Oswald Ernald Mosley Part II

The Fascist

Introduction. The end of Part One of this article left Oswald Mosley, a former Labour minister, leading The New Party. It included himself, his wife, four other MPs and their followers. The communists denounced it as fascist but they later denounced the Spanish POUM as Fascists.

Ashton under Lyne is near Manchester. On 26 March 1931 its Labour MP Albert Bellamy died aged sixty. He was a locomotive driver who was elected at a 1928 by election; held the seat at the 1929 General Election; and under the second Labour government was Parliamentary Private Secretary to Frederick Owen Roberts, the Minister of Labour.

An Ashton under Lyne by-election was held on 30 April 1931. The New Party candidate Allan Young was born in Blantyre near Glasgow on 18 August 1895; served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in the First World War; was a Labour organiser; was the defeated Labour candidate for Sparkbrook, Birmingham, in 1929; and was Oswald Mosley’s Political Secretary at Smethwick where Mosley was still MP.

At this by-election Allan Young got 4,472 votes coming third. Labour’s John William Gordon a railwayman got 11,005 votes. The Conservative Colonel John Broadbent, a First World War veteran, campaigned to impose tariffs on textile imports to protect local mills; got 12,420 votes and won. He held the seat at the 1931 General Election but lost it in 1935.

The New Party had split the Labour vote. This was why the New Party’s business backers had financed it, as some businesses were to finance the Social Democrats in 1981 after the Social Democrats left the Labour Party. Later in 1931 John Strachey, the Aston MP, and Allan Young left the New Party. They said that Oswald Mosley was going fascist.

The Great Depression worsened. King George V asked the party leaders to form a National Government. The Conservatives and Liberals, the Labour Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald, and some of his colleagues, agreed. The Labour National Executive Committee expelled them from the Labour Party and a General Election was called.

The 1931 General Election was held on Tuesday 27 October 1931. The New Party stood twenty five candidates. None were elected. Two saved their deposits.

Oswald Mosley left Smethwick and stood at Stoke on Trent. His wife Cynthia Mosley the Stoke MP 1929 to 1931 stood down. She was pregnant with their third child, ill and disillusioned with parliament. Oswald Mosley got 10,534 votes, saved his deposit but came third. The Conservative Ida Copeland, a Girl Guides leader, got 19,918 votes and won. Labour’s Ellis Smith got 13,264 votes. He retook Stoke for Labour in 1935.

At Merthyr Tydfil the New Party candidate, Major Sellick Davies, a First World War veteran and Cardiff Technical College Lecturer, got 10,834 votes and saved his deposit. The sitting Independent Labour MP Richard Collingham Wallhead got 24,623 votes and held the seat. No Conservatives or Liberals stood and some people who would have voted for them voted New Party.

The two sitting New Party MPs standing in their own constituencies lost their deposits. The ex-Labour Dr Robert Forgan came third at West Renfrewshire; and the ex-Liberal Cecil Randolph Dudgeon fourth at Galloway. The lowest New Party vote was 154 for the Jewish boxer Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis at Whitechapel and St Georges where he came fourth.

Nationally the Conservative, Liberal and National Labour coalition won more than two thirds of the popular vote and 551 seats including 470 Conservative seats. Labour won fifty two. The Lloyd George Independent Liberals won four and other candidates eight.

The British Union of Fascists. In January 1932 Oswald Mosley visited Mussolini in Italy. He was impressed by Mussolini’s real and alleged achievements. Mussolini warned him in vain against using militaristic tactics in Britain.

In April 1932 Mosley wound up the New Party except for its Youth Movement which ‘Kid’ Lewis had developed in the East End. In summer 1932 Mosley’s Book, The Greater Britain was published. It called for a Fascist economic policy broadly similar that of his former New Party but more nationalistic and authoritarian.

Oswald Mosley announced the formation of the British Union of Fascists (the BUF) on 1 October 1932. It had a black-shirted militia and stewards drawn from former New Party followers.

Mussolini had destroyed the Italian Labour movement and had had the Italian socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti murdered. This meant that Mosley attracted Labour Movement organised hostility. There was also the Jewish question. Oswald Mosley initially denied being anti-semitic. Mussolini had seized power in 1921 and it was 1938 before he started persecuting Italy’s Jews. Mussolini had had Jewish supporters and even some Jewish thugs. The small previous British Fascist Groups had included some Jew-baiters but also some Jews.

The BUF attracted Jew-baiters. British Jews had seen the rise of Hitler, who took power in Germany in 1933. Wealthy Jewish New Party supporters turned against the BUF; and Jews co-operated with communists, Labour supporters and trade unionists in disrupting BUF meetings.

‘Kid’ Lewis broke with Mosley. According Morton Lewis, in his biography of his father, this was done spectacularly. Many other respectable followers including Dr Robert Forgan and Peter Howard also parted company with Mosley. Even so the BUF quickly expanded and at its peak allegedly had fifty thousand members. About half of Britain’s Jews then lived in the East End and the BUF played on tensions there and elsewhere. On January 1934 the Daily Mail published its notorious headline Hurrah for the Blackshirts!

Bereavement. On 16 May 1933 Lady Cynthia Mosley died of peritonitis after an appendicitis operation; she was thirty-four. She had had stomach trouble for some time but it had been blamed on post-pregnancy complications. Her husband grieved but he had been having an affair with Lady Diana Guinness née Freeman-Mitford, one of the Mitford sisters.

Diana Guinness was married to Bryan Walter Guinness, a poet and novelist, the son of the 1^st Lord Moyne. They had had two children. She now divorced her husband for his alleged adultery. The divorce was made absolute in 1934. Her ex-husband later remarried and fathered another nine children.

Olympia. On 7 June 1934 a BUF rally was held at Olympia in London. A hundred and fifty MPs attended it. Hecklers were thrown out and savagely beaten as they lay on the ground in full view of the crowd outside which included journalists. The police saw this and did not arrest the fascists; but threatened to arrest people who wanted to intercede on the side of the victims. Everyone who has had meetings disrupted knows how infuriating it can be. Stewards are entitled to eject disrupters but are not entitled to beat up helpless people lying on the ground. Most newspaper coverage was hostile. Even Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail broke with the BUF but he told Hitler that he had done so under Jewish business pressure.

In 1935 the BUF boycotted that year’s General Election. It never got any MP’s elected but did get a few councillors elected. In 1936 Mosley changed its name to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists. It lost many more members.

Remarriage. On 6 October 1936 Oswald Mosley, thirty-nine, married Diana Guinness, twenty-six, in the Berlin drawing room of Hitler’s Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Hitler was a guest and gave the newly-weds a signed photograph of himself as a present. Mosley could not have married Diana Guinness in an Anglican church as she was divorced. Oswald and Diana Mosley were to have two sons.

Cable Street. On Sunday 4 October 1936 two thousand fascist black-shirts planned to march through the East End and split into four groups to hear speeches by Mosley and other fascists. The Jewish People’s Council’s petition for the marches to be banned got more than a hundred thousand signatories including the all five mayors of the East End boroughs. The Home Secretary Sir John Simon rejected it.

More than seven thousand police, including all London’s Mounted Police, turned out to protect the fascist march; but more than a quarter of a million people turned out to block it under the slogan They Shall Not Pass. Barricades were erected and the police could not clear a path for the fascists, who instead marched through the West End and rallied in Hyde Park. This episode was called the Battle of Cable Street.

Plaque commemorating the Battle of Cable Street (Wikipedia)

The Public Order Act. In December 1936 Stanley Baldwin’s National Government’s Public Order Act banned wearing political uniforms in public places or public meetings; banned paramilitary groups; and made disrupting meetings a criminal offence.

Some fascists began wearing black shirts as part of ordinary suits, but Oswald Mosley actually increased his support amongst middle class Conservatives after he cut out the SS style uniforms. The Public Order Act was often used against people disrupting fascist meetings. In 1937 Mosley renamed his movement the British Union. It opposed the forced abdication of Edward VIII and campaigned for peace with Germany. The Nazis secretly funded it, giving it nearly £50.000. At the 1937 London County Council elections the fascists stood six candidates and got 15,278 votes but won no seats.

In 1937 William Brooke Joyce and other open Nazis split from Mosley and formed the short lived National Socialist League. For every pure there is always another more pure to purify them. William Joyce broadcast for the Nazis during the Second World War, was known as Lord Haw Haw, and was hanged for treason in 1946.

The Second World War began in September 1939. Oswald Mosley continued agitating, blamed the Jews for the war and called for a negotiated peace. Fascist by-election candidates tried to take advantage of voters disgruntled by the war time pact between the main parties. Under it whichever party held the seat before the by-election would stand a candidate and the other main parties would not. On 22 May 1940 Frederick Haslam the British Union candidate got 416 votes at the Middleton and Prestwich by election. The Conservative Major Ernest Everard Gates got 32,036 votes and won.

On 23 May 1940 Oswald and Diana Mosley were interned without trial. So were more than four hundred other fascists and Nazi sympathisers. The British Union was banned.

At first Mosley was held in Brixton Gaol and his wife in Holloway. Later they lived in a house in the Holloway grounds. They were freed in November 1943. There was an uproar but only twenty six MPs supported a motion condemning the release. The Mosleys were held under house arrest for another year.

After the War. Hard core fascists reorganised after the Second World War. They resumed Jew baiting especially in the East End. They took advantage of public revulsion against Zionist outrages against British troops during the creation of Israel.

In 1946 Mosley published his My Answer and in 1947 he published The Alternative. In 1948 he founded the Union Movement which in 1968 mostly merged with other groups to form the National Front.

The Union Movement moved from Jew baiting to racialism. It called for an end to coloured immigration, for forced repatriation, and banning mixed marriages. Many of its meetings were disrupted. It could not always count on establishment protection. Oswald Mosley who mainly lived abroad, in Ireland and France, became a holocaust denier. He published Europe: Faith and Plan in 1958.

The 1958 Notting Hill Riots stimulated Mosley to stand at North Kensington at the 1959 General Election. He got 2,821 votes coming last. Labour’s George Henry Roland Rogers, a railway clerk, got 14,925 votes, and won. The Conservative Robert Walter Bulbrook, a professional boxer, turned navvy, turned Gas Board Trench Inspector, got 14,048. The Liberal Michael Louis Hydelman got 3,118.

In 1961 Mosley published his 300 Questions Answered. At the 1966 General Election he stood at Shoreditch and Finsbury in London. He got 1,126 votes. Labour’s Ronald William Brown got 17,456 votes and won. The Conservative Roger Edward Sims got 7,166 votes.

The End. Sir Oswald Mosley’s autobiography was published in 1968 and serialised in The Times. In his last years he suffered from Parkinson Disease. He died at his home near Paris on 3 December 1980, aged eighty four. He was cremated and his ashes scattered in the lake in his garden. His widow Lady Diana Mosley died in Paris on 11 August 2003 of a heart attack, aged ninety three.

Conclusion. The nearest post-war parallel to Mosley was Enoch Powell a Conservative MP who within a few years moved from exposing British atrocities during the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya, to stirring up racialism in Britain with his Rivers of Blood speech. He said that all political careers end in failure.