Orwell, Mosley, Fascist Meeting

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Introduction. After my previous two articles looked at Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, here I look at George Orwell’s first encounter with him.

The Meeting. On Sunday 15 March 1936 Orwell was in Barnsley, Yorkshire, researching The Road to Wigan Pier. That day he attended a British Union of Fascists (BUF) meeting at Barnsley Public Hall. (The hall was built by Henry Harvey in 1877 as Barnsley Mechanics Institute and Public Hall. It should not be confused with Barnsley Town Hall built in 1932-1933). The speaker at this meeting was Oswald Mosley. George Orwell wrote:

Last night to hear Mosley speak at the Public Hall which is in structure a theatre. It was quite full – about 700 people I should say. About 100 Black-shirts on duty with two or three exceptions weedy looking specimens, and girls selling “Action” etc. Mosley spoke for an hour and a half and to my dismay seemed to have the meeting with him. He was booed at the start but largely clapped at the end. Several men who tried at the beginning to interject questions were thrown out, one of them – who as far as I could see, was only trying to get a question answered – with quite unnecessary violence, several Black-shirts throwing themselves upon him and raining blows on him while he was still sitting down and had not attempted any violence.

M is a very good speaker, His speech was the usual claptrap – Empire Free Trade, down with the Jew and the Foreigner, higher wages and shorter hours all round etc. After the preliminary booing the (mainly) working class audience was easily bamboozled by M. speaking from as it were a socialist angle, condemning the treachery of successive governments towards the workers. The blame for everything was put on mysterious international gangs of Jews who are said to be financing among other things the British Labour Party and the Soviet. M’s statement re the International situation “We fought Germany before in a British quarrel; we are not going to fight them now in a Jewish one” was received with loud applause.

Afterwards there were questions as usual and in struck me how easy it is to bamboozle an uneducated audience if you have prepared beforehand a set of repartees with which to evade awkward questions e.g. M kept extolling Italy and Germany but when questioned about concentration camps etc. always replied “We have no foreign models; what happens in Germany need not happen here”. To the question “How do you know that your own money is not used to finance cheap foreign labour?” (M. having denounced the Jewish financiers who are supposed to do this) M. replied “All my money is invested in England” and I suppose comparatively few of the audience realised that this means nothing.

At the beginning M. said that anyone ejected would be charged under the Public Meetings Act. I don’t know if this was actually done but presumably the power to do so exists. In connection with this the fact that there are no police on duty inside the building is of great importance. Anyone who interrupts can be assaulted and thrown out, and then charged into the bargain, and of course the stewards i.e. M himself are the judges of what constitutes an interruption. Therefore one is liable to get both a hammering and a fine for asking a question which M. finds it difficult to answer.

At the end of the meeting a great crowd collected outside as there was some public indignation about the men who had been thrown out. I waited for a long time in the crowd to see what would happen, but M. and Party did not emerge. Then the police managed to split the crowd and I found myself at the front whereupon a policeman ordered me away but quite civilly. I went round to the back of the crowd and waited again, but still M. did not appear and I concluded he had been sneaked out by a back-door so went home. In the morning however at the Chronicle office I was told that there had been stone throwing, and two men had been arrested and remanded.

On 17 March 1936 Orwell wrote to Jack Common that I heard Mosley speak here on Sunday. It sickens me to see how easily a man of that type can win over and bamboozle a working class audience. There was some violence by the Black-shirts as usual and I am going to write to the Times about it, but what hope of their printing my letter?  His letter did not appear in The Times.

The aftermath. On 18 March 1936 in The Road to Wigan Pier Diary, Orwell wrote:

… some curious coincidences. When I went to see Len Kaye he recommended me to see Tommy Degnan to whom I had also been recommended by Paddy Grady at Wigan. But what was more curious still was that D. was one of the men who were thrown out at Mosley’s meeting, though not the one I actually saw thrown out. I went round to see D. last night and had some difficulty finding him. He lives in a dreadful barn of a place called Garden House which is an old almost ruinous house which half a dozen unemployed men have taken and made a sort of lodging house of. D himself is not unemployed though at the moment “playing” because a few days before the hammering he got at M.’s meeting he was slightly crushed by a fall of stone in the mine.

We went out to look for the man whom I actually saw thrown out as I want to get particulars and see his bruises before writing to the papers about it, but couldn’t find him and I am to see him today. . Then in the street we ran across another man whom I saw thrown out. The latter’s ejection was an interesting instance of how any upset can be misrepresented and used to advantage by a demagogue of the type of Mosley. At the time of the uproar at the back of the Hall this last man – name Hennesy I think – was seen to rush onto the stage and everyone thought he had gone there to shout something out and interrupt M’s speech. It struck me as curious that though on the stage he didn’t shout anything out, and the next moment of course the black-shirts on the platform seized him and bundled him out, M. shouted out “A typical example of Red tactics”

It now appears that what happened was that Hennesey saw the Black-shirts at the back of the hall bashing D. and couldn’t get to help him because there is no aisle up the middle; but there was an aisle on the right hand side, and the only way he could get to this was over the stage. D after being thrown out was charged under the Public Meetings Act. But H. was not. I don’t know yet if the other man Marshall was. The woman who was thrown out – this was somewhere at the back and I didn’t see it – was hit on the head with a trumpet and was a day in hospital. D and H. were in the army together and H was wounded in the leg and D taken prisoner when the Vth Army was defeated in 1918. D being a miner was sent to work in the Polish mines. He said all of them have Pit Head Baths. H says the French ones have them too.

In a handwritten footnote Orwell wrote that: His name is Firth. I got it as Hennessey because he was introduced to me as Hellis Firth. (Ellis Firth – people here very capricious about their H’s). According to the Collected Works the variations in spelling Hennessey were Orwell’s

On Saturday 22 March 1936 Orwell attended a Communist open air meeting in Barnsley market place. He wrote it was disappointing. The trouble with all those communist speakers is that instead of using the popular idiom they employ massively long sentences full of “despite” and “notwithstanding” and “be that as it may” etc. in the Garvin strain – and this despite of always speaking with broad provincial or Cockney accents – Yorkshire in this case. I suppose they are given set speeches which they learn by heart.

After the visiting speaker Degnan got up to speak and was a much more effective speaker – he speaks broad Lancashire and though he can speak like a leading article if he wants to he doesn’t choose. The usual crowd of men of all ages gaping with entirely expressionless faces and the usual handful of women a little more animated than the men – I suppose because no woman would go to a political meeting unless exceptionally interested in politics. About 150 people. Collection taken for defence of the young men arrested in the Mosley affair and realised six shillings.

On 20 April 1936 Orwell wrote to Richard Rees asking him to find out from John Strachey, an old Mosley associate, if Mosley was sincere. Mosley, Orwell wrote, had spoken unutterable bollox at Barnsley, but admitted that Mosley was a capable orator.

The BUF flash had been introduced in 1935, the year before Mosley spoke in Barnsley

Yorkshire Newspapers such as the Monday 16 March 1936 Leeds Mercury and the Sheffield Independent reported the Mosley meeting. They focused on the disturbances there and did not report what Mosley said.

The Legal Consequences. I have found no evidence that Thomas Degnan or Ellis Firth were charged with public order offences as Mosley had said that hecklers might be. However two protestors were charged.

On Monday 16 March 1936 Norman Stanley a Worsborough Dale miner, aged twenty, and John Hobson, aged eighteen, a Barnsley miner, were charged with breach of the peace. George Henry Butler, the Chief Constable of Barnsley, asked the magistrate for time to prepare his evidence. This was agreed and the two men were remanded for a fortnight but bail was allowed.

The case was heard on Monday 6 April 1936. Chief Constable Butler accused Stanley and Hobson of throwing stones at the buses that were carrying fascists away from the meeting. The two accused men denied the charges but were found guilty and bound over to keep the peace in return for a £5 surety; or go to gaol for a month.

Barnsley Borough Council attempted to bill the BUF twelve shillings for damage allegedly done inside Barnsley Public Hall at their meeting. This was legally dubious and I do not know the outcome of this claim.

On Tuesday 21 April 1936, at a Barnsley Borough Council meeting, Councillor George Mason moved and Councillor Allen seconded a motion to ban the BUF from meeting at Barnsley Public Hall again. The motion was supported by Alderman James Walton who claimed that ninety five percent of Mosley’s audience had been bussed in from other areas; Councillor Arthur Jepson; and Alderman Edward Sheerian.

The motion was opposed by Councillor John George Edmund Rideal who claimed that only the Labour Party had got free speech in Barnsley; and Alderman William Emslie Raley who said it should first be ascertained if the BUF or their opponents did the damage. Supporters of the motion denied opposing free speech and it was passed.

Thomas Degnan, who Orwell called Tommy Degnan or D, was born in Wigan on 24 November 1897. His parents were Joseph and Catherine Degnan. He left school aged thirteen and became a Wigan miner. He served in the British Army in the First World War, and was captured in the March 1918 German spring offensive. The Germans used him as forced labour in Polish coal mines.

After the 1921 miners’ strike Degnan moved to the Barnsley area to work in the mines there. He joined the Communist Party in 1922, was an active trade unionist and faced victimisation and unemployment. He served in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and was badly wounded. In the 1950’s he helped mentor the young Arthur Scargill. In retirement Degnan helped organise the 1970’s miners’ strikes. He died in 1979 aged eighty one.

Ellis Firth, who gave Orwell considerable personal help researching The Road to Wigan Pier, was born in Barnsley on 20 May 1895 the son of Thomas and Margaret Rhoda Firth; and by 1911 was a miner. He was a Private in the Machine Gun Corps in the First World War and in 1916 married Agnes May Lunn. He died in 1978 aged eighty three.