Authors: Jim Wilson
Having met and in some respects tried to emulate Mussolini, Mosley now went to see Hitler in Berlin. To Mosley, Hitler was another example of how the politics of the extreme right could reinvigorate a country and inspire its youth. Initially Hitler was not wholly convinced by Mosley and he doubted the depth of his commitment to National Socialism. However, Hitler was impressed by Mosley’s fiancée Diana, one of the famous Mitford sisters who were considered the epitome of high society in England. Mosley later married Diana, after the death of his first wife Cimmie, in a private ceremony in the drawing room of Goebbels’ house to which Hitler went as a guest. Hitler clearly had a soft spot for Diana; as a wedding present he gave her a personally signed photograph of himself in a silver frame, decorated with the German eagle. Diana kept it at her bedside. But Hitler was even more smitten by Diana’s sister Unity, and both girls were regular and welcome visitors to Hitler’s homes. In fact, British secret service files show that intelligence officers were more interested in the Mitford sisters and their close relationship with Hitler than they ever were in Mosley himself.
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The growing attraction between the Mitford girls and Hitler, which was mutual, proved useful to Mosley who was receiving financial support from Europe to help fund his growing Blackshirt movement in Britain. Mussolini is thought to have funded him to the tune of over £2.5 million a year in today’s money. There were rumours of a £1.7 million gift from Germany, although MI5 were of the opinion that Hitler was unwilling to provide secret funding.
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In January 1934 Rothermere published his notorious article in the
Daily Mail
headlined ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’, which praised Mosley for his ‘sound commonsense and Conservative doctrine’.
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But privately, Rothermere went further. He took steps to win Hitler over to the British fascist movement by sending a personally written note via Princess Stephanie in which he expressed his view that the Blackshirts would ‘rule Britain within three years’. In America the FBI noted that Princess Hohenlohe had in her possession a ‘long-hand notation in Rothermere’s own hand writing declaring his belief that the Blackshirts would indeed take over as the leading political force in the United Kingdom’. Further evidence that Rothermere instructed Stephanie to convey his conviction that in Britain the Fascists would eventually emerge as the leading party, is recorded in the legal documents prepared for the princess’ notorious court case against Rothermere which reached the High Court in November 1939.
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The BUF was initially anti-communist and protectionist. It supported strong state intervention in the economy. Rothermere described the BUF in his article as ‘A well organised party of the right ready to take over responsibility for national affairs with the same directness of purpose and energy of method Hitler and Mussolini have displayed’. The
Daily Mail
’s supportive articles boosted Blackshirt recruitment. The Home Office expressed concern that the BUF was growing in numbers and influence, and attracting ‘a better class of recruits’. In 1934 MI5 estimated it had between 35,000 and 40,000 active members, although this figure might have been somewhat higher than was factually correct.
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The influx included a smattering of senior service officers, prominent businessmen, and even debutantes; all of them hooked by the patriotic side of Mosley’s appeal. But the drive for members extended across the class divide. It reached out to the middle classes, to working-class Tories and even to some Labour voters. One Conservative MP, Col. Thomas Moore, writing in the
Daily Mail
in April 1934, declared: ‘Surely there cannot be any fundamental difference of outlook between the Blackshirts and their parents, the Conservatives?’
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A number of prominent people contributed anonymously to BUF funds, believing it was a movement that had the ability to secure a national renaissance. It was even rumoured that the Prince of Wales made a donation. However, despite Mosley’s strong appeal to certain elements in British society, the BUF did not contest a single seat in the 1935 election, which was strange given Mosley’s belief that the Conservatives were the representatives of a failed past and needed to be swept away. His objective, not helped by the violence his Blackshirts demonstrated in London’s East End and in some other big towns and cities in the Midlands and the North, was to challenge the existing political Establishment in Britain. In fact, despite Mosley’s ambition to take extreme right-wing politics from the streets into the House of Commons, the only fascist candidate to stand for Parliament in the late 1930s was at a by-election in Hythe, Kent, in 1939. That candidate was Harry St John Philby, ironically the father of Kim Philby, the most prominent, and from the Soviet view most successful, of the notorious Cambridge spy-ring recruited by the Russians to work within the British Establishment.
Another of Rothermere’s newspapers, the
London
Evening News
, found a more popular and subtle way of supporting the Blackshirts. It procured 500 seats for a Blackshirt rally at the Royal Albert Hall and offered them as prizes to readers who sent in the most convincing reasons why they liked the Blackshirts. A further Rothermere title, the
Sunday Dispatch
, even sponsored a Blackshirt beauty competition to find the most attractive BUF supporter. Embarrassingly, there were no entries! Mosley himself was forced to explain this away by saying that these were serious young women, dedicated to the cause of their country rather than ‘aspirants to the Gaiety Theatre chorus line’.
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The
Daily Mirror
weighed in with its support even though Rothermere had disposed of his shares in the newspaper in 1931. It declared:
Timid alarmists all this week have been whimpering that the rapid growth in numbers of the British Blackshirts is preparing the way for a system of rulership by means of steel whips and concentration camps.
Very few of these panic-mongers have any personal knowledge of the countries that are already under Blackshirt government. The notion that a permanent reign of terror exists there has been evolved entirely from their own morbid imaginations, fed by sensational propaganda from opponents of the party in power.
As a purely British organisation, the Blackshirts will respect the principles of tolerance which are traditional in British politics. They have no prejudice either of class or race. Their recruits are drawn from all social grades and every political party.
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Meanwhile, George Ward Price, the
Daily Mail
’s European correspondent who by 1934 had built up a unique rapport with Hitler, was a close friend of Mosley’s and a leading figure in the January Club, conceived the idea for Mosley and Rothermere to go into business together by forming a company, in May 1934, called New Epoch Products Ltd. The plan was for the company to manufacture a range of goods, including cigarettes, which would be distributed via the 500 or so Blackshirt chapters that had been formed throughout the country.
It was New Epoch Products of which my father, as a young chartered accountant of 25, became company secretary. Jack Kruse knew my father, James ‘Jimmy’ Wilson, well through his marriage to Annabel Wilson, my father’s aunt. They were ‘family’, and got on well together socially. On occasions my father accompanied Kruse on Alpine and Monte Carlo rallies. He shared Kruse’s interest in fast sports and touring cars, and had even driven some of Kruse’s iconic cars when Kruse toured on the Continent. My father had frequently visited Jack and Annabel in London and at their North Yorkshire home, Moor Top near Castleton. It was natural that Jack Kruse should introduce my father to Rothermere, Kruse’s employer and close colleague. Rothermere perhaps saw in my father a substitute for one of the two sons he had lost during the war. It was through the circle around the newspaper baron, and in particular the Kruses, that my father also met and became on friendly terms with Princess Stephanie. My father had worked for an agency, based in London’s Leicester Square, dealing with writers’ and publishers’ contracts, and in that role he came into contact with the princess. Rothermere was particularly generous to my father and he appointed him to a key role in his new company. Rothermere invested £70,000 (equivalent today to around £2.4 million) in a factory and all the necessary plant. With an eye on business as well as politics, he saw the project as an opportunity to use spare capacity from his Canadian paper mills, normally used in producing his newspapers, in cigarette production. For a time the factory prospered, but the commercial relationship with Mosley did not last for long. It faltered after the notorious Olympia riot that marked out the Blackshirts as an unsavoury, un-British intervention into the politics of the time and all but sealed the prospects of National Socialism taking root in any serious way in the UK.
Almost certainly the catalyst for Rothermere’s disillusion with the BUF came as a result of the massive rally Mosley held at Olympia in June 1934. It was planned along the lines of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies and Mosley set out to make it the largest, most spectacular public gathering in the history of British politics. Fifteen thousand gathered to hear the leader of the Blackshirts, and as with the huge rallies Hitler and the Nazis organised in Germany, the proceedings were carefully stage-managed on an impressively theatrical level. Instead of swastikas there was a profusion of Blackshirt banners bearing the ‘bolt of lightning’ symbol Mosley had chosen to emulate the Nazi swastika. Opponents sarcastically dubbed it ‘the flash in the pan’. Union Jacks fluttered everywhere, amid the black uniforms of Mosley’s followers. But the strutting and bogus ceremonial were provocative to those opposed to Mosley’s brand of fascism. The communists, who were there in numbers, were determined to express their opposition. The proceedings were delayed by at least half an hour by violent protests outside the building. When Mosley arrived, he paraded the 200yds down the central aisle of Olympia towards a raised platform at the end of the hall. The Blackshirt leader was flanked by his bodyguards and preceded by a procession of uniformed BUF members bearing fascist banners. This attempt to whip the crowd into a frenzy, in much the same way as at Hitler’s rallies, failed to work. The communists had infiltrated around 2,500 agitators into the hall, and as Mosley began to speak, a well-organised campaign of disruption began. Agitators shouted slogans like ‘Fascism means murder’ and ‘Down with the Blackshirts’. There was chaos in the hall, and savage fighting broke out. The Blackshirt stewards were brutal in their efforts to suppress the uproar and expel the agitators. Outside the auditorium, 200 Blackshirts patrolled the corridors, beating up those already ejected from the main hall. Many ejected from their seats were handled quite brutally and suffered injuries. Fifty needed hospital treatment and five were detained as a result of the beatings they received.
The potent combination of pageantry and violence at a political rally was totally foreign to Britain and the British middle classes viewed it with distaste and alarm. Among the crowd that night was Collin Brooks, former editor of Rothermere’s
Sunday Dispatch
, and, at the time of the Mosley rally, a confidant and assistant to the press baron. He wrote in his diary:
The advertised time of the great oration was eight o’clock. At 8.45 the searchlights were directed to the far end, the Blackshirts lined the centre corridor – and trumpets brayed as a great mass of Union Jacks surmounted by Roman plates passed towards the platform. Everybody thought this was Mosley and stood and cheered and saluted. Only it wasn’t Mosley. He came some few minutes later at the head of his chiefs of staff. In consequence the second greeting was an anti-climax. He mounted to the high platform and gave the salute – a figure so high and so remote in that huge place that he looked like a doll from Marks and Spencer’s penny bazaar. He then began – and alas the speakers hadn’t properly tuned in and every word was mangled. Not that it mattered – for then began the Roman circus. The first interrupter raised his voice to shout some interjection. The mob of storm troopers hurled itself at him. He was battered and biffed and bashed and dragged out – while the tentative sympathisers all about him, many of whom were rolled down and trodden on, grew sick and began to think of escape. From that moment it was a shambles. Free fights all over the show. The Fascist technique is really the most brutal thing I have ever seen, which is saying something. There is no pause to hear what the interrupter is saying: there is no tap on the shoulder and a request to leave quietly: there is only the mass assault. Once a man’s arms are pinioned his face is common property to all adjacent punchers.
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Brooks observed that one protestor had climbed into the high beams in the roof of the hall after being chased by six Fascist bouncers, risking a fatal fall onto the frightened audience below. His diary continued:
[The] breaking of glass off-stage added to the trepidation of old ladies and parsons in the audience who had come to support the ‘patriots’. More free fights – more bashing and lashing and kickings – and a steady withdrawal of the ordinary audience. We left with Mosley still speaking and the loud speakers still preventing our hearing a word he said, and by that time the place was half empty. Outside, of course, were the one thousand police expecting more trouble, but I didn’t wait to see the aftermath. One of our party had gone there very sympathetic to the fascists and very anti-Red. As we parted he said ‘My God, if it’s to be a choice between the Reds and these toughs, I’m all for the Reds’.
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In his diary Brooks commented that the whole thing was a fiasco and had probably done more to rally opinion to the National Government than anything else since 1931. His view was that the personal appeal of fascism had been drowned out by the display of un-British behaviour. To answer communist brutality with fascist brutality in the middle of an orderly audience of peaceful citizens was to undermine the whole theory of the modern state, and the government seemed to have realised that.