(Author: Gabriel A. Sivan, Vol. 71, No. 1, Pesach 2016)
Like many, I thought that organized antisemitism in the United Kingdom had its origin in Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) until a book by Colin Cross entitled The Fascists in Britain (1961) made me revise my ideas and undertake some intensive research. In the first place, it was not Mosley who established Fascism as a political movement in the UK. Secondly, there is no evidence that Mosley was a dyed-in-the-wool Jew-hater from the start. Thirdly, we must abandon various misconceptions about Fascist and Nazi sympathizers, Anglo-Jewry in the 1930s, the celebrated “Battle of Cable Street” and the long-term effects of antisemitism in Britain.
Origin of Fascism
The political movement known in Italian as Fascismo was first established by Benito Mussolini, a former Socialist, in 1919. Aspiring to revive the power and glory of ancient Rome, he drew his new movement’s name from the fasces, a bundle of rods with an axe tied together with a thong, which was carried before Roman magistrates as a symbol of their authority. Mussolini and his adherents made it their emblem and called themselves Fascisti. He assumed dictatorial power as il Duce (“the leader”) in 1925, suppressing all other political parties in the following year. Ultra-nationalistic and violently anti-Communist, Mussolini headed an autocratic, centralized government that stood for economic and social regimentation, dominating Italy from 1922 until 1943.
Mussolini’s Fascist government and its Blackshirt cohorts were imitated by totalitarian movements in Europe and other parts of the world. According to Winston Churchill (in The Gathering Storm), “as Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism”.
Proto-Fascism in Britain
Long before Mussolini gained power in Italy, the British Brothers’ League, whose slogan was “England for the English”, campaigned against the unrestricted influx of Russian and Polish aliens into Britain. The League’s campaign was launched on 14 January 1902, at a mass meeting “in favor of restricting the further immigration of destitute foreigners“, chaired by Major Evans-Gordon, a Conservative M.P., and held at the People’s Palace, Mile End. Although the BBL was not initially antisemitic, those “destitute foreigners” whom it sought to exclude were mostly Jews ‒ and they became the focus of its campaign, especially in east London.
Attempts to organize the League on paramilitary lines were largely unsuccessful, but the fact that its rallies were stewarded by guards who ejected vocal opponents was a sign of things to come. The Aliens Act of 1905, restricting immigration, was mainly attributed to the League’s campaign and its support then dwindled. However, this dislike of “bloody foreigners” would resurface as Germanophobia in 1914, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (for example) made a token contribution to the outmoded BBL’s funds. Drawing its membership from die-hard elements in the Conservative Party, the British Brothers’ League never aspired to become a separate political movement, but its platform would inspire far-right groups in the country ‒ from the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s to the League of Empire Loyalists after World War II.
Antisemitism and the Early Fascist Movements
The first movement that took its inspiration from the Duce was the British Fascisti group, established by Rotha Lintorn-Orman as early as 1923. The granddaughter of a Field Marshal, she was a staunch imperialist and had distinguished herself in women’s hospital service during the First World War. The rise of the Labour Party made her seek recruits for an organized force that would tackle the supposed threat of Red Revolution in Great Britain. Miss Lintorn-Orman attached herself to Fascism because of her admiration for Mussolini and his action-based style of politics, but she never formulated a coherent policy of her own. British Fascisti maintained that they were defending the monarchy, Toryism, free enterprise and Christian values against Socialism, the trade unions, free love and atheism. As such, the movement appealed to right-wing Conservatives, blimpish retired generals and admirals, minor industrialists and some Anglican clergymen.
They elected a Grand Council, with branches from London to Scotland, and claimed a membership of 100 000 by August 1924, when the hierarchy organized “flying squads” and the stewarding of Conservative Party meetings. No uniforms were worn, but Rotha Lintorn-Orman (who reputedly carried a sword at times) designed special badges and prescribed a “Fascisti salute” to accompany playing of the national anthem. How the movement’s name should be pronounced gave rise to controversy: the leadership mostly favored the anglicized Fassist, while others preferred the sound of Fashist.
Though not particularly antisemitic, the British Fascisti denounced “alien forces” at work in the country; and when Lintorn-Orman was temporarily consigned to the background, Brigadier-General R. G. D. Blakeney reorganized the movement and gave emphasis to the maintenance of law and order. At Portsmouth in 1925, he delivered a decidedly racist speech, asserting that Communism was run by “international Jews” seeking world domination. Splinter groups constantly plagued the movement, with some members demonstrating their support for the authorities during the 1926 General Strike. Rotha Lintorn-Orman designed a British Fascisti uniform ‒ black shirts for men and black blouses for women, the latter patrolling London streets, rescuing prostitutes and heckling their political opponents. Oswald Mosley’s creation of the British Union of Fascists in 1932 sounded the death knell of her movement, its more radical elements leaving to join the BUF. For her part, Rotha Lintorn-Orman would have no truck with Mosley, whom she viewed as a near-Communist. Rumors claiming that she took drugs and participated in orgies destroyed her reputation and ended her financial support. When she died, barely 40, in 1935, her movement was already defunct.
Before Mosley’s somewhat reluctant turn against the Jews (discussed further on), antisemitism was only the creed of a few eccentrics with no real political influence in Britain. Their most bizarre representative was Henry Hamilton Beamish (1873-1948), the son of an admiral, whose experiences as a soldier in the Anglo-Boer War and while living in South Africa made him a fanatical antisemite. He claimed that the Anglo-Boer War was fought to preserve Jewish control of the gold and diamond industries; and, after returning to England, he founded The Britons, an anti-Jewish propaganda organization, in 1919. A poster that he distributed that same year targeted Sir Alfred Mond, a Jewish industrialist and a Zionist, who served as Commissioner of Works in Lloyd George’s cabinet. Beamish denounced him as a traitor and Mond, who was later raised to the peerage as Baron Melchett, sued him for libel and was awarded damages amounting to ₤5000. Beamish fled the country without paying the fine and became a “travelling salesman of antisemitism”, preaching Jew-hatred from Europe to America and the Far East. With the notorious forged Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as his textbook, he asserted that “wars, revolutions and every social evil were the work of the Jews, Communism and capitalism were the twin manifestations of Jewish power” and that the Jews “also worked through Freeemasonry, Black Magic and the Christian religion”. The Britons Publishing Company, which he established in 1921, produced no less than 85 editions of the Protocols, as well as similar anti-Jewish works. Beamish is known to have corresponded with Henry Ford, the US automobile magnate, whose weekly magazine, The Dearborn Independent, also utilized the Protocols in a nationwide antisemitic campaign (1920-27).
Equating Bolshevism with Judaism, Beamish was far closer ideologically to Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism than to Benito Mussolini’s Italian Fascism. He was received by the Führer and by Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, who treated him as an honored guest at the Nuremberg Rallies. While visiting North America in 1937, he met and admired the Canadian Nazi leader Adrien Arcand in Montreal, and addressed a mass meeting of the German American Bund, a uniformed Nazi organization, in New York. Beamish finally settled in Southern Rhodesia, where he became an MP in 1938 and was interned during World War II (1940-43) as a Nazi sympathizer.
Arnold Spencer Leese (1878-1956) was the first man in Britain to combine antisemitism with Fascism in a coherent political form. Born in Lytham St. Annes, a coastal resort near Blackpool, he qualified as a veterinary surgeon and made his career in London, India and East Africa, becoming an authority on camels and the treatment of their diseases. After serving in the Royal Army Veterinary Corps on the Western Front and in the Middle East during the First World War, Leese opened a practice in Stamford, where he worked until his retirement in 1927. There he became friendly with an antisemitic economist, who gave him a copy of the Protocols and persuaded him that control of money, the key to power, lay in the hands of “international Jewry”. His opposition to shechitah, inspired by a vet’s love of animals, was another factor in his obsessive hatred of Jews. Having joined Lintern-Orman’s movement in 1924, he and a colleague won a municipal by-election in Stamford, the only declared Fascists ever to gain office in Britain.
After abandoning the British Fascisti, Leese established his own Imperial Fascist League (IFL) in 1929. He and his followers espoused a violently racial form of antisemitism and were closer than any other British movement of the far right to Hitler’s Nazis. Their aim was to abolish the democratic system, replace it with a new “governing caste” and establish a totalitarian corporate state. They targeted Freemasonry, and (like Beamish) Leese maintained that Christianity was part of a Jewish scheme to undermine the “Nordic race”. IFL men wore black shirts and breeches, which made them hard to distinguish from Mosley’s BUF members, whom Leese derided as “kosher Fascists”. In 1933, their fasces emblem on banners and armbands was changed to the Union Jack with a swastika superimposed. Leese visited Germany and conferred with Julius Streicher, whose Jew-baiting cartoons in Der Stürmer were subsequently emulated in Leese’s monthly, The Fascist. He also published articles justifying the blood libel and proposing the mass murder of Jews in gas chambers (1935-36). Though an indifferent public speaker, Leese exerted an influence far beyond the Imperial Fascist League’s insignificant membership ‒ an influence that would still be felt after the Second World War.
Enter Oswald Mosley
We now come to the central figure in British Fascism, Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley (1896-1980), whose character and political career have been the subject of innumerable books, articles and television presentations. After surveying his many turnabouts, from Conservative to Labour and then to Fascist, I will discuss Mosley’s change of attitude toward Jews and the Anglo-Jewish community’s reaction to him.
Born and raised in the minor aristocracy, Oswald (“Tom”) Mosley was the eldest son of a baronet distantly related to Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the future wife of King George VI. His front-line experiences during the “War to End Wars” changed Mosley’s view of British society and led him to enter politics. At the age of 21, as Conservative MP for Harrow, he was the youngest member to take his seat in the House Commons after the General Election of 1918. A gifted, often sarcastic orator who dispensed with notes, he championed the League of Nations and the rights of demobilized servicemen, advocating the retrospective taxation of war profiteers and a range of social reforms that had little to do with Conservative policy. In August 1920, he married Cynthia (“Cimmie”), the attractive and highly intelligent daughter of Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon. Shortly after their marriage, to the horror of his new father-in-law, Mosley crossed the floor of the House and took his seat as an Independent behind the Labour Opposition benches. One reason for this break was the Government’s use of irregulars, the dreaded Black-and-Tans, to repress civil disobedience in Ireland; he likened these reprisals to “the pogrom of the barbarous Slav”. He built up a following in his constituency and retained the Harrow seat against a Conservative challenge in the 1922 general elections.
By 1924, however, Mosley saw his future elsewhere, joined the Labour Party and allied himself with the left. Since Harrow would clearly not re-elect him on the Labour ticket, he had to choose a new seat and campaigned against Neville Chamberlain in Birmingham Ladywood. There he infuriated the Tories by stigmatizing Chamberlain as a “landlords’ hireling” and, after several recounts, lost the election by just 77 votes. Now outside Parliament, Mosley formulated the “Birmingham Proposals”, constituting the basis of his economic policy. He recommended higher wages and shorter hours, slum clearance and improved health services. When the Labour-held seat of Smethwick fell vacant in 1926, Mosley won the December by-election and returned to Parliament, where he proved to be one of the very few members capable of standing up to Churchill. Lady Cynthia Mosley, who had adopted her husband’s Socialist outlook, was elected Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent in 1929. They had three children, but Oswald was an incorrigible womanizer, even indulging in affairs with Cimmie’s younger sister and (for a time) with her stepmother.
Being close to Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and extremely ambitious, Mosley looked forward to attaining high office after Labour won the general election in 1929 as the Great Depression tightened its grip on the country. However, the only post offered to him was outside the Cabinet, as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, with responsibility for solving the unemployment problem. After his first proposals were blocked by the Cabinet, he devised the more comprehensive “Mosley Memorandum” which, in addition to the nationalization of key industries, called for a public works programme and other radical measures. When his scheme was again rejected in May 1930, he resigned in protest against Government inertia and made one last attempt in the following October to gain support from the Labour Party Conference. Faced with yet another defeat, Mosley chose to quit the party instead of remaining to fight another day. Three decades later, in 1961, Richard Crossman would state that this ‘brilliant’ memorandum was “a whole generation ahead of Labour thinking”.
From the New Party to the British Union of Fascists
Mosley founded his short-lived New Party in March 1931, but its only effect was to split the left-wing vote at successive by-elections, allowing Conservatives to top the poll. Many of those in the Labour Party (such as Aneurin Bevan and trade union leaders) who had expressed support for Mosley and his economic programme condemned his growing interest in Europe’s so-called “Modern Movements”, which were actually Fascist. When angry Labour opponents disrupted his meetings, a 100-strong force of young hearties trained by Ted (“Kid”) Lewis, a Jewish former world boxing champion, kept order and served as Mosley’s bodyguards. Dressed in black uniforms, they were nicknamed “Blackshirts”; newspapers dubbed them “Mosley’s Biff Boys”. Some intellectuals were drawn to the New Party, notably Raymond Mortimer, Eric Partridge, John Strachey, Osbert Sitwell and Harold Nicolson (who edited Action, its literary and political weekly), but this political manoeuvre failed completely. At the general election held late in 1931, all the New Party candidates ‒including sitting MPs like Mosley ‒ suffered a humiliating defeat. “Kid” Lewis fared worst of all, securing only 154 votes in his native Whitechapel.
Undeterred by this setback, Mosley embarked on a study programme of the new “Modern Movements” in Europe. Visiting Italy in January 1932, he met Mussolini and was impressed by the Duce’s success in restoring the nation’s order and prosperity. Back home, Mosley decided that Britain’s democratic system had failed and that its only hope lay in a Fascist corporate state that he would lead. However, Britain was not Italy. The economic crisis that had resulted in widespread unemployment was beginning to recede, a National (coalition) government under Ramsay MacDonald retained power, and the British were averse to any kind of dictatorship. Ignoring public opinion was Mosley’s fatal mistake.
After disbanding the New Party in April 1932, Mosley spent the next few months developing his latest political programme, The Greater Britain, and aimed to incorporate small groups on the far right within the movement that he launched in October and partly funded, the British Union of Fascists. After another audience with Mussolini, in April 1933, he secured the Duce’s financial backing (₤60 000 per annum) for the BUF, whose nucleus was provided by the “Biff Boys” and remnants of the New Party’s youth movement. Between January 1933 and June 1934, the BUF’s membership grew from 10 000 to five times that number. Its supporters included establishment figures and members of the aristocracy, who saw in Mosley’s Fascists a dynamic element that the Labour and Conservative parties lacked and a bulwark against Communism. Some of these supporters were the Duke of Bedford, Baron Redesdale, Sir Alliott Verdon Roe (the aeronaut), Sir Reginald Goodall (the conductor), St. John Philby, A. K. Chesterton and Sir Malcolm Campbell (the racing motorist). The Remains of the Day (1993), a film based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, indicates the appeal that Fascism had for many upper-class Britons in the 1930s.
Viscount Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail and a right-wing Tory, was a case in point. He met and was photographed with Adolf Hitler soon after the Nazis came to power, and in a Daily Mail editorial (10 July 1933) wrote that “a few isolated acts of violence” had been exaggerated by the Reds “to give the impression that Nazi rule is a bloodthirsty tyranny.” The Führer sent him a letter of thanks for this unsolicited testimonial. Rothermere’s poor judgment was displayed once again in January 1934, when he signed a full-page article in the newspaper entitled “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” Naively,he alsomaintained that there was no “racial prejudice” in the BUF.
Since the earliest Fascist movement in Britain was founded by a woman (Rotha Lintorn-Orman), the fact that Mosley gained considerable support from women admirers is scarcely surprising. Emmeline Pankhurst, who had been imprisoned at Holloway in 1914 as a militant suffragette, would land there again in 1940 because of her Fascist involvement. Mary Richardson, another leading suffragette, went on to head the women’s section of the BUF; and at parades of women Blackshirts in the 1930s, Mosley often took the salute.
Mosley and the Jews of Britain
There is no hard evidence of antisemitism in Oswald Mosley’s outlook up to the middle of 1934. When Arnold Leese alleged that he had married a half-Jewess because the name of Cynthia’s grandfather, a Chicago department store millionaire, was Levi Leiter, Mosley was able to prove (for genealogical, not anti-Jewish reasons) that Leiter was actually of Dutch Calvinist or Mennonite descent. There were Jews in his social circle and among his early supporters. He admired Harold Laski, the political scientist who played an influential role in the Labour Party, while “Kid” Lewis served for a time as his chief bodyguard. The January Club, a ‘front’ organization that held dinner parties “to inquire upon modern methods of Government” (1934-35), had two prominent Jewish members. Ralph D. Blumenfeld, a former editor of the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, was a Zionist and a campaigner against antisemitism. Major Harry Nathan, a lawyer and MP active in Jewish communal affairs, would become a Labour peer (as Baron Nathan of Churt) in 1940 and Minister of Civil Aviation in the postwar Labour government.
Initially, anti-Jewish propaganda was not conducted by the BUF. Mosley had attacked anti-Fascist hecklers, dubbing them “class warriors from Jerusalem,” but insisted that he was not against Jews as such, only those who “financed Communists or were pursuing an anti-British policy.” What in the main led to his rather surprising about-face was pressure from William Joyce and other leading Blackshirts, who blamed most of the world’s troubles on “international Jewry.” However, this change of heart did not occur overnight.
Emulating Mussolini’s technique, Mosley organized the first of three rallies at the Royal Albert Hall on 22 April 1934, when his audience was treated to a display of Fascist pageantry and a long speech by The Leader outlining the BUF’s creed. To make the most of this successful event, Mosley decided to hold an even bigger rally on 7 June at London’s Olympia Hall. While 13000 places were sold in advance, another 2000 seats were available free of charge. A fair number of those attending were peers and MPs, diplomats, tycoons and journalists who wished to gauge the BUF’s strength. On this occasion, the atmosphere more closely resembled that of the Nuremberg Rallies organized by the Nazis since 1927. Wearing his Blackshirt outfit, Mosley stood on a raised platform surrounded by spotlights and party banners. Some 500 anti-Fascists, including some Jews, had managed to gain entrance, but Mosley was prepared for them. When they began loudly heckling his speech, he made regular pauses that enabled 1000 Blackshirt ‘stewards’ to deal with their opponents inside and outside the auditorium.
Hitherto neutral members of the audience who rose from their seats to protest against this Fascist brutality were also manhandled, sensational press reports emphasizing the deliberately organized violence of Mosley’s thugs. As a result of the ensuing public outcry, anti-Fascist sentiment grew and middle-class support dwindled. Letters from several Conservative MPs. who had walked out in disgust, appeared in the national press, one signed by Geoffrey Lloyd, Stanley Baldwin’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, who wrote: “I came to the conclusion that Mosley was a political maniac and that all decent people must combine to kill his movement”. Less than a month later, Hitler’s bloody purge of disaffected Nazis received wide coverage in the media, where the “Night of the Long Knives” was associated with BUF tactics at Olympia.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row] Mosley reviewing Blackshirts, 1935 Faced with signs of growing Jewish participation in the anti-Fascist demonstrations, and with a majority of his followers expressing their admiration for Hitler, Mosley found it difficult to resist pressure for the BUF to adopt an antisemitic line. He then argued “that a dynamic creed such as Fascism cannot flourish unless it has a scapegoat to hit out at, such as Jewry”. This was reflected in his speeches at rallies and parades from the autumn of 1934 onwards. Now even Lord Rothermere became alarmed. Not wishing to be tarred as a racist or to lose the Daily Mail’s Jewish readers and advertisers, he urged Mosley to undertake policy changes in the BUF dropping its “Fascist” title, for example, and repudiating antisemitism. When these proposals were rejected in July 1934, Rothermere formally withdrew his support for the BUF. Lord Beaverbrook, another Conservative press lord, had opposed Mosley all along, even permitting left-wing writers to attack Fascism in the columns of the Daily Express. By the time his second Albert Hall rally took place, on 28 October 1934, Mosley’s speeches had become more aggressively antisemitic. “I have encountered forces which I did not dream existed in Britain,” he declared. “One of them is the power of organized Jewry, which is today mobilized against Fascism”. Since the British Empire comprised “numerous races, bound together in a mighty unity”, the BUF did not attack Jews on racial or religious grounds, but “because they fight against Fascism and against Britain.” He went on to assert that although Jews constituted “only six per cent of the population”, they had been responsible for fifty per cent of the attacks on Fascists”. The real threat came not from “little Jews in the streets, the sweepings of foreign Ghettos”, but from “big Jews working in secret”. They controlled the press, and the cinema was “Jewish from beginning to end”. Their allegiance was not to the Empire but to their own “kith and kin in nations beyond our frontiers”. Invoking the Fascist cult of youth, Mosley announced that his movement would get rid of “the old men” in government and rebuild the country. “We fought Germany once in our British quarrel. We shall not fight Germany again in a Jewish quarrel”. The inconsistencies and nonsensical claims in Mosley’s speech were overlooked by the audience, which gave him the ovation of his life. Paradoxically, of course, those “big Jews” he singled out for attack were the very ones who had been in favour of “keeping a low profile” as long as the BUF was not openly antisemitic. That was the policy of the Anglo-Jewish establishment, headed by the Jewish Chronicle and the Board of Deputies. Neville Laski, Harold’s elder brother, had been elected president of the Board in 1933. A traditional Jew, he was the son-in-law of Haham Moses Gaster. A fourfold strategy was adopted by Laski and his colleagues to defeat the BUF and similar movements: 1. Anti-defamation, refuting lies told about the Jews; 2. Intelligence gathering of Fascist activity for the British Home Office; 3. Lobbying the authorities to clamp down on antisemitic activity; and 4. Avoiding direct confrontation with the Blackshirts. Most Jewish MPs, Labour and Conservative, backed this strategy. Yet those “little Jews” whom Mosley discounted were the very ones his followers now targeted. The BUF embarked on an “East End Campaign” in 1935, with the aim of intimidating thousands of Jews living there, as uniformed Blackshirts marched through the streets chanting “The Yids, the Yids, we gotta get rid of the Yids!” Rejecting the establishment line, East Enders supported the Jewish People’s Council Against Fascism and Anti-Semitism, a left-wing defense organization that called for physical opposition to the BUF and its uniformed thugs. They could not forget how Jewish ex-servicemen and trade unions requesting affiliation with the Board of Deputies had been turned down, on the grounds that they were “too close to the Communist Party”. So it was that when the Deputies finally agreed to set up a Jewish Defence Committee in mid-1936, the matter was (for the time being) out of their hands. The watchword of Spanish Republicans battling the Falangists, “They Shall Not Pass!” (¡No Pasarán!), became that of Jewish and Gentile anti-Fascists alike. It was only in the East End of London that Mosley and his BUF gained a mass following. How and why this came about is easily explained. From Whitechapel to Mile End, kosher butcher shops and bakeries, Jews speaking Yiddish and the quiet descending on Shabbat typified this whole area. Some Cockneys, lacking ambition and resenting it in others, noted the Jewish drive to work hard (especially as tailors and carpenters) in order to provide their children with a good education. There was little social contact between Jews and Gentiles, intermarriage was scorned on both side, and anti-immigrant feeling had given rise to a smouldering antisemitism that only needed Mosley to ignite it. As a show of strength, and to mark the fourth anniversary of his movement’s birth on Sunday, 5 October 1936, Mosley planned a march through the East End by several thousand Blackshirts, including women, cadets and four bands. At stops en route he meant to address crowds of his supporters. Labour Party leaders warned the Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, that this march was bound to provoke violence and should be cancelled. For Socialists and Communists it was a British version of Franco’s revolt in Spain. Jews feared that it might herald a pogrom and the Board of Deputies urged them keep away. Sir Philip Game the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, was determined to maintain order and drafted 10 000 constables, including his entire mounted police force, to prevent any disruption of the march by anti-Fascists. Mosley and his henchmen arrived in newly designed uniforms (resembling those of Hitler’s SS) to inspect their troops and begin the march at Royal Mint Street near the Tower of London. What Mosley and Sir Philip had not reckoned on, however, was the strength of the opposition and its resolve that “They Shall Not Pass!” At least 100 000 anti-Fascists took advantage of the fine weather and prepared for action. Blackshirts who reached the Commercial Road at Gardiner’s Corner found their way blocked by anti-Fascist demonstrators and then sought an alternative route via Cable Street. There they were awaited by a vast number of local residents, Jews and non-Jews, together with Labour and Communist party stalwarts, trade unionists and Irish dockers, who erected a whole series of barricades which the police were hard pressed to dismantle. What followed was not the legendary “Battle of Cable Street” between Mosley’s Blackshirts and Jewish East Enders, but a violent struggle between massed anti-Fascists and the Metropolitan Police. Demonstrators and householders, convinced that the police were siding with the Blackshirts, pelted them with broken furniture, stones, rotten food and other junk, while children rolled marbles under the hooves of police horses, toppling their riders. Casualties mounted as the demonstrators were subjected to repeated baton charges. One of the injured was Fenner Brockway, the Independent Labour Party’s general secretary, who managed to reach a phone box and warn the Home Office that the streets would flow with blood unless the BUF march was cancelled or diverted. That opinion was shared by Sir Philip Game, who ordered Mosley to call off his parade but allowed the Fascists to turn west, under police escort, along the Embankment and to end their march at the Strand. “The Government surrenders to Red violence and Jewish corruption”, Mosley declared. “We never surrender”. This was simply double-talk, because an alliance between parties of the Left, the trade unions, the Jewish People’s Council and most of the local population had outwitted the enemy and sent him reeling.1 In any case, as we shall see, Mosley was not inclined to waste time arguing with the authorities on that particular day. According to a Special Branch report, there was far more support for Mosley in East London than his opponents claimed and the recent disorders were “largely Communist-inspired”. The Manchester Guardian and other newspapers gave a rather different picture of the events. Antisemitic violence reached its height a week later when about 100 young toughs who invaded the Mile End Road smashed the windows of Jewish shops and homes, attacking anyone they thought to be Jewish. A hairdresser and a four-year-old girl were hurled through a plate-glass window. Following the East End disturbances and the Mile End pogrom, a Public Order Act was hurried through Parliament and became law on 1 January 1937. This Act banned the wearing of political uniforms in the public domain; strengthened the existing law that made it an offence for speakers to use insulting and inflammatory words liable to cause a breach of the peace; and gave the police more power to ban provocative marches and processions. Deprived of their uniforms, the Fascists appeared nondescript and lost much of their glamour, while any adherents who defied the ban on insulting speech could be fined on the spot and threatened with a jail sentence. With the enforcement of these regulations it became increasingly difficult for the Fascists to hold marches and rent halls for meetings in London and the Provinces. Although the BUF survived until 1940, the Public Order Act was largely responsible for its political decline. Anti-Jewish sentiment in British politics was not confined to the Fascist movements. After the Olympia rally’s display of Blackshirt violence in 1934, there was a revealing exchange in the House of Commons between two wealthy Conservative MPs. “Is it not a fact”, one asked, “that 90% of those accused of attacking Fascists rejoice in fine old British names such as Ziff, Kernstein and Minsky?” Another could not resist adding: “Were some of them called Feigenbaum, Goldstein, Rigolsky and other good old Highland names?” Ever since the Zinoviev Letter, a fabrication meant to discredit the Labour Party, made headlines in 1924, right-wing Tories had feared a Communist take-over in Britain. Once Mosley began associating Jews and ‘Reds’, he gained recruits from high society who admired the Nazis. They included Lord Redesdale and two of his extraordinary daughters, the Mitford Sisters. Unity Valkyrie Mitford (1914-1948) was infatuated with Hitler and even hoped to marry him. Britain’s declaration of war in 1939 found her in Munich, where she promptly shot herself in a suicide attempt. The Führer arranged for her to be sent home, brain-damaged; she died in 1948. A blonde, blue-eyed beauty whom Hitler called “a perfect specimen of Aryan womanhood”, Diana Mitford (1910-2003) visited Germany with her sister and attended several of the Nuremberg Rallies. In 1932, while married to Bryan Guinness of the wealthy brewing family, she and Oswald Mosley embarked on a love affair. Although Diana divorced her husband, Mosley refused to leave his wife, who had loyally followed him from one party to another. Not until ‘Cimmie’ died of peritonitis in 1933 would he consider marrying Diana. She finally persuaded Mosley, who looked down on Hitler as an upstart, to have their union solemnized in Berlin. Immediately after the “Battle of Cable Street”, he flew to Berlin, where the wedding ceremony took place before a registrar at the home of Reich propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, whose wife (Magda) was a friend of Diana’s. Hitler, one of the few guests attending, gave the newly married couple a framed portrait of himself. Unity Mitford (left) and sister Diana at the 1937 Nuremberg Rally Nancy Mitford (1904-1973), their older sister, became a successful novelist and biographer. Her anti-Fascism was displayed in Wigs on the Green (1935), which satirized the Blackshirts (as “Union Jackshirts”), with Unity appearing (thinly disguised) as a rabble-rousing aristocrat. Caring for Spanish Republican refugees in France and Jewish evacuees from blitzed areas of the East End strengthened Nancy’s hatred for the Nazis. After the outbreak of war, she provided MI5 with information about her sister, Diana Mosley, “a devoted Fascist and admirer of Hitler”. Nancy Mitford later established her literary reputation with The Pursuit of Love (1945), a bestseller, while Noblesse Oblige (1956) made her the arbiter of “U” and Non-U” speech, a concept that became widely popular, though meant as a joke. Known as the “red sheep of the family”, Jessica Mitford (1917-1996) left home at 19 to marry her second cousin, Esmond Romilly, a left-wing nephew of Winston Churchill who had recently fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. They moved to the US in 1939, but Esmond served with the Royal Canadian Air Force and died on a bombing raid over Hamburg in 1941. Two years later, Jessica married Robert Treuhaft, an American Jewish civil rights lawyer. They joined the Communist Party at the height of the McCarthyite “Red Scare” (1953), but resigned in protest against Soviet repression in 1958. Like Nancy Mitford, Jessica became a successful writer, publishing The American Way of Death (1953), an exposé of the funeral business. Hons and Rebels (1960) described her upbringing in the Redesdale household. Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford (2006) includes a note concerning the visit she and her little son Benjamin paid to Britain after the war. Diana Mosley apparently invited them to come and see her. “I thought better not”, Jessica wrote, “as I didn’t want Benjy turned into a lampshade”. Among other events, 1936 saw the formation of a Popular Front government in France, the outbreak of civil war in Spain and German troops reentering the Rhineland, not to mention the BUF’s renaming as the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists (or simply the “British Union”). Most traumatic in Britain was the crisis ending in December 1936 with the abdication of King Edward VIII. It is still often maintained that Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, and the Archbishop of Canterbury forced the king to abdicate because he insisted on marrying Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American socialite. Recent evidence clearly indicates, however, that matters of state security rather than Church precept were responsible for this drastic solution to the problem. As Prince of Wales, Edward was proud of his German descent, spoke fluent German and felt an emotional and racial tie with the Nazi leaders. In July 1933, he told Prince Louis-Ferdinand, the ex-Kaiser’s grandson: “It is no business of ours to interfere in Germany’s internal affairs, either re Jews or anything else. Dictators are very popular these days, and we might need one in England before long”. Wallis Simpson had been close to a series of Fascists, detested Blacks and was openly antisemitic (except when she had something to gain from rich Jewish acquaintances). She never wanted to be the exiled Duchess of Windsor but the king’s mistress, enjoying all the pomp and influence of a queen without the official title and helping to influence the course of political events. An FBI file in Washington indicates that the contents of documents entrusted to the king had somehow reached Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador in London, and that Mrs. Simpson (identified as the leak) was under surveillance by MI5. Sir Robert Vansittart, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, became her implacable enemy. “The prospect of a Nazi king backed by an infinitely more able and resourceful Wallis Simpson was intolerable” and all secret information was henceforth withheld from her lover. Although it came as a great relief to Baldwin, when Edward chose “the woman I love” and quit the throne, he still constituted a menace abroad. Invited to visit Germany in October 1937, the new Duke of Windsor made a point of greeting enthusiastic crowds with the Nazi salute. He and Wallis were received by the Führer at his Berchtesgaden retreat, where they were photographed with him. His visit and tête-à-tête with Hitler received wide and unfavourable coverage in the British press. Since he favoured peace with Germany at almost any price, Nazi leaders considered Edward a potentially valuable ally. The Duke and Duchess had moved to neutral Lisbon in 1940 when the Gestapo’s No. 2 man, Walter Schellenberg, arrived there on a cloak-and-dagger mission to fly them to Berlin. Word of this scheme reached Prime Minister Winston Churchill, one of Edward’s keenest supporters four years earlier, who was now determined to keep him way out of Hitler’s reach. In the comic opera scene that followed, Schellenberg was outwitted by Churchill’s agents, who quickly had the Windsors shipped off to the Bahamas, where Edward spent the rest of the war as nominal Governor in privileged captivity. Left to his own devices, the foolish, egotistical Duke might well have become the puppet ruler of a Nazi-occupied Britain. Did any other members of the Royal Family have Fascist (let alone Nazi) sympathies? Nothing has ever been proved, but there was a burst of outrage last July when The Sun published a home movie clip dating from around 1933-34, in which the future King Edward VIII is seen encouraging his niece, the present Queen of England, to make a Nazi salute. That absurd caper was filmed soon after Hitler rose to power: little Princess Elizabeth must have thought she was playing a game and could scarcely have imagined what Nazism would inflict on humanity, but Edward was already pro-Hitler. As Duke of Windsor, he would blame “Jews and Reds” for World War II and even suggest in 1940 that the Nazis should bomb Britain into an alliance with the Third Reich. After Buckingham Palace was hit during the London Blitz, King George VI appeared to be convinced that Edward had given targeting advice to the Luftwaffe. Queen Elizabeth, his wife, loathed the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and denied her brother-in-law the right to walk behind the coffin in her husband’s funeral procession. Towards the end of April 1945, the king had ordered a dependable emissary to retrieve certain documents from Schloss Kronberg and other castles belonging to distant cousins of his in Germany. They were thought to comprise letters written to and from Queen Victoria, King George V and the Dowager Queen Mary, as well as some of their personal effects. However, this clandestine operation also unearthed Third Reich documents showing that members of the princely Hesse-Kassel family related to the king had been leading Nazis. Worse still, a thick dossier of microfilmed telegrams in one specially labeled German Foreign Office file revealed the extent to which the Duke of Windsor had not merely admired Hitler but involved himself in Nazi political intrigues. There was consternation at Buckingham Palace, and Churchill wished to have all the evidence destroyed, but George VI had other ideas. The incriminating documents were and are now safely locked away in the Royal Archives. Incidentally, the king’s emissary was a certain Major Blunt, later Sir Anthony Blunt KCVO, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art at London University. In 1979, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher named him as a Soviet agent who, for ten years, had served the Kremlin rather than the Crown. As for the mission he undertook on the king’s behalf, even Blunt’s MI5 interrogator was never permitted to learn its secret. Let us now return to Sir Oswald Mosley and the problems he and his movement increasingly faced. Whereas German industrialists provided Hitler with huge financial resources, British support and Mussolini’s subventions dried up after 1936. Mosley was then forced to pump his own cash reserves (about ₤100 000) into the BUF to keep it solvent, and to stop paying most of his organizers to save costs. Furthermore, serious differences emerged between the head office, which concentrated on antisemitic propaganda in East London, and the Provincial branches where this activity had far less appeal to disgruntled but patriotic Tories. Again and again, Mosley had misjudged public opinion, first by switching from one party to another and then by exploiting yobbish Jew-hatred to further his political ambitions. After a vain attempt to keep Edward VIII on the throne, he continued to lose support by ignoring the Nazi Kristallnacht pogroms and by justifying the Anschluss and Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia. In Tomorrow We Live (1938), Mosley again distinguished between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Jews, proposing that those who (allegedly) worked against British interests should be expelled, that the rest be treated as foreigners and that ultimately they should all be given a national home ‒ not in Palestine but in one of the “waste places of the earth possessing great potential fertility”. Even so, he made little attempt to define who was or was not a Jew. Arnold Leese and his Imperial Fascist League were far more specific, anticipating Goering’s Nuremberg Laws and Hitler’s Final Solution. “The most certain and permanent way of disposing of the Jews”, he wrote, “would be to exterminate them by some humane method such as the lethal chamber”. Alternatively, everyone of Jewish extraction would be relocated to Madagascar, where the existing population would be removed and the world’s navies would ensure no Jew every escaped. An uninhibited disciple of Julius Streicher, Leese resurrected the mediaeval blood libel, claiming that Jews kidnapped and murdered Gentile children whose blood they used for baking matzah. None of these revolting charges found their way into Mosley’s propaganda. Although British Union candidates made a reasonable showing in the London County Council elections of March 1937, not one was returned and they never fought a General Election. Mosley’s campaign against war with Nazi Germany allied him with prominent appeasers, but outraged anti-Fascists in all the major cities. While touring the country in an effort to drum up support, he showed undeniable courage when facing his opponents. In October 1937, for example, while standing on a loudspeaker van to address followers in Queens Drive, Liverpool, he was showered with missiles, one of which struck him on the head. Rescued from an angry crowd by mounted police, he was rushed to Walton Hospital and spent a week there recovering from his injuries. This was by no means an isolated incident. A “Mind Britain’s Business” rally at Earl’s Court in July 1939 was Mosley’s last desperate attempt to keep his ship afloat. By then, leading British Union figures had castadrift. John Beckett and William Joyce, who had been made redundant and had lost faith in the Leader, set up the even more extreme National Socialist League. Charles Wegg-Prosser left because the movement’s anti-Jewish line sickened him. In a letter republished by the Board of Deputies, Wegg-Prosser accused Mosley of imitating foreign dictators: “You sidetrack the demand for social justice by attacking the Jew; you give the people a false answer and unloose the lowest mob passion”. Up to the summer of 1940, Hitler pinned his hopes on the Anglo-German Fellowship, the Right Club, the National Socialist League and, of course, the Imperial Fascist League ‒ pro-Nazi organizations that could be manipulated to win over and neutralize the British Empire. For Sir Oswald the Führer had neither time nor money. Following the outbreak of World War II on 3 September 1939, Mosley urged party members not to do anything that would harm the country or assist a foreign power. Taking advantage of the “phony war”, the British Union contested three Parliamentary by-elections (February-May 1940), but its candidates never received more than 3% of the poll. Churchill succeeded Chamberlain as Prime Minister on 10 May, when German troops invaded the Low Countries; on the 22nd, while enemy tanks were driving into France, Mosley was nearly lynched at Middleton in Lancashire. That same day, an amendment to Defence Regulation 18B empowered the Home Secretary to imprison without trial anyone thought likely to endanger the safety of the realm. Mosley and eight other leading Fascists were promptly interned and, by 27 May, dozens more had been jailed. The British Union was dissolved and its publications banned three days later. This sounded the British Union’s death-knell. Arnold Leese, Britain’s would-be Gauleiter, went into hiding and managed to avoid arrest until November 1940. Diana Mosley was also interned, a week after her husband; they eventually received VIP treatment in the shape of a four-room apartment with cooking and other facilities at Holloway Prison, remaining there until Sir Oswald’s release on health grounds in November 1943. William Joyce, the BUF ideologist and Mosley’s former right-hand man, fled to Germany a few days before Chamberlain declared war. Derisively nicknamed “Lord Haw-Haw”, he became notorious for his sardonic propaganda broadcasts in English from the Third Reich. He was captured after the war and, though an American by birth, was hanged as a traitor in 1946. Movements of the radical Right, from mildly Fascist to neo-Nazi, reappeared in Britain soon after World War II. Arnold Leese churned out more vicious nonsense, beginning with The Jewish War of Survival (1945). A. K. Chesterton, one of Mosley’s prewar allies, founded the super-patriotic League of Empire Loyalists in 1954. After demobilization, Jeffrey Hamm set up the British League of Ex-Servicemen and Women, which drew support from people who, like himself, had been youthful members of the BUF and who would form the nucleus of Mosley’s postwar Union Movement. Far more dangerous than any of these was Colin Jordan, a Cambridge graduate and disciple of Leese, whose fanatical ideas and activities led him from the League of Empire Loyalists to the White Defence League and from there to the British National Party (BNP) in 1960. Two years later, after a split in the BNP, Jordan and John Tyndall founded the National Socialist Movement on Hitler’s birthday (20 January). At their Trafalgar Square rally on 2 July 1962, a banner proclaimed “Free Britain from Jewish Control” and the ensuing riot led to Jordan’s dismissal from a teaching post and to police surveillance. He went on to establish a World Union of National Socialists, of which he was elected “World Führer” with George Lincoln Rockwell (head of the American Nazi Party) as his deputy. Throughout the 1960s, Jordan was fined and jailed for offences against the Public Order and Race Relations Acts, such as attempting to organize a paramilitary force on Nazi storm trooper lines. At the Leyton by-election in 1965, he led 100 neo-Nazis who tried to stir up racial hatred at a Labour Party meeting, where Denis Healey, the Secretary of Defence, punched him in the face! A Holocaust denier and a defender of Adolf Eichmann, Jordan believed that Hitler was the only “true savior”. National Socialist Movement thugs who carried out 34 arson attacks on Jewish property in North London included John Tyndall’s ex-fiancée, Françoise Dior, the French fashion designer’s niece. Other NSM terrorists stockpiled weapons to assassinate Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Happily, Jordan’s political career was brought to a premature end in 1975 when he was caught shoplifting at Tesco’s in Leamington Spa. Encouraged by Jeffrey Hamm and the League of Ex-Servicemen, Mosley returned to active politics in 1948 with his concept of a united “modern movement” for the whole of Europe.2 Demographic changes as a result of the war had their effect on his domestic policy, antisemitism now giving way to the “colour problem” and the focus of Union Movement activity shifting from the East End of London to Notting Hill Gate. Still in his prime (63) when he stood for North Kensington in the 1959 General Election, Mosley called for the prohibition of mixed (interracial) marriages and the expulsion of West Indian and other coloured immigrants (except bona-fide students). He came bottom of the poll (with 8.1%) and, for the first time in his political career, lost his deposit. Nothing daunted, he proceeded to contest the 1966 election at Shoreditch and Finsbury, where his final share of the vote was even worse (4.6%). The Mosleys returned to Paris, where Sir Oswald published his memoirs and died in 1980. After his death, one of his harshest critics turned out to be his eldest son, the writer Nicholas Mosley (3rd Baron Ravensdale), whose works of non-fiction include Rules of the Game (1982) and Beyond the Pale (1983). These two books question his father’s political motives, make no attempt disguise his personal failings and constitute the basis of a Channel Four TV series entitled Mosley (1998). Colin Cross, The Fascists in Britain (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1961). 
The “Battle of Cable Street” – Fact and Fiction
Friends and Foes of the Nazis
The Windsors
Mosley’s Decline and Fall
War and Internment
Postwar Fascism and Some Recent Developments
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
W. F. Mandle, Anti-Semitism and the British Union of Fascists (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1968).
Robert Benewick, The Fascist Movement in Britain (London: Penguin Books, 1972).
Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers on the Right(Oxford: OUP, 1983).
Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).
Charles Higham, Wallis: Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsor (Sidgwick, 1988).
Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (London: Vintage, 1996).
Tony Kushner & Nadia Volman, Remembering Cable Street: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Society (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000).
Martin Allen, Hidden Agenda: How the Duke of Windsor Betrayed the Allies ((London: M. Evans and Co., 2002).
Julie V. Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement, 1923-45 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003).
Mary S. Lovell, The Mitford Girls: The Biography of an Extraordinary Family (London: Abacus, 2002).
Martin Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (New York: Random House, 2005; London: Pimlico, 2006).
Stephen Dorril, Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (London: Penguin, 2007).
Daniel Tilles, British Fascist Antisemitism and Jewish Responses (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2015).Gabriel Sivan, a veteran contributor to and long serving member of the editorial board of Jewish Affairs, is Chairman of the World Jewish Bible Centre in Jerusalem. This article, which provides interesting parallels to the South African situation as covered elsewhere in this issue, is adapted from his lecture delivered to the Israel branch of the Jewish Historical Society of England in Jerusalem in February 2016.
NOTES
