Just Kidding, Mr Mosley?

Continuing our series on Oswald Mosley and George Orwell

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Introduction. In 1941 George Orwell wrote:

One would have had to look a long time to find a man more barren of ideas than Sir Oswald Mosley. He was as hollow as a jug. Even the elementary fact that Fascism must not offend national sentiment had escaped him. His entire movement was imitated slavishly from abroad, the uniform and the party programme from Italy, and the salute from Germany, with the Jew baiting tacked on as an after-thought, Mosley having actually started his movement with Jews among his most prominent followers. (The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, Secker and Warburg, 1941)

Who were these Jewish followers of Mosley? When he set up his New Party in 1931 it was a splinter group from the Labour Party. Ramsay Macdonald’s Labour government had rejected Mosley’s radical proposals to tackle unemployment during the Great Depression.

Many businessmen funded the New Party including Lord Nuffield, the motor car manufacturer, who donated £50,000 to it about ten million pounds in our terms. Among them were some Jews such as Israel Moses Sieff, the Vice Chairman and Joint Managing Director of Marks and Spencer from 1926 to 1964. He was made the 1^st Baron Sieff in 1966; and died in 1972 aged ninety two.

Another Jewish New Party supporter was Henry Ludwig Mond, the 2^nd Baron Melchett, of the German Jewish family that built up ICI,, the chemical industry multi-national. He was born in 1898; studied at Winchester; served in the South Wales Borderers in the First World War despite being under age; was wounded in 1916; inherited his title in 1930; and died in 1949 aged fifty.

Lord Nuffield, Israel Sieff and the 2^nd Lord Melchett were paternalists but this was not why they funded the New Party. Henry Ludwig Mond was the Liberal MP for Ely from 1923 to 1924; was defeated; left the Liberals; joined the Conservatives; was elected Conservative MP for East Toxteth in Liverpool in 1929; and ceased to be an MP in 1930 because he inherited the title after his father the 1^st Lord Melchett died.

The businessmen who funded the New Party wanted to split the Labour vote and let the Conservatives back in. This was shown at the 1931 Ashton under Lyne by election when the New Party’s Allan Young split the Labour vote. This let the Conservative Colonel John Broadbent, a pawnbroker’s son, take the seat for the Conservatives.

The Liberals were once the party of trade and money and the Conservatives of land and birth. The rise of socialism and the Labour Party united the ruling class against a common threat. Stanley Baldwin who dominated the Conservatives between the two World Wars and was three times Prime Minister was a steel manufacturer’s son.

For the same reason many businesses funded the Social Democrats when they split from Labour in 1979 after Michael Foot became the Labour Leader of the Opposition. This gave Margaret Thatcher her landslide victories in 1983 and 1987.

When Mosley went openly fascist in 1932 most of his business supporters no longer wanted to know him. This was especially true of his former Jewish supporters. The rest of this article concerns Ted Kid Lewis, a working class Jewish boxer who supported Mosley for rather longer but eventually realised the truth.

Orwell and Ted Kid Lewis. George Orwell directly mentioned Ted Kid Lewis once. In his essay The English People, commissioned in September 1943, finished in May 1944, and published in 1947, Orwell wrote that:

Nevertheless sports worship is not carried to quite such imbecile lengths as one would imagine from reading the popular press. When the brilliant lightweight boxer, Kid Lewis, stood for parliament in his native borough, he only scored a hundred and twenty five votes.

The boxer later known as Ted Kid Lewis was born Gershom Mendeloff on 28 October 1893 at 23 James Street in St George’s in the East District, in the East End of London. He was the third of eight children and the oldest son of Solomon Mendeloff, a cabinet maker, and his wife Leah, who had fled Tsarist Russia to escape the pogroms.

Gershom Mendaloff won a scholarship and studied at the Rothschild-financed Jewish Free School in Spitalfields. He and his friends en route to school ran the gauntlet of boys shouting anti-semitic taunts and throwing mud and stones. He and some of his friends fought back and he learnt how to handle himself in difficult situations i.e. how to mess it in a scrap. Aged twelve he became a cabinet maker like his father.

Kid Lewis. According to legend a policeman saw Gershom Mendeloff brawling and suggested he join a boxing club. In 1909 aged fifteen Gershom joined the Judean Boxing Club in Whitechapel. He began to box professionally calling himself Kid Lewis. He was initially a flyweight. In 1913 aged nineteen he defeated Alec Lambert at London’s National Sporting Club and won the British Featherweight title having risen two weights. On 27 February 1914 he won the European featherweight title.

In 1914 Kid Lewis and his trainer Alec Zelig Goodman went to Australia. In early 1915 they went to the USA. Kid Lewis took the name Ted Kid Lewis. In August 1915 he defeated Jack Britton, an Irishman, in Boston and won the World Welterweight title. Ted Kid Lewis lost it to Britton eight months later, regained it from him in June 1917 and lost it back to him in March 1919.

The British Embassy in the USA had advised Ted Kid Lewis to stay in the USA and promote British interests there through his boxing. This is why he did not return to Britain and join the army after the First World War broke out.

Marriage On 12 February 1917 Lewis married Elsie Schneider a model in New York. After the USA entered the First World War on the allied side in April 1917 he helped teach American troops hand to hand combat.

Ted and Elsie Lewis’s son Morton Maxwell Lewis was born on 25 October 1917; became an actor and sporting film producer; wrote a biography of his father titled Ted Kid Lewis: His Life and Times (Robson 1990); and died on 17 August 2006 aged eighty eight.

In 1919 Lewis returned to England. In June 1920 he won the British and European welterweight titles. In May 1922 George Carpentier, the World Light Heavyweight champion, defeated Lewis in the first round by a trick in connivance with the referee. In June 1922 Lewis won the British Middleweight title and in November 1922 he won the European Middleweight title.

Ted Kid Lewis gave up boxing in 1929 aged thirty six. He had fought 299 bouts, won 233, lost 41 and drawn 25. He began as a defensive, evasive fighter, but in America adopted a more aggressive style. He was one of the first boxers to use a mouth-shield.

Mouth-shields are today used in many contact sports. They were allegedly invented by Lewis’s friend Jack Marks, a bantamweight boxer who became a dentist. An article by Robert V. Reed junior in the 25 June 1994 British Dental Journal attributes the invention to another boxer and dentist friend of Ted Kid Lewis called Philip Krause. Dentistry is today highly regulated but it has not always been.

Lewis and Mosley. By 1931 Lewis was at a loose end. Sir Oswald Mosley had split from Labour and formed the New Party. His meetings were disrupted by Labour supporters who saw him as a renegade. He recruited Lewis as his chief personal bodyguard after they met at a cocktail party.

Ted Kid Lewis told Mosley about the East End slums and the effects of malnutrition. Oswald Mosley told Lewis that he wanted to clear the slums and give the youth of England the chance to pursue manly sports such as boxing.  Lewis became first the New Party’s Chief Physical Instructor and then Mosley’s Chief Bodyguard, leading and training a group of East End toughs.

At the 1931 General Election Ted Kid Lewis was the New Party candidate for Stepney, Whitechapel and St George’s. He got 154 votes and came bottom of the poll out of the four candidates. Barnett Janner, then a Liberal, got 11,013 votes and took the seat from the sitting Labour MP James Henry Hall, a dock worker and trade unionist who got 9,964 votes. The communist Harry Pollitt got 2,658 votes.

After Mosley went openly fascist Lewis initially continued supporting him despite warnings from his friends and from his wife Elsie. Oswald Mosley initially denied being anti-Semitic. One day Ted Kid Lewis and his son Morton visited Mosley at his headquarters and found him sitting down flanked by two men in brown shirts i.e. Nazi storm troopers. Oswald Mosley said that the time for subterfuge was over and began to reveal his true aims.

Lewis allegedly slapped Mosley hard across the face and sent him flying backwards into the wall. The two storm-troopers turned on Ted. Morton jumped on one from behind. Ted knocked one Nazi out cold. Ted asked Morton to let go of the Nazi Morton had restrained. Then Ted knocked this Nazi out cold. Ted and Morton left the building. Once Morton was safe Ted returned and knocked out the two door guards,

Later Life. In his later years Ted Kid Lewis followed various occupations including being a boxing trainer and manager, a boxing referee, a bookie, a haberdasher, a wine and spirits vintner, a security officer and a travel agent. He traded on his celebrity status and made money easily. However he was very generous and was a soft touch for anyone with a hard luck story.

In the early 1960’s Ted Kid Lewis was friendly with the Kray twins who operated a London nightclub and were big time gangsters. He attended their parties and charity evenings. The Krays then had many political and show business friends. Most of them did not want to know the Krays in later years, though a few such as Barbara Windsor remained loyal to them.

Elsie Lewis died in 1962. Ted Kid Lewis’s eyesight deteriorated and he developed Parkinson’s-Disease. In 1966 he moved into Nightingale House in Balham in South London a Jewish retirement home.

On 20 October 1970 Ted Kid Lewis died at Nightingale House, according to his death certificate, of bronchopneumonia, senility, and anaemia aged seventy six. Senility meant dementia. Anyone can develop it but it is an occupational disease among boxers where it is known as being punch drunk, and in some other sports. The authorities were told of the death by Morton Lewis. Dr Cyril Josephs certified the causes of death.

Reputation. The Wednesday 21 October 1970 London Times gave Ted Kid Lewis an obituary written by its boxing correspondent Neil Allen. It focused on Lewis’s boxing and did not mention his involvement with Mosley.

Stan Shipley wrote Ted Kid Lewis’s online Dictionary of National Biography entry published in 2011 and accessed by me on 3 January 2025. It, too, focused on Lewis’s boxing. It only hinted at his involvement with Mosley, saying that Lewis was sentimental and politically naïve. This was despite the entry listing Morton Lewis’s biography of Ted Kid Lewis as a source.

An English Heritage Blue Plaque commemorating Ted Kid Lewis was put up at Nightingale House in 2003. His son Morton Maxwell Lewis unveiled it.

Conclusion. George Orwell was slightly unfair to Ted Kid Lewis who got 154, not 125, votes when he stood for parliament; and was a middleweight not a light weight. However Orwell was not to know that his every word (readers of the Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters will know that Lewis reappeared in Orwell’s ken in 1947 as the subject of a letter to his friend Julian Symons) would be scrutinised by nit pickers. . Like nearly all writers I myself have made some grisly typos.