (SA) 627,
Italiano (MSI) 562, Naldera (Broadstairs) 43, 629
582, 586, 590, 594, 344 National Party of Europe
596, 607, 623, 636 Nathan, H. L. 310 (NPE) 624, 631
Moyne, Lord 201, 223, Nation, The 255, 285 National Publicity Bureau
513 Nation Europa 581, 591, 313
Muggeridge, Malcolm 595-6, 601, 604 National Renaissance
486, 494, 517, 521, National Book Association Party 596
628 408 National Socialist League
Mullally, Frederick 645 National Citizens Union 413, 433, 460, 525
Munro, E. 454 200, 424, 454, 473, National Socialist
Munster, Count Paul 428 549 Movement 622, 626
Murphy, Esther 114, 118 National Council for Civil National Unemployed
Murphy, Gerald 69 Liberties 552, 580 Workers Movement
Murphy, Patrick 114 National Council of (NUWM) 222, 226,
Murray, Basil 325 Industry and 323
Murray, Gladstone 352 Commerce (NCIC) National Union (Norway)
Museum Trust 460 147, 148, 154, 157; 316
Mussolini, Anna Maria 160 National Union of Ex-
(daughter) 586 National Credit Servicemen 123
Mussolini, Benito 138, Association 205 National Union of
174, 191-2, 194, National Democratic Party Railwaymen 121, 311
198, 209, 210, 228, (NPD) 631 National Zeitung 424
244, 250-1, 256, National Executive Naumann, Klaus 608
708 INDEX

Naumann, Dr Walter 588, New Times, The 208, 212, 465, 471-2, 478,
595-6, 602 595 482, 493
Nazi-Soviet Pact 467 New York Times 521 Nordische gessellschaft
Neame, Alan, 601 News Chronicle 274, 297 425
Nelson (OM publisher) News Letter 556, 564 Norman, Montague 83,
637 New Society 636 183, 242, 309
New Age, The 69, 73-6, News of the World 591 Northcliffe, Lord 9, 30
217 Newsam, Frank 498 Northern Council against
New British Broadcasting Newton, Sir Issac 534 Fascism 626
Station 525 Nicholas II, Tsar 328 Northumberland, Duke of
New English Weekly 205 Nichols, Beverly 23.4 68
New Epoch Products 307 Nicholson, Mrs Christabel Norwich, John Julius 606
New Era Securities 416 454, 479; 496 Nouvel Ordre Europeen
New Fabian Group 157 Nicolson, Harold 27, 121, (NOE) 596, 623
New Guard 225, 381 130, 132, 143, Nuffield, Lord (see
‘New Labour’ 150 154-5, 157, 160-1, William Morris) 547
New Leader, The 79, 114, 180, 199, 202, 249, No. 1 Wing (RFC) 17
124, 130 255, 298, 353, 440, No. 6 Wing (RFC) 17, 20
New Look 634 483, 508, 539, 647: Nunan, Sean 553, 592,
New Museum Investment on OM 26; literary 599
Trust 416, 419 works 26; FO 32; Nuova Antologia 374, 402
Newnham, Henry 434, OM circle 45; NUPA 189-92, 194,
465, 4735 549 biography 113; 202-4, 205, 208,
New Order (SA) 572 Young Tories 132; NP 210:
New Party, 387: 163, 165, 169, anti-semitism 208, 210,
origins 162-3; National 173-4, 181, 183, 253i
policy 164-5; funds 188, 205; Action Nuremburg War trials
169, 191; ‘A National 185-6; Fascism 189, 5555 563
Plan for a National 193; Rome 192-4; Nusvenska Rorelsen 586
Crisis’ 185; general anti-semitism 194;
election (1931) 187; leaves NP 202; Observer, The 152, 154,
Hitlerism 188, 209; Cimmie’s death 239; 156, 239, 272, 351,
eugenics 190; Rome visits OM in prison 634
delegation 191; New 522 O’Connor, T. P. 61, 153 >

Movement 189-200; Nicolson, Max 152, 211 299

Kings Road, Chelsea Nietzsche, Frederich 73-4, ODESSA 562, 603, 610
189; NUPA 189, 192, 217, 533 O’Duffy, General Eoin
205, 207, 208; Jews Niermans, Guy 474 316, 327
194; dissolved 202; Nieuwenhus, Jean 474 O’Dwyer, Sir Michael 426
assessment 214 ‘Night of the Long Knives’ Officer Training Corps
New Pioneer 445, 452, (1934) 303, 311 (OTC) 12, 198
476 Noel-Buxton, Lord 447, Ogilive-Grant, Mark 503
New Political Economics 47° O’Hagen, Robert 204
196 No More War Movement Ohlendorf, Lt.Col. Otto
New Republic 569 122 571
New Statesman 226, 230, Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi Ohnesorge, Dr Wilhelm
242 Council 363 434
New Swedish Movement Nordic League 425-6, Olley Air Services 379
591 450-1,
454, 4595 ‘Omega’ (OM) 32
YC
INDEX
7°99
On Guard 558, 568 Peace Aims Group ATS Phillimore, Lord 364, 456
Operation Barbarossa 489 Phillpott, R. H. S. 231,
524 Peace and Progressive 235
Operation Lion 516 Information Service Phillpotts, Christopher
Operation Sealion 517 474 606
Operation Yellow 495 ‘Peace Party’ 470, 474, Phipps, Sir Eric 398
Orage, A. R. 69, 73, 77; 476, 483-4, 507 Phipps, Lady 345
205 Peace Pledge Union (PPU) Phoenix Book Club 554
Organization for the 453, 456, 471, 490 Piercy, Eric Hamilton
Maintenance of Peace with Ireland Council 229-30, 322, 323,
Supply (OMS) 184, 56 411, 515
198, 200 Pearson, Lady 242, 249, Pile, Duke 559
‘Orange Book’ 117 278, 451-2, 487, 502 Pineton, Charles 365
Ormsby-Gore, Mary 422 Pelizzi, Camillo 259, 361 Pini, Giorgio 636
Ormsby-Gore, William Pelling, H. 367 Pinter, Harold 580
153 Pemberton, Sir Max 308 Pioneer, The 410
Orwell, George, 8, 227, Penty, A. J. 73, 76, 205, Pioneer Clubs 184
246, 366-7, 371, 250, 251 Piratin, Phil 351, 375,
401, 444, 517, 525 Penty, Michael (son) 251 579°
Other Club 153, 378° People’s Campaign Pirow, Oswald 572, 577,
Otter, Laurens 570 Against War and ~ 587, 591
Ottobre 217, 235 Usury 452 Pitt, the Elder (Earl of
Oulthwaite, Alison 444 People’s Common Law Chatham) 25, 107,
Owen, Arthur (SNOW- Parliament 525 545
JOHNNY) 446 People’s League for Pitt, the Younger 25, 545
Owen, Frank 154 Economy 48 Pitt-Rivers, George Lane-
Owen, Robert 77, 206 Pepler (Weekly Review) Fox 327-8,
452, 473,
547 487, 513
Pakenham, Frank (Lord Pepys, Sir Mark 405 Plathen, Dick 250
Longford) 140, 375, Peron, President Plato 534
641 (Argentine) 610, 631 Platt-Mills, John 570
Paleswski, Colonel Gaston Perth, Lord 318, 435, 460 Plugge, Captain Leonard
583 Petain, Marshal 507, 509, 387, 415, 440
Pall Mall Club 358 517; 523 Plumb, Sir Henry 586,
Panorama (BBC) 638 Peterloo Massacre (1918) 629
Papineau, Mr 174 4 Pocock, Tom 559
Paramour, Lord 266 Petrie, Sir Charles 233, Point Counter Point
Parisy, George 630 256-7, 278, 327, 408 (1928) 12
Parker, Lord Chief Justice Petter, Sir Ernest 147, 164 Pole, Sir Felix 128, 147,
634 Pfister, Dr Georg 284, 158
Parker, John 642 287-8, 290, 294, Political Economic
Parris, Matthew 647 301-3,
307, 317-8; Planning (PEP) 211
Paternosters Club 430 338 Political Quarterly 202
Paton. J. 226 Philby, Harry St John 458 Pollard, Major Hugh 379
Paton, Jon 86, 103 Philby, Kim 438, 570, 606 Pollitt, Harry 198, 222,
Patriot, The 147, 196, Philips, Wogan 165, 213 288, 318, 358,
529, 547 Philips Price 156 396-7, 487, 537
Pavey, Inspector (agent) Philips, Trevor and Mike Ponsonby, (Lord) Arthur
451, 545,554 613 85,355
710 INDEX

Ponsonby, Elizabeth 85 Puller, H. P. 515 Redesdale, Bertie 382

Pope, Ernest 422 Purdy, Ken 552 Redesdale, Lady (Sydney)
Pope-Hennessy, James Purcell, Hugh 639, 646 201, 3725 440, 4575
4795 5355 539s 577
589
Por, Odon 74, 205 “Q’ (see Mayne) 446 Redesdale, Lord (David
Portal, Charles (Air Quaderni Neri 629 Mitford) 201, 372,
Marshal) 173 Queen’s Quarterly 160 386, 439-40,
543,
Portal, Peter (Viscount) Queen’s Westminster 555
Territorials 457 Rees, Philip 205
13
Portal, (Viscount) Queensbury, Lord 460 Reichspartei Day
Wyndham 147, 158, Quennell, Peter 185 (Nuremburg) 309,
160, 169, 175, 278 Query 438 320, 325, 356, 389,
Portals (paper Quill, Michael 557, 436, 463-4
manufacturer) 147 578-80, 630 Reith, Sir John (Lord) 168,
Porter, Cole 69 Quisling, Vidkun 316, 184, 186, 314, 358,
Portland, Duke of 32 327, 490, 495, 510, 405
Portsmouth, Lord 547 512 Remains of the Day, The
Potato Marketing Board (1989) 373
Remer, Major-General
450 Racial Preservation Society
Potter, Sydney 86 636 Otto 602-3
Pound, Ezra 26, 74, 77> Radical Party (France) Rendell, Dr 12
205,251; 287,361, 72 Renton, David 579
399, 561, 601 Radio Athlone 415 Rentoul, John 647
Preen, J. C. 421 Radio Bari 419 Resio, Arturo 245, 255
Preston, Anne 280 Radio Leesen 419 Reuter 359
Priester, Karl-Heinz Radio Luxemburg 416, Review of Reviews 399
_ §90-2, 594, 596 495, 510, §12 Rexists (Belgium) 316,
Prince of Wales (‘Bertie’, Radio Normandy 387 427; 561, 563
Edward VII) 9 Radio Toulouse 388, 415, Reynolds News 239, 580
Prince of Wales (Edward 437 Rhodes, Sir John 295
VIII) 62, 69, 174, Railton, Ruth 641 Rhondda, Lady 167
179, 244, 258, 263, Ramcke, General Ribbentrop, Adolf von
278, 294, 328, 333, Barnhard 604 608
356, 367, 369, 373 Ramsay, Captain Ribbentrop, Joachim von
Protocols of the Elders of Archibald Maule 425, 237, 293, 330) 349,
Zion 77, 204, 425, 450-2, 454, 456, 362, 372, 393, 398,
501 460, 470, 473, 402, 406, 422-5,
Proud, Cynthia 608 477-8, 482, 489, 428, 430, 444, 453,
Proud, Sid 608, 620 498, 501, 506, 463, 517, 528
Proust, Marcel 605 509-10,
§15, 520-1, Richardson, George 274,
Pryce-Jones, Alan 185 550 275
Pryce-Jones, David 346 Ramsay, Mrs 473, 479 Richardson, Mary 280
Public Order Act (POA) Randall, E. D. 212, 280, Richter, Dr Franz (aka
276, 392, 402, 323, 358 Fritz Roessler) 594
407-8, 411, 415-7, Rand Daily Mail 616 Rickett, Maurice 205
423 Rathenau, Walter 99 Ridell, Lord 320
Public Trustees Rawnsley, Stuart 289, 444 Riddell, Enid 495
Department 543 Read, Herbert 444 Riefenstahl, Leni 3 56-7
Pugh, Michael 355 Reavely, Captain 322 Rifle Brigade (WWII) 536
 INDEX 70
Right Book Club 408 146, 153, 158, 168, Association 250, 417,
Right Club, The 230, 440, I9I, 193, 205, 228, 586
4545 4595 470, 2.58, 266, 275, 276, Rushcliffe, Lord 470
473-45 479, 482, 291, 307, 317, 324, Russell, A. E. 56
486, 489-90, 497, 335s 340, 356, 418, Russell, Lord 258
498, 500, 505-6, 455, 516, 637: Russian Tea Rooms
515, 520, $32, 550 Anti-Waste League 47, (Kensington) 328,
Risden, Wilfred (‘Bill’) 50; Empire Free Trade 426, 492, 496
84-5, 165, 169, 205, 128, 129, 132; United Ryan, Sergeant 12
212, 286, 311, 326, Empire Party 132, Ryan, Michael 566, 569,
367 200; supports OM 576
Ritschell, Daniel 94, 139, 194, 217, 269, 272,
157 284, 300; on Hitler Sackville-West, Vita 113,
Ritter, Nikolaus 445 244, 303; pro-fascist 183, 185, 194, 353;
Robb, J. H. 599 245; India 257; 440
‘Roberts’ (MIS agent) 488 Jewish boycott 303, St Barbe, T. 474
Roberts, Andrew 646 308-9; drops OM St Barbe Baker, Richard
Robertson, T. A. R. 523 307, 309-10; 453
Rodd, Francis 372 Abyssinia 352, 369; St Clair Erskine, Hamish
Rodd, Peter 179, 194, abdication 403-4 179, 260
260, 280, 348, 372 Rothschild, Lord 83, 254 St Clair Erskine, Mary (see
Rodd, (Lord) Sir Rennell Rothschild, Baron Louis Lady Dunn) 320
249, 260, 296 432, 455 Salazar, President 572
Roditi International 419, Rothschild, (Lord) Victor Salisbury, Lord 47-8, 364,
455 201, 488, 506, 522 460
Roe, Sir Alliot Verdon Round Table 313 Salmon, Judge 615
251, 278 Row, Robert 567, 587, Salo Republic 560, 562
Roesel, Dr Gottfried 424, 600-1, 604 Samuel, Mrs Osborne 452
450, 526 Rowe, T. Victor 425, 454, Sandhurst 14-16, 110,
Rogers, Alan 627 471 3795 450
Rogers, George 614 Rowse, A. L. 126 Sanden, Henrich 601
Rogers, William 334 Royal Army Service Corps Sanducetti, Jullio 258
Rohn, Ernst 303, 422 377 Sandys, Duncan 335
Rolleston Hall Royal Bank of Scotland Santa, General villa 359
(Derbyshire) 5, 12, 49 373 ‘Sapper’ 195
Romilly, Esmond 175 Royal Flying Corps (RFC) Sark, Dame of (Sibyl) 415
Roosevelt, President (FDR) 16-8, 31 Sasson, Sir Philip, 254
100, 275, 3725 4395 Royal Institute of Saturday Review 152, 191,
486, 489, 496-7, International Affairs 249, 335, 351, 460
504, 508 (RUSI) 194, 233 Saunders, Robert 552,
Rose, Lionel 5 58-9, 573 Royal Society of St George 567, 585-6, 619, 629
Rosenberg, Alfred 181, 460 , Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Duke
190, 236, 325, 341, RSPCA 586 of 369
345, 374, 383, 410, Rudel, Colonel Hans- Sayer, Dick 545
476 Ulrich 562, 586, 588, Scanlon, John 81-2, 151,
Rosenberg, Charlie 569 591, 595, 621, 624 453-45 479
Ross, Colin 383, 560 Rueff, Bill 435 Scarsdale, Lord 43
Rosslyn, Earl of 260 Rumbold, Anthony 242 Schacht, Hjalmar 337-8,
Rothermere, Lord 31, 104, Rural Reconstruction 356, 588, 603
712 INDEX

Schaub, Julius 333 Sherriff, R. C. 178 591, 594, 608, 610,

Scheel, Dr Gustav 595 Sherwood, Hugh 581 621
Schilling, Dr Walter 572 Shinwell, Manny 171, 551 Skorzeny, Waltraut
Schmidt, Albert 610 Siemens 258 (daughter) 608
Schmidt, Ernst 596 Sieff, Israel 211, 212, 220, Smart, Mariette 532
Schmidt, Paul 341, 526-7 221 Smart, Nick 300
Schmidt-Lorenzen, Sieff, Marcus (son) 212 Smiley, David 480
Gunther 254-5, 261 Silent Help 608 Smirnoff, Eugene 492
Schopenhauer 382 Silverman, Sydney 540 Smith, Albie 186, 189
Schroeder, Lucy (see Dyer) Silver Shirts 563 Smith, F. E. (Lord
Simmons, Jim 148, 156 Birkenhead) 29, 44-6,
436
Schurch, Theodore 377, Simon, Sir John 57, 276, 66, I15, 153-4
Smith, Gerald K. 578
5325 552 380, 391, 402, 408
Schuster, Sir Claude 354, Simpson, Professor Brian Smith, Ian 632
426 472, 524 Smith, Simon Harcourt
Schutz, Waldemar 595 Simpson, Celia (aka 388
Scrimgeour, Alex 278, 414 Strachey) 141 Smithers, Sir Waldron 549
Scrimgeour, J. and A. 128 Simpson, Wallis (Duchess SNOW (see A. Owens)
Scobie, Edward 613 of Windsor) 328, 393, 446
Scott, Sir Harold 554, 573 403-4, 406, 428, Snowden, Philip 79, 82-3,
Scott, Sir Russell 285, 329, 598, 644 104-5, 109, 115,
409 Sinclair, Sir Archibald 66, 129, 133, 136, 141,
Scott, Lord William 258 146, 176, 298 I5§1, 176, 180, 182,
Sebastian, Mr (British Sinclair, Sir John (MI6) to 640
consul) 509 Sitwell, George (17th Social Imperialism 30,
Secret Army Organization century) 178 36-8,
194, 215, 349
(OAS) 620, 625, 629, Sitwell, Georgia 111, 112, Socialist League 271, 275,
632 113, 132, 144, 174, 368, 421
‘Section D’ (see IIB) 197 202, 203, 209, 239, Socialist Reich Party 588,
Section D (MI6) 440, 448, 297 594
488 Sitwell, Osbert, 111, 133, Society of Motor
Seeley, Sir John 38 177-8, 361, 529, Manufacturers 128
Semphill, Master of 20, 541, 543 Soil Association 586
415, 453 Sitwell, Sachverell (Sachie) Soloman, Dorothy 251
Senhouse, Roger 379 III, 178, 182, 209, Sonnenkinder 45, 178-9
Sermoneta, Duchess of 258 Sonnemann, Emmy 342
373 Six, Franz, 526, 532, 561 Sons of St George 566
Seton Hutchinson, Lt. Col. 16th Lancers 16 Sophocles 534
426 62 Group 626, 628 Soref, Harold 632
17th Lancers 16 Skeels, ‘Professor’ Sorel, George 75, 217,
Sewell, Father Brocard 644 Serrocald 426 219
Shackleton, Ernest 267 Skidelsky, Robert 141, Spanish Travel Agency
Shape of Things to Come, 157, 228, 237, 295, 608
The (1933)
267 306, 346, 416, 456, Spears, Brig. Gen. E. L.
Shaw, Captain (BBC) 350 463, 557, 560, 568, 275
Shaw, George Bernard 38, 611, 623, 635-6, Special Operations
73, TOP pDEZ, ELCs 639-40, 642-3 Executive 480, 528
162, 168, 180, 221, Skorzeny, Colonel Otto Spectator, The 157, 164,
508, 537, 548 318, 562, 586, 588, 477
 INDEX
713
Speer, Albert 333, 343 III, 114, 118, 125, Swift, William 507
398 ’ 129, 138, 141, 150, Swinburne, Algernon 26
Spengler, Oswald 205, 153-4, 164~5, 169, Swinton, Lord 504-5,
230, 253, 279-80, 172, 175-6, 206, 513, 515, 518-9
311, 572; 575 215, 234, 251, 277, Swiss Nazi Party 603
Spengler Book Club 554 321 Swope, Herbert 114
Sphere, The 11 Strachey, Lytton 85 Sydenham, Lady 199
Spicer (BU) 546 Strachey, Mrs Ray 64 Sydenham, Lord 220
Spitzy, Richard 398, 531 Strachey, St Leo 85 Sykes, Mark 32, 55
Spot, Jack 392 Strange, Capt. Louis 18, Sykes, Lady (Mark) 57
Spranklin, Philip 357-8, 20 Sylvester, David 194 (son)
422, 434-5, 444, Strasser, Dr Otto 562, Sylvester, Philip 194
497 565, 601 Syndicalists 39
Spurling, Skinner and Strauss, George 137-8,
Tudor 239 165 Tablet, The 379
‘Squadramania’ 47 Strauss, Richard 381 Tabor, Major G. J. H.
Squire, Sir J. C. 178, 256, Streatfield, A. C. 457 236, 278
257-8 Streicher, Elmar 319, 415 Ta Fari, Emperor Ras 351
Stalin, Josef 574 Streicher, Julius 283, 293, Tahan, Valerie Taylor 198
Stammer (Nazi official) 302, 317, 345, 356, Tambroni (Italian PM)
386 370, 420, 448-9, 623
Stanford, Molly 474, 479 479; 637 Tariff Reform League 38,
Stanley, Oliver 121, 132, Streicher, Lothar 317 40, 124
142, 152-3, 163 Stuart, Sir Louis 426 Tatler, The 54, 69, 258,
Stanley, Sidney 579 Sueter, Admiral Sir 294, 422
Starace, Achille 192, 229 Murray 329 Taubet, Dr Eberhard 595
Starmer, Major Sir Sunday Dispatch 296, Tavener, Mary 260-1
Lovelace 16 300, 308, 330, 334, Tavistock, Lord (Duke of
Steel, Johannes 235, 285 474 Bedford) 205, 424,
Steel-Maitland, Sir Arthur Sunday People 539 452-3, 471, 473>
147, 326 Sunday Pictorial 519, 550, 479, 482, 484, 486,
Stephens, Peter 637 558 488, 515
Stephens, Colonel ‘Tin- Sunday Telegraph 626 Taylor, Vice-Admiral A. E.
Eye’ 518-9 Sunday Times 627 299
Sternhell, Zeev 34, 75 Sundermann, Helmut 458 Taylor, A. J. P. 141, 214,
Stevas, Norman St John Suner, Serrano 581-2 220, 226
638 Suner, Zita 581 Taylor, Frederick ‘Speedy’
Stevenson, John 366 ‘Suspect List’ (MIS) 415, 99
Stevenson, W. H. 256 425, 471, 488, 506, ‘Taylor, P. G.’ (aka James
Stewart, Desmond 577, 515, 525 McGuirk Hughes)
601 Susser, Leslie 400 197-8, 262-5, 274,
Stewart, Graham 135, 141 Sutherland, J. F. ‘Duke’ 2.76, 294-5, 301,
Stock, Noel 601 348 322, 323, 414, 421,
Stokes, Richard 475, 489, Sutherst, G. P. 278 454, 494, 507
499 501, 517, 522 Sutton, George 247, 501, Taylor, Sterling 279
Stourton, J. J. 230 556 Taylour, Miss Fay 479
Strachey, James 85 Sutton, Sir George 329 Tchelichew, Pavel 606
Strachey, John (Evelyn) Swaffer, Hannen 214 Tea with Mussolini (film)
72, 85, LOI, 108-9, Swann, Robert 541 353
 714 INDEX

Technique of Planning 574-5>

581, 583, TUC 133, 142, 149, 2535
(TEC) 211 585-7,
591, 596-75 263, 540, 614
_ Teichmann, Paul 620 600, 604, 609 Tucker, Justice 552
Telegraph, The 131, 156, Thomson, Hanning 482 Turner, Wendy 558
166, 298, 319, 371; Thornton, A. P. 40 TW3 (BBC) 625
Thorpe, Jeremy 622 Tyndall, John 578, 622,
427, 445, 489, SOT,
609, 621, 643, 647 Thost, Dr Hans-Wilhelm 626, 636
Telesio, Giovanni 258 168, 203, 244, 294,
Temple-Cotton, Rafe 465, 425, 460 Uckert, Arthur 344
567-8 Thurlow, Richard 27, 40, UFA Films (Germany) 357
Templeton, Viscount 293 205, 581, 605 Ulster Fascists 284
Tennant, David 111, Thwaites, Norman 256-7, Ulster Volunteer
320-1 267 Association 16
Tennant, Diana 335 Tiechen, Hendrik 559 Union 572, 579s 5913 599»
Tennant, Eleonora 549 Time and Tide 167 604, 613
Tennant, Stephen 111 Times, The 33, 105, 112, Union of British Freedom
Tenniel, Sir John 8 137, 141, 147, 156, 556, 566
Terje Ballsrud 316 158, 166, 177, 186, Union Movement:
Tester, Dr Arthur Albert 189, I91I, 224, 260, origin 566; funds 570,
344-5) 377> 4275 293, 297, 364, 506, 627; European
430, 446, 448, 485 613, 625, 638, 644-5 Contacts Section 571,
Thayer, George 630 Tindell, Kenneth 10 574; membership 573,
- Theosophical Society 27 ‘Tithe Wars’ 250-2 576, 583-6, 590,
Theosophists 77 Todd, Colonel Alfred 364 615, 627; anti-
Thierack (Saxony’s Tomorrow We Live (1937 immigration 579,
Minister of Justice) — OM) 430, 553 599, 612-6; anti-
261 Town Crier 86, 102, 105, semitism 579-80,
3rd Cavalry Brigade 16 148 599; elections 580,
Thiriart, Jean 620, 623-4, Transport and General 597, 622; Special
629 Workers’ Union 91, Propaganda Section
Thomas, Eric 472, 476 566 597; violence 626-7;
Thomas, J. H: 104, 121, Travel Association 440 NOE 624
123, 124, 127, 129, Trefusis, Violet 249, 353 United Christian Front
131, 133, 135, 140, Trenchard, Hugh (Lord) 450
144, 193, 203 17, 266, 276, 293, United Empire Party 132,
Thomas, Linda (nee 295, 307, 504 I4I
Porter) 69 Trevelyan, Charles 83, United Europe Movement
Thomas, P. 577 116, 125, 152, 165 583
Thompson, Major 173 Trevor-Roper, Hugh United Ratepayers
Thomsen, Hans 255, 555 Association 454
290 Tribune 613 Unity Band 200
Thomson, Lord 124, 148 Troost, Frau 357 Unwin, Captain VC 378
Thomson, Alexander Trotsky, Leon 144 Upton, H. M. 293
Raven 205, 230, Troughton, Rupert 179 Ustinov, ‘Klop’ 426
251-3, 258, 260, Truman’s Brewery 531
262, 279, 317, 383, Truth 313, 434, 440, 447, Vaegen Framat 583
410, 445-7, 493, 465, 470, 486, 504, Valeriani, Mr 542
4975 501, 550, 529, 5425 547 Van Heemstra, Baroness
553-45
559, 563, Tryon, Major G. C. 435 Ella 262, 343, 427
 INDEX
715
Vansittart, (Lord) Sir von Mackensen, Hans 244, 269, 271, 286,
Robert 253, 358; 364, Georg 487 300, 307, 389, 408,
409, 428, 499, 517, von Oven, Wilfred 362, 420, 460, 474
547 427, 595 Wardell, Mike 15, 62
Varsity 623 von Pflugl, Baroness Alice Wardrop, Oliver 278
Vaughen-Henry, Dr Leigh 574-6 Warwick, Lady 103
473, 494 von Rohrsschiedt (Nazi Waterman, L. G. 208
Vernon, Major Wilfred official) 527 Waters, Frank 458
421-2 von Scheppenburg (Nazi Watson-Cheyne, Sir
Verona Programme 561, official) 450 William 24
565 von Schroeder, Baron Watts, Charlie 524-5,
Versailles Peace Treaty Bruno 372 529, 542, 559, 574,
46 von Schroeder, Helmut 585, $89
Vickers 258, 405, 540 372 Waugh, Evelyn 179, 201,
Vickers, Vincent 278 von Schroeder, Kurt 373, 357>
359, 582-3
Victoria, Queen 342 441 Webb, Beatrice 37, 67, 71,
Vignon (architect) 592 von Schuschnigg, Kurt 431 82-5, 102, 104, II5,
Viking Brigade (SS) 561 von Thadden, Adolf 591, 124, 127, 136, 140,
Villari, Luigi 258-9, 361, 602, 607, 623-4, 631 143, 163, 168, 187
374 von Trott, Adam 508 Webb, Sidney 37, 62, 71,
Villiers-Stuart, James and von Zech-Burkersroda 483 85, 266
Emily 606 Vorwaites 82 Webster, Martin 622, 636
Vitkowitz (steel works) Webster, Nestor 196
4325455 Wagner, Adolf 333 Webster, William 627
Vivian, Dr Margaret 552, Wagner, Richard 342, Weedon Cavalry School
559 382-3, 462 14
Voight, Frederick 167 Wagner, Siegfried 382-3 Week-End Review 152,
Volkischer Beobachter Wagner, Winnifred 342, 157, 160, 175, 177,
168, 181, 203, 300, 382-3, 461, 608 211
374. 537 Waley, Daniel 355 Weekly Review 547
Volksbund fur Frieden und Walker, Danton 556 Wegg-Prosser, Charles
Frieheit (VFF) 595 Walker, Martin 636 414
von Bulow, Nicholas 422 Wall, Alfred 505 Welles, Sumner 489
von Dirksen, Herbert 447, Wallace, Doreen 250 Wellesley, Dorothy 440
458 ‘Wall Street Crash’ 126-7 Wellesley, Lord George
von Dornberg, Alexander Walsh, Gladys 391 (Duke of Wellington)
610 Walter, Bruno 275 20, 426, 440
von Hoesch, Karl 526 Walters, Detective Wellesley, Gerald (7th
von Hoesch, Leopold 258, Sergeant 615 Duke of Wellington)
334, 370 Walton, William 111 249, 440, 549
von Kanstein, Baron Fritz Warburton, Edmond 488, Wells, H. G. 103, 162,
630 ® 168, 180, 181, 193,
644
von Kaufmann 422, 460, Warburton, John 265, DIT, get 5'2) 5,
349, 363, 396, 466, 267-8, 287
463
von Killinger (Nazi 502, 548, 550, 5575 Wells, Inspector 237
official) 527 566, 578-9, 587, Werlin (Mercedes director)
von Lagen, Herr 421 609, 630, 636 342
von Leers, Colonel Johann Ward, M. Dudley 586 Wertheimer, Egon 81-2,
Ward Price, George 147, 109, I14, 119
59t
716 INDEX

Wessex Agricultural 464-5. 487, 506, Woods, George 540

Defence Association 529, 547, 566, 601 Woolf, Leonard 168
Williamson, Hugh Ross Woolf, Virginia 168, 275
327 Worker, The Daily 84,
West, Rebecca 553, 558, 4535 490; 494, 529
576 Wilson, A. N. 646 167, 331, 295, 391;
West Downs School ro Wilson, Sir Arnold 256, 4595 540, 545,
Westfront (1918) 178 364, 408 550-1, 577
Westminster, Duke of 38, Wilson, Colin 619 World Alternative, The
132, 329, 3345 424; Wilson, Harold 637, 639 (1936) 560
Wilson, Sir Henry 28, 55, World Review 444
465, 470; 495
Westminster Gazette 65 60 World’s Press News 309
Westropa Press 576 Wilson, Horace 124, 429 Worral, Albert 540
Weymouth, Lord 24 Winchester School 11-12 Wrede, Franz 377, 381,
Wheatley, Denis 430 Windsor, Duke of 422, 406, 409, 420
Wheatley, John 79, 84, 93, 428-9, 469-70, 474, Wrench, John 297
to5; 1L0;\T22, 1134 483, 494, 507, 510, Wright, Elwin 362
Whinfield, Lt.Col. H. C. 512,
516, 531-2 Wyatt, Woodrow 579
and Muriel 478 Windsor Club 339, 361, Wybot, Roger 581, 589
Whinfield, Peter 478, 480, 364, 408, 425, 428, Wyndham, Patrick 111
484 471 Wyndham, Richard
Whistler, James 202 Winkworth, Peter 173, ‘Dick’ 111-2, 124,
White, John Baker 196-8 175 144, 145
- White, Margaret 411 Winterton, Earl of 299
White Knights 425 Wire Broadcasting 442 *X’ (see Kurtz) 446
‘White List’ 509, 516, Wired Wireless System
526 388 Yeats-Brown, Colonel
White Rose 588 Wireless Publicity 440 Francis 52, 256-7,
White’s Club 81, 112, Wise, E. Frank 30, 77-9, 297, 311, 325, 3425
379 85-6, 126 361, 408, 437, 452,
Whitfield, Edward 487 Wise, Leonard 437, 502 458, 473, 529
Wiedemann (Hitler’s Wistrich, Robert 349 ‘Yellow Book’ 115
adjutant) 422, 427, Wodehouse, Lady 21 Yellow Star Movement
430, 441 Wodehouse, P. G. 249, 626
Wigham, Peter 601 443 Yockey, Francis Parker
Wilhelm II, Kaiser 192 Wolkoff, Admiral 328 563-4, 571-2, 574-5
Wilhelmina, Queen Wolkoff, Anna 328, 426, York, Edward 284
(Holland) 344 454, 459s 4745 Yorkshire Post 298
Wilkinson, Ellen 107, 108, 486-7, 490, 492, _ Young, Allan 84, 85, 103,
1435 $39 494-5, 498, 500, 124, 129, 149,
Willart, Paul 345 506, 521, 551 163-4, 168, 170,
Willey, Vernon 98, 100 Wolkoff, Gabriel 328 172,
173, 175-6
Williams, Glyn 182 Wollheim, Eric 291 Young Communist League
Williams, Dr Sir John 3 Wollner, Senator 435 319
Williams-Ellis, Amabel 72, Women’s League of ‘Young England’ 25, 38,
85, 96, 103, 107, 163 Health and Beauty 47
Williams-Ellis, Clough 96, 240 “Young Plan’ 372
103, 125 Women’s Reserve 267, 389 Younger, Sir George 32
Williamson, Henry 24, 33, Wood, Edward (Lord “Young Tories’ 155, 157;
178, 3575 4175 456, Halifax) 52, 56 159, 160, 182
 INDEX 717

Zeffirelli, Franco 353 Zietschrift fur Geopolitik Zinoviev Letter 313

Zepplin company 525 : 383 zu Christian, Major Walter
Zetland, Lord 403 Zimmermann, General 516
Ziegveld (Nazi official) 530 Paul 602 zu Putlitz, Wolfgang 426
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book to read ...
Not too much to ask, is it? It was in 1935 when Allen Lane, Managing
Director of Bodley Head Publishers, stood on a platform at Exeter railway
station looking for something good to read on his journey back to London.
His choice was limited to popular magazines and poor-quality paperbacks —
the same choice faced every day by the vast majority of readers, few of
whom could afford hardbacks. Lane’s disappointment and subsequent anger
at the range of books generally available led him to found a company — and
change the world.

‘We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent
books at a low price, and staked everything on it’
Sir Allen Lane, 1902-1970, founder of Penguin Books

The quality paperback had arrived — and not just in bookshops. Lane was
adamant that his Penguins should appear in chain stores and tobacconists,
and should cost no more than a packet of cigarettes.

OO 9
Reading habits (and cigarette prices) have changed since 1935, but
Penguin still believes in publishing the best books for everybody to
enjoy. We still believe that good design costs no more than bad design,
and we still believe that quality books published passionately and responsibly
make the world a better place.

So wherever you see the little bird — whether it’s on a piece of

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the very best that the genre has to offer.

Whatever you like to read — trust Penguin.

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 ‘Dorril takes us into the dark alleys of the shady aristocrats,
disillusioned generals, renegade politicians, sadistic thugs and
lost romantics [of] British fascism’ OBSERVER

Hated and adored, trusted and feared, respected and scorned — public
opinion has never been indifferent to Sir Oswald Mosley. A brilliant politician,
Mosley turned his back on conventional party politics to found, in 1932, the
British Union of Fascists.

Over the intervening years, many have worked hard to guard Mosley’s
reputation but Blackshirt casts new light on the man. It reveals the true
nature of his relationship with the Nazis, and challenges the prevailing view
of his descent into anti-Semitism. With ground-breaking research, Stephen
~ Dorril uncovers an extraordinary set of characters and behind-the-scenes
friends and colleagues who supported Mosley — the crooks, swindlers, political
and royal figures, secret agents, Nazi spies, lovers and ‘crackpots’ - and who
helped to create the most infamous politician of the twentieth century.

‘Magnificently fleshes out a politician whose sense of personal destiny

outstripped his sense of human decency’ SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY
‘Easy-paced and entertaining, judicious — and damning. He work(s]
his way carefully through all the claims made for Mosley and show(s]
how far each one is hollow, misconceived or false’ LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS —

0
ISBN 978-0-140-25821-9

80140"2582

U.K. £9.99 CAN. $20.00 —

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