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Fascism failed in Britain in the 1930's and unlike many European countries, fascists were never a serious threat to Britain's democratic order. Cullen examines the history of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), and demonstrates that although the BUF set out to be hyper-patriotic, it did have close links with continental fascism.
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Fascism failed in Britain in the 1930s - Europe's decade of the 'Brown plague'. Unlike in many European countries, fascists in Britain were never a serious threat to the democratic order. This was not for want of trying, especially on the part of Sir Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists (BUF), which he founded in October 1932. The BUF was a vibrant fascist movement, at the centre of political unrest throughout the 1930s, so much so that the National Government passed the Public Order Act of 1936 in order to check both the spread of the BUF, and the violence and disorder that was associated with its activities. And it was fear of possible fascist Fifth Column activity that led the wartime coalition government to ban the BUF, and intern over 800 of its leaders, in the desperate spring of 1940. Why did such an active, and apparently threatening, movement fail, when many similar movements across Europe helped cast the political fates of their respective nations?
There were a variety of factors that ensured that the BUF struggled to make a great impact on the British political scene. Foremost among these was the lack of political space on the British political landscape. National politics throughout the 1930s was dominated by the 'safety first' administrations of the National Government, local politics remained firmly in the hands of established political parties, and the wider Labour movement retained the loyalty of the industrial working classes. In addition the political violence associated with the BUFs meetings and activities, often caused by anti-fascist opponents, did the movement no good. Neither did a media boycott, once Mosley broke with Lord Rothermere, who, with his Daily Mail newspaper, had been an early supporter of the BUF. Yet one aspect of the BUF which helped undermine the movement's campaigns, and finally led to its enforced demise, has received little historical attention. That was the tension between the BUFs patriotism and its fascism, a tension whose source was the BUF's participation in a loose fascist 'international'.
The BUF was a highly programmatic political grouping. In Mosley's own writings, most notably in The Greater Britain (1932), and Tomorrow We Live (1938), and in those of his lieutenants and followers, the BUF set out a complex blueprint for their promised revolutionary state the 'People's State'. This was a refined version of Mussolini's Corporate State, and was allied to a number of other key policies, which formed the BUF's political platform. The BUF promised Empire autarky (an expanded version of the National Government's Empire Preference scheme); an isolationist foreign policy characterised by the slogan 'Mind Britain's Business'; it was antiSemitic, particularly from 1934 onwards; stressed the enhanced role of the fascist movement in the day-to-day life of the country; and, above all, offered itself to the British people as the most patriotic party in British politics. It was this hyper-patriotism that characterised the general approach of the movement, its Blackshirts, and their supporters.
However, if the BUF's raison d'etre can almost be reduced to its hyperpatriotism, its appearance and most of its policies seemed, to many British eyes, to be incorrigibly foreign. This was a weakness from the outset and was widely commented upon by contemporaries. As one critic, Ivor Brown, noted in 1934: These devotees of democracy [the BUF] insist on wearing the uniform, using the salute, and generally practising the rigmarole of the Italian Fascists [...if they] insist on aping the Italian model in its choice of shirtings and salaams, they can hardly expect the public to dissociate them entirely from its practice and philosophy.1
Furthermore, it was a practice that, not withstanding Mussolini's prestige on the Right in general, was also commonly associated with the violent activity of the Italian squadristi, the suppression of dissent within Italy, and the assassination of exiled opponents without. This association with similar movements abroad caused the BUF endless problems. The BUF's isolationist foreign policy was seen by some as merely a method of supporting Italian Fascist and Nazi German aggression. This was recognised by fascists themselves, as a former East Ham blackshirt remembered in the mid-1980s:
It seemed that every time we [the BUF] were getting on marvellously, old Hitler would go into Austria or Czechoslovakia or somewhere, and they [the public] always seemed to associate that with what we were because the newspapers, naturally, tried to ally us with Germany.2
Mosley and his movement made great efforts to disassociate the BUF from the taint of 'foreignness'. Mosley likened the dramatic marches and meetings of the BUF, with their coloured shirts, banners and bands, to the Durham Miners' Gala, thereby seeking to remind the public of his prior, and high-profile, attachment to the Labour movement, and attempting to link the BUF's choreography with those of an unquestionably British group. Further, the prominent emblem of the BUF, the fasces, which figured on the movement's uniforms, standards, literature, and badges, was passed off as not being specifically Italian, but being fittingly Imperial. In this context, attention was drawn to the widespread use of the fasces on civic buildings throughout Britain. Yet, the BUF did not learn. As Hitler's star climbed in the 1930s, so the movement re-styled itself the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists (later just 'British Union'), and adopted another symbol, the 'flash of action in the circle of unity'. This appeared on armbands as a white symbol on a blue and red background. seen from a distance, and especially when worn on the SS style 'Action' uniform (which Mosley later admitted was a mistake), it had something of the swastika about it. Yet, the BUF still claimed that it was a British movement, and apparently eschewed direct links with continental expressions of this variety of political modernism. Mosley, for example, refused to attend the Mussoliniinspired International Fascist Congress held in Montreux in 1934, although representatives from thirteen European countries did.
Nevertheless, the BUF maintained a variety of both formal and informal links with fascist movements and governments throughout its history. This did not amount to the sort of international communist movement nurtured and sustained by the Comintern, and adherence to the principles of'democratic centralism', but there was at work a loose association of international fascism. It was not just theory and appearance which linked the BUF to its co-fascists abroad, there were also four other types of links between the BUF and continental fascists. There were formal febetween the movement and other fascist and nazi movements and governments; financial ties; BUF branches in other European countries, especially in Italy and Germany; and individualfascists'who developed links with fascists abroad, and vice versa.
Formal contacts between leading members of the BUF, Mosley included, and figures in the Italian Fascist Party (PNF) and the Nazi Party (NSDAP), had important implications for the direction of the British fascist movement, and, indeed, for the scope of its activities in its earliest years. It was no secret that Mosley had been greatly impressed by the Fascist regime and that a crucial visit to Italy (after the electoral failure of his short-lived New Party (NP) in the 1931 election) helped push him in the direction of fascism. With hindsight, we can say that the New Party was a proto-fascist party and that Mosley's step towards full-blown fascism was a small one. However, there was no intrinsic reason why Mosley should have moved to embrace fascism. After all, almost all of the leaders of the NP were former Labour Party members, or MPs, and Mosley's economic policies in 1931 were closer to the Liberal Party's 'Yellow Book' proposals than anything else. It seems, then, that Mosley's visit to Rome was essential in directing his future energies. This much was admitted in the early biography of Mosley, Oswald Mosley, Portrait of a Leader (1938), by a leading BUF officer, A.K. Chesterton, who wrote:
Women Blackshirts parade, under leading BUF women's officer, Anne Brock Griggs, prior to the BUF's aborted Cable Street march of 4th October 1936.
Confirmed upon his course of action by all that he had seen abroad, Mosley made up his mind to lead a Fascist movement in Britain - a movement freely acknowledging its debt to Hitler and Mussolini, but, nevertheless, distinctively British in policy and method, concerned solely with the welfare and greatness of the British people.3
Chesterton neatly, if unintentionally, encapsulated the difficulty of such an avowedly patriotic, and stridently British movement, having to acknowledge its debt to a foreign idea. Yet the Italian Fascists continued to be vital to Mosley and the BUF for a number of years, both in ideological and financial terms. In April, 1933, Mosley made another visit to Rome, and received a Fascist banner on behalf of the BUF from the PNF secretary, Achille Starace, as part of the celebrations surrounding the highly successful Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution (the Mostra delta rivoluzione fasdsta), which attracted nearly three million visitors from across Italy and Europe, and marked, in the opinion of contemporaries and historians alike, the high water mark of Italian Fascist culture.
Despite many years of denial by supporters of Mosley, it has been known for some time that the BUF was sustained in its early years by a generous subvention from the Italian Fascists. But, until now, the actual method ofthat secret funding was not widely known, and the details read like pages from a 'Sapper' novel. Until October 1935, British security services had no direct evidence that Mosley and the BUF were receiving money from Italy, although they did have suspicions. That month, MI5 obtained information that there was a growing rift between Mosley and his deputy leader, F.M. Box. The two men had argued after Mosley returned from holiday in Italy, and Box had expressed concern, in the words of an MI5 report, that the relationship between the Italian Fascists and Mosley brought to mind the proverb: 'the man who pays the piper calls the tune'.4 MI5 attached great significance to this, as Box was known to be a close confidant of Mosley. Strains within the senior leadership of the BUF increased, and, in December, Box resigned from the BUF. By then, the security services were convinced that the BUF was receiving some £36,000 a year from Italy, but nothing from Germany. However in 1936, the Italians, believing that the BUF was in decline, reduced the subsidy to £1,000 per month. In fact, the BUF was regrouping after a disastrous fall in membership, and had already begun the slow process of recovery, which it maintained until its banning in 1940, by which time it had over 20,000 members. But, by then, the Italian government had long since ended its subsidy to the BUF - in March 1937, after the BUF's poor showing in the London County Council elections.
The Lancaster BUF leader, sporting the 'Flash of Action in the Circle of Unity' armband on his blackshirt.
The conduit for the Italian Fascist money was a BUF leader, Ian Hope Dundas, who had extensive connections with Italy. He made frequent visits to Rome, driving himself across the continent, picking up packets of money in used notes of mixed currencies from Fascist agents, and returning to BUF headquarters with the money. Dundas was a supporter of both British and Italian fascism. He was one of a circle of British figures in Italy who were close to leading members of the PNF. This group included the famous fascist, Catholic convert, and Italophilejames Strachey Barnes, author of The Universal Aspects of Fascism (1928), which had been prefaced by Mussolini, and Half a Life Left; with an Account of the Abyssinian Campaign (1937). Another British supporter of the Fascist regime was Colonel Cyril Rocke, who broadcast on Italian radio, and was Reuters correspondent with the Italian forces during the war in Abyssinia. During his frequent stays in Italy, Ian Hope Dundas became one of the first Britons to broadcast for Italian radio, being particularly active on the air waves during the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. These broadcasts were aimed at the English-speaking world, and there was comment in the British press about Dundas' involvement. He was, in fact, one of the first foreigners to broadcast on Italian radio, setting a trend which led to Ezra Pound's wartime broadcasts from Italy, not to mention the German broadcasts of William Joyce, former BUF activist, and, later, National Socialist League (NSL) leader. But Dundas was not merely a courier between the Italians and the BUF, and a broadcaster for Italian radio, for, in April 1936, he became the BUF's official Liaison Officer between the BUF and the PNF, starting his new job with a six month posting to Rome.
But Mosley's and the BUF's star eventually waned in Italy, just as some British fascists began to look to Germany, and the Nazi state, as an apparently more effective model. The growing prominence of Nazi Germany on the European stage was undoubtedly welcomed by that group within the BUF who considered themselves more national socialist than fascist. Here, the defining issue was anti-Semitism. The BUF was not, at the outset, an antiSemitic organisation in a formal sense. Indeed, an early and violent clash with members of the openly Nazi grouplet, the Imperial Fascist League (IFL), came about because BUFBlackshirts objected to the IFLs anti-Semitism, believing it would tar their variety of fascism with the same brush. However, some of the BUFs early recruits, most notably those from the British Fascists (BF), were undoubtedly anti-Semitic. Yet this alone does not explain the BUF's moves toward an official anti-Semitism. That was the result of a complex series of events, influences, and pressures - one of which appears to have been the direct influence of the German Nazis. At the same time as BUF and IFL militants were fighting in London, other BUF activists were visiting Germany, where they had their existing anti-Semitism strengthened. These German-influenced fascists then began a concerted push to make the BUF an anti-Semitic movement. Special Branch reports submitted to the Home Office in November 1933 talked of a group of ex-British Fascists in the BUF who were 'fanatically anti-Jewish', and wished to push Mosley towards anti-Semitism. The report went on to state that:
In September 1933, a number of leading officials of the British Union of Fascists attended the Nuremberg Conference as the guests of the Nazi Party, and in this connection it is perhaps significant that about the beginning of November, 1933, the movement came out openly as an opponent of Jewry.5
Further, the imposition of a British Jewish boycott of German goods, and increasing clashes between antifascist Jews and BUF members, helped the ex-BF faction, with its German links, to push the BUF down the dead-end path of anti-Semitism.
Mosley himself met Hitler in April 1935, but did not, by his own account, take to him in the same way as he had with Mussolini. Yet Mosley, his second wife, Diana Mitford, and her sister, Unity, received much hospitality over time from Nazi leaders, even if Hitler himself did not think that Mosley was likely to come anywhere near power in Britain.
The BUF had official contacts with other groups, apart from the PNF and the NSDAP. Fascist leaders, and individual members, often made trips to London to attend BUF events. Among a group of foreign fascists who attended a BUF meeting at the Royal Albert Hall in October, 1934, was Anton Mussert, the leader of the Dutch movement, the Nationaal-Socialistiche Beweging der Nederlanden (NSB), which, despite its name, was more fascist than national socialist at this point in its fourteen year history. Mussert's attendance at the BUF meeting was no accident, as the BUF had a liaison officer in place in Holland with the NSB. This was a keen amateur film maker, Bertram Lister, the scion of a well-known Yorkshire textile family. Lister reported on the NSB's activities to the BUF, and shot thousands of feet of film of political events in Holland. Unfortunately, when Lister was arrested and interned in the spring of 1940, it appeal's that his wife destroyed what would have been valuable archive footage.
Not only did the BUF accept both ideological and financial help from abroad, it also maintained branches of the movement throughout Europe and the Empire. The BUF press frequently ran items on the activities of branches abroad, which were, in turn, the subject of scrutiny by British embassies, who monitored these expatriate fascists for the Foreign Office in London. In the early months of 1934, for example, The Blackshirt reported on BUF branches in Milan, Genoa, Paris, Madrid, and Rome. These reports were mixed with articles lauding the successes of both the Italian and German regimes. Italy's fight against tuberculosis, its Dopolavoro scheme, the role of women in Fascist Italy, and the triumphal draining of the Pontine Marshes all featured in the fascist paper. There could have been few British Blackshirts who were not aware of the fortunes of their Italian counterparts. This was part of the actively pursued project of creating a fascist internationalism, making clear links between the successes of the Italian regime, such as the draining of the Pontine Marshes, and the policy stance of the BUF.
If the BUF gave full coverage to the success of fascism abroad, the Italian press, at least in the early years, repaid the compliment. The British Embassy in Rome reported to the Foreign Office in April, 1934, that Mosley was being 'written up' in the Italian press. The embassy also noted that, at a fascist meeting in Genoa, British Blackshirts came from Milan, Turin, Florence, Alassio, and Bordighera, as well as from Genoa. But the tone of all the embassy reports was that, while the expatriate BUF members were relatively active, they posed no serious threat to British interests, and were merely treated with polite interest by their Italian hosts.
As in Italy, so the BUF maintained branches in Germany, the British Embassy in Berlin reporting that there were three BUF branches active in Germany in 1934. The leader of the Cologne branch of the BUF was a Captain Eewis, who had been promoted from gunner to officer in the field while serving with the Royal Field Artillery in the Great War - a rare distinction. But Captain Lewis was even more interesting, as the embassy reported that he wasjewish. While there were Jewish Blackshirts in the early years of the BUF, it is difficult to see how a British Jew in Germany could have joined a fascist party. It may have been a form of protection, or, it may have been something else, as was the case with the Jewish fascist, John Beckett, a leading BUF officer who left Mosley's movement, only to join the openly Nazi NSL of William Joyce. Whatever the reason, the case of Captain Lewis illustrates the often unusual personal histories of individuals caught up in destructive historical events. Lewis was not the only BUF member to find himself in strange circumstances, as another British Blackshirt with links to Germany, Clement Bruning, a noted East End BUF militant, was eventually imprisoned in Auschwitz during the war, where he was murdered in 1944.
But the BUF had more complex relations with German Nazis than a handful of branches in Germany. The director of the BUF Foreign Relations Department in London was Dr. Pfister, and he saw his main role as forging closer links between Nazi Germany and the BUF, specifically to push the British movement to wards a more anti-Semitic line. An MI5 report of August, 1984, identified Pfister as a key link in the anti-Semitic chain. MI5 established that the Germans were eager to turn the BUF into an antijewish organisation, and were using Pfister to that end. This, as we have seen, was also around the time when ex-BF members of the BUF were pushing for the same policy. But Dr. Pfister's intrigues led to his removal from the foreign relations department by Mosley, and he was given a job in the, perhaps no less sensitive, research department. Once again, however, it is fairly clear that, at the least, the BUF's place in the informal and formal links that made up the fascist international did bring pressures to bear on the ideological standpoint of the BUF.
The final experience of international fascism which concerns us here is the personal links that some fascists formed with the Nazi and Fascist regimes. Having pen-pals in Germany and Italy, or visiting one of those countries, was not unusual among British fascists, just as political tourism in the idealized home of Soviet communism was the dream of many communists. Although rank and file fascists visited Italy, as did Roland Andrew who published his rather critical account, Through Fascist Italy; an English Hiker's Pilgrimage, in 1935, it was more usual for BUF members to visit Germany. A woman blackshirt teacher from Birmingham recalled, in the mid-1980s, visiting Nazi Germany with her boyfriend, also a BUF activist, and the lesson she drew from the holiday:
We weren't taken on any official thing. We were a man and a woman having a look at a country we had heard a lot about. [...] they [the Germans] did not want a war with Britain, they did not, without a doubt. [Her emphasis].6
Such holidays in Germany often caused British Blackshirts problems in the spring of 1940, when there is evidence that having taken a holiday there was a sufficient reason to be interned.
Perhaps the most well-known fascist to visit Nazi Germany was the novelist, Henry Williamson. Still famous for his Tarka the Otter, Williamson went on to write an enormous thirteen volume novel sequence, which is infused with his fascist perspective, entitled The Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. Williamson was a long-time admirer of Mosley, and never repudiated his inter-war fascism. Further, Williamson, who was deeply affected by his Great War combat experiences, convinced himself that Hitler was a man of peace, attempting to overthrow the forces of international capitalism which led to the First Word War. Unsurprisingly, Williamson's memoir, Goodbye West Country (1937), which contains an extensive section on his visit to Germany in 1935, was a hymn to the achievements of Hitler and the Nazis. He dismissed stories of the persecution of Jews, which he likened to the treatment of black people in the USA, compared Hitler to T.E. Lawrence, and defended Hitler's instigation of the Night of the Long Knives. Williamson was far from being the only British visitor to Nazi Germany who wrote fulsome praise for the new regime, but Williamson became a well-known supporter of Mosley and the BUF, and, one might suppose, his views closely mirrored those of many BUF members.
The BUFs links with international fascism have hitherto received little attention in terms of the fortunes of the British fascist movement itself. The BUF faced, from the outset, an uphill struggle in its attempt to convince the British people that the fascist revolution was worth supporting. But Mosley did himself and his followers few favours in so clearly linking his movement with other manifestations of the creed. To claim, as the BUF did, that it was the patriotic movement above all others, and yet to adopt so much in the way of presentation, organisation, and ideology from abroad, was to create a tension, in the minds of most Britons, that could not be resolved in the BUF's favour. The BUF tried to resolve this tension by acknowledging the movement's debt to Mussolini and Italian fascism, while at the same time claiming that they were pursuing an independent path to the Corporate State. Yet, to an important extent, this was not the case. Unbeknown to rank and file Blackshirts and their supporters, the BUF was buoyed up, until early 1937, by Italian Fascist money, and, perhaps of much greater importance, the movement's ideological position was fatally influenced by the Nazis. The adoption of anti-Semitism by the BUF is a complex, and contested, area of historical study, but it seems clear, from the arguments presented here, that one key factor was the interaction between leading anti-Semites in the BUF (especially former members of the British Fascists), and the Nazis. While anti-Semitism may well have increased support for the BUF in small pockets of Britain, like the East End of London and Manchester, it was, more generally, a serious, and distressing, disaster for the BUF, and, more importantly, for community relations in those areas where anti-Semitism loomed large. Finally, the BUF in its press, in its acknowledgement of the Italian and German experiences, its branches abroad, and the individual links that Blackshirts formed with their comrades in Europe, tied itself into a loose alliance of fascists and Nazis which can, quite convincingly, be termed a Black International.
4FURTHER READING
Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Modern Britain, (Sutton, 2000).
Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, (I B Tauris, 1998).
Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-45, (UCL Press, 1995).
Noel O'Sullivan, Fascism, (Dent, 1983).
REFERENCES
1. Ivor Brown, 'War's New Ally in Fascism', in Philip Noel Baker (ed), Challenge to Death, (Constable, 1934), p.145.
2. In a recorded interview with the author, 13 November, 1985.
3. A.K. Chesterton, Oswald Mosley, Portrait of a Leader, (Action Press, 1938), p.111.
4. Report to the Home Office, dated 23"' October 1935, in the Public Record Office (PRO), Kew. HO 144/20145, 674, 216/349.
5. Special Branch report, entitled 'Developments of Fascist anti-Semitic policy', dated 2nd November, 1936, in a PRO file, HO 144/21062, 692, 242/140A.
11. In a recorded interview with the author, 4th October, 1985.
Dr Cullen received a D Phil from the University of Oxford in 1999 for his thesis on gender and the Great War. He has published articles in History, the Journal of Contemporary History, the Welsh History Review, and Oral History.
Copyright THE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION Winter 2003