British Fascism After the Holocaust: From the Birth of Denial to the Notting Hill Riots 1939–1958 [1 ed.] 9781138624146, 9781138624139, 9780429452628

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BRITISH FASCISM AFTER THE HOLOCAUST

This book explores the policies and ideologies of a number of individuals and groups who attempted to relaunch fascist, antisemitic and racist politics in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust. Despite the leading architects of fascism being dead and the newsreel footage of Jewish bodies being pushed into mass graves seared into societal consciousness, ­fascism survived World War II and, though changed, survives to this day. Britain was the country that ‘stood alone’ against fascism, but it was no exception. This book treads new historical ground and shines a light onto the most understudied period of British fascism, whilst simultaneously adding to our understanding of the evolving ideology of fascism, the persistent nature of antisemitism and the ­blossoming of Britain’s anti-immigration movement. This book will primarily appeal to scholars and students with an interest in the history of fascism, antisemitism and the Holocaust, racism, immigration and postwar Britain. Dr Joe Mulhall is a historian of fascism and Senior Researcher at the anti-fascist organisation HOPE not hate.

Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right Series editors Nigel Copsey Teesside University, UK Graham Macklin Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX), University of Oslo, Norway

This new book series focuses upon fascist, far right and right-wing politics ­primarily within a historical context but also drawing on insights from other disciplinary perspectives. Its scope also includes radical-right populism, cultural manifestations of the far right and points of convergence and exchange with the mainstream and traditional right. Titles include: Hitler Redux The Incredible History of Hitler’s So-Called Table Talks Mikael Nilsson Researching the Far Right Theory, Method and Practice Edited by Stephen D. Ashe, Joel Busher, Graham Macklin and Aaron Winter The Rise of the Dutch New Right An Intellectual History of the Rightward Shift in Dutch Politics Merijn Oudenampsen Anti-fascism in a Global Perspective Transnational Networks, Exile Communities and Radical Internationalism Edited by Kasper Braskén, Nigel Copsey and David Featherstone British Fascism After the Holocaust From the Birth of Denial to the Notting Hill Riots 1939–1958 Joe Mulhall For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Fascism-and-the-Far-Right/book-series/FFR

BRITISH FASCISM AFTER THE HOLOCAUST From the Birth of Denial to the Notting Hill Riots 1939–1958

Joe Mulhall

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Joe Mulhall The right of Joe Mulhall to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mulhall, Joe, author. Title: British fascism after the Holocaust : from the birth of denial to the Notting Hill riots 1939–1958 / Joe Mulhall. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge studies in fascism and the far right | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020020162 (print) | LCCN 2020020163 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138624146 (paperback) | ISBN 9781138624139 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429452628 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Fascism—Great Britain—History—20th century. | Antisemitism—Great Britain—History—20th century. | Racism—Great Britain—History—20th century. | Great Britain—Race relations— History—20th century. | Great Britain—Politics and government—20th century. Classification: LCC DA588.M85 2020 (print) | LCC DA588 (ebook) | DDC 320.53/3094109044—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020162 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020163 ISBN: 978-1-138-62413-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-62414-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-45262-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For my Mum and Dad

CONTENTS

Acknowledgmentsviii Introduction

1

1 The unbroken thread: British fascism during World War II

26

2 ‘Wir kommen wieder’: the re-emergence of fascism 1945–1948

45

3 A Jewish invention? The birth of Holocaust denial

62

4 Europe-a-nation: transnational ideologies

95

5 King, country and empire: traditional nationalist ideologies

122

6 Windrush to Notting Hill: race and reactions to non-white immigration

136

7 A relationship in hate: postwar transatlantic fascist networks

166

Conclusion

195

Bibliography198 Index210

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people have helped with this project but none more so than Professor Dan Stone who supervised my PhD, the final result of which is this book. His remarkable scholarship remains an inspiration, and his guidance and endless patience towards me, especially concerning my abysmal punctuation, has been invaluable. Special thanks also to Dr  Andrea Mammone who provided PhD feedback and encouraged me to make this project more transnational in nature. Thanks also to Samuel Moyn, who kindly offered me a research assistantship at Harvard University. The transatlantic sections of this book are the result of that period in America. I am hugely grateful to Craig Fowlie at Routledge for his friendship and advice and the series editors Graham Macklin and Nigel Copsey, without whom this would never have become a proper book. I must also thank all my friends and colleagues at HOPE not hate, especially Nick Lowles, David Lawrence, Simon Murdoch and Patrik Hermansson for their support and feedback. They never let me forget that the most important reason to research fascism is to understand how best to fight it. Finally, thanks go out to my friends who have loyally feigned interest in this book for years and my family, Mum, Dad, Kelly and Philip, who have always loved, encouraged and supported me.

INTRODUCTION

By the time the cannons fell silent across Europe in 1945 the leading architects of fascism were dead. Mussolini was hung upside down from a metal girder in the Piazzale Loreto and Hitler hurriedly cremated after swallowing a cyanide capsule and shooting himself in the head. With much of Europe turned to rubble, few families left untouched and the newsreel footage of Jewish bodies being pushed into mass graves seared into societal consciousness, most understandably thought that fascism would die with its founders. Despite all this, fascism survived World War II, and though changed, it survives to this day. Despite being the country that ‘stood alone’ against fascism and whose national myth is forever entwined with the idea that it sacrificed so much to oppose it, Britain is no exception here. In 1946 the British journalist, author and anti-fascist Frederic Mullally stated that, ‘In the midst of the uncertainties and hazards of war, here we thought, was one thing that could be taken for granted: fascism had had its day in England; there could be no “come back” ’.1 Yet the truth is that during the war years there were fascists in England working to keep the flame alive, and even before the killing had stopped British fascists were readying themselves to relaunch in the hostile postwar period. Many contemporary historians have argued that the start of the war marked the end of prewar British fascism, while some go further and state that it marked the end of British fascism all together.2 However, in truth the search to find a definitive endpoint for interwar fascism and a clear start point of the postwar movement is a fruitless one. The lines between the two blend into each other beyond distinction as British fascism continued through the war years and into the postwar period making the division into pre and postwar a false paradigm. As Graham Macklin argues in Failed Führer’s ‘the ongoing centrality of race, racism, and anti-Semitism, within the racial nationalist tradition reinforced a seamless continuity’ between the two periods.3 In reality the history of British fascism is best understood as an unbroken thread and a continual holistic tradition with a traceable lineage that runs through

2  Introduction

the war years and into the postwar period. By understanding the phenomenon as continuous, the war and immediate postwar years take on a new significance, shifting from an abstract, irrelevant and often overlooked period in the history of British fascism, to a flame carrying period that kept the ideas of prewar fascism alive. It was the transition phase and training ground when the baton of British fascism was passed on to those individuals who later achieved unprecedented success with the National Font and then the British National Party. Only by understanding fascism in the immediate postwar period can we properly understand the much more influential far-right movements that emerged decades later. While British fascism is best understood as an unbroken thread, the world of the 1950s was of course very different to that of the 1930s, especially in terms of the political climate in which the fascists were operating. It goes without saying, for example, that the postwar world was a measurably more hostile climate in which to propose fascism. This had obvious effects on the scale of the postwar movement but also its ambitions. In the 1930s many believed the world was their oyster and the march towards fascism was inevitable and unstoppable. While some of the more deluded activists were unaffected by the war years, many tempered their ambitions in the immediate postwar period to the mere survival of the movement. However, while it is important to highlight these discontinuities, what is most interesting is just how similar the postwar British fascist movement was despite the fact that it operated in such a different world. This book tells the story of this period, when British fascism was at its lowest ebb. It provides an in-depth analysis of the core ideological beliefs and priorities of the various ideologues and fascist organisations that existed in the immediate postwar era. It explores the policies and ideologies of a number of individuals and groups that attempted to re-launch fascist, antisemitic and racist politics in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust. It shows how the war, the revelation of the Holocaust and the advent of non-white immigration into Britain, forced a change in the ideological priorities of Britain’s far-right, shedding new light onto the most understudied period of fascism in Britain, while simultaneously adding to our understanding of the evolving ideology of fascism, the persistent nature of antisemitism and the blossoming of Britain’s anti-immigration movement. One of the central questions it sets out to answer is: how did some people remain unmoved by the horrifying revelations of the Holocaust? How after news of Belsen, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Buchenwald and Chełmno did so many refuse to turn away from fascism and antisemitism? For many fascists, the answer was simply denial: denial of the gas chambers, denial of mass murder, denial of the six million dead. This book shows how British Holocaust denial actually pre-dates its Franco-American counterparts giving British antisemites the ignoble honour of being the very first to properly deny the Holocaust, laying down the blueprints for the denial industry that lasts to this day. Despite their best efforts to deny the truth of the Holocaust, however, many British fascists understood it remained the primary roadblock to the resurrection of their besmirched ideology and looked for alternative ways to escape the political

Introduction  3

ghettos to which they had been confined. The immediate postwar period saw the arrival of large scale non-white immigration, provoking a racist societal reaction and a glimmer of hope for beleaguered fascists. However, while British fascists were the first to deny the Holocaust they were surprisingly slow when it came to seeing the opportunities provided to them by non-white immigration. Now in an age when any immigration will be met by far-right outrage, the arrival of Windrush in 1948 from the West Indies provoked little or no reaction from most of the far right who remained preoccupied with antisemitism. With time however, they came to see it as their best recruiting tool, shifting towards anti-black racism. Sadly, this research further challenges the idea of a tolerant country with a racist fringe and shows how Britain’s far-right were often following societal racism, not leading it. Another reason why overlooking the immediate postwar period is folly is that a number of British fascists in the period produced works that sit amongst the most influential fascists texts ever produced in the UK. Oswald Mosley’s ‘Europe a Nation’ theory, Francis Parker Yockey’s neo-Spenglerian tome Imperium, as well as the conspiratorial antisemitism produced by A.K. Chesterton all remain in print to this day. Some of the works produced in this period provide rare examples of British fascist ideas being exported as well as imported. Fascistic ideas in the postwar period moved to and fro across borders making it imperative to take a transnational approach to the study of this period. Extensive archival research, especially in America – notably the private archive of the Armenian American Avendis Derounian  – resulted in some exciting revelations regarding the extent of farright ­transnational cooperation in the period. Holocaust denial and fascist networks across the Atlantic, Europe and the beleaguered British Empire are all highlighted showing how far-right people and ideas operated internationally. Building on existing scholarship of this period, this book fills in the blanks and sheds important new light onto the least studied period of British fascism. By looking at the moment when the movement was arguably at its lowest point, we can better understand the survival instinct of fascism. If fascism didn’t die with the gas chambers it’s likely that nothing will kill it, revealing its ability to change and adapt and the persistence of prejudice and hatred.

Literature review The historiography of fascism is vast in both breadth and depth covering almost all conceivable angles and oddities. Ranging from fundamental questions like ‘what is fascism?’ and studies of national variations in ideology, organisations, individuals, style and period, through to more specialised and niche scholarly endeavours covering everything from fashion,4 football,5 cinema,6 sex, opera,7 literature, art, culture and women8 under fascism. The study of anti-fascism has its own extensive historiography9 though not anywhere near as encompassing as that of fascism itself. However, despite the abundant and ever increasing canon of secondary literature devoted to the ‘Fascist Century’,10 it falls short of comprehensive, and gaps remain that still demand scholarly investigation.

4  Introduction

In the case of British fascism finding such a gap can prove challenging due to the seemingly oxymoronic situation where the mass of published work is indirectly proportional to the scale of the historical phenomena. W.D. Rubinstein stated that, ‘Seldom indeed, has so much ever been written about so little’11 while perhaps the leading historian of British fascism, Richard Thurlow, conceded that, ‘rarely can such an apparently insignificant topic have been responsible for such an outpouring of ink’.12 Stanley Payne made his evaluation of the importance of British fascism crystal clear in his mammoth A History of Fascism by dedicating fewer than two pages to the interwar British movement, arguing that it ‘never escaped total insignificance’.13 However, charges of ‘insignificance’ are ordinarily based on a narrow notion of what constitutes significance, namely being in power or electoral success. While the electoral performance of the vast majority of both prewar and postwar fascist organisations has indeed been dismal, the same cannot be said about the British National Party, which peaked in 2010 with two members of the European Parliament and over 60 councillors. If one believes that there is a direct and unbroken line both ideologically14 and in some cases with respect to personnel,15 from the interwar ‘classic’ fascism, through the postwar period right up to contemporary times, as this book does, then British fascism has had periods when it has escaped electoral insignificance. In addition the failure to break through into the political mainstream does not necessarily determine irrelevance. The far right has always had a gravitational pull that has the ability to shift the centre ground of political discourse further to the right on issues such as immigration and identity.16 Furthermore, many British fascists rejected democratic politics altogether in favour of direct action,17 meaning solely measuring importance through electoral success is of limited use.18 Anyone who remembers the London nail bomb campaign carried out by David Copeland in April 1999 or taking note of the record number of far-right terrorism arrests in 2019 would certainly challenge any charge of irrelevance. The existing historiography of British fascism is at present an uneven one with a ‘bias towards the 1930s (BUF), 1970s (NF) and 1990s (BNP)’.19 Roger Griffin states in his Oxford Reader on fascism that, there has been a conspicuous lack of scholars prepared to trace the continuity between interwar and postwar fascism, either at an organizational or ideological level. . . . Almost without exception monographs or edited volumes on the subject have focused on events up to 1945 (usually in Europe), and have been content to confine their reflections thereafter to a few perfunctory remarks or a superficial chapter at most. For the period after 1945 the subject has fallen into the domain of political scientists and journalists.20 Since then however both Graham Macklin and Dave Renton have produced monographs that have begun the process of filling in this hole in the historiography by focusing on what one might call the ‘forgotten years’ of British fascism. Renton

Introduction  5

correctly states in the introduction to Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s that, One further reason for writing about British fascism as it existed in the 1940s is simply that nobody else has. The existing literature on the period is scanty, especially when compared to the literature on fascism in the 1930’s or the 1970’s.21 Despite both Renton and Macklin having begun the much-needed investigation into the immediate postwar era, it still offers the exciting opportunity to tread genuinely new ground. Currently, Graham Macklin’s Very Deeply Dyed in Black provides the most comprehensive existing work to tackle this period and succeeds in its stated aim of providing ‘a firm empirical foundation from which further studies into the nature of postwar British fascism can be launched’.22 Indeed, this book builds directly upon this firm foundation. Unlike much of the literature that treats this period as an epilogue to the history of interwar fascism or a foreword to studies on the National Front and the British National Party, Macklin demonstrates the unbroken lineage of British fascism between the pre and postwar periods showing how, ‘the reemergence of the Mosleyite movement provided an important personal and ideological bridge’.23 Focusing primarily on Oswald Mosley and the Union Movement, Macklin explains the tentative early steps of postwar fascism as its attempted to relaunch itself amidst the ‘stink of humiliating defeat’.24 Interestingly, he builds upon the ideas of Roger Eatwell and offers a ‘unique micro-case study of how “coterie charisma” ensured the survival and comparative triumph of fascist ideology over adversity’25 with strong emphasis being placed on the importance of the internment of some British fascists during WWII. While not confined to the immediate postwar period, there is also much to learn from Macklin’s more recent book Failed Führers: A History of Britain’s Extreme Right.26 This enormous and important work is a prosopography that tells the history of the British far right through the biographies of its six principle figures, including Leese, Mosley and Chesterton. This work, likely to become the definitive work on British fascism for some time, spans both the pre and postwar careers of these key individuals, meaning its revelations in relation to the immediate postwar period are scattered throughout this book. Dave Renton’s book, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s, is the only other full-length monograph dedicated solely to British fascism in the immediate postwar period. Notably, he explores the contributing factors that resulted in the ‘remarkable’ rebirth of fascism in the face of ‘a broad anti-fascist consensus, shared across the whole political spectrum, from the left wing of the Communist Party (CP), to the right fringes of Conservatism’.27 Renton argues that despite public hostility, fascism underwent a bell curve of success between 1945 and 1951 that peaked during the troubles in Palestine (1947–48) but had retreated back by 1951. As its name suggests, Renton’s book also investigates both popular and state

6  Introduction

anti-fascism in the same period, giving the work a balanced and comprehensive feel. More recently, Daniel Sonabend’s book on the 43 Group, We Fight Fascists, has shed much needed new light on anti-fascism in the late 1940s, tactfully correcting some of the inaccuracies in Morris Beckman’s autobiographical account of the period.28 In addition to the two full-length monographs by Renton and Macklin, numerous other historians have tackled the immediate postwar era in a plethora of shorter articles, chapters or sections of chapters. The earliest such work is actually a 1965 political science book called The British Political Fringe: A Profile by George Thayer, which investigated a wide array of contemporary marginal political movements, extremist parties and groupuscules from across the political spectrum. Thayer profiled Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement, A.K. Chesterton’s League of Empire Loyalists and what he calls ‘the Neo-Nazis’, namely Colin Jordan, John Bean, Martin Webster and John Tyndall. The relevant chapters of this lucid and thoroughly readable book may not be as detailed, illuminating or thoroughly researched as later academic works, but they are interesting for two reasons. First, through a series of fascinating anecdotes of personal meetings Thayer gives the reader an insight into the personalities and demeanours of many of the primary individuals covered in this thesis, including Tyndall, Jordan, Mosley and Austen Brooks of the LEL. However, more important is how clearly he portrays both the ideological and personnel links between the prewar fascists and those who went on to be the future leaders of the postwar far right. For example, Thayer explains that, ‘The high priest of postwar neo-Nazism was Arnold Spencer Leese’29 and that ‘If Hitler was [Colin] Jordan’s God, then Leese was his spiritual father’.30 Interestingly, writing in 1965 it seems that Thayer saw no need to break British fascism into pre and postwar, instead treating the phenomenon of British fascism as an unbroken lineage. Through a series of short biographical vignettes, it becomes clear that the immediate postwar period was an incestuous yet often fractious ideological school that saw the nurturing of the flickering flame of British fascism, a flame that unbeknown to Thayer at the time of writing was to burn much brighter in the decades to come. In stylistic contrast to The British Political Fringe is the rather dry yet informative article ‘ “Tell me chum in case I got it wrong. What was it we were fighting during the war?” The Re-emergence of British Fascism, 1945–58’ by Nicholas Hillman that appeared in Contemporary British History in 2001. Of all the published work covering the same period as this book, Hillman’s short article is the most aligned, as, It considers what sort of people supported fascism after 1945 and argues that those who remained active were part of a continuous ideological thread linking the nascent fascism of the 1920’s, the British Union of Fascists and the plethora of neo-fascist groups formed between the 1950s and 1990s.31 Hillman considers the re-emergence of fascism and identifies the need for further detailed work into the period and, while recognising Renton’s contribution to

Introduction  7

the historical record, criticises it for working in an ‘inappropriate Marxist framework’.32 The article interestingly summarises the ‘views and impact’ of Mosley, Chesterton and Leese, concluding that Mosley’s ‘Europe a Nation’ policy situated him firmly within the mainstream of continental fascism but resulted in his influence on postwar British fascism falling ‘a long way short of the impact of Leese and Chesterton’.33 These short introductions are a useful starting point from which to launch the far more detailed ideological analysis within this book. Far more abundant than specific works on the immediate postwar period are chapters within broader works on British fascism.34 As is to be expected these vary in both relevance and quality. Among the more recent additions to the expanding cannon is Nigel Copsey and John E. Richardson’s edited volume – Cultures of Postwar British Fascism.35 Building on Julie Gottlieb and Thomas Linehan’s earlier collection of essays – The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the Far-right in Britain – it adds a much needed postwar perspective to the ‘cultural turn’ in generic fascist studies. Some of these ideas, especially Janet Dack’s contribution on ‘cultural regeneration’, are discussed in the ideologies chapter of this book. Most interesting among this plethora of relevant literature is the work of the doyen of the history of British fascism, Richard Thurlow. Both the primarily historiographical Fascism in Modern Britain and the chapter ‘New Wine for Old Bottles’ in Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to the National Front offer intriguing hypotheses on postwar ‘neo-fascism’. Unlike Macklin, Renton or Hillman who emphasise continuity, Thurlow argues that ‘Classic fascism died in 1945’36 and instead emphasises the revisionist nature of ‘neo-fascism’. While accepting that Arnold Leese’s bias ‘hardened significantly’,37 he does strongly insinuate a major revision in the nature of Oswald Mosley’s postwar ideology, primarily in reference to its Europeanisation. However, this shift is discerned via a phenomenological approach that relies too heavily on the public pronouncements of Mosley himself. Renton far more convincingly argues that, In terms of core politics, anti-communism, anti-socialism, eugenicism, elitism, racism, and a belief in the use of force against its opponents, in the destruction of trade unions and in the abolition of democracy, the Union Movement was little different from its predecessor, the BUF.38 Most likely, the actual truth lies somewhere between the two views. Far more convincing, however, are Thurlow’s views on the fascist revisionism of A.K. Chesterton, rightly concluding ‘that his antisemitism showed important changes’.39 While in the British Union of Fascists, Chesterton wrote his most visceral antisemitic tracts in a series of articles for the British Union Quarterly, which were later compiled into his infamous work The Apotheosis of the Jew. Much of his interwar antisemitism takes a racial form and could be construed as quasi-­ genocidal.40 He referred to Jews as ‘a rabble race’ and ‘blood-cousins of the maggot and the leech’.41 While there is no doubt that he remained a vehement antisemite, even after the Holocaust, the tone and style changed.

8  Introduction

If one is to properly understand Chesterton it is imperative to engage with the two biographies, David Bakers Ideology of Obsession and the more recent A.K. Chesterton and the Evolution of Britain’s Extreme Right, 1933–1973 by Luke LeCras.42 The former has useful biographical information and focuses mainly on Chesterton’s road to becoming a fascist in the 1930s while LeCras focuses more on the postwar period of his career, emphasising his ‘status as a transitional figure who played a substantial role in the survival and evolution of Britain’s extreme right across two distinct periods’.43 The work of Paul Stocker, who deals specifically with the British far-right, empire and imperial decline is also useful for understanding the politics and Chesterton and the LEL. He fills in a hole in the postwar historiography by exploring Mosley’s Union Movement and A.K. Chesterton’s League of Empire Loyalists, ‘relationship with imperialism and more specifically, decolonisation’ in the postwar period.44 His thesis also spans the war years, starting in the 1920s and finishing in 1963, providing further evidence to the unbroken thread between the pre and postwar British far right.45 One area that Thurlow covers well but is surprisingly only given a cursory reference in Renton’s book is the major impact of non-white immigration beginning in the late 1940s.46 Thurlow argues that, There can be little doubt that fascism would not have survived as a political irritant in Britain after 1945 if those who adopted revisionist forms of the prewar doctrine . . . had not latched on to the problems created by the influx of new commonwealth immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s.47 Macklin is in accord stating that Mosley’s activists in Notting Hill during the race riots had ‘inadvertently discovered the formula around which fascism could emerge from the political ghetto’.48 Likewise, Roger Eatwell writes that Mosley believed immigration would be ‘the populist issue that would lead him triumphantly back to centre stage’.49 Hence the lack of in-depth scholarly work into the effect of the birth of non-white immigration on Britain’s embryonic postwar far right is surprising and something this book sets out to correct. Where focus on early non-white immigration on British fascism does exist, it is overwhelmingly focused on Oswald Mosley and the Union Movement.50 Stephen Dorril’s lengthy and thoroughly informative biography of Mosley, Blackshirt, though primarily weighted towards the prewar period, does venture into Mosley’s postwar career, shedding new light onto the effect of the so-called coloured invasion.51 Dorill clearly articulates the opportunist nature of the UM’s tactics in Notting Hill following the riots in 1958, stating: Mosley’s UM did not spark off the riots, nor was it responsible for them . . . but in the atmosphere of hostility which began to surround migrants it provided “a vocabulary and a programme of action which shaped the resentments of inarticulate and disgruntled people”.52

Introduction  9

The role of other contemporary far-right groups is far less documented than that of the UM. Martin Walker’s 1977 work The National Front, still to be bettered, does tackle the role of what he calls the ‘dissident graduates of the League of Empire Loyalists who were simultaneously active in Notting Hill’.53 He investigates the role of John Bean’s National Labour Party (NLP) and Arnold Leese and Colin Jordan’s White Defence League (WDL), albeit only briefly. In addition some of the literature that deals with race,54 ethnicity and the immigrant experience also briefly touches upon the racial nationalists of the period. For example, Edward Pilkington’s Beyond the Mother Country explains how Notting Hill ‘became one of the centres of the postwar fascist revival’55 and proceeds to analyse the role of the NLP, WDL, LEL and the UM in the Notting Hill riots. ‘The fascist groups did not so much create racial hatred, as exploit and encourage it’,56 he argues. However, as with much of the secondary literature that only pays a cursory glance to this subject, it is often interesting but lacks the in-depth primary research included here. With a view to discerning if anti-immigration actually replaced antisemitism as the primary ideological focus of British fascism or whether it was simply viewed as more politically expedient, it is necessary to read Thurlow’s work in conjunction with Michael Billig’s work on the later National Front. Thurlow states in reference to the postwar period that, ‘If antisemitism was toned down in comparison to prewar attitudes, more strident racial views were noticeable’.57 Billig argues that the ideology of ‘neo-fascism’ developed an anti-immigration superstructure on top of a core of a Nazi Nordic base.58 Thurlow adds that, ‘Whereas members were recruited, typically as a result of an anti-immigration campaign, this exocentric appeal was deepened to indoctrinate members into the inner-core ideology of the movement’.59 Martin Walker, when discussing Colin Jordan’s 1950s White Defence League, stated that, ‘For Jordan, the great advantage of the immigration issue was that it made people think in terms of race and thus be more sympathetic to his antiSemitic propaganda’.60 Similarly, Edward Pilkington points out that John Bean’s National Labour Party, ‘still lingered on the theme of the “Judaeo-CommunistMasonic plot”  .  .  . but the target of its invective had shifted from the “Jewish Red Peril” to the new “Coloured Peril” ’.61 This duality, with an anti-immigrant ‘superstructure’ with an antisemitic ‘core’ would become the norm for the British far-right for decades to come, but it was developed in the immediate postwar years.

Defining fascism Of all the unanswered questions of our time, perhaps the most important is: What is Fascism?62

The vast cannon of scholarly literature dedicated to fascism is ever growing, which makes the study of the relatively virgin turf of the immediate postwar period in Britain all the more appealing. However, any attempt to provide a brief précis of the thousands of books dedicated to other countries, regimes or aspects of fascism

10  Introduction

would be wholly unsatisfactory, if not pointless. However, over the last 20 or so years a field often called ‘fascism studies’ has emerged with a view to distilling a satisfactory definition of the term itself. The vast and complex nature of the debate has lead, as Payne derisively states, to the great majority of scholars making ‘little or no effort to define the term and simply assume that their readers will understand and presumably agree with the approach, whatever that may be’.63 To avoid such a charge it is necessary to provide a critical précis of the broad arguments and dip a toe into this seemingly endless debate to outline what is meant by fascism in this book. However, fascism is a constituent part of the broader far right, making it first necessary to explain what is meant by the umbrella term under which it sits. While ‘far right’ is a very broad term, those within it are united by a common set of core beliefs. Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg point out in Far-Right Politics in Europe that: Far-Right movements challenge the political system in place, both its institutions and its values (political liberalism and egalitarian humanism). They feel that society is in a state of decay, which is exacerbated by the state: accordingly, they take on what they perceive to be a redemptive mission. They constitute a countersociety and portray themselves as an alternative elite. Their internal operations rest not on democratic rules but on the emergence of “true elites.” In their imaginary [sic], they link history and society to archetypal figures . . . and glorify irrational, nonmaterialistic values. . . . And finally, they reject the geopolitical order as it exists.64 Though ‘far right’ is a useful umbrella term, its broadness makes it necessary to split it further into its constituent parts; the democratic radical right and the extreme far right. The social scientist Cas Mudde explains that the extreme far right ‘rejects the essence of democracy, that is, popular sovereignty and majority rule’, while the radical right ‘accepts the essence of democracy, but opposes fundamental elements of liberal democracy, most notably minority rights, rule of law, and separation of powers’.65 While not all, most on the radical right can simultaneously be described as ‘populist’, which Mudde describes as a (thin) ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, the pure people and the corrupt elite, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.66 While fascism makes up part of the extreme far right it still requires a definition of its own. However, first, if the term is to retain its usefulness, the long-term trend of dilution to little more than a vague epithet must be rejected to avoid elastication beyond tension; something that George Orwell understood as early as 1944: It will be seen that, as used, the word “Fascism” is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have

Introduction  11

heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.67 However, despite the slovenly bastardisation of a deeply serious term, the word fascism has not been debased beyond usefulness for the classification of political individuals or organisations, despite what some historians argue. Gilbert Allardyce stated that, ‘Fascism is not a generic concept. The word fascismo has no meaning beyond Italy’.68 Such nominalism deserves to be rejected because as Robert O. Paxton rightly states, ‘The term fascism needs to be rescued from sloppy usage, not thrown out because of it. It remains indispensable. We need a generic term for what is a general phenomenon’.69 Neither the frequent incorrect use of the term nor the diversity of the phenomenon is cause enough to discard it all together. Fascism is unquestionably one of the great ideological monoliths that, along with communism, socialism, liberalism, democracy and conservatism, helped shape the turbulent history of the 20th century. Yet it is a far more amorphous concept than most of its contemporary ideological rivals. Mussolini’s The Doctrine of Fascism and Hitler’s Mein Kampf lack the crystalline thought of the Communist Manifesto, Lenin’s What is to be Done? or Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and fail even to rival the debased Stalinist orthodoxy outlined in Dialectical and Historical Materialism. In short, though there was no shortage of willing candidates, Alfred Rosenberg among them, fascism had no Marx. Nor are there fascist works to rival the influence of the writings of Locke, Burke, Malthus, Ricardo or Smith in the formation of the liberal political tradition, especially not in terms of literary merit. This lack of a primary ideologue or foundation text makes a definition of fascism both highly necessary yet intrinsically allusive. The nature of fascism further complicates attempts to reach a consensus-based definition. Jose Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish Nietzschean proponent of perspectivism, described fascism as ‘simultaneously one thing and the contrary, it is A and not A’.70 Kevin Passmore elaborates on this premise by asking, How do we make sense of an ideology that appeals to skinheads and intellectuals; denounces the bourgeoisie while forming alliances with conservatives; adopts a macho style yet attracts many women; calls for a return to tradition and is fascinated by technology; idealizes the people and is contemptuous of mass society; and preaches violence in the name of order?71 The search for a definition of an ideology that seems contradictory in nature and has emerged in numerous different forms depending on the geographic location and the socio-economic, historical and political environment in which it emerged has existed almost as long as the term itself. Indeed, as Ernest Mandel once observed, ‘The history of fascism is at the same time the history of the theoretical analysis of fascism’.72 Even 22 years after Mussolini had seized control of Italy,

12  Introduction

Orwell identified the difficulty of distilling a single consensually derived definition. He asked, ‘Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one – not yet, anyway’.73 Since then, as stated by Paul Preston, ‘the study of fascism becomes every year a more daunting and bewildering task’,74 and the consensus definition that Orwell sought remains elusive. However, the pursuit of consensual definition of a general or ‘fascist minimum’ remains an important task. By drilling down and finding the key patterns common to all different putative fascisms, one identifies fascism as a distinct phenomenon, and thus individuals and groups can be described as fascist or non-fascist by ‘disinterested’ academics or even non-fascists and anti-fascists, irrespective of what the individual or group claim themselves. Before delving into the often heated debates that seek to result in a consensual general theory of fascism it is necessary to touch upon the one intellectual and academic tradition that has long been in agreement and for whom this debate has rarely been an issue. Marxist scholars have long been in agreement that fascism is a reactionary movement born out of a crisis in capitalism and formed as a bulwark against the proletarian forces of communism. Although most historians addressing this debate today either deride or more likely simply ignore the Marxist approach, to do so is folly, as it is not without merit. After all it was often Marxists who first wrestled with the nature of fascism and were first alive to its dangers. In 1935 in the face of growing fascist hostility towards Marxists across Europe, the Communist International provided their definitive definition of the ‘enemy’: Fascism in power is the open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinistic, the most imperialistic elements of finance capitalism.75 Georgi Dimitrov in his report to the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International added that, fascism is not only bourgeois nationalism, it is fiendish chauvinism. It is a government system of political gangsterism, a system of provocation and torture practiced upon the working class and the revolutionary elements of the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, and the intelligentsia. It is medieval barbarity and bestiality, it is unbridled aggression in relation to other nations.76 Dimitrov’s visceral definition lacks the calm, detached and useful objectivism of many later attempts to define fascism, yet when one considers it was stated in 1935, before the Spanish Civil War and nearly a decade before Soviet troops passed through the gates marked Arbeit macht frei, its prescient emphasis on the barbarity and chauvinism of fascism must be noted even though its emphasis on fascism as a tool of capital was flawed. Marxist approaches77 provide useful additions to our understanding of fascism for several reasons. While seemingly unpopular and increasingly moribund, the consideration of a class analysis for historical phenomena remains important. Fascism

Introduction  13

as an ideology was forged among the fires of the 20th century’s social struggles, and unquestionably many were awoken to its supposed charms by their fear of a possible proletarian uprising. Hence, Marxist definitions temper the notion of fascism as a radical ideology and as Passmore concedes, ‘have shown that the revolutionary discourse of fascists cannot be taken at face value’.78 This alone is enough to make Marxist definitions of fascism worthy of comment. Furthermore, Marxists have been alive to the continuing existence of fascism in the postwar period, (one of the contentions of this book) and, as Griffin points out, are ‘spurred on by the conviction that fascism cannot be safely consigned to “history”, but is a latent tendency in all modern states’.79 While not an exclusively Marxist assertion, the desire to avoid confining fascism to the time-bound shackles of the interwar years has obvious advantages to any historian of the postwar period. The value of Marxist approaches primarily lies in their ability to help explain the cause of fascism rather than providing an adequate definition. Marxist definitions are unquestionably retarded by their determination to describe fascism as the last stand of capitalism against the march of history towards socialism. The result is that any semblance of radicalism in fascist ideology is disregarded out of hand. Even if one takes the major leap of faith and accepts the proposition that the primary aim of fascism’s ultra-nationalism was to divide transnational working-class loyalty, one is still left with no explanation for Nazi human experimentation, the eradication of the disabled or antisemitic conspiracy theories. The major fault with Marxist definitions of fascism is their failure to accept ‘the possibility that these goals were pursued for reasons unrelated to the (supposed) logic of capitalism’.80 Thus, almost all Marxist definitions are hindered by their assumption that fascism’s ultimate, possibly even only, purpose was the defence of capitalism and Marxists’ refusal to concede that the left does not have a monopoly over revolutionary movements. Hence, while Marxist definitions have some value they are also unsatisfactory. Thus, it is within the liberal tradition that the search for an acceptable, consensual definition has made the most ground. In 1998 the perennial lack of consensus led Roger Griffin to prematurely proclaim the emergence of a new consensus in fascist studies. Despite later admitting his declaration had been mischievously designed to manufacture consent,81 it is fair to say that Griffin’s ‘emerging paradigm and the “cultural” interpretation of British fascism has dominated recent historiography on the subject’.82 However, while Griffin’s definition is currently the most successful, it is not alone in adding value to this sprawling debate. Stanley Payne, the author of major works on the Spanish Falange, offers a ‘typological definition’ which, while not perfect, has significant taxonomic value. Payne’s aim is to offer ‘a wide spectrum description that can identify a variety of allegedly fascist movements while still setting them apart as a group from other kinds of revolutionary or nationalist movements’.83 To arrive at his definition he identifies three broad categories each with numerous addendum; the three categories are Ideology and Goals, Fascist Negations and Style and Organization.84 The advantage of Payne’s taxonomic definition is its ability to be both flexible yet rigid when required. It is particular enough to distinguish between fascist and non-fascist organisations but

14  Introduction

allows numerous movements other than the Nazis in Germany and Mussolini’s Fascists to be labelled as fascist. In addition, his tripartite definition’s inclusion of the fascist negations, namely anti-liberalism, anti-communism and anti-conservatism, as part of a wider definition, is most useful. The inclusion of the ‘anti’-dimensions of fascism is imperative to any grounded definition, as it is fascism’s oppositionism, whether towards capitalists, communists, Jews or immigrants, that has significantly contributed to its appeal and success. However, Roger Eatwell criticises Payne’s emphasis on the fascist negations, stating: It is more helpful to see that fascism’s negations were partly propagandistic and stemmed from the fact that – as a “latecomer” to the political spectrum to adopt Juan Linz’s fertile term fascism tended to attack existing ideologies and groups as a way of defining “space” for itself.85 Eatwell argues that the negations are better viewed as part of the ‘style’ of fascism and as part of its ideological desire to split the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’. His criticism leaves one wondering how the antisemitic murder of six million Jews can be more helpfully described as ‘partly propagandist’. The relegation of such an important aspect of the reality of fascism is unwise. As is the danger with the whole of this debate, it can sometimes be dominated by academic abstraction and thus become too distant from the reality of fascism as experienced by society, and for this reason alone the emphasis on fascism’s negations is apposite and necessary. That said, fascism should not be categorised solely as an anti-phenomenon or as revolutionary nihilism. When discussing the general characteristics of fascism, Renzo de Felice talks of a negative common denominator and asks if there are any common positive goals to be found.86 Such a definition is unsatisfactory in the same way that solely describing communism as anti-capitalist would be. Despite its many positives, Payne’s suggested definition has had only limited success when attempting to garner the requisite academic support to form a working consensus. Griffin labels the definition as a cumbersome conceptual framework and complains that it ‘marks out fascism as a genus of political energy which is unique in apparently requiring its self-professed ideological goals to be supplemented by its “style” and “negations” before they can serve as an adequate basis for a definition’.87 While he is right to label Payne’s tripartite definition as ‘cumbersome’, his second charge is less valid. In many ways fascism is a unique ideology, as shown by the major problems reaching a consensual definition, hence to criticise an attempt for its ‘unique’ tripartite approach seems unfair. The major problem with Payne’s definition lies in its reliance upon the historical features of fascism, which ultimately, as Ernst Nolte points out, provides the label of fascism with an epochal significance limited to the interwar years. Payne himself states that, ‘Specific historic fascism can never be re-created’, though he does concede the possibility of ‘partially related forms of authoritarian nationalism’.88 Hence, Payne’s definition becomes unworkable for any historian who desires to ‘illuminate further the protean timelessness of fascism’,89 which is a core aim of

Introduction  15

this book. Payne is not alone in emphasising the need for a working definition to encompass historical contextualisation. Robert O. Paxton offers the following definition of fascism but adds the caveat that it ‘encompasses its subject no better than a snapshot encompasses a person’.90 He states that, Fascism may be defined as a form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.91 While a useful definition of the interwar fascist movements, its precise and detailed nature curtails its usefulness as a general definition for fascism. Paxton argues that definitions should be ‘grounded in a proper historical understanding of the processes at work in past fascisms, and not by checking the colour of the shirts or seeking traces of the rhetoric of the national-syndicalist dissidents of the opening of the twentieth century’.92 He disregards the notion of a comparable fixed essence of fascism or ‘fascist minimum’ and calls for fascism to be understood as a ‘process’ to be studied contextually. Instead of comparing rhetoric, ideology or style when labelling postwar groups as fascist, Paxton suggests one asks: Are they becoming rooted as parties that represent major interests and feelings and wield major influence on the political scene? Is the economic or constitutional system in a state of blockage apparently insoluble by existing authorities? Is a rapid political mobilization threatening to escape the control of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted to look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge?93 Paxton’s emphasis on historically grounded questions inhibits any historian who wishes to describe postwar movements as fascist by narrowing the definition with unnecessarily rigid contextual caveats that go too far and produce time-bound shackles. It is unsurprising then that those definitions that rely less heavily on historical contextualisation and instead propose an ‘ideal type of generic fascism’ that fits no case exactly but rather provides an amalgamated ‘essence’ have come closest to achieving consensus.94 The conundrum of defining a sprawling, diffuse and deeply varied historical phenomenon with a single term is overcome by the adoption of an ‘ideal type’. Coined by Max Weber, the ‘ideal type’ does not exist empirically but rather as an intellectual abstraction and promotes common properties in favour of uniqueness to create a ‘general’ genus. Weber states, ‘In its conceptual purity this thought-picture cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality, it is a utopia’.95 Unlike Payne’s taxonomic definition, the implementation of an ideal

16  Introduction

type to describe generic fascism creates not a definitive definition but a heuristic one. As Griffin points out, such definitions ‘serve not to describe or explain facts as such but to provide tentative conceptual frameworks with which significant patterns of facts can be identified, casual relationships investigated and phenomena classified’.96 It is the acceptance of an ‘ideal type’ of generic fascism that overcomes many of the problems that cling to definitions weighed down by over-historical contextualisation. However, while the rejection of time-bound historical definitions is most welcome, the question over how to define a fascist ‘ideal type’ is by no means an easy or, unsurprisingly, a consensual one. Roger Griffin defines ‘generic fascism’ as a ‘genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism’.97 The key innovation here is his addition of the term ‘palingenesis’ to describe the fascists’ vision of national rebirth, which he argues in his book Fascism is a ‘visceral longing for radical change and regeneration which can be explained only partially by objective socio-political forces of crisis and has a deep symbolic and psychological dimension’.98 Importantly, Griffin’s definition correctly challenges both the Marxists’ denial of a revolutionary component to fascism and earlier liberal approaches, which defined fascism solely by its negations.99 Despite garnering a modicum of consensus, Griffin’s definition continues to face criticism for his ‘zeal to reduce fascism to one pithy sentence’.100 Others, such as Eatwell, for example, have criticised Griffin, believing that his ‘emphasis on myth plays down the rational side to fascism’s ideology’. He also notes that Griffin’s focus on palingenesis ‘introduces a confusion between ideology and propaganda’ and that his inclusion of the term ‘populism’ is too vague.101 In its place Eatwell offers his own definition stating that fascism is: An ideology that strives to forge social rebirth based on a holistic-national radical Third Way, though in practice fascism has tended to stress style, especially action and the charismatic leader, more than detailed programme, and to engage in a Manichaean demonisation of its enemies.102 As with Griffin’s definition there is much to be admired in Eatwell’s effort as they share many of the same virtues. It too is an attempt to distil the essence of fascism and provide a heuristic definition of a general genus. In addition, there is a conscious lack of interwar context-dependant features such as those present in Paxton and Payne’s attempts. However, as Macklin correctly points out, the centrality of ‘rebirth’ to his own definition makes his criticisms of Griffin’s use of the term ‘palingenesis’ rather confusing.103 Despite this, the emphasis on ideology, the mention of third way economics and importantly a subtle nod to fascism’s negations with the incorporation of ‘demonization of its enemies’ makes Eatwell’s definition a passable alternative. However, while no definition of this complex political theory will ever be perfect, Griffin’s is no doubt the best we currently have, and in the words of Walter

Introduction  17

Laqueur, it ‘might be difficult to improve on’.104 Amongst its many virtues is its flexibility when it comes to postwar fascism. Eatwell, for example, has commended Griffin’s efforts for having the ‘advantage of not being locked into a specific time period, thus avoiding the error of seeing fascism as essentially an interwar phenomenon’.105 Similarly Macklin rightly states, the benefits of Griffin’s effort are ‘obvious to any historian of postwar fascism wishing to define the movement they have under their microscope as “Fascism” in the generic sense regardless of their agreement with the cultural primacy of Griffin’s “fascist minimum” ’.106 In this sense its flexibility and broadness are unquestionably a virtue. Though Griffin’s ideal type definition sheds fascism of its interwar chains and allows for the existence of postwar fascist incarnations, it opens up an ancillary debate regarding the prefix ‘neo’. In short, if fascism can and does exists after 1945, is it the same as prewar fascism, or is it a fundamentally different and ‘new’ form of the same genus? Like the term ‘fascism’ itself, neo-fascism and neo-Nazism are often used without thought. Many journalists, anti-fascist activists and even some scholars seemingly add the prefix ‘neo’ simply to indicate ‘recent’ rather than distinct or ‘new’ in comparison to ‘classical’ fascism. Lazily, there is a tendency to describe anything from 1945 onward as ‘neo-fascism’ without seeking to explain what, if anything, about it was ‘new’. Take for example the 1991 collection of articles NeoFascism In Europe, the introduction of which offers no explanation of what is actually ‘new’ about the fascists they discuss beyond a reference to their self-­definition as ‘neo-Nazis or neo-Fascists’.107 In reality, as Mudde points out, ‘They were mostly described as “neo-fascists,” but there was really not much new to them’.108 However, while there was very little that was ‘new’ about the fascists themselves, the world in which they operated was significantly different. Griffin correctly states that, Between 1945 and 1955, the international political, social, economic and cultural order underwent structural changes no less profound, rapid and unexpected than those that combined in the wake of the First World War to create the original conditions for fascism to burst unannounced and unscripted onto the stage.109 These new postwar conditions were no doubt different and also less fertile for the growth of fascism, with Griffin describing them as ‘lethal for fascism as a credible alternative’.110 However, none of this means that what emerged after the War was not fascism. In Failed Führers Macklin rightly explains that while the ‘epochal’ conditions ‘ceased to exist after 1945’ and postwar fascism lacks ‘the broader economic and existential crisis from which it derived its “significance” during the interwar period this does not mean that post-war variants have ceased to be “fascism” ’.111 If one moves a cow from a field to a barn it still remains a cow. However, the question remains whether the change in conditions precipitated a large enough mutation in fascism thereby warranting the use of the term neo-fascism. In the case of Britain, it absolutely did not.

18  Introduction

While most who use the term ‘neo-fascism’ do so to describe postwar fascist movement, others place the change during the war years. Camus and Lebourg, for example, argue that there is a ‘Fascist spectrum  .  .  . based on international chronology’ that identifies three periods: ‘an ideological gestation before 1919; the Fascism of 1919 to 1942, which, to be sure, unfolded in several phases; and then a neo-Fascism from 1942 on’.112 They argue that the shift from Fascism to neoFascism occurs when ‘the Third Reich decided to re-orient its propaganda along a Europeanist axis’ and when in contrast to its precursor, ‘privileged society over the state, Europe over the existing nations’.113 While interesting, there are several issues with pointing to 1942 and the shift to Europeanisation as the birth of a neofascism. First, while they accept the pre-existence of ‘supernationalist fringe elements’ between 1919 and 1941 it isn’t particularly clear why they identify 1942 as a more significant shift. It is certainly true that there were pan-European fascists well before this such as Georges Valois in France during the 1920s and 1930s.114 Italy also had its own tradition of fascist Europeanism with Julius Evola publishing essays on ‘The European Idea’ and the need for a ‘European Law’ in 1940 and 1941.115 In Germany as early as October 1939, Werner Daitz, a member of Alfred Rosenberg’s Foreign Policy Office of the NSDAP, established the ‘Society of European Economic Planning and Grossraumwirtschaft’, which called for continental European unity under German leadership. Also in the early years of the war Nazi policy makers including Karl Ritter, an economic adviser, met in the Foreign Ministry to discuss ‘European Grossraumwirtschaft’ (a large economic sphere of interest).116 These ideas were then adopted by Reich Economics Minister, Walther Funk, in June 1940, who subsequently presented Göring with his proposals for the ‘New Order’ on 6 August 1940.117 All of this suggests the idea of a ‘Europe over existing nations’, which Camus and Lebourg point to as the birth of neo-fascism, as not being particularly ‘new’ in 1942. Even if one accepts the idea that such a shift did occur it remains unclear why 1942 is chosen as the primary year when one might be better pointing to 1943 when it became official policy of the Republican Fascist Party in Italy and a call for the ‘realisation of a European community’ was explicitly stated in the Manifesto of the Republic of Salò.118 Alternatively, one might point to even later in the war when Alfred Rosenberg and Daitz floated new ideas involving a united Europe119 or in the writings of Karl Heinz Pfeffer, president of the German Institute for Foreign Affairs, who wrote in 1944 that ‘Europe today knows that it is a single entity’.120 In short, pan-Europeanism has always been a component of fascism with varying levels of influence at different times, and even when at its most popular amongst fascist ideologues, it generally failed to replace more traditional ultranationalism amongst normal activists. In truth, when discussing the immediate postwar years, especially in Britain as outlined in this book, the continuities of people and ideas far outweigh any novelty or change. There is certainly no definitive schism in 1945 that sees the ‘birth’ of a new type of fascism. The hostile postwar world in which fascists found themselves

Introduction  19

operating was no doubt very different and did, in certain cases, result in superficial changes – but not sufficient enough to warrant the use of the term ‘neo-fascism’. That is not to say that in later decades, when superficial changes were matched by more genuine structural and ideological shifts, that the term ‘neo-fascism’ might be of more use. One would better point to the generational change that happened several decades after the war or the more genuine modernisation projects undertaken by some European fascist parties towards the end of the century. Or perhaps one might argue that the revolutionary changes brought about by the digital age and the new fundamentally transnational far-right movements such as the post9/11 anti-Muslim movement or the so-called alt-right better suit the term ‘neofascist’.121 However, in the years covered in this book, continuity far outweighs discontinuity, making the use of the term ‘neo-fascism’ unnecessary and inaccurate.

Methodology It is necessary to engage with the debates around a definition due to the methodological ramifications that can result. One such example is Dave Renton’s contribution to the debate as part of his criticism of ‘liberal historians’.122 He argues that: in order to justify their idealist definition, the historians assert that fascism, as a movement, was one where fascist principles or ideas determined fascist action. . . . Theirs are flawed histories inextricably linked to definitions of fascism offered by fascists themselves; thus they do not constitute a critical theory of fascism.123 Renton suggests a need to ‘break out of the prison of ideas’ and to base any understanding upon a ‘historical foundation’. However, his argument creates a paradox, which he fails to address. He decries the ‘closed or implicit’ consensus that the age of fascism is dead124 while simultaneously calling for the time-bound historical shackles that come with a contextually derived definition. Despite this he does raise an important methodological challenge, namely that the ‘liberal’ historians overemphasise the role of ideas when seeking to understand fascist movements. As this book is both a study in the field of the history of ideas and is based in the immediate postwar period when many fascists did not call themselves fascist and a difference between what they publicly stated and how they actually acted is discernable, Renton’s methodological challenge must be considered. While Renton has discussed this methodological question with direct reference to fascism studies, these debates have raged for decades in the wider history of ideas field. Scholars such as Dominick LaCapra have called for a direct reading of texts that refuses to reduce them to examples of larger concepts. However, the work of Quentin Skinner, a historian of political thought, emphasises the importance of context. Skinner argues that it is necessary to ‘situate the texts we study within such intellectual contexts as enable us to make sense of what their authors were doing

20  Introduction

in writing them’.125 When summarising the work of Skinner, Anthony Grafton stated that he: had set out to erect a new discipline in which context – the local matrices within which texts were forged and read – and language – the language of humble pamphlets and bold speeches, as well as that of canonical texts – took center stage.126 In addition, John Tosh states that, ‘Context is at least as important as text when coming to terms with an original thinker in the past’.127 Of course, the problem is that when one writes about ‘context’ this is also a form of ‘text’. The work of Skinner and others such as Bernard Bailyn, which emphasises placing the text in context, ensures that historians of fascism can avoid one of the major potholes of the field. The danger of concentrating on just the ideas of fascist thinkers and detaching them from the reality of the phenomenon as experienced by its millions of adherents and victims is that it could bestow on these ideas an unwarranted legitimacy. As Roger Griffin has noted the result could be that an exercise originally conceived as casting light on the internal logic and dynamics of fascism in the spirit of “know thy enemy” might assume revisionist connotations: stressing its ideological cohesion could unwittingly rationalize and normalize it.128 Thus, when engaging in a history of ideas, especially when the ideas in question are fascistic, it is imperative not to detach the texts in question from the context in which they were created and the reality on which they had an impact. On the other hand, it is important not to become reductive and negate the impact of fascist ideas on fascist actions all together. Rather a balance must be struck. As Stephen Bronner has explained: Political theory should never serve as the handmaiden of political practice. But it also should never simply sever its ties with history. It would thereby deny the obvious, relegate its insight into the realm of metaphysics, and – most importantly – truncate its ability to illuminate reality.129 Bronner rightly goes on to state that a ‘work is reducible to neither its text nor context. To ignore either is to undermine the political relevance of the given theory’.130 When researching fascism it is important to find a route between Renton’s dismissal of the importance of ideas and ideology and an understanding of fascism solely as an idea. One must accept and point out the discrepancies often visible between fascist thinkers and fascist reality, which challenges the utopian ideas with the often dystopian realities, which simultaneously doesn’t become reductionist and relegate fascism to nothing more than a reactionary mass movement.

Introduction  21

The sources used in this book reflect these methodological concerns. To understand the ideologies of the period it draws heavily on the many publications, pamphlets, newspapers and books of the groups and ideologues themselves to understand the ideas in question. In line with the increasingly prevalent ‘cultural turn’ in fascism studies this book also seeks to explore what can be learnt from the novels of the ideologues discussed. However, a critical approach is adopted to the sources produced by fascists themselves, which is a necessary precaution. Some such as Van Donselaar, Fleck and Müller and Eatwell have shown how when looking at fascist parties there is often a ‘front-stage’ and a ‘back-stage’. The former is a comparatively moderate façade displayed to the public that masks the true more extreme reality.131 With this in mind extra scrutiny is required when analysing the texts produced by fascists for public consumption. Their public declarations and publications must therefore be approached critically and placed in their proper context as well as being checked against other contemporary sources. As such, this book combines the study of ideas with the reality of actual events and behaviours as documented by anti-fascists, the state and the wider press. In short, it is important to adopt a critical approach that doesn’t rely solely on the words of the fascists themselves nor solely on those who opposed them.

Notes 1 Frederic Mullally, Fascism Inside England (London: Claud Morris Books Ltd, 1946), 84. 2 See: Jim Wolfreys, ‘The European Extreme Right in Comparative Perspective’, in Andrea Mammone, Emmanuel Godin and Brian Jenkins (eds.), Varieties of Right-wing Extremism in Europe (Oxon: Routledge, 2013), 21; Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 370; S.M. Cullen, ‘Political Violence: The Case of the British Union of Fascists’, Journal of Contemporary History, 28:2, 1993, 243–268, 245; Colin Cross, The Fascists in Britain (Tiptree, Essex: Barrie and Rockliff, 1961); Alan Sykes, The Radical Right in Britain: Social Imperialism to the BNP (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 92. 3 Graham Macklin, Failed Führers: A  History of Britain’s Extreme Right (London: Routledge, 2020), 12. 4 Eugenia Paulicelli, Fashion Under Fascism: Beyond the Black Shirt (Dress, Body, Culture) (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2004); Mario Lupano and Alessandra Vaccari (eds.), Fashion at the Time of Fascism (Bologna: Damiani, 2009). 5 Simon Martin, Football and Fascism: The National Game Under Mussolini (Oxford: Berg, 2004). 6 Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo (eds.), Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922– 1943 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Steven Ricci, Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922–1943 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 7 Jeremy Tambling, Opera and the Culture of Fascism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 8 Martin Durham, Women and Fascism (London: Routledge, 1998). 9 Most notable in the British case is Nigel Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Nigel Copsey and Andrzej Olechnowicz (eds.), Varieties of Anti-­ Fascism: Britain in the Interwar Period (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 10 Term coined by Benito Mussolini in The Doctrine of Fascism, 1932. 11 W.D. Rubinstein, A History of the Jews in the English Speaking World: Great Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 314.

22  Introduction

12 Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to the National Front (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998), x. 13 Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 305. 14 Nick Griffin MEP and the BNP generally have regularly and publicly stated the ideological influence of the prewar and postwar British antisemite A.K. Chesterton. See Graham Macklin, ‘Transatlantic Connections and Conspiracies: A.K. Chesterton and the New Unhappy Lords’, Journal of Contemporary History, 47:2, 2012, 277. 15 Andrew Brons MEP started his political career in Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement, which was run out of Arnold Leese’s house. 16 In 1979 the National Front stood 303 candidates at the General Election and stood on the verge of electoral breakthrough. However, Margaret Thatcher’s infamous ‘swamped’ speech on immigration and her emphasis on the defence of British culture undermined their chances. Alan Sykes stated, ‘the Conservative party moved in to occupy its ground’. See Sykes, The Radical Right in Britain, 114. 17 For example an interview with John Tyndall, then in the NSM, in the early 1960s shows that ‘Rather than fighting elections (in which they do not believe), Tyndall said the NSM was content to simply remain in the background’. See George Thayer, The British Political Fringe: A Profile (London: Anthony Blond, 1965), 28. See also Nick Lowles, White Riot: The Violent Story of Combat 18 (Bury: Milo Books, 2001); Graeme McLayen and Nick Lowles, Mr. Evil: The Secret Life of Racist Bomber and Killer David Copeland (London: John Blake Publishing, 2000). 18 Graham Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley and the Resurrection of British Fascism After 1945 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 4. 19 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 3. 20 Roger Griffin (ed.), Fascism: Oxford Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 311. 21 Dave Renton, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000), 3. 22 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 4. 23 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 28. 24 Paul Wilkinson, The New Fascists (London: Grant Mcintyre, 1981). 25 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 11. 26 Macklin, Failed Führers. 27 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 4. 28 Daniel Sonaben, We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post-war Britain (London: Verso, 2019), 5. 29 Thayer, The British Political Fringe, 15. 30 Thayer, The British Political Fringe, 16. 31 Nicholas Hillman, ‘Tell Me Chum in Case I  Got It Wrong: What Was It We Were Fighting During the War?’ The Re-Emergence of British Fascism, 1945–58’, Contemporary British History, 15:4, 2001, 1–34. 32 Hillman, ‘Tell Me Chum in Case I Got It Wrong’, 2. 33 Hillman, ‘Tell Me Chum in Case I Got It Wrong’, 13. 34 Alan Sykes, ‘The Union Movement and the National Front’, in Sykes, The Radical Right in Britain, 93–105; Anne Poole, ‘Oswald Mosley and the Union Movement: Success or Failure’, in Mike Cronin (ed.), The Failure of British Fascism: The Far-Right and the Fight for Political Recognition (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1996), 53–80; Martin Walker, ‘The Lunatic Fringe 1945–1963’, in Martin Walker (ed.), The National Front (Glasgow: Fontana Paperbacks, 1977), 25–50; Paul Wilkinson, ‘War’s Aftermath’, in Paul Wilkinson (ed.), The New Fascists (London: Pan Books, 1983), 50–66; Richard Griffiths, ‘Race Nostalgia and the Search for Acceptance: The Postwar Extreme Right’, in Richard Griffiths (ed.), An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Fascism (London: Gerald Duckworth  & Co., 2000), 144–152; Richard Thurlow, ‘New Wine for Old Bottles, 1945–1960’, in

Introduction  23

Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, 203–229; Stephen Dorril, ‘The Union Movement’; ‘The Neo-Fascist Internationals’; ‘The Coloured Invasion’, in Stephen Dorril (ed.), Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (London: Viking, 2006), 569–633. 35 Nigel Copsey and John E. Richardson (eds.), Cultures of Postwar British Fascism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015). 36 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, 117. 37 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, 207. 38 Renton, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s, 32. 39 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, 209. 40 David Baker in his biography of Chesterton argues on the side of caution claiming that there is ‘little evidence of Chesterton’s desire to exclude all Jews from humanity’. See David Baker, Ideology of Obsession: A.K. Chesterton and British Fascism (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 143. 41 Quoted in Baker, Ideology of Obsession, 141. 42 Baker, Ideology of Obsession; Luke LeCras, A.K. Chesterton and the Evolution of Britain’s Extreme Right, 1933–1973 (London: Routledge, 2019). 43 LeCras, A.K. Chesterton and the Evolution of Britain’s Extreme Right. Retrieved from https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=q0LBDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT4&lpg=PT4&dq=l ecras+ak+chesterton+books&source=bl&ots=qRsTKfTj5I&sig=ACfU3U0rheh9N_ UigGf8N8ghbC-HvWjo_g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjr6viAyP7pAhXlQkEAHa RdCq4Q6AEwCnoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=status%20as%20a%20transitional%20 figure%20who%20played%20a%20substantial%20role%20in%20the%20survival%20 and%20evolution%20of%20Britain%E2%80%99s%20extreme%20right%20across%20 two%20distinct%20periods&f=false 44 Paul Stocker, ‘The Postwar British Extreme Right and Empire, 1945–1967’, Religion Compass, 9:5, 2015, 162–172. 45 Paul Stocker, ‘ “The Surrender of an Empire”: British Imperialism in Radical Right and Fascist Ideology, 1921–1963’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Teesside University, 2016). 46 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 67–76. 47 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, 212. 48 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 70. 49 Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (London: Pimlico, 2003), 331. 50 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 67–76; Dorril, Blackshirt, 613–633. 51 The Union Movement distributed leaflets in Notting Hill on ‘The Coloured Invasion’. 52 Dorril, Blackshirt, 613. 53 Walker, The National Front, 33. 54 For example see Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Routledge, 1992), 98–99. 55 Edward Pilkington, Beyond the Mother Country: West Indians and the Notting Hill White Riots (London: I.B. Tauris, 1988), 98. 56 Pilkington, Beyond the Mother Country, 99. 57 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, 216. 58 Michael Billig, Fascists: A Social Psychological View of the National Front (London: Academic Press [for the] European Association of Experimental Social Psychology, 1978). 59 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, 8. 60 Walker, The National Front, 34. 61 Pilkington, Beyond the Mother Country, 98. 62 George Orwell, ‘What Is Fascism?’ Tribune, 24 March 1944. Accessed 29 March 2016. www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc. 63 Payne, A History of Fascism 1914–1945, 4. 64 Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 22. 65 Cas Mudde, The Far Right Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 7. 66 Mudde, The Far Right Today, 7.

24  Introduction

6 7 Orwell, ‘What Is Fascism?’ 68 Gilbert Allardyce, ‘What Fascism Is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept’, American Historical Review, 84:2, 1979, 367–288. 69 Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (London: Allen Lane, 2004), 21. 70 Jose Ortega y Gasset, Sobre el Fascismo (1927), cited in Kevin Passmore, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), page after title page. 71 Passmore, Fascism, 11. 72 Ernest Mandel in his introduction to Trotsky (1971), 9, cited in Griffin, Fascism: Oxford Reader, 246. 73 Orwell, ‘What Is Fascism?’ 74 Paul Preston, ‘Reading History: Fascism’, History Today, 35, 1985, 46. 75 Definition offered at the Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in 1935. 76 Georgi Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class Against Fascism (1935). Accessed 24 November 2013. www. marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm. 77 Dave Renton identifies at least three Marxist theories of fascism in Dave Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice (London: Pluto Press, 1999). Roger Griffin’s excellent Fascism: Oxford Reader provides a very useful précis of Marxist arguments with extracts from Soviet historians, East German historians, Western Marxists and numerous structuralist arguments. Any impression of homogenising Marxist approaches in this section is unintended. 78 Passmore, Fascism, 16. 79 Griffin, Fascism: Oxford Reader, 279. 80 Passmore, Fascism, 17. 81 Roger Griffin, ‘The Primacy of Culture: The Current Growth (or Manufacture) of Consensus within Fascism Studies’, Journal of Contemporary History, 37:2, 2002, 21–43. 82 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 7. 83 Payne, A History of Fascism 1914–1945, 6–7. 84 For full lists see Table I.1, ‘Typological Description of Fascism’, in Payne, A History of Fascism 1914–1945, 7. 85 Roger Eatwell, ‘On Defining the “Fascist Minimum”: The Centrality of Ideology’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 1:3, 1996, 303–319. 86 Renzo de Felice, Fascism: An Informal Introduction to Its Theory and Practice (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1976). 87 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1991), 7. 88 Payne, A History of Fascism 1914–1945, 520. 89 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 8. 90 Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, 218. 91 Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, 218. 92 Robert O. Paxton, ‘The Five Stages of Fascism’, Journal of Modern History, 70:1, 1998, 23. 93 Paxton. ‘The Five Stages of Fascism’, 22. 94 For example, David Baker adopts Griffin’s definition in Ideology of Obsession as Macklin points out in Very Deeply Dyed in Black. Richard Thurlow has dropped his own definition in favour of Griffin’s. See Richard Thurlow, ‘Fascist Morsels’, Patterns of Prejudice, 30:2, 1996, 81. 95 Thomas Burger, Max Weber’s Theory of Concept Formation, History, Laws, and Ideal Types (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 128. 96 Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 11. 97 Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 26. 98 Roger Griffin, Fascism: An Introduction to Comparative Studies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 41. 99 Griffin, Fascism: An Introduction, 40.

Introduction  25

100 Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, 221. 101 Eatwell, ‘On Defining the “Fascist Minimum” ’, 311. 102 Eatwell, ‘On Defining the “Fascist Minimum” ’, 313. 103 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 5. 104 Walter Laqueur, Fascism: Past, Present, Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 9. 105 Eatwell, ‘On Defining the “Fascist Minimum” ’, 311. 106 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black. 107 Luciano Cheles, Ronnie Ferguson and Michalina Vaughan (eds.), Neo-Fascism in Europe (Harlow: Longman, 1991), 13. 108 Mudde, The Far Right Today, 12. 109 Griffin, Fascism: An Introduction, 91. 110 Griffin, Fascism: An Introduction, 91. 111 Macklin, Failed Führers, 18–19. See note 8. 112 Camus and Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe, 38. 113 Camus and Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe, 38–39. 114 A. Georges Valois, ‘What Is Fascism?’ Le Nouveau Siecle, 13 December 1925, in Eugen Weber (ed.), Varieties of Fascism (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand Company Inc., 1964), 183; A. Georges Valois, War or Revolution, trans. E.W. Dickes (Woking: Unwin Brothers Ltd, 1932), 183. 115 Griffin, Fascism: Oxford Reader, 343. 116 J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945: Volume 3, Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination. A  Documentary Reader (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001), 276. 117 Noakes and Pridham, Nazism 1919–1945: Volume 3, 278–281. 118 Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 3rd ed. (London: Papermac, 1990), 188. See also: Griffin, Fascism: Oxford Reader, 344. 119 Griffin, Fascism: Oxford Reader, 344. 120 Karl Heinz Pfeffer, ‘European Consciousness’, Zeitschrift für Politik, 34:10–12, October/December  1944, 377–385 (excerpts), in Walter Lipgens (ed.), Documents on the History of European Integration, 171. 121 For more on the alt-right see: Patrik Hermansson, David Lawrence, Joe Mulhall and Simon Murdoch, The International Alt-Right: Fascism for the 21st Century (London: Routledge, 2020). 122 For a heated debate between Renton and Griffin see, Dave Renton, ‘Fascism Is More than an Ideology’, Searchlight, 290, August  1999, 24–25; Roger Griffin, ‘Fascism Is More than Reaction’, Searchlight, 291, September 1999, 24–26. 123 Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice, 28–29. 124 As shown earlier, this is simply incorrect to say of Griffin and Eatwell. 125 Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Volume 1: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3. 126 Anthony Grafton, ‘The History of Ideas: Precept and Practice, 1950–2000 and Beyond’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 67:1, 2006, 4. 127 John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History, 5th ed. (Harlow: Pearson, 2010), 132. 128 Roger Griffin (ed.), International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus (London: Arnold, 1998), ix. 129 Stephen Eric Bronner, Ideas in Action: Political Tradition in the Twentieth Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 2. 130 Bronner, Ideas in Action, 7. 131 For details on this see Cas Mudde, The Ideology of the Extreme Right (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 20; Roger Eatwell, ‘Towards a New Model of Generic Fascism’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, 4:2, 1992, 174.

1 THE UNBROKEN THREAD British fascism during World War II

While the end of the war didn’t mean the end of fascism, it did mean the death of most of Europe’s fascist leaders. Across large parts of the continent the fascist movement was left in ruins, its architecture turned to rubble, its reputation indelibly tied to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Yet in one place the movement remained surprisingly intact, hidden away for the war years, able to survive: Great Britain. If one is to properly understand postwar fascism it is imperative to understand the experience of British far-right and fascist activists between 1939 and 1945, which significantly and lastingly affected the nature of fascism in Britain. One thing that is clear is that for the fascists, the Britain that existed after the war was different and notably more hostile than the one of the prewar period. However, while the world had changed around them they emerged surprisingly unchanged.

The early war years The two events that most historians point to as ending interwar British fascism were doubtlessly major challenges that did threaten the survival of the movement. The first was the declaration of war against Germany in September  1939. The second was the mass internment without trial under Defence Regulation 18B and the subsequent proscription of Mosley’s British Union in July 1940. The start of the war resulted in the disbanding of a number of radical right and pro-Nazi organisations. Some completely disbanded while others simply ceased public activity.1 William Joyce’s National Socialist League was dissolved in August 1939, and pro-German organisations such as the Anglo-German Fellowship and the Link also officially folded. The influential Nordic League publicly ceased activity though leading members continued to meet until the internment of Oliver Gilbert on 22 September.2 A.K. Chesterton’s short-lived group British Vigil crawled on for several months but also joined the list of deceased groups in January of 1940.3 In addition the activities of those organisations that did survive were greatly reduced.

The unbroken thread  27

Many of the B.U.F. offices around the country were closed down, as was the headquarters of the Imperial Fascist League at Balls Pond Road, Dalston, which closed with the swastikas that adorned the outside being painted over.4 With the outbreak of war on 3 September the primary concern of Britain’s fascist activists, many left without an official political vehicle, was to bring a prompt end to the war. The inevitability of hostilities had been evident for some time, and a symbiosis between the fascists and the Peace movement had been evolving. Extraordinarily the Chairman of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) became a member of the pro-Nazi and antisemitic organisation The Link. The PPU’s determination to avoid and to oppose war led some to jettison their moral compass and form alliances with domestic fascism. In addition, many British fascists realised that war with their ideological comrades in Germany could ruin the movement irrevocably and pushed peace to the very forefront of their activity. Many found the PPU a convenient, legal and less controversial organisation in which to pursue their aims. Upon the closure of the notorious Nordic League at the start of the war all members were advised to join the PPU,5 which found its ranks rapidly swelling with fascist sympathisers. Many rank-and-file PPU members would no doubt have been horrified by this infiltration of fascists, but there is little doubt that leaders of both movements worked in conjunction on the peace campaign. No stranger to PPU meetings was John Beckett, who as well as being a former Labour MP had been a leading member of the BUF and the founder of the British People’s Party.6 The severing of cordial relations with Germany saw him throw his considerable talents towards the anti-war movement. Along with Captain Robert Gordon-Canning – another old BUF supporter and key member of the BPP – and Admiral Domvile and several supporters of his now deceased pro-German organisation The Link, Beckett set up the British Council for a Christian Settlement in Europe (BCCSE). Having only set up the BPP in April 1939,7 Beckett placed its full resources behind the new BCCSE,8 giving some indication of the primacy of the anti-war campaign in the minds of many British fascists. Beckett became Secretary, the Duke of Bedford Chairman, Captain Gordon-Canning its treasurer,9 and the operation was based out of Ben Green’s Berkhamstead home.10 Beckett’s journey from Labour MP to prominent fascist was well known, yet despite the obviously fascist origins of the organisation the BCCSE managed to court a broad church of supporters from across the political spectrum. Their Statement on the European Situation, which called for an end to the war, is adorned with a peculiar mix of signatures that ranged from prominent fascist and pro-Nazi sympathisers, through to the Labour MP Richard Stokes. The PPU supported the new endeavour11 as did an assortment of aristocrats such as the Earl of Mar and Lady Stalbridge. While peace campaigning was thrust to the forefront, Britain’s fascist movement by no means completely jettisoned its commitment to antisemitism. It is important to note that during the war years The Britons Publishing Society printed two editions of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, one in 1941 and another in 1942.12 Indeed, antisemitism and peace campaigning were combined. On 23 May 1939 the BPP had launched the People’s Campaign Against War and Usury.13 With ‘usury’ a thinly veiled synonym for Jews, the campaign was an example of how the fascist

28  The unbroken thread

movement saw an intrinsic link between the war and Jews. As difficult as it is to grasp in a post-Holocaust age, the narrative being proposed by Britain’s far right during the war was that it had been fostered by Jews as an act of revenge against the Germans.14 As one Right Club leaflet put it, ‘the stark truth is that this war was plotted and engineered by the Jews for world-power and vengeance’.15 Outside of Beckett and Bedford’s BCCSE there remained active factions on Britain’s far right working to bring an end to the war by exposing its ‘Jewish roots’. Between the start of war and the proscription of the British Union in May 1940, a considerable, if significantly reduced, amount of open and public fascist activity continued. The British Union, ‘Jock’ Houston’s Nationalist Association, the Militant Christian Patriots and even some of the remnants of the Imperial Fascist League16 continued their regular public meetings. Though some speakers significantly tempered their public rhetoric for fear of internment, vociferous and vocal antisemitism was often on display.17 Meanwhile ‘Jock’ Houston of the Nationalist Association could regularly be heard from the platform praising King Edward I for expelling the Jews in 1290, referencing the Protocols of Zion and calling for the deportation of all British Jews to Madagascar.18 Most of these meetings involved between 200 and 500 people with notable exceptions such as the BUF meeting in Bethnal Green in November 1939, which drew around 2,00019 and another at Manchester Free Trade hall in February 1940, which had 2,500 people, 60% of whom were reported to have given the fascist salute.20 However, by June 1940 a combination of public hostility and an increasingly oppressive state all but brought public street meetings to an end,21 and they were not to be seen again on Britain’s streets until 1944. However, anti-war campaigning and public antisemitism persisted despite the start of the war; the first major blow struck against British fascism had been survived. However, the actions of another of Britain’s surviving far-right organisations were to lead to the second major blow, namely the mass expansion of the use of Defence Regulation 18B. The Right Club, formed in May 1939 by the Conservative MP and virulent antisemitic convert Captain Archibald Ramsay, was set up with the primary aim of exposing ‘the activities of organized Jewry’ and to ‘clear the Conservative Party of Jewish influence’.22 The first nine months of the war were transformative for the Right Club with it simultaneously shrinking in size while becoming more extreme. It moved away from its original stated aims of purging the Tory Party, becoming an altogether more subversive organisation that disseminated antisemitic and pro-Nazi propaganda.23 Due to the astute work of Maxwell Knight, a former member of the Fascisti turned MI5 spymaster and three talented female spies, a link between the Right Club  – a cipher clerk at the American Embassy, Tyler Kent  – and the Italian Embassy was uncovered. Kent had been secretly copying documents from the embassy, including secret correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt that revealed Churchill’s requests for help from the Americans. In a climate of non-interventionism in America, backed up by statute in the form of the Neutrality Acts of the 1930s, the revelations of secret discussions with Churchill would expose the ever-increasing gap between Roosevelt’s public declarations of isolationism and

The unbroken thread  29

his secret work to increase aid to Britain. The possible ramifications of a leak of this kind were explosive and could well have scuppered what became the Lend Lease Act in 1941. However, Tyler Kent was arrested on 20 May 1940 and found with 1,500 stolen documents. Shocked by the news and unsure of the scope and danger of the newly found fifth column, the Cabinet and MI5 acted swiftly, dramatically enlarging the number of fascists detained under the draconian Defence Regulation 18B, and thus, by July 1940 public and open displays of fascism had all but come to an end.

The struggle on the inside: the effect of internment The expansion of the number of people interned following the Tyler Kent Affair posed another significant threat to the survival of British fascism. However, in converse to what one might assume, it was behind the prison walls where the flame of British fascism was most passionately and successfully nurtured. The clanging of closing cell doors was to echo through the decades, and understanding the impact of internment on the victims of Defence Regulation 18B is imperative to understanding the nature of the fascist movement after the war.24 Unsurprisingly, the experience of internment proved to be such an ordeal that some committed and ardent fascists decided to withdraw from active politics once they were released.25 As Nellie Driver put it, ‘Some of them have suffered too much in one way or another, and now they ask to be forgotten’.26 However, little evidence exists of damascene moments where incarceration awakened a fascist to the folly of their beliefs, though one can find examples of fascists who became disillusioned with politics more generally. Reginald Windsor, an active BUF member in Leeds before the war, claimed that he was ‘sick of politics, which have brought me in here and ruined my life’.27 Others such as Mick Clarke, who had been one of Mosley’s ‘old East End boys’, followed suit and ‘settled for a more peaceful life than that which had brought hardship to his middle years’.28 Many had attempted to build a respectable life post-internment and rid themselves of the shame attached to being labelled a fifth column traitor and simply did not want to risk any further affiliation with individuals and groups that might hamper their rehabilitation back into mainstream life.29 But if a large proportion of fascist internees withdrew from active politics due to the effects of Regulation 18B, many did not. For some, locked away in camps at Ascot and Peel, the experience actually served to radicalise them further, forging deeper commitment to the fascist cause. Internment acted like a greenhouse, which helped individuals’ political consciousness blossom and develop. Pulling together fascists from different ranks within the movement and from all over the country provided an opportunity for unprecedented knowledge transfer between members. Ralph Dawson, one-time antiquarian, actor, novelist and detainee, found 18B a most welcome opportunity to meet other fascists: ‘I said it was certainly more of an asset for the people to get together and know one another. . . . I knew practically nobody in the British Union [before internment]’.30 There is little doubt that internment greatly increased the ability to build fascist networks and created an environment where political friendships

30  The unbroken thread

could be forged, which doubtless helped when attempts were made to rebuild the movement after the war. In many ways the prisons and internment camps became schools of fascist learning where political skills were honed and ideological knowledge expanded. Walter Wallace, BU District Leader for Pudsey and Otley before the war, wrote to the notorious antisemite Arnold Leese in 1948 explaining that, ‘Apart from reading before the war I  had some introduction to your views in the exercise-yard of Brixton in the spring of 1942’.31 Rigorous political debate was the norm with many commenting how they missed the intellectual stimulation and verbal jousting.32 Reginald Windsor complained that he must have ‘rest and quiet for as you might realise we have people who drive one crazy with continuous arguments, in fact I have had enough to last me a lifetime’.33 As well as casual conversations and debates there were formal lectures in the camps to help further political awareness and deepen indoctrination. Arthur Beavan noted in his diary that he had, attended lectures by very able men in a lot of subjects it has taught me the value of patience, it has given me an insight to the processes of reasoning of many of my comrades, in fact very little of the time has been wasted, but it will only have been useful if the time ever comes or the opportunity arises in which I can make use of the knowledge.34 Thus, far from isolating fascists from politics, interment created the perfect environment for fascists to meet and debate and thus advance their understanding of the fascist creed and made party collaboration easier than ever before.35 Forcing Britain’s fascist ideologues and activists together created a hothouse effect that provided the opportunity for fascists from all levels of activism and education to be schooled in the faith. The result was often an increased understanding and commitment to ideas for which they had already been interned. As Beavan confirms, It only remains to place on record that, far from discouraging me, This detention has served to make me more determined than was to see that The Cause + The Leader emerge victorious. I consider that I am now more fit to take my place in the ranks of The Leader’s followers.36 One can see parallels with Della Porta’s study of militant radical prisoners in Germany and Italy that similarly found that ‘participating radicals acted as a self-­ reinforcing mechanism to drive radical activists to become increasingly more radical’.37 Francis Hamley, the British Union Propaganda Organiser for South Yorkshire before the war, is one such example. When considering a revision or relaxation of the restrictions on him it was deemed inadvisable because if anything he was ‘a more convinced fascist than ever’.38 Hamley was deeply bitter over his incarceration and treatment, and he was by no means alone in being radicalised by bitterness. In a letter to his wife, the internee Ralph Dawson wrote, ‘It only embitters us, makes our resentment stronger, and increases our unfailing purpose to overthrow

The unbroken thread  31

the system’.39 For many resentment was the fuel that fed their postwar activism. As Simpson stated in In the Highest Degree Odious, ‘There is absolutely nothing to equal persecution for consolidating ideological beliefs’.40 However, for the most violent and extreme interwar antisemites, often those outside the ranks of the BU, further radicalisation was hardly possible. For these people internment often simply confirmed and vindicated already firmly held beliefs. Put simply, for those committed to their belief in the Jewish world conspiracy, their imprisonment without trial was nothing short of definitive proof of their conspiratorial assertions. Their imprisonment was not a precautionary measure against possible fifth column activity but rather punishment for their antiJewish work.41 The best example of this reaction came from the most notorious British antisemite of the 20th century, Arnold Leese. In his viscerally antisemitic tract The Jewish War of Survival, in which he reiterates his argument that World War II was fought for Jewish interests, he declared the cause of his incarceration under 18B to be Jewish power, writing, ‘I was jailed so that I might not divulge to others the result of careful investigation into the menace of the Jew’.42 For Leese, internment did not end his fascist beliefs but rather irrevocably confirmed them and his commitment to his mission. Leese was not alone in rationalising internment through a conspiratorial antisemitic lens. Captain A.H.M. Ramsay, leader of the Right Club, believed that of all those interned the ‘one common denominator was they opposed Jewish power over this country in general’.43 Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, founder of The Link, argued that interment ‘is clearly outlined in the Protocols. . . . Everything points to the fact that World Jewery is closely connected with the conception and conduct of this regulation’.44 He viewed 18B as the 20th-century version of Shylock’s pound of flesh and hoped that it would prove as ill-fated for the modern day Jewish conspirators as it did for the moneylender in Shakespeare’s play. If one is to properly understand the postwar British fascist movement and the Union Movement in particular, it is necessary to grasp the ability of collective persecution to forge deep unity. Internment during the war years resulted in a newfound inter-activist solidarity and the solidification of even deeper collective devotion to their leader, Oswald Mosley. Graham Macklin has written about how ‘ “coterie charisma” ensured the survival and comparative triumph of fascist ideology over adversity”45 while Della Porta has explained how radicals in prison are ‘bound together by personal ties and by their shared activist experiences’.46 Internment resulted in an unprecedented new loyalty towards Oswald Mosley from BU internees. For those locked in Brixton with Mosley being in such close proximity to their leader and sharing a common experience was to solidify their loyalty for a lifetime. Charlie Watts wrote of the effect of being interned with Mosley in his autobiographical account of internment, It Has Happened Here, stating: The door opened and out stalked The Leader. . . . I dropped my can of porridge and grabbed hold of his hand, saying how pleased I was to see him. . . . I can honestly say that I  felt prouder at that moment than on any other

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occasion in my life; just to know and feel that I was sharing with the Leader one of his greatest triumphs, perhaps the greatest.47 Such an experience was not uncommon. While also in Brixton Andy Burn said to Watts that the day he was interned was undoubtedly the proudest day of his life; that he considered it a great honour and privilege to be considered dangerous and important enough to be worthy of incarceration in the same prison and for the same reason as that great Englishman – Mosley.48 Many of the internees were forever bound in loyalty to their Leader, and as Macklin has rightly pointed out, ‘Long after their commitment to fascism had waned, many fascists remained personally loyal to Mosley’.49 This unbreakable loyalty forged through internment goes some way to explaining why Mosley was able to relaunch his political career after the war. Another key part of the increased unity and loyalty was the internee’s development of a common martyr complex born out of collective persecution for his or her beliefs. The internee’s belief that honour was accrued by willing sacrifice is abundantly clear in a letter from a released detainee to Frank Wiseman who remained interned. It stated: Do you realise that you are a member of the “epic generation”? – In case you do not allow me to prove some: You, Frank, one of God’s souls have sacrificed greatly + even dared all that Britain might live?  .  .  . From the depths of a worldly complacency you cheerfully but heroically spurned the secure tranquillity of a schoolmaster’s made by virtue of principles that have captured your heart! . . . What can I say to you? Are there words that can do justice to such a spirit!?50 The potential to create martyrs of the internees was a concern recognised by some at the time. Even non-fascists could see that locking people away for their beliefs without trial or sentence was a dangerous game. Writing in the Sunday Pictorial Stuart Campbell stated, ‘We are turning every one of the victims into martyrs. . . . When we have won the war we shall have to let them all out again . . . they might get out in a body and use their martyred zeal to inflame the civil population’. Campbell’s article showed astute foresight, as this was exactly what the internees attempted to do. One can better understand the ability of internment to cause a martyr mentality by drawing on more contemporary studies relating to modern day political prisoners and looking beyond the field of British fascist studies. The similarities between the effects on and the behaviours of fascist internees and modern Nazi and Islamist prisoners are striking. The Anti-Defamation League’s 2002 report on the activities of

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Nazis and white nationalists in the American prison system explains the process and effect of prisoners perceiving themselves as martyrs: Knowing that many of their allies in the free world regard them as martyrs, extremists entering prison are often imbued with a false sense of importance that encourages them to continue their associations and to become active within the prison walls. White supremacists and anti-government activists are told by followers that they are “political prisoners,” “concentration camp inmates” or “prisoners of war.”51 There was certainly a ‘false sense of importance’ displayed by many fascist internees with some even claiming to be the ‘government in exile’52 or alternatively so dangerous and subversive that the worldwide Jewish conspiracy had chosen to lock them away.53 Furthermore the use of the term ‘concentration camps’ to describe Ascot and Peel was commonplace,54 and the fact that Jeffrey Hamm’s postwar group, the League of Ex-Servicemen, allowed in interned fascists who had not seen active service with the military55 shows that many within the movement did perceive internees as ‘prisoners of war’. With internees being celebrated as martyrs it is worth noting the influence of interment on those British fascists who for various reasons were not swept up in the 18B net. Macklin has written about the ‘guilt and stigma’56 felt by those who avoided internment and mentions Dorothy, Viscountess Downe who felt ‘so ashamed to be free!’57 Dorothy was not alone in lamenting her freedom. Gladys Walsh, Women’s BU District Leader for Limehouse in London, also admitted she sometimes wished to be ‘among my own people’.58 Freedom also came with suspicion from comrades who had not been so lucky.59 The whiff of collusion with the state was attached to those comrades who remained outside the walls of Brixton and Holloway and was also extended to those who were perceived to have been released early.60 It is no surprise then that many who remained in the movement after the war wore internment like a war medal and a badge of honour. The common experience of persecution and the resulting martyr complexes converged with the deepened sense of comradely solidarity to forge a myth of internment that played a significant role in the movement’s survival and the activists’ desire to re-launch the movement almost straight away despite the crushing of continental fascism. However, while 18B ensured Mosley and British fascism would never again threaten mainstream success, it also simultaneously guaranteed the movement’s survival due to an increasingly loyal and committed group of activists. An autograph book kept by G.R. Merriman during his internment at Brixton, Walton and Ascot, started with a lengthy quotation from Mosley’s 1938 speech Comrades in Struggle, in which Mosley bellowed, ‘Together in Britain we have lit a flame that the ages shall not extinguish. Guard that sacred flame my brother Blackshirts until it illumines Britain and lights again the path of mankind’.61

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Just as organised British fascism did not die outside of the internment camps, nor did attempts to ‘guard the sacred flame’ end inside them. The Hail Mosley and F’Em All Association (H.M.F.E.A.), for example, was formed in the Ascot detention camp with the stated aim of keeping alive the spirit of ‘Britain First’. Charlie Watts, its founder, was worried that ‘The words of our Leader, “To give all and to dare all” became a mockery. The “sacred flame” of British Union was slowly dying’.62 In short, ‘a rot had set in at Ascot’.63 He was concerned at the amount of deviation from the strict dogmatic positions of BU policy64 and desired a return to strong centralised control. The resulting organisation, H.M.F.E.A., worked to keep doctrinal discipline and party loyalty strong, proving a success on both counts. The group celebrated Mosley’s birthday and the anniversary of the formation of the BU, as well as holding meetings where patriotic BU songs were sung and poetry recited, all with the aim of keeping the semblance of an organisation together and ready for Mosley to assume control over upon their release. In a memorial book presented to F.C. Wiseman by Charlie Watts as a ‘reminder of those dark days at Ascot’,65 fellow detainee James L. Battersby wrote, When the democrats imprisoned us and banned our Movement, they thought they had broken not only our political machine, but the spirit of social patriotism within us. The flame of British Union is eternal. . . . But there are moments when the Sacred Flame burns low, when those to whom it is entrusted lag in trusteeship and service. It was thus at Ascot Concentration Camp in September 1940. And it was then that a group of men within our ranks, patriots and revolutionaries, determined that the time had come to reinvigorate the spirit of the Movement, to demonstrate not only to our captors but to our members themselves that no matter what futile legislation the government passed, the inspiration and vitality of the Movement stronger yet under the fires of persecution and imprisonment.66 This passage is typical of others in both its tone and sentiment. The image of the sacred flame is ever present as is the notion of radicalisation and unity forged through persecution. Merriman’s autograph book is full of comments with similar such sentiments such as, ‘Our Victory is Assured’; ‘British Union still lives, Mosley still leads, On with the fight’; ‘The greater the struggle – the greater the victory’; ‘The Blackshirts will march again! Hail Mosley!’67 The H.M.F.E.A. Association is a concrete expression of the effects of internment on internees as discussed earlier. It showed that even in the face of adversity and state oppression British fascism survived within prison walls ready to reorganise and relaunch on the outside after their release.

The struggle on the outside While most of the upper echelons of the British fascist movement were imprisoned following the extension of Defence Regulation 18B in 1940 it was only ever a fraction of those sympathetic to fascism and Mosley before the war. In July 1939

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Mosley had addressed a crowd at Earls Court of just over 20,000 people,68 yet at the height of internment only around 800 BUF members were detained. Some areas were hardly affected, with fewer than 40 fascists arrested in Manchester, just six in Hull and only four in Kent.69 In addition, as Stephen Dorril points out, the arrests were carried out indiscriminately and in a haphazard way meaning that it was not unusual for non-active members to be interned while some of the most active were not.70 While many British fascists would have been conscripted, thereby severely curtailing their opportunities to engage in politics, and others no doubt may have changed their minds with the commencement of hostilities, a great many of Britain’s interwar fascists remained at large even after June 1940. Disproportionately high among those who avoided detainment were fascists of aristocratic background, chief among them the Duke of Bedford. Thus, even after the expansion of 18B resulting in further arrests, there were sufficient numbers of non-interned fascists who were able to continue their activities. One manner in which non-interned fascists continued their activism was through a widespread national campaign of fascist and antisemitic chalking and graffiti across the country, primarily perpetrated under the cover of the blackout. Found in Derby, Manchester, Newcastle, Ramsgate, Glasgow, Leeds and London, the graffiti included everything from standard BUF graffiti such as ‘Read ActionBritain First’ through to more elaborate antisemitic slogans such as ‘Jewish Refugees feed on the fat of the land whilst British unemployed starve’; ‘The Jew Fills the Pocket- Britain Fills the Grave’ and simply ‘P.J’. for Perish Judah.71 The Board of Deputies Defence Committee organised a clean-up operation that between March and June of 1940 cleared nearly 500 antisemitic slogans and despite persistent repainting effectively eradicated the problem.72 In addition to graffiti a whispering campaign was orchestrated by antisemites. For example, within a few hours of the Bethnal Green disaster in 1943, when 173 people were crushed in a stampede during an air raid, a rumour spread that it had been caused by Jews. In reality the shelter was not used by Jews as their community was on the other side of Bethnal Green.73 There was also a persistent slur that Jews were black market profiteers, a rumour that continued to be held against them even after the war. In 1947 a speaker on Clapham Common claimed that Jews were: ‘Filthy lice, underhanded swine, black marketers corrupting the children of the country’.74 The irony of the claims that Jews profited from the black market is that there is evidence of fascists being prosecuted for the same crime. Peter Forster, a member of the Kensington Branch of the UM who translated fascist material into French, was sentenced for obtaining coupons for 77,000 gallons of petrol and selling them on.75 However, recently released MI5 documents have revealed how far many of those fascists who avoided internment were willing to go in engaging in fifth column activity. In addition to the Tyler Kent Affair, it has now been revealed that, in the words of MI5, the number of possible Nazi sympathisers willing to pass information onto the Germans during the war years amounted ‘certainly to scores and probably to hundreds’.76 An MI5 agent, alias Jack King, acting as a Gestapo

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agent, infiltrated pro-German networks, primarily in the South-East of England, and gathered a wealth of information on individuals ‘ready to assist the enemy by supplying information, committing sabotage and spreading pro-Nazi propaganda’.77 The extremely successful operation began as a limited investigation into the German company Siemens Schuckert and expanded when surveillance drew attention to the wife of an interned former member of the BUF, Marita Perigoe. King, posing as a Gestapo agent, then used Perigoe to find out information on and build a network among her contacts who were sympathetic to the Nazis. There are examples such as the BUF sympathiser Hilda Leech who despite being described as ‘unstable and neurotic’ was willing to pass on information about the top-secret development of propeller-less jet propulsion aeroplanes.78 There was also Edgar Whitehead, another former BUF member, who was attempting to pass on secret information about amphibian tank trials to the Spanish Embassy79 and Eileen Gleave, a BUF member since 1936, who ‘volunteered to provide food and hiding for Germans in time of invasion’.80 Furthermore, there are examples of former 18B detainees and relations of detainees also seeking to engage in pro-Nazi activities such as Ernest Fare-Prescott who had been interned in 1940 but was released by the Advisory Committee. Ena Blunk, the wife of internee Freddie Blunk, explained how she was willing to commit sabotage at a munitions factory that she worked in.81 This newly released information has revealed how extensive the possible fifth column threat was and the number of domestic fascists involved. In addition to the actively pro-German activity of some British fascists was the less subversive desire to continue to organise and express their political beliefs. This was done by entering and influencing existing political organisations and by creating new and overtly far-right groups. Some gravitated towards the Social Credit Movement. Social Credit was an inter-disciplinary reform programme formed by C.H. Douglas in the 1920s and was essentially a monetary reform idea based on an alleged ‘Christian economic democracy’82 with a view to dispersing economic and political power to the individual. Another outlet for Britain’s fascist diaspora during the war years was Robert J. Scrutton’s People’s Common Law Parliament, which was formed in 1940 and held its first National Assembly in London in November 1942.83 The organisation struggled to grow for the first two years of its existence; however this changed in 1942 with an influx of fascists and former BUF members.84 Only weeks after the Assembly on 17 December 1942 the PCLP was described as ‘fascist and defeatist’ and was accused of ‘seditious activity’ by an MP.85 The headquarters of the group were paid for by the long term supporter of Britain’s far right, the Duke of Bedford,86 though he felt it best to remain a silent supporter as ‘There are, of course, still some people in the peace movement who, while keen on ending the war, are suspicious of me being a “pro-Fascist” ’.87 Others were less cautious, with an array of ex-BUF members attending meetings at which support for those in internment was expressed and Jew-bating was reported. However, for some non-interned fascists, bit part involvement in non-fascist organisations failed to quench their political thirst, meaning some found outlets for their continued commitment to the movement via a number of groups that

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emerged during the war years. The most prominent of these wartime organisations where those linked to the prewar British Union. The 18B Detainees (British) Aid Fund was ostensibly a charitable organisation, registered under the 1940 War Charities Act, designed to help the families of those fascists who were detained and former detainees upon their release. The group was organised and managed entirely by former BU members but went to great lengths to avoid all illegal activity that could result in it being shut down. That said, as MI5 pointed out at the time, the fund was a useful means of consolidating the remaining fascist ranks and keeping in contact with the former BU membership.88 More openly political was the 18B Publicity Council, an organisation from which the Aid Fund was careful to distance itself.89 Formed in October 194290 and holding its first public meeting on 6 December 1942,91 the Publicity Council was designed to ‘actively campaign for the rehabilitation of fascist detainees whose reputations lay in tatters’.92 The first public meeting, attended by around 700 people, was made up overwhelmingly of members, associates and sympathisers of the BU, and reports indicate that fascist salutes and cries were seen and heard, including one cry of Perish Judah.93 In the absence of their now illegal BU, the Publicity Council provided both a cause around which to rally and a fascist political organisation with which to affiliate. The Publicity Council was by no means the only option for malcontent and frustrated British fascists with a desire to maintain their political activism. Edward Godfrey’s British National Party (BNP), formed slightly earlier than the Council in August 1942, provided an alternative. Perhaps the largest difference was the BNP’s refusal to accept Oswald Mosley as the leader of the movement. However, the numerous policy similarities were striking, including calls for a negotiated peace with Hitler.94 This led Mr Ivor Thomas, Labour MP for Keighley, to ask the Home Secretary if he was aware of the BNP as ‘this Party appeared to be a revival of the British Union of Fascists’.95 Confined almost entirely to London and the Home Counties96 the BNP’s activity amounted to little more than the distribution of a handful of leaflets and public meetings. However, with the war still raging this was enough to cause a significant public outcry.97 So vocal was the opposition that on 23 April  1943 Godfrey closed the party and attributed its demise to the attacks made on it and ‘the way in which we have been identified with the British Union of Fascists’.98 In its place Godfrey launched the English Nationalist Alliance (ENA) with the former BPP member Ben Greene as Vice Governor with an inaugural luncheon on 15 June 1943. However, despite financial support from the Duke of Bedford99 the ENA was stillborn, and when Godfrey fought the Acton by-election in December 1943 he received just 258 votes.

After internment By the middle of 1943 only 429 people remained detained under DR18B. Those who had not been detained had done their job by keeping the flickering flame of fascism alive, and now it was time to ready the movement in preparation for the end of the war. The first major attempt to bring together the disparate remnants

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of Britain’s fascist movement was headed up by A.K. Chesterton and came to be known as the National Front after Victory (NF after V). Chesterton spent time in East Africa during the war before returning to Britain in 1943 following a collapse that resulted from malaria and gastric illness compounded by a relapse into alcoholism.100 His period in Africa left his enthusiasm for fascism undimmed, and upon his return he began to start again. As early as 12 August 1943 Chesterton was holding meetings with a view to creating a militant anti-Jewish group, which at first was to be called the British Officers Freedom League.101 After many months of meetings and discussions the National Front was finally launched at a meeting on 24 November 1944 with an impressive array of Britain’s interwar fascists present, including the Earl of Portsmouth, Major General J.F.C. Fuller and numerous former detainees. Despite its size and short-lived nature, the group is significant in the career of Chesterton, “as it represented his first real attempt to found a mass political movement following the collapse of the BUF’.102 The group was to spend many months arguing over its programme with some feeling uncomfortable about Chesterton’s radical proposals and his insistence on publicly discussing the ‘Jewish question’. Chesterton intended for the NF to spring into action on the night after victory over Germany and to cover London in chalking reading, ‘Now Germany is Defeated, Hang Churchill and Deal with the Jews’.103 His insistence on such an openly antisemitic programme and his proposed tactics ‘implicit connection to subversion, social upheaval and violence’104 caused many to leave the fledgling organisation, and the group had fewer members after its first year than when it had started, forcing Chesterton to water down his proposed ‘aims and objectives’. LeCras correctly summarises the NF as ‘an exercise in nostalgic fascism, a failed attempt to rekindle the spirit and function of the interwar movement under a different guise’.105 The efforts of Chesterton and the NF were scuppered by the work of the Jewish Board of Deputies who reactivated their mole and infiltrated the organisation. They then blew the whistle on the emerging threat via a question in the House of Lords. Soon after the question by Lord Vansittart, Chesterton called a meeting at which he rightly drew attention to the likelihood of a spy amidst their ranks and called for the National Front to be shut down.106 However, despite its failure, the NF was a firm example that there was a hunger – in certain, small circles – to reorganise and rebuild the movement and that British fascism had indeed survived its darkest days between 1940 and 1942. Another, perhaps more important organisation that emerged while active hostilities still raged on the continent was Jeffrey Hamm’s British League of Ex-Servicemen and Women. Discussions to amalgamate the League with Chesterton’s NF after V, with a view to exiting the war years with a united movement, failed, but while the NF floundered and then folded the League of Ex-Servicemen survived into the postwar period. Formed in 1937 as a non-fascist ex-servicemen’s organisation, it succumbed to a fascist coup in late 1944 by Jeffrey Hamm, a former BUF member107 who had been detained while working in the colonial service as a travelling teacher in the Falkland Islands. He was eventually returned to England,

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via South Africa, to take up service in the army. His remaining fascist sympathies resulted in him being transferred four times to make sure he never saw active service, before he was eventually discharged, unbeknown to him for spreading fascist propaganda amongst the ranks.108 Hamm’s resolve had been stiffened by internment and his commitment to Mosley strengthened through a common martyrdom. Once under his control the League became a vehicle for active fascist street politics until Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement eventually subsumed it in 1948. So despite what one might presume, outside the high walls of Brixton and Holloway Prisons and the barbed wire of the internment camps, British fascism struggled on and managed to survive. Free fascists, though severely curtailed by circumstance, kept British fascism alive and operational throughout the war years and from 1943 onward seriously began to reorganise, ready for the postwar relaunch.

Unique? A transnational context The question that remains is whether the British fascist movement that emerged from the war years was unique when compared with other postwar European movements. In some senses it patently was, not least because of how remarkably intact it managed to remain. With the exception of Francoism in Spain, British fascism avoided the destruction wrought upon its ideological cousins in continental Europe. While the major European fascist movements in Italy and Germany were in many ways destroyed during the war, Britain’s tiny movement was cocooned away in internment camps, resulting in a continuity of organisation and structure that was unthinkable in occupied Europe. In addition, the very survival of Mosley into the postwar period and his continued political activity is also relatively unique. Bar Franco in Spain, all of the big names of European fascism, not least Hitler and Mussolini, had left the stage, in one way or another. Thus British fascism had not been decapitated like its European counterparts and entered the postwar period with a figurehead around which the remnants of the movement could gather. On the continent, those prominent fascist leaders that did survive were often preoccupied with their attempts to evade capture and prosecution. Though there were postwar Nazi organisations in West Germany and Austria, their impact was limited. Organisations such as Odessa, the clandestine network of former SS officers, specialised in little more than trying to help Nazis escape undetected rather than reform or organise. Thus, unlike Britain, the individuals engaged in the resurrection of fascist movements in Europe were by and large marginal figures, described by Paul Wilkinson as ‘middle-range officials and local party organisers’.109 This absence of the vast majority of the major interwar fascist leaders resulted in a newfound prominence and cachet on the international fascist scene for Oswald Mosley. The end of the war and the defeat of the Axis powers saw Mosley go from being a small fish in a big pond to a big fish in a small pond, as he became one of the most prominent European fascists after Franco. This enhanced his ability to promote and foster pan-European alliances as part of his ‘Europe a Nation’ ideology and no doubt helped Mosley launch his National Party of Europe, the

40  The unbroken thread

high point of which was the Conference of Vienna in 1962, which saw representatives attend from dozens of fascist and Nazi groups including from the Deutsche Reichspartei, Jeune Europe and the Mouvement d’Action Civique. While the project failed in the long run it was ‘very much a Mosley affair’,110 and his status as one of the prominent surviving fascists helped bring this disparate group of fascists together, and even the MSI, which had a membership of almost 80,000, far larger than the UM, sent Giovanni Lanfree. However, while the distinct experience of the war years and Mosley’s survival marks British fascism out, it would be wrong to categorise postwar British fascism as unique in all aspects. All postwar fascist movements were attempting to re-launch their often hated and discredited doctrines in a scarred and hostile environment. Britain had won the war and remained unoccupied with the result being that anti-fascism became part of the national identity beyond the way it did in Italy, Germany or Spain. However, fascists in all European countries faced very similar hurdles, namely the need to throw off the stench of criminality that was attached to a political ideology indelibly linked to a destructive and traumatic war and the systematic mass murder of six million Jews. Some, as in the case of Britain and France, attempted to separate the ideology from the Holocaust through a process of malicious historical revisionism while others, such as in Italy, pointed to the difference between Italian and German fascism. The solutions sometimes varied from country to country, but the problem of attempting to relaunch a discredited political genus was uniform across Europe. Furthermore, as with the British case, it was the experience of the various fascist movements during the war years that shaped the nature of their postwar incarnations. It is not just in Britain that one should look to the events of 1939–1945 to understand the birth and nature of the postwar movements. When discussing Italy, Andrea Mammone writes, even if only a minor phenomenon, the analysis of clandestine fascism (along with the whole period 1943–46) is important for a more rounded understanding of the immediate postwar establishment of the foremost extreme right-wing party, the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI).111 The effect of the war years on Italian fascists has several striking similarities to Britain: For many “true” believers, however, fascism was far from dead. . . . They could not betray the Duce, they had to fight for his doctrine. In other words, fascists did not want to surrender to the new anti-fascist society. The desire for revenge was indeed very strong among war veterans and fascist believers.112 The belief that fascism never died and the notion of fighting on for the Leader, Mosley in Britain, Mussolini in Italy, rather than the doctrine, are commonalities, as is the emotion of revenge as a driver of postwar activism.

The unbroken thread  41

Notes 1 Secretary Report, 3 October 1939 (Neville Laski), Board of Deputies Defence Archive, Wiener Library, London (henceforth BODA), 1658/1/1/2. 2 Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to the National Front (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 139. 3 National Archives (henceforth NA), KV 2/1345. 4 Survey of Fascist Activity in London To-Day, n.d., BODA, 1658/1/1/2, 46. 5 Note dated 3 November 1939, NA HO 45/25392. 6 Francis Beckett, The Rebel Who Lost His Cause, the Tragedy of John Beckett, MP (London: London House, 1999), 160. 7 Special Branch Report on BPP, 7 October 1939, NA HO 144/21538. 8 BPP Message to members and friends, NA HO 144/21538. 9 Special Branch Report, 7 October 1939, NA HO 144/21538. 10 Beckett, The Rebel Who Lost His Cause, 160. 11 Anonymous to Sir Ernest Holderness, Bart., 3 November 1939, NA HO 45/25392. 12 Graham Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley and the Resurrection of British Fascism After 1945 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 30. 13 Ex-Labourites and Pacifists in New Party, Catholic Herald, 26 May 1939. 14 Secretary’s Report, Minutes, 2 January 1940, BODA, 1658/1/1/2, 110. 15 NA HO 144/22454/109. Quoted in Richard Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, The Right Club, and British Antisemitism 1939–1940 (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 60. 16 Report, 14 March 1940, BODA, 1658/5/1/1. 17 For example see: Report of meeting at Ridley Road, Sunday, 5 November, BODA, 1658/5/1/1. 18 East End Observer Reports on Antisemitism at Fascist Meetings, 1939–1940, BODA, 1658/5/1/1; Secretary Report, July 1939 (Neville Laski), BODA, 1658/1/1/2. 19 East End Observer Reports on Antisemitism at Fascist Meetings, 1939–1940, BODA, 1658/5/1/1. 20 Report on Mosley Meeting at Manchester, 4 February 1940, BODA, 1658/1/1/2. 21 East End Observer Reports on Antisemitism at Fascist Meetings, 1939–1940, 3 June 1940, BODA, 1658/5/1/1. 22 A.H.M. Ramsay, The Nameless War (London: Britons Publishing Society, 1952), 103–104. 23 NA HO 144/22454/87, cited in Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, 140. 24 For the fullest account of fascist internment see: A.W. Brian Simpson, In the Highest Degree Odious, Detention Without Trial in Wartime Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); see also Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, 157–202. 25 George Thayer, The British Political Fringe: A  Profile (London: Anthony Blond, 1965), 40. 26 Nellie Driver, From the Shadows of Exile, Rawnsley British Union of Fascists Collection, J.B Priestley Library, University of Bradford, Bradford (henceforth RBUFC), 1/A, 117. 27 Summary of Information subsequent to Reginald Windsor’s Detention, 8 December 1943, NA, KV 2/680. 28 Last Post: In His Centenary Year Mosley’s Old East End Boys Laid to Rest (Mick Clarke), 16 November 1996, No. 47, Hope Not Hate Archive (henceforth HNH). 29 Vincent (?) to Robert (Bob) Saunders, 17 July  1946, Robert Saunders Papers, Sheffield University Library, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield (henceforth RSP), 119/ c10/113; Letter from Jack to Robert Saunders, 21/11/46, RSP, 119/c10/141. 30 Advisory Committee interview of Ralph Murrell Dawson, 4 September 1942, 10, NA KV 2/2970. 31 Wallace to Arnold Leese, 9 November 1948, NA, KV 2/901. 32 Illegible to Frank Wiseman, 10 April 1943, Private Papers of F.C. Wiseman, Imperial War Museum Archive, London (henceforth FCW), 86/1/1.

42  The unbroken thread

33 Letter from Reginald Windsor to Wife, 7 June 1943, MI5 Report, 28 August 1943, NA, KV 2/680. 34 Diary Entry, 26 October 1941, Arthur Beavan: Diary Entries From: 12 May 1941–26 June October  1941, Defence Regulation 18B Research Papers, Sheffield University Library, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield (henceforth DR18B), 3/1, MS 287. 35 Special Branch Report to the Chief Constable Canterbury City Police, 9 June 1941, NA, KV 2/2970. 36 Special Branch Report to the Chief Constable Canterbury City Police, 9 June 1941, NA, KV 2/2970. 37 D. Della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), cited in Elizabeth Mulcahy, Shannon Merrington and Peter Bell, ‘The Radicalisation of Prison Inmates: Exploring Recruitment, Religion and Prisoner Vulnerability’, Journal of Human Security, 9:1, 2013, 8. 38 Francis Joseph Hamley, Security Service File, NA, KV 2/683. 39 Ralph Murrell Dawson to Wife quoted in Letter from S.H. Noakes to Miss J. Williams of the Home Office Advisory Committee, 1 September 1941, NA, KV 2/2970. 40 Simpson, In the Highest Degree Odious, 257. 41 Arnold S. Leese, Out of Step: Events in the Two Lives of an Anti-Jewish Camel-Doctor (Guilford: Carmac, 1951), 61. 42 Arnold S. Leese, The Jewish War of Survival (Uckfield, Sussex: Historical Review Press, 1945), 5. 43 Captain A.H.M. Ramsay, The Nameless War (Uckfield: The Print Factory, n.d.), 68. 44 Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, From Admiral to Cabin Boy (Uckfield, Sussex: The Historical Review Press, 2008), 73. 45 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 11. 46 Della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence and the State. 47 Charlie Watts, It Has Happened Here: The Experience of a Political Prisoner in British Prisons and Concentration Camps During the Fifth Column Panic of 1940/41. Unpublished Autobiography, British Union Collection, Sheffield University Library, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield (henceforth BUC), 5/8 MS 199, 9. 48 Watts, It Has Happened Here, 10. 49 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 11. 50 Alec to Frank Wiseman, 12 June 1943, FCW, 86/1/1. 51 Anti-Defamation League, Dangerous Convictions: An Introduction to Extremist Activities in Prisons (New York: Anti-Defamation League, 2002), 51. 52 Bob Row to Francis Beckett, 10 June 1997, John Beckett Collection, Sheffield University Library, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield (henceforth JBC), MS 238, File 8. 53 Leese, The Jewish War of Survival, 5. 54 Booklet presented to F.C. Wiseman by leader of Ascot camp C.F. Watts, 28 June 1941, FCW, 86/1/1, 1. 55 S.R. Report, 7 February 1945, NA, KV 6/3. 56 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 12. 57 Dorothy, Lady Downe to Lady Redesdale, n.d. but 1940, Oswald Mosley Papers/Diana Mosley Deposit, Box 16 held University of Birmingham Library, cited in Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 12. 58 Gladys Walsh Remembers-Gladys Walsh Remembered, Comrade, 51, August 1999, 5, HNH. 59 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 12. 60 John Charnley discusses the possibility that Tommy Moran was released early to deliberately cause disaffection among the remaining detainees. See John Charnley, Blackshirts and Roses (London: Black House, 2012), 111. See also, Driver, From the Shadows of Exile, 68. 61 Comrades in Struggle by Oswald Mosley (Speech given in June 1938), quoted in Autograph Book in Private Papers of G.R. Merriman, Imperial War Museum, London (henceforth GRM), 01/28/1. 62 Watts, It Has Happened Here, 58.

The unbroken thread  43

6 3 Watts, It Has Happened Here, 56. 64 Watts, It Has Happened Here, 57. 65 Booklet presented to F.C. Wiseman by leader of Ascot camp C.F. Watts, 28 June 1941, FCW, 86/1/1. 66 ‘The Spirit of the British Union Lives On’ by James L. Battersby, page 23–24 in Booklet presented to F.C. Wiseman by leader of Ascot camp C.F. Watts, 28 June 1941, FCW, 86/1/1. 67 All quotes from Autograph book, GRM, 01/28/1. 68 Special Branch estimate, just 11,000 in PRO HO 144/21281/150, 20,000, cited in Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, 86; Dave Renton, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000), 20. 69 All figures in Renton, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s, 23; Kent number in D. Turner, Fascism and Anti-Fascism in the Medway Towns 1927–40 (Rochester: Kent Anti-Fascism Committee, 1993), 40. 70 Stephen Dorril, Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (London: Viking, 2006), 502. 71 BODA, 1658/1/1/2. 72 Secretary’s Report, June 1940, BODA, 1658/1/1/2, 184. 73 Sidney Salomon, ‘Antisemitism in Great Britain’, Paper presented to International Conference of Christians and Jews, Conference on Antisemitism in Europe, at Seelisberg, Lake of Lucerno, 30 July–5 August 1947, 5. England Contacts and Data File, Avendis Derounian Collection National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, Belmont, MA (NAASR from now on). 74 Lionel Rose, Survey of Open-Air Meetings Held by Pro-Fascist Organisations, April–October 1947: Factual Survey No. 2 (London: McCorquodale & Co., 1948), 28. 75 Report titled ‘Mosley Man in Blackmarket Deals’, England – Catholics, London Misc File, NAASR. 76 The S.R. Case, NA, KV 2/3800. 77 Postwar Applications of a Case Involving a Group of Disloyal Persons in Great Britain, NA, KV 2/3800. 78 Illegible title, July 1942, NA, KV 2/3800. 79 Illegible title, July 1942, NA, KV 2/3800. 80 Illegible title, July 1942, NA, KV 2/3800. 81 Illegible title, July 1942, NA, KV 2/3800. 82 Typescript article on right-wing groups in Britain during WWII, n.d., 1943, David Spector Misc Papers, Wiener Library, London (henceforth DSMP), 610/12. 83 Typescript article on right-wing groups in Britain during WWII, n.d., 1943, DSMP, 610/12. 84 Tony Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice: Antisemitism in British Society During the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 33. 85 W.R. Hipwell, ‘Beware the Anti-Semites’, Reveille, 6 October 1945, NA, HO 45/22344. 86 Note on Robert Scrutton and the School of Practicing Citizenship, 11 June 1947, NA, HO 45/22344. 87 Duke of Bedford to Mr Scrutton, 14 September 1941, Wiener Library, 711/1–13. 88 Report of Meeting of 18B Aid Fund, 8 March 1942, NA, KV 3/260. 89 Special Branch Report, 13 October 1942, NA, KV 3/260. 90 Special Branch Report, 13 October 1942, NA, KV 3/260. 91 T.M. Shelford to Mr Stamp, n.d., NA, KV 3/260. 92 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 32. 93 T.M. Shelford to Mr Stamp, NA, KV 3/260. 94 Report, 5 March 1943, NA, HO 283/23. 95 ‘The British National Party’, Typescript article on right-wing groups in Britain during WWII, DSMP, 610/12. 96 Report, 5 March 1943, NA, HO 283/23.

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97 Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice, 32. 98 Godfrey Press statement quoted in Typescript article on right-wing groups in Britain during WWII, DSMP, 610/12. 99 Godfrey Press statement quoted in Typescript article on right-wing groups in Britain during WWII, DSMP, 610/12. 100 Luke LeCras, A.K. Chesterton and the Evolution of Britain’s Extreme Right, 1933–1973 (London: Routledge, 2019). 101 Special Branch Report, 19 August 1943, NA, KV 2/1345. 102 LeCras, A.K. Chesterton and the Evolution of Britain’s Extreme Right. 103 Report on meeting, 21 September 1944, NA, KV 2/1347. 104 LeCras, A.K. Chesterton and the Evolution of Britain’s Extreme Right. 105 LeCras, A.K. Chesterton and the Evolution of Britain’s Extreme Right. 106 Report on Meeting, n.d., NA, KV 2/1348. 107 Report on Meeting, 6 November 1944, NA, KV 6/3. 108 NA KV 6/3. 109 Paul Wilkinson, The New Fascists (London: Pan Books, 1983), 66. 110 Dorril, Blackshirt, 623. 111 Andrea Mammone, ‘The Black-Shirt Resistance: Clandestine Fascism in Italy, 1943– 1950”, The Italianist, 27, 2007, 284. 112 Mammone, ‘The Black-Shirt Resistance’, 285.

2 ‘WIR KOMMEN WIEDER’ The re-emergence of fascism 1945–1948

Six years of war and 70 million dead and displaced all failed to cause the death of fascism. As Lionel Rose put it in 1948: fascists from Mosley down to the street-corner fuehrers, and fascist organisations from “The British Union of Fascists” to the more insidious but not less virulently anti-democratic and anti-Semitic “British Protestant League,” were neither converted by the lessons of war nor destroyed by the advent of victory.1 Fascism survived the war years in Britain and re-emerged into a hostile postwar world where the very mention of fascism stirred strong emotions. The war had touched everyone, and for thousands of families fascism was the hated ideology that murdered their son, their family or their friend, that bombed their home and darkened their lives. Similarly, one might presume that as the world learnt of the horrors of the Holocaust antisemitism would die out as people saw the results of this pernicious prejudice. Yet despite this there remained a dedicated few determined to resurrect fascism and antisemitism. Most had been prominent players from the prewar period, thereby showing the unbroken thread of British fascism through the war years and into the late 1940s, and despite the extremely hostile environment there was one glimmer of hope for them: The Palestine Crisis. Within months of the end of the war Britain saw anti-Jewish riots with Jewish shops being smashed and a synagogue burnt to the ground.

The re-emergence and the effect of Palestine Along with the news of Nazi atrocities came victims seeking to make a new home in Britain. As the overwhelming majority of Britons accepted the veracity

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of Nazi atrocity reports one might presume that the reaction to those Jews seeking refuge in the UK would have been one of acceptance and sympathy. While some undoubtedly displayed such empathetic emotions in abundance, such a reaction was by no means universal. The Hampstead anti-alien petition of 1945 shows how a general anti-alien feeling prevalent in the immediate postwar period occasionally had deeply antisemitic undertones.2 Graham Macklin has challenged the perception that the years 1945 and 1946 represented a moment of respite for Jews before the fallout from the situation in Palestine once again worsened the situation. Following the war, partly bolstered by a genuine housing crisis resulting from the extensive German bombing of major British cities, a general antialien sentiment existed that called for refugees to return home so as to provide accommodation for returning ex-servicemen. In Hampstead, North London, this widespread feeling evolved into an organised movement and resulted in a petition of up to 3,000 signatures.3 However, as pointed out by G.R. Mitchell in his monthly reports to the Home Office, ‘The majority of Hampstead’s aliens are, in point of fact, Jewish, and for that reason the petition aroused great interest in fascist circles’.4 Right-wing and fascist groups such as Jeffrey Hamm’s League of Ex-Servicemen and Women, Mrs  B.M. Young’s Women’s Guild of Empire and Sir Waldron Smithers, M.P.’s Fighting Fund for Freedom all offered their assistance to the petitioners.5 The petition is important for understanding that feelings towards Jews in Britain were by no means universally sympathetic and that some viewed them not as victims of Nazi barbarism deserving of help but rather as ‘parasitic interloper[s]’.6 While many people were conflicted, feeling a mixture of sympathy for camp survivors but revulsion at Jewish terrorism in Palestine, the events that followed in Palestine only served to worsen the situation for Jews in Britain. Thanks to a mandate provided by the League of Nations, the Middle Eastern territory of Palestine came under the control of the British Empire from September 1923 until the formation of Israel in May 1948. Britain’s management of Jewish immigration to Palestine after the Holocaust angered many Zionists with some going as far as talking of the ‘fascist British Foreign Office’ and calling for the Jews of the world to realise that ‘the British Foreign Office has taken the place of Hitler as Jewish Enemy No.1’.7 The British withdrawal from Palestine in 1948 caused a significant wave of wider public antisemitism following the terrorist campaign orchestrated by the paramilitary Zionist organisations, Haganah, Irgun and Lehi. On 22 July 1946, the Irgun blew up the British military headquarters in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 and injuring 45.8 Winston Churchill articulated the mood of the war-weary British public by questioning the wisdom of remaining in Palestine and risking further British fatalities.9 The events of 1946 angered many, and the backlash against the British Jewish community soon started. In December an East London synagogue was broken into and sacred scrolls damaged as ‘a warning’ to Jewish terrorists. Someone called a newspaper claiming to be a representative of a group calling itself the National Guard and said, ‘Tonight the synagogue in Lea Bridge Road was destroyed by fire. This is a warning to the terrorists in Palestine that unless their policy against British troops ceases we, the

‘Wir kommen wieder’  47

National Guard, shall meet terror with greater terror’.10 This arson attack was just a taste of what was to come the following year. Despite the ever-growing signals that Britain’s Palestine policy was swiftly moving towards withdrawal, the dissidents in Palestine continued their reign of terror. On 29 July  1947, in what became known as ‘The Sergeants Affair’, the Irgun hanged two kidnapped British soldiers for ‘criminal anti-Hebrew activities’. Their bodies were driven to a eucalyptus grove south of Netanya where their garrotted corpses were left hanging above mines.11 The British media were whipped into a frenzy as typified by the Daily Express, which ran a full-page picture of the two hanging bodies under the title ‘Hanged Britons: Picture that will shock the world’. The possible ramifications for Anglo-Jewry were recognised immediately by the British Jewish community, which strongly condemned the murders.12 The emotive and intensely descriptive media coverage fuelled the public outrage that had been growing since the beginning of the Palestinian crisis. What followed shows the power of affronted nationalism. Just two years after the unspeakable tragedy of the Holocaust had shocked Britain, anti-Jewish riots broke out in major cities including Liverpool, Manchester, London and Glasgow. In some areas, the violence would not have been out of place in 1930s Germany. A wooden synagogue was burnt to the ground in Glasgow, and the Manchester Guardian reported that in Liverpool, ‘over a hundred windows belonging to Jewish owners were shattered’.13 It is clear that at least some of the rioters were active members of fascist organisations such as the Independent Nationalists (IN). Recounting a conversation with the Independent Nationalists leader G.F. Green, John Roy Carlson, an undercover anti-fascist from America, wrote: “I’ve been busy,” he said. “I had to provide bail for some of our members who were arrested and fined”. He was referring to the epidemic of brickthrowing against Jewish shops, the rioting and the beating of Jews in a dozen English cities and towns. “I don’t want to see one brick thrown,” Green muttered between his missing teeth. “I want to see a million. But I’m against too much violence at this time. Bad tactics. We’re not strong enough. Things will get better for us as England goes down. The Jews are bringing on the crisis. When it comes, we’ll be in.”14 Green was not alone in his optimism. The riots excited British antisemites and gave them hope that all might not be lost. Enthused by the news of the riots the notorious antisemite Henry Beamish wrote: ‘These riots prove that at last some people are beginning to get annoyed’.15 Robert Gordon-Canning, another notorious Jew-hater wrote in a private letter, ‘I am surprised that a thousand Jews have not been hanged in London during the last forty-eight hours’.16 His solution to the problems in Palestine was nothing short of pogrom stating that, ‘If I were in Palestine, I’d give my men twenty-four hours to do with the Jews as they wished. Silly humanitarianism’.17 Around this time an American anti-fascist called Avendis Derounian went undercover in the UK and using the alias Charles Morey gained the trust of

48  ‘Wir kommen wieder’

numerous prominent far-right activists. Later – this time using John Roy Carlson, another alias – he wrote of his experiences and recounted a dinner he attended with Gordon-Canning, Maule Ramsay and Admiral Domvile, all prominent British antisemites. His brief description of the evening reveals the frenzied and bloodthirsty feelings that the events in Palestine whipped up in fascist circles: London was aflame over terroristic activities in Palestine and we were at no loss for conversation. Between mouthfuls, the Jew was our diet. Between the appetizer and soup, we minced him. Between the soup and entrée we had him roasted, or hanging from Palestinian lamp-posts. Thereafter the Jew – dead, quartered, massacred – was with us till we left.18 Of course, while the events excited fascists, the rioting was not merely the actions of organised far-right groups but more worryingly was widespread. Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, told the American Secretary of State that as a result of the Sergeants Affair, ‘anti-Jewish feeling in England now was greater than it had been in a hundred years’.19 Britain’s fascists, many of whom had only recently been released from wartime detention under Defence Regulation 18B, saw this as their opportunity to relaunch their political careers. Denis Plimmer, writing in the New York Post in 1947, agreed, stating that, ‘British Fascists nowadays are relying chiefly on Palestine as a stimulant for antisemitism’.20 This was certainly the case with it being easy to find examples such as a street meetings on Gore Road in London in 1947 when a speaker bellowed from the platform that ‘Every Jewish man, women and child in Britain is aiding and abetting the Jewish thugs and murderers in Palestine’.21 The 43 Group, a militant Jewish anti-fascist organisation, fully understood the importance of the Palestinian crisis for the re-emergence of fascist organisations such as those linked to Oswald Mosley. Their newspaper On Guard noted that, ‘The Mosley clique are taking full advantage of the propaganda pouring out about Palestine. It is the greatest ammunition to our Jew-bating would-be Gauleiters’.22 And, ‘One thing at least is certain. British Fascists, no longer able to make blatant antisemitism their “platform” in this country, are turning longing eyes towards troubled Palestine’.23 As Stocker has shown, Mosley sought to capitalise on Zionist violence, ‘denouncing Jews as violent’ and via ‘continuous comparisons between the violent actions of Zionists and the crimes of Nazi Germany against Jews’.24 The British People’s Party, another prewar fascist party seeking revival in the immediate postwar period, also attempted to make hay out of the Palestinian crisis. A 1946 BPP publication argued that even after the Nuremberg trials, the Jews are still not satisfied. Their search for new persecutors has even led them to brand their best friends, the kindly people of Britain, as Neo-Nazis, and to parade the streets of New York under a Union Jack upon which the swastika had been superimposed. Such events, together with the indiscriminate murder of innocent Britons in the King David’s Hotel and elsewhere, although they do not excuse the last wild frenzy of the Nazis, at least suggests that the Jews are not the easiest people in the world to accommodate.25

‘Wir kommen wieder’  49

Unsurprisingly, the Jewish demonstrations in New York that the BPP speak of were also picked up by the American far right. The Cross and The Flag, the publication of the antisemitic America First group, stated, ‘The same people who were yelling, “Hate the Germans! Hate the Germans!” and now yelling, “Hate the British! Hate the British!” . . . merely because Britain is not fulfilling the demands of the Zionist Jews’.26 It seems that antisemites on both sides of the Atlantic saw value in using the Palestine situation. Some of the more extreme antisemites positively revelled in the situation. Victor Burgess, leader of the Union of British Freedom (a founding member of Mosley’s Union Movement) wrote a letter in which he asked, ‘Have you volunteered to join the Palestine Police yet, or do you prefer as I do that we slaughter Jews at home?’27 In another he stated, ‘I hope that you are slaughtering as many Jews as we seem to be doing in Palestine’.28 However, while the reaction of the BPP and Oswald Mosley’s followers were more extreme than the average, the July  1946 Mass-Observation report shows that such opinions could be found beyond the confines of the dyed-in-the-wool antisemites on Britain’s far right. The report showed how much of the sympathy brought about by the Holocaust was offset by the events in Palestine. One can find examples of this in the report such as: ‘[With regard to the explosion at the King David Hotel] I could not have loved a Jew before, now I think Hitler was more right than wrong in his idea of extermination’.29 However, far more common than the odd genocidal reaction was the general feeling that full assimilation was the answer to the ‘Jewish question’, and thus Jews were generally blamed for antisemitism. Even after the news of the extermination programme was accepted, the old trope ‘no smoke without fire’ was a common position.30 However, the events in Palestine were not the only driver of the re-emergence of British fascism. At a conference on antisemitism in Europe, at Seelisberg in 1947, Sidney Salomon of the Board of Deputies of British Jews explained that when accounting for the re-emergence, one must remember that the old poison of nine years’ incessant Nazi propaganda has never been completely eradicated, that the early months of the “phoney” war made a number of people, some of whom were not inclined to fight, disillusioned and dispirited. Then comes the period when Great Britain stood alone. . . . Those Fascists who had not been interned carried on their whispering campaign.31 Thus, a plethora of factors came together to create a climate whereby just months after the news of the Holocaust had reached Britain, openly fascist and antisemitic politics were visible on Britain’s streets. Quick to notice the re-emergence was Lord Vansittart who in 1946 told the House of Lords that the fascist movement was ‘beginning to come to life again’.32 His statement on the re-emergence of fascism in London mentioned Captain Ramsey, Arnold Leese, 18B Detainees, League of Ex-Service Men and Women, Radcliffe’s British Protestant League and The Victory Group, and his speech became international news with the New York Herald Tribune being among the foreign

50  ‘Wir kommen wieder’

newspapers to report on it.33 Street activism became an increasingly common sight in the immediate postwar years, so much so that by 1947 it was reported that, ‘In London alone, not a night passes in which some Fascist speaker does not mount the platform at a street corner, display the Union Jack and launch into a violent antiSemitic outburst’.34 Activity was not limited to London with perhaps the leading organisation outside the capital being the Sons of St George, which was based in Derby.35 Writing several years later in 1949 Dudley Barker of the Daily Herald made a similar point when he described how: On every night of the week except Thursdays, four years after the end of the war against Fascism, a Fascist meeting is held somewhere in London. There are also regular meetings in a few provincial centres, chiefly at Derby, Manchester and in South Coast towns around Brighton.36 It is clear that neither the Holocaust nor the years of war managed to extinguish the flame of British fascism and that as soon as it became possible to relaunch after the war the remaining activists seized their opportunity. However, it is important not to overemphasise the scale of the fascist resurgence in the early postwar years. Sidney Salomon believed it was doubtful that the membership of all British fascist bodies combined exceeded 7,000, and most agreed that this number was not growing.37 Lionel Rose similarly estimated between 6,000 and 7,000, however, to this must be added a considerable number of people with fascist sympathies but who, if challenged, would hotly deny they could be so described.38 Rather than a growth in the number of fascists the immediate postwar years witnessed a growth in the activity of fascist organisations. However, by 1950 the activity of the far right, spurred on by Palestine, began to wane. In a letter sent in 1950 Salomon explained that, as far as this country is concerned the fascist movement is on the way out. It consists of Mosley and a group of corner boys. The difference in the movement can be gauged from the fact that in 1937 the fascist movement was able to record 27,000 votes in the London Municipal Elections, while last year all that they were able to obtain was 1798!39 A confidential report on the 1950 elections sent to the American anti-fascist Avendis Derounian backed up Salomon’s point stating, ‘As far as fascist threats were concerned, it can also be said that they came to nothing. . . . Fascist literature was also conspicuous by its absence’.40 Thus, while British fascism re-emerged straight after the war and showed signs of growth, by 1950/51 it had begun to shrink back and retreat once more.41

Organised groups in the immediate postwar period Broadly speaking one can split fascist and far-right groups active in the immediate postwar years into three groups. One is the extreme and Nazi people and parties

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often, though not always, grouped around Arnold Leese. The second are those grouped around Oswald Mosley, many of whom were later subsumed by his Union Movement. The third is the handful of parties and groups that do not fit into the previous two categories but were still within the milieu of postwar fascistic politics.

Arnold Leese and extreme far right The most fanatical fascists of the immediate postwar period gathered around the notorious prewar fascist Arnold Leese.42 This group who remained in loose touch have been called the ‘SS of British fascism’,43 and in the words of G.R. Mitchell, who monitored British fascism in this period: ‘They scarcely have any political ideal beyond the pogrom’.44 Chief among this disparate band of like-minded extremists was Leese, the former camel veterinarian and pro-Nazi antisemite. He first rose to prominence as a world-renowned expert on camels and 1910 and was rewarded with a genus of nematode worms being named Thelazia leesei in his honour. In 1927 he published A treatise on the one-humped camel in health and in disease, which is said to have remained the seminal work on the topic in India for many years to come.45 Slightly earlier in 1924, along with his friend Harry Simpson, he had been elected as a councillor in Stamford and later proudly boasted in his autobiography that he was ‘the first constitutionally elected Fascist in England’.46 In 1929, he formed the Imperial Fascist League (IFL), which was one of the most pro-Nazi political groups in British history. Despite numbering no more than 500 members, their emblem – which consisted of a Union Flag embossed with a S­ wastika – and their funding from the Nazis provided the organisation with notoriety disproportionate to their size.47 Unsurprisingly Leese spent much of the war behind bars as a detainee, and by the time it came to an end he was showing his age. After the war, he sat at the centre of a loose web of extreme fascist supporters and pumped out antisemitic literature via his Anti-Jewish Information Bureau. However, he soon found himself imprisoned again in March 1947 for being engaged in a conspiracy to assist P.O.W.s in the UK escape to Germany but was released again in January 1948.48 While he did not relaunch his prewar IFL or any other new organisation, he remained a central organising figure on the extreme right, and as well as producing his own virulently antisemitic newspaper titled Gothic Ripples, he encouraged his supporters to engage in entryism. As he explained, ‘I am 67 and too old to run an activist movement. But I am in touch with all sound people of our way of thinking. They are all busy, our aim now being penetration of every other “near” movement to teach the people met in them’.49 His aim was to make far-right organisations more openly antisemitic, and he was damning about anyone who failed to agree with his tactics. As Salomon from the Board of Deputies explained at the time, ‘Everyone whose policy did not agree with Leese was de facto a Jew’.50 This is confirmed by a letter Leese wrote to an American, which explained that, ‘If, for instance, you were a Mosleyite, like Burgess, you wld [sic] have to unlearn everything that the Jew Raven-Thompson taught you’.51 It is clear that Leese’s hatred of Mosley and his ‘kosher fascists’ was another thing that survived the war.

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Unsurprisingly, in the wake of the Holocaust Leese’s commitment to vocal and open antisemitism was not shared by most other postwar fascists, but that is not to say he was completely alone. Also in this vein was G.F. Green of the Independent Nationalists. Green himself was described as: a short, pudgy, red-faced man, dressed in a worn and wrinkled dark suit, and he had about him the air of an energetic door-to-door salesman. What teeth he possessed were irregular and brown-stained. A goodly number were missing, giving his mouth an empty look.52 Similarly to Leese, Green wrote to an undercover anti-fascist explaining that, I have only one word – JEW. I am not prepared . . . to join any activities which are not fully, openly and efficiently directed against all the activities of world-jewery. Racial, political, social, economic – in fact a spiritual and material war on jewery. Race is first, fundamental; next comes nationalism. . . . I am tightly fixed in a jewish concentration camp called “England”.53 So extreme was Green that like Leese, he too had been in contact with Goering’s defence team at the Nuremberg Trial, and he even claimed to have obtained a letter purportedly written by Goering to Winston Churchill in the final days before his suicide.54 The group that he ran, the Independent Nationalists – that he described as ‘a radical and revolutionary party’ who were for ‘a Briton’s Britain’55 – certainly stuck to his principle of vocal and open Jew-hatred. In terms of ideology Salomon explained how it ‘closely conforms to the policy of the old Imperial Fascist League’ and how it endeavoured to form links with the re-launched British People’s Party (BPP).56 Originally formed in 1939 the BPP sprung back into action in 1945 after an imposed hiatus during the war years. Its stated aims were the re-orientation of foreign policy, based on a recognition of national needs, as the only real road to lasting peace; a complete change of monetary system in order to release for the country the abundance provided by the scientific and mechanical progress; and reconstruction of our agricultural life, with particular attention to the evil of land erosion.57 With Mosley’s Union Movement not being launched until 1948 it experienced a modicum of success in its efforts to unite the disparate and scattered remnants of Britain’s fascist movement. Writing in 1946 Douglas Hyde of the Daily Worker explained that: Most active and successful of organisations with which former Fascists are associated is the Duke of Bedford’s British People’s Party. In addition to reforming this organisation and restarting his paper, the Duke is steadily uniting a variety of individuals and organisations of similar kidney.58

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However, the group’s limited success was short-lived as it was soon eclipsed by Mosley’s return to active politics in 1948. Other prewar fascist activists of the extreme and revolutionary variety who remained active in the postwar period included Captain Gordon-Canning and Maule Ramsay. In 1951 John Roy Carlson described Gordon-Canning as: a towering, well-proportioned man with a ruddy complexion, Much larger than normal, his face was set in a large head with a bald dome, and gave him a massive appearance. His eyes were blue, puffy, and encased in deep wrinkles, but when he smiled they twinkled pleasantly. His very long upper lip, heavy drawling voice, and full but formless mouth gave the impression of a distant and self contained man.59 Canning hit the headlines in 1945 when for £500, a substantial sum at the time, he purchased a bust of Hitler formerly owned by the German embassy. He did so ‘To challenge the Jews. To prevent purchase by them. To return [it] to Germany at a suitable time’.60 Meanwhile Ramsay, whom Carlson described as ‘an unusually tall and gangling Scot, with a pronounced eagle nose’,61 also remained active but made little impact after the war, though he did release his autobiography The Nameless War in the early 1950s, which remains in print to this day. Joining Ramsay and Canning in the old guard of the postwar antisemitic milieus were characters such as Admiral Domvile who also published his autobiography, From Admiral to Cabin Boy, in the postwar period, yet despite later getting involved with the League of Empire Loyalists and the National Front he failed to make any real impact in the postwar period. Within the orbit of these extreme antisemites was a number of small but extreme political groupuscules. One was the British Protestant League led by Alexander Ratcliffe of Glasgow who also produced The Vanguard. As is discussed in the chapter on Holocaust denial, Ratcliffe was one of the very first Holocaust deniers in the country and perhaps even the world. On the more esoteric end of the antisemitic spectrum was the League of Christian Reformers led by Captain T.G. St Barbe Baker and James Larrat Battersby who produced the monthly journal Kingdom Herald. Battersby and his associates were vocally pro-Hitler, believing that ‘his only enemy was International Jewish Finance’.62 Fervent believers in the Jewish world conspiracy, they were convinced that Jews started the war, ‘because he [Hitler] had broken the Bonds of the Financiers in his own country’.63 However, they went well beyond just defending him and actually deified Hitler, believing that he and his mission against the Jews were divinely ordained.64 The most violent of these postwar fascist groupuscules was the tiny North-West Task Group, headed by John Gaster and based in Burnt Oak, near Edgware in London. Lionel Rose’s 1948 factual survey described them as ‘a small amorphous body, headed by one John Gaster’: It is the most violent of all anti-Semitic groups, though fortunately the least important. Its card of membership gives the motto “Wir kommen wieder,” and it boasts in its article of membership of being fanatically anti-democratic and fanatically anti-Jewish.65

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The group was also closely tied to the Union of British Freedom, though they did not acknowledge the tie too openly.66 Other tiny groupuscules active during the period included the Bath and West Nationalist Crusade that produced Bridgehead, which was edited by Edwin Bassett Morton. There was also the National and Empire Unity Party that produced The Nationalist under the editorship of A. McCarthy and the National Workers Movement of Anthony F.X. Baron, an accountant who lived in Suffolk who was a protégé of Leese. It was also during this period that Colin Jordan, later to become the leading British Nazi of the postwar period, set up the Birmingham Nationalist Club after graduating from Cambridge.67

Pre-union movement Mosley-linked groups By far the leading British fascist of the interwar period was Oswald Mosley who had managed to fill Earls Court with 20,000 people in 1939.68 The end of the war saw a cautious return to politics from Mosley via numerous small front groups that were run by avid followers rather than the ‘The Leader’ himself. Chief among these were the Mosley Book Clubs, of which there were 47. They acted as a channel for the dissemination of his postwar ideas and the distribution of his publications. The nature of the groups varied significantly with some not being openly Mosleyite at all, to the extent that many who joined were unaware that they were anything other than a literary society, while others were clearly political planning cells for the resurrection of Mosley’s career. In a similar vein to the Book Clubs were the University Corporate Clubs. In 1948 Lionel Rose described these as an ‘important and serious aspect of the fascist revival’.69 They were established at the Oxbridge Universities, as well as others such as the Leeds University Union National Unity Association.70 The groups preached Mosley’s doctrines though they were careful to shun open or obvious antisemitism. Rose stated that Mosley took some personal interest in these clubs, particularly at Oxford, and that he has addressed more than one meeting of its members in the room provided for the purpose. He is also in the habit of inviting the more socially prominent to his house in Ramsbury.71 Members of the Oxford University Club also wrote for British League Review, the organ of Jeffrey Hamm’s League of Ex-Servicemen.72 As mentioned in the chapter on fascism during the war, Hamm had staged a coup and taken control of the League. Upon his release from detention under 18B he relished the opportunity to re-engage with his prewar politics, and, along with Victor Burgess, another former BUF member and 18B detainee, he set about wrestling the League of Ex-Servicemen away from its founder James Taylor. Once under the control of Hamm and Burgess the term ‘ex-Servicemen’ was loosened to include all former BUF members paving the way for the full radical politicisation of the organisation,73 and Hamm decided to ‘expand both the name and scope of

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the organisation’.74 While later claiming that it remained a genuine ex-servicemen’s organisation, he did concede that ‘The British League also served to keep the name of Sir Oswald Mosley before the public at a time when he was restricted by the conditions imposed upon him after his release from internment’.75 Hamm built the League with a view to handing control over to Mosley when the time was right.76 Hamm’s League spearheaded the revival of public and open street-level fascism and made waves with its first public meeting in Hyde Park on 5 November 1944. While former BUF members had been publicly speaking against 18B in Hyde Park for some time,77 the likes of the League’s public meetings had not been seen since July 1940. Rose described the propaganda as ‘openly fascist, proNazi and anti-Semitic; considerable attention was devoted to the ‘alien and communist menace’; incitement to violence was often followed by disturbances and police action’.78 An American anti-fascist went undercover to a public meeting and reported the scenes: “Traitor Churchill, Traitor Attlee. . . . England has been sold down the river to America by Traitor Baruch. . . . Britain First, England for the Englishman. . . . The dirty Jews, those miserable creatures crawling around London.” This sort of baiting delighted the crowd. They roared themselves hoarse. Somebody yelled: “It’s time we wiped them out!” “P J! P J!” some one in the crowd began to chant’.  .  .  .  “Mosley! Mosley! We want Mosley! We want Mosley! Heil, Mosley!” All around hands were outstretched in the Nazi salute. It was hard to believe that I was in London.79 The operations of the League were by no means confined to London though. Hamm travelled to Liverpool to address a meeting, and as Daniel Sonabend has shown, they managed to gain “a small foothold” in Brighton due to the work of Leslie Jones, whose own group, The Twentieth Century Socialist Group, was incorporated into the League.80 Spouting similarly hateful language from platforms at street meetings was the Gentile-Christian Front. It was run by F.A. Young who had links with Hamm’s League and even spoke on their platforms, a favour Hamm reciprocated. The group’s propaganda was ultra-nationalist and virulently antisemitic with Young touting the Protocols from the platform.81 Just a few years later it was reported that a women speaker at a Union Movement meeting in Marylebone went as far as to state: ‘Gas chambers are too good for the Jews’.82 Active at the same time as the League was the Union for British Freedom, led and run by Victor Burgess, a former BUF member and co-founder with Hamm of the British League, which he left to set up the new body. The group, specifically named to keep the old initials BUF,83 produced the newspaper Unity and had three known provincial limbs. They were the British Workers’ Party for National Unity, which was based in Bristol and organised by John Alban Webster. The group set up a paper called Britain Defiant. In conjunction with A.E. Day, Webster also published the periodical Sovereignty, which was then incorporated into the journal TO-MORROW, an organ of the Social Credit Party.84 In July 1947 Webster

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debated local Communist Party representatives in front of a crowd of 2000 on the motion: ‘That there is no case for discrimination against the Jewish race’ and managed to win.85 However, in the same year he stood in the Municipal Elections in Avon Ward, Bristol and received just 485 out of 7,149 votes cast. The group was short lived, and in January 1948 he wrote an open letter completely recanting his antisemitic views and stated he was dissolving his party.86 Other provincial limbs of the BUF included The Order of the Sons of St George, a Derby-based group organised by F. Antley and the Manchester-based Imperial Defence League, which was organised by A. Gannon. It emerged from the Manchester Municipal Elections of 1945 in the New Cross Ward and held outdoor meetings in Manchester around Thurloe Street and Wilmslow Road, Rusholme.87 Other postwar groups who moved in Mosleyite circles or were inspired by him included the Britons Action Party (BAP), which was run by J.C. Preen, a prewar member of the BUF who ran a builders merchants in Paddington and sold Mosleyite literature. The group produced the newspaper Britain Awake.88 Like most of the other groups, Preen’s party failed to make any inroads, and when he stood in Harrow Road Ward in May  1947 he came third with just 316 votes out of 4,809.89 BAP grew out of the organised Vigilante Movement, which was an antidemocratic party that called for action instead of parliamentary politics and sought to use the ‘vast heritage of empire’ and the ‘restoration of pride of the British in their own great traditions and sterling qualities of character’.90 Despite forming his own party, Preen was clear that his real ambition lay in the resurrection of Mosley. As he put it, ‘We are hoping hourly for our own great Leader Sir Oswald Mosley to return to lead us on to victory’.91 Another tiny Mosleyite group active in this period was the Anglo-German Youth Contact Club. In 1949 the anti-fascist newspaper On Guard reported that a British ex-P.O.W. named Gerald Seager was running an organisation designed to foster relationships between young German Nazis and young British sympathisers. Seager himself was said to have fallen in love with the Germans while in a prison camp there. The aim of the group was to ‘oppose Communism and alien influence among British and German youth’. Seager stated he had no differences with the policy of Mosley’s Union Movement and claimed to have 250 members, mainly in the East End of London.92 Many of these groups named previously were little more than collections of Mosleyites biding their time and awaiting the return of their Leader. They played their role in keeping the flame of Mosley’s politics alive during an extremely hostile period, and in 1948 their prayers were answered as he finally decided to emerge from the shadows and relaunch his political career.

Anti-fascist response Unsurprisingly, the rebirth of public fascism and open antisemitism was opposed vociferously by anti-fascists. With hundreds of thousands dead and maimed by years of fighting the Nazis and with many still in uniform on the continent, the

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re-emergence of such public fascism in Britain was greeted with extreme anger. Hamm’s meetings were interrupted with cries of, ‘Lynch him’.  .  .  .  ‘Get back to Berlin’.  .  .  .  ‘Where’s your pal Captain Ramsey?’.  .  .  .  ‘Is Mosley your next speaker?’93 Many saw the hypocrisy of a supposed ex-servicemen’s organisation dominated by men who had not seen active duty because of their perceived sympathies with the enemy. The League’s meetings were regularly greeted by hundreds of anti-fascists, often Jewish, shouting down speakers, causing disruption and overturning platforms.94 Hamm also claimed that once he started the public meetings he was sacked by his employer because of Trade Union pressure and also evicted from his flat.95 Such events show the emergence of an anti-fascist consensus that would become commonplace and was a taste of the severely hostile climate in which fascists would have to operate in the postwar period. Of course the legacy of World War II, being so present in the mind, was a central part of anti-fascist rhetoric in the immediate postwar period. For example, one leaflet titled Fascism Again in 1947? stated: Yet here in Britain, a country which suffered longer than any other from the savagery of Fascism, complete freedom is allowed to the British satellites and admirers of Hitler and Mussolini – freedom to revive the doctrines of intolerance and racial hatred which brought the whole civilised world to the brink of disaster. Democracies biggest mistake is to regard the suppression of Fascism as “undemocratic.” The truth is that it is undemocratic not to destroy this deadly menace to liberty, decency and all the other values we so rightly hold dear.96 Similarly another called Your Freedom in Danger declared: All that we fought for, all that we have sacrificed, everything for which we hope, everything which made this country, and which still makes it, a country of free men, will be lost if the Union Movement . . . is allowed to continue its nefarious activities. . . . We were forced into war in 1939 by the Nazis – have we ten years after to listen to the Nazis’ friends and allies, to the speeches of a political party which, unique in British history, produced a nest of black traitors?97 Another stated, ‘The fascist plague devastated Europe in which fifteen million men women and children died. The plague is still with us . . . in this country. It is The Union Movement led by Oswald Mosley. Avoid it like the plague’.98 Meanwhile M.J. McLean, a disillusioned former Mosley support, produced a leaflet called Mosley Exposed: The Union Movement from Within that stated: Intimate acquaintance with the leaders of Union Movement forces me to recognise the truth, that the idea behind their activities is the very idea that drove Adolf Hitler forward to the insanity of war, the idea that reduced large numbers of the German people to the level of beasts, the idea that fed on

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violence and fostered misery . . . even for its own creators”. . . . “Now, almost before the bodies of his erstwhile “comrades” are cold in their graves, we find him poking out into obscure corners of the European Continent, disseminating his fascist propaganda and rallying the scattered Fascist remnants.99 However, it wasn’t just societal opposition or anti-fascist leaflets that greeted those seeking to relaunch fascism in Britain; many were greeted by the fist and the boot. While much of the militant opposition was done by random anti-fascists or communists, the most prominent organised militant anti-fascist group of the period was the notorious 43 Group. For many years information about this muchunderstudied group was primarily based on the autobiographical account of leading member Morris Beckman. However, as historian Daniel Sonabend has shown more recently, ‘most of the Group veterans thought it [Beckman’s book] was a load of tosh’.100 That said, Beckman’s Untold Story remains a gripping read and has certainly acted as a source of inspiration for many anti-fascist activists since its publication. However, Sonabend’s work offers a more accurate picture of the group’s scale and influence, placing the number of active members at some 2,000101 and arguing that with time it turned into a ‘fully functioning, multifaceted anti-fascist organisation’.102 At every level of society, be it the Jewish ex-service people of the 43 Group or general societal antifascism, those seeking to relaunch fascism in the immediate postwar years were up against it from the start. While the militant actions of antifascists certainly played a role, it was likely widespread postwar societal hostility that really stopped the fascist movement making real progress in the period. As Dan Stone has shown, ‘In Britain, pride at defeating Hitler was a commonplace sentiment across all classes for many years’.103 The conditions that postwar fascists found themselves operating in were so different to the fertile ground in which they had emerged in the 1920s and 1930s. Despite this, though, it is remarkable how unchanged the movement was by the war years and the new climate in which they found themselves. In many cases the postwar fascist scene was the same people, propagating the same ideas as before the war, and what changes did occur were often superficial. Many historians and politicians refer to postwar fascists as ‘neofascists’, but in Britain there was very little ‘new’ about them. While the events in Palestine offered the far right a glimpse of hope, the spectre of six years of war against Nazism loomed large in British society, making their efforts doomed from the off. Of course, that didn’t stop them trying.

Notes 1 Lionel Rose, Fascism in Britain: Factual Survey No. 1 (London: McCorquodale & Co., 1948), 2. 2 Graham Macklin, ‘ “A  Quite Natural and Moderate Defensive Feeling”? The 1945 Hampstead ‘Anti-Alien’ Petition’, Patterns of Prejudice, 37:3, 2003, 277–300. 3 Hampstead and Highgate Record and Chronicle, 2 November 1945, in Macklin, ‘A Quite Natural and Moderate Defensive Feeling?’

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4 Report by (Sgd.) G.R. Mitchell on Fascist Activities- November–December 1945, 4 December 1945, NA HO 45/25395. 5 Report by (Sgd.) G.R. Mitchell on Fascist Activities- November–December 1945, 4 December 1945, NA HO 45/25395. 6 Macklin, ‘A Quite Natural and Moderate Defensive Feeling?’ 7 Joseph J. Cummins, ‘A Call to Arms’, The Broom, 9 September 1946, 4. 8 Norman Rose, “A  Senseless, Squalid War”: Voices from Palestine 1945–1948 (London: The Bodley Head, 2009), 113. 9 Wm. Roger Louis, ‘British Imperialism and the End of the Palestinian Mandate’, in Wm. Roger Louis and Robert W. Stookey (eds.), The End of the Palestine Mandate (London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 1986), 10. 10 ‘Vandals Raid Synagogue in London as “Warning” ’, New York Times, 13 December 1946. 11 Rose, A Senseless, Squalid War, 164. 12 Board of Deputies of British Jews, cited in Jewish Chronicle, 1 August 1947, 1. 13 Manchester Guardian, 4 August 1947. 14 John Roy Carlson, Cairo to Damascus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), 37. 15 Henry Hamilton Beamish to Mr  Morey, 27 August  1947, Beamish H.H. England File, ADC. Morey was actually an American undercover anti-fascist called Avendis Derounian. 16 Robert Gordon-Canning to Professor S.F. Darwin-Fox, quoted in Carlson, Cairo to Damascus, 30. 17 Carlson, Cairo to Damascus, 29. 18 Carlson, Cairo to Damascus, 36. 19 Ernest Bevin quoted in Louis, ‘British Imperialism and the End of the Palestinian Mandate’, 19. 20 Denis Plimmer, ‘Britain’s Fascists Come Back’, N.Y. Post, Overseas News Agency, 1947, Cutting in ADC. 21 Lionel Rose, Survey of Open-Air Meetings Held by Pro-Fascist Organisations, April-October 1947: Factual Survey No. 2 (London: McCorquodale & Co., 1948), 28. 22 ‘Palestine: Hard Facts’, On Guard, August 1947, 2. 23 Rupert Marlowe, ‘Fascists’ New Stamping Ground: Blackshirts in M.E.’, On Guard, April 1948, 9. 24 Paul Stocker, ‘ “The Surrender of an Empire”: British Imperialism in Radical Right and Fascist Ideology, 1921–1963’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Teesside University, 2016), 177. 25 Anonymous, Failure at Nuremberg (London: Research Department of the British People’s Party, 1946), 14. 26 ‘The Jews and the British’, The Cross and The Flag, 1946, 5–6. 27 V.C. Burgess to (Name blacked out), 8 December  1945, Burgess, Victor  – England File, ADC. 28 V.C. Burgess to Charles Morey, 1 December  1945, Burgess, Victor  – England File, ADC. 29 M-O A; DR Jam 11, Pin 1, Cle 2, July 1946, cited in Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), 227. 30 Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, 227. 31 Sidney Salomon, ‘Antisemitism in Great Britain’, Paper presented to International Conference of Christians and Jews, Conference on Antisemitism in Europe, at Seelisberg, Lake of Lucerno, 30 July–5 August 1947, 9. 32 Richard Vidmer, ‘Vansittart Sees Fascist Revival Since War End’, New York Tribune, 13 March 1946. 33 John Roy Carlson to the British Library of Information in New York, 21 March  1946, ADC. 34 Plimmer, ‘Britain’s Fascists Come Back’. 35 Sidney Salomon quoted in Plimmer, ‘Britain’s Fascists Come Back’.

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3 6 Dudley Barker, ‘Fascism in Britain’, Daily Herald, 24 October 1949. 37 Plimmer, ‘Britain’s Fascists Come Back’. 38 Rose, Fascism in Britain, 8. 39 Sidney Salomon to John Roy Carlson, 8 March 1950, 2. England Contacts and Data File, ADC. 40 Unnamed confidential report titled: The New Parliament: A Note on the General Election, February 1950, 1. In: England Contacts and Data File, ADC. 41 Dave Renton, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000), 2. 42 For full biographical detail about Leese see: Graham Macklin, Failed Führers: A History of Britain’s Extreme Right (London: Routledge, 2020), 22–91. 43 D.D.G. Report by G.R. Mitchell, 6 November 1945, NA HO 45/25395. 44 Fascist Activities April to May 1946, 7 May 1946, G.R. Mitchell, NA HO 45/25395. 45 Arnold Spencer Leese, A Treatise on the One-Humped Camel in Health and in Disease (Stamford, Lincolnshire: Haynes & Son, 1927). 46 Arnold Spencer Leese, Out of Step: Events in the Two Lives of an Anti-Jewish Camel Doctor (Guildford: Arnold Spencer Leese, 1951), 49. 47 Stephen Dorril, Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (London: Viking, 2006), 203. 48 Rose, Fascism in Britain, 7. 49 Arnold Leese to Mr Morey, 20 March 1946, Leese, Arnold File, ADC. 50 Salomon, ‘Antisemitism in Great Britain’, 7. 51 Arnold Leese to Mr Morey, 8 December ? (Likely 1945), Leese, Arnold File, ADC. 52 Carlson, Cairo to Damascus, 37. 53 G.F. Green to John Roy Carlson, cited in Carlson, Cairo to Damascus, 37. 54 Graham Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley and the Resurrection of British Fascism After 1945 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 183, n65. 55 Carlson, Cairo to Damascus, 38. 56 Salomon, ‘Antisemitism in Great Britain’, 8. 57 British Peoples Party, Points the Better Way, Leaflet (London: Edgar G. Dunstan). 58 Douglas Hyde, ‘Sir Oswald Gets Busy’, Daily Worker, 4 January 1946, 2. 59 Carlson, Cairo to Damascus, 27–28. 60 Carlson, Cairo to Damascus, 25. 61 Carlson, Cairo to Damascus, 26. 62 Larrat Battersby, ‘The Miracle of Dunkirk’, The Kingdom Herald, 1:5, October 1946, 6. 63 Ernest Hope, ‘Then and Now’, The Kingdom Herald, 1:5, October 1946, 11. 64 Special Correspondent, ‘Is Adolf Hitler Living?’ The Kingdom Herald, 1:5, October  1946, 20. 65 Rose, Fascism in Britain, 6–7. 66 Salomon, ‘Antisemitism in Great Britain’, 7. 67 Lionel Rose to John Roy Carlson, 18 April  1950, England Contacts and Data File, ADC. 68 Special Branch estimate, just 11,000 in HO 144/21281/150, 20,000 from both Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to the National Front (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 86; Renton, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s, 20. 69 Rose, Fascism in Britain, 4. 70 TAC: Bulletin of the Trades Advisory Council, 6:10, October 1947, 2. 71 Rose, Fascism in Britain, 4. 72 A Member of the Oxford University Corporate Club, ‘The Theory and Practice of Communism’, British League Review, 2:2, August 1947. 73 S.R. Report, 7 February 1945, NA, KV 6/3. 74 Jeffrey Hamm, Action Replay (London: Black House Publishing, 2012), 109. 75 Hamm, Action Replay, 109. 76 Report of discussion between Hamm and Alan Woods and Robert Dunlop of the Aid Fund and Publicity Council, NA, KV 6/3.

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77 Hamm, Action Replay, 108. 78 Rose, Fascism in Britain, 4. 79 Carlson, Cairo to Damascus, 24. 80 Daniel Sonabend, We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post-war Britain (London: Verso, 2019), 174. 81 Rose, Fascism in Britain, 6. 82 Civil Liberty, Annual Report – 1948–49, 9:3, 1949, 4. 83 Carlson, Cairo to Damascus, 22. 84 Rose, Fascism in Britain, 5. 85 Sonabend, We Fight Fascists, 175. 86 Rose, Fascism in Britain, 6. 87 Rose, Fascism in Britain, 6. 88 Anonymous, TAC: Bulletin of the Trades Advisory Council, 6:11, November 1947, 1. 89 Rose, Fascism in Britain, 6. 90 Britons Action Party, Britons Action Party Policy, Leaflet (London: Britons Action Party). 91 D.M. Hearn to Charles Morey, 1 November 1947, Britons Action Party File, ADC. 92 Typescript of ‘Pen-Pals for Young Fascists’, On Guard, February  1949, in England Misc – Dead Stuff File, ADC. 93 W.A.E. Jones, ‘ “Lynch Him” Shout Park: Police-Not Crowd- Hear Ex-18B Man’, Daily Herald, 13 November 1944. 94 Secretary’s Statement, 30 August 1944, BODA, 1658/1/1/2, 783. 95 Hamm, Action Replay, 110–111. 96 Anonymous, Fascism Again in 1947? Leaflet (London: Frederic Mullally, 1947), 2. 97 Anonymous, Your Freedom in Danger: The Union Movement and its Members (London: The Holborn Press, 1949), 3. In: England Contacts and Data File, ADC. 98 The Fascist Plague, Leaflet. In: England Contacts and Data File, ADC. 99 M.J. McLean, Mosley Exposed: The Union Movement from Within (London: London Caledonian Press, Undated – late 40s), 1–2. In: England Contacts and Data File, ADC. 100 Sonabend, We Fight Fascists, 5. 101 Sonabend, We Fight Fascists, 319. 102 Sonabend, We Fight Fascists, 75. 103 Dan Stone, Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 9.

3 A JEWISH INVENTION? The birth of Holocaust denial

The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated on 15 April 1945. Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which. . . . The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them.1 Despite the first news of the Nazis’ Final Solution reaching Britain in the summer of 1942,2 the haunting scenes reported by Richard Dimbleby from a newly liberated Belsen were so inconceivable that the BBC in London hesitated in broadcasting them until they could be verified by newspaper accounts.3 However, newsreels followed, and as Dan Stone states, ‘The famous images of British bulldozers moving mounds of corpses at Belsen were seared into people’s consciousness in 1945’4 meaning that for most, any remaining scepticism and disbelief turned to horror. However, for Hitler’s heirs it was clear that before a successful resurrection of fascism could happen, ‘this blot must be removed’.5 Rather than distancing themselves from their antisemitic past, many British fascists remained shockingly unmoved. As long as there have been reports of Nazi crimes there have been people determined to deny and undermine them. The Nazis themselves were the first deniers, seeking to destroy the evidence of their crimes and deny them to the world. However, historians of Holocaust denial have bestowed the ignoble distinction of being the first person to maliciously deny the validity and uniqueness of Nazi war crimes on numerous different candidates. Deborah Lipstadt, in her respected book Denying the Holocaust, has stated that the prominent French fascist Maurice Bardèche was ‘the first to contend that the pictorial and documentary evidence of the murder process in the camps had actually been falsified’.6 A close runner up was his

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compatriot Paul Rassinier who, as Samuel Moyn has shown, was believed by many on the extreme right to be ‘the original source of “negationism” ’.7 Remarkably, a camp inmate himself at Buchenwald, Rassinier published Le Mensonge d’Ulysse in 1950, which harshly scrutinised survivor testimony from the camps. He then began to question the existence of gas chambers arguing that any that did exist were built at the behest of rogue madmen and were by no means part of a systematic programme aimed at liquidating Jews. By the 1960s he began to talk about the ‘myth of the Holocaust’ as a fallacy created to legitimate Zionism and the State of Israel.8 Such views led to his ‘canonization by the extreme right’.9 However, in Holocaust Denial in France, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Limor Yagil name Professor René Fabre as the first French negationist for his 1945 study, which questioned the use of gas for exterminations.10 Kenneth Stern’s informative work Holocaust Denial posits that it emerged from 1944 onward, produced by exiled Nazis hiding in Sweden, Arab states and South America, though again attention is drawn to Rassinier as ‘one of the earliest’.11 Others also note early Swedes such as Einar Åberg, who was the key individual who kept the flame of antisemitism alive in postwar Sweden. During the war he formed Sveriges Antijudiska Kampförbund [Sweden’s Anti-Semitic Battlefront/Fighting Alliance]. Soon realising the obstacle that the Holocaust presented for those peddling antisemitic politics, Åberg began denying Nazi crimes from 1944 onward, making him among the first to do so. As such Kaplan and Weinberg have dubbed him ‘the father of Holocaust denial’.12 Alternatively, Meir Litvak and Esther Webman state that denial’s ‘earliest propagators were extreme right-wingers, isolationists and antisemites in the US’.13 Fascinatingly, Henry Feingold explains how the ‘denial of the Holocaust finds its roots in Allied information strategy during the Second World War’, which downplayed Jewish suffering.14 While there is no solid consensus among historians as to who was the first true Holocaust denier, all these accounts do have a commonality, namely they either ignore or overlook early British deniers. One exception is Denying History by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, which is the first work to draw any attention to early British denial, pointing to Alexander Ratcliffe as possibly ‘the first person to deny the Holocaust’.15 However, while this unique example of attention being paid to early British Holocaust denial is most welcome, it stretches to just one short paragraph before reverting to the historiographical norm of citing Paul Rassinier as the ‘first influential Holocaust “revisionist” ’.16 It is not until decades later that British denial is seriously dealt with by the historiography. The section on Britain in Stephen E. Atkins’ Holocaust Denial as an International Movement is a perfect example. After briefly mentioning the attention drawn to Ratcliffe by Shermer and Grobman, he writes off early British denial in the period from 1945 until 1980 as a ‘pale reflection of French Holocaust denial’ suggesting that there was little impulse among the British to rehabilitate Hitler and the Nazis and that the ‘British neo-Nazis were fragmented and busy fighting among themselves’.17 As such he cites Richard Verrall (alias Richard Harwood) as ‘the most prominent early British Holocaust Denier’ despite the fact that he was not born until 1948

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and didn’t publish his famous work of denial, ‘Did Six Million Really Die?’ until 1974.18 It then proceeds to cover the heavyweights of British Holocaust denial in the 1970s and 1980s such as Michael McLaughlin and David Irving. Atkins is in no way unique in overlooking early British denial. Similarly, Stern’s Holocaust Denial doesn’t start the section on Britain until the 1970s, and the same is true of Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust, in which the chapter titled In the Shadow of World War II makes no mention of Britain at all.19 More recently, a section on Holocaust denial in a book specifically regarding The Postwar Anglo-American Far-right makes the same mistake of not starting until the mid 1970s.20 Strangely Richard Thurlow incorrectly argued that, the chief survivors of the British fascist generation believed that Hitler had committed foul crimes against European Jewry. . . . It was only through the smokescreen of hindsight that later apologists for Hitler in the NF [National Front] and BM [British Movement] felt bold enough to promote a cover-up.21 In fact, the truth is that Holocaust denial in its traditional form began not in France or America – as most have argued – but actually in Britain. For most people the notion that the Holocaust was an enormous hoax is nonsensical. How is it possible to see the newsreels from barbed wire-encircled camps with emaciated and withered bodies in piles or mass graves and not be filled with horror and sympathy? With such definitive evidence how can one still not believe? The answers to these questions are complex and important and hold contemporary relevance. It is of course likely that many who denied the Holocaust publicly thought differently in private. They did so as biased revisionism, and denial was politically expedient and vital to their attempts to rehabilitate the doctrine with which they identified and which they were attempting to revive. Nazi atrocities had of course become inextricably linked to the doctrine of fascism, and any attempt to relaunch the ideology required either the separation of one from the other or denial that the atrocities had happened at all. However, for those British fascists who truly believed that the genocide of the Jews had not occurred one must look at their existing views about the Jews. Since the Judeo-Christian battles for religious hegemony over the Hellenistic world in the 3rd and 4th centuries, the myth that the Jewish diaspora was endowed with sinister and secret power has endured. The idea of a Jewish world conspiracy, as outlined in the infamous Russian forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, claims that a clandestine cabal of powerful Jews, exploiting their position as a diaspora and their supposed domination of the world’s press and financial systems, manipulates world events, with the aim of creating a Jewish world government. Thus, when reacting to the news of mass Jewish extermination at the hands of the Nazis, fervent antisemites were faced with the paradoxical situation whereby an all-powerful race had ‘allowed’ itself to be destroyed. For many on Britain’s far right the options for surmounting this logical contradiction were stark; either Jews were not all-powerful and did not rule the world or they had not been destroyed and the Holocaust was

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a lie. The latter position required the least revision of their often deeply ingrained illogical prejudice and thus proved a popular conclusion. So, when seeking to answer the question – How can there still be antisemitism after the Holocaust? – the answer of many antisemites was: what Holocaust? However, there are degrees of Holocaust denial ranging from outright rejection of all atrocities to more moderate attempts to reduce the number of victims or to relativise Nazi crimes by comparing them to allied actions and thereby negating the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Many historians use the term ‘revisionists’ and ‘revisionism’ when discussing this topic, which is the terminology adopted by the deniers themselves. However, while it is important to distinguish between the various forms in which denial is manifest and to explore the different tactics used, all are degrees of the same untruth, thus all are, to varying degrees, denial. As such this chapter will avoid the term ‘revisionism’, which is a perfectly legitimate and normal historical tool.

Societal reactions to the Holocaust Before addressing the reaction of Britain’s far right to the news of the Holocaust, it is necessary to add a level of contextualisation by addressing the general public’s reaction, levels of public antisemitism at the time and the effect of the Palestine Crisis. Only by doing this is it possible to discern whether the reactions of the far right were different, exceptional and noteworthy. Today the tragedy of the Holocaust has entered the wider public consciousness via thousands of books, documentaries, films, monuments and events such as the annual Holocaust Memorial Day. Most people, except a coterie of Nazis, fascists, Hitler worshippers and discredited deniers, accept that somewhere in the region of six million Jews and many hundreds of thousands from among other minority groups were systematically exterminated by the Nazis’ industrial extermination programme. Until recently, the traditional consensual narrative on the public’s concept of the Holocaust during the years in question generally agreed that while the liberation of the death camps provoked major media coverage, the general public were left with a wholly incomplete understanding of the events due to news reports that tended to focus on concentration camps rather than the death camps. As such the British public, while well informed about the conditions in the Belsen camp, liberated by the British armed forces, were on the whole ignorant of the mass extermination of Jews in Eastern Europe.22 However, more recently historians such as David Cesarani have provided fresh evidence that re-assesses and challenges the old consensus that said survivors stayed silent, resulting in few memoirs as well as lack of coverage in the media and popular culture such as literature and films. Quite to the contrary in fact, Cesarani states that by the mid 1950s ‘there were so many books on Nazi atrocities that authors and publishers felt the need to apologise for the appearance of yet more’23 and that if the ‘wartime plight of the Jews was spoken of less often in public discourse from the early 1950s onward it may have been because it was too well known to bear reiteration’.24 In addition the newsreels of the period focused

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heavily on the liberation of the camps and clearly showed the nature of Nazi atrocities, and in 1945–1946 had a regular audience of about 26 million per week in Britain plus the majority of the armed forces abroad.25 Similarly, the American media also flooded society with news of Nazi atrocities. In 1945 between 20 April and 11 May, the New York Times alone ran 105 atrocity-related items including 82 articles and 23 pictures, which was an average of three articles and one picture daily. It has been estimated that this is more than 1,280 column inches of space – an average of 75 inches daily – devoted to informing the American public about the news of Nazi crimes.26 As was the case in Britain, many Americans also saw the newsreels from the camps, with somewhere between 65 million and 85 million people visiting the cinemas each week.27 On the charge that the British public were aware of only Belsen and ignorant of the Eastern death camps it is worth noting that following the Belsen Trial in the autumn of 1945 the camp’s relationship with the death camp of Auschwitz in the East was firmly established.28 As Cesarani has stated, ‘If there was widespread ignorance in Britain about the death camps in “the east” it was not for lack of material’.29 Furthermore, by late 1945 the fact that up to six million Jews had been exterminated was widely accepted.30 For example, the journalist and anti-fascist Frederic Mullally, writing in 1946 on whether one should take the resurrection of British fascism seriously, argued that not to do so ‘is to turn our backs, with a shrug of indifference, on the foul inhumanity of Belsen and Buchenwald, on the memory of six million innocent men, women and children fiendishly butchered on the high altar of fascism’.31 While the general public in the late 1940s and 1950s may have lacked the comprehensive and structural understanding of the Holocaust that we possess today, there was sufficient understanding and acceptance of Nazi atrocities against the Jewish people to make some of the opinions expressed by British fascists in the immediate postwar period both exceptional and inexcusable. It is important to understand the public consciousness of Nazi atrocities so as to challenge the denial of later British fascists and apologists who have often claimed ignorance of the Holocaust as the primary defence when seeking to reform the image of early deniers. When writing about his father’s reaction to Nazi atrocities Nicholas Mosley partly aimed to excuse Oswald, the leading British fascist of the age, by stating, ‘This was a time when the worst stories of German atrocities had not yet come out’.32 Apologetic claims such as this are regularly trotted out by antisemites or those with a vested interest in reforming the tarnished character of either themselves or others. However, the work of historians such as Tony Kushner and David Cesarani has provided the necessary evidence to challenge the apologetic assertions of those who aim to whitewash the black mark of denial from next to their name by proclaiming widespread ignorance of Nazi atrocities. However, despite the spike in societal antisemitism that resulted from the Palestine crisis, it is worth reiterating that the vast majority of people remained convinced by the overwhelming evidence of Nazi atrocities. Any lingering doubts that the news of Nazi horrors had been wartime propaganda were usually dashed by the radio and newsreel reports from the camps. As the Daily Express exhibition of

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photographs from Belsen, Buchenwald and Nordhausen put it: ‘Seeing is Believing’.33 This was an age when the idea that ‘the camera does not lie’ was widely accepted.34 Thus when judging the reactions of Britain’s fascists to the news of Nazi atrocities it is worth remembering that while events in Palestine angered many and reduced public sympathy towards the Jews it did not lead to widespread denial of the facts. As recent scholarship has shown, while the structural and comprehensive understanding of the Holocaust that we possess today was not yet in place, the understanding that the Nazis had engaged in the widespread extermination of Jews resulting in the death of up to six million was widely accepted by the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s.

Pioneer deniers: British fascists’ reactions The denial of Nazi crimes by British fascists predated the war and can be found throughout the 1930s and during the war years. As some socialists turned a blind eye to the terrors of Stalinism, so Britain’s fascists did the same with the reports coming out of Germany. Prominent British far-right activists visited Germany and returned keen to dispel the ‘myth’ of German brutality. Following a spell in Germany in 1937 to recover from his alcoholism, A.K. Chesterton, writing in Blackshirt, the organ of the British Union of Fascists, stated, the concentration camps which the gullible British people imagines to be crammed with people who cannot accept National Socialist principles do not exist. Nobody in Germany has been punished because of his opinions – that is since Hitler came to power.35 Major General J.F.C. Fuller, also a member of the British Union of Fascists, similarly set out to challenge the narrative of an oppressive regime operating inhumane camps. Fuller visited the Oranienburg concentration camp just before the outbreak of war and penned an apologia for the camp in the right-wing magazine Truth, in which he praised its cleanliness and order. When discussing the Jewish inmates he claimed that he had ‘never before seen so many degenerates collected together’ and concluded that, ‘whether these concentration camps are barbarous or not, a civilisation which produces such creatures is one to be fought against rather than to be fought for’.36 Such views were commonplace among Britain’s extreme right wing before the war and were not dispelled by the increasing evidence of barbarism emanating from the continent.37 As the war progressed and increasingly solid evidence emerged of Nazi atrocities, elements of the British far-right were quick to challenge their authenticity. One such example was the 1942 pamphlet Propaganda for Proper Geese, written by the Duke of Bedford, a leading far-right activist. It questioned the validity of the emerging stories about Nazi atrocities and brazenly dismissed the pictorial evidence as fake. While accepting that many Jews had been ‘extremely harshly

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treated’, Bedford went on to state that ‘In regards to the infliction upon Jews of actual physical brutality, it appears certain that this has happened on many occasions, but it may be deemed equally certain that the extent of the abuse has been greatly exaggerated by propaganda’.38 In answer to the question, ‘Is it understandable that Hitler should have a prejudice against Jews?’, he answers with a definitive, ‘Yes, very’.39 According to Bedford, the newspapers were inflating the atrocity stories to keep happy the Jewish firms that advertised in them. Another early contribution was Alexander Ratcliffe’s The Truth about the Jews, published in 1943. Ratcliffe, a militant Protestant and founder of the Scottish Protestant League was a religious fundamentalist and extreme antisemite.40 The pamphlet argued: The various press reports about Hitler’s terrible persecution of the Jews mostly are written up by Jews and circulated by Jews. Mostly such reports are the invention of the Jewish mind. For the historian immediately after the war will prove that 95% of the Jew “atrocity” stories and “photographs” of such atrocities appearing in the press, magazines and journals are mere invention.41 He went as far as to make the remarkable claim that, ‘There is not a single authentic case on record of a single Jew having been massacred or unlawfully put to death under the Hitler regime’.42 He asserted: Only an idiot (there is no other term for it) would place any confidence in the ridiculous stories of the “Atrocities” committed under Hitler towards the Jews. Some of these stories, and especially the “photographs” (probably faked in the Jew Cinema studios) are enough to make a cat laugh. They are so crude, and their falsity is so evident, that only a half-wit would place any reliability on them.43 His claim that the pictorial evidence of Nazi atrocities was being faked refutes Lipstadt’s assertion that the first to do so was the French denier Maurice Bardèche.44 Unsurprisingly such claims were met with anger and derision by the Jewish Chronicle, which described The Truth About the Jews as ‘the vilest anti-Semitic pamphlet yet produced in Britain, and it is pure – or rather impure – Streicher from beginning to end’.45 While the pamphlet was the best known of his antisemitic tracts published during the war, Ratcliffe regularly packed his magazine, Protestant Vanguard, with similar sentiments. Two especially noteworthy editions were published in 1945, both dedicated to denying and excusing Nazi crimes – though with markedly different tactics. The April edition’s front page declared ‘Atrocities Not German’ with the accompanying article arguing that the people who accept the reports of German atrocities in this war are fools. . . . Once this war is over, folks will snigger at the German “atrocity” yarns. They will actually wonder how they could be so easily deluded,

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especially they will wonder how they could swallow the silly yarns about the wholesale massacre of millions of Jews. A shock is coming to the people, and no doubt they will ultimately discover that the actual real atrocity that did take place was in 1939, when the country was tricked by interested financiers to declare war against Protestant Germany.46 Published in April but with no exact date given, it is difficult to know whether the liberation of Bergen-Belsen on 15 April by the British predated publication of the article, though it seems unlikely as no reference to it is made. Importantly, within this short article lay two arguments that became staples for the postwar Holocaust denial movement. First, it attempted to relativise and thus diminish any crimes that did occur by referencing Allied atrocities. Second it referenced the false stories of German atrocities during World War I.47 The latter was a tactic he had long used. The Truth about the Jews had also mentioned the ‘ “Atrocity” business of the last War’. In reference to a book that debunked World War I atrocity propaganda he stated: And so in this War history is repeating itself, and when the war is over we will have another “Falsehood in Wartime,” with the press commending it, and denouncing the very lying photographs which they themselves published in regard to Hitler’s “Atrocities” against the Jews!48 Radcliffe was not alone in pointing to the unreliable nature of wartime propaganda in 1914–1918 as the cause of their scepticism. The initial cynicism and partial denial of fellow fascists A.K. Chesterton and John Beckett were also influenced by memories of First World War atrocity propaganda.49 David Baker, Chesterton’s biographer, argues that he ‘carried a legacy from the past which helped still further to dim his critical faculties’.50 Chesterton pointed to the ‘notorious lie about German “corpse factories” for obtaining grease’.51 Inaccurate World War I atrocity propaganda was also sighted by Americans such as Willis Carto, founder of the Liberty Lobby and one of America’s leading far-right Holocaust deniers and racial theorists. He also justified his denial by saying, ‘I think people are generally aware of this story of Germans [during World War I] throwing babies in the air and catching them with their bayonets. And cutting their arms off. After the war people learned that that was a big lie’.52 There is no doubt that World War I propaganda did lie about German corpse-rendering factories and baby killing and thus many fascists’ first reaction to the news of Nazi death camps was sceptical disbelief. They argued that the government fabricated stories as a post facto justification for intervention against Germany, meaning falsified propaganda from World War I was both a cause of disbelief and a means by which antisemites tried to undermine the validity of German atrocities during World War II. The second Ratcliffe article of note in Protestant Vanguard was ‘The Truth about the German Atrocities’, which appeared in July 1945, well after the liberation of the camps and the cinema newsreels had shown the ‘ghostly procession of emaciated,

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aimless people’.53 As such Ratcliffe was forced to change tack and deploy a different form of denial. In a complete volte-face from the absolute denial displayed in The Truth About the Jews and the ‘Atrocities Not German’ article published just three months previous, Ratcliffe accepted the images emanating from the camps as real stating that, ‘there have been such atrocities none need dare seek to deny’.54 However, he poses the question, ‘How did these bodies come to be lifeless?’ His answer: ‘These bodies were starved to death! And why were these bodies starved to death? Because there was no food for these bodies! And who were to blame for that? Directly, or indirectly, the Allies’.55 Thus, Ratcliffe attributed the piles of dead bodies to starvation brought about by the Allied blockade of Germany. Laying the blame for the atrocities at the feet of the Allies, sometimes blaming starvation or sometimes diseases such as typhoid, became a popular defence for those on the far right not willing to adopt all-out denial. Once again Ratcliffe was a pioneer of this new form of antisemitism. Importantly, as Colin Holmes has correctly argued, these are not the claims of an isolated and ignored fanatic but rather those of ‘an important carrier of ideological antisemitism’. The work of Ratcliffe was well known in right-wing, circles and the second edition of The Truth About the Jews was published by the Right Review Press of Count Potocki de Montalk and sold by Edward Godfrey’s Essential Books. It even travelled across the Atlantic, being republished in America by the Sons of Liberty as late as 1979.56 It is for this reason that Holmes correctly labels Ratcliffe a ‘pioneer revisionist’,57 a label that, as has been shown earlier, could also be attached to the Duke of Bedford, A.K. Chesterton and J.F.C. Fuller among others on Britain’s far right. Importantly, as will be shown later, these deniers were not merely the first in Britain to advance a whole new form of antisemitism – namely Holocaust denial – but were among, were perhaps even the first, to propagate it anywhere.

Count Potocki de Montalk For all the perniciousness of antisemitism and denial, fascism does occasionally attract such eccentric characters that they border on the comical. One such individual is Count Potocki de Montalk whose antisemitism, fervent anticommunism and denial of Nazi atrocities led him inadvertently to stumble across an important truth. He was in essence little more than an antisemitic milkman from New Zealand, and in addition to his fascination with paganism and his poetic pretensions, he had a self-delusional claim to the Polish throne. Often to be found with his long flowing hair strutting around London’s Soho in a Robin Hood-esque crimson robe and sandals, Geoffrey, as was his real name, received a modicum of notoriety after he was sentenced to six months in Wormwood Scrubs for ‘obscene libel’. He was prosecuted after trying to publish his work, the Lament for Sir John Penis, which included the incriminating line ‘Here lies John Penis/Buried in the mound of Venus’. Convinced of his right to the Polish throne he held meetings of his ‘court’ in exile, which, rather than gathering in the Royal Castle in Warsaw, met at Half Moon Cottage in Surrey where he would confer knighthoods and tracts of land in Eastern

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Europe to British antisemites such as the architect John Hooper Harvey.58 Despite his eccentricities, Macklin and Fowlie have shown how he was actually an important “ ‘enabler’ for extreme-right propaganda over a period of nearly fifty years’.59 Despite the fanciful pretentions, in 1943 he penned the Katyn Manifesto which, contrary to the line of the British and Soviet governments,60 correctly placed the blame for the massacre of around 22,000 Polish nationals at the feet of the Soviets rather than the Nazis. His pamphlet exposed the Soviet atrocities, attacked the diplomatic protection of Bolshevism and implied a cover up involving the British government. Unsurprisingly the British authorities moved quickly to discredit Potocki and his manifesto, not a particularly difficult task when he opened the manifesto by stating his credentials as, HIS MAJESTY WLADYSLAW THE FIFTH, BY THE GRACE OF GOD KING OF POLAND, HUNGARY AND BOHEMIA, GRAND DUKE OF LITHUANIA, SILESIA AND THE UKRAINE, HOSPODAR OF MOLDAVIA, ETC. ETC. ETC: HIGH PRIEST OF THE SUN.61 Despite the eccentricities and pro-German, antisemitic nature of Potocki, in the face of a major international cover up, he was among the first to rightly attribute the massacre to the Soviets, which ironically provides a unique example of denial of Nazi atrocities proving to be correct. So worried were the British authorities by the publication of his Katyn Manifesto and its ability to cause increased tensions between wartime allies that they considered prosecuting him under Defence Regulation 39B, before decided against it.62 It was not until the mid 1990s with the release of wartime intelligence reports that the full extent of the British attempts to cover up the truth by pretending that ‘the whole affair was a fake’ came to light. The reason given was that, ‘Any other view would have been most distasteful to the public since it could be inferred that we were allied to a power guilty of the same sort of atrocities as Germany’.63 The British were not alone in falsifying the truth, with the Russians not admitting the truth until 1990. Incidentally, much of the far right came to agree with Potocki’s correct accusation with both the British People’s Party and Arnold Leese blaming the Soviets slightly later in 1945.64

Postwar denial and ‘concentration camp fairy tales’65 British fascism had been severely crippled during the war years with the proscription of the British Union and the detention without charge or trial of nearly 1,000 leading members of the movement under Defence Regulation 18B. However, despite mass public hostility and severe government pressure the movement survived and had begun to rebuild from 1943 onward. The immediate postwar years saw many of the major interwar players relaunch organisations under different names with varying levels of success. Undoubtedly the major hurdle facing the would-be revivers of radical right and antisemitic politics was the Holocaust.

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Different leaders and activists had different reactions towards the news of the Nazis’ extermination programme that ranged from horror and condemnation through to denial and even celebration. Oswald Mosley’s reaction to the Holocaust has been something of a debated topic. Lord Skidelsky, the cross-bench peer and eminent historian of the economist Keynes, wrote an informative yet sympathetic biography of Mosley, possibly influenced by his close friendship with Mosley’s son. In a biography that clearly aimed to rehabilitate Oswald and bring him back from ‘beyond the pale’, Skidelsky significantly played down Mosley’s antisemitism. He argued that ‘Officially, the Jewish question no longer existed. Prewar policy proposals were dropped. Jews were even welcome to join Union Movement’66 and that as a result ‘antisemites sought other pastures’.67 However, an interview Mosley gave in 1947 completely contradicts Skidelsky’s statement: Would you have Jews in your new party? “No” You would not have Jews as candidates? “Jews would not make suitable candidates for us”. But your movement is open to all parties? “To all parties but not Jews” So you would not have Jewish candidates? “No! They would not be suitable. You must leave us the liberty of choosing our candidates”. . . . Does that mean that you would get rid of the Jews out of this country? “Jews who have not been a long time in Britain would certainly have to go; that is, Jews who have not got their roots deep in the country, recent arrivals and such”.68 Furthermore, any serious exploration of Mosley’s reaction to Nazi atrocities against the Jews soon undoes any attempt at rehabilitation as it becomes clear that he was central to drawing up the blueprint of British Holocaust denial. Mosley was quick to criticise the Nuremberg trials as ‘a zoo and a peep show for gloating joy of everything that is lowest in human or beast’.69 His defence of Nazi ‘atrocities’, usually written in speech marks, was multi-faceted. First, he defended the need for German concentration camps: Men were short, food was short, disorder raged as all supply services broke down under incessant bombing. They held in prison or camps a considerable disaffected population, some German, but most alien, who were requiring guards and good food supplies.70 Second, while accepting the existence of some concentration camps, he denied the conscious mechanical extermination programme by suggesting the conditions in the camps ‘were largely produced by Allied bombing and consequent epidemics’.71 He stated definitively that ‘Buchenwald and Belsen are completely unproved’ and that ‘Pictorial evidence proves nothing at all. We have no impartial

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evidence’.72 As was to become the standard rebuttal of the denier, Mosley pointed to typhus outbreaks to explain the dead and diminish the responsibility of the Nazis: ‘If you have typhus outbreaks you are bound to have a situation where you have to use the gas ovens to get rid of the bodies. If we had been bombed here in prisons and concentration camps, there would have been a few of us going into the gas ovens’.73 Third, he blamed the Jews and the allies for any crimes that did take place: ‘Modern war is the end of morality. Those responsible for beginning war, are, also, responsible for ending morality’.74 Mosley had long denounced the war as a ‘Jew’s war’, and thus he blamed the Jews for their own deaths. His final refuge was to argue that if the Holocaust did happen then Hitler knew nothing about it.75 In short Mosley’s reaction to the Holocaust was to first deny the Nazis’ extermination programme and then to place the blame for any crimes that were committed at the feet of the Allies or the Jews themselves. While Mosley’s Union Movement newspaper talked of ‘concentration camp fairy tales’76 it is clear that equally fabulous are the parts of Skidelsky’s biography that attempt to whitewash Mosley’s postwar antisemitism. The arguments Mosley used to deny Nazi war crimes have been regurgitated ever since and form the bedrock of British Holocaust denial, which became a veritable cottage industry for Britain’s fascists. Mosley’s Holocaust denial deeply affected his postwar thought and impressed itself upon his analysis of major postwar events such as the Cold War and influenced the nature of his grand postwar theory, ‘Europe a Nation’. In language that would become common in Britain as the Cold War progressed, Mosley argued that Europe was faced with ‘the external menace of a fundamentally opposed and very powerful State, which intends the destruction of the civilisation and cultural heritage of the West in favour of that International Communism’.77 It is important to note that unlike the truly fanatical conspiracy theorists Mosley did not see America as the second arm of the conspiracy.78 In fact he argued: ‘Apart from all tradition of spiritual and cultural communion, America and Europe have to work together for survival’.79 This is some distance from the New York/Moscow Axis (two puppets operated by the same master) rhetoric and the virulent anti-Americanism displayed by Chesterton, as discussed in the next chapter. However, it would be wrong to state that Mosley’s thinking had no links with conspiratorial antisemitism. His analysis of the Cold War as laid out in The Alternative was intrinsically linked to his Holocaust revisionism. It was, he argued, the fault of the ‘Jewish Problem’ that Western Europe failed to unite in the face of its impending destruction at the hands of the Soviet Union: What are the other causes of European division which tend to prevent union and thus inhibit peace, security and an economic solution? The other factors of bitterness, psychological rather than tangible, appear to be rooted in those dark, atavistic memories of the European mind, which, in recent times, have found a partial and unilateral formulation under the general heading of “Atrocities”.80

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Later in 1958 in Europe: Faith and Plan he went further: Can a week go by . . . when he does not read, hear or see something which is well calculated to prevent or delay European Union? . . . But does not this curiosity itself derive largely from the atrocity propaganda which accompanied and followed the last war? . . . The atrocity business lies at the very root of European divisions.81 Mosley clearly placed the blame for the failure of Europe to unite in the face of international communism at the feet of those who, he felt, fabricated atrocity stories about the Jews. However, this was not the only conspiratorial element to his analysis of the Cold War as he hinted at a more traditional conspiratorial trope regarding the links between a Jewish conspiracy and communism. Also in Europe: Faith and Plan, he wrote: The strong resistance of many great vested interests to all necessary changes [to unite Europe and defeat communism] often creates the suspicion of some collusion between the money power and communism. And in some cases, undoubtedly, the more international elements of the financial world have taken a gamble on communism.82 In a post-Holocaust age one often has to read between the lines when analysing the statements of fascists and the far right. In this case ‘the more international elements of the financial world’ should read ‘Jews’. While Mosley coded his language, others in the Union Movement were more brazen. A 1949 article in the UM publication Union titled “Antisemitism”: A Jewish Invention stated that, ‘From corruption to Communism is but a step and again we find Jews in the forefront. This is an ideology that has increasingly interfered in the internal affairs of all nations. . . . Communism is Jewish’.83 It is clear that the Union Movement continued to equate communism with a Jewish conspiracy even after the Holocaust and while often more coded and insinuated than some of his predecessors and contemporaries, Mosley’s analysis of communism and the Cold War was no doubt also influenced by conspiratorial antisemitism and his Holocaust denial. Unsurprisingly for a party built on coterie charisma and veneration of the leader, Mosley’s line was echoed by most of those who stayed with him in the postwar period. Interestingly there is evidence of cases where convinced fascists from the BU believed and were appalled by the news of atrocities on the continent. Charlie Watts, a leading Mosley activist talked of ‘vile Nazi atrocities’84, and another notable exception is John Charnley who had been District Leader of the British Union of Fascism in Hull. His Secret Service file states that, it is known that Charnley at first discredited accounts of the ill treatment of prisoners in the camps mentioned and in order to be convinced that the incidents had actually happened, he visited a local cinema and viewed one of the

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newsreels showing victims of the outrages. . . . He is now satisfied that the ill-treatment did actually occur and is not a propaganda trick and, as stated above, he seems to have been badly shaken by what he saw.85 Charnley was not alone in his shock at the pictures coming from the camps. While he decided to remain part of the movement86 many others decided to withdraw from fascist and antisemitic politics as a result. Nellie Driver who had been a prewar BUF activist stated: British Union started again as the Union Movement but with nothing like the membership and influence it once enjoyed. Maybe, the evil memories of Belsen, Auswitz [sic] and Buchenwald, and the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, not to mention the war itself, made people look askance at National Socialism, whether German, Italian or British.87 While some were ultimately shaken to their senses by the revelation of the logical conclusion of their prejudice and ideology, cases such as Charnley who accepted the Holocaust but remained active members of the far right are in the extreme minority. In fact writing in Charnley’s Security Service file P.M. Burke states that he had ‘come across only one other case of a British Fascist who believed the reports of the atrocities’.88 The common line was one of disbelief that claimed the images were British propaganda to justify the war. Typical of BU members and in line with Mosley’s position was one female BU supporter who had seen the newsreel three times and stated, We are convinced that these camps were isolated camps for typhus and T.B. cases. Out of the millions of prisoners the Germans took there would be thousands who might contract typhus and T.B. And where was the Red Cross? Did’nt [sic] they know of these camps? [sic] and where are the pictures of children supposed to have been done to death there, and the instruments of torture? They can only produce one wooden mallet.89 For those who found it difficult to be so brazen in their denial in the face of such convincing and overwhelming evidence the relegation of Nazi crimes below those supposedly committed by the Allies and in particular the Soviets was the primary line of defence.90 While Oswald Mosley and his Union Movement were the largest immediate postwar group of fascists, they were by some stretch not the most fanatical or extreme. Well to the right of Mosley and his supporters were a group of revolutionary fascists whose antisemitism knew no bounds. Central to this extreme fascist milieu was Arnold Leese whose Holocaust denial took the opposite trajectory to that of Alexander Ratcliffe; he started off accepting that Jews had been murdered but blamed the Allies and only later shifted to outright denial. In line with the apologia offered by Oswald Mosley, Leese also pointed to Allied bombing as the

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primary cause of the emaciated victims found in the concentration camps. The very first edition of his postwar newsletter Gothic Ripples carried an article called, ‘Yes, but Who did it?’. While accepting that many died, it shifted blame away from the Nazis: We do not blame the Allies for making full use of their air-force to damage the enemy; but the consequences of doing so are now seen (but apparently not recognised) in the starvation stories, fully illustrated for their Jewish propaganda value, advertised in our newspapers.91 He denounced the Nuremberg trials as a ‘purely Jewish and Masonic affair . . . it is an act of revenge taken against those who were chiefly authoritative in the German attempt to free their country from the twin-plagues, Jewry & Freemasonry’.92 In early 1946 he expanded upon the regular machinations outlined in Gothic Ripples on Nuremberg and Nazi atrocities in a self-published book entitled Jewish War of Survival. The primary premise was that World War II was orchestrated by a secret Jewish conspiracy that used the British Empire to smash Hitler as he had woken up to the threat of international Jewry – or as Leese put it, had become ‘Jew-wise’. A  copy of the work was sent to and accepted by Herman Goering’s council at Nuremberg.93 While Leese continually questioned the evidence produced at the Nuremberg trials, declaring it ‘Belsen Bunkum’,94 he did not deny Nazi atrocities. Rather the book excuses the crimes and lays blame on the Jews themselves. As the Allied forces were puppets of the Jewish conspiracy, Leese does not differentiate between Allied actions and Jewish actions. He points to Samuel Untermeyer’s declaration of war against Germany by the Jewish people in 1933 as proof of a conscious Jewish war against the Nazis.95 Thus the Nazis’ extermination programme was simply legitimate retaliation for Allied attacks such as the aerial bombing campaign.96 As he put it, ‘The Germans began to take counter-measures against those within their reach whom they considered responsible’.97 In short Germany simply ‘fought & overcame its Jewish menace’.98 He thus asks, ‘Can the Jews blame other than themselves for all that has happened to them in Europe?’99 Throughout the immediate postwar period Leese’s views on Nazi atrocities developed as he added denial to the potent cocktail of his conspiracy-laden antisemitism. In 1953 in an article called ‘The Six Million Lie’ he stated, The fable of the slaughter of six million Jews by Hitler has never been tackled by Gothic Ripples because we take the view that we would have liked Hitler even better if the figure had been larger; we are so “obsessed with antisemitism” that we believe that as long as the destruction was done in a humane manner, it was to the advantage of everyone . . . if it had been true.100 Here Leese manages to both deny the Holocaust and also call for the ‘humane’ liquidation of the Jewish race.

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After his death Leese’s journal Gothic Ripples passed under the editorship of Anthony Gittens who continued the crusade against the truth. The 1958 frontpage article ‘Cooked in the Gas Ovens’ is a good example of another popular tactic used by deniers, namely what might be called ‘the numbers game’. This seeks to discredit the validity of the Holocaust and undermine the death of six million Jews by questioning the accuracy of the figures. The article quotes the World Jewish Congress, which claimed 12,000,000 Jews felt the effects of antisemitism in 1957, which it then claims is a drop of 3,749,000 since the official figures of 1946. This is then compared against the official figures of 16,140,000 Jews worldwide in 1938, thus supposedly making the net reduction during the war years just 391,000. As such the article claimed that the accepted figure of 6,000,000 Jews being exterminated must be false. As it coarsely put it, ‘we have a feeling it wasn’t the Jews who were being cooked in the gas ovens but it was the figures’.101 By playing fast and loose with both facts and figures Leese’s journal continued to deny the Holocaust after his death. Among Leese’s fellow postwar revolutionary fascists, the celebration and defence of Nazi atrocities and the call for the ‘humane’ destruction of the world’s Jews as a necessity was not uncommon. One of Leese’s associates, Captain Ramsay, a former British Army Officer and the only serving British MP to be detained under Defence Regulation 18B during the war, was also a fanatical antisemite convinced of the Jewish world conspiracy. In 1946 while trying to convince Jeffery Hamm to abandon his loyalty to Mosley and instead follow the revolutionary line of Leese, Ramsay is reported to have argued that, A state of mind must be brought about in which the public would abandon sentimentality and recognise that extermination of the Jews, lethally but humanely, was the one and only solution. He did not favour either cruelty or torture: Nazi methods, which had been distinguished by their humanity, were the correct ones.102 While in a minority, outlandish and disturbing opinions such as this were common among the group of revolutionary antisemites that sat on the very extreme fringe of Britain’s radical right.

‘Immoral equivalencies’103 While some on the far right either denied, excused or condoned Nazi atrocities, it is worth noting that not all leading activists of the period followed suit. A.K. Chesterton, an interwar disciple of Mosley, was one such character. Chesterton, publisher of Candour Newsletter and founder and leader of the postwar radical right group, the League of Empire Loyalists, was the leading British conspiratorial antisemite of the 20th century and would later go on to become the first leader of the National Front. Chesterton is remarkable as, despite remaining a dedicated antisemite, utterly convinced of Jewish world control, he both accepted the existence

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of Nazi atrocities and was horrified by them. He showed that in addition to outright denial or celebration, it was possible to accept that the Nazis had committed crimes against the Jews but remain a committed antisemite. In a 1948 letter to his Jewish friend Joseph Leftwich, Chesterton wrote: The unutterable abominations of Buchenwald and elsewhere completely knocked me flat and filled me with such horror that I  began to doubt whether human affairs were not too far gone in depravity for anybody to do anything about them.104 He also wrote that, ‘the horrors of the gas-chamber were instituted by a Germany gone berserk in war’.105 However, his response to the Holocaust did combine a ‘mixture of equivocation and rationalization’ according to his biographer LeCras.106 Chesterton was not alone in accepting the validity of atrocity stories but remaining a dedicated far-right activist. Writing about his father, leader of the British People’s Party John Beckett, Francis Beckett said, ‘At first he certainly thought that this was an invention of British and Jewish propaganda. . . . Later on, I believe he slowly and painfully started to realise that the Holocaust had really happened’.107 Despite this realisation he remained an avowed antisemite. It seems that for some antisemites even the acceptance of Nazi atrocities, the logical conclusion of their own prejudice and hatred put into action, did not manage to shake them from their beliefs. For those who accepted that atrocities had been committed but remained on the far right, the focus of their attention shifted to providing a critique of the Nuremberg Trials. In the year following the war Chesterton was a member of the British People’s Party Research Department along with former Imperial Fascist League member Harold Lockwood and the former Labour MP, British Union of Fascist member and leader of the party John Beckett. In 1946 the group published the pamphlet Failure at Nuremberg, actually written by John Beckett’s wife. The pamphlet, funded by the Duke of Bedford, has been described as ‘one of the first British anti-Semitic apologias for Nazi war crimes’.108 As with much apologetic literature published by Britain’s far right in reaction to Nazi war crimes, a key aim of the publication was to relativise German crimes by equating them to Allied ones, a tactic Deborah Lipstadt calls ‘immoral equivalency’.109 Failure at Nuremberg stated, If the Nuremberg law is to be held inviolate, therefore, it will be seen that a strong prima facie case exists against both the Russian and the American leadership, whose surviving members must forthwith be placed in the dock as suspected war-criminals.110 As has since become a core tenet of Holocaust denial, a major emphasis was placed on Allied bombing to show equality of criminality or immoral equivalency. However, the pamphlet goes beyond denouncing the Nuremberg trials and offers a defence of Nazism and antisemitism. It argued that the ‘sweeping denunciation of Nazi organisations as “criminal” is a verdict which the fair-minded

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historian, examining all the evidence of the times, is certain unhesitatingly to reject and reverse’. With all that said, the pamphlet does not go as far as to actually deny the events that would come to be called the Holocaust. It talks of the ‘deplorable frenzy which led to the final abomination of slaughtering them [the Jews]. This was a fearful atrocity’.111 Though it is important to note that they place the persecution of the Jews below the ‘slaughtering of the bourgeoisie by order of the present rulers of Russia’.112 The BPP thus accepted Nazi atrocities against the Jews but attempted to relativise their immoral nature and historical uniqueness. The pamphlet, Failure at Nuremberg, received widespread coverage upon its release from people and publications across the political spectrum. The left of centre New Statesman magazine described it as ‘an elaborate attack on the wisdom and justice of trying the Nazi war leaders. Allied politicians, it is said, are as guilty as the Germans’. Right-wing newspapers such as Truth also reviewed it, describing it as ‘valuable’ while the magazine Patriot, originally set up and funded by Alan Percy, the 8th Duke of Northumberland, praised it for being ‘well documented’.113 However, not all on the right praised it, with some such as Arnold Leese criticising it for being too moderate, stating that ‘We do not agree with . . . the Jewish Extermination Policy being labelled an Abomination or a Fearful Atrocity, as on page 13’.114 The British People’s Party’s attack on the Nuremberg Trials was by no means just confined to the publication of Failure at Nuremberg but was rather a prolonged offensive played out in the pages of the party’s organ, People’s Post. It bemoaned the ‘nauseating spectacle at Nuremberg’ and the ‘smug hypocrisy of his [Hitler’s] conquerors’.115 Once again the hypocrisy of which they talk is a reference to possible Allied crimes. Talking of the playing of atrocity footage at the Trials they said, We can safely rest assured that the cellars of Hamburg, the deserts which were once Hiroshima and Nagasaki will not be on view. There will be pictures of countless prisoners murdered but will the mass graves of Katyn be brought before the Court? . . . Pictures will be shown of starving peoples deported by Germans. Will the Court see the Germans of 1919 starving under blockade?116 As members of the BPP understood it: ‘Instruction in committing the crimes for which we have been executing some of our late adversaries was given at our own seats of learning’.117 Thus, Nuremberg was simply ‘Satan reproving sin’.118 However, it was not just wartime crimes that were pointed to in an attempt to negate the uniqueness of the Holocaust. The mass population transfers that followed the war were also pointed to. Writing in People’s Post the Duke of Bedford explained how: the expulsion of Germans by Czechs and Poles, approved of by Russia and tolerated by Great Britain and the U.S.A., is going on under conditions of cruelty which equal anything ever attributed to Nazi policy and which, moreover, is being carried on a much larger scale.119

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The mass population transfers after the war became a fulcrum of Holocaust Denial and remain so to this day. As recently as 2009, Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review, one of the world’s leading Holocaust denial organisations, delivered an address titled ‘An “Unknown Holocaust” and the Hijacking of History’ in which he explained how the ‘victorious Allies ushered in a horrible new era of destruction, looting, starvation, rape, “ethnic cleansing,” and mass killing’.120 Count Potocki de Montalk also engaged in ‘immoral equivalency’, describing the trials as a revolting travesty of justice.121 However, he went even further than claiming mere equivalency of crimes when in a pamphlet dated 25 December 1945 he stated: The Allies have committed more and worse crimes of the types defined in their own documents than there is any possibility of their enemies having done. There is no respect in which the Allies are not more guilty than their enemies.122 While there is a serious discussion to be had about the morality of the Allied forces during the war, especially in relation to the use of area bombing,123 the motivation for writing articles and pamphlets such as those written by Chesterton, Beckett and Potocki were not born of a burning desire for justice but rather of a wish to diminish Nazi crimes, strip the Holocaust of its uniqueness and paint Nazi atrocities as one crime among many.

Major General Fuller and Liddell Hart Amongst the most influential Britons to publish literature designed to relativise and thus diminish Nazi crimes in the immediate postwar period were Major General Fuller and Liddell Hart. Their influence was no doubt helped by the moderateness of their writings on the matter and their position as respected and important military commentators and strategists. A  letter from Hart to Fuller explained how Chiang Kai-Shek’s military advisers had been brought up on their writings ‘as their bibles’,124 and an entry in Hart’s diary shows that he was invited to lunch by Nehru in 1948 while he was on a trip to London. In short, despite Fuller’s overt fascism in the interwar period, both remained respected military men, had links to the British Establishment, and both wisely, in public at least, stayed clear of the extreme denial material published by Leese, Ratcliffe and Bedford. At first glance much of what they published in the immediate postwar years comes across as legitimate criticism of the Nuremberg Trials born of a concern for justice. Fuller’s postwar work did not so much deny Nazi atrocities (unlike his prewar comments) but rather he argued that both sides were guilty of terrible wrongdoing and to condemn the Nazis was simply victor’s justice. He argued modern conflict lacked all morality and had become what he called ‘Cads’ Warfare’,125 which had ‘dissolved into a howling pandemonium in which every kind of atrocity is

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applauded when committed against the enemy and execrated when perpetrated by him’.126 It was this position that made him such a critic of the Nuremberg Trials: There are atrocities in every war, therefore if you are going to swing for a small one you may as well swing for a big. The whole thing is such a filthy business that it casts a halo round Hitler’s head. By our behaviour at Nuremberg we canonized him. What a farce!127 The published writings of Fuller in the postwar period do not often, at first glance, seem extreme or pernicious. Yet what Fuller was really doing was engaging in immoral equivalency with a view to denying the uniqueness of Nazi crimes. His comments become even more suspicious when placed in their proper context and combined with knowledge of his links to fascism and the far right. Prior to the war Fuller had published articles describing Jews as ‘degenerates’, praising concentration camps and denying prewar Nazi crimes.128 He also had a long history as a fascist activist in the BUF, which had scuppered any chance of re-employment with the military in the 1930s and 1940s.129 His connections with German Nazis and Spanish and Italian Fascists were well known and made him the target of governmental suspicion. He did however avoid the fate of many of his BUF comrades of being interned during the war years, possibly because his patriotism was deemed beyond doubt.130 Yet, his fascist sympathies survived the war with his biographer accepting they sometimes ‘peeped through’ in his postwar writings.131 A long-term friend and accomplice of Fuller was Captain Basil Henry Liddell Hart, described as ‘perhaps the most famous strategic theorist of the twentieth century’.132 Despite his respected reputation and patriotism he also published works designed to undermine the uniqueness of the Holocaust. In reply to a letter from Fuller outlining his position on the war crimes trials Hart replied, ‘I agree with your comments on Nuremberg’.133 In 1948 he published what proved to be a controversial book, The German Generals Talk, the second edition changed to The Other Side of the Hill. The book is by no means a work of outright Holocaust denial with only the briefest mention of atrocities or Nuremberg, though it has been described as ‘a markedly sympathetic assessment of the German Military High Command’.134 One of his core arguments was that the German army generally behaved well during the war and that it is possible to separate the actions of the generals and the army from the actions of the Nazis. Hart wrote: ‘What is really more remarkable than the German generals’ submission to Hitler is the extent to which they managed to maintain in the Army a code of decency that was in constant conflict with Nazi ideas’.135 He tended to believe that the generals’ postwar attempts to distance themselves from Nazi aggression and atrocities were ‘not without reason’ and based his position on a ‘prewar background knowledge wider than that of the prosecutors at Nuremberg’.136 However, he ‘wilfully ignored the Wehrmacht’s willing complicity in the descent into genocide’ and his attempts to portray the military as apolitical,

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‘actively colluded in whitewashing their horrific crimes’.137 It is unsurprising then that the book was not greeted by universal approval, as Hart explained to Fuller: Rather surprisingly, “The Other Side of the Hill” has had far more favourable reviews in France than anywhere else – indeed, there has not been a single unfavourable one, contrary to anticipation. All the reviewers have treated the book as purely objective, and none of them have suggested that it is an attempt to whitewash the Germans, or let them whitewash themselves – as was quite a frequent criticism of American reviewers and to some extent here.138 While the book itself is generally moderate in tone, the suspicion of pro-Germanness was perhaps not unfounded. His diaries from that period show that he was in contact with numerous prominent far-right and fascist activists involved in denial of Nazi crimes from both Britain and abroad. Most notable in Britain was the Duke of Bedford whom he met for lunch on at least several occasions around the time and just after the publication of the book.139

Anglo-French denial links Who denied the Holocaust first is less important that who did it most successfully. What matters is influence, and the French denier Maurice Bardèche was unquestionably one of the most influential of the early period. In 1947, he published Letter to François Mauriac, which strongly defended French collaboration and denounced the execution of his close friend and collaborator Robert Brasillach for treason.140 He followed it up with Nuremberg or the Promised Land in 1948, which he opened with the now traditional adage of the denial movement: ‘I am not taking up the defense of Germany. I am taking up the defense of the truth’.141 However, the text reveals otherwise. On the concentration camps, he wrote: They photographed them, they filmed them, they published them, they made them known by a gargantuan publicity campaign, like for some brand of pen. The moral war was won. . . . After having presented our most sincere compliments to the technicians, mostly Jewish, who orchestrated this program, we now want to see clearly.142 Like Ratcliffe before him he went as far as to question the legitimacy of the pictorial evidence, claiming they showed fabricated scenes with: Reconstituted torture chambers in places where they never existed . . . like a film set. . . . And in the pious intention of making them more realistic, supplementary crematory ovens were constructed at Auschwitz and Dachau to appease any scruples which might have been born in the minds of certain mathematicians.143

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The text goes on with irony to describe Nuremberg as ‘another Dreyfus case’,144 exonerates Germany for starting the war and when talking of German atrocities mischievously states, ‘the truth, here, is not as easy to disentangle as one would think’.145 Like many Britons with a similar motive, Bardèche also engaged in immoral equivalency by arguing that the Allies also engaged in ‘different but just as effective methods, a system of extermination almost as wide-spread’146 and stated, ‘I will believe in the judicial existence of war crimes when I see General Eisenhower and Marshal Rossokovsky take seats at the Nuremberg Court on the bench for the accused’.147 If these arguments sound similar to those published in Britain, it is no mere coincidence. Bardèche’s next book, Nuremberg II ou les Faux Monnayeurs, published in 1950, made it abundantly clear that he was well aware of much of the earlier denial literature emanating from Britain. He talked of the Anglo-Saxon intellectuals and journalists who rose up against the supposed injustices of Nuremberg long before he did.148 He specifically drew attention to the work of the Duke of Bedford and quoted the BPP pamphlet Failure at Nuremberg, which he described as an extremely inflammatory pamphlet, very well-supported with evidence.149 While mentioning that the pamphlet contained sections on the partiality of the tribunal, on condemnations brought to trial by ex post facto law, on the Allied war crimes and on the fundamental dishonesty of the trial itself, he quoted at length from the passages concerning National Socialism and those about the falsification of evidence and testimonies.150 In addition to the Duke of Bedford and the BPP, Bardèche mentioned the work of numerous other British writers such as Montgomery Belgion, Major General Fuller, Liddell Hart and the author of Advance to Barbarism, F.J.P. Veale. Clearly impressed with the work of the British journalist Montgomery Belgion, Bardèche quoted at great length from his 1946 book Epitaph on Nuremberg.151 Though incorrectly, as has been shown earlier, Bardèche believed Belgion to be the first to go beyond mere criticism of the trials and to describe them as political operations and propaganda designed to justify the Allies’ actions.152 He also believed this marked the first example of someone accusing the Allied forces of having committed the same atrocities that they were condemning the Germans for.153 While wrong about Belgion being first, his general summary of his work was correct. Belgion wrote, ‘I see the Trial as having taken place in order to give the delusive appearance of a legal finding to the contention that Germany caused the war’154 and that: This time, instead of waiting for a peace treaty in which to proclaim Germany’s “war guilt” for the second war, it was decided to have trials that would, it was hoped conclusively establish this guilt in the eyes of the whole world, and also in the eyes of the German people themselves. . . . The Nuremberg Trial was a gigantic “put up show”. The Nuremberg Trial was a gigantic piece of propaganda.155

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Furthermore, attention was drawn to Allied bombing campaigns, described as the ‘RAF’s Holocausts’,156 starvation and disease in Germany caused by Allied actions157 and the brutal tactics of resistance movements. In short, he believed, ‘the Nuremberg Trial was not held in order to do justice, it must have been held in order to do injustice’.158 Ironically it had been Victor Gollancz, an anti-fascist publisher, who originally encouraged Belgion to write the book, but when he saw a draft he found it ‘unpublishable’ as he had ‘fallen over backwards to give the impression of whitewashing Nazi horrors’.159 It was this attempt at whitewashing history that no doubt impressed Bardèche so much. He also praised the work of Captain Liddell Hart and Major General Fuller for showing no reluctance in demonstrating severe judgements towards the Allied bombardments, as much as towards Hitler’s concentration camps.160 He specifically praises Fuller’s 1945 book, Armament and History, for providing some of the most damaging condemnations against the Allies.161 Thus, when looking at the early work of Bardèche, the man lauded by many as the first denier, it becomes clear that he was drawing extensively on the work of British deniers who predated him.

Early American Holocaust denial While it has been shown how early British denial literature reached an audience beyond Britain and influenced some of the most famous international Holocaust deniers of the period, it is worth exploring similarities and differences between early denial on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps the best known early American Holocaust denier is Francis Parker Yockey who, in his 1948 book Imperium, wrote: Thousands of the people who had been killed published accounts of their experiences in these camps. Hundreds of thousands more made fortunes in postwar black markets. “Gas-chambers” that did not exist were photographed, and a “gasmobile” was invented to titillate the mechanically minded.162 The argument and tone of Yockey’s denial echoes the work of the British ‘pioneer revisionists’ discussed earlier. While American, Yockey was based in Britain, with British fascists, during much of the late 1940s, and his work Imperium was published first in the UK, which likely accounts for the similarities with early British denial literature. Like much of the denial literature published in the UK, Imperium also gained an audience among foreign sympathisers. The Frenchman Bardèche was in contact with Yockey, and they met in the winter of 1950/1951. Yockey had contacted him, and they then entered into correspondence that saw Yockey send him ‘extremely valuable documents’, which Bardéche used in Nuremberg 2 or the Counterfeiters. Yockey also sent him a copy of Imperium, which interested Bardéche ‘a great deal and to such a point that I began the translation of it’. Yockey asked to be put in contact with the most important far-right people in France, and Bardéche obliged by organising a meeting at his home with Rene Binet.163 For a period Yockey also

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formed transatlantic via G.L.K Smith who mentioned Yockey’s Proclamation of London and his organisation, the European Liberation Front (ELF), in his newspaper The Cross and the Flag. Yockey’s supporter Anthony Gannon also claims that Smith provided financial assistance to the ELF, though the relationship was to later end.164 Biographer of Yockey, Kevin Coogan, has argued that his work ‘may have been the first attempt by an American to deny the Holocaust in print’.165 However, this is incorrect, and as is the case in Britain, American denial also started earlier than is generally believed. Though not quite as early as in Britain, one can find examples of Americans denying Nazi crimes in print as soon as the war finished. One example is Leon de Aryan in his newspaper The Broom. De Aryan, born in Romania in 1886, arrived in America in 1912 following stays in Austria, Egypt and Mesopotamia, was a prominent antisemite and anti-communist on the West Coast and claimed to have the unique ability of being able to tell a communist over the phone because of the ‘gutter sound’ in their voices.166 This prominent West Coast Fascist was among those indicted during the war joining America’s leading Nazi sympathisers in the ‘Great Sedition Trial’. Just as much of the British far right believed that Jews were to blame for the start of war, so too did de Aryan. The pages of The Broom claimed that Jews secretly pushed for war, even by funding Hitler to arm and organise the Brownshirts.167 After the war it was common to find pro-Nazi articles in the paper, with one declaring, ‘Hitler is not dead in the hearts of the German people, for Hitler is not a man. Hitler is a legend. . . .] The legend of Hitler is dear to the German people as a liberator from the yoke of the Rothschild clan, the usurers’.168 Unsurprisingly, the paper was vocally opposed to the ‘Nuremberg travesty’,169 greeting the Trials’ announcement with the headline, ‘Mass pogrom of 6,000,000 Nazis demanded’, obviously a reference to the 6,000,000 dead Jews.170 Any crimes that the Germans did commit were laid squarely at the feet of the Jews themselves, absurdly arguing: ‘The real instigators of war crimes are the Jews. . . . Jewish hate and sadism has poisoned the German mind. . . . The atrocities committed by Himmler’s Gestapo are nothing but the Jewish chickens come home to roost’.171 They even printed a letter from a Mr Eugen Brand that offered the novel hypothesis that Jews died not because of a systematic programme of murder by the Nazis but because Jews were soft living people (extremely rich food and no exercise), not devoted to physical exercise or sport but coffeehouse denizens (twice a day). It is easy to understand why so many Jews died in wartime when the shortage of food became acute thru the English blockade.172 Thus, the decline in Jewish numbers was to be explained by Jewish laziness and the actions of the British. Those who suffered in concentration camps were said to be Marxists and thus legitimate targets. This was not the only fantastical hypothesis advanced in the pages of The Broom. Leon de Aryan believed: While the Jews got their revenge at Nuremberg, it must be kept a “top-secret” that one of the conditions by which Wall Street and London, Amsterdam and

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Paris financed Hitler was that he institute a reign of terror against Jews, to enrage America, “outrage” humanity.173 This is a uniquely American-centric form of Holocaust denial arguing that the primary aim of Jewish persecution by the Nazis, instigated and encouraged by Jews themselves, was to draw America into the Second World War. While printing numerous explanations for Jewish persecution, all of which were said to be the fault of the Jews, there was a consensus within the pages of The Broom that ‘in their unlimited hatred of Germany and Germans, the Jews continue to spread the lie that Hitler murdered 6 million of them’.174 The most they would concede is that the Nazis murdered just 600,000 and the number was then inflated ten times by the Jews.175 As was common in Europe among apologists for the Nazis, de Aryan and The Broom engaged in immoral equivalency arguing that both Britain and America had committed crimes equal in scale to those of the Nazis.176 They often referenced the use of rape, claiming that ‘Communist-Jewish French “white” officers’ ordered the Senegalese regiment in Stuttgart to ‘round up over 5000 German girls into the subway and rape them for 5 days’.177 In 1958 de Aryan published a long article, accompanied by a series of graphic pictures of mounds of charred bodies, telling the story of the Allied bombing of Dresden.178 Austin App advanced similar arguments, whose articles they occasionally published.179 The US racist newspaper White Sentinel also vocally condemned the Nuremberg Trials and defended German war criminals by condemning the chief US ‘persecutor’ for evolving ‘the strange theory that planning and conducting a war was a crime punishable by death and that a man could not absolve himself of guilt even when he acted on the direct orders of his superiors’.180 Furthermore, it argued that ‘he knew that the Communists were far more guilty of such crimes that the representatives of the German Third Reich’.181 Essentially, the American far right employed all the same tactics as their British counterparts to diminish Nazi crimes. As the 1950s began American pioneer deniers were to be joined by an everincreasing number of likeminded activists. In 1952 W.D. Herrstrom wrote in Bible News Flashes that there were five million Jews illegally residing in America and that it was, ‘No use looking in Shickelgruber’s ovens for them. Walk down the streets of any American city. There they are’.182 G.L.K Smith, the clergyman and far-right political organiser who founded the America First Party and then The Christian Nationalist Crusade, was another source of such denial material during the first half of the 1950s. He had long been a campaigner for non-intervention in the war and sought to rationalise Hitler’s atrocities. During the prewar and war years he was joined in his attempts by other antisemites such as Lawrence R. Griffith who wrote and distributed the pamphlet Why Do you Hate Hitler? which argued that ‘Franklin Roosevelt’s hate Hitler program and love Churchill and Stalin is nothing more than a political Jewish method of getting the public mind off the Jew, and as a smoke screen, placing the blame on Hitlerism’.183 Griffith, Smith and antisemites like them sought to minimalise the crimes of Hitler with a view to avoiding

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American intervention. Smith’s biographer Glen Jeansonne states that while his views ‘might seem eccentric or comical to modern readers, millions of Americans shared them’.184 In 1940 The Nation estimated that more than 15 million people were influenced by such ideas.185 However, after the war Smith shifted from rationalising Nazi crimes to outright denial of them. A 1952 article in his newspaper, The Cross and the Flag, stated that: The last big lie to be put over by the world propagandists was that six million Jews were killed by Hitler. This falsehood has now been exposed by the new census of Jews which shows that the world Jew population is many, many millions more than it was before World War II.186 In the following years this argument became commonplace in the pages of Smith’s newspaper, usually referring to the Holocaust and Nazi crimes as ‘the big lie’.187 Also peddling pernicious denial in the early fifties was the National Renaissance Party (NRP). The NRP was America’s first avowedly postwar fascist organisation, headed by James H. Madole.188 Writing in the National Renaissance Bulletin Kurt Mertig, leader of the Citizens’ Protective League, talked of the, ‘myth of 6,000,000 Jews killed during the Nazi regime’.189 As had others before them, the NRP played the numbers game, using figures from different sources to supposedly show that it was impossible for six million Jews to have died. ‘Where are those six million Jews who were murdered by Hitler?’ James Madole asked in 1952.190 For him, ‘the myth concerning six million European Jews allegedly roasted and barbecued by the National Socialist government of Germany is the most colossal swindle ever perpetrated’.191 Going well beyond simply denying Nazi crimes, Madole was determined to paint the victims as the perpetrators, arguing that ‘World Jewry not the German military and political leaders who were legally butchered at the infamous Nuremberg trials were the real war criminals’.192 Any attacks against the Jews that did occur were said to be beyond reproach and legitimate: ‘National Socialist attacks on the Jews were based solely on the fact that Jews were the motivating force behind Communism in Germany. National Socialist antisemitism had nothing to do with the Jews as either a religion or a race, but was based solely on Jewish treachery’.193 Such views were increasing aired publicly by the end of the 1950s. In 1959 an article by Benjamin Freedman called ‘Six Million Jew Hoax’ appeared in the journal Common Sense, and in the same year an article in the Cross and the Flag called ‘Into the Valley of Death Rode the Six Million Or Did They?’ argued that the six million missing Jews were actually living in America.194 One can also find examples of explicit denial coming from George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party. In the late 1950s he pretended to be an ex-SS officer and fabricated a letter claiming that he knew the Nazis had performed vivisections on Jewish concentration camp inmates. A magazine published the fake article, and this was, in his eyes, definitive proof of the falsification of the Holocaust myth.195

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Notes 1 Richard Dimbleby, ‘The Liberation of Belsen’, BBC Radio, Broadcast 15 April 1945. Accessed 9 April 2015. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/4445811.stm. 2 Tony Kushner, ‘Different Worlds: British Perceptions of the Final Solution During the Second World War’, in David Cesarani (ed.), Holocaust: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, Vol. 6 (London: Routledge, 2004), 262. 3 Joanne Reilly, Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp (London: Routledge, 1998), 30. 4 Dan Stone, Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 46. 5 Frederick J. Simonelli, American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 107. 6 Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 50. 7 Samuel Moyn, A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2005), 63. 8 Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Limor Yagil, Holocaust Denial in France: Analysis of a Unique Phenomenon (Tel Aviv: The Project for the Study of Antisemitism, n.d.), 32. 9 Moyn, A Holocaust Controversy, 63. 10 Vidal-Naquet and Yagil, Holocaust Denial in France, 25. 11 Kenneth S. Stern, Holocaust Denial (New York: The American Jewish Committee, 1993), 6. 12 Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg, The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 111. 13 Meir Litvak and Esther Webman, From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust (London: Hurst, 2009), 155. 14 Henry Feingold, ‘The Surprising Historic Roots of Holocaust Denial’, in Debra Kaufman, Gerald Herman, James Ross and David Phillips (eds.), From the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Holocaust Denial Trials: Challenging the Media, the Law and the Academy (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007), 67. 15 Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 41. 16 Shermer and Grobman, Denying History, 41. 17 Stephen E. Atkins, Holocaust Denial as an International Movement (Westport: Praeger, 2009), 117. 18 Atkins, Holocaust Denial as an International Movement, 117. 19 Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust, 49–65. 20 Paul Jackson, ‘Accumulative Extremism: The Postwar Tradition of Anglo-American Neo-Nazi Activism’, in Paul Jackson and Anton Shekhovtsov (eds.), The Postwar AngloAmerican Far-Right: A  Special Relationship of Hate (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 19. 21 Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to the National Front (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 208. 22 Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 23 David Cesarani, ‘How Postwar Britain Reflected on the Nazi Persecution and Mass Murder of Europe’s Jews: A Reassessment of Early Responses’, Jewish Culture and History, 12:1–2, 2010, 115. 24 Cesarani, ‘How Postwar Britain Reflected’, 121. 25 Nicholas Pronay, ‘Defeated Germany in British Newsreel: 1944–45’, in K.R.M. Short and Stephen Dolezel (eds.), Hitler’s Fall: The Newsreel Witness (London: Croom Helm, 1988), 45. 26 Milton D. Stewart, ‘Mass Media: The Atrocity Stories’, Common Sense, XIV:5, 1945, 23.

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2 7 Stewart, ‘Mass Media’, 23. 28 Tony Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice: Antisemitism in British Society During the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 226. 29 Cesarani, ‘How Postwar Britain Reflected’, 126. For the same point see also: Tony Kushner, ‘ “I Want to Go on Living After My Death”: The Memory of Anne Frank’, in K. Lunn and M. Evans (eds.), War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Berg, 1997). 30 Cesarani, ‘How Postwar Britain Reflected’, 98. 31 Frederic Mullally, Fascism Inside Britain (London: Claud Morris Books Ltd, 1946), 87. 32 Nicholas Mosley, Rules of the Game and Beyond the Pale: Memoirs of Sir Oswald Mosley and Family (Pimlico: London, 1998), 545. 33 Kushner, ‘Different Worlds’, 211. 34 Pronay, ‘Defeated Germany in British Newsreel”, 45. 35 Blackshirt, 1 May and 26 June 1937, 2. Referenced in David Baker, Ideology of Obsession: A.K. Chesterton and British Fascism (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 146. 36 J.F.C. Fuller, ‘German Concentration Camps’, Truth, 24 November 1939, 575. 37 Dan Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939: Before War and Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 3 8 Duke of Bedford, Propaganda for Proper Geese (Glasgow: The Strickland Press, 1942), 17. 39 Bedford, Propaganda for Proper Geese, 16. 40 For more on the life and career of Alexander Ratcliffe see: Colin Holmes, ‘Alexander Ratcliffe, Militant Protestant and Antisemite’, in Tony Kushner and Kenneth Lunn (eds.), Traditions of Intolerance: Historical Perspectives on Fascism and Race Discourse in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 194–217. 41 Alexander Ratcliffe, The Truth About Jews, 2nd ed. (Glasgow: Alexander Ratcliffe, 1943), 15. 42 Ratcliffe, The Truth About Jews, 16. 43 Ratcliffe, The Truth About Jews, 15. 44 Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust, 50. 45 Jewish Chronicle, 9 April 1943, in Ratcliffe, The Truth About Jews, Inside back cover. 46 Atrocities Not German, Protestant Vanguard, 331, April 1945, 9. 47 Atrocities Not German, Protestant Vanguard, 9. 48 Ratcliffe, The Truth About Jews, 14–16. 49 Francis Beckett mentions WWI propaganda as a cause of his father’s initial disbelief in email to author, 15 August 2013. 50 Baker, Ideology of Obsession, 147. 51 Action, 18 November 1937, 3. In Baker, Ideology of Obsession, 147. 52 Interview in George Michael, Willis Carto and the American Far-Right (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2008), 129. 53 Dimbleby, ‘The Liberation of Belsen’. 54 Alexander Ratcliffe, ‘The Truth About the German Atrocities!’ Protestant Vanguard, 334, July 1945, 4. 55 Ratcliffe, ‘The Truth About the German Atrocities!’ 4. 56 Holmes, ‘Alexander Ratcliffe, Militant Protestant and Antisemite’, 205, 212. 57 Holmes, ‘Alexander Ratcliffe, Militant Protestant and Antisemite’, 212. 58 Graham Macklin, ‘The Two Lives of John Hooper Harvey’, Patterns of Prejudice, 42:2, 2008, 181. 59 Graham Macklin and Craig Fowlie, ‘The Fascist Who Would Be King: Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk’, Patterns of Prejudice, 53:2, 2019, 154. 60 Richard Reynell Bellamy, We Marched with Mosley: The Authorised History of the British Union of Fascists (London: Black House Publishing, 2013), 294. 61 Quoted in Stephanie de Montalk, Unquiet World: The Life of Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2001), 232.

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6 2 Macklin and Fowlie, ‘The Fascist Who Would Be King’, 164–165. 63 Original reference not given. Found in Montalk, Unquiet World, 231. 64 Krensky and Katin, Gothic Ripples, 5, 20 October 1945, 1. And in Anonymous, Failure at Nuremberg (London: Research Department of the British People’s Party, 1946). 65 Union, 10, 17 April 1948. 66 Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (London: Papermac, 1990), 490. 67 Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 491. 68 Extracts from Press Conference held by Sir Oswald Mosley, at 39 South Eaton Place, SW1, on 28 November 1947. Quoted in: Appendix C: The Emergence of the “Union Movement”; Rose, Fascism in Britain, 14. 69 Oswald Mosley, The Alternative (Ramsbury: Mosley Publications, 1947), 227. 70 Mosley, The Alternative, 221. 71 Mosley, The Alternative, 218. 72 Extracts from Press Conference held by Sir Oswald Mosley, at 39, South Eaton Place, S.W. 1, on 28 November 1947, 15. 73 Extracts from Press Conference held by Sir Oswald Mosley, at 39, South Eaton Place, S.W. 1, on 28 November 1947, 15. 74 Mosley, The Alternative, 221. 75 Graham Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley and the Resurrection of British Fascism After 1945 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 118. 76 Union, 10, 17 April 1948, in Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed In Black, 118. 77 Mosley, The Alternative, 191. 78 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 80. 79 Mosley, The Alternative, 191. 80 Mosley, The Alternative, 212–213. 81 Oswald Mosley, Europe: Faith and Plan (London: Black House Publishing, 2012 [1958]), 12. 82 Mosley, Europe, 11. 83 ‘ “Antisemitism”: A Jewish Invention’, Union, 51, 5 February 1949, 3. 84 Charlie Watts, It Has Happened Here: The Experience of a Political Prisoner in British Prisons and Concentration Camps During the Fifth Column Panic of 1940/41. Unpublished Autobiography, British Union Collection, Sheffield University Library, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield (henceforth BUC), 5/8 MS 199. 85 Chief Constable of Southport (can’t read signature) to Major F.W. Towns, 14 May 1945, John William Charnley, NA KV 2/497. 86 For John’s story see: John Charnley, Blackshirts and Roses (London: Black House Publishing, 2012). 87 Nellie Driver, From the Shadows of Exile, Rawnsley British Union of Fascists Collection, J.B Priestley Library, University of Bradford, Bradford (henceforth RBUFC), 1/A, 117. 88 P.M. Burke to Major F.W. Towns, 24 May  1945, John William Charnley, NA KV 2/497. 89 P.M. Burke to Major F.W. Towns, 24 May 1945, John William Charnley, NA KV 2/497. 90 P.M. Burke to Major F.W. Towns, 24 May 1945, John William Charnley, NA KV 2/497. 91 ‘Yes, but Who Did It?’ Gothic Ripples, 1, 22 June 1945, 1. 92 ‘Trial of Nazi Leaders’, Gothic Ripples, 5, 11 November 1945, 1. 93 Arnold Spencer Leese, Out of Step: Events in the Two Lives of an Anti-Jewish Camel Doctor (Guildford: Arnold Spencer Leese, 1951), 70. 94 Belsen Bunkum, Gothic Ripples, 4, 13 October 1945, 1. 95 Arnold Spencer Leese, The Jewish War of Survival (Uckfield: The Historical Review Press, n.d. [orig. 1946]), 87. 96 Leese, The Jewish War of Survival, 66. 97 Leese, The Jewish War of Survival, 87. 98 ‘Last Phase at Nuremberg’, Gothic Ripples, 22, 15 September 1946, 1. 99 Leese, The Jewish War of Survival, 87.

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100 ‘The Six Million Lie’, Gothic Ripples, 96, 14 January 1953. 101 ‘Cooked in the Gas Ovens’, Gothic Ripples, 151, 15 April 1958, 1. 102 G.R. Mitchell, Fascist Activities April to May 1946, 7 May 1946, NA HO 45/25395. 103 A phrase coined by Deborah Lipstadt in Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust, 42. 104 A.K. Chesterton and Joseph Leftwich, The Tragedy of Antisemitism (London: Robert Anscombe, 1948), 150. 105 Chesterton and Leftwich, The Tragedy of Antisemitism, 213. 106 Luke LeCras, A.K. Chesterton and the Evolution of Britain’s Extreme Right, 1933–1973 (London: Routledge, 2019). 107 Email from Francis Beckett to author, 15 August 2013. 108 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 124. 109 Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust, 42. 110 Anonymous, Failure at Nuremberg, 11. 111 Anonymous, Failure at Nuremberg, 13. 112 Anonymous, Failure at Nuremberg, 13. 113 All reviews taken from an advert for the pamphlet in Peoples Post, 4:11, 23 December  1946, 8. The Duke of Northumberland’s newspaper Patriot had an audience on both sides of the Atlantic. It was quoted in The Individualist, a Nebraska-based newspaper edited by Charles W. Phillips. For example see: The Individualist, 187, 15 March 1943, 4 and The Individualist, 190, 14 April 1943, 2. 114 Gothic Ripples, 26, 27 October 1946, 4. 115 ‘Satan Reproves Sin’, People’s Post, December 1945, 6. This same argument was used by Richard Edmonds of the National Front during an interview with the author in August 2013. It was also used from the floor during a David Irving Lecture in Oxford attended by the author in August 2013. See also: David Irving, Apocalypse 1945: The Destruction of Dresden, Second Updated and Rev. ed. (Windsor: Focal Point Publications, 2007). 116 ‘Satan Reproves Sin’, 6. 117 ‘Review of Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, Thunderbolts’, Peoples Post, 4:9, 21 October 1946, 6. 118 ‘Satan Reproves Sin’, 6. 119 Duke of Bedford, ‘From the Duke of Bedford’, Peoples Post, 2:9, 25 September  1945, 2. 120 ‘An “Unknown Holocaust” and the Hijacking of History’. An address by Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review, delivered at an IHR meeting in Orange County, California, on 25 July  2009. Accessed 13 April  2015. www.ihr.org/other/ july09weber.html. 121 Report by G.R. Mitchell on Fascist Activities, 29 November 1946, NA, HO 45/25395. 122 Quoted in report by G.R. Mitchell on Fascist Activities, 29 November 1946, NA, HO 45/25395. 123 For example, see, A.C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan (New York: Walker and Company, 2006). 124 Liddell Hart to J.F.C. Fuller, 24 September 1946, Liddell Hart Archive, Kings College, London (henceforth LHA), LH 1/302/325. 125 ‘Review of Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, Thunderbolts’, 6. 126 Major General J.F.C. Fuller, Armaments and History: A Study of the Influence of Armaments on History from the Dawn of Classical Warfare to the Second World War (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1945), 182–183. 127 J.F.C. Fuller to Liddell Hart, 15 October 1946, LHA, LH 1/302/326. 128 Fuller, ‘German Concentration Camps’, 575. 129 Anthony John Trythall, “Boney” Fuller: Soldier, Strategist, and Writer 1878–1966 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1977), 181. 130 Trythall, “Boney” Fuller, 213.

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131 Trythall, “Boney” Fuller, 237. 132 Azar Gat, Fascist and Liberal Visions of War: Fuller, Liddell Hart, Douhet, and Other Modernists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 127. 133 Liddell Hart to J.F.C. Fuller, 17 October 1945, LHA, LH 1/302/327. 134 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 133. 135 B.H. Liddell Hart, The Other Side of the Hill: German Generals Their Rise and Fall, with Their Own Account of Military Events, 1939–1945 (London: Cassell, 1951), 12. 136 Hart, The Other Side of the Hill, 11. 137 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 133. 138 Liddell Hart to J.F.C. Fuller, 14 June 1949, LHA, LH 1/302/408. 139 Diary Entry, 20 November  1948, LHA, LH 11/1947–1948 and Diary Entry, 26 July 1949, LHA, LH 11/1947–1948. 140 Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (New York: Autonomedia, 1999), 162. 141 Maurice Bardèche, Nuremberg or the Promised Land (First published 1948) (This version: Internet, le Secrétariat international de l’Association des Anciens Amateurs de Récits de Guerre et d’Holocauste (AAARGH), 2007), 7. http://vho.org/aaargh/fran/ livres7/BARDECHEnureng.pdf. 142 Bardèche, Nuremberg ou la terre promise, 23–24, cited in Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 167. 143 Bardèche, Nuremberg ou la terre promise, 146, cited in Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality, 167. 144 Bardèche, Nuremberg or the Promised Land, 18. 145 Bardèche, Nuremberg or the Promised Land, 38. 146 Bardèche, Nuremberg or the Promised Land, 39. 147 Bardèche, Nuremberg or the Promised Land, 66. 148 Statement is paraphrased from the French: ‘Il serait trop long de citer ici tous ceux qui, bien avant moi, se sont élevés contre l’injustice du procès de Nuremberg. Dès la fin du procès, des intellectuels et des journalistes anglo-saxons protestèrent’. In Maurice Bardèche, Nuremberg II ou les Faux Monnayeurs (First published 1950) (This version: Internet, le Secrétariat international de l’Association des Anciens Amateurs de Récits de Guerre et d’Holocauste (AAARGH), 1998), 5. https://ia902703.us.archive.org/6/ items/NurembergIiOuLesFauxMonnayeurs/MBNur2.pdf. 149 Statement is paraphrased from the French: ‘Presque à la même époque, le duc de Bedford en Angleterre et P.O. Tittmann aux Etats-Unis faisaient paraître deux brochures extrêmement violentes et fort solidement documentées’. In, Bardèche, Nuremberg II ou les Faux Monnayeurs, 5. 150 Statement is paraphrased from the French: ‘Je passe sur les arguments traditionnels contenus dans cette brochure, sur la partialité du tribunal, sur les condamnations portées ex post facto lege, sur les crimes de guerre alliés, sur la malhonnêteté fondamentale du procès lui-même. Je ne retiens que les passages qui concernent le national-socialisme et ceux qui concernent la falsification des témoignages et des preuves’. In, Bardèche, Nuremberg II ou les Faux Monnayeurs, 40. 151 Bardèche, Nuremberg II ou les Faux Monnayeurs, 29–37. 152 Statement is a paraphrase from the French: ‘Mais, pour la première fois dans ce livre, on voit un auteur aller bien au-delà de ces objections habituelles. En dénonçant le jugement de Nuremberg comme une opération politique destinée à justifier les vainqueurs, il en dénonce aussi le caractère d’opération de propagande, préparée et préméditée, exactement comme ce fut le cas pour d’autres opérations de propagande de la seconde guerre mondiale’. In, Bardèche, Nuremberg II ou les Faux Monnayeurs, 29. 153 Statement is a paraphrase from the French: ‘C’est également dans ce livre que, pour la première fois, on voit un écrivain accuser les armées et les gouvernements alliés d’avoir commis eux-mêmes les atrocités pour lesquelles ils ont condamné les chefs militaires

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et politiques allemands. Reprenant point par point les griefs de l’acte d’accusation, Montgomery Belgion complète ainsi, à sa manière, la documentation du Ministère public allié’. In Bardèche, Nuremberg II ou les Faux Monnayeurs, 31. 154 Montgomery Belgion, Epitaph on Nuremberg: A  Letter to Have Been Sent to a Friend Temporarily Abroad (London: The Falcon Press, 1946), 86–87. 155 Belgion, Epitaph on Nuremberg, 88–89. 156 Belgion, Epitaph on Nuremberg, 50–51. 157 Belgion, Epitaph on Nuremberg, 54–55. 158 Belgion, Epitaph on Nuremberg, 85. 159 Victor Gollancz to Liddell Hart, in Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 187, n. 122. 160 Statement is a paraphrase from the French: ‘Des critiques militaires anglo- saxons, comme Liddell Hart ou Voigt, des généraux anglais comme le général Morgan ou le général Fuller, des personnalités ecclésiastiques, n’hésitèrent pas à se montrer aussi sévères pour les bombardements alliés que pour les camps de concentration hitlériens’. In Bardèche, Nuremberg II ou les Faux Monnayeurs, 6. 161 Statement is a paraphrase from the French: ‘Le major général Fuller peut écrire dans son livre Armament and History quelques-unes des condamnations les plus accablantes contre les Alliés’. In Bardèche, Nuremberg II ou les Faux Monnayeurs, 6. 162 Ulick Varange [Francis Parker Yockey], Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (London: Westropa Press, 1948), 533. 163 Maurice Bardèche to Keith Stimley, Summer 1982, Keith Stimley Collection, University of Oregon, Eugene, USA (henceforth KSC), Stimley Box 1 of 2, Up08OM, Francis Parker Yockey Folder. 164 Anthony Gannon to Keith Stimley, 1 March 1981, KSC, Stimley Box 1 of 2, Up08OM, FPY: . . . Gannon . . . Folder. 165 Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 162. 166 California Legislature, Report: Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in California (Sacramento, CA: The Senate, 1943), 249. 167 ‘Who Started the War?’ The Broom, XI:51, 15 September 1941, 1. 168 ‘The Legend of Hitler Lives on’, The Broom, 7 May 1945, 4. 169 ‘Some Political Trials’, The Broom, 29 July 1946, 4. 170 ‘U.S. Asks Nazi Party Trial: Mass Pogrom of 6,000,000 Nazis Demanded’, The Broom, 14 May 1945, 2. 171 ‘Nazi Atrocities Charged to “Seditionists” ’, The Broom, XV:37, 4 June 1945, 1. 172 Letter from Eugen Brand published in The Broom, 23 August 1948, 4. 173 Leon de Aryan, ‘Nurnberg Trials, Russian Spies, Jewish Rule and Ruin’, The Broom, XIX:12, 20 December 1948, 1. 174 ‘Did the Nazis Murder 6 Million Jews?’ The Broom, XIX:17, 24 January 1949, 1. 175 ‘Those 6 Million “Dead Jews”!’ The Broom, 4 April 1949, 3. 176 The Broom, 21 May 1945, 2. 177 ‘War Criminals Face Sentences of Death’, The Broom, VXV:43, 16 July 1945, 1. See also: The Broom, XV:44, 23 July 1945, 1. 178 ‘It’s Going to Happen Here Also in World War III’, The Broom, XVIII:45, 9 August 1948, 1. 179 For example see: Austin App, ‘Ravishing the Women of Conquered Europe’, The Broom, 20 May 1946, 3. 180 ‘Hangman of Nuremberg’, White Sentinel, IV:10, October 1954, 7. 181 ‘Hangman of Nuremberg’, 8. 182 W.D. Herrstrom quoted in, Lipdstadt, Denying the Holocaust, 65–66. 183 Lawrence R. Griffith, Why Do You Hate Hitler? cited in California Legislature, Report: Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in California (Sacramento, CA: The Senate, 1943), 251. 184 Glen Jeansonne, Gerald L.K. Smith: Minister of Hate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 81.

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185 ‘Within the Gates’, The Nation, 151, 1940, 74. Cited in Jeansonne, Gerald L.K. Smith, 81. 186 ‘Promoters of the Big Lie’, The Cross and Flag, 10:12, March 1952, 5. 187 ‘Perpetuation of a Big Lie’, The Cross and Flag, 12:5, August 1953, 22. 188 US Congress, House Committee on Un-American Activities, Preliminary Report on Neo-Fascist and Hate Groups, 17 December 1954, 3. 189 Kurt Mertig, ‘Funny Folks, Those Jews’, National Renaissance Bulletin, July 1953, 6. 190 James Madole, ‘The True Story of Nazi Germany’, National Renaissance Bulletin, January 1952, 4. 191 James Madole, ‘Did Nazi Germany Destroy Six Million Jews?’ National Renaissance Bulletin, 11:3, March 1960. 192 James Madole, National Renaissance Bulletin, July 1952, page number not visible. 193 National Renaissance Bulletin, August–September 1950, 2. 194 All quotes from Arnold Forster, ‘The Ultimate Cruelty’, ADL Bulletin, June 1959. 195 William H. Schmaltz, Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1999), 49–50.

4 EUROPE-A-NATION Transnational ideologies

As has always been the case, during the immediate postwar years there was no single, homogeneous British far right. There were dozens of organisations, led by a multitude of varied characters with differing outlooks, priorities and methods. However, in the wake of World War II, almost all on the far-right and fascist fringe were concerned with national decline. It was sometimes attributed to different causes, but all proud nationalists bemoaned the increasingly rapid deterioration of British pre-eminence. Many believed British and civilisational decline were inextricably entwined and sought recipes for national and cultural palingenesis. For them the sense of imminent crisis was palpable. The majority of activists remained committed to traditional nationalist solutions with a continuing emphasis on Britain and Empire, but a small minority saw the failings of traditional interwar nationalism and proposed trans-continental nationalism as a solution: a united fascist Europe.1 On the whole their ideas, unsurprisingly, were not particularly new, despite what they sometimes claimed themselves. While much postwar fascist thought was presented as radical and innovative, it was often actually firmly rooted in prewar fascist traditions, once again adding weight to the hypothesis that the continuities between the pre and postwar periods in terms of British fascism outweigh the discontinuities. Some proposals for national rejuvenation were genuinely grounded in serious philosophy with British fascists creating magpie ideologies that stole ideas and concepts from a range of thinkers such as Heidegger, Spengler, Nietzsche, Goethe and Schmitt.

Oswald Mosley and Europe a nation Mosley’s incarceration during the war years under Defence Regulation 18B provided him with an opportunity to read, one that he vociferously and enthusiastically seized. Mosley called it his ‘enforced withdrawal into reading and reflection’.2

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The Mosley that emerged from internment was a fundamentally different thinker from the one who had been arrested some years earlier and was now armed with a broader canon of philosophers, authors, playwrights and even musicians. Through a series of articles and books Mosley outlined his grand vision for the postwar world making him, in the words of Sonabend, ‘by far the most prominent’ postwar fascist thinker.3 Mosley’s vision for society was rooted in his analysis of the contemporary one, a society he believed was in crisis and decline. His ideas and those of the prewar BUF had long been rooted in philosophical thought, especially anti-rationalist and anti-positivist thinkers such as Henri Bergson, Gustave Le Bon, and Georges Sorel, but it was the ideas of Oswald Spengler that were most influential on his thought.4 Mosley first read Spengler during his time as the leader of the New Party in 1931.5 Spengler’s magnum opus The Decline of the West significantly influenced Mosley, just as it had many leading Nazis in interwar Germany. His work rejected unilinear theories of historical development as ahistorical and Eurocentric and favoured a cyclical understanding of history with the rise and fall of contained civilisations.6 Cultures were to be perceived as organic and progressing through proscribed stages, rising and then falling. As he put it, ‘the great Cultures accomplish their majestic wave-cycles. They appear suddenly, swell in splendid lines, flatten again and vanish, and the face of the waters is once more a sleeping waste’.7 Each civilisation ‘passes through the age-phases of the individual man. Each has its childhood, youth, manhood and old age’.8 It was Spengler’s analysis that Europe was well past its prime. While by no means the first or last to espouse a cyclical understanding of history, it was the work of Spengler that excited Mosley, who in 1933 spoke of his ‘tremendous contribution to world thought’ and explained how ‘the great German philosopher has probably done more than any other to paint in the broad background of fascist thought’.9 The notion that Europe was in decline was a long-held position for Mosley, and it became markedly more acute in the postwar period. In his 1947 work The Alternative, a work that constitutes his largest contribution to fascistic thought, Mosley argues that the divided nature of Europe had brought her youth to death; her culture to the dust; her happiness to ruin; her material prosperity to destruction, and her spiritual life to a jeopardy which threatens with eternal night the sunlit heights of the European mind. It is no small moment in the history of man when darkness descends on three millennia of human culture. We stand in front of a potential tragedy without equal in the known annals of time.10 Yet despite being in accord with Spengler regarding the idea of a civilisation in crisis and decline, he fundamentally disagreed with him regarding the supposedly inexorable nature of the decay. Spengler wrote: ‘the history of West European mankind will be definitely closed . . . the outcome is obligatory and insusceptible

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of modification, that our choice is between willing this and willing nothing at all’11 and that it ‘will be accomplished with the individual or against him’.12 It is at this point that Mosley diverged from Spenglerian thought as he fundamentally rejected its determinism. While Spengler ‘gave new impulse’ to his thinking and ‘accentuated the impending disaster’,13 he felt it was possible to summon ‘the mighty spirit of modern science to provide the answer’.14 This split with orthodox Spenglerianism was neatly described by Lady Mosley, who wrote: I think in his opinion, Spengler (whose work he greatly admired) had said it all, that up to a point Spengler was a prophet, but that he thought he had left out of account the fact of scientific advance, which might modify the pessimism inherent in the idea, that the West must decline. Mosley’s own thought was directed towards the future, the Union of Europe’.15 In both the prewar and postwar periods Mosley felt that the decline could be reversed through revolutionary new ideas, which fundamentally contradict Spengler’s conclusions. As Mosley put it, ‘pessimism and revolution are contradictions in terms’.16 Interestingly, as a short aside, this statement further questions the position of those historians and anti-fascists who have sought to negate all revolutionary aspects of fascism by painting it as mere nihilism. Mosley’s belief in decline and his proposed solution for its reversal had some striking parallels with the work of the influential German philosopher and sometime Nazi supporter Martin Heidegger.17 Heidegger, the inspiration for the philosophical current of existential phenomenology, most famous for his 1927 book Being and Time, described in Introduction to Metaphysics, a series of lectures delivered in the summer of 1935, how The spiritual decay of the earth is so advanced that people risk exhausting that reserve of spiritual force which enables them just to see and take stock of this decay. . . . This simple observation has nothing to do with cultural pessimism: for in every corner of the world the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the massification of man, the contemptuous suspicion of everything which is creative and free, have reached such proportions that such childlike expressions as pessimism and optimism have long become laughable.18 While he was primarily concerned with the fate of Germany, believing that, ‘As the Volk situated at the centre we experience the sharpest pressure, as Volk with the most neighbours we are the Volk in the greatest danger’,19 he made it clear that he was also concerned with the wider crisis faced by Europe and the West as he talked of ‘the destruction of the earth’ and the ‘flight of the gods’.20 While there is of course nothing explicitly Nazi about this position, his utter despair and longing for an end to the erosion of authentic Being and metapolitical renewal by means of a

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cultural revolution no doubt was the cause of his support for the Third Reich – yet also perhaps for his rejection of it when he realised his mistake. During the 1930s Heidegger deeply felt the spectre of this impending crisis in Europe, which derived, he felt, from the nihilism engendered by World War I, the threat from Russia and Asia in the East and the rise of America, including the Americanisation of language.21 As he put it, ‘This Europe, which is always in the process of tearing itself apart out of utter blindness, lies today in the great pincergrip formed by Russia on the one hand and America on the other’.22 He expanded on this theme during a speech to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in April  1936 explaining how he understood the situation of Europe eschatologically, believing the impending crisis would determine the future – or lack thereof – for Europe and the West.23 His opening remarks stated that, Our historical Dasein experiences with increasing distress and clarity that its future is tantamount to a naked either/or: either Europe’s rescue or its destruction. The possibility of rescue, however, demands two things: 1. The preservation of the European Völker against the Asiatic. 2. The overcoming of their own deracination and fragmentation.24 There is much in Heidegger’s work on crisis and Europe that Mosley would have agreed with. First, the notion of a Europe ‘tearing itself apart’ was central to Mosley’s call for postwar continental unity, as he also often blamed decline on ‘division and war’.25 They also agreed on the external forces hastening decline with Heidegger talking of a ‘pincer-grip’ formed by America and Russia and Mosley’s postwar denouncement of ‘mob and money. Communism and Finance’.26 More important, however, was their shared belief that radical palingenesis was needed to stave off total destruction: a civilisation on the precipice. Heidegger talked of ‘either Europe’s rescue or its destruction’ and in accord Mosley of ‘crashing, burning death – or new civilisation’.27 Furthermore, the overcoming of fragmentation as a means of rescue was the same means of survival offered by Mosley in his postwar Europe-a-Nation proposal. However, when both are historically contextualised, Mosley’s ideas stand out as divergent from the general moods of the time in which they were written. Heidegger’s predictions of a Europe in crisis were written during the tumultuous 1930s with the impending spectre of a second continental war making pessimistic predictions common, while Mosley’s came in the late 1940s, after the war, as a new optimism was emerging across the continent. With that said, Mosley’s belief in European decline and impending crisis places his postwar analysis – the very starting point of his postwar plan – firmly within the prewar pessimistic philosophical tradition. Yet, as did many fascists in the interwar period, he firmly rejected the inevitability of this decline and built his whole doctrine around finding a way to reverse it. His belief in the possibility and necessity of cultural rebirth – the staving off of eternal night – also places Mosley’s postwar plan for society within the

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fascistic tradition of mythic palingenesis. While the obsession with decline is a constant in Mosley’s thought, his proposed solution to halt and reverse it changed after the war.

Beyond fascism and democracy Forced into political exile by internment, Mosley read extensively and importantly learnt German in what one biographer called an ‘attempt to think and feel as a European’.28 The result of this newly felt Europeanism was his postwar doctrine of ‘Europe a Nation, Africa an Empire’, with which he relaunched his political career. In November 1947, to a crowd of adoring supporters gathered at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, just after the publication of his postwar statement of ideology, The Alternative, Mosley said: If they linked the Union of Europe with the development of Africa in a new system of two continents they would build a civilisation which surpassed, and a force which equalled, any power in the world. . . . From that union would be born a civilisation of continuing creation and ever unfolding beauty that would withstand the tests of time.29 The union of Europe was to be the foundation and core of his postwar ideology and was presented both then and sometimes even now as a brave new idea.30 In short Mosley called for a united Europe that would act as a third force to the USA and the USSR. This ‘new’ idea was to be built on a synthesis of all that was best with Europe and America and would thus be ‘beyond Fascism and Democracy’.31 His vision of a mercantilist super-state, perhaps paradoxically, was to be built on a rejection of the internationalism of communism and the transcendence of the narrow nationalism of traditional fascism. It was to be replaced by ‘the extension of patriotism on the basis of kinship’.32 His united Europe was to be a bulwark against communism, and thus, unlike some on the right, Mosley called for the new European Nation to be allied to America because as he saw it: America and Europe have to work together for survival. The reason is that they are faced with the external menace of a fundamentally opposed and very powerful State, which intends the destruction of the civilisation and cultural heritage of the West in favour of that International Communism.33 As will be shown later, not all on the British far right were so willing to be pro-American. Unsurprisingly some were shocked by what they wrongly perceived as Mosley’s volte-face away from ‘Britain first’ politics towards Europeanism. Yet for Mosley the two positions were not contradictory, as he saw the union of Europe as a way to protect Britain in the new scientific age: ‘The new science presents at once the best opportunity and the worst danger of all history. It has destroyed for ever the island

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immunity of Britain and compelled the organisation of life in wider areas’.34 Thus the ‘true service to the British people is now identical with service to the other great peoples of the West’.35 Mosley perceived Europeanism as an extension rather than a rejection of British interests, not an outright refutation of British nationalism but rather a tactical and necessary shift towards pan-continental nationalism. As Macklin correctly states, Mosley ‘merely adapted and enlarged the parameters of his fascist panacea to suit the times’.36 What is clear is that he really did believe that this plan was the only way to overcome the determinist predictions of Spengler, arguing that it was ‘not a matter of volition, but of compulsion. . . . Within Western Europe . . . resides the answer to the basic question of whether the human species will continue’.37 He concluded: ‘We postulate, therefore, that the Union of Europe is a first condition of human survival’.38 Perhaps more interesting than the plan for a united Europe was his vision for Africa, which he saw as ‘key to all’.39 His plans for Africa developed over time. Initially he envisaged the subsuming of white colonies into his European economic system while the black colonies were to be given immediate independence. This Africa would be divided into two separate nations along racial lines. He later proposed an alternative idea that involved increasing the size of white controlled Africa and ensuring a white majority that would then operate an Apartheid-style system.40 While the intricacies of his idea evolved, in essence, Mosley envisaged a subordinate African empire, which would be developed for two reasons: ‘Food and raw materials’ and because ‘Within the limits of the existing system we cannot find the means to pay for them’.41 A united Europe would engage in ruthless economic imperialism, stripping resources and dumping surplus goods. In Mosley’s eyes this breadbasket adjunct would allow a united Europe to compete with the superpowers on the world stage, end European dependence on American aid and create new spheres of international influence among the great powers. As Mosley delusionally envisaged it, Europe would ‘develop Africa as a source of supply and exchange for European manufactured goods, and . . . leave America the Western Hemisphere and the larger part of the other world markets’.42 Such a proposition might be viewed as unworthy of study if not for its ability to illuminate Mosley’s attitude towards race in the postwar period. Some, like Skidelsky, have attempted to rehabilitate him by casting doubt on his postwar racism, arguing that ‘It would be wrong to describe his position as racialist’.43 Yet his Euro-Africa theory makes a mockery of this claim. The briefest investigation of this aspect of his postwar ideology makes it clear that Mosley had lost none of his patronising, imperial racism or his more vulgar and base rhetoric about ‘JuJu- men’.44 He believed his theory would ‘carry the light of Europe through the shades of darkest Africa’45 and made no bones about who this was being done for. As he wrote, ‘The Trusteeship [of Africa] is on behalf of White civilisation. The duty is not to preserve jungles for natives, but to develop rich lands for Europeans’.46 In short, as Macklin notes, ‘Mosley’s scheme was not only reminiscent of the worst excesses of eighteenth century slavery it was also completely unworkable’.47

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Not new or unique The concept of a united Europe was by no means a theory invented by Mosley. The idea has roots dating back as far as Abbé Dubois in 1306 and became popular between the 17th and 19th centuries, inspired by a growing consciousness of a common civilisation.48 It was, however, only during the cataclysmic destruction of the First World War that an organised movement for unification developed, supported by a section of the intelligentsia, with a view to securing a lasting peace. Groups such as The Union for Democratic Control, founded by Ramsay MacDonald, Charles Trevelyan and Norman Angell, for example, called for the establishment of a ‘European federation of states’.49 However, it was during Second World War that the drive for unity really accelerated. There is no doubt that a Nazified Europe, with a single centrally controlled economy, helped normalise the notion of continental governance, though its plainly totalitarian and racialist nature made most realise it was a contorted and ugly divergence from the existing tradition of thought concerning European unity.50 More in keeping with those who sought to avoid a repeat of World War I by rejecting traditional nationalism were the theories of integration that emerged within Resistance movements during the war. Many were fighting not just against fascism but also for a new and different future, which meant, ‘no return to the Balkanization of a continent in which each people would be enclosed behind its economic and political barriers’.51 In August 1943 the Movimento Federalista Europeo called for a system whereby ‘The maintenance of freedom and security on the entire continent should be solely in the hands of the European federation and its executive, legislative, and judiciary organs’.52 Later in August 1944, the International Programme of the Mouvement de Libération Nationale laid out their vision of European unity: The national States must federate and transfer to the Federal Government the right to organise the economic life of Europe; the sole right to have an army and suppress any attempt to re-establish a fascist regime; to be in charge of foreign affairs; to administer such colonies as are not yet ripe for independence; to create European citizenship in addition to a national citizenship. The Federal Government shall be democratically and directly elected by the peoples, not by the national States.53 Thus, traditional nationalism was rejected outright, and the idea of a voluntary European federation with a strong federal government became the dominant position of the non-Communist Resistance groups across Europe.54 After the war, calls for a united Europe could be heard from across the political spectrum. Generally, the 1940s and 1950s saw a shift towards thinking, ‘in terms of “Europe” as an entity’ with some believing that ‘the goal could possibly be a ‘United States of Europe’.55 Many, particularly the left wing in France, were growing resentful of Western Europe’s increasing dependency on America and so called for a united Europe to form a third force between America and the Soviet Union.56 Simultaneously many Americans also felt that a united Europe was the best route

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to the continent becoming self-sufficient and reducing its reliance on American resources. John Foster Dulles, then US Secretary of State, stated that: we understand the policy of Continental European countries is to create a union here which will make it impossible for strife to break out again. . . . The United States was interested primarily in the unification of France and Germany. . . . If they [Western countries] decide to commit suicide again they may have to commit it alone.57 These calls for integration from across the spectrum went beyond theoretical discussions. The creation of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, the Treaty of Paris in 1951 and the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community are just a few examples of how this shift towards Europeanism was manifest in reality in the early postwar period. Separate, though often not dissimilar to the mainstream tradition of Europeanism, was that within the far right. Despite often being portrayed as a revolutionary departure from his prewar ‘Britain First’ thinking, the reality is that the idea of a united Europe had long been a latent aspect of Mosley’s ideology with a nod in that direction clearly visible in his 1936 article for the Fascist Quarterly, ‘The World Alternative’.58 In it he wrote that ‘we must return to the fundamental conception of European Union’ and referred to ‘the union of Europe within the universalism of the Modern Movement’.59 While ‘Europe a nation’ was sometimes portrayed as an intellectual awakening born in the mind of an imprisoned leader, the truth is much more evolution than revelation. As with his sense of impending civilisational crisis, his great ‘new’ postwar idea was not all that new, providing another example of ideological continuity within the British fascist movement that transcends the prewar/postwar paradigm. However, in addition to being a latent component of Mosley’s thinking, calls for a united Europe had long been a theme among the European far right, a concession Mosley later made in his 1958 book Europe: Faith and Plan,60 thus undermining his supporters’ portrayal of Mosley as a revolutionary thinker. One interesting parallel from interwar Britain is the ideas of Rolf Gardiner. A complicated character who publicly attacked fascism yet nonetheless had considerable sympathy with German National Socialism, Gardiner called for the unity of northern Europe as a Germanic federation.61 He explained that, ‘while between, say, Whitby and Lübeck, Elsinore and Danzig, there are many superficial differences, there is something familiar to them all’ and that Britain’s revitalisation required ‘a union of North Sea and Baltic, as in the heyday of the Hanseatic League’.62 Mosley was not even unique on the British far right during the 1950s. As well as Francis Parker Yockey, who is discussed at length later, was the British-based Northern League, also calling for a united Europe in the 1950s. Gerald AfanfrynHill and his comrades in the pan-Nationalist Northern League argued: What we have to learn, and learn quickly, if we as Europeans are not to be annihilated as a species, is to begin to think in terms of ethnic identity, and pan-national concepts. What we must do is develop a world-wide bond

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between our own kind, and to avoid being misled into more fratricidal wars. For the past thousand years we have been busy destroying our own kind, while those of other races sit back and laugh at us. When are we going to begin to think in terms of ethnic and racial identity?63 Some of these ideas have striking parallels with Mosley’s ‘Europe a Nation’ concept, though the ideas of the Northern League lacked Mosley’s veiled references to culture and were much more explicitly racial. If one looks abroad it becomes even clearer that Mosley’s plans for Europe were not new or unique. In the 1920s Georges Valois, founder of France’s first openly fascist party, the Faisceau, proclaimed that, ‘Fascism has a European (not merely a purely local character)’.64 His 1931 book, War or Revolution, argued that ‘Europe must be a union of equal republics’.65 Mosley was also beaten to the punch by the French collaborationist Marcel Déat whose 1943 proclamation referred to a ‘community of European nations’ and a ‘European duty against the evils of Bolshevism and capitalism’.66 Italy also had its own tradition of fascist Europeanism, which included the Italian fascist philosopher, esotericist and long-time champion of a pan-European fascism, Julius Evola. He published essays on ‘The European Idea’ and the need for a ‘European Law’ in 1940 and 1941.67 It was also official policy of the Republican Fascist Party from November 1943 onward; indeed, a call for the ‘realisation of a European community’ was explicitly stated in the Manifesto of the Republic of Salò.68 This Europeanist tendency within Italian fascism survived into the postwar period, and while Evola disagreed with parts, he was later to endorse Imperium, the pan-European magnus opus by Francis Parker Yockey, which is discussed at length later.69 He also declared that ‘Circumstances have rendered the need for European unity imperative on our continent’70 in his 1951 article in Europea Nazione entitled ‘Spiritual and structural presuppositions of the European Union’. In addition, as Andrea Mammone has shown, the Ordine Nuovo (ON), led by Pino Rauti, founded a new journal called Ordine Nuovo Europeo in 1958, which talked of ‘Fatherland-Europe’ and ‘Nation-Europe’.71 There was also the influential journal Europa Nazione, founded by Filippo Anfuso, an MSI member of parliament in 1953, which called for ‘a free and united Europe’.72 These examples, among others, prove that the notion of Europeanism among Italian fascists went well beyond Evola. As was the case in Britain, France and Italy, German fascism also had its own tradition of Europeanism. During the early years of the war, when it appeared it was soon to be won, Nazi policy makers including Karl Ritter, an economic adviser, met in the Foreign Ministry to discuss ‘European Grossraumwirtschaft’ (a large economic sphere of interest).73 As early as October 1939, Werner Daitz, a member of Alfred Rosenberg’s Foreign Policy Office of the NSDAP, established the ‘Society of European Economic Planning and Grossraumwirtschaft’, which called for continental European unity under German leadership, from ‘Gibraltar to the Urals and from the North Cape to the Island of Cyprus with their natural colonial extensions radiating out into Siberia and beyond the Mediterranean into Africa’.74

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These proposals, written by the relatively unimportant Daitz, began to gain traction, first drawing the attention of Karl Ritter; the idea was then adopted by Reich Economics Minister, Walther Funk, in June  1940, who subsequently presented Göring with his proposals for the ‘New Order’ on 6 August 1940.75 The ‘New Order’ was to involve the ‘integration of the occupied territories in the economy of Greater Germany and the reconstruction of a continental European economy under German leadership’.76 However, while influential, it seems that Hitler himself had little interest in these new and sophisticated forms of imperialism and preferred traditional direct exploitation.77 While never implemented, the concept of Grossraumwirtschaft is another example of fascists thinking on a continental scale. However, the ‘New Order’ was by no means a break with traditional nationalism as, though consciously couched in the language of Europeanism for practical reasons,78 it was essentially German imperialism. As a short aside, the ‘New Order’ concept was coincidentally markedly similar to Rolf Gardiner’s calls in the 1920s for a united Europe under German leadership. However, these German ideas had little in common with the calls for true European unity, often as a form of federalism, emanating from other fascists such as the Republican Fascist Party in Italy. Later in the war, when the Wehrmacht found itself on the back foot in Eastern Europe, Rosenberg and Daitz floated new ideas involving a united Europe using Africa for its resources, which obviously has striking parallels with Mosley’s postwar ideas.79 Other parallels can be found with the writings of Karl Heinz Pfeffer, President of the German Institute for Foreign Affairs. Even as Germany found itself increasingly on the back foot towards the end of 1944, he believed that the achievements of ‘the first four years of this war cannot be nullified by the setbacks of the fifth. From Narvik to Athens and from Reval to Bordeaux, German soldiers have carried a message that can no longer die. Europe today knows that it is a single entity’.80 However, similarly to what Mosley would later espouse, Pfeffer saw European unity not as a replacement for traditional nationalism but rather as an extension of it. The first basic realization is that European nationalism cannot be dispensed with. The European community must not destroy the nationalism of European peoples but must sublimate it in the Hegelian sense, so that it continues to exist but becomes a living element in a larger unity.81 Pfeffer’s ideas diverged from the ideas of Daitz in that he talked of numerous European nationalisms working in accord rather than merely a united Europe under German rule. The concept of a federal Europe consisting of nationalist states became increasingly popular among the European far right in the postwar period. As was the case in Italy, when the war came to an end and the total defeat of Nazism became inevitable, other German fascists joined Pfeffer in shifting their ambitions for a postwar world towards a pan-continental European federation, quite different to the German dominated ‘New Order’. There was ‘The German Freedom Movement’, a blueprint for a postwar pan-European fascist state

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drafted in April 1945 by a former officer in the SS Totenkopfverbände, and head of the Personnel Section of Himmler’s RSHA, Franke-Gricksch. The German Freedom Movement’s 12-point policy programme called for the creation of a new ‘Sworn European Community’ of peoples that would operate as a European federation.82 Unsurprisingly, with such similar ideas, a relationship came to exist between Franke-Gricksch and Mosley, though the former’s Eastward orientation was a source of tension.83 In addition there was SS Brigadier General Franz Alfred Six who called for a united Europe in his book Europe’s Civil Wars and the Present War of Unification and Europe: Tradition and Future and SS Lieutenant General Werner Best, another strong advocate of pan-European fascism.84 The ideological shift towards Europeanism among portions of the fascist movement soon resulted in attempts to build pan-national fascist organisations. The first of these was instigated by the MSI in Rome in March 1950. The ensuing conference, called to discuss the future of Europe, was attended by Mosley from Britain, Maurice Bardèche from France, Anna Maria Mussolini, Karl Heinz Priester from Germany and Sweden’s Per Engdahl.85 A follow up conference was held in Malmö, Sweden in 1951, which resulted in the creation of the Mouvement Social Européen (MSE), chaired by Engdahl and also known as the Malmö International. The venture was a short-lived one and was largely defunct by the end of the decade, though it did provide a useful structure for the transnational transfer of pan-­ nationalist ideas in the postwar period.86 It is clear that when placed in its proper historical context Mosley’s shift to pan-European nationalism in the postwar period was by no means revolutionary, but rather it sat comfortably within an existing fascist tradition that simply became more prominent in the postwar period thanks to the fascists’ pragmatism in accepting the unalterable failure of the narrow nationalism of the interwar period. It also sat comfortably in a wider non-fascist tradition of Europeanism. Interestingly, the concept of a united Europe offered by Oswald Mosley, with its vision of a truly united continent, not run in the interest of a single country, had far more in common with the ideas of the wartime resistance movements than it did with the Nazi ideas of a ‘European Grossraumwirtschaft’ and the ‘New Order’, which were more akin to traditional imperialism. Thus, Mosley’s gradual ideological shift from narrow British nationalism to European unity was by no means revolutionary or unique as some of his followers and supporters believed.

Mosley’s doctrine of higher forms Mosley’s new transnational super-state was to be forged by a new type of man, and he called his proposed method for its creation the ‘doctrine of higher forms’, an idea that he felt was to be his lasting and most recognised contribution to philosophical thought.87 It is perhaps ironic then that while his ‘Europe a Nation’ idea has become synonymous with his postwar ideology, most commentators simply ignore or pay just passing reference to his idea of ‘higher forms’. However, one cannot hope to understand Mosley’s postwar thought, namely his proposed

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solution to Spengler’s pessimistic prophesies of inevitable decline, without exploring it in depth. As he saw it, ‘It is not merely a question of changing material environment, important as this work is: even more important is a question of changing man himself ’.88 One can grasp important insights into Mosley’s ideas regarding the formation of higher forms by exploring his understanding of the work of the German composer Richard Wagner and his divergence from the interpretation of Nietzsche and George Bernard Shaw. It all hinges on his reading and interpretation of Der Ring des Nibelungen [The Ring of the Nibelung], a cycle of four marathon operas that stretch to around 15 hours in length and tell the epic story of a ring that grants its owner power to rule the world. It was within Götterdämmerung [the twilight of the gods], the fourth and final opera of this protracted and wandering story involving all manner of gods, dwarfs, creatures and humans, where the key revelation lay for Mosley. For Shaw the fourth instalment to the story was something of a redundant addition, whereas for Mosley it was ‘not an irrelevance but the supreme relevance; it poses the final question’.89 In short Shaw and Nietzsche believed Siegfried, the third opera in the cycle, was the logical and desirable conclusion to the story. They perceived Siegfried, the eponymous revolutionary hero of the saga, as the realisation of the higher form. Siegfried defeated Wotan and the old order; the revolution had happened and was successful and the new world created, thus Siegfried embodied Nietzsche’s superman90 and Shaw’s desire to ‘breed a race of men in whom the life-giving impulse predominated’.91 Yet in the fourth instalment, Götterdämmerung, the hero falls and order and beauty are lost. Shaw understood this as the betrayal of the hero, the abnegation of the higher form and a reversion to the former state, thus rendering the quadrilogy cyclical. However, Mosley felt that both Nietzsche and Shaw had misinterpreted the ending of the story and wrongly identified Siegfried as the higher form incarnate. For Mosley, Siegfried was ‘inadequate to this destiny and must fail’, meaning that in Götterdämmerung Wagner was stating that ‘the end-achieving hero had still to come’.92 Mosley believed that Wagner had seen beyond the vision of both Shaw and Nietzsche to the possibility of a still higher form, thus his decision to add a fourth instalment that sends Siegfried on more and ultimately doomed adventures was not done for mere dramatic or musical reasons but was rather an articulation of the necessity of continual struggle. This chimed with the idea of continual struggle articulated in Goethe’s Faust, a tragic play in two parts, with which Mosley was captivated. He first read Faust after learning German while interned, and, according to his wife Diana, ‘It is impossible to exaggerate the excitement generated in him by Goethe’s ideas’.93 For Mosley himself, ‘the reading of Faust is eternal discovery’,94 and he believed that: For an individual to win harmony with himself, and the world, and yet to retain the striving will towards ever greater purposes and higher forms – to unite harmony and dynamism – is not only to become a near perfect man,

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but also to be the near perfect instrument of Destiny in high achievement. This was the great vision of Goethe in the prophetic rapture of his Faust.95 Not only was this continual striving supposedly desirable, but it was required, for as Mosley saw it, man ‘must lose all or win all; he has no alternative: and his redeeming achievement is to transcend himself in a higher form. To stand still, or even to remain himself, is to fail’.96 This sentiment, as expressed in Goethe’s Faust and Siegfried’s adventures in Götterdämmerung was essential if the higher form was ever to be realised and necessary to avoid the destruction of man. Mosley’s long-held belief that decline could be overcome by the creation of this higher form was reinforced by his reading of the work of the British historian and philosopher of history Arnold Toynbee, best known for his 12-volume, expansive and influential A Study of History. Toynbee, like Spengler a believer in the cyclical nature of history, argued that ‘a society does not ever die “from natural causes”, but always dies from suicide or murder – and nearly always from the former’.97 His ‘challenge and response’ theory provided Mosley with examples of civilisations being revived by dynamic responses and thus for Mosley ‘reinforced the view that the doom of our civilisation . . . could be met and overcome by the will of a determined movement to national resistance’.98 For Mosley, Toynbee’s ‘challenge and response’ theory echoed a core theme in Goethe’s Faust. Just as Toynbee argued that civilisations arose in response to some form of challenge, Mosley saw in the work of Goethe an explanation of how challenge and evil could be the spur towards the creation of a higher form and the creation of a new civilisation able to save Europe. The Prologue in Heaven in Faust includes a conversation between ‘The Lord’ and ‘Mephisto’, the demon or devil, who asks for permission to appear to Faust and to ‘lead him down my path to his perdition’.99 The Lord agrees, stating that For man’s activity can slacken all too fast, He falls too soon into slothful ease; The Devil’s a companion who will tease And spur him on, and work creatively at last.100 For Mosley the interaction of good and evil, notably the requirement of evil for progress, was a profound revelation. After reading this Mosley asked, Can primitive man move beyond the elementary without the stimulus of pain and disaster? . . . Is the progress both of individual men and of civilization achieved in some degree by the challenge of evil which evokes the response of good? Is not, therefore, what men call evil merely an instrument of good?101 It is one thing to note how war in the 20th century brought huge technological advancements that transformed society, but it is quite another to propose an

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ideology that actively incorporates evil as the driver of progress.102 This notion, the ‘Faustian riddle’ as it is called, the idea that suffering and evil is not inflicted by God for capricious reasons but rather for creative purposes, was for Mosley ‘the main thesis’ of Goethe’s work.103 Mosley’s determination to find a positive reason for the existence of evil and suffering places him in contrast to a philosopher and philosophical tradition that he admired. Nietzsche and before him Greek philosophers saw a clear contradiction between heroism and humanitarianism with the Greek idea of heroism being based on a denial of rights to the inferior and a near fetishisation of characters like Achilles or Ajax and Heracles from the Sophoclean tragedies whose nobility negated their crimes.104 Nietzsche felt the alternative option was humanitarianism, which for him involved a denial of self, which would prove fatal to genius. While Mosley admired Nietzsche, the Greek tradition and the concept of heroism, he was unable and unwilling to accept their brutalism or the supposed contradiction between heroism and humanitarianism as it was based on a concept of an amoral world and an erratic god, both an anathema to a Christian. In a letter to his son, written while interned during the war, Mosley sought to reconcile the two in a Hegelian manner, stating ‘In Christianity you have the thesis – in Nietzsche the antithesis. There remains the synthesis’.105 It was within the Faustian riddle, with its ability to marry the heroic with the moral, that Mosley found his synthesis, a key to his doctrine of higher forms. The creation of the ‘thought-deed man’ or higher form was not some abstract hope but rather a blueprint for the leaders and implementers of his postwar philosophy of ‘Europe a Nation’. The determinism and inevitability of civilisational decline predicted by Spengler could only be avoided by his plan for a united Europe, which in turn required the creation of a higher form of man, the result of an accelerated evolution. But what exactly constituted this mystical higher form, and why is it important for understanding Mosley’s postwar plan? Mosley believed Wagner was showing how the rejection of continual Faustian struggle and the failure to reject materialism, represented by Marxism and liberalism,106 would result in the inevitable destruction of man. Mosley felt that Wagner’s Siegfried was capable of heroism but not divine love, while supreme achievement was only to be reached by those who could renounce ‘the lesser loves of humanity’, ‘joy for the sake of destiny’ and ‘even the delights of human love for the sake of the life force, in dedication to the winning of ever higher forms’,107 something Siegfried failed to do. The mythical higher form beyond Siegfried, man’s apotheosis, was to be the result of a Hegelian dialectic, a synthesis of the antitheses, namely life and love. For Mosley the higher forms could be described as: Men who will be ready to renounce the lesser in order to achieve the greater, who will yield joy to serve destiny because some are called to strive greatly that higher forms may come. Greater love hath no man than this: that he renounces the fullness of present life to serve the future life which shall thereby be brought to earth. . . . But to make that love perfect he must first

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possess life and love in its full rhythm; he does not deny life but, through his final renunciation, fulfills life’s creative purpose. . . . Otherwise the synthesis of life and love would not be there. He would not be the final hero, the symbol of that generation of the higher men which is ready to give all that all may be won.108 Despite being couched in a serious philosophical casing, it is worth drilling down to find out exactly what Mosley’s doctrine of higher forms would actually mean in reality. While portrayed as a noble pursuit, lurking within his theory was a deep racism and traditional fascistic social Darwinism and a call for eugenics. Unsurprisingly, the higher forms were to evolve only within the white race, as ‘some races . . . can do certain things and others cannot’.109 As such his whole ‘Europe a Nation’ concept was to be built on a biological basis, ‘in harmony with all nature and history. . . . You may blend like with like, but you cannot mix oil and water’.110 The result was to be an Apartheid system. However, even within the white community there was to be a strict hierarchy, as the idea that ‘god made men equal . . . is plainly at variance with the facts’.111 To overcome the inadequacies of the existing stock and to realise his dream of higher forms, Mosley essentially called for the introduction of a eugenics programme: ‘Heredity can be made to play a far greater part in the attaining of new heights of human achievement than has yet been fully realised. But it must be tempered by selection, which discards the unfit and attracts new resources’.112 The failure of some academics properly to explore Mosley’s postwar thought has led to the true nature of his ideas, rooted in traditional fascistic rhetoric about the creation of a new man, based on racial superiority and eugenics, often being missed.

Francis Parker Yockey: an alternative Europeanism While understandably the most famous, Mosley was by no means the only fascist operating in Britain in the immediate postwar period who was calling for a shift towards a united Europe. Francis Parker Yockey was an American Nazi sympathiser who, extraordinarily, spent time as part of the US legal team at the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials.113 After his dismissal he moved to Dublin before heading to Brittas Bay in County Wicklow where he wrote his magnum opus, the Spenglerian tome Imperium.114 Sometime in the autumn of 1947 he travelled to England in search of Oswald Mosley where he subsequently became involved in Union Movement activity, perhaps even becoming a paid member of the European Contact Section of the party.115 He published Imperium in London in 1948 expecting a warm welcome from Mosley due to the similar calls for a united Europe but was shocked when he rejected it and turned against Yockey. Spurned and angered, Yockey, along with a small group of UM members such as John Gannon and Guy Chesham, left to form the European Liberation Front (ELF). Never numbering more than around 150 members and with its newspaper Frontfighter having a monthly circulation of only 500, the group stagnated and had disbanded by 1954.116 To understand properly

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why Mosley rejected Yockey’s advances and why Yockey eventually felt he had to break with him completely it is necessary to explore in more depth the ideas proposed by Yockey. They also provide an alternative fascistic vision of European unity emanating from Britain in the immediate postwar period. At a cursory glance, Yockey’s work, with his call for European unity, was strikingly similar to that of Mosley. Imperium argued: This is the battle of the Idea of the Unity of the West against the nationalism of the 19th century. Here stand opposed the ideas of Empire and petty-Stateism, large-space thinking and political provincialism. Here find themselves opposed the miserable collection of yesterday-patriots and the custodians of the Future. The yesterday-nationalists are nothing but the puppets of the extra-European forces who conquer Europe by dividing it. To the enemies of Europe, there must be no rapprochement, no understanding, no union of the old units of Europe into a new unit, capable of carrying on 20th century politics.117 Put more succinctly in the opening lines of his 1949 Proclamation of London, he stated that ‘Throughout all Europe there is stirring today a great superpersonal Idea, the Idea of the Imperium of Europe, the permanent and perfect union of the peoples and nations of Europe’.118 However, while the outcome, a united Europe, was the same as Mosley’s, Yockey’s reasoning for its necessity had some important differences. While Mosley diverged from orthodox Spenglerianism by arguing that decline could be reversed, Yockey was a true disciple, rejecting the Eurocentric narrative119 and unilinear view of history120 and accepting the pessimistic determinist conclusions laid out in the Decline of the West. This was so much so, in fact, that Yockey adopted the name Oswald Spengler and was known to use it in correspondence.121 Echoing the analogy of human life offered by Spengler himself,122 Yockey believed that a culture has a ‘period of gestation, and a birth-time. It has a growth, a maturity, fulfillment, a down-going to death’.123 Thus, the decline of Western civilisation, just like Indian, Aztec-Mayan or Classical culture, was inevitable and irreversible. Yet he challenged those who portrayed such a position as pessimistic by asking, ‘exactly how is it “Pessimism” to say that since seven High Cultures fulfilled themselves that an eighth will also? If this is “Pessimism” then anyone admitting his own mortality is inevitably a “Pessimist” ’.124 Such an argument elucidates both Spengler’s and Yockey’s belief in an organic conception of civilisations. However, unlike Mosley who felt a united Europe could reverse decline, Yockey simply believed that it would be the mechanism for reaching the pinnacle of Western civilisation before its unavoidable decline, making his rallying call: ‘Forward to our greatest Age of all’.125 He felt it inevitable that the arrival of the ‘Age of Authority’, built on hierarchical socialism – namely work, duty and discipline – would come to replace the malaise of late civilisation. This new age of ‘cultural vitalism’ was to be driven by a sense of communal purpose born from the ‘culture

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bearing stratum’ and osmotically spread to the receptive masses. While closer to orthodox Spenglerianism than Mosley’s position, some still felt Yockey was calling for the impossible. Julius Evola’s 1951 work Spiritual and Structural Presuppositions of the European Union criticised Yockey for misreading Spengler and for trying to ‘turn the negative into a positive’.126 Yockey believed rebirth would derive from the virtues inherent in a culture’s springtime, a time that in Europe’s life cycle had already passed. Europe had reached a stage of senescence, it was already post-mitotic, and thus Yockey’s plan to build the Imperium drew on attributes from a previous stage in the organic cycle of a culture, which therefore no longer existed. As Evola put it, ‘Writers such as Varange [Yocky’s alias] mix things belonging to distinct planes’.127 The present phase of Europe thus lacked the attributes Yockey called on to mobilise the forces necessary to slow decline.128 While Yockey’s belief in the ability to retard the progress of inevitable decline was a slight divergence from Spenglerianism, his understanding of the role of internal and external threats – and the primacy of the former – were more orthodox. Spengler’s explanation of decline and the self-destructive nature of late civilisation made little of the influence of external attacks, as did Toynbee’s theory, which as mentioned earlier hypothesised that suicide, not murder usually caused the death of civilisations.129 While Yockey was ready to highlight the influence of external threats from the two major superpowers he still placed more emphasis on internal threats, in his mind from a supposedly Jewish conspiracy. Yockey’s understanding of internal and external threats and his concept of the role of the state drew heavily on the work of the German philosopher, political theorist and Nazi Party member Carl Schmitt. Schmitt’s Friend–Enemy Thesis as explained in his 1927 work Der Begriff des Politischen [The Concept of the Political] declared that ‘The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is the distinction between Freund und Feind’.130 In the abstract the political is not immutable, rather it is ‘the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping’.131 The state’s role then is the defence of friends against enemies. The identification of the enemy is critical as it dictates the actions to be taken by the state. As Yockey rephrased it decades later, ‘The choice of enemy is the most important decision in the entire realm of activity called Politics’.132 While Schmitt’s friend-enemy theory formed the foundation of Yockey’s understanding of the political and the role of the state, he seemingly failed to grasp that ‘the friend-enemy concept can only be understood within this existential framework and should not be confused with moral or economic concepts, or with private feelings. . . . Political enmity does not even necessitate personal hatred of the public enemy’.133 Yockey was of course not the first to draw confrontational conclusions from the friend-enemy thesis that Schmitt did not intend. Following criticism from the Social Democratic legal theorist Hermann Heller that he was ignoring ethics, Schmitt wrote to Heller stating: ‘I do not recall stating that the enemy should be destroyed’. However, Yockey felt otherwise, believing an enemy emerged due to a clash of opposites, the result of which was an almost social Darwinian struggle for

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survival between cultures. Yockey, as had Spengler before him, drew on the ideas of the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus and his argument that ‘all things happen through strife and necessity’ and that ‘Strife is the father of All That Is and king of All That Is’.134 Yockey expanded on the idea of strife between polarities in his 1953 book The Enemy of Europe, which identified two general opposing categories, ‘Imperialism/Capitalism’ and ‘Ascendent instincts/Decadent instincts’ under which he identified a further 34 polarities such as ‘Europe as Imperium/Petty Statism’ and ‘Europe as Nation/Chauvinism’.135 These dualisms could be used to identify the all-important enemies as the more categories that were polarised the more incompatible the cultures and the closer they were to what Schmitt called the moment of Ernstfall or Yockey ‘the Political’, when politics was reduced to the law of the jungle.136 Again, drawing on Schmitt, Yockey divided the enemy into external enemies and internal and domestic – or Staatsfeind as Schmitt called them – and then fused this concept with Spenglerianism to explain the cause of European civilisational decline. The external enemy was Moscow and Washington while the internal enemy was Jewish. While Yockey identified both external and internal enemies as causes of decline he placed far more emphasis on the latter threat. A confirmed antisemite, he sought to explain deculturation by stressing the role of what he believed was Jewish subversion from within. In the case of Western civilisational decline Yockey argued that ‘culture-aliens’, in this case Jews, were exercising a form of ‘cultureparasitism’.137 The victory of rationalism, materialism, capitalism and democracy had opened the door to the Jews due to their ‘quantitative’ nature, which broke down the exclusiveness of the West thereby liberating Jews from the ghettos and allowing them to take revenge for centuries of persecution.138 The instruments of this assault were supposedly the weapons of propaganda via the press, radio, cinema, stage and education.139 Jews used these ‘weapons’ to bring in Materialism, atheism, class-war, weak happiness-ideals, race-suicide, socialatomism, racial promiscuity, decadence in the arts, erotomania, disintegration of the family, private and public dishonour, slatternly feminism, economic fluctuation and catastrophe, civil war in the family of Europe, planned degeneration of the youth through vile films and literature and through neurotic doctrines of education.140 Yockey’s belief in a Jewish conspiracy meant he attributed the causes of decline to pernicious Jewish actions rather than natural European developments.141 The result of these supposed Jewish attacks was the destruction of Europe and the control of the continent by ‘outer enemies’, namely America and the USSR.142 Similar to the ideas concurrently espoused by Mosley, Yockey’s master plan to stave off European destruction at the hands of internal and external enemies involved the unification of Europe. These calls for unity, as with so much of his ideology, were again deeply influenced by the work of Schmitt, namely his concept of Grossraum. Unveiled during an infamous lecture in April 1939,143 the concept

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of a Grossraum was a continental realm based on a political idea144 that was always formulated with a specific opponent in mind.145 For Schmitt an example of this was the American Monroe Doctrine and its demands for non-intervention by foreign powers in its sphere of influence.146 Schmitt felt the enemy was any group that seriously endangered the established political and legal order and that a Grossraum could emerge in response to this threat.147 For Yockey the enemy was identified not just by its threat to the political and legal order but against the ‘Idea’, the base of the Grossraum. The ‘Idea’ was a timeless symbol of the soul of a specific ‘High Culture’, and the ‘Idea’ that forms the base of the realm is the marker from which to identify enemies. Thus Yockey, influenced by Schmittian thinking, understood the relationship between Europe’s friends and enemies, both internal and external, as the antinomy that defined the polarising quintessence of the ‘political’.148 Thus, Yockey’s call for continental unity – a new European Grossraum – was born of his belief that such an entity would be capable of destroying both the internal and external enemy. This victory would allow European civilisation to reach its pinnacle before, as all organic organisms do, it declines and finally dies, as predicted by Spengler.149

Look East Yockey’s obsessive antisemitism increasingly lead to a distinctive anti-Americanism and an increasingly pro-Russian position. He felt that, as a former European colony, America did not have ‘the spiritual profundity and continuity of the Mother-soil of the Culture’150 and therefore had ‘lower organic resistance to Culture-Disease’.151 As such America was more susceptible to Jewish subversion. It, ‘succumbed more deeply to retarding influences’,152 and ‘the entire continent of America passed into the control of the Jewish Culture-State-Nation-Race-People’ in 1933.153 As the Cold War got underway and the world became increasingly polarised, Yockey progressively shifted to a more pro-Soviet stance stating that: My policy, and the policy of the European Liberation Front aims at the unconditional liberation of Europe’s soul and Europe’s soil from AmericanJewry and from Russia. America-Jewry controls 90% of Europe’s soil; Russia controls 10% of Europe’s soil. Elementary political tactics reveal from whom Europe can gain power over its own Destiny once more.154 His 1953 book Der Feind Europas explicitly called for an accommodation with the Soviet Union: In their political relation to Europe, however, the two extra-European powers widely and fundamentally differ. Owing to the presence of a European inner America, the Washington regime is able to establish or maintain in every European country: Culture-distortion, petty-statism, finance-­capitalism, democracy, economic distress, and chaos. Regardless

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of its intentions, Russia produces a spiritual aversion throughout Europe. If America, deliberately or otherwise, relinquished to Russia the whole of Europe, Russia’s occupation would have to be based either on terror or large-scale concessions to procure collaboration. Both occupation policies would end in the domination of Russia by Europe, either through a peaceful inner conquest or a series of Liberation Wars that Europe would wage as a unit against Russia. Barbarian Russia can only awaken Europe’s sterner instincts. The American-Jewish Symbiosis, composed of fellahJews and American colonials who are at once primitive and over-civilised, appeals to the lowest stratum of Europe and to the lowest stratum in every European, the stratum of animal instincts, laziness, cowardice, avarice, dishonour, and ethical individualism. America can only divide Europe – no matter what its policy. Russia can only unite Europe – no matter what its policy.155 However, Yockey’s biographer Coogan rightly states that his pro-Russian stance should not be reduced to mere ‘Machtpolitik’ but should be viewed as part of an intellectual movement called ‘Eurasianism’, also favoured by Spengler and with its origins among the intellectuals of the exiled White Russians.156 Yockey was not alone on the far right in shifting his gaze Eastwards. Around the same time the German radical right group Sozialistische Reichspartei [Socialist Reich Party] was calling for a pro-Eastern neutralist Germany, becoming something of a cousin party to Yockey’s ELF.157 Importantly however, it was his rampant antisemitism that provides the best explanation for his increasingly pro-Russian stance. The Prague Trials and the increasingly antisemitic attempts to combat ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ in the Soviet Union caught the eye of Yockey, who lauded their prejudice and felt it further divided East from West. The Trials marked a landmark moment for Yockey as he took them to be a declaration of war by the Soviets on the Jews of Eastern Europe and he went as far as to argue that Stalin was ‘following in the footsteps of Hitler’.158 In his view the increasing antisemitism of Russia meant: The European fascist elite can emerge more and more into the world affairs, and will force the leadership of American Jewry to render back, step by step, the custody of European Destiny to the people of Europe. If the JewishAmerican leaders refuse, the new fascist leaders of Europe will threaten them with the Russian bogey. To us in Europe, the Prague Trials are welcome.159 Yockey’s increasingly pro-Soviet position led some, such as the leading American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell and Arnold Leese in Britain, to describe Yockey as a Strasserite.160 Michael O’Meara, a modern sympathiser, argues that this is ‘not entirely off the mark’, summarising Yockey’s ideology as a, ‘fascism of the left: socialist, revolutionary, euronationalist, pro-Russian, anti-American, anti-Zionist,

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anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial’.161 However, while those statements are true to varying degrees (anti-colonial?) Yockey and Strasser had little in common, with the former’s shift towards the Soviet Union being motivated in large part by antisemitism rather than any Strasserite concept of a worker-based Nazism, thus undermining attempts to describe Yockey’s ideas as a ‘fascism of the left’. In addition, it is worth noting Otto Strasser’s strident opposition in the postwar period to any calls for a united Europe: We Europeans are sick unto death of hearing this idiotic demagoguery about how “necessary” it is for Europe to “unite” ! ! . . . The moment in which Europe allows herself to be forced, for practical considerations, into one great hodgepodge unit . . . will be the moment in which Europe relinquishes her meaning and her mission.162 Thus only with many caveats can one attempt to compare Yockey’s postwar ideology with Strasserism. Yockey’s turn towards Russia can look paradoxical, not least because Russians fall outside his understanding of the European race. However, his concept of race is perhaps more flexible than one might first imagine as he doesn’t completely equate cultural unity with racial uniformity. Yockey seems to have accepted the Spenglerian idea that a race was not solely a specific biological type but rather formed the character of a society and embodied a psychic ethos. A strong race was said to have the capability to absorb new blood. He even went as far as to accept that some Jews ‘had acquired Western rhythms and have thereby acquired Western race’. Yockey’s supporter John Gannon described his leader’s notions of race as ‘horizontal’ rather than ‘vertical’. He wrote: If one could rely upon the FACT that every blue-eyed, fair-haired human being was a FRIEND, and that the others were probably ENEMIES how simple and predictable life would be, and have been . . . believe me, I will go along the VERTICAL line for esthetic [sic] reasons, and certainly exclude non-Europeans from our Imperium (our colonials, excepted, of course), but for all the rest it is all quite absurd when taken to the lengths of determinism! FPY postulated that RACE is what a man DOES.163 While Yockey’s belief in possible assimilation of peoples into the Western race was a marginal aspect of his thought when compared to the emphasis he placed on Western exclusivity, it was more than enough to draw criticism from ‘vertical’ racists. Arnold Leese abused Yockey in his literature because of this difference and accused him of being ‘all sorts of a mongrel’.164 Guy Chesham and John Gannon once met with two of Leese’s collaborators to see if cooperation between them and Yockey’s group was possible, but this issue made any union impossible.165

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Cause of the split What becomes clear upon closer inspection of the two proposals for European unity emanating from Britain in the immediate postwar period  – Yockey’s and Mosley’s – is just how different from each other they really are. At a glance it seems remarkable that two fascist ideologues operating in such a hostile anti-fascist climate and both calling for a shift towards European transnationalism were not cooperating but competing. It is true that Yockey made strident overtures to Mosley in the hope of fostering cooperation, but he was continually rebuffed. Supporters of Yockey, seeing the similarities between Mosley’s ‘Europe-a-Nation’ and Yockey’s Imperium, were furious at the former’s refusal to cooperate, with Chesham arguing it was because of Mosley’s ‘well-known inability to tolerate men of intellect and imagination’ and because Imperium was ‘a summons to action, because it demanded a shattering of illusion and a manly facing of political facts’.166 Meanwhile John Gannon believed it was because Mosley’s imprisonment during the war resulted in a loss of self-confidence and because ‘he was older, less decisive, more opportunistic’.167 By contrast, Mosley’s biographer Skidelsky argues that the split with the openly antisemitic Yockey happened because Mosley ‘deliberately renounced much of his old chauvinist, racialist following and tried to win new converts. . . . His cold shouldering of the American Francis Parker Yockey  .  .  . is a case in point’.168 While there may be a modicum of truth in all these explanations, the purely personal ones offered by Yockey’s supporters seem unlikely and, as has been shown earlier, Skidelsky’s argument that Mosley’s rebuff of Yockey was due to the latter’s extremist views is overly kind and part of a wider attempt to rehabilitate Mosley’s postwar image. Rather, the in-depth exploration of the postwar ideology of Mosley and Yockey offered earlier points to Mosley’s rebuff being most likely the result of important ideological differences. As has been shown, while both admired Spengler, Mosley rejected the pessimistic orthodox Spenglerian notion of inevitable and irreversible decline while Yockey did not. It is therefore no surprise that Mosley scribbled, ‘A very dull re-hash of Spengler’ in the margins of Chesham’s memorandum of dissociation.169 In addition they differed somewhat on the cause of European decline with Yockey placing far more emphasis on the role of internal subversion resulting from a supposed Jewish conspiracy. Most important was the major divergence over the direction which a united Europe should face, with Mosley favouring the US as an ally against communism and Yockey favouring the Soviet Union as an ally against America. A letter exists in which Raven Thomson, a close aide of Mosley, stated that he refused to publish Imperium as ‘it was full of Spenglerian pessimism and was quite unnecessarily offensive to America’.170 Meanwhile another key Mosley supporter, Jeffrey Hamm, later explained the cause of disunity being that ‘we were rather suspicious of Yockey . . . we are suspicious of suggestions that communism is not the menace we regard it to be, and advocate some sort of co-operation with it, as I understand Yockey did’.171

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It is not just Mosley and his supporters that pointed to ideological differences as the cause of the split. Writing a few years later Yockey himself said of Mosley that: I was interested in his possibilities because of his prewar orientation as Hitler’s voice on the Island. When I discovered he was pro-Churchill and pro-American, and anti-Russian a outrance, [sic] even to the extent of mobilizing Europe to fight for America-Jewish victory over Russia, I left him. Mosley is an effective American agent.172 As such, it is fair to argue that the key dividing line that scuppered all hope of cooperation was their differing views on which direction a united Europe should face.

Notes 1 An interesting aside here is that during the immediate postwar period Enoch Powell – who would later become so important to far-right politics from the 1960s onward – also turned away from Britain’s imperial ambitions. Unlike Mosley who expanded his nationalism, Powell turned towards the territorial ‘nation as the touchstone for all political action and thinking’. For more on Enoch Powell’s rejection of imperialism, Camilla Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 76. 2 Oswald Mosley, My Life (London: Book Club Associates, 1968), 320. 3 Daniel Sonabend, We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post-war Britain (London: Verso, 2019), 180. 4 Janet Dack, ‘Cultural Regeneration: Mosley and the Union Movement’, in Nigel Copsey and John E. Richardson (eds.), Cultures of Postwar British Fascism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 8. 5 Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 3rd ed. (London: Papermac, 1990), 465. 6 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: An Abridged Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 12, 15–16. 7 Spengler, The Decline of the West, 73. 8 Spengler, The Decline of the West, 74. 9 Mosley’s March 1933 Speech at the English-Speaking Union, in, Mosley, My Life, 321. 10 Oswald Mosley, The Alternative (Ramsbury: Mosley Publications, 1947), 19. 11 Spengler, The Decline of the West, 29. 12 Spengler, The Decline of the West, 415. 13 Mosley, My Life, 331. 14 Mosley, My Life, 325. 15 Diana Mosley to Keith Stimely, 29 June 1982, KSC, Stimley Box 1 of 2, Up08OM, Francis Parker Yockey Folder. 16 Mosley, My Life, 325. 17 For an introduction to Heidegger, see George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). See also Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to the Task of Thinking (1964) (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). 18 Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik (Max Niemeyer Verlag: Tubingen, 1987; 1st ed., 1935), 28–29; Roger Griffin (ed.), Fascism: Oxford Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 151. 19 Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik; Charles Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 145. 20 Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots, 145.

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2 1 Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots, 168. 22 Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, 28–29; Griffin, Fascism: Oxford Reader, 151. 23 Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots, 168. 24 Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots, 167–168. 25 Mosley, The Alternative, 19. 26 Mosley, The Alternative, 19. 27 Mosley, The Alternative, 271. 28 Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 468. 29 Oswald Mosley speech, Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, 15 November 1947, quoted in Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 481. 30 Dave Renton, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000), 32. 31 Mosley, The Alternative, 11. 32 Oswald Mosley quoted in Letter from Desmond Stewart to Mr  Morey, 19 February 1948, ADC, London Misc Folder. See also, Mosley, The Alternative, 14. 33 Mosley, The Alternative, 191. 34 Mosley, My Life, 433. 35 Mosley, The Alternative, 10. 36 Graham Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley and the Resurrection of British Fascism After 1945 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 4. 37 Mosley, The Alternative, 145. 38 Mosley, The Alternative, 152. 39 Mosley, The Alternative, 164. 40 Dack, ‘Cultural Regeneration’, 11–12. 41 Mosley, The Alternative, 156. 42 Mosley, The Alternative, 187. 43 Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 508. 44 Mosley, The Alternative, 166. 45 Mosley, The Alternative, 51. 46 Mosley, The Alternative, 182. 47 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 84. 48 Walter Lipgens, A History of European Integration: Volume 1 1945–1947, the Formation of the European Unity Movement with Contributions by Wilfried Loth and Alan Milward, trans. P.S. Falla and A.J. Ryder (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 35. 49 Lipgens, A History of European Integration, 36. 50 Lipgens, A History of European Integration, 45–46. 51 Lipgens, A History of European Integration, 47. 52 The Movimento Federalista Europeo, 28 August  1943, in Dan Stone, ‘Introduction: Postwar Europe as History’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 13. 53 International Programme of the Mouvement de Libération Nationale (Region Lyon), August  1944, in Walter Lipgens (ed.), Documents on the History of European Integration (Berlin: de Gruyter for European University Institute, Florence, 1985), 353. 54 Lipgens, A History of European Integration, 51. 55 Keith Robbins, The World Since 1945: A  Concise History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 31. 56 Robbins, The World Since 1945, 76. 57 John Foster Dulles, quoted in Otto Strasser, ‘The Role of Europe’, The European, June 1954, 8. 58 Oswald Mosley, ‘The World Alternative’, Fascist Quarterly (1936), in Griffin (ed.), Fascism: Oxford Reader, 174–175. See also: Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 79. 59 Mosley, ‘The World Alternative’, in Mosley, The Alternative, 15. 60 Oswald Mosley, Europe: Faith and Plan (London: Black House Publishing, 2012), 4. 61 Dan Stone, The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory: Essays in the History of Ideas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 96–97.

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62 Gardiner quoted in, Matthew Jefferies and Mike Tyldesley, ‘Introduction’, in Matthew Jefferies and Mike Tyldesley (eds.), Rolf Gardiner: Folk, Nature and Culture in Interwar Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 13. 63 Gerald Afanfryn-Hill, ‘How Will the Rightwing Get Together?’ Right, 34, July 1958, 5. 64 A. Georges Valois, ‘What Is Fascism?’ Le Nouveau Siecle, 13 December 1925, in Eugen Weber (ed.), Varieties of Fascism (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand Company Inc., 1964), 183. 65 A. Georges Valois, War or Revolution, trans. E.W. Dickes (Woking: Unwin Brothers Ltd, 1932), 183. 66 Marcel Deat, ‘What the R.N.P. Wants’, Un Part, un Chef (Paris, 1943), 29–32, in Weber, Varieties of Fascism, 185. See also: Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 488. 67 Griffin, Fascism: Oxford Reader, 343. 68 Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 188. See also: Griffin, Fascism: Oxford Reader, 344. 69 Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (New York: Autonomedia, 1999), 168. 70 Julius Evola, ‘Spiritual and Structural Presuppositions of the European Union’. Accessed 29 January 2015. http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id54.html. 71 Andrea Mammone, ‘Revitalizing and De-Territorializing Fascism in the 1950s: The Extreme Right in France and Italy, and the Pan-National (“European”) Imaginary’, Patterns of Prejudice, 45:4, 2011, 306–307. 72 Mammone, ‘Revitalizing and De-Territorializing Fascism in the 1950s’, 307. 73 J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945: Volume 3, Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination. A Documentary Reader (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001), 276. 74 Memorandum by Werner Daitz advocating the ‘Creation of a Reich Commission for Grossraumwirtschaft’, 31 May 1940, Document 621 in, Noakes and Pridham, Nazism 1919–1945: Volume 3, 277. 75 Noakes and Pridham, Nazism 1919–1945: Volume 3, 278–281. 76 Proposal for ‘New Order’ presented by Walther Funk to Herman Göring, 6 August 1940, Document 625 in, Noakes and Pridham, Nazism 1919–1945: Volume 3, 281. 77 Noakes and Pridham, Nazism 1919–1945: Volume 3, 290. 78 Daitz notes that it should not be termed a German Grossraumwirtschaft, as for reasons of prestige the Italians would want one, as would the Russians etc. See: Memorandum by Werner Daitz advocating the ‘Creation of a Reich Commission for Grossraumwirtschaft’, 31 May 1940, Document 621 in, Noakes and Pridham, Nazism 1919–1945: Volume 3, 277. 79 Griffin, Fascism: Oxford Reader, 344. 80 Karl Heinz Pfeffer, ‘European Consciousness’, Zeitschrift für Politik, 34:10–12, October/ December 1944, 377–385 (excerpts), in Lipgens, Documents on the History of European Integration, 171. 81 Pfeffer, ‘European Consciousness’, 171. 82 Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 194. 83 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 92. Franke-Gricksch was a friend of Mosley’s and wrote an introduction to his book The Alternative. Franke-Gricksch was involved with the postwar German group known as the Offiziers Bruderschaft, which was led by the ‘former Gauleiter of Hamburg’ Karl Kaufmann. Though unlikely, anti-fascists of the period claimed that some of the groups funds derived from Mosley. See Lionel Rose to John Roy Carlson, 3 May 1950, ADC, England Contacts and Data File. See also, Brotherhood of Officers, ADC, England Contacts and Data File. 84 Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 194. 85 Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 168. See also Mammone, ‘Revitalizing and De-Territorializing Fascism in the 1950s’, 314. 86 For details about the formation and operations of the MSE see, Stephen Dorril, Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (London: Viking, 2006), 594–196. 87 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 81. 88 Mosley, The Alternative, 84.

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89 Oswald Mosley, Wagner and Shaw: A Synthesis (London: Steven Books, 2010), 8 (first published in The European Magazine circa 1954; First printed in book form by Euphorian Books in 1954). 90 Friedrich Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader (London: Penguin, 1977), 237. 91 George Bernard Shaw, quoted in, Mosley, Wagner and Shaw, 8. 92 Mosley, Wagner and Shaw, 12. 93 Diana Mosley, Forward to Oswald Mosley, Goethe’s Faust (London: Steven Books, 1991), 2. 94 Mosley, Goethe’s Faust, 3. 95 Mosley, The Alternative, 293. 96 Mosley, The Alternative, 84. 97 D.C. Somervell, Editor note in, Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History: Abridgement of Volumes I – VI by D.C. Somervell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 273. 98 Mosley, My Life, 331.   99 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust with Urfaust: A Tragedy in Two Parts (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2007), 12. 100 Goethe, Faust with Urfaust, 12. 101 Mosley, Goethe’s Faust, 3. 102 Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 472. 103 Oswald Mosley to Nicholas Mosley, Quoted in Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 472. 104 Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 470. 105 Oswald Mosley to Nicholas Mosley, Quoted in Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 472. 106 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 81. 107 Mosley, Wagner and Shaw, 9. 108 Mosley, Wagner and Shaw, 13. 109 Mosley, The Alternative, 257. 110 Mosley, The Alternative, 150. 111 Mosley, The Alternative, 255. 112 Mosley, The Alternative, 63. 113 Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to the National Front (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 214. 114 Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 159. 115 Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 162. 116 Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 175. 117 Ulick Varange [Francis Parker Yockey], Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (London: Westropa Press, 1948), 116. 118 Francis Parker Yockey, The Proclamation of London of the European Liberation Front (Shamley Green and Indianapolis: The Palingenesis Project, 2012), 3 (originally published 1949). 119 Yockey, Imperium, 40. 120 Yockey, Imperium, 39. 121 Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 146. 122 Spengler, The Decline of the West, 74. 123 Yockey, Imperium, 22. 124 Yockey, Imperium, 58. 125 Yockey, Imperium, 64. 126 Evola, ‘Spiritual and Structural Presuppositions of the European Union’. 127 Evola, ‘Spiritual and Structural Presuppositions of the European Union’. 128 Michael O’Meara, ‘Yockey’s Manifesto of European Destiny’, Introductory essay to Yockey, The Proclamation of London of the European Liberation Front, xxxiii. 129 D.C. Somervell, Editor’s note in, Toynbee, A Study of History, 273. 130 Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen (1927), 26. Cited in Joseph W. Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 88. 131 Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, 30. Cited in Bendersky, Carl Schmitt, 88. 132 Francis Parker Yockey, The Enemy of Europe, trans. Thomas Francis (York: Liberty Bell Publications, 1981), 62.

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133 Bendersky, Carl Schmitt, 88–89. 134 Heraclitus, Fragment 18 and 19, cited in Richard G. Geldard, Remembering Heraclitus (Aurora: Lindisfarne Books, 2000), 40. 135 Yockey, The Enemy of Europe, 51–53. 136 Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 144. 137 Yockey, The Proclamation of London of the European Liberation Front, 31. 138 Yockey, The Proclamation of London of the European Liberation Front, 28. 139 Yockey, The Proclamation of London of the European Liberation Front, 33. 140 Yockey, The Proclamation of London of the European Liberation Front, 41. 141 O’Meara, ‘Yockey’s Manifesto of European Destiny’, xliii. 142 Yockey, The Proclamation of London of the European Liberation Front, 58. 143 John P. McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Europe: Culture, Imperial and Spatial Proposals for European Integration, 1923–1955, 9. Accessed 30 March  2016. www.gongfa.com/ shimiteMcCormick.pdf. 144 O’Meara, ‘Yockey’s Manifesto of European Destiny’, xxxi. 145 Bendersky, Carl Schmitt, 253. 146 McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Europe, 9. 147 Bendersky, Carl Schmitt, 90. 148 O’Meara, ‘Yockey’s Manifesto of European Destiny’, l. 149 Yockey, The Proclamation of London of the European Liberation Front, 63. 150 Yockey, The Proclamation of London of the European Liberation Front, 30. 151 Yockey, Imperium, 475. 152 Yockey, Imperium, 475. 153 Yockey, The Proclamation of London of the European Liberation Front, 30. 154 Francis Parker Yockey to Wolfgang Sarg, 24 January 1953, KSP, Box 15, Acc 55006 15.29/30. 155 Yockey, The Enemy of Europe, 85–86. 156 For discussions regarding Eurasianism see Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 185–188. 157 Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 182. 158 George Michael, Willis Carto and the American Far-Right (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2008), 80. 159 Francis Parker Yockey, ‘What Is Behind the Hanging of Eleven Jews in Prague?’ Bulletin, December 1952, cited in Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 267. 160 Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 191. 161 O’Meara, ‘Yockey’s Manifesto of European Destiny’, xxvii. 162 Strasser, ‘The Role of Europe’, 10. 163 John Gannon to Keith Stimely, 15 February 1982, KSC, Stimley Box 1 of 2, Up08OM, Francis Parker Yockey Folder. 164 John Gannon to Keith Stimely, 7 September 1980, KSC, Stimley Box 1 of 2, Up08OM, Francis Parker Yockey Folder. 165 John Gannon to Keith Stimely, 7 September 1980. 166 Guy Chesham, cited in Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 170. 167 John Gannon to Keith Stimely, 13 July 1980, cited in Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 170. 168 Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 491. 169 A Memorandum of Dissociation sent to Oswald Mosley by Guy Chesham. O.M.’s comments in the margins. 31 August 1949, KSC, Box 1 of 2, Up08OM, Francis Parker Yockey Folder. 170 A. Raven Thomson to H. Keith Thompson, 27 March 1953, cited in Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 171. 171 Jeffrey Hamm to Keith Stimely, 16 January 1982, KSC, Stimley Box 1 of 2, Up08OM, Francis Parker Yockey Folder. 172 Francis Parker Yockey to Wolfgang Sarg, 24 January 1953, KSP, Box 15, Acc 55006 15.29/30.

5 KING, COUNTRY AND EMPIRE Traditional nationalist ideologies

While two of the key postwar fascist ideologues, namely Mosley and Yockey, espoused transnational pan-European ideologies, many on the far right found such ideas alien and unwelcome. Many British fascists found it hard or impossible to follow Mosley or anyone else along the road to transnational Europeanism. Even within the Union Movement, the shift away from traditional nationalism was too dramatic a departure for many and resulted in some activists abandoning Mosley.1 Unsurprisingly, Mosley’s new declaration of faith, The Alternative, was greeted unfavourably by many non-UM far-right papers. Writing in 1949 for the British Peoples Party organ People’s Post, Colin Jordan, later the most famous Nazi in Britain but just a young activist at the time, bemoaned how ‘Truly Sir Oswald’s mind had passed far beyond Fascism, Democracy, or anything he had previously stood for. He had taken to championing European union. He had graduated to the cosmopolitan front’.2 Jordan believed ‘his new ideas, whatever fresh support they may attract, are nicely calculated to rid him sooner or later of all sincere nationalists, and to reduce his old following to those who adhere to the dictum: “The Leader is always right” ’.3 Jordan was a critic of Mosley, believing him to have discredited the nationalist cause during the interwar period. Ironically, considering his later adoption of pan-Aryan ‘Universal Nazism’ and his future role as world Führer of the World Union of National Socialists, Jordan criticised Mosley for the BUF’s ‘fatal and distasteful close emulation of Continental models’, which ‘alienated that mass support which would otherwise have been forthcoming, and enabled a most damaging stigma to be attracted to all nationalism in general in this country’.4 However, in the late 1940s, while still just a young activist writing for the BPP, Jordan was one of many far-right activists alarmed by the shift away from conventional nationalism towards transnationalism. Like many on the far right straight after the war he felt ‘To-day, even more so than then, it is the Empire which holds the key to Britain’s future’5 and that ‘Britain then, if she is to survive, recover and

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advance, must look to the Empire, first and foremost, now and always’.6 Sharing his concerns was M.J. McLean who lamented that ‘1948 saw him (Mosley) writing off the Empire as a “lost cause,” and embracing ardently men who have in recent years worked unremittingly for the destruction of the Empire’.7 It is no surprise then many young far-right activists of the period turned to the leading postwar proponent of traditional nationalism and Empire loyalism, A.K. Chesterton.

The British conspiratorial tradition Having been a key supporter of Mosley’s before the war, A.K. Chesterton moved out from beneath his shadow to become a prominent far-right leader in his own right. In stark contrast to Mosley’s Europeanism, Chesterton trumpeted more traditional nationalism based on Britain and her Empire. While both agreed that Britain was in decline, Chesterton passionately argued that it was the Empire that offered salvation, not European union. Central to his ideas was a uniquely British form of conspiratorial antisemitism that argued the Empire was under attack by secret Jewish power. The British tradition of conspiratorial antisemitism has a long history, but the notion that Britain itself – and importantly its empire – was under attack began life in the wake of World War I. Like most of Europe at the time, Britain emerged from the horrors of the First World War with a kaleidoscope of conflicting national emotions. Coupled with the trauma of massive human loss was the relief of victory and the façade of imperial security. In 1919, following the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, the British Empire acquired an additional 1,800,000 square miles of territory and 13 million new subjects.8 Yet even before the red ink had dried on the enlarged map of the British Empire, crisis struck with revolts in Ireland, Egypt, India and Mesopotamia. Simultaneously, Bolshevism threatened to spread across Europe and ‘poison’ the minds of Britain’s war-fatigued proletariat. In the midst of this turbulent and bipolar public consciousness, a uniquely British conspiracy theory regarding alleged Jewish global ambitions emerged. In The Cause of World Unrest, a collection of articles published in 1920 that heavily referenced the notorious Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the then-editor of The Morning Post, H.A. Gwynne, argued: That there is a Jewish Peril I have no sort of doubt. . . . It is easy to prove that a certain section of the Jews in the world are engaged in a mighty attempt to destroy the established rule in many countries and to bring this world into communistic brotherhood.9 The simultaneous challenge of Bolshevism, with its internationalist agenda calling for ‘world revolution’ and the Protocols’ false evidence of a Jewish-led plot for world domination, made the synthesis of the two epiphenomena almost inevitable. In the interwar years, no one did more to develop the conspiracy and to add a pseudo-intellectual edge than the ‘historian’ and occultist, Nesta Webster. She had

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contributed to the multi-authored The Cause of World Unrest, but it was with her later books that she detailed her particular take on the world conspiracy. Webster argued that the long-term aim of the Jewish conspiracy was to hijack the apparatus of the Illuminati – an Enlightenment-era secret society – and use it to destroy Christian civilisation.10 With the British Empire championed by Webster as the bastion of this civilisation, it was naturally a primary target of the Jews’ subversive activity: It is because England, with all its shortcomings . . . yet remains the stronghold of Christian civilisation, that the conspiracy has made her the principal point of attack. . . . Illuminism is mustering all its forces for a supreme onslaught in our own country.11 The British Empire was the final dam that, if breeched, would allow the waters of subversion to flood and drown civilisation. While the most prominent and influential conspiracist, Webster was not the only person investigating Britain’s interwar imperial turmoil through an antisemitic lens. In 1935, in a scathing pamphlet, the notorious antisemite Arnold Leese, leader of the Imperial Fascist League and mainstay of the British far right well into the postwar period, alleged secret Jewish control of India. In The Destruction of India, Leese argued: ‘To destroy Aryan prestige in India is to kill it throughout Asia. That is the objective of Jewish Politics applied to India’.12 In his mind, the White Paper published in 1933, which laid down the blueprint for Indian selfgovernment, was the primary tool of Jewish conspirators: ‘Thus it is proved from official sources that the White Paper and Army Indianisation are both the product of Jewish Rule in India’.13 The fear of a world without British hegemony led many to seek out an explanation for imperial decline, and, for those who still believed in the legitimacy of the Protocols, such as Leese,14 the Jewish world conspiracy provided an answer.

The postwar ideas of A.K. Chesterton While conspiratorial explanations for imperial decline can be traced back to World War I, they survived into the postwar period. One outlet for such ideas was Tomorrow, the organ of the Social Credit Party. A  survey of British fascism in 1948 explained how the paper was ‘fanatically anti-American, anti-Russian, and antiJewish. This paper devotes a good deal of its time to declaring that Zionism is only a plot to overthrow the British Empire’.15 However, the idea of a Jewish plot to destroy the Empire undoubtedly reached its zenith with the postwar work of A.K. Chesterton. Using his considerable talents as a journalist and propagandist, A.K. Chesterton had long been a prominent member of Britain’s far right who cut his teeth in the interwar period while a member of the British Union of Fascists. In fact it was during the 1930s that he wrote his most visceral antisemitic tracts in a series of articles for the British Union Quarterly, which were later compiled into his

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infamous work: The Apotheosis of the Jew. Typical of this often shocking text are passages such as this: Financially, socially, politically, culturally, the Jew has brought all things down to the level at which he feels most at home. . . . To go to a swimming pool anywhere near London . . . is as efficacious as baptism in the Jordan; one becomes positively anointed with Semitic grease.16 Despite his vehement and occasionally quasi-genocidal17 antisemitism, Chesterton declined the offer of a post as a propagandist for the Nazis in Berlin18 and instead signed up for the British army in World War II. His decision to reject Nazism after March 1939 gives one a valuable insight into Chesterton’s political priorities. His primary driver was an unalterable patriotism, and it was this, infused with antisemitism, that amalgamated in the postwar period to create the very British form of conspiratorial antisemitism that came to monopolise his postwar thinking. He was horrified by the revelations of the concentration camps and argued that those responsible for the gas chambers should be hanged.19 As repellent as Chesterton’s metaphorical embellishments could be, when in the postwar period he laid out his extensive writings on the Jews and imperial decline, he shunned the biologically based, pseudo-scientific prejudices of the Nazis in favour of a conspiratorial form of antisemitism. While influential in the BUF before the war, it is his postwar conspiratorial work for which he is best remembered. His biographer, David Baker, stated: ‘Chesterton’s legacy today resides in his conspiracy theory’, meaning that he will ‘go down in modern history as the man most responsible for keeping alive, spreading, and developing the British tradition of conspiracy thinking’.20 Chesterton’s views and those of his fellow theorists were articulated through his newspaper Candour, while his pressure group, the League of Empire Loyalists, was the largest and most significant organisation to propagate antisemitic conspiratorial theories. Like Yockey, Chesterton was convinced there was a Jewish conspiracy; however, unlike Mosley and Yockey, Chesterton felt the way to overcome the threats faced by Britain was not via a united Europe but rather via the retention of the British Empire. Chesterton outlined his theories in great detail, and while his conspiratorial ideas had a limited impact upon mainstream thought, he nevertheless held sway on the fringes and the extreme right – both nationally and internationally. This marks him out as one of only a handful of postwar far-right ideologues who has successfully exported far-right ideas from Britain. The tumultuous immediate postwar period shook the Empire to its core with Britain being replaced by the US as the primary military power. This ‘crisis of empire’ in the late 1940s ‘fulfilled many of Chesterton’s worst fears about imperial decline’.21 In August 1946 he published Menace of the Money Power, which was ‘a variation on the same conspiratorial themes that had preoccupied Chesterton since the early 1930s, but placed new found emphasis on Bretton-Woods as the “coup de grace” to British sovereignty’.22 However, it wasn’t until 13 April 1954

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that Chesterton established the League of Empire Loyalists as a ‘Board of Deputies of Native Britons to safeguard British interests’, in what he believed was an increasingly Jew-dominated world.23 As shown by Stocker, the LEL “did not seek a new, utopian vision of British imperialism. Rather, they sought a return to the (perceived) harmony of the British Empire before the First World War, when few questioned Britain’s imperial role in the world’.24 The League’s size varied considerably throughout its relatively brief existence. It reached its peak in 1958 with a membership of perhaps 3,000 in Britain and possibly 10,000 when including branches in the Commonwealth and Empire.25 Le Cras argues that the LEL ‘showed few signs of developing into a genuine neo-fascist enterprise’ though paradoxically concedes that its ‘rhetoric and ideology contained overarching themes of cultural decadence and national regeneration, similar to those that permeated British and European fascism’, coupled with, ‘radical nationalism, anti-communism, and conspiratorial anti-semitism’.26 While true that the LEL was a broad church, with members ranging from concerned Conservative activists, rooted in the patriotic imperial tradition, right through to former Blackshirts and Nazis, the reality of Chesterton’s and the LELs ideology were often indistinguishable from fascism. It is certainly true that despite being regularly described as a Colonel Blimp-like organisation, a deep-seated ideological antisemitism ran just beneath the traditional Conservative empire loyalist surface.27 Some such as Van Donselaar, Fleck and Müller and Eatwell have rightly argued that within many far-right organisations there exists an extreme ‘back-stage’ behind a comparatively moderate ‘front- stage’ as presented to the public – or as Eatwell puts it, between the esoteric and exoteric appeal.28 This was very much the case with the LEL. While some of its rank-andfile membership may have been no more than concerned empire loyalists, it is fair to surmise that the core was au fait with the antisemitic conspiratorial theory that represents the League’s true ideology. John Bean, the former Northern Organiser for the LEL,29 has written of Chesterton’s ‘coded references to Jews with ‘ “New York international money power” ’.30 Bean’s memoirs also confirm that quotation marks often used around ‘America’ were code for ‘Jewish Bankers’.31 That said, Chesterton’s antisemitism was rarely constrained to coded innuendos. In his 1965 work The New Unhappy Lords, for instance, under the chapter title ‘Is the Conspiracy Jewish?’, he asks: ‘Are these master-manipulators and master-conspirators Jewish?’ and continues, ‘The answer is almost certainly “yes”. Whether or not One World is the secret final objective of Zionism, World Jewry is the most powerful single force on earth’.32 Unlike predecessors such as the conspiracy theorist Nesta Webster, who believed that the Jewish conspiracy’s primary objective was to destroy Christian civilisation, Chesterton believed it to be essentially motivated by a hunger for wealth and power. Thus the British Empire fell into the conspiracy’s firing line thanks to its position as the ‘greatest single obstacle to the expansion of America’s exportcapitalism’.33 Britain’s empire had supposedly been used by the ‘Money Power’ to destroy the Third Reich whose primary crime had been Hitler’s attempts to

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circumvent international finance by instituting a system of international commodity bartering.34 Once that hurdle had been demolished, the ‘international financiers’ turned their eyes towards the British Empire. Building upon the themes implied in the Cause of World Unrest, this conspiracy was held to consist of a clandestine cabal of powerful Jews, pulling the strings in both New York and Moscow, with the aim of hegemonic world control.35 In a rallying call to new readers of Candour, Chesterton explained that the ‘The enemy we fight is the International Money Power . . . which attacks the historic nations of Europe in its twin guise of Bolshevism and anti-Bolshevism’.36 Together they formed a ‘gigantic campaign to smash the British world system’.37 Thus the allegations in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were updated for the postwar world. Whereas his predecessors identified this Jewish conspiracy within secret societies and unknowable hidden organisations, Chesterton claimed to have located its exact whereabouts, as well as those who were involved. Bernard Baruch, the American financier and political consultant to both Woodrow Wilson and Roosevelt, headed the conspiracy.38 The wider infrastructure with which the world was to be financially enslaved included the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.39 Most important was the United Nations, which was the ‘embryonic world government which has been planned for the enslavement of mankind’.40 Alongside supranational agitation, Chesterton believed, was the erosion of the British race at home via the encouragement of race-mixing: The Jewish interest in the business of nation-smashing and race mixing is manifold . . . there is a belief that if nations and races can be progressively obliterated, there will die in the Gentile spirit that survival sense which might otherwise resist Jewish world domination.41 In an earlier article in Candour he argued: The one thing we must not allow them to do is to poison the bloodstream of those who are native here because no recovery of Britain’s greatness could be expected from a mulatto nation.42 Chesterton’s work laid out the nature and composition of the Jewish conspiracy, in addition to the tactics they were using. Special venom was directed at the supposedly duplicitous British government, which Chesterton believed was acting ‘under duress’ in helping ‘Money Power’ to achieve its objectives.43 For Chesterton, Jewish attempts at global control had already begun to manifest visibly with the transition of hegemonic world power from the British Empire to the United States. The very first edition of Candour articulates the supposedly subversive nature of this transition. Writing as Faulconbridge, Chesterton stressed: In place of the British Empire, there arises the Empire of the United States. . . . Indeed, British power, is being, or has already been smothered

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over huge portions of the earth’s surface. . . . If Britain but awakes, she alone can foil this plot.44 While Chesterton commented at length about every aspect of imperial decline throughout the 1950s and 1960s, there were several events that came in for special scrutiny: the Suez Crisis and Rhodesia.

Suez For postwar antisemites, the Suez Crisis had all the circumstantial evidence necessary to be deemed as proof of their conspiracy theory. Early in 1956, British troops had been withdrawn from Egypt, and the Sudan had been granted independence. For those alleging a Jewish world conspiracy, the multilateral condemnation of Britain’s imperialist actions coming from the ‘supposed’ Cold War enemies of the US and Russia, coupled with open Jewish involvement via Israel, was nothing short of definitive. It soon became clear that President Eisenhower’s outspoken disapproval, along with the United States’ financial and oil sanctions, had forced a ceasefire before Britain had completed any of its political or military objectives.45 An embarrassment on this scale sent conspiratorial minds on the extreme and ultra-conservative right into overdrive. The conspiracy theory advanced by Chesterton on the topic of the Suez Crisis is as follows: Britain had been used as a tool by an international Jewish conspiracy to achieve several major steps forward on the road to world domination. First, ‘The Israelis . . . calmly annexed the whole of the Sinai Peninsula’. Second, the ‘pullers of strings’ wanted to ‘let Britain and France go in and do the job and in the process vastly increase the hatred in which they have come to be held by almost the entire Islamic world!’46 Third, the conspirators desired ‘an international police force to be sent into the Middle East to “take care” of the situation’ and hand power to a ‘ruthless politico-financial cabal which for years has systematically engaged in dispossessing us of our overseas Empire and spheres of influence’. Finally, Jewish ‘usurers’ were to then ‘deliver the coup de grace in the form of further loans and “aid” ’.47 The embarrassment that surrounded the Suez Crisis was felt acutely by many, which makes the growth in both activity and size of the League of Empire Loyalists no coincidence. This was especially the case in the wake of the worldwide coverage received for a protest against the ‘scuttle’ from Suez held at the Conservative Party Conference in October 1956.48 For Chesterton, the unilateral condemnation from the twin manifestations of the Money Power, New York and Moscow, coupled with Israeli involvement, cemented the Suez Crisis as an archetypal example of the subversive power of Jewish conspiracies and their designs on the Empire. As LeCras has shown, the events of Suez did result in a small bump in supporters who viewed the events as proof ‘of an anti-Empire conspiracy’.49

Rhodesia and the unilateral declaration of independence Along with the reaction to the Suez Crisis it was the events in Rhodesia that took centre stage in the mind of Chesterton in the 1950s. Following a protracted dispute

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between the British and Rhodesian governments regarding the terms of possible independence, the Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith declared unilateral independence with a view to maintaining white rule. Throughout the dispute Smith had received support from Chesterton, who dismissed ideas of self-government and independence for the black population, believing that it meant ‘as little to their minds as does Quantum Theory to the minds of monkeys’.50 Chesterton greeted the Unilateral Declaration of Independence with glee stating: For the first time since the helter-skelter retreat of Europeans before the onrush of barbarism, backed by alien finance, began, a British community has dared to stand fast, declare unswerving allegiance to the Crown and defy, not only a British Government but the entire finance-regimented world, determined to prize it out of the land which it tamed, civilized and made prosperous.51 However, what is most interesting is the clear conspiratorial edge to this statement. Even here, when commenting on a part of the world with almost no Jews, Chesterton sees the hidden hand of ‘alien finance’ at work. In a later article Chesterton articulated this further: The Devil – for sure no less a potentate must be the Supreme Commander of this global operation – has been busy alerting his political, financial, diplomatic and propaganda forces in every part of the world to coerce the White population of Rhodesia into the acceptance of a policy which would soon replace civilized rule by a regime of barbaric obscenity and terror.52 Chesterton felt that imperial decline all over the world was the result of a conspiracy and as such all events were interlinked. He even felt the decline of Portuguese rule in East Africa was merely a stepping stone designed to isolate and then destroy Rhodesia.53 This obsession with imperial decline and its conspiratorial driver, especially in Rhodesia, which Chesterton felt was a ‘battle destined to change history’, motivated him and the LEL to take action.54 Throughout the 1950s and 1960s they were heavily involved in organising sanction-breaking trips to Rhodesia.55 In November 1965 they stormed the ‘Yankee-style – not to say Nuremberg-style – orgy of self-love and mutual adoration known as the Liberal Party Annual Rally’ to shout down the speaker and condemn the party’s ‘shameful betrayal of White civilisation’,56 and they also stormed Harold Wilson’s platform at a Labour Party Rally.57 Their campaigning was not confined to British shores as they embarked on tours of the colonies, including Rhodesia, in an attempt to whip up support.58

Major General Hilton The conspiracy theories advanced through Candour and in The New Unhappy Lords in regard to Rhodesia and imperial decline more generally echoed the work of

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earlier conspiratorial antisemites such as Nesta Webster. Yet Chesterton’s work was markedly more comprehensive, detailed and articulate, not least because of his long experience as a journalist. His work also inspired and influenced others in the postwar period. One such person was Major General Richard Hilton, a sporadic contributor to Candour in the late 1950s,59 briefly a member of the LEL General Council and later of the BNP and the NF and author of Imperial Obituary: The Mysterious Death of the British Empire. It was published in 1968 by the long-time purveyor of extreme antisemitism, the Britons Publishing Company. While paying glowing tributes to the work of Nesta Webster and lauding the ‘enlightened patriots’60 in the LEL, Hilton’s book is part glorification of imperial successes and part lament at its decline. According to Hilton, Britain’s imperial collapse was brought about by the undermining of British national character.61 This was achieved by a ‘surgical operation on the nation’s political brain’62 carried out by Fabianism and the London School of Economics and made irreversible by a ‘torrent of coloured immigration’.63 The latter, in turn, would ‘eventually destroy the whole character of the British nation’.64 While no mention of Jews is explicitly made, the perpetrators of this plot are the usual suspects, namely Bernard Baruch65 and ‘international finance’ that was based in – and controlled by – the United States.66 In the words of Hilton: ‘These plans necessitated for a start the downfall of the British people and the destruction of their empire’.67 His accompanying description of the conspiracy’s perpetrators is a near carbon-copy to that espoused by Chesterton, though some specifics vary such as Hilton’s greater emphasis upon the alleged mass-psychological degradation of the British people as a whole. He was also far more restrained when openly mentioning the role of the Jews than was Chesterton. However his membership of the LEL, BNP and the NF – and his selection of publisher, The Britons Publishing Society – leave little doubt about who Hilton was referring to when he spoke of ‘international financiers’.

Influence of Chesterton: then and now Despite imperial decline rarely being of primary importance to the British far right, the ideas and theories of Chesterton did have a serious influence on the movement. His obsession with reversing imperial decline was not just popular with some farright activists but right across society. It is for this reason that despite his overt antisemitism and open fascist past and affiliations he drew supporters from a range of sources. The armed forces proved fertile recruitment grounds for the LEL, with those who had actively fought in defence of the British Empire during the First and Second World Wars understandably more receptive to Chesterton’s message. As might be expected, many rank and file soldiers became members of the League in response to the disintegration of the imperial power that they had fought to maintain only a few years earlier. Importantly, it seems that the allure of the League’s simplistic, monocausal explanation  – and the provision of a Jewish scapegoat  – for imperial decline attracted some prominent and decorated ex-servicemen. In addition to Major General Hilton, the LEL’s General Council included decorated

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servicemen from both world wars, including General Sir Hubert Gough, who was famously Commander of the Fifth Army in World War I; Capt Arthur Rogers, a member of the Imperial General Staff; Major General P.J. Mackesy, who was Land Commander for the Norway Campaign in World War II; and Lieutenant General Sir Balfour Hutchinson, who was General Officer Commanding Sudan and Eritrea and Quartermaster General of India during World War II. Yet of all the ex-servicemen who joined the League there is no doubt that Field Marshal Lord Ironside of Archangel was the most significant. Having been Chief of the Imperial General Staff for the first year of World War II, he joined the LEL’s General Council in the middle of 1956. While the degree of these military figures’ involvement in the running of the LEL remains open to question, their very membership no doubt provided the League with significant propaganda material. Alongside the military, another fruitful recruiting ground for the LEL were the ranks of the Conservative Party. In 1955 one Mr  Adamson of the Conservative Party wrote: ‘It is a fact that many sincere Conservatives are members of the League of Empire Loyalists because of their belief in the Empire’.68 By 1956 in the wake of the Suez fiasco, the LEL could legitimately be viewed as a ginger group on the right of a Conservative Party that had alienated many of its more hard-line supporters with its adoption of the consensual politics of Butskellism. If one strips away the often cloaked insinuations of antisemitism and conspiracy, the exoteric message of Empire loyalism was extremely attractive to the traditional Conservative supporter. In response, the Rt Hon. Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith MP was alive to the LEL’s growing influence, writing: ‘They realise that their path to notoriety lies through the Conservative Party whose members naturally react to Empire Loyalty’.69 The LEL’s bellicose attitude, coupled with their persuasive, monocausal hypothesis for imperial decline, wooed many amongst the Tory grass roots. Above all, however, it was the Young Conservatives who became particularly enamoured by the message of the LEL – causing some alarm among the more seasoned party operators at the Central Office: ‘Their Empire theme, outdated though it may be, appeals to the young and ex-officers, the latter being a disgruntled class. The League is at the moment proselytising the Young Conservative movement’.70 The Rt Hon. Dorman-Smith MP, a former member of the English Mistery,71 went as far as to say, ‘They have raped my Young Conservative Branch!’72 However, the LEL’s influence in the party encompassed more than just the youth movement, with some evidence suggesting that it may have had sympathisers higher up in the party. The League’s seeming ability to infiltrate and attend any Conservative Party meeting – including the ticket-only events such as the Party Conference – and the fact that it received important leaked internal information in advance of its public release73 suggests the LEL received covert support from some MPs and prominent Conservative party members.74 It is also beyond question that many members of the National General Council of the LEL remained active and well-known Conservative Party members.75 Perhaps more important than the LEL’s connections with either the army or the Conservative party was the influence enjoyed by A.K. Chesterton and his

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conspiracy theories on the British far right. The League’s most enduring legacy has been the rather dubious honour of being the birthing pool and training ground for the most influential British fascists of the 1970s and 1980s. Four of Britain’s most notorious fascists, as well as scores of rank and file members, have all passed through the League, schooled in Chesterton’s antisemitic conspiratorial curriculum. John Tyndall, later a leader of the National Front, took his first real political footsteps as a member of the League and as a contributor to Candour in 1957.76 In 1971 he declared, ‘Without hesitation, what understanding of political affairs I have I owe much more to A.K. than to any other person’.77 As well as being the first leader of the NF, Chesterton’s ideological influence upon the National Front echoed on for years, not least in Tyndall’s decision to advocate a policy of neo-imperialism.78 This decision led to the formation of NF branches in South Africa and Australia. Tyndall continued to recommend the work of A.K. Chesterton right up to his death in 2005.79 Tyndall jointly chaired the NF until 1974 with Martin Webster, who was also a former LEL member and contributor to Candour.80 For his part, he described the work of Chesterton as ‘very important’, claiming that it had ‘a tremendous impact’.81 In addition, John Bean, founder of the National Labour Party, which later merged with the White Defence League to form the original British National Party in 1960, emerged out of the ranks of the LEL to form a career as a major figure on Britain’s political periphery. Finally, Colin Jordan, who wrote for Candour in the mid 1950s82 and was the LEL’s Midlands organiser, became perhaps Britain’s most notorious Nazi and antisemite. Chesterton’s influence has not waned within the British far right, continuing to resonate amongst contemporary far-right parties, such as the British National Party and its now deposed leader, Nick Griffin.83 The New Unhappy Lords continued to appear on BNP book lists well after Nick Griffin became chairman in 1999, while Chesterton’s less well-publicised sequel, Facing the Abyss, was both publicised and favourably reviewed.84 Additional evidence that contemporary antisemitic conspiracy theories, as elucidated by Chesterton, still influence Britain’s far right is provided by the regular republication of his work. Most recently, the fifth edition of The New Unhappy Lords was released in 2013, containing a new foreword by former BNP MEP, Andrew Brons.85 As well as within the UK, Chesterton’s work has gained an audience and degree of international influence. Graham Macklin demonstrates that ‘Chesterton had a discernable and enduring ideological impact on a number of far-right activists and organizations on both sides of the Atlantic’86 such as Willis Carto’s Liberty Lobby and the Defenders of the American Constitution. Beyond this transatlantic influence, Chesterton’s ideas were exported from Britain to the dominions and commonwealth. In addition to the local groups in Britain, the LEL had an extensive network of active foreign branches. There were eight branches in Kenya alone, accompanied by multiple branches in New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, the Central African Federation (Rhodesia and Nyasaland), India and several others dotted around the world, meaning that while the LEL’s membership remained small in the UK, it may have had more than double its amount of support abroad.87

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Macklin has also shown how Chesterton influenced Hendrik Johan van den Bergh (1914–1997), the head of the South African Bureau of State Security (BOSS). While it remains unclear just how much influence his conspiratorial ideas had, it seems that ‘the book [The New Unhappy Lords] did have an impact upon the intellectual framework through which van den Bergh understood the nature of “subversion” ’.88

Notes 1 John Roy Carlson to Miss Helen Levy, 14 (Month illegible) 1950, ADC, England, Contact and Data File. 2 Colin Jordan, ‘The Circus Front!’ People’s Post, 5:13, January 1949, 1. 3 Jordan, ‘The Circus Front!’ 1. 4 Jordan, ‘The Circus Front!’ 1. 5 Colin Jordan, ‘Look to the Empire’, People’s Post, 5:7, July 1948, 4. 6 Jordan, ‘Look to the Empire’, 5. 7 M.J. McLean, Mosley Exposed: The Union Movement from Within (London: London Caledonian Press, Undated – late 40s), 3. ADC, England Contacts and Data File. 8 Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 315. 9 H.A. Gwynne, The Cause of World Unrest: With an Introduction by the Editor of ‘The Morning Post’ (London: Grant Richards Ltd, 1920), 13. 10 Nesta Webster, World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilisation (London: Constable and Company, 1921), 293. 11 Webster, World Revolution, 326–327. 12 Arnold Spencer Leese, The Destruction of India, Its Cause and Prevention, 3rd ed. (London: Steven Books, 1974 [Originally published London: Imperial Fascist League, 1935]), 6. 13 Leese, The Destruction of India, 7. 14 Arnold Spencer Leese, Out of Step: Events in the Two Lives of an Anti-Jewish Camel Doctor (Guildford: Arnold Spencer Leese, 1951), 50. 15 Lionel Rose, Fascism in Britain: Factual Survey No. 1 (London: McCorquodale & Co., 1948), 7. 16 A.K. Chesterton, British Union Quarterly, April–June 1937, 53–54. 17 Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to the National Front (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 237. 18 David Baker, Ideology of Obsession: A.K. Chesterton and British Fascism (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 130. 19 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, 237. 20 Baker, Ideology of Obsession, 197, 198. 21 Luke LeCras, A.K. Chesterton and the Evolution of Britain’s Extreme Right, 1933–1973 (London: Routledge, 2019). 22 LeCras, A.K. Chesterton and the Evolution of Britain’s Extreme Right. 23 Announced in Candour, 1:27, 30 April 1954; see also ‘Is a New Party Needed’, Candour, 1:21, 19 March 1954. 24 Paul Stocker, ‘ “The Surrender of an Empire”: British Imperialism in Radical Right and Fascist Ideology, 1921–1963’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Teesside University, 2016), 90. 25 ‘Great Progress in Africa: New Loyalist Branches Formed’, Candour, VII:195, 19 July 1957. 26 LeCras, A.K. Chesterton and the Evolution of Britain’s Extreme Right. 27 Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (London: Pimlico, 2003), 334. 28 For details on this see Cas Mudde, The Ideology of the Extreme Right (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 20; Roger Eatwell, ‘Towards a New Model of Generic Fascism’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, 4:2, 1992, 174.

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29 John Bean, Many Shades of Black: Inside Britain’s Far-Right (Burlington: Ostara Publications, 2011), 100. 30 Bean, Many Shades of Black, 99. 31 Bean, Many Shades of Black, 112. 32 A.K. Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords: An Exposure of Power Politics (London: The Candour Publishing Company, 1965), 216. 33 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, 29. 34 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, 22–23. 35 A.K. Chesterton, ‘Our Battlefields Defined’, Candour, 1:13, 23 January 1954. See also Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, 19. 36 ‘Welcome to New Readers’, Candour, 1:17, 19 February 1954. 37 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, 78. 38 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, 33–39. 39 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, 40–47. 40 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, 44. 41 Candour, 13 January 1961, 9, cited in George Thayer, The British Political Fringe: A Profile (London: Anthony Blond, 1965), 63. 42 Candour, 5 September 1958, cited in Baker, Ideology of Obsession, 144. 43 A.K. Chesterton, Stand by the Empire: A Warning to the British Nations (London: Steven Books, 2004), 10–11. 44 Faulconbridge, ‘Sound the Alarm’, Candour, 1:1, 30 October 1953. 45 John Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire (London: Bookmarks Publications, 2006), 178. 46 A.K. Chesterton, ‘The Israeli-British Alliance’, Candour, V:159, 9 November 1956. 47 A.K. Chesterton, ‘That Vote of Confidence’, Candour, V:164, 14 December 1956. 48 ‘Continuing the Battle for British Survival’, Candour, VII:217–218, 20 and 27 December 1957. 49 LeCras, A.K. Chesterton and the Evolution of Britain’s Extreme Right. 50 A.K. Chesterton quoted in, Hugh McNeile and Rob Black, The History of the League of Empire Loyalists and Candour (London: The A.K. Chesterton Trust, 2014), 59. 51 A.K. Chesterton, ‘Right Royal, Heroic’, Rhodesia, Candour, XVII:447, November 1965, 1. 52 A.K. Chesterton, ‘Why the Devil Is at the Helm: A Message for Christmas’, Candour, XVII:448, December 1965, 1. 53 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, 120. 54 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, 130. 55 Baker, Ideology of Obsession, 197. 56 ‘Loyalists Speak out for Rhodesia’, Candour, XVII:447, November 1965, 62. 57 ‘Wilson’s Platform Invaded, Loyalists Speak out for Rhodesians’, Candour, XVII:448, December 1965, 75. 58 McNeile and Black, The History of the League of Empire Loyalists and Candour, 61–62. 59 Candour, VI:182–183, 1967; Candour, X:292, 1959. 60 Major General Richard Hilton, Imperial Obituary: The Mysterious Death of the British Empire (Devon: Britons Publishing Company, 1968), 104. 61 Hilton, Imperial Obituary, 83. 62 Hilton, Imperial Obituary, 81. 63 Hilton, Imperial Obituary, 103. 64 Hilton, Imperial Obituary, 107. 65 Hilton, Imperial Obituary, 106. 66 Hilton, Imperial Obituary, 107. 67 Hilton, Imperial Obituary, 106. 68 Mr  Adamson, to G.D., 11 May  1955, Conservative Party Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford (henceforth CPA), CC03/4/75, Vol. 1803. 69 Rt. Hon. Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, G.B.E. to Sir Stephen Piersenne, T.D., 25 October 1956, CPA, CC03/5/88, Vol. 2419. 70 C.O.O. to Chairman Central Office, 5 July 1957, CPA, CC03/5/88, Vol. 2419.

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71 Dan Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939: Before War and Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 171. 72 Rt. Hon. Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, G.B.E. to Sir Stephen Piersenne, T.D., 25 October 1956, CPA, CC03/5/88, Vol. 2419. 73 John Winning (Central Office Agent for Yorkshire) to Chief Organisation Officer, 30 June 1958, CC03/5/88, Vol. 2419, CPA. 74 Martin Walker, The National Front (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977), 30. 75 C.O.O. to Chairman Central Office, 5 July 1957, CC03/5/88, Vol. 2419, CPA. 76 Candour, VI, 1957. 77 Spearhead 1971, in Baker, Ideology of Obsession, 198. 78 Britain: World Power or Pauper State (Croydon: NF Policy Committee, 1974). 79 Graham Macklin, ‘Transatlantic Connections and Conspiracies: A.K. Chesterton and The New Unhappy Lords’, Journal of Contemporary History, 47:2, 2012, 277. 80 Candour, XV, 1961. 81 Macklin, ‘Transatlantic Connections and Conspiracies’, 276. 82 Candour, IV, 1956. 83 Macklin, ‘Transatlantic Connections and Conspiracies’, 277–278. 84 Macklin, ‘Transatlantic Connections and Conspiracies’, 277. 85 The New Unhappy Lords By A.K. Chesterton (5th Edition), Foreword to the New 5th Edition by Andrew Brons. Accessed 11 June 2014. http://britishdemocraticparty.org/ the-new-unhappy-lords-by-a-k-chesterton-5th-edition/. 86 Macklin, ‘Transatlantic Connections and Conspiracies’, 271. 87 In the wake of Suez and following a tour by Chesterton and Miss Greene in Africa, a flurry of branches opened and Candour reported that membership had grown to between 8,000 and 10,000. See: ‘Great Progress in Africa: New Loyalist Branches Formed’, Candour, VII:195, 19 July 1957. However, while the official history of the LEL as released by the A.K. Chesterton Trust quotes 8,000 and 10,000 figures, it argues this must have included supporters as well as full members, as the South African Branch had just 26 members in 1957, the Transvaal branch just 18 and the Kenya branch just 167. See McNeile and Black, The History of the League of Empire Loyalists and Candour, 63. 88 Graham Macklin, ‘The British Far Right’s South African Connection: A.K. Chesterton, Hendrik van den Bergh, and the South African Intelligence Service’, Intelligence and National Security, 25:6, 2010, 841.

6 WINDRUSH TO NOTTING HILL Race and reactions to non-white immigration

Scientists have reached general agreement in recognizing that mankind is one: that all men belong to the same species, homo sapiens. . . . [B]iological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood . . . in this sense, every man is his brother’s keeper. For every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main, because he is involved in mankind.1

While contested by some biologists as unscientific,2 the UNESCO Statement on race, drafted in Paris in 1950, was a statement of intent for the second half of the 20th century. Created as a reaction to the horrors caused by the Nazis’ biological racism, the Statement emphatically dismissed biological ideas of mental racial difference. Unsurprisingly the British far right reacted with repulsion at its publication with Chesterton’s newspaper Candour publishing an article by Derek Tozer entitled ‘UNESCO Hates the Rich Diversity of Men’. However, the notion of innate and unconquerable racial difference, more accurately white superiority, was not a prejudice confined to the lunatic fringe of the British political spectrum. Thus, UNESCO’s desire to usher in a new era of progressive racial equality was very much an ambition rather than a reflection of the existing attitudes of the wider public of the period. The sizable difference between the egalitarian and progressive ambitions of the Statement’s authors and the prevailing social attitudes in postwar Britain become starkly clear when one looks at the various reactions to the arrival of non-white immigrants in the postwar period. Contrary to popular belief it was not the Empire Windrush but rather the Ormonde that was to begin a process of immigration that would shape modern Britain in the second half of the 20th century.3 The Ormonde’s arrival in Liverpool in late 1947 with 108 migrant workers from the Caribbean was a watershed moment in the country’s history that has fundamentally changed Britain and Britishness. The

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island’s music, food, language, culture and identity were forever altered. Despite its lasting impact, the arrival of immigrants in the postwar period was far from a historical aberration or irregular phenomena. Panikos Panayi has identified Britain’s history of immigration dating back to pre-history pointing to the age of invasions before the 11th century; the wave of continental tradesman, craftsmen and Jews during the high and late middle ages; religious refugees, economic newcomers and slaves between 1500 and 1650 followed by a significant rise in the variety of groups that arrived from the mid 17th century onward.4 Between 1815 and 1945 the rate increased with as many as a million Irish immigrants between 1800 and 1900 and tens of thousands of Germans and Russian and Jewish Poles. The First World War saw 240,000 Belgian refugees arrive in Britain while a further 200,000 Europeans arrived during the Second World War. On top of all of this Panayi estimates an extra 300,000 people moved to Britain between 1815 and 1945 from a range of places including France, Spain, Greece, India and across Africa, bringing the total to between 1.5 and 2 million immigrants.5 On paper then, the arrival of the Ormonde in Liverpool and the Windrush at Tilbury dock should have been little more than the latest advent in a history of immigration. However, while some have wrongly sought to portray their arrival as akin to Cortes landing in Mexico – the vanguard of an invasion – their arrival is rightly seen as ‘a turning-point in British history’.6 In the words of Mike and Trevor Phillips, ‘the Windrush sailed through a gateway in history, on the other side of which was the end of Empire and a wholesale reassessment of what it meant to be British’.7

The arrival The arrival of non-white immigrants in the late 1940s did not mark the first appearance of black people in Britain. Well before World War II small settlements of black people existed, often made up of colonial seamen and usually in ports such as Liverpool and the East End of London, often dating back to World War I.8 In addition, during the Second World War around 130,000 black American troops were stationed in Britain with many accounts of the cordial nature with which they were received. General Eisenhower noted: The small town British girls would go to a movie with a Negro soldier quite as readily as she would go with anyone else, a practice that some of our white troops could not understand. Brawls often resulted, and our white soldiers were further bewildered when they found that the British press took a firm stand on the side of the Negro.9 In fact the arrival of Windrush was not even the beginning of West Indians in Britain, with some 8,000 having been based there during the war.10 These men had served the ‘mother country’ in numerous regiments such as the Trinidad Squadron and Jamaica Squadron of the RAF and the British West Indian Regiment of the Army. However, while the authorities could not compel these men to return home

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when the war ended, they were strongly ‘encouraged’, and many made the voyage back across the Atlantic. Sadly the islands that they returned to had changed. The hurricane season of 1944 had wrought havoc with one major storm landing near Kingston, Jamaica and causing severe damage as it crossed the island to Montego Bay in August of that year. In addition to the storms and all of the socio-economic and employment problems that accompanied them, many who returned to the islands after the war found life in the Caribbean ‘slower, smaller and poorer than it had before, with even fewer opportunities for advancement or self-expression, and governed by the same oppressive structures of imperial control’.11 As such many decided to return to Britain, joined by others who were making their way to the imperial metropolis for the first time; their decision to do so was a major step on the road to modern, multiracial, multicultural Britain. The 1948 Nationality Act gave all imperial subjects the right of free entry into postwar Britain. However, due to the financial hurdle of paying for passage via boat, the immigration from the West Indies that started in 1947 remained a trickle for the first few years. By the mid 1950s this changed with steadily increasing numbers making the voyage. In 1954 24,000 people arrived, followed by 26,000 the year after, meaning that by 1958 some 115,000 people had left the port of Kingston and Port of Spain and arrived in Britain to make a new life.12 The West Indians were not alone in making the journey to the imperial capital. Many thousands came from India and Pakistan, often as a result of the problems caused by partition. Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims and as many as 30,000 Anglo-Indians also made the journey to join their fellow colonial subjects,13 bringing the total to nearly a quarter of a million empire and commonwealth migrants in the decade following the arrival of Windrush.14 There is little doubt that war-ravaged Britain needed the labour, but what welcome did these colonial subjects, many of whom had fought for King and country during the war and saw themselves as British, receive?

Official responses The historiographical debate around the official responses to the arrival of nonwhite immigrants in the immediate postwar period is a lively one. For a long time, the historiography portrayed an image of a liberal elite being progressively forced by an illiberal public to crack down on non-white immigration. However, from the late 1980s onward this idea was increasingly challenged and ostensibly a consensus emerged that portrayed a picture of successive governments in the immediate postwar period being pre-occupied with the notion of race and Britishness while formulating their policy responses.15 More recently however, this consensus has also been challenged and from the 1980s onward the role of racism in formulating policy has been highlighted as key factor. Such a position is convincing considering the tiny numbers of non-white immigrants that arrived in the late 1940s and just how much concern was aroused in government over the issue. In June 1950 a Cabinet Committee, GEN 325, was created to determine ‘whether

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the time has come to restrict the existing right of any British subject to enter the United Kingdom’.16 The Tory government in 1951 seemed less concerned with immigration, perhaps influenced by the comparative lack of press interest in the years following Windrush, but behind the scenes some felt it remained a pressing issue. Winston Churchill reportedly told Ian Gilour in 1954 that ‘immigration is the most important subject facing this country ’ and further articulated his fears to Sir Hugh Foot when he stated, ‘We would have a magpie society: that would never do’.17 Churchill was by no means alone in expressing racist views with some other cabinet voices expressing apprehension over interracial contact.18 Such prejudiced views regarding miscegenation were common among the establishment. For example, Sir Alfred Bossom, chairman of the Royal Society of Arts, raised few eyebrows when he argued that with the progressive increase of non-whites over the whites, and influenced by the unlimited ability to travel . . . intermarriage between people of different racial stock will increasingly become the usual thing. Consequently these mixed social traditions in families will most likely be accompanied by the deterioration in standards of behaviour and morals and a lessening of the appreciation of the finer graces of life.19 This aversion to interracial reproduction would eventually become manifest in government policy. While some were opposed to miscegenation due to its perceived effect on white racial stock, others were more concerned by the possible social problems. One Home Office civil servant stated that ‘sooner or later action must be taken to keep out the undesirable elements of our colonial population’ and with an eye on the possible racial tensions felt their arrival was ‘a formidable problem’. Conversely Clement Attlee refused to take it ‘too seriously’.20 Aware of the delicate nature of the issue, the Home Office, Colonial Office and Ministry of Labour entered a dance of obfuscation and evasion until the Colonial Office was bureaucratically outmanoeuvred and left to deal with the Windrush’s arrival.21 While it is important to avoid characterising the West Indian, Indian and West African immigrants as ‘a block whose sole distinguishing characteristic is the colour of their skins’,22 the fact that these immigrants were not white is clearly of importance. As Robert Winder points out, ‘a country which had recently seen off thousands of German bombers, and was absorbing 120,000 Poles with negligible fuss, was quaking at the prospect of a few hundred migrant workers from the Tropics’.23 Layton-Henry reiterates the point, stating that It is extraordinary that, at a time when Irish immigration was estimated to be 60,000 per year, immigration controls should have been considered in order to prevent the entry of a mere 3,000 people who as colonial and Commonwealth citizens, were British subjects.24

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In fact within a few years of the end of the war Britain absorbed some 345,000 Europeans from across the continent, including 78,500 from Eastern Europe, with a view to plugging the labour shortage.25 While Colin Holmes questions the consensus that the Poles and other European immigrants received ‘negligible fuss’ when moving to Britain,26 it is clear that the government seemed far more concerned with black and Asian immigrants in the same period. The racial dimension of opposition to the arrival of West Indian immigrants becomes starkly clear when viewed in conjunction with the comparable lack of governmental fuss at white European arrivals during the same period. The reaction from both Labour and Conservative governments in the immediate postwar period betrayed a deep concern and frequently an air of hostility among the ruling elite towards non-white immigrants.27 However, some recent contributions to the historiography have questioned the consensual position on official responses being driven by racism. Randall Hansen, for example, calls the consensual position ‘a sloppy and inadequate account’28 and instead posits that such racists as there were did not drive policy towards Commonwealth migrants; that there were moments when politicians and civil servants took a principled stand against racism and won the argument; that throughout the post-war period British policy-makers were, taken as a whole, more liberal than the public to which they owed their office; and that, as a result, the “racialization” thesis is too sweeping and exaggerated to be anything but an impoverished account of the British state’s varied responses to post-war migration.29 Whether one fully agrees with Hansen or not, he certainly makes a case for adopting a more nuanced position when analysing official responses to the arrival of non-white immigrants in the immediate postwar period. However, by the end of the 1950s there is no question that official attitudes had hardened, and as Hansen explains, ‘By January 1961, it was clear that the free entry policy’s days were numbered’.30 What followed was the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act. Gavin Schaffer, while discussing the passing of the Act, in part brought about by the fallout from the Notting Hill Riots, explains how, ‘We can see in this legislation a political mirroring of the views and concerns of Britain’s conservative biologists and eugenicists, who shared the government’s desire to prevent as far as possible further black/white racial mixing in Britain’.31 While one might debate the drivers of official reactions to non-white immigration in the immediate postwar period, it seems that by 1962 the causes were more obvious.

Popular responses The arrival of Empire Windrush itself was greeted with fascination by the press. The newspapers had keenly followed the imminent arrival of the ‘400 Sons of Empire’32 as the Daily Mirror had patronisingly dubbed them, and newsreel cameras

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and front-page headlines greeted the ship. The Evening Standard even rented a plane to intercept the boat before it docked and ran a front-page headline of ‘Welcome Home!’33 However, if the initial press response was quite warm then much of the popular response was downright cold. Obviously, reactions varied extensively depending on location and socio-economic environments, and some early arrivals have mentioned how Communists tried to befriend them as soon as they arrived.34 However, there is certainly evidence to provide a serious challenge to the myth of British tolerance and friendliness. Far more pervasive than overtly physical manifestations of racism were the more day-to-day prejudice and discrimination faced by new non-white immigrants with many struggling to find employment, accommodation and social acceptance in. The first necessity for many new immigrants was employment. Many industries and professions were essentially out of bounds for the new immigrants because of their colour, meaning many found the racist job market hurtful and frustrating: Day after day he tries to get work. Day after day he hears the radio crying out for workers. He can’t understand it, he begins to think: they want workers in the mills and in the mines, they want workers here and there, I see Poles and even Germans getting jobs, what’s wrong with me? Ah! the light shines. My Colour.35 A study by Ruth Glass in 1958–1959 found that 55% of West Indians underwent a job downgrade due to migration with professional and clerical West Indian males having just a one in four chance of finding a similar job in Britain.36 Most found work in unskilled or semi-skilled jobs despite their background as skilled workers or professionals. Employers often claimed to be rejecting black applicants on the grounds of a lack of qualifications or a grasp of the language, however, research in the 1960s showed these excuses were inaccurate and that ‘blatant racial discrimination in employment was taking place on a massive scale’.37 It was not only from the employers that the immigrants faced discrimination and prejudice. The reaction of parts of Britain’s trade union movement to the employment-seeking immigrants is a stain on the history of the British labour movement. A fear of competition for jobs, undercutting of wages and conditions and downright racism meant that parts of the Trade Union movement reacted in a highly un-progressive manner. The Daily Express reported in June of 1948: ‘No more coloured men are to be employed in pits in the north-west under a pact made between the Coal Board and miners’ leaders’.38 While the operation of a colour bar was against the constitution of some unions, the reality on the ground was often very different. One can find many examples such as the Nottingham and Stockwell bus workers who refused to work with West Indians, the Nottingham members of the Electrical Trades Union who were accused by their branch officials of operating a colour bar and some foundrymen who simply refused to work with ‘coloured’ men.39 One senior official of the National Union

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of Railwaymen was quoted in the News Chronicle as saying: ‘If you send any more, the men will demand separate canteens and lavatory facilities’. Jack Jones, thenMidland Regional Secretary of the TGWU, said that further immigrant workers could create ‘problems’.40 In 1954, 100 union leaders met in Coventry to discuss the protection of white workers with a view to depriving black people of promotion prospects and job security.41 Jim Leask, head of the Transport and General Workers Union, proposed that, ‘Negro workers should not be given supervisory jobs over whites’, that ‘they should not be hired if white workers are available’, that ‘there should be an agreement between management and labor before any negroes are employed’ and that ‘negroes should be the first fired in the case of recession’.42 For many new non-white immigrants the employment market was extremely hostile with a combination of either rejection or exploitation from the employers and resentment from their colleagues. Despite the hurdles new immigrants faced, most managed to find work, even if that meant taking a significant job downgrade, meaning the other necessity was finding accommodation. The reaction of many landlords once again questions the accepted notion of innate British tolerance and friendliness and rather portrays a society riddled with pervasive racism and discrimination. When asked about the struggle to find accommodation, Cecil Holness, a West Indian immigrant, said, it’s either two or three of you in a room, in those days, as a black man, it’s very hard to get a room, you wouldn’t get one. They always put on the board, “Black-Niggers not wanted here”, on the board you know, these boards out there, “No Niggers” or “No Colour”, things like that. So it’s very hard to get a room.43 The difficulties faced by Holmes were by no means extraordinary but rather ‘typical and characteristic’44 of the problems new arrivals found when looking for accommodation. This is backed up by a private poll conducted in 1956 by John Darragh, a British journalist, which found only 15 out of 1,000 white people in Birmingham were willing to rent accommodation to ‘coloured’ people.45 Glass did a similar study of rental adverts in the Kensington Post in 1959 and found one in six adverts were ‘anti-coloured’. However, she accepts that this only covers the ‘overt discrimination’, and despite the majority being ‘neutral’ adverts, most estate agents and landlords would refuse to take non-white tenants; in fact only one in six was prepared to consider a black applicant.46 The hostile rental market resulted in groups of immigrants pooling resources in ‘pardner’ groups in the hope of buying properties. Even then, however, their colour proved a problem. Very few estate agents were willing to do business with them, and those that did demanded special terms that often included extra commission, cash bribes and 50% or more cash to be paid for the house to overcome reluctant and racist vendors. They also paid an extortionate premium, which according to the Birmingham Post was as much as £300-£400 more on a house worth £1,000£1,200.47 The result of such prejudice and exploitation was overcrowding in slumlike conditions, a form of ghettoisation in poor areas, often leading to further

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confrontation with the local poor white working-class communities who felt they were creating higher competition for cheap housing and low skilled jobs. On top of this racism in the workplace and exploitation in the accommodation market was a rejection and isolation in the social sphere, including, pubs, dance halls and churches. Many new non-white immigrants, especially the West Indians, were devout Christians and were deeply shocked and hurt by the frosty reception they received from many congregations in Britain, both Anglican and Roman Catholic.48 In addition, while not all pubs and clubs rejected black patrons, many did erect a colour bar, often claiming it was on their customers’ objections. Some of the clubs that did allow non-white customers were forced to close down because of protests. The Paramount Dance Hall on Tottenham Court Road, London, for example, shut down following protests by the brothers of girls who mixed with black men. The proprietor stated, ‘White men mix and accept the coloured races on the same social footing, but they will not share their women with anyone’49 a quote that manages to be racist, misogynist and oxymoronic all in one sentence. Some white women were also against mixing in clubs with one writing to the black magazine Checkers to complain about ‘the number of coloured men who are allowed admittance’. She stated: ‘Personally I wouldn’t dance with a coloured man if he asked me: I consider their behaviour disgusting’.50 The result of such unwelcoming prejudice was the creation of their own clubs and a blossoming of house parties and private dances and functions.51 Sadly, for many of the non-white immigrants who sought to build a new life in the ‘mother country’ in the late 1940s and 1950s, the reception they received was intolerant and heartbreakingly prejudiced. Dilip Hiro summarises the experience of new immigrants thus: The West Indians had arrived in Britain, ebullient and enthusiastic, to share the British dream. But within a decade the dream had turned sour. They found themselves downgraded in jobs, performing menial and unpopular tasks; overcharged in renting and buying houses; and through an unwritten, but pervasive, code of conduct, slowly, but definitely, segregated in “Coloured Colonies”.52 Writing about the pain of racism in the UK, this time following a racist article in the Daily Mirror, the editor of Checkers Magazine despondently summed up how the community felt, ‘hurt, humiliated, disappointed, disillusioned and shocked’.53 Upon closer inspection one is left seriously questioning the tradition of liberty, tolerance and friendliness that is so trumpeted in public discourse when discussing ‘Englishness’. Perhaps the most poetic and articulate deconstruction of the tolerance myth of the British people came via a fictional account of West Indian immigrants in 1950s London. Sam Selvon, a Trinidadian author and an immigrant to Britain himself, penned his classic 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners. It details the lives of West Indian immigrants in 1950s London as they experience the failed promise of the ‘mother country’, the hostility of the locals and the struggles to build new lives, all coupled

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with the heady excitement of being in a city they had read and dreamt about. While Moses, the main protagonist, mentions a modicum of tolerance, ‘It have a kind of communal feeling with the working class and the spades, because when you poor things does level out’,54 the overwhelming reaction is portrayed as hostile and deeply racist. The following passage from the novel, a discussion between Moses and Galahad, a new immigrant arrival, is worth quoting at some length as it successfully shows up the racism and hypocrisy that lies just beneath the myth of English tolerance. ‘These days, spades all over the place, and every ship load is big news, and the English people don’t like the boys coming to England to work and live’. “Why is that?” Galahad ask. “Well, as far as I could figure, they frighten that we get job in front of them, though that does never happen. The other thing is that they just don’t like black people, and don’t ask me why”. “Things as bad over here as in America?” Galahad ask. “That is the point the boys always debating,” Moses say. “Some say yes, some say no. The thing is in America they don’t like you, and they tell you so straight, so that you know how you stand. Over here is the old English diplomacy: “thank you sir,” and “how do you do” and that sort of thing. In America you see a sign telling you to keep off, but over here you don’t see any, but when you go in a hotel or restaurant they will politely tell you to haul – or else give you the cold treatment”.55 Alvin Bennett makes strikingly similar observations in his 1959 novel Because They Know Not. Once again a long established West Indian immigrant explains and humorously deconstructs the British façade of decency and tolerance to a new arrival. Since I come ‘ere I never met a single English person who ‘ad any colour prejudice. Once, I walked the whole length of a street looking for a room, and everyone told me that he or she ‘ad no prejudice against coloured people. It was the neighbour who was stupid. If we could only find the “neighbour” we could solve the entire problem. But to find “im is the trouble! Neighbours are the worst people to live beside in this country”.56 Such accounts are common with hypocrisy often being highlighted in West Indian accounts of their perceptions of their new home. The sad truth is that often the reactions to the birth of non-white immigration, both official and popular, lacked the humanity and civility that are the markers of a tolerant country.

Far-right responses to immigration The far right sit on the margins of mainstream political discourse, ordinarily noticeable by their extremism, yet when it comes to societal reactions to the arrival of non-white immigration it’s important to determine whether far-right and fascist organisations were leading public opinion or following it.

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As has been shown in the previous chapters, British fascism survived the war years and relaunched immediately, albeit with mixed results. However, there is a world of difference between survival and prospering. Even with the effect of the Palestine crisis and the creation of Israel, antisemitism and Holocaust denial was never going to be enough to help the far right break out of the political ghetto in which it found itself. The bombing of the King David Hotel and the Sergeants Affair may have briefly made antisemitism a viable tactic, but coupled with the anti-fascist consensus, the Holocaust loomed over the movement like a haunting spectre making even nominal public support beyond their reach. Yet the arrival of non-white immigrants and the subsequent racist societal backlash offered a glimmer of hope to the postwar far-right. As Thurlow rightly points out, There can be little doubt that fascism would not have survived as a political irritant in Britain after 1945 if those who adopted revisionist forms of the prewar doctrine, or who still saw Hitler as the saviour of European civilisation, had not latched on to the problems created by the influx of new commonwealth immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s.57 Some scholars point to this shift towards anti-black racism as a key difference between ‘classic’ interwar fascism and its postwar manifestation, yet Macklin more convincingly argues that while anti-black racism was by no means a centrepiece of interwar British fascism ‘it was certainly an ambient presence’, thereby further highlighting continuity between the two periods.58 While the issue certainly became a more central tenant of their prejudiced politics, it didn’t happen as quickly as one might have presumed. As the Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury dock it was greeted by the attention of the national press. Newsreel cameras, expectant journalists and even a welcome plane paid for by the Evening Standard all swarmed to see the arrival of 492 passengers from Jamaica. Finding press reports of that day is easy. Unless one happens to be looking through the newspaper of Britain’s largest far-right party of the period, Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement. In what seems an aberration today when the arrival of every new immigrant, black or white, is greeted with howls of disapproval from far-right parties, it seems quite remarkable that Union, the UM newspaper, passed no comment at all. The symbolic arrival of colonial and Commonwealth immigrants, the opposition to which would later become the raison d’être of Britain’s far right, seemingly completely passed the Union Movement and Oswald Mosley by. That is not to say they do not mention immigration at all in the late 1940s. In fact the Union Movement vocally denounce what they saw as ‘Life Blood Flows Out – Sewage Flows In’. However, such prejudice was directed at the arrival of ‘every spiv and shark from Eastern Europe’59 or the old enemy, ‘the jews’,60 not the increasing number of immigrants from the West Indies, India, Pakistan or West Africa. In fact Union doesn’t properly mention the ‘coloured invasion’ until July 1951, a full 25 months after the arrival of Windrush. Even then the article is just four small

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paragraphs about how Lambeth Borough Council had protested the arrival of black people in South London. The article applauds the council and states that it is certainly high time that some public protest should be made about this influx of coloured work-shys. . . . We are glad to see that one London Borough at least sees the need of segregation not only in Africa but in this country as well.61 For the first two and a half to three years after the arrival of Windrush, Union and the Union Movement limited their comments on non-white immigration to the racist behaviour of others such as borough councils and trade unions. At the beginning the Union Movement was by no means leading the outrage over increasing non-white immigration but rather responding to it. One only has to take the briefest look at how the far right reacted to the next ‘wave’ of immigrants, the Ugandan Asians in 1972, to understand how between the late 1940s and the early 1970s immigration shot up the agenda with the realisation that immigration was the issue that could help the far right break out of its post-­ Holocaust isolation. The National Front, then Britain’s leading far-right party, greeted Edward Heath’s compassionate decision to grant asylum to many of those Ugandan Asians forced into exile with a ruthless but astute political campaign. Martin Webster, deputy leader of the NF, instantly saw the possibilities for recruitment offered by the imminent arrival of thousands of non-white immigrants. The party seized upon the rapidly growing fear with remarkable speed holding a demonstration outside Downing Street less than 24 hours after the alarming news from Uganda had begun to percolate through Britain. They also held pickets outside Heathrow and Manchester Airport to ensure the arriving Ugandans were made to feel as unwelcome as possible; a marked difference from the total lack of reaction to the arrival of Windrush by the UM. The result of the NF’s swift opportunism was a rapid swelling of their rank and file membership. The speed of mobilisation and the understanding of the political capital that could be gained through anti-immigrant campaigns was a world apart from the sluggish and indifferent reaction shown by the Union Movement in the late 1940s. However, the NF reacted as it did in 1972 because of the lessons that the far right learnt in the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s: namely that immigrant bashing sells. As such one might temper Richard Thurlow’s declaration that the UM ‘was amongst the first to take up the issues posed by coloured immigration’62 and Skidelsky’s view that for a number of years the Union Movement, with the idiosyncratic exception of Cyril Osborne, the M.P. for Louth, had the field virtually to itself in drawing attention to this phenomenon, and the social tensions inherent in it, which did not really hit the public and the political system till the celebrated Notting Hill race riots of August 1958.63 While Oswald Mosley and the UM would later declare this to be the case, the reality is that they lagged behind wider popular reactions. It is true to say that

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Mosley outlined his commitment to apartheid in his ‘Decision on the Coloured Question’ issued on 27 February 1952, but the UM only truly adopted immigration as a campaign issue after realising its appeal. However, if a little slow out the blocks, the UM were quick learners and soon sought to exploit the existing sense of public anger and racism. One can see the change by looking at the primary UM campaign issues at two elections in this period. At the L.C.C. Elections in 1949 the UM campaign slogan in South Kensington was ‘Above Parties: Against Communism’.64 Conversely, at the 1952 L.C.C. Elections the UM declared that they would fight the elections in Brixton and ‘make the coloured question one of the main planks of its policy for the locality’65 and adopted the now infamous slogan ‘Keep Brixton White’66 (often shortened for graffiti purposes as K.B.W.).67 However, it would be wrong to deduce that Brixton was a major turning point when non-white immigration became the core of UM policy. An unscientific survey of Union shows that black immigration drops back off the agenda after the Brixton election campaign with few mentions in 1952, not a single dedicated article to the issue in the whole of 1953 and doesn’t pick up again until May  1954. Throughout this whole period, the issue receives far less coverage than the ‘Jewish threat’, imperial decline, communism and even a campaign to boycott Japanese goods. Non-white immigration and its effects don’t become a prominent theme in UM publications until 1955, over seven years after the arrival of Windrush. On the one hand this is not particularly surprising as the rate of immigration began relatively slowly and it took some years before they became visible communities. However, on the other hand, as has been shown earlier, racism towards Black immigrants started as soon as they stepped off the boat, including anti-black rioting in Liverpool in 1948; Deptford, London, in 1949; and the attacks on the homes of Indian workers in Birmingham in 1949,68 all of which passed without any comment from Mosley or the Union Movement. There was only a cursory mention of the interracial violence that broke out in Camden in August 1954.69 None of this is to say that the Union Movement was not genuinely racist; it was, stridently so – one only has to look at the numerous article on race, imperialism and apartheid during the same period. It is simply to point out that non-white immigration was not a political priority for UM until the middle of the 1950s, and it only became so because of the popularity of the issue; the UM were responding to popular demand rather than pushing the agenda. From 1955 onward, anti-‘coloured’ rhetoric had ascended to become the primary public Union Movement issue during the second half of the 1950s. A shift exemplified by the decision to move UM operations from the Jewish areas of East and North London to the new immigrant areas in the South and West of the city.70 However, as Macklin rightly states ‘This is not to suggest that visceral antisemitism did not remain at the core of UM politics’.71 This tension between internal and external ideological priorities – private antisemitism at the core and anti-­immigrant racism in public – has remained a core problem ever since, right

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up to the modern British National Party. Trevor Grundy, leader of the UM youth movement, remembers a meeting he attended with his father in 1956: The debate following The Leader’s speech had turned to immigration. Members had said that too many West Indians were coming into Britain and that there’d be trouble. My father rose and said that the problem wasn’t the blacks, it was the Jews. Red-faced and with great passion he’d screamed, “And if you’re looking for the first man in Britain to turn on the gas taps, I’m here!” . . . As we moved from our seats, a few old members slapped my father on the back. One said, “Suppose you shouldn’t have said that, Sid, but I would, too”.72 Trevor’s father was not alone in expressing frustration at the public shift away from antisemitism and towards ‘coloured’ immigration. Alan Neame, a friend of Lady Mosley and contributor of poetry to another Mosley publication The European, expressed his support to Trevor, Your father is quite wonderful. He seems to think that The Leader is copping out, taking on the blacks and not the Jews. I rather agree. My goodness, at least the Jews were a reputable enemy. I can’t say that for most of the poor dears walking around here with banjos and bananas. I feel rather sorry for them, don’t you. I mean coming from their lovely island in the sun to Latimer Road.73 In addition, one witness to an Oswald Mosley speech in North Kensington commented on how The claque [which surrounded him] frequently seemed bored at the concentration on West Indians and disappointed at the absense of full-blooded antisemitism. When Sir Oswald made an incidental reference to the Jasper case, there were eager shouts of “At last we’ve got the Yids on the run!”74 For some of the old guard of the Union Movement, forged as fascists during the antisemitic campaigns of the interwar period, the public change of priority rankled. As with the reactions to the news of Nazi atrocities as discussed in the previous chapter, the reaction of the far right to non-white immigration was, while universally hostile, not universal in nature or form. As one might expect the reaction of A.K. Chesterton and his followers in the League of Empire Loyalists was similarly hostile to those of Mosley and the Union Movement. Chesterton’s newspaper, Candour, started in October 1953, first mentions non-white immigration in January 1954, but as with UM publications the issue does not gain prominence until the end of 1954 and the beginning of 1955. The supposed motivation for immigration to Britain bears striking similarities to those articulated by the modern far right. Chesterton explained how Settlement in Britain has much to offer the Black or coloured man from Africa or the West Indies.  .  .  . News of the Welfare State has apparently

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penetrated to the remotest villages, and the lure of a better standard of living, with no conditions attached, has set many a black foot upon the gangplank.75 Chesterton was a fanatical conspiracy theorist, thus unsurprisingly, the arrival of non-white immigrants in Britain was not the result of economic ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors but rather a dastardly plot to weaken Britain. The conspirators were, as always, the ‘international Jew’: ‘That the Communists may have a hand in organising this dusky traffic to Britain is all too probable’.76 He offers various explanations for why the conspirators might want to encourage black people to move to Britain. One theory was that they wanted to create the equivalent of the ‘men of Marseilles’, a contingent of people ready to cause disorder on the streets when necessary. However, he eventually settled on the far more racially motivated conclusion that the ‘International Jews’ were encouraging black immigration ‘as a long-term means of poisoning our national life’ by breaking down all ‘national and racial pride’, which amounted to a ‘sort of Satanic genocide’.77 While Chesterton and Mosley both led movements of note in the 1950s, there was a much smaller and more extreme group of revolutionary fascists, the ‘SS of British fascism’,78 whose pre-occupation was rabid antisemitism. Their entire worldview was filtered through an extreme form of racialism, thus making their reactions to the arrival of black and Asian immigrants offensively blunt, crude and lased with pseudo-scientific racial theories. Chief among this group was Arnold Leese, who as with reactions to the Holocaust, was far and away the most extreme when reacting to non-white immigration. As such, unsurprisingly, unlike Mosley and the UM, Leese was quick to comment on the arrival of Windrush. In June there were imported into Britain 492 black Jamaicans for labour in this country. We have not yet traced the maniac who arranged this – perhaps it does not matter, as this country is so completely devoid of any race-sense that no-one, so far as we know, has raised a voice against it.79 The overwhelming majority of articles in Leese’s Gothic Ripples were related to his obsession with the Jews. However, anti-black racism against new immigrants became far more prominent during 1951 and 1952, and by May  1953 he had started his infamous column ‘Nigger Notes’. Much of his racism was tied up with resentment against nationalist movements in the empire where he believed Jews were promoting the notion of racial equality with a view to encouraging descent and uprisings in the colonies. In his view ‘The only sensible white man’s policy with Niggers is to STAY ON TOP and stand no nonsense about equality’.80 However by 1955 his focus was increasingly on domestic racial issues as he commented on wider racist stories about black crime and sexual stereotypes in Britain. Similarly to Chesterton, Leese placed the blame for non-white immigration squarely

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with the international Jewish conspirators. In a crudeness absent in Chesterton’s explanations, Leese stated: The policy of importing nigger labour into Britain is sheer madness from the white standpoint; but it is a Jewish policy, and far from mad from the Jewish standpoint. It encourages interbreeding between the races, with permanent results; it increases the Communist army; and it increases also the housing shortage and food security.81 Leese was to die in 1956 and pass the flame of British racial Nazism to his apprentice Colin Jordan.

The 1958 Notting Hill riots The hostility  – governmental, popular and far-right  – towards the arrival of non-white immigrants was overwhelmingly manifest in the form of prejudice and discrimination. However, in 1958, as a balmy summer drew to a close, intolerance turned into violence as some of the worst racial violence Britain has ever seen exploded on the streets of Nottingham first and then Notting Hill in West London. This was not the first example of racial violence experienced by non-white immigrants. There had been anti-black rioting in Liverpool from 31 July to 2 August 1948 and further riots in Deptford, London, in July 1949. The homes of Indian workers near Birmingham were also attacked in August of 1949.82 Interracial violence broke out again in London in August 1954 with disturbances in Camden Town when a white mob attacked black people with bottles, axes and a petrol bomb that burned out the home of a black resident.83 However, these racially motivated attacks were all overshadowed by the major riots of 1958. What became one of the largest examples of racial violence in British history had humble origins. On the evening of 23 August a shout of ‘lay off that woman’84 from a white man to a Jamaican immigrant in the Chase Tavern, a pub in the St Ann’s area of Nottingham, resulted in eight people being hospitalised, two with stab wounds to the back. A scuffle between the two men engulfed the pub as others joined in, soon spilling out of the tavern and onto the streets. What began as a pub brawl evolved into a full on race riot as a crowd of white people that quickly swelled to 1,000 strong set upon West Indians. Simultaneously, just over a hundred miles south, in Notting Hill, London, a group of nine white men, crammed into a car and armed with table legs, chains and pointed iron railings, were out ‘nigger hunting’. The result of their racially motivated bloody rampage around West London that night was five seriously injured West Indians. The following weekend in Nottingham saw a crowd of 4,000 white men and women disappointed by a prepared police force and a West Indian community that had largely gone to ground. With very few West Indians around to target, the crowd turned on itself and internecine fighting broke out.85

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In London, however, despite a week of newspaper coverage predicting where racial tensions might next manifest in displays of violence, Notting Hill’s police failed to put extra officers on the beat. As with the Nottingham riots a week previously, it is generally understood that what became known as the Notting Hill Race Riots were triggered by a single quarrel. The match that lit the tinderbox was struck on 29 August following an argument outside Latimer Road tube station between a ‘mixed race’ couple from Jamaica and Sweden. Majbritt and Raymond Morrison, him a pimp, her later to become a prostitute, drew a crowd of onlookers as they quarrelled. White men soon shouted at Raymond in defence of Majbritt; not dissimilar to the ‘lay off that woman’ that had sparked the violence in Nottingham the previous week. However, when Majbritt sided with her black partner rather than the white crowd, things began to get nasty.86 Events escalated quickly, and by the following evening mobs rampaged around the streets, many armed to the teeth, leaving a path of destruction in their wake. What followed was roughly a week of rioting and violence that shocked Britain.87 The newsreels declared that, Something new and ugly raises its head in Britain. In Notting Hill Gate, only a mile or two from London’s West End – racial violence. . . . Opinions differ about Britain’s racial problems. But the mentality which tries to solve them with coshes and broken railings has no place in the British way of life. This violence is evil and the law and public opinion must stamp it out.88 One can find a litany of opinions on the role of the far right in starting and inflaming the Notting Hill riots. Some such as Clive Bloom believe that ‘the rioting that broke out in Notting Hill, West London, in 1958 was entirely manufactured by white racist groups and not a spontaneous reaction of disgruntled locals’.89 He even goes on to argue that the various far-right groups ‘were coordinated’.90 At the time of the riots some journalists felt similarly, with the Daily Mirror stating: ‘The people to blame are the stupid stooges of Mosley’s Union Movement who have been distributing disgusting anti-coloured leaflets in the London riot area’.91 However, Bloom’s position is a wild exaggeration, and most historians have rightly been far more cautious, though many still place too much emphasis on the role of the far right. Pilkington argues: ‘By providing an organised forum and by urging white people to take action, the fascists helped to translate racial hatred from its passive to its active voice – from pub gossip to street violence’.92 Winder argues something similar, stating: ‘Extremists, not for the first or the last time, were setting the agenda’.93 The tendency of commentators, both academic and journalists, to overegg and exaggerate the role of the far right in the 1958 riots is perhaps understandable. Some no doubt draw comfort from characterising the riots as the work of extremists rather than a rupture born of a racist society as it fits more comfortably within the ‘tolerant country’ narrative. Unsurprisingly  – and rightly  – historians of British fascism and racism have played down the role of the far right in the riots. Dorrill argues that ‘Mosley’s UM did not spark off the riots, nor was it responsible for them’.94 Thurlow states that

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‘the UM had not been responsible for the encouragement of antipathy’.95 Macklin shows how it was ‘largely the work of white “Teddy Boys” rather than fascists’.96 Such a position is not one resulting from hindsight. The Times wrote at the time that ‘there is no evidence that the party [the UM] are the cause of them . . . and the movement could not organise a clash let alone find all the rioters’.97 Despite talk of impending crisis born of non-white immigration, few, if any, on the far right truly anticipated the riots. On the day before the argument outside Latimer Road tube station that was the touch paper for the London riots and one week after the violent rampage by white youths, the Daily Express ran a picture of Oswald Mosley asking ‘The face is familiar – but can you place it? An ageing star of the early cinema? A general enjoying his retirement? An oil tycoon? . . . Wrong every time! It’s Sir Oswald Mosley sunning himself at the Lido beach in Venice’.98 Clearly Mosley was not anticipating an outbreak of major racial violence. This is backed up by Trevor Grundy, a leading youth member of the UM, who was told about the outbreak of rioting by a UM member: ‘You won’t believe what’s happening, Trev! It’s like a dream come true and I don’t think even the Old Man [Mosley] knew anything about it’.99 Thus the question of whether the British far right was behind the start of the riots has, despite the relatively recent work by Bloom, been put to bed. That however, does not mean that the actions of the far right during the riots and in their aftermath do not require further scholarly exploration; in fact much can be garnered from doing so. While the far right had not fostered or even predicted the riots, the Union Movement, along with the rest of the far right, were quick to see their potential. The UM, in the words of the T.U.C., were ‘fanning the flames of racial violence’100 and sought to exploit the explosive situation. Jeffrey Hamm of the UM was aware that any activity in the riot areas from UM members would draw this charge but decided to target the area anyway. In his words, ‘who had a greater right than Union Movement to hold a meeting and make use of that unpopular expression: “We told you so”?’101 The UM’s official line during the riots was tinged with a conspiratorial edge as they argued that ‘the crooks’, ‘the jews’ and the government were complicit in forcing white people out of areas such as Notting Hill.102 Once the violence had begun the UM sprang into action with meetings in public houses, large outdoor gatherings and the widespread distribution of UM literature. A ‘rabble rousing’103 speech by Hamm drew as many as 2,000 people, after which the attentive audience ‘moved off in an excited state’.104 The reaction of the UM to the outbreak of rioting was indeed swift, but the party was reacting to wider public racism rather than leading the agenda on the issue. The explosion of popular racial violence gave great heart to the beleaguered UM activists who had spent many years languishing in the political doldrums. Some, perhaps carried away with events, felt their new target, the black immigrant, could relaunch their fortunes and that it ‘could be bigger than the East End before the war’.105 While not all were as overexcited as this, it had been decided that this was not an opportunity to be missed. On 8 September Hamm, secretary of the Union Movement, announced that Mosley would return to Britain ‘at the

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beginning of next month to lead the movement’s largest campaign since the war’.106 They opened a ‘second headquarters’ in the area on Kensington Park Road and distributed their new newspaper, the North Kensington Leader, to every house in the area.107 So excited were they by the prospect of renewed success off the back of the riots that Oswald Mosley decided to stand in the General Election of 1959 as a candidate in North Kensington. However, in a frenetic campaign, marred by the racist murder of Kelso Cochrane, an Antiguan carpenter ambushed by a white gang, Mosley, for the first time in his political career, lost his deposit and received just 2,821 votes.108 It seems that despite the bubbling racial tension in the area, the postwar anti-fascist consensus held firm meaning Mosley and his men remained beyond the pale. The UM were not alone in Notting Hill as The Times newspaper explained: ‘Two other organisations besides Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement are watering the ground in Notting Hill that has lately looked fruitful for their purposes’.109 The first, formed in 1958 by Colin Jordan, was the White Defence League. It was run out of the former house of Arnold Leese in the Notting Hill area just north of Holland Park. Having formed the Cambridge University Nationalist Club while still an undergraduate, Jordan came to the attention of Leese who began to view him as a possible heir and successor. After a spell being associated with the British People’s Party he joined the League of Empire Loyalists in 1954 only to leave three years later due to his intransigence over what he felt was the LEL’s overly lenient attitude towards Jews. As such in 1956110 Jordan founded the White Defence League and began publishing Black and White News. The virulently racist paper sold between 700 and 800 copies in the Notting Hill area during the summer of troubles111 and “claimed Notting Hill was at the forefront of a new battle, and that white residents should stand firm and reject migration to the area’.112 It declared in bold type, ‘Blacks Invade Britain’ and played on all of the existing racist stereotypes: ‘One of the chief reasons for the blacks pouring into Britain is their desire to mate with the white women of our country’113 and that, ‘The white man took civilisation to Africa. The Black man has brought Indian hemp [marijuana] to Britain’.114 Jordan and the WDL also flooded the riot areas with leaflets that Walker perfectly summarised when he later wrote: ‘The leaflet is a classic, of its pernicious kind, embracing the key themes of racial nationalism . . . sex, spongers on the welfare state, racial interbreeding, Governmental encouragement, stress on British civilization – all the bases are covered in fifty words’.115 In addition to distributing extremist literature the WDL held street meetings in Notting Hill almost every night during the summer of 1958. However, their rampant, frothing racism and open antisemitism severely marginalised their appeal to the general public, meaning the organisation numbered never more than a few score, and their public meetings usually failed to gain any positive response.116 That said, it seems likely that their continual presence in the area stopped the existing tensions from dissipating and kept them bubbling along. Not dissimilar in ideological outlook and also active in Notting Hill that summer was the National Labour Party, founded by John Edward Bean in 1957.117 A former

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member of Mosley’s UM, Bean was also a member of the League of Empire Loyalists, though he was expelled for using their offices to set up his own organisation. The NLP had a newspaper called Combat (‘The voice of Race and Nation’), which was preoccupied with the traditional target of the Judeo-Communist-Masonic plot. However, as with the rest of the far right it was all too willing to direct some fire towards the new ‘Coloured Peril’ by warning: ‘it will turn our nation into a race of mongrels’.118 They also produced and distributed the tract Look Out that touched on the familiar clarion calls of jobs, housing and the taking over of the nation by ‘triumphant aliens’.119 However, as with the WDL, it was miscegenation that most preoccupied the prejudiced minds of the NLP supporters. John Steel of the NLP was quoted in the Kensington News as saying, ‘We will be a nation of half-castes. The result will be that the nation will possess neither the rhythm of the coloured man, nor the scientific genius of the European’.120 The NLP had dedicated its short existence to agitating in areas with visible black populations such as Brixton and Notting Hill. During the riots they held regular meetings in the riot affected areas and even had one forcibly cancelled by the London County Council, ‘because we have been advised by the police that it would be unwise to hold such a meeting at such a place at such a time’.121 At the time Bean claimed that the riots had swelled the number of members of the infant party to 250, but in reality the extremist nature of the NLP meant their fortunes mirrored those of the WDL as they achieved very little traction in the area. Many years later in his autobiography Bean would concede the point, explaining that ‘Audiences were nothing spectacular and I cannot recall us gaining more than two new members’.122 Once again, the NLP was an example of a far-right party attempting (and failing) to jump on the bandwagon of popular discontent rather than fostering it themselves. Almost completely absent from the secondary literature concerned with the role of the far right in the riots are the activities of A.K. Chesterton’s League of Empire Loyalists. Their omission is peculiar considering they had been one of the most vocal anti-immigrant voices on the right – far more visceral than the public rhetoric of the UM. Several leading LEL activists, including Austen Brooks, did indeed visit Notting Hill during the troubles. Their analysis of what they saw placed no blame whatsoever at the feet of the white perpetrators but rather blamed the West Indians. They felt the local white population: had become increasingly exasperated as a result of their experience of living surrounded by an ever-increasing swarm of Black and Brown interlopers, that the behaviour of a great many (though not all) of these interlopers had become increasingly provocative, and that . . . had stretched the patience of the white inhabitants to breaking point.123 At public meetings during the riots the LEL declared that ‘race-mixing’ was the cause of the violence. A report in Candour explained how: ‘Mr. Austen Brooks told a large crowd that the blame for the recent race riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill rested with no one race but with those who had failed to put a stop to the

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growing race-mixture in Britain’.124 However, despite their long-standing vocal opposition to immigration and the flurry of exploitative articles during and after the riots, the LEL seemed tentative when it came to taking action in the riot areas. Instead of Notting Hill, they trumpeted the ills of immigration and race mixing from loudspeaker vans in Brixton and Clapham.125 Their public meetings, called to discuss the riots, were also in South London rather than West. Whether the LEL’s decision to target Brixton and Clapham rather than Notting Hill was designed to avoid being accused of provocation or conversely a plan to spread the riots to other areas with racial tensions is impossible to determine. However, the former seems much more likely as the LEL, with its faint whiff of respectability as a ginger group of the Tories, were also sure to condemn violence as a mechanism for change. At one outdoor meeting Austin Brooks ‘stressed that street rioting was not the answer to the situation’,126 and it was stated in Candour: ‘Bashing heads in street fights is not a satisfactory way of solving what has become a grave social problem’.127 Any violence that did occur was not the fault of the rioters themselves but rather Macmillan, the PM, who was at fault due to his failure to heed the warnings of the LEL.128 Chesterton and the LEL were perhaps the least affected by the riots and had the least impact upon them. They had long discussed the issue of race, race mixing and immigration, and while they revelled in the riots, they had no impact on events. Thus, it is clear that those who have sought to place the blame for the riots at the feet of the numerous far-right organisations operating at the time have done so incorrectly. While it is true that they were ‘at least partially responsible for reinforcing and sustaining the palpable aura of tension’,129 the idea that the riots were ‘entirely manufactured by white racist groups’130 is unsubstantiated conjecture. This, however, is no defence of the far right who certainly sought to exploit the riots to the fullest. While convenient, scapegoating the far right covers up the far more worrying truth that the racial violence that exploded during that balmy summer in 1958 was born of a wider societal racism, not the actions of a lunatic fringe but rather those of an intolerant society. The real history of the riots is an inconvenient truth for those who, convinced by the myth of innate British tolerance, want to portray these islands as an oasis of civility, a world away from the racial barbarism of the American South. Yet for some commenting on events at the time, the riots caused cracks in the veneer of the tolerance myth as loud as thunder: Every decent person in this country is ashamed of the outbreak of race rioting and hooliganism in British streets. It has come like a kick in the pants to all of us. We have lectured other countries but failed to prevent the stinking explosion in our own backyard. The Mirror is probably more guilty than any other British newspaper in assuming that it couldn’t happen here. It has. The events of the past few days have brought our smug satisfaction to an abrupt end.131 However, despite their minimal role in fostering the riots, the events in Nottingham and Notting Hill at the back end of the summer of 1958 were a tipping

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point for the far right’s ideological outlook as expressed to the wider world. The public and media reaction to the riots, usually blaming the West Indians, no doubt provided succour to the beleaguered and marginalised fascists. While antisemitism had still not been shaken from its position as the major concern for the hardcore activists, a realisation had occurred that race and immigration could be their ticket out of the post-Holocaust political ghetto in which they had been languishing since the war. The riots created an increasingly racially aware society, often infused with a sense of normative whiteness. Many on the far right saw the opportunities this provided: ‘For Jordan, the great advantage of the immigration issue was that it made people think in terms of race and thus be more sympathetic to his antiSemitic propaganda’.132 So while the far right had a limited impact on the Notting Hill riots, the Notting Hill riots had a profound effect on the far right.

Race Analysing the far right’s reaction to immigration and the Notting Hill riots illuminates their wider attitudes to race. As with any political party one can find a spectrum of opinions on any one issue, but analysing the reactions unavoidably sheds light on the party’s wider understanding – or lack thereof – of the issue of race. Publicly Mosley usually eschewed the determinism inherent in biologically derived definitions in favour of a primarily cultural conception of race. Thurlow portrays Mosley as a neo-Lamarckian who saw culture rather than race as the driver of evolution and the engine of historical change.133 It is also possible to portray Mosley’s call for apartheid in Africa and repatriation of non-white immigrants from Britain as a Spenglerian belief in the separation of cultures to avoid mutual decay. However, dig a little deeper and the lines between biological and cultural racism begin to blur. Oswald Mosley’s 1948 article ‘Race, The First Reality of European Union’ provides a severe challenge to those who portray his position as non-biological. The article articulates how Mosley’s conception of culture is born of the biological race: This unique stock of men in Europe has in fact produced the culture, the values and the achievement of the west. . . . This achievement has been the result of their character which in turn was the result of their race.134 The article discusses how the Scandinavian nations are ‘near in blood to us’ and argues for a united Europe with those ‘most nearly related to us in blood and race’. The article also undermines Mosley’s regular pronouncements that he had always believed that races were different, not inferior or superior, by stating ‘Horses go further and faster than donkeys, because they are horses and not donkeys’.135 This article’s descent into the realm of biological racism is not unique among the cannon of Mosley’s postwar writings. He sometimes referenced the work of the English geneticist, biologist and eugenicist C.D. Darlington.136 Mosley was especially interested in his work on ‘wide outcrosses’, the practice of introducing unrelated or

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alien genetic material into a breeding line. Betraying an ignorance born of prejudice Mosley wrote of the disastrous results one would get from crossing a horse with a cow or a rose with a cabbage as evidence of the folly of miscegenation137 and how ‘we have a deep sentiment for the preservation of the purity of our race, realising that mixtures do not bring the best results’.138 In reality of course genetic diversity increases health. With all this in mind, surely it is time to question, as Macklin has already begun to do,139 those such as Sykes who argue, ‘his usually cultural conception of race avoided the determinism of biological definitions’140 or Skidelsky, who states: ‘It would be wrong to describe his position as racialist’.141 In addition to calling for a re-evaluation of the biological versus cultural racism debate, the evidence exists that allows one to question the sincerity of the Union Movement’s public anti-immigrant stance in general. During the 1950s UM pronouncements always relentlessly denied racism, with Mosley stating, ‘It is complete nonsense to say we are trying to run a race war in this country. I have never had a quarrel with the coloured people. I have said they are getting a raw deal’.142 Taking such a position at face value has led to some historians, especially those inclined towards revising Mosley’s postwar image such as Skidelsky, to argue that ‘Mosley’s attacks on coloured immigration was more principled than his attack on Jews in the 1930s. For one thing, it was, in the main, an attack on immigration, not immigrants’. In reality the pages of Union spewed forth a veritable cornucopia of racist tropes and generalisations about the ‘Negro invasion’ of ‘dope peddlers’, pimps143 and sexual predators who ‘debauch British girls’.144 The long-time farright activist John Bean explained the gap between the moral public declarations and the reality on the ground. When writing about the Brixton election campaign of 1952 he explained how while the official policy called for an end to immigration coupled with investment in the West Indies so as to reduce unemployment and thus the need to emigrate, ‘most of the speakers turned their meetings into a “hate the Nigger” campaign.145 Hence, one must cast a critical eye over the public front of the Union Movement and dig beneath the veneer of respectability that they attempted to cultivate during the 1950s. What emerges is a picture of a deeply racist party, inclined to visceral outbursts of crude and base prejudice, fronted by a leader inclined towards biological racial theorising. Not dissimilar to the understanding of race offered by Mosley were the pronouncements of Chesterton. The nature of his racism was a mixture of patronising imperial paternalism and visceral biological anti-‘coloured’ racialism. However, the source of Chesterton’s prejudice is easier to trace than Mosley’s. Chesterton wrote that ‘England is the land of my aspiration, and of my race, as well as most of my adult life, but by birth I belong to Africa’.146 It seems beyond doubt that Chesterton’s childhood in colonial South Africa shaped his attitudes on race. His biographer David Baker convincingly states: ‘Basically he had absorbed the patriotic jingoism, racial paternalism and fundamental conservatism of South African Uitlanders’.147 Similarly to Mosley he sometimes publicly declared: ‘The unfortunate thing is that the concept of “superiority” and “inferiority” should be imported into a situation where it need have no place’.148 However, while Chesterton may

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well have believed that his racial views did not surmount to white superiority, even the most sympathetic of observers would see the patent supremacist tendencies of his beliefs. While Chesterton rejected the pseudo-scientific theories of the British racialist Houston Stewart Chamberlin, whose work he described as ‘clotted nonsense’ and the ideas of the Nazi Party’s chief racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg, which he called ‘racial rubbish’, Chesterton did hold a fundamental belief in the notion of racial difference.149 Convinced of the greatness and uniqueness of the British race he strongly criticised interracial breeding, arguing: ‘The one thing we must not allow them to do is to poison the bloodstream of those who are native here because no recovery of Britain’s greatness could be expected from a mulatto nation’.150 The ‘them’ he is referring to is of course the Jews, a point he makes explicitly elsewhere. The Jewish interest in the business of nation-smashing and race mixing is manifold . . . there is a belief that if nations and races can be progressively obliterated, there will die in the Gentile spirit that survival sense which might otherwise resist Jewish world domination.151 Chesterton’s aversion to race mixing was commonplace among those in the fascist movement. Talking of his father, the prominent British fascist and sometime colleague of Chesterton’s, John Beckett, Francis explained how He could also, partly to shock, say things so grossly racist they would make your hair stand on end. He disliked seeing mixed race couples on the streets of London. He explained to me that there were certain forlorn types, in both races, who could not find a partner of their own race, and had to find one of another race.152 Repulsion at race mixing – Chesterton talked of ‘a retching of the stomach’ – was by no means unique to the LEL leader. However, while unquestionably a racist, Chesterton strongly condemned those whose prejudice spilled over into violence, stating ‘strong measures should be taken against those white thugs who have already been responsible for several ugly incidents’ against those ‘they openly and discriminately call “niggers” ’.153 This is partly because Chesterton’s more biologically inclined views on race, while visceral at times, were far outweighed by his inclination to racism of a patronising and paternalist nature. His descriptions of black people are littered with comments about their ‘indolence and irresponsibility’154 and how ‘it is a fact that the natural instinct of the African is to admire and trust the European’.155 His patronising racism can best be seen by reading his 1947 novella Juma the Great. It chronicles the misadventures of one Juma, a Ugandan Headman who left his village to drive a lorry for the British Army during the invasion of Abyssinia. All of Chesterton’s imperial prejudice is neatly portrayed through the main protagonist. He is good at and enjoys menial tasks but has bad self-discipline and is often to be found neglecting duty in

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favour of drink. Throughout the novel Juma takes great pride in keeping his white officer happy, who is often frustrated by the constant need to control the disorderly and ill-disciplined African soldiers. The whole novelette is deeply patronising and laced with lazy racial stereotypes. The scene when Juma is offered the job of driver is a case in point: As the fumes stole into his brain Juma reviewed the amazing proposition put in front of him – the proposition to become a god in control of one of these miraculous chariots . . . and above all to move about the world surmounted by a huge, heroic askari hat. Life could have no more magnificent destiny for any man.156 The notion that no black man could dream for any more than the opportunity to drive a truck is laid on thick. So too is the constant reminder of white superiority, which is regularly commented on by the black characters. In addition to calling them his ‘white superiors’157 Juma states: ‘These white men are indeed wonderful people’,158 and even after being severely reprimanded he comments: ‘They can swear at us in our own language better than we can swear ourselves’.159 No attempt is made to hide the fact that Juma is an allegory for all Africans, as it is explicitly stated, ‘Juma was like most Africans – the more towering their virtues the more staggering their defects and the more inexplicable the occasion on which these defects were manifested’. The reaction to Juma’s many mistakes in the novel are the same as Chesterton’s in real life – namely, ‘what can you expect from an African?’ As with his reaction to immigration, Arnold Leese’s conception of race was far more extreme than Mosley or Chesterton. For Leese ‘Race is the basis of politics. . . . The object of Nationalism obviously must be the preservation of the race or races of the people making up the Nation’160 and that ‘No amount of propaganda can prevent the natural law “All is Race” from asserting itself ’.161 It is worth quoting the following passage at some length as it explains fully his understanding of black immigration, its supposed purpose and the role and motivation of the international Jewish conspirators in encouraging it: Seven hundred niggers from Jamaica arrived on our shores on 6th September . . . the authorities who allow this traffic, or who take no measures to end it, are guilty of worse than murder, for they are introducing an alien and unassimilatable element into Britain quite needlessly, the presence of which can only lead to bloodshed and racial mongrelisation. As Rabbi Emanuel Rabinovitch said to his fellows in 1952: “Mixing the dark with the white means the end of the white man, and our most dangerous enemy will become only a memory.” Well, who is the Jew who has greatest sway over Britain’s so called leaders? What reasonable doubt can there be that he is the man who is bringing this black plague to England?162 Unlike Chesterton, whose repulsion of race mixing was based on gut instinct, Leese’s was firmly rooted in pseudo-scientific racial theories and a belief in the

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fundamental inferiority of non-white races: ‘The Nigger has to be taught who is his master’.163 Leese even understood the Cold War European split through a racial lens. He felt that Europe could broadly be divided into two camps, the long-heads and the short-heads, with each race being biologically different and thus having different needs and wants. The long-heads are made up of Nordics and Mediterraneans, and the short-heads include the races of Dinaric, East Baltic, Alpine, Hither Asiatic and Mongol. While the former generally preferred disciplining themselves, the later have an inferiority complex, thus making them readier to accept communism. As Leese saw it, ‘the present political division of the world is not just a matter of East versus West, but Short-heads versus Long-heads’ and of course above all of this is the Jew, who ‘not only incites short-head against long-head and vice versa, but also governs both sides’.164 As this peculiar Cold War thesis demonstrates, Leese was immersed in the world of racial science, which influenced his interpretation of events, which in turn all sat below his fundamental obsession with antisemitism. His commitment to racial science meant he greeted UNESCO’s 1950 declaration on race with extreme hostility. UNESCO’s statement that ‘racial discrimination has no scientific foundation in biological fact; mental and temperamental characters of all races are essentially similar’165 struck at the very core of the belief systems of Leese and his fellow racialists. Leese blamed the Jews and argued that the UNESCO statement was designed ‘So the average white succumbs to the Jewish teaching that he is no better than his “black brother” ’.166 With Leese dying in 1956 the mantle of Britain’s premier racist fell to his primary disciple, Colin Jordan. Jordan shared the ‘All is Race’ outlook, was also obsessed with racial science and was convinced of the undeniability of racial difference. In a 1958 article titled ‘Are Blacks as Good as Whites?’ he answered: The blacks say “yes”. Those renegade whites who are sponsoring black settlement in our land, and the pollution of our race, say “yes”. The cranks, charlatans, and lying propagandists they have brought forward as “experts” say “yes” too and have persuaded large numbers of well-meaning but gullible British to say “yes” as well. But science and common sense emphatically say “no”.167 Much of Jordan’s analysis of black immigration and the Notting Hill riots relied heavily on the work of the academic and pseudo-academic racial theorists. Black and White News quotes many racial scientists including the English biologist Thomas Huxley. He quotes from his 1863 work Man’s Place in Nature: ‘The difference in weight of brain between the highest and lowest of men or between the white and the negro is far greater, both relatively and absolutely, than between the negro and the highest ape’.168 However, one does not have to look back to 1863 to find scientific justifications for racism and separation. In 1958 the British Eugenics Society produced a pamphlet titled West Indian Immigration. The pamphlet was no doubt music to the ears of the British far right who were provided with an academic

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justification for their racial prejudices and their vocal condemnation of miscegenation. Written by G.C.L. Bertram, the pamphlet stated: It is recognized that the more obvious disadvantages of race mixing are social and psychological but perhaps more amenable to correction; while the less obvious disadvantages, which are genetic, may be real, yet once they have taken place they cannot be undone.169 It continued: ‘that race-mixture in fact more commonly leads to trouble than to happiness’.170 However, while these conclusions are mirrored by those of the extreme racial nationalists, their recommendation for a solution is far removed and markedly more moderate. They conceded that race-mixing’s ‘deliberate stoppage, if desirable in principle, would require a resort to force and a removal of liberty which would not be tolerated’.171 The wider reaction to the publication of the pamphlet seems to have been generally favourable. Writing of its reception in the Eugenics Review several months later, the editor explained how this West Indian Broadsheet does appear in general to have been widely accepted as an honest attempt to provide helpful perspective. The Times gave it a three-quarter column précis almost without comment, and “Peterborough” in the Daily Telegraph seemed to find it broadly commendable.172 This serves to reiterate the point that the far right were not extremist outliers on the issue of race, immigration and miscegenation in the immediate postwar period. While their language was often (though not always) more visceral and base, their interest more obsessive and their recommended solutions often more extreme, the British far right were echoing the views of large proportions of the wider general public. This is no doubt why, as the 50s turned into the 60s, realising that this was the case, the British far right increasingly shifted (at least in terms of public rhetoric) away from the Jewish-Bolshevik plot towards issues of race and immigration.

Notes 1 UNESCO, Four Statements on Race (Paris: United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 1969), 30–35. 2 The declaration of psychological and intellectual similarities went too far for most natural scientists, with even Julian Huxley, who had been at the forefront of attacks on racism, believing the statement was ‘unscientific in making sweeping but unproved assertions as to racial differences’. For more on the UNESCO statement and the debate around its scientific accuracy see: Gavin Schaffer, Racial Science and British Society, 1930–62 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 120–132. 3 Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain (London: Little, Brown, 2004), 267. 4 Panikos Panayi, Immigration, Ethnicity and Racism in Britain, 1815–1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 10.

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5 Panayi, Immigration, Ethnicity and Racism in Britain, 23. 6 Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945–51 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), 440. 7 Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (London: Harper Collins, 1998), 6. 8 Zig Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration, Immigration, ‘Race’ and ‘Race’ Relations in Postwar Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 10. 9 General Eisenhower, cited in Winder, Bloody, 253. 10 Hennessy, Never Again, 439. 11 Phillips and Phillips, Windrush, 45. 12 Numbers from: Winder, Bloody Foreigners, 270. 13 Winder, Bloody Foreigners, 272. 14 Winder, Bloody Foreigners, 265. 15 See Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain, Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (London: Cornell University Press, 1997); See also Schaffer, Racial Science and British Society, 165. 16 Quoted in Colin Holmes, A Tolerant Country? Immigrants, Refugees and Minorities in Britain (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 55. 17 Both Churchill quotes found in Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration, 31. 18 Holmes, A Tolerant Country? 55. 19 From an address by Sir Alfred Bossom to the Royal Society, cited in, ‘Briton Sees Mixed Marriage’, Citizens’ Council, 3:1, October 1957, 4. 20 Quoted in Paul Rich, ‘Black People in Britain: Response and Reaction, 1945–62’, History Today, 36:1 (1986). 21 Richard Cavendish, ‘Arrival of SS Empire Windrush’, History Today, 48:6 (1998). 22 Phillips and Phillips, Windrush, 6. 23 Winder, Bloody Foreigners, 260. 24 Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration, 33. 25 Winder, Bloody Foreigners, 254. 26 Holmes, A Tolerant Country? 46–50. 27 For further evidence of this position see Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration, 28–36. 28 Randall Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-war Britain: The Institutional Origins of a Multicultural Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), v. 29 Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-war Britain, vi. 30 Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-war Britain, 100. 31 Schaffer, Racial Science and British Society, 165. 32 Daily Mirror cited in Peter Hennessy, What the Papers Never Said (London: Politics Association, 1985), 102. 33 ‘Welcome Home!’, Evening Standard, 21 June 1948, 1. 34 Phillips and Phillips, Windrush, 85. 35 R. Donaldson, ‘A Jamaican in London’, Checkers Magazine, 1:1, July 1946, 23. 36 Ruth Glass, assisted by Harold Pollino, Newcomers. The West Indians in London (London: Centre for Urban Studies & George Allen & Unwin, 1960), 31. 37 Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration, 47. 38 Daily Express, 11 June  1948, cited in, ‘Miners and Colour Bar’, Union, 19, 19 June, 1948. 39 All examples sighted in: ‘Nottingham Workers Raise Colour Bar’, Union, 340, 27 November 1954, 3. 40 Quotes from News Chronicle article cited in ‘Unions and Colour’, Union, 432, 20 October 1956, 3. 41 ‘British Union Leaders Move for Racial Ban’, Chicago Tribune, 23 November 1954, 6. 42 ‘British Union Leaders Move for Racial Ban’, White Sentinel, IV:12, December 1954, 8. 43 Interview with Cecil Holness in Phillips and Phillips, Windrush, 89. 44 Phillips and Phillips, Windrush, 92. 45 Poll cited in Anthony Chater, Race Relations in Britain (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1966), 7.

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4 6 All figures in Glass, Newcomers, 60. 47 Birmingham Post, 28 November 1961, Quoted in Dilip Hiro, Black British White British: A History of Race Relations In Britain (London: Grafton Books, 1991), 22. 48 Hiro, Black British White British, 29. 49 Mr C.L. Heiman, Director of Mecca, Ltd, cited in ‘‘Apartheid’ in London’, Union, 125, 15 July 1950. 50 A letter from K.L. to Checkers Magazine: ‘It’s My Opinion’, Checkers Magazine, 1:1, July 1946. 51 Conversely, it is rather amusing to note a letter published in Checkers that stated, ‘As a coloured girl who goes dancing quite a bit. I think it is about time some of the coloured men started dancing with girls of their own race. They seem to prefer white girls however’. See: ‘It’s My Opinion’, Checkers Magazine. 52 Hiro, Black British White British, 25. 53 ‘Editorial’, Checkers Magazine, 1:4, December 1948, 3. 54 Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (London: Penguin Books, 2006) (First published Alan Wingate, 1956), 61. 55 Selvon, The Lonely Londoners, 20–21. 56 Alvin Bennett, Because They Know Not [A Novel] (London: Phoenix Press, 1959), 22. 57 Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to the National Front (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 212. 58 Macklin, Failed Fuhrer’s, note 12. 59 ‘Life Blood Flows Out – Sewage Flows In’, Union, 44, 11 December 1948. 60 Cedric Dover, ‘Commonsense on Immigration’, Union, 88, 29 October 1949, 2. 61 ‘Coloured Invasion’, Union, 174, 7 July 1951, 1. 62 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, 216. 63 Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 3rd edn (London: Papermac, 1990), 506. 64 ‘Kensington Achievement’, Union, 61, 23 April 1949. 65 ‘Exodus From Brixton Owing to “Little Africa” ’, Union, 202, 2 February 1952, 4. 66 ‘Fight For a ‘White’ Brixton’, Union, 208, 15 March  1952, 4 and Union, 212, 19 April 52, 4. 67 See Graham Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley and the Resurrection of British Fascism After 1945 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 67–70. 68 Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration, 37. 69 Union, 326, 21 August 1954. 70 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, 216. 71 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 67. 72 Trevor Grundy, Memoir of a Fascist Childhood (London: Arrow Books, 1999), 96. 73 Grundy, Memoir of a Fascist Childhood, 185. 74 Description by Keith Kyle in David Butler and Richard Rose, The British General Election of 1959 (London: Macmillan, St. Martin’s Press, 1960), 179–180. Found in George Thayer, The British Political Fringe: A  Profile (London: Anthony Blond, 1965), 45. 75 ‘Black Invasion’, Candour, 1:12, 15 January 1954, 4. 76 ‘Anti-Racial Design’, Candour, 2:2, 5 November 1954, 3. 77 ‘Turned Back From Jamaica’, Candour, 3:100, 23 September 1955, 4. 78 D.D.G. Report by G.R. Mitchell, 6 November 1945, NA HO 45/25395. 79 ‘Still They Come’, Gothic Ripples, 42, 23 September 1948, 2. 80 ‘From Far and Near’, Gothic Ripples, 109, 10 January 1954. 81 ‘Niggers in England’, Gothic Ripples, 83, 17 December 1951. 82 Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration, 37. 83 Hiro, Black British White British, 36. 84 Edward Pilkington, Beyond the Mother Country, West Indian and the Notting Hill White Riots (London: I.B. Tauris, 1988), 106. 85 Pilkington, Beyond the Mother Country, 106–124.

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86 Mark Olden, Murder in Notting Hill (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011), 26–27. 87 For further details on the riots in Notting Hill and Nottingham see: Pilkington, Beyond the Mother Country, 106–124. See also: Olden, Murder in Notting Hill, 26–36. 88 Notting Hill, Shameful Episode, Pathe News, 1958. Accessed 31 March 2016. http:// britishpathe.wordpress.com/2013/08/20/the-notting-hill-race-riots-1958/. 89 Clive Bloom, Violent London: 2000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 2003), 378. 90 Bloom, Violent London, 379. 91 ‘It’s a damned outrage – and he is right’, Daily Mirror, 9 September 1948, 2. 92 Pilkington, Beyond the Mother Country, 99. 93 Winder, Bloody Foreigners, 279. Winder somewhat contradicts this statement when on page 281 he states that ‘25 per cent of people felt the blacks were to blame for whatever trouble befell them. Other polls revealed that 80 per cent of the population favoured controls’. It seems more likely that the 80% of people were the ones setting the agenda. 94 Stephen Dorril, Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (London: Viking, 2006), 613. 95 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, 216. 96 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed In Back, 71. 97 ‘Union Movement Not Cause of Racial Clashes’, The Times, 8 September 1948, 6. 98 ‘In Black Trunks- Remember Him?’ Daily Express, 28 August 1958, 11. 99 Grundy, Memoir of a Fascist Childhood, 172. 100 ‘Union Movement Not Cause of Racial Clashes’. 101 Jeffrey Hamm, Action Replay (London: Black House Publishing, 2012), 145. 102 Grundy, Memoir of a Fascist Childhood, 174. 103 Laurence Turner et al, ‘‘Bombs’ in Race Riot’, Daily Mail, 2 September 1958, 1. 104 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed In Back, 71. 105 Grundy, Memoir of a Fascist Childhood, 172. 106 ‘Sir O. Mosley to Lead Campaign in Britain’, The Times, 9 September 1958, 6. 107 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed In Back, 71. 108 Olden, Murder in Notting Hill, 66. 109 ‘ “Keep Britain White” Call in Notting Hill Area’, The Times, 10 September 1958, 5. 110 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, 233. 111 Martin Walker, The National Front (Glasgow: Fontana Paperbacks, 1977), 33. 112 Paul Jackson, Colin Jordan and Britain’s Neo-Nazi Movement: Hitler’s Echo (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 88. 113 ‘Blacks Seek White Women’, Black and White News, 1948, 1. 114 ‘Kings of the Drug Trade’, Black and White News, 1948, 1. 115 Walker, The National Front, 34. 116 Thayer, The British Political Fringe, 16. 117 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, 233. 118 Combat, cited in Pilkington, Beyond the Mother Country, 98. 119 Look Out, cited in Pilkington, Beyond the Mother Country, 117. 120 Kensington News, 26 September 1958, 5. 121 ‘ “Keep Britain White” Call in Notting Hill Area’. 122 John Bean, Many Shades of Black: Inside Britain’s Far Right (Burlington: Ostara Publications, 2011), 122. 123 Austen Brooks, ‘Coloured Threat to British Freedom’, Candour, IX:255, 12 September 1958, 87. 124 ‘League Active in North and South’, Candour, IX:256, 19 September 1958, 96. 125 ‘Stop Coloured Immigration’, Candour, IX:254, 5 September 1958, 80. 126 ‘League Active in North and South’. 127 ‘Behind the News’, Candour, IX:255, 12 September 1958, 82. 128 ‘Behind the News’, Candour. 129 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed In Back, 71.

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130 Bloom, Violent London, 378. 131 ‘Black v White’, Daily Mirror, 3 September 1958, 1. 132 Walker, The National Front, 34. 133 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, 225. 134 Oswald Mosley, ‘Races, The First Reality of European Union’, Union, 14, 15 May 1948. 135 All quotes: Mosley, ‘Races, The First Reality of European Union’, Union. 136 Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 508. 137 Union, 10 April 1948. 138 ‘Mosley Featured in B.B.C. Broadcast’, Union, 341, 4 December 1954, 2. 139 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 67–70. 140 Alan Sykes, The Radical Right in Britain: Social Imperialism to the BNP (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 99. 141 Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 508. 142 South London Press, 27 March 1956, cited in ‘Mosley says – ’, Union, 432, 20 October 1956, 3. 143 ‘The Black Slave Traffic’, Union, 404, 17 March 1956, 3. 144 ‘Big Vice Scandal’, Union, 454, 25 May 1957, 1. 145 Bean, Many Shades of Black, 83. 146 A.K. Chesterton, Juma The Great (London: The A.K. Chesterton Trust in Association with the Historical Review Press, 2012)(First published 1947), Foreword. 147 David Baker, Ideology of Obsession: A.K. Chesterton and British Fascism (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 34. 148 ‘White Verses Black’, Candour, 1:31, 4. 149 Baker, Ideology of Obsession, 144. 150 Candour, 5 September 1958. Cited in Baker, Ideology of Obsession, 144. 151 Candour, 13 January 1961, 9. Cited in Thayer, The British Political Fringe, 63. 152 Email from Francis Beckett to author, 15 August 2013. 153 ‘Coloured Invasion of Britain’, Candour, 2:1, 29 October 1954, 7. 154 ‘Colour Bar’, Candour, 1:10, 1 January 1954, 4. 155 ‘Africans Don’t Want Asians’, Candour, 3:99, 16 September 1955, 5. 156 A.K. Chesterton, Juma The Great (London: The A.K. Chesterton Trust in Association with the Historical Review Press, 2012)(First published 1947), 3. 157 Chesterton, Juma The Great, 42. 158 Chesterton, Juma The Great, 19. 159 Chesterton, Juma The Great, 19. 160 ‘All Is Race’, Gothic Ripples, 18 October 1948, 3. 161 ‘Racial Truth Asserts Itself ’, Gothic Ripples, 13, 21 March 1946, 4. 162 ‘Worse than murder’, Gothic Ripples, 118, 30 September 1954. 163 ‘Non-Masonic Notions on Niggers’, Gothic Ripples, 96, 14 January 1953, 2. 164 ‘All Is Race’, Gothic Ripples. 165 Quoted in ‘Jews and the Nigger Menace’, Gothic Ripples, 95, 12 December 1952, 1. 166 ‘Jews and the Nigger Menace’, Gothic Ripples. 167 Colin Jordan, ‘Are Blacks as Good as Whites?’ Black and White News, 1958, 2. 168 Thomas Huxley, cited in Black and White News, 1958, 4. 169 G.C.L. Bertram, West Indian Immigration (London: The Eugenics Society, 1958), 5. 170 Bertram, West Indian Immigration. 171 Bertram, West Indian Immigration, 22. 172 ‘Notes of the Quarter’, The Eugenics Review, 50:40, January 1959, 217–230.

7 A RELATIONSHIP IN HATE Postwar transatlantic fascist networks

One of the most interesting developments of the world-wide anti-communist, nationalist movement is the recent establishment of cooperation between patriots of all nations. Fighting for the same principle: national freedom and dignity, and fighting the same enemy: the internationalist drive to destroy all national boundaries and races, and to drive all mankind down into the same formless Marxist mass, these patriots of all nations have been placing themselves in close touch with each other.1

For many British and American fascists, the war made it impossible to collaborate across borders and build alliances. However, as the previous quote illuminates, the years that followed saw a blossoming of international fascist collaboration. Despite this, generally it is believed that the immediate postwar period marked a lull in far-right and fascist transatlantic cooperation. Kaplan and Weinberg, for example, while accepting that ‘attempts at continued linkage by a cadre of dedicated individuals did continue’, there ‘appears to have been a cessation in efforts to link together radical right groups active on different sides of the Atlantic’ in the immediate postwar years.2 It is Macklin who has best explored transatlantic networks in this period, showing how, ‘By the late 1950s a burgeoning transatlantic traffic in correspondences, information, and literature existed’.3 Similarly, writing in the edited volume The Post-War Anglo-American Far Right, Clive Webb correctly stated that, ‘Historians have assessed the transnational flow of tactical and philosophical ideas among civil rights activists’. Yet, less studied by scholars is the fact that ‘British racists also looked to the United States for inspiration, attempting to construct their own transatlantic political networks with southern segregationists’.4 His chapter provides an interesting and most welcome attempt to explore these postwar networks, though he mainly focuses on the late 1950s and the better-known links from the 1960s – most famously the Cotswold Agreement that set up the World Union of National Socialists in 1962.

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While it is true that the number of transatlantic links blossomed in the later part of the 1950s, cooperation between far right and fascist groups and individuals existed from the late 1940s onward and was far more extensive than is at present believed. When asked about foreign connections by the undercover Armenian– American anti-fascist Avendis Derounian in 1947, John Beckett of the British People’s Party instructed his assistant to reply that ‘we have no allies or connections in other countries as the British Peoples Party is a purely British movement’.5 However, many on the British far right had a far more international outlook, and with likeminded Holocaust deniers and racists publishing such similar work on both sides of the Atlantic it is no surprise that from the second half of the 1940s onward an extensive network existed between British and American Nazi and fascist activists. Within these circles many relationships predated the war but were severed by the events of the conflict, thereby making the early postwar years a period of reconnection.6

Transatlantic antisemitism and Holocaust denial While the earliest Holocaust denial literature was actually produced by British antiSemites, they were very quickly joined by deniers around the world and soon became part of transnational networks sharing ideas, tactics and ‘evidence’. Some of these transnational networks existed between moderates on the Holocaust denial spectrum – those who generally sought to diminish the uniqueness of the Holocaust by engaging in ‘immoral equivalency’ – while others, such as those involving early American deniers, existed among the more extreme fascist and Nazi groups of the period. The dividing line between moderate and extreme denial is a blurred one and is more of a spectrum, meaning that some individuals and groups appear in both sections. At the most moderate end of the spectrum were Major General Fuller and Liddell Hart, whose work relativising the Holocaust is covered at length in the Holocaust denial chapter. Fuller’s writing on British bombing was lauded in America, notably by the American textile importer and prominent anti-Communist, Alfred Kohlberg, who at considerable expense sent all three volumes of Fuller’s A Military History of the Western World to seven people.7 The two were also in contact,8 and in 1952 Kohlberg came to London and they agreed to meet.9 Fuller also found American supporters among the more extreme elements of the American far right such as Leon de Aryan, publisher of The Broom, who often informed Americans of events in Britain. De Aryan also corresponded with and published articles by a number of British activists.10 Articles about the bombing of Dresden referenced Fuller and with glee explained how, ‘It’s not some “Nazi” who charges Churchill with this monstrosity, but General J.F. Fuller, an Englishman’, a statement built on the erroneous assertion that ‘Nazi’ and ‘Englishman’ are mutually exclusive.11 He had first been mentioned in the pages of The Broom in 1948 when it published an article by the German-born American journalist Karl von Wiegand, first published in The Leader, in which Fuller’s book The Second World War was referenced. Its arguments regarding Churchill and the British bombing of Germany were

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discussed, while Wiegand mentioned how it ‘created a furore’ upon publication.12 Impressed by the work of Fuller, de Aryan proceeded to publish extracts from his 1945 book Armament and History on numerous occasions, usually on the topic of Dresden and British bombing.13 However, it was not just to Fuller that de Aryan turned to on the issue of British war crimes. Another article on British bombing referenced Advance to Barbarism by fellow British author F.J.P. Veale.14 The same week they proceeded to positively review Veale’s ‘splendid little book’15 and quote his ‘scathing attack on the war crimes trials’ in a separate article.16 Liddell Hart also had American admirers. In November 1948, Hart had lunch with the American Francis Parker Yockey. At the meeting the infamous American fascist gave Hart various documents relating to ‘the Dachau case’17 and the trial of SS Colonel Fritz Knochlein who was indicted in 1948 for a massacre of British soldiers. On the strength of the information provided to him by Yockey, Hart helped secure the services of the Labour MP Reginald Paget KC for Knochlein’s defence.18 Yockey also gave Hart a proof copy of Volume II of his as-yet-­unpublished work Imperium, which included extreme Holocaust denial.19 In 1951 Hart also met the prominent American denier Harry Elmer Barnes at which meeting Barnes presented him with a copy of Design For War – A Study of Secret Power Politics 1937–1941 by Frederic R. Sanborn.20 They remained correspondents for many years after their meeting, sending each other their books and articles as well as those by others they deemed of interest.21 Barnes also put Hart in contact with the influential American publisher Devin Garrity who ‘always admired’ the work of Hart.22 Barnes himself toured Europe in 1951 meeting numerous European deniers in addition to Hart including Montgomery Belgion. At the meeting Barnes suggested that Belgion should cross the Atlantic and give a series of lectures stateside.23 Harry Elmer Barnes, a Professor of History at Smith College, was an isolationist and had been an outspoken critic of World War I and the Versailles peace treaty. He was also a champion of Germany and had previously shown his approval of Hitler.24 In 1947 he published The Struggle Against the Historical Blackout. The work sought to absolve Germany of any responsibility for the start of World War II by shifting the blame to the Allies and ironically lamented what he believed was the postwar emergence of the ‘ “Nineteen Eighty-Four” pattern of intellectual life’ in which ‘professional historians gladly falsify history’.25 The ‘blackout’ of which he spoke was a reference to the supposed ‘abject terror and intimidation’ that denier historians felt as a result of the ‘smearbund’.26 His 1962 pamphlet Blasting the Historical Blackout went further by claiming that Germans who had been the victims of postwar population transfers from Poland and Czechoslovakia suffered an ordeal, ‘obviously far more hideous and prolonged than those of the Jews said to have been exterminated in great numbers by the Nazis’.27 By 1966 he had added outright denial to his existing immoral equivalency when in Revisionism: A Key to Peace he claimed that, it is almost alarmingly easy to demonstrate that the atrocities of the Allies in the same period were more numerous as to victims and were carried out for

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the most part by methods more brutal and painful than alleged extermination in gas ovens.28 From his initial steps merely attempting to exonerate Germany for starting the war, he had arrived at the outright denial of Nazi atrocities by the 1960s.29 Barnes’ radicalisation towards outright denial was deeply influenced by the work of Paul Rassinier, one of the first French Holocaust deniers.30 Harry Elmer Barnes praised Rassinier as a ‘distinguished French historian’ and applauded him for exposing the ‘exaggerations of the atrocity stories’.31 While the influence of early French denial literature on American deniers has been explored by historians,32 it is clear that Americans were also looking to Britain for ideas. One influential early British denier was F.J.P. Veale, a well-known member of the Brighton branch of the British Union of Fascists before the war. In 1948 (under the pseudonym A. Jurist) he published Advance to Barbarism, a book that argued that within a short space of time the whole character of warfare had shifted from civilised back to savagery and barbarism and that the area bombing campaigns of World War II and the Nuremberg Trials were symptoms of this shift.33 He also argued that the usefulness of the evidence outlined at the Trial to future historians would be ‘tempered by the thought of the overwhelming temptation to perjury and the unparalleled facilities for forgery which existed’.34 However, this is by no means an out and out work of Holocaust denial. Veale continued to say: None of the considerations mentioned above should be taken to suggest that the accused were, in fact, innocent of all or even a substantial part of the charges brought against them. On the contrary, the probability certainly is that they were guilty – so far as it was possible for them to incur guilt in a struggle with opponents who had declared that in waging war “there were no lengths of violence” to which they would not go.35 What Veale was arguing was not that no atrocities took place but rather that they were the result of the descent of war back to barbarism, and thus both sides, Nazis and Allies, were culpable, so singling out the Germans for their atrocities was an example of victor’s justice. This book is the perfect example of what Lipstadt has called ‘immoral equivalency’.36 The book found a wide audience and was well-received around the world by deniers. Harry Elmer Barnes described the book as: The best general work on the Nuremberg Trials. It not only reveals the illegality, fundamental immorality and hypocrisy of these trials, but also shows how they are bound to make any future world wars (or any important wars) far more brutal and destructive to life and property. A very readable and impressive volume and a major contributor to any rational peace movement.37

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His glowing review of the book was perhaps not surprising as the two had been in contact for some time before its publication, and in 1951 he paid for Veale to receive literature from Lawrence Dennis to help him write a book.38 After its publication he was then responsible for the publication of the American edition.39 With the help of Barnes, Advance to Barbarism found an audience in American right-wing circles. Macklin has described it as ‘immensely popular in American revisionist circles’ with Veale even receiving praise in The New Yorker.40 The prominent American denier Austin App was also a fan of the book, describing it in 1955 as ‘the most brilliant book so far written about the war’.41 He was later to become a correspondent of Veale’s.42 So popular was Veale’s book in American denier circles that by the time of his next book he was described in the adverts as ‘already well known to Americans’,43 and by the end of the 50s the American far-right newspaper Right referred to Advance to Barbarism as a ‘classic work’.44 In 1958 he published a similar work titled War Crimes Discreetly Veiled, which also received a ‘splendid review’ from Harry Elmer Barnes in Modern Age.45 With time Veale became more openly antisemitic, and by the early 1950s he had begun to lament not being more explicitly anti-Jewish in Advance to Barbarism, explaining to Barnes that: When I wrote it in 1948, I carefully avoided any adverse criticism of Mr. Churchill or any mention of the Jewish Question. . . . I quite realize that my book in its original form suffered as a result of my caution. Admiral Domville, for example, told me that he liked it very much but it omitted all mention of the main factor – the Jewish desire for revenge for Nazi persecutions. In short, it was like Hamlet with the character of Hamlet omitted!46 By 1961 he had progressed from his position of immoral equivalency to explicit Holocaust denial as shown by a letter to Oswald Mosley in which he explained that he was convinced that ‘this “Six-Million-Jew-Massacred” is a propaganda myth. No doubt the figure  .  .  . is nearer 250,000’.47 Interestingly Veale and his work remained influential well after his death, and in 1986 the Seventh Conference of the Institute of Historical Review, then the leading Holocaust denial organisation in the world, was dedicated to his life and work.48 His influence at the time and since is further evidence that British Holocaust denial from the immediate postwar period was far more important and influential than the existing historiography suggests. Barnes’ and Veale’s relationship was just one part of a burgeoning transnational network of deniers. Veale’s work was also sold by the Dutch Nazi Paul van Tienen. In turn Barnes helped distribute Tienen’s work The Fate of the Jews in the Second World War – Fiction and Reality. Tienen called for greater cooperation, writing to Veale to say: I am very sorry that there is so little co-operation between revisionists all over the world; I  think we could make much more progress if we had a

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joint organ for instance. Couldn’t you, as our European foreman, take the initiative for founding not an organisation, but a simple co-operation of all revisionists with non-political intentions?49 Paul van Tienen, believing that closer international cooperation was required, published a pamphlet in which all ‘important studies’ of ‘revisionism’ were reviewed ‘from Montgomery Belgion’s “Epitaph on Nuremberg” in 1946 untill [sic] Veale’s “Crimes discreetly veiled” in 1958’.50 Veale’s work also received an impressive reception in Germany with the translation, Vormarsch zur Barbareri, reprinted the following year as Der Barbarei entgegen. It received 44 favourable reviews across the German far-right press.51 Veale also joined other early British deniers by being referenced by Maurice Bardèche in Nuremberg II ou les Faux Monnayeurs.52 Also involved in these networks was the Italian Luigi Villari who was a correspondent of both Barnes and Veale. Barnes edited a book of Villari’s53 while Veale visited him in Rome in the late 1950s.54 Another denier to make the journey to Rome was Liddell Hart, who visited him in 1956.55 This network of like-minded people including Veale, Barnes, van Tienen, Villari and Liddell Hart, to mention a few, shows just how transnational the early Holocaust denial scene was.

American influence in Britain Just as the work of Britons found its way abroad, so too did foreign denial literature and writers find an audience in Britain. Major General Fuller, for example, wrote to Liddell Hart praising the work of Harry Elmer Barnes for being ‘most illuminating’ though he felt, in reference to Barnes’ work on the historical blackout, that ‘the blackout over here is much blacker than in the U.S’.56 Fuller was not alone in admiring the work of Barnes, with Captain Russell Grenfell quoting from him and describing him as a ‘distinguished American historian’ in his 1954 book Unconditional Hatred.57 Barnes returned the favour describing Grenfell’s book as ‘one of the really great books of our time’.58 He was not alone in America in his admiration, with the far-right newspaper The Cross and Flag lauding Unconditional Hatred as ‘a tremendous book’.59 It was also being sold by the American fascist National Renaissance Party in the back of National Renaissance Bulletin.60 However, the transnational nature of early Holocaust denial went beyond mere admiration, and there are examples of prominent American Holocaust deniers actively cooperating with the British far right. The best-known example is Francis Parker Yockey who worked for Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement, employed as part of the European Secretariat.61 The UM also seconded the services of the leading American Holocaust denier Austin App to write for the party’s newspaper. App lacked the moderation and academic credibility of his compatriot Elmer Barnes and had been a member of numerous German–American groups with a history of defending the Nazis.62 As Lipstadt has explained, App’s Holocaust denial was more developed and more explicit much earlier than Barnes’.63 This is backed up by a series of letters written by App dating from the war years and in

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its immediate aftermath. Writing to Mr F. P. Kenkel at the Social Justice Review in 1945, App argued that the crimes of the Nazi regime ‘were no greater than those of dozens of other countries and much less than those of Russia’ and that the Allied policy of unconditional surrender ‘was a greater atrocity than any attributed to Hitler’.64 He regularly used terms such as ‘so-called war criminals’ and ‘the German so-called offenders’.65 Even as early as this his determination to negate German crimes cannot be put down to ignorance of them. The concentration camps had been liberated, and news had reached America, notably via the now famous issue of Life Magazine that showed pictorial evidence from Belsen and told its readers: Last week the jubilance of impending victory was sobered by the grim facts of the atrocities which the Allied troops were uncovering all over Germany. For 12  years since the Nazis seized power, Americans have heard charges of German brutality. Made sceptical by World War I “atrocity propaganda,” many people refused to put much faith in stories about the inhuman Nazi treatment of prisoners. . . . [But] With the armies in Germany were four LIFE photographers. . . . The things [their photos] show are horrible.66 By May 1945, with the help of articles such as this, 93% of Americans believed the atrocity stories to be true, thereby making App’s position a marginal one.67 The ever-increasing body of evidence that emerged in the immediate postwar period did nothing to alter App’s position confirming his inherent bias. This bias is clearly evident in a series of vitriolic articles he wrote for the Cross and the Flag. A core aspect of his writing regarded the treatment of women by the Soviets. The issue was a legitimate one considering the widespread abuse and rape of women by the Red Army during and after the war. However, he used the issue to reduce the uniqueness of the Holocaust and to deflect blame from the Germans for their war crimes and place it on the Allies: ‘While Americans kept screeching for a harsher and harsher peace, their unconditional surrenderism had delivered German women helplessly into mass Eurasian beastiality’.68 In fact, he felt that the treatment of German women by the Soviets far outweighed any atrocities committed by the Nazis and that it happened under the smirking conspiracy of silence of the conniving Anglo-American governments  .  .  . and was thoroughly smokescreened by sadistically ballyhooed war-crimes trials, atrocity films, executions of Germans, who committed no atrocities which the Anglo-Americans did not commit or hold military justifiable, and whose crimes in any case did not include the most beastly of atrocities, the one utterly and ever without any possible military necessity, the mass outraging and the lust-murder of women.69 This argument was fleshed out in his 1950 pamphlet German Women in Russian Hands.

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More generally App was critical of the Nuremberg Trials and the prosecution of German prisoners, which he described as ‘Judaistic revenge barbarism’.70 His 1947 pamphlet History’s Most Terrifying Peace concisely summed up his position with the opening line asking, ‘Who committed the greatest crime of this age? The Italians, Japanese, or Germans? Wrong. It is the Allies’.71 Unsurprisingly, these pro-German sentiments caught the eye of the British far right, and App began to write for Union, the newspaper of Mosley’s Union Movement. He contributed a number of articles on numerous topics including the immorality of forced German disarmament.72 Raven Thomson,73 the Editor of Union, wrote to App in 1950 upon receipt of one of his articles, stating, ‘It is very good to hear once again from such a good friend in the States, and one who really understands what it is that we are striving for on this side, which very few Americans seem to appreciate’.74 App went on to be one of America’s leading Holocaust deniers with his so-called eight incontrovertible assertions and became ever more open in his denial of Nazi crimes with the publication of works such as The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the German people for hard marks with fabricated corpses. He spent the last years of his life active in the Institute of Historical Review.75 His influence on the British far right went well beyond his period writing for Union as he ‘inspired a generation’ of Holocaust deniers such as Arthur Butz who later influenced the British National Front.76 These early transatlantic networks were symbiotic and just as early British denial literature found an audience in American and Europe, early American deniers influenced the scene in Britain. Interestingly, many of the works discussed previously were not just influential at the time but became core texts within the denial movement with their influence often lasting to this day. Dr Michael F. Connors’ influential denial work Dealing in Hate, published in 1966 by the notorious antisemitic Britons publishing house and later reissued in America by the Institute of Historical Review, is still circulated to this day. Among the books on its short recommended reading list are: Grenfell’s Unconditional Hatred, Veale’s Advance to Barbarism and War Crimes Discreetly Veiled, Captain Ramsay’s The Nameless War, Arnold Leese’s The Jewish War of Survival and Harry Elmer Barnes’ Blasting the Historical Blackout.77 Connors’ use of early British denial literature in Dealing in Hate, published by the IHR into the 1990s and still available on its website, is proof of the continuing influence of early British Holocaust deniers.

The Nazi fringe As well as those networks that existed between individuals whose primary focus was Holocaust denial and diminishment, there were also long-standing relationships between the pro-Nazi and extreme antisemitic fringe on both sides of the Atlantic that re-emerged after the war. A good example of this is the relationship between Henry Beamish of The Britons and the American George Deatherage, founder of the American Nationalist Confederation and the Knights of the White Camellia. Explaining the situation in a 1946 letter, Deatherage wrote, ‘It was futile

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of course for any of us to have written during the war years as it would have only subjected all parties to further trouble and annoyance’.78 Another example of Beamish rekindling transatlantic relationships after the war was with another American friend and correspondent, the anti-Jewish pamphleteer and organiser of the Pan-Aryan Conference, Robert Edward Edmondson. After a break of years Beamish and Edmondson restarted their correspondence with Mrs  Edmondson writing to Beamish in 1945 to explain how she and her husband ‘admire you and love you for your devotion to all that is decent’.79 Clearly there was a common bond with Beamish being interned in Rhodesia and Edmondson facing sedition trials in America during the war. Both were passionate and vocal believers in the Jewish world conspiracy with Edmondson assuring Beamish that, ‘like you I have no patience with those who puseyfoot [sic] and refuse to condemn the communizing as Jewish’.80 It is likely for this reason that Edmondson was also in contact with Arnold Leese.81 Beamish himself had long been relatively well-known in American far-right circles, claiming in 1947 that ‘I am well known to most of your “Seditionists” and am in constant touch with a number of American patriots’.82 At one point, perhaps driven by his own sense of self-importance, he tried to convince the American Geo W. Armstrong of Texas to put one million dollars towards a Beamish-run anti-communist group, though he was unsuccessful.83 However, his idea was driven by a desire for international cooperation: ‘there has been far too little coordination amongst the various Patriots of the different nations. This lack of coordination must be put right’84 and that ‘The Jewish Menace must be dealt with INTERNATIONALLY just as are Malaria, Cancer and Leprosy’ he added.85 In his desire for transnational cooperation he was by no means alone. By the second half of the 1940s extensive networks of Anglo-American antisemites had either re-emerged or formed for the first time. The Christian Nationalist Crusade (CNC), for example, felt common cause with British antisemites: ‘The good people of Britain are not in power. They are being ruled by a set of political scoundrels similar to those who have had authority over us for altogether too long in America’.86 Understanding their supposedly common predicament, some looked across the Atlantic, and many found the work of Nesta Webster who became one of the most familiar sights on the book lists issued by American fascists in the period. Her work was recommended by Charles Hudson, James True, Elizabeth Billing, Gerald Winrod and head of the American Nationalist Confederation George Deatherage, who were all tried for attempting to form a Nazi state in the USA, as well as the seditionist William Dudley Pelley, to name just a few.87 In addition, her conspiratorial works were cited in The Cross and Flag, informing their understanding of the Jewish world conspiracy.88 The Cross and Flag also lauded the ‘fearless and devout patriot’89 Captain Ramsay, who, they believed, understood ‘the Jewish question and its relationship to the survival of Christian civilization as few men in the world’.90 The Christian Nationalist Crusade similarly respected him and sold his 1952 autobiography, Nameless War, in America. Upon his death in 1955 they reprinted an obituary, originally written by

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Arnold Leese in Gothic Ripples, which closed with, ‘I have lost a true friend’.91 In addition, they looked to Arnold Leese and his ‘brilliant periodical’ Gothic Ripples, which they described as a ‘pungent little package of fact summary’.92 From it they would often reproduce the column ‘Jews in the News’.93 So impressed were they by Leese’s ‘magnificent journal’, ‘published by a persecuted handful of Christian patriots’, that they took his research on the supposed Jewish control of the A-Bomb and H-Bomb and reproduced it in tract form for sale in America.94 When Leese died he received a glowing obituary in The Cross and Flag remembering him as a fearless patriot who understood the manipulations of international Jewry. . . . He was thorough in his research and fearless in his utterances and published statements. . . . We are paying tribute to this fearless lover of truth who was not afraid to give his life in defence of higher principles as he saw it.95 Even the death of Leese did not break the link with Gothic Ripples, with articles still being syndicated regularly under the editorship of his successor Anthony Gittens.96 Another link between Britain and the CNC was via The Britons, to whose journal, Free Britain, CNC subscribed and encouraged their readers to do likewise.97 They declared it to be written by ‘a handful of fearless men devoted very largely to the principles for which we stand’.98 As well as receiving Free Britain, they clearly took an interest in works published by the Britons Publishing Society describing Hillary Cotter, author of the Britons-published Cardinal Mindszent: details of the Cardinal’s real “crime” as proclaimed by the communists, as ‘a brilliant writer’ and publishing an article of his.99 The relationship was symbiotic with The Britons buying extra copies of The Cross and Flag each month so as to distribute them in the UK.100 Another Briton whose work found its way into CNC’s paper was A.K. Chesterton, whom they called ‘a brilliant British journalist’. They were made aware of Chesterton’s work by Ron Gostick, editor of the journal Canadian Intelligence Service, which shows how transnational networks passed information and articles between each other on both sides of the Atlantic.101 This interest in the events as well as the views and ideas emanating from Britain resulted in the Christian Nationalist Crusade hiring a foreign correspondent in 1955 to provide reports from Britain and the rest of Europe.102 The correspondent, Jack Blake, regularly wrote a column titled ‘European Letter’, which reported news of Jewish activity, communism and the race issue from all over Europe.103 Other extreme American groups such as the National Renaissance Party were also clearly influenced by British antisemites, selling a number of books by notable British far-right activists. Leese’s Jewish War of Survival, a book littered with Holocaust denial, was described as ‘one of the greatest compilations of documentary evidence concerning the role of International Jewry in fomenting World War II’.104 They also sold Leese’s Jewish Ritual Murder.105 In addition they regularly advertised Colin Jordan’s antisemitic book Fraudulent Conversions,106 Wing Commander Leonard Young’s Deadlier Than the H-Bomb, Captain Ramsay’s Nameless War and

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Chesterton’s The Tragedy of Antisemitism.107 As well as selling Chesterton’s book, articles from his journal Candour regarding the Jewish conspiracy were quoted in National Renaissance Bulletin.108 Finally, George Thayer’s excellent 1967 work on the American political fringe explained how NRP leader, Madole, ‘is an acknowledged admirer and supporter of Sir Oswald Mosley’s. . . . Madole maintains close contact with Mosley’s organisation, the Union Movement’.109 This was by no means Mosley’s only American contact. He was also said to correspond with Gerald L.K. Smith and had links with Gerald Shanon in Wisconsin who offered to sell The Alternative. Another ‘notorious contact’ was the New York-based Merwin K. Hart who Mosley met in the summer of 1948.110 The NRP were by no means alone in keeping an eye on Britain and updating their readers regarding events and ideas emanating from across the Atlantic. Leon de Aryan, whose Holocaust denial is discussed earlier, was another source of transnational information. The Broom reported on events within the British far right such as the formation in London of the Legion of Christian Reformers, a group who regarded Hitler as divine. They also reported on Robert Gordon-Canning, a former member of the BUF, buying a bust of Hitler for £2000 at an auction of wares from the former German Embassy in London.111 However, the relationship went well beyond mere interest in events in Britain, and it became a regular occurrence in the immediate postwar period for correspondences with and works by British fascists to appear in the newspaper. For example de Aryan began publishing syndicated articles by G.F. Green from his British-based newspaper The Independent Nationalist.112 Extracts from his bulletin were also published in America by Gerald L.K. Smith and published and sold by We, The Mothers, Chicago’s leading female hate group.113 De Aryan also published extracts from a series of articles by C.H. Douglas from The Social Creditor regarding a conspiracy by the ‘Financier-Socialist Plotters’.114 In 1948 it syndicated a long article written by A.K. Chesterton, though published under his pseudonym Philip Faulconbridge, which, while criticising the Marshall Plan, pointed out clearly that he did not mean to be anti-American.115 The article, originally published in London Tidings, was syndicated across three weeks and concluded on a note unlikely to be popular with American nationalists: ‘It seems to me that Americanism is itself a royal road to Communism, and that the true alternative is the greatest possible revival of the British spirit, and the speediest possible restoration of the British world’.116 Later, in 1956 they again turned to Chesterton for information on the Middle East.117 Another way de Aryan and The Broom brought the work of British antisemites to an American audience was by publishing the letters and articles of N.W. Rogers. The Rogers in question is almost certainly the American Judge who published a number of antisemitic tracts. In 1948 de Aryan published his letter quoting the Duke of Bedford in Montgomery Belgion’s Epitaph on Nuremberg.118 It was also via Rogers that quotes from The Peoples Post, the organ of British BPP, appeared in The Broom.119 Not long after, the Duke of Bedford was also being quoted on the ‘real’ cause of World War II.120 Upon the death of Henry Hamilton Beamish of The Britons, Rogers described him as a ‘great pioneer’, stating that those who met him

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while he was in America in 1927 ‘will undoubtedly treasure the memory’.121 Even after Beamish’s death The Broom continued to receive copies of Free Britain and quote from it regarding ‘the Jewish menace’.122 In addition, de Aryan was in correspondence with A. Gittens of The Britons, with the latter writing to explain the termination of contact between the Britons Society and A.F.X. Baron.123 Meanwhile, Arnold Leese and his journal Gothic Ripples also received a mention. However, in the case of Leese, the published letters of Rogers were by no means his first appearance in the pages of The Broom.124 Back in October  1945, a number of far-right activists were arrested in New York for distributing copies of Arnold Leese’s Jewish Ritual Murder.125 The meeting, organised by the Christian Front, a prewar organisation of primarily Irish and German Catholics grouped around Father Coughlin, was called in October 1945 to consider reforming now that the war was over. Prominent activists present included Daniel Kurts, Christian Front leader for Queens; Kurt Mertig, Chairman of the Citizens’ Protective League; Ernest F. Elmhurst former head of the Pan-Aryan League and the prominent antisemite Homer Gustav Maertz, owner of the Pioneer News Service. Elmhurst, Mertig and Maertz were arrested and held on charges of unlawful assembly, while Maertz was additionally charged with disorderly conduct as a result of distributing Leese’s pamphlet.126 It was ‘alleged that the sale of the pamphlet written by Arnold Leese, an Englishman, entitled “Jewish Ritual Murder” . . . was unlawful in that the pamphlet might stir up racial clashes’.127 As well as selling it, Maertz had read passages from the pamphlet during his speech.128 Maertz and Leese were actually in contact with Leese, hoping he would print The Jewish War of Survival, as ‘No printer here dare touch it’.129 While critical of the arrests, de Aryan rejected Leese’s claims regarding ritual murder, describing them as ‘plain Jew baiting’ and condemning it for ‘stirring up blood-feuds’.130 The following week they published a letter describing the idea of ritual murder as ‘nonsense’.131 For them, while vehemently against kosher butchery, they felt Leese’s belief that human children were ritually butchered went too far. Hearing of their rejection of his position, Leese wrote to The Broom to defend himself, sending with his letter a pamphlet about his book.132 Following receipt of Leese’s letter, de Aryan and the editorial line of The Broom seemed to soften towards him. They syndicated an article from The Individualist, a newspaper published by Charles W. Phillips in Virginia, which talked of Leese’s work in a much more positive tone.133 In the years that followed, quotes by Leese and extracts from Gothic Ripples often found their way onto the pages of The Broom.134 They even decided to review his book The Jewish War of Survival, nearly four years after its publication.135 So enamoured by it – the review claimed it provided evidence to ‘prove that the War was Jewish’ – they printed it time and time again, often on the front page.136 Increasingly, they also published articles actually written by Leese,137 and upon the death of Henry Hamilton Beamish they printed an obituary written by him on the front page, which described the founder of the Britons as ‘a great Aryan gentleman and a straight fighter’.138 By 1951 the transformation from the sceptical position they took regarding his work on ritual murder through to full support for him was

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complete, and they celebrated his court victory over the ‘Jew Libel’ and printed long extracts from Leese’s own account Rex Versus Leese.139

Anglo-Saxon-British-Israel Movement Perhaps the most curious source of Anglo-American cooperation between antisemites came via the Anglo-Saxon-British-Israel Movement, variously called the Anglo-Israelite creed, Celto-Saxon, Destiny of America, Pyramidology or the Kingdom Message.140 This most peculiar of belief systems was a wellspring of transatlantic cooperation that while active in the immediate postwar period actually predated it by some time. The British-Israelite creed dates back as far as the late 18th century and the ideas of Richard Brothers, a British religious zealot who claimed to be descended from King David. They believed that Anglo-Saxons are one of the lost tribes of Israel and that they are God’s chosen people. Using some painfully tortured logic they argue the etymology of the word British was originally berithish, berith being Hebrew for covenant and ish meaning man, thus ‘men of the covenant’. Placing logic on the rack once more they argue that England comes from the Hebrew engle meaning ‘bullock’, which following some etymological acrobatics is said to be the source of John Bull, the symbolic Englishman.141 These ideas were often manifest in antisemitism and a belief in racial superiority as Miss Allen of the Pro-American Vigilantes explained: Jesus was NOT a Jew, but an Israelite. . . . Abraham and Isaac were Hebrew (not Jews): Jacob, son of Isaac, was the first Israelite, because the Lord changed Jacob’s name to Israel: so all sons of Jacob (Israel) were ISRAELITES, as well as Hebrews (but not Jews). . . . ISRAEL IS THE ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLES (including the Nordic).142 Thus, they believed Jacob, Isaac and Jesus were not Jews, but Anglo-Saxons. As she put it: ‘The Descendents of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were Aryan Hebrews, NOT Jews’.143 The Jews were believed to be remnants of Judah, a nation separate from Israel and a bastard mix of Edomites, Hittites and Canaanites who were never part of God’s supposed scheme.144 The aim of these ideas was intended to show the superiority of the Anglo-Saxons as a chosen Aryan people.145 The British Israel World Federation, whose president in the immediate postwar period was R. Llewelyn Williams, was based in London but had branches all over the Anglo-Saxon world.146 As well as branches in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and East Africa, the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America had numerous branches such as the active Chicago branch run by Henry Smith.147 However, the headquarters was based in Haverhill, Massachusetts. The figurehead of the Federation was Howard B. Rand, who edited its magazine Destiny, a publication that regularly published articles by Harold Stough, an American based in the UK who was Secretary of the World Federation in London. It also had contributions from Englishmen such as Kenneth de Courcy, an aristocrat who had a monthly column

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in Destiny called Review of World Affairs.148 The fact that de Courcy was involved in such a strange movement is of distinct interest as at the exact same time he was writing his monthly column for Destiny he was involved in a failed plot hatched with the former King Edward VIII to return to Britain and become regent, thereby pushing aside Princess Elizabeth, now queen, upon the death of her father.149 For those within the British Israel World Federation, Anglo-American cooperation was fundamental to the destiny of mankind. America was said to be modern Manasseh, and England was modern Ephraim. Manasseh would become a ‘Great People’, and Ephraim would become a ‘multitude of Nations’. Thus they believed it was: part of their Divinely appointed role that they should pursue divergent destinies whilst moving along parallel straight lines which only appeared to meet upon the horizon. Out of the fusion of these two great experiments in human freedom something even greater will yet emerge – the New Order of the Ages. Thus it will be seen that the Anglo-Saxon race is destined to be the basis for a World Commonwealth of Nations.150 The Anglo-Israel movement is evidence that transatlantic links, often based on antisemitism, went well beyond moderate and extreme Holocaust deniers and penetrated even the more esoteric and obscure areas of the far right.

Racism and immigration As the issue of non-white immigration became increasingly important to the British far right during the 1950s, a burgeoning set of transatlantic links between individuals and groups concerned with the issue of race and immigration developed concurrently with those connections based on antisemitism and Holocaust denial. Some British racists and fascists found in ‘the defiant resistance of segregationists to civil rights reform a model on which to base their own opposition to non-white immigration’.151 With Nazism and fascism crushed on the continent, the segregationists of the American South provided ‘an alternative source of inspiration to British racists’.152 Many were convinced of the ills of postwar non-white immigration, so America was viewed as a worrying glimpse into the future of a multiracial Britain, with the unrest in the American South being the supposed logical conclusion of a racially mixed society. The 1958 pamphlet titled West Indian Immigration by the British Eugenics Society highlighted how ‘The United states has a much publicized example of the problems, social, emotional, genetic and otherwise, when an important minority happens to have another skin colour’.153 Increasingly, British racists felt common cause with their ideological kin in the American South. For example, a UM sympathiser H. Michael Barrett moved to the USA in 1954 and later became a leading member of the National Socialist White People’s Party, a successor to the American Nazi Party.154 Similarly William Simmons, a former BUF activist, became a leading member of the Mississippi

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White Citizens’ Council.155 The Citizens Council was a loose confederation of state-wide segregation associations that originally emerged in 1954 to resist the implementation of the Supreme Court’s school desegregation ruling.156 In 1955, with William J. Simmons as its editor, the organisation began publishing a newspaper, The Citizens’ Council.157 An Englishman and UM activist, L.J. Irving, regularly wrote to it to express his ‘complete sympathy’ with their cause. Irving was a steward in Mosley’s Union Movement who, angered at the arrival of ‘African negroes straight out the jungle’ and ‘Arabs, Chinamen, Hindus, Fuzzy-Wuzzies, South Sea Islanders, coloured kikes and a host of others in various stages of Stone-Age culture’ found inspiration from and common cause with the southern segregationists in America.158 As he put it in a letter to The Citizens’ Council: ‘Because the very thought of Europeans mixing their blood with the Mongoloid or Negroid races absolutely horrifies me, I  am anxious to keep in touch with your activities’.159 Irving also wrote to thank White Sentinel for a ‘very generous package of literature from your organisation’, which ‘will be most helpful to me and my fellows in the Union Movement (Europe’s leading anti-communist movement) in our struggle to keep the coloured races out of Europe’.160 The White Sentinel, edited by John Hamilton, was the organ of the National Citizens Protective Association, a fiercely racist group led by Forest W. Wolf, in St Louis. In addition to receiving information, resources and ideas from the American far right, some in Britain sought to emulate them. This resulted in a number of tiny copycat Klu Klux Klan groups popping up in the UK during the 1940s and 1950s. This was nothing new, with similarly oddball imitations existing before the war such as the Crusaders and the White Knights of Britain, though these groups focused their attentions against Jews. In the postwar period, as early as 1947, Barbara Gould, Labour MP for Hendon North, received threats from a group claiming to be the British section of the KKK.161 The episode was reported across the Atlantic, with the New York Times stating that the group was called the ‘Klavern Eight’.162 The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that the letter warned Gould that ‘mentioning or antagonizing the K.K.K. was likely to bring her trouble’. As a warning the letter then mentioned a ‘certain Jew’ who ‘had a very nasty experience and received medical attention last week’.163 This was an apparent reference to a recent attack on Lewis Lipstein, a Jewish barber. The 1950s, however, saw the emergence of more exclusively anti-black British Klan imitations. In April 1957 the streets and lampposts around the US Embassy in London were daubed with stickers replete with hooded figures and burning crosses. In the spring of 1958 more propaganda appeared on London streets, and in autumn of 1959 Dr David Pitts, a black physician, civil rights activist and Labour PPC, received death threats reported to be from a British Klan.164 While some contemporary press reports dismissed such incidents as a fraud, it is beyond question that there was a tiny handful of activists in the UK who identified with the Klan and sought to emulate them. One such example was the ‘one man show’ Klanvern operated by Ian G. Shaw, who had links with KKK Grand Wizard H. Sherman Miller, based in Waco, Texas. The American far-right newspaper Right

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also applauded a Mr Joseph Cleveland for establishing a London unit of the Ku Klux Klan, describing his actions as ‘logical self-defence’.165 Similarly tiny imitation Klans continued to spring up in the UK for decades, and while not influential, they do show that some British racists were seeking to learn from and emulate American racism. That said, such activism deeply embarrassed some on the British far right; for example, Shaw had links to the Union Movement and Mosley and the UM issued a disavowal of this form of emulation. While British racists looking to America is a phenomenon touched on in the existing historiography, the fact that American racists were also looking to Britain is much less studied. The American far right had long been interested in the arrival of black immigrants in the UK with groups such as the Citizens’ Council reporting on the supposed problems being caused by West Indian immigration to Britain.166 One group that the Citizens’ Council applauded for its stand against immigration and miscegenation was the Birmingham Nationalist Club, a tiny organisation set up by Colin Jordan just after he left Cambridge University.167 Many segregationists in America saw the rise of racial disturbances in London during the 1950s as vindication of their position and chastised the British for what they saw as their hypocritical self-righteous sermonising about racism in America while ignoring the increasing racial division in Britain.168 The Citizens’ Council newspaper stated, almost with a sense of glee, that, ‘Britons, long critical of America’s handling of its racial problem while having none themselves, are discovering with shock that they are rapidly acquiring a color problem of their own. . . . Signs of segregation are becoming more evident every day’.169 In a similar vein, following some disturbances in London in 1954, White Sentinel wrote that ‘The British, who were so free in their criticism of the South’s handling of the negro problem, are getting a taste of their own medicine’.170 Later in 1957, they stated that: Englishmen were and are fond of criticising segregation in the United States and the Union of South Africa. . . . We trust that until England can handle its little handful of negroes, its Lady Astors and Marxists will refrain from condemning segregation in America.171 Meanwhile, The Cross and Flag, published by CNC leader Gerald L. K. Smith, was in accord regarding British hypocrisy, stating that ‘For years the British tended to take a critical view of how America handled their Negro problem. But that was before Britain’s Negro colonials began immigrating in large numbers to England’.172 They described how the English people were ‘very “green” concerning the problem of the negro’ and condemned British ‘do-gooders, Socialists and sentimentalists’ for criticising America.173 In addition to charging the British with hypocrisy they recommended that, ‘Britain should heed the advice from the States and return these negroes to their homes before they become a problem like they are in America’.174 American groups regularly drew parallels, believing that ‘what is happening in England is similar to the States’175 and warned of a ‘Negro fifth column’.176

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To garner more information and to draw on the expertise of British racists Smith and his paper The Cross and the Flag turned to numerous British people and groups. On the topic of ‘mongrelization’ in the UK, Smith quoted the ‘courageous British patriotic journal’, Free Briton. In 1954 he published a long article taken from it, which sought to explain non-white immigration as the result of a conspiratorial ‘social experiment by UNESCO, which intends to use the British Isles for the stock raising of a mixed breed of people’.177 So important did they deem this article, which spread across three pages, that they reproduced it in tract form for sale in America.178 From then on they often turned to Free Britain for information regarding the ‘black and white issue’.179 Smith was by no means alone in looking to Free Britain for expertise on the race issue. The openly fascist National Renaissance Party, led by Madole,180 also turned to its pages for information about Jamaican immigration and its conspiratorial roots.181 The NRP were also interested in the work of British racist Arnold Leese. In 1952 they headed their newspaper, the National Renaissance Bulletin with a long quote from Race and Politics in which Leese explained why ‘the most striking illustration of the fatal effects of blood mixture is the condition of the United States of America today’.182 Describing him as ‘a noted English authority on racial questions’, they would quote him on issues of ‘racial mongrelisation in America’.183 Leese’s work on race was well appreciated across the Atlantic, with those at the Citizens Protective Association also describing him as the ‘noted British authority on the race question’.184 They printed articles by him, one on the ‘inequality of races’, which argued that the Asiatic race ‘were born to be slaves, not masters, and the correct treatment for them is Force, used justly’.185 Much of the information the American far right received about events in Britain was unsurprisingly received from British far-right activists. This was often the case in Right, a vociferously antisemitic newspaper started in 1955 by Willis Carto, (under his pseudonym E.L. Anderson), who was later to become a prominent American far-right activist and founder of the Liberty Lobby.186 Right was a nonaligned nationalist newspaper that sought to build links between segregationists, far-right conspiracy groups, Klan and neo-Nazi organisations.187 Those at Right had long been angered by the fact that Britain was supposedly ‘in the process of transferring great numbers of her Anglo-Saxon population overseas and replacing it with negroes’.188 Well before the 1958 riots, Right claimed that the American NAACP were ‘now eyeing England as a likely place to ply their trade due to the mysterious influx of Jamaicans to Britain’, and they reported on the formation of a UK branch of the NAACP.189 In the wake of the UK riots, Right mentioned John Bean’s National Labour Party, describing it as ‘dynamic’190 and a ‘two-fisted nationalist group’ and ‘a fearless spokesman for White Britain’ as well as advertising their journal Combat.191 Similarly, the American Citizens Protective Association and their organ White Sentinel were also kept up to date on the situation in Britain by correspondence from British racists. One such letter explained how ‘You may have some difficulty in believing that there is now in London a considerable negro problem’.192 In a refrain now commonplace among anti-immigrant groups, the White Sentinel

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bemoaned the ‘influx of negroes from the West Indies’ and how ‘they will be kept by the British welfare state’.193 The paper took a special interest in how Black American G.I.s based in Britain were said to be causing anti-American feeling.194 In April 1957 the newspaper ran a large feature titled ‘Britain Gets a Taste of Integration’, which used the story of a siege in Notting Hill at which a police officer was stabbed by a black man as the starting point for an exploration of increasing racial tensions in the UK.195 Also quoted as part of the feature was Colin Jordan writing in Free Britain, the organ of the Britons, about how ‘The people of Birmingham . . . are opposed to the coloured invasion’.196 Later, in 1958, they again turned to Colin Jordan, this time filling a whole page with articles taken from his racist newspaper, Black and White News, including ‘Blacks Seek White Women’ and ‘Coloured Men Lazy’. The introduction read, ‘Black and White News is a well edited, hard hitting paper and very similar to The White Sentinel. . . . It tells the truth, the truth that should be printed’.197 Jordan’s Black and White News encapsulates well the transatlantic cooperation of the period. As well as being lauded by American racists, it drew heavily on their work. While Britain had its own tradition of racial science, many on the British far right looked to America for the scientific justifications of their beliefs. Jordan, for example, was clearly looking at the racial science emanating from segregated America where he harvested most of his ideas on racial difference. As a result his publications of the period are littered with references to the work of racial scientists. He quoted the American psychologist Dr Frank C.J. McGurk, Associate Professor at Villanova University, who ‘says that psychological tests given to negros during World War I and since have shown them to be inferior to whites in the ability to learn’.198 He also cited Wesley Critz George, Professor of histology and embryology, then based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who wrote that one of the consequences of miscegenation ‘will be the deterioration and probably destruction of the creative genius of our people’.199 In addition to being inspired by American racial science, Jordan clearly viewed the problems in the American South as a blueprint of what might occur in a multiracial Britain. Using statistics for the State of Mississippi, he declared, ‘Negroes Lead in Illegitimacy’;200 using statistics for the State of Virginia he stated, ‘Negroes Lead in V.D.’;201 using a report of the US Narcotics Commissioner he wrote of ‘Coloured Drug Addicts’,202 and referencing FBI crime rates he claims, ‘More negroes mean more crime’.203 There was clearly a transatlantic transfer of racist ideas and in the absence of British evidence; Jordan highlighted American research that he felt would act as a warning to his British readers. One American racist organisation that actively cooperated with UK groups in the 1950s was the Defenders of the American Constitution (DAC). For a start their newspaper Task Force had a London correspondent, the Russian émigré and monarchist George Knupffer.204 However, in November  1954, Col. Eugene Cowles Pomeroy, Vice President of the DAC, visited England and France. Upon his arrival in the UK he was greeted by a telegram of greetings from the leading British farright activist A.K. Chesterton and a cordial message from Mrs Mary Collingridge.

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The latter, along with her daughter, Lady Wheeler, held a reception for Pomeroy at which he could meet members of the League of Empire Loyalists. As he saw it, ‘This organisation [The LEL] and our Defenders of the American Constitution have in common the driving force of the same ideology’.205 He was delighted to meet people ‘who are foremost in the battle against the same enemies within the British Empire that the Defenders are fighting in America’.206 It is for this reason that Pomeroy found his 1954 UK visit to be so encouraging due to discovering ‘at first hand there is a gallant and courageous legion of Anglo-Saxons waging war against the same enemies as we, and who regard the Defenders and Task Force as worthy co-fighters’.207 Both organisations were passionate believers in the existence of a Jewish world conspiracy towards one world government and thus were natural allies, with Candour and Task Force correctly being described by Macklin as ‘ideological mirror images’.208 Pomeroy was clearly impressed by Chesterton personally, with the front-page report of his trip to London describing him as ‘talented and courageous’,209 and it seems the admiration was mutual. Pomeroy wrote of it being ‘gratifying to find the interest in and approval of the Defenders’ and how ‘they [the LEL] had been so favourably impressed with the Defenders, and so heartily approved of our Task Force’.210 This is confirmed in the pages of Candour where Chesterton described the DAC as ‘a staunch supporter of the cause which the real people of America have in common with the real people of the British Empire’.211 This mutual admiration and common cause resulted in both journals syndicating articles by the other.212 Deeper cooperation was to follow when in 1958 the DAC and the LEL jointly launched a support campaign for the imprisoned antisemitic poet Ezra Pound.213 The DAC’s strong stance on Pound resulted in letters of admiration and support, with Michael Harald from London writing to ‘record my appreciation of your action regarding Ezra Pound’s right to freedom’.214 It is highly likely that this Michael Harald is the same as that who wrote regularly for Action, the organ of Mosley’s UM, in the late 1950s.215 Another link between the DAC and Britain came via P.J. Huxley-Blythe, who had been involved in various British far-right organisations grouped around Mosley before the formation of the UM. However, he was later to split away and became an associate of the UK-based American Francis Parker Yockey, founder of the European Liberation Front (ELF). Huxley-Blythe subsequently became editor of the ELF organ Frontfighter. In 1954 he was part of the group that established the Nationalist Information Bureau (Natinform), an Anglo-German organisation. He later went on to help organise the far-right, panAryan Northern League with Roger Pearson.216 P.A. del Valle reviewed a copy of Huxley-Blythe’s book Betrayal, for Task Force, in which he argued that a true anticommunist policy needed to be adopted by the West if World Communism was to be avoided. Del Valle was clearly impressed, describing it as an ‘excellent work’, a ‘courageous work’ and a ‘tremendous contribution’.217 So impressed were del Valle and Pomeroy by the work of Huxley-Blythe that in 1956 they took the unusual step of combining their August and September editions so as to ‘present whole one of the most important articles it has ever been our privilege to publish’.218 Spread

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over six pages, Huxley-Blythe’s article claimed that the C.I.A. was treasonably inefficient and a risk to American security as it was actually funding known Communist groups while ignoring real anti-Communist groups.219 Huxley-Blythe is a further example of how the DAC not only had firm links with a range of far-right activists and organisations in Britain but also that it was looking across the Atlantic for ideas even concerning the state of their own country. Huxley-Blythe was also held in high esteem by those behind Right. First mentioning his work Betrayal, published by Friends of Nationalist Russia in 1956,220 they then began to quote from his anti-communist report World Survey on a regular basis on issues ranging from the supposedly pro-communist actions of Dwight Eisenhower221 to his views on Suez.222 However, it was when they read his protracted article about the C.I.A., ‘Insecure Security’, published in the American newspaper Task Force, that they really seemed to take note of him.223 By 1958 his reputation on the other side of the Atlantic had spread, and in the words of Right, he was ‘no stranger to informed American patriots’.224 He contributed a guest article to the paper, which demanded that Western governments take the offensive against the Soviet Union, claiming that his contacts in the anti-communist resistance awaited support.225 In 1958, ‘Right’ informed it readers of the merger of Huxley-Blythe’s World Survey and a paper called The Northlander, issued by the Northern League.226 The merger saw two of the groups most lauded by Right join forces. Discussed at length in the next chapter, the Northern League  – so venerated by Right – was in some ways the culmination of the burgeoning AngloAmerican and transnational links that had been steadily increasing in the immediate postwar period.

Global white unity An interesting area for further exploration is to expand beyond Anglo-­American links and to show how this was just one part of an increasingly transnational approach being adopted by racial nationalists in the postwar period. The basis of this extensive cooperation between racists on both sides of the Atlantic centred on an increasing belief that their race transcended the nation state. They found common cause based on white or pan-Aryan unity, thus the situation in America and the arrival of non-white immigrants in Britain were for them two fronts in the same global war. However, this war went beyond just Britain and America. As one UM activist put it in a letter to Citizens’ Council, ‘This racial matter is becoming a world-wide problem. . . . One would think, then that as people in the South have lived in contact with the negroes for centuries, their views would be sought’.227 Thus, their belief in a global racial struggle meant many also found common cause with the white communities in Africa. Chesterton for one drew parallels between the events in America and the struggle in parts of White Africa, arguing that ‘the emotions of Arkansas and the other Southern States are identical with those of the Union of South Africa, the Rhodesians, Kenya and other countries where White and Black live side by side’.228

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The NRP in America was in agreement, stating in their Bulletin that, whether it was the ‘illiterate background of the Puerto Ricans in America, the Jamaicans in England and the jungle savages of South Africa’, they all were believed to ‘breed slum conditions, crimes and violence, dope-peddling and a tremendous increase in juvenile crime in all major cities where these savage immigrants settle’.229 As a result of such views many on the far right, even in America, defended imperialism, a system predicated on white rule. As Thomas Noer has shown, segregationists felt ‘African independence was a clear premonition of the calamity that would follow racial equality at home’.230 For example, the White Sentinel argued that anti-colonial commentators ‘forget that chaos, bloodshed, slavery, cannibalism, ignorance, poverty, famine and disease existed long before the White man arrived. The natives were better off under white rule’.231 Thus, Segregationists in America sought to use the problems in newly independent African nations as a defence of continuing white rule in America. The 1950s saw the rise of anti-colonialism in Africa, the arrival of non-white immigrants in Britain and the blossoming of the civil rights movement in America. For racists and segregationists these epiphenomena were no coincidence but rather the result of an international conspiracy.232 For some, such as A.K. Chesterton, the source of the conspiracy was secret Jewish power. Again his views were shared by the NRP, who believed the same powers were at work behind the ‘racial problems’ on both sides of the Atlantic. The same Jews who were said to be utilising ‘the mass immigration of Negroes and Puerto Ricans’ in American industrial cities were also behind the ‘wave of negroid Jamaican labor which is pouring into Great Britain’. For them it was a global struggle seeing the secret hand of Jewish power at play wherever white and black people came into conflict, which they believed was proven by the Jews being ‘foremost in the struggle against the Apartheid (segregation) policy of the South African government’.233 For those racists also obsessed with antisemitism, their fight for their race saw the two enemies as inseparable. The globalisation of their racial struggle mirrored aspects of the civil rights and Black Nationalist movements who also perceived their struggle as part of a global conflict.234 Both white supremacists and African American civil rights leaders were looking at decolonisation to draw ideas and inspiration from the opposing sides in the struggle. White segregationists in America borrowed the global emphasis from the civil rights movement and emulated their conceptualisation of the struggle as a global battle.235 Just as civil rights campaigners called for unity against white supremacy, segregationists and the racial nationalists, in both America and Britain, began to call for global white unity. This may, in part, explain why Anglo-American links between racist activists steadily increased throughout the late 1940s and 1950s and then flourished in the 1960s during the height of the civil rights struggle and the decolonisation of Africa. While such ideas require further study, one can be more certain in regard to the central proposition of this chapter. While the war did mark something of a break in Anglo-American far-right cooperation, the immediate postwar years were a period of reconnection when links increasingly flourished. Thus, it is time to re-evaluate

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our understanding of the period with it now being evidently clear that the number of links and the extent of cooperation was much more extensive than is at present believed. In short, from the moderate revisionists such as Fuller and Hart through to the rabid antisemites such as Leese, there was almost no area of the British far right during the immediate postwar period that did not in some way have links to America. Furthermore, the nature of the transatlantic relationships was symbiotic, with ideas and cooperation travelling both ways.

Notes 1 ‘Rightist Internationalism’, Right, no. 27, December 1957, 4. 2 Jeffrey Kaplan and Lonard Weinberg, The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), 37. 3 Graham Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley and the Resurrection of British Fascism After 1945 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 70. 4 Clive Webb, ‘Jim Crow and Union Jack: Southern Segregationists and the British Right’, in Paul Jackson and Anton Shekhovtsov (eds.), The Post-War Anglo-American Far Right: A Special Relationship of Hate (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 69. 5 Michael Brooks to Mr Morey, 30 October 1947, ADC, British Peoples Post File. 6 For example, see Mrs Robt. Edmondson to Mr Beamish, 25 December 1945 and R.E. Edmondson to Mr Beamish, 26 December 1945, Beamish H.H. England File, Avendis Derounian Collection (Henceforth ADC), National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (Henceforth NAASR), Belmont, Massachusetts, USA. 7 Alfred Kohlberg to The Bookmailer, 11 September 1956, Alfred Kohlberg Papers, Hoover Institution, Palo Alto, USA (henceforth AKP), Major Gen J.F.C. Fuller File, Box 71, Acc 61002. 8 J.F.C. Fuller to Alfred Kohlberg, 8 April  1956, AKP, Major Gen J.F.C. Fuller File, Box 71, Acc 61002. 9 J.F.C. Fuller to Alfred Kohlberg, 14 November 1952, AKP, Major Gen J.F.C. Fuller File, Box 71 Acc 61002. 10 For example see: ‘Calls Hitler God’s Instrument’, The Broom, XVI:12, 10 December 1945, 4. G.F. Green, ‘The Tales of Hoffman’, The Broom, XX:13, 26 December 1949, 3; G.F. Green, ‘ “I.N.” News-letter No. 7’, The Broom, XX:46, 14 August 1950, 4; G.F. Green, ‘Ike and the World “Crisis” ’, The Broom, XXI:19, 5 February 1951, 2. Articles by C.H. Douglas and extracts from The Social Creditor, compiled and published as, ‘Know Your Enemy: The Financier-Socialist Plotters’, The Broom, XX:35, 29 May 1950, 3; Philip Faulconbridge in London Tidings, republished as, ‘Marshal is no Fairy Godfather!’, The Broom, XVIII:24, 15 March 1948, 1; The Broom, XVIII:25, 22 March 1948, 3–4; The Broom, XVIII:26, 29 March 1948, 4. 11 ‘It’s Going to Happen Here Also in World War III’, The Broom, XVIII:45, 9 August  1948, 1. 12 Karl von Wiegand in The Leader, syndicated as: ‘British General’s View of Churchill’, The Broom, XVIII:44, n.d., 1. 13 Extracts from Armament and History by Major General J.F.C. Fuller, published in, ‘Why Dresden Was Destroyed’, The Broom, 10 January 1949, 4. See also, ‘British Major General Fuller Calls a Spade a Spade’, The Broom, 11 April 1949, 3. 14 ‘Britain Started Bombing Civilians’, The Broom, XIX:37, 13 June 1949, 1. 15 ‘Hitler the Malihned: Advance to Barbarism by A  Jurist’, The Broom, XIX:37, 13 June 1949, 4. 16 ‘The Phase of Barbaric War’, The Broom, XIX:37, 13 June 1949, 4. 17 Letter from Francis Parker Yockey to Liddell Hart, Undated, LHA, LH2Y/10/1–2. 18 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 121.

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19 Letter from Liddell Hart to Francis Parker Yockey, 11 December  1948, LHA, LH2Y/10/1–2. 20 Letter from Liddell Hart to J.F.C. Fuller, 18 August 1951, LHA, LH 1/302/462. 21 See for example, Letter from Liddell Hart to Harry Elmer Barnes, 14 June 1957, Harry Elmer Barnes Collection, American Heritage Centre, Wyoming, USA (henceforth HEBC), #745, Box 46. 22 Devin Garrity to Liddell Hart, 27 August 1958, Devin A. Garrity Papers, Hoover Institution, Palo Alto, USA, (henceforth DAGP), Box 51, Acc 82032 8.23. 23 Montgomery Belgion to Harry Elmer Barnes, 19 September  1951, HEBC, Correspondence, 1 January 1951 to 31 December 1951, #745, Box 37. 24 Stephen E. Atkins, Holocaust Denial as an International Movement (Westport: Praeger, 2009), 146. 25 Harry Elmer Barnes, The Struggle Against the Historical Blackout, 7th, Revised and enlarged ed. (The author, 1951), 8. 26 Barnes, The Struggle Against the Historical Blackout, 9. 27 Harry Elmer Barnes, Blasting the Historical Blackout, (1962) cited in Kenneth S. Stern, Holocaust Denial (New York, The American Jewish Committee, 1993), 6. 28 Harry Elmer Barnes, Revisionism: A  Key to Peace, (1966), cited in, Stern, Holocaust Denial, 7. 29 Lipstadt, Deborah, Denying the Holocaust, The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (London, Penguin Books, 1994), 73–74. 30 Vidal-Naquet and Yagil, Holocaust Denial in France, 31. 31 Lipdstadt, Denying the Holocaust, 74. 32 Lipdstadt, Denying the Holocaust, 74–75. 33 A. Jurist, Advance to Barbarism (Brighton: The Merrymeade Publishing, 1948), 7–9. 34 Jurist, Advance to Barbarism, 6. 35 Jurist, Advance to Barbarism, 157–158. 36 Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust, 42. 37 F.J.P. Veale, [Online]. Accessed 29 April  2015. www.revisionists.com/revisionists/ veale.html. 38 Harry (Elmer Barnes) to Lawrence (Denis), 17 March 1951, Lawrence Denis Papers, Hoover Institution, Palo Alto, USA, (henceforth LDP), Box 2, Folder 2.14 Acc 8403625.03, See also Harry (Elmer Barnes) to Lawrence (Denis), 30 December 1951, LDP, Box 2, Folder 2.14, Acc 84036-25.03, LDP, HI. 39 Harry Elmer Barnes to Dr (Austin) App, 20 October 1953, The Austin J. App Collection, American Heritage Centre, Wyoming, USA (henceforth AJAC), Correspondence Files 1935–1976, Letters of Importance, Box 27, #8817-84-11-06, Box 27. 40 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 130. 4 1 Austin J. App, ‘Here and Abroad: A Weekly Chat’, Nord-Amerika, 3 February  1955, 4. 42 Austin App to F.J.P Veale, 6 January 1973, AJAC, Box 63, #8817-84-11-06. 43 Advert for War Crimes Discreetly Veiled (Devin-Adair Company), DAGP, Box 31, Acc 82032-8.23. 44 ‘ “War Crimes” Trials’, Right, 41, February 1959, 2. 45 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 130. 46 F.J.P Veale to Dr Barnes, 14 January 1952, HEBC, Correspondences: 1 January 1952 to 29 May 1952, #745, Box 38. 47 A.J.P Veale to Oswald Mosley, 28 March  1961, HEBC, Correspondences: 1 January 1961 to 31 May 1961, #745, Box 57. 48 F.J.P. Veale, [Online]. Accessed 29 April  2015. www.revisionists.com/revisionists/ veale.html. 49 Paul van Tienen to Mr Veale, 27 November 1959, HEBC, Correspondences: 1 October 1959 to 31 December 1959, #745, Box 53. 50 Paul van Tienen to Harry Elmer Barnes, 14 June 1958, HEBC, Correspondences: 2 January 1958 to 30 June 1958, #745, Box 48.

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5 1 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 130. 52 Bardèche, Nuremberg II ou les Faux Monnayeurs, 6. 53 Liddell Hart to Harry Elmer Barnes, 9 August  1958, HEBC, Correspondences: 1 July 1958 to 29 September 1958, #745, Box 49. 54 Montgomery Belgion to Harry Elmer Barnes, 5 December 1959, HEBC, Correspondences: 1 October 1959 to 31 December 1959, #745, Box 53. 55 Liddell Hart to Harry Elmer Barnes, 9 August  1958, HEBC, Correspondences: 1 July 1958 to 29 September 1958, #745, Box 49. 56 J.F.C. Fuller to Liddell Hart, 19 December 1955, LHA, LH 1/302/487. 57 Captain Russell Grenfell, Unconditional Hatred (New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1954), 78. 58 Advert for Unconditional Hatred (Devin-Adair Company), DAGP, Box  31, Acc 82032-8.23. 59 ‘A Mysterious Death’, The Cross and Flag, 13:9, December 1954, 14. 60 National Renaissance Bulletin, 12:1, January  1961, 5 and National Renaissance Bulletin, 11:10–11, October–November 1960. 61 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 57. 62 Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust, 85. 63 Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust, 87. 64 Austin App to Mr F.P. Kenkel, 5 September 1945, in Austin App, Morgenthau Era Letters (Philadelphia: Boniface Press, 1966), 54–55. 65 Letter from Austin App to Dr William Draper Lewis, 20 October 1945, in App, Morgenthau Era Letters, 58–59. 66 Quotes from, Ben Cosgrove, At the Gates of Hell: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, April 1945, Time Magazine, 12 April 2013 [Online]. Accessed 28 April 2015. http:// time.com/3679103/at-the-gates-of-hell-the-liberation-of-bergen-belsen-april-1945/. 67 When asked about the reports of Nazi atrocities 84% believed them to be ‘True’ while a further 9% believed them to be ‘True, but exaggerated. The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935–1971, Volume One 1935–1948 (New York: Random House, 1972), 504. 68 Austin App, ‘Red Rape’, The Cross and the Flag, 6:6, October 1947, 29. 69 App, ‘Red Rape’, 30. 70 Austin App, ‘Slavery By Consent’, The Cross and the Flag, 6:3, July 1947, 8. 71 Austin App, Histories Most Terrifying Peace: Thirteen Reprinted and Original Articles (San Antonio, TX: Austin App, 1947), III. 72 Austin App, ‘Nonsense About German Disarmament’, Union, 101, 28 January 1950, 2. See also; Union, 157, 3 May 1951. 73 Raven Thomson had numerous American contacts. One was the American Holocaust denier Keith Thompson. Keith asked Raven to be the Honorary Adviser on British Affairs to his American Committee for the Advancement of Western Culture and Raven accepted the offer. See: A Raven Thomson to Mr Thompson, 27 March 1953, Harold Keith Thompson Papers, Hoover Institution, Palo Alto, USA (henceforth HKTP), Box  15. Acc 44006-15, 29/30. After Raven’s death the relationship was picked up by Robert Row, who wrote to Keith Thompson explaining that the UM ‘regard our American friends very highly’. See: Robert Row to Mr Keith Thompson, 2 December 1955, HKTP, Box 16, Acc 55006 15.29/30. 74 Raven Thomson to Austin App, 6 January 1950, AJAC, Box 5, Folder 1948 ? + Publications, #8817-84-11-06. 75 Atkins, Holocaust Denial as an International Movement, 154–155. 76 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 183. 77 Dr  Michael F. Connors, Dealing in Hate: The Development of Anti-German Propaganda (London: Britons Publishing Company, 1966), 87–88. 78 Geo. Deatherage to H.H. Beamish, 25 February 1946, ADC, Beamish H.H. England File. This was also the case with Beamish and Adrien Arcand, leader of the Canadian Movement with whom Beamish was in contact with in 1946 for the first time since ‘the fall of 1939’. See Adrien Arcand to H.H. Beamish, 18 June 1946, ADC, Beamish H.H. England File.

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79 Mrs Edmondson to Henry Hamilton Beamish, 25 December 1945, ADC, Beamish H.H. England File. 80 Robert Edward Edmondson to Henry Hamilton Beamish, 26 December 1945, ADC, Beamish H.H. England File. 81 Robert Edward Edmondson to Henry Hamilton Beamish, 26 December 1945. 82 Henry Hamilton Beamish to Mr Costain, 31 July 1947, ADC, Beamish H.H. England File. 83 Henry Hamilton Beamish to Mr Costain. For more on this plan see: Henry Hamilton Beamish to Mr Morey, 21 July 1947, ADC, Beamish H.H. England File. 84 Henry Hamilton Beamish to Mr Costain, 31 July 1947, ADC, Beamish H.H. England File. 85 Henry Hamilton Beamish to Mr Morey, 1 May 1946, ADC, Beamish H.H. England File. 86 ‘Divide and Conquer’, The Cross and Flag, 12:10, January 1954, 20. The same point is made in the article, ‘Fattening the Foe’, The Cross and Flag, 17:6, September 1958, 20. 87 Report on Mrs  Nesta Webster, By A.S., January  1945, ADC, Domville  – Fuller – Webster (England) File. 88 ‘The Roots of Communism’, The Cross and Flag, 11:8, November 1952, 19. 89 ‘Captain Archibald M.H. Ramsay, M.C’, The Cross and Flag, 14:4, July 1955, 20. 90 ‘Ramsay’s Book’, The Cross and Flag, 11:10, January 1953, 2. 91 ‘Captain Archibald M.H. Ramsay, M.C’, The Cross and Flag. 92 ‘Word From England’, The Cross and Flag, 14:2, May 1955, 10. 93 ‘Jews in the News’, The Cross and Flag, 13:4, July 1954, 9; ‘Gothic Ripples’, The Cross and Flag, 13:9, December 1954, 9; The Cross and Flag, 13:10, January 1955, 14. 94 ‘The Jews Still Have the A-Bomb and the H-Bomb’, The Cross and Flag, 13:7, October 1954, 3, 30. 95 ‘Arnold Leese’, The Cross and Flag, 15:1, April 1956, 11. 96 ‘Smothered History’, The Cross and Flag, 16:2, May 1957, 21; ‘News from London’, The Cross and Flag, 16:6, September 1957, 11. 97 Another American receiving and referencing Free Britain was Willis Carto, editor of the far-right newspaper Right. See: Right, 11, August 1956, 4. It also advertised Prisoner of Peace, a collection of letters between Rudolf Hess and his wife that was published by the Britons Publishing Society. See: Right, 12, September 1956, 5. 98 ‘British Crusaders’, The Cross and Flag’, 13:2, May 1954, 9. 99 ‘Six-Point Plan for Conquest’, The Cross and Flag, 13:9, December 1954, 10. 100 ‘British Crusaders’, The Cross and Flag, 14:6, September 1955, 24. 101 Editor’s Note to A.K. Chesterton, ‘The New Kuhn, Loeb International’, The Cross and Flag, 14:11, February 1956, 28. 102 ‘European Letter’, The Cross and Flag, 14:6, September 1955, 26–27. 103 For example see, Jack Blake, ‘European Letter’, The Cross and Flag, 14:9, December 1955. 104 National Renaissance Bulletin, 8:4, May 1957, 6. 105 National Renaissance Bulletin, May 1958, 5. Jewish Ritual Murder was also sold by The National States Rights Party in their newspaper Thunderbolt. See: George Thayer, The Farther Shores of Politics: The American Political Fringe Today (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 40. 106 Fraudulent Conversions was also advertised in Right and offered for sale in America via Examiner Books in New York. See: ‘Russia- Strong or Weak?’ Right, 6, March 1956, 2. Also, Frank L. Britton publisher of The American Nationalist, a newspaper based in Inglewood, California described it as probably the most outstanding contribution to Nationalist literature to be published in 1955. Certainly it ranks among the top ten Nationalist books to come out in the postwar period’. See: Frank L. Britton, The American Nationalist, December 1955. 107 For example: National Renaissance Bulletin, 8:4, May 1957, 6; National Renaissance Bulletin, 8:8 and 9, August–September 1957, 5; National Renaissance Bulletin, 9:8, August 1958. 108 James Madole, ‘The Sinister Forces Behind Premier Charles de Gaulle’, National Renaissance Bulletin, 9:6 and 7, June–July 1958, 4. 109 George Thayer, The British Political Fringe: A  Profile (London: Anthony Blond, 1965), 58.

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110 John Roy Carlson to Mr  Lionel Rose, 6 April  1950, ADC, England Contacts and Data File. 111 ‘Calls Hitler God’s Instrument’, The Broom. Canning believed he had an American contact but it was actually an undercover anti-fascist. Canning wrote to him stating, ‘All you Americans are energetic. You’re an odd people. You believe in humanitarianism abroad, but lynch your negroes at home. The Jews, not your Negroes, are the ones to get after’. See: John Roy Carlson, Cairo to Damascus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), 28. 112 Green, ‘The Tales of Hoffman’, The Broom; Green, ‘ “I.N.” News-letter No. 7’, The Broom; Green, ‘Ike and the World “Crisis” ’, The Broom. 113 Carlson, Cairo to Damascus, 37. 114 Articles by C.H. Douglas and extracts from The Social Creditor, compiled and published as, ‘Know Your Enemy: The Financier-Socialist Plotters’, The Broom. 115 Philip Faulconbridge (alias of A.K. Chesterton) in London Tidings, republished as, ‘Marshal is no Fairy Godfather!’, The Broom; The Broom, XVIII:25, 22 March 1948, 3–4; The Broom, XVIII:26, 29 March 1948, 4. 116 ‘Marshal is no Fairy Godfather!’, The Broom, 4. 117 ‘Middle East Crisis’. Sun Workshop and the Broom, 25:4, 31 December 1956, 3. 118 The Broom, XVIII:31, 3 May 1948, 1. 119 N.W. Rogers to Leon de Aryan, published as, ‘Jewish Warmongers’, The Broom, 28 March 1949, 2. 120 Duke of Bedford, ‘Cause of War’, The Broom, 6 June 1949, 3. 121 N.W. Rogers, ‘Henry Hamilton Beamish’, The Broom, 1 November 1948, 4. 122 See: ‘Charles Parsons: The Jewish Menace’, The Broom, 19 September 1949, 4; Free Britain: These are the people you would have to fight for in another war’, The Broom, XXI:6, 6 November  1950, 3; Free Britain: Satan Rules Both of Them, From Free Britain’, The Broom, XXI:7, 20 November 1950, 3. 123 A. Gittens to de Aryan, published in, The Broom, XXI:27, 14 May 1951, 4. See also, A. Gittens to de Aryan, published in The Broom, XXI:32, 18 June 1951, 1. 124 N.W. Rogers to de Aryan, published as, ‘Winston Churchill’, The Broom, 22 August 1949, 3. 125 ‘Unlawful Assembly In Queens Village’, The Broom, XVI:4. 15 October 1945, 2. 126 Review of the Year 5706- United States, American Jewish Year Book, 179– 180 [Online]. Accessed 30 June  2015. http://webcache.googleusercontent. com/search?q=cache:fYMdm1PKUGQJ:www.ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/ Files/1946_1947_5_USCivicPolitical.pdf+%22Homer+Maertz%22+Dispatch&cd=1 &hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us. 127 ‘3 N.Y. Judges Convict 3 Christian Speakers’, The Broom, XVI:18, 21 January 1946, 1. 128 John Roy Carlson, The Plotters (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1946), 6. Maertz was by no means alone in selling Leese’s Jewish Ritual Murder in America. It was also sold by We, the Mothers Mobilize for America, Inc. See: Carlson, The Plotters, 191. 129 Arnold Leese to Mr Morey, 20 March 1946, ADC, Leese, Arnold File. 130 ‘Unlawful Assembly In Queens Village’, The Broom. 131 H to Kosti, printed in The Broom, 22 October 1945, 4. 132 Arnold Leese to The Broom, published in: The Broom, 4 February 1945, 2. 133 Article from The Individualist republished as, ‘Fight for Bill of Rights in N.Y’, The Broom, 25 February 1946, 3–4. 134 For examples see: The Broom, 17 May 1948, 4; The Broom, 28 June 1948, 4; ‘A TellTale Jewish Map’, The Broom, XX:20, 13 February  1950, 4; ‘Gothic Ripples’, The Broom, XXI:5, 30 October 1950, 1. 135 ‘Book Review: The Jewish War of Survival By Arnold Leese’, The Broom, XIX:30, 25 April 1949, 1. 136 The Broom, XIX:30, 25 April 1949, 1; XIX:31, 2 May 1949, 1; XIX:32, 9 May 1949, 2; XIX:33, 16 May 1949, 1.

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137 Arnold Leese, ‘Is France Finished?’, Gothic Ripples, 18 January 1948, republished in The Broom, 28 July 1948, 3. 138 Arnold Leese, ‘Life Sketch of Henry Hamilton Beamish’. The Broom, XVIII:39, 28 June 1948, 1. 139 ‘Englishman Beats “Jew Libel” ’, The Broom, XXI:21, 2 April 1951, 1–2. 140 Thayer, The Farther Shore of Politics, 75. 141 Thayer, The Farther Shore of Politics, 76. 142 Miss Allen, cited in Carlson, The Plotters, 151–152. 143 Allen, cited in Carlson, The Plotters, 151–152. 144 Carlson, The Plotters, 91. 145 Carlson, The Plotters, 91. 146 Harold E. Stough to Charles Morey, 12 March  1948, ADC, England-MISC Dead Stuff File. 147 Harold E. Stough to Charles Morey. 148 Dozens of articles by Harold Stough appear in Destiny during the immediate postwar period. For an example see: Harold E. Stough, ‘Christianity Challenges Communism’, Destiny, XVIII:7, July 1947, 241–242. For example de Courcy’s column see: Kenneth de Courcy, ‘Review of World Affairs’, Destiny, XVIII:1, January 1947, 21–22. 149 Christopher Wilson, ‘Revealed: The Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s Secret Plot to Deny the Queen the Throne’, The Telegraph, 22 November  2009. Accessed 20 March  2016. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/theroyalfamily/6624594/ Revealed-the-Duke-and-Duchess-of-Windsors-secret-plot-to-deny-the-Queen-thethrone.html. 150 A.R. Heaver, Foreword to Harold E. Stough, On Eagles’ Wings: Britain and America. Their Origin, Mission and Destiny, Prophetically Foretold, Foreshadow the Foundation of the New Order of the Ages, 2nd ed. (London: The Covenant Publishing Company, 1944), 3. 151 Webb, ‘Jim Crow and Union Jack’, 69. 152 Webb, ‘Jim Crow and Union Jack’. 153 G.C.L. Bertram, West Indian Immigration (London: The Eugenics Society, 1958), 7. 154 Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 165. n. 185. 155 Ibid, 70. 156 For a history of the Citizens’ Councils, see: Neil R. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954–64 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press 1971). 157 McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, 37. 158 L.J. Irving [letter] in Citizens’ Council, 1:9, June 1956, 3. 159 L.J. Irving [letter] in Citizens’ Council, 1:11, August 1956, 3. 160 L.J. Irving [letter] in White Sentinel, VII:4, April 1957, 3. 161 John Roy Carlson to Barbara Gould, 14 October 1947, ADC, NAASR. 162 New York Times article mentioned in Thomas Decker to Barbara Gould, 24 June 1947, ADC, NAASR. 163 ‘British K.k.k. Threatens Labor M.p.; Boasts of Recent Attack on Jewish Barber’, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 15 May 1947 [Online], Accessed 20 July 2015. www.jta.org/1947/05/15/ archive/british-k-k-k-threatens-labor-m-p-boasts-of-recent-attack-on-jewish-barber. 164 Information on action of Klan groups in the UK is taken from Webb, ‘Jim Crow and Union Jack’, 70. 165 ‘Overseas’, Right, 20 May 1957, 4. 166 Citizens’ Council, 1:3, December 1955, 3. 167 Citizens’ Council, 1:5, February 1956, 1. 168 This point is made in Webb, ‘Jim Crow and Union Jack’, 68. 169 ‘England Feeling Racial Problem’, Citizens’ Council, 2:12, September 1957, 4. 170 ‘Race Riots in London’, White Sentinel, IV:11, November 1954, 7. 171 ‘Negroes Create Problems Wherever They Go’, White Sentinel, VII:1, January 1957, 8. 172 ‘The Black and Tan Problem in England’, The Cross and Flag, 13:10, January 1955, 13.

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173 ‘The Cloud Over Britain’, The Cross and the Flag, 14:4, July 1955, 13. 174 ‘Race Riots in London’, White Sentinel. 175 ‘Britain Gets a Taste of Integration’, White Sentinel, VII:4, April 1957, 8. 176 ‘A Warning to Great Britain’, White Sentinel, VII:1, January 1957, 2. 177 ‘British Patriot Discusses Mongrelization’, The Cross and Flag, 13:7, October 1954, 5. 178 ‘British Patriot Discusses Mongrelization’, The Cross and Flag, 25. 179 ‘The Cloud Over Britain’, The Cross and the Flag. 180 US Congress, House Committee on Un-American Activities, Preliminary Report on Neo-Fascist and Hate Groups, 17 December 1954, 3. 181 Free Britain quoted in National Renaissance Bulletin, June 1955, 4. 182 Arnold Leese, Race and Politics, quoted in, National Renaissance Bulletin, May–June  1952, 1. 183 National Renaissance Bulletin, February–March 1955, 4. 184 White Sentinel, V:5, May 1955, 8. 185 Arnold Leese, ‘The Inequality of Races’, White Sentinel, 3:2, February 1953, 4. 186 For Carto and the Liberty Lobby see: Frank Mintz, The Liberty Lobby and the American Right: Race, Conspiracy and Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985); George Michael, Willis Carto and the American Far Right (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2008). 187 Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (New York: The Guildford Press, 2000), 187. 188 ‘Overseas’, Right. 189 Right, no. 6, March 1956, 4. It is certainly true that the fledgling black community in Britain was looking to America and the civil rights struggle for inspiration. The issue was regularly discussed in Britain’s first Black magazine Checkers. See: Pauline Byrd Taylor, ‘The Status of the Negro in the United States’, Checkers, 1:1, July 1946; Pauline Byrd Taylor, ‘Signposts of Change’, Checkers, 1:2, October 1948; Edward Scobie, ‘Grow Up Uncle Sam’, Checkers, 1:2, October  1948.; Harold Rogers, ‘Books You Should Read – Inside Black America by Roi Ottley’, Checkers, 1:3, November 1948. 190 ‘From Here, There and most Everywhere’, Right, no. 44, May 1959, 6. 191 ‘and Pamphlets That Are Right’, Right, no. 50, November 1959, 6. 192 ‘A Report From England’, White Sentinel, IV:5, May 1954, 7. 193 ‘20,000 Blacks Is Too Many For England’, White Sentinel, IV:10, October 1954, 4. 194 ‘Negro G.I.s Cause Anti-American Feeling In England’, White Sentinel, VI:10, October 1956, 3. See also, ‘English Town Objects to Negro Troops’, White Sentinel, VII:9, September  1957, 6. A  similar point was made in the Christian Nationalist Crusade’s newspaper. See: ‘Blacks in England’, The Cross and the Flag, 16:6, September  1957, 24–25. 195 ‘Britain Gets a Taste of Integration’, White Sentinel, 3 and 8. 196 Colin Jordan writing in Free Britain, quoted in, ‘Britain Gets a Taste of Integration’, White Sentinel, 3. 197 White Sentinel, VIII:9, September 1958, 3. 198 Dr Frank C.J. McGurk, quoted in, Black and White News, 1958, 2. 199 Wesley Critz George, quoted in Black and White News, 1958, 2. 200 ‘Negroes Lead in Illegitimacy’, Black and White News, 1958, 3. 201 ‘Negroes Lead in V.D.’, Black and White News, 1958, 3. 202 ‘Coloured Drug Addicts’, Black and White News, 1958, 3. 203 ‘Negroes Lead in Crime’, Black and White News, 1958, 4. 204 George Knupffer, ‘The World Situation’, Task Force, 2:8, December 1955, 1. 205 Col. Eugene Cowles Pomeroy, Report from London, Task Force, 1:8, December 1954, 1. 206 Eugene Cowles Pomeroy, ‘Report from London’, Task Force. 207 Eugene Cowles Pomeroy, ‘Report from London’, Task Force, 4. 208 Graham Macklin, ‘Transatlantic Connections and Conspiracies: A.K. Chesterton and The New Unhappy Lords’, Journal of Contemporary History, 47, 2012, 279. For details

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on how the Defenders of the American Constitution understood the conspiracy see: Eugene Cowles Pomeroy, ‘One Worlders’ Plan Disclosed!’, Task Force, 1:9, January 1955, 1–2, 4. 209 Eugene Cowles Pomeroy, ‘Report from London’, Task Force. 210 Eugene Cowles Pomeroy, ‘Report from London’, Task Force, 4. 211 Candour, III:225, 14 February 1958 quoted in Macklin, Transatlantic Connections and Conspiracies: 280. 212 For example: Edith Essig, America’s “Elder Statesman”, Task Force, 2:11, March 1956, 1; Derek Tozer, ‘Attacks Through “Mental Health” ’, Task Force, 4:7, November  1957, 1, 3. 213 Macklin, Transatlantic Connections and Conspiracies, 280. 214 Michael Harald [letter] ‘Briton Lauds Defenders on Pound Case’, Task Force, 5:2, June 1958, 3. 215 List of some Action articles by Michael Harald at: Steve Woodbridge, Purifying the Nation: Critiques of Cultural Decadence and Decline in British Neo-Fascist Ideology, in Julie V. Gottlieb and Thomas P. Linehan (eds.), The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the Far Right in Britain (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 232, n. 45. 216 ‘Obituary: Peter Huxley-Blythe’, The Telegraph, 25 October 2013 [Online]. Accessed 23 June  2015. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10380814/Peter-HuxleyBlythe.html. 217 P.A. del Valle, ‘A Book Review: Betrayal, The Story of Russian Anti-Communism’, Task Force, 2:11, March 1956, 2. 218 Introductory Note, By Eugene C. Pomeroy, to, Peter J. Huxley-Blythe, ‘Insecure Security’, Task Force, 3:4–5, August–September 1956, 1, 4–8. 219 Peter J. Huxley-Blythe, ‘Insecure Security’, Task Force, 3:4–5, August–September 1956, 8. 220 Right, no. 6, March 1952, 2. Excerpts from Betrayal by Huxley-Blythe were also published in Leon de Aryans antisemitic newspaper The Broom. See: ‘Eisenhower’s Crimes Against Humanity’, Sun-Workshop and The Broom, 24:52, 29 October 1956, 3. 221 Right, 10, July 1956, 2; Right, 16, January 1957, 3. 222 Right, 10, July 1956, 2; Right, 16, January 1957, 3; ‘Truth About Suez Not Known’, Right, 15, December  1956, 4; ‘The Russian Riddle’, Right, 25. October  1957, 2; ‘From Here, There and ‘most Everywhere’, Right, 27, December 1957, 4. 223 Right, 13, October 1956, 5. 224 Introduction to: Peter Huxley-Blythe, ‘How Will the Rightwing Get Together?: Victory without war’, Right, 30, March 1958, 5. 225 Peter Huxley-Blythe, ‘How Will the Rightwing Get Together?: Victory without war’, Right, March 1958, 5. 226 ‘Political Action’, Right, 34, July 1958, 1. 227 L.J. Irving [letter] in Citizens’ Council, 1:11, August 1956, 3. 228 A.K. Chesterton, ‘Little Rock as Viewed Through British Eyes’, Task Force, 4:9, January 1958, 1. 229 National Renaissance Bulletin, June 1955, 2. 230 Thomas Noer, ‘Segregationists and the World: The Foreign Policy of the White Resistance’, in Brenda Gayle Plummer (ed.), Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1988 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 142. 231 ‘The Benefits of White Colonialism’, White Sentinel, VII:8, August 1957, 3. 232 Noer, ‘Segregationists and the World’, 141. 233 National Renaissance Bulletin. 234 Malcolm X, ‘The Black Revolution’, speech delivered 8 April 1964 in George Breitman (ed.), Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 50–51. 235 Noer, Segregationists and the World, 158.

CONCLUSION

Fascism is a cockroach ideology, unloved by most yet seemingly un-killable. The end of World War II and the revelation of the Holocaust ensured that fascism in its classic interwar form had had its day. In Britain, a country whose national myth became indelibly entwined with the struggle against Nazism, fascism faced insurmountable hurdles. However, the history of British fascism is an unbroken thread that runs from its birth in the 1920s directly through to today. This book shows the continuity of both ideas but also people and in some cases organisations, meaning it no longer makes sense to separate the prewar period from the postwar as starkly as is so often the case. The war years superficially changed British fascism but it failed to kill it. Some historians and journalists refer to postwar fascism as ‘neo-fascism’, often without really explaining what was ‘new’ about it. However, in the case of British fascism, continuity far outweighed discontinuity, making the use of the term ‘neo-fascism’ inappropriate. Though the postwar world was no doubt different in many ways, 1945 was not a year zero. That is not to say that the fascist movement of the late 1940s and 1950s was identical to that of its interwar iteration. It certainly operated in a fundamentally different and more hostile world, which affected its ambitions and optimism. The scale of the immediate postwar movement was also much diminished; the days of thousands of uniformed supporters packed into arenas was gone. Yet the numerous continuities highlighted throughout this book are all the more surprising in light of the changing world around them. Even the war years did not mark a break as is often believed, but rather British fascism survived within the internment camps. It is difficult to write a more succinct and accurate appraisal of the effect of internment and its importance for the postwar movement than that provided by the antifascist Frederic Mullally, who in 1946 wrote: Here, clustered together like a brood of malignant vipers, were to be found some of the most dangerous of the British fascists, and here, nurtured and cultivated like a hot-house plant, was the idea which Mosley had declared

196  Conclusion

immortal in October  1939. There was no remorse among many in that camp; nor were these interested in the possibilities of conversion. They fed their bitter minds on a dark, common hatred of Democracy and, with the single-mindedness of incorrigible fanatics, spun out their years of detention with dreams and schemes of a fascist revival.1 For many of those who did not lose the faith, internment resulted in stronger loyalty to Mosley, a deeper understanding of fascism and a hard-forged unity with their often newly befriended martyr comrades. Both inside and outside the prisons, the flame of interwar British fascism was not extinguished. In one sense Mosley emerged from the war as an enhanced figure on the fascist scene; after all there were few surviving prominent prewar fascists besides Franco, and in much of the continent the movements had been literally killed. This was not the case in Britain, and the domestic fascist movement was relatively intact in 1945. For this reason, it is only by understanding the war years that one can fully understand the re-launch of fascist politics in the immediate postwar period. While continuity outweighs change, the movement that emerged after the war was not identical, not least ideological changes such as Mosley’s shift towards his Europe-a-Nation theory. Yet even here his were not particularly innovative or new – despite what is sometimes claimed – and were actually firmly rooted in prewar fascist traditions. Mosley’s Europeanisation and Yockey’s thought were very much part of a tradition of transnational fascism but also part of a trend within the postwar European far right, which was seeking answers and solutions to the failure of traditional nationalism. Not all followed Mosley though, and many refused to make the leap towards transnationalism. Chief amongst them was Chesterton, whose postwar conspiratorial antisemitism remains influential in far-right and antisemitic circles to this day. His organisation, The League of Empire Loyalists, was a birthing pool for future leaders of the British far right, showing once again why understanding the immediate postwar period is so important in understanding the later far right of the 1970s and 1980s. Of course, the primary hurdle faced by the postwar fascists in their attempts to garner support was news of the Holocaust. As one might expect, the reactions of British fascists was varied. A number of prewar far-right activists were no doubt appalled by what they saw on the newsreels from Belsen and decided to jettison their commitment to the movement. Of those who stayed involved, the news of Nazi atrocities were greeted by a broad spectrum of reactions ranging from outright shock and condemnation through to denial and even celebration. However, many of the leading British fascists of the immediate postwar period began building the ‘smokescreen’ of denial immediately. As has been shown, this was certainly the case for Oswald Mosley, meaning it is time to put to bed any and all attempts to reform his reputation based on groundless arguments that he moderated his views on Jews in the postwar years; he rightly remains ‘beyond the pale’. Far from it being a later phenomenon, one can find all of the key tenets of modern Holocaust denial, such as doubting pictorial evidence, blaming Allied bombing and typhus, moral equivalency and even arguing Hitler’s ignorance of crimes, in the immediate postwar years. The fact that all of these arguments can be found so early

Conclusion  197

in Britain makes it necessary to reposition Britain in the international history of early Holocaust denial. Publications such as Bedford’s 1942 pamphlet Propaganda for Proper Geese and Ratcliffe’s 1943 The Truth about the Jews show that the earliest examples of printed Holocaust denial emanated not from France or America but from Britain. More generally, what is apparent is that from its very inception Holocaust denial was a transnational movement with the transfer of ideas and arguments across borders. Contrary to what has previously been thought, early British deniers played an important part in this milieu and were both influential at the time and also since. This was certainly the case in America. While the war did mark something of a break in Anglo-American far-right cooperation, the immediate postwar years were a period of reconnection, making it time to re-evaluate our understanding in light of the links and the extent of cooperation. From the moderate deniers such as Fuller and Liddell Hart through to the rabid antisemites such as Leese, there was almost no area of the British far right during the immediate postwar period that did not in some way have links to America. One area in which cooperation with American activists was very important in shaping the nature of British fascistic and far-right thought was on the issue of race and immigration. With the birth of large-scale non-white immigration after the war, British activists looked to America as both a warning and an inspiration. Many saw American-style racial disharmony as the inevitable result of immigration but also lauded the Jim Crow-style attitude towards minority groups. Surprisingly however, many on the British far right were relatively unanimated by black immigration in the late 1940s. Contrary to what one might expect, they made very little reference to the birth of non-white immigration at first, rather continuing with their prewar obsession with Jews and Communism. That is not to say they were not racist, for they patently were, but rather than leading public opinion on the issue of immigration they were following it. Sadly, the far right were not extremist outliers on the issue of race, immigration and miscegenation in the immediate postwar period. While their language was often, though not always, more visceral and base, their interest more obsessive and their recommended solutions often more extreme, the British far right were echoing the views of large proportions of the general public. However, throughout the 1950s the issue of immigration became ever more central to the politics of British fascism, and while antisemitism often remained at the core, it was anti-black racism that was to eventually lead the British far right to unprecedented electoral success in future decades. The decade following World War II was the toughest climate in which to fight for fascism, and those years saw British fascism at its lowest point. Yet against all the odds, in the rubble-strewn streets of Britain, it survived. Just as Britain set to work rebuilding the damage wrought by the Luftwaffe, Britain’s fascists set to work rebuilding their own movement. By denying the Holocaust, seizing on societal antiblack racism and networking around the world, activists managed to keep their beleaguered movement alive making the history of British fascism an unbroken thread.

Note 1  Frederic Mullally, Fascism Inside Britain (London: Claud Morris Books Ltd, 1946), 84–85.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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INDEX

18B Detainees (British) Aid Fund 37 18B Publicity Council 37 43 Group 6, 48, 58 Åberg, Einar 63 Afanfryn-Hill, Gerald 102 alt-right 19 America First Party 86 American Nationalist Confederation 173 – 174 American Nazi Party 87 Anfuso, Filippo 103 Angell, Norman 101 Anglo-German Fellowship 26 Anglo-German Youth Contact Club 56 Anglo-Saxon-British Israel Movement 178 – 179 Anglo-Saxon Federation 178 anti-fascism 3, 7, 40, 56 – 58 anti-Jewish riots 47 apartheid 100, 109, 147, 156, 186 App, Austin 86, 170 – 171 Armstrong, Geo W. 174 Aryan, Leon de 85, 167, 176 Ascot Camp 29, 33 – 34 Auschwitz 2, 26, 66, 82 Australia 132, 178 Baker, Thomas Guillaume St. Barbe 53 Bardèche, Maurice 62, 68, 82 – 84, 105, 171 Barker, Dudley 50 Barnes, Harry Elmer 168 – 173

Baron, Anthony F.X. 54, 177 Baruch, Bernard 55, 127, 130 Bath and West Nationalist Crusade 54 Battersby, James L. 34, 53 Beamish, Henry 47, 173 – 174, 176 – 177 Bean, John 6, 9, 126, 132, 153 – 154, 157, 182 Beavan, Arthur 30 Beckett, John 27 – 28, 69, 78, 80, 158, 167 Beckman, Morris 6, 58 Belgion, Montgomery 83 – 84, 168, 171, 176 Belsen see Bergen-Belsen Belzec 2 Bennett, Alvin 144 Bergen-Belsen 2, 62, 65 – 67, 69, 72, 75 – 76, 172, 196 Bergson, Henri 96 Bertram, G.C.L. 161 Bevin, Ernest 48 Billing, Elizabeth 174 Binet, Rene 84 Birmingham Nationalist Club 54, 181 Blake, Jack 175 Blunk, Ena 36 Blunk, Freddie 36 Board of Deputies Defence Committee 35 Board of Deputies of British Jews 35, 38, 49, 51 Bon, Gustave Le 96 Bossom, Sir Alfred 139 Brand, Eugen 85 Brasillach, Robert 82

Index  211

British Council for a Christian Settlement in Europe (BCCSE) 27 – 28 British Israel World Federation, The 178, 179 British League of Ex-Servicemen and Women 33, 38, 46, 54 – 55, 57 British Movement 64 British National Party (1940s) 37 British National Party (1960) 132 British National Party (1982) 2, 4 – 5, 132, 148 British Officers Freedom League 38 British People’s Party 48, 52, 78 – 79, 153 British Protestant League 45, 49, 53 British Union of Fascists 6, 7, 26 – 30, 37, 45, 67, 74, 124, 169 British Vigil 26 British West Indian Regiment 137 British Workers’ Party for National Unity 55 Britons, The 27, 130, 173, 175, 176, 177, 183 Britons Action Party 56 Brooks, Austen 6, 154 – 155 Brothers, Richard 178 Buchenwald 2, 63, 66 – 67, 72, 75, 78 Burgess, Victor 49, 51, 54 – 55 Burke, Edmund 11 Burke, P.M. 75 Burn, Andy 32 Butz, Arthur 173 Carlson, John Roy 47 – 48, 53 Carto, Willis 69, 132, 182 Central African Federation 132 Chamberlin, Houston Stewart 158 Charnley, John 42n60, 74 – 75 Checkers Magazine 143, 163n51, 193n189 Chełmno 2 Chesham, Guy 109, 115 – 116 Chesterton, A.K. 3, 5 – 8, 26, 38, 67, 69 – 70, 73, 77 – 78, 80, 123 – 133, 136, 148 – 150, 154 – 155, 157 – 159, 175 – 176, 183 – 186, 196 Christian Front 177 Christian Nationalist Crusade (The) (CNC) 86, 174 – 175, 181 Churchill, Winston 28, 38, 46, 52, 55, 86, 117, 139, 167, 170 Citizens’ Protective League 87, 177 Clarke, Mick 29 Cleveland, Joseph 181 Cochrane, Kelso 153 Communist Party 5, 56

Conference of Vienna 40 Connors, Dr Michael F. 173 Conservative Party 28, 128, 131 Copeland, David 4 Cotswold Agreement (The) 166 Council of Europe 102 Crusaders of the White Knights of Britain 180 Daitz, Werner 18, 103 – 104 Darlington, C.D. 156 Dawson, Ralph 29 – 30 Day, A.E. 55 Déat, Marcel 103 Deatherage, George 173 – 174 Defence Regulation 18B see Internment Defenders of the American Constitution (DAC) 132, 183 – 185 denial see Holocaust denial Dennis, Lawrence 170 Derounian, Avendis 3, 47, 50, 167 Deutsche Reichspartei 40 Dimbleby, Richard 62 Dimitrov, Georgi 12 Domvile, Admiral Barry 27, 31, 48, 53 Dorman-Smith, Reginald 131 Douglas, C.H. 36, 52, 176 Dulles, John Foster 102 Driver, Nellie 29, 75 Dubois, Abbé 101 Duke of Bedford 27, 35 – 37, 52, 67, 70, 78 – 79, 82 – 83, 176 Earl of Mar 27 Earl of Portsmouth 38 Edmondson, Robert Edward 174 Edward I (King) 28 Egypt 85, 123, 128 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 83, 128, 137, 185 Electrical Trade Union 141 Elmhurst, Ernest F. 177 Engdahl, Per 105 English Nationalist Alliance 37 Enoch, Powell 117n1 Essential Books 70 Eugenics Review 161 Eugenics Society (The) 160, 179 European Coal and Steel Community 102 European Liberation Front 85, 109, 113, 184 Evola, Julius 18, 103, 111 Fabre, René 63 Faisceau (The) 103

212 Index

Fare-Prescott, Ernest 36 fascism: definitions of 9 – 19; neo-fascism 7, 9, 17 – 19, 195 Faulconbridge, Philip see Chesterton, A.K. Field Marshal Lord Ironside of Archangel 131 Final Solution see Holocaust denial Foot, Sir Hugh 139 Forster, Peter 35 Franco, Francisco 39, 196 Franke-Gricksch, Alfred 105, 119n83 Freedman, Benjamin 87 Friends of Nationalist Russia 185 Fuller, Major General J.F.C. 38, 67, 70, 80 – 84, 167 – 168, 171, 187, 197 Funk, Walther 18, 104 Gannon, Anthony 56, 85 Gannon, John 109, 115 – 116 Gardiner, Rolf 102, 104 Garrity, Devin 168 Gentile-Christian Front 55 George, Wesley Critz 183 German Freedom Movement (The) 104 – 105 German Institute for Foreign Affairs 18, 104 Gilbert, Oliver 26 Gilour, Ian 139 Gittens, Anthony 77, 175, 177 Gleave, Eileen 36 Godfrey, Edward 37, 70 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 95, 106 – 108 Gollancz, Victor 84 Gordon-Canning, Captain Robert 27, 47 – 48, 53, 176 Göring, Hermann 18, 52, 76, 104 Gostick, Ron 175 Gough, General Sir Hubert 131 Gramsci, Antonio 11 Green, Ben 27, 37 Green, G.F. 47, 52, 176 Grenfell, Captain Russell 171, 173 Griffith, Lawrence R. 86 Grundy, Trevor 148, 152 Gwynne, H.A. 123 Haganah 46 Hail Mosley and F’Em All Association (The) 34 Hamley, Francis 30 Hamm, Jeffrey 33, 38 – 39, 46, 54 – 57, 77, 116, 152 Hamstead anti-alien petition 46 Hanseatic League 102

Hart, Liddell 80 – 84, 167 – 168, 171, 187, 197 Hart, Merwin K. 176 Harvey, John Hooper 71 Harwood, Richard see Verrall, Richard Heath, Edward 146 Heidegger, Martin 95, 97 – 98 Heller, Hermann 111 Heraclitus 112 Herrstrom, W.D. 86 Hilton, Major General Richard 129 – 130 Hitler, Adolf 1, 6, 11, 37, 39, 46, 49, 53, 57 – 58, 62 – 69, 73, 76, 79, 81, 84 – 88, 104, 114, 117, 126, 145, 164, 168, 172, 176, 196 Holloway Prison 33 Holness, Cecil 142 Holocaust denial 2 – 3, 40, 53, 62 – 88, 167, 196 – 197; American 84 – 87; British 67 – 82; French 82 – 84; transatlantic networks 167 – 178 Home Office 46, 139 Houston, ‘Jock’ 28 Hudson, Charles 174 Hutchinson, General Sir Balfour 131 Huxley-Blythe, Peter 184 – 185 Hyde, Douglas 52 Imperial Fascist League 27, 51 – 52, 78, 124 Imperial Defence League 56 Independent Nationalists 47, 52 India 51, 123 – 124, 131 – 132, 137, 139, 145, 147, 150, 153 – 154 Institute for Historical Review 80, 170, 173 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 127 internment 26, 28, 29 – 34, 55, 96, 99, 195 – 196 Irgun 46 – 47 Irving, David 64, 91n115 Irving, L.J. 180 Israel 46, 63, 128, 145, 178 Italy 11, 18, 30, 39 – 40, 103 – 104 Jack, Jones 142 Jamaica Squadron 137 Jeune Europe 40 Jones, Leslie 55 Jordan, Colin 6, 9, 22n15, 54, 122, 132, 150, 153, 156, 160, 175, 181, 183 Joyce, William 26 Jurist, A. see Veale, F.J.P. Katyn massacre 71, 79 Kenkel, F.P. 172

Index  213

Kent, Tyler 28 – 29 Kenya 132, 135n87, 185 King, Jack 35 King David Hotel 46 – 49, 145 Klu Klux Klan 180 – 181 Knight, Maxwell 28 Knights of the White Camellia 173 Knochlein, Fritz 168 Kohlberg, Alfred 167 Labour Party 129 Lady Stalbridge 27 Lanfree, Giovanni 40 League of Christian Reformers 53 League of Empire Loyalists 6, 8 – 9, 77, 125 – 126, 128, 131, 148, 153 – 154, 184, 196 League of Ex-Servicemen see British League of Ex-Servicemen and Women League of Nations 46 Leask, Jim 142 Leech, Hilda 36 Leeds University Union National Unity Association 54 Leese, Arnold Spencer 5 – 7, 9, 30 – 31, 49, 51 – 54, 71, 114 – 115, 124, 173, 174 – 175, 177 – 178, 182, 187, 197; Holocaust denial and 75 – 80; racism and 149 – 150, 153, 159 – 160 Leftwich, Joseph 78 Liberty Lobby 69, 132, 182 Link (The) 26, 27, 31 Lipstein, Lewis 180 Locke, John 11 Lockwood, Harold 78 London School of Economics and Political Science 130 Lord Vansittart 38, 49 MacDonald, Ramsay 101 Mackesy, Major General P.J. 131 Madagascar 28 Madole, James H. 87, 176, 182 Maertz, Homer Gustav 177, 191n128 Malmö International 105 Malthus, Thomas Robert 11 Manifesto of the Republic of Salò 18, 103 McGurk, Frank C.J. 183 McLaughlin, Michael 64 McLean, M.J. 57, 123 Mein Kampf 11 Merriman, G.R. 33 – 34 Mertig, Kurt 87, 177 MI5 28, 29, 35, 37 Militant Christian Patriots 28

Miller, Sherman 180 Ministry of Labour 139 Mississippi White Citizens’ Council 179 – 180 Mitchell, G.R. 46, 51 Montalk, Count Potocki de 70 – 71, 80 Mosley, Diana 106 Mosley, Nicholas 66 Mosley, Oswald 37; American contacts 173, 176, 180 – 181, 184; antisemitism and 48, 66; Book Clubs and 54; British Union of Fascists and 26; doctrine of higher forms and 105 – 109; ‘Europe a Nation’ and 3, 7, 95 – 105, 196; Francis Parker Yockey and 109 – 117, 171; Holocaust denial and 72 – 75, 170; internment and 31 – 35; National Party of Europe and 39 – 40; New Party and 96; non-white immigration and 145 – 154; racism and 156 – 159; Richard Wagner and 107; Union Movement and 5 – 6, 8, 49 – 51, 52 – 57, 173 Mothers, The 176 Mouvement d’Action Civique 40 Mouvement de Libération Nationale 101 Movimento Federalista Europeo 101 Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) 40, 103, 105 M.P.’s Fighting Fund for Freedom 46 Mullally, Frederic 1, 66, 195 Mussolini, Benito 1, 11, 14, 39 – 40, 57 Mussolini, Anna Maria 105 National and Empire Unity Party 54 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 182 National Citizens Protective Association 180, 182 National Front 5, 9, 22n16, 53, 64, 91n115, 132, 146, 173 National Front after Victory 38 National Guard 46 – 47 Nationalist Association 28 Nationality Act (1948) 138 National Labour Party 9, 132, 153, 182 National Party of Europe 39 National Renaissance Party 87, 171, 175, 182 National Socialist League 26 National Socialist White People’s Party 179 National Union of Railwaymen 141 – 142 National Workers Movement 54 Nazism 58, 78, 104, 115, 125, 150, 179, 19; neo-Nazism 6, 17; Universal Nazism 122

214 Index

Neame, Alan 148 Nehru, Jawaharlal 80 neo-fascism see fascism neo-nazism see Nazism New Party 96 New Zealand 132, 178 Nordhausen 67 Nordic League 26 – 27 Northern League 102 – 103, 184 – 185 North-West Task Group 53 Nottingham Riots 150 – 151, 154 Notting Hill Riots 8 – 9, 140, 146, 150 – 156, 160 Nuremberg Trials 48, 72, 76, 78 – 81, 83, 85 – 87, 169, 173 Odessa 39 O’Meara, Michael 114 Oranienburg 67 Order of the Sons of St George (The) 56 Ordine Nuovo 103 Ormonde 136 – 137 Orwell, George 10, 12 Pakistan 138, 145 Palestine 5, 45 – 50, 58, 65, 67, 145 Pan-Aryan Conference 174 Peace Pledge Union 27 Pelley, William Dudley 174 People’s Campaign Against War and Usury 27 People’s Common Law Parliament 36 Perigoe, Marita 36 Pfeffer, Karl Heinz 18, 104 Phillips, Charles W. 177 Plimmer, Denis 48 Pomeroy, Eugene Cowles 183 – 184 Pound, Ezra 184 Prague Trials (The) 114 Preen, J.C. 56 Priester, Karl Heinz 105 Pro-American Vigilantes 178 Protocols of Learned Elders of Zion 27 – 28, 31, 55, 64, 123 – 124, 127 Ramsay, Captain Archibald 28, 31, 48, 53, 77, 101, 173 – 175 Rand, Howard B. 178 Rassinier, Paul 63, 169 Ratcliffe, Alexander 53, 63, 68 – 70, 75, 80, 82, 197 Rauti, Pino 103 Red Cross (The) 75 Republican Fascist Party 18, 103 – 104

Republic of Salò 18, 103 Rhodesia 128 – 129, 132, 174, 185 Ricardo, David 11 Right Club 28, 31, 41 Right Review Press 70 Ritter, Karl 18, 103 – 104 Rockwell, George Lincoln 87, 114 Rogers, Arthur 131 Rogers, N.W. 176 – 177 Roosevelt, Franklin 28, 86, 127 Rose, Lionel 45, 50, 53 – 54 Rosenberg, Alfred 11, 18, 103 – 104, 158 Royal Society of Arts 139 Russell, Hastings William Sackville see Duke of Bedford Russia 64, 71, 78, 79, 98, 113 – 115, 117, 124, 137, 172, 183, 185 Salomon, Sidney 49 – 52 Schmitt, Carl 95, 111 – 113 Scrutton, Robert J. 36 Seager, Gerald 56 Selvon, Sam 143 Sergeants Affair 47 – 48, 145 Shaw, George Bernard 106 Shaw, Ian G. 180 – 181 Siemens Schuckert 36 Simmons, William J. 179 – 180 Simpson, Harry 51 Singapore 132 Six, General Franz Alfred 105 Smith, Adam 11 Smith, G.L.K. 85, 86 – 87, 176, 181 – 182 Smith, Henry 178 Smith, Ian 129 Smithers, Waldron 46 social credit 11, 36, 55, 124, 176 Social Credit Movement 36 Social Credit Party 55, 124 Sons of St George 50, 56 Sorel, Georges 96 South Africa 39, 132, 133, 135n87, 157, 178, 181, 185 – 186 Soviet Union (The) 71, 73, 75, 101, 113 – 116, 185 Sozialistische Reichspartei 114 Spanish Civil War 12 Spengler, Oswald 3, 95 – 97, 106, 106 – 116, 156 Stokes, Richard 27 Stough, Harold 178 strasserism 114 – 115 Sudan 128, 131 Suez Crisis (The) 128, 131, 135n87, 185

Index  215

Sveriges Antijudiska Kampförbund 63 Sweden 63, 105, 151 Taylor, James 54 teddy boys 152 Thomas, Ivor 37 Thomson, Raven 116, 173, 189n73 Tienen, Paul van 170 – 171 Toynbee, Arnold 107, 111 Tozer, Derek 136 Transport and General Workers Union 142 Treaty of Paris (1951) 102 Treblinka 2 Trinidad Squadron 137 True, James 174 Twentieth Century Socialist Group (The) 55 Tyndall, John 6, 22n17, 132 Ugandan Asians 146 UNESCO 136, 160 – 161, 182 Union for Democratic Control (The) 101 Union Movement 5 – 8, 31, 34, 39, 49 – 52, 54 – 57, 71 – 75, 109, 122, 145 – 148, 151 – 153, 157, 171, 173, 176, 180 – 181 Union of British Freedom 49, 54 – 55 United Nations 127 University Corporate Clubs 54 Untermeyer, Samuel 76 Valle, P.A. del 184 Valois, Georges 18, 103 Vansittart, Lord 38, 49 Veale, F.J.P. 83, 168 – 171, 173 Verrall, Richard 63

Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 63 Vigilante Movement 56 Villari, Luigi 171 Wagner, Richard 106 – 108 Wallace, Walter 30 Walsh, Gladys 33 Watts, Charlie 31, 32, 34, 74 Weber, Mark 80 Webster, John Alban 55 Webster, Martin 6, 132, 146 Webster, Nesta 123 – 124, 126, 130, 174 West Indies 3, 138, 145, 148, 157, 183 White Defence League 9, 132, 153 Whitehead, Edgar 36 Wiegand, Karl von 167 – 168 Williams, R. Llewelyn 178 Wilson, Harold 129 Wilson, Woodrow 127 Windrush 3, 136 – 140, 145 – 147, 149 Windsor, Reginald 29 – 30 Winrod, Gerald 174 Wiseman, Frank 32, 34 Women’s Guild of Empire 46 World Bank 127 World Union of National Socialists 122, 166 Yagil, Limor 63 Yockey, Francis Parker 3, 84 – 85, 102 – 103, 109 – 117, 122, 125, 168, 171, 184, 196 Young, B.A. 46 Young, F.A. 55 Young, Leonard 175 Zionism 63, 124, 126