'HURRAH FOR THE BLACKSHIRTS!': Fascists and Fascism in Britain between the Wars
by Martin PughCape £20 pp400
Why did Britain not become fascist between the wars? The obvious answer is that the British temperament is inhospitable to fascism. Fascism calls for ardour and common purpose, whereas the British are by nature disgruntled, unhopeful, individualistic and suspicious of ideas. They do not like being organised, and they have a keen sense of the ridiculous, which is lethal to fascism. One-man rule has never attracted them. As early as 1649 they were obliged to chop Charles I's head off to bring this point to his attention. Their main interest in human grandeur is watching it come an almighty cropper, as Shakespeare's tragedies testify.
None of these answers would satisfy Martin Pugh. That interwar Britain did not become fascist was, he suggests, merely a matter of chance. If the economic depression had bitten deeper, or if the 1926 general strike had not petered out, or if Edward VIII had stuck to his guns instead of abdicating, the consequent political crisis might easily have swept a fascist dictator to supreme power in the person of Sir Oswald Mosley. Far from being alien to British political culture, fascism was, Pugh argues, a home-grown product. In 1923, only four years after Mussolini launched his Italian fascisti in Milan, the first British fascist party came into existence. It aimed to emulate the "lofty ideals" of the Boy Scout movement, and its founder, Rotha Lintorn-Orman, was herself a Girl Scout leader. A more militant breakaway group, the Imperial Fascist League, adopted full Nazi black-and-gold regalia, with an armband depicting the swastika superimposed on the Union Jack. Arnold Spenser Leese, its founder, was an expert on the diseases of camels and something of a recluse, his closest relationship, according to Pugh, being with his bull terrier. Other splinter groups developed throughout the 1920s, among them the National Fascisti, whose most renowned member was Valerie Arkell-Smith, a transvestite who spent years successfully passing herself off as Sir Victor Barker. The appeal of rural life, the Middle Ages and the feudal system drew other fascists to the English Mistery, later renamed the English Array. Its founder, Viscount Lymington, organised "musters" or camps where fascists built compost heaps, drank unpasteurised milk, and lamented the effects of tinned food on the British character.
It comes as a surprise, after reading Pugh's account of these organisations, to find him claiming there was "nothing very eccentric about the British fascists". They seem, on the contrary, to be a bunch of inveterate British oddities of a kind that any genuine fascist regime would have speedily wiped out. Their total membership was small and their political influence negligible. Mosley's British Union of Fascists (BUF), founded in 1932, was, of course, more serious, and Pugh ably lists Mosley's attractions. He had a fine war record, having served in the Royal Flying Corps. He was a spellbinding orator and an immense success with women, who would squeal "Oh Valentino" as he twirled his moustaches at BUF rallies. His Blackshirts are usually remembered as urban and right-wing, dedicated to Jew-baiting in the East End. But, in fact, Pugh points out, the BUF was popular in farming communities, where it campaigned for trade tariffs to stop the home market being swamped by cheap foreign food. Mosley had been converted to socialism in the 1920s and had served in Ramsay MacDonald's second Labour government. He cared deeply about poverty and unemployment, and it was the failure of successive governments to remedy these ills that led him to denounce parliamentary democracy as temporising and impotent. The genuineness of his concern was recognised in the industrial towns, where BUF membership had a sizeable working-class component.
Where he went wrong was quite simply in becoming a fascist, for this inevitably linked him with Hitler and the Nazis, and as the monstrous nature of their aims became apparent during the 1930s so his following among decent people fell away. The high point for the BUF came in the early months of 1934 when Lord Rothermere's Daily Mail took up the fascist cause with the headline "Hurrah for the Blackshirts!", and a mass rally in London's Olympia gave the public its first view of Mosley's shock-troops. It was not a pretty sight. Hecklers were picked out by spotlights, efficiently beaten up and ejected. Mosley stopped speaking while this was going on so that the audience could concentrate on the bloodshed. The brutality alienated educated opinion and when, only weeks later, Hitler eliminated his opponents and massacred the brownshirts in the Night of the Long Knives, the similarity between the two movements seemed blatant. Rothermere withdrew his support after the Olympia rally, and BUF membership dropped from 50,000 in 1934 to 5,000 in 1935.
Fatally, Mosley did nothing to distance himself from his Nazi counterparts. He married his second wife, Lady Diana, in the Goebbelses' drawing room, and the Führer sent a silver-framed photograph of himself as a wedding gift. His rallies were plainly a cut-price version of Hitler's vast theatrical parades. At the last of them, in July 1939 at Earl's Court, he entered to a trumpet fanfare and harangued the crowd from atop an enormous plinth like a beleaguered steeplejack. Although the BUF was not markedly anti- semitic in its early days, it became increasingly obsessed with Nazi-style theories about a worldwide Jewish conspiracy of capitalists and Bolsheviks that aimed to destroy western civilisation. Jews, in BUF rhetoric, were responsible for all the world's evils, whereas each new instance of aggression by the fascist dictators — Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia, Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland and Czechoslovakia — was portrayed by Mosley as utterly innocent. It is hardly surprising that when the BUF eventually fielded three candidates in by-elections in early 1940 they were humiliatingly defeated, and Mosley came close to being lynched. Shortly after, he was arrested and imprisoned, along with 747 of his followers, which may well have saved his life. In Nazi Germany he would of course have been shot long before for preaching defeatism and appeasement.
Pugh's book is not an easy read. It is maddeningly repetitive and recycles its stage army of cranks and fanatics in chapter after chapter. However, it incorporates new research, especially about BUF membership, and puts the English fascist movements into their wider political and economic contexts. Tellingly, he lists Conservative MPs and cabinet ministers who were unashamedly fascist throughout the 1930s. Some of the instances are almost incredible. During the phoney war the chief of the imperial general staff wanted to appoint Major-General "Boney" Fuller, a BUF candidate, as his deputy, and had to be overruled by the war cabinet. When the BUF was eventually rounded up, virtually all the leading aristocratic fascists remained at large. Pugh leaves us in little doubt that had Hitler invaded in 1940 he would have found several figures on the right of the Conservative party ready to welcome him.
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