NOTHING NEW OSWALD MOSLEY FOUNDER OF THE BRITISH UNION OF FASCISTS (BUF) SAID THE SAME
Labour says Andrew Sabisky ‘must be removed from this position immediately’ – amid signs of a revolt by other advisersRob Merrick Deputy Political Editor
Andrew Sabisky also argued for giving all children modafinil,
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‘Science must be the Basis’. Sir Oswald Mosley’s Political Parties and their Policies on Health, Science and Scientific Racism 1931–1974
David Redvaldsen
Pages 368-388 | Published online: 16 Mar 2016
Download citation
https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2016.1144511
Abstract
This article investigates the health and science policies of the New Party, British Union of Fascists (BUF) and Union Movement, founded by Sir Oswald Mosley. Throughout his life, Mosley believed in science as a gamechanger. Health policies also mattered because the New Party and the BUF wanted a nation of ‘fit’ men and women. In reality, opportunism guided the parties in relation to these concerns. Only the BUF developed comprehensive health policies. Science was used to justify ideology, but was seldom integrated in party policies. Despite eugenics and scientific racism being available to lend credence to BUF and Union Movement attitudes, this avenue remained unexplored. Inter-war BUF racism targeting Jews tended to be cultural, though some was biological. Post-war Union Movement racism targeting Commonwealth immigrants was biological. Ultimately, however, science merely provided a convenient excuse for how the parties could promise results without making tough decisions.
intersections onlineVolume 11, Number 2 (Autumn 2010)
Bret Rubin, “The Rise and Fall of British Fascism:
Sir Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists,”
intersections 11, no. 2 (2010): 323-380.
ABSTRACT
Modern connotations of "fascism" in mainstream Western society are unflinchingly negative, heavily associated with the historical regimes of Mussolini and Hitler begun before the Second World War. It seems impossible to believe that the people of such an entrenched democratic country as Great Britain could ever harbor mainstream fascist leanings. However, fascism was not always such a vilified ideology in the West. In the late 1920s and 1930s in Great Britain, fascism was often admired by the public. During Britain's deep economic depression, many pointed to emerging autocracies in Italy and Germany as powerful new examples of effective modern government. The celebrated young British Member of Parliament Oswald Mosley became especially enamored of this new ideology in the early 1930s. Mosley created the British Union of Fascists as a vehicle for his economic vision of Britain as a Keynesian economic state, with an emphasis on deficit spending. After a period of initial popularity, his movement eventually became a haven for lunatic antiSemites and fringe members of society. As Mosley became lost within the monster he created, frequent public violence at his group's rallies made him a national pariah. The impact of Mosley and his British Union of Fascists on British attitudes towards fascism cannot be underestimated. While it would seem that fascism's unpopularity was brought on by external forces, it was really Mosley's movement on the home front that initially turned the British public against the ideology. It was Oswald Mosley, not Hitler or Mussolini, who did the most to ensure Britain remained a free democracy and never succumbed to fascism.
Andrew Sabisky also argued for giving all children modafinil,
a drug that cuts the need for sleep by two-thirds, even at the cost
of ‘a dead kid once a year’ ( BBC )
Boris Johnson is under growing pressure to sack a new adviser after it emerged he called for the young to undergo compulsory contraception to prevent “a permanent underclass”.
Andrew Sabisky – already under fire for attacking women’s sport and backing a risky mind-enhancing drug – also suggested more black people are “close to mental retardation”.
Downing Street refused to comment on the controversy provoked by the recruitment of Mr Sabisky, which followed Dominic Cummings’s call to sign up “misfits and weirdos”.
But there were signs of a revolt by special advisers, some of whom said they would refuse to attend meetings with him, or respond to any requests he made.
And Jon Trickett, Labour’s Cabinet Office spokesman, said: “There are really no words to describe Boris Johnson’s appointment, as one of his senior advisers, of a man who is on record as supporting the forced sterilisation of people he considers not worthy.
Boris Johnson is under growing pressure to sack a new adviser after it emerged he called for the young to undergo compulsory contraception to prevent “a permanent underclass”.
Andrew Sabisky – already under fire for attacking women’s sport and backing a risky mind-enhancing drug – also suggested more black people are “close to mental retardation”.
Downing Street refused to comment on the controversy provoked by the recruitment of Mr Sabisky, which followed Dominic Cummings’s call to sign up “misfits and weirdos”.
But there were signs of a revolt by special advisers, some of whom said they would refuse to attend meetings with him, or respond to any requests he made.
And Jon Trickett, Labour’s Cabinet Office spokesman, said: “There are really no words to describe Boris Johnson’s appointment, as one of his senior advisers, of a man who is on record as supporting the forced sterilisation of people he considers not worthy.
Read more
Has Johnson abandoned his pledge of a cabinet less pale and male?
“He must of course be removed from this position immediately.”
On Saturday, it was revealed that Mr Sabisky tweeted: “I am always straight up in saying that women’s sport is more comparable to the Paralympics than it is to men’s.”
Calling himself a “super-forecaster”, he also said richer people are more intelligent, telling an interviewer: “Eugenics are about selecting ‘for’ good things.”
And he argued for giving all children modafinil, a drug that cuts the need for sleep by two-thirds, even at the cost of “a dead kid once a year”.
It has now emerged that Mr Sabisky wrote on Mr Cummings’s website in 2014: “One way to get around the problems of unplanned pregnancies creating a permanent underclass would be to legally enforce universal uptake of long-term contraception at the onset of puberty.
“Vaccination laws give it a precedent, I would argue.”
In another blogpost, discussing female genital mutilation, he claimed: “It is still unclear to what extent FGM represents a serious risk to young girls, raised in the UK, of certain minority group origins. Much of the hue and cry looks more like a moral panic.”
And, also, in 2014, he said a higher rate of black Americans suffered from “intellectual disability” saying: “It [is] simply a consequence of the normal distribution of cognitive ability.”
No 10 has declined to say which policy area Mr Sabisky is working in, but confirmed he was a contractor working on specific projects.
Aged 27, he joined the administration following Mr Cummings’s rambling 3,000-word new year blogpost urging “misfits and weirdos” to help him transform government.
One source told The Times he had already made his mark, saying: “He dresses just like Dom in a scruffy jumper and jeans.
“He’s incredibly cocky and isn’t afraid of telling everyone what he thinks, however senior they are.”
“He must of course be removed from this position immediately.”
On Saturday, it was revealed that Mr Sabisky tweeted: “I am always straight up in saying that women’s sport is more comparable to the Paralympics than it is to men’s.”
Calling himself a “super-forecaster”, he also said richer people are more intelligent, telling an interviewer: “Eugenics are about selecting ‘for’ good things.”
And he argued for giving all children modafinil, a drug that cuts the need for sleep by two-thirds, even at the cost of “a dead kid once a year”.
It has now emerged that Mr Sabisky wrote on Mr Cummings’s website in 2014: “One way to get around the problems of unplanned pregnancies creating a permanent underclass would be to legally enforce universal uptake of long-term contraception at the onset of puberty.
“Vaccination laws give it a precedent, I would argue.”
In another blogpost, discussing female genital mutilation, he claimed: “It is still unclear to what extent FGM represents a serious risk to young girls, raised in the UK, of certain minority group origins. Much of the hue and cry looks more like a moral panic.”
And, also, in 2014, he said a higher rate of black Americans suffered from “intellectual disability” saying: “It [is] simply a consequence of the normal distribution of cognitive ability.”
No 10 has declined to say which policy area Mr Sabisky is working in, but confirmed he was a contractor working on specific projects.
Aged 27, he joined the administration following Mr Cummings’s rambling 3,000-word new year blogpost urging “misfits and weirdos” to help him transform government.
One source told The Times he had already made his mark, saying: “He dresses just like Dom in a scruffy jumper and jeans.
“He’s incredibly cocky and isn’t afraid of telling everyone what he thinks, however senior they are.”
David Redvaldsen
Pages 368-388 | Published online: 16 Mar 2016
Download citation
https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2016.1144511
Abstract
This article investigates the health and science policies of the New Party, British Union of Fascists (BUF) and Union Movement, founded by Sir Oswald Mosley. Throughout his life, Mosley believed in science as a gamechanger. Health policies also mattered because the New Party and the BUF wanted a nation of ‘fit’ men and women. In reality, opportunism guided the parties in relation to these concerns. Only the BUF developed comprehensive health policies. Science was used to justify ideology, but was seldom integrated in party policies. Despite eugenics and scientific racism being available to lend credence to BUF and Union Movement attitudes, this avenue remained unexplored. Inter-war BUF racism targeting Jews tended to be cultural, though some was biological. Post-war Union Movement racism targeting Commonwealth immigrants was biological. Ultimately, however, science merely provided a convenient excuse for how the parties could promise results without making tough decisions.
intersections onlineVolume 11, Number 2 (Autumn 2010)
Bret Rubin, “The Rise and Fall of British Fascism:
Sir Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists,”
intersections 11, no. 2 (2010): 323-380.
ABSTRACT
Modern connotations of "fascism" in mainstream Western society are unflinchingly negative, heavily associated with the historical regimes of Mussolini and Hitler begun before the Second World War. It seems impossible to believe that the people of such an entrenched democratic country as Great Britain could ever harbor mainstream fascist leanings. However, fascism was not always such a vilified ideology in the West. In the late 1920s and 1930s in Great Britain, fascism was often admired by the public. During Britain's deep economic depression, many pointed to emerging autocracies in Italy and Germany as powerful new examples of effective modern government. The celebrated young British Member of Parliament Oswald Mosley became especially enamored of this new ideology in the early 1930s. Mosley created the British Union of Fascists as a vehicle for his economic vision of Britain as a Keynesian economic state, with an emphasis on deficit spending. After a period of initial popularity, his movement eventually became a haven for lunatic antiSemites and fringe members of society. As Mosley became lost within the monster he created, frequent public violence at his group's rallies made him a national pariah. The impact of Mosley and his British Union of Fascists on British attitudes towards fascism cannot be underestimated. While it would seem that fascism's unpopularity was brought on by external forces, it was really Mosley's movement on the home front that initially turned the British public against the ideology. It was Oswald Mosley, not Hitler or Mussolini, who did the most to ensure Britain remained a free democracy and never succumbed to fascism.
Sir Oswald Mosley: Blackshirt – Stephen Dorril
Stephen Dorril’s “Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism” is an exhaustive re-examination of the man who, far from being a Hitler admiring crank, was inextricably bound up with British politics and upper class attitudes, writes Ben Granger
Many may find the sheer weight of this tome wrongly flattering of its subject, regardless of content. Why should such a figure merit 700 pages? Surely this was, at best, a nearly-man in British politics? He may have risen to Cabinet level certainly, but then so did hundreds of others. The grimy pack of thugs he came to lead once his mainstream ambitions failed may have caused a splash as they bashed enemy heads in, but no-one voted for them. Surely, ultimately, they and he were an irrelevance? Dorril’s expertly researched account gives the lie to such a view and leaves no doubt that the story of Mosley is inexorably entwined with the story of twentieth century politics as a whole, mirroring the highs and the lows, ricocheting from the machinations of high society to the violent desperation of the underclass, and taking in every major Parliamentary player in between.
Sir Oswald “Tom” Mosley was a pure-grade scion from a northern branch of the old land-owning aristocracy (Mosley Street in Manchester takes its name from the clan), of the type still rolling in money but comparatively side-lined politically in the bourgeois twentieth century. With a boorishly uncaring, neglectful father, and indulgent mother, his defining character traits were shown early on at boarding school and elsewhere. A narrow, directed charm, rampant ambition, intellectual laziness, sexual incontinence, untrustworthiness, and a tendency to brow-beat and bully. Above all, a narcissistic sense of self-adoration, belief in entitlement and complete lack of self-doubt, of the type so often found in his caste. But taken just that one degree further.
After service in the air-force during the First World War, where he performed with distinction and enthusiasm, impetuous Tom managed to secure a position as a Conservative MP by the age of 22, the natural home for a man of his class and connections. He soon became renowned as a powerful orator in the Commons for his party. But this “man in a hurry” was impatient with the old guard still running both party and country, those who had allowed the calamity of war to decimate the young men of the nation fighting abroad, and who allowed an untrammelled laissez-faire capitalism to terrorise them with poverty once they had returned. Dorril goes into expansive and exacting detail about the clashing political and economic trends amongst the elite of the time. This in itself provides an unfaultable Parliamentary political history of the period, a vivid picture of the flux at work, which formed the background of the contradictions which made up Mosley’s outlook. He at first identified wholesale with the “social imperialists” in the Tory Party as against its free trade faction. He supported those who, in wishing to save the existing social order, believed in economic protectionism to protect a relatively decent living standard for the British working-class, bolstered by the exploitation of Empire. Such a world-view was entrenched in a romantic conception of England, with the foreign (and, sometimes, Jewish) “other” as its symbolic foe. This paternalistic ethos was the basic core of Mosley’s philosophy from thereon, but his contempt for the Empire Tories’ lack of innovation made him seek his cause, his following and followers, elsewhere.
Mosley was as much a figure in “high society” as in politics, very Tatler fodder. Those he ran with were rich, young, louche, promiscuous, glamorous and shallow, of the type Evelyn Waugh at once admired and despised. As Mosley married his first wife Cimmie, this “dashing”, charismatic figure dazzled many. While gentle, warm Cimmie was liked by most who met her, quite as many people were as put-off by Mosley’s boundless self-importance as were taken in by his charm. While praise came from many, his Tory rival Stanley Baldwin spoke for many more by remarking “He is a cad and a wrong’un and they will find it out,” before he left the party. Cimmie’s delicate nature was in turn tested to immense distraction by her husband’s countless, remorseless affairs – including with her sisters.
Mosley would never be content as anything less than the biggest fish in the pond. The Tories disappointed him so he joined Labour, seeing that as the party more capable of delivering the change -still amorphously defined- that he craved. For a while his “radicalism”, advocating wholesale economic reorganisation to achieve full employment led a few on the Left, even the great Bevan for a short time, to see him as a potential leader. Indeed, it is distinctly unnerving to see both the respect Mosley was shown by sections of both the Labour Party Left and the Independent Labour Party, and the seeming ease with which his rhetoric of renewal could blend with theirs.
As Mosley made his way into the Cabinet of Ramsay McDonald’s doomed Labour government and expounded his economic programmes to tackle unemployment (Keynesianism with an authoritarian kick), their rejection by McDonald was due to the latter’s timidity rather than any genuine opposition to creeping dictatorship. Mosley was enraged as his proposals were ignored, and immediately split with the Labour leadership. As this schism occurred, it is a testimony to both the man’s demagogic charisma and his ideological vacuity that many in both main parties now saw him as a possible leader. The ambiguity was such that for a very brief time Churchill and Bevan alike were keen for him to lead their respective parties. But impatient Tom had his own ideas. He had taken his ball home. He would have his own party. The New Party.
The New Party was formed in early 1931, it soon became clear just what its founder’s forever trumpeted radicalism amounted to. Fierce rhetoric about change and national renewal (and the clamour of a throng of restless, violent young men to drive this home) masked a dangerous and ringing hollow at the party’s ideological core. Its launch was a huge media event at the time, and figures of the stature of Bernard Shaw and H G Wells were initially sympathetic (both being Fabian socialists but with a disturbing penchant for Mosley’s coldly elitist, authoritarian and technocratic attitudes). The initial boost was short-lived however, and the New Party’s lack of clarity, together with a poor showing at their first by-election in Ashton-under- Lyne, saw it heading nowhere in electoral terms. By 1932, the New Party had already changed its name to the British Union of Fascists.
The BUF was never less than an unabashed personality cult from the beginning, the logical conclusion of the overweening toxic brew of narcissism and megalomania that animated its founder. Massively over- represented by ex military men like Mosley himself, he found it easy to run the movement as army rather than a party, dominating every aspect of members’ lives. They even had their own uniform, they were the Blackshirts, aping Mussolini’s crew before them. Ex-member Colin Cross recalled the faithful “Even saluted him when he went into the sea to bathe at the Movement’s summer camps at Selsey”, and “they whispered his name in religious awe………he was presented to the public as a superman. Criticism was taboo and humour nearly so.” At last the man had found the captive audience he had always craved. Now all he had to do was enlarge the audience to encompass the whole nation.
The BUF was always clear in its violence, but it was far from ideologically coherent, even less so than the man himself. He took a fair-sized gang of old Labour comrades with him, but to the great majority of Labour and trade-union men and women, the Fascist movement was not just a mistake, but a sickening anathema. This was a party based on a movement that massacred their brothers and sisters in Italy, directly supported by the capitalist class in that country. They knew the enemy where they saw it. The organised working-class were forever, fervently opposed. Many more members came from elsewhere, including pre -existing smaller UK Fascist movements. Amongst them were the British Fascists, an old group of simplistic upper-middle-class reactionary blimps who had previously been active in trying to break the 1926 General Strike. Joining them were more recent and more vicious groups of Nazi cheerleaders, whose chief motivation was a pathological hatred of “Jewry”. Of equal importance and greater number were natural Tories driven to a new radical dynamism against the perceived socialist threat. This contingent was personified by Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere, a friend of Mosley’s who threw his paper behind the new movement wholesale. Meanwhile, the movement was secretly, and illegaly, receiving a large chunk of its funding direct from Fascist Italy, and, increasingly, (as the anti-Semitism increased) from Nazi Germany too.
The degree of the extent of Mosley’s anti-Semitism is central to the conundrum of his character. It is interesting to contrast his personality with that of Hitler, the man he so desired to emulate, failing so spectacularly. There is no doubt that Mosley was not possessed of the overwhelming personal hatred of Jews that so engulfed Hitler. He had several Jewish friends prior to the BUF. His rival, the hysterically overwrought anti-Semite Arnold Leese, leader of the tiny, ultra-fanatic Imperial Fascist League taunted Mosley as a “kosher Fascist” for this very reason. Amusingly, one of Mosley’s early New Party stalwarts was a Jewish East End boxer named Ted “Kid” Lewis, who exited the movement with a punch to Mosley’s nose when the latter confirmed that yes, he did intend his movement to be anti-Semitic. Furthermore, Oswald explicitly did not sign up to the facetious and insane pseudo-science the Nazis used to justify their race hatred, casually denouncing it as gibberish. He mocked the notorious forgeries the Protocols of the Elders of Zion too.
The very fact he could then lead a movement openly engaged in repeated violence against this scape- goated racial group shows the black-hearted, gangster opportunism at the core of his being. The hatred of the Jewish enemy was a galvanising myth to a movement which otherwise had little to tie it together, and he knew it. With characteristic dishonesty, Mosley dismally pleaded self defence in his campaign against the Jews, claiming “they started it.” Mosley came to advocate the expelling of all Jews from Britain who had shown “disloyalty.” Where they were to go was unclear, Madagascar, or possibly Uganda (“very empty and a lovely climate” helpfully offered Mosley’s second wife Diana, formerly Guinness, formerly Mitford.) It is an interesting rumination of what constitutes a truer evil, the deep-felt fanaticism of a Hitler or the gutter-shallow opportunism of a Mosley. It is however, much easier to see which was more successful.
Adolf met Oswald on several occasions but was never fully convinced of him, doubting his commitment, sensing his lack of whole-hearted zealotry. Goebbels was even less impresed, dismissing him as “an outsider of small political significance.” Hitler was however genuinely taken with Mosley’s wife Diana. He was even more taken by her sister Unity, and the feeling was mutual. Mosley married Diana at a secret ceremony in Goebbels’ house, having already carried out a long affair with her. The contrast of kind-hearted if naive Cimmie with the coldly ruthless Diana was seen by some as emblematic of Mosley’s journey to the dark side. While her portrayal as a Lady Macbeth figure even more malignant than her husband may have a toe in misogynist myth, he had certainly met his match with her in amoral callousness. The Mitfords were the epitome of high society elan, and Hitler himself, for all his railing against “British decadence” was far from immune to the charms of this glamorous set. Diana and Unity, regular and welcome visitors to Hitler, acted as a conduit between Mosley and his new benefactor, while the intelligence services were more concerned with the Mitford pair than Mosley himself as a threat to the state.
The BUF was to change its name to the BU at the end of 1934. Short for the British Union, though its full new title was the rather less innocuous British Union of Fascists and National Socialists, reflecting the increasing influence of the Fuhrer. The thuggishness was thrown into sharp relief at an infamous public gathering at Olympia in June 1934. The mass meeting was held in a theatrical, explicitly Nuremburg style, the movement’s new Lightning-in-a-Circle symbol (wittily dubbed “the flash in the pan” by opponents) dominating the hall just as the swastika did to the Nazi faithful in Germany. The Blackshirts deliberately attracted as many opponents as possible to this meeting, and then, with a variety of home-made weapons, pulped into bloody submission anyone who heckled The Leader. Many serious injuries resulted. Mosley was attempting to prove his control of “the street” once and for all, yet this one meeting probably did more than any other act to convince potential followers of his ruthless, sadistic nature. His unpredictable nature too – probably a greater anathema to the British business class.
The BU suffered a severe propaganda blow with the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, when a massive crowd of local working-class youths, Jews, Communist and Labour activists violently prevented Mosley (resplendent in a new uniform explicitly modelled on that of the Nazi SS), from provocatively marching down the street in the heart of the Jewish East End. As the Blackshirts were protected by police, (many sympathetic to Mosley, or at least distinctly hostile to his leftist opponents), the fight was between demonstrators and police rather than the barricaded Blackshirts themselves. But the victory was real, They Did Not Pass. As Dorril shows, in some areas of London, notably Hoxton and Stepney support from sections of the East End working-class was actually to rise afterward – but the psychological defeat struck deeply amongst its followers, and seemed emblematic of the movement’s wider failure. The early membership height of 50,000 had fallen to under 10,000 by this point. The movement was losing money continually, despite being bankrolled by both the foreign Fascist powers and Mosley’s own landed estates. Uniforms, banners, headquarters and truncheons do not pay for themselves. Intellectually he was without capital too. The writers of the day were overwhelmingly Left. The strangely acidic Wyndham Lewis was one of the few artists who were taken in for a time by the movement, but even this support did not last the distance. Dorril recounts Lewis and Mosley met on several occasions in the late 30s, but the former was increasingly alarmed by the latter’s talk of the sad practical necessities of machine gunning the movement’s foes in the street “when push came to shove”. When Lewis came to write the ironically titled “The Jews – Are They Human?” in 1937 he was sardonically repudiating his past Fascism. The only noted author to back Mosley by then was Henry “Tarka The Otter” Williamson. With even his few intellectual allies now taking the piss, who would take Oswald seriously now?
When Britain went to war with Mosley’s ideological masters in Germany and Italy, it was the cataclysmic close of any last lingering chance of a revival in his movement. Unity Mitford shot herself in the head, yet failed to succeed in suicide, dribbling on for years afterward. While Mosley and his wife claimed they were still loyal to Britain (whilst agitating for “negotiated peace”) the authorities had different views, and imprisoned the pair in Holloway Prison. Sympathy was not widespread. Nancy Mitford was one of those who denounced sister Diana and her infamous husband to the security services. Several BU members either fled to Germany or had moved shortly before war was declared, to fight for the Nazi cause. Some were propagandists like “Haw Haw” Joyce, others like John Amery joined Waffen SS divisions. In keeping with the stomach-wrenching nature of their treachery, none saw active combat against soldiers, yet several were active in murderous atrocities against unarmed Jewish civilians. By association, Mosley was seen, by the vast majority of British people, as the most venal kind of traitor.
Churchill, one of many who once saw Mosley as a potential leader of his party and country, decided to release the man and wife in late 1943 in what he saw as a humane gesture in relation to the Blackshirt’s ill- health. The decision sparked mass popular protest and outrage. The working-classes in particular were prominent in street demonstrations demanding that the key should be thrown away, or the noose brought in. The would-be Leader of Britain was really – truly – loathed the length and breadth of the land. Oswald and Diana seemed to bear this hatred with an attitude beyond the straightforward arrogance which was their defining nature, and into a whole other worldly nether-realm of bitter fantasy. It was the Jews who hated them, the establishment, the government – certainly not the good old British people. These demonstrations were the results of the Jewish cabal that had Britain in its grip…..surely?
His solipsism increased by incarceration, Mosley took to writing at greater length, honing his philosophy in ever more verbose terminology. He claimed to have now moved “beyond Fascism”, and propounded that that he had found a unique “synthesis”, beyond the both capitalist and socialist ethic, fusing Christianity and the ideals of Nietzsche, combining dictatorship and democracy. But the schism between his feigning of esoteric high mindedness and the squalor of his day-to-day political activities became starker than ever when he began his new party in 1947- the Union Movement. The same gang of dysfunctional Jew baiters were to continue their street fighting, to a mixture of disgust and indifference from the general populace (gaining for instance less than 2000 votes in the whole of London during local elections in 1949). The full extent of the Nazi horrors, the millions of innocent souls butchered in the camps, was now evident, discrediting Mosley’s mob as never before. Accordingly, the calibre of the UM member was even lower than that of the BU before them, a selection of gangsters, psychopaths and street thugs, with the odd loopy Lord thrown in.
This sorry pack were eventually to find a new scapegoat, and a short-lived new lease of life with the “coloured immigration” of the 50s. As tensions grew in sections of the white population towards the novel new migrants from the Caribbean and Indian sub-continent, the UM had some success in actively encouraging race riots, in particular the Notting Hill riot of 1958. Their success in leading to smashed windows and broken bones did not translate into votes however, and the fetid nature of their street activity stood in starker contrast than ever from Mosley’s increasingly abstruse theorising. His new vision was of a United Europe, national boundaries broken down among the great White brotherhood, who would in turn go to plunder what they needed from Africa, using their superior colonial know-how. Ironic that a movement now recruiting on an anti-immigrant platform should have as its ultimate goal the large scale immigration of a white master class to the African continent. This was grotesque racism sure enough, but it was neither populist nor popular. Even amongst rising anti-immigration feeling, the UM could not truly take off.
Ultimately it was to be Mosley’s intellectualism that was the final death knell of his movement. The issue of race did indeed strike at the core of British political life by the late 60s, and immigration became a key electoral theme. But the UM’s abstract ideas of White European Unity did not accord with the xenophobic mood ignited by the “Rivers of Blood” speech of the Conservative Enoch Powell. The sentiment he unearthed and tried to harness was as strongly anti-European as it was anti-black. Those who didn’t like the “niggers” and “pakis” didn’t tend to be too keen on “frogs” and “krauts” either.
The Mosleys were livid that Enoch had succeeded on territory where they had failed. In an amusing glimpse of the couple’s snobbery and delusion, Oswald dubbed Powell a “middle-class Alf Garnett”, while Diana denounced him as “far-right” as opposed to their “hard centre”! A truly Fascist party was to gain from the racist rhetoric of Powell. This was not the Union Movement however. It was the National Front.
The NF was inspired by the same Nazi and Fascist ideas that Mosley first fermented in the country. Its first chairman was A.K. Chesterton, formerly a leading figure within the BU and a close confidante of Oswald. But its simplistic, xenophobic approach was far more adept than the UM at tapping into the visceral, base hatred that keeps such a movement going. It was blacks and Asians who were getting the beatings and firebombed houses now, with the added advantage they were much easier to spot than Jews. The boot- boys of the NF were every inch the descendants of the Blackshirts before them, but they had moved on and left their spiritual grandpa and grandma Oswald and Diana behind. Bitterly jealous of the NF’s success, Mosley remarked to his private circle, in a statement beyond the parody of the most gifted satirist, that the Front was “funded by Jews.”
The pair moved to France, and lingered on as bitter remnants, their reputation rotting in a pleasing reflection of their withered souls, cursing the cosmopolitan conspiracies that had kept them from greatness, never seeing the fault in themselves. No matter that most saw a malevolent opportunist, in his mind’s eye he would always be the great, lost, put-upon prophet. Mosley would periodically attempt to reappear with attempts at self-justification. Following one such appearance on The Frost Report in 1967 interviewer David Frost remarked.
“He saw everything through the distorting mirror of his own fantasises, and was irretrievably consumed by them. He would never see himself as others saw him.”
Oswald died in 1980, and the vaguely sympathetic obituaries he received in certain quarters such as The Times revealed for the last time that the solidarity of the ruling classes will out in the end.
Dorril has produced the definitive Mosley biography, superseding the absurdly sympathetic soft-soaping work of Robert Skidelsky, which centred on Mosley’s Parliamentary career and treated the BUF as an epilogue (a bit like a biography of Fred West which focussed more on his earlier career as an ice cream salesman.) This is a fascinating story, both for anyone interested in British political history of the last century, and anyone intrigued by the tragic tale of a truly diabolical man. Dorril has done an unfaultable job on the research, and brings the narrative to life well with his grotesque menagerie of characters. There are flaws to the book. The author has a background as an analyst of the machinations of the intelligence services of Britain and abroad, and while this eye for detail has undoubtedly made this work the powerhouse of research it is, the endless recanting of certain details, the exact nature of how the BUF obtained its funding for example, can sometimes drag the story’s flow. More directly, he concentrates a little too much on the nature of MI5’s observation of the movement, when this is very much a side-show to the main narrative. This dry style can sometimes cloy over such a long length. Further, while Dorril is great on the detail, actual analysis is very thin on the ground. The one time Dorril does attempt an analytical overview, it is with some rather tenuous observations about Messianic leaders toward the end, claiming that one Tony Blair shares the traits of this style. Maybe so, but the point is made clumsily and without satisfactory justification.
Ultimately however, Dorril’s stance in going for the research style, dispassionately observant, pays off into a great narrative by nature of the sheer dramatic scope of the story he so meticulously examines. Scene after scene and figure after grotesque figure linger on the psychic retina. The drawing room parties of the man playing host to every major political figure of the early part of the century, one by one falling away as he fell into disrepute. Mosley’s seaside frolics with his patrician pals, offset against the pogrom style excesses of his nastiest East End thugs, breaking into Jewish houses and attacking children within. Mosley’s relentless psychological torture of his first wife, the most poignant of his bullying victims. Diana fending off the accusations of sister Nancy that she had had supported a movement that murdered six million Jews with the remark “But darling, it was the kindest way.” The London BUF headquarters that doubled up as a knocking-shop, underlying with grim humour the movement’s crossover with organised crime. The UM hijacking the teddy-boy youth cult just as the NF did with skinheads two decades later. The sheer gall and lack of self-awareness in Mosley’s late-life attempts to rehabilitate himself, attempting a “truce” with Jewish leaders without any pretence of apology.
This is a grim tale that needs only clear explanation and examination to be one of fascination. This is a task Dorril has performed with enormous success with this eye-opening and exhaustive work.
December 10, 2007
What happened to the children of Oswald Mosley's Blackshirt followers?
What happened to the children of Oswald Mosley's Blackshirt followers?
Blackshirt followers of Oswald Mosley gave Nazi salutes in the street, openly greeted strangers with anti-Semitic slogans and holidayed at ultra-right-wing seaside camps CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES
Cressida Connolly
Cressida Connolly
2 JUNE 2018 •
In a memoir published in 1998, journalist Trevor Grundy recalled how, when he was a boy just after the war, his mother used to come out on to the front step of their house in Paddington to see him off to school. As he turned out of the square where they lived, he’d wave back at her.
Each morning, she’d stand to attention and fling out her right arm in a full fascist salute. ‘I returned it. “PJ,” she shouted – Mosley-follower speak for “Perish Judah”. I shouted it back.’ And then he’d run, satchel flying, to catch his bus.
A decade earlier, in Sussex, a little girl called Diana Bailey had been taught to greet people in the same way. Her parents, too, were supporters of Sir Oswald Mosley. Those who knew him always speak of Mosley’s remarkable charisma. Muscular (he was a keen fencer), with a characteristically upright bearing, he was a life-long womaniser, with a dash of the swashbuckler about him.
Bailey’s parents instructed her to use the straight-arm salute and to say ‘PJ’ to passers-by when they went for an afternoon stroll. Sometimes people responded in kind: the Bognor Regis area had an especially active branch of Mosley supporters.
In a memoir published in 1998, journalist Trevor Grundy recalled how, when he was a boy just after the war, his mother used to come out on to the front step of their house in Paddington to see him off to school. As he turned out of the square where they lived, he’d wave back at her.
Each morning, she’d stand to attention and fling out her right arm in a full fascist salute. ‘I returned it. “PJ,” she shouted – Mosley-follower speak for “Perish Judah”. I shouted it back.’ And then he’d run, satchel flying, to catch his bus.
A decade earlier, in Sussex, a little girl called Diana Bailey had been taught to greet people in the same way. Her parents, too, were supporters of Sir Oswald Mosley. Those who knew him always speak of Mosley’s remarkable charisma. Muscular (he was a keen fencer), with a characteristically upright bearing, he was a life-long womaniser, with a dash of the swashbuckler about him.
Bailey’s parents instructed her to use the straight-arm salute and to say ‘PJ’ to passers-by when they went for an afternoon stroll. Sometimes people responded in kind: the Bognor Regis area had an especially active branch of Mosley supporters.
Sir Oswald Mosley with a BUF member at a rally in the 1930s
CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES
It was near here – on farmland around Pagham and Selsey – that fascist summer camps were set up by Mosley followers during the 1930s. For 25 shillings a week, members in their hundreds would come with their children from all over England for sea bathing, fellowship and fun.
There was also an educational aspect to the gatherings – and even a jokey camp newsletter. It became part of their folklore that Mosley’s annual visit always brought the sun out: people would refer to it as ‘Leader weather’. At eight and nine years old, Diana was brought along by her parents.
When I happened upon a book of photographs of these camps, called Blackshirts-on-Sea, the juxtaposition of their apparent sunny innocence with Mosley’s dark ideology intrigued me. One photograph showed two ladies of a certain age – with pearls, parasols and floral frocks – selling the British Union of Fascists (BUF) newspapers, Action and The Blackshirt; another depicted four young men, grinning through the entrance of their bell tent.
It became part of camp folklore that Mosley’s annual visit always brought the sun out
They looked for all the world like ordinary British holidaymakers. As I came to write my new novel, After the Party – about three sisters and the ways in which they influence and then betray one another – I knew the summer camps would find their way into my story. Set in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the book charts the women’s gradual immersion into the world of provincial English fascism. It examines, too, the long-term consequences that holding such views could have on the rest of the family.
Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (later renamed the Union Movement) was active during the 1930s. To most of the electorate, Mosley’s politics – of which anti-Semitism formed a key part, especially after 1934 – were simply odious. So there was no outcry when he and his wife, Diana (who was one of the aristocratic Mitford sisters), as well as some 800 of his followers, were interned in 1940 under Defence Regulation 18B.
It was thought that their fascist beliefs might make them Nazi sympathisers; that they were potential enemies of the state. To the prisoners and their families, however, 18B was an outrage because their right to habeas corpus was suspended. (Right-wing commentators today compare 18B’s suspension of legal rights to Guantanamo Bay.)
A few hundred of these internees were subsequently shipped to the Isle of Man, where seaside boarding houses were requisitioned as dwellings. Some local Manx men and women jeered them as they landed in the island’s capital, Douglas. It’s well known that many German Jewish refugees were sent to the Isle of Man during the Second World War, but the Mosley supporters’ time there has been less well documented.
A portion of my novel is set there, in the pretty little harbour town of Peel. Their leader, however, remained in London. It was thought that sending him to the Isle of Man would cause too much upheaval.
It was near here – on farmland around Pagham and Selsey – that fascist summer camps were set up by Mosley followers during the 1930s. For 25 shillings a week, members in their hundreds would come with their children from all over England for sea bathing, fellowship and fun.
There was also an educational aspect to the gatherings – and even a jokey camp newsletter. It became part of their folklore that Mosley’s annual visit always brought the sun out: people would refer to it as ‘Leader weather’. At eight and nine years old, Diana was brought along by her parents.
When I happened upon a book of photographs of these camps, called Blackshirts-on-Sea, the juxtaposition of their apparent sunny innocence with Mosley’s dark ideology intrigued me. One photograph showed two ladies of a certain age – with pearls, parasols and floral frocks – selling the British Union of Fascists (BUF) newspapers, Action and The Blackshirt; another depicted four young men, grinning through the entrance of their bell tent.
It became part of camp folklore that Mosley’s annual visit always brought the sun out
They looked for all the world like ordinary British holidaymakers. As I came to write my new novel, After the Party – about three sisters and the ways in which they influence and then betray one another – I knew the summer camps would find their way into my story. Set in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the book charts the women’s gradual immersion into the world of provincial English fascism. It examines, too, the long-term consequences that holding such views could have on the rest of the family.
Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (later renamed the Union Movement) was active during the 1930s. To most of the electorate, Mosley’s politics – of which anti-Semitism formed a key part, especially after 1934 – were simply odious. So there was no outcry when he and his wife, Diana (who was one of the aristocratic Mitford sisters), as well as some 800 of his followers, were interned in 1940 under Defence Regulation 18B.
It was thought that their fascist beliefs might make them Nazi sympathisers; that they were potential enemies of the state. To the prisoners and their families, however, 18B was an outrage because their right to habeas corpus was suspended. (Right-wing commentators today compare 18B’s suspension of legal rights to Guantanamo Bay.)
A few hundred of these internees were subsequently shipped to the Isle of Man, where seaside boarding houses were requisitioned as dwellings. Some local Manx men and women jeered them as they landed in the island’s capital, Douglas. It’s well known that many German Jewish refugees were sent to the Isle of Man during the Second World War, but the Mosley supporters’ time there has been less well documented.
A portion of my novel is set there, in the pretty little harbour town of Peel. Their leader, however, remained in London. It was thought that sending him to the Isle of Man would cause too much upheaval.
BUF members salute as they head to a rally in Birmingham to hear Mosley speak CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES
When Mosley’s health began to fail, Winston Churchill, anxious to avert the publicity that might result from a fascist martyr, moved Mosley from Brixton Prison to Holloway Prison, where he shared married quarters with Diana.
The BUF was never represented in Parliament. At its peak in 1934, however, it attracted some 50,000 followers, many of whom were deeply devoted to their leader. Some remained so, long after the party was disbanded in 1940. After the war, Mosley formed the Union Movement. He stood for Parliament in North Kensington in the 1959 general election, the year after the Notting Hill race riots.
His campaign called for forced repatriation of Caribbean immigrants and a prohibition on mixed marriage. To his dwindling band of followers, he was still the greatest orator this country had ever produced, a man of singular vision. So what was it like to be brought up in such a milieu? Mosley died in 1980, but his name and the politics associated with it cast a long shadow. In 2008, his son Max Mosley successfully sued the News of the World, for reporting on an orgy which was falsely alleged to have had Nazi themes.
Max Mosley has since become a campaigner for tighter press regulation. When his son Alexander died in 2009 from an accidental drug overdose, a cousin told the Telegraph, ‘It is sometimes not easy having this name.’
Earlier this year, Max Mosley was accused by the Daily Mail of having published, in the early 1960s, a racist leaflet in support of his father’s Union Movement. Photographs were published showing a young Max accompanying his father to a meeting in London’s East End.
When Mosley’s health began to fail, Winston Churchill, anxious to avert the publicity that might result from a fascist martyr, moved Mosley from Brixton Prison to Holloway Prison, where he shared married quarters with Diana.
The BUF was never represented in Parliament. At its peak in 1934, however, it attracted some 50,000 followers, many of whom were deeply devoted to their leader. Some remained so, long after the party was disbanded in 1940. After the war, Mosley formed the Union Movement. He stood for Parliament in North Kensington in the 1959 general election, the year after the Notting Hill race riots.
His campaign called for forced repatriation of Caribbean immigrants and a prohibition on mixed marriage. To his dwindling band of followers, he was still the greatest orator this country had ever produced, a man of singular vision. So what was it like to be brought up in such a milieu? Mosley died in 1980, but his name and the politics associated with it cast a long shadow. In 2008, his son Max Mosley successfully sued the News of the World, for reporting on an orgy which was falsely alleged to have had Nazi themes.
Max Mosley has since become a campaigner for tighter press regulation. When his son Alexander died in 2009 from an accidental drug overdose, a cousin told the Telegraph, ‘It is sometimes not easy having this name.’
Earlier this year, Max Mosley was accused by the Daily Mail of having published, in the early 1960s, a racist leaflet in support of his father’s Union Movement. Photographs were published showing a young Max accompanying his father to a meeting in London’s East End.
Fascists peer out of a tent at a fascist camp CREDIT: PATHE NEWS
This part of London had been the scene of the notorious Battle of Cable Street in 1936, in which local residents intervened to prevent Mosley and his followers from marching through the area. Interviewed on Channel 4, Max Mosley said, ‘You are entitled as you get older to change your views.’
Today Diana Bailey, that little girl from Sussex, is in her 90s. She radiates intelligence and warmth. She is tall and bookish: she lives in a tall house full of books, not far from the Cotswolds. In the spring of 1940, when she was about to turn 14, she was a boarder at a Roman Catholic school.
One day, as she was passing through the school hall, she saw the daily newspaper laid out on a table. The headline was ‘Naval Officer’s Wife Interned’. With a mounting sense of dread she read the accompanying article, in which she learnt that the woman in question was her own mother. ‘My whole body swept with flush, if you know what I mean,’ she recalls now.
She took the paper and tore it into tiny pieces so no one else would see it. Later that day the headmistress – a nun – invited Bailey into her study. She said, ‘Daddy has telephoned and he’s told me everything. Mummy’s been taken off in handcuffs to Holloway jail. But you mustn’t worry. Daddy’s going to bring you a birthday cake and I’ll never tell anyone if you don’t want me to.’
She was as good as her word: no one in the school learnt about what had happened.
For Bailey, the consequences of her parents’ political beliefs were to shape her life. Her family was broken up. Her father was imprisoned a few weeks after his wife, then sent to the Isle of Man.
This part of London had been the scene of the notorious Battle of Cable Street in 1936, in which local residents intervened to prevent Mosley and his followers from marching through the area. Interviewed on Channel 4, Max Mosley said, ‘You are entitled as you get older to change your views.’
Today Diana Bailey, that little girl from Sussex, is in her 90s. She radiates intelligence and warmth. She is tall and bookish: she lives in a tall house full of books, not far from the Cotswolds. In the spring of 1940, when she was about to turn 14, she was a boarder at a Roman Catholic school.
One day, as she was passing through the school hall, she saw the daily newspaper laid out on a table. The headline was ‘Naval Officer’s Wife Interned’. With a mounting sense of dread she read the accompanying article, in which she learnt that the woman in question was her own mother. ‘My whole body swept with flush, if you know what I mean,’ she recalls now.
She took the paper and tore it into tiny pieces so no one else would see it. Later that day the headmistress – a nun – invited Bailey into her study. She said, ‘Daddy has telephoned and he’s told me everything. Mummy’s been taken off in handcuffs to Holloway jail. But you mustn’t worry. Daddy’s going to bring you a birthday cake and I’ll never tell anyone if you don’t want me to.’
She was as good as her word: no one in the school learnt about what had happened.
For Bailey, the consequences of her parents’ political beliefs were to shape her life. Her family was broken up. Her father was imprisoned a few weeks after his wife, then sent to the Isle of Man.
Diana – Mosley’s second wife – with her sons from her first marriage,
1930 CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES
Her mother was detained for nine months, during which time she lost her teeth and her hair turned grey. ‘I went to see her, with Granny, and I hardly recognised her. She couldn’t speak, she just sat on the other side of a wide table, crying. She put out her hand, but I couldn’t reach it. I was just so sad and horrified.’
But a far greater shock was to come. In 1945, when Richard Dimbleby made his famous and devastating broadcast from Bergen-Belsen, Bailey learnt what had been happening to the Jews under Hitler. ‘It was a shot to my heart. I suddenly thought: I was doing that, I’d written “PJ” on walls. I felt so guilty.’
The images of the piled-up bodies of the dead were awful, terrifying. She determined to try to make up for what she’d done as a girl. She was fortunate to meet Anglican clergyman James Parkes, a driving force in the Council for Christians and Jews (The Parkes Institute at the University of Southampton continues his work), and spent the next two years working for him.
After her children grew up, she worked as a guardian ad litem, representing the interests of children in court cases.
And yet, like the other children and grandchildren of Mosley supporters I spoke to, Bailey feels no anger towards her mother and father. When I suggested to her that teaching a child of eight to perform the fascist salute and parrot anti-Semitic views might now be considered tantamount to child abuse, she just shrugged.
George Vincent, from Plymouth, is similarly forgiving. The fact that he takes an active interest in history, attending courses and lectures at his local U3A, gives him a wider historical perspective through which to view his parents’ past. He didn’t find out about their political affiliations until after the war.
People say, 'Your grandfather wasn’t really that bad.' He was. He embraced evil
‘My father never, ever mentioned it; but when I was 13 my mother showed me her scrapbook and there were cuttings from newspapers, describing how she’d spoken at political meetings. She’d also published articles. She later destroyed the book and never really referred to it again.’
What did Vincent think, when he discovered his mother’s sympathies?
‘I saw it as a passing phase she’d gone through. She’d been very left wing as a young woman, before she followed Mosley. I don’t know that she continued to hold views sympathetic to his cause; I think she became a liberal in the end.'
'A lot of people go through the political spectrum. I can’t say that it’s affected me in any way, but neither of my brothers will talk about it, even now. Our dad was interned for a few months, but I was too young to have been aware of it. My oldest brother, though, I think he knew about it at the time.’
Her mother was detained for nine months, during which time she lost her teeth and her hair turned grey. ‘I went to see her, with Granny, and I hardly recognised her. She couldn’t speak, she just sat on the other side of a wide table, crying. She put out her hand, but I couldn’t reach it. I was just so sad and horrified.’
But a far greater shock was to come. In 1945, when Richard Dimbleby made his famous and devastating broadcast from Bergen-Belsen, Bailey learnt what had been happening to the Jews under Hitler. ‘It was a shot to my heart. I suddenly thought: I was doing that, I’d written “PJ” on walls. I felt so guilty.’
The images of the piled-up bodies of the dead were awful, terrifying. She determined to try to make up for what she’d done as a girl. She was fortunate to meet Anglican clergyman James Parkes, a driving force in the Council for Christians and Jews (The Parkes Institute at the University of Southampton continues his work), and spent the next two years working for him.
After her children grew up, she worked as a guardian ad litem, representing the interests of children in court cases.
And yet, like the other children and grandchildren of Mosley supporters I spoke to, Bailey feels no anger towards her mother and father. When I suggested to her that teaching a child of eight to perform the fascist salute and parrot anti-Semitic views might now be considered tantamount to child abuse, she just shrugged.
George Vincent, from Plymouth, is similarly forgiving. The fact that he takes an active interest in history, attending courses and lectures at his local U3A, gives him a wider historical perspective through which to view his parents’ past. He didn’t find out about their political affiliations until after the war.
People say, 'Your grandfather wasn’t really that bad.' He was. He embraced evil
‘My father never, ever mentioned it; but when I was 13 my mother showed me her scrapbook and there were cuttings from newspapers, describing how she’d spoken at political meetings. She’d also published articles. She later destroyed the book and never really referred to it again.’
What did Vincent think, when he discovered his mother’s sympathies?
‘I saw it as a passing phase she’d gone through. She’d been very left wing as a young woman, before she followed Mosley. I don’t know that she continued to hold views sympathetic to his cause; I think she became a liberal in the end.'
'A lot of people go through the political spectrum. I can’t say that it’s affected me in any way, but neither of my brothers will talk about it, even now. Our dad was interned for a few months, but I was too young to have been aware of it. My oldest brother, though, I think he knew about it at the time.’
A crowd gathered to repel a Mosley rally at Ridley Road, east London,
in 1962 CREDIT: PATHE NEWS
One man I spoke to was more sanguine than rueful about having had grandparents and parents who were followers of Mosley. As a child at school in the 1950s, he misheard a teacher who was talking about the Bible story of Moses, thinking instead the lesson was about ‘Mosley and the bullrushes’. This only confirmed to his young mind the importance of the man whose name was constantly discussed at home.
‘When I first used to go round to friends’ houses after school, I couldn’t believe my ears – all they talked about was football, the garden, going on holiday. At home we all read the papers, political pamphlets… We talked about politics, debated.’
In which spirit, he challenged me on the premise of this article: ‘You wouldn’t be asking me all these questions if my parents had been members of the Communist Party,’ he said. As it happened, his other set of grandparents were, in fact, communists. But he had a point.
In this country at least, fascism may leave a stain on future generations that communism does not. And yet, as our conversation drew to a close, he began expounding theories about banking and Israeli expansionism that have uncomfortable echoes.
One man I spoke to was more sanguine than rueful about having had grandparents and parents who were followers of Mosley. As a child at school in the 1950s, he misheard a teacher who was talking about the Bible story of Moses, thinking instead the lesson was about ‘Mosley and the bullrushes’. This only confirmed to his young mind the importance of the man whose name was constantly discussed at home.
‘When I first used to go round to friends’ houses after school, I couldn’t believe my ears – all they talked about was football, the garden, going on holiday. At home we all read the papers, political pamphlets… We talked about politics, debated.’
In which spirit, he challenged me on the premise of this article: ‘You wouldn’t be asking me all these questions if my parents had been members of the Communist Party,’ he said. As it happened, his other set of grandparents were, in fact, communists. But he had a point.
In this country at least, fascism may leave a stain on future generations that communism does not. And yet, as our conversation drew to a close, he began expounding theories about banking and Israeli expansionism that have uncomfortable echoes.
Max Mosley attending one of his father’s rallies, 1962 CREDIT: MIRRORPIX
For some of the children brought up with fascist parents, the older generation’s politics became a quest, a riddle to be solved. In order to try to better understand his parents, Trevor Grundy wrote Memoir of a Fascist Childhood, while Francis Beckett published a memoir entitled Fascist in the Family. Beckett’s father, John, had once been a Labour MP.
‘I was proud of my father, for having stolen the Mace, which no one had done since Oliver Cromwell,’ he recalls affectionately. As he says of his father in his book: ‘He was intelligent, sincere, noisy and very human.’ He was also a passionate fascist. And, as it turned out, a Jew. John Beckett hid his heritage all his life.
Grundy’s mother, the one who called out ‘PJ’ after him every morning, had also been born Jewish. Neither writer is able to account for what made their parents become so ardently anti-Semitic. Grundy did not remain an acolyte. ‘He [Mosley] was no longer God; he could be laughed at,’ he says, despite clearly maintaining a certain admiration for the fascist leader.
He notes in his book: ‘The last night of Mosley’s 1959 comeback campaign ended with him making a magnificent speech in Ladbroke Grove, which revealed, once again, his amazing power as an orator of the grand style.’ But few agreed: Mosley won just over seven per cent of the vote.
For some of the children brought up with fascist parents, the older generation’s politics became a quest, a riddle to be solved. In order to try to better understand his parents, Trevor Grundy wrote Memoir of a Fascist Childhood, while Francis Beckett published a memoir entitled Fascist in the Family. Beckett’s father, John, had once been a Labour MP.
‘I was proud of my father, for having stolen the Mace, which no one had done since Oliver Cromwell,’ he recalls affectionately. As he says of his father in his book: ‘He was intelligent, sincere, noisy and very human.’ He was also a passionate fascist. And, as it turned out, a Jew. John Beckett hid his heritage all his life.
Grundy’s mother, the one who called out ‘PJ’ after him every morning, had also been born Jewish. Neither writer is able to account for what made their parents become so ardently anti-Semitic. Grundy did not remain an acolyte. ‘He [Mosley] was no longer God; he could be laughed at,’ he says, despite clearly maintaining a certain admiration for the fascist leader.
He notes in his book: ‘The last night of Mosley’s 1959 comeback campaign ended with him making a magnificent speech in Ladbroke Grove, which revealed, once again, his amazing power as an orator of the grand style.’ But few agreed: Mosley won just over seven per cent of the vote.
Alexander, Max Mosley’s son, who died of an overdose in 2009
CREDIT: ENTERPRISE NEWS AND PICTURES,
Sir Oswald Mosley’s eldest son, Nicholas (by his first wife Cynthia), a distinguished writer, struggled with his father’s legacy throughout his long life. His father’s politics were abhorrent to him. There were many years when the two did not speak. Before Oswald’s death there was a reconciliation, of sorts; although, subsequently, after Nicholas published two volumes of biography about his father, Mosley’s widow Diana never forgave her stepson for what she saw as his betrayal of her beloved husband.
She not only shared her husband’s fascist views, it was said among some who knew them that, in fact, she was more right wing than him. She never recanted, up to and including her 1977 memoir, A Life of Contrasts, and a difficult appearance on Desert Island Discs. While Grundy experienced the workaday end of British fascism, Diana had presided over the considerable upper-class strain.
Nicholas’s eldest son, Ivo Mosley, didn’t meet his grand- father until his early teens. He found nothing to like. ‘He was just a horrible person, quite sadistic, with no charm at all. I don’t mind when people ask me about my surname. What does trouble me is when people say, “Your grandfather wasn’t really that bad.” Because he was. He embraced evil. He was even very unpleasant about the people who followed him; he had a cynical contempt for them,’ he says.
Sir Oswald Mosley’s eldest son, Nicholas (by his first wife Cynthia), a distinguished writer, struggled with his father’s legacy throughout his long life. His father’s politics were abhorrent to him. There were many years when the two did not speak. Before Oswald’s death there was a reconciliation, of sorts; although, subsequently, after Nicholas published two volumes of biography about his father, Mosley’s widow Diana never forgave her stepson for what she saw as his betrayal of her beloved husband.
She not only shared her husband’s fascist views, it was said among some who knew them that, in fact, she was more right wing than him. She never recanted, up to and including her 1977 memoir, A Life of Contrasts, and a difficult appearance on Desert Island Discs. While Grundy experienced the workaday end of British fascism, Diana had presided over the considerable upper-class strain.
Nicholas’s eldest son, Ivo Mosley, didn’t meet his grand- father until his early teens. He found nothing to like. ‘He was just a horrible person, quite sadistic, with no charm at all. I don’t mind when people ask me about my surname. What does trouble me is when people say, “Your grandfather wasn’t really that bad.” Because he was. He embraced evil. He was even very unpleasant about the people who followed him; he had a cynical contempt for them,’ he says.
Francis Beckett, who wrote a memoir of his fascist father, John
CREDIT: ALAMY
Ivo wasn’t much minded to attend the dinner for his grandfather’s 80th birthday, in 1976. But friends persuaded him – it would be historic. Over the course of the evening he went up to the old man and asked him what he was up to at present. ‘I’m waiting for the call,’ Mosley replied.
His grandson teased him: ‘What, the call of nature? The call of the wild?’ ‘No,’ said Mosley, ‘The call of the people. This country is descending into crisis. I will be required.’
After the Party, by Cressida Connolly (Viking, £14.99).
Ivo wasn’t much minded to attend the dinner for his grandfather’s 80th birthday, in 1976. But friends persuaded him – it would be historic. Over the course of the evening he went up to the old man and asked him what he was up to at present. ‘I’m waiting for the call,’ Mosley replied.
His grandson teased him: ‘What, the call of nature? The call of the wild?’ ‘No,’ said Mosley, ‘The call of the people. This country is descending into crisis. I will be required.’
After the Party, by Cressida Connolly (Viking, £14.99).
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